SPLIT DECISION

by Alexa Smith
Presbyterian News Service

WASHINGTON, DC — In an evocative conversation before an audience of 600 people, two prominent theologians — one liberal, the other evangelical — explained why they agree that the Presbyterian Church (USA) should not split over the question of ordaining sexually active homosexuals.

Richard Mouw, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, an evangelical school in Pasadena, CA, and Barbara Wheeler, the president of Auburn Theological Seminary, a liberal institution in New York City, let the Covenant Network listen in on a conversation they’ve been having for years.

The question: How do strangers live as friends, thereby building better community?

Do they understand why some Presbyterians — some gays and lesbians and their supporters, and some who oppose the ordination of homosexuals — want to leave the denomination? Yes.

Do they think the church could simply fragment? Yes.

Do they think there is more to be gained, ecclesiastically and theologically, if Presbyterians stay in the denomination?

Yes — because by doing so they demonstrate that people who disagree on important issues can choose cohesion over division.

“The most critical reason for us Presbyterian ‘strangers’ to struggle through our disagreements is to show the world that there are alternatives to killing each other over differences,” Wheeler said.

“As long as we continue to club the other Presbyterians into submission, with constitutional amendments, judicial cases and economic boycotts, we have no word for a world full of murderous divisions — most of them cloaked in religion.”

Wheeler is urging people to “skip the split” that has shattered other Reformed communions and Presbyterian denominations of other eras, to make that witness.

“We Presbyterians, who share so much — a confession of faith, a rich theological heritage, the advantage and burdens of wealth and social power — we could covenant to stay together in our Reformed relations, to labor with each other in love, for justice and truth,” she said. “It would be very arduous and painful — much more so than splitting or drifting apart. (But) It would be worth it.

“The world would take note of what the gospel makes possible for those who . . . keep on going, strangers locked in covenant, toward the better country of diversity and harmony, liberty and love.”

Mouw agreed that the reason to hang together is theological witness.

He said past splits have done more harm than good to the church because they have reduced the influence of Calvinist orthodoxy.

In other words: What’s to be gained by learning only from those with whom you already agree?

“The denomination from which the dissidents depart,” Mouw said, “is typically left without strong voices who are defending their understanding of orthodoxy.”

He said evangelicals should realize that a split could lead to rancor in their own ranks.

“When we evangelical types don’t have more liberal people to argue with, we tend to start arguing with each other,” he said, “and I can testify to the fact that intra-evangelical theological arguments are not always pleasant affairs.

“I would much rather see us continue to focus on the major issues of Reformed thought in an admittedly pluralistic denomination than to deal with the tensions that often arise … when we have established (our) own ‘pure’ denominations.”

Mouw said he has learned much over the years from social-gospel Protestants of the past such as Harry Emerson Fosdick and Walter Rauschenbusch, and from more contemporary liberal Christians who have modeled commitment to racial justice and to peacemaking.

He argued that repentance creates a common ground where evangelicals and liberals can stand together. Wheeler said each camp can learn from the other.

“(Liberals) make a strong case: God invites gay- lesbian- bisexual-transgendered (GLBT) persons into full membership, committed partnerships and church leadership on the same basis as everyone else,” Wheeler said. “But we tend to leave it at that, to give the impression that inclusion is the end of the story.

“Of course, it is not. God incorporates us into Christ’s body for a reason: transformation.”

Wheeler said liberals can look to evangelicals for insight into what that transformation might look like.

“We can stand our ground ... and still let the evangelicals help us balance our word to the church: inclusion, acceptance, but also metanoia, new life,” she said. “Who knows? If evangelicals listen intently to the testimony of faithful GLBT persons, and if our side accepts evangelicals’ prompting to admit our need and desire to be renewed, maybe can strive together for a church as just and generous — and holy — as God’s grace.”

Mouw said Presbyterians could benefit from coming together at the foot of the cross.

“We do not have to have either our theology or our ethics well-worked-out before we can come together to Calvary,” he said. “All we need to know is that we are lost apart from the sovereign grace that was made available to us through the atoning work of Jesus Christ.”

In that awareness, he said, “We can journey on as friends — no longer strangers to each other — who are eager to talk to each other, and even to argue passionately with each other, about crucial issues of Christology, atonement and discipleship, as servants who are ‘wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.’ ”

He said he’d be surprised to see the denomination put aside the issues that divide until “after we have knelt and laid our individual and collective burdens of sin at the foot of the cross. … But then, the God whom we worship and serve is nothing if not a God of surprises.”

Wheeler expressed hope that God may, in fact, be leading the church into an entirely new understanding — not of sex, but of hesed, a Hebrew term for “loyal love.”

Describing homosexuality as an important issue before the church but not a “faithbreaker,” she said that many Presbyterians of differing theological views have recognized that “God’s blessing is available to all who commit themselves to love God more fully by loving another person truly.”

“Richard, this isn’t capitulation to a libertine culture,” she told Mouw. “This expanding understanding makes the church and us in it more, not less, holy. This is, I am deeply convinced, the work of the Holy Spirit.”

Mouw and Wheeler later took questions from the floor, including one from Robert Dykstra, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, who asked Mouw what would change his mind about the rightness of ordaining sexually active gays and lesbians to church office?

“A biblical argument,” said Mouw, adding that, while there are ambiguities in scripture on the issues of gender, race and slavery, there is no ambiguity in its condemnation of homosexual behavior.

The toughest text, he said, is Romans 1. If someone could demonstrate that the verses there about “unnatural intercourse” and “shameless acts” do not apply to faithful, lifelong commitments between persons of the same gender, he said, his mind “probably” would be changed.

The theme of the Nov. 6–8 conference at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church here was “The Church We Are Called to Be and to Become.”