The True Kirk

John 10: 5, 27-28

The Scotts Confession, from chapter 18

January 8, 2017

Ah, those Scotsmen of the 1500s knew how to talk about their opponents, eh? The “horrible harlot, the church malignant” – now that’s a confession of the faith a true Scot can get behind!

Sometimes it’s fun to step into the way-back machine! And pretty soon I will have said this often enough that almost everyone here will recognize the way-back machine as the context for much that we talk about together this year. But the year has barely begun, so it’s still necessary and worth saying: 2017 marks the 500^th anniversary of the beginning of what we now call the Protestant Reformation in western Europe.

The Scots Confession, written in part by John Knox – the father of Presbyterian tradition – and ratified by the Scottish Parliament in 1560, emerged in the midst of the ongoing Reformation.

We are a church, not a college history class. Why, you rightly ask, do these roadside historical markers from Europe of the 16^th century matter to us North American Christians of the 21^st century?

As Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch writes in the introduction to his magisterial history of the Reformation, “American life is fired by a continuing energy of Protestant religious practice derived from the sixteenth century. So the Reformation, particularly in its English Protestant form, has created the ideology dominant in the world’s one remaining superpower.”[1]

At a moment when everything in American life – including that foundational ideological impulse – is unsettled, it’s critical to understand how we got here. I don’t know if it’s true that those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it, but I do believe that if we don’t know how we arrived where we are then we’ll make lousy decisions concerning where we want to go from this point.

Life in Western Europe 500 years ago was far more unsettled – and far more dangerous – than 21^st-century American life. While it was not quite Hobbesian, it was often nasty, brutish, and short. Life expectancy at birth in 1500s Europe was about 30 years. If you avoided war, disease, and giving birth, you’d probably make it to about 70. That was, of course, a big if. Infant mortality, maternal mortality, widespread disease were the norm.

In that context, how to get to heaven was a pressing existential concern. After all, when so many lives were cut so short and the work for those who lived longer than their life expectancy at birth was usually harsh and often brutal, it’s not difficult to imagine that human beings longed for something more than what this mortal coil had to offer.

The church offered salvation – eternal life beyond the sickness and strife of this one. It also claimed for itself the role of gate keeper. That is to say, the church proclaimed as an essential tenet of the faith that the church itself was the only way to the eternal salvation promised by the faith. Clever marketing under the guise of theological conviction? Perhaps.

When your eternal salvation was your key concern and receiving it depended upon your church membership, it was crucial to be part of the true church and not some false and pale facsimile. Thus the various reformers – from Luther to Calvin, Zwingli to Knox, Anabaptists to Moravians – as well as the counter-reforming Roman Catholic bishops and popes – all made claims to the truth of their own ideas about church.

Often, in their claims, they cited Jesus’ words from the gospel of John: “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” If, as both scripture and the church had proclaimed, the church of Jesus Christ is the body of Christ in the world, then the true church was the true body, and true believers would follow faithfully.

Ah, but what is truth?

The various reformations and counter-reformations pointed to various practices and beliefs to stake their various claims to truth, but for those who led what came to be called the Reformed Church – in whose line we stand – church discipline and right administration was a consistent through-line. It is not the sole or even central tenet of Reformed faith, but it has always been a significant part of the tradition.

We Presbyterians often joke about our preoccupation with being “decent and in order in all things,” but the underlying truth is that we value order in the life of the church. The original impulse toward church order arose in response to widespread corruption in church leadership, but it also reflected a fundamental conviction about the nature of human life and the reality of God.

In Calvin’s famous phrase, the Reformers believed in the total depravity of human kind and the grace of God. Orderly structures in the church are necessary because absent them human beings will, in their depravity, pursue narrow self-interests over the best interest of the community.

We may not like old John’s word choice these days, but truth still lingers in them. We speak more often now of human brokenness than we do of depravity, and we celebrate the belief that our brokenness is not the whole story of who we are.

Nevertheless, we hold on to the necessity of ecclesiastical discipline and order because we still recognize the danger of unchecked power within any human system. It’s not like no human beings prior to the Reformation understood this, but the reformers’ emphasis on the universality of human brokenness and the logical necessity of checks on human power stood in stark contract to an ecclesiastical system with an infallible pope and a political system that rested upon the divine right of kings.

You can see where that led, right?

Today, five centuries into the whole reformation enterprise, we face a different set of concerns.

The global wars and genocides of the past century have raised a new set of existential concerns as well. In place of a deep desire for eternal life in the face of limited expectations for long life or the inescapable drudgery of brutal toil, today we experience a widespread desire for deeper meaning in the face of the capriciousness of life lived with expectations of much longer spans and far great human freedom. When meaning is the deepest concern, what practices and convictions should shape our faith lives and communities? What implications would such practices and beliefs have for other systems – political, social, economic ones?

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Reformation – or whatever we come to call this season of profound and global change – does not mean throwing out everything. It was no accident that we focused on church order on a day when we elected, ordained, and installed elders to lead this congregation. Even if you believe more in original blessing than in original sin, that doesn’t mean that any one of us is perfect, that any one of us is immune from temptation, that any one of us is infallible.

Whatever we are, a people who long for connection and for love, and for our voices to be heard. Let us lift our voices and express those longings in prayer.

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[1] Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation (New York: Penguin, 2003) xxii.