It is, in that, a declaration intended to be both unifying and integrative.
Like the Barmen Declaration, which challenged the usurpation of the church by the Nazi regime, or the Belhar Confession, which renounces the spiritual blight of racist segregationism from the depths of South African apartheid, most confessions rise from a condition of conflict, and give the faithful a clear vision of where the Beloved Community must stand.
They are a fierce call to integrity in life together. It's why Presbyterians remember confessions, and why the Book of Confessions is part of the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s Constitution.
Our era poses plenty of challenges for the church, and so...Presbyterians being who we are...we've convened a committee to come up with a statement that speaks powerfully to where God is calling us right now. They've done the work, and now we've been asked, by that committee, to give that confession a read.
Then, we have been asked to sit with it a while. Where it troubles us, reflect meaningfully on why, and then consider it some more. When we've done that, respond.
The confession they've drafted for our consideration does not yet have a name, other than "Proposed New Confession." This doesn't quite have the ring of "Second Helvetic" or "Westminster," although it's probably already catchier than "Brief Statement." Were I a marketer, I'd really want us to have a stronger brand identity at launch.
So how does it read? What does it say? What are we called to affirm, and what crisis calls us to a moment of choosing and shared witness?
The language is reflective of the academic-progressive character of the PC(USA), and marks our denomination's continued emphasis on inclusion and welcome. It has four sections. The first, entitled Image of the Triune God, lays out our understanding of the nature of...surprise surprise...the Triune God. It does so in language that moves even further down the inclusive language path than the Brief Statement of Faith. In tone and semiotic choices, it's fuzzier and more prone to poesy than other confessions, but nonetheless retains a vital and necessary core witness to the nature of our Creator.
I particularly appreciated its Augustinian expression of the Trinity as Love, which shows some solid theological chops cast with concision and poetry. It's in essence the same understanding of an interrelationship of love that C.S. Lewis expresses in Mere Christianity, even if it's wearing some soft flannel pajamas.
One could quibble, I suppose, with some of the language. Like, say, the use of the word "affection" as a wiffle-ball euphemism for "sexual orientation." Them's ain't the same things, y'all, not by a long shot. στοργή is not Ἔρως is not ἀγάπη, right?
Generally speaking, it's perfectly fine.
The second section, Turning Away From God's Image, establishes the nature of the crisis.
In four powerful paragraphs, it lays the essence of the challenge of our age. The first three name that challenge: that humankind has once again lost itself in the thrall of wealth and power. This love of Mammon and the sword has corrupted the witness of faith, and as a prophetic critique, it's dead on. It stings like Amos and Micah, and delivers the sort of uppercut to heresy that would do Saint Nicolas proud.
In the final paragraphs, there's a clear naming of our deepest moral and spiritual challenge: the mutual careening towards the sabotage of our entire ecosystem. Taken together, those paragraphs are succinct, cogent, and complete.
But in the midst of that fierce declaration, the confession takes a detour. There's an abrupt tonal shift, the punch is pulled, and instead we get the rote neo-Cistercian self-flagellation of the Presbyterian People's Front.
Meaning, all of a sudden we've donned our best intersectional sackcloth, mourning our Complicity in such pressing contemporary crises as...checks notes..."manifest destiny." What follows, if one knows generic progressive discourse, is the usual performative litany of historical wrongs. We're colonialist, and racist, and sexist, ableist and queer-o-phobic, all of us damnable sinners, pie Crenshaw domine, dona eis requiem, whack.
I find this both baffling and frustrating, for a variety of reasons, three of which I'll pitch out here.
First, all of these lamentations seem to operate under the assumption that the PC(USA) is made up entirely of cisgender White men who can trace their lineage back to the Mayflower.
"We have," the Proposed New Confession intones, again and again, but that "We" is not a "We" that the church as a whole can confess together. Sure, our demographic skew is heavily towards being the Presbyterian Home of Honkeytown, but...and I don't know if you've noticed this...that's not who all of us are now.
Can a Korean American choir director or a Ghanaian elder claim to have reviled their immigrant neighbors? Can a historically Black church say that it has covered itself in racism's robes? Can the women who make up a supermajority of our membership lament their complicitness in their own self-denigration? Can the Queer folk who have fought for decades for inclusion declare themselves morally responsible for the harm inflicted upon them? None of them can, not meaningfully.
All of these Christians are (and here I'll turn on all caps) PART OF THE (PC)USA. They are not they. They are us. They are we. Yet those members of our shared fellowship are all positioned as the objects of the confession, not the ones proclaiming it. It's an exclusionary, neosegregationist liturgy, which is jarring given the confession's stated purpose.
Second, it just doesn't resemble the PC(USA) I've known for the entirety of my 57 years as a cradle Presbyterian. Every Presbyterian congregation I have worshiped in, been a member of, or pastored? None of them have lived out their lives together in a way that would justify these laments. In the more recent cases, be it the civil rights movement, the ordination of women, the inclusion of Queer folk, or the embrace of those who live with disability? In every one of those instances, we've fought our way through to an authentic witness, and at nontrivial cost in relationship and membership. Saying, for example, "You took a consistent stand for women's voices, but, you know you could have done more, and you're part of The Patriarchy, so you are automatically complicit?"
I don't buy it. I've looked at it, sat with it, thought about it, and...no. One cannot repent for a sin they have not committed. We have plenty of concrete and material sins to attend to, and repentance...understood from the whole witness of Scripture...just does not work that way. Here, I'm very much aware that I'm not compliant with the demands of our particular denominational Newspeak. I still view persons as the fundamental unit of moral analysis, for example. I'm guilty of so many doubleplus ecclesiastical thoughtcrimes. Mea culpa.
And finally, it feels, and here forgive me...Old. Not just Old, but Old Old, in a very particular gerontological way.
The laments themselves are cast in semi-chronological order, a retelling-in-negation of the history of the Presbyterian church in this country. They are decades out of date and centuries passed, sepia and crumbling. None of them, not one, meaningfully reflects the PC(USA) now, or the specific crisis we inhabit.
It's almost like we don't know where we are anymore, like we can't remember what we did yesterday, or the names of the people around us. But oh, do we remember the past, past struggles, past traumas, and past conflicts. We remember when we mattered, back when we once shaped the direction of a nation, when our voice made a difference. Remember at the General Assembly of 1818, when we let expediency and groupthink water down our witness, where we made a bold statement and then equivocated? Remember when we marched at Selma? No-one else remembers that, not anymore, but we're lost in the thrall of wouldacouldashoulda. It's a little solipsistic, a little maudlin, and more than a little morbid.
This section reads, to be blunt, like the deathbed confession of White Liberal Christianity.
"The Deathbed Confession?"
Do we want that to be what this is? An end of life groan of regret at mistakes made and things left undone, croaked from dry and dying White throats as the denomination falls into the Consuming Fire? Maybe we do. Maybe that is what we want. I know that's what some of y'all want.
The time for that church is over, some folks say. It should just cash out. Think of the things we could do with that money! Choose any charity! Give to the poor!
But again,"The Deathbed Confession" has kind of a ring to it, if we're talking brand identity.
As a foundation on which to build, though, and a naming of the spiritual battle facing the church, this section might not be the best step forward.
Because we're not dead yet.
To those who've labored long and hard over this work, in the unlikely event you find yourself reading these reflections: I recognize that some of these responses might feel uncomfortable. But, you know, just sit with them for a little while. And anyway, it's just one portion of one section, and y'all did ask for responses. I mean, you did.
There's so much more to the Confession than this, though, and I'll get to that in another post.
Posts
