Task force member lectures others on faith
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, May 12, 2006
CHICAGO – The format for the May 10 meeting of five members of the Theological Task Force and three Presbyterian Coalition board members was negotiated. The day-long Q&A was supposed to begin with five-minute summaries by the task force members.
But all that time went to Mark Achtemeier, probably the most outspoken member of the task force during his service with the 20-member panel. Achtemeier, a member of the faculty at Dubuque Theological Seminary in Iowa, read a 20-minute written statement, essentially a lecture in which he declared that the task force had found a more faithful way to be Christians in a troubled and faltering denomination.
He said the past battles over ordination standards – standards that are rooted in Scripture – had “brought scandal to Christ.” The task force proposes “what we believe is a more faithful way of relating to one another.”
He listed a number of ways that the task force had lived out and was proposing the “more faithful way” – “a different spirit and a more faithful ethos to govern our lives together as brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ;” “a more truthful or faithful way in conducting ourselves;” “holding the church together and conducting ourselves more faithfully;” a better way for the “majority and minority to relate to one another faithfully;” the “pursuit of the truth by conducting a debate truthfully.”
The task force report was not, he asserted, “a compromise;” “a proposal to change current church teaching;” “a report about the church’s current ordination policy.”
He rued the legislative process in which the denomination deals “with division by means of winners-take-all votes” and “it is up to all the rest to accept the outcome or else leave the church.”
He refuted critics of the task force’s “discernment process,” including those who said the task force was seeking “to do away completely with Roberts’ Rules and parliamentary procedure. This is not the case; rather, there are times when the church is not ready to make a final vote.”
Achtemeier made it clear that he believed the task force had risen above “a conflicted status quo” in which “anger, fear and outrage are very prevalent motivators for getting people out to vote” and there’s an “enormous incentive to demonize the opposition.”
On the other hand, the task force experience was a discovery of “very loving Christians” who realized “how damaging and false were the stories we had been telling about each other,” he said.
The task force members became “fond of our shared devotion to Christ and his Word” and discovered that was more important than “particular hermeneutics.”
The task force “is challenging Presbyterians to get to know one another and stop telling stories about one another,” he stressed.
The disagreements among the group “did not involve the foundations of the faith.”
In an apparent reference to the constitutional process in the Presbyterian Church (USA), he said, “As Protestant Christians, we have no authority higher than God’s Word.” He called for “disciplined, ongoing engagement with the Word of God … to submit ourselves and our established conclusions to the light and discipline with God’s Word.”
Task force on Bible and sexuality
(Lines 521-528)
The theological and biblical literature on human sexuality in general and same-gender sexuality in particular is diverse, subtle, and complex. It could not readily be divided into the two categories – either approval or disapproval of same-gender relationships and practices – that are assumed to anchor much of the conflict in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) today. In one session, a member of the task force offered a typology of six positions. Each position conveyed a distinctive view of sin, reconciliation, and redemption. We acknowledged that other analysts might approach the material differently and provide alternative interpretations. During the day-long interview/debate, other task force members repeated that theme and also said their highest authority was Scripture. But in their report, they cited no Scripture dealing specifically with injunctions against homosexual behavior – a relevant issue because of decades of argument about what Scripture says about the subject. Furthermore, none of the Coalition members asked them to state clearly whether they felt they agreed with Biblical proscriptions against homosexual conduct.
Rather, Achtemeier said, the task force “seeks to solve the church’s problem with one another rather than against one another.” The alternative, he said, is “to split the church … to carve up the body.”
“We found no basis to support the notion of the church as a voluntary community of the like-minded,” he said. “Christ is not divided … The foundation and the bulwark of the church’s community is God’s atoning work in Christ.”
He declared that the most important recommendation of the task force is “that we hold the church together” because “Jesus gave up all of his divine prerogatives for the sake of sinners.”
Quoting from Ephesians 4, he called for humility, patience and forebearance. “Recommendation 5 calls our church to a Biblical forebearance. We forebear with dissenting minorities in the church. We make room for them when possible. Our church has said ordaining bodies should strive to make space in the church’s life for the free exercise of the church’s conscience. … We create room for conscience, not because truth doesn’t matter, but because it does. If we deprive minorities of conscience, we drive them from the church.”