For the last long while in this blogspace, I have mostly had my nose to the proverbial grindstone, sharpening my responses to decisions made by recent Christian Reformed synods—synods which adopted for human sexuality a punitively rightwing version of church teaching. In doing so, these synods have purposely excluded churches and church leaders who differ from their decisions. I’ve argued that in important ways these decisions misconstrue the scriptures, violate the church order, fail to understand Reformed theology, and exhibit a profound lack of good Christian sense.
I’ve done so because sexual issues are important. They are important theologically, but more than this, they are important for people, for people we love: for LGBTQ+ people and their partners and communities, for the people who love the people who love queerly, for siblings, children, parents, friends—for all those who have been marginalized by churches, whose love has been called sinful, to whom the church has said over and over again: you are only welcome here if you are no longer you. It’s well that we remain focused on the human cost in these church controversies.
But sex is not everything. The church gets hung up on sex. There is something depressingly contemporary about the controversy that is splitting the CRC. It’s very much of our time. It breathes a spirit breathed in much of American politics. The message in the church as it is outside is “carnage”: the notion that we are losing what we value most, and what we value most is what we have been. It’s the privileging of grievance. And it is destructive of the church.
But these specifically 21st century issues are only part of a larger set of issues. Gospel issues. Issues for what it means to follow Jesus in this or any other century. Issues for how to read scripture. And, yes, issues for what it means to be Reformed. And, as always, these issues are destructive of Christian community. The greatest challenge in all this is how to turn anger into joy, opposition into embrace, judgment into hope. It’s to these things, not critique but constructive theology, to which in this blog I hope increasingly to turn in this and subsequent posts.
I begin with what I regard as one of the great joys of the faith: the joy of discovery. I think I’m in good company here. When I read Paul, I often hear in his voice astonishment. He says in various ways in many of his letters: look at me (Paul), me of all people, to me God has revealed an astounding heretofore never seen perspective on the ancient faith, a perspective revealed in Jesus, the messiah, a “mystery” (Paul’s own word) formerly hidden but now announced through me to the world. For Paul the faith was a constant journey of discovery, with new vistas over every rise on the spiritual path. His writings have a palpable sense of excitement.
But joy in discovery is true not just for theology but for all knowledge. Or, rather, for the all pursuit of knowledge. The pursuit of knowledge requires restlessness, a sense that what we know is on the way to knowing more and to knowing what we already think we know in new and surprising ways.
This joy in discovery seems not to be true for everyone. Some months past I was invited to a conversation with two members of the CRC faction that has taken over recent CRC synods. I didn’t realize at the time we met that these two had already decided to send a letter to my council claiming I should be disciplined. I somewhat naively met them at a coffee shop and openly discussed my positions with them.
Our conversation eventually came to rest on the CRC Covenant for Officebearers. The Covenant is a statement of agreement with the standards of the denomination. Officeholders in the CRC are required to sign it. In a supplement to Article 5, The CRC Church Order gives guidance about what agreement with the denominational standards, actually means. It says, notably, that agreement does not mean that the teachings of the confessions are “all stated in the best possible manner” or that they “cover all that the Scriptures teach on the matters confessed” or that “every teaching of the Scriptures is set forth in [the] confessions.” Nor does the agreement require that one is “bound to the references, allusions, and remarks . . . incidental to the formulations of these doctrines, nor to the theological deductions that some may draw from the doctrines set forth in the confessions.” These statements seem collectively to imply that one should approach agreement with the standards of the denomination with a certain thoughtfulness, a judiciousness. The confessions are the product of a time and a place, the Church Order advice implies. Focus on what’s important.
But all of that advice about what agreement doesn’t require seems to be contradicted in the same Church Order supplement by the claim that anyone “signing the Covenant for Officebearers affirms without reservationall the doctrines contained in the standards of the church as being doctrines that are taught in the Word of God” (emphasis added). “Without reservation”! What on earth would this mean?
In my conversation with the two synod-affirming clergy, I asked, “Can you really do this? Can you affirm anything, let alone what is contained in three 16th-17th century confessions, written as they were in the heat of history, ‘without reservation.’” Isn’t having reservations a requirement of thought itself? Isn’t the Reformation precisely about having reservations with regard to official church teaching? I was astounded and not in the Pauline sense, confessing, perhaps without sufficient caution, that I have reservations about almost everything, including about what I just said. Not so for them, they claimed. They had no reservations about anything in the confessions of the church. None at all.
I wondered at the time if they were being completely honest about this, but that is not mine to judge. What we can judge are the implications of this claim. It would seem that if one affirms something without reservation, one affirms it as a final truth. By “final truth” I mean that one need not think about the matter more; what is said settles it once and for all.
This may be true for exasperated parents who have been asked about something one too many times. They declare that whatever they say is final. And when the child asks one more time, “Why?” the parent says, “Because I say so.” The CRC Synod 2022, followed up by Synods 2023 and 2024, did something like this about their conclusions on human sexuality. Asked to explain, they said, “Because we said so.”
But that sort of parental exasperation will not do for theological conclusions in any serious sense. Further, as has often been pointed out, declarations of the “because I said so” type fly in the face of Reformed tradition and, for that matter, the broad Christian tradition in general. Our tradition is of the type that insists that no conclusion is ever final. In fact, as I said earlier, one of the joys of the Christian faith is that it leans into discovery. We believe that a truth grasped at one moment in life of the church will at another point in the life of the church come to be grasped again in new ways. The truth of the gospel is forever disruptive. It’s forever subverting what we thought by new and deeper insights.
In this respect, theological truth is rather like scientific truth. Scientific truth is not simply an accumulation of what is known about this or that in the natural world. It’s not the sum of experimental results. It’s certainly not one of those dull older textbooks of the kind that used be given to children to teach them a even duller litany of established conclusions. Science is not just facts but insight, where insight means that we see how things hang together. It’s more than this, of course. Ways of seeing how things hang together—theory—directs to see what before we had missed. Seeing and insight go together. No facts without theory (a word that originally meant “seeing”) and all that.
Christian tradition is the same. Revelation is not a dribbling out of a litany of facts about God. Revelation is insight, a way to see the world of our experience that brings together the world as we know it, the presence of God as we experience it, the reality of evil as we encounter it, and the meaning of human life as we live it.
As Christians we stand poised between two revelatory moments. The first is the Jesus moment, including cross and resurrection, a moment which required the earliest Christians to grasp what they knew of God and the world in new ways. The New Testament is the apostolic wrestling with how to grasp what happened and happens in Jesus. In wrestling with this, they didn’t reject the testimony of the older testament, but they came to understand it in fresh ways.
The second great revelatory moment is the one that has not yet happened. It lies beyond us. Perhaps forever beyond us. It’s the second coming of Christ. At the second coming, “all flesh shall see him,” but not in the ordinary sense of seeing. The event to which the scriptures look is not visual but a final and definitive seeing of the truth such that all will be revealed. But we are not there. Our theological understanding is not final. There is more to be revealed.
We find ourselves between these two moments of revelation, the original revelation in Jesus and the final revelation in the second coming. David Bentley Hart (Tradition and Apocalypse (2022) points out that these revelatory moments are always an “apocalypse.” Not “apocalypse” in the meaning the word has acquired from misreadings of the last book of the Bible, the Apocalypse, but the original meaning of “an unveiling,” a (disruptive) revelation. The apocalypse of God is not a single unveiling, as if the truth can be unveiled just once, but a progressive unveiling, each event a new way to see beyond what we saw before.
It’s these unveilings that are often the greatest joys of reading the Bible, of thinking about the Christian life, of living together as Christian community. The great 4th century theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, says that forever reaching for what is new in the old is an essential quality of the well-lived Christian life. Speaking of Moses, he says, “He shone with glory. And although lifted up through such lofty experiences, he is still unsatisfied in his desire for more,” adding, “Such an experience seems to me to belong to the soul which loves what is beautiful. Hope always draws the soul from the beauty which is seen to what is beyond, always kindles the desire for the hidden through what is constantly perceived.” “What Moses yearned for is satisfied by the very things which leave his desire unsatisfied” (The Life of Moses, translation, introduction and notes by Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson; preface by John Meyendorff. Paulist Press, 1978).
For those who regard divine truth as something at which we have already arrived, who see, for example, the 16th and 17th century Reformed confessions as conclusive formulations of the truth to which we need only to subscribe “without reservation,” Gregory’s yearning for ever deeper and more comprehensive understandings of the faith may seem strange, but in fact it’s at the core of what it means to believe. What it has always meant to believe.
To hold up even our best theology as final is to turn insight into idolatry. And no petulant synodical “because we say so” will make it otherwise. Unless each time scripture is read we come to it to discover the new in the midst of the old, unless each time we think through our theology we do so in the hope that we may discover new insights into the divine and the human, unless each time we gather we are eager to consider anew who we are as the followers of Jesus, we will end up reading and thinking and worshiping ourselves. And what’s the joy in that?
Clay