If the Presbyterian Church (USA) approves a controversial statement on sexuality, it will more closely resemble a Canaanite fertility cult than a Christian church.
Following is a guest editorial by James R. Edwards, professor of religion, Jamestown College, Jamestown, North Dakota:
Next month, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) will be asked to adopt the report of the General Assembly Special Committee on Human Sexuality. The report, entitled Keeping Body and Soul Together: Sexuality, Spirituality, and Social Justice, is a sustained apology for erotic empowerment in its manifold forms under the expression of “justice-love.” It is a quantum leap away from the biblical and Reformed heritage of the church.
What’s In The Report?
Here is a sample of the report’s pronouncements and recommendations:
• That “all persons, whether heterosexual or homosexual, whether single or partnered, have a moral right to experience justice-love in their lives and to be sexual persons” (p. 46).
• That gays and lesbians be received as full participant members, and for ordination “regardless of their sexual orientation and that sexual celibacy not be a requirement for ordination” (p. 168).
• That worship resources be designed to celebrate same-sex relationships (p. 169).
• That the problem before the church is not sexual sin but the “prevailing social, cultural, and ecclesial arrangements … [and] conformity to the unjust norm of compulsory heterosexuality” (p. 34).
• That “a reformed Christian ethic of sexuality will not condemn, out of hand, any sexual relations in which there is genuine equality and mutual respect” (p. 40).
These standards, and the paper that presents them, are to be presented to congregations for study and distributed with copies of the current youth curriculum on sexuality. The recommendation to foist this report on our young people is unconscionable. Having spent the last 25 years ministering to youth in churches and colleges, I grieve to think what this report would mean for young people struggling to realize their God-given sexuality in the light of divine revelation.
The 196-page report goes far beyond same-sex issues and the ordination of practicing homosexuals. It appeals for a fundamental reconstruction of sexuality and sexual ethics in this culture, dismissing biblical mandates or Reformed theology wherever these vary from “justice-love.” Eroticism in any form is accountable only to “fidelity,” which is defined as “an open-ended process of learning how … to renegotiate the [relationship’s] character as needs and desires change” (p. 45).
Beneath The Surface
A study issued in April 1990 showed that a strong majority of Presbyterians disapprove of sexual intercourse outside of marriage or of the ordination of practicing homosexuals. Clearly the special committee does not represent what the majority of Presbyterians believe about sexual morality.
Three motifs echo throughout the report. They represent a kind of reasoning that is evident not only in mainline churches, but increasingly in evangelical circles as well.
First, the report is an example of what happens when pluralism, rather than Scripture, is made the final arbiter of faith and morality. The report may claim a place of honor for Scripture, but, like the honor of the queen of England, it is largely a formality. Citing a shift away from “explicit appeals to scriptural authority” to “the broad message of Scripture” (p. 22), the report reveals a reductionist view of Scripture. By “broad message,” the committee means “inclusive wholeness” and all Scripture that challenges that canon is summarily omitted. In the minds of the committee, the “historical distance between twentieth-century Christians and first-century Christians” is too great for us “to borrow … their conclusions about human sexuality” (p. 23).
The result, biblically speaking, is like looking at the Alps through a keyhole. Numerous passages in both Testaments that give unambiguous mandates regarding fornication, adultery, homosexuality, sodomy, and sexual perversion are either distorted or neglected. The New Testament teaching of fidelity in marriage or abstinence outside it—and those who hold it—are dismissed as “voices of conformity … largely white, affluent, heterosexual protestants in nuclear families” (p. 8).
The critical reader will find a document that assumes such values without argument, and demeans those who disagree as middle-class bigots who are anxious for power and fearful of sex. The effect is to neutralize the Bible and eliminate its authority in order to exonerate consensual sex under the rubric of “justice-love.” “Where there is justice-love, sexual expression has ethical integrity. That moral principle applies to single, as well as to married persons, to gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons, as well as to heterosexuals. The moral norm for Christians ought not be marriage, but rather justice-love” (p. 56).
Second, the report is essentially an ideological document, ostensibly radically feminist, but actually rooted in a neo-Marxist hermeneutic. Its conclusions are determined by the classic Marxist dichotomy of oppressed (read: “marginalized” “gays,” “lesbians,” “bisexuals,” “sexually active singles”) versus oppressors (read: “patriarchy,” “heterosexuals,” “white males,” “the church,” “conventional sexual morality”). According to the report, the Christian’s chief calling is neither faithfulness to God nor ethical holiness, but egalitarianism. “The prime Christian virtue of our day is solidarity” (p. 12).
The report assumes that social sciences, and above all, changing social conditions, are normative for the church in sexual mores. Scripture and theology are made subservient to this determination. The report claims to offer a “prophetic” word on sexuality, but it is in fact an accommodation to what the Confession of 1967 called “anarchy in sexual relationships … and perennial confusion about the meaning of sex” (9.47). The drive to “decenter patriarchy” results in demeaning, by innuendo and negative association, biblical virtues of heterosexuality, monogamy, and chastity. Inclusiveness irrespective of sexual orientation supplants all other values.
Third, the report emphasizes a theology of creation at the expense of a theology of redemption. An erroneous assumption is that the human package we are born with neither can, nor need, be changed. There is little hint here that because of the Fall, sexuality, like other human gifts, is prone to selfishness or abuse. Absent are terms such as sin and disobedience. Sexual expression is regarded as a “right” that, apart from coercion, is beyond morality. There is apparently no need for the Cross of Christ for forgiveness and moral renewal, and no mention of it. The word agap, which characterizes God’s love and Christian love 320 times in the New Testament, is conspicuously absent, whereas eros, which does not occur once in the New Testament, is apotheosized into a prophecy of God as “the fiery flame of … divine eros” (p. 63). “Justice” and “spirituality” are linked inextricably with eros. That is a revealing association, as anyone will recognize who is familiar with the Old Testament’s warning against collapsing covenant fidelity into the Canaanite fertility cults. The “erotic spirituality” of this report brings us back to the courts of Baal and Ashtoreth.
Elevating eros to the plan of spirituality, the report says that “unless we Christians are able to embrace eros, we stand in danger … of falsely misrepresenting love in our actions.” So much for the love of Jesus, Paul, Saint Francis, and Mother Teresa.
A Clear Choice
The fundamental issue before American Christianity—both liberal and conservative—is the proper relationship between pluralism and confessionalism. Christianity is by nature confessional. American democracy is by necessity pluralistic, and rightly so. A serious problem results, however, when the political concept of pluralism takes precedence over the creedal nature of Christian belief. This is the Achilles’ heel of Keeping Body and Soul Together, and of reports that will follow it. The issue is not that of pluralism or confessionalism, but rather of the limits of pluralism. Pluralism without limits is like a football field without boundaries.
This same issue lay at the root of the fourth-century Trinitarian debates. If the Great Church could not pinpoint the exact nature of the Trinity, it did succeed in drawing a large circle outside of which it believed the truth could not be found. The orthodox consensus, as it came to be known, is worth reconsidering. American Christians must redefine the circle of faith and the limits of pluralism.
Keeping Body and Soul Together is a wholesale departure from the biblical witness to morality, from 2,000 years of Christian moral theology, and from the ethical wisdom of the ages. Dean W. R. Inge said, “The Church which is married to the Spirit of its Age will be a widow in the next.” Deacons, elders, and ministers in the Presbyterian Church (USA) have not taken a vow to the spirit of this age, but to “fulfill [their] office in obedience to Jesus Christ, under the authority of Scripture, and be continually guided by our confessions.” Commissioners must remember that vow when they vote on Keeping Body and Soul Together. The report, along with a proposed two-year study process, deserves to be defeated and buried without honors. This is the kind of thing that is killing the mainline denominations.
