The CT Review: Resisting Church Divorce
Denominational conflicts may arise from views of God rather than competing worldviews
Richard Mouw | posted 6/11/2001 12:00AM
GODVIEWS: The Convictions that Drive Us and Divide Us
Jack Haberer
Geneva Press, 174 pages, $19.95
In the spring of 1998, it became clear that the traditionalist forces within the Presbyterian Church (USA) had won a significant—if only temporary—battle against the movement to liberalize the denomination's position on homosexual practice.
The 1997 General Assembly had approved an amendment to its Book of Order that seemed to open the door to the ordination of noncelibate homosexuals. The amendment required ratification by local presbyteries, however, and by the end of March 1998 the tally of votes showed that the proposed changes had failed.
Jack Haberer was elated by this turn of events. As the moderator of the Presbyterian Coalition, an umbrella group for various conservative organizations within the PCUSA, he had campaigned diligently against the liberalizing amendment. But before he allowed himself to celebrate this victory, Haberer phoned to express his sympathy to Scott Anderson, a leader of Presbyterians for Lesbian and Gay Concerns. In doing so, he wasn't entertaining second thoughts about the cause he had been espousing.
"I did not doubt that we conservatives were following an understanding of God's truth regarding sexual ethics that had stood uninterrupted for 3,000 years," Haberer writes. But he still felt compelled to acknowledge that "my opponents believed themselves to be following an understanding of God's love and grace that had wrestled against exclusivist trends ever since the days of the Apostles. I surely could feel compassion for the way they felt that the church's policy shut them out."
This gesture by Haberer, senior pastor of Houston's large Clear Lake Presbyterian Church, to one of his ecclesiastical opponents nicely captures the mood of his book about ecclesiastical conflict. He sees the 21st-century church as living in a tension between Carmel, where Elijah confronted false prophets for the sake of the truth, and Caesarea, where Peter encountered Cornelius and learned an important lesson in inclusivity.
And he wants us all to consider the possibility that maybe the Lord "wants us to live in both Carmel and Caesarea at the same time."
The importance of this tension is highlighted in the pages of his book even before we read a word from the author: the book has two friendly forewords—one by Craig Barnes, the evangelical senior pastor of Washington's National Presbyterian Church, and the other by John Buchanan, of Fourth Presbyterian in Chicago, a leader in the more Caesarea-leaning movement within the denomination.
Five "Godviews"While many accounts of mainline church conflict focus on the tension between unchanging revealed truth and a gospel-mandated embrace of differences, Haberer insists that the real arguments are in fact many-sided. Indeed, a basic strategy in his argument is to downplay any simple "two-party" scenario for understanding the present-day debates. A good half of his discussion is devoted to discussing various "GodViews"—a term he prefers in this context to "worldview"—at work in the Christian community. He identifies five, each offering a different understanding of God and "of what God is calling the church to do."The Confessionalist emphasizes truth, the Devotionalist a hunger for intimacy with God, the Ecclesiast the centrality of the church and its offices, the Altruist service to the needy, and the Activist the struggle against unjust structures. Each of these GodViews, Haberer argues, is onto something and has an important place in the life of a healthy church.
June 11 2001, Vol. 45, No. 8
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