I Would Not Be Admitted

Words to Know

Ordination — the official act by which a church authorizes someone to lead or preach.

Seminary — a school for training clergy. The word means a seed-bed. It has a founding date.

Doctrinal statement — a list of beliefs a church requires its leaders to sign.

Collaborator — someone who works for an occupying power against his own people.

Let me arrive.

I am a manual laborer from an occupied province. I own one set of clothes. I have no permanent address and no income. My hands are wrecked. I do not speak your language.

I have no credentials of any kind. I never attended a school of religion. I hold no office and no one has licensed me to speak.

Go deeperWhat I look like

My skin is the color of a man who has worked outdoors in the Middle East his whole life. My hair and beard are dark, and the beard, as Lesson 22 told you, is about the only item in your mental picture that is probably right.

And I have a criminal record.

I was taken at night, in a garden, by an armed party carrying torches. In the morning I was handed to the Roman prefect of the province, who heard the matter himself, with no jury, no counsel and no appeal. I was flogged and executed before the day was out. The charge was sedition: claiming to be a king.

So in your terms: a capital conviction against the state, no jury, no appeal, sentence carried out. If your church runs a background check on me, that is what comes back.

Go deeperThe record in full

A background check usually means a form, and the form will want the details, so here they are.

I was held overnight before the hearing. The prefect worked from no written code, and none of the protections I just listed were available to a provincial who was not a Roman citizen. He found against me, and the whole thing, from the arrest to the cross, took less than a day. The charge was written on a board. Lesson 12 explains how that machinery worked.

Here is who is with me.

A woman with a reputation in her town is with me. So are several men who work with fish and smell of it, a man who collected taxes for the occupying power, which makes him a collaborator, and a man who begged on a road for years. None of us has been vetted.

Go deeperThe whole company, and the walk into your church

Somebody's mother is with me too, and two or three people who were recently out of their minds.

Would the greeter smile? Would somebody offer me a microphone?

I am not sneering. I am asking you to picture the actual room.

Now walk us into your church. Would the woman with the reputation be welcome in the women’s group, or would she be a topic in it? Would the man with the record be allowed near the children’s wing? Would I?

Here is the thing that should trouble you most, and it is not about rudeness. I would not qualify to teach.

That is not because anybody in that building is wicked. It is because of the standards: a degree, a license, a board, an ordination, a background check, a doctrinal statement, a reference. And every one of those has a date and a reason.

• 1559: Calvin founds an academy at Geneva to train ministers who can read the text in Greek and Hebrew.
• 1563: The Council of Trent orders every diocese to set up a seminary to train boys for the priesthood. ¹
• 1636: Massachusetts Puritans found Harvard because they “dreaded to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches.” ²
• 1808 and 1812: Andover and Princeton seminaries open, and boards begin examining and licensing candidates. ³
• 1910 to the 1920s: The fundamentalist fight over the new study of the Bible produces lists of essential doctrines, and then the signed doctrinal statement. ⁴
• 1984 to 2002: Clergy abuse cases, from Lafayette, Louisiana, to the Boston Globe, lead churches and their insurers to require background checks. ⁵

Go deeperHow each gate was built, with the dates

The degree, and the seminary behind it.

For most of Christian history there was no school for this. A man learned the job from another man, or did not learn it. Complaints that parish priests could not understand the Latin they were reciting run through the Middle Ages, and they were often true.

The seminaries Trent required were boarding schools that took in boys, and that decree is the origin of the clergy pipeline you know.

The Protestant side got there from the other direction. If the center of the service is explaining a text, then a minister has to be able to read the text, in Greek and Hebrew if possible, and that means schooling.

When the Puritans in Massachusetts founded their college, they published their reason in their own words: they had built houses and churches, and next they dreaded to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when the present ministers should lie in the dust. Within a century of Andover and Princeton, being trained at a seminary, examined by a board and ordained by a body was simply what a minister was.

The doctrinal statement.

American Protestants spent the early twentieth century tearing themselves apart over whether the new historical study of the Bible could be accepted. In 1910 the Presbyterian General Assembly issued a short list of doctrines it declared essential and necessary: the inerrancy of scripture, the virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection, and the reality of the miracles. It reaffirmed that list in the years after.

In 1922 a preacher named Harry Emerson Fosdick stood up in a Presbyterian pulpit in New York and preached a sermon asking whether the fundamentalists were going to win. It was printed and mailed across the country, and the war between fundamentalists and modernists was now fully underway. The twelve free volumes from Lesson 34 fed the same fight and gave the movement its name.

What came out the other end was a piece of paper with a list on it, and a line for a signature. Seminaries adopted it. Mission boards adopted it. Denominations adopted it. Today almost every religious institution in your country has one, and nobody remembers that the instrument was forged in a specific argument in a specific decade.

The background check.

This is the newest gate in the building, and the only one built out of an emergency.

In 1984 and 1985, a criminal case in Lafayette, Louisiana, against a Catholic priest named Gilbert Gauthe became the first widely reported prosecution of its kind in the United States, and it made public both the abuse and the fact that the man had been quietly moved between parishes.

In 1985, a confidential report was prepared for the American bishops by a canon lawyer, a psychiatrist and an attorney, warning them of the scale of the problem and of what it would cost. Nobody acted on it.

In January 2002, the Boston Globe published an investigation showing a pattern of abuse and reassignment across an entire archdiocese, and the story went worldwide. In June 2002, the American Catholic bishops adopted a charter on the protection of children which required criminal background checks and safe-environment training for clergy, employees and volunteers who work with children.

It did not stay Catholic. Through the 1990s and 2000s, Protestant denominations adopted child-protection policies, and liability insurers began requiring screening as a condition of covering a church at all.

The doctrinal statement came out of one fight in one decade, and nobody remembers that now.

The background check is different, and I want you to be glad about it. It came from children being harmed by men whom nobody had checked, in institutions that moved them along instead of stopping them. If a rule keeps a child safe and it keeps me out of the building too, the rule is right and I will wait outside.

Here is the honest part, because one gate is older than all of them.

The reference letter is older than every other gate, and the first Christians vetted people too. Paul mentions letters of recommendation (2 Corinthians 3:1). An early Christian handbook called the Didache, probably from the late first or early second century, says that any apostle who stays more than a couple of days is a false prophet, and any prophet who asks for money is a false prophet. ⁶ Travelling frauds were a real problem, and poor congregations were being drained. That is the strongest thing anyone can say against this lesson, and it is true.

Here is my answer. The Didache screens for greed. Your gates screen for a degree, a signed opinion and a reference from people already inside. The early test asks is this man taking from you. Yours asks is this man one of us, and can he afford to be.

Go deeperThe Didache and the reference letter at length

Paul does more than mention the practice: he sends Phoebe to Rome with what amounts to one such letter (Romans 16:1–2).

The first Christians were doing this within a generation of me, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to win an argument.

Does the travelling teacher stay too long? Does he ask for money? Those are the only tests the Didache applies, tests a poor community used to protect itself from being consumed.

Your gates ask more. A degree costs money and years. A doctrinal signature tests opinions. A license comes from a board.

And no church I know of has ever sat down and gone through its own rules to sort out which ones protect children, which ones protect doctrine, and which ones simply protect the people already holding the microphone.

And now the strongest thing in this lesson, and it is in your own Bible.

The clergy requirements do not come from me. I never wrote a job description for anybody. They come from 1 Timothy 3:1–7 and Titus 1:5–9. That is the literal, historical source of the qualifications every tradition uses, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant alike. Ordination councils still read them out loud.

Now hold me up against it.

Married, the husband of one wife. I was not married.

He must manage his own household well, with his children respectful. I had no household and no children. I told people to leave theirs.

Not violent. I knotted a whip out of cords and turned the money-changers’ tables over in the Temple courtyard, at the busiest week of the year (John 2:15).

Not quarrelsome, and gentle. I called the most respected religious teachers in my country whitewashed tombs and a brood of vipers (Matthew 23).

Well thought of by outsiders. The outsiders executed me as a rebel. Before that, the standing complaint about me was that I was a glutton and a drunkard (Matthew 11:19).

Above reproach. See the criminal record above.

That is at least five failures, on a seven-item list, and one of them is capital.

First, the list is not mine. Not a word of it is in red in anybody’s Bible.

Second, it is late. The letters to Timothy and Titus are among the ones whose authorship is most seriously questioned, and they are generally placed decades after Paul.

Third, it is a document about running an organization. It cares about stability, reputation, household order and what the neighbors think. That is a reasonable thing for a young institution to want. But do not miss what happened: a later text, written by somebody else, to protect an institution’s reputation, became the gate the founder cannot walk through.

Go deeperThree things about that list

You had that authorship dispute in Lesson 15, and the dating puts these letters the better part of a lifetime after me.

A document about running an organization has its own concerns: those of a movement that has decided it is going to last and wants to look respectable to the city around it.

And you can check all of this tonight, with one Bible and ten minutes.

Here is the sentence I most want in your head.

The people I could not get along with, in my own lifetime, were not the drunks and the prostitutes and the collaborators. I ate with those people more than with anyone else. The people I fought with were the religious professionals of my own tradition, who knew the text, tithed correctly, and were quite sure they were on God’s side. They were not villains. Most of them were sincere. That is exactly the problem.

If you had been alive in my town, you would almost certainly have been on their side, out of upbringing and decency and trusting the people you were taught to trust. I am not saying that to shame you. Every person in this book who read me right was told they were wrong by the respectable religion of their own day.

Go deeperThe religious professionals, and the people who read it right

They were careful, respectable, and doing exactly what they had been taught. That combination is what makes a person impossible to warn.

I am saying this because it is the most likely truth about all of us. And the list of people in this book who paid for getting it right runs long: Valdes, Francis, the Beguines, the peasants with their twelve articles, Woolman, Sharpe, Day, Romero.

There has almost never been a century where the faithful thing was also the well-regarded thing.

So when something in this book has made you uncomfortable, and the first voice in your head says but my pastor says, that voice is the oldest one in the story. It is not a wicked voice. It is just always, reliably, on the side of whoever owns the barn.

Go deeperWhere else that voice was, with the dates

That voice showed up more than once, with a name and a date each time.

It was at Constance in 1415, where a church council burned Jan Hus for saying the church should not be a landlord, after the emperor had given him a written safe-conduct to come and explain himself (Lesson 25).

It was in Wittenberg in 1525, where Martin Luther, whose own protest had begun eight years earlier, published a pamphlet urging the princes to stab and slay the rebelling peasants, peasants whose twelve demands had scripture references written beside them (Lesson 27).

It was in Augusta, Georgia, in May 1845, where the churches that would not accept a ban on slaveholders as missionaries walked out and founded a new denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, which apologized a hundred and fifty years later (Lesson 29).

And it was in South Africa in 1974, where the Dutch Reformed Church published a long report setting out a case from the Bible for racial separation (Lesson 32).

Four councils, committees and assemblies of serious, devout, well-read men, each one certain, each one voting.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 1 Timothy 3:1–7 and Titus 1:5–9 — the qualification lists your church actually uses.

You will find: married, a household run well, children in order, gentle, not quarrelsome, well thought of by outsiders. Then go through them one at a time and mark which ones I pass.

Then look up: Matthew 11:19 — what my critics called me.

You will find: a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. That was the complaint against me, from religious people.

Then look up: Luke 7:36–39 — what a respectable host thought when a woman with a reputation touched me.

The Short Version

• I was a laborer with no credentials and a capital conviction for sedition, with no jury and no appeal.
• The gates have dates: seminaries from 1563, doctrinal statements from the 1920s, background checks from 1984 to 2002.
• The background check is the one gate built out of a real emergency, and I am glad it exists.
• The Didache screened teachers for greed, and yours screen for credentials, opinions and connections.
• By 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, later letters that are not mine, I fail at least five items.

Think About It

1. Honestly: in my own village, whose side would you have been on?
2. Go through your church’s requirements for someone who wants to teach. Mark each one: protects a child, protects a doctrine, or protects the people already in charge. How many are in the third column?