Commencement 2006
‘I have called you friends,' John 15.15.
I congratulate you with all my heart. You are graduates of one of the greatest theological schools in the world. You have earned your degrees in classroom, seminar, precept, library, field education, through essay and examination. You are now alumni or alumnae. Though no longer studying here, you are permanent members of the Princeton Seminary community. You are welcome visitors returning to a place where you already belong. The resources of the library are open to you and will always remain so. I look forward to seeing you again.
When you leave this chapel, a series of relationships change. No longer will you be students. Faculty and staff, I hope, will be seen as friends. There is a glad renegotiation of who you are.
For many of you, this is only the first stage in a series of renegotiations. For many, ordination will follow and with it profound changes in the depth and extent of responsibility. You will receive new charisms or return to previous ones. God has called you and God will uphold you.
But there are human dimensions as well. What is the boundary between friendship and professionalism? When is it appropriate to step back and when is it permissible to become complicit and partisan? Very many of you already have or soon will address the issue of pastoral confidentiality in one of its various forms. Each kind of absolutism raises its own challenges. This is no exception. One view, as no doubt you know, is that pastoral confidentiality is a permitted form of partisan aid. It is beneficial to society and the making of community that certain people—those who are sick, those in deep distress, those who are guilty and require the fullest range of dispassionate advice—are provided with a level of assistance not accorded to others. But all of this has to remain within limits or deeper values are threatened. For example, it is widely agreed that no one may collude in sheltering the abuser of a child. And there are other critical circumstances that are almost as obvious and that can seem to call into question the credibility of the offer of protection and support. The puzzle then is: When ought one to cross the line?
I suggest that much of the mindset behind that question is the burning need to specify everything. For those who think like that, much of education is the elaboration of just that specificity, that is, when exactly to do what in an airtight kind of way. I suggest to you that this is futile in the world of the twenty-first century into which you graduate.
To challenge that mindset, I want to turn to Andrew Walls, who from 1997 to 2001 was guest professor of ecumenics and mission research at our seminary. Mark Noll has said of him that “no one has written with greater wisdom about what it means for the Western Christian religion to become the global Christian religion.” In a recent study, Andrew Walls looked at “Christian Scholarship and the Demographic Transformation of the Church.” Andrew Walls’s purpose is to take account of the fact that at the beginning of the twentieth century, more than 80% of professing Christians lived in Europe and North America. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, “well over half of the world’s Christians live[d] in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific.” By this century’s end, he suggests that two-thirds of the world’s Christians may be living in the southern continents. But he is not only talking about numbers. He is talking about enormous changes in the nature and quality of Christian believing. The Christianity of the West and the northern hemisphere, Andrew Walls argues, is largely the Christianity of the European Enlightenment. I am one who certainly sees the values of the Enlightenment, but, as Walls argues, it characteristically tended to draw a sharp divide between the material world which we see and the world of the spirit. There were ‘identifiable crossing places: the incarnation, the resurrection, revelation, prayer, and perhaps miracles.” Andrew Walls’s bold thesis is that Western Christianity, now faltering and fractious, may rediscover itself and be redeemed through exposure to the faith of the southern hemisphere.
He may well be right, but let’s take his idea and turn it in a different direction. The Enlightenment disposed not only of miracles but also of casuistry, wisdom, and, most of all, moral intuition. These were replaced by the categorical imperative and the calculus of utilitarianism. I am not convinced that either will be of much help ultimately to those of you who enter ministerial practice and seek help in drawing the boundary between the pastoral and the personal, between the role of the friend and the role of the official. Especially today we have need of a Christian morality that is neither polarizing nor vacuous.
One of my friends is a person called Herbert Kerrigan, who is one of the most successful criminal defense attorneys in Britain. He once drove me from Edinburgh to Glasgow and navigated from one murder scene to another. We have been friends for a long time. In 1975, a stage in the civil war in Angola ended. A group of mercenaries was rounded up and put on trial for their lives. Bert Kerrigan was one of two or three international attorneys who volunteered their services so that the prisoners could have a fair trial. He believes fervently in justice. I remember asking him how he could control his feelings in a situation when the stakes were so high. He told me: “Whatever you do, you must not personally become involved.” There is one extreme for you. This may be good for steadying the nerves of a trial attorney, but if you practice ministry with that degree of emotional distance, you will fail.
Here is another case: on the 6th of July 1988 the largest oil platform in the North Sea blew up. There was an inferno 350 feet high and 167 people died. It was a matter of national anguish, and at the subsequent memorial service, one of the officiating pastors broke down and wept. This was an understandable and human act. Jesus wept. Yet my sense is that if you conduct ministry regularly with that degree of exposure, then you will be crushed and you will fail.
This is a graduating class that has not been untouched by loss. On the day I arrived in August 2004, Scott Schuller died. He was in every sense an extraordinary person, remarkable in his ability to inspire and to create community across different groups. That was his gift. His absence is palpable and his life will always mark those of you who knew him.
After 9/11 the British ambassador to the United States delivered a message to the people of New York from Queen Elizabeth. He ended with her words: “Grief is the price we pay for love.” These words are now engraved in stone at St Thomas’ Church in New York City.
Herein, I believe is the key to Christian living. We cannot be inured from hard decision-making either through over-involvement or under-involvement. That is not how Christian professionalism is benchmarked. A participation in the love of God enables us to steer a path between the judicial and the sentimental. The practice of love distinguishes us from the worthy but distancing ethics of the Enlightenment. In your ministries be steeped in God’s love and display it to others without cost or moralizing. By refusing division and by persisting in love, with God’s blessing we may hold together the Presbyterian denomination, of which this Seminary is a part, in all the struggles of its General Assembly meeting in Birmingham. May God bless all of you.
Pages 166-183 in Theological Literacy for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Rodney L Petersen with Nancy M Rourke (Grand Rapids, William B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002).
Ibid, p. 171
Ibid, p. 171
Ibid, p. 177
Piper Alpha
