[Dialogue] 8/18/11, Spong: Lecturing in the Church of Scotland

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Lecturing in the Church of Scotland
To come to Scotland is to come to that mysterious land of clans with their identifying tartans and clan warfare; to a nation that forced the English to build Hadrian’s Wall, and to a land that still harbors deep independent feelings that cause Scotland’s membership in the United Kingdom still to be publicly debated.  It is also a land where the strong message of John Calvin, filtered through the deeply moral and puritanical consciousness of John Knox, captured the peoples’ religious yearnings and ultimately organized them into the Church of Scotland, the mother church of most of those who today call themselves Presbyterians.  There is no Pope in Presbyterianism.  The governing body in that church is the gathering of the elders, called “the Presbytery.”  In that church, however, the “Word of God” inscribed in scripture, is said to be the ultimate authority in all theological disputes.  Like all branches of Christianity today, the Presbyterian Church has liberals, moderates and conservatives and its conservative wing stretches into a rigid, moralistic fundamentalism.  My grandparents on my mother’s side were identified with this most fundamentalistic side of Presbyterianism.  They were members of a Presbyterian faction that called themselves the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. This ARP Church was a small sect that resisted modernity vigorously.  They called Sunday “the Sabbath” and they were part of the Southern religious consciousness that kept what were called “The Blue Laws” legal.  These laws forbade businesses from operating on Sundays.  My mother’s ARP Church observed the “Ordinance” of the Lord’s Supper only one time a year on Maundy Thursday.  They stood foursquare against the popular sins of the day, smoking, drinking, dancing, gambling and cursing.  They sang no hymns in worship, since hymns were human creations, and they believed that only the words of God should be heard in church so their hymnal consisted of the 150 psalms set to music.  They had a college in South Carolina where they trained their clergy.  It was called Due West College and was located in Due West, South Carolina.  No one said what it was due west of, but its name suggested that the center of the ARP Church was east of Due West.  This area of the Carolinas was settled primarily by Scottish people and in my mother’s family, names like Kirkpatrick, Cameron and Wilson were abundant.
I do not mean to suggest that all Scottish Presbyterianism was this extreme, but this church has traditionally tilted in this direction and some of the theological faculties at Scottish universities, where their clergy are trained today, do in fact represent a rigid traditional Christianity that is unchanged by and resistant to the knowledge revolution of the last 500 years.
In recent decades Scotland has, however, produced some major progressive theological leaders.  One thinks of Donald M. Baillie and John Macquarrie, for example.  The dominant center of the Scottish Church is, however, markedly conservative.  A number of years ago I gave a lecture in Edinburgh sponsored by the Scottish Episcopal Church, but housed in a large  downtown Church of Scotland (Presbyterian) building.  Following the lecture I was heckled by a man sitting in the balcony, who clearly wanted to attack what I was saying.  I discovered later that he was a well known, ultra-conservative member of a Scottish theological faculty.  Shouting out from the balcony at a public lecture is hardly polite behavior, but I have noted a tendency toward rudeness to be in direct relationship to the sense that there is only one approach to Christianity, namely the approach of those who do the rude behavior.
In the last decade or so an organization known as the Progressive Christian Network of Great Britain has been formed and it has a number of chapters in Scotland.  This network is beyond denominations and includes Presbyterians, Anglicans (Episcopalians), Methodists, Congregationalists and a growing number of disaffected Roman Catholics.  In the last three years this organization has sponsored lectures in Edinburgh and Glasgow led by people like Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan.  This trip to Glasgow was under the auspices of this Progressive Christian Network, but for the first time for me the lectures were to be housed in two Church of Scotland (i.e. Presbyterian) parishes. I looked forward to it with some excitement.  I was returning to the land and the religion of my mother’s family.
Two things on this Scotland trip fascinated me.  First, I met a group of Scottish clergy, most of them Presbyterian, who were dedicated not just to reformation, but also to calling their congregations into engagement with the real world of contemporary academic learning.  They too had fought the battle against fundamentalism and its Bible-quoting justification for ongoing prejudices against Catholics, Jews, women and homosexuals.  These clergy had won the approval of their congregations, though they also had aroused the suspicions and sometimes the hostility of “headquarters.”  They had created a new image for their churches that in turn gave birth to a second look for those who had long ago moved away from Christianity altogether.  These disaffected ones had been saying to their churches for years “The God I meet inside your structures is too small to be God for the world I now inhabit.”  Since the church as they experienced it seemed to have no other idea of God, they wanted no part of religion.
The first church that hosted me was Cairns Church.  Its able and sensitive pastor was named Andrew Frater.  He has served them for the past 15 years.  By his dedicated pastoral care, his able scholarship and his effective preaching, he has created there a congregation in which many people, who were searching after truth outside traditional religious boxes, could find a welcome.  Andrew Frater’s church posted publicly its creed as a kind of mission statement of welcome. This statement invited into its life those who’s “searchings, longings and questions about what it is to be human and what life is about” especially, it said, “those who found no answer for those yearnings in a religious way.”  Our concern for them,” this statement went on to say “is to express our openness to them unconditionally.”  I gave one lecture at this church on a Thursday night.  The crowd was significant. My lecture was on the Bible; how it came into being and what it meant underneath its literal texts.  I sought to lay before them the Bible’s call not to be religious, but to be whole.  The audience was responsive; the questions asked that night were designed to wrestle with new insights not to defend past formulas.
This lecture was picketed by a group of conservative Presbyterians, who did not think that the literal words of the Bible should ever be looked at critically.  It was the first time I have been picketed since Fred Phelps did it in Illinois a few years ago.  I was actually pleased to meet that level of energy once again.  I feared that my message might have become mainstream!
On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the lecture series moved to the Orchard Hill Parish Church of Scotland where another incredibly gifted minister named Chris Vermeulen was serving.  Chris was a Congregationalist minister in South Africa before moving to Scotland about 17 years ago to serve in the Church of Scotland.  He has had a broad experience and is a confident, bright, sensitive clergyman, one who would be a credit to any church.  The subject of these lectures was also the Bible, but how it needs to be read in the light of the revolution in thought and knowledge created by the likes of Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Hawking.  Once again, we were picketed by the same group on Friday night.  To aid their picketing that Friday, they had added a car laden with posters, deploring the efforts of that church to explore the Bible in a new way.  They parked this poster-laden car in such a way as to create a traffic jam, making it difficult for those who wanted to attend to gain access.  I wondered  what a petty God it must be that these people serve, who might be so visibly threatened by the words of one who is deeply committed to studying the Bible, who worships in church every Sunday, but who does not believe that his understanding of God and God are the same.  I remembered my fundamentalist upbringing and the sense I had as a child and young adolescent that God needed me to defend God against the infidels lined up against God.  It never occurred to me then that if God needed someone as weak and uninformed as I was that God was in a desperate way.  In the Church of Scotland today, there is a small group of broad, questioning, intelligent, thoughtful clergy, dedicated to serving God in the accents of today.  They are a growing presence.  One will not meet finer or more able clergy than Andrew Frater and Chris Vermeulen.  Part of what I do in my travels is to tell clergy like these that they are not alone.  There are pastors like them in every part of the Christian Church, struggling to lift the Christ message out of the fears and rigid conclusions of those who believe that they are doing God a favor by defending God against new learning.
I am convinced that it will be from the fringes of the Christian Church that its renewal will come.  It will originate from those marginalized by their respective hierarchies.  It was the Vatican, I remind you, which decided that Hans Kung, Edward Schillebeeckx, Charles Curran, Leonardo Boff,  Rosemary Ruether, Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza and Matthew Fox were not prophets of a new day, but “troublers of Israel.”  It was the Anglican Church that marginalized John A. T. Robinson, Don Cupitt, and James Pike among many others.  It was the Presbyterian Church that marginalized Janie Spahr and to some degree those spectacular clergy in Glasgow.  It was the Lutheran Church that wanted to dismiss Gerd Luderman; the Methodist Church that put Amy Delong on trial for conducting a same sex marriage.  On and on we could go.
In Andrew Frater and Chris Vermeulen serving the Church of Scotland in Glasgow there is still a faithful remnant out of which new life will also be born in that wonderful land that produced my mother.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
Margaret Rolfe from Australia writes:
Question:
Week after week in the liturgy we have “Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”  How do you, as a progressive Christian scholar, understand this?
Answer:
Dear Margaret, 

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity has been a cornerstone in the Christian Church since the fourth century CE, but it has not been unchanging.  It has been modified over the years to remove the exclusively masculine characteristics of patriarchal language.  “The Holy Ghost” has been changed to the “Holy Spirit.” The word “Ghost” might have communicated something to traditional Christians, but to those of us living in the 21st century, it sounds somewhat like Casper with a halo!  At one time the idea of the Trinity identified liturgically about half the Sundays of the church year since those were known as the “Sundays after Trinity.”  This has now been replaced in modern lectionaries by what we call the “Sundays of Pentecost.” 

The Trinity was a conclusion to which the Christian Church came after a long journey through history. It was not a part of early or original Christianity.  If you read Paul closely, you will find that he is not a Trinitarian! 

I think what people fail to understand is that the Trinity is not a description of God, it is rather a description of the human experience of God couched in the language of 4th century, Greek-speaking Europe.  We experience God as the source of life beyond any limit that the human imagination can impose on anything and we call that God “the Father.” We experience God as the ultimate depth of life, deeper than our own breath and we call that dimension of life “Spirit.”  We experience God coming to us through the lives of others, and, for those of us who are Christians, coming to us uniquely through the life of one called Jesus of Nazareth, and we name him “Son,” offspring of “the Father.”  Have we in this manner defined God?  No, of course not.  We have defined only what we believe is our experience of God. 

In that sense, I have no trouble with Trinitarian language.  I do not believe that I can say that God is a Trinity, for I do not think the human mind can ever define God with human words without becoming idolatrous.  On the other hand I can say that I am a Trinitarian for that formula helps me to make sense of the God I experience as real and the God to whom I am drawn. 

~John Shelby Spong





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