Sermon from January 22, 2006
I have called into question two cherished habits of evangelical Christianity. One is suspicion about tradition; the other is suspicion about the Church, which transmits the Christian tradition through the ages. These habits arose in the revolt against the past that shaped the new nation that was born on the fourth of July.

But one authority from the past escaped this suspicion. Belief in the Bible alone captured the imagination of pre-Civil War America. Ordinary people could glean from the Bible all the guidance they would need for all that life could throw at them.

The Civil War exposed the fatal flaw in this belief. Ordinary people and some most extraordinary people read the same Bible but came to opposite conclusions about African slaves. One side of the population said the Bible clearly supported slavery. The other side said the Bible clearly supported emancipation. Both sides could prove their case from the Bible without tradition. The dispute could only be adjudicated at places like Gettysburg, Antietam, and Appomattox.

But why did it have to be adjudicated in that bloody way? It is historically responsible to say that despite their dominance in American culture, churches could not close the deepening divisions over slavery. The integrating center of American Christianity did not hold, and, as a result, the nation did not hold together.

It might have turned out differently, if American churches had been open to their evangelical peers in Great Britain and Canada and to the streams of Christian tradition that had come down through the centuries. But tradition was suspect, the Church was suspect, and the churches in America were terribly divided.

We are not wise to reject the ancient paths or the Church that transmits to us the wisdom of the past. Two more case studies of the Church in pre-Civil War America will show us why, one the Methodist Church and one of Calvinism.

Methodists – A Case Study
In the Methodist case study, let me first give honor to whom honor is due. In 1770 there were 20 Methodist churches in the American colonies. Fourscore and seven years later, there were 20,000, thanks to Methodist circuit riders. Drive down Mt. Lebanon Road, and look at the founding date on the Methodist Church. I think it is 1812. You can be sure that Methodist circuit riders traveled this way two hundred years ago.

The greatest circuit rider of them all was Frances Asbury. "He traveled through every state in the Union annually for more than thirty years," (Noll, 330), and, of course, he did it on horseback.

His untiring labor and administrative genius helped the Methodist Church to be the largest in the country. Asbury didn't care much for politics, and like most Methodists in those early years, he did not try his hand at theology. Methodists had a theology. John Wesley had written it, and in many ways it said what orthodox Christianity teaches. As with all Protestants in the U.S., the Bible held priority with Methodists.

In 1807, Nathan Bangs, a Methodist Circuit Rider and pastor, heard a fellow preacher make the following statement: "'When reason dictates our will we are virtuous, consistent, uniform, wise,'" (Noll, 344).

Rev. Bangs responded by saying, "'I cannont assede [accede] to all you say concerning reason .... If this were so, what need is there of revelation? ... Scripture, not reason, must be our guide, and reason become its handmaid,'" (ibid). Bangs touted the priority of the Bible over unaided reason.

In 1813, three years before Asbury died, another Methodist, Asa Shinn, published a 400-page theology called An Essay on the Plan of Salvation. All in all it was faithful to the theology of John Wesley. But something new entered his book in chapter one, where he exactly reversed what Nathan Bangs had said.

Shinn held a minority opinion, but it was a straw in the wind that was beginning to blow through the Methodist Church. His idea was that if you really want to know the truth, you need to listen first to the "intuitive certainty" inside your own head. If that's not clear enough, "the evidence of reasoning" will get you to the truth you need. If all else fails, there is always "the evidence of Revelation."

In other words the past was increasingly irrelevant. John Doe, Methodist, didn't need king, bishop, priest or legislator to tell him what was best. He could figure it out for himself and probably get it right. He might not even need divine revelation.

I don't know that any Methodist thinker described this transition as a revolt against the past. The fact remains that for John Wesley and Francis Asbury "grace and the Bible defined" their outlook on everything. By the 1860s "natural human ability" did that for the leading thinkers of American Methodism, (Noll, 357).

This trend continued, and a hundred years later became the theological liberalism of the late 20th century that has bedeviled not only the United Methodist Church, but all the mainline Protestant bodies in this country. They have paid dearly for their rejection of the life-giving past of Christian orthodoxy.

Calvinism – A Case Study
The second case study considers Calvinism, especially the Congregational and Presbyterian Calvinists, who left a deep mark on the nation. Once again, I'd like to give honor to whom honor is due.

Congregational Calvinists founded Harvard and Yale, and Presbyterian Calvinists founded Princeton, to name a few of their elite institutions. Calvinists and the rebels they spawned were the nation's intelligentsia. They gave the Church Jonathan Edwards and many other, lesser but extremely competent theologians. They taught Founding Fathers like Jefferson and Madison. They gave the Church the Great Awakenings and revivals. The Salem Witch Trials are a pathetic caricature that hides the impact of Congregational and Presbyterian Calvinists on the American soul.

Calvinists were and are Reformed theologians with a capital R. Their books, sermons, and disputes were about "divine sovereignty, the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit, or the atonement, imputation, and sanctification," (Noll, 328).

That sounds academic to us; it was life and death for them. It is painful to read Jonathan Edwards' journal entries about his internal, spiritual torment. We have polite disputes about the elect and the damned. They agonized over which group they were in.

Within the religious, theological, political, artistic, and social achievements of Calvinists, seeds of destruction were growing. One seed blossomed into Unitarianism in Boston. Another blossomed into the excesses of revivalism. But a personal story of a great Puritan family captures the central heartache of Calvinist Christianity.

On the eve of the Civil War there was no more famous preacher than Henry Ward Beecher of Plymouth Church of Brooklyn, NY. He had a sister, Catherine Beecher, with whom we are not familiar. He had a distinguished sister, whose name you may recognized: Harriet Beecher Stowe. She wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin.

She wrote another book called The Minister's Wooing. It revealed the wound that forever threatens to reopen in the heart of Calvinism. In the story the heroine's fiancé, who had never been able to relate a credible, personal experience of salvation, was drowned at sea.

Much of the book has to do with discussions about whether this upright young man would go to hell. Had God predestined him to hell and then let him drown? She traced Puritan thought on the subject from Jonathan Edwards to the brilliant Samuel Hopkins. The mother of the fiancé delivered the book's assessment of Calvinism.

"'Dr. Hopkins says that this is all best, – better than it would have been in any other possible way, – that God chose it because it was for a great final good .... It is not right! No possible amount of good to ever so many can make it right to deprave ever so few – happiness and misery cannot be measured so! I can never think it right, – never! ... It is impossible! – it is contrary to the laws of my nature! I can never love God! ... No end! – no bottom! – no shore! – no hope! – O God! O God!'" (Noll, 326).

That book was art imitating life. Her sister's fiancé had drowned. Harriet's own son, Henry, had also drowned. Neither young man had made a credible, personal confession of faith in Jesus Christ. The book appears to have been a way of working, not only through her grief, but also through Calvinism's answer to her grief.

The agony in the passage I quoted was personal to both sisters. Their heritage notwithstanding, they could not remain Calvinists. Harriet Beecher Stowe joined the Episcopal Church.

Catherine's more chilling assessment of the Calvinism in which she had been bred and which she understood as well as any man said simply: "'There must be a dreadful mistake somewhere .... My renewed decision was, 'There is some dreadful mistake somewhere,''" (Noll, 327). The hard features of Calvinism drove her away from orthodox Christianity into a vague spirituality. Her story has been repeated thousands of times.

The Protestant Reformation recovered much that had been lost in the late, Medieval Church. Few expressed so well what had been recovered as did John Calvin. At the same time, the Reformation began to lose contact with other parts of its life-giving past and with the larger Church that transmitted it.

The Church had had a long history of trying to understand predestination. Calvinism was aware of that history but ignored previous restraints on that difficult doctrine. As a result, Calvinism drew theological and pastoral conclusions that constantly threaten to turn it into something harsh and legalistic.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
Things can be old in more than one way. The Kodak camera with which my parents photographed me is old, and to use that camera instead of your digital camera, except for fun, is out-of-date. The shipping lanes in the North Atlantic are ancient, much older than the Kodak camera, but every sea captain reckons with them.

From Abraham to Billy Graham, Western Civilization has believed in truth older than the oceans and as relevant as the tides. That's why Scripture and the Church's 2000-year-old record of the Spirit's guidance seem like the very latest thing. Look with me at several scriptures that undergird this conviction.

Romans 15:4 says: Everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. The Scripture Paul referred to was already hundreds of years old, and he said they could make a difference in the pressing circumstances of the moment. That makes the past, preserved in scripture, interpreted, and transmitted by the Church, indispensable to the present. Where does this life-giving power of the past come from?

First, like nothing else on earth, it tells us about God and His ways with the human family. Look at John 5:39. Jesus was speaking, and He said this about Himself: "You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life."

Many Jews of Jesus' day saw the Scriptures as the portal to eternal life. Jesus agreed and went a heart-stopping step further by saying, "These are the Scriptures that testify about me." He said that before the New Testament was written. The book is the portal to Jesus Christ and through Him to the knowledge of God and eternal life. It may be old, but it offers what nothing else in our day and age offers. Eternal life doesn't go out of style. When the Methodist Church and others revolted agains the priority of biblical revelation, they began to dam up the life-giving streams of the past.

That life-giving power comes from a second source. Psalm 78:2b-4 says: I will utter hidden things, things from of old – that we have heard and known, what our fathers have told us, we will not hide them from their children; we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, his power, and the wonders he has done. The passage pictures the process of passing down treasures of knowledge from one generation to another. It is a process of preserving memories. It is a process of preventing spiritual dementia.

Dementia takes away the past, but, as we know all too well, taking away the past takes away the person we knew. Memories of the past make it possible to retain our sense of identity and to function well here and now.

Reading this old book together and hearing what the Church and Israel have said about it for thousands of years makes it possible for the Church to retain its sense of identity and to function well in its long sojourn through this world.

Something else is at stake here. Bear with me for a minute. I came of age politically in the presidential campaign between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. I couldn't vote. You had to be 21 then. Kennedy was elected by a slim margin, and he won, because he carried Chicago. The word on the street was that he carried Chicago, because Mayor Richard Daley made sure that dead democrats in Chicago voted for him.

It's not a good thing in politics for the dead to vote. But in matters of faith, the dead always have a place at the table. C.S. Lewis pointed out their value to the living, when he praised the reading of their books. He said: "Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need (old) books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period," (God in the Dock, "On the Reading of Old Books," 202).

Reading this old book together and hearing what the Church and Israel have said about it for thousands of years gives us a place to stand from which we can spot the nonsense of our own age. The present moment can be a tyrant. It embodies the arrogance of those whose only claim to fame is to be walking around. There is no one to blow the whistle on the present except voices informed by the past. The life-giving past comes to us in the Bible and in the accured wisdom of the Church. Let us love the book. Let us love the Church. Let us hear their wisdom and speak it to our generation.