Unity and Conformity
In church disputes—and there are always church disputes—it is easy to confuse conformity with unity. They are not the same. Unity acknowledges and embraces difference; it brings differences together. Conformity wants sameness; it insists that everyone think and talk the same. Unity builds bridges; conformity tears them down. The denomination in which I grew up, the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), has lately confused conformity with unity. It should not surprise us that the denomination seems to be coming apart.
As I outlined in a previous post, the last few CRC synods have worked to collapse the structure of Reformed theological authority into a single level, ruling that synodical decisions can have confessional authority, and that the confessions in turn have a quasi-scriptural authority. They have done so in the name of unity, but it’s not unity that these synods have wanted; it’s conformity.
And a rather narrow conformity, at that. It’s important to keep in mind what this is about: sex. Queer sex, to be specific. Not about a core Christian doctrine. Not Trinity, for example. Or election and reprobation. Or atonement. Or the sacraments. Synod 2022, presented with the opportunity to condemn queer sex, wanted to lock down its decision for all time—or as close as they could come to all time—by making their decision confessional.
In CRC polity synodical decisions are—at least, were—debatable. You need not agree with synod. If you choose, you may voice your disagreement out loud or in print or however else. If you are a synod delegate, you may even do so at the synod itself by registering your negative vote in the official minutes. You can’t be charged with heresy or brought up on ecclesiastical charges for merely throwing shade on a synodical decision.
This is not to say that synodical decisions do not have authority. They do. They set denomination policy. They are, in the language of the church order, “settled and binding.” Violating a synodical decision may have consequences. But synodical decisions are not, or at least historically were not, the end of the argument.
But ending the argument is what Synod 2022 and subsequent synods have wanted. They have wanted to enforce conformity on the issue of queer sex so that no one holding office in the CRC could claim, contrary to synod, that a case, biblical or theological or common sense, can be made for officially recognizing same-sex marriage in the church. They regard their convictions in this regard as—I’m quoting here—“a hill to die on,” a line not to be crossed. In short, confessional—what they mean by “confessional.”
Faultline
But that’s the issue. What does it mean for something to be confessional? Quite unintentionally in their rush to acquire confessional authority for their rulings on queer sex, recent CRC synods have exposed a faultline in the CRC. They have forced consideration of a long overdue question: what holds the denomination together? Unity in denominations like the CRC is based on the Reformed confessions. But how so? In my last post, I skirted this issue. In this post, I would like to face it head on.
Levels of Authority
For what follows, it’s important to keep in mind how each of the levels of ecclesiastical authority works or should work in a Reformed church like the CRC. The three levels are scripture (the Bible as read in the church), the creeds and confessions (in the CRC functionally limited to the Reformed confessions), and synodical decisions. Each carries its own weight, its own characteristic authority.
The focus in this post is on the second of these, the authority of the confessions, but allow me one additional comment on the authority of synodical decisions relevant to the moment in which we find ourselves. Let stand what I said above: that synodical decisions are, in the language of the church order, “settled and binding,” “settled and binding” meaning that that once decided a given synodical decision stands—until it doesn’t. A synodical decision is challengeable, but until altered by another synod, it has authority.
That may seem cut and dried: if synod decides, congregations and those who serve in them must obey. But this is not as clear as those in power in the CRC seem to think. For years CRC synods have debated the weight of synodical authority. They asked themselves—this has come up often—whether congregations can be compelled to obey. Most synods before 2022 ended up saying no: congregations can be “urged,” but they cannot be compelled to obey. Until the last few synods, the CRC has had a healthy respect for congregational autonomy. Synodical authority is important but not absolute. There has always been room for principled dissenters.
How the confessions should function in the church is a different and much trickier question. Recent CRC synods have been keen to add confessional authority to their synodical decisions on queer sex, assuming that doing so elevates the status of their decisions. I (and many others) have made the case that doing this is bad church order. It collapses the confessions into synodical process, which means that the confessions can be altered by any synod. Bad enough. But there is a deeper reason why claiming confessional authority for synodical decisions is dubious: it confuses two different kinds of authority. Confessional authority is not a stronger form of synodical authority, as recent synods seemed to have assumed. Confession authority is authority of a different kind. Synodical authority and confessional authority operate differently. (Were we to extend this analysis, we would want to say the same thing about biblical authority. It's of a different order than that of either the confessions or synods.)
Confessional authority in a way that is not true for synodical authority is about identity: who we are. The confessions in Reformed tradition are called, not for nothing, “forms of unity.” It’s how the denomination is held together that is at stake in the current controversy over queer sex. Those who lately wish to ban not only the practice of queer sex but the very mention of it view the confessions in a way that lends itself to conformity: they take the confessions as a kind of law. But this is neither the only nor the most compelling way to think of the role of the confessions. There are other ways, embedded in scripture and ultimately more constitutive of denominational unity, to under the proper role of the confessions in a confessional church like the CRC.
Subscription
In sorting this out, it's important to get the language right. Synodical decisions require obedience or, when necessary, principled disobedience. One obeys synod (or doesn’t). The language is the language of compliance. One does not obey the confessions. One subscribes to them. You sign on. It is not obedience so much as identification. In signing, one says: this is where I stand. These historic statements of faith speak for me.
In this regard, it’s important to remember how signing on to the confessions got started. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, delegates to various church assemblies representing dissenting (protestant) churches expressed their unity by signing copies of programmatic statements like the Belgic Confession—then one expression of the Reformed faith among others. By signing, delegates affirmed not just the words but the movement—the still developing movement to reform the church. To sign was dangerous. Subscription could cost you your life.
Eventually, when the moment of greatest danger had passed, subscription to the confessions began to be formalized. Instead of signing your name directly to a copy of a confession, assemblies began to require delegates to sign a “form of subscription”—a statement detailing what signing meant. (These early forms of subscription were all over the place, some requiring strict adherence to doctrine; some not.) The Reformed churches were moving toward a harder form of confessionalism: it was no longer here I stand with these others but here I stand on these doctrines. The movement was beginning to calcify into an orthodoxy. The arguments were no longer for the soul of the faith but for this version of (Reformed) theology or for that one. It wasn’t death one risked so much as heresy.
Call the first idea of subscription, standing with others in the fire of the moment, movement subscription. You sign on to a movement and to a program for reforming the church. You say: these people who sign along with me are my people. I stand with them. No one in that early era thought that a given document, like the Belgic Confession, was a final statement, a new scripture. It was a statement for the moment, something on which to take a stand, a program for changing the church. Always the movement was in view. The reform was not over. It remained dynamic. And for that reason, dangerous.
Gradually subscription to a movement was replaced by a second idea of subscription, doctrinal subscription. The focus of signing was not now pledging oneself to a movement but to agreement with the “doctrines” included in the confessions. These teachings were regarded as unchanging and definitional. By the Synod of Dort in 1618-9, Reformed churches were well on their way to this second understanding of subscription. It expressed a unity of the head more than the unity of the heart.
Center and Edge
Key to the current controversy in the CRC is that both of these ideas about subscription to the confessions are still operative in the church. In fact, both are found in the current CRC form for subscription to the confessions, the Covenant for Officebearers. And it’s precisely this confusion, with the confessions meaning one thing at one moment in the life of the denomination and quite another at a second moment, which has and continues to be milked for advantage by the recent CRC synods.
Look carefully at the language of CRC Covenant for Officebearers. It’s written in the first person plural: “we.” To sign the statement is to include oneself in that “we.” “We” speaks to unity. We affirm, it says:
. . . three confessions—the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort—as historic Reformed expressions of the Christian faith, whose doctrines fully agree with the Word of God. These confessions continue to define the way we understand Scripture, direct the way we live in response to the gospel, and locate us within the larger body of Christ [my italics].
Grateful for these expressions of faith, we promise to be formed and governed by them. We heartily believe and will promote and defend their doctrines faithfully, conforming our preaching, teaching, writing, serving, and living to them.
In reading these paragraphs, you will readily see that most of the language in the Covenant speaks to the historical role of the confessions. The confessions “define,” “direct,” and “locate.” This is identity language. It has in mind something like what I called above “movement subscription.” I will return to this below.
But we also find in the Covenant the clause I’ve italicized above: “whose doctrines fully agree with the Word of God,” the clause attached anomalously to the statement that the confessions are “historic Reformed expressions of the Christian faith.” When a new Covenant for Officebearers was proposed to Synod 2012, this “fully agree” language was not part of it. But the synod, not satisfied with “define,” “direct,” and “locate,” reached back to an earlier form of subscription for the claim that signing on to the confessions meant signing on to “doctrines” that “fully agree with the Word of God.” This is a quite different understanding of the confessions and what it means to subscribe to them—what I’ve called “doctrinal subscription.”
The difference between these two understandings of subscription is the difference between center and edge. In the one, movement subscription, the confessions characterize a theological and ecclesiastical direction and history. It’s as much how these statements go about their work as the work itself. The documents, after all, are from a specific historical moment. And they are the work of people who lived in a certain place and trained in certain kinds of schools. But for all that, they represent a theological impulse, characterized by their way of interrogating the scriptures, that continues among Reformed churches to the present. If one signs on, one signs on to this movement, this way of proceeding. In subscribing one claims a people and a history. In this view, the confessions center us.
In contrast, for doctrinal subscription, it’s not a history or a people or even a tradition to which one signs on. One signs on to teachings—teachings, it is claimed, that “fully agree with the Word of God.” If the first is the idea that the confessions center us, the second is the idea that the confessions define a Reformed theological boundary. It’s about what we are and what we are not. What we think, and what all those others think. It’s edge and not center. Conformity more than unity.
Chosing or Chosen: Two Views of Unity
I began this essay by asking what holds the church together. This is not merely a denominational question but a question for the church as a whole. If, as the Nicene Creed has it, we believe in “one holy catholic and apostolic church,” in what do we find the church’s oneness?
For those who demand doctrinal subscription, the unity of the church is to be found in the agreement of its members. What holds a church together is its agreement on a set of doctrines. Since Synod 2022, these key (confessional) teachings have included the denominational position on queer sex. In this way of thinking, the CRC has grown more unified over the past few years as those who dissent from the denominational position are forced out. Unity is a kind of purity. More uniformity than true unity.
In this way, churches—denominations—become brands. There is something deeply American about this way of thinking about unity. The denominational idea began in America. The church is divided into various brands, some old and some new. It’s up to you to choose which fits your religious preferences. Step up to the religious smorgasbord. Recent CRC synods were all about clarifying the brand.
But this view of unity is neither biblical nor Reformed. In the New Testament (and implicitly in Reformed theology), unity is not where you end up. It’s not something you choose. Unity is where you begin or, better, where God begins. Having had this community thrust on you, the task is to work out how best to live together. You don’t get to choose your faith family.
Perhaps the story that best captures this way of thinking about unity is the story found in Acts 10. Peter, like Jesus an observant Jew, arrives at the house of Cornelius, an officer in the Roman army occupying the ancient land of Israel. In Luke’s account, Peter seems rather annoyed to be there. He’s not welcoming. From the point of view of growing the church, it’s not a promising beginning.
On arriving at Cornelius’s house, Peter gives a brief statement of the gospel. At the heart of his proclamation is the claim that God is bringing the world together through and in the risen messiah, Jesus of Nazarus. He is still speaking when the gentiles in the room begin to manifest signs of the Spirit. Peter stops, astounded. He says, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” And then, “he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 10:47-8).
“Can anyone withhold the water?” Can anyone deny that these gentiles are equally church with Peter’s company? This new unity of Jerusalem Jews and Caesarean gentiles was not something they achieved or even something they wanted; it was manifested among them. Unity was not the goal; unity was the fact. There remained much to overcome, but that was for later. Christian (Reformed) theology begins—or should begin—with the fact of unity, and then try to work out what that unity should look like.
An even more stunning example is the book of Ephesians. Again, the theme of the book is unity: the tearing down the wall of separation between Jew and gentile Christians. But it begins with chosenness (Ephesians 1:2-14). In a passage that gladdens the hearts of Calvinists, the writer (Paul or someone writing in the voice of Paul) says in highly charged language that against all expectations God chose “us,” the “us” including Paul and his company and, as he says, the Ephesians themselves, to make “known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” For Paul this is the great mystery (see Ephesians 3), not that he chose Christ but that Christ chose him and others to proclaim to all God’s great plan to heal all the divisions of humanity and bring all people together in Christ.
In this view, the church is chosen not by Paul or the Ephesians or us but by God. Election in Ephesians is not some divine lottery game, as it is sometimes portrayed in Reformed theology—these lucky winners go to heaven and those others don’t—but the fact of our having been brought together in whatever way we have been brought together as the church of Christ. And this not for our sake, but for the sake of the world.
Election in this sense is the recognition of the sheer facticity of our having been thrust into the role of witnesses to the divine plan to gather all things in a new way of being human. It’s an answer to the question: why us? And the answer is who knows? But here we are and we have been given this task. It’s with this mystery (Paul’s word) that Ephesians begins. It’s not that what we choose, but what has chosen us. We have been brought together in ways we can scarcely imagine, Jews, Greeks, women, men, those enslaved and those who enslaved them, poor and rich, those who have gone to school and those who haven’t, those who love Christian rock and those cannot abide it, and on and on. We didn’t sign up to this. Its not the sort of community we would choose. It’s what we are: “one holy catholic and apostolic church.”
Apply Ephesians (and Acts 10) to the confessions. In a smaller, historically conditioned way, God brought people together in new ways to renew the church. The confessions are their statements of wonder, their way of understanding the moment in which they lived and the mission to which they were called. Their “mystery.” And we, we who call ourselves Reformed, are now part of this. We have been brought together with them, with others, to carry the flame in this new age. It’s not what we choose that matters but what chose us.
This perspective has been parodied as legacy Christianity—people who believe they are entitled to membership in the church because they were born to it. But the parody misses the point: it’s not legacy that holds us together but God called us, an ever diversifying community, some born CRC, some not, some now RCA, some Presbyterian, like me, but still in this last day called to be one.
Once we recognize our unity, we will have much work to do. Belonging is never easy. But if we begin with belonging, we will in most cases find ways to work it out. I know. I had to learn what it means to belong. I’ve told the story before, perhaps too often, but it’s worth telling again. When I was applying a second time to the CRC for ordination, after having been rejected the first time for my views on the early chapters of Genesis, Henry Stob, long-time much esteemed professor at Calvin Seminary, said to me with his characteristic brevity: “Clay, what they [the synod, the church in general] want to know is whether you are for us or against us.” I decided that I was for us, and that this people and this history and this mission was mine, like it or not.
So count this as a belated plea, a plea that we—whoever we are—begin not with the unity we would choose but with the unity that we are. Or were. And still are. We did not choose this mystery; we have been chosen by it. And we have work to do. Being chosen means puzzling out the meaning of the mystery that we are together (Ephesians 3:1-13). Working that out is not where we end but where we begin.
Clay
Excellent. Unity vs Conformity is well written.