Rome Sweet Home Read online

  Scott and I spent some extra time together just after he recruited me. We would begin talking at lunch and finish just after supper. After about three weeks of some rather intense sharing times, Scott said, “Kimberly, I’m really enjoying our time together. But if we spend more of this kind of time, I’m going to fall in love with you. And I don’t have time this year to fall in love. Maybe next year. I think we should stop dating,”

  I was really surprised. That sure was a creative way to break up. I was disappointed, to be sure. But I felt he was the godliest man I had ever dated, so I took him at his word that there wasn’t some other hidden reason he was ending things. We backed out of our dating but continued to serve in ministry together.

  Young Life seemed to fit into my plans to be trained to be a minister, a dream I had had since I was in second grade. My dad convinced me by his life that being a pastor was the most exciting job in the world. He came home day after day, thrilled with sharing the gospel so that people could come to faith in Christ, counseling couples in marital difficulty and seeing their marriages restored, teaching and preaching the Word of God and bringing comfort to those grappling with sickness and death. Nothing seemed more wonderful than imitating him in the call of pastoring. I believed I had many of the same gifts and talents he had, similar abilities, drives and desires to share the gospel and disciple others for Jesus Christ.

  Then some good friends, including Scott, began to challenge me during my junior year, from Scripture, on whether or not God was, in fact, calling me to be a minister. I agreed with them that if the Scriptures did not support it, then God had a different plan for my life.

  It was very difficult to examine a dream that had been mine for so long and to alter that dream. But I had to, once I became convicted that Scripture did not support the ordination of women to be pastors. However, once that became my conviction, my deep desire to be ordained diminished, and I looked for another way the Lord would use my talents and desire to serve him.

  Besides being very involved in Young Life, Scott and I also enjoyed bantering over theology, sometimes in rather strong discussions. At Christmas my junior year, I was at home describing one of these conversations to my mother, and she said, “Why, Kimberly, I wonder if you won’t marry this guy. I’ll bet you do.”

  “Marry him! I can hardly have a theological conversation with him without getting frustrated!”

  “Yes, I think you’ll probably marry him.” She had never said that about any other guy I had ever dated, I noted her words.

  Though we were not dating any more, Scott and I built a great foundation for a future dating relationship. Unbeknownst to me, Scott told people the summer before our senior year that he intended to return to college and to date and marry Kimberly Kirk. Toward the end of summer, I too had a deep sense that he was the one for me.

  On September 31, during a Young Life leadership training weekend, we began to date again. Through our Young Life ministry together, we saw how much family life could prosper through ministry, like two oxen pulling as a team. I appreciated Scott’s drive for the truth and his love for the Word. He was a powerful communicator. Lives changed as the Lord worked through him. And Scott appreciated who I was and how the Lord used me as well.

  Scott and I again had long talks—sharing what we had been thinking and studying. We had very complementary dreams. He wanted to be a minister and a teacher; I wanted to be a pastor’s wife. He wanted to be a writer; I enjoyed typing and editing. Both of us liked to speak. Even though we wrangled over theology, we had tremendous unity theologically, and that let us know that, holding such similar convictions, we could go forward together stronger being side by side than we could in our own individual ways.

  By January 23 we were engaged to be wed the following August. (Our engagement date, we have recently discovered, is the Stigmatine Fathers’ feast day ot the betrothal of Mary and Joseph!) Shortly before graduation, I realized I did not know whether or not he wanted a large family. I had always hoped that I could have at least four or five children. So I casually brought it up, saying, “You do want children, don’t you?”

  “Well, not too many.”

  I thought, Oh, no, he’s a ZPGer (Zero Population Growth advocate)! Still trying to sound casual, I said, “How many is not too many?”

  “I don’t know”, he said. “I think we ought to keep it down to five or six.”

  I could hardly believe my ears. “Yeah, let’s think small”, I said with a smile.

  This was just one more way our hearts and minds were united. Each of us was amazed at the gift that God had given the other. And to think the differences in our theology were basically resolved! All we had to do was get married, go off to seminary and explore the truth we found there. Then we would set off to conquer the world for Jesus Christ. At least that’s what we thought.

  On August 18, 1979, in Cincinnati, before our families and more than five hundred friends, we covenanted ourselves in marriage to have Jesus be the center of our life together. We had enough dreams to last a lifetime.

  Scott and Kimberly’s wedding. August 18, 1979 in Cincinnati, Ohio.

  Married life in the seminary. September, 1981.

  3

  New Conceptions of the Covenant

  Scott:

  Kimberly and I arrived at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary just two weeks after our wedding. We were both firmly convinced that evangelical, reformed theology was biblical Christianity at its best.

  At this point I would describe my study as a detective story. I was searching Scripture to discover clues as to the whereabouts of real Christianity: Where was the Bible being faithfully taught and lived out? Wherever that was, I knew God wanted me there—for a lifetime of teaching, I was an energetic detective, willing to follow Scripture no matter what it taught.

  I met a fellow seminarian named Gerry Matatics, who quickly became a close friend. (He figures large in the story later,) Among the Presbyterian students, we were the only ones stalwart enough in our anti-Catholicism to believe the Westminster Confession ought to retain a line most reformed people were willing to drop: the Pope is the Antichrist, Although the Reformers—Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Knox and others—disagreed on many things, one conviction they all shared was that the Pope was the Antichrist and that the Church of Rome was the whore of Babylon.

  When the Pope came to Boston in 1979, many fellow seminarians said, “Isn’t he wonderful?” Wonderful! He claimed the power to bind hundreds of millions of hearts and minds as the supposedly infallible teacher of the universe. That’s wonderful? That’s abominable! Gerry and I worked in the seminary to help our brethren see just how wrong it was.

  My second year of seminary was Kimberly’s first. Something very curious occurred when she took a course on Christian ethics. I had taken this course previously, so I knew the class would divide into small groups to work on a single moral issue. I asked Kimberly what topic she had chosen.

  She said, “Contraception.”

  “Contraception?! That was an option last year, but nobody took it. It’s really just a Catholic problem. Why would you want to study contraception?”

  “I keep running into questions about birth control when I give talks on abortion. I don’t know why, but I do. So I thought this would be a good chance to find out whether or not the Bible has anything to say about it.”

  “Well, if you want to waste your time studying a non-issue, it’s your time.” I was surprised but not really concerned. After all, there really wasn’t a right or wrong way to look at contraception. Little did I know how much her study would affect our lives.

  A couple of weeks later a friend stopped me in the hall. “Have you talked to your wife about her study on contraception?”

  “Not really.”

  “You might want to. She’s come up with some pretty interesting thoughts about it.”

  Given the subject matter, I thought I’d better talk to her. I asked Kimberly what she had found out that was so interesting about
contraception. She shared that before 1930 there had been a unified witness of all Christian churches: contraception was wrong in all circumstances.

  I conjectured, “Maybe it’s taken this long to work out the last vestiges of Catholicism.”

  She challenged me further. “But do you know what reasons they give to oppose birth control? They have stronger reasons than you might think.”

  I had to admit I didn’t know their reasons. She asked me if I would read a book on the subject. She handed me Birth Control and the Marriage Covenant, by John Kippley (which has since been revised and retitled Sex and the Marriage Covenant). I was a specialist in covenant theology. I thought I owned all the books that had the word “covenant” in the title, so this piqued my curiosity.

  I looked at it and thought, Liturgical Press? This guy’s a Catholic! A Papist! What was he doing hijacking the Protestant notion of the covenant? I was curious to see what he would say. I sat down to read the book, I thought, This isn’t right—it can’t be! This man is making sense. He was showing how marriage is not a contract, involving merely an exchange of goods and services. Rather, marriage is a covenant, involving an exchange of persons.

  Kippley’s argument was that every covenant has an act whereby the covenant is enacted and renewed; and that the marital act is a covenant act. When the marriage covenant is renewed, God uses it to give new life. To renew the marital covenant and use birth control to destroy the potential for new life is tantamount to receiving the Eucharist and spitting it on the ground.

  Kippley showed that the marital act demonstrates the powerful life-giving love of the covenant in a unique way. All the other covenants show God’s love and transmit God’s love, but it is only in the marital covenant that the love is so real and powerful that it communicates life.

  When God made man, male and female, the first command he gave them was to be fruitful and multiply. This was to image God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three in one, the Divine Family. So when “the two become one” in the covenant of marriage, the “one” they become is so real that nine months later they might have to give it a name! The child embodies their covenant oneness.

  I began to see that every time Kimberly and I performed the marital act we were doing something sacred. And every time we thwarted the life-giving power of love through contraception, we were doing something profane. (Treating something sacred in a merely common way profanes it, by definition.)

  I was impressed, but I was very quiet about being impressed. Kimberly asked me what I thought of the book; I said it was interesting. Then I began to watch her pick off my friends, one at a time—some of the best and the brightest changed their minds!

  Then I discovered how all the reformers—Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Knox, and all the rest—held the same position as the Catholic Church on this issue.

  I grew disturbed. The Roman Catholic Church stood alone as the only “denomination” in all the world with the courage and integrity to teach this most unpopular truth. I did not know what to make of it. So I resorted to an old family saying: “Even a blind hog can find an acorn.” I mean, after two thousand years, the Catholic Church was bound to get something right.

  Catholic or not, it was true. So we threw out the contraceptives we were using and began trusting the Lord in a new way with our family plans. First, we used Natural Family Planning for a number of months. Then we decided to be open to new life whenever God saw fit to bless us.

  I organized a cadre of a dozen of the top Calvinist seminarians at Gordon-Conwell into a weekly breakfast group to talk about issues, inviting professors to share their views and be cross-examined. It was a great time of fellowship and stimulating conversation. We called it the Geneva Academy, after Calvin’s school in Geneva.

  Sometimes we would get together on Friday nights, meeting at Howard Johnson’s or some local pub for pizza and beer in order to talk theology until three in the morning, with a promise to our wives to take them out the next night. For three or four hours we would go deeper into the Word of God, debating hard doctrines: Christ’s second coming, arguments for God’s existence, predestination and free will and other great mysteries that theologians love to explore, especially the covenant.

  Digging deeper into Scripture meant wrestling more and more with the meaning of key texts on our own. We were acquiring some skills in Greek and Hebrew. For us, the Bible alone was our authority; therefore, having these skills meant that we could go straight into Scripture. For us, no traditions were infallible or authoritative. They might be helpful. They might be reliable. But they were not infallible; so they might slip and slide and fall at any point. In practice, this required all of us as individuals to rethink doctrine from the ground up. It was quite a task, but we were young, and so we believed that with the Holy Spirit and Sacred Scripture we could reinvent all the wheels, if need be.

  In my senior year, a crisis began brewing. My research was forcing me to rethink the meaning of the covenant.

  In the Protestant tradition, covenants and contracts were understood as two words describing the same thing. But studying the Old Testament led me to see that, for the ancient Hebrews, covenants and contracts were very different. In Scripture, contracts simply involved the exchange of property, whereas covenants involved the exchange of persons, so as to form sacred family bonds. Kinship was thus formed by covenant. (Understood from its Old Testament background, the concept of covenant wasn’t theoretical or abstract.) In fact, covenant kinship was stronger than biological kinship; the deeper meaning of divine covenants in the Old Testament was God’s fathering of Israel as his own family.

  When Christ formed the New Covenant with us, then, it was much more than a simple contract or legal exchange, where he took our sin and gave us his righteousness, as Luther and Calvin explained it. Although true, that explanation fell short of the full truth of the gospel.

  What I discovered was that the New Covenant established a new worldwide family in which Christ shared his own divine sonship, making us children of God. As a covenant act, being justified meant sharing in the grace of Christ as God’s sons and daughters; being sanctified meant sharing in the life and power of the Holy Spirit. In this light, God’s grace became something much more than divine favor; it was the actual gift of God’s life in divine sonship.

  Luther and Calvin explained this exclusively in terms of courtroom language. But I was beginning to see that, far more than simply being a judge, God was our Father. Far more than simply being criminals, we were runaways. Far more than the New Covenant being made in a courtroom, it was fashioned by God in a family room.

  Saint Paul (whom I had thought of as the first Luther) taught in Romans, Galatians and elsewhere that justification was more than a legal decree; it established us in Christ as God’s children by grace alone. In fact, I discovered that nowhere did Saint Paul ever teach that we were justified by faith alone! Sola fide was unscriptural!

  I was so excited about this discovery. I shared it with some friends, who were amazed at how much sense it made. Then one friend stopped me and asked if I knew who else was teaching this way on justification. When I responded that I didn’t, he told me that Dr. Norman Shepherd, a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary (the strictest Presbyterian Calvinist seminary in America) was about to undergo a heresy trial for teaching the same view of justification that I was expounding.

  So I called Professor Shepherd and talked with him. He said he was accused of teaching something contrary to the teachings of Scripture, Luther and Calvin. As I heard him describe what he was teaching, I thought, Hey, that is what I’m saying.

  Now this might not seem like much of a crisis to many, but for somebody steeped in Protestantism and convinced that Christianity turned on the hinge of sola fide, it meant the world.

  I remembered how one of my favorite theologians, Dr. Gerstner, once said in class that if Protestants were wrong on sola fide—and the Catholic Church was right that justification is by faith and works—“I’d be on my knees
tomorrow morning outside of the Vatican doing penance.” We all knew, of course, that he said that for rhetorical effect, but it made a real impact. In fact, the whole Reformation flowed from this one difference.

  Luther and Calvin often said that this was the article on which the Church stood or fell. That was why, for them, the Catholic Church fell and Protestantism rose up from the ashes. Sola fide was the material principle of the Reformation, and I was coming to the conviction that Saint Paul never taught it.

  In James 2:24, the Bible teaches that “a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.” Besides, Saint Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13:2, “. . . if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” This was a traumatic transformation for me to say that on this point I now thought Luther was fundamentally wrong. For seven years, Luther had been my main source of inspiration and powerful proclamation of the Word. And this doctrine had been the rationale behind the whole Protestant Reformation.

  At this point, I put my investigation on hold. Kimberly and I were planning for me to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, where I had been accepted as a candidate for the degree, focusing on the covenant; that is, until we discovered, much to our delight, that the Lord had blessed our openness to new life with our first child. A change in our theology had produced a change in Kimberly’s anatomy. But at the time, Margaret Thatcher made it almost impossible for Americans to have babies at British taxpayers’ expense; so we took this as a sign for us to look elsewhere for work, delaying doctoral studies for a while.

  We got a call from a small church in Fairfax, Virginia, that was looking for a minister. When I candidated for the position at Trinity Presbyterian Church, I shared my views and concerns regarding justification—that I took Dr. Shepherd’s position. They understood and said they did, too. So, shortly before graduation, I accepted the pastorate at Trinity, as well as a teaching position in their high school, Fairfax Christian School. By God’s grace, I found myself graduating at the top of my class. It was time to say good-bye to some of the finest friends I’d ever made—both students and professors. God had blessed us with very deep friendships with men and women who were really serious about opening up their minds and hearts to the Word of God. Kimberly and I graduated together; she earned a Master of Arts degree in theology, while I received a Master of Divinity degree.