must stand for something definite and specific if they are to avoid surrendering to the dominant cultural tendencies of the time.”67 And this “standing for something” became the difficulty.
Along with socialization and acculturation once revivalism had done its damages, other winds picked up. Individualism blew stronger as post-World War II governments adopted human rights platforms, and believers fell before this onslaught of humanism. As one wrote, “. . . I came to consider that the creeds are a form of speaking in tongues.”68 That is, individualism descended into glossolalia. With no one to interpret, each succumbs to what is right in his/her own eyes.
An ecumenical storm also swept over the continent, seeking to bring churches to a lowest-common denominator confessional basis, thereby to accommodate disparate traditions and spirits; each faction to ecumenical agreement did so on the basis of a minimal creedal statement to eliminate points of division and incorporate only issues of agreement, sometimes no more than “Jesus is Lord.” Not faithfulness to the Scriptures, but mollycoddling human inventiveness carried the day in ecumenical circling about only “grand essentials.”69 Such the formation of the Canadian Council of Church, for one, manifested in 1944. “In searching for a theological bond of unity that would escape a too narrow creedal limitation, the Council accepted the Affirmation of the Edinburgh Conference of 1937. It declares a fellowship of churches which ‘accepted our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour.’”70
Then, too, neo-orthodoxy, a denial of any absolute expression of truth also in confessions and, hence, an affirmation of relativism, troubled mainstream churches. “Barth held this view and was able to say the Bible was fallible because every word fell short. But the spiritual message and its function (God’s revelation for you!) was thought to be untouchable by historical criticism . . .. Thus the Bible was split and the word ‘revelation’ took on a new meaning.”71 This sort of religiosity-coated individualism required continuing support through more of such revelation. “Neo-orthodoxy’s emphasis on continuing revelation and the revelatory event is very compatible to the charismatic emphasis, but the similarities between the charismatic movement and neo-orthodox does not stop here. Both movements were reactionary movements to dead orthodoxy and the old liberalism. They both desired to recapture the subjective and experiential aspect of the Christian life and devalued the doctrine of the written Word and the objective promises of God.”72 This neo-orthodoxy, congenial to North America’s pagan soul, leveled off and further eliminated confessional interest as incompatible with individualism and experiential religion.
And not to forget, raging secularism, ubiquitous, further asphyxiated confessional concentration, “. . . an attitude begotten of modern science and philosophy and a demand for satisfying ‘creature wants’; modern advertising is the messenger of an ever-enlarging set of selfish desires.”73 Secularist storms struck away at confessional growth, demanding a flat earth.
Thus, from the lowest anti-confessionalism, leaders in the Church searched for new highs in religiosity, and found failed expectations.
CONCLUSIONS
Frontal assaults of anti-confessional winds and tempests arrested creedal life, drawing out its sap and withering its wood. The symbols—Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Reformed—planted in poor and rocky North American soil struggled for existence. In a lengthy process of neglect, despised, confessional traditions became stunted and misshaped entities, experiencing at best nominal adherence, perhaps “perfunctory orthodoxy.”74
Strangely, in times of anti-confessionalism and perfunctory orthodoxy, more symbols sprang up, especially among those of Reformed persuasion.75 Somehow, Christ-implanted and Spirit-driven necessity to confess the Faith comes out, however meager and pitiable compared to sixteenth-century confessions. For instance. The 1973 Declaration of Evangelical Concerns. The Christian Reformed Church’s 1984 Our World Belongs to God. The Reformed Church’s Our Song of Hope. The Presbyterian’s Living Faith. The Lutheran’s Evangelical Catechism. The 1975 The Hartford Appeal for Theological Affirmation. As much as these and more from birth struggled for breath and life, they became historical curiosities, occasional declarations, passing phases of interest suddenly smitten by anti-confessional storms.
In short, confessional plants in poor and on rocky soil withered under blatant anti-creedalism. For ecclesiastical symbols, North America proved to be an infertile continent.
2005/2015
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baird, Robert. Religion in America: A Critical Abridgment. New York: Harper & Row, 1856/1970.
Bayne, Stephen Fielding, Jr. “United States.” William E. Leidt, ed. Anglican Mosaic. Toronto: The Anglican Book Centre, 1962.
Bratt, James D. Dutch Calvinism in Modern America: A History of a Conservative Subculture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984.
Busch, Eberhard. “The Closeness of the Distant: Reformed Confessions After 1945.” David Willis and Michael Welker, eds. Toward the Future of Reformed Theology: Tasks, Topics, Traditions. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999.
Freitag, Walter. “Lutheran Tradition in Canada.” 94–101. John Webster Grant, ed. The Churches And the Canadian Experience. Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1963.
Grant, John Webster, ed. “Blending Traditions: The United Church in Canada.” 133–144. The Churches And the Canadian Experience. Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1963.
Henderson, Ron L.H. “Canada.” William E. Leidt, ed. Anglican Mosaic. Toronto: The Anglican Book Centre, 1962.
Hudson, Winthrop S. The Great Tradition of the American Churches. New York: Harper/Torch, 1953/63.
———. Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965.
Ivison, Stuart. “Is There A Canadian Baptist Tradition?” 53–68. John Webster Grant, ed. The Churches And the Canadian Experience. Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1963.
Norris, Kathleen. Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. New York: Riverhead, 1998.
Stanford, Craig S. The Death of the Lutheran Reformation: A Practical Look at Modern Theology And Its Effects In the Church and in the Lives of Its People. Fort Wayne: Stanford, 1988.
Wilson, Douglas J. The Church Grows in Canada. New York: Committee on Missionary Education/Canadian Council of Churches, 1966.
SECOND STUDY:POST-CONFESSING ACROSS NORTH AMERICA
Covetousness mutilates and scars North America’s landscape. Sooner or later, all who sought confessional integrity on these shores slid or collapsed into the continental pit, consumed by greed. Avarice is difficult, if not impossible, to resist; everyone breathes in its ruinous seductions. Hence, the breakdown of the four main European confessional imports—Anglican/Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Reformed—by subtle contortions of mammonism descending into grace-less infernos.
Even new-created symbols—as the 1950 Reformed Foundations and Perspectives of Confession, the 1954 Reformed The Doctrine Concerning Holy Scripture, the 1954 Presbyterian Declaration of Faith Concerning Church and Nations, the Presbyterian Confession of 1967, the 1972 Presbyterian A Declaration of Faith, the 1984 Presbyterian Living Faith, the 1974 Reformed Our Song of Hope, and the 1984 Christian Reformed Our World Belongs to God—totter on precarious edges of the continental black hole. However, not even this post-World War Two spurt of confessional eagerness gives the lie to the restless North American-wide human folly catering to covetousness—the mangling economic covetousness of naked self-interest—preventing these intellectual exercises from taking hold of heart and soul.
