I attended my first Synod meeting in 1976 or1977, I cannot remember exactly. It was a hugely different Synod than the ones we see now. All meetings were held in the Chapel. The delegate signs were placed almost halfway up the aisles, and the seats were never full. There was always a cloud of delegates hanging out at all the entrances smoking--mostly ministers. There were lines night and day at all the pay phones. It was as slower, less crowded, and less organized kind of meeting. It was also much less accessible to outsiders. In jokes and folksy stories were prevalent in debate. Often it seemed that the speakers had to establish their pedigrees as ARP's by telling who their daddy and granddaddy was before the got down to saying what they wanted to say.
The biggest difference between then and now was that the people seemed to be more interested in proving they were loyal ARP's than saying anything of substance. It resembled a cross between a dinner on the ground and a brawl.
Even so, the meetings were usually longer, There was far more controversy than there is now. There was a battle going on for the very soul of the church. The church was deciding whether it was going to remain a collection of countrified families, related by blood and friendship, or whether it was actually going to be a church held together by doctrinal statements and mission.
The issue was simple--inerrancy or non-inerrancy. Did the Bible contain factual errors or did it not? This was the issue behind almost everything. The ARP's in the Sixties produced a group of pastors who had been either educated in liberal Southern Presbyterian seminaries, or who had been instructed at Erskine by professors who had attended liberal seminaries. Those not in favor of inerrancy saw the church as a smaller, more folksy version of the PCUS. Those in favor of inerrancy were mainly educated in the upstart Reformed Seminary. Aligned with them were a few old-timers from the days when Erskine was an inerrancy institution.
There were also a sizeable group in the middle. These were some of the born and bred ARPs who were bothered by the word "inerrant" because they could not imagine the church believing in anything else. The Bible was not questioned where they came from, so there was no need to defend it. They had never been challenged by outside influences. They truthfully did not know what all the fuss was about. All they could do is say "why can't we all just get along?"
Back in those days, we who fought for inerrancy were driven by a real fear that the ARP's would lose their faith, like their sister denominations the PCUSA and the Cumberlands. Those denominations were already in membership free-fall and ours was teetering on the edge.
I was an inerrantists and proud of it. I had come out of the mainline church and had seen the powerlessness of an organization that stood for nothing, and therefore stood for anything. I was on that side not only because I believed it and all my friends believed it, but because of the way the non-inerrantist establishment within the church conducted business. Whenever they were challenged in their assumptions, they raised the specter of division. It was all the fault of outsiders who just wanted to agitate. Meanwhile, they tolerated just about everything from those loyal to the institution. It seemed to me then (and still does now that these people stoop to just about anything to protect the institutions they loved from control by outsiders. They did this without a hint of self-criticism or realization that holding blindly to an institution was idolatry.
While the inerrantists and non-inerrantists slugged it out, there was much collateral damage. The first casualty was the Gospel. Both sides seemed to be more interested in defeating heretics than reaching the lost. Love was another casualty. Both sides contributed about equally to the party spirit that rocked the church. A third casualty was the prosperity of the church. No one wanted to have much to do with the little denomination which seemed to have lost their minds.
The longer the debate went on, the more difficult it came to tell the good guys from the bad guys. It became obvious to me that power, not doctrine, was king. The non-inerrantist side used every kind of political chicanery and parliamentary maneuvering to keep power. Eventually as they gained strength, the inerrantists changed from idealists to pragmatists, using the same tactics--political maneuvering, controlling meetings, distortions of their opponents' views, and just plain intolerance. Some of the lead inerrantists enjoyed the power and control that came from the battle more than they loved what they were fighting for.
Even though I was an inerrantist, I was not as conservative as many of them. I had been educated mainly at a Methodist school and a mainline seminary. I finished at Erskine and enjoyed the diversity of that institution. Though I disagreed with most of my professors, I came to love and admire them as people. Because of my past experiences, I never learned the niceties of Reformed culture. learned the buzzwords common to among my other Calvinist friends. Furthermore, I was not convinced (and remain unconvinced) that all rightness and piety resides in the Reformed tradition. So I wondered If my side won, would they one day turn on people like me? Once they ran off their enemies, would they come after their friends?
Today the church has changed and the world has changed. Non-inerrantists in the ARPs are rare as hen's teeth and have no real voice in it. The inerrantists have won completely. As a result, the church has become peaceful, and it has grown considerably. Reformed Seminary now educates the majority of our pastors.
But there are always divisions. We are not nearly as isolated as we once were, having found connections among the emerging counter-society of Calvinists.
Even so I have to ask, are we any closer to loving the lost? Is the ARP salt and light in the world, or have we remained a fortress?
In many ways, the church still seems clueless to what is really happening out there in the larger world. We still think of mainline church as our primary even though their actual influence has shrunk to practically nil. For decades, we watched as liberalism conquered the mainline churches and institutions. We fought their influence and keep them out. But today, the mainline churches have shrunk to ghosts of their former selves, and theological liberalism is dissolving into the cultural mess it always was. We would be hard pressed to name a single religious institution that had fallen to liberalism in the past thirty years. The mainline church is all but dead--for now, at least. There is no need to fear becoming like them. They are in full retreat.
Today we are caught in a new world, with militant atheism and humanism gaining ground on one side, and Islam gaining on the other. Church attendance is waning all around us and we are still not loving the lost. We are so obsessed with fighting for the church that we do not fight for the souls of men. We are still battling each other when we should be battling the Devil. We are still facing inward, and not outward.
Now, let me get to more current history--the called meeting of Synod to deal with Erskine. It seems odd to me that there was no acknowledgement of where the institution has come from and where it is going.
When I was there, all my seminary profs were Barthian. They all rejected inerrancy. Today, we worry about one or two who may not believe in inerrancy deeply enough, or do not use the right terminology. Today, we argue that the college has some non-evangelical professors hired before faith requirements were solid, most of whom have tenure and therefore are extremely hard to fire. Once it was difficult to find more than a handful of professors who were evangelical Christians. We worry about a president who does not enforce the creedal statements. For decades, we had presidents who thought the school was a miniature version of Davidson or Furman. The school has come a long, long way. It has farther to go still, but it has been moving in the right direction.
But that it was not changing fast enough, it seems. The majority of Synod voted to finish the job quickly, no matter what the cost. Maybe they were right.
But consider the collateral damage. The methodology of the change is deeply reminiscent of the old days of he Seventies, when non-inerrantists sought to outmaneuver their opponents. The leaders of our denomination have shown no compunction about being heavy-handed and possibly even underhanded to reform Erskine.
Consider how this was done. A commission is appointed by the moderator, who puts himself and his elders on the commission. This commission gives no printed statements of what it intends to do so that no organized voices can be raised against it. The reason, they say, is because of shocking revelations that should not be made public. When those revelations are finally brought to the floor, they are about things that happened, ten, twenty, and even thirty years ago, and really are not that shocking. This is done at an emergency meeting, leaving little time for thoughtful appraisal. Two weeks before, at a board meeting, the commission brought recommendations to the board, and then changed those recommendations before they were presented. Several board members spoke of threats to dissolve the board if they did not fully agree or comply. Then when they largely agreed, they moved to dissolve them anyway. The commission then hand-picks and interim board which will be responsible for choosing the president, making sure to put on it the board members and other who will not have dissenting opinions, putting themselves on the board. This interim board will in all likelihood be the one to approve the next president. Then the commission attempts to put a body of ex moderators in charge of the ongoing composition of the board, of which half the members are of the same commission.
In the end, Erskine will change. That change will likely be for the better. But the real damage is to our denomination not to Erskine. The openness and trust of the ARPs for each other has been broken, and dissent has been crushed. Like in the old days, no dissent will be tolerated, because no dissenters will be allowed to sit on the board.
This is not right. This is not fair. But it is, and we must accept that. Even if this has pointed us in the right direction, God help what we will become when we arrive.
In Orwell's Animal Farm, the animals on the farm staged a revolution, led by the pigs. They succeed in taking over the farm. But by the end of the book, the pigs who lead the revolution have come to look and act just like the people who once oppressed them. We have ended the thirty-year war to bring our church in line with Evangelical theology, but in the process, we have become like the people we once despised.
And we still don't love the lost.
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