The Advisory Committee on the Constitution recently issued its formal advice regarding the report of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) — and has concluded that what the task force is recommending “is clear and within the power of the General Assembly to approve if it chooses.”
That leaves the assembly, which will meet in Birmingham in June, free to decide what it wants to do about the task force report, which so far already has inspired both strong support and intense criticism.
The ACC traced in its advice the history of Presbyterian decision-making regarding the ordination of gays and lesbians. The denomination’s constitution limits ordination to those who practice fidelity if they are married or chastity if they are single.
The task force is recommending that those national ordination standards remain in place, but asks the assembly to issue a new authoritative interpretation that would allow local governing bodies to determine whether departures from those standards would violate essentials of Reformed polity and faith, or should be permitted.
The ACC reports that previous rulings by the General Assembly’s Permanent Judicial Commission — the church’ highest court — have made clear that:
· Sessions and presbyteries can’t just disobey the national ordination standards. If a local governing body expresses its intent to disregard the standards, higher governing bodies must exercise oversight.
· A candidate for ordination or installation must self-acknowledge problematic conduct — conduct the confessions call sin — in order for the governing body’s decision to ordain or install that person to be challenged. That self-acknowledgement must be “plain, palpable and obvious.”
· Sexual orientation alone isn’t enough to trigger an inquiry.
But the court’s rulings haven’t specified “how an ordaining or installing body should determine which practices the confessions call sin,” the ACC report states. Nor is it clear what standard of review higher governing bodies should use in scrutinizing such decisions.
The ACC advice concludes that what the task force is recommending is consistent with historic Presbyterian principles — for example, allowing higher governing bodies to review the decisions of lower governing bodies and with “the usual breadth of discretion given ordaining or installing bodies.”
But it leaves up to the assembly the decision of whether to issue an authoritative interpretation of the kind the task force has requested.
The ACC, in providing its advice, also raised some interesting issues.
First, it reminds the assembly that while the focus of the church’s debate over ordination standards has been gays and lesbians, the language of that section of the constitution actually “is much broader, proscribing the ordination or installation of any person who self-acknowledges engaging in any `practice which the confessions call sin’ and refuses to repent of that practice.”
While the ACC advice doesn’t say so explicitly, it’s hinting at the reality that the task force recommendations, if the assembly adopts them, could be applied in a much broader range of cases that could go beyond only sexual behavior.
Second, it discusses two policy statements — at first called “definitive guidance” — which the northern and southern branches of the church adopted in the late 1970s and which sought to prohibit the ordination of “self affirming practicing homosexual persons.” In the Presbyterian system, a definitive guidance does not carry as much force as an authoritative interpretation.
A General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission ruling from 1985 determined that those statements carried constitutional force and the assembly in 1993 adopted the language as an authoritative interpretation — “thus the earlier `definitive guidance’ became an `authoritative interpretation,’ “ the ACC report states.
In recent years, some have sought to remove that authoritative interpretation — a move to do so at the 2004 assembly fell just four votes short.
The ACC advice states, “Neither a permanent judicial commission nor a General Assembly adopting an authoritative interpretation can change the standards for ordination or installation. All either can do is interpret the standards that are part of the Constitution.”
Constitutional changes require approval by the majority of the presbyteries.
And restating that “may lend weight to arguments” that the authoritative interpretation regarding practicing homosexuals “should be eliminated because that authoritative interpretation added to rather than interpreted the existing constitutional standards.”
That question of whether existing standards were interpreted or new ones created would have to be answered, the ACC wrote, by a General Assembly or by the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission.
