A Church for many different people

By Henri Persoz

Translated by Sara MacVane

The strength of our United Protestant Church of France is that it resembles Christians who have many very different ways of belief, even quite opposite ways sometimes. We call this type of church multitudinous or multivalent, the opposite of a confessional church gathered around a confession of faith. We hold together big differences, between those who believe in miracles and those who don’t, those who see God fashioning the world in his way and those who believe that an interior force pushes us towards good actions. We also have different beliefs about some very essential points like the resurrection, the role of grace, the divinity of Christ, the meaning of salvation, what it means to be faithful to scripture, and so forth.

And yet we remain together: Lutheran, and Reformed, evangelical, orthodox and liberal. We don’t all think about faith in the same way, and indeed sometimes we find it difficult to understand each other, but nonetheless we all belong to the same Church, which is a result of the Reformation. This Church cannot be confessional, because no confession of faith will be acceptable to everyone. We cannot gather together around a dogma, because there is no dogmatic authority in our Protestant tradition. And if we divest a hypothetical confession of anything with which one part or another of the church do not agree, nothing much will remain, except some saccharine phrases without any force or significance regarding the faith.

So what brings us together? What is our communality? It is exactly that we don’t have a common confession of faith and that our faith in the Word of God as revealed in Jesus does not mean that we all believe in the same way. It does mean that we listen to the word and take it into account in our lives, in order to be open to human problems. At least that is one way of seeing it. According to the Gospels, Jesus was not particularly concerned about expressing a new faith. .. whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother[1] (Matthew 12. 50). This is what brings us together: to do the will of God. Not to believe, but to do. Jews and Moslems have understood this idea very well. They come together first of all for a practice, which must evidently be adapted to the time period. Or as Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote to Christoph de Beaumont, the archbishop of Paris: My teacher had little to say about dogma, but quite a lot about what we should do; he insisted less on the particulars of faith than on acts of kindness. He didn’t say that belief was a pre-requisite to being kind. When he summarized the Law and the Prophets, the emphasis was much more on kind acts than on formulas of belief. And in person and through his apostles he said that whoever loves his brother has fulfilled the Law.

The Virtual Protestant Museum http://www.museeprotestant.org/ has an even larger vision. It claims that

a multivalent Church: is a church which welcomes all those who are searching for God. Let us search for God then, and the rest will be given to us in abundance.

For lack of a confession of faith then, the United Protestant Church of France is thinking about a statement of faith. The difference is rather subtle and not so clear. According to the Protestant Encyclopedia (l’Encyclopédie du protestantisme) a statement of faith consists of a reformulation, in a particular time and particular circumstances, of the faith that has always been ours. It is a sort of modernization; the meaning of faith in the present day. That gives us the same difficulty though. How can this reformulation summarize the range of thought which characterizes our Protestantism today? And, is it really necessary?

When it was important to emphasize the differences between Christianity and pagan belief, or to fight what were considered heresies, or to mark our differences with the Roman Catholic Church, it is clear that statements (or confessions) of faith were necessary. But now, on the contrary, to carry on with a union already created, the necessity is less evident.

[1] The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

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