519 - Remembering Tim Kerr

Positive Protestantism: A Return to First Principles
By John M. Mulder

Thirty years ago, Hugh T. Kerr published Positive Protestantism: A Return to First Principles¹, which was a revision and restatement of his argument in a book of the same title issued in 1950. The volume was an attempt-on the eve of dramatic changes in the church, theology, and culture-to chart a theological agenda for Protestantism. Today, three decades later, the theological identity and coherence of American Protestantism constitute a major and compelling challenge. Despite the passage of time, Kerr's work serves as an insightful guide to churches searching for new vitality.

I

Writing on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, Kerr declared that Protestantism must move away from its tendency to define itself over against Roman Catholicism. Instead, he wrote, there is "a prior and more basic question. That question has to do with the essence and inner core of Christian faith itself." By shifting "from the negative to the positive, from the defensive to the offensive, from the critical to creative," the church will be able to articulate a "positive Protestantism, " which is "nothing more, and nothing less, than a straightforward, unequivocal proclamation of the gospel."

Kerr unabashedly conceded that this slim volume was "in the nature of a manifesto, an ultimatum, or less grandly, a tract for the times." As in so much of his writing, he wore his scholarship lightly, acknowledging that the book was indebted to "all sorts of" theologians and books, " and it hardly seemed to serve any useful purpose to underline the obvious" by citing them. He eschewed the approach of trying to define Protestantism by tracing its distinctive history. "Instead, this book seeks to raise the really radical questions proposed by the historical and doctrinal sources." What was at stake in the Reformation, he argued, was an attempt to recover the heart of the Christian faith. "The gospel, as a theological exegesis of the word itself shows, is the

John M. Mulder, currently President and Professor of Historical Theology at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, served from 1979 to 1981 as an assistant to Hugh T. Kerr in editing THEOLOGY TODAY. He is also moderator of the Board of Directors of the Louisville Institute for the Study of Protestantism and American Culture, which funds programs of research and leadership education. His recent books are Sealed in Christ (1991) and, with Milton J Coalter and Louis Weeks, The Re-forming Tradition: Presbyterians and Mainstream Protestantism (1992), part of a seven-volume Westminster/John Knox Press series, "The Presbyterian Presence: The Twentieth Century Experience."

¹ Hugh T. Kerr, Jr., Positive Protestantism: A Return to First Principles (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963).

520 - Remembering Tim Kerr

good news that God was in Christ for [humanity's] redemption. That is what the Reformers rediscovered in their day, and what is needed for the re-creation of contemporary Protestantism."

Kerr recognized that the difficulty in forging a "positive Protestantism" was inherent in the Protestant principle-its protest against not only "whatever it takes to be false and misleading" but also Protestantism itself. This self-critical stance is its genius and offers the possibility of renewal. However, Kerr issued a warning that would be lost amid the theological iconclasm of the ensuing decades: "It is not inevitable that radical self-criticism will of itself issue in reform or rebirth, " he wrote. "It is because reformation remains only a possibility and not a certainty that the self-critical nature of Protestantism offers a peril. The peril makes itself felt when self-criticism is so radical as to frustrate all hopes for transformation. It becomes a real threat when self-criticism is aimless, ambiguous, or unable to discover the true source of its protest. Self-examination is not a hopeful sign in itself because it may result in confusion and rout. This is the risk that Protestantism runs when it turns the principle of protest in upon itself, and unless it can discover through such a self-scrutiny how it must be reformed, the possibility of rebirth will be forfeited."

II

The heart of Kerr's argument for a "positive Protestantism" and "a return to first principles" is his analysis of the Christian gospel, particularly his discussion of "The Nature and Content of the Gospel." In it he sets out three fundamental affirmations:

(1) "Jesus Christ is at the heart and center of the gospel.
"There can be no doubt about this," Kerr wrote. "The gospel is a Christ-centered message. It is not a philosophy, or a theology, or a system of ethics. It is Jesus Christ." Jesus Christ is the messiah promised by the prophets of Israel. "He is the incarnation of God's promise of deliverance. The teacher, the miracle worker, the teller of parables, the uneducated and rural rabbi-he is what God has been saying in times past. The gospel is the good news that Jesus is the Christ."

The gospel thus becomes "a personal message. It is not merely a doctrine or a way of life; it is the good news about a person." Kerr hastened to add that the gospel is not simply news about a human being, but joyful proclamation about one who had a unique relationship to God. "This man is the Christ because he is the Son of God. The incarnation is not the good news that the son of Mary became the Son of God, but that the Son of God became the Son of Mary."

(2) "Christ is at the heart and center of the gospel because God was in Christ.
"The New Testament nowhere gives the impression that what Jesus said was important because he said it or because of its intrinsic truth,

521 - Remembering Tim Kerr

but because it was as if God himself had said it," Kerr declared. "The divine guarantee that God was in Christ is what gives the gospel its distinctive authority and power."

The incarnation is the center of the gospel, Kerr asserted. "[T]he gospel is the revelation of God in history. The gospel is the good news of what God has done.... Christ is not only the best or highest revelation of the nature and purpose of God; he is God himself in the flesh. He is what God has revealed himself to be in history and event; he is what God has to say to us."

The message of God in Christ was captured in the resurrection"the divine guarantee on the gospel as the good news of God in Christ...... It was this conviction," Kerr wrote, "that God was in Christ-not only in his life (incarnation) and his death (atonement), but in his resurrection-that gives the New Testament its boundless enthusiasm and its contagious sense of joy, victory, and triumph. The gospel of God in Christ is the good news that a new age has dawned, that with the coming of Christ the darkness has passed, that the new [person] in Christ is a new creation."

(3) "Christ is at the heart and center of the gospel because God was in Christ for [humanity's] redemption. "

For Kerr, Christianity is a religion of salvation. It may involve many other matters-the deeds and teachings of Jesus, the truth of God's revelation, the power of God over human history, the call to an ethical life-but in the last analysis, the gospel is God's declaration in Jesus Christ that humanity is saved-redeemed.

"It is only when the redemptive note is sounded that the gospel becomes good news," Kerr wrote. "It is not necessarily good news to know that God was in Christ unless we know that this was for us. The gospel does not stop with the proclamation of what God has done in Christ; it is the good news that he has come for our redemption."

"[T]his is the Core and essence of the Christian faith," Kerr continued. "Whatever else may be said about Christianity, this at least must be said. Whether we like it or not, whether we approve of it or reject it, whatever our response may be, Christianity stands or falls on the gospel. It is the source of all true theology, the impulse of Christian ethics, the theme of preaching, the charter of evangelism, the bond of fellowship."

"[I]t is the gospel that judges us, and not we the gospel. It is the gospel that warns the Church to be the Church and challenges Christianity in every age to be true to its divine source. It was the gospel that the Reformers rediscovered in the sixteenth century, and it is the gospel that Protestantism today must recapture if it is to stand upon its feet and proclaim the living Word of God."

III

In successive chapters, Kerr spelled out what positive Protestantism, the recovery of the gospel, might mean for preaching, "whether

522 - Remembering Tim Kerr

through homily, worship and sacrament, education, or Christian living and social witness." He stressed that the communication of the gospel centered on the critical and radical issues of life and faith-authority, God, human nature, and death. "The new preaching of the gospel," he concluded, "turns out to be the old preaching of the gospel." Yet, this was no obscurantist appeal to a pristine past. Instead, Kerr called for "an adequate and comprehensive evangelical ethic" to provide a Christian interpretation of "the perplexities and confusion of contemporary existence."

In his conclusion, Kerr reiterated his central thesis: The fundamental challenge to the church is to recapture its understanding and its proclamation of the gospel of our redemption by God in Jesus Christ. "The future of Protestantism," he warned, "does not depend on the maintenance of the status quo or upon radical emancipation from all the traditions of the past. It is not a matter of more theology or less theology, more liturgy or less liturgy, more organization or less organization. It will not be assured by retreats, or cells, or ecumenicity, or social action. It is quite simply and clearly a matter of witnessing to the gospel that God was in Christ for [humanity's] redemption.... Without this nothing else will really matter."

IV

In the ensuing thirty years under Kerr's editorial leadership, THEOLOGY TODAY served as an accurate reflection of what historian Sydney Ahlstrom called "the radical turn in theology and ethics."² Through it all, Kerr tried valiantly to discern what might be the gospel amidst the competing theological agendas.

Now, in 1993, the "mainstream" or "mainline" or "oldline" Protestant churches, for whom Kerr was essentially writing, confront a different world and face a series of perplexing predicaments. Membership peaked in the mid-sixties and plummeted thereafter, with some denominations losing more than one-third of their adherents. Members migrated easily to other denominational options and often to no church affiliation at all. Divisions and alienation between congregations and national denominational structures deepened.

Perhaps most baffling is the fragmentation of theology and the proliferation of diverse and competing schools of theology, each with a different agenda. In 1987, Kerr surveyed the phenomenon of "single issue" theologies and asked, "What is the locus of single issues within the grand theological orbit of the Bible as a whole, of Christian tradition, past and present, and of the universal church everywhere? The kind of symmetry that theology was once supposed to imply may not be a viable option among theologians in our day, but it still must be true that any portion of the gospel belongs within the implicative

² Sydney Ahlstrom, "The Radical Turn in Theology and Ethics: Why It Occurred in the 1960s," Religion in American History, edited by John M. Mulder and John F. Wilson, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1978), pp. 445-56.

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network of the whole of God's plan and purpose. Advocates of single issues tend to avoid such wider theological ramifications. Why?"³

Many observers described these momentous changes as a profound restructuring, reshaping, and re-forming of American religious life.⁴ Indeed, some wondered whether there was a future for mainstream Protestantism.⁵

Crucial to the renewal of these churches and American Christianity is the question Kerr posed thirty years ago: What is the gospel? What does it mean to be Christian? Contemporary American Christians are not especially interested in or moved by the particular institutional characteristics or doctrinal accents of Protestant denominationalism, although they are usually willing to accept them as useful ways of organizing a church or understanding their own form of Christianity. What drives the contemporary religious quest is a search for good news. What might offer the possibility of renewal in the church is its willingness to listen and hear again the gospel of Jesus Christ: God was in Christ for our redemption.

With a new and lively vision of the gospel, the church will experience again the joy of faith and hope. Kerr had perhaps one favorite quotation among all the ones he used to grace his essays and books. It was William Tyndale's definition of the gospel, and Kerr cited it in both Positive Protestantism and his final book, The Simple Gospel (1990). In his 1525 Prologue to the New Testament, Tyndale wrote, "Euangelio (that we call gospel) is a greke word, and signyfyth good, mery, glad and ioyfull tydings, that maketh a mannes hert glad, and maketh hyrn synge, daunce and leepe for ioye."⁶

I cannot read that without hearing Kerr's own chuckle. And I cannot read those words without hoping and praying that the church might return to what Kerr called "first principles"-the gospel of Jesus Christ. That would indeed be a positive Christianity.

³ Hugh T. Kerr, Jr., "Trademarks of Theology," THEOLOGY TODAY, 42 (1987), p. 469.
⁴ Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis Weeks, The Re-forming Tradition: Presbyterians and Mainstream Protestantism (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992); Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) and The Struggle for America's Soul Evangelicals, Liberals, and Secularism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989); Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); William R. Hutchison, editor, Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
⁵ Erling Jorstad, Holding Fast/Pressing On: Religion in America in the 1980s (New York: Praeger, 1990); Robert Michaelsen and Wade Clark Roof, editors, Liberal Protestantism (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1986).
⁶ Kerr, Positive Protestantism, p. xiii.