Far from a '˜theological Brexit' the Presbyterian Church in Ireland has an outward-facing posture

In our part of the world we know that it is all too easy to delve into the past and to exploit aspects of history for our own ends.

Sometimes appeals to history do nothing more than impose our current ideas on the past resulting in an emerging story that is unrecognisable compared to reality of what actually happened.

There have been two recent examples of this in the debates that have taken place in the wake of this year’s general assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.

The first was in an opinion piece in the News Letter which suggested that ‘Ulster Presbyterians were among the most enlightened people in Ireland but have stepped back into the Dark Ages’ (June 21).

Brian McClinton was of course particularly alluding to those Presbyterians in late eighteenth-century Belfast whose embrace of reformist and revolutionary ideas paved the way for the events of 1798.

His argument was that this ‘more progressive movement’ and other ‘periodic shifts towards liberalism’ have consistently been shouted down and that some of the decisions taken by the general assembly this month demonstrate a reversion to the ‘puritanism’ of the seventeenth century.

His use of ‘Dark Ages’ to describe the medieval world and the references to Cromwellian liberty and the Enlightenment suggest the acceptance of a discredited evolutionary view of history.

This way of telling the story sets Western history in a triumphalist narrative of steady progress out of a world of superstition and clericalism into the dawn of a new day which, in time, arrives at modern secularism.

The past is simply used to legitimise the ever-more-enlightened present.

Historical revisionism has swept away this old narrative of the unrelenting march of progress.

Most historians believe that it is no longer useful to refer to the medieval period as the ‘Dark Ages’ because the era simply was not that dark.

Furthermore, McClinton rightly noted the opposition of the Ulster Presbyterians to

Oliver Cromwell’s toleration laws.

However, even if it is granted that Cromwell and Milton’s understandings of liberty were very different from those in a modern liberal democracy, the significance placed upon them as harbingers of things to come is misplaced.

The danger of this way of approaching history is that we only ask questions of the past that seem to be of relevance for today and we miss out on what history can actually teach us.

The other example of the misuse of history is found in a widely reported comment by Lord Alderdice.

He characterised the Protestant martyrs as those whose ‘radical commitment to the search for liberty and truth’ led to them going to the flames of martyrdom.

His point was that the Presbyterian Church had squandered its Reformation legacy and instead now resembles ‘those who lit the fires’.

In response it must be said that it is simply inaccurate to suggest that those with concerns about complex pastoral questions are unrepresentative of historic Protestantism.

Such a misrepresentation of what took place should suggest caution in attempting to determine who is (in his words) ‘no longer the spiritual heir’ of the Reformation.

Properly understood, the history of the Reformed Churches in the sixteenth and seventeenth century can illuminate the current debates.

First, the theologians of the era were highly sophisticated scholars of the biblical text and so those apparently ‘blockish presbyters’ would have offered thoughtful responses to the questions that McClinton raised about some of the laws in the Book of Leviticus e.g. prohibitions about mixed fibre clothing and eating pork or shellfish.

Secondly, recent scholarship has also demonstrated that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Reformed Churches of Europe often had very close working relationships with others who shared their confession.

Far from engaging in ‘a theological Brexit’ the Presbyterian Church in Ireland maintains a similar outward-facing posture.

In its decisions the church was not adopting ‘isolationist measures’ but simply standing in the closest alignment with the global church in its understanding of the nature of marriage and human sexuality.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the Reformers had an uncompromising commitment to the authority of scripture and it led them into conflict with those who wished to live under various forms of human authority.

Those who wish to understand the rationale behind the general assembly’s decisions need to recognise that at least in this sense the Presbyterian Church in Ireland sees itself as a true heir of the Reformation.

• Rev. Dr. Martyn Cowan is lecturer in Historical Theology at Union Theological College in Belfast