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The emergence of confessing Christians
By Thomas C. Oden

Mainline churches stand today not merely in a crisis of numbers, but in a deeper crisis of faith. Though often portrayed as a crisis of politics or demographics or moral values or sexuality, it is more profoundly a crisis of biblical authority and theological integrity. The confessing movement ventures into divisive political territory on the value of life and sexual ethics only because biblical faith requires it.

The decisive challenge for the mainline is not coming from some quarter outside the church, but precisely from within the churches themselves. Powerful voices within the denominational leadership grossly diminish Christian teaching, refuse to follow reasonable discipline democratically arrived at, and discriminate unfairly against those who disagree with them. What happens when those who pretend to represent historic Christianity wander far from it, and even inveigh against it?

The most blatant challenges have to do with evasive or equivocal assertions about the very center of Christian teaching: Jesus Christ. These are not ancillary points. Some reject his atoning work as unique Savior of the world and deny his resurrection and his teaching on the sanctity of marriage. Crucial doctrines cannot be side-stepped. The biblical teaching of creation has direct consequences for deciding about the creation of man and woman in God's image, and the value of life. The biblical teaching of the oneness of God has direct bearing on the use of witchcraft motifs in worship or the veneration of the goddess Sophia. The biblical understanding of God the Father, Son, and Spirit is not to be used merely as a political ploy for leverage in disputes on language fairness.

The crisis lodges precisely within the worshiping community. The mainline churches are now unready to confess with one voice the orthodox Christian faith in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. To confess Jesus Christ as the only Son of God, Savior of the world, constitutes a particular stumbling block. Permissive leadership often looks the other way as opinions gain currency that are obviously contrary to ancient and historic ecumenical Christian teaching. No one calls them to task. Sometimes it appears that no one can. So worshipers have had to suffer through wild and idiosyncratic versions of the faith that they find nowhere in Scripture or classic Christian teaching.

When secularizing church leadership is distracted by false gospels, the outcomes are disastrous. Finances are misspent. Maladministration is allowed to grow. Valuable mission resources are channeled into experimental grant-making for social service projects-some of them weird and entirely lacking in any clear Christian identity or proclamation of the one on whose behalf they offer compassion. Much of the deep continuity with the historic consensus of faith is being forgotten or imperiled. Many theological seminaries, where it is assumed that ministers will be rightly prepared in Scripture and moral reasoning, have been inundated for three decades with such far-ranging diversions as highly speculative Scripture studies, neopaganism, channeling, voodoo, sexual permissiveness, absolute moral relativism, and gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender activism.

When such straying occurs, the purpose of renewing and confessing Christians is gently to call the churches to confess classic Christian teaching in good conscience without evasion or dilution. Who has suffered the most from these diversions? The faithful worshipers in the pews who are forced to listen to thin sermons and are still expected to pay the bills.

The mainline after modernity
It is now possible to speak confidently of the rebirth of orthodoxy in the mainline churches. To some modest extent it is also visible in their seminaries and legislative assemblies. Modernity is losing its power to intimidate. Modernity is the period and the ideology that prevailed in the time from 1789 to 1989, from the Bastille to the Berlin Wall. By postmodern, orthodox Christians refer to the course of actual history following the decline of modernity.

Youthful classic Christians are now well prepared by modernity to use the very methods of modern consciousness (that is: scientific, historical, hermeneutical, psychological, sociological, and behavioral change models) to detoxify the illusions of modernity that have eaten like acids into the bone of the faith, the family, the culture, and the mainline churches that have accommodated to the culture.

Confessing Christianity is not accurately defined as anti-modern. It is not merely a censorious negative reaction against modernity-for there is no reason to be opposed to something that is virtually dead. A frustrated anti-modern emotive reaction errs in overestimating the continuing resilience of modernity now in terminal crisis. Many in the renewing intellectual leadership of orthodoxy have already doubly paid their dues to modernity and now search for ancient wisdom long ruled out by the narrow dogmas of secular humanism. There is no way for us to reflect upon modernity except amid the collapse of modernity.

Confessing Christians do not despair over the plight of modernity. Rather, they celebrate the providence of God that works amid the wreckage of failed modern ideologies. They live amid withering forms of a tired Protestantism that has sold its soul to modernity. But the end of the elite, modern old-line is the beginning of a new, ecumenical re-centering committed to orthodox Christian teaching.

The seminaries
Most of the seminaries of the mainline have striven to adapt snugly to this vulnerable and passing modernity. The liberal old-line Protestant elites, gatekeepers, and bureaucrats have been slow to understand the moral language of the congregations they serve. Institutions long funded by evangelical donors and convictions have been taken captive. Dated modern habits of moral permissiveness, hyper-toleration, and secularism still have a stranglehold on many arteries of mainline church bureaucracies and their collusive academies.

But below the surface there is among these institutions an outlook of desperation and identity diffusion. The mainline seminaries, with few exceptions, are confused about who they are in relation to the church. They struggle also with their ambiguous relation to the university, but more desperately in their relation to basic Christianity as such. Their idealism itself has rendered them defensive and demoralized. The heart is gone from the idyllic nineteenth century song of inevitable progress. It has become a twenty-first century dirge with a heavy, hard-metal beat.

These tired, fading modern illusions are woven together into an ideological temperament that still sentimentally shapes the knowledge-elites of liberal Protestantism, especially its politicized bureaucracies and schools. They remain largely unprepared to grasp either their own weaknesses or their mission within this nexus of historical change.

Only a few denominational seminaries within the mainline have begun to reverse these trends and move toward classic biblical teaching: Among Presbyterian seminaries, Princeton, Dubuque, and Pittsburgh have taken the right turn. Among United Methodists, Duke has shown the most signs of regaining equilibrium, and among the Episcopal seminaries, Trinity Episcopal School of Ministry is healthy, and Nashotah House is returning to the fold. For most, it will take a long time to turn around tenure overloads.

In the absence of mainline seminary reform, viable candidates for ministry are more frequently electing to go to places like Asbury, Fuller, Trinity Evangelical, and Gordon-Conwell, despite punitive resistance from their denominational officers jealous of their rising importance. More United Methodist ordinands go to Asbury (which gets no support from the United Methodist General Conference) than to the officially supported Iliff, Claremont, and Ohio seminaries combined.

Once a seminary faculty has been filled with permanently tenured radicals, its members easily fall into the temptation of cloning themselves with look-alike future colleagues. The ensconced bureaucracies of hyper-tenured faculties have learned well the fine art of xeroxing themselves politically, repeating ever anew their own ideological biases, making sure that no one gets tenure who will challenge the prevailing ideological tilt. All this occurs under the surface, of course, and with a polite and tolerant smile.

The collapse of the armies of Liberation
The description I am making may tempt some to think that I am exaggerating. I am reporting only what I have seen. I have been teaching and lecturing in mainline seminaries from 1959 to 2004. This is not hearsay, but eyewitness reporting from the line of fire.

"Liberated" is not a term used lightly. It is not a term applied by detractors to these wayward ideologues, but a term they constantly insist on applying to themselves. The subtext of "liberated" is: doctrinally imaginative, liturgically experimental, disciplinarily nonjudgmental, politically correct, morally broad-minded, and above all, sexually lenient and permissive. As a former full-time card-carrying liberator, I know from experience how mesmerizing this enchantment can be.

When the liberated have virtually no immune system against heresy, no defense whatever against perfidious teaching, and no criteria for testing the legitimacy counterfeit theological currency, it is time for the worshiping community to act to guarantee faithful Christian teaching. The ordinary worshipers in the pews are coming to understand that they have a decisive interest in the quality and apostolicity of the ministries they have been asked to trust and support. Trustees of church-related educational institutions are increasingly demanding the right to know why clergy leadership is so prone to political absurdities, moral permissiveness, and ideological binges.

Most worshipers have been spared from knowing the details of the arcane machinery of mainline liberal seminary education. They have no reason to doubt that their divinity schools are like any other institution-to some extent reformable. But those of us who have spent a lifetime in Scripture-deprived theological education are those most wary of the stubborn fact that the present system, short of some mighty act of Providence, is highly resistant to reform, and indeed seems practically irreformable. The irreversibly tenured faculty is so intractable that, lacking some special act of grace, its reform seems virtually unimaginable. The tenure principle, which was designed to protect academic freedom, has become so exploited as now to protect academic license, neglect, incompetence, and at times moral turpitude, since once tenure is offered, it is virtually impossible to withdraw.

The trend toward sanity
If the liberated have the freedom to teach apostasy, the believing church has the freedom to withhold its consent. If the liberated teach counter-canonical doctrines and conjectures inimical to the health of the church, then the church has no irreversible moral obligation to give them support or to bless their follies.

The rhetoric of inclusivism has resulted in the fact of exclusion. This is especially seen in the willful exclusion of orthodox and evangelical Christians from leadership. Confessing Christians are at last learning how to communicate to absolute egalitarians how hollow the inclusion arguments sound to traditional believers who themselves have been so long marginalized.

What is happening amid this historical situation is a joyous return to the sacred texts of Christian Scripture and the classic guides of the ancient ecumenical faith. Young confessing Christians are those who, having entered in good faith into the disciplines of modernity, and having become disillusioned with its illusions, are again studying the Word of God-that Word made known in history as attested by prophetic and apostolic witnesses whose testimonies have become perennial texts for this worldwide, multicultural, multigenerational remembering and celebrating community.

Why an exit strategy is self-defeating
The abiding issue for many: Should confessing Christians be quick to look for an "exit strategy," or should they seek the transformation of the church that brought them to faith and baptized them, by reaffirming their steady, durable commitment to remaining in it and transforming it? The confessing movement was earlier somewhat ambivalent, but more and more of the heart of the movement is saying: stay in. The timing to exit is poor. To leave the liberal bureaucracies just when they are collapsing is a singular misjudgment.

Within this frame of "discipline not separation," it is still permissible for confessing Christians to discuss scenarios by which those who want to leave the disciplined community can do so. But this view, which is sometimes called "amicable separation," must always be conceived as a gentle act of generosity to allow those whose conscience cannot abide discipline to go on their own without taking down the whole communion with them. It is not the faithful who want to exit. Nor is it the faithful who have a bad conscience about the polity and discipline and doctrines of the church. Those who cannot bear the thought of remaining in a church that they think is not free enough, not secular enough, not permissive enough, should not be restrained from leaving. There should be no barriers put in their way. They should not have to fight to recover their pensions and church properties. This is the notion of "gracious exit." This is not meant to malign or refuse to acknowledge the motivations of faithful Christians, who, for reasons of conscience, choose to leave a mainline congregation, but to point to the alternative.

The idea of "gracious exit" should never mean that orthodox believers exit or split from their churches, but rather that they make it easier for those who repeatedly reject Christian doctrine and discipline to take their leave. What confessing Christians properly mean by "amicable separation" is not that the growing evangelical influence in the mainline might leave the endowments and institutions to the collapsing liberal wing, but that they are committed to reclaiming them, and providing a fair plan to permit voluntary, peaceful departure of those who refuse discipline, allowing them to take with them their local church property.

This is hard to explain to a biased press that often wants to portray evangelicals as schismatic. The concept is clear in the minds of confessing Christians, but almost always distorted when reported. Amicable separation allows those whose conscience cannot abide discipline to go on their own way and to retain their assets. What part of that sentence is unclear? Its constant distortion is a willful act of misunderstanding. Believers who separate for reasons of conscience, when biblically informed, remain accountable to strong scriptural mandates against schism (1 Cor. 1:10).

The search for an apt analogy
Three analogies are often applied to this dilemma: the marriage or divorce analogy, the business partners analogy, or the holy communion analogy.

The marriage versus divorce analogy views the disciplined church and the permissive church as engaged in a conflict that could lead to divorce. Those who seek the continuity of marriage and family are trying to make the relationship more just. They are concerned about the children, even when the parents quarrel. To divorce is to give up on the promise of the family.

The business partners analogy views the question of remaining together more as a fiscal matter of whether property agreements can be made, or whether they must be divided up in a just way, if need be under a judge.

The communion analogy is entirely different: Its key metaphor is that of the penitent coming to the communion table. All are invited to the communion table, but only on the premise of repentance. Those who are penitent are the faithful who earnestly confess their sins and boldly confess the atoning Christ and receive forgiveness. Those who come to the communion table without repentance bring judgment on their own heads by their own choice.

The invitation to communion is open to all who repent and believe. Whether or not one is penitent is a matter of the heart. Only God knows the authenticity of repentance. Only God can judge the heart. The table is not barred, but the penitent church has a duty to warn rashly impenitent communicants about the consequences of their actions.

All three analogies are useful, but the most penetrating is the communion analogy, where the crucial matters are repentance and faith, not legal partnerships or separation of properties or the breakup of the family. This reframes the question to focus on where it ought to be: the grace of repentance at the communion table, and the willingness to seek the holiness of the church at that table.

Thomas C. Oden is the Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Theology and Ethics Emeritus at Drew University and a contributing editor of Good News. He is the author or editor of many books, including The Rebirth of Orthodoxy, and is the general editor of the acclaimed "Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture" series. This article is excerpted from his latest book, Turning Around the Mainline: How Renewal Movements are Changing the Church (Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group © 2006). Reprinted with permission.



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