by
Jerry Andrews
In
the Ruins of the Church: Sustaining Faith in an Age of Diminished
Christianity, by R. R. Reno. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2002.
Pb., 208 pp. ISBN 1-58743-033-9. $15.99.
Here
is a book that might be read to good effect while we contemplate our
situation in the PC(USA). In the Ruins of the Church: Sustaining
Faith in an Age of Diminished Christianity, by R.R. Reno was
written during the same time as the PUP task force deliberations.
It is
the work of a college professor describing his own Episcopal Church
(USA) and, by extension, the whole American Church including our own.
I found the analysis profound and near perfect pitch: Conflict is
not the source of trouble in the Church. Something else is the source
of conflict. Our remedies to the conflict are the source of our continued
troubles.
The
early chapters chronicle the modern and postmodern disposition to
distance. Troubles?” we ask; “Unhappiness,” we feel.
Well, there is a solution, we think, we know. Distance ourselves from
it! Don’t go down with the Titanic. Don’t catch the contagion.
Be distant. Remote. Make ironic observation. Cynical description and
determined disconnection characterize our remedies. They do not serve
the Church, argues the author.
Make
no mistake about it, he continues in the middle chapters, the Church
is in ruins. His description of his fellowship is sympathetic to his
own, and frighteningly like our own. The hard work of sympathetic
and rigorous self-examination is yet to be commissioned by the General
Assembly, and remains undone among us. Difficult will be the speaking
and hearing of the report that says we are in ruins.
More
difficult still will be the remedy. If distance and distancing is
the wrong solution, the right one is intimacy. Think Nehemiah. Upon
hearing the commissioned report that Jerusalem is in ruins, he weeps
sympathetically. Then (and here is Rusty Reno’s point) he goes
to Jerusalem. The Spirit says, “Come” to the Church in
ruins. Sit down among the fallen stones there. Know this place as
home.
Only
after that does Nehemiah set about the repair of the walls. In the
book’s concluding chapters, Rusty gives his “Neo-Barthian,
Anglo-Catholic” program for the restoration of the walls and
how to keep body and soul together in the meantime. Much is valuable
here too, I think, though, an agenda thoroughly Reformed and Evangelical
would get my vote.
I recommend
it because it starts in a better place than the PUP report, and thus
is able to give an analysis and invitation that is at once more sympathetic
to the Church, and more rigorous in its self examination.
Because
Church conflict is not our great trouble, programs for peace, unity
and purity are therefore not our solution. Human sin has always been
what divides us from God, distances us from one another, and each
of us from the Church. Repentance, mentioned by Rusty, unmentioned
by the Task Force, is required of us and it requires our intimacy
with the Church in ruins.
The
call to repentance needs to be spoken, heard and heeded. Do we care
enough to dare enough?
Upon
reading this book I was convicted of my own unsympathetic cynicism,
my distancing irony, and my own need of and our call to repentance.
And hope!
The
stones fallen are living, for God sits among the ruins with us.
Jerry Andrews is pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Glen Ellyn,
IL, and co-moderator of the Presbyterian Coalition. This review originally
appeared in The Presbyterian Outlook. Used by permission.
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