BCCN - Who?
B.C. Christian News, December 1997
Who do they say that He is?
By Peter T. Chattaway
RECENT controversies within the United and Anglican denominations have once again focused attention on the question of Jesus' divinity and whether or not belief in Jesus is essential for salvation.
In each case, the controversy was sparked by a church leader who made statements that struck the more conservative members of his denomination as a denial of Christian orthodoxy. Specifically, both leaders -- United Church of Canada moderator Bill Phipps and Anglican bishop Michael Ingham -- have stated that Jesus is not the only way to God, and that salvation exists outside of Christianity.
The greatest controversy has probably been over the remarks of Phipps, who was quoted in the October 24 issue of The Ottawa Citizen as saying: "I don't believe Jesus was God . . . I don't believe he rose from the dead as a scientific fact. I don't know whether those things happened. It's an irrelevant question."
Bill Phipps |
Phipps, who was elected moderator of the UCC last August, went on to say, "I don't believe Jesus is the only way to God . . . I believe that Christ reveals to us as much of the nature of God as we can see in a human being . . . The whole concept of the nature of God is broader and wider and more mysterious and more holy than could be expressed in Jesus . . . That doesn't mean that Jesus is the totality of God."
While Phipps was praised by some for his "bravery," his remarks brought an immediate protest from several UCC churches, especially in Ontario and the Maritimes, which called for his resignation and claimed that he had failed to uphold the beliefs of the church.
The executive of the General Council of the UCC considered these petitions at its November 21 - 24 meeting in Toronto and issued a statement in which they acknowledged the feedback, both pro and con, generated by Phipps' remarks and affirmed that, while the UCC moderator has a right to express his personal point of view, his freedom of expression "must be tempered by the need for congruence with stated policies and statements of The United Church of Canada."
In the interim, Phipps, who pastors Scarboro United Church in Calgary, has met with several congregations and released statements of his own in an attempt to clarify his position. Referring to his interview with the Citizen, Phipps said, "It was clear that the opinions expressed by me were mine alone . . . However, I believe that nothing I said is outside the broad mainstream of United Church belief."
Bumper sticker theology?
Bob Smith, pastor at First United Church in Vancouver and a former UCC moderator himself, told BC Christian News that Phipps was the victim of secular reporters who failed to convey the nuances of his beliefs. "They're trying to reduce theology to bumper stickers," he said. "He's being tried in the media by headline, and I can't tell you how unfair that is."
Bob Smith |
Smith also said people were using theology as "a kind of passive-resistant avoidance mechanism" so they wouldn't have to deal with Phipps' focus on social issues. "People don't want to talk about the moral economy. They don't want to talk about Jesus and the poor. They want to talk about theological abstractions," said Smith.
But according to Dr. Don Faris, pastor at North Lonsdale United Church in North Vancouver, one cannot motivate believers to political action without first grounding them in proper doctrine. Christian ethics, including concern for the poor, are grounded in "the very materialism of the incarnation and the resurrection," he said.
"It's correct Christian belief which drives social action, and when you damage Christian belief as Phipps has done, by questioning the real incarnation and resurrection of the Lord, you simply disembowel social action," added Faris, who was at one time an NDP MLA in Saskatchewan. "There's less social action going on now in the United Church than there ever has in the past, and that's partly because the leadership of the United Church in the last 10 years has managed to lose 25 per cent of our church attendance. Once you undercut the gospel, what you end up with is a sort of ethical debating society, instead of a Christian church."
Mansions of the Spirit
A debate of another sort took place November 25 at Christ Church Cathedral, where Michael Ingham, Bishop of the New Westminster diocese, discussed his book, Mansions of the Spirit, with an audience of about 200.
In his opening presentation, Ingham summarized the main points of his book, which he said was an attempt to build peace between religions and an attempt to address the fact that "every religion has a history of violence," which he called a "strange paradox."
Michael Ingham |
This paradox, he said, has its roots in the fact that each religion makes a claim about "ultimate truth" and demands a commitment to it from its followers. But sometimes those claims lead to absolutism, and that, he said, can lead to imperialism and intolerance.
Ingham said he rejects exclusivism -- the belief that only those who profess a belief in Jesus Christ can be saved -- because it "distorts" the Bible and because it suggests that God would condemn billions of people simply because they have never heard of Jesus. To Ingham, such a God would be "abhorrent," "repugnant" and "im-moral," "not like the loving father of whom Jesus spoke, but like an abusive father."
Ingham also rejected inclusivism, the belief that Jesus would save people outside the Christian faith, because it retained exclusivism's "imperialistic" and "absolutist" character. And although he embraces a form of pluralism, he acknowledged that pluralism also has its problems, not least in that it has difficulty distinguishing between "demonic" and "life-giving" beliefs.
The solution, Ingham said, was to transcend theology altogether and follow the "monks and mystics" of all religions who experience God directly. "We need to move beyond theology altogether to prayer," said Ingham. "Doctrine divides, but prayer unites."
In response to critics who attended the dialogue, Ingham denied that he had compromised his ordination vows and said God's jealousy, reflected throughout the Old Testament, should not be interpreted as an exclusivist claim, but as a way of challenging "the impoverishment and diminishing of human life."
Ingham also said the 39 Articles of the Anglican Church, which specify that salvation is through Christ alone, "offer a snapshot of what our church held and believed in the 16th century" and must be interpreted against the background of the Crusades, which had come to an end only decades before.
J. I. Packer responds
But J. I. Packer, professor of theology at Regent College, told BC Christian News that prayer cannot unite people when they have very different understandings of God. "Frankly, I don't think the activity of prayer gets you any further than maintaining a proper humility and a sense of needing help in the whole enterprise of seeking to know God," he said.
Packer also cited a number of verses in the New Testament which, he said, point to the early Christian belief that salvation was through Jesus alone, and he said this was what motivated the growth of the church in the first place.
"Why did they think that was necessary? Why did they want to make disciples of all nations? Why did they think it important to plant churches everywhere? If Ingham is right, then it wasn't important, and they all got Christianity wrong from the word go, including Jesus himself," Packer said.
J. I. Packer |
David Short, rector at St. John's (Shaughnessy) Anglican Church, commended Ingham's book for raising the question of how the church ought to live in a pluralistic culture. But he also said the book "does not further the discussion one little bit. It's a regurgitation of views which are regarded as passé by the majority of New Testament scholars today."
Short also questioned Ingham's suggestion that such apparently exclusivist passages as John 14:6-7 reflect a specific historical context and may not be the historical words of Jesus.
"That's a two-edged sword," said Short. "I could easily build an historical reconstruction that could explain away the statements in scriptures that say that God is love. Once you start playing around with scriptures and say the historical situation explains why we have this text, you set up a greater authority outside the text of scripture."
Short said Ingham had abandoned the Anglican tradition of following "scripture interpreted by reason within the context of tradition." By giving a privileged status to mysticism, Ingham "has added the category of experience at the bottom, and then he's turned the whole thing upside down," Short said.
Both Short and Packer described themselves as exclusivists, but said they did not know what happens in the afterlife to people who have never heard about Jesus. "I leave that to the God who made the human race and whose attitude to mankind is one of love and good will," said Packer.
Seeds of doubt
Critics within both denominations have expressed concern that, in chipping away at the mainstays of Christian doctrine, both leaders may be doing harm to those within Christianity itself. But both Ingham and Phipps, while recognizing the turmoil that has followed their publicly stated positions, have said it's important to leave room for disagreement and uncertainty in matters of faith.
At the Christ Church event, Ingham declared: "I hope I have sown the seeds of doubt. That was why I wrote the book. But I don't see doubt as the opposite of faith. The opposite of faith is certainty. Doubt and faith are companions."
Phipps expressed similar sentiments when he appeared on Bill Good's CKNW talk show November 26 and said that Christians need to "understand the contradictions in the Bible."
"The Bible isn't clear at all, in any of the accounts of the resurrection, what form that took . . . The resurrection is a very powerful event, but we must never forget its mystery," Phipps said.
Growing chasm
But some, such as Rev. Stuart Appenheimer of Brighouse United Church in Richmond, have expressed concern that the current debates reflect a growing chasm between denominational leaders and regular churchgoers.
"As the bureaucracy has led in one direction, many churches have just opted out and don't pay much attention to what goes on nationally any more," Appenheimer said. But he also noted that the more liberal theology of the hierarchy may trickle down to local churches through the seminaries.
His concerns may be supported by a 1994 survey of the United Church conducted by Reg Bibby, a sociologist of religion at the University of Lethbridge. In his survey, Bibby found that at least four out of five UCC members held "traditional beliefs concerning the existence of God, the divinity of Jesus and life-after-death," while only one in four faculty members in UCC seminaries believed it was very important to confess "Jesus as Lord and Savior."
Appenheimer also expressed concern that Phipps had "produced a fault line" across the UCC and "polarized" it, leaving little room for moderates, though he did not expect any churches to leave the denomination just yet.
Brian Thorpe, executive secretary for the United Church in B.C., said the UCC would probably stay together as long as it held to its core doctrines, but it had to leave room for its members to interpret them. "I think we can stay united, but it is important for us to be clear about our identity. We couldn't stay united if we ceased to be a Christian church," he said.
"We have to remember that we do have some seminal theological positions articulated in the Basis of Union and the Statement of Faith in 1940. And in order to remain united, we can have all sorts of debate and struggle around how we interpret them, but I don't think we'd remain united if we ever got to the point of just abandoning them."
For his part, Bishop Ingham recognized polarization and a sort of abandonment as somewhat inevitable, but also possibly beneficial.
In an interview with BC Christian News after his lecture, he said, "When there is a paradigm shift, there is always a drawing apart, a polarization of thoughts and deeds. That's not a bad thing. If I could use an analogy in science, when science begins to propose new hypothetical models for seeing physics or particle physics or the structure of the atom, and it challenges formerly received models, people don't throw up their hands and cry out, 'This is a betrayal of science!' What they do is they regard that as part of the scientific enterprise.
"And I think there's no need for us in the church, when a new theological model is proposed, to just argue that anyone should see that as, in some sense, a betrayal of the faith. It's always been a part of the faith and its development. Theology, religious thought, evolves and changes, and old models pass away."
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