I Can't Stop Thinking about The Issue

John Updike's novel, "In the Beauty of the Lillies" is about a family considered over four generations. The saga begins in 1910 with the story of the Reverend Clarence Author Wilmot. One of the most haunting narratives of this book describes how his once fairly orthodox Old Princeton Christian faith finally and completely leaves this not so good pastor. This existential and internal happening ultimately results in his moral and spiritual demise. He leaves his calling and his marriage to sell encyclopedias door to door - at that vocation he also fails.  His fall, like Adam's, subsequently corrupts several generations that follow it.

"...the Reverend Clarence Author Wilmot, down in the parsonage of the Fourth Presbyterian Church on the corner of Straight Street and Broadway, felt the particle of his faith leave him. The sensation was distinct -- a visceral surrender, a set of dark bubbling sparks escaping upward."

 I am not sure Updike, a (live and let live) Unitarian in temperament and a Barthian in his theological foundation, always fresh in his thinking, realized how clearly he describes my thoughts and feelings about the  of moral and doctrinal liberalism that currently haunts our part of Christ's holy Church.

The former Presbyterian pastor, who studied under BB Warfield and owned all forty four volumes of Calvin's commentaries, could not revive his dying faith. What killed it? Liberal Theology and Higher Biblical Criticism. To his credit he did not remain in the Church. He understood that his faith, or lack thereof, was no longer Christian. With his still born faith, hope was gone. Christ, if he was ever there, was now far from his heart. He became a stranger to his former friend and would be Savior.

John Updike's novel and poems are never far from the subject of human sexuality. It is as though sexual feelings become the energy behind his existential anxiety. Like the Barthian he was, he brings his readers to a moral and spiritual crisis.

Like one of Updike's characters, many of the leaders in the Presbyterian Church (USA) have taken those in their pastoral guidance just one step short of where Rev. Wilmot, finally arrives. We are watching "a set of dark bubbling sparks escaping" that last remains of a dying orthodoxy. In its place is what? The religion of doing good as defined by the doer and in passionately faithful conformity to the evil spirit of this age. We have traded the life changing Gospel for some ambiguous movement of the currently fashionable definition of social progress. "I've an idea, lets reverse two thousand years of Christian moral theology concerning sexuality. Let's make what was once considered personally good seem evil ("oppressive monogamy") and what is once considered to be personally evil good ("sexual healing")." The leaders in my denomination are the children of the once reverend Clarence Author Wilmot. I'll not follow them to their ruin. Yet, where shall I go?