Is God Mean?

I had meant to write this week about penal substitutionary atonement (PSA). (Doesn’t that sound exciting?) I thought to call the piece: “Is God Mean?” And, in line with the direction of my Bad Theology series, to ask whether a mean God leads to mean politics. (The answer is yes.)

For those of you who are not theology wonks, PSA is a common theological take on why Jesus had to die (in evangelical churches, the most common “theory” of atonement). The question PSA attempts to answer is about the significance of the cross of Jesus Christ. According to PSA, Jesus had to die to pay the penalty (thus “penal”) for sin instead of us (thus, “substitutionary”). In this view, God requires justice (or, in an earlier form of this theology, “satisfaction”) from someone. God cannot do otherwise (so claim the advocates of PSA). God’s own nature requires that someone suffers for sin. For those who believe, the suffering of Jesus on the cross substitutes for their own; for those who do not believe, their own suffering will be required, in hell, eternally. 

You see why PSA might prompt the question: Is the PSA God mean? In answer to that question, even theologians from the evangelical tradition have sometimes answered yes (see, for example, Douglas A. Campbell and Jon Depeu, 2024). But PSA is often taken to be a straightforward reading of the Bible, and required for belief. But that, too, is being questioned these days, from at least two angles. From the side of New Testament studies, we have the “new perspective on Paul,” actually not all that new anymore, going back to 1977 and E.P. Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism. From the side of Old Testament studies, comes a deeper understanding of the Levitical sacrificial system. A new book by King’s University professor Andrew Rillera, Lamb of the Free (2023), reviews the evidence in great detail.

Culture or Confessions?

But more on that next time. For the present post, I have decided to respond to a narrative about those of us leaving the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) for other communions—forced to leave, I should add, by the actions of Synod 2024. I am doing this even though I have lately found myself growing more distant from the CRC. Besides, aren’t there are more important matters at the moment than losing a small mostly Midwest denomination, matters like losing our democracy? Still, I thought some things should be said.

What brought this narrative to mind was a long Substack post by Kent Hendricks that hit my inbox a few days ago (2/3). Kent’s new piece, “Dutch culture vs. the confessions, addresses a claim from the Abide crowd—the “winners” in the CRC wars—about what has happened in the CRC. According to several well-placed Abiders, the issue has been culture versus confessions. According to this narrative, those leaving the CRC—people like me—were merely “cultural” members. Those now in control of the CRC are, in contrast, “confessional” members. Let me steal a few quotations to this effect taken from Kent’s piece:

“Synod 2024 was a clash of two competing visions of the Christian Reformed Church in North America. One sees the CRC defined by its heritage and history. The other sees the CRC defined by its beliefs from Scripture as described in the creeds and confessions. This is the current tension in the CRC….  (Aaron Vriesman)

They don’t actually believe what the denomination believes. They rest all of their arguments on—‘I grew up in the CRC, my grandparents were in the CRC, so this is what I was taught as a child, not this is what the Bible says or this is what our creeds and confessions say. This is what my parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents said, and this is how I was taught growing up’—and there was no understanding of what the Bible actually says. (Report from delegates to Synod 2024 to Classis Minnkota) 

It was never, for some people, about biblical identity. It was cultural. The traditionalists were on the side of Wilhemenia mints and whose-ever grandfather built First CRC in Wherever. And I learned through that argument of people saying how—‘I’ve always had acceptance in this denomination, how dare you kick me out, I grew up here, I was baptized here, I graduated from this Christian school… how dare you say my acceptance in this denomination is no longer needed’—for those who were standing by an open and affirming position. Through that, I learned that no matter how orthodox my faith was I would never be CRC enough for them. And that was a big revelation. (Michael Bently)

You get the drift. The Abiders allege that we who are being forced out of the denomination were never all that serious in the first place. We were members of the CRC because we grew up in the CRC and attended CRC institutions. True membership, so say the Abiders, is not history with the denomination but believing what the denomination believes, and this belief is certified by signing “without reservation” the denominational “Covenant of Officebearers.” Denominational membership is believing the right things.

This sounds right, at least, to many people who grew up in conservative Christian churches, but it’s not. It’s wrong on what it means to belong to a church. And even more, it’s wrong on what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Centrally, it gets faith wrong.

Feeling the Pain

I’ll come to that presently, but I should first acknowledge the pain expressed in what the Abiders are saying. I hear it especially in that last quote, from Michael Bently. After quoting a typical CRCer to the effect that she or he has always belonged, Bently says, “Through that [the sorts of things the CRCer was saying], I learned that no matter how orthodox my faith was I would never be CRC enough for them. And that was a big revelation.” 

“Never . . . CRC enough for them.” If one came from the outside, from outside of CRC institutions and from outside the CRC ethnic family, one could never belong. And there were, probably still are in CRC population centers, a hundred ways to remind you that you don’t belong. Dutch bingo: “Oh, you are related to Vander Kloppen; I’m related to his wife. Bingo.” Calvin bingo: “You took Bible 103 from Van Sniffer? So did I! What a guy! Bingo.”) A subtler form of bingo formed of growing up experiences, education, a style of thought, an arrogance about one’s way of life, and a taste for mashed potatoes and pea soup (“No spicy food for me. I’m Dutch.”) A palpable sense of superiority often lay like a blanket of judgment over CRC congregations. It’s little wonder that these churches welcomed few strangers. If you joined such a congregation, you were told every week that you were lucky to be there. 

I’ve had long experience with these attitudes. I spent much of my life not quite belonging. Sometimes I came close. I served on denominational study committees. I was frequently delegated to synod. I wrote for The Banner and other CRC magazines. I even taught at Calvin and Calvin Seminary. Close, but never so that I felt like I really belonged. So, yes, Michael Bently, what you report is true: “Never . . . CRC enough for them.” And I’m sure it stung and stings still.

Deconstructing a Denomination

But the remedy is worse than the disease. Look what the recent CRC synods have done. In 2022, they ruled, along with Synod 1973 and Synod 2016, that queer sex is prohibited by the Bible. In itself this is not surprising, although, it should be noted that making such a ruling in 2022 is quite different from making such a ruling in 1973. The ruling in 1973 was exploratory; the ruling in 2022 was malevolent. Read the reports. Note the tone of them. The 1973 decision was cautious, temporizing, allowing for continuing discussion and perhaps a different decision in the future. The 2022 decision was the opposite. By then opinions had hardened. The synod drew a line in the sand. On this side, the faithful; on that side, the unfaithful. It made its decision creedal: on this side, gospel; on that side, gospel-denying falsehood.

But that was not enough. What of the many people in the denomination who disagreed with the decisions of the synod, including many at the synod itself? Synod 2022 appeared to open a path for dissent: the gravamen. It did so explicitly, if informally, on the floor of synod. The reporter for the committee who brought the motions to declare queer sex wrong, himself an Abider, if I’m not mistaken, was asked by one of the delegates what he should do. Synod had just declared its decision on the matter to be creedal. The delegate, like the others who had spoken on the losing side of the issue, suddenly found himself losing not just the issue but his place in the denomination. What should he do? he asked. 

The committee reporter counseled him to follow Article 5 of the Church Order. Article 5 at that time laid out a path for dissent from the creeds: the gravamen. A gravamen is nothing more than a formal acknowledgement to an official church body, say, one’s local church council, that you have reservations about something included in the creeds. It can be and usually was a quiet form of dissent. It went no further. The council in effect said, “Noted.” And the person bringing the gravamen continued to serve.

This was the path suggested by the committee reporter and later counseled by denominational officials. But Synods 2023 and 2024 were having none of it. They declared gravamina (plural of gravamen) to be temporary expedients, a chance to receive the proper instruction so that one can come into full compliance with the confessions. Barring that, it would be synod’s way or the highway. Synod 2024 ruled that any dissent by any officeholder on any confessional matter at all made one subject to discipline and that, further, any church council supporting a person who dissented was subject to a hostile takeover by church authorities.

Who Belongs?

It was in the midst of the Synod 2024 debate that the matter of what makes one Christian Reformed came up on the floor. One of the delegates, Ryan Schreiber, brought up Professor Alvin Plantinga. Plantinga was until his retirement a prominent Christian philosopher whose scholarly work was devoted to making theism credible “to its cultured despisers” (to steal a phrase from Friedrich Schleiermacher). For many years, he was one of the most prominent CRC intellectuals. Schreiber noted that Plantinga had for years quietly dissented from the creedal position on reprobation. A few speeches later, another delegate, Patrick Anthony from Ripon, California, responded with: “I’m not Dutch, and I’m more Christian Reformed than Alvin Plantinga.” 

What’s notable is not the apparent arrogance of Anthony’s comment—as someone who has made many speeches on the floor of synod, I know how easy it is in the heat of the moment to say things in ways you might wish later you had said differently—but how it misses the point. What was and is at stake are two different visions of what faith means.

For Anthony, faith or, at least, denominational membership, is all about belief. Membership in the CRC is defined by believing what the Reformed confessions say. If a confession says that gay sex is wrong, then one must acknowledge it to be wrong. Here’s the current instruction from the CRC Church Order (modified after Synod 2024):

The person signing the Covenant for Officebearers affirms without reservation all the doctrines contained in the creeds and confessions of the church as being doctrines taught in the Word of God. “Without reservation” means that an officebearer does not have a difficulty or hold a settled conviction contrary to any of the doctrines contained in the creeds and confessions. This includes what synod has declared to have confessional status. (Supplement, Article 5-a)

What counts as being “more Christian Reformed” than thou? Agreement with the Reformed confessions, marked by signing  the Covenant for Officebearers “without reservation.” The fact that Anthony could sign the Covenant “without reservation,” while Plantinga couldn’t means, in Anthony’s opinion, that he is “more Christian Reformed than Alvin Plantinga.”

What’s missing in Anthony’s way of thinking about denominational belonging is history. And people. But this is not because people who attend to these things are “cultural” Christians. It not because they don’t believe; it’s because of what they believe. They believe what might be called a “Reformed dynamic.”

A Reformed Dynamic

The Reformed confessions are historical documents. For the CRC, they include just three: the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort. All of them come from the 16^th and 17^thcenturies, from a narrow slice of time between 1561 (the Belgic Confession) and 1619 (the Canons of Dort). This was a decisive time for the Reformed tradition in Europe (the Reformed faith in England took a different tack, tied to the Westminster standards). We honor these documents in part because of the role they played in developing the tradition of which we remain a part. But they were never seen as being final.

Indeed, to say that these documents are final is to deny the most basic claim of these confessions: that they are biblical. The authority they bear is the authority of scripture. Scripture judges them. If these documents are final, then it’s they and not scripture that constitute the decisive witness to the faith. The Covenant for Officebearers acknowledges all this. It says in its penultimate paragraph:

We also promise to present or receive confessional difficulties in a spirit of love and fellowship with our brothers and sisters as together we seek a fuller understanding of the gospel. Should we come to believe that a teaching in the confessional documents is not the teaching of God’s Word, we will communicate our views to the church, according to the procedures prescribed by the Church Order and its supplements. If the church asks, we will give a full explanation of our views. Further, we promise to submit to the church’s judgment and authority.

“Should we come to believe that a teaching in the confessional documents is not the teaching of God’s Word. . ..” Think of the church as a long conversation with scripture. Actually, with both scripture and the world we live in, but for the moment focus on the conversation with scripture. At times, the church finds it necessary to declare as clearly as it can what it hears in the pages of scripture. In these moments, it’s often one part of the church over against another. The Reformed confessions were written in such a moment. Part of what we honor in these documents is how at a decisive point in the history of the church, these documents help point the way forward. They were not meant to be final but to be directional: the truth lies in that direction.

But the conversation with scripture and with the world in which we live continues. Must continue. This is in fact how we honor these historic statements of faith: not by blindly accepting them but by testing them against scripture and against what we have come to understand as the world has moved on. We honor them not by enshrining their words and making them law but by engaging them in a continual conversation. We ask, is this (still) the best way to understand what the faith means? Is, for example, the way the Canons of Dort construe election in terms of 17^th century European metaphysics the best way to understand what Ephesians means when it says that we are chosen of God? Many of us would say no. That does not mean we do not honor the Canons or that we can’t learn from them; it does mean that we must always be seeking a fuller understanding of the faith and better ways to frame it.

Faith as Faithfulness

Which brings me to faith itself. As I said above, for the Abiders faith seems to be mostly belief. It’s defined intellectually. It’s what you do with your head. I have had conversations with Patrick Anthony. For him, belief is settled. Or so he says. He claims to be able to affirm “without reservation” everything the confessions say. I confess I find this hard to fathom. Is it possible to reach this kind of certainty about the teachings of 16^th and 17^th century theology? For me, the answer to that question would be no. No on the basis of scripture, the larger tradition, and what I have learned of life. 

But not only can I not reach such certainty about the confessions, I think it unfaithful to do so. To be faithful is to engage the conversation, to ask continuously whether we have gotten our faith right, always believing that every formulation of the faith is provisional. To be faithful is to do what Guido de Bres of the Belgic Confession and Casper Ursinus of the Heidelberg Catechism and the divines of the Synod of Dort were themselves doing. They were trying in a new time, a time in which new ways to read the Bible were coming into vogue and new ways to understand the world were being developed, to grasp the faith anew. If we are to be faithful to their legacy, we must do the same. This is, as I said, the Reformed dynamic.

Faithfulness requires continual scrutiny of what we believe and how we live out what we believe. To put this in classic Reformed terms: ecclesia semper reformanda est, “the church must always be reforming.” It’s faithfulness to a process.

But there is more. Faith in the Bible is not what it has become in contemporary evangelical theology. It’s not mostly about belief. We are not saved by getting our doctrine right. By saying the right words. Faith in the Bible has two aspects. One is trust in the God who saves us. The other is living faithfully. For the New Testament, trust in God is trust in Jesus. And living faithfully is living the life of Jesus.

The faithful life is inherently relational. The early church thought about this in terms of body, soul, and spirit. In this way of thinking, body, soul, and spirit are not things but relationships. Body is our relationship to all that is physical, to the earth, other creatures, our own bodies. Soul is our relationship to all that is human: other people, culture, art, science, our own minds. And Spirit is our relationship to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, creator, logos, and life. To be faithful is to live faithfully in these relationships.

This is what the comments above about culture as opposed to confession get wrong. Being faithful members of an ecclesial community requires attention precisely to what they seem to despise: to people and history and ways of doing things. These are not merely “cultural,” as if people who attend to such things don’t really believe anything. They are covenantal commitments, and commitments to people in the ethic of the New Testament is precisely what Jesus taught us to do: “By this they shall know know that you are my disciples [students], that you love one another” (John 13:35).

How do we do this? We do this by living in community. We worship together. We help each other. We read scripture together and think about the faith. We talk. We argue. We disagree. And we do so over a long period of time. 

A long time ago, Henry Stob, another in the line of CRC intellectuals and scholars, defined what it means to belong to the CRC in this way: “Clay,” he said, “what they [synod delegates at the time] want to know is whether you are for us or against us.” That focused my mind. I was then and still am for the CRC. 

A Time to Leave

But sadly the CRC is no longer for me. I expect that sometime soon I will be transferring my ordination to another denomination, along with many other long time CRCers, not because we wanted to do so, but because we must. Synod 2024 declared the conversation over. We have been invited to leave.

The memories we take with us are not merely cultural relics, legacy claims. They are the memories of a church that tried and admittedly often failed to cut a path between an intellectually bankrupt fundamentalism and a too casual embrace of the culture. It hung on far too long to its ethnic roots, thereby excluding people from full participation. It sinned. But I, for one, will be sad to see it go.

Clay

Correction: An earlier version of this post had Andrew Rillera at Redeemer College; he teaches at The King’s University in Edmonton, AB.