I took my thoughts out into the bigger world. https://youtu.be/K5PZtwq3zto
On this morning’s livestream https://www.youtube.com/live/7IByI5R64Q4?si=Cbp-o-SBNE2RdyD2 (long stream, you’d have to jump forward to the place around where I spoke. I’ll probably make a clip video of the salient parts later today…) I got into the fact that:
- Clean room catechesis is wishful thinking in our media saturated pluralistic society. the old Heidelberger as Snapper’s uncle used to call it simply is such a tiny part of the formation of anyone born after WWII.
- “three forms of unity” hardly are acting that way right now. They are supposed to be sort of a smaller canon to help the church but the issues we are fighting over aren’t even the main events in those documents nor of those times. The major fights of the CRC have mostly been peripheral to those documents. That isn’t to say that those documents can’t speak to them, but they don’t address them directly in the way that they addressed the issues of their own day.
- Most of us are dealing with something that is both mono-culture (lots of big sins with real punishments like racism or sexism publicly) and also a poly-culture where people do come from various traditions. We have semi-detached religious institutions trying to control confessionality but if you really dig down, and multiply the sorts of religious opinions one must form to deal with his deeply interconnected age achieving some sort of confessional synthesis is tremendously difficult.
Fortunately we are capable of pragmatic management at a local level which helps people compromise on various areas in order to form a religious institution. I believe that with enough background knowledge probably find significant disagreement in any council room among various topics that you could provoke the need for CDG at many levels if pushed hard enough. What does double predestination really mean and how far do you carry or practice it? We have examples in our history. What about limited atonement? Does life begin at conception? Are you ready to prosecute IVF or frozen eggs as if they are murder or human life?
I don’t intend to provoke people to give their answers to these questions. My point is that I can probably provoke ENOUGH questions to any group of people to force them into accepting that they technically should submit a CDG on some point or another, but the vast majority don’t. Why not? Because they don’t need to. Why not? Because they have quite adequately figured out the mind of the body to a degree of sufficiency to know what is in and what is out even in an interconnected way for the church.
Now that we have all these old acts and agendas for Synod online go back and check out what they fought about then. Marriage and divorce. Adoption was a huge issue of debate. Should you baptize adopted children?
The meta-point around Harry Boer’s story is that our prescribed process isn’t practicable. A few thousand well educated CRC officers could submit Confessional Revision Gravamen and not one of them would be processed in a way that would likely satisfy the spirit of the process. If we couldn’t do it with Harry Boer, who could we do it with? If we couldn’t do it over double predestination what could we do it over?
Modern liturgies are governing. Most office bearers want to serve their local churches. They operate with a good-enough mental thumbnail of their local church as it relates to their personal thumbnail of their theological convictions. They will visit homes, count money, go to meetings, decide what is a boundary issue and what is a gray area. They will be faithful to their thumbnail of what faithfulness is all contextualized to the situation today. It isn’t disconnected from our historical confessions but the mapping isn’t nearly as high resolution as our system proports it to be.
- The way forward is probably being more honest about the level of analysis. The individual is too complex, and the complexity is reduced at the level of the body of a local congregation, and then up from there. What is the confession of that local congregation? It will have a far smaller footprint. They will be taking received texts of various kinds, including the old confessions, but of course their reading will not be genetic but epi-genetic. There will be areas of those confessions that are fairly active in the life of the church and a lot of code that has gone quite dormant. That’s OK. There is also a lot of code that is implicit and unwritten. The local office bearers know that code and could be provoked to articulate it to a degree if necessary but for the most part it is embedded in local practice. It is good enough to keep the local church going.
The same is true of a classis and even the Synod. It operates. People are amazing. Each have their own spirit.
- We are now at a likely breaking point. We have two groups with code that is incompatible, at least for a season. It might be that in 20 or 30 years if the churches survive they can come back together. Maybe not. We will see what survives 30 years at all. I think a better way is to stay in dialogue even if structures have to be adjusted. None of us are wise enough to really know what happens with this fork in the code as we move forward. Life is like that. Maybe conservative churches will ossify and wither. Maybe affirming will flourish or fade. I don’t know. All of the above is what usually happens and only some of it will be related to the issues at hand.
- We are having a confessional conversation. We have to figure out what these things are. How they work. How we work. pvk
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