As the General Assembly receives the report of the PUP Task Force and starts to discuss it, one simple question ought to be on our minds: What are our alternatives?
One, the GA can approve the report. This could lead to pressure for schism and anger breaking out because now Presbyterians will essentially permit an action that by vote of presbyteries three times in the last twenty years we have refused to approve.
Two, the GA can refuse to approve the report. In that case, we have lost what is a really important affirmation of many crucial points in our theological map–the ringing affirmation of the Lordship of Christ and his rule in our life, the call to understanding each other that the process promotes. The whole context of the report and its hopeful spirit would be lost or irreparably damaged.
Three, we can amend the report. Some have suggested we do that by excluding the Authoritative Interpretation. That has some resonance in my mind, because the implication is that the AI effectively amends the constitution without a vote of the Presbyteries. For those of us turned on by church history, that is exactly what the Commission of 1925 was about. It was formed with almost the same mandate as this Task Force, “to consider the matters dividing the Church. …” Its major conclusion was that action by successive assemblies to interpret the constitution by defining what is essential and therefore what is not essential, without amendment voted on by Presbyteries, is essentially unconstitutional.
So the Auburn Affirmation declared, and so the Church ruled and so we have lived.
But if we do that without any other discussion we have not advanced the Church’s life together any distance, and we with the goal of purity have threatened the unity and peace of the body just as much as the approval of the report would.
So have we any other options?
Well, we can do what I suggested we do after the 1991 General Assembly so wisely set aside the regrettable report on human sexuality that came to that
Assembly. We can do what that special committee failed to do. We can first answer the question, “What is the biblical norm for the expression of human sexuality?“ Without getting ourselves wrapped up in prohibitions, detailed codes in the Torah, arguments about Sodom or even overly precise explorations of Paul’s sermonic matter in Romans 1, we can come to a common and uniformly expressed statement of the Biblical Norm for Human Sexuality. I don’t think that is difficult. The message is consistent from Genesis through the Gospels into Paul’s Christological expressions of marital relationships.
Once we have arrived at a church-wide and uniformly accepted understanding of the norm then the question is what variation from the norm is acceptable and what disqualifies for ordination and office.
At this point we must toss out any statement about objective rights to office and ordination. There is no civil rights matter at stake. It is clear in our constitution that office is the recognition by the church of a gift given and able to be exercised, and not all have that gift. The first chapter of the Form of Government in language that dates from 1788 clearly says that any association of particular churches has the right to determine its own rule, and “the qualifications of its ministers and members, as well as the whole system of government … that in the exercise of that right they may, notwithstanding, err, in making the terms of communion too lax or too narrow; yet, even in this case, they do not infringe upon the liberty or the rights of others, but only make an improper use of their own.”
The question of a particular variance and office can be asked. For example, lifelong singleness is a variation from the biblical norm as I see it, yet our Foreign Mission of the last century and a half depended with much gratitude on the company of hundreds of what were termed kindly “maiden ladies” who may have sacrificed personal fulfillment for the cause of the spread of the gospel and did absolutely astounding work in mission.
We have a long history of successful and fruitful lifetime unmarried pastors, many of whose biographies describe a relationship with mother that a Freudian would could analyze for decades, but whose preaching and leadership enriched the church beyond measure.
In my own lifetime in ministry, I have seen divorce move from being a disqualification from pastoral ministry to a regrettable but recoverable bump in the road. In the 1940s and 50s, a divorced minister was without question limited to service in institutional ministry or maybe, after a suitable penance, allowed back on a large staff of an urban church. Now multiple marriages are as common in the ministry as in the community at large.
When and if we arrive at a church-wide consensus as to the Biblical Norm, then I am willing to trust my neighboring session, or my neighboring presbytery, to make discerning decisions on variations. But until we have such a consensus, I am afraid I must still cling to the specificity of the Book of Order as voted repeatedly by the presbyteries of this Church, and I do not favor amending it by definition instead of by overture.
So let us call upon those favored few who will gather in Birmingham this summer to deliberate and vote to do so with great care for the health of the whole. Let us pray they will be delivered from the fallacy of anecdotal evidence and the enthusiasms of those who sit beside them without vote, nor commitment to, nor in some cases, knowledge of the Scripture or the Confessions. Let us pray that perhaps they may see in the Spirit’s leading some process, some steps, some action that will lead us to further steps in witnessing to our culture of the biblical life style. Let us further pray that no one will see fit to rend the body of Christ over issues that do not determine our eternal destiny.
When we have divided properly it was over questions of salvation, not polity. As one of our greatest clerks used to regularly remind us, the reason the Book of Order can be amended by a simple majority of the Assembly and the presbyteries, while the Book of Confession needs a two-thirds vote and two successive assemblies, is that polity does not affect the eternal destiny of the Church, but faith commitment does.
Charles A. Hammond is a former executive of the Presbytery of Philadelphia. He is presently interim pastor of the La Jolla Church in La Jolla, Calif.
