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Living in the Body: What General Assembly Called Us To Be and To Do
A Plenary Dialogue between Cynthia M. Campbell, President, McCormick Theological Seminary, and Douglas A. Nave, Esq., Member of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York at the Covenant Network Annual Conference - 2006, Broad Street Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
November 10, 2006
Cynthia
In thinking about this matter of declaring a scruple, it’s helpful to reflect on the way this has been practiced in other parts of the life our church. I first met this concept when I was doing my intern year in Little Rock, Arkansas in the early 1970s. I went to a congregation and the pastor of that congregation, a man by the name of Donald Campbell (no relation) told me this story of his examination for ordination before the Presbytery of Arkansas.
Back in those days, the southern Presbyterian Church (like the northern church, actually, at that time) was governed by the Westminster Standards. The ordination vows were really quite specific: Do you affirm that the Westminster Standards “contain the system of doctrine taught in Holy Scripture?” It was customary to ask candidates to express their faith and then to ask them, “Are there any places where you feel you depart from the Westminster Standards?” And Don said, “Yes, there is a place where I depart, and I declare a scruple. The Westminster Standards forbid praying for the dead, and I believe that they’re wrong. I have always prayed for my grandmother, and I will continue to do so. I declare this as a scruple.” Now, he acknowledged that when the Westminster Standards were written, that article had to do with the then-prominent idea within Catholic Christianity of prayer being a vehicle of moving the souls of the deceased from purgatory into the blessed state. But nonetheless, the prohibition remained, and he declared a scruple about something we now would not have a particular debate about, I think, in the life of the church. It’s an interesting example for me as to what exactly that has meant in our tradition.
Another example, frankly, if we had been using this as a way of understanding how to live with our confessional tradition, is that we would have required most of us, a large majority of us, women especially, to express scruples with the entirety of the Book of Confessions before the Brief Statement of Faith was written. Why is that? Well, that’s because both the Scots Confession and Second Helvetic Confession make it clear that women are not to function in the ordained offices. It is only with the Brief Statement of Faith, which clearly says that women and men are called to all ordained offices of ministry, that the need for the expression of a scruple was removed.
So departures from parts of the confessions should not be seen, I think, as a particularly unusual thing. The process of scrupling, in fact, may demonstrate the movement of the church with respect to our understanding of the status of different doctrines.
Doug
Okay, getting down to brass tacks, let’s look at G-6.0106b, “Amendment B.”
The GAPJC reminded us in a case several years ago that every single person in the Presbyterian Church is in violation of G-6.0106b. That’s the provision of the Book of Order that requires everyone to live in obedience to scripture and conformity with the confessions, or to repent. And none of us lives perfectly in accordance with scripture and the confessions.
G-6.0106b is commonly thought of as the “anti-gay” provision in the Book of Order; the only place G-6.0106b has ever been applied, in any of the PJCs, is in cases relating to gay and lesbian persons. But let’s think for a minute about how it might apply. Here again, just to point out some resources – I hope you’ll read them on the flight home, or when you get home – we’ve made available Guidelines for Examination of Church Officers. We’ve included (in Chapter 6, I think) some cases as to how people might be out of compliance with our standards.
We start with the woman who drives the SUV because she thinks it’s stylish. The question is, is that a faithful reflection of our standard that we’re to protect the environment and act in a manner that doesn’t reflect greed or self-interest?
Cynthia
She unrepentantly drives the SUV.
Doug
She unrepentantly – she bought it! And we have other examples. And in raising up examples, we don’t mean to suggest the answers; we mean to suggest how many questions there are.
You know, you can leave from Ohio or Kansas, fly a bomber over to Serbia, deliver a bomb load over a city, and come home for dinner. So there may be Presbyterian churches here that have bombers on their sessions – that is, people who have chosen to exercise this practice in their jobs. Well, does that comply with our Confessions or not? I can’t tell you the answer, and none of us can tell anyone else what the answer is. We have to search our consciences.
What about people who believe that the war on terror validates torture? What about people who believe that bank officers serving on our sessions should adopt certain lending rules, rules on interest? What about those of us who are divorced and remarried? What about of those of us who enjoy playing the lottery, or going to the casino on occasion? We don’t mean any harm by it; it’s like going to the movies or having a sport or hobby. We spend money entertaining ourselves; why can’t we go to the casino and play a little poker? What about those of us who golf on Sunday morning? “Mental Health Awareness Day,” Sunday morning golf. Is it essential for church officers to be in church every Sunday morning? Is there a difference if the officer is working at his job on Sunday morning to support his family, as opposed to golfing? What do our standards require? Are those standards “essential”?
If we put this kind of thought into what G-6.0106b really means, we see that the gay and lesbian “issue” is in one tiny corner of the many, many things that we should be concerned about as Christians today.
But it is an issue, it’s the one people are focused on, and it’s an interesting issue. You know, there are presbyteries out there who are saying – I love this – “If you’ve got any scruples, you’ve got to declare them.” I can just envision the first examination. The candidate gets up and says, “How many do you want?” Somebody was talking about the person who took the Book of Confessions on their vacation. This is going to be one long presbytery meeting, and they’ve only gotten through Candidate #1!
That’s not really how our process works very often. What happens is, our examiners come with certain concerns and ask about those. But it is helpful and important to remember that what might be of concern to me is not necessarily what’s of most concern to God, or should be of most concern to the church.
How do we approach G-6.0106b? I gave you two words; do people remember them? Standards and scruples, and they come in that order. Our standards say that our officers are required to live either in a faithful heterosexual marriage or in chastity in singleness, and any person refusing to repent of any practice the Confessions call sin shall not be ordained to the office of elder, minister, or deacon. There’s a lot of stuff to unpack there if we’re going to take it at all seriously. (Another thing I love is these proposals that “everything in the Book of Order shall be required,” as if it’s all black and white.)
For example, what’s “chastity”? Is it celibacy, or is it monogamy? What is it? If you read these Guidelines, you’ll see we’ve got several pages on chastity. The answer is not clear, as a matter of history or of polity in the Presbyterian Church.
Or what do the Confessions call sin? You know, there are only two passages in all of the Confessions that potentially talk about homosexuality. One of them condemns “homosexual perversion”. Well, I assume we condemn “heterosexual perversion” as well, but that doesn’t mean we condemn all heterosexual relations. The other passage condemns “sodomy”. But if you go back and read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, where that word comes from, you realize we’re talking about rape, or inhospitality, or injustice, or oppression. The scriptures never say that the sin of Sodom was same-sex relations in a loving consensual relationship. So what practices do the Confessions really call sin?
If you, the candidate, or the examining body (session or presbytery) decide that these provisions really do outlaw all conjugal relationships in a same-sex couple – let’s assume that – and somebody comes in and says, “I’ve been in a 20-year relationship, it’s monogamous, and I believe that I cannot live in compliance with this standard because I believe the standard is wrong” – is that person “refusing to repent”? What is repentance? Is it just saying, “I don’t agree with the majority”? Well, the Confessions don’t say that. The Confessions say that repentance is a God-given sense of inward conviction about the wrongfulness of our acts. You can look it up, it’s in there. If this person is not convicted of the wrongfulness of his or her acts, is she really “refusing to repent”?
There are lots of questions, and those are just some of them, in G-6.0106b. It’s important to think through all of those issues and decide what the standard means, to decide if you have a disagreement with the standard. You don’t know if you disagree with the standard until you know what the standard means. It’s only if you’ve determined that the standard creates a problem that you might declare a scruple.
It’s interesting to me that the definition in the 1700s of “matters that can’t be scrupled” is “matters on which disagreement makes us ‘incapable of communion.’” You know, 45% of the Presbyterian Church, or more, believe that G-6.0106b is wrong. Are we saying that 45% of our members really aren’t Christians, that this is so “essential” we can’t possibly be in communion with each other? I don’t think so. In fact, I know that’s not right, because we've had this disagreement for a long time, and we haven’t excommunicated that 45%. Many of them are still serving as officers and ministers in the church. So we need to understand what the standard says, and then we need consider scruples, and what’s really “essential” in our life of faith.
I had an interesting conversation before the conference with somebody who said, “Isn’t what we’re really talking about here fidelity to our covenant together to live by the rules?” And I said, “Absolutely.” But the question is, “Which rules?” We can talk about a sexual ethic as a rule, but we can also talk about our historic, fundamental, defining belief that God speaks to the conscience of each of us, and that we owe each other mutual forbearance in matters of conscience. If we try to cram down one understanding of a sexual ethic, we’re being unfaithful to much larger values in Reformed Christianity.
I’ll wrap up with this: I was listening to Jon Walton comment a little bit before this session started about the fear in the denomination today, the fear. You see it in presbyteries and sessions: What is going to happen? Do we have to adopt resolutions to make sure that what GA did doesn’t create anything bad? It’s fear. Jesus told us the answer to that. Jesus said, “Perfect love casts out fear.” And that’s what we’re called to do.
Cynthia
I get a lot of grief from friends of mine because I was known in the church I served for always beginning a discussion, “On the one hand . . . but on the other hand. . . .” I actually deeply believe that’s the right approach, as a principle of theological engagement. That is the heart of what it means to be Presbyterian, but is also a part of the reality of Christian tradition. Another way to put it is resisting the temptation to say there’s only one answer. Or resisting the temptation to see one value and not affirm others.
There are those in the life of our church who feel very deeply about personal holiness and the lifestyle of a leader in the life of church – elder, deacon, or Minister of Word and Sacrament – that our lives should be different, that we are called to a form of life, to disciplines relating to all kinds of choices, in economic, political and religious terms as well as in terms of our relationships. This concern about personal holiness is deeply embedded in the biblical tradition, as well as in our Reformed tradition.
There’s another side of that, and that is that holiness is always something that is conferred; it is not earned. I was doing some research on something else and was reminded that the first time the word “holiness,” or “to make holy,” ever appears in scripture is on the seventh day. When God rested, God made the seventh day holy. It’s the first time anything was made holy. The day wasn’t holy in and of itself until God made it that way. What was holy was not a person or a place, but time. Holiness is something we receive from God as a gift, as a grace that we are then enabled to live into. Yes, holiness matters, and yes, so does understanding that it is a gift of God to live into as imperfect people.
What we’re talking about here is in the best of the Reformed tradition: having standards, rules and policies – principles, if you will – that shape our life as perhaps a boundary, a large boundary, but also being clear about what is our core, which is our common faith and trust in Jesus Christ. It is about applying those standards but looking precisely to the individuals and the situations in which we are called to discern the meaning and applicability of those standards.
In order to do this, we have three places where trust comes in: trusting one another and freedom of conscience, understanding all of us to be enlightened by God’s Spirit; trusting in the sovereignty of God, who reveals truth in its season and walks with us through our journey as community; and trusting in the grace of God, that even if we’re wrong about this, God will not let us go, from God or from each other.
Thank you very much. We’re ready now to take questions, and David will manage those questions.
Question:
Our assumption is that all seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Why is it that the Holy Spirit opens some Christian minds to new understandings of the faith and not others?
Doug
That’s a terrific question. Who would like to answer it?
One of the things I find helpful in thinking about this – there’s so many ways to answer it, the great theologians have written books and spent careers on it. One of the things I think most interesting is when we look at the four gospels, we see that they were written to different audiences with different focuses. Sometimes they seem to be inconsistent with each other. And you wonder why that is. I think that reflects an acknowledgement and a witness in scripture that God speaks to different people in different ways. We see that also in our Book of Confessions. We recognize that the church hears the Holy Spirit in different ways in different times. God is so big and our understanding is so small that often we need to hear the message in many different ways in order to even begin to grasp an essential truth. That’s one answer.
Cynthia
Another answer to that is in an analogy I sometimes use when I’m teaching theology. It’s related to the example of the four gospels. One can think about the work of doing theological reflection – that is to say, trying to love God with one’s mind, to let our faith seek understanding and expression – as much like a group of people around a piece of sculpture or, for example, that baptismal font. My vantage point on that baptismal font is one thing, and it’s another thing for those of you who are sitting in different locations. You see different things. Some of you can see that there’s a bowl inside of that, and some of you cannot. I can see that from here, so I would describe it with that recessed bowl inside of it, but back in the back row, I’ll bet you can’t see that. You don’t know it’s there. You perceive it from a different vantage point. That is part of what accounts, I think, for real theological difference: our place within the tradition, and our own experience, that we bring when we stand before the mystery of God, which none of us will ever comprehend. So we live under the guidance of God’s Spirit, trying to move around and expand our angles of vision.
Doug
Can I add one other thought that occurred to me? I’d have to go back and look at the story to think if I’m using it correctly, but there is the story in the gospels about Jesus being tempted to throw himself down from a high point, to demonstrate his sovereignty and power. And that just isn’t the way God has worked in the biblical accounts. If we believe in free will, then we believe that God, for some reason, has felt it is important that we have choice and faith; and perfect revelation almost makes choice and faith impossible. Perhaps there’s something in the created human nature that makes it important not to have complete and true and absolute revelation, because then we wouldn’t have the free will and choice to worship God, we would simply be automatons and serfs.
Question:
How does a governing body work with the “shall” language? Can something mandatory be deemed non-essential?
Doug
Yes. What’s the next question?
The “shall” language – there are lots of ways to address that. I think the short answer is that we have lots of different rules and hierarchies and levels of rules, and it depends on what level you’re looking at.
We have a rule that says people “shall not be ordained” – that’s where this comes from, let’s get to the agenda around those claims that, under G-6.0106b, people “refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin shall not be ordained.” That’s the “shall” word. If you believe all of that – “people refusing to repent of any self-acknowledge practice which the confessions call sin” – if you believe all of that means “persons engaged in unrepentant, same-sex conjugal relations,” then the “shall” might have some bite. But when we [the Church] wrote G-6.0106b, we wrote into it the need to interpret and grapple with our confessional heritage. What do our Confessions call sin? What is “refusing to repent”? What is “chastity”, which is in the sentence before? That “shall” word doesn’t have one meaning. You have to understand the whole sentence, take it apart and understand what it means.
Some have said, “Oh, that’s all legalisms; everybody knows what General Assembly meant to do when it adopted G-6.0106b.” Well, if that’s what they meant to do, the question is, why didn’t they do it that way? We had language we’d been working with since 1978: “self-affirming, practicing homosexuals” cannot serve. Real clear. Why didn’t its supporters try to put that into the Book of Order? Because they didn’t believe it would command a majority in the presbyteries to pass. We had to have language that provided flexibility and that was truer to our confessional and biblical understanding of human agency. When you hear that “shall” question, it’s important to note that it’s coming from a lot of assumptions about G-6.0106b that simply aren’t true.
The other point I would make is that you have the hierarchies of rules. You have sexual ethics at one level. You have other rules that say freedom of conscience “shall” be respected. We have a “duty” to show mutual forbearance to each other. We have those requirements too. I find it hard to believe that a sexual ethic that is so contentious today can be deemed as important as the guiding principles of our Reformed heritage for 400 years.
(continued)