The Pilgrim Road: Sermons on Christian Life

Christian Century, April 5, 2000 by William C. Placher

The Pilgrim Road: Sermons on Christian Life. By B. A. Gerrish; edited by Mary T. Stimming. Westminster John Knox, 213 pp., $14.95.

AS I READ these two books by Brian Gerrish, I had three reactions in turn: first, I marveled at what a wonderful scholar and theologian he is; second, I realized how much I disagree with him on several points; third, I was surprised at how little those disagreements seem to matter when reading his wonderful sermons.

Gerrish has moved from the University of Chicago, where he held the Nuveen Professorship (whose previous occupants had been Paul Tillich and Paul Ricoeur) to Union Seminary in Richmond, where he is Distinguished Service Professor of Theology. His many publications on Reformation and 19th-century theology (above all, on Calvin and Schleiermacher) are models of rich scholarship, elegant prose and reflection on the history of theology with an eye to how it matters for church life today.

In Saving and Secular Faith Gerrish turns his focus from history to constructive theology. He offers an introduction to the task of theology centered on the concept of faith, considering that concept in dialogue with psychologists, historians of religion and sociologists, as well as with the history of theology. Faith, he says, is obviously "one of the keywords in the language of the Christian community." But, starting with the Bible itself, it has two meanings: assent or belief, and trust. Emphases can vary--more on assent in Aquinas and more on trust in Luther, for instance--but Gerrish admits that he has come to see fewer and fewer differences between Protestant and Catholic perspectives. He calls this trusting assent at the core of Christian life "saving faith."

One of the book's central claims is that this "saving faith" is but one species of a genus "faith" to be found in other religions and indeed in all human activities. Gerrish rather awkwardly (as he admits) lumps Muslim, Buddhist and nonreligious faith into the category of "secular faith." Scientists, for instance, have faith "that observations made on Monday yield data our research can use on Tuesday and a discovery made in Cambridge will hold good in Gottingen or Chicago."

Indeed, everybody holds certain principles of "elemental faith": for example, that the world has some kind of order to it, and that we have some kind of moral responsibility. Elemental faith and other forms of secular faith provide "points of contact" for Christians trying to explain saving faith. The content of our faith is different from yours, we can say to skeptics--but don't pretend that we have faith and you don't, or that having faith is in principle a bad idea.

Christian theologians explore their faith within a particular community and tradition, though "keeping faith with tradition ... is not at all being bound by the letter of the law; it is more a matter of the company you keep--or the books you reach for first--when you want to do your best thinking." But contemporary Christian theologians also operate in a particular historical context, and that makes for some differences. At one point Gerrish summarizes saving faith as the "construal of the story of Jesus, and therefore of our own story, as the work of a parentlike God who means us well, and in whom we accordingly place our trust."

Today such faith faces at least two new sorts of problems related to "the uniqueness of Christ and the historical reliability of the Gospels," Gerrish argues. We find ourselves in conversation with adherents of other religions, and the question whether Christ is the only way to God inevitably arises. We also encounter the works of historians who reach a wide range of conclusions about Jesus, including skepticism. Does saving faith have to wait until they agree on an answer?

According to Gerrish, "To say that the Christian receives saving faith through the New Testament image of Jesus need not imply that faith cannot be had in any other way, or that no other religious faiths convey salvation." We trust in what Christ has done for us, and we can enter openly into dialogue with non-Christians about what has transformed their lives. As Gerrish puts it in one of the sermons collected in The Pilgrim Road, "The Creator must love variety, since the world is so full of it. We are summoned to be loyal to the best we know and to bear faithful witness to it. We are not required to deny that the eternal goodness we believe in may reach out to others in other ways."

Knowing what our encounter with the New Testament picture of Christ has done in our own lives, we can be agnostic about the degree to which that image corresponds to historical reality. Gerrish quotes the blind man from John 9: he does not know just who this Jesus is, he tells his suspicious questioners, but "one thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see." Gerrish comments, "That, to him, was the one thing certain. And it is not so very different for ourselves." The evangelist who, when asked if Jesus is alive, replied, "I know he is: I spoke with him this morning," offered, Gerrish says, "a wiser response than any attempt to prove the tomb was empty, though we might do better to reverse the order of the response." (I spoke with him this morning because I know that he is alive, not the other way round.)