04318
July 16, 2004

Reformed churches ponder whether economic order is heretical

by Manuel Quintero
Ecumenical News International

QUITO, Ecuador — Should the present world economic system be rejected as sinful and heretical?

      That is the critical and potentially divisive issue that delegates from more than 200 Presbyterian, Congregational, Reformed and United churches in more than 100 countries will have to face when they gather in Accra at the end of July for the 24^th general council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.

      In 1982, the alliance’s 21st general council, or world assembly, had declared the theological basis for the South African apartheid system to be a “heresy” and suspended two churches with whites-only membership for promoting it.

      Now, as delegates prepare to travel to Ghana, some churches are calling for a similar denunciation of the global economic system, but the issue has already created rifts between churches with different understandings of what globalization means.

      “Many churches do not see that we should take a position vis-a-vis economic injustice, neither do they understand the way churches in the South are facing such a reality,” said the Rev. German Zijlstra, executive secretary of AIPRAL, the body which brings together most Presbyterian and Reformed churches in Latin America.

      “Some churches in the North are afraid that by confronting this reality, that is to say, by making a clear and strong faith stance against economic injustice and ecological irresponsibility, they will affect their relations with the corporations that sustain the current world system,” Zijlstra told Ecumenical News International during a visit to Quito last week.

      Last year, Reformed churches from the southern hemisphere met in Buenos Aires and said it was “critical, for the integrity of our faith, that we take a faith stance” on economic injustice.The churches gathered in the Argentine capital also rejected “any theological justification for neo-liberal ideology” and what they termed “imperial power.”

      Still, this position is considered “a bit too simplistic” by some churches in the North, noted Paraic Reamonn, WARC’s secretary for communications.

      “There is general agreement within the Alliance family of churches that the world we live in generates economic injustice and ecological destruction on an unacceptable scale, and that our Christian faith impels us to respond,” but the issue in the debate, suggested Reamonn, is the nature of what that response should be.

       “Many in our Latin American churches and elsewhere would be happy to see a statement from Accra rejecting the present world order as a ‘sinful system,’ to be rejected in the same way as apartheid was by the 21st general council [in Ottawa 1982],” he added.

      There words like sin and heresy were used, and South Africa’s then racist ideology was declared to be a “status confessionis” (a situation of confession) — a theological term that describes a situation where a clear and unequivocal decision for the truth of the Gospel is demanded from the church and where the opposed opinion, teaching or practice is identified as heretical.

      Declaring that a situation constitutes a “status confessionis” means “that we regard this as an issue on which it is not possible to differ without seriously jeopardizing the integrity of our common confession,” the 1982 Ottawa general council had noted.

      But some churches in the North are less happy with this approach when it comes to the global economy, Reamonn said.

      “Their difficulty with the Buenos Aires ‘faith stance’ is that, although it clearly speaks to the experience of many Alliance churches in the South, it doesn’t communicate easily to congregations elsewhere,” he noted.

      “These churches don’t like the language of ‘status confessionis,’” Reamonn explained. “They worry about a tendency to demonize those individuals and institutions that are seen to be at the root of the problem.”

      A document approved by European delegates and church leaders who met in Utrecht in April stated that, in the Reformed tradition, the declaration of a “status confessionis” had only been applied in cases where churches were teaching a false doctrine.

      “Economical or societal phenomena, be they even on a global scale, have never qualified for the declaration of a status confessionis,” the Reformed leaders said in Utrecht.

      And the Rev. Christoph Stueckelberger, general secretary of the Swiss church organization “Bread for All,” noted it was “generally unacceptable” to equate, as the churches did in Buenos Aires, neoliberalism and the “capitalist market system.” This statement, claimed Stueckelberger, failed to recognize the variety and pluralism of market systems.

      For Reamonn, the main question is “how far we can agree on a description of what is wrong with our world today, and on what the gospel challenges us to do about that.” From there, he hopes, the delegates at the Accra meeting “will produce a strong message directed at our churches that will challenge them to reflect together more deeply on these evils and to act together more strategically to bring about real change.”