Uniting Church Theology and History - February 2023.

This unit was introduced two years ago as a fully accredited academic unit within the University of Divinity. To make it an academic unit was very intentional. It was to signal that the unit is more than an professional/insitutional induction into the UCA. At one level, it remains this. But in its present form it drills down deeper into both the theology and history of the UCA by applying to it the sort of rigour, analysis and testing of assumptions that would be normal in any academic study. Some of the rationale behind this intention is spelled out in a blog I posted two years ago and which can be read here. 

The unit continues to be co-hosted with United Theological College in Sydney and co-taught with Dr Damian Palmer. As per the arrangement last time, we'll be live streaming into each other's class rooms, sharing the teaching, and variously hosting our guest presenters from different parts of Australia). Our respective content overlaps by at least 80%, but there is a an additional day for the Pilgrim cohort to address some additional issues.

On that extra day for the Pilgrim students, I will be taking the chance to interrogate a few claims that I think have  become very much part of UCA culture and rhetoric. Some, I fear, have become unexamined shibboleths. Here are a few:

"We don't read the bible literally, we read it metaphorically."

I will admit this has been bugbear of mine for quite a while, and I've written about it elsewhere. Sure, it's a handy polemical tool to distinguish a UCA  approach (and not only a UCA approach) to the Bible from that of those who identify as fundamentalists. But that's about all it does. To say we read the bible metaphorically is actually strikingly uninformative. The bible contains so many genres that its different parts invite being read in a whole mutlitude of ways. And by trading on this binary of literal and metaphorical, Christianity's long and complex tradition of honouring ways of reading beyond the literal, but which can't be neatly summarised as metaphorical, is obscured. And also obscured by this binary are wider issues relevant to the reading the Bible e.g.,  where we read it, why we read it, and what we might expect of it. Paragraph 5 of the Basis doesn't trade on this binary at all. Its own theologically important - and theologically open - categories are 'witness' and 'testimony.' These actually point to many other enriching dimensions of the church's varied practices of reading the Bible that go well beyond the choice of hermeneutical method. These other dimensions will be explored in the unit. 

"The UCA is the first uniquely Australian church"

Are we? And if so, what is at issue in making the claim? Certainly, the three antecedent churches were already self-governing churches that had broken free of their 'sending' churches in England and Scotland. They were themselves already results of earlier smaller-scale, intra-tradition unions. Neverthelesss, it is reasonable to say that this new church intentionally sought to develop its own traditions in and for this geographical and cultural context (i.e., Asia and the Pacific). It would not simply replicate those it had received from its parent churches located at the heart of European Christendom.This was no small thing, and the language used in the Basis about the value of the those earlier traditions, whilst not denying them, clearly relegates them to being of secondary importance. Be that as it may, the shadow that haunts this claim about being the first Australian church is the invisbility of First Nations people in the Basis of Union. In other words, in what "Australia" did this new church come to be? This must, I think, be received as a disconcerting reminder that the formation of the UCA, alongside all the other things it was, was a union of three settler-colonial churches. Perhaps it could even be argued that it was the last settler-colonial church formed in Australia. But the existence of this shadow has pushed the UCA to address it.The unit will explore how The Covenenant with UAICC, the Revised Preamble, as well as the statement, "We are a multicultural church" are steps towards a yet to be discovered identity as a church in Australia.*

(*There will be discrete sessions in the shared parts of the unit from the UAICC (Nathan Tyson) and on the cultural diversity of the church (Dr Sef Carroll). I will build on these to open up the issues named above. In doing so, in my own sessions I will also be drawing on, and am indebted to two recent academic papers by other UCA authors: Joy Han's "The Call to Transcend Racial Boundaries: A Critical Analysis of the Langauge in Paragraph 2" presented at the The Basis @ 50 conference hosted by Pilgrim Theological College in November 2021 (and to be published this year) and Dr Michelle Cook's "The Ecclesiology of a Covenanting and Multicultural Church" in Uniting Church Studies 24, no 2 (December 2022):21-32.)

"The UCA takes contemporary scholarship seriously"

Far be it from me to question the UCA's commitment to scholarship, but this claim is often heard (at least to my ears) as one that is intended to set us apart from other churches and not without hints of claims to the intellectual high ground. True, it might be one of the few churches (if not the only one?) which makes such an explicit commitment to the value of scholarship and the vocation of scholars in its founding document, the Basis of Union, paragraph 11. That, too, is no small thing. But we are far from the only church that makes significant investment in scholarship. And there are manifold problems with isolating the commitment to scholarship from the other vocations mentioned in paragraph 11. These problems are exacerbated by the very unhelpful post-union decision to give this paragraph the heading "Scholarly Interpreters" at the expense of any reference to the other vocations named in this paragraph: evangelist, prophet and martyr. In my view there is an additional problem with the isolation of scholarship - it cultivates the view that scholarship is decisive in theological discernment. Scholars equally committed to scholarship and equally gifted with scholarly skills can come to strikingly different conclusions on the same issue. (In my view, scholarship does it greatest work in developing disciplines of intellectual contemplation and producing wisdom rather than in shoring up theological 'positions.') In the end, the most suggestive feature for the UCA's theological discernment is found elsewhere in this paragraph: it is the summons to "stand in relation to contemporary societies in ways which will help it to understand its own nature and mission." This opens up important questions about the church's posture towards its neighbours and how that posture itself can be theologically generative. We'll explore these issues in the unit.

And one more thing....

This is not something I'd describe as a shibboleth. It's more an unresolved, but also unexamined, tension about our identity as a uniting church. You will often see or hear the UCA defined as a church standing in the Reformed and Evangelical traditions. This is true, but it is also a reminder that the adjective 'uniting' has not yet come to define or intepret itself; it has to be qualified by employing adjectives drawn from two of the different traditions of the post-Reformation Western church. This is a reflection of the fact that the ecclesiology, and theology more generally, of uniting and united churches is still too undeveloped for uniting to be an immediately informative descriptor. Perhaps it never will be. Whilst there was a mountain of theology developed in the mid-20th century to justify acts of union between churches, the theology that has emerged because of or as a result of being a uniting or united church is not only still emerging, it is also seldom studied. Indeed, this is a major gap in contemporary ecclesiology. Absent such reflection on being specifically a uniting church, the persistent use of "Reformed" and "Evangelical" to describe the UCA runs the very real risk that the "ecclesiastical carpentry" resisted by the writers of the Basis will actually triumph. Exploring how being unitng genereates its own theological and ecclesiological emphases will also be something I take up in this unit. 

Alot of these questions and issues are of abiding interest to me, and it is my intention to develop a book around them in due course (probably post-retirement). In the meantime, as well as looking forward to the insights that this unit's students will offer, I'd welcome any thoughts, observations and comments etc from anyone reading this. 

A Post-Christendom, Sort-of Commentary on the Basis of Union - Post 4/4

Last year I published (through MediaCom) a short commentary on the Uniting Church's Basis of Union. This is the fourth of four posts, each of which consist of the commentary on a selected Paragraph from the Basis. The first post - which includes a bit more detail about the purpose and structure of the book - can be found here and the second post is here and the third here. 

If this whets your appetite, you can order the book through MediaCom or CTM Resourcing. There's also a short article about the book in the NSW/ACT Synod magazine, Insights.

Commentary on Paragraph 11

This is the second of the two paragraphs which, in my view, have been assigned an especially unhelpful heading in the officially published editions of the Basis. ‘Scholarly Interpreters’ has led to a serious neglect of the full range of issues the paragraph raises. It completely bypasses all “those who have reflected deeply upon, and acted trustingly in obedience to, God’s living Word”. It obscures the other witnesses specifically mentioned in this paragraph: evangelists, prophets and martyrs. The actual theme that runs through this paragraph is that of the various ministries which help the Church to “confess the Lord in fresh words and deeds”. I think a more appropriate heading would be ‘Contemporary Witnesses’.

At the same time, to note the wider themes of the paragraph is not to gloss over the significance of what is said about the ministry of scholarship. Research by Andrew Dutney into the background to this paragraph has highlighted that the commitment to scholarship was included to ensure that in learning from Scripture, we did not limit ourselves to the example and insights of earlier readers, specifically those of the Reformers who were mentioned in the previous Paragraph.[i]

It emerged out of a recognition that between the Reformation and the twentieth century, there had been some immensely significant developments in the scholarly engagement with Scripture. Many of these developments made serious claims upon the church’s attention. Hence the second sentence of this paragraph and its reference to the “inheritance of literary, historical and scientific enquiry” of “recent centuries” and the note of gratitude that “God’s ways with humanity…are open to an informed faith”.

Note the location of scholarship. It is not the academy per se, but the church. What is imagined here is a ministry within the church by those who seek to use their scholarship to help the church better hear “God’s living Word”. The scholarship implied here is not that which begins with the scepticism towards faith and religion characteristic of the secular academy. Rather it is scholarship which begins with the expectations formed by Christian convictions, specifically the Christological convictions that lie behind the phrase ‘God’s living Word’. Take those convictions away, and the meaning and significance of this paragraph is fundamentally distorted.

The purpose of having an informed faith is not to convince ourselves that we’re smart. Nor is it to claim that the intellectual challenges to Christian faith can be easily overcome. At least one of the purposes of being informed about our faith is that we “sharpen our understanding of the will and purpose of God”. But this is not achieved merely by scholarship. This paragraph suggests that such a sharpening of our understanding occurs “within a world-wide fellowship of Churches” and “by contact with contemporary thought”. The paragraph also suggests the relationship with contemporary societies will “help [the Church] understand its own nature and mission”. These are striking and important claims, but they are not novel.

Christian thinkers have long recognised that there is insight and wisdom beyond the church which have claims upon the church. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) acknowledged, albeit grudgingly, that whatever from the philosophers “which happen[s] to be true and consistent with our faith should not cause alarm, but be claimed for our own use, as it were from owners who have no right to them”.[ii] More charitably, John Calvin (1509-1564) declared that if God “has willed that we be helped in physics, dialectic mathematics and other like disciplines, by the work and ministry of the ungodly, let us use this assistance.”[iii] And John Wesley (1703-1791) produced, and continually revised, a Compendium of Natural Philosophy to help the Methodist community be intellectually aware.

In this process of ‘sharpening its understanding of the will and purpose of God’, the Uniting Church relates itself to scholarship, the world-wide fellowship of Churches, contemporary thought and contemporary societies. Perhaps the acute challenge of this network of relationships is one which echoes what was observed in the commentary on Paragraph 5. Today when we talk about the ‘worldwide fellowship of Churches’ we are acknowledging communities in Asia, the Pacific and Africa which inhabit social, cultural, and intellectual worlds significantly different from those of the West. The insights which they learn from their contemporary societies and their traditions of thought will add to – and often be in tensions with – those which the Western Churches received from the “literary, historical and scientific enquiry of recent centuries” in the West.

It is also from those contexts that we might be challenged to overcome our neglect of evangelists, prophets and martyrs. It is an understatement to say that the Uniting Church has been nervous about evangelism. Perhaps we need to let go of our anxieties generated by the bad press which many styles of evangelism have understandably generated. To embrace the task of evangelism is not to commit to supposedly smart techniques with their frequent hints of manipulation. It might well start, instead, with learning from the basic confidence in the gospel which characterises so many of the Churches beyond those in the West.

Perhaps we have not been entirely deaf to the witness of prophets, especially those who have properly confronted us with our easy capitulation to materialism, our preoccupation with property, our tolerance of patriarchy, and our complicity in the colonialism which has wreaked havoc on Australia’s First Peoples. Prophets discern when the church neglects or distorts the core claims of the faith, and when it lives in outright denial of those claims. By their very nature, prophets are irritating, idiosyncratic and frequently disruptive of the church’s complacency. They and their message must, however, be heard.

To be called to acknowledge the witness of martyrs often generates similar anxieties as those associated with evangelism. In today’s world martyrdom easily conjures up the fanaticism of a suicide bomber. It is also true that only a small minority of Christians have been called to martyrdom. But those of us living in Australia must pause and reflect on the fact that in many part of the world today, notably the Middle East, some Christians are being martyred not because they are fanatics, but simply because they are Christian. With their example before us, we can only pray that we be ready “when occasion demands to confess the Lord in fresh words and deeds.” 

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[i] See Dutney, Where Did the Joy Come From? 25-27.

[ii] Saint Augustine, On Christian Teaching (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 64

[iii] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion Vol 1, trans. Ford Lewis Battles and ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 275.

A Post-Christendom, Sort-of Commentary on the Basis of Union - Post 3/4

Last year I published (through MediaCom) a short commentary on the Uniting Church's Basis of Union. This is the third of four posts, each of which consist of the commentary on a selected Paragraph from the Basis. The first post - which includes a bit more detail about the purpose and structure of the book - can be found here and the second post is accessible here. The fourth post will be published in due course.

If this whets your appetite, you can order the book through MediaCom or CTM Resourcing. There's also a short article about the book in the NSW/ACT Synod magazine, Insights.

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Commentary on Pragraph 9 of the Basis

When did you last say either the Nicene or Apostles’ Creeds in worship? And if you said it, how many in the congregation had their fingers crossed whilst saying it? Or, did you notice a distinctly muted collective mumble when it came to the statements 'born of the Virgin Mary' and 'on the third day he rose again'. These elements of the Creed have troubled Christians who have been enculturated into modernity. They constitute the so-called ‘supernatural’ elements of Christianity which modern people have been taught to distrust. To this objection, it could be asked, ‘Why stop at these elements?’ If modernity is our benchmark, why even believe in God as Creator?

On the other hand, other Christians are troubled by the fact that we continue to use creeds which, quite apart from any specific problematic details, come from an overall cultural and intellectual framework so (apparently) alien to our own. As such, their relevance is deemed doubtful. This can only be pushed so far as an intellectually serious objection because Jesus’ own context and that of the New Testament is even older and arguably even more alien than that of the Creeds.

Then there are others who are troubled not merely by any particular claims or by the cultural difference between us and the authors of the Creeds, but by the very act itself of saying a Creed. For them, to affirm Creeds defined as “authoritative statements of the Catholic faith…[which] declare and guard the right understanding of that faith” is a challenge to the freedom of individuals to make up their own minds about what to believe. 

Whilst the themes of Paragraph 9 will increase the anxieties of all three of these groups of objectors, they probably most clearly prompt an engagement with the third set of concerns. But the other two concerns also invite some brief comment. In many ways both of them question the capacity for the wisdom of the past to engage us or make any claim upon us. And here, I suspect, we confront a divide in the church that is less between Christendom and post-Christendom, and more between baby boomers and certain Christian millennials. The posture of baby boomers towards the past is probably best captured in Marcus Borg’s description of the Enlightenment as “the great watershed event in Western cultural history that created the modern world, separating it from all that went before” and which led to a “collision between the Enlightenment and Christianity”.[i]

Of course there was a clash between the Enlightenment and Christianity. But millennials might well regard the Enlightenment’s supersessionist posture (‘separating it from all that went before’) towards the past as somewhat quaint. (Some of them would also have studied enough philosophy and history to know that modernity existed well before the Enlightenment; the Enlightenment was one specific political manifestation of the intellectual currents of modernity. But that is another story!) Few millennials – Christian or not – buy modernity’s triumphant rhetoric about itself. Many of the millennials in the Uniting Church have much to teach the rest of us about how to resist modernity’s dubious legacies of colonialism, its misplaced confidence in Western rationality, and the culturally-sapping forces of its individualism. That Uniting Church millennials are critically open to pre-Enlightenment wisdom is not because they are more ‘conservative’ – as baby boomers might assume. It is because they have been nurtured in different and arguably more politically- and ideologically-aware notions of truth than baby boomers tended to be.

To return now to the third of the concerns identified above. A willingness (or not) to acknowledge an “authoritative statement” which “guards a right understanding of the faith” says something, at least in principle, about our understanding of Christianity regardless of the content of the Creed. I stress, in principle. But the principle is focused in this question: Do we think Christianity is something we can parochially reinvent or is there something constant about it across time and space? That the Basis declares that saying these Creeds links us to the “unity of the Church throughout the ages” suggests the latter. And to affirm that unity indicates a willingness, in some sense, to be accountable to the whole church regardless of whether we ‘believe’ everything that every other Christian of the past has believed.  After all, as already noted earlier in this commentary, the Creeds bypass the details of  Jesus’ human life and manage to say what they say without mentioning God’s love. But that is not a reason not to use them.

But what ‘right understandings of the faith’ are actually entailed in the Creeds? Interestingly, the Basis is quite coy about this – something which reinforces the point made above. Nevertheless, in describing their use as “acts of allegiance to the Holy Trinity” there is an implicit reminder that the Trinitarian understanding of God is a primary concern of both Creeds, particularly the Nicene.  Space does not allow a full discussion of this here. Suffice to say the following. In relation to their Trinitarian orientation, I wish that rather than saying “framed in the language of their day”, this paragraph had actually said ‘responding to the issues of their day’. Had it done so, we would have been continually reminded that the task of interpreting the Creeds requires an understanding the questions to which they were answers.

One of the background questions to early Trinitarian disputes was whether the claim that Jesus was God incarnate implied that God had somehow become less God by entering the messiness of this world. Some felt that God’s ‘godness’ was being dishonoured by affirming the incarnation. To say that God is Father, Son and Spirit is, in a very short summary form, a way of insisting that Christians don’t believe in just any ‘god’. Rather they believe in God whose very ‘godness’ is on full display and not at all compromised by entering the world of flesh and time in the work of the Son and Spirit. If that’s not true, then the game would be up for Christianity. That is perhaps the key thing we can learn from a “careful study of these creeds” and which is worth ‘declaring and guarding’.

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[i] Marcus J. Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), 21.