The issue was so heated that a great number of the churches and pastors were prepared to leave, including most of New York City Presbytery and the Synod of New York. The story is told that late at night, Charles R. Erdman, moderator of the GA, came to the room of Henry Sloane Coffin, and promised a special commission to correct the problem if Coffin would try to keep the angry pastors from bolting. Coffin agreed, and Erdman led the General Assembly to appoint the Special Commission of 1925.
Its major decision, adopted enthusiastically, centered around one basic idea, The General Assembly may not amend the constitution without the vote of the Presbyteries. That principle has been central to our polity ever since, until now.
Now once again fundamentalists are trying to amend the constitution to achieve their desire regarding ordination by declaring that certain mandatory requirements of the law of the church may be ignored at the will of each presbytery. The Permanent Judicial Commission just a few months ago told them once you can’t do that, but this Assembly wished to do it again. The stated clerk or the moderator should have ruled the motion out of order, but they did not. The Assembly was in order when it expressed its will by proposing an overture to change the constitution; it was not in order when it tried to amend the constitution through interpretation.
Now we have the very real possibility that presbyteries will act before the PJC has had a chance to rule, and before the vote on the proposed amendment can take place. Then we will have people who might have their ordinations revoked because they were done illegally.
The tactic is once again that of fundamentalists. By controlling the assembly, but not the church, a party of deep conviction tries to place the national church in such a position that its opponents in good conscience will have to withdraw. In 1925 the fundamentalists almost succeeded in driving the more progressive members of the denomination out. In 1837 the Old School majority succeeded by ruling the New School no part of the church. At my first Assembly in 1971, there were some who believed, with good reason, that the whole Angela Davis controversy was an attempt on the part of ideological left of the church to drive out the right.
And the tactic regrettably does work. We have seen strong churches on the move, albeit it often in questionable legality and with a lot of pastoral ego involved, but move they do. These folk, frustrated by having won victories in the presbytery for their position, see the GA try again and again to invalidate those decisions. Their patience is thin. They forget that while the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, so is the price of faithfulness to a tradition.
One would wish that these cultural fundamentalists would have the patience to wait until the proper courses of change work their way through the system. If they are so very sure they have the only truth, then they should be willing to wait until the truth is clearly recognized. The unwillingness to do that through the established processes, and the willingness to sunder the church again and again, can only be fundamentalism winning out over good sense. Some twenty years ago, a prominent staff leader in social justice issues in our church said to me that he would rather a pure church of one million than a flawed church of three million. He is well on the way to succeeding, though I doubt very much that the refined and much smaller church will be any purer, any more free of human sin. When the PCUS shuffled off the PCA in the early 1970s their leaders had hopes re-union could now be voted, but it is clear, those presbyteries which lost so many members and churches, continued to vote the same way after as before.
Fundamentalism does not move the church forward; humble and thoughtful and prayerful discussion might.
Charles A. Hammond is honorably retired and living in Banning, Calif.
