The Study of the Past
Everybody knows that history is
the study of the past. But why do we
study the past? It is more than mere curiosity or
antiquarianism. The reason we investigate what
happened yesterday (or a thousand years ago) is
because we hope that it will yield up lessons and
patterns that can shed light on the predicaments and
possibilities of today and tomorrow. Through
history we can gain perspective on where we have
come from so we can better figure out where we are
going.
Historical awareness is
retrospective. History’s lessons only become visible
as we look back from the vantage point of the
passage of time. We need the perspective of distance
in order to appreciate the significance of the past.
But that significance is never completely beyond
dispute or controversy. People disagree widely on
the meaning of history, which is why there are so
many conflicting interpretations of historical
events.
People say history repeats itself
but that’s only partly true. It’s true in the sense
that we can see patterns that allow us to draw
analogies between what happened in the past and
what’s happening now. We know that every ten or
fifteen years, the stock market falls suddenly after
a period of sustained growth. That means we
shouldn’t be surprised when it happens (although we
almost always are.) But if it really were true that
history repeats itself, we would be a lot better at
predicting accurately what is going to happen. Mark
Twain wrote that history may not repeat itself -- “but
it does rhyme.” Events are unique, but they have
similarities that instruct us. As we reflect on the
path we have taken, it can help to illuminate the
path ahead – not perfectly, because we still have to
journey by faith, but enough to be helpful.
We are often puzzled and
perplexed by what is happening around us because we
do not grasp what it means to think historically.
Either we expect too little of the past and ignore
its lessons; or too much, and are surprised when
things do not happen the way they happened before. I
would like to reflect on these thoughts as they
apply to Canadian Christianity, especially to the
United Church of Canada. Canadian churches have been
shaken to their foundations in what seems like a
very short time and church people are bewildered.
How did things change so fast? And what, if
anything, can we do about it?
Atheism and Theism: A Case Study
in Historical Dialectic
Recently, I read a book that shed
some light for me on these questions. At
the Origins of Modern Atheism, by
the Jesuit scholar Michael J. Buckley[1],
explains the remarkable rise of modern atheism.
Religious people today tend to be puzzled by the
aggressiveness and fanaticism of contemporary
atheists. Every new book on the evils of religion
seems to be more strident and mean-spirited than the
last. The atheist triumvirate of Dawkins, Hitchens
and Harris, and their imitators, argue that religion
in all its forms “poisons everything.”
It is one huge nasty mistake, the source of
everything wrong with the world, a pestilential
relic from a superstitious past. Taking their cue
from Freud, they judge religion to be a form of
mental delusion. The world will be a much better
place when religion has finally been banished.
Public opinion polls show that the atheists may be
gaining ground. The only “religious” group that is
really growing in our culture are those who have “no
religion.”
This is an historical anomaly.
The vast majority of human beings who have ever
lived have been religious. So, where did atheism
come from? The usual answer is “modern science” –
especially Darwin. Science teaches that what is real
is what is measurable. And you can’t measure God.
Science is about what can be falsified, and you
can’t falsify God. If you could, you would destroy
religion anyway; so “faith,” they say, is nothing
more than refusal to accept the evidence. How many
young people have gone away to university only to
find their faith damaged beyond repair by first year
biology and psychology courses that “prove” there is
no room for God anymore? A
young woman from my church recently e-mailed me: “I
can say that university has really taken a hit on my
faith, not to say I don't believe, but Christianity
gets a bad rap in many university settings.” Modern
culture is all about trying to explain things
and successive scientific breakthroughs have
undermined God as an explanatory hypothesis.
Revolutionary advances in science, like Darwin’s
theory of natural selection, have seemingly removed
any need of God to account for the way the world
works. The result? Religion in the west has been in
defensive retreat for four hundred years. In 1867,
Matthew Arnold published “Dover Beach,” a poem that
seems at first to be about watching the waves of the
sea wash up on the shore, but turns out to be about
the demise of religious faith.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Faith once covered the earth like
the ocean. Now, because of science, all that is left
is a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” Not that
we’re any better for it. We find ourselves, Arnold
writes, “on
a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of
struggle and flight/ Where ignorant armies clash by
night.” But what can you do? As they say on CSI,
you can’t argue with science.
But atheism is not new, Buckley points out. People
have long accused one another of “atheism,” but that
did not mean a denial of God per se, but a denial of my God. The
Martyrdom of Polycarp records
that St. Polycarp, the 86 year old bishop of Smyrna
in the second century, was commanded on pain of
death to recant his Christian faith, to “swear by
the fortune of Caesar and cry ‘Away with the
atheists’” – meaning to recant his faith and
denounce fellow Christians who would not bow down to
the Roman gods. Polycarp is said to have turned on
his accusers and bellowed at them,
“Away with the atheists!”, a thrilling act of
courage that sealed his fate. Atheism is an old, old
word, but modernity has put a new spin on it. It is
now based on the philosophical denial of the
existence of God, which only became possible in
modernity. So, how did this happen?
Buckley argues that modern atheism is not the result
of the conflict between
science and religion, as is often believed, but the
exact opposite. Atheism, he says, emerged out of the
enthusiastic embracing of
science by religion in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Religion and science became
almost fused in such a way that early modern belief
in God actually created the conditions for the
eventual denial of that God.
History, Buckley argues, tends to
be dialectical in nature.[2] In
other words, what drives it is the working-out of
inner conflicts and contradictions. Theism and
atheism are two poles that exist in dialectical
tension.
An essential unity in
intelligibility lies between atheism and theism, and
if only the negative moment of this dipolarity
receives attention, the problematic situation
remains undetermined …. Atheism does not simply
replace theism. The conflict between them is mortal
because of their more general unity of meaning.[3]
Atheism is dependent on theism,
is “parasitic on theism,” Buckley argues. Without
theism, atheism would not have arisen.
At the Origins of Modern
Atheism is
a long and extremely complex book but Buckley’s
argument can be grasped through his treatment of the
work of Isaac Newton. Newton
was a deeply religious man, but he posited a
universe that works like a vast machine, according
to laws of force and motion that are the same
everywhere. God functions as the ultimate force and
prime mover.[4] “The
[Newtonian] universe is a system, a unity composed
of the sun, planets, and comets whose masses and
motions are proportioned so carefully that they
‘could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of
an intelligent and powerful being.’”[5]
Newton believed that the
complexity and harmony of the cosmos testified to
the grandeur and dignity of God. However, Newton
inadvertently made it possible to deny the existence
of this God by reducing God to a force that could be
inferred from the structure of the world. Newton’s
God was essentially a “god of the gaps” and
knowledge of this God was ironically dependent on
the way the universe operates, not the other way
around. Newton
was never able to resolve certain irregularities in
nature and he appealed to divine intervention to
account for them. Newton
believed, for example, that the planets and stars
did not collapse in on themselves because a wise and
providential God kept them all in place. But future
advances in understanding came up with natural
explanations for what Newton was not able to explain
with the methods of the time, rendering God
superfluous. For example, a century after Newton,
the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon
Laplace “established the dynamic stability of the
Newtonian universe … a dynamic stability that needed
no intervention from god to correct its mechanical
errors.”[6] Laplace’s
conclusions were simply one episode in the much
larger story of the steady incursion of scientific
research into areas that were formerly thought to be
God’s domain. Maybe the high point in this process
(or low point, depending on your viewpoint) was
Darwin’s claim that the emergence and evolution of
life itself, attributed by Christians to the
creative power of God, can be accounted for through
purely natural processes without recourse to divine
intervention.
The United Church: Growth and
Decline
Buckley isn’t talking only about
atheism but about the dialectical structure of
historical events. And I think that his work
provides an interesting lens through to examine the
history of the United Church of Canada. Just as
theism and atheism appear to be diametrically
opposed phenomena that are actually inextricably
linked, so the burgeoning and self-assured United
Church of 1960 seems to have little in common with
the beleaguered and bewildered church of 2010. But
if Buckley’s analysis is sound, then maybe the
explanation for the condition of the church today is
to be found in the state of the church at an earlier
time. Maybe the origins of the church’s present
“failure” can be found in its past success.
One narrative of the United
Church’s history goes something like this. The
church was strong, healthy and growing, but
somewhere along the way something “happened” and it
became sick and declining. Some say it started in
the early 1960s with the New Curriculum. Some say it
was the church’s preoccupation with human sexuality
in the 1980s, culminating in the decision of the
General Council in 1988 to declare that sexual
orientation would not be a barrier to ordination.
All of these suggestions assume that the United
Church got into trouble because it abandoned its
core identity. But what if the problem is that core
identity itself?
Let’s take 1965 as a symbolic
year. The United Church was forty years old and
seemed poised to go from strength to strength. New
churches were opening across the country every
month. Sunday Schools were bursting at the seams.
Life was good. But, this very expansion and the
values it expressed made the church vulnerable,
because the United Church, like many mainline
Protestant denominations, was based on the belief
that its essential purpose was to attract as many
people as possible, build as many churches as
possible, and spread its influence as widely as
possible throughout the mainstream of society.
Church expansion expressed the essence of the
church’s missional life during the postwar boom
years.
It was easy to get on board with
this vision because it was true. The United Church did have
a wide influence. People did listen
to its leaders. More and more people did join.
It reflected the mainstream of Canadian culture.
“Mainstream” was embedded in its DNA. According to
John Webster Grant, the United Church expressed “the
evangelical liberal drive to sanctify Canadian
society.”[7] Sometimes
the United Church is portrayed as a radical and
prophetic vanguard, but in my experience, this is
not the church’s dominant characteristic. From its
inception the mission of the United Church has been
to exercise as broad a presence and influence within
Canadian society as possible.
The Church union movement was
born out of the idealistic conviction that
denominational divisions were a scandal, an affront
to Jesus’ High Priestly prayer “that all may be
one.” But there was a practical, strategic side as
well. A united church would be better positioned to
evangelize a growing nation of immigrants. It was
all part of the larger goal of “Christianizing”
Canadian society -- an almost universally accepted
value in the first four decades of the United
Church’s existence, embraced by both traditionalists
and progressives, evangelicals and social gospellers
alike. This value propelled the powerful
anti-gambling and temperance movements, as well as
the church’s ill-fated involvement in Native
residential schools. And it explains the success of
the United Church in its first fifty years. The
goals of the church were congruent with the goals of
society. That
is why the United Church grew. United Churches
encouraged respectable family values and hard work.
They promoted social reforms that have become iconic
expressions of Canadian identity, such as universal
health care and pensions. United Church members were
good citizens of their community and country.
Because the church essentially mirrored the core
values of the society, the church was respected,
visible and listened to.
There was a downside, however.
Breadth always comes at the cost of depth. As
numbers went higher, expectations of church
membership went lower. If you are going to “draw the
circle wide” enough to encompass anyone who wants to
belong, you cannot make belonging too difficult. The
1960s may have been the time when churches were
filling up, but they were filling up with people who
had an increasingly tenuous knowledge of and loose
commitment to Christian identity. We succeeded in
growing the church, but forgot how to make
disciples.
This may account for the related
phenomenon of the ongoing relative strength of more
conservative denominations. During the time when the
United Church seemed to dominate the Protestant
religious landscape, these churches were
considerably more marginal and sectarian. But their
expectations of doctrinal correctness and a
counter-cultural lifestyle were higher. That meant
that their appeal was narrower, and, while they
didn’t expand as rapidly, but they haven’t declined
either. Sociologist Reg Bibby has pointed out that
the so-called “evangelical” churches have not grown
as a percentage of the population in almost a
century and a half. In 1871, they represented 8 per
cent of Canadians – the same percentage as today.[8] Their
apparent growth is the result of maintaining that
percentage of a growing population, while the
proportion of mainline Protestants has plummeted.
The essential question is: How have they held onto
that 8 per cent? Does it have something to do with a
commitment to discipleship?
What has really characterized the
United Church of Canada is its desire to occupy the
cultural centre, which accounts for both its earlier
success and its current decline. It is the constant
that explains much of our history. The church did
not change in this respect so much as the culture in
which the church was situated changed. The United
Church never gave up trying to appeal to the
cultural mainstream, but that culture became a
moving target, increasingly at odds with the
church’s inherited identity. The 1960s were famously
a time of major cultural upheaval. We became more
cynical, more materialistic, more individualistic,
morally more relativistic. Pierre Trudeau’s oracular
pronouncement that “The government has no business
in the bedrooms of the nation” captured the spirit
of the times; and the United Church marched in step
with this spirit, believing that the way to appeal
to people was to show how closely the church’s
values mirrored their own. What the church did not
bank on was that religion
itself would
become a casualty of consumer culture. In the vast
smorgasbord of deinstitutionalized spiritual options
that emerged in the 60s, fewer people had any
appetite for what the church was serving up. The
church that downplayed any serious conflict between
its expectations and prevailing cultural norms ended
up being the victim of its own success. The main
problem that has plagued the United Church of Canada
is the combination of a desire to be mainstream but
an inability to find ways of speaking effectively to
the mainstream of today.
The travail of the United Church
of Canada is one brief moment in the much larger
story of the decline of Christendom, in which the
church occupied, or even defined, the cultural
mainstream. For those who grew up in Christendom,
the demise of the church as we know it seems like a
catastrophe. But theologically, it may be what saves
us. The church may have been in danger of gaining
the whole world, but losing its soul. It was never
intended that the church reflect the mainstream
values of its culture. As John Howard Yoder has
commented, “that the church is a minority is a
theological, not a statistical, statement.” Churches
today are caught in a transitional moment in the
dialectic of mission and discipleship. Mission and
discipleship are not contradictory values, but they
are often in tension. As the church exercises its
mission to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ, it
often finds that the demands of discipleship are
compromised. Is the Gospel about free grace lavished
on whole world, available to everyone without cost?
Or is the Gospel about costly discipleship, the
straight road and the narrow gate through which only
a few may enter? The answer is that it is about both;
but we don’t like living in tension, so our instinct
is to try to resolve it by emphasizing one over the
other. But it is a tension that is not meant to be
resolved but to be lived. When mission starts to
overshadow discipleship, or discipleship mission,
the church has to be renewed so that the balance can
be restored. That’s what the principle that the
church is semper
reformanda – “always
in need of reform” – is about. The cultural success
of a thousand years of Christian mission has brought
us to the point where a renewed emphasis on
discipleship is required. That is the challenge and
the possibility of the present time.
Whither “Renewal”?
Which brings us to the “renewal”
movement in the United Church. This movement exists
through four organizations: Church
Alive, which publishes Theological
Digest & Outlook, Fellowship
Publications, which publishes Fellowship
Magazine, the
Community of Concern (COC), and the National
Alliance of Covenanting Congregations (NACC). The
renewal movement’s mission is to call the church
back to its true theological and moral identity. I
have long supported the renewal movement because it
seemed to me to stand against the United Church’s
willingness to simply kowtow to contemporary mores,
even at the cost of eviscerating the Gospel.
However, it is has become clear that the pathos of
the church and the renewal groups are one and the
same. The renewal movement finds itself in a steep
decline that mirrors the decline of the church as a
whole.
It is usually assumed that the
renewal movement is at odds with the establishment
of the church over matters of theology and doctrine.
This is certainly true; but it is not the whole
story. I have argued that the church’s very
“success” in its early decades – its ability to
appeal to the broad mainstream -- has become its
Achilles heel today. Analogously, the fundamental
problem of the renewal movement is not its
opposition to the church’s agenda but the extent to
which it has allowed itself to be defined and
controlled by that agenda. The main thrust of the
renewal movement has always been the reform of
denominational structures, such as the General
Council and the theological colleges. But what if
God’s plan for the church is not that these
structures be reformed but swept away? The form
which the United Church has taken since 1925 is
proving less and less capable of sustaining the
church’s life. By fixating primarily on the
decisions of entrenched structures like General
Council, the renewal groups have become sidetracked
from strategies that might genuinely renew the
church. Again, the reason for this is not to be
found in differences between
the fundamental values of the church and the renewal
movement but in their co-dependent similarity. Both
are concerned to be culturally mainstream, but
differ on how that goal should be accomplished. Is
it by getting in step with evolving social values,
or by defending the church’s historic creeds and
constituency?
Recently someone drew my
attention to an article from the February, 1968
issue of the United Church Observer about
the (then) fledgling United Church Renewal
Fellowship. This
article describes the UCRF as a conservative
movement launched in protest over the New
Curriculum, the United Church’s cradle to grave
Christian education program, which incorporated
insights from historical biblical criticism into its
lessons.[9] The
article characterizes the UCRF as a “rebellion
against what the protesters call a drift to humanism
and liberal theology” which “demand[ed] a return to
‘sound biblical theology.’”[10] But
what is really fascinating is the fear expressed by
the UCRF that the
church would lose its share of the religious
marketplace as
people departed for more theologically conservative
denominations. I don’t say this critically or
cynically. Important theological and religious
principles were at stake. But the UCRF was a child
of the United Church, and it shared with the
establishment of the church the basic concern to
shore up the church’s historic place in society.
Later renewal groups followed the
lead of the UCRF. Church Alive began in 1974 to be a
voice for orthodox theology within the United
Church. The Community of Concern famously emerged in
the late 1980s in anger over the General Council’s
apparent indifference to a deluge of resolutions
from congregations and Presbyteries opposing the
proposal to ordain “self-declared” homosexuals. The
National Alliance of Covenanting Congregations was
established to provide encouragement and support to
individual churches that saw themselves at odds with
the decisions of the church. All the groups have
portrayed themselves as the defenders of the “true”
United Church and the path to the restoration of the
church that once existed.
I want to be clear. I believe
that the renewal movement has played a vital role in
the United Church for four decades, not sufficiently
appreciated by its critics. For one thing, these
groups have provided a place and a voice for those
dismayed with the direction the United Church has
taken. According to the 1968 Observer article, the
Evangelical United Brethren may never have entered
into church union in 1968 were it not for the
existence of the UCRF. And, while scores of members,
clergy and congregations broke away after 1988, the
renewal groups were the only thing that kept many in
the church. The renewal movement has been an
alternative voice in a denomination whose commitment
to diversity and “inclusivity” is often little more
than lip service and from which conservative
evangelicals have been systematically excluded.
However, the renewal movement’s obsession with
reforming the church structurally has limited its
effectiveness.
I have been part of many
conversations in which it is alleged that something
“happened” to a church that was once strong and
proud, but has been hijacked by fools and
blackguards. The renewal groups have seen it as
their mandate to “hold the church’s feet to the
fire,” and to demand accountability from the powers
that be. But, accountable to what? The mantra of the
renewal movement has been “the Twenty Articles of
Faith of the Basis of Union.” These conversations
suggest that if the church would just adhere to its
theological heritage, it would get back on track.
But this analysis is too simplistic. As
church historian John Webster Grant has argued,
however, the doctrinal section of the Basis of Union
was not particularly well thought out. The Articles
of Faith were basically a unimaginative committee
effort, cobbled together for reasons of expedience,
and never intended to be the church’s final word on
theology. Furthermore, Grant wrote, the “failure to
think [more] in terms of the whole Christian
tradition has encouraged the United Church to look
inward” and “there has been a tendency to regard the
formularies of the United Church as self-contained.”[11] I’m
afraid that the renewal movement’s constant appeal
to “the Twenty Articles of Faith” has contributed to
the same inward-looking attitude that is expressed
in the establishment’s almost mystical reverence for
a so-called “United Church ethos.” The Twenty
Articles of Faith have not generated any more
missional growth than the establishment ethos has
been able to achieve. In other words, the same blind
spots and obsessions that have weakened the
denomination as a whole have inhibited the renewal
movement from sustaining long-term renewal.
Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s
always easy to say what might have been if we had
done things differently. The renewal movement can
recognize and honour the important role it has
played in the church; but the time has come to own
up to its decreasing relevance, because the
church that it seeks to renew no longer exists.
The United Church’s ambition to encompass the
mainstream of Canadian society has ironically pushed
it from the centre to the margins, and perhaps
institutional oblivion is not very far off. It has
continued to try to move with the culture, but
lacked the courage to fully relinquish its former
status. The result has been that the culture no
longer knows nor cares what the church does. Heroic
resuscitation measures are past the point of
effectiveness.
The renewal movement has striven
to restore both the character and the image of the
United Church. But it is doubtful that that church
can be restored. In my opinion, the renewal movement
should turn its attention to the more modest, but
more fruitful task of encouraging communities of
Christian disciples who can be a sign, witness and
foretaste of God’s kingdom in a post-Christian
culture. This is happening, for example, in the UK,
where evangelicals in the Church of England and the
Methodist Church have been at the forefront of the
“Fresh Expressions” movement, which has been
initiating new and creative examples of Christian
community in contexts where the established church
has all but disappeared.[12] This
mission of Fresh Expressions is not to shore up the
inherited church, but to direct the church’s
energies outward in mission to those not currently
being reached. The kind of disciples required by the
Kingdom today are not those who will occupy
influential pulpits or to administer a
coast-to-coast denomination. They are not those who
stake out a particular position on the theological
spectrum, whose categories themselves are largely
the creation of modern consciousness. Instead, they
will simply learn what it means to follow Jesus
among a people who no longer recognize him. In a
sense, it’s more like living in New Testament times.
Not exactly, because history only “rhymes”; but
close.
I share the sorrow of many that
much of the church that formed me as a Christian
seems to have disappeared. The current state of the
United Church, of which I have been a member my
entire life, saddens me. But God’s people have
always been pushed to the margins. What they have
discovered is that the margin and not the centre is
where God is most often to be found. The renewal
movement will have a future if it is able to speak
into that situation and discern where God is active
in a post-Christendom world. In the rhyming cadences
of Christian history, the demise of inherited forms
of church have been times of greatest spiritual
reawakening and renewed vitality for mission. The
challenge of the renewal movement is to see where
this is happening and catch up to what God is doing,
for the benefit of the whole church.
