Why the Belhar Confession Should Be Adopted - a response to Mr. Alan Wisdom

Why the Belhar Confession Should Be Adopted

The Belhar merits inclusion in our confessional standards because no other confessional standard speaks to the essential balance of unity, reconciliation and justice so powerfully, nor ties the church’s mission to the nature of Trinity so humbly and beautifully.

Don’t let the two simple statements that kick off the confession scoot past you.  They may not be flowery or loquacious.  They don’t need to be.  These statements are the framework for the entire confession.  The Belhar is meant to reflect the working of our Triune God by calling us to embrace unity, reconciliation and justice in equal measure in all we do.  It intends to draw our eye, not myopically on our immediate circumstances, but far more broadly to embrace the whole of Christ’s church everywhere.

Belhar calls us to unity, not just within our own sanctuaries but among all Christian churches.  Belhar calls us to broker reconciliation, not just between dissident members or families, but between severed denominations and, most importantly, between the broken world God so loves and the Christ of our salvation.  Belhar calls us to justice, not only to see how inequality takes power out of another’s hands, but to be our metric for the success of all we do in Christ’s name.  Most significantly, the Belhar challenges us to work on all three concurrently, urgently and equally.

There aren’t a whole lot of churches that do this well, or even try.  A church that excels in keeping unity within its membership often does so at the cost of alienating other congregations by constantly defining self against her neighbors.  A church that majors in evangelism often fails when it comes to standing up for social justice issues.  A church that readily pickets and petitions and participates in politics may not have a clue how to do so in Jesus’ name.

Belhar won’t stand for this nonsense.  Belhar will challenge churches to break out of these broken and ineffective patterns.  Belhar will make us ask important questions so our ministries are fully formed to reflect the God we serve and not just the traditions of our parishes.  To the evangelistic will come questions about offering tangible salvific acts to the poor, the orphan and the widow.  To the reclusive will come questions about their ministry with the greater Body of Christ.  To the politically eager will come questions about their willingness to abandon religious language when making a stand. 

Further, Belhar won’t allow us to consider racism as all but dead in the water.  Racism is a persistent evil with deep, deep roots.  Think outside of America for a moment.  In Chiapas, Mexico, the Mestizo govern and hold all property and consider the indigenous natives of Mayan descent as dogs.  In India a social caste system amounts to a religious oppressive force perpetuating the cycle of poverty.  Israelis and Palestinians see the other, not as children of God, but as thieves stealing holy ground.

And here in America racism still thrives, not only in the kind of outward rejection, isolation and stereotypical assumptions we can all identify, but more surreptitiously in institutionalized policies, learned distrust and shared communal pain.  The Belhar makes us ask why only blacks were crowded into the Superdome when Katrina hit, why Franklin and Marshall College is surrounded by ancillary business when Lincoln University is not, and why there remains such a real tie between opportunity and race.

The standard of the Belhar on this persistent evil won’t become moot until all people are treated as equally as they’ve been created, nothing more or less.

This said, the Belhar is not just about racism.  Its principles of unity, reconciliation and justice apply to any place, person, or institution where disunity, division and injustice are in play.  As such, the application of this confession is as broad as all human endeavors.  Were it a single issue standard it would not be worthy of adoption.

Alan Wisdom’s approach to oppose the adoption of the Belhar consists of locking it down to a 1980’s South African context and then dismembering it by not only tearing out its redundancies with other established confessions but also by seeking to dislodge the arguments for adoption with the refrain that the language of Belhar isn’t strong enough.  Add to that a criticism that this confession isn’t Christological enough and you’ve pretty much got his stance figured out.

But if you apply this argument to existing confessional standards, then neither would we have the Shorter and Larger Catechisms as these could be seen as redundant iterations of the Westminster Confession, nor would we hold to Barmen as it was formed in a 1930’s German context.

Mr. Wisdom consistently asks us to compare the context of Belhar’s writing with the Presbyterian church of 2011 in America.  That too, is off.  We are not a national church.  Ours is a global church with missionaries worldwide, and so deliberation of the Belhar must be considered from a global perspective.  Each time he asks “does this make sense in the PCUSA of 2011?” he does so with a false assumption that our analysis of the confession is American only.

That assumption alone underscores the need for Belhar’s call to keep the whole Church in view.

Finally, the argument that the Belhar is not strong enough in its Christology can be met on two points.  First, the Belhar would stand alongside existing standards expressing a high Christology, not overshadow or replace them.  Second, the Belhar brings a theocentric, Trinitarian element to the formation of our ministries, and in that, is unique.

If so discerned, the Belhar can retool our approach to being Christ’s church.  It can lead us to develop and implement well-rounded discipleship initiatives that seek not only shalom in ourselves but also shalom in our community.  It can expose our willing participation in divisive systems and help us challenge those systems to embody equality.  It can help us create ministries that embrace the ideals of unity, reconciliation and justice.  Through it we will see the church move from fractured to cooperative, homogenized to diverse, insular to missional, stagnant to nimble and suspicious of our differences to respectful, even grateful, for our differences.

I urge you to vote to include the Belhar as a confessional standard for the PC(USA), and thank you for your prayerful consideration.

Not a Proud Presbyterian

The worst thing you can say about an Amishman is that he's proud.  You never want to tell a father that he must be proud of his son, or tell a farmer that he must be proud of his team of Percherons.  It's anathema, a profound insult.  Pride is to the Amish spirit as rattlesnake to the nervous system.  There is no room in the Amish heart for pride.

We who are not Amish are proud of pride.  We cultivate it, promote it, generate it.  We push for pride in our schools, pride in our kids, pride in our work, pride in our families and the obstacles they overcome.  Pride is a good thing, a compliment, a word born of the right mix of hard work, good choices, loyalty and love, and who would stand opposed to those values?

Certainly not me.  Work hard, make good choices, stand by the relationships and the decisions that got you where you are, and be generous with your heart.  That sounds like a winning combination of laudable values.  So why the disparity between these two perspectives on pride?

The Amish know that pride is as smooth and alluring as 100 year old barrel aged whiskey.  Indulge too much and I don't care how expensive the shot - it'll turn you into its slave.

The things we are proud of become the things we defend, whether they're defensible or not.  They become the things that are most important, around which we've even wrapped out identity.  We are proud of our heritage because that's where we came from and it's who we are, even if that heritage is marked by quick temper or thick headedness or historic supremacy or learned distrust.  We are proud of our kids, and that pride has led many parents to develop massive blind spots to their childrens' capacity for evil.

Pride plugs ears, stops up hearts, drowns out reason, implodes self-understanding, controverts wisdom, erodes relationships, misaligns priorities, protects privilege, twists truth, justifies sin, celebrates selfishness and elevates entitlement.  Pride goes before a fall.

That said, do you believe that the collected discernment of the many can come up with a better idea than one person?  Aren't dictators like Qaddafi fools for failing to listen and yield to the collective voice of the majority?  Aren't governments like Yemen and Syria becoming unruly, quite literally, because they are trying to restore "order" through military action and placating the masses with condescending and empty promises?  And what "order" are they trying to restore but the one that keeps the powerful in power?

One great wisdom of Presbyterian polity is that it requires humility.  Let the debates carry on while the thing is being deliberated, and hold passionately to the side you champion.  Be vocal and definitive, yet listen, listen, listen far more than you speak.  Then, once the process is complete and all sides are heard and all points are prayerfully considered, then the matter is settled by the discernment of the majority.  The collected wisdom of the majority becomes the united voice of the whole Church (G-1.0400).

Or so they say.  If the collected wisdom of the majority is to become the united voice of the whole church, both the winners and the losers of the debated article must adopt humility and take on that characteristic of Christ who, "though in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant," (Philippians 2:6-7).

Here's what this means to me:  The ones who lost the debate must bow to the collected wisdom of the majority, and the ones who won must seek to come underneath the wounded and serve them.  "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.  Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others,"  (Philippians. 2:3-4).

The fracturing of the church is along pride's faultlines and the failure to both serve and submit.  It isn't going to work as long as the winners stand on their victory and demand submission with phrases like "get over it," or "you can always find another church."  And it isn't going to work as long as the losers demand that their perspecitve be served with phrases like "We have just begun to fight," and "Here I stand; I can do no other."

Pride goes before a fall.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that the cohesiveness and mission of the church is threatened by proud Presbyterians.  There are plenty of proud Presbyterians on all sides of all issues, but the unity, purity and peace of the church cannot abide pride.  It is the proud hand that tells the foot it is not part of the body because it is not a hand.

There are lots of things I don't like about the church, but I choose to be part of a church that values a process that debates and considers and prays over its decisions, because this requires of all its members a Christ-like humility of laying down entitled powers to serve the other.

And here's another beautiful thing about our process.  Decisions can be changed.  We can bring concerns from the grassroots up to be considered by the entire church.  We can scruple our disagreements because we recognize that even all the debating in the world won't get every perspective heard.  We can acknowledge that "God alone is Lord of the conscience," and find a way to work together within a broad doctrinal spectrum.

Why do I say this is beautiful?  It sounds chaotic, as if it gives the discontented fertile ground to sow their discontent and stand on ceremony and not adopt a humble heart.  But it's beauty lies in providing voice for the marginalized and power for the disenfranchised.  It allows the Church to continually acknowlege that, though it's discernment model is the best in the world, it's still an imperfect collection of the thoughts of a fallen people, and it allows for continual listening to the movement of the Spirit who alone lifts the scriptures from stagnant to being "living and active," (Hebrews 4:12).

So I ask you to pray a dangerous prayer with me.  Ask God for humility.  Ask God to melt pride's faultlines until they become smooth roads.  Ask God of this for yourself, because to pray for the humbling of another is itself a prideful prayer.