The Foundations of This House

"...."That one is like a man building a house, who dug deeply and laid the foundation on a rock."

The Foundations of This House "Human inheritance," writes Kathleen Norris, "is both a blessing and a curse. And in religious inheritance this paradox is acute." She goes on to say that for many, religion is "heavy baggage. Stories of love and fear, liberation and constriction, grace and malice come not only from our own experiences and our family's past, but from an ancestral history within a tradition. What curses do we need to shed, in the process of growing up?" she asks. "What can we hold to as blessing?"

Perhaps one of the backhanded curses of my own religious upbringing was that I had nothing against which to rebel. Raised in a liberal Presbyterian household, I slowly became aware of certain characteristics, peculiar to my church's life which, when contrasted to Baptist, Catholic, Methodist friends, made me proud! In the first place, I can remember reading the Bible intelligently and under the tutelage of a minister willing to expose his own struggles with the kind of book we had been given. From confirmation class on, I knew that the Bible was a masterpiece of editorial genius: not dictated from on high, word for word, but pieced together over centuries of stories told and visions tested. The competing histories of J, E, P, and D in the Old Testament, the differences in the four gospels, caused friends from other churches no end of worry about the so-called contradictions within these pages. I gloried in them, like puzzle pieces to be made into a picture of complex connections.

Neither did I have to rebel, in the second place, against a church detached from the world in which I lived. I watched the nightly news as Presbyterian ministers marched for integration. My youth was spent discussing the ethical challenges of Viet Nam and the Cold War, of space exploration verses the needs of the poor, of racism and economic justice and abortion and, of course, sex. This happened every Sunday night at church with friends and a seminarian from Princeton with whom I regularly fell in love. Never were we given the "Christian answer," or told what verse to cite in the Bible as proof of an absolute moral position. Rather we debated about what Jesus would do, learning to think critically from out of a faith which sought understanding more than certitude.

Finally, though not exhaustively, I did not have to rebel against the weekly worship of God. The service was a carbon copy of this service today, save that when the preacher began the sermon at the very end of the service, an usher slowly dimmed the lights: always a signal to my father that a nap was at hand and a signal to mother that holy vigilance was needed. Though that same preacher taught me how to listen to a sermon, such that I usually was anxious to get over the preliminaries of prayers and offering and anthem. I had come to be challenged by his three points which were sure to be discussed on the way home--what Martin Marty calls fricasseed preacher--but they were points that engaged me early on, along with my parents, in the exercise of thinking theologically.

What I did not realize, until I was well into seminary and even beyond, was the coincidence between the particularities of my religious upbringing and the peculiar emphases of the Reformed theological tradition from whence they had come. It was not by chance that I learned to love the Bible with all the powers of my reason...or that I came to expect evidence of the church's witness in the public arena...or that I considered the sermon to be the center of a Sunday morning. Therefore, on this Sunday, when we remember our Reformed theological inheritance, I want to call to mind the foundations of our Presbyterian slant on the Christian tradition such that, when asked what it means to be a Presbyterian, we might have more to say than, "Well, we eat together alot!"

The preface, of course, is that tradition, for Presbyterians, began with its rejection--or at least rejection of the authority of Roman Church tradition. Part of what Zwingli and Calvin railed against was a church whose dogma superseded scripture in its power to order people's lives or shape people's faith, and whose hierarchy presumed themselves to be the holders and the brokers of salvation. Therefore the Reformers set about clearing away centuries of church teachings, in order that the Biblical witness, through the working of the Holy Spirit, might again be God's reforming Word to the church, might again be our sure foundation.

This is why, in the first place, the way Reformed people read the Bible is a distinctive part of this church's foundation. The Reformers had what we would call a liberal arts education. As humanist scholars, they came to the Bible equipped to study it from a linguistic and literary and historical perspective, as well as from the perspective of faith. Those who have "even tasted the liberal arts," said Calvin, "penetrate with their aid far more deeply into the secrets of divine wisdom." No literalists were they, but they took the Bible with the seriousness of scholars and believers, listening for God's Word so that they could proclaim and teach that word thoughtfully to their congregations. They also read Scripture emphasizing the whole of Scripture's witness rather than any one verse's literal words. Thus Presbyterians eschew proof-texting, reading rather in search of a certain passage's wider witness to God's Word in Jesus Christ.

What does it matter that we read the Bible in this way? It means that we are a people for whom the biblical story is central and complex, a people for whom God's Word is powerful and free from our tendency to tie it's meaning down once, for all. We are a people whose lively engagement with God's Word sends us into God's world as those who love God with our minds as well as our hearts, souls and strength. In a time taken with conservative certitude, this is a desperately needed witness and our sure foundation.

But more, for when the Reformers said no to papal pronouncements, a system of indulgences, an understanding of the sacraments and a sanctuary full of statues among other things, they still were left to reclaim a theological tradition that had its roots not only in the Biblical witness but also in the early church. Ours became a tradition grounded in God's grace and not human works, a tradition that believes the initiative to be with God and our response that of gratitude, a tradition convinced God is a God whose purposes are played out in history, a theological tradition whose touchstone is still Nicea where the Trinity was made to dance on the head of a pin, whose fondness for Augustine cannot be forgotten, whose heart and head and life cannot help but confess in each age that Christ is Lord and no other.

In the second place, then theologically Presbyterians are taken with the majesty and mystery of the triune God who "creates the heavens and the earth, the Holy Spirit who gives comfort, the God who encounters people and redeems them in Jesus Christ." Therefore, we have little patience with any sort of personalistic concentration on how things are between me and Jesus, a Jesusology kind of piety which often issues, says one Reformed theologian, in sentimental, self-oriented hymns. That is why Methodists and Baptists are generally not crazy about Presbyterian hymn sings! We are more likely to belt out Immortal, Invisible God Only Wise or God Is Working His Purpose Out while Blessed Assurance, Jesus in Mine would better characterize the bent of traditions forged on the frontier of tent revivals or taken with personal salvation.

Over against "every ethic of self-realization, against inordinate concern with the salvation of one's own soul, against excessive preoccupation with questions of personal identity," Presbyterians direct their lives toward the Triune God. "The great fact is God," says John Leith, "and the true vocation of every human being is trust in him and loyalty to his cause." Given a world in love with human potential, this is a distinctive witness to bear and our sure foundation.

But undergirding our biblical and theological foundations, the Reformers set in motion a way of recovering and reappropriating the tradition of the church, of reforming the church generation after generation: it was an insistence on an educated clergy and laity. To wit, Jeroslav Pelikan, in a little book called The Vindication of Tradition, says that we who exist in the church today have a choice to make when it comes to this thing called tradition. Pelikan, by the way, defines tradition as the "living faith of the dead," while traditionalism, he says, "is the dead faith of the living!" The choice we have in relation to our tradition is whether to be conscious participants or unconscious victims. Without the thoughtful engagement of ministers and members with our biblical and theological inheritance, the Reformed tradition will cease to be. For we have no pope making headlines and telling us what to believe. What we have are the scriptures, the confessions of our church, a wealth of historical as well as theological resources, certain people set apart as teachers in the church and, of course, the Holy Spirit helping our faith seek understanding. We have been given all those things, yet in every generation, as Kathleen Norris said, we need to make them ours, shedding the curses and holding to the blessing.

"I lived for years in a sublimely sophisticated place, the island of Manhattan," concludes Norris, "and the thought of crossing the door of any of the thousand churches there did not occur to me. I suspect that it is only because I so blindly and crazily embraced my inheritance--leaving the literary world in New York City for a small town, the house my mom grew up in, the church my grandmother belonged to for nearly sixty years--that I am now glad to identify myself as an ordinary Christian, one of those people who, to the astonishment of pollsters, still totter off to church on Sunday morning. It has been a lively journey. And I am the same person who departed, so long ago, and not the same at all." May it be so, by God's reforming grace, for every one of us!

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