Pittsburgh seminary prof criticizes task force report
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, September 7, 2005
The report of the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity is “a local option Trojan Horse,” a wormy apple, a false conclusion, a “sacrifice on the altar of real authority,” and a string of other metaphors.
That’s the conclusion of Robert A.J. Gagnon, a Biblical scholar and a professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, whose 16,000-word response nearly matched the 39-page length of the task force’s report.
“[N]early the whole of the Final Report attempts to move readers in various ways to the dangerously false conclusion that a male-female prerequisite for a God-ordained sexual union is, whether or not a serious matter, a nonessential feature of New Testament and Reformed sexual practice,” Gagnon says.
Gagnon is an expert on what the Bible has to say about homosexual practice. His magnum opus on the subject is titled The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics, which many consider the definitive work on the issue that has been kept boiling by gay activists and their allies who oppose the denomination’s constitutional and Biblical ordination requirements.
Before the task force had issued its final report, Gagnon predicted during a seminar at the New Wineskins Initiative Convocation in June that the task force report would include a “sneaky local option variant.”
And that’s what it did, he says in his detailed response.
“Although there are some good elements within the Final Report and doubtlessly the report reflects some genuine goodwill, nearly the whole of the Final Report attempts to move readers in various ways to the dangerously false conclusion that a male-female prerequisite for a God-ordained sexual union is, whether or not a serious matter, a nonessential feature of New Testament and Reformed sexual practice,” he says.
The task force report calls for ordaining bodies – sessions and presbyteries – to decide for themselves whether the constitutional prohibition against ordaining practicing homosexuals is an “essential” requirement.
While task force members have disputed criticism that their report is local option, the Rev. John “Mike” Loudon, a Confessing Church pastor who joined in the task force’s unanimous approval of the report, says he can understand that view.
Loudon, who favors the church’s current policy, conceded that some presbyteries might judge a candidate’s same-sex relationship to be non-essential and go ahead with ordination. “That’s going to be the tension,” Loudon told a reporter for his hometown newspaper, The Ledger, in Lakeland, Fla. “My guess is that in Tampa Bay, Central Florida and Peace River presbyteries, we’re going to say no, that’s constitutional, that’s biblical, it’s an essential. I can’t speak for San Francisco or New York presbyteries. But then what happens if (a gay minister) is called to a church in Pinellas Park?” he said.
Warning against the adoption of the report by the 217th General Assembly, Gagnon says, “No national institutional structure can officially give license to local ordaining and installing bodies to demote specific, highlighted requirements in its constitution to the status of a ‘nonessential requirements’ (an oxymoron) without eventually losing the trust and respect of its members and sowing the seeds of its own destruction.”
And he declares that the adoption of the report will not end the debate in the PCUSA over homosexual practice. “It would be foolish to think that the Task Force’s recommendations, if adopted, would bring us to a terminus or finishing point on the polity question of homosexual practice,” he says. “This is merely a temporary way station. The recommendations of the Task Force, if adopted, will pave the way for an ultimate legitimizing of homosexual practice throughout the denomination. If renewal-type members of the Task Force think that they have arrived at a solution that will insure their own freedom of conscience on this question for a decade or more to come, they are sadly mistaken.”
Gagnon has strongly criticized the task force before – and apparently scored some points. The task force’s preliminary report to the 216th General Assembly (2004) was a theological argument based on selected verses from the first three chapters of Ephesians.
The task force concluded then that Jesus alone was the church’s peace, unity and purity, without any reference to the last three chapters of Ephesians that describe how Christians should respond to the work of Christ.
The interim report declared that “unity with one another is not an optional feature of life in Christ. It is a necessity: union with Christ means union with all other members of Christ’s body, including those with whom one would not ordinarily choose to associate. The implication of the biblical teaching is clear: Christians cannot even entertain the notion of severing their ties with sisters and brothers in Christ without also placing themselves in severe jeopardy of being severed from Christ.”
After criticism by Gagnon and others, the severance clause was eliminated from the final report.