(Editor’s Note: This article is written in response to “When departures relate to practice,” a commentary by Douglas Nave in the Oct. 16 issue of The Presbyterian Outlook.)
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) may appropriately permit officers freedom of conscience while requiring compliance with the ordination standards in the Form of Government. The historical and judicial examples Douglas Nave offers to support his claim that such would be unchristian or unpresbyterian are either mistaken or irrelevant.
Consider Jesus. We read that Jesus did not “reject the sanctity of the Lord’s Day.”
While Lord’s Day observance developed to honor his resurrection, after the fact, Jesus did honor the Sabbath, even as he transformed it in light of his own presence in the world. He worked this transformation, in part, by healing on the Sabbath. These healings were not ethical expressions of faith, as Mr. Nave suggests, but rather were acts through which Jesus taught. This is a different matter, unrelated to Mr. Nave’s point.
Similarly, when Jesus says, “You will know them by their fruits” (Mt. 7:15) he is helping his disciples identify false prophets. This has nothing to do with Mr. Nave’s philosophical claim that there is a metaphysical or logical link between belief and practice that prevents them from being distinguished. So this saying of Jesus is also no help in sorting out the issue we are discussing.
Mr. Nave brings John Calvin into the conversation, a welcome development. However, his implication that Calvin would accept most any version of morality as long as it was consistent with belief is remarkable. Calvin sought consistency between faith and life, assuredly. This is one consideration that moved him to seek real discipline in Geneva, among other things. Calvin believed orthodox faith should come to expression in good works.
On the other hand, it hardly needs to be said that Calvin did not praise people he thought were in error theologically for living consistently with their convictions. We cannot imagine Calvin saying, “You believe something contrary to the Bible, but I do admire how you live in accord with your heresy!”
The Adopting Act of 1729 is a further item in Mr. Nave’s argument. It provided that every minister or candidate who sought admission to the Synod must either sign the Westminster standards or declare his acceptance of them, at his own discretion. As part of this declaration, every minister was invited to state doubts or “scruples” about the Westminster standards, and the Synod would decide whether these points were essential and necessary.
This way, conservatives were assured the church had real standards, and evangelicals were satisfied that their consciences had not been bound to a document outside the Scriptures.
There is some debate whether the Synod passed one act or two, because their deliberations were interrupted by a break, presumably for the midday meal. Conservatives who wanted strict subscription came to call the Synod’s action in the morning an “Act Preliminary” to the Adopting Act, and to treat the business of the afternoon session as the Act itself.
This allowed these strict subscriptionists to claim that one could state scruples about the twentieth and twenty-third chapters of the Confession at most, which the Synod’s members had done in the afternoon. However, this was a tendentious reading, meant to undermine the compromise the Act embodied.
The most natural reading of the minutes sees the morning action, in which a committee’s report, “concerning the Affair of the Confession … was agreed upon” as the Adopting Act proper. In the afternoon the Synod applied the Act’s provisions to its members. It is in the minutes of the morning session that the Synod records its decision to “adopt” the Westminster standards, giving the Adopting Act its name.
What was a minister allowed to scruple, according to the Adopting Act? On Mr. Nave’s reading, one might state a scruple about “articles not essential and necessary in Doctrine, Worship or Government.” If this were correct, a minister might decide that some principle of presbyterian government was not essential and state a scruple about it, thus perhaps avoiding compliance with it if the examining court agreed.
As the Synod’s minutes show, though, the Adopting Act only allowed ministers to state scruples “with respect to any article or articles of said Confession or Catechisms.”1 The Synod could then “judge his scruple or mistake to be only about articles not essential and necessary in doctrine, worship, or government.”2
It was a question for the court, then, not the examinee, whether the scrupled points were essential and necessary to doctrine, worship, or government; the candidate could not decide that issue in advance, as Mr. Nave has claimed.
Moreover, convictions, principles, or practices not mentioned in the Confession or Catechisms were not subscribed, so there was no reason or occasion to state scruples about them. (Scrupling only makes sense in a subscriptionist context: if you are not required to believe something, there is no reason to seek an exception to that requirement.)
Nothing in the Adopting Act brought a minister’s compliance with polity into play, then. The Adopting Act dealt only with the Confession and Catechisms, so far as the minister was concerned. A minister might be permitted a scruple about a concept in those documents, but that would not ordinarily allow behavior contrary to their ethical teachings or to the Synod’s order.
Therefore, the Adopting Act does not support a case that practice cannot be divided from belief, but rather supports the opposite position: theology and polity certainly can be divided for these purposes, and in our history they often have been.
Finally, Mr. Nave falls short in understanding the essence of the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission (GAPJC) cases he cites. He states that Maxwell (UPC 1977), Hambrick (PCUS 1983), Huie (PCUS 1977) and Simmons [PC(USA) 1985] “did not turn on whether the candidate believed or acted in a particular way. Rather, they turned on whether the candidate was prepared to carry out the function of the office he sought.”
However, in these cases, candidates who disagreed with a mandated behavior of the Constitution, but were willing to submit, were upheld. Candidates who defied the discernment of the majority were denied ordination and installation. Mr. Nave treats “to act” and “to carry out the function of the office” as two different things. The respective GAPJCs made no such error.
Furthermore, Mr. Nave confuses the situation by asserting that there is little church court case law “that addresses any purported distinction between belief and practice where the practice at issue is not also an important function of office.” The Simmons [PC(USA) 1985] decision relied heavily on the concluding section of “Historic Principles, Conscience, and Church Government.” This section was held as an expansion of the Historic Principle of Church Order “that there is an inseparable connection between faith and practice, truth and duty” (G-1.0304).
However, the issue was not whether the disagreement or refusal to submit happens to be important to ordained office. The nature of the Church as a covenantal community was at stake. An ordained officer vows to submit to the discernment of the majority by pledging to be governed by the Church’s polity (G-14.0207e; G-14.0405b.(5)). In addition, in Londonderry [PC(USA) 2001] the PJC held that every part of the Constitution must be read with force.
While the original intent of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity, and Purity may have been to grant a previously undiscovered freedom for sessions and presbyteries to grant exceptions to mandates regarding the manner of life of ordained officers, the amended final version might not have delivered what Mr. Nave wishes. That will be a matter for the courts.
However, if a future GAPJC decision does grant Mr. Nave his desire, then the next GA will be ethically obliged to vacate that decision by removing the AI and renouncing it as an illegal attempt to bypass how our Constitution is amended.
Mr. Nave not only fails to make his point, he also leads readers spiritually astray with his misinterpretations of history and law. Our ordination standards should not be subjected to clever word play that “brings truth and falsehood upon a level.” The clear, plain, historical reading of events and standards will move us forward, not semantic and historical sleight of hand.
Christopher A. Yim is senior pastor of Neelsville Church in Germantown, Md. He is a member of National Capital Presbytery and a former member and vice-moderator of the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission. He serves on the board of Presbyterians for Renewal. Michael D. Bush is a professor at Erskine Theological Seminary in Due West, S.C, He is a leader of Constitutional Presbyterians.
1 Guy S. Klett, ed. Minutes of the Presbyterian Church in America 1706-1788. (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Historical Society, 1976) 103.
2 Klett, Minutes, 104.
