04461
October 14, 2004

Listless

Theological Task Force eschews laundry list of ordination standards

by Jerry L. Van Marter

CHICAGO — Though they have yet to take a vote on the controversial issue of ordination standards in the Presbyterian Church (USA), a clear majority of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity of the Church appear unwilling to propose a “list” of qualifying criteria for church officers.

      Led through a discussion of two internal documents — “fidelity and chastity” and “essential tenets” — by task force member and Princeton Theological Seminary professor Stacy Johnson, the group agreed on the need for greater clarity and understanding in the church about the doctrinal standards for ordination. But only the Rev. Mike Loudon of Lakeland, FL, voiced support for a list of essentials to which officer candidates would have to subscribe.

      Responding to a comment by Union Theological Seminary professor Joe Coalter that “ordination standards are not unified nor clear in our Book of Confessions.” Loudon said, “A lot of people would be surprised to know that, and they are hungering for a concrete list of essential tenets.”

      The PC(USA) ordination questions include “Do you sincerely receive and adopt the essential tenets of the Reformed faith as expressed in the confessions our church…?” But the General Assembly has never identified what those essential tenets are.

      Task force members had in front of them a list of six “essential tenets” and seven “Reformed distinctives” adopted last year by San Diego Presbytery. But the Rev. Jack Haberer of Houston said, “I don’t like the idea of a set of supra-standards that are held to be higher than our confessional standards.”

      “The church has had the chance to do a list and never has,” Coalter said. “We need to find a process of deriving clarity . . . but ‘essential tenets’ sounds too much like ‘law.’ “

      The Rev. Victoria Curtiss of Portland, OR, insisted that “a list is not the solution to our hunger for clarity.” Johnson agreed. “A laundry list will increasingly be viewed simply as a hoop that must be jumped through rather than a dynamic process of examining faith and doctrine.”

      The Rev. Mark Achtemeier, a professor at Dubuque Theological Seminary, asked, “ ‘Essential’ for what? Essential for salvation? Essential for continuity with the Reformed tradition or Christian orthodoxy? What?”

      Johnson said a list would change the whole dynamics of candidate examinations. “There’s a huge difference between a candidate presenting a statement and the ordaining body deciding if it fits or not, and an ordaining body presenting a candidate with a statement and asking if the candidate agrees or disagrees.”

      Barbara Wheeler, president of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York, said she sees two issues: What are the standards and where do they come from? and What is the church supposed to do with them? “What I hear,” she said, “is the call, not just for clarity, but for loyalty and adherence to the standards.”

      This is especially true, most task force members agreed, of the highly charged question of sexual ethics. For many, standards of sexual conduct for ordination are black-and-white. “By definition, anything outside the bounds of faithful, heterosexual marriage is promiscuity,” Loudon insisted. “There’s a constituency in the church who believe that to even talk about this is unfaithful,” Achtemeier said, responding to Loudon. “We need to acknowledge [that belief] and address it.”

      Johnson said that “the idea that there is a Biblical and a non-Biblical way to look at (the morality of same-gender relationships) is a tautology that gets us nowhere.”

      Wheeler said, “This gets us back to our earlier discussion of Biblical interpretation — can people who disagree on what’s Biblical still be grounded in a Biblical faith?” When Loudon responded, “Yes,” Achtemeier suggested that “maybe the way out is to look at self-understandings of people holding different views rather than standing above the fray with this tautology of right or wrong.”

      Resolution of these thorny questions is pressing on the task force, which meets here through Friday evening and then has just two more scheduled meetings — in March and July of next year — before the scheduled release of the preliminary draft of its final report in the fall of 2005. The task force makes its final report to the 2006 General Assembly in Birmingham, AL.