Here We Stand, pt 4

Matthew 22: 34-40

June 23, 2013

The great confessions of the Reformation Era, with which we’ve framed our worship this morning, sound a bit discordant to post-modern ears. Not only is the language stilted and distant, but the rather bleak emphasis on human sinfulness, the redeeming blood of Christ, and the assurance of life everlasting seem also more than a bit out of step with contemporary concerns.

It’s helpful, in trying to get into the mind of our Reformation forebears, to recall that they were writing in the age so memorably described by Thomas Hobbes: life was nasty, brutish and short.

Consider the lives of a few of the key players in the Reformation:

Ulrich Zwingli risked his life to minister to victims of the plague. He survived that but died in his mid-40s in a battle between Protestant reformers and Roman Catholics.

John Calvin lived only to 54, and struggled with often debilitating illness much of his adult life.

There were among the lucky ones.

Life expectancy for one born in medieval England at the time of the Westminster Confession was about 30 years, although if you survived to age 20 you could expect to make it to your early 60s. Today’s 20-year-olds can anticipate making it into their early 80s, which is also true for American babies born last week. In other words, life may be many things for us, but it is not likely to be “nasty, brutish and short.”

When life is nasty, brutish and short it’s probably not unusual to ask two basic questions: why is it so? And is there more that I can hope for from eternity?

Embedded in the language of these Reformation creeds we hear both a concern for moral behavior, on the one hand, and the recognition that life is already pretty messed up. Absent hygiene and antibiotics, fallen humanity seems as good an explanation as any for the Black Death.

In a world of constant sorrow – when infant mortality was the norm and death in childbirth claimed countless mothers, when disease was little understood and the treatments often worse than the ailment – the promise of eternal life was a much-needed source of constant comfort and hope.

Thus the opening inquiry of the Heidelberg Catechism strikes a profoundly pastoral note: What is your only comfort, in life and in death? That I belong – body and soul, in life and in death – not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

The opening question of Heidelberg, written in 1562, predates by almost a century, the opening question of the Westminster Catechism, which sounds a similarly hopeful note: What is the chief end of man? To glorify God, and to enjoy God forever.

These two catechism questions and answers form a neat bookend to the cataclysmic upheaval that the Reformation Era brought to all of Europe, and, taken together, they voice quite simply the two great themes of Reformation thought: first, that God alone is sovereign and, second, that humankind is utterly dependent upon the grace of the sovereign God made known to us through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

That seems hardly worth a century and a half of bloody conflict, but buried within those simple declarations, and all of the subordinate clauses flowing from them, lie core convictions upon which rest the subsequent 500 years of Western history. For the conviction that God alone is sovereign over the hearts, minds and souls of humankind calls radically into question the authority of any earthly sovereign, whether king or pope, and, similarly, it calls into question any human institution that upholds earthly claims to sovereignty, whether it be the church or the monarchy.

To say, as our Book of Order proclaims in naming the essential tenants of Reformed theology, that “God alone is Lord of the conscience,” is also to say to king and bishop: “you’re not the boss of me.”

Funny thing about that: neither kings nor bishops appreciate hearing anyone say that to them. Holy Roman emperors get especially testy. Thus it was that as Emperor Maximilian II looked down upon Frederick III as Frederick stood in the center of the Council Hall of Augsburg to defend his adoption of the Heidelberg Catechism, Maximilian pondered what to do with a troublemaking official who had introduced a catechism that did not align with the Augsburg Confession.

As Jack Rodgers describes it, “Maximilian was a moderate Catholic, but his rule depended on firm control over the Protestant princes. He feared that escalation of the conflict (between the Reformed proponents of Frederick’s catechism and its Catholic and High Lutheran opponents) might lead to civil war. The matter needed to be cleared up, and dispensing with Frederick would be the obvious solution.”[1]

Frederick stood accused of heresy and threatened with banishment unless he repented of his Reformed faith.  Standing before the emperor and his fellow princes, Frederick thought of the words of the catechism he had initiated and sponsored: What is my only comfort in life and in death? That I belong – body and soul, in life and in death – to Jesus Christ.

Frederick’s calm and gentle manner in defending his faith so impressed his accusers that they petitioned the emperor not to censor or punish Frederick. He was acquitted on all charges, and the Heidelberg Catechism became the preeminent theological standard for Reformed communities in much of Europe.

Not all of the Reformers were so lucky. As I mentioned earlier, Ulrich Zwingli died in battle. Zwingli, who was born in 1484, mentored the much younger Heinrich Bullinger, who wrote the Second Helvetic Confession. Though it is not as well known today as other Reformed documents, in its own time Bullinger’s confession was considered central to Reformed theological thought.

Zwingli was among the earliest and most radical of Protestant thinkers. He and other Zurich-based Reformers published a German translation of the Bible in 1530, four years prior to Luther’s now famous translation. Zwingli led public demonstrations for the Protestant cause, including participating when the leader of the printer’s union served sausages to his fellow printers during Lent. While that sounds harmless, and even ridiculous, the act has been compared to burning draft cards.[2]

Zwingli had been pressured by powerful laymen to leave his position in part because he dared to call into question the practice of recruiting Swiss peasants to mercenary roles in European armies, including that of the pope. Zwingli protested, saying, “Some condemn the eating of meat on Fridays and consider it a great sin, though God has never forbidden it. But to sell human flesh – that they do not consider a great sin.”[3]

It probably came as no great surprise that such a man, in such an age, should die with a sword in his hand.

By the time of the Westminster Confession and associated catechisms, almost a century later than the great Reformation confessions of the Scots, Germans and Swiss, the age was coming to a close. Great change had swept the religious, political and economic landscape of Europe.

The long conclave at Westminster Abby in London – convened in 1643 and lasting five years – found itself struggling to codify a form of church order and civil government that might thread the needle between monarchists and parliamentarians. The Westminster divines, as they were known, succeeded in crafting a confession that defined the Presbyterian Church for hundreds of years, but failed in their efforts to craft a document that would lead to civil order based on shared power.

The basic problem, as is so often the case, was the matter of power. The key theological assertion of Westminster – the sovereignty of God – ran smack into the key political assertion of the monarchy – the divine right of kings. If God is sovereign and is alone lord of the conscience, then the king no longer has ultimate authority over the whole lives of his subjects.

Fifteen chaotic years after the Westminster Confession was completed, the English Presbyterians who played central roles in its drafting were tossed from their parishes, impoverished and disgraced by King Charles II and his vengeful bishops whose power had been stripped by the Presbyterian form of church order crafted at Westminster.

These old documents and their histories have still much to teach us. I’m far from alone among my contemporaries at looking at our moment in history as strikingly similar to the age of the Reformation. The foundational institutions of our world – economic, political, religious – are in tremendous flux, and our communications technology has been revolutionized in our generation. We stand in deep need of a second Reformation.

But the violence and chaos of the first Reformation ought to remind us that the chief lesson of the gospel must stay at the forefront of our reforming. The law and the prophets – and those who would reform them – must hang on this: love the Lord with all your heart, mind and power; and love your neighbor as yourself. May that remain our first confession of faith. Amen.

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[1] Jack Rodgers, Presbyterian Creeds (Louisville: Westminster Press, 1985) 106.

[2] Rodgers, 117.

[3] Ibid.

Here We Stand, pt. 3

Apostles' and Nicene Creeds: A Brief Introduction

the Rev. John Green

June 16, 2013

The oldest creedal statement of the Christian faith is also the simplest: “Jesus is Lord.” The two second-oldest creedal statements of Christendom, the Nicene and Apostles' creeds, are a good bit longer and a great deal less simple. They are familiar to most church-going Christians, in most churches in most countries of the world. But that doesn't mean that we church-going Christians actually understand much of what these creeds say, nor what they mean, on either a scholarly or personal level.

The first question that comes to mind is, “Why two such similar statements of belief?” Would not one or the other have been sufficient? Both are concerned with answering the question, “Who is Jesus,” but they do so in different ways. Neither is much concerned with details of Jesus's life and ministry – reduced to a comma in the Apostles' Creed, a period in the Nicene. It is the person of Jesus and the office of the Son that are of concern in both creeds, not the Beatitudes nor the Parables.

The chief difference between the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed is that they came into existence in very different ways.  The Apostles' Creed is the product of centuries of use and acceptance into the proclamation and practice of the faithful. Its use is closely tied to the Baptismal rite of the early church, and it contains what was considered the irreducible minimum of information that a new Christian was expected to know and understand.

The Nicene Creed, on the other hand, is the product of a purposeful enterprise initiated by the Roman emperor Constantine and performed by two separate meetings of all the bishops to bring order and uniformity to the church's teaching. The Apostles' Creed evolved within the life of the church; the Nicene Creed was created by ecumenical councils.

Rather than try to understand the meaning of “substance” and figure out why the “filioque” is important, let's step back and look at what Constantine and the bishops were really up to, and up against.

The Hebrew faith is firmly and unequivocally monotheistic: Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. There are no assistant gods or associate gods, demigods or oh-my-gods, and the angels are never clearly defined: Adonai echod, the Lord is one. But to Romans, such a limitation on their thinking would be fundamentally incomprehensible and decidedly unwelcome. Romans were deeply and enthusiastically polytheistic: They loved gods, adopted and celebrated the gods of their neighbors, the gods of people they conquered, gods they made up on the spur of the moment. Apollo, Mithra, Isis, the more the merrier, bring them all, and welcome, every one.

So you see the problem: How do you knit together two such utterly opposite understandings? God is one, God is many, can we have it both ways? As it turns out, yes we can ... (that has a strangely familiar ring). Yes, we can have it both ways, but we're going to have to do some mental gymnastics in order to get there. Bear with me a moment.

The Romans were also wildly favorable toward anything that was Greek: architecture, sculpture, drama, poetry, philosophy, spanakopita, Romans couldn't get enough. So, as it happens, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were well known and admired by the Roman intelligentsia. The philosophical system we know as Platonic-Aristotelian divided the world into two parts: material and spiritual. The spiritual world was the habitation of the ideal, the perfect, the eternal. The material world was the opposite: imperfect and temporary.

In the language of Plato, the substance of a thing was its perfect, eternal quality that exists in the spiritual realm. The bishops decided that it could prove to be a handy device for proclaiming that there was only one God but three persons of the same substance. The Platonic-Aristotelian system divided reality into two parts, ideal and spiritual on the one hand, physical and material on the other, the former superior to the latter. In contrast, the Hebrew mind – the mind of Jesus – knows only one reality. By introducing the concept of substance into the language of faith the bishops created a division in reality, idealized the spiritual realm and diminished the material world in a way that would never have occurred to Jesus. A temporary and admittedly almost unsolvable problem – the blending of a monotheistic faith with a polytheistic culture – was managed, but in a way that leaves a genuinely unsatisfactory taste in our modern, post-Enlightenment minds. The Platonic solution created a greater problem, the cleaving of the world into two parts, spiritual and material. The damage caused by this “solution” is in many important respects the subtext of the Reformers, who sought to repair the damage done to the faith and message of Jesus by the introduction of the Platonic world view into Christian proclamation. And so we turn now to the Reformation. David, it's all yours.

Here We Stand, pt. 2

June 16, 2013

Deuteronomy 6:1-9

“Hear O Israel: the Lord is one.”

That’s one translation of the shema – a title that comes from the Hebrew imperative “hear!” as in, “listen up!” What follows is the fundamental statement of faith, the creed or confession, if you will, of the people of Israel: there is one God, we belong to that God, we shall love that God, and we shall pass this faith along to our children.

As we consider together this summer the creeds and confessions that mark us as a distinctive people of considered and articulated faith, I find it helpful to be reminded that we are not alone in this. Beginning with the earliest expression of monotheism, the people of Israel give voice to their faith.

Indeed, as Walter Bruggemann puts it, the people of Israel, in this speech, bring something new into being. Through their faithful testimony they speak a new reality into being. The utterance of the people, their confession, brings about the world they inhabit. For Brueggemann’s theology of the Old Testament, “faith consists in a willingness to live in the world of this utterance, and to accept as reliable its speech as testimony. Such speech – spoken regularly, in season and out of season – recruits persons into this community and into its faith.”[1]

In this manner, the community’s confession of faith not only describes the world, but also it summons it into being. Gandhi famously invited his followers to “be the change” they wished to see in the world. For people of the word and of the book, we speak the world we long for and in our speech we summon it forth.

That’s why confessing the faith matters. It is, of course, not the whole of our faith nor of our summoning, but it is where we begin. For, in the beginning was the Word.

Last week, I kicked off this summer with the confessions with a brief look at the earliest creeds. One of the great joys of being in ministry at Clarendon is the wealth of gifted theologians in the community. So before jumping ahead a millennia to the Reformation, I’m going to invite the Rev. John Green to take us a bit deeper into the early creeds.

*****

Christians throughout our history have given voice to the faith and expressed it in creeds and confessions. I had a lovely brief conversation on this with our friend Kevin Ogle, who will preach here in a couple of weeks. Kevin is ordained in the Disciples of Christ tradition, a tradition that proudly proclaims “no creed by Christ.”

Good Reformed Presbyterian that I am, when Kevin articulated that foundational principle of his tradition I couldn’t resist asking immediately, “so, which Christ?”

That, of course, is always the heart of the matter. For we all want to believe that we are being faithful, that we are living faithful lives, that we are, indeed, following Jesus. But clarity on just who that Jesus is becomes crucial when our following leads us in vastly different directions. Everyone who claims to be following Jesus lays claim, also, to the idea that their church is the true church.

Such was the case for Europe during the Reformation era. Almost all of the people – and, significantly, all of the rulers – were at least nominally Christian. As the Reformation bled across the continent, families and towns and kingdoms split into Catholic and Protestant factions. Once begun, the urge to “protest” is hard to stop and quickly the Protestant factions splintered as well into various factions each striving to be “more true” than the others.

The urge to purity had often tragic consequences not only for minority Christian groups who were often vilified, but all the more so for Jewish communities who were often the victims of pogroms.

In Scotland our Presbyterian forebears joined cross and sword in the battle to build the true kirk. Back in January, Martin and I stood on the street outside the walls of the castle at St. Andrews. On the roadway you find the letters GW carved into the stone. They mark the spot were Protestant reformer George Wishart was burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic archbishop Cardinal David Beaton.

Beaton was a poster-child for the rampant corruption of the Catholic Church in Scotland, and was reputed to have fathered eight children despite his vow of celibacy and lack of a wife. The martyrdom of George Wishart, the last in a line of reformers who died at Beaton’s stake, inflamed the passions of his followers. A few months after Wishart’s death, a small band of reformers broke into the castle, killed Cardinal Beaton, and left his body hanging out a window.

John Knox became chaplain to the reformers at St. Andrews, preaching the Reformation tenants that he had learned from Wishart. They occupied the castle for less than a year before it fell to a French warship in league with the widow of King James V of Scotland, the French Roman Catholic Mary of Guise.

The struggle to win the Reformation in Scotland was long and bloody, and over the next dozen years Knox spent time as a galley slave on the French ship, and several years in exile in Calvin’s Geneva. While in Geneva, Knox, impassioned by his dealings with Mary, wrote his famous, or infamous, tract The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.

By 1560, upon the death of Mary of Guise, the French Catholics were withdrawn from Scotland and John Knox stood before the Scottish parliament “to make known to the world the sum of that doctrine which we profess and for which we have sustained infamy and danger.”[2] With those words, Knox introduced the Scots Confession, and gave birth to the church we have inherited.

Among its many doctrinal statements, the Scots Confession lifts up, in particular, the sacramental essence of the church. For Knox and his co-authors, the marks of the true kirk are these: the right administration of the sacraments and the right preaching of the gospel.

For that reason, for a long time, the Presbyterian Church ordained those who would serve it as pastors to the office of minister of word and sacrament. The Scots heritage is one reason that I question our decision at the most recent General Assembly to change the title of the office to “teaching elder.” But, I digress.

I hope the teaching that John and I have tried to do this morning accomplishes at least two things: first, I hope it underscores just how rich and complex is the history of our confessions; second, I hope it lifts up both the gifts and challenges of these documents.

From the Scotts we receive the compelling reminder about the centrality of word and sacrament to our common life, but we also receive from the great John Knox the continuation of the patriarchy and its structures of power and domination that have done far more damage to the gospel of love than all the other heresies the creeds and confessions attempt to address.

As we explore our history and, all the more so, as we work together to articulate the faith for our own time and place, I hope above all that we’ll proceed with the humility of those who stand in a long line of folks who had the courage, creativity and faithfulness to speak the faith, and who also had the brokenness and blindness of the human condition that needs the faith.

That is the reality we stand in, certainly, and we join our voices to speak a new reality into being knowing that our speech will always be limited and provisional.

I suppose, in the end, that is also why we confess. Amen.

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[1] Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997) 722.

[2] Jack Rodgers, Presbyterian Creeds (Louisville: Westminster Press, 1985), 86.

Here We Stand

June 9, 2013

1 Peter 3:8-15

Credo. “I believe.” The first word of the Apostles’ Creed in the Latin raises some wonderfully rich questions that will, I hope, help us embark on a summer of exploring the confessions of the faith that, in part, define us as a congregation of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and individually as members of the body of Christ.

We’ll come back to the word itself in a bit, but first, you might well be wondering why it matters at all. I had a lovely long conversation last week with a long-time friend who pastors a little Presbyterian congregation in New England. Pat serves on the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission. That body is, in effect, the supreme court of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

They hear and decide all kinds of cases about issues in the church ranging from disputed dissolutions of pastoral calls to disputes over church property. Pat told me last week about a case that is upcoming involving a congregation whose session has voted to leave the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and, as is almost always the case, wants to retain the church property which, in all cases, actually belongs to the presbytery of which the congregation is a member congregation.

The case revolves around a disputed understanding of what it means to be part of the Reformed theological tradition. In other words, it comes down to how we understand who we are as a church. In still other words, it comes down to what we proclaim or, in still other words, what we confess.

As our text from 1 Peter suggests, there are times when one must be prepared to give account of the hope that is within us. As the various historic documents that comprise our Book of Confessions indicate, giving an account of hope is all the more important in times of despair and hopelessness.

The confessions matter because they are efforts by particular people at particular moments in history to declare clearly and publicly who they are and for what they hope. The confessions come from moments when a people felt the clear need to declare, “here we stand.”

If you grew up in the church, at least in its Mainline Protestant or Roman Catholic expressions, you’ve encountered, and, perhaps even memorized the words of the ancient creed that are printed on the back of this morning’s bulletin.

You’d think by its name that this creed is the most ancient Christian expression. You’d be forgiven for believing (as, in fact the church-supported legend held for centuries) that these words were codified when the apostles themselves felt the clear need to declare, “here we stand.”

Actually the Nicene Creed predates what we now know as the Apostles’ Creed by at least several centuries.

“Several centuries” is a fairly large margin of error, and that margin serves as an excellent reminder that we live in unimaginably different times than our forebears in the faith. There are not multiple iterations of the Apostles’ Creed carefully preserved in markup Word files. Indeed, there are no manuscripts at all, just fragments and references in other texts to something that eventually coalesced in the early 700s into the form we have today.

The creed was used as a teaching tool and as part of the baptismal liturgy. Parents were expected to know it by heart and priests were expected to be able to teach the faith based upon the claims of the creed, which distills various parts of scripture into a dozen assertions about the triune God.

The Apostles Creed provided a common language used by early Christians to say, in effect, “here we stand.”

The creed of Nicaea, slightly longer but similar in many respects to the Apostles’ Creed, has a considerably clearer history. It emerged from Emperor Constantine’s desire to unify his empire ecclesiastically as well as militarily and economically.

Perhaps understanding the call in our text this morning for “unity of spirit,” Constantine said, “Disorder in the church I consider more fearful than any other war.” He was intent on creating order first by achieving agreement on the fundamentals of the faith.

Far more interested in political stability than in complex theological formulations, nevertheless, the emperor suggested the compromise language that convinced the holy fathers of Nicaea to declare that Jesus was of the same substance as the Creator at the council of the year 325 of the Common Era. In Constantinople in 381, a second council further developed the creed, and by the middle of the fifth century it was accepted as the definitive statement of Christian faith.

“The creed, in its present language, is the oldest theological statement of the church, and it is the only creed accepted and used by all three major branches of Christendom: Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant.” As former GA moderator Jack Rodgers put it in a book that has seen the past generation of Presbyterian clergy through our ordination exams, “It is highly appropriate that [the Nicene Creed] stands first in our Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Book of Confessions.”[1]

The Book of Confessions is part one of the constitution of the Presbyterian Church. It includes nine historic confessions: the two ancient ones we’re considering this morning; four that come from the age of the Reformation and its immediate aftermath; and three more from the 20^th century.

When we ordain and install officers in the church – ruling elders to serve on session; teaching elders to serve as pastors; deacons to serve pastoral needs in community – we ask them to “sincerely receive and adopt the essential tenets of the Reformed faith as expressed in the confessions of our church” and to be “instructed and led by those confessions as [they] lead the people of God” [W-4.4003].

We are a people of hope, as we sing here each Sunday, and we are also a people who have striven through the ages to be clear about the nature of that hope and about the God who is its source.

That’s why we have these documents; they are both examples of how our ancestors said, “here we stand,” and guides in our own attempts to say the same thing in our own time and place with words that speak the truth as we have been given to understand it.

Of course, the confessions are more than that. They arose from particular moments when a great deal was at stake politically, socially and in the life of the church. Constantine, for example, was trying to hold an empire together, and the church was a significant part of the effort.

Our time is no different, and, also, vastly different. We face our own set of questions and challenges, but the demand on us is the same: in the face of what confronts us, where do we stand? In the face of a culture of despair, what is the nature of our hope? In the face of a culture of disbelief, what truth do we proclaim?

Credo. I believe.

In a few moments I’ll invite you to join in reciting the ancient words of the Apostles’ Creed. If by the words, “I believe,” we mean “I give my intellectual assent to these propositions taken literally,” then I cannot stand before you and say “I believe” to a great many of these ancient ideas.

So where does that leave me? You may find yourself in a similar boat. If by credo we mean “I hereby agree to the literal-factual truth of the following statements,” many of us should remain silent. But credo doesn’t necessarily mean that, or merely that.

While the deep and ancient etymological roots are twisted, complicated and buried under centuries of linguistic sediment, there’s a connection in the Latin credo to the heart as well as to the mind. Thus, as Marcus Borg puts it, “when we say credo at the beginning of the creed, we are saying, ‘I give my heart to God.’”

Borg goes on:

And who is that? Who is the God to whom we commit our loyalty and allegiance? The rest of the creed tells the story of the one to whom we give our hearts: God as the maker of heaven and earth, God as known in Jesus, God as present in the Spirit.[2]

So here I stand: committed to living as fully and deeply into relationship with this God and with God’s people in the community of Christ’s church, endeavoring, even now – especially now – to follow the way of Jesus who beckons us, “come and see.” I have, I am and I will. And this has made all the difference.

Amen.

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[1] Jack Rodgers, Presbyterian Creeds (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster Press, 1985) 39.

[2] Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco: Harper, 2003) 40.