Presbyterian Theology Pt 2

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
Thanks for joining us as we today take on part two of Presbyterian theology.
Last week we had a conversation generally around the Reformation and some of the ideas
that came through the Reformation,
some of the ideas that started the Reformation.
And if you’ve not watched that it may be helpful to check that one first through our website.
But today we move on to look at where we went from there and where did those initial ideas
take us and how did the Presbyterian or what became the Presbyterian Church run with those
ideas in the direction that ended up bringing us,
at least in part,
to where we are now.
I don’t know that we’ll get all the way to the modern era,
Michael.
We are trying to save some of those reflections for later.
But I think the idea is the bridge.
If we understand that Luther began this process of Reformation,
John Calvin jumped in and
for our part gave it significant skin.
What does it look like from there and how do we look back and see it unfold in our history?
Yeah, and as we seek to engage that question,
I think it’s worth beginning with sort of
a clarification and that is that Presbyterians as a body have historically been very thoughtful
people.
Not to say that other traditions aren’t thoughtful,
but Presbyterian theologians and pastors have
tended to very much value the scholarship and the reading and the writing.
And there are many libraries filled with books written by Presbyterian ministers and scholars.
And this is not an attempt to trace Presbyterian thought throughout all time.
That would be an impossible task in the short amount of time that we have and much of it
would be probably uninteresting.
So what we’re rather attempting to do is to piece out some of those unique emphasis that
Presbyterians have had and also some of the ways in which that thought has driven us to action.
And we’ll probably point out when we make some of those transitions here in our conversation,
but it’s not just pure thought.
It’s really what’s the ways in which the Reformed tradition has been made specific in Presbyterian life.
Yeah, and obviously that’s far too big to cover.
So we’re going to try and hit some highlights and mine a few of the places we think are
important and we start with probably the least favorite.
Presbyterians have given a lot of thought to sin, to human brokenness.
Now in many ways that’s not unlike we don’t really think much different about sin than
say Martin Luther or the Lutherans.
We understand sin is the fundamental problem of humanity as it comes to God because it
separates us from God.
But I would say, Michael,
that Presbyterians in our attempt to try and think things through
have probably, I want to be careful not to say thought deeper about sin,
but I think in some ways we have a bigger view of sin than some of our brothers and sisters in other
traditions where sin is primarily the thing you do or the mistake you make or the sin that you commit.
And for Presbyterians that is true,
but underneath that we can speak theologically about sin being far more.
Sin is the compulsion we have to do those things.
Sin is our fundamental problem.
Sin is, yes, it’s the sins we commit,
but in some ways those are the least important
aspects of what we mean when we say sinfulness.
Yeah, in fact, some have leveled against the Presbyterian/reformed reading that Presbyterians
have that we are obsessed with sin.
I’m not sure if this is a helpful metaphor for everyone.
I think you could very much think of Presbyterians start with,
in our own sort of theological
journey, we generally start with that statement that we are completely sinful,
that our senses are so damaged by sin that we wouldn’t know which way was north without someone intervening.
And of course you can anticipate who that someone is.
But other theological traditions,
to give you a little bit of context,
they might not start there.
There are some Christian traditions that it’s going to start before sin with creation and
they’re going to talk about the imago dei or the image of God,
that God made us in His
image and that that might be their starting place.
But Presbyterians want to say if you want to know yourself truly,
you have to start
with the recognition that you are fundamentally broken.
Your faculties are not fully functioning and your ability to know yourself.
You need someone to intervene and that’s what we mean by that sort of core depraved sinfulness
that we talk about in the Presbyterian circle.
Yeah, said another way, our fundamental problem for Presbyterians is not that we’re sinners,
it’s that we’re sinful.
We lack even the compass by which to make decisions because left to our own,
we have not enough goodness in us to even recognize goodness.
And so what God has done is to first show us our sinfulness,
which is the bad news that
precedes the good news that in doing so we understand our need to be saved.
We understand our need of grace because we confess that there’s nothing we have to offer.
We are so far removed from God in our sinfulness that only God can close the gap.
We cannot.
And God has done that in Jesus Christ.
And so part of the reason that we have such a deep and nuanced theology of sin is because
we think that it helps us understand the power and the majesty of what we also then believe
about Jesus Christ.
It sets the stage to help us see the amazing thing that God has done,
but it’s not a very
fun place to start.
No, I think that Presbyterians have in numerous occasions throughout history been accused
of being pretty skeptical,
not having a very high view of humanity,
even in our sort of
institution and structure, which we’ll talk a little bit about the end of this conversation.
We’re pretty open eyed about human nature,
and we expect people to go outside the bounds
of morality, to go outside the bounds of God’s direction.
And that flows from this conviction that if we are to know ourselves honestly,
we know ourselves as broken.
But that connects interestingly to the conversation we had last time,
Clint, about this reformation emphasis upon grace.
This is one of the ways that that emphasis comes into our tradition because we believe
that we are saved by grace,
a hundred percent God’s gift unmerited favor given to us.
And because of our deep conviction that we are broken in a completely,
in a way that
we cannot restore ourselves,
the only way forward, therefore, is grace.
So you see how that reformation principle gets taken up,
and it lives alongside this
core belief that’s driven us in Presbyterian thought.
Yeah, and so you hear people say it once in a while.
You know, I just think that people are basically good.
And I understand that when people say that,
they’re not making a theological statement,
but Presbyterian has a hard time with that statement.
Presbyterians don’t believe people are basically good.
We have tended to believe, theologically speaking,
that people are self-serving,
they’re selfish,
they’re self-motivated,
and they are full of sin,
of wrongness, and left to our own,
it will always be a journey downhill into those baser aspects of our nature.
It’s who we are as people,
and it’s why we stand completely within the need for God’s saving grace.
Michael, I remember some,
I don’t know if I get all,
if I remember all of it,
but there was a joke at some point in which the short version was that the Presbyterian Medic Alert bracelet said,
“If you find me in need of medical care,
I’m a Presbyterian and I deserve to suffer.
I’m sinful and I deserve to suffer.”
And the unfortunate maybe side effect of our not obsession,
though close,
our insistence on sin has been that at times it’s made us a little sour on human nature,
and we have not always been able to celebrate the goodness that we see in people because we tend to be
looking for the shadow behind it.
And that’s where we come from.
I would argue maybe we’ve gotten better,
but we tend to be fairly suspicious about human
motivation because we think sin is always lurking in there somewhere.
Yeah, and I think that maybe this is where the bridge gets built because you’ve got a
factor on our starting point.
We have a very open-eyed view of how broken humanity is.
You say, “Yeah, that’s a pretty sour view of the world.”
But Presbyterians have tried on the other hand to really balance that with an abnormally
high view of God’s providential role,
would be the theological term,
God’s active role in creation in our lives as God’s people.
In other words,
while we have emphasized and sort of put down the human nature,
we’ve sought to raise up our understanding of God and God’s work in the world.
And our thinking in that is that the greater our problem is,
the bigger God is to meet
that need.
That’s the force of grace that comes to us is the God who’s big enough to save us from
ourselves, from the sins that we have committed.
And not just the sins in sort of a moral sense,
but the fundamental brokenness,
the sinfulness of human nature, that God is able by God’s power to transform that.
And that moves us into another theme of Presbyterianism.
Yeah, I think one of the fundamental things that has been important in Presbyterian thought
is this idea of sovereignty.
And sovereignty means God’s power.
And what we have always said,
what Presbyterians have staked the faith on at every turn is
that God is in charge,
that God is sovereign over the world,
that the world is not simply
running on its own track,
that within all of the chaos,
within all of the struggle,
within all of our lives,
God’s presence is providing direction.
And ultimately, God’s will will be done.
The world is not going to go anywhere that God doesn’t want it ultimately to go.
And whether or not that’s true in the short term,
Presbyterians have argued about.
But where we’ve always agreed is that God has an overarching,
hesitate to use the word
plan, God has an overarching goal,
and that goal will be fulfilled because it’s God’s goal.
And God,
nothing can stand in the way of God’s goal.
Nothing can ultimately undo God’s goal.
And this has brought struggles for us in regards to understanding things like free will and
making choices, et cetera, and those have been Achilles’ heels for Presbyterians.
But they come from this deep desire to believe that the world is not running loosely.
The world is not unhinged.
The world is not unhooked.
God remains in control and in charge.
And those are two words we’d have to spend some time unpacking,
Michael.
But in broad terms,
I think they get the idea of cross.
Yeah, and there’s a nuance here I think we should pause and speak to.
It’s a nuance that’s actually been tracked throughout the history of Presbyterianism.
There’s a form of sovereignty where when we look at God’s power and work in our lives
in the world, in which we recognize that we need God to be greater than the sin that exists
in us.
And that’s a good thing.
But there’s a corresponding anxiety that comes on the other side of that.
And that is that question that is innately human.
OK, so if I’m broken and I need God to save me,
is God going to save me?
And there’s this long debate over a particular word called the election.
It’s played out over the generations of Presbyterians in different ways.
We won’t be able to trace it all in this conversation.
But really,
Presbyterians at some points in history have been very anxious about how
do you know if God has chosen you for salvation?
If God has a plan,
then I sure hope I’m in God’s plan.
And that sort of self-referential question can sometimes lead us awry because God has
promised to be for us.
God has committed to be good.
And yet we don’t always see how that plays out.
We’re just creatures living in a certain time and space.
We don’t have that sort of omnipotent view of time.
So when we bring some of our smaller questions to God who’s all-knowing and all-powerful,
we always fall short in seeking to explain it.
Yeah, and simply stated,
I think election essentially means that you don’t choose God.
God chooses you.
And again,
that creates some issues that have to be sorted out,
and there are different
ways Presbyterians have unpacked that.
But the basic idea,
and keep in mind,
this is happening during a moment in the church
where the existing church of the day is saying,
“You people that leave the church are forfeiting your salvation.
You’re giving up your faith.”
And John Calvin and others said, “No.
Nobody holds that decision except God.
And when God has chosen us,
we are His.” And this idea of election and its cousin,
its Presbyterian cousin predestination,
and we won’t go into that very much today,
but it’s one of those Presbyterian words we kind
of all wish would maybe go away at times.
It has been in times helpful and in lots of other times not helpful.
But the point of that,
and this is where the context matters so much, I think, Michael,
the original message of election,
and we could say predestination,
was intended to be good news.
It didn’t raise the troubling questions in its first context,
because its first context
was reassurance to people who were told they had left the church,
they had left the faith,
they were going to hell.
And the Reformers stood and said,
“No,
you are in God’s hands,
and when God has chosen
you, He will not let you go.” Your salvation,
your faith, does not rest in human institution.
It doesn’t rest in human declaration.
It doesn’t rest in human action.
Your faith and your life is in God’s hands,
and it could not be safer anywhere else in
the universe.
And it was intended to deeply reassure people who were living in turbulent times that God
was faithful to the promises God had made to them.
I had a friend once who had done some study of some theology,
one of those situations
in which they had learned enough to not know exactly what they thought,
and they were just
obsessed with predestination jokes, election jokes,
and so I only say this to say if you’ve
heard this before, it gives you a little bit of context.
There’s this joke that Presbyterians,
that God’s election is set against free will.
In other words, this idea that since God has chosen you,
you don’t get to choose anything.
And we’ve had differing roads there,
but that’s not a fair map to walk.
Presbyterians don’t believe that you have no freedom in life,
that your actions don’t
matter.
We aren’t fatalists.
We believe that God can work through human beings,
but that ultimately it’s God will
be sovereign.
God is able to work all things towards God’s plan,
but that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t
choose to work through people.
In fact, scripture is an entire text showing us how God does miraculous things through
fallen and fallible people.
So if you’ve heard that before,
I think it’s just a note of nuance,
that election and the
belief in God’s sovereignty doesn’t equal this idea that there is no human action that
matters, that those two things are not equal.
Yeah, I think one of the struggles for all of us is that when we hear the word control,
we think of coercive power.
In other words, I’m in control of someone if I can make them do what I want.
I have control if I have the power to enforce my authority on others.
And that very human and very flawed,
to use our sin language earlier,
conception of control is not, I think, helpful,
theologically speaking.
When we say God is in charge,
we don’t mean that God scripts every moment of everyone’s
day and causes cancer and knocks cars off the roads and drops bombs on them.
That’s not what we mean at all.
We mean in the overarching history of the human experience,
it is going somewhere and
it will ultimately go where God wants it.
That’s what it means for God to be in control.
Not that God is proscriptive of all of the details,
but that God is the final arbiter
of the final word.
And that, I think, is helpful for us as we try to understand what it means that we can
use words like sovereignty and election and providence.
And I hope that’s helpful.
If it’s not helpful,
drop some comments in.
We’ll be glad to have more conversation.
This is not an easy discussion for Presbyterian because we have evolved in many evolutions
of thinking in our history on these subjects,
and they’re not easy.
Because ultimately,
we’re all guessing at things that we don’t fully understand.
But this discussion has been important to us,
and maintaining the idea of the authority
and sovereignty of God has been desperately important to Presbyterians.
I think, Michael,
exactly because we’ve been honest about sin,
exactly because we look
at the world and we acknowledge the deep pain and division and brokenness,
we do not flinch
from some of the darker realities of human life.
And because of that,
we say just as strongly that they don’t undo the authority and the
sovereignty of the living God.
Yeah, if I may try to make that very personal,
I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this.
I’ve heard this from numerous people,
I felt it myself.
There comes these moments in life where you pause in your life and you look back and you
see the road that lies before you and you think to yourself,
I can’t imagine it going
a different way, that how I got here has been blessed even though the road took all these
turns I would have never predicted.
If you’ve ever felt that,
that’s a tiny microcosm of what Presbyterians believe at the end of
all things, that when you get to the end of all things,
it doesn’t mean that all of the roads were happy,
that all were good,
that all were easy,
that we don’t experience suffering on the way.
But our core conviction is that if we were left to our own devices,
our own sinfulness, we will hurt ourselves and others.
But because of God,
that when you get to the end and you look back,
you’re going to see
all of this was going somewhere,
not because of our ability,
but because of the God whose
power and commitment is drawing us to that point.
And if you’ve experienced that,
you’ve experienced just a tiny microscopic version of that larger commitment.
Yeah, and the struggle for all of us is that we come to a point where we believe God is
good and God has power,
and yet our life is painful.
And we think, well,
then God should fix that.
But that is an admission that we don’t understand.
Instead of a critique of God,
that is a critique of our own ability to understand the working
and the mind of God.
And I think Presbyterianism prepares us uniquely to admit that.
I think that’s harder for other traditions than it is for Presbyterians,
though we’ve had a stranger road to get to that admission than some,
and we’d have to confess that.
Let’s switch directions, Michael.
Let’s talk about some of the practical aspects of being Presbyterians.
Some of the things that I think we have,
for the most part,
done well, or how those things have moved us,
I think one of the things we’d have to look back on and say that Presbyterians
did well, from the very outset,
men like John Calvin and John Knox and others did not believe
the church was an enclave to itself.
They didn’t think the church should simply pull back,
shrink from the world,
and maintain itself in isolation.
The Reformers set us on a very important path early on,
which was to say that the church
should care about what happens in the broader world.
The church should continue to care about the poor,
the needy.
The church should be involved in educating people.
The church should work for social justice when it sees abuse and oppression.
And I would say in many ways that forms a backbone of sorts for the modern Presbyterian
experience.
I suspect if you go to any version of modern Presbyterianism,
you’re going to find deep
concern for the world outside of the building.
Yes, we care about the building and the congregation,
but any Presbyterian church that’s living
up to its heritage in any way,
shape, or form is going to be looking for ways to minister
and do mission outside of its fellowship.
Yeah, and this is not a radical departure from the previous conversation.
Just very briefly,
right?
This is proof that Presbyterians have never felt like we’re fatalists,
like what we do
doesn’t matter.
Presbyterians have always jumped into the fight.
And I think you could easily point to that even in the United States.
You look at things like the number of Presbyterian schools that began as outreach
opportunities.
You may not know, Princeton,
what is now the university,
was originally founded as a
seminary for Presbyterian pastors.
It grew into it,
and then a seminary sort of grew out of that again.
But the commitment to education has actually concretely created educational institutions.
You’ll find Presbyterian in the name of hospitals across the country,
commitment to help those who are sick and wounded,
many of those hospitals founded as nonprofit
organizations.
That’s not even talking about the Presbyterian commitment to world mission,
which is historic and strong.
And though there’s critiques of it and things that have happened,
it’s largely looked upon very positively with the legacy that’s been created.
So Presbyterians have always felt a commitment to serve others.
And there have been times in that history,
Clint, if we’re going to be honest,
that that has even connected to the role of governance.
I mean, Presbyterians have been active and vocal in politics on both sides of the aisle,
depending upon what point in history you’re at.
There’s a long history of different aisles,
but Presbyterians have had a voice in the
not just sort of nonprofit seek to serve others,
but there’s also been a significant
care for how we govern.
Is that equitable?
And how is it reflective faith that we’ve been given?
Yeah, there was a Presbyterian abolitionist that signed the Declaration of Independence.
We haven’t always agreed on what the proper course was to chart through any certain issue,
but we have always believed that the church should be active,
the church should be vocal
in human life.
And you could contrast this with maybe some of our more conservative brothers and sisters
in the faith who have said,
well,
the world is sort of going to hell in the handbasket,
and our job is to not follow it and be the church and kind of isolate,
do our own thing,
and separate ourselves from the world,
not let any of the world in.
And Presbyterians have said, no,
that border should be far more fluid.
We should care about the realities of the world.
We should care who votes.
We should care who doesn’t have rights.
We should care when children are hungry.
We should care about government and about structure.
These things should be important to us because they give us an opportunity to do the work
of Jesus Christ in our midst, in our community,
in our country,
and in our world.
And, Michael,
I don’t think anyone would be surprised.
I can share a long laundry list of things I think the Presbyterian Church doesn’t
and hasn’t done particularly well.
And I feel like I try to be fairly honest about our failings.
But I am proud as a Presbyterian of the extent to which we have historically given
time,
talent,
money to causes that mattered.
I don’t always maybe agree with where we land in those causes,
but I am always grateful to be reared and nurtured by a tradition that says,
it matters when you call yourself Christian how you interact with the culture and world around you.
And it matters what you do with the blessings you have been given to manage
in respect to those who have less and who have needs.
And I think that’s a very strong part of our heritage.
Yeah, and I think it should also be seen,
Clint, as a temperament
to that very first thing that we talked about.
The human condition is broken as we look at it,
but that isn’t some sort of blanket permission to look over the plight of neighbor.
And that’s 100% biblical.
That’s a commitment to Presbyterians reading scripture
and trying to not just know it,
but to try to live it out.
It’s this commitment to go into the world and to seek to make someone else’s life better.
I think maybe this might help tease out the difference that comes in like a Presbyterian
mission context.
We send missionaries all around the world,
but in some Christian traditions,
some of that mission is connected to,
did you say a prayer or did you receive a tract?
Presbyterian missionaries would tend to be comfortable with,
no, we’re working on water in your area.
And if you see people who care that that very action itself is going to point you
towards the true water,
the life-giving water that John reveals to us is Jesus Christ,
right?
So there’s this sense that if we serve others,
we do so because of God working through us.
It’s a gift of grace given to us that we’re called to give to others.
And as we do that,
we believe that God’s going to work through it and God’s ends will be worked out.
And I think at our best,
there’s a kind of glorification of Jesus Christ that is beautiful
in our tradition because we never once pretend that we showed up and got it right on day one.
We believe that whatever good is being done is to God’s glory because it is God working
in and through us.
And that’s a really,
I think, admirable part of our character.
Now,
there are downsides, of course, but there are truly good things that have come with that.
And there would be many who would have accused the Presbyterians at some point of meddling
in social issues or caring too much about social issues,
but that’s the balance.
That’s the cost, I guess, of being passionate about helping other people and being involved
in trying to move communities and societies in a good direction.
And we’ve done that not only locally,
but globally.
And I think that’s something that Presbyterians can stand on and be proud.
I also think, Michael,
that it has helped us in an interesting way.
I think it has given us a certain humility as we look at the problems of the world,
as we’ve acknowledged that we’re all broken,
as we have claimed our need for grace in Jesus Christ.
There is a wonderful humility that comes with that.
And another thing that I think Presbyterians have historically done well
is partner with other kinds of Christians.
Presbyterians,
for all our faults,
have been pretty good historically at not saying
being Presbyterian is the only way to be Christian.
Now, we’re pretty proud of being Presbyterian,
and there have been times,
you know, we’ve clearly thought it was the best.
But we’ve never said,
“If you’re this kind of Christian or that kind of Christian,
we wouldn’t work with you.”
We have been very quick.
Presbyterians have essentially partnered with anybody who would have us.
And if we go to an area and there’s a group doing good work,
we join them.
And we don’t need to call it Presbyterian.
If there’s a Methodist outreach,
we’ll jump in, we’ll get involved.
And we’ve done that on a global level.
We’ve done that on an institutional level.
And I think it has been a deep benefit for Presbyterians
to be able to partner with other Christians
and simultaneously say in that partnership,
“This is how we follow Christ,
and we think it works.
In fact, we think it’s really good for us,
but we understand that you may have a different take on some things.
And let’s put those aside.
Let’s learn from each other.
But mostly, let’s not let them get in the way as we try to do the work of Jesus.”
Because we can all agree,
whatever we think about this theological issue
or that theological issue,
we all know that hungry people need food.
We all know that orphans need cared for.
We all know that the sick need healing and access to medicine
and clean water and whatever else.
And let’s partner in those things and let’s try to let Jesus get the glory.
And you know what?
We’ll sort out the rest,
or we won’t.
It doesn’t matter.
Let’s get busy.
And I think we’ve done that well.
And again, it’s one of the things as a Presbyterian,
I would take some pride in our heritage there. You know,
Clint, if someone just joined us about 10 minutes ago,
they would think, “Wow, who are these Presbyterians?
They are active and passionate people.
I want to get on board with these people.”
And the truth is,
if you’ve been around Presbyterian worship
and maybe a few Presbyterians,
you might not have gotten.
Maybe passion wouldn’t have been the first word that you used.
And part of that is because Presbyterians have simultaneously emphasized
this idea of order,
of well-intentioned structure,
and even a kind of code of conduct.
We’ll maybe talk about that towards the end.
But I think it’s worth noting here that we’ve paired
what I think is fairly called passion.
I don’t want to retract that.
But we’ve paired it with a really firm and committed understanding of institution.
And we believed historically,
and still today, sometimes to our detriment,
that there are proper orders and channels and ways of doing things
because we think we need to hedge for human brokenness.
We think, you know,
you shouldn’t just give people free reign
because when you do that,
people take advantage of the system.
People hurt others.
People hoard for themselves.
So let’s create an institutional structure that we can all agree is reasonably effective.
And let’s try to live within that system.
And so passion is paired with order in an interesting way.
Yeah, and I think in your average Presbyterian church,
order may win the day a fair amount of the time.
You’re probably rarely going to leave a Presbyterian church
thinking, “Wow, those people are there on fire.
They’re passionate.” You’re more often going to leave thinking,
“Oh, that was nice.
They have a way of doing things.”
Presbyterians historically have been a little suspect of emotion
because we felt like emotion is easy and it’s easy to manipulate.
And as people who value thought and as people who are a little distrustful of human nature,
emotion is not something that has come easily to us.
And at times,
rightly so.
That has been a precaution we take against being led astray.
We put a lot of faith in our heritage.
And so there is a tremendous kind of inertia to do things the way they’ve been done
because they’ve been thoughtful and they were good enough for generations.
And so Presbyterians have occasionally…
Michael, not occasionally,
let’s just be honest.
Presbyterians have often not been quickly adaptable when circumstances change.
We tend to plow our furrow pretty deep.
And that’s not a bad thing,
but it does bring some challenges when the landscape changes.
Presbyterians are often not very quick to make adjustments.
That’s not an easy thing for us to do.
Yeah.
And to an outsider,
maybe, the structure may feel like it’s overly protected.
And I think that when you look at the…
And we’re going to talk about in another conversation,
I think our last conversation of this series,
we’re going to talk a little bit about the Presbyterians today
and what’s the context of Presbyterianism.
It’s not going to be a surprise for you to discover that sometimes
deep thinking,
slow progress forward,
commitment to institutions and ways of doing things
can certainly be an anchor that holds you in a time when you need gas.
And that said,
this all makes sense if you return to the thing that begins our conversation.
When we start with that fundamental concern
that human nature left unto itself is destructive.
It makes sense that the people who seek to live that out in our lives and in our fellowship
would create systems of checks and balances along the way
so that nobody acquires too much power,
so that there’s no single bishop who can move the church in one direction,
but rather the people have a voice that a congregation has a vote.
You would be shocked to learn how much power the leaders of a congregation have
as opposed to, say, a pastor.
Many traditions, the pastor very much has most authority in making decisions,
not so in the Presbyterian church, it’s distributed.
And all of that exists for that sole purpose of recognizing the temptation of human nature
and our need to rely upon God’s grace and the checks and balances to hold us in that order.
And so it’s maybe not a fun conversation,
and it may not to all even be a relatable conversation.
But I do think it’s fair to say historically,
Presbyterians have had an institutional commitment
that they have channeled a great deal of passion through.
And if you don’t combine those two,
you’re missing part of the story.
It’s not all frozen, chosen, stodgy.
There has been great passion put into the work of the gospel and to mission,
but it has been channeled into thoughtful ways.
Yeah, and I would say, Michael, historically,
when we have aired,
when we’ve separated the two,
we have tended to go order and not passion.
So when the Presbyterian church uncouples things that belong together,
we tend to land on the side of the fence that is staid,
that is wilted,
that is formal,
that is boring.
Well,
Presbyterians have used Robert’s rules authoritatively in the past.
And so the challenge for us, I think,
has been to let the passion that is there
enliven the structures,
and when we fail to do that,
the structures themselves lack the power to make the difference.
And I think if you’ve visited very many Presbyterian churches,
I suspect at some point you found yourself in one that didn’t naturally feel like it
had a lot of life.
And that’s not to be judgmental.
It is to say that our structure itself doesn’t exude that.
It takes the people animating it to make that apparent.
The buildings aren’t going to do it.
There are very few gaudy Presbyterian churches.
Almost all of them are sort of staid traditional.
We’re not flowery.
We’re not showy.
And when we fail,
that begins to look,
unfortunately,
like we’re maybe a little dull.
And that happens.
And I think maybe the last thing to note here is in our midst of our commitment to order,
to institution.
We’ve also had a real commitment to the idea of decorum,
of how you treat one another.
And Presbyterians, though we do not always claim it,
and though more often than we would like to admit,
we fail at living it out.
We have a lot of practice living with those who we disagree with.
Sometimes it’s driven us to split.
We’ve not always been able to hold the fellowship together.
But that has also, at times,
been able to, over time, bring us back together under the same fold.
I think,
especially in a very polarized time in our national discourse, our public culture,
Presbyterians do have a long trail of practicing the Christian gifts of disagreeing Christianly.
And now we don’t always live that out perfectly.
But we have those resources in the cupboard.
And at our best,
we do behave Christianly towards one another.
And we are able to keep a large circle.
We can have lots of different kinds of Christians in the Presbyterian fellowship
because we practice loving people with diverse outcomes and perspectives.
And that’s a great example,
Michael, because even when we split,
we are uniquely Presbyterian.
When Presbyterians get mad and part ways,
it’s not just that a group up and leaves.
There’s meetings.
There’s discussions.
There’s votes that take place.
You’re not going to find,
if you go to the south,
you’ll find first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth Baptist churches maybe within blocks of each other,
as through the years,
a group decided that they wanted to not be part of the main group and they did their own thing.
You will not find that in a Presbyterian church.
You’re not going to go find first and second Presbyterian church across the street from
each other because half of them left and started a new thing.
The Presbyterian isn’t going to allow that and will unpack all that down the road.
But the reason that’s important is because Presbyterians also value our sense of connection.
And yes, there are times we’ve parted company and we try to do that,
even that as orderly as possible,
but we
understand that being a church in one place
means that you should be connected and interact with churches in other places,
other Presbyterian churches particularly,
that there should be this acknowledgement
that we are part of a thing together.
And so this is,
I think this is,
I would say, Michael, that as much as anything else,
this is one of our hopes for the future is that in an era where people are increasingly willing
to draw a circle and say,
“This is mine and I’m in it,” Presbyterians push back on that and say,
“No, that’s not enough.” Yes,
be in our circle,
but our circle cares how that circle is doing.
And our circle partners with this circle to try and do something else.
And this sense of connectionalism,
we often call it in Presbyterianism,
does, I think, offer us some of that passion,
some of that lifeblood that we were talking about a minute ago.
Yeah, I think in the very span of this conversation,
you’ve seen some of these lovely
things that are set against each other,
not as opposites, but they’re held in tension,
right?
The brokenness of humanity,
the fallenness of human nature is paired with this commitment
to connectionalism with other people who we acknowledge are broken.
That’s why we have
systems to try to order it well.
Then on the other hand,
you have this reality that we know
that we need grace,
God who is sovereign to act on our behalf.
And yet, we believe that as God’s
children, we are compelled into the world to do God’s work.
So we don’t just leave that to God,
we go try to bring our gifts and do whatever we can to bring glory to the one who has called us
as his own.
So all of these things are held in this beautiful sort of dynamic tension.
At our best, we’re a living, vibrant community.
At our worst, we’re stodgy and institutional.
And somewhere in the midst of that,
we’re trying to be faithful to the calling of God.
And that’s part of what makes us Presbyterian.
Yeah, I would say if you have the sense here of where we’ve come from,
it won’t surprise you to hear this.
We’ve done somber,
probably better than we’ve done joy.
We do joy,
it’s just that seriousness is probably more of our home base historically.
We do formal,
probably better than we do emotional,
certainly than we do,
you know,
what’s the word I’m looking for, Michael?
Oh,
we don’t do intuitive real well.
Maybe that’s not the right word.
What we are not necessarily good at as Presbyterians is,
I guess we could call it flexibility, spontaneity.
Spontaneity is tough in the Presbyterian Church.
We don’t always make room
for it, partly because we don’t trust it.
And some of that is learning to rely more on the
spirit.
And some of that is being cautious about the ways that spontaneity can be used
to harm the church.
So, you know, we’ve been a little bit suspicious of new things historically.
Those are some of our growing edges,
some of our Achilles heels.
They make us interesting at times,
and they are sometimes a struggle for us.
But in the midst of that,
they also unveil
some fundamental commitments.
And why those things have been a struggle for us are rooted not just
in that we’re boring people,
but we’re cautious people.
We’re careful people.
We’re thoughtful
people.
We’re people who don’t typically jump first and then look for a landing place.
We study that jump for a long time.
And then we jump a little bit.
The history of the Presbyterian Church has
not been lurching and starting and changing directions and all over the place.
That’s not us.
We are digging a tunnel steadily,
and we’ve been doing it a long time.
And sometimes it feels
not productive when, in reality,
it’s just we’re not looking for the big win as Presbyterians.
That’s not historically been who we are.
And so we’re a little slow to embrace new things.
And that hasn’t been a challenge for us,
but it comes from a good place.
I am very cautious to say,
but I was imagining if John Calvin was sitting at the table here,
how often he would be rolling his eyes at us.
But I think what he would say,
and I think we can say confidently,
is he would say that his legacy he hoped to leave
in his theology and leadership in the church was that God is first.
God is most.
God is all.
God is the one to whom all glory and honor and power is due.
And so I think,
to be fair,
Presbyterians have not always gotten it right,
but that emphasis has remained from day one through now.
And we seek to continue to do that in our worshiping life, in our fellowship,
to God be the glory,
even in our failings,
may God be lifted up.
Yeah, and I would hope,
Michael, that I think I could say this honestly.
In my estimation,
when we have gotten it wrong,
it has often been for the right reasons.
So we have sometimes not done things well because we overdid our caution and trying to make sure
that God was first.
We hunkered down longer than we should have, perhaps.
But that’s a little of
what we think it means to have been Presbyterian.
We will have an upcoming conversation about what
it means to be Presbyterian.
We continue to hope that it helps to see some of the ground we’ve
traveled because it helps us understand where we are now.
At least we think that it might.
And we appreciate you being part of the conversation with us.
Yeah, absolutely.
Please do leave a comment if there’s an area you’d like some more explanation
of.
We’d be happy to engage in that conversation.
In fact, that stuff can get worked into future conversations.
And also,
please be sure to share this if you think that there’s someone who might
be interested in learning a little bit more about Presbyterianism,
our history, our theology.
We’ve actually heard from a number of people who have found that sort of track interesting.
So feel free to share it.
But that being said,
we’re glad that you have joined us today.
We look forward to seeing
you next week, 9 o’clock Central Standard Time.
We release on Facebook and everywhere else.
And until then, be blessed.
Thanks, guys.