Hanging in there: why conservatives need liberals

Christian Century, Jan 13, 2004 by Richard J. Mouw

I HAVE SPENT a number of years engaged in Jewish-Christian dialogue. More recently, I have been involved in extensive exchanges with Muslim scholars. I regularly visit Utah for off-the-record discussions with Mormon leaders about deep disagreements between Mormons and evangelicals. I approach all these conversations with great enthusiasm, And yet I have found myself regularly breaking into a cold sweat at the thought of engaging in dialogue with fellow Presbyterians about homosexuality. Why the anxiety in this case?

It's because there is so little room for genuine give-and-take in our Presbyterian discussions and at the same time so much hanging on them. The issue is vitally connected to the question of whether we can stay together as a denomination. In that sense, the Presbyterian debates do not feel like friendly arguments over the breakfast table, or even the more heated kinds of exchanges that might take place in the presence of a marriage counselor. Rather, it often feels as if we are already getting ready for the divorce court, under pressure to measure every word that we say with an eye toward the briefs that our lawyers will be presenting as we move toward a final settlement.

Barbara Wheeler and I have argued much about the issues that threaten to divide us, but we share a strong commitment to continuing the conversation. She regularly makes her ease for staying together by appealing to a high ecclesiology. The church, she insists, is not a voluntary arrangement that we can abandon just because we do not happen to like some of the other people in the group. God calls us into the church, and that means that God requires that we hang in there with one another even if that goes against our natural inclinations.

I agree with that formulation. And I sense that many of my fellow evangelicals in the PCUSA would also endorse it. The question that many evangelicals are asking these days, though, is whether God expects us to hang in there at all costs.

One of my reasons for wanting to see us stick together is that a Presbyterian split would be a serious setback for the cause that I care deeply about, namely, the cause of Reformed orthodoxy. I spend a lot of time thinking about how people with my kind of theology have acted in the past, and I am convinced that splits inevitably diminish the influence of the kind of orthodoxy that I cherish--for at least two reasons.

First, the denomination from which the dissidents depart is typically left without strong voices to defend orthodoxy. This is what happened in the early decades of the 20th century when J. Gresham Machen and his colleagues broke away from the northern Presbyterian church.

I know that this is not a very popular thing to say in this setting, but I happen to be a strong admirer of Machen. I think that he pretty much had things right on questions of biblical authority, the nature of Christ's atoning work, and other key items on the theological agenda. But I have strong reservations about his ecclesiology, and I regret that his views about the unity of the church led him to abandon mainline Presbyterianism. As long as he remained within the northern church, he had a forum for demonstrating to liberals that Calvinist orthodoxy could be articulated with intellectual rigor. When he and his friends departed, this kind of witness departed with them.

The evangelicals who stayed on in the northern church generally did so because they were not as polemical as the Machen group; they were 'also not nearly as inclined as the Machenites to engage in sustained theological discussion. This meant that the quality, of theological argumentation in mainline Presbyterianism suffered for several decades--some would even say up to our present time.

The second way in which the cruise of Reformed orthodoxy was diminished has to do with what happened to the conservatives themselves alder they left the mainline denomination. They quickly began to argue among themselves, and it was not long before new splits occurred in their ranks. The result was that conservative Calvinism itself became a fractured movement.

I worry much about what would happen to Presbyterian evangelicals if we were to leave the PCUSA. When we evangelical types don't have more liberal people to argue with, we tend to start arguing with each other. And I can testify to the fact that intraevangelical theological arguments are not always pleasant affairs. I would much rather see us continue to focus on the major issues of Reformed thought in an admittedly pluralistic denomination than get into the debates that seem inevitably to arise when evangelicals have established their own "pure" denominations

In the 1970s and 1980s I spent considerable time in dialogue with Mennonite scholars about the differences between, the Reformed and Anabaptist traditions on political and ethical questions. One of the most interesting encounter of this sort happened one evening at a Mennonite church in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where Myron Augsburger and I debated the issues of just war doctrine and pacifism. I had come prepared to launch immediately into a critic of pacifism from my Calvinist perspective. But when Augsburger and I met in the afternoon to talk over the format for the evening, he proposed a somewhat different approach. "Let's do it differently tonight," he urged. "Let's each of us begin by talking in very personal terms about the things we respect in the other person's position."