The Upper Register Blog

In a previous post I quoted Andrew Sullivan’s insight that no one can escape the contingency of their upbringing, nor should we regard this as a bad thing. Technically, Presbyterianism isn’t the contingency in which I was born and raised. It is, rather, one that I have adopted when I was a young adult, and in which I have lived for the past 15 years. So the question naturally arises, how does the contingency of my childhood relate to the contingency of my adulthood? There was a break, to be sure, when I abandoned my dispensational, Arminian, higher-life, Plymouth Brethren background and became covenantal, Reformed, and Presbyterian. But there are also important areas of continuity:

(1) I continue to believe that the Bible is the only infallible rule of faith and practice, the touchstone of all that we do and believe. The church in which I was raised instilled in me a high regard for the Scriptures. It was certainly wrong in its interpretation, but right in principle. We were steeped in the Bible. We did Bible studies several times a week using the Navigator’s chapter summary method. When listening to sermons, we were exhorted to turn in our Bibles to every passage that the preacher read, and this often meant turning to what seemed like hundreds of passages every Sunday. And we took notes too, filling up reems of paper over the years. I did this as a child and so my mind was chock-full of Scripture.

(2) I continue to be an evangelical, that is, one who believes in the centrality of the cross and the necessity of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. This is probably the most important thing. One can have all kinds of head knowledge, but without a personal, saving, intimate relationship with Christ such knowledge is vain. The leader of the church in which I was raised often railed against “dead orthodoxy” and emphasized a mystical form of higher-life piety. Unfortunately, the constant striving for this higher experience had an unintended consequence — it actually produced despair in those who could not achieve it, and hypocrisy and arrogance in those who thought they had. As a result, when I first joined the Presbyterian fold I reacted against that and embraced doctrinalism, which I perceived to be the only safeguard against subjectivism. I have now come full circle and realize that my old church was right — dead orthodoxy is a very real danger, especially for conservative Presbyterians. Doctrine and life must go hand-in-hand. It is absolutely vital to have a personal relationship with Christ as one’s personal Lord and Savior, and to commune with him in prayer. Paul put it best: “I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil 3:8).The famous revivalist Presbyterian pastor Gilbert Tennent is remembered as having taught that ”We can preach the gospel of Christ no further than we have experienced the power of it in our own hearts.”

These, then, are crucial elements of the invaluable inheritance that I received from the church in which my parents raised me, and which I continue to carry with me into my Presbyterian context. Since Presbyterians (at least the ones I know) tend to be weak in these two areas, I like the idea of reaching back into my past and carrying forward these two elements into the present. We need a chastened Presbyterianism in which basic things like personal prayer and Bible reading are encouraged rather than set aside as bad ”evangelical” habits. Presbyterians of an earlier day knew that doctrine, in and of itself, is barren unless rooted in the soil of a vital relationship with the risen Christ.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Sola Scriptura, Presbyterianism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.