A New Church for Scotland?

Church of Scotland General Assembly

On Sunday morning, 24 May, a large number of Church of Scotland people awoke utterly perplexed by their Church’s decision the previous evening. The General Assembly, by a huge majority of 326 to 267, had taken an unprecedented, if not entirely unanticipated, decision to approve the Aberdeen Presbytery’s sustaining a call from the congregation of Queen’s Cross Church to Rev Scott Rennie, a 37 year old divorcee and father, who lives in an open homosexual relationship.

The following day the BBC website focused on the emotional upset suffered by Mr Rennie, running the headline “Gay minister ‘hurt’ by church row”, whilst the Scotsman reported “Gay minister humbled by Kirk’s backing.”  Hurt or humbled, or both, and I would not want deny his emotions, nor minimise them, many others were also deeply wounded that night. The over 5,000 members of the Church of Scotland who had signed the on-line petition of the Fellowship of Confessing Churches were grieved to the core of their souls by what had transpired.

In its pre-assembly statement, the Fellowship of Confessing Churches made it very clear that, in its view, by inducting into its congregations those living in relationships other than heterosexual marriage, the Kirk would be crossing a Rubicon into a moral, spiritual and theological wasteland, thus positioning itself outside “the fellowship of orthodox, creedal Christianity worldwide.”

The issue now confronting all those good and godly Kirk ministers, elders and members who subscribed to the petition is simply this, how, for the glory of Christ and his cause in Scotland, can they remain where they are? Does  not the logic of their own argument mean that their position within the Church has now become untenable?

Saturday’s decision  is not, however, a sudden, erratic, departure from “orthodox, creedal Christianity,” to quote the Fellowship’s statement. It is but the latest staging post on a long road strewn with the debris of all that is valued by orthodox, confessional Christians. For over a century confidence in the cardinal doctrines of the Faith has been eroded. Kirk ministers, without fear of restraint, have denied that the Bible is itself the Word of God, attacked the miraculous and supernatural, doubted the Trinity, expressed reservation over the resurrection, and had qualms over the twin eternal destinies of heaven and hell. For some, the ordination of women elders and ministers was to have been the final straw, but the camel’s back has proved to be remarkably strong and has not yet buckled. Now this latest Assembly decision is set to test once more the resilience of the evangelical conscience, and I fear it will prove to be a hardy old faculty, well up to the latest challenge. The reality is, time and again, evangelicals have complained about departures for orthodoxy, and have even mildly protested against them, but have concluded, in words I have heard repeated time and again, that nothing but nothing would induce them to leave the Kirk.  Well, we will see.

Even without this latest debacle, the moral and spiritual landscape of Scotland is as bleak as ever it has been.  Does this mean all is lost? Is the spiritual decline of the Scottish church now terminal? Of what significance is it that the twentieth century was the first century since the Reformation without national religious revival?  And is that a sign that the candlestick of Christian witness is being removed? Are we one of the last generations of Scottish Christians? Will it perhaps fall to our grandchildren or our great-grandchildren finally to turn out the lights, lock the doors and watch the dust settle on a derelict Church, abandoned both by God and man?

The scale of the challenge now confronting evangelical and Confessional Presbyterians calls for nothing less than the redrawing of the Christian map of Scotland. It calls for the creation of a new Presbyterian Church made up of the Free Church of Scotland and the confessional congregations of the Church of Scotland, along with all others who desire to be reunited in wholehearted commitment to Christ, Scripture and mission. Of course there will be difficulties to overcome. An obvious concern for some Presbyterian churches is worship, using as they do the metrical Psalms alone. But that is an issue they would do well to concede, rather than sacrifice the greater principles of confessional Christian unity and national mission.

I would like to think that a new confessional Presbyterian Church in Scotland is not a fantasy of imagination but a vision glimpsed with the eye of faith. There can be no doubt that the deplorably shattered and fragmented state of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland is contrary to God’s revealed will and Scripture’s unambiguous insistence on Christian unity.

We are all too prone to justify our separate denominational existence by an emotional attachment to our heritage and traditions, an attitude that leads us to disparage the Bible’s call to unity. May I remind you of something Professor John Murray once wrote?

Though the diversity which manifests itself in differentiating historical developments might appear to make ecclesiastical union inadvisable or even perilous in certain cases, yet the biblical evidence in support of union is so plain that any argument to the contrary, however plausible, must be false.

We must reject of the fractious tendencies inherent in our history and engage with other Christians in a movement towards Confessional unity, where the People of God work hand in hand to heal and reunite the fragments of a torn and disordered church.

A reunited Scottish Church would make possible Columba’s vision of Christ’s Good News being carried to a pagan nation and souls won to God. It could secure Knox’s desire for reformation enabling our nation to hear the Good News uncomplicated by aberrant theology, both liberal and fundamentalist. Such a Church would facilitate Melville’s dream of a nation united under the supreme but kind and gracious headship of Jesus Christ. How wonderful if a Church existed able to recover the Christ-like compassion for the marginalised and excluded that led Thomas Chalmers to care for the urban poor and inspired Thomas Guthrie to provide education, nutrition and career training for destitute children.

Let us imagine that such a Church existed, that it could exist, that it were allowed to exist. What might its key attributes be?  If you can bear the alliteration, I see it as confessional, compassionate and contextual.

The Authority of a Confessional Church

A fault of much modern preaching is a lack of authority. There is an increasing fashionable inclination towards tentative soliloquizing, a sharing of insights and perspectives, rather than the authoritative proclamation of God’s Word. Perhaps fear of being stigmatised as dogmatic or arrogant makes some preachers timid, unwilling to sound convincing or commanding. Someone has well said, ‘In general we preach the gospel as if we were delivery men, and we see too little that Christ did not call us to be messenger boys, but ambassadors.’

Coincidentally, the contemporary Church is suffering a crisis of confidence in the discipline of systematic and confessional theology. We prefer the less dogmatic approach of biblical theology. Without disparaging biblical theology, Bob Reymond points out in the Preface to his New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith (Nelson, 1998), that whereas biblical theology views Holy Scripture as an unfolding revelation, systematic theology sees it as a completed revelation. Or to use a phrase from Gresham Machen, systematic theology seeks to set forth ‘the grand sum of what God has told us in his Word.’ In the prevailing anti-intellectual climate, terms like ‘completed revelation’ or ‘grand sum’ sit very uncomfortably with post-modernism’s denial of a metanarrative.  If ever there was an age crying out for a confident, though humble, return to the ringing affirmations of the historic confessions of the Reformed Church, it is now.

And let us remind ourselves that separation was precisely what the Westminster Confession of Faith was designed to avoid.  The Confession of Faith was devised to counter the unpopular liturgical innovations of Archbishop Laud in the 1630s which precipitated civil war in England. It was part of a programme aimed at restructuring the churches of Christ in the kingdoms of Scotland, England and Ireland Church on a Presbyterian model and although that grandiose project proved a forlorn hope, it reminds us that a raison d’etre of the Westminster Confession of Faith was as a bond of unity, not as a basis of factionalism.

Although it is rather a case of the pot calling the kettle black, Richard Dawkins never fails to remind us that religion is contentious. He is not wrong. Historically, religious tolerance has been conspicuous by its rarity.  The history of Scottish Presbyterianism is particularly scandalous. Today there are seven denominations in Scotland all of which have as their subordinate standard, the Westminster Confession of Faith. Five of these adhere so strictly to the Confession that there is no point of doctrinal difference between them. Yet, we find it difficult to work together, worship together or sit at the Lord’s Table together. It is a sad fact that during the period of most intense Presbyterian disintegration, from the Disruption of 1843 to the year 2000, church attendance in Scotland fell through the floor. Perhaps it could be argued that confessional Presbyterianism, down to the present day, is possessed of a malign genius for frustrating the prayer of its Lord for the visible unity of his people.

It is also important we do not duck the allegation that confessions constrain, buckle and bend truth to force it within a straight-jacket of theological propositions and biased historical perspectives. They may indeed have such an effect. It is therefore imperative that confession makers and confession users do not forget that no confession is to be elevated to the status of a supreme standard and afforded an authority that belongs exclusively to Holy Scripture. The best confessions are derived from Scripture and to it they are subordinate. That is why in their preface to The Scots Confession of 1560 the compliers famously left themselves open to correction and revision:

if any man will note in this our confession any article or sentence repugning to God’s holy word, that it would please him of his gentleness, and for Christian charity’s sake, to admonish us of the same in writing; and we, of our honour and fidelity, do promise unto him satisfaction from the mouth of God (that is, from his holy scriptures), or else reformation of that which he shall prove to be amiss.

But confessions serve not only as bonds of unity, they are also instruments of discipline. For John Knox an authentic Church bore three distinguishing marks: the true preaching of the Word, the proper administration of the sacraments, and also the faithful exercise of Church discipline. The 1647 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, having subjected the Westminster Confession of Faith to thorough scrutiny, approved it as ‘agreeable to the word of God,’ and welcomed it as both a basis of unity and, ‘for the more effectual suppressing of the many dangerous errors and heresies of those times’ and for ‘a great strengthening of the true reformed religion against the common enemies thereof.’

Language which speaks of ‘suppression,’ ‘errors,’ ‘heresy’ and ‘common enemies’ sounds incredibly antiquated, harsh and judgmental to modern ears. Yet despite the negative resonances of its seventeenth century vocabulary, the 1647 Assembly has something important to say to us we. Whilst we rightly object to the gratuitous burdening of men’s consciences with formulations of the minutiae of doctrine and practice, and whilst we deplore heavy-handed and inept applications of discipline, there can be no denying that  Christ has committed to the Churchthe task not only of teaching his Word but also of upholding definable standards of truth and righteousness. Integrity will not, therefore, allow our relationship to the Confession to degenerate into a subjective and sentimental attachment to an historical document, whose teaching can be rejected at will where it is not deemed to belong to some undefined ‘substance of the Faith.’

Confessional integrity requires that theological and moral boundaries be set and maintained. They must not be the narrowest and most restrictive, they must allow a fair degree of latitude and generosity, but they must be defined and held to. Francis Schaeffer used to illustrate this by likening truth to a table top rather than the apex a pyramid. The top of a pyramid allows room only for one interpretation to stand, from which no dissent can be tolerated. A table top allows room for a number of interpretations to coexist but, nevertheless, has clearly demarcated sides over which it is possible to fall. Much as we must love and promote the peace of the Church, we must also be jealous of the purity of the Church, for nothing robs the Church of its peace more than impurity, in doctrine and life.

Another reason why any restructured Church should be confessional is that mission lies at the very heart of a confessing Church. By calling itself confessional a church is in fact saying that it is a missionary church and accepts the commission to confess Christ and his gospel before the unbelieving world. This point was not lost on the compilers of the 1560 Scots Confession. The first substantive paragraph of the Preface opens with the words: ‘Long have we thirsted, dear brethren, to have notified unto the world the sum of that doctrine which we profess.’

In his review of the classical uses of Church confessions, Clement Graham has observed:

If we have been right in attributing confession-making in part to the joy of discovery, this is joy which the Christian wishes to become infectious.  The man who has studied the Word of God and compared the Confession of Faith with it makes a happy declaration when he acknowledges it as his own, but his happiness is increased by sharing.

The Credibility of a Compassionate Church

After two thousand years of Christian values we take it for granted that compassion is a divine attribute and therefore the appropriate Christian response to suffering and need. We may fail to grasp how radical to the ancient world was the idea of a compassionate God. To a Stoic the supreme attribute of God was apetheia, the negation of feeling. By remaining unaffected by human joys or sorrows, by putting himself beyond the reach of anything outside himself, the Stoic’s god was majestically aloof, his dignity secure, his transcendence unchallenged. But, for all his majesty, such a god neither heard the prayers of his people, nor was touched by their plight. Those who bore his image banished from their mind all thought of compassion or mercy. When tragedy struck they didn’t care.  How startlingly different was the Good News of Jesus Christ. It spoke of a God of love and a Saviour who was moved with compassion for the plight of ordinary people.

According to the gospels, Jesus was ‘moved with compassion’ when he saw that the crowd who had come to hear him was hungry and thirsty or appeared leaderless and lost, ‘like sheep without a shepherd.’  His concerned gaze also penetrated the throng to identify needy individuals. He saw a widow woman, two blind men, a leprosy sufferer or an epileptic, and was ‘moved with compassion’ for them. The word used by the gospel writers vividly conveys Jesus’ stomach churning, gut wrenching, emotion as he saw their pitiful need.

Our Lord was moved by the whole spectrum of human suffering, including the spiritual agonies of those tortured by sexual temptation. He was tolerant, not impatient with human superficiality, nor annoyed by thoughtlessness, nor angered by fecklessness. Rather he was moved with pity. Not only so, but Jesus also ascribes such compassion to his Father. He vividly portrays how a destitute and profligate son, wearily trudging homewards along a dusty road in the heat of the day, is seen a long way off. Moved by compassion, the waiting father abandons all his patriarchal dignity and runs to meet him, throwing his arms around his neck, he kisses him. There are no recriminations, all the mistakes of the past are forgiven and forgotten. The Father who has been waiting all this time does not want his son to live in his presence burdened with regrets for the past. In his immense compassion, he banishes all his faithlessness into the abyss of infinity: As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. How wonderful. What amazing grace!  Here are the essential attributes for faithful mission; keen observation that sees human need and holistic compassion that does something about it. This is the example to follow.

A frequent accusation levelled at Confessional churches is that they are not like that. What we are, it is said, is narrow-minded, censorious and heartless. Non-doctrinaire and broad-minded liberalism is seen as much more sympathetic and kindly. Such an accusation cannot be dismissed out of hand, nor dare we deny we have gained notoriety for being stern, legalistic and overcritical. The separatist churches, such as my own, the Free Church of Scotland, are percieved to be austere, lacking in warmth and compassion. Naturally, we deeply resent such a portrayal and would want to argue that it is unfair and inaccurate and ignores a huge reservoir of love and compassion, warmth and sympathy. Yet we would be wise to heed what is said and demonstrate by our deeds rather than our words that it is a caricature.

It was precisely to encourage Christians to demonstrate the authenticity of their faith in action and reveal the inner springs of their religious life that James wrote:

What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?  If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food,  and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?  So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.

Earlier James defined the true religion of which God approves, as a religion of deed, not word only:

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.

I find something deeply disturbing in the way these words cut across our cherished understanding of normal Christianity. We may be ready to concede that faith that exists only in the intellect is bogus, and that Joseph Hart was true when he wrote: True religion’s more than notion, something must be known and felt. But James challenges us to go one step further, insisting that it is not the secret mystical encounter between our souls and God that is true religion, what really counts is the outward, practical, visible, tangible expression of such encounter. Religion that is little more than listening to preaching at services, communions and conferences, and then talking about it afterwards in fellowships is little more than worthless. Indeed James goes further and shocks us by telling us that the true sphere of ‘pure and undefiled religion’ is not the gathered church at all but wherever needy people are found and where we run a risk of getting our hands dirty by contact with the world.

God will hold us accountable for all we hear and read and if our output in good deeds, practical Christian service, social involvement and works of compassion does not equal the input we have received, he will want to know the reason why.

Compassion authenticates the gospel; it gives credibility to the Church’s profession of faith. Therefore, any church desiring to have its message taken seriously must make a decisive break with legalism and lack of love. Francis Schaeffer repeatedly challenged us to see the apologetic and evangelistic value of demonstrative love, such as the radical hospitality he and his wife Edith practiced at L’Abri, their home in the Swiss Alps. Schaeffer’s apologetic was never an abstract theorizing about truth. He passionately believed that ‘the final apologetic’ was love, the love that Christians show to unbelievers. Such love would be a cherished mark of a reconstructed Presbyterian Church in Scotland.

The Impact of a Contextual Church

I sometimes fear that in constructing and organising church life we often act as if the church exists for the benefit of its members. As a consequence those with strong, or at least, loudly expressed views block necessary change to the life and ministry of the Church as it seeks to serve the community in which it is placed. Outside many of our churches are notice boards which welcome visitors to our services, but little accommodation is made to them and they are expected to take us as they find us.

God, on the other hand, acts very differently. Nowhere in Scripture is this made clearer than in the doctrine of the incarnation. In his The Person of Christ Donald Macleod movingly summarises the significance of incarnation for the Son of God:

Incarnation meant a whole new set of relationships: with his father and mother; with his brothers and sisters; with his disciples; with the scribes, the Pharisees and the Sadducees; with Roman soldiers, lepers and prostitutes. It was within these relationships that he lived his incarnate life, experiencing pain, poverty and temptation; witnessing squalor and brutality; hearing obscenities and profanities and the hopeless cry of the oppressed.  He lived not in sublime detachment or in ascetic isolation, but ‘with us’, as the ‘fellow-man of all men’, crowded, harassed, stressed, molested.  No large estate gave him space, no financial capital guaranteed his daily bread, no personal staff protected him from interruptions and no power or influence protected him from injustice.  He saved us from alongside us.’

In other words, Christ is the archetypal Comforter, the original Paraclete, who comes alongside us to befriend us, encourage and empower us and, ultimately, to save us. So concerned was he that gospel ministry should be conducted in this gracious and accommodating spirit that he assured his disciples that after his ascension to the Father, he would send the Holy Spirit as another Comforter, another of the same kind. Philippians 2, the Scripture passage that most powerfully sets out Christ’s ministry of humility, service, sacrifice and winsomeness is prefaced by the application, ‘let this mind be in you.’ Over the last few years at Greyfriars, we have been discovering that if we desire growth we must cultivate a servant’s heart, an attitude that accommodates others and be willing to let go our traditional practices when they are unhelpful or irrelevant to those we seek to win. We have also discovered how wonderfully resilient are the old and cherished values, how readily they survive even the radical changes necessary for effective ministry.

Although some traditionalists dislike the idea of contextualisation, fearing it smacks of compromise, of altering the gospel to make it more acceptable, it is quite clear that both Christ and the Apostles adapted their words to the different audiences they addressed. Jesus’ interview with Nicodemus was very different to his conversation with the Samaritan woman. Paul’s approach to the Jewish people who had the Hebrew Scriptures was fundamentally different to the way be addressed his gentile audiences, who did not. Neither adapted their message to the prejudices and tastes of their audiences to make it more palatable. They adapted their message to make it more understandable.

Contextualisation is nothing more, though nothing less, than a call to take the people to whom we witness seriously. A quotation that has consistently challenged and inspired me throughout the 35 years of my ministry, both pastoral and missionary, is from J. H. Bavinck’s Introduction to the Science of Missions:

…it is possible to have the best intentions and ignore the cultural possessions of a people, and to preach the gospel pure and simple, without any application to their specific characteristics.  History has shown that such a procedure is questionable…such a method does not take seriously enough the people to whom one speaks. God, in contrast, takes us, and those to whom we speak, very seriously, and as his ministers we ought to do the same. Abstract, disembodied and history-less sinners do not exist; only very concrete sinners exist, whose sinful life is determined and characterised by all sorts of cultural and historical factors… I must bring the gospel of God’s grace in Jesus Christ to the whole man, in his concrete existence, in his everyday environment. It is obviously then a great error on my part if I do not take a person’s culture and history seriously.

Bavinck reminds us that God’s mission in reaching down to us was thoroughly contextual. Christ accommodated himself to us, he spoke our language, he ate our food, he wore our clothes, he assumed our nature in indissoluble union with his divine nature, he experienced our temptations, he carried our sorrows and he bore our sins. He did not require us to adapt to him. He took us as we were. We, in turn, can make no prior demands on those to whom we explain the Good News. But whatever may be the cost for us in terms of our status, identity or reputation, the investment will be worthwhile if through it men and women of Scotland are led in faith to love and serve Christ and humanity at home and overseas.

Love, Death and the Kirk

Abelard and Heloise

I wish I were a poet for I would write an elegy for a fallen Kirk. Or if a piper, I would tune my pipes to play a coranach at a lonely grave on the Mound. If a composer, I would write a Threnody to the Victims of Political Correctness. I have no such talents and so stuggle to express my profound sadness that last weekend the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland committed suicide, by ingesting a lethal cocktail of political correctness, putrid theology and corrupt morality.

Those responsible for the death of the Kirk voted to approve homosexual ministers and a revisionist sex ethic for singles. Thereby the Kirk sold out to the morality of the street, if not the gutter. It has lost its raison d’être, making itself utterly extraneous. If the Church cannot provide a spiritual or moral lead, then what purpose can it possibly serve? Far from making itself more attractive to ordinary people, its very sameness makes it irrelevant. It is no coincidence that the fastest declining churches are the most liberal. Few, other than evangelical churches show sustainable growth.

Those who voted in favour of these changes ought now to consider their position. Integrity obliges them to recognise that the only honourable course of action is to follow the lead of Richard Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh, whose abandonment of anything approximating authentic religion (he calls himself an “after-religionist”) led him inexorably to the conclusion that his leadership in the church was untenable. Logically, in 2000 he resigned. Of course these people won’t follow Holloway’s lead, because they have neither his honesty nor his courage.

In my quieter moments, this week, sandwiched between my day job, and the squalls of international blogging and torrents of emails, I have been reading Roger B. Lloyd’s The Stricken Lute, an account of the story of Abelard and Heloise. This medieval story of love, philosophy and hubris, leads inevitably to trauma, sorrow and guilt, but ultimately to redemption. This, as it turned out, proved a very relevant parallel text to events in Scotland.

Peter Abelard (1079-1142), the most able and popular teacher of philosophy in his day, falls for the intellectually brilliant but still teenage Heloise. He contrives to be taken on as her tutor by Fulbert, her uncle. Heloise reciprocates his love, and madly and passionately they abandon themselves to their desire. Heloise, inevitably, falls pregnant. Their flight to Abelard’s Brittany is no solution. They leave their son, Astrolabe, behind and return to Paris to face Fulbert’s fulminations. Fulbert insists on a secret marriage knowing this will destroy Abelard’s chances of a career in the Church. However, the secret gets out and with broken hearts Abelard and Heloise dissolve their marriage as Heloise enters a convent. Outwitted, Fulbert’s bitterness knows no bounds, he hires a gang of thugs who break into Abelard’s house and emasculate him. Abelard plunges into a dark world of pain, grief, guilt and paranoia. Following accusations of heresy, he withdraws to a hermitage, to which his students flock. An Oratory is built, dedicated to the Paraclete, Abelard’s unfailing Comforter. Further theological strife leads Abelard to accept the post of abbot of the monastery of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys in Brittany, where the monks are sunk in depravity. He seeks to reform the monastery. The monks plot his murder. Poison fails, as do attempts by hired assassins. Abelard flees.

In the meantime, Heloise’s convent at Argenteuil is dissolved, and she and her companions tramp the roads seeking an alternative location. A quirk of providence brings her to Abelard’s door. He makes over to her and her nuns the Oratory of the Paraclete and becomes their spiritual adviser. Within the limitations of their circumstances, Heloise seeks to revive their love. Abelard, no less in love with her than before, is resolute in sublimating his feelings to the service of God, and counsels her to do the same. He refuses futher to correspond on a personal level, but agrees to write a Rule for their house, and provides spiritual materials for the nuns, including a hymnbook.

Abelard’s reflections on the Atonement led him to reject the prevailing medieval Ransom to Satan theory, which taught that by Christ’s death God paid the price for our deliverance from sin by making payment to Satan, whose slaves we are. Some, such as Rufinus of Aquileia went further and saw the Cross as a mouse-trap set to catch the devil. They depict God ensnaring Satan, who takes the bait of Christ’s human nature but impales himself on the divine nature, being unable to overcome his victim who is none other than Very God. Disposing of this theory as a legal fiction, Abelard suggested that what lies at the heart of the Atonement is the transforming power of the Love of God, which we make our own by the union of our love with His. The love of the Cross draws from us our love, dispels fear and opens for us the “glorious liberty of the children of God.” The weaknesses in Abelard’s theory are not hard to detect. They include a neglect of faith as the instrument of union with Christ and a preoccupation, perhaps understandable in his case, with the sanctifying rather than justifying benefits of the Cross. Although this early version of the moral influence theory shares many of the weaknesses of that approach, it was, none the less, a real advance on the ‘mouse-trap’ theory. Taken together with Anselm’s doctrine of the Atonement as rendering satisfaction to the divine honour by Christ, the God Man, they move the understanding of Atonement towards its ultimate definition at the Reformation.

For many the moral of the story of Abelard and Heloise is that of indomitable human love. But that is seriously to misread it. It is not the nature of their monumental love that transforms this “sordid affair of treachery, intrigue, [and] unbridled lust,” but rather Abelard’s seeking of God, his learning to love God, to find pardon and to renew his mind. This leads Roger Lloyd to contrast Heloise’s “unchecked passion” with the “graver beauty” of Abelard’s, whose last personal letter to Heloise leads to “an exaltation of religious devotion when Abelard, throwing all restrain to the winds, comes to a majestic climax in prayer:

God…Who hast raised marriage to the greatest honour…despise not the prayer of thine handmaid, which for mine own excesses and for those of my beloved in the sight of thy Majesty I pour forth in supplication. Pardon, O most bountiful, nay bounty itself: pardon our so great offences, and may the ineffable immensity of Thy Mercy make trial of our faults….

Thou hast joined us together, O Lord, and thou hast put us asunder when it pleased Thee and in the manner that pleased Thee. Now, O Lord, what Thou hast mercifully begun most mercifully finish. And those that Thou hast divided from one another upon earth join perennially to Thyself in Heaven. Our hope, our portion, our expectation, our comfort, Lord Who art Blessed, world without end. AMEN.

Farewell in Christ, Bride of Christ, in Christ farewell, and in Christ dwell. AMEN.

Whilst never deprecating revelation, Abelard revered reason. Falsely accused by Bernard of Clairvaux of rationalism, he protested. Writing to Heloise as her spiritual mentor, shortly before his death he said, “I do not want to be a philosopher if the price of it is that I must rebel against St Paul. For Christ, who reigns at the right hand of God the Father, I love and worship.” Abelard’s reason did not lead him to rewrite God’s Word, to rationalise away his and Heloise’s sin, for sin he knew it to be. Rather it led him to search the Scriptures, to desire fresh theological understanding, which led to repentance. Repentance in turn brought to him pardon and peace. Would that all who exalt their love above the wisdom of God, gay or straight, like Abelard be led to contrition, to Christ’s atonement and so to spiritual renewal.