Sir Lloyd Geering, Wellington, New Zealand

In Defence of Gretta Vosper.

I understand that Gretta Vosper is soon to appear before a church committee to be examined concerning her beliefs. I do not know what her beliefs are but in my personal contacts with her I have found her to be a person of creative Christian faith, of which we have all too few in the ministry, especially at a time when human culture is changing so rapidly. I wish to give her moral and theological support by respectfully making the following points.

It is essential to distinguish between faith and beliefs. Faith is an attitude of trust and should never be identified with adherence to a set of beliefs. Beliefs change in the course of one’s life time and hopefully mature. Beliefs change even more over the centuries, so that many of the beliefs of yesterday become the superstitions of today, or as W. Cantwell Smith put it in his excellent book, Faith and Belief, “One’s beliefs belong to the century one lives in, whereas faith has been experienced in every century as something essential to human existence”. Faith is a matter of giving oneself heart and soul to the highest values one knows and the highest Christian value is love.

It is true that the ancient Christian Creeds, along with the Confessions of the Protestant Reformation, played an important role in the past in providing an anchoring and unifying tool for the ever-changing Christian ‘Way’ (the first name of what became Christianity). But almost from the beginning they also had a divisive effect in their respective times by removing from the church those who could not give assent. Today these statements of belief have become much more divisive and have the effect of shutting people out from the influence of the Christian movement. This is because they were composed before Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein and do not allow for the knowledge explosion within which we live today. What is even worse, as scholars are now finding out, is that they marginalized or even omitted to mention the original teaching of Jesus on love.

The Christian Way of love is a living tradition and hence subject to change and development. Today, in this fast-changing world, the church is finding it difficult to change and to free itself from the accumulated baggage of the past. It too often insists on wrapping up its basic message of love in a container of supernatural beliefs that have long passed their use-by date. The Gospel of love that has been preached from Paul onwards is also a Gospel of freedom. As his letter to the Galatians makes clear, Paul offered to his fellow-Jews a way to be free from the Jewish legalism in which they were imprisoned and he harshly criticized the Judaizers who tried to win them back to their former ways. Today, in a similar way, the Christian Gospel of love and salvation should be offering us freedom from those beliefs of the past in which we have become imprisoned.

Ever since the Western Enlightenment humans have been free to think for themselves and to exercise critical thought. From that time onwards people began to slip out of the church because they found they could no longer give assent to what the church required them to believe. The time for being required to give assent to sets of beliefs is now past. The church that I am member of – St Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace – declares itself to be an Open Church, where all are welcome, irrespective of their beliefs. What links us all together is our common devotion to the Christian tradition and our desire to put its values into practice, particularly love, compassion and social justice.

From what I have been told I believe the church of which Gretta is the minister is somewhat similar to St Andrew’s. I believe Gretta should be encouraged in her pioneering efforts and commended her for her courage and creativity.

Lloyd Geering,
Minister Emeritus of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Past Principal of the Theological Hall, Knox College, Dunedin
Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies, Victoria University of Wellington