Special-interest group, former moderator vilify ‘Essentials Tenets’
The Layman Online, June 27, 2003
The San Diego Presbytery’s decision to prepare its candidates for ministry with Scripture, The Book of Confessions and the Book of Order has been vilified by the Witherspoon Society and Herbert Valentine, a former moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA).
Valentine, applauding the commentary by Gene TeSelle, who is called the Witherspoon Society’s issues analyst, asked, “What is going on in San Diego that they would set a standard that invites lockstep belief and check-off orthodoxy?”
The “orthodoxy” Valentine fears is lifted straight from the PCUSA Constitution. Nonetheless, Valentine says he believes it should have been “challenged or least vetted in theological circles of academia before adoption.” Constitutional documents are adopted by the presbyteries, not the academicians.
“This document, I have read it, comes very close to theological ‘painting by numbers,'” Valentine added. “I guess I shouldn’t be amazed at the nature of the document; it is an ever recurring theme in our times; the attempt to codify and regularize the non-codifiable as regulatory. What has happened to mystery?”
TeSelle’s analysis, titled “A New Fundamentalism?”, criticizes the San Diego Presbytery because of its “Essential Tenets and Reformed Distinctives” – even though the presbytery says it will apply them within the denomination’s boundaries. That means that the presbytery will not require candidates for the ministry to “subscribe” to the essentials as a condition for receiving a call.
The list of essentials and Reformed distinctives comes directly from Chapter 2 of the Book of Order. Those essentials and distinctives were included in what was called the Plan for Reunion that the Northern and Southern denominations approved before the two became the Presbyterian Church (USA) in 1983.
But Valentine, who was moderator of the 203rd General Assembly in 1991 and is now retired as the executive of the Presbytery of Baltimore, has long opposed anything that smacks of orthodoxy.
He once began a General Assembly communion service with a “smudging ceremony” to drive out evil spirits. He has been one of the powers in Baltimore in that presbytery’s refusal to comply with the constitution’s “fidelity/chastity” ordination standards. He defended former President Bill Clinton as a “moral” man and lobbied publicly for partial-birth abortion.
The Witherspoon Society, a special-interest group that promotes gay ordination and “progressive theology,” invited readers to respond to TeSelle’s commentary about the San Diego paper. As of June 27, Valentine was the only one who had responded.