This address was delivered on Oct. 10, 2024, at Theology Matters’ fourth conference at Providence Presbyterian Church, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.
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“The Gates of Hell shall not prevail against the church.” We heard this theme––the theme of this conference–– brilliantly proclaimed last night in worship.[1] And we heard the text of Matthew 16 and the supremely important question that Jesus asks of his disciples: “Who do you say that I am?”
I remember an old joke that references this text––it goes something like this: Jesus asked his disciples, “What are people saying about me?” And they offered a few responses.
Then He became more specific. “How about you? What do you think? Who do you say that I am?”
After a long silence, Simon Peter stepped forward and said: “Rabbi, you are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of all Being, the ontological foundation of our very selfhood revealed, the kerygma of eternal proclamation.” And Jesus looked around at his disciples and said, “Does anybody else have an idea?”My son, Jonny, is working on becoming a commercial pilot and I’ve learned that the language they speak in the cockpit would not often be understood by any non-pilot. But when the pilot speaks to the passengers in the cabin, a plain and simple language is needed and is spoken. Every preacher, every academic, needs to remember this.
The fact that the New Testament is written in koine Greek––the common street language spoken by the people––is sufficient evidence, I think, that when it comes to the proclamation of the good news, the Lord takes seriously the importance of clear and effective communication. Without that––apart from clear and effective communication––the gospel message can easily get garbled and lose its cutting edge.
In his memoir, The Pastor, Eugene Peterson tells the story of establishing a new congregation in Bel Air, Maryland. He writes:
One of the attractions for me … was the prospect of forming a church of disciplined and committed Christians, focused and energetic. I think I had the image of a congregation of Green Berets for Jesus. No half-Christians, no almost-Christians, but the real thing.
I had imagined that when word got out that a new congregation was being formed, it would attract men and women who were willing to take risks, who were prepared to make sacrifices, who weren’t interested in
comfortable pews. I went through the neighborhoods, knocking on doors, introducing myself and asking if I could talk to them about this new church. … After six weeks …, I wrote a letter to everyone who had expressed an interest inviting them to worship with us in the basement of our home the next Sunday. Forty-six people showed up. And still no Green Berets. …
What I wasn’t prepared for was the low level of interest that the men and women in my congregation had in God and the scriptures, prayer, and their souls. Not that they didn’t believe and value these things; they just weren’t very interested. …
The lack of common cause resulted in what seemed to me was a lot of religious clutter, much of what struck me as an accumulation of trivia. My imagination had been schooled in the company of Moses and David, my congregation kept emotional and mental company with television celebrities and star athletes. I was reading Karl Barth and John Calvin; they were reading Ann Landers and People magazine.[2]
Peterson goes on to describe the messiness of the church and to affirm that those of us who are part of the church, who love the church, know that the church is scrambled, mixed-up, and messy (another word for that is sinful)––primarily because each of us brings our own scrambled, mixed-up, messy, sinful selves into the church.
But I would like to add an addendum to Peterson’s assessment of the church. Despite all the messiness, there is simply no place more important for theology to matter than in the local church, the visible expression of the Body of Christ.
Here, of all places, theology matters. And bad theology matters, too––for the implications of not getting it right are enormous. If the church doesn’t rightly understand who God is, what He has done and is doing, who we are in Him, who He is in us, what we’re called to become and to do by the indwelling power of the Spirit––well, it’s the world that suffers. For the light of Christ has been placed under a bushel and the proclamation of good news is muted and often lost. And that’s what brings us here this week.
You might remember the mission statement of this movement called Theology Matters: “to encourage, equip, and inspire the Christian community,” that is, the church, “and the Reformed-Presbyterian family,” that is, the church that speaks with a certain Reformed accent.
How is this done according to Theology Matters? “… by articulating theology in a clear and coherent way that is reformed according to God’s Word,” that is,by bearing witness to the truth of Jesus Christ, by relying on the guidance of the Holy Spirit, by drawing scattered Presbyterians together, by solidifying Reformed theology and proclamation.
The mission statement continues: “The task of theology is to evaluate the church’s proclamation of the gospel according to Scripture and as attested in the catholic creeds and the Reformed confessions and catechisms of the church, in order to ensure that it is an authentic proclamation of the gospel and not something other. This urgent work must be done afresh in every age.”
“In every age”—such as our own.
Karl Barth, although he had a complicated relationship with the teachings of John Calvin, would agree with this. When he was twenty-three years-old, serving as an assistant pastor in Calvin’s old church in Geneva, he became much more fully conversant with Calvin’s writings.
Twelve years later, when teaching courses on Calvin and Reformed Theology at the University of Göttingen, Barth wrote a letter to his friend, Eduard Thurneysen, a theologian in his own right. It includes this paragraph:
The little bit of ‘Reformed theology’ that I teach is really nothing in comparison to the trumpet blast which needs to be blown in our sick time [1922]. … Calvin is … a primeval forest, … something directly down from the Himalaya, absolutely Chinese, strange, mythological; I lack completely the means, the suction cups, even to assimilate this phenomenon, not to speak of presenting it adequately. What I receive is only a thin little stream and what I can then give out again is only a yet thinner extract of this little stream. I could gladly and profitably set myself down and spend all the rest of my life just with Calvin.[3]
Theology Matters is clearly committed to this. And there’s much good that comes from receiving the spiritual blessings embedded in this Reformed tradition.
If there is anything I have learned from parish ministry, it is that life brims with collisions that require well-anchored theological reflection.
A personal example: it happened on Christmas Eve, 2012. I was finishing up some preparation in my study at the church when I received a phone call. It was 4:15 p.m., just forty-five minutes or so before the first of our Christmas Eve services would begin.
I answered the call. A longtime friend and member of the congregation said, “Jim, I’m calling about our son ––he took his life today. We’re just coming home from the hospital.”
Their boy was a bright and gifted eighteen-year-old senior in high school. I simply could not believe what I had just heard. “What do you mean?” I asked. What happened?” And then the story tumbled out.
It was now 4:30 p.m.––and I did not really know what to do. Two dear friends had just lost their beloved son to suicide. And I was headed into a beautiful candle-lit sanctuary ready to speak these opening words:
Friends, hear the good news: Once upon a night, God poked His face into our benighted world, wrapped Himself in baby clothes and came and lived among us ––undertaking a rescue operation of untold proportions. And in the darkness of that night shepherds were watching their flocks when an angel suddenly appeared to them and said: “Fear not for behold I bring you good news of a great joy that will be to all the people: for unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And you will find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. And a host of angels appeared….and began to sing: “Glory to God in the highest—and on earth peace among those with whom He is pleased!” (Luke 2).
It was one of the worst theological collisions I have ever experienced, like two trains coming from opposite directions, one bringing great good news and the other bringing unspeakably bad news. Joy and anguish intermingled.
What do we do with this? How does the Christian community address this? The great apostle tells Timothy: “I want you to do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15). And there’s no better place to grow in theological understanding than in the real time events of life within the Christian community.
When I was a second-year student at Princeton Seminary, I took a systematic theology course on John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion taught by Dr. Edward Dowey. I still remember his opening words at the beginning of the semester: “John Calvin wrote the Institutes when he was twenty-seven years old; I challenge you to read them by the time you’re twenty-seven!”
Well, I was twenty-four at the time and I remember thinking: “I’ve got three years. I can meet that challenge.” But I didn’t even get close. In the intervening years, though, I’ve learned why Dr. Dowey would charge his students to read Calvin, to embrace the insights of the Reformed tradition. It’s time-tested, spiritually enriching, nourishing, and has the power to awaken us to the Spirit’s presence in our lives.
So, here’s my second story. I was invited to speak at a retreat hosted by a longstanding Sunday School class at the local Methodist Church in downtown Tulsa. There must have been close to a hundred people in the class and they had been meeting together week by week, Sunday by Sunday, for over thirty years. They knew each other well and were comfortable being transparent with each other.
In preparing for the weekend, the leader of the class said to me, “Why don’t you just get us thinking a bit about John 3:16-17. Let that text serve as your theme.”
So, I did. And while I was preparing, I decided that a Presbyterian minister headed to a Methodist retreat should bring John Calvin with him and offer a Reformed insight or two. This is what I found in Calvin’s commentary on John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Calvin writes:
Christ shows the first cause and as it were source of our salvation. And this He does that no doubt may be left. For there is no calm haven where our minds can rest until we come to God’s free love. The whole substance of our salvation is not to be sought anywhere else than in Christ. … For men [and women] are not easily convinced that God loves them; and so, to remove all doubt, He has expressly stated that we are so very dear to God that for our sakes He did not spare even His only begotten Son. God has most abundantly declared His love toward us and therefore whoever is still doubtful and unsatisfied by this testimony does Christ a serious injury, as if He had been some ordinary man who had died accidentally. We should rather consider that God’s love for His only begotten Son is a measure of how precious our salvation was to Him, that He willed that the death of the Only Begotten Himself should be its price.[4]
This is an amazing statement––and not least the line: “For men [and women] are not easily convinced that God loves them.” And it is the gospel truth. It is not easy to convince the world that God loves the world.
I brought that single thought to the retreat and invited the group to reflect on whether there had ever been a time in their lives when they were not convinced that God loved them. And people started to stand up and tell their stories––as I suspect many of us could do just now.
Said one, “I was in the fourth grade when a policeman came into my elementary school classroom and walked up to the teacher’s desk. Then both the teacher and the policeman came to where I was seated; they asked me to come with them to the principal’s office. When I got there, they sat me down and told me that my father had been murdered. Even as a fourth grader, God’s love suddenly seemed very far away. How could He allow this to happen to my dad?”
Another voice spoke up: “I prayed for years that the Lord would bring a faithful, loving Christian man into my life. And when I was married, I was certain that my husband was the answer to my prayers. Less than five years later I learned that he had been unfaithful––and our marriage ended in a train-wreck. For the next twenty years, I never spoke to God, not one time.”
It is not easy to convince the world that God loves the world.
Many of you know the name Bart Ehrman. He is a gifted professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He was a student at Wheaton College when I taught there in the Greek Department. We occasionally had coffee together and he was asking about which seminary might be a good place for him.
He went on to Princeton Seminary, gained his Ph.D.––but he lost his faith along the way. As he describes it, it was the suffering in the world––the wounds, and the hurts all around him––that caused him to question everything about God––even His existence. For Ehrman, the most searching question became: How could a loving God allow such tragedies?
Ah, theology matters.
And the question comes straight to the local church, the visible expression of the Body of Christ on earth. What would you say to a Bart Ehrman? How do we the followers of Jesus enter his questions, walk with him, listen to him, challenge him, encourage him? Ah, theology matters.
In his commentary on Galatians, Martin Luther invites us to grow in humility and faith. He writes:
Therefore let no one boast or glory in his own righteousness, wisdom, and other gifts, but let him humble himself and pray with the apostles (Luke 17:5): Let us humble ourselves and pray with the apostles, “Lord, increase our faith!”
And then he writes:
I am making such a point of all this to keep anyone from supposing that the doctrine of faith is an easy matter. It is indeed easy to talk about, but hard to grasp, and it is easily obscured and lost. Therefore let us with all diligence and humility devote ourselves to the study of Sacred Scripture and to serious prayer, lest we lose the truth of the Gospel.[5]
Can that really happen? Can we lose the truth of the Gospel? Well, the historians among us, I think, would offer an undoubted and emphatic, “O Yes!” Without devoting ourselves to the study of sacred Scripture, to prayer, and to cultivating Christian community, we can lose the truth of the gospel.
An obvious example would be the scrambled church in Germany living under the Nazi regime––a subject that Martha Burnett will speak to in one of our breakout sessions.
Or, closer to home: Is the church in our day losing the truth of the Gospel? Is the Presbyterian Church (USA)
––the expression of the church many of us serve––at risk of wandering from the apostolic and historic faith? I don’t believe it’s being an alarmist to say, “Yes––in many respects, we have––and we are.”
I’m reminded of the cautionary word we find in the Letter to the Hebrews: “We must pay the greater attention to what we have heard––lest we drift away from it” (Heb. 2:1).
You don’t have to do anything in order to drift. You just take your oars out of the water and the current takes you where it’s headed. If you row your boat to the middle of the Mississippi and fall asleep, when you awaken, you’ll find yourself in a very different place than where you started. So too, with the spiritual currents in which you and I swim. We must pay closer attention to what we have heard.
I would encourage you to take up Dr. Burnett’s essay, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” It’s a brilliant assessment of where we are in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and how far the currents of our age can carry us off course. I stopped reading when I came to this sentence in Richard’s essay: “Olympia Presbytery recently denied ordination to two candidates who refused to affirm that Christian marriage is anything other than a covenant between one man and one woman.” [6]
I simply did not know that had happened. I suppose I should not have been surprised. But I am. The idea that a pastoral candidate in the PCUSA (in this case in the Olympia Presbytery) who holds to a sexual ethic that the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church has affirmed for more than two thousand years … the idea that this candidate would be denied ordination on that count––should dismay us all.
And if there is any group that understand these kinds of challenges facing the church here in these United States, it would be this Theology Matters community.
Nevertheless! There is good news according to Jesus our Lord: “I will build my church and the gates of hell [Hades]shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). Hades, of course, is the realm of the dead. So, we might take Jesus promise this way––whatever is deadly, lethal, life-threatening, whatever is part of the realm of the dead––none of this will ultimately prevail against the church.
One thing is for sure: Jesus, the King of kings and Lord of lords, rules and overrules in every event and circumstance; He has rescued His flock, washing us from our sins and redeeming us in spite of them. His power to bend evil to the good is infinite. How else might we refer to God-awful Friday as Good Friday?
This is biblical theology––and it truly does matter. And this is great good news, indeed.
[1] Lorenzo R. Small, “A Firm Foundation,” Theology Matters 30/4 (Fall), 2024: 13–14.
[2]. Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir (New York: HarperOne, 2012), 104–106.
[3] Karl Barth to Eduard Thurneysen, June 8, 1922. Revolutionary Theology in the Making: Barth–Thurneysen Correspondence, 1914–1925 (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1964), 101.
[4] John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel According to John, trans. T.H.L. Parker (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1961), (John 3:16): 73–74. Italics added.
[5] Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians (1535) in Luther’s Works v. 26, trans. Jaroslav Pelican (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1963), Gal. 2:13, 114.
[6] Richard E. Burnett, “‘Shall the Fundamentalists Win?’ Whether Christian Liberty Survives in the PCUSA,” Theology Matters 30/1 (Winter), 2024: 1–4.
