Transcript
As the chair of the faculty committee on the Institute, it is my privilege to welcome all of you to this, the 43rd Institute of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. It was in the very early years of World War II that our late president, Dr. John Alexander MacKay, had the vision that those who served in the ministry of the church would need themselves to continue to grow in mind and spirit, and that there would be the possibility
for that growth and for some personal refreshment and enrichment here at this institution. And so this institute was born and has continued ever since. It has grown in numbers. It has changed somewhat in format, although not a great deal. As our numbers increased, as we began to feel more and more the pressure of size, several years ago we were able to form ourselves into workshops for the first time, thereby reducing the size of the groups, giving
you more choices and possibilities, which always, we know, makes for also the frustration that you can't be at least three places at the same time. We have endeavored to listen to your critiques and criticisms. And I want to say at the beginning that our solicitations of your advice and recommendations, both for format and for leadership, are very welcome and indeed desired. Please, before you leave, do fill out the sheet which you have found in your packet
of materials or will find, and leave it with one of us so that our committee can take that into consideration in our thought for future institutes. Because we do plan considerably ahead, we may not be able to be immediately responsive to what you might have to suggest, but we assure you that we read all of those critiques very thoroughly and carefully, and we want to know what you are thinking about your needs and what you would
like to see at this institute. One of our customs through the years, I hesitate to call it a tradition, although it has become almost that, is that the president of the seminary is invited to be the initial speaker and to open the institute on this Monday evening program. This year, for the first time, it is a pleasure to introduce to you the new president of Princeton Theological Seminary. Dr. Thomas W. Gillespie, and he is doctor. I
see that they doctored Jack Cooper and they doctored me, and we did not doctor President Gillespie. It's things like this can cost deans their jobs, you know. Dr. Gillespie does have his PhD from Claremont School of Theology. He began last September as the fifth president of this institution. After a lifetime in vocational service in the parish ministry of the church, he was for 29 years the pastor first of the Presbyterian Church in Garden Grove, California. Yes,
there is a Presbyterian Church in Garden Grove, California. And then as pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Burlingame, California. I was reading recently in Martin Marty's little commentary called, "Context: A Brief Passage on Bloopers", which somebody at some college has been saving and discovering. And one of them came out of the time when Eugene McCarthy was very active in politics in this country. And somebody wrote of him that Eugene McCarthy had a warm heart and a
good mind. Things that are very bad when you're running for president. Thomas Gillespie has a warm heart and a good mind. And we at Princeton Seminary think that's just right for our president. And we have been delighted at his leadership during this year and are delighted that he has accepted our invitation and that we are able to present him as the preacher this evening. President Thomas W. Gillespie. Thank you, Dean Massa. You needn't fear. You're much
too valuable a colleague. Since you were promised a threefold welcome, I think I should first fulfill Dr. Cooper's promise and say welcome to the Institute of Theology for this year. And to say what a joy it is to be here to welcome you. This has been a year of firsts for me. First day of class, first academic year, first faculty meeting, first meeting of the board of trustees, first commencement, and now my first institute. That's a
bit of a confession because I am and always have been a loyal alum of this institution but have never before been to one of the institutes. That's not only the result of geography, having lived these last 29 years in camps furthest out in California, but really a taste of the New Jersey summer that my young bride and I experienced as we began my senior year. I had never been in Princeton before the 15th of September and
never stayed longer than the 3rd of June until that fateful year. Barbara and I were married in Los Angeles and drove across country in the midst of a terrible heat wave. And I had so built up this place in her mind that she thought surely when we got to Princeton, all would be well. And so we arrived on about the 27th of August and moved into a third floor, half of an attic, over at 86 Stockton
Street. And she really thought I had done her in. She wanted to go home immediately. So I think consciously or unconsciously after that, I said to the institute, now let's see, that's in New Jersey and that's in July, forget it. But here we are and having enjoyed every minute of the last year. Let me introduce to you the woman who still is my bride. She's here tonight. I think you ought to meet her. You'll see her
from time to time around the campus. And may I ask Barbara to please stand in the back? Would you please, dear? She's limping a bit. Three weeks ago today, she fell down the stairs at Springdale and fractured her ankle. And today is a day of liberation because the cast came off. But she's still not racing, which is her usual speed. And so if you see her limping around, you know that it's only an impermanent injury. Our
daughter, our youngest daughter, is here too. I'm not going to embarrass her and ask her to stand because she'll kill me tonight if I do. But we're glad to have our daughter, Dale, here who is a senior to be at the University of California at Santa Barbara and is on her way to Cambridge in England for the summer session there. And we're very happy to have her home for a brief time. I wouldn't say there's a
lot of pressure that I'm feeling tonight. But just to make sure that I was feeling enough, my beloved homiletics professor, who may remain anonymous, although he's sitting in the front row, said to me this week or last week, you realize I have not heard you preach since you graduated. I'm not going to tell you what he said to me the last time he did hear me preach. And tonight, he doesn't get rebuttal time. But seriously, we
do welcome you. And we trust that this will be, for each one of us, a week of personal, spiritual, theological renewal of our lives. To that end, let us now turn to the hearing of God's word as it is written in the letter to the Ephesians, reading from the first chapter at the first verse. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are also faithful in Christ Jesus, grace to
you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the
praise of his glorious grace, which he freely bestowed on us in the beloved. In him, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us. For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in him,
things in heaven and things on earth. In him, according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his will, we who first hoped in Christ have been destined and appointed to live for the praise of his glory. In him, you also, who have heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and have believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, which is the guarantee of our inheritance
until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. Let the good news come now, our Father, not only in word, but in power, in the Holy Spirit, and with full assurance, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Never before had I participated in a conference that was at the same time so stimulating and so threatening. I'm referring to a Mission Futures
Workshop, which I attended some years ago in Spokane, Washington. It was sponsored and hosted by then President Eduard Lindeman of the College of Whitworth. The 40 participants represented 20 Presbyterian congregations of various sizes and situations from across the whole land. Each church was represented by an elder and a pastor. Together, we reflected the rich diversity of theological conviction and political opinion, which characterizes our denomination. The leader of our morning, afternoon, and evening seminars was Dr. Warren Ziegler,
a professor of Futurology at Syracuse University. His contract was to teach us in six days how to invent the future. Our contract was to learn how to think in terms of the future, rather than in terms of the past or the present. It was this new way of thinking which made the experience both stimulating and threatening, for few, if any of us, were accustomed to approaching life from its future dimension. By the end of the
conference, we discovered two significant things about ourselves. The first was the incredible unity we have in Jesus Christ in spite of our real diversity. Dr. Ziegler told President Lindeman at the conclusion of the workshop that he had never been a part of a group before that was in such open conflict on issues and in such evident harmony in life commitment. The second was our equally incredible hope for the future of the world. Together, we faced the
future predicted by many secular prophets, a future characterized by increasing material expectations and decreasing material resources, by increasing technological advancement and decreasing vocational satisfaction, by increasing population density and decreasing personal life, by increasing revolution and terrorism and decreasing social stability, by increasing moral relativity and decreasing moral order. We took a long, hard look at these gloomy forecasts, and yet we remained a people full of hope. We came away from the conference convinced that the basis of
our unity is also the basis of our hope. The person of Jesus Christ is the foundation of our oneness and of our optimism. Nowhere in the New Testament is this unity and hope that is in Christ more clearly set forth than in the letter to the Ephesians. This evening I want to focus our attention on the opening prayer of that letter. In the Greek language in which it was composed, this prayer forms, would you believe, a
single sentence? It is the longest sentence in the New Testament, a sentence which sets forth God's dream, our destiny. When we talk about dreams and destiny, we're talking about the future, and the future is a dimension of time. But what is time? All of us use the word. I dare say all of us know what it means. But how many of us can define it? Long ago, Augustine wrote, what then is time? There can be no
quick and easy answer, for it is no simple matter, even to understand what it is, let alone find words to explain it. Yet in our conversations, no word is more familiarly used or more easily recognized than time. We certainly understand what is meant by the word, both when we use it ourselves and when we hear it used by others. What then is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me. I should
have used that one when I was in seminary. But if I'm asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled. The mystery of time is deepened when we try to define the future. According to Dr. Ziegler, only the present is real. And it's fleeting. The past exists only in our memory or in our collective memories. And the future exists only in our imagination or our collective imaginations. By imagination, he means the dreams and the
fantasies which emerge out of that 95% of our minds, which only occasionally comes to consciousness. With this definition of the future, our first exercise at the conference was to allow our imaginations to work. We were invited to take a walk in the woods or to lie out on the grass in the sunshine and to imagine what the church would, could, should be like at the turn of the century. From these imaginations, we were to invent
the future of the church. A quarter century from then. Now that sounds easy enough until you try to do it. I've never been considered a very imaginative person. And this exercise confirmed not only those worst suspicions, but my own. After a long walk that ended in frustration, I returned to our room and found the elder from our church so desperate that he was reading the Bible for a clue. That night at dinner, as fate would have
it, I was sitting next to Dr. Ziegler. He asked the fellow across the table from me what he had come up with. This young man then began to wax eloquent about this marvelous experience he had had while lying on the grass in the warm sunlight. He told of drifting off into a quasi-sleep, and in that moment of transition he had felt the power of the primeval. He saw himself running freely through the forest in total
freedom at one with the whole world. I listened to this in total silence, hoping that I would not be asked to match it. But the inevitable happened, and our leader turned to me and said, What did you experience? And I said, A great nap. If I dreamed anything during that siesta, I couldn't remember it. In fact, the only dream I could remember that week was not the sort of thing from which the future is invented. I
awoke one morning with the vivid memory of giving a clarinet solo at a junior high talent show. I was in the middle of the night, I was a veritable Pete Fountain playing Chattanooga choo-choo. Forget the nonsense and consider the serious point. The point is that the future exists only in our minds. In the letter to the Ephesians, this point is picked up and attributed to God. The future of the world exists now only in the
mind of God. And it exists in God's mind, as Paul puts it, from before the foundation of the world. The apostle boldly declares in this prayer of blessing that the world and its history are the product of God's imagination. They are, in Paul's words, the product of the mystery of his will. And what does God imagine for the future? According to the apostle, God imagines a world of unity and a world of harmony in Christ. A
world that is which is reconciled to God and reconciled to itself. A world delivered from conflict and from disharmony. In other words, God is the great inventor of the future. This is the message of hope that is declared in the letter to the Ephesians. But the invention of the future, according to Warren Ziegler, requires more than imagination. It also requires intentionality. Intentionality moves us beyond our dreams to purpose. What am I about in this world? What
am I about in this world? What is my life purpose? These were the questions we were invited to answer in inventing the future of the Church. And those are scary questions because they compel us to move out beyond our roles and beyond our routines where we are safe and secure. They force us to decide what it is that we are up to in our lives. Imagination by itself does not produce the future. The future of my
life is produced by the intentions I have for my life, by my purpose in life. Now that's not an absolute. I realize that. There's also truth to the dictum that life is what happens to you while you're making other plans. That's because we're all caught up in a web of other people's intentions as well as our own. Of other people's intentions as well as our own. Of other people's purposes as well as our own. But the
great context of it all, according to Paul, is God's purpose. Three times in this prayer the Apostle speaks of God as the one who accomplishes all things according to the purpose of his will. What a tremendous affirmation. God is not an idle dreamer. God is not a vain speculator. God is a God of purpose, a God of intention. What he imagines as the future of the world he pursues with purpose and intentionality. The ingredients of intention
are action and choice. The future is not merely the domain of knowledge. It's a mistake to think so. The future is also the domain of action. Many so-called futurologists simply predict the future on the basis of what they know already about the past and about the present. They consider the way the world's been going and the way it is now going. They establish a trajectory. They push it out a few years or a century and
then they know what's going to happen. That's why there have been so many prophecies of doom lately. That's why people say the future isn't what it used to be. That's why Murphy's Law was developed, which says the closer the future gets, the worse it looks. Take the simple but fundamental problem of food for a world population that is exploding. Do you realize that the population of the Earth has doubled between the time of our Lord and
the year 1650? Between 1650 and 1800, it doubled again. Between 1800 and 1975, it doubled yet again. And it will double yet again by the year 2000. On the basis of our apparent inability to feed this many people, many are predicting a cataclysmic world famine, if not an apocalyptic atomic war over food resources. That's predicting the future on the basis of knowledge. But the future is determined also by action and choice. There are things we can
do to change the predictable if we're willing to make the right choices and to take the right actions. These choices and actions are, of course, of a moral nature, which means that the future is dependent upon our moral decisions. The Apostle Paul, however, places all of this in a much larger context. He speaks of the choices and the actions of God, which will, in fact, determine the future of the world. He tells us, for example, that
God has chosen us in Christ that we should be holy and blameless before Him. He tells us that God has destined us in love to be His sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace. And God has taken the necessary action to assure our destiny. In Christ, we have redemption, not destruction. God has acted in Christ in such a way as to assure and ensure the fulfillment
of His eternal purpose. And it is in Christ that we discover what God is up to in the world. For He has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of His will. According to His purpose, which He set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth. And the fact that God has chosen to act in accordance with
the purpose of His will for the achievement of His plan means that we are free to act and choose in concert with God. We ourselves can have an impact upon the future. This is what Paul means when he writes in him, according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to the counsel of His will. We who first hoped in Christ have been destined and appointed to live for the praise of His glory. That's
you and me he's talking about. God's purpose revealed in Christ is the basis of our hope for the future. But living in hope is not a matter of letting God do it. It's a matter of working with God and the fulfillment of His plan for the fulfillment of time. The way of hope is the way of choices and actions. And we're faced with some very difficult and painful choices. Scientists, for example, are telling us that we
are living under two ecological absolutes. One is that everything and everyone in this world is interconnected. That's the way it is. And the other is that the earth has limited resources, and that, too, is the way it is. These absolutes mean that we cannot continue to believe that bigger is better and that more is best of all. We must choose between careful stewardship and wasteful consumption, between austerity and affluence, between responsibilities and rights, between betterment and
biggerment. There are, of course, many who believe that it's already too late for the planet Earth. They view our hope in Christ as mere wishful thinking. Not a few of our contemporaries see us as captives of the powers and forces and systems of the world in which we live. To them, we Christians appear like the two characters in a New Yorker cartoon. They are prisoners in a dungeon with a very small barred window. Each of them
is handcuffed. Each of them is wearing ankle bracelets. And each of them is wrapped tightly in locked chains. And in this condition, one of the prisoners is saying to the other, now here's my plan. Our situation in the modern world seems like that to many. But we know better. We believe better. We know that God has a dream, a dream for us and for His creation. And we believe that God is intentionally and actively pursuing that
dream even in the world tonight. You and I are not alone in a chance universe that is governed by accident. We are chosen and destined and loved by God for life in harmony with Him, with one another and with the world in Jesus Christ. This is our faith. And on the basis of our faith, we dare to hope. We are compelled to hope. And on the basis of our hope, we are compelled to act. In the
opening session of that conference, President Lindemann said to us, to refuse to hope is an act of treason against our future. I would sharpen that a bit. To refuse to hope is an act of treason against the future of Jesus Christ. He is our hope. For in Him we know that it is God's plan to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth. That is God's dream. It is also our destiny. Let
us pray. Seal, O Lord, your word to our hearts. Cast out all that is false and untrue, that we may meet Jesus Christ afresh. Fix our faith firmly upon the reality He is, and find in Him a basis for hope in a desperate world. In His name we pray. Amen.
(music)
And now the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen. (music)