RICHMOND — Is there a future for ministry in the liberal church? That question was on the mind of about a hundred Presbyterians who gathered on May 18 at Union Theological Seminary-Presbyterian School of Christian Education to bid farewell to Douglas Ottati, one of its professors of theology. After 30 years at the school, he is leaving to accept appointment to the faculty of Davidson College in North Carolina. In his honor, the seminary quickly organized a symposium to discuss a topic closely identified with Ottati’s teaching.
Liberal theology appears to be on the wane, as acknowledged in the title of Ottati’s most recent book, Theology for Liberal Christians and Other Endangered Species.
Lectures on the future of liberal theology were presented by three individuals followed by brief responses by six others.
Davis Perkins, president and publisher of the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation, agreed with the Ottati book title. “Quantitatively, [the] future appears bleak to me. Eighteen years ago when I joined Presbyterian Publishing, there were 3.2 million Presbyterians; today there are 2.3 million. This numerical membership decline has been among the center and the leftwing.” He added, “And we all know that the historic mainline Protestant denominations have lost their franchises in terms of being the dominant religious influence in American culture.”
Then again, what is it that is on the wane? What is liberal theology? Paul Capetz, associate professor of historical theology at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities in New Brighton, Minn., affirmed that he identifies “with the Ottati brand of theology.” However, the liberalism in his region of the country makes Ottati’s look pretty conservative.
“Doug’s appreciation for the tradition, … including such classicists as John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, … his confessional identification, [and ] … his insistence upon intellectual rigor when making moral arguments” all make him stand out both for his rootedness and for his skills as a theologian.
Perkins underlined that point. “Doug truly appreciates the church’s tradition and wishes to retrieve and re-appropriate the confessional standards of the church.”
The liberalism at issue, nevertheless, does test the boundaries often surrounding the church’s faith. Kerra Becker English, pastor of First Church, Oak Ridge, Tenn., said, “As Doug liked to tell his students at seminary, any theology worth its salt is willing to ‘bring out mystery in the 9th inning.’ We need to be even more amazed by all that we do not know or cannot understand.”
Roger Gench, pastor of New York Avenue Church in Washington, D.C, summarized Ottati’s view of the church in the world. “The church is in the world, never giving up on God’s good creation, and the church is with the world, confessing our common faults and sins, against the world, for the sake of the crucified and resurrected creation, [and] the church is also for the world because it is ‘a community of hope, which believes that if sin means derangement, then grace mean rearrangement. If sin means inordinate constriction, then grace means enlargement'” (Reforming Protestantism: Christian Commitment in Today’s World, p. 112).
All the more, this liberalism is open to people. Kathryn Van Brocklin, the minister director of That All May Freely Serve in the Michigan Region, explained, “We are all called to be in relationship with one another. The key to sustaining those relationships is to be grounded, confidently in our Reformed Tradition, that we are children of God — beautifully and wonderfully made in God’s sight — and to humbly realize that the person in front of us is as well.”
While liberalism may not be capturing the major population, Macalester College Chaplain Lucy Forster-Smith assured, “It is an underground reality, a guerilla phenomenon that both arises at unexpected times and in unexpected ways.”
“In fact,” said Perkins, “one could argue that in its essence, Christianity has always been a fringe movement, that the truth of the Gospel does not depend upon quantitative validation. In fact, perhaps precisely as a prophetic movement, as a gadfly to the rest of the church, liberal church theology may be providing the greatest service imaginable.”
Most importantly, both the essence of the liberal theology being discussed, and the hope for its future, declared virtually every speaker, is the work of God’s grace.
English said, “For any of us feeling endangered by the threats of a backlash society, Doug’s practical sense of theological wisdom is a breath of fresh air. He weighs out every concept on the scales of God’s grace. Does it make room for all God’s children, or not? Does it fit the Scripture’s breadth and diversity, or not? Do our creeds and interpretations of those creeds allow us to live as human beings designed for the enjoyment of God, or not?”
Randy Tremba, who is pastor of Shepherdstown Church in W.Va. summarized simply, “From Doug I have adopted and adapted a mantra: ‘Life is hard, sometimes very, very hard, but grace abounds.'”
