Category Archives: United Church of Christ

Reflections on The New Century Hymnal

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Reflections on The New Century Hymnal
Richard L. Floyd

(Note:  In 1995 the United Church of Christ had just published The New Century Hymnal, which was the first denominational hymnal to take a radical approach to the issue of “inclusive language.” The hymnal was from the first very controversial, and objections to it were raised on both poetic and theological grounds.

In Eastertide of 1996 Confessing Christ sponsored a symposium at the Congregational Church in Boylston, Massachusetts to raise some of the theological issues raised by the language changes in the hymnal. Members of the Hymnal Committee were invited to come and speak, as were people from Confessing Christ.

I was on a panel responding to some of the speakers. I had prepared some remarks, but they have never appeared in print, and I just found them in a computer file while cleaning out an old computer. It is an old battle now, but at the time it was pretty contentious and it was interesting for me now to see what I had to say at the time.)

I’d like to thank Herb Davis and Confessing Christ for inviting me to give some remarks today about my response to The New Century Hymnal.   My friend Ted Trost, who is a historian at Harvard, has reminded me that the German Reformed Church (one of our UCC predecessor bodies) fought bitterly over the language of the liturgy for over a generation and somehow stayed together. Some of you have indicated that you think the UCC is being split over The New Century Hymnal, but I hope that it isn’t so.  I would hope the United Church of Christ can have this extended conversation about the language appropriate for the church to express it faith without ad hominen attacks, “telling the truth in love” for the up-building of the church. Continue reading →

Let’s Get Keith Richards to General Synod!

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The United Church of Christ’s “Let’s Get a Celebrity” Sub-Committee” in Cleveland has recently been promoting getting Ellen De Generes to come to our next General Synod, but I think Keith Richards would be a better idea, and here’s why:

I know Ellen is a big gay icon and all, and I like her as much as the next person, but Keith is a way bigger celebrity, and let’s face it, he’s hipper, too.

Sure, there are other hot celebrities right now, but their minuses outweigh their pluses.  For example, take Lil Wayne.  He’s a person of color, which is a plus. He wears a cross around his neck, and has a couple cross prison tats, which are pluses.  But he is in jail on weapons charges and might be too dangerous even for Synod.  See what I mean.

Or take Bristol Palin.  She’s young and she’s a Christian, and she been on Dancing with the Stars, which are all pluses.  But she’s not our kind of Christian and she’s too Republican, which are deal breakers.

I could go on and on, but I think it has got to be Keith. He has a new autobiography out, and he is on the cover of the current Rolling Stone, so this is definitely a Keith Richards moment.

He has some minuses it’s true.  First of all, there has been some unsavory behavior in the past, but who are we to judge, especially a big celebrity like Keith.  Secondly, there is no evidence he is a Christian.  But, hey, I haven’t heard anything about Ellen being a Christian either.  And years ago we had Carl Sagan as the keynoter for the big-church Orlando Conference.  When someone asked him if he believed in God, he said, “No.”  That wasn’t a deal breaker then, why now?  And Keith once sang in an Anglican junior choir. That’s good enough for me.

So I say. Let’s get Keith Richards to Synod!

Donald Bloesch: An Appreciation

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Theologian Donald Bloesch died a week ago at the age of 82. His friend and colleague Gabriel Fackre paid tribute to him in Christianity Today and commented that he was “underappreciated in his lifetime.”

His denomination (and mine), the United Church of Christ, certainly never paid him much heed. Fackre said, “Don was never given the recognition due to him in the UCC because he was a feisty critic of the liberal establishment. We both were doing our best in the United Church of Christ to call it back to its original ecumenical vision.”

But whether he got the recognition he deserved or not in the United Church of Christ, he never left it, and in doing so he embodied a steadfast commitment to church that reflected his own deep catholicity. In this regard he was an evangelical catholic in the best sense of the word, but he defied easy labels. He himself used such dialectical phrases as “progressive evangelical,” and “Ecumenical orthodox” to describe himself.

He called himself an evangelical theologian and he was on the board of Christianity Today to prove it, but he was never at home with the obscurantism and anti-intellectualism that so often attached itself to the label evangelical.

He came by the term honestly, since he was actually a big E evangelical, being born into the Evangelical Church, where his father and both his grandfathers were ordained ministers. The current minister of the First Evangelical Church in Bremen Indiana found his baptismal records. The records state: Donald George Bloesch, born, May 3, 1928, baptized, June 24, 1928. His father Herbert Bloesch was pastor there at the time.

The Evangelical Church (which joined with the German Reformed in 1934 to form the Evangelical and Reformed Church) was a German immigrant church with a lively combination of theological rigor and deep piety that clearly shaped Bloesch’s own approach to his theological projects.

In 1957 the E and R joined with the Congregational Christian Churches to form the United Church of Christ and that became Bloesch’s church until he died.

Bloesch was actively involved in theological renewal movements in the United Church of Christ, and wrote the Dubuque Declaration, which became the statement of faith of the Biblical Witness Fellowship.

I think of Bloesch as an accessible interpreter of large theological ideas. He introduced many evangelicals to the thought of Karl Barth, a figure often viewed with suspicion in their camp, and to P.T. Forsyth, the great British pastor theologian of the cross. Bloesch brought fresh readings to these and other figures. His writing is easy to read and infused with a warm-hearted piety. Like Barth and Forsyth he wrote primarily for the church, not the academy, and he knew that fruitful theology grows best in the rich soil of active church life and personal piety (what today we, but not he, would call “spirituality.”)

Another corrective Bloesch’s theology offers to his evangelical brothers and sisters is an appreciation of the length and breadth of the church, that is, tradition and ecumenism. Fackre notes in the CT article that scholars as diverse as Roman Catholic Cardinal Avery Dulles and Reformed theologian T.F. Torrance paid tribute to Bloesch in the 1999 festschrift volume Evangelical Theology in Transition.

I am proud that he was a theologian in my denomination, and grateful for his contribution to the great church which he loved.

My Top Ten Reasons why Anne Rice would hate the United Church of Christ:

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When writer Anne Rice recently said she’s done with church, the UCC Office of Communication in Cleveland started a Facebook page called “You’d like the UCC, Anne Rice.” But I am convinced that they are wrong, and here’s why:

1. We are not the Roman Catholic Church. Yes, we Reformed Christians do believe that we are included in “the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church” of the Creed, but don’t bet the farm that Anne Rice thinks that. When she says she is done with “the Church” she knows just what church she is done with. When Philosopher George Santayana said he didn’t believe in God, he clarified by saying, “And the God I don’t believe in mother’s name is Mary.” Anne isn’t looking for liberal Protestantism.

2. She would love all our social views, but hate our religious ones. Yes, we affirm science and tolerance toward women and gays, and affirm birth control, and other progressive stuff. She would like that. But she would hate our distrust of authority, our shoddy theology, our aversion to dogma, our rejection of the cross, our sloppy liturgies, our tortured language. She would do better to search the database for subscribers to the New York Times or the New Yorker or join a book group.

3. We use grape juice at communion. C’mon.

4. We’re a tiny franchise. The Roman Catholic Church has 1.1 billion members. We have 1.1. million members (about half what we had when I was ordained) and are shrinking fast.

5. We are afraid of the Dark Side. Anne is a writer of Gothic vampire novels. What would she think of our chirpy optimism. How the church of Calvin and the Puritans came to have such a sunny view of human nature is one of those great imponderable mysteries, but Anne would hate it.

6. She would have nothing to push back against. Anne likes to fight with authority, but we don’t have any worth fighting with. She would hate that.

7. She would miss the thick texture of the Roman Church for our trimmed down decaffeinated Protestantism. Think about it: no Veneration of Mary, no stations of the cross, no fasting during Lent, no confession. Anne wouldn’t like it.  She just wouldn’t.

8. Our meeting houses have too much light. Anne is a “Gothic” novelist. Guess what kind of architecture she wants in her place of worship? Trust me on this one.

9. She would hate the New Century Hymnal. Why? Because she’s a writer and respects authorial intent and felicity of language.

10. She might get tired of hearing about how great we are because of our enlightened social views, and actually want some Christianity.

Anne Rice repudiates Christianity (again)

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So Anne Rice, who was raised a Roman Catholic, but repudiated it and became a bestselling pop writer about vampires (as everybody knows), later decided that Christianity was, after all, pretty great, and wrote a bestseller in 2008 about her return to the faith. Cool. Everybody is entitled to change her mind. Glad to have you back, Anne.

Not so fast! Now she has decided that Christianity isn’t so great because of all the hateful toxic human stuff that flies under it’s banner, and so she has repudiated it again, which is fine, since we all change our minds from time to time, and God knows she has a point.
But, unlike the rest of us, Anne doesn’t have the luxury of nobody caring what she thinks, so she comes off, at least to me, as fickle and maybe not quite as serious and committed as one would hope.

Then my crowd, the United Church of Christ, which never misses an opportunity to brand itself as the Christian equivalent of the unCola, launches a publicity campaign to say, “Hey Anne, you’d love us, cause we’re cool and don’t hate science, gays and women, and are very welcoming and all (and practically don’t sin, except for our really big self-righteous thing.) So come join us.”

I’m troubled that our faith has became part of a big public relations campaign within the culture of celebrity.  It is true that the Christian brand has been degraded by sinners, but, alas, there is no one else left to represent it.

“Justification and Justice: Good News and Good Works”

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1.  “Does justification by grace through faith (God’s good news) call us to good works of justice?”

This question requires an affirmative answer but one with qualification, especially in light of the way both “justification” and “justice” are often understood today. The problem of a privatized understanding of justification and a secularized understanding of justice (identified below in question 2) are a modern development which cloud the intentions of the Reformers, who saw the hand of the sovereign God in all things in heaven and earth in ways we do not. Both Lutheran and Reformed articulations of the Pauline concept of justification by grace through faith carefully guarded the primacy and sovereignty of God as the actor in salvation. So, the Augsburg Confession, for instance, insists “we cannot obtain forgiveness of sin and righteousness before God by our own merits, works, or satisfactions, but that we receive forgiveness of sin and become righteous before God by grace, for Christ’s sake, through faith, when we believe Christ suffered for us and that for his sake our sin is forgiven and righteousness and eternal life are given to us.” (Augsburg Confession, Article IV).

Likewise, the Westminster Confession (and Savoy Declaration) state: “Those whom God effectually calleth he also freely justifieth; not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous: not for any thing ‘wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone; nor by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them, they receiving and resting on him and his righteousness, by faith; which faith they have not of themselves, it is the gift of God.” (Westminster Confession, Chapter XI, I.) This is language which is confident in its assumption that the primal theological issue is salvation of sinful mortals before the holy God. That God was sovereign over nations and societies, as well as over persons, was also taken for granted. The Reformation Christian, Roman Catholic, as well as Protestant, was located in a Christian state, despite disagreement over the exact confessional nature of that state.

The “good works of justice” which flowed from justification were described in the Reformation Confessions under the category of sanctification as “good fruits” or “good works.” (Augsburg Confession, Article VI, “The New Obedience,” and Article XX, “Faith and Good Works”; Westminster Confession, Chapter XIII, “Of Sanctification” and Chapter XVI, “Of Good Works”) Here again, God’s sovereignty as the actor of salvation is carefully protected. “Faith should produce good fruits and good works  . . . but we should do them for God’s sake and not place our trust in them as if thereby to merit favor with God.” (Augsburg Confession, Article VI) “Their ability to do good works is not all of themselves, but wholly from the Spirit of Christ.” (Westminster Confession, Chapter XVL)

To the Reformers the doctrine of justification needed no justification, as it seems to today, against the charge that it led to a privatized faith. Rather it protected God’s sovereignty and initiative in the act of salvation and in the processes by which the salvation takes hold of people. That “good works and responsible service in the whole world” (Invitation to Action, p. 9, paragraph 6) were the fruits of justification was not questioned.

2. How does the atoning “work of Christ” inform out work?

The “lost chord” in modern mainline Christianity is atonement: the conviction from which the church was born and by which its life was fueled for centuries. Because of this loss the question of the proper relationship between justification and justice, between what God does and what we do, is the critical theological question for our time. In the modern period Christian faith has increasingly been understood as a religion of amelioration, rather than a religion of redemption. Thus understood, Christian faith is reduced to a series of ethical imperatives; guidelines for relationships of human being to human being, rather than of human beings to God.

Christians of an earlier time knew themselves the recipients of redemption by an act of a righteous God, so justice was, for them, the social righteousness demanded by the righteousness of God. For example, P. T. Forsyth (1848-1921) could write: “Righteousness is applied holiness,” and (quoting Wernle) “ … it is in the doctrine of justification that Christian theology and Christian ethic meet.” (The Christian Ethic of War, pp. V and 165)

When justice is wrenched from justification the church loses its way and finds itself running errands for society, rather than confronting that society with the grace and judgment of the cross of Jesus Christ. Where the cross is seen as a sign or symbol, even of high principles, rather than as an atoning act of the Holy God, the church will understand its primary charge to make like sacrifices on behalf of others. Jesus is then seen more as model and exemplar rather than as savior. But classical Christianity, in a variety of formulations, asserted that only God can save, that God doesn’t show something by the cross but does something on the cross. The cross is not an object lesson or demonstration, but a divine act of life which justifies sinful humanity before the holy God.

Certainly there can be disagreement on the theological articulation of the atonement, but can we question the fact of atonement itself and remain identifiably Christian? My “bridge-repair” suggestion is renewed attention to the Biblical conviction of the holiness of God and the sinfulness of humanity. The “work of Christ” might then have its ethical content restored, so often lost when we focus on the person of Christ using metaphysical categories. In theological terms this means Soteriology precedes and controls Christology.

3. How are Christ’s obedience and ours related?

The “Joint Statement on Justification” from the Lutheran-Reformed Dialogue (Invitation to Action, p. 9, items 2, 5, 6) offers these summary statements: “This gospel is the good news that for us and for our salvation God’s Son became human in Jesus the Christ, was crucified and raised from the dead. By his life, death and resurrection he took upon himself God’s judgment on human sin and proved God’s love for sinners, reconciling the entire world to God . . . This doctrine of justification continues to be a meassage of hope and of new life to persons alienated from our gracious God and from one another. Even though Christians who live by faith continue to sin, still in Christ our bondage to sin and death has been broken. By faith we already begin to participate in Christ’s victory over evil, the Holy Spirit actively working to direct our lives . . . As a community of servants of God we are called and enabled to do works of mercy and to labor for justice and peace among individuals and nations.”

Emilio Castro’s evocative book title “Sent Free” captures the dynamic relationship between justification and justice. We are not justified out of the world but for the world which God loves and for which Christ died. Of special importance today is a new understanding of humanity’s relationship to the created order in the light of the atoning work of Christ, which brings about “a new creation.” The World Council of Churches now identifies “The Integrity of Creation” as a concern along with “Peace and Justice.” These emphases properly recognize that the gospel has implications not only for individuals but for nations and societies as well. There are cosmic implications to the work of Christ, and justification must not be understood in a social vacuum.

But neither can justice take the place of justification at the center of the gospel. The ethical fundamentalism of some Liberationists resembles nothing so much as Biblical and confessional fundamentalism in its resistance to critical questions. To view the issue of inclusive language, to take one example, solely as a justice issue, without regard for substantive theological issues, is to mistake the complex for the simple and to risk the church’s teaching and witness. Another example where we have lost the proper relationship between justification and justice is this: Certain associations in the United Church of Christ are requiring candidates for ordination to document their commitment to justice issues. This is right-minded but wrong-headed. It puts the ethical cart before the theological horse. But a vacuum will be filled, and since the historic religion of redemption has given way to the religion of amelioration there is a certain logic to this new requirement. How uncouth it would seem today if a Church and Ministry Committee would inquire of a candidate, “Do you believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins?” Would a negative answer be outweighed by a dramatic commitment to peace and justice? Whose peace? Whose justice? Will volunteer work for “Right to Life” be accepted or rejected? On what grounds? Since we are not saved because of works, neither should we be ordained because of them?

Our works of justice must be eschatological and symbolic. We still bear the burden of a Constantinian conception of Christendom, when a sectarian and missionary model of the church more closely approximates our situation in the modern world. One mission instrumentality executive confessed: “We cannot deal with every social issue, but we look constantly to determine how we can make a difference.” (S. Rooks) This recognizes the proximate nature of all our good works, and expresses a proper Christian humility. Justice understood apart from justification can easily become functional atheism, losing sight of God’s primacy and sovereignty, which is what the doctrine of justification by grace through faith is meant to insure.

(I delivered this paper at the Seventh Craigville Theological Colloquy, Craigville, MA, July 16 – 20, 1990.)

(Photo:  R. L. Floyd, 2010)

 

Churches with Adjectives

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I’m against churches with adjectives. Years ago, when I was a pastor in Maine, I would sometimes drive by a church with a big sign announcing the church to be a “Bible-believing, fundamentalist, conservative, born again church.” I supposed they subscribed to the notion of truth in advertising, but that sign always bothered me. It wasn’t just the coded message that here was a church different from my own. The sectarian specifics of that sign offended my sense of the catholicity of the church. Why not just be the church without all the adjectives?

We are no better in the United Church of Christ. We have Peace and Justice churches and Open and Affirming churches. I am against these on principle, though I cannot imagine a church of Jesus Christ that isn’t for peace and justice, and who are we not to be welcoming to someone for whom Christ died? I remember when General Synod declared the UCC a Just Peace church. I thought at the time, what could this possibly mean? We clearly were not one of the historic peace churches, like the Society of Friends and the Mennonites. My father was a Quaker, and I know what being a peace church has meant, so what would Reinhold Neibuhr or Roger Shinn think of their beloved UCC saying it is a peace church? Perhaps it depends upon what “is” means.

There are other problems with adjectives for churches. I worry that declaring such adjectives betrays self-righteousness or pride, and offers a way to distinguish ourselves from other Christians, much as the Maine church with the big sign did. And the votes are suspect. Some congregations I know voted unanimously to be “Open and Affirming”, but the truth is, that the dissenters either quietly left the congregation or kept their doubts to themselves for fear of being called homophobes. Unanimous votes always make me nervous.

Shouldn’t the church be the one place where people who bitterly disagree can come together? I remember Will Campbell serving the Lord’s Supper to the Ku Klux Klan during the Civil Rights struggle, because he believed Jesus’ table was big enough for even them. I know that their sin and mine are only different in degree and not in kind, and the blood of Christ’s cross can cleanse us both. Flannery O’Connor has a short story in which her vision of the judgment shows the good people of the church coming up the aisle and even their virtue is burned away. Is it possible that our adjectives will need to be purged before we can all join the great congregation? We’ll be in line right behind those folks from Maine waiting for our adjectives to burn away with theirs.

So I’ve assiduously kept the adjectives away from the church where I have been pastor for nearly two decades. “United” is hard enough to live up to, but it is the “of Christ” that I have tried to have as the prevailing and controlling modifier for our life and mission. So here comes my mission chair with an enthusiastic proposal from the UCC that we become a Jubilee 2000 church. He wants to take it to the annual meeting. I’m between a rock and a hard place, because I think Jubilee 2000, a proposal to forgive third-world debt, is just the kind of thing the church should be for, and my mission chair is a great guy with faithful enthusiasm for mission which I don’t want to dampen in any way. So I sputter through all the above objections to a church with adjectives. “Can’t we just be the church?” I say. “Such resolutions don’t cost us anything,” I say. “They lead to resolutionary Christianity instead of revolutionary Christianity,” I say.

He sees my point, but at annual meeting we vote anyway and it passes, you guessed it, unanimously. So now we are a Jubilee 2000 church. Oh, and while we’re at it, we are also a Habitat for Humanity covenant church, and a Stephen Ministry congregation. We’re pretty proud of it, actually.

Lord, have mercy.

(This first appeared in Colleague,Vol. XXI, No. 3, May, 2000)

“ . . . and to the Son”

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The Gloria Patri and Inclusive Language
by Richard L. Floyd

The basic question before us is whether it is any longer acceptable to use the name of “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” in Christian discourse, and, more specifically, in Christian worship. That this is more than an academic concern is apparent by the fact that my denomination, the United Church of Christ, in its Book of Worship, 1986, decided that it would not use that formulation in its liturgies, except in the baptismal formula (for ecumenical reasons), and, inexplicably, in the “Brief Order for the Service of Word and Sacrament” (p. 79).

As the first denomination to accept such a thorough-going agenda to eliminate masculine language about God, the UCC will be judged by history either to have been a bold pioneer blazing the trail for others to follow, or to have been merely the most zealous in acting out the persistent death-wish of mainline Protestantism by cutting its moorings to scripture, tradition, theology and ecumenism.

The issue is often cast in the terms of a feminist critique versus traditional articulations of Christianity, but the playing field is a far larger one than that. This discussion is a symptom of a major epistemological struggle taking place in the Post-Enlightenment world of which we are by necessity a part. The real issue here is whether God named as “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” or by any other trinitarian euphemisms has any place in the “plausibility structure” (to use Peter Berger’s category) of the humanistic, scientific, and secular “world” which dominates cosmopolitan life in the West, including (I would say particularly) in the academy.

I contend that God so named has been deemed to have no place, and, therefore, attempts are taking place to find a God more in line with the plausibility structure. In the academic world from which our seminaries and bureaucratic elites derive their ethos, those attempts have been going on with vigor for decades. That this “plausibility structure” is itself a faith, an alternative faith I would contend, is seldom understood, but no less dangerous for being so.

I have been asked to examine the issue of trinitarian language in our liturgies with special attention given to the second person. I would like to focus particularly on the use of “the Son” in the Gloria Patri and compare its theological meaning with that of one of the major revisionist alternatives, “the Christ” as used now in the Gloria of the United Church of Christ Book of Worship. Clearly such an analysis cannot be undertaken apart from some reference to “the Father” and to a lesser extent also to “the Holy Spirit.”

The most often employed way to duck naming the first person of the Trinity “Father” is by substituting the word “Creator.” This substitution satisfies not only the feminist critics, but also others whose plausibility structure finds a nature-God more congenial than the God of the Bible. There are any number of problems that arise from this substitution, not the least of which is that “Creator” can aptly be used to describe the work of not only the first person but of all three persons since creation is a work of the Godhead, and not of any one person of the Trinity, as a quick look at Genesis 1 and John 1 will show.
This substitution of “the Creator” for “the Father” is used in what Geoffrey Wainwright has suggested is probably the most favored among the alternatives currently being used in North America: “Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.” This particular formulation risks the ancient heresy of Sabellius who saw in the three persons three aspects or phases of the activity of the Godhead toward the world. (“The Doctrine of the Trinity” Interpretation, April 1991, p. 121)

But for our discussion “Creator” is principally flawed as a substitute for Father because it in no way represents the intimate relationship between the first and second person signified by Father and Son, a relationship critical for understanding the dynamics at work within the Trinity and for any adequate soteriology which might be understood to arise from that relationship. The constellation of meanings around the notion of “inheritance” is also lost when we cease to speak of the relationship of the Father to the Son, meanings also critical for soteriology. The doctrine of the Trinity has profound soteriological implications, which have often been lost in liberal Protestantism’s reductionism, even before it started to muddle the language; witness Schleiermacher who was practically unitarian and never developed much of a place for the Atonement in his system except as the apotheosis of human sacrifice.

In discourse about the Trinity, theologians distinguish between the immanent or essential Trinity, what God is in God’s own being, and the economic Trinity, what God does in the world. The alternatives to “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” suggested by the revisionists invariably substitute economic language for immanent language as a way to avoid naming God with the offensive masculine language, but what they do not accomplish is to name the Trinity at all. For example, “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” doesn’t name the Trinity, but merely describes three economic terms, all of which involve all the persons of the Trinity. They say what God does, but not what God is.

John Wesley anticipated the inadequacy of such economic formulas as substitutes for the trinitarian name when he wrote in a letter in 1771: “The quaint device of styling them three offices rather than persons gives up the whole doctrine.” (Wainwright, p. 121) He understood that the name “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” expresses essential internal relations within the Godhead, which are evidenced in the biblical narrative; relations of personal communion and cooperation among the persons of the Trinity that are not expressed by the functionalism of the alternatives.

Let us look at the Gloria Patri, the most widely used canticle in the church, as one of the principle liturgical expressions of the Trinity. The Gloria Patri is known as the Lesser Doxology to distinguish it from the Gloria in excelsis, or Greater Doxology. This ancient canticle of the church is an ascription of praise to the Trinity. The first part, “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit,” is based on the dominical great commission found in Matthew 28:19. It may have come into use as early as the second century in both the Eastern and Western church. Its use at the end of the Psalms to give them a trinitarian character is attested from the fourth century, which is also when its second half was added, “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be . . . ” which was intended to counter Arianism by affirming that the Triune God of the New Testament is the same divine being as in the Old Testament, something the Arians denied.

Now let us look at what the UCC has done to the Gloria Patri, or Gloria as it now must be called since there is no father to be referred to even under the cloak of Latin. The Gloria from Book of Worship is:

Glory to God the Creator,
and to the Christ,
and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning,
is now,
and will be for ever.
Amen.

In the UCC Gloria we have now begun to speak of the Trinity in code, known only to those who know that “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” are what we mean when we say “Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit.” But when those of us who know the old code have gone, will new generations of Christians be able to speak intelligibly about the Trinity? One wonders.

Besides, the code is fraught with theological dangers. Perhaps most significantly, “Creator, Christ and Spirit” are even more susceptible than “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” to the Arian tendency to view Christ and the Spirit as mere creatures. This carries with it, to use Wainwright’s words: “the unfortunate possibility of divine authentication for a natural order in its fallen state. Without a christological and pneumatological qualification (i.e., without the redemptive work focused in the Son and the transformative work focused in the Holy Spirit, the three persons being in divine communion), the ‘Creator’ now becomes responsible for creation in its disordered condition . . . a danger when the notion is cut off from the full biblical narrative on the basis of which a properly trinitarian God was seen by the church to be a saving necessity—now graciously self-revealed.” (Wainwright, p 122) A “Creator” thus detached from the trinitarian substance, so carefully articulated by tradition to capture the nuances of the biblical narrative, leaves us in the precarious situation of having a Gospel for which we have no need. Most religions claim God as Creator, but the trinitarian faith has some very particular claims to make about God and creation that are in danger of being obscured (and, in fact, are obscured in some of the newer “Creation Theologies” of which the writings of Matthew Fox seem to be the most popular example.) Some of the Eastern religions might well accept a “Creator” deity with an anointed “Christ” as having some special divine status, as an avatar perhaps, but this hardly represents the particular claims of Christian faith about the relations between the first and second persons of the Trinity.

In light of these dangers to the integrity of Christian theology and liturgical expression I consider the present time to be an “Athanasian” moment. What is at stake is nothing more nor less than our doctrine of God. “Creator” and “Christ” will not carry the theological freight. Economic terms are not adequate substitutes for immanent terms, for in Christian theology what we know about creation follows rather than precedes what we know about the nature of God. As Athanasius said, “It is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call him Father, than to name him from his works and call him Unoriginate.” Thomas Torrance puts it like this:

“To know God in any precise way we must know him in accordance with his nature, as he has revealed himself—that is, in Jesus Christ his incarnate Son in whom he has communicated not just something about himself but his very Self. Jesus Christ does not reveal the Father by being Father but by being Son of the Father, and it is through Christ in the one Spirit whom he mediates that we are given access to God as he really is in himself. In contrast with Judaism and its stress on the unnameability of God, the Christian Faith is concerned with God as he has named himself in Jesus Christ, and incarnated in him his own Word, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ is the arche, the Origin or Principle, of all our knowledge of God, and of what he has done and continues to do in the universe, so that it is in terms of the relation of Jesus the incarnate Son to the Father, that we have to work out a Christian understanding of the creation. It is the Fatherhood of God, revealed in the Son, that determines how we are to understand God as Almighty Creator, and not the other way round. It was through thinking out the inner relation of the incarnation to the creation that early Christian theology so transformed the foundations of Greek philosophy, science and culture, that it laid the original basis on which the great enterprise of empirico-theoretical science now rests.” (The Trinitarian Faith, p. 7)

Given Torrance’s observations about the name of the Trinity it is interesting to me that Phyllis Trible’s article on the “Nature of God in the Old Testament” (in the Supplementery Volume to the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible) is cited in Book of Worship as a principal source for the decision to eliminate masculine language about God. Her point about the need to expand the vocabulary of images with which we talk about God to include female imagery is surely well taken, but there is no precedent in scripture or tradition where God is named using female names, and to do so, as Book of Worship has, is to embark on a radically new enterprise.

To add Mother to the name of the first person of the Trinity, as both the Inclusive Language Lectionary and Book of Worship have done is a curious decision, given the identification of mother language with Canaanite fertility religion in the Old Testament, and the place of Mary, the Mother of God, in the New Testament and subsequent Christian tradition. Elizabeth Achtemeier has repeatedly raised the charge that a “Mother/Father” God makes hash of the role of Mary as portrayed in scripture and tradition. We might do well to recall that the title Theotokos for Mary was primarily a christological affirmation of the unity of Christ’s person and only secondarily to promote the veneration of Mary. That its formulation in the fourth and fifth centuries roughly coincided with the trinitarian and christological formulations of Nicaea/Chalcedon that we have been considering in Confessing One Faith is suggestive that these issues should not be separated.

We could probably all agree that it is just and right and highly desirable to expand the metaphorical base of our speech about God, especially the lost traditions now being recovered from the scriptures, but that is not the issue here. What is at issue is which God will we be using our expanded metaphorical base to describe? Is that God named in ways that are consistent with the Word of God as attested in scripture and maintained by the great tradition of the ecumenical church? At those key moments when the church names God, especially at moments of praise and during eucharistic prayers and at baptism the church names the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as our ancestors have for nearly two millennia, not to describe God’s attributes, God’s works and deeds, but to confess which God it is we are worshiping.

The difference between describing God and naming God is critical for a proper understanding of these issues. There is, to take one example, an important distinction to be made between the descriptive use of the term “father” to show God’s compassionate care for humankind (as in Psalm 103:13) and Jesus’ use of the name “Father” as an address for God. “Father” in the former sense could as easily have been “mother”, and sometimes is in scripture. Some confusion exists in cases like this when all biblical images are reduced to the great grab bag of the category of metaphor. (See, for example, Sally McFague, Metaphorical Theology, 1982 or, much better, Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language, 1985) Clearly in the example above, the “father” who pitieth his children functions quite differently from the “Father” of our Lord Jesus Christ. The former is a metaphor, the latter, while metaphorical, is the name which Jesus chose to call God and taught us to do so as well, and, therefore, might correctly be put under the heading of “the scandal of particularity.”

Let me be quite clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying that God is male; Christian discourse about God and liturgical speech to God has been sufficiently apophatic in its adjectives (“infinite,” “eternal,” “immeasurable,” “incomprehensible,” etc.) to guard against the idolatry of ascribing sex or gender to the Godhead. To Mary Daly’s aphorism “if God is male, the male is god” Wainwright says that the decisive retort is to deny the conditional clause. God is not male. (Wainwright, p. 118.) I am also not saying that excessively masculine and patriarchal language in liturgy is not a problem for contemporary listeners, nor am I saying we shouldn’t make language regarding people inclusive where that was clearly the intent of the author. The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible has done well with this, in my opinion.

In the liturgies and proclamation of the congregation where I am Pastor we minimize the use of masculine pronouns referring to God and seek to find a wide variety of biblical images to speak about God. The battle about people language is over, I believe, and the church has reached a consensus that language about people must be brought up to conformity with the changes that have taken place in English. Accordingly, my congregation has amended its covenant to change “brotherhood,” “mankind” and other formally generic words that no longer are inclusive to their acceptable equivalents. This is a problem of English, as we recognize that no language ever stops changing. But the issue of the trinitarian name of God is not a translation problem, or a problem with the English language. That this issue of translation and language about people and the issue of “Father and Son” language in the Trinity are seen as identical has led to much of the current confusion.

The inclusive language issue is viewed by many as a simple issue of justice, and accordingly very frequently takes place without theological issues being raised at all. Let me cite a few personal anecdotes. When a colleague balked at the retaining of “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” in the baptismal service of Book of Worship, and I suggested that it had been an ecumenical necessity which avoided otherwise dire consequences the reply was, “That is why I hate ecumenism. Why should we have to refrain from doing what we believe to be right because of other churches?” Another colleague suggested that we depersonalize all language about or referring to God along the lines suggested by some process theology. I said that I thought an impersonal God would do little justice to the biblical narrative and would lead inevitably to Unitarianism. The answer was “What is wrong with that?”

A certain “political correctness” around this issue has seeped into denominational enterprises. Certain official publications of the United Church of Christ have taken to putting “sic” after masculine personal pronouns referring to God within quotations from historic figures such as Reinhold Niebuhr, St. Augustine and John Calvin. Seminaries that abandoned doctrinal policies generations ago embrace “language policies” with no sense of irony. A nationally respected scholar was dismissed as a possible preacher for a denominational conclave when someone said, “We can’t invite her. She doesn’t use inclusive language!” (more specifically, she still speaks of “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”) It is difficult for me to imagine someone being barred in the same manner for having an inadequate trinitarian theology.

As a former seminary chaplain and chair of a Church and Ministry Committee I have witnessed repeatedly the conflict that results when seminarians trained by their professors to see these issues as paramount take their places in churches where their first order of business is to change the “sexist” Gloria Patri and Doxology. Congregations characteristically resist such attempts to tamper with the sacred things of their faith. Church history is replete with examples of the faithful people of God resisting changes in liturgy, especially of the parts of the liturgy that are theirs, that they either say or sing. Horace Allen has brought it to my attention that this is why we have little indigestible nuggets of older liturgies in the liturgies that replaced them; the people of God won’t give them up. Thus we have a Greek “Kyrie” in a Latin Mass, Latin words, like Gloria Patri in Protestant English liturgies, and an Elizabethan “Lord’s Prayer” in an otherwise modern language liturgy. In worse cases the seminarian or newly-minted ordinand sees only an intransigent congregation and they soon become her or his enemy, which is bad for congregations and ministers alike (although sometimes it does satisfy the well-developed appetite some ministers have for martyrdom.)

Given all this it should come as no surprise that we have spawned a reactionary organization. The Biblical Witness Fellowship, a conservative renewal movement within the United Church of Christ, has recently laid a charge of “apostasy” at the door of the national leadership for a long list of perceived failures in upholding the faith, among them the acceptance of the radical inclusive language agenda. That this is not good for the church goes without saying, but the vehemence of the charge and the defensiveness and lack of understanding from the leadership convinces me of a widening gap between the plausibility structures of denominational hierarchies and many people at the grass roots.

In my own congregation we have just looked at the issue of the Gloria Patri since our Minister of Music has written a new tune, and the question was raised whether we should use the opportunity to begin using the Gloria from Book of Worship. After much soul-searching on the issue we decided that since the church did not yet know its own mind on the subject we would retain the status quo, which does at least have nearly two millennia of Christian liturgical practice behind it.

The National Conference of Catholic Bishops in their Criteria for the Evaluation of the Inclusive Language Translations of Scriptural Texts Proposed for Liturgical Use (November 15, 1990) offers this guideline: “In fidelity to the inspired Word of God, the traditional biblical usage for naming the persons of the Trinity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is to be retained.”

That seems right to me.

An address given to the Massachusetts Commission on Christian Unity on March 3, 1992 at Pope John the XXIII National Catholic Seminary at Weston, Massachusetts. This also appeared in Prism ,Volume 7, Number 2, Fall, 1992.

Confessing Christ

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The other place I blog is the Web Site of Confessing Christ. Here is A Brief history of Confessing Christ by Pastor Frederick R. Trost:“In August of 1993, a Convening Committee for Confessing Christ was on the phone, composed of pastors and teachers of the Church and a graduate student in American Church history. Might there be a way of gathering others in the United Church of Christ who love the Church and are devoted to its ministry, to talk about our “life together” for the sake of our mission as Christians and our commitment to social justice, liturgy, and pastoral care?From the beginning there was agreement on the necessity for solid, joyous, theological work in the Church, for Biblical study and conversation with our varied, rich, and living theological heritage in the United Church of Christ. We took as our theme the words of the First Article of the Barmen Declaration:

“Jesus Christ, as he is witnessed to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we must hear and which we ought to trust and obey in life and in death.”
From the beginning [that] summer and in our many conversations since, our purpose has been neither to “weep bitterly” over the Church (which would be theologically irresponsible) nor to pound upon others (which would be uncharitable), but to take our place alongside the publican to the temple, to acknowledge with those who have “confessed Christ” in every generation that we live, as the Reformers insisted, by grace alone, through faith, and that the prayer “Be merciful unto me, O Lord.” is meant to be found on the lips of the whole church. In the struggle for theological re-formation, as in all else, “there is none that is righteous, no, not one!” (Romans 3:10)
We’ve said the most important thing is to recommit ourselves to theological work that takes Scripture, ecumenical creeds, the confession and covenants upon which the United Church of Christ was founded (see the Preamble to the UCC Constitution),
  • with joyful seriousness,
  • not as a kind of hobby,
  • not with any desire to settle down in the sixteenth century

but to honor our baptism, to see how dialogue with one another and with those who believed before we were born, can reform the life of the Church for the sake of its vocation in the world.

There are times when we have to face the fragile state of our life together. We believe this is one of those times. There are moments when the question “What is truth?” won’t go away. This is one of those moments. There are hours when the ancient query “What think ye of Christ?” cannot be avoided. We believe this is one of those hours.

Book Review of “Who Do You Say That I Am?”

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Who do you say that I am?”: Christology and Identity in the United Church of Christ, edited by Scott R. Paeth. United Church Press, Cleveland. 2006. Paper. 221 pages.   (This book review is from Joy in the Word, Spring 2008)A few weeks after my ordination back in 1975, I heard Robert Moss, then president of the United Church of Christ, preach a sermon in which he told a humorous anecdote about Kenneth Teegarden, the president of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), who upon his retirement opened his morning Indianapolis Star to read this headline: “Disciples of Christ seek leader!” And we thought we had an identity crisis in the United Church of Christ!But even though we confess that “Jesus Christ is the sole head of the church” (Preamble to the UCC Constitution) it does not mean we have settled the questions of who Jesus Christ is, and what it means to be the church of which he is the head.

These are the big questions addressed in Who do you say that I am?” Christology and Identity in the United Church of Christ. This is an ambitious undertaking, given the dizzying diversity of views in our church, and the multiplicity of heritages in our history.Lee Barrett, sums up the challenge succinctly when he writes, “At times this variety may seem more like a curse than a blessing, leading to the suspicion that “Jesus Christ” has become nothing more than a blank screen upon which the proudly autonomous individual can project anything that tickles one’s fancy. Frequently, it seems that the Christ who was supposed to be center of the United Church has become the “wax nose” feared by Luther that could be twisted any way one wants, leaving the denomination centerless.” (p.42-43)Or as editor Scott Paeth puts it in his introduction: “Talking about Christology in the United Church of Christ is akin to wrestling an octopus.” (p. 9) He describes the purpose of the book as making a contribution to “the task of interpreting Jesus Christ in the United Church of Christ.” (p. 16)

Read more of this Book Review