Showing posts with label Uniting Church origins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Uniting Church origins. Show all posts

Friday, August 17, 2018

Grace, Scripture, Confessions and the Living God


Prompted by a conversation earlier today, I went back to 'The Faith of the Church', the first document produced, in 1959, by the Joint Commission on Church Union, the body whose work laid the theological foundations of the Uniting Church in Australia. My friend and I had been talking about how to distinguish between what is primary and what is secondary in the Christian faith. The relevant passage from 'The Faith of the Church' is reproduced below. The language is gendered, the prose a product of its 1950s context, and there are potentially jarring echoes of certain kinds of piety, albeit all mixed with some strong rhetoric. But what is notable is the way it orients the church to scripture and tradition through the framework of grace, or more precisely, the one who is gracious, namely the living Jesus Christ.

 1. Our commitment is made in faith

The position in which we stand as churches and human beings is one of grace. God has dealt with us graciously, and he has done so with us as with men who are unworthy. There is only one way in which to receive this grace and that is by faith. We would wish to see the biblical teaching of justification by faith through grace written out in the corporate life of the Church and in the life of Christians in their personal and social relations in our day.

The Church on earth must ever learn the meaning of justification by faith.

a. We would express it in the way we hold the faith. By our reverence before the witness of scripture and our humility before the confessions of believing men, but above all, and through all, in our awareness of the Living God, we would show that we are grasped by a holy love and power which is not our own but which was made manifest for us in Jesus Christ our Lord. The knowledge which we have of divine things is given to faith. But faith is not a way of knowing what has been objectively given, apart from a relation of trust and obedience which is conditioned by the One who grasps and holds us.

The Church will therefore guard against allowing that which is necessary but secondary to play a dominant part in her life. No system of Church government, no rules or precedents, no system of doctrine or ethics, no technique of evangelism, no tradition of men regarding the ordering of worship, is sufficiently free from error to be permitted to hold anything but a subordinate position in the life of the Christian Church. Only by setting forth as the primary ground for her existence God’s justifying act in Jesus Christ, apprehended in the Church by faith, can the Church prevent a proper concern for law from deteriorating into legalism, a proper concern for morals deteriorating into moralism, a proper concern for theology from deteriorating into intellectualism, a proper awareness of the grace set forth in the sacraments from deteriorating into sacramentalism.

The Church’s message is not even of justification by faith, lest the holding of that should become a justifying work. The Church’s message is of her Justifier. We preach not ourselves (not anything to do with ourselves — our doctrines, our practices, our religious experience, or our faith) but Christ Jesus as Lord and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake. He only is the Justifier of the Church’s life.*


*Joint Commission on Church Union, The Faith of the Church in Theology for Pilgrims: Selected Theological Documents of the Uniting Church in Australia, edited by Rob Bos and Geoff Thompson (Sydney: Uniting Church Press, 2008), 59-60.

Monday, June 22, 2015

Learning from UCA Origins: Survival strategy or God's will for unity and mission?


Recently I was preparing a short chapter on the tradition of Reformed Theology in Australia and New Zealand for a forthcoming book. In my background reading I came across a chapter on Presbyterianism in Australia in the book, Engaging with Calvin (2009). It included the following explanation of the roots of the Uniting Church.

By the 1960s it was clear that the Presbyterian Church, along with all the major Protestant denominations, was in decline. The number of Presbyterians in Australia had slipped from a high of 11.72% in 1921 to 9.29% of the population in 1961. This would drop to 6.64% in 1976. Decreasing numbers of migrants from Scotland intensified the problem, but the influence of liberal theology was also a factor.  ... The answer for many in the Presbyterian Church was for the denomination to unite with the  Congregationalist and Methodist. Thus the Uniting Church came into being in 1977. (1)

The 'Thus' of the last sentence is deeply problematic. In fact, it badly misrepresents the story of union. No doubt, people supported union for all sorts of reasons. It would be naïve to think that all who entered union did so for the neatly argued theological reasons proposed by the Joint Commission on Church Union. Undoubtedly some people supported union because they perceived it as a means of survival. (In fact, as in all elections, there were probably some people who voted for union by ticking the wrong box!) So, yes, there were multiple reasons for union. But whatever the reasons, it is important to note the 'official' arguments and their social context, and the relation between them. One of the authors of the Basis of Union, Norman Young, did this in an article published in Pacifica in 2012He compares the social location of the churches now with what it was when union was being planned.

Norman Young
 Given the decline of membership in all Australian mainline churches in recent decades, one of the motives for union could have been to join forces in the face of dwindling recourses. However, this was not the case in the 1950s, for then the churches were in a period of expansion (short-lived at it turned out to be), due in some measure to the response to a Billy Graham campaign and to 'planned-giving' programmes that led to expanding existing church buildings, and erecting new ones. Thus the move toward union did not arise from any perceived weakness in membership, but at least on the part of most, simply from the need to obey God's will that followers of Christ should be one, ...(2)

Of course, these arguments for union were developed during the late 1950s and into the 1960s. And the quest for unity was inseparable from a commitment to mission (as made so clear in the Basis). And, in turn, the commitment to mission was inseparable from a prior commitment to the gospel.

By the time union actually happened (1977), the social context had changed and it had changed in ways the impact of which reaches deeply into the present. John Evans captures the issue very well:
Unfortunately for the new church the perception soon arose that it was formed out of weakness and begrudging necessity rather than being a vital and enthusiastic expression of the unity of the church in Australia. It came at a time when church attendance showed a marked decline and the role and place of the church itself was being questioned. (3)
It is that dramatic 1970s shift in the place of Christianity in Australia that has, potentially, obscured from us the arguments for union and its link to mission. Union was not survival strategy.  Nor was it the cause of declining numbers and changing role.

A danger in our present context of marginality is that local unions or amalgamations will be overwhelmed by the impulse for survival. Survival is good if it sustains and nurtures the church's proclamation of the gospel. But on its own it not a sound theological basis for bringing congregations together. And if a church has got to the point of thinking about its survival apart from a concern for mission, it might, in fact, have reached the point of no return. As Steve Taylor recently commented on Facebook (and quoted here with permission): "The church in the West is increasingly interested in mission. If this is related to its decline, it results in tragic distortions." 

Survival. Decline. Amalgamations. Mission. Unity. Gospel. The narratives around these various terms are often entangled in very unhelpful ways. Can we disentangle them so that a new discourse emerges that relates gospel, unity, and mission in a coherent and fruitful way?

* * * * * *
 
 
(1) Colin Bale, "Calvinism in Australia 1788-2009: A Historical Assessment" in M. D. Thompson (ed), Engaging With Calvin: Aspects of the Reformer’s Legacy for Today (Nottingham: Apollos, 2009), 286.
 
 
(3) John Evans, "Globalization and the Uniting Church", Uniting Church Studies, 7:2 (2001), 20.

Friday, June 5, 2015

Colin Williams, Secularism, the Church and UCA Origins


 
 Recalling Colin Williams
An Evening Seminar
 
7pm, Wednesday 24th June
(6pm for optional dinner)
 
Centre for Theology and Ministry,
29 College Crescent, Parkville  3052
 
Speakers: Brian Howe, Ian Weeks and Damian Palmer
 
 
Colin Williams was a significant Australian theologian in the Methodist tradition who spent most of his career in the United States. Before leaving for the US, he was Professor of Systematic Theology at Queen's College in Melbourne and was a member of the Joint Commission on Church Union. I understand he played a leading role in the writing of the Commission's second report, The Church: Its Nature, Function and Ordering. His most notable scholarly work was John Wesley's Theology Today: A Study of the Wesleyan Tradition in the Light of Current Theological Dialogue (1960). Half a century on, it remains available for purchase and it still gets quoted in critical studies of Wesley's thought. After leaving Australia he became a major figure in America's ecumenical and theological circles from the mid-1960s through to the 1980s, including a decade-long stint as Dean of Yale Divinity School. The United Methodist Church maintains a significant archive of his papers.
 * * * * *
Last year I had reason to read Williams' 1965 book, Faith in a Secular Age. The book, as the title implies, explores the roots and contours of the rise of the secular, and canvasses alternative reactions of the churches to it. He offers this description of the secular which at the time was pressing itself upon the consciousness of the American church.
We are witnessing…the rise of secular man (sic). It is not suggested that this secular attitude is the product of a sudden change in man’s way of thinking. On the contrary, the change has been brewing for centuries and behind it there lies factors such as the rise of the scientific attitude, the successful bid for the autonomy of increasing areas of human thought from ecclesiastical tutelage, the subsequent flight of institutions from the church’s direct control…., and the spread of an attitude of this-worldly confidence. … With this increasing dependence upon the new things that man can create ‘from below’, there has come also a continuing diminution of the wisdom that comes down into our life through religion and revealed truth. (.p.20)
 
 
Obviously, this is a very much a description of the secular rooted in the discourses and assumptions of the 1960s. Reading Williams, you don't have to scratch too far to realise that he was writing in an environment informed by demythologising, the death of God, and various 'secular' theologies.
 
Like others at the time, Williams offers a positive assessment of this rise of the secular. It is not so much to be resisted by the church but as a new condition in which faith can be reformed and fine-tuned for the sake of the church's mission.  
 
The rise of the secular attitude to life must be interpreted positively as the fruit of the gospel and…religion must be interpreted not as the cause we are called to defend, but as the mythical, metaphysical, ontocratic clothing of our childhood that we must now learn to put off if we are to be for true faith in the living God as he is working in the events of our time.
 
There is an impulse to cross the interface between the church and the world, to move out from the church and its insularity and into the world and its only apparent secularity. ‘Only apparent’ because God has not given up on the secular world, even if the secular world has given up on God. The theological rationale for this is not simply frustration with the insularity of the church and the confines of ‘religion’.

The reason why this openness to the world has arisen...is precisely that the church is learning again to turn its eyes to Christ. ... And it is in him that this openness to the world is seen (p.108).

I guess that among the issues which might come up at the seminar would be these: Has the church actually learn that lesson (of turning its eyes to Christ) or is it still learning it? Can the confidence in the 'secular' be transferred to the present context, half a century later? Can this christologically-driven 'openness to the world' be extended to multiple definitions of 'secular' and a church/world interface which seems irreducibly complex? How do William's insights help us address the contemporary situation.
 
Come along and engage with Ian Weeks and Brian Howe, both of whom knew Williams, as well as Damian Palmer who has been pursuing research on Williams as part of a wider project on twentieth-century ecumenism.


Sunday, February 1, 2015

How did we get the Basis of Union?

I was asked to write a very brief reflection on the origins of the Basis of Union for this month's Crosslight, the monthly magazine of the Victorian/Tasmanian Synod of the Uniting Church in Australia. You can read it here. It's the first in a series of 'Did you know...?' articles which Crosslight will be running this year. The current issue also carries articles on the UAICC national conference, reviews of both Birdman and The Water Diviner, and information about UnitingJourneys (a programme of responsible travel to learn and share with partner churches), plus much else.


6_UCA-inauguration