Prof. Stacy Johnson believes
“Our House Is Broke”
By James D. Berkley, The Layman, November 7, 2008
Stacy Johnson
MINNEAPOLIS — The first major address at the Covenant Network Conference in Minneapolis, November 6, wound up the crowd and made them think. William Stacy Johnson, a former attorney and now a professor of systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, held the crowd in his thrall. Johnson played a major role in the deliberations and the 2006 report of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church. He spoke at length, with passion, and to the great delight of the crowd. Using the words of his little daughter when once she despaired over the startling state of their home, emptied for a move, he titled his talk “Our House Is Broke!”
“I want you to know that I worked for Obama’s campaign,” Johnson proclaimed. “We are a covenant people and we gather here in Minnesota as a Covenant Network. We seek to open our doors to all … but we have to acknowledge that despite the gains [such as those of the last week], our house is still broken.”
“A generational shift is on the way,” Johnson postulated, “but it’s not clear the Presbyterian Church is ready for that.” He views the shift in the church as one of many major shifts going on in society. “I see the rest of my career as handing on the torch [to today’s seminarians]. We should give our heritage, our endowment, the whole works to that generation and not tell them what to do with it, but say, ‘Here it is. What do you want to do with it?’”
Johnson’s main theme was one of capitulation to the evil “powers that be.” He pulled no punches. In speaking of California’s vote affirming heterosexual marriage, he lamented that “these votes remind us that though our covenant is profound, it is not yet complete.” Apparently Johnson believes that God’s covenant is largely about politics rather than salvation, offering many examples of social and economic problems. “Our house is broke. The list is so long—so long, friends—that we’ve become used to it not working. We become so used to sin that we’ve become forgetful of how the world ought to be. We have become so accustomed to injustice that we have become friends with the powers that be. As a society, we have been doing that habitually for the last thirty years [since the Reagan presidency]. We’ve learned to come together and make compromises that essentially give the powers of injustice what they want!”
Then Johnson tossed some red meat to the crowd: “We have become accustomed to injustice in the world, and I fear that we have become accustomed to injustice in the church!” The injustice of which he spoke was clear to all in the room: the exclusion from ordination of practicing homosexual persons. “By and large, I’m thought of in the PCUSA as a moderate,” Johnson claimed. “I cozy up to people in Covenant Network and people in PFR. I’m beginning to wonder in my old age if that’s a good thing. We need to come together, but we do not need to come together at the expense of injustice. We do not need to come together in a way that gives power to exclusion.”
Johnson asked rhetorically why G-6.0106b—the “fidelity and chastity” standard that he prefers to refer to as “Amendment B”—received approval. “I think we did it because we were giving in to power,” he speculated. “Aren’t you glad that God didn’t tell Moses to go cut a deal with Pharaoh?”
Neither conservatives nor liberals escaped Johnson’s critique—the liberals for “reducing Jesus to merely an antiquarian perspective” and the conservatives for “being stuck.” However, for this audience, Johnson zeroed in on conservatives. “It is time to put aside the notion that the Bible is a book for people who are trying to keep the world from changing,” Johnson thundered. “When the Protestant reformers read the Bible, the earth shook—and it still does! Because of the dynamic nature of the covenant, we have permission to envision a new and different world than the one we see around us. It is to this sort of re-imagining that the church should devote its energy. We freeze-frame the action, take one little section, and say, ‘This is the truth.’ But the real truth is the ongoing play of the story until the end, and the end is not yet here.”
In response to a question, Johnson revealed his baseline assumption that the heart of the matter is interpersonal experience. “I would encourage us to look beyond ideology and beyond the issues and see the people behind the issues,” he implored. “My hunch is that when you spend time with one of the million gay and lesbian couples that are struggling to raise children, that is better than theological arguments…. I think that if all of us could hold our positions loosely and hold on to God’s justice firmly, then we’re going to see things differently. We have to maintain dialogue and conversation with those with whom we differ…. On whose behalf are you crying? Are we crying on behalf of our ideology, or are we crying on behalf of the people who are behind this debate?”
Johnson concluded with an invitation: “God is calling us this day, every day, to become a voice, to become God’s voice and not merely an echo of the voices of the crowd that echo the powers that be. Our house is broken, but we can have hope, because we worship and serve a God who would rather die than break covenant with us.”
Johnson will speak again on Saturday about why proof-texting arguments are wrong. “I think it will be a definitive statement,” he teased, “so you ought to show up.” Judging from the enthusiastic response he received on Thursday afternoon, people most certainly will.