Passionate case for unity made at Covenant Network meeting

Speaking in a joint presentation on Nov. 7 at the Covenant Network’s national meeting — Wheeler addressing her friends from the political battles, Mouw bringing the view from the other side — these two together made a passionate case for unity. They spoke of their own experiences: of hearts changed (although not necessarily their theological opinions) by time spent listening to those who are different.

And they spoke of the costs of division.

Mouw says if conservatives get angry enough to leave and split the denomination, they’ll turn to fighting among themselves — that’s the pattern drawn by history. And Wheeler said that “a tense, edgy, difficult church” is better than one where everyone thinks alike, and that Presbyterians have a chance here to provide real Christian witness, “to show the world that there are alternatives to killing each other over differences.”

Here’s more of what each had to say.

Mouw —”I want us to stay together.”

Mouw’s career has been shaped by extensive across-the-boundaries experiences: representing the Christian Reformed perspective in ecumenical conversations; being involved in conversations with Jews and with Koran scholars; holding off-the-record discussions with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints about what Mouw described as “deep disagreements between Mormons and evangelicals.”

Yet Mouw said “I have found myself regularly breaking into a cold sweat at the thought of engaging in dialogue with fellow Presbyterians here,” at the Covenant Network’s conference.

Why, he asked himself? Perhaps because the issues involved in the debate over ordaining gays and lesbians “are not simply topics about which we happen to disagree,” Mouw said. “They are matters that are vitally connected to the question of whether we can stay together as a denomination” — discussions, essentially, that are a prelude to a possible divorce.

“I hope with all my heart that we can avoid the divorce court,” Mouw said. “I want us to stay together.” But while Wheeler often argues that “God calls us to the church” and that it “is not some mere voluntary arrangement that we can abandon just because do we do not happen to like some of other people in the group,” Mouw said, evangelicals are regularly asking another important question — “whether we are expected by God to hang in there at all costs.”

His answer, in part, had to do with what he sees as the impact of division on Presbyterian evangelicalism. “I genuinely believe that a Presbyterian split would be a serious setback for the cause that I care deeply about,” Mouw said — that schism would diminish the impact of Reformed orthodoxy.

If conservatives leave, the voices of orthodoxy would be diminished in what’s left of the denomination — that’s what happened when J. Gresham Machen and his colleagues left the northern Presbyterian church in the 1900s, Mouw said. As long as he stayed, Machen “had a forum for demonstrating to the denomination’s liberals that Calvinist orthodoxy could be articulated with intellectual rigor” — but those conservatives who remained after Machen broke off were not nearly as inclined to become involved in serious theological debate.

And when the conservatives did leave, “they quickly began to argue among themselves, and it was not long before new splits occurred in their ranks,” Mouw said. “The result was that conservative Calvinism itself increasingly became a fractured movement … When we evangelical types don’t have more liberal people to argue with, we tend to start arguing with each other,” leading to more unhappiness in the new, so-called “pure” denominations. (“When other targets are not available,” Wheeler said later, “evangelicals tend to turn their aggressiveness on themselves with special vehemence.”)

Mouw also said he’s been influenced by what he was taught in discussions with Mennonites in the 1970s and 1980s about the differences between the Reformed and Anabaptist traditions (debates that, in earlier times, might have resulted in the loser being put to death, he said). One night, at a Mennonite church in Pennsylvania, debating the issue of just war doctrine and pacificism, his counterpart, Myron Augsburger, suggested that each of them start off in a different way: by talking about what they respected in each other’s traditions. The resulting conversation was “profoundly moving,” Mouw said, and suggested an approach that for him has stuck.

During the Vietnam War and civil rights protests, Mouw said, he marched in the streets with liberal Christians “who modeled for me a courageous commitment to the biblical vision of justice and peace.”

And he called for an ethic of “sexual humility” that he hasn’t always seen modeled by his evangelical friends. Mouw said that “my views on same-sex relations are very traditional. I am convinced that genital intimacy between persons of the same gender is not compatible with God’s creating or redeeming purpose” — that certainly wasn’t a popular message with this crowd.

But Mouw also said he was distressed to hear one conservative spokesman say this: “We normal people should tell these homosexuals that what they are doing is simply an abomination in the eyes of God.” The truth is, Mouw said, very few can claim to be “normal” sexual beings in the eyes of God, and the labels often used to describe sexual orientation “are blatant examples of false advertising. My homosexual friends are not very ‘gay.’ They have experienced much pain and loss in their lives. And the rest of us are not very ‘straight.’ We are crooked people, often bruised and confused in our sexuality … We are all sinners who have been deeply wounded by the stain of our depravity.”

What liberals and conservatives can do, Mouw said, is come together before God in admitting sin and brokenness. “It has never been more important for us not to tiptoe around Golgatha,” he said. “Indeed, our only hope for moving on together as partners in the cause of the Gospel is to bow together at the Cross of Calvary” — and then, having experienced God’s healing mercy, “we can journey on as friends.”

Wheeler — “Strengthed” by relationships with conservatives

Wheeler also described herself as “acutely uncomfortable” in talking to the Covenant Network about her vision of “the church as it ought to be,” in part because for her, the church is “the theological topic about which I care the most.”

Wheeler said her own conversion experience took place in a church (“Yes, Richard, I had one,” she joked to Mouw. But “happily I’m a liberal Presbyterian, so I don’t need to tell you another thing about it.”) When her faith has flagged, Wheeler said, it’s been other Christians who sustained her. “Perhaps God arranges exclusive assignations with some people, but not with me,” she said. “In my case, it’s always been a group date.”

In recent years, Wheeler said, two groups have had an especially powerful impact on her own experience of faith.

One has been gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Presbyterians. “Let me address you directly,” she said to those in the crowd. “You have not been a problem for me. Quite the opposite: you have provided me with luminous examples of how to live a Christian life under adverse conditions. Very adverse conditions,” she said, adding that the PC(USA)’s position on ordination — which limits ordination to those who practice fidelity if they’re married or chastity if they’re single — is “restrictive to the point of cruelty.”

Gays and lesbians who want to dedicate their service to the church are often turned away, being told “your life choices are so much more sinful than the rest of ours that we’ve had to erect special barriers to keep you from laying your gifts at the altar,” Wheeler said.

And “our church’s teaching that all same-sex acts are wrong, no distinctions, has downright perverse effects,” she said. “The more you conform to the practices the church blesses and honors for heterosexuals — public pledges of fidelity to another person, family commitment to the nurture of children — the less likely that you can be ordained” or welcomed to worship in most Presbyterian congregations. Yet many continue to try to help the church, she said, and “your unselfishness lifts my sights.”

The other group that has shaped her, Wheeler said, has been evangelical and conservative Christians. She fell into their midst in what she described as “an academic accident” — doing research at an evangelical seminary — and said, “I could not have been more of an outsider if I had gone to do my research in Bali. I grew up in a home so liberal that when Dwight Eisenhower was elected president, I couldn’t believe it. In all my eight years, I’d never met a self-identified Republican” — how, she wondered, “could a party with no members elect a president?” Wheeler said she still has a bumper sticker on her truck at home: “Friends don’t let friends vote Republican.”

Wheeler said she arrived at the evangelical seminary with stereotypes and preconceptions, thinking (as many liberals still do, she said) “that the only reason anyone would chose to become or remain a religious conservative is lack of the psychological strength to confront the ambiguity and uncertainty of the world as it is.” (The corresponding conservative stereotype, she said, is that “we are liberals because we lack the moral fortitude to confront the truth and live by it.”)

Instead of theological dinosaurs, however, she found evangelicals who were thoughtful and funny and hospitable, some of whom were willing to look at the world with “unsparing honesty” and whose lively theological conversation “has reminded me how much gold there is in classic Christian tradition and how it still enriches all of us, including liberals.”

She found her own faith strengthened, not weakened. And she noticed in the best of those relationships “a moment — a sort of spiritual ‘ka-ching’ — when we both knew, and knew that the other knew, that we were hearing the same gospel, loud and clear.”

Wheeler said she’s grateful to Mouw and others who’ve been willing to take the risk (“you do have some rather ruthless colleagues,” she said) of publicly affirming the faith and the sincerity of liberals — even though others claim “that our party practices a different religion, promotes a false gospel.” For example, Wheeler said she treasures the letter that Price Gwynn, a former General Assembly moderator and “a card-carrying conservative,” wrote when conservatives were challenging her re-election to a General Assembly committee. “Barbara Wheeler is a faithful follower of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” Gwynn wrote. “That doesn’t keep her from being wrong most of the time.”

But Wheeler said she is pained that the two groups “that have been the church so powerfully to me in recent years can’t stand each other,” that generally “these two groups avoid and terrify each other,” each fearing they will suffer if the other one gains.

Her suggestion? Wheeler used as her text the 11th chapter of Hebrews, the description of Abraham and Sarah and Noah and others being “strangers and foreigners on the Earth,” on a journey seeking a new land. What if conservatives and liberals did the same, she asked — admitted they are strangers to each other, embracing that as a gift from God?

“This image of the church as a band of strangers who accept our discomfort with each other as God’s way of moving us forward may seem grimly Calvinistic, the sort of thing that Garrison Keillor had in mind when he said that Presbyterians are those folks who think that having a good time with nice people in a pleasant place makes you stupid,” Wheeler said.

Some find a cozy collection of like-minded folks more comfortable, easier to be around. But Wheeler argued for “a tense, edgy, difficult church” made up of strangers, “who cling to each other for dear life in the same chilly, rocky baptismal boat because we are headed to the same destination: a better country.”

Wheeler said she and Mouw do not agree on ordaining gays and lesbians — she thinks that God is teaching the church, through the “impressive testimony” of those who are not heterosexual and who do not leave, “that to love another person with one’s whole being and to pledge one’s life for that person’s welfare is not a sin.” She turned to Mouw and said, “Richard, this isn’t capitulation to a libertine culture… . This is, I am deeply convinced, the work of the Holy Spirit.”

But as important as the issue of homosexuality is, “it is not a faith-breaker,” Wheeler said. By staying together, Presbyterians could be a witness to the world “for what the gospel makes possible. But “as long as we continue to club the other Presbyterians into submission with constitutional amendments, judicial cases and economic boycotts, we have no word for a world full of murderous divisions, most of them cloaked in religion.”

When they were finished with their remarks, the audience had time to ask questions.

A gay graduate student who’s interested in doing doctoral work at Fuller started it off. He told Mouw he’d exchanged several e-mails with people at Fuller, exploring the academic program there, until he asked to be put in touch with other gay students. He said he got this response: “There are no gay men here.”

Mouw said that was rude, unfortunate and not accurate. Fuller does have a behavioral standards policy that prohibits premarital, extramarital and homosexual sex. But there are gay students, Mouw said, (and “undoubtedly,” he added, students who break those rules.)

In response to another question, Mouw said there is “terrible promiscuity” among both gay and straight people, and that perhaps “we’re living in a time of sexual crisis, in which both conservatives and liberals could be evangelical in telling people of Jesus Christ.

And both agreed that the term “evangelical” isn’t the sole province of conservatives — there are liberals too who are passionate about spreading the news of Jesus Christ.

But, in the end, Wheeler and Mouw agreed to disagree.

Wheeler said she is convinced that opening the doors of ordination to gays and lesbians is “the will of God.”

Mouw said acceptable scriptural arguments can be made for repudiating slavery and allowing the ordination of women, but not, it appears to him, for ordaining gays and lesbians. He said he’s read all of the major scholarship arguing this point and the first chapter of Romans is, for him, a particularly significant text in this debate.