Surprised By Grace - How The Risen Christ Can Change The Mainline One Pastor At A Time

www.ReformationUCC.org
July 16th, 2008

Editor's Note: Is there any genuine hope for the mainline? If so, in what might that hope consist? Yes. There is hope. But not the kind that comes by the continued compromise of truth and bureaucratic tinkering. So where might actual hope lie? That hope lies in the sovereign grace of God displayed in the lives of individuals. This is the same type of hope revealed in Ezekiel 37, and only that hope. It is a hope based not on whimsy, but solidly grounded in the merciful purpose of God the Heavenly Father to redeem a fallen world through God the Son, Jesus Christ, through the sovereign working of God the Holy Spirit.

Furthermore, this hope is based on the promise of the One True God that the Good News of the Risen Christ was not only for the Apostle's and their hearers, but also for covenant children (Acts 2:39 & 1 Corinthians 7:14) and whomever else the Lord wills to call. Taking our confidence in the Lord of 2 Chronicles 7:14, we unite in prayer for the conversion of all those within the mainline who reject the joyous truth of God's Word. This autobiographical essay was originally posted by Rev. Toby L. Brown who holds the copyright. Rev. Brown is a mainline pastor and graduate of the mainline seminary establishment.

I remember how I used to laugh at the kind of person that I found myself now becoming. I used to find an unending source of amusement when I heard people saying the type of things that I was actually now contemplating. It was quite a time in my life.

Being a pastor has changed me as a person. I came out of seminary beleiveing what I had been taught, trained in the school of academic thought that says that anyone who thinks the Bible is without inner contradictions, that it was actually written by the people who the books themselves claim wrote them is a brainless dope. In short, I was a well-trained historical-critical, Neoliberal pastor.

I was launched out of the halls of academia into the parish with shelves full of books that would refute any notion that the Bible was consistent, had a central, coherent message and had historical accuracy. I had all the arguments, all the pride, ready to correct all of the simpletons that I would meet in my ministry. Little did I know what God had in store for me, to make me precisely the kind of person that I had trained to correct. God does have a sense of humor!

In the parish I had a rigorous preaching schedule and I taught a regular Sunday morning Bible study before the worship service. Week after week several church members and I engaged the Scriptures and discussed their meaning. In that class I found myself with two people in particular who had been taught under the teaching ministry of R.C. Sproul and Ligonier Ministries. They loved me and I loved them, so week after week we engaged each other in the attempt to convince the other that they misunderstood the interpretation and purpose of Scripture.

I found myself losing the argument, week after week.

Being prideful, I started to investigate these outrageous claims that I was unable to refute. These people anticipated my every argument, every counter-move and every point that my seminary training had taught me! It was extremely frustrating...

Concurrently, I found that in this time my preaching had also started to suffer. I had run out of ideas. My faith slipped further into irrelevancy. It was only at the funerals that I could preach with clarity and conviction. Somehow, it was in speaking of the gospel promises of Christ that I sensed what I had been missing.

So, I started reading. Not my seminary texts. They could not, had not helped. I started reading strange fellows, people that had never been even mentioned in either of my two mainline seminaries.

Funny how that happens.

We had read radical feminists. We read Mujerista and medieval mysticism from Spanish and French convents. We grappled with Marxist Liberationists and Tillich as a side dish to our Barth. We played with some Calvin, but he was mostly an afterthought.

But now I started to read these wild and strange fellows that had been verboten in the seminary, they who must not named: I started reading J.I. Packer. I read Graeme Goldsworthy and D.A. Carson. I remember it so clearly–They were so rational and so clear! They were so confident and yet humble in their assuredness that the Bible really was without error and had a sweeping unity of narrative.

The scales fell from my eyes. Now, I began to understand why these writers had been hidden from us! They had just as much academic training and credentials as the people the seminary adored, but these theologians and biblical scholars had come to the opposite conclusion after studying the same data! They were utterly convincing.

I began to see where I had gone wrong. I had always been taught that Scripture was a patchwork of human ideas about God that were mutually contradictory yet somehow inspired by God to teach us about the love of Christ. The basic notion had been that Jesus came to teach us what was wrong with Scripture itself. Isn't that funny? That's what I came out of seminary with, the idea that we could take some things from the Bible that worked for us in the modern world and discard the rest, as long as Jesus said it was ok.

Suddenly, I found Jesus in the Old Testament. Imagine that! I found the whole sweep of God's redemptive history in the full and complete witness of the whole 66 chapters in the one book of the Bible. I saw it now–as an opening, a middle and a finale. One Author, many witnesses, one story.

I realized that this is what Jesus had been trying to teach his disciples all along. I found that the Reformed hermeneutic had all the answers to my questions about the Bible, that Reformed theology took the whole witness and counsel of the Bible into account. I discovered that the Reformed faith was the only witness that did this. There were no gaps, no messy contradictions, no muddy compromises. Just clarity and peace. Perfect peace.

Now Psalm 119 made sense to me. Jesus loves his Father's Law! He fulfilled it and completed it so that sinners could be saved. God so inspired the Word in the diverse witnesses of the Bible's books that believers are led by the Spirit to see God as the Author.

I had jumped the shark, so to speak. As a mainline, PC(USA) pastor I had found myself the guy that I used to laugh about. That mocking derision to the simple-minded folk who actually claimed what I now claimed about the Bible was directed at me. You see, in the mainline church culture, it only works one way: conservatives and evangelicals can turn liberal. But never, never the reverse! A liberal turning fundamentalist is a violation of the contract. Oh well...

So here I am. A PC(USA) pastor, not going anywhere, who is now the person that I never expected to become. A minority of a dwindling minority.

And I wouldn't trade it for any treasure in all the world.

END