Happy One-Hundredth Birthday, United Church!
On the occasion of the United Church of Canada's 100th anniversary, I suppose that I should address the liberalist/fundamentalist controversy, since the United Church only exists because of the liberalist/fundamentalist schism.
I suppose that I should go back to the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Actually, I suppose it all started with Jesus, and the discussion over what was the greatest commandment. The greatest commandment was to love God, but there was a second commandment: to love your neighbor. I suspect that this is where it all started.
Okay, let's jump forward to the Reformation. At this point, we do have, in a sense, the united church, although, at this point, they use the word "catholic," rather than united. But, for about 1500 years, the church has really been concentrating on the first commandment: love God. Yes, there have been a few people who have tried to interest people in the second commandment, to love others, but, for the most part, they are mostly concentrating on the commandment to love God. And the fact that it is a commandment. The church was really very heavy on commandments. The fundamentals of the Christian church. The commandments of God. And they use God primarily as a bit of a threat, to keep people following the commandments.
At least the ones that they like.
But, as I said, now we have the Reformation. And the Reformation people, while still saying that you need to love God, also tend to emphasize, fairly strongly, the command to love your neighbors: that is, other people. And this moves into the broader culture, and philosophy, in terms of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment tends to say that, in terms of an overall view and even philosophy of life, you should be considering other people. You should be loving them, and you should be running your life so that you are doing things for them, and helping them.
And this sort of seeps back into the church. Actually, by this time, churches. Because Christianity is no longer completely united. There are a whole bunch of different denominations. Lutherans. Anabaptists. Reformed. (No, I don't know whether the Reformed Church was called that because it started during the Reformation, or whether it was called the Reformation because the Reformed Church was so keen on it. Ask your mother.) And some of them tend to emphasize the fundamental loving God part, and others of them, while still loving God, tend to emphasize that you need to have that love of God express itself in loving other people.
And this goes on for about four hundred years. Over that time, the individual denominations sort of even themselves out. There isn't much difference, aside from how much water you use to baptize people, and whether you actually use wine rather than grape juice and whether you use one cup or a bunch of little cups for whatever it is you are drinking in the communion service, in terms of the overall theology of the different churches. They all have factions that emphasize the fundamentals of loving God, and they all have factions that emphasize the more liberal aspects of loving your neighbor.
And so it goes until the first world war.
The first world war is pretty awful. And tens of millions of men (and not a few women, nursing and driving and suchlike) come home from the trenches of the first world war kind of asking themselves how on earth is it that there can be a God who can allow such horror on earth.
And all of these people (well, I suppose not *all* of them ...), with all of their questions and PTSD, come back to their churches. Some of them addressed the horror that they have seen by *leaving* the church. Some of them addressed the horror by leaning into the fundamentals of loving God, and just ignoring the horrors that are in the world. And some of them addressed the horrors by leaning into the more liberal ideas of loving your neighbor, and trying to address whatever horror is around them in the lives of others.
And, over the years, the two camps (of fundamentalism and liberalism) get into squabbles about which of these two commandments is the more important. And the various denominations form liberal and fundamental wings. In many cases, an individual church will address itself more to the liberal side, or more to the fundamental side. And those who are more comfortable with liberal ideologies tend to join those churches that are more liberal. And those who are more comfortable with the more fundamental ideologies tend to join those churches that are more fundamental. Sometimes whole denominations tend to move to the liberal, or to the fundamental, side. But sometimes a group of churches, either fundamental churches within a denomination that is primarily liberal, or liberal churches within a denomination that is from a merely fundamental, will split off and form a new denomination.
In Canada, a number of churches on the liberal side of the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congregationalist denominations decided to band together, and try to unite the church--in typical church fashion by splitting and forming a *new* denomination. This became the United Church of Canada. (Actually, the "of Canada" part is kind of redundant. The United Church originated in Canada, and, for the most part, the United Church is in Canada. By and large, any other "United" churches were started by mission church plants from Canada.)
Actually, this story resonates with me very strongly, for two reasons. I am a Baptist (where our motto is, "I'm a Baptist, and *nobody* is going to make me a Christian!"). The Baptists are the most shismatic Christian denomination that there is, and I have the statistics to prove it. Baptist distinctive are that we are non-creedal, so we don't tend to split over theological issues, since we don't have a statement of belief to disagree about. But we also believe, very strongly, in the priesthood of all believers, and in the independence of the local church. So we tend to split about all kinds of other important topics, such as whether or not the members of the choir should wear choir gowns, or whether we should replace the pews with chairs, or, having replaced the pews with chairs, what the "one true" layout of the chairs should be.
The other reason that the formation of the United Church resonates with me is that the same liberalist/fundamentalist schism that formed the United Church in Canada, led to the creation of an entirely new Baptist sub-denomination in British Columbia. The Baptists are primarily a fundamentalist denomination, but certain of the churches in British Columbia decided that they needed to become even *more* fundamentalist (and less liberal), and so banded together and formed a new sub-denomination. You may have heard of the Three Greenhorns, who were three of the original settlers in the Vancouver area, and who, because of holding a good deal of land in a rapidly expanding urban area, eventually became quite wealthy. John Morton, one of the Three Greenhorns, was a Baptist, and, in his will, he left a large portion of his fortune to the "regular" Baptist Church. By this, of course, he meant the majority Baptist Church, the Convention of Baptist Churches, in British Columbia. However, in order to lay claim to this fortune, the new sub-denomination officially registered itself as the Regular Baptist Church of British Columbia. This led to a huge, and lengthy, legal battle over the probate of John Morton's will, finally resulting in the Convention of Baptist Churches receiving about a quarter of the money, the Regular Baptist Churches receiving about a quarter of the money, and a whole bunch of lawyers receiving approximately half of the total amount of money that was originally intended for the churches.
No comments:
Post a Comment