Theology Today - Vol 45, No. 2 - July 1988 - EDITORIAL - A Brief Statement of Reformed Faith

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A Brief Statement of Reformed Faith
By Hugh T. Kerr and Craig Dykstra

A special committee of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has been working for three years to draft a new, brief statement of faith that the recently reunited church might affirm as a contemporary expression of what this church in the Reformed tradition believes. The results of their efforts are ready and have been distributed across the denomination for reflection, study, and comment. We reprint the proposed statement here, not only for our Presbyterian readers, but for all who wonder what some of the leading theologians of a major or Protestant denomination are proposing as a declaration of faith.

Like many contemporary American Protestant mainline denominations, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is increasingly pluralistic-culturally, theologically, even racially and economically. This is slightly more the case now with the merger of two churches from the northern and southern regions of the country. The merger is what occasioned this Statement, and it may be that the pluralism is what makes a new confessional document timely. (There are those who wonder whether such a document should be created at all. The Presbyterian Book of Confessions is getting rather bulky and the span of time elapsing between the creation of each new addition is shrinking rapidly. Does the prospect of a creedal miscellany begin to threaten?) Though the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is possessed of a clear, historic theological tradition, which for some of its members is the continuing source of its identity, an increasing portion of this church has come to it from communions with different heritages. And many in it are aware of no strong theological identity at all. At the same time, key groups in the church have passionate convictions about various issues, theological, political, social, and ecclesiastical. The positions held are, needless to say, not always compatible. Yet, the competing voices would like to see their visions at least reflected in what the church declares to be its faith.

Stating a church's faith in such a context is an extraordinarily delicate task. Perhaps it is a blessing that the Presbyterian Church decided to keep it brief. This rivets everyone's attention on the bare bones, the utterly essential. But the brevity also makes every word count. Each phrase is loaded with considerable freight. Furthermore, structure

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A PROPOSED BRIEF STATEMENT OF REFORMED FAITH

In life and in death we belong to God.
   Through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
   the love of God,
   and the communion of the Holy Spirit,
we believe in this God
   and will serve no other.
We trust in Jesus Christ,
      God with us in human flesh,
   who proclaimed the reign of God:
      he preached good news to the poor
         and release to the captives;
      he healed the sick
         and ate with outcasts;
      he forgave sinners
         and called all people to repent and believe.
   Condemned for blasphemy and sedition,
      Jesus was crucified,
      giving his life for the sins of the world.
   But God raised him from the dead,
      vindicating his life,
      breaking the power of sin and evil,
      delivering us from death to life.
We trust in God, sovereign in love,
      whom Jesus called Abba, Father,
   who created all things good
      and made us equal in God's image,
         male and female,
         every race and people.
   But we rebel against God:
      we exploit neighbor and nature,
      debase ourselves,
      and threaten death to the planet
         entrusted to our care.

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We deserve God's condemnation.
   Yet from the beginning God chose a covenant people
      for the blessing of the nations,
   and remains faithful still,
      like a mother who will not abandon the child in her arms,
      like a father who runs to welcome the prodigal home.
We trust in God the Holy Spirit,
      the Lord and giver of life,
   who sets us free
      and binds us together as one body of Christ,
      one church, the communion of saints.
   The same spirit
      who inspired prophets and apostles
      still speaks through Scripture read and proclaimed,
      washes us in living water,
      feeds us with the bread of life,
      and calls both women and men to all the ministries of the church.
   In a broken and fearful world
   the Spirit gives us power
      to witness to Christ as Lord and Savior,
      to work for justice, freedom and peace,
      to smash the idols of church and culture,
      and to claim all of life for Christ.
   Made bold by the Spirit,
      we dare to serve Christ in our daily tasks
      and seek to live holy and joyful lives,
   even as we look for God's new heaven and new earth,
      praying, "Come, Lord Jesus!"
With believers in every time and place,
   we confess that nothing in life or death
   can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Amen*
*This line may be either said or sung.

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is crucial. With what should it begin? How should it end? What gives pattern to the whole? Decisions on these matters determine what can and will be said, as well as how it will be used.

The choice of structure is, perhaps, the place at which a particular church's tradition may make its greatest impact on a contemporary statement of faith. On this issue, the proposed statement has some surprises. The structure of the Brief Statement follows the sequence of' the Apostolic Benediction-"the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit" (II Cor. 13:14)-rather than the traditional sequence of the baptismal commission. The latter-"in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matt. 28:29)-it is generally agreed, provided the trinitarian basis for the earliest Christian creeds as well as many theological treatises, including Calvin's Institutes.

Attempts to change that sequence are not commonplace, so the bold effort of the Brief Statement in using the Apostolic Benediction is innovative. Presumably, the theological intent of the Brief Statement is to accent the christological priority which the Apostolic Benediction affirms. Rather than beginning with God the creator (or with what used to be called natural or general revelation), Christians put Christ first in the order of creedal declaration.

The christocentric emphasis is not entirely new. One can find this in the Heidelberg Catechism, the Barmen Declaration, and the Confession. of '67. In these formularies and in others, the "second article" of the Nicene-Apostolic Creed takes precedence. In the case of Heidelberg, the emphasis is on the Christian's grateful response to Christ's redemption: for Barmen, commitment to Christ comes before loyalty to the state; and. in the Confession of '67, christic reconciliation is the religious and. ethical imperative prescribed and hoped for.

Nonetheless, one must look to obscure efforts to find such obvious rearrangement of sequence as appears in the Brief Statement. Alfred E., Garvie, Principal of Hackney and New College, London, wrote a big systematic theology in 1925, with the title The Christian Doctrine of the Godhead. Garvie anticipated the Brief Statement with his subtitle: "The Apostolic Benediction as the Christian Creed." He argued that since Christians know about the love of God because of Jesus Christ, then we should begin our confession with the redeemer rather than the creator, Alas, Garvie's effort and his book are now scarcely remembered.

More recently, Henry P. Van Dusen, the late President of Union Theological Seminary in New York, tried to re-order the sequence of belief in his volume, Spirit, Son, and Father (1958). Van Dusen argued., and very persuasively, that the place to begin in any creedal statement is with the Spirit, because God's redemptive grace in Jesus Christ is made known to us through the person and work of the Holy Spirit. This

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position would not only receive approval from Pentecostals of all sorts, but from Calvin and the Westminster Standards. In the crucial transition of Calvin's Third Book of the Institutes, after having written of God the creator and Christ the redeemer, it is stated that "the Holy Spirit is the bond by which Christ effectually unites us to himself" (III.i.1). The Shorter Catechism, Question 29, answers the inquiry as to how we are made partakers of Christ's redemption by stating that "we are made partakers of the redemption purchased by Christ by the effectual application of it to us by his Holy Spirit."

Alas, again, Van Dusen's suggestive sequence, like Garvie's earlier plea, fell mostly on deaf ears, and his earnest book belongs to that category of well-intentioned but ignored theological treatises. But it may well be that echoes of Garvie and Van Dusen reappear in somewhat different guise in the Brief Statement.

The Brief Statement committee makes a couple of additions to the Apostolic Benediction, perhaps in order to give that scriptural formula a more modern and contemporary emphasis. The three-fold structure of the Apostolic Benediction is framed by a preface ("in life and death we belong to God") and a conclusion ("we believe in this God and will serve no other").

Some may interpret the preface as a radical reversal of the Reformed insistence on the sovereignty of God. Instead of beginning with God, the creator of all that is and the initiator of the process of redemption, the Brief Statement stresses our belonging and our believing. But there is ample evidence that the Reformed tradition itself sanctions such an approach. The Scots Confession (1560) begins with the words: "We confess and acknowledge one God alone, to whom alone we must cleave, whom alone we must serve, whom only we must worship, and in whom alone we put our trust." The answer to the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) reads, in part: "I belong-body and soul, in life and in death-not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ." The first affirmation of the Barmen Declaration (1934) asserts that "Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to bear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death." The Confession of '67 begins with the assertion that "the church confesses its faith when it bears a present witness to God's grace in Jesus Christ."

It is true that other Reformed standards begin, for example, with God's revelation in Scripture, as is the case with the Second Helvetic Confession (1561) and the Westminster Confession of Faith (1643). Calvin begins the Institutes by noting that we can start either with the knowledge of God or with the knowledge of ourselves, since they are "mutually connected." Calvin, in fact, chose to begin with the knowledge of God, but, unless he was setting up a false option, he might as well

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have chosen to begin with the knowledge of ourselves. One can only wonder what kind of Institutes might have emerged had he chosen the; second option.

III

The Brief Statement concludes, not with the Apostolic Benediction. itself, but with the Gloria: "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Amen." This addition may seem confusing. Why does this come at the end rather than the beginning? Would one not expect to open with the Gloria and close with the Benediction, especially since the committee has a liturgical context in mind for its use? One might also ask whether it is wise to close the Statement with a trinitarian quotation that has a different sequence from the one by which the whole document is organized. Such an emphatic but inconsistent conclusion seems a bit jarring.

Perhaps the answer is simply that the Gloria is the church's long-lived way of giving praise and thanks to God, and that is what we should do by way of concluding a statement of faith, especially in worship. More cynically, perhaps, the inclusion of the Gloria is a consolation for those who are unwilling to relinquish entirely the masculinist language of' "Father" and "Son." (The Brief Statement carefully avoids sexist language until this point, observing only that Jesus called God "Abba, Father.") Bringing the traditional language in only at the end, and. through what is obviously a quotation from Scripture, may have been a compromise everyone could live with-though, perhaps, making no one exactly happy.

The big question here is whether structure and sequence make any difference in trying to formulate a creedal statement. Does it really matter where we start or where we end? If we are living in an apocalyptic time, as many believe, then eschatology must receive priority. If ecological negligence threatens human life and the earth itself, then creation and providence could seem to command initial attention. If the inner experience of spiritual reality and the development of a viable faith identity seem most important, then we might assume that the person and work of the Holy Spirit should be foremost.

Creeds are always contextual, and the Presbyterian Book of Confessions, being a collection of ancient and modern examples, illustrates the point. If the context is particularly focused on some special issue, as with Barmen or the Confession of '67, the declaration may lose its impact on later generations if the same issues have diminished in importance. The confrontation between the German confessing church and the Nazi regime is a crucial piece of recent history, but it is not now a viable context for the writing of a new creed. The Confession of '67 perceived the need for "reconciliation," both individually and socially, as the compelling reason for drafting a doctrinal statement. But, as we well

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remember, 1968 and the years immediately following were radically disruptive with the student protest movement, the collapse of political integrity, and the violence of the civil rights outcry.

What is the context for the Brief Statement? One is struck by the fact' that the two trinitarian formulae, one at the beginning and a different one at the end, are each linked intimately to claims that "in life and death we belong to God" (the closing version is a quotation from Rom. 8:38, 39-"We confess that nothing in life or death can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord"). Why is this? Whether the committee intended it or not, the context conveyed seems to be one of threat. The themes of destruction, abandonment, prodigality, brokenness, and fear permeate the Brief Statement. Death-huge, massive, intolerable death-as well as the kind of living that leads to it, seems to loom over the Statement. And it threatens to be death of a kind that can, indeed, separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Perhaps this is what we feel in our bones. So, it is in the face of precisely this that we now lay claim to the realities made known in Christian faith.

An innovative and controversial trademark of the Brief Statement is an implicit claim that the realities of Christian faith are made known and authenticated by and through the witness and obedience of the faithful. The Brief Statement is not very lucid or instructive in defining the nature of revelation, the attributes of God, the two natures of Jesus Christ, the relation between justification and sanctification, the meaning of election and calling, how the sacraments are the means of grace, or how to interpret the last things. The Brief Statement, in studiously avoiding the older theological language and categories of thought, would take its place, if and when approved, as an additional item among the doctrinal standards of the Book of Confessions. These classic formularies, different in many ways but converging as historic expressions of the Reformed faith, are not being by-passed, still less superseded, by the Brief Statement. What has been received and accepted still stands. The Brief Statement adds to this confessional corpus by making its own witness in its own way for our own day and age.

What is that witness? The Brief Statement declares that the grace of Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit are made known today in our complex and disruptive world in and through the lives of those who trust in Jesus who "preached good news to the poor and release to the captives," who trust in the God of "sovereign love," and who trust in the Holy Spirit who "gives us power to witness � to work for justice � to smash idols � and to claim all of life for Christ."

The operative words here are "trust" (not believe), "Jesus" (not Jesus Christ, with all the theological implications of the two natures in one person), and "sovereign love" (not omnipotence or transcendence). The

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older theological vocabulary is scarcely recognizable in the Brief Statement. We do not hear much about the doctrine of creation or providence, election or the plan of salvation, atonement, or even the Kingdom of God. All of these traditional categories are actually alluded to in the Brief Statement but in new and significantly different ways. For example, we do not read about the Kingdom of God, with the inevitable masculinist overtones, but that Jesus "proclaimed the reign of God."

The special accent of the Brief Statement can be detected in what many present-day thinkers in various fields call the trend toward a postliberal perspective. In theology, the term has nothing to do with the distinction between liberalism and conservatism as conventionally understood. To be "postliberal" means to resist the urge to support the Christian faith by appealing to common rational principles on which, presumably, everyone can agree, such as the creation of the world by a divine intelligence. The Brief Statement takes a different approach by simply summarizing the gospel message and its practical implications for those who trust in and seek to be faithful to this evangelical narrative.

Instead of declaring the substance of the faith against the backdrop of a metaphysical verticality, the Brief Statement, in the simplest of terms, speaks of what it means to be faithful "in a broken and fearful world." This implies not only "to work for justice, freedom, and peace," but "to live holy and joyful lives."

Enlightenment principles, so long taken for granted in assuming common intellectual ground on which all humans everywhere and always are supposed to stand, are mostly ignored or by-passed by the Brief Statement. Not much is said by way of doctrinal definitions or propositional truths that might provide a rational apologetic for the faith. Without saying so, the Brief Statement moves beyond former presuppositions about the harmony and structure of "the spacious firmament on high." What we have instead is a sort of free-verse recital of the gospel which is more allusive in character than propositional or definitional. Through its liturgical style, the Brief Statement expresses the faith in short statements and doxological affirmations.

This contemporary accent provides the historical and theological context out of which the Brief Statement speaks to the church today. This will also be the controversial aspect of the document, as many argue whether this is indeed a Reformed creed and whether its implied context issues from realistic perception born of faith or is simply a sign of despair.