Recently a Catholic friend asked me about the state of the Presbyterian Church. She said that, for her, Presbyterianism has always represented a thinking person’s Protestantism, and that this historic role is more needed today than it has been for a long time.
Thinking, education, intellectualism, or, as our Reformed forebears put it, the life of the mind in the service of God, are no less under assault today in the Presbyterian Church than in society at large.
There are many in our society and even in our Church who are frankly suspicious of the life of the mind, who do not value education, and would replace it with indoctrination or reduce it to a kind of training in techniques. There are even some who have outright contempt for scholarship.
During the coming year we’ll be celebrating the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin, the architect and apologist of Presbyterianism. Calvin is fondly remembered by most Presbyterians as a leader of the evangelical reformation of the Church. And that he was. But he was also a scholar and an educator – and maybe a layperson. He was as relentless in exposing superstition, claptrap and humbug as he was in preaching the Gospel. A Renaissance thinker and a theologian of the first order, Calvin had more in common with Jonathan Edwards, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Kathryn Tanner than he would with the advocates of lowest-common denominator religious sentiment and superficiality in our time.
A church doesn’t move forward by running from its past. Every branch of the Reformation, and the children of those branches, all have their distinctive contributions to make to the life and faith of the larger Church. There are elements of their distinctive characteristics that I would hope we share, as I would also hope that they think about what they believe too. But my Catholic friend was right in seeing Presbyterianism as a Protestantism distinctively dedicated to thinking.
From Scottish Presbyterians establishing the first universal public education program in history, to the founding by Presbyterians of many of the premier colleges, universities and medical centers in the United States, to the historic leadership Presbyterians have given in every field and profession that serves the public good, to our continuing insistence that our pastors be well educated for the practice of ministry: Presbyterians have consistently believed that disciples ought to exercise disciplined minds.
There’s nothing elitist about trying to be the best educated and best prepared servants we can be. If tomorrow the Presbyterian Church were to abandon its role as “a thinking person’s Protestantism,” I have every confidence that God will raise up another people to carry this torch. And I’ll want to read their books and send my children to their schools.
Michael Jinkins is Academic Dean and Professor of Pastoral Theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. mjinkins@austinseminary.edu
