Two recent and very ordinary events have set me thinking about a New Year’s resolution that might just be worthwhile for us all. First, a conversation with a seminarian:
My conversation partner was a young adult who has grown up in a great and famed Presbyterian Church. She had asked me to clarify what it means to use the term “Reformed.” She wondered if the term applies to all churches that came from the Reformation? Are Lutherans “Reformed”? Are Episcopalians? Her concern, at least in part, was that we might be slighting other Protestants by not calling them “Reformed.”
I assured her that Lutherans and Episcopalians would not necessarily see it as a compliment to be called Reformed. Then I tried to clarify our history and theology as Protestants and as heirs of Calvin and Knox, and to distinguish our Reformed tradition from Lutheranism, Anglicanism, and others.
Second, a letter from a pastor:
A few days later a letter arrived in my “inbox.” It had been sent to the seminary by a member of a presbytery committee on ministry. He apparently sent the letter to Presbyterian seminaries nation wide. The letter lamented the lack of “Reformed sacramental theology” among recently graduated candidates for ministry. Seminaries are largely responsible, he said, for instilling in candidates an appropriate Reformed sacramental theology. As requested by the author of the letter, I shared its contents with our faculty.
Now, I’ve been mulling over both this conversation and this letter for the past few weeks. While I might wring my hands, as a former pastor, at a failure of the church to impart the essential distinctives of the Reformed tradition to a cradle Presbyterian who has been active in Sunday School and worship her whole life; and while, as a seminary dean, I can see the validity of the letter writer’s premise, that seminaries bear a particular responsibility for ensuring that future ministers are theologically competent, I also see a larger issue at stake here.
The issue at stake is illustrated by a remarkable, if idiosyncratic, fact: A generation ago Shirley Guthrie’s Christian Doctrine was considered appropriate Sunday school material for adult members of the Presbyterian church. Today it is not unusual to find this book among the texts for seminary classes in systematic theology. There was a time when, as a pastor, I used John Leith’s The Church: A Believing Fellowship with teenagers. Today Leith’s book, complete with discussion starters, would not be out-of-place on a reading list for seminarians prepping for their ordination exams.
It appears to me that we are dealing with an issue of Christian education and Christian formation, specifically education and formation in the distinctive patterns of faith and practice in the Reformed tradition, that goes to the heart of our life together as Presbyterians, and that underscores the importance of the special partnership between the church and the seminary. In other words, I think we (the big we, i.e., all of us) have taken the Reformed tradition for granted. We have forgotten just how wonderful, amazing and unique this tradition is. We have caricatured ourselves as “the frozen chosen” for so long we have forgotten that there’s something precious in our Reformed identity, something worth not losing.
Several years ago, while visiting in a Presbyterian congregation, I was reading through the church’s promotional material for prospective members. The church flyer provided a brief overview of some basic Reformed beliefs, including a statement on the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper – in other words, “Reformed sacramental theology.” The flyer told prospective members that Communion, or the Lord’s Supper, is a memorial, just a remembrance of Jesus’ saving death for us, and nothing more.
I don’t know if there was a conscious decision to opt for (at best) a Zwinglian doctrine of Communion, or if they just were trying hard not to sound too different from their Baptist neighbors. But there wasn’t a hint of John Calvin’s rich theology of the real presence of Jesus Christ at Table with us. No reflection on the Reformed concept of our “mystical” (Calvin’s word) participation in the life, death and resurrection of Christ in anticipation of his coming again. Not even a nod at our union with Christ effected once for all in the incarnation and celebrated in the Eucharistic feast. Nor even a glancing acquaintance with our spiritual nourishment by the power of the Holy Spirit on the Body and Blood of Christ. The hard won distinctive Reformed teachings on Communion were simply missing in action.
Now, the pastor of that congregation was a third generation Presbyterian minister whom I still admire and from whom I have learned a great deal over the years. I’m not sure I would be prepared to blame his seminary for not preparing him (I know who his professors were and he was taught better than that!), or his father and mother (ditto), or the churches in which he was formed (ditto, ditto). I think everybody just took for granted the distinctive, rich, deep teachings of the Reformed tradition (in this case related to Holy Communion) for so long that the teachings moved from assumed to tacit to forgotten. And what replaces remembered distinctives when ecclesial amnesia takes hold? Lowest common denominator Protestantism, that’s all!
I’d like to hold us all responsible. And I’d like to hold us all responsible for something I think we can do something about. Let’s resolve with this New Year (as we celebrate Calvin’s 500th!) not to take the Reformed tradition for granted. This is one resolution we can keep.
For too long we have acted as though to speak of the distinctive beliefs and practices of the Reformed tradition was somehow inconsistent with a commitment to working warmly and closely with other Christians. Some have even implied that to affirm the distinctives of one’s own faith tradition is somehow to be at odds with authentic Christianity. This is foolish. No one can be generically Christian! Authentic faith is always particular, peculiar, and concrete. I would encourage Methodists to recover Wesleyanism, Episcopalians to recover Anglicanism, Lutherans to recover their distinctively Lutheran voice, Baptists to rediscover what it means to be Baptists, and Roman Catholics to celebrate the uniqueness of their Catholicism.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from interfaith conversations over the years, it’s the wisdom of the great Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel who said: “The first and most important prerequisite of interfaith [dialogue] is faith.” The same is true of ecumenical relations. We can only speak to other Christian traditions with integrity when we speak from our own tradition knowingly.
There’s a very short distance from a lack of memory regarding one’s tradition to wholesale ignorance of a faith tradition. And when it comes to faith, it is not familiarity but ignorance that breeds contempt.
The people who taught me this, by the way, were members of the congregations with whom I have served. I remember, for example, as a young adult joining a Presbyterian Church in the Dallas suburb of Irving. An elder and member of the session (she would have been the first to remind you, incidentally, that in the Presbyterian Church “ruling elders” are ordained to ministry no less crucial and no less a ministry than “teaching elders”) asked me what the most important doctrine of the Reformed tradition was. She had good questions, and she had few doubts about the right answers. If you answered, “the sovereignty of God” (which, according to her, was the right answer), she wasn’t done with you. She next wanted to know what the relationship is between the Reformed doctrine of God’s sovereignty and our understanding of God’s grace and God’s providence. She wanted to know if I had thought about such things because a member of a Presbyterian church ought to give these matters some thought. Church members, she taught me, are not volunteers.
She wanted to know these things because she believed that something real is at stake in what we believe, and why we believe it, in what we do with our lives, and why we do it. She believed that something real is at stake when we belong to a church, and when we become part of a living tradition. She believed something real is at stake when we worship God in particular ways, when we pray using particular words, and when we try to serve God in a particular place.
We often act as though an appreciation for the Reformed tradition is somehow at odds with moving forward or doing new things. I would argue just the opposite. You don’t know where to go next if you don’t know who you are and where you’ve been.
One of my favorite novels is Chaim Potok’s wonderful book My Name is Asher Lev. Asher, a promising young painter, is apprenticed to an experienced older artist. Asher is eager to break new ground, to make his own mark. He is frustrated with his mentor’s requirement that he endlessly practice the lines and strokes and styles of the great artists of the past. In response to Asher’s resistance to this discipline, his teacher tells him that art “is not a toy,” it is “not a child scrawling on a wall.” Art, his teacher explains, is “a tradition.” He says to Asher: “You are entering a religion called painting…. And I will force you to master it…. No one will listen to what you have to say unless they are convinced you have mastered it. Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right to attempt to add to it or to rebel against it” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972, p. 213).
Amnesia with respect to the Reformed tradition (and, of course, this tradition is not singular; it proceeds in a variety of streams and branches of traditions) is often the product of an arrogant disregard for the saints who have preceded us. Such arrogance does not make us stronger or better or more viable as a church, and it certainly does not breed trust among those people who know that unless we have mastered – and remembered – a tradition we have no right to add to it or rebel against it.
I believe that if the Presbyterian Church does end up surrendering to the peculiar ecclesial amnesia that threatens us; if we do forget who we are and what we believe and what we do and why we do it, God will raise up another people to fulfill our role. “The life of the mind in the service of God” is just too good a distinctive mission to be neglected forever.
There are, of course, Presbyterian congregations and seminaries, pastors, church officials, elders, and professors, and many, many others who have not fallen victim to this amnesia, who still remember, who still live and practice, work to master, and attempt to critique, add to and build upon the Reformed tradition. May their tribe increase! And may all of us resolve anew not to take this tradition for granted.
Michael Jinkins is dean and Professor of Pastoral Theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary
