Should we follow the theological task force or stand with Luther?
By Harry L. Chronis, Special to The Layman, May 8, 2006
About the author
Harry L. Chronis, pastor of White Rock Presbyterian Church in Los Alamos, N.M., participated in a panel presentation for the Presbytery of Sante Fe on the report of the Theological Task Force on Peace and Purity. Chronis, who describes himself as a “lone reed” in the presbytery, provided a copy of his remarks to The Layman. This is an abridged version. Chronis has written for a number of scholarly, evangelical publications, including a forthcoming article on the task force report for Touchstones magazine. After the presentation, the presbytery decided not to take a vote on the task force report.Let me tell you why I cannot – at this point, at least – agree with the central recommendations of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity or with crucial pieces of its rationale.
For starters, I am not at all sure, as the task force asserts, “that the world is watching the Presbyterian Church (USA) and other denominations as we engage in highly publicized debates.” I think that the world increasingly could care less about what goes on in dying, if not already brain-dead, old-line churches, including our own. How we manage our schizophrenia matters little to any except us.
What the world is dying to hear, I submit, is the truth of the Gospel, which it cannot hear so long as we continue to speak out of both sides of our mouth. Integral to our vocation as it is, our unity can only undergird and confirm that witness to God’s truth; it can never take its place.
I am not so sure, either, that it is a failure of love to let our genuine and profound differences rightly divide us. I have Mormon friends in Los Alamos, whose “goals and views differ from, even contradict, [my] own” – to use the report’s language. That doesn’t keep me from loving them; I do love them, as my friends. But it does keep me from being church with them. I have been loving many of you for 20 years now, and you me, despite a mutual conviction that we are each in the eyes of the other in very serious error!
The proper question, it seems to me, is: Can and should we continue, and for how long, to be church together, when – and here let me put its ugliest face on it – I would rather trust the preaching and teaching of God’s truth and the discernment of who is ready to assume the preaching and teaching office to some dear non-Presbyterian partners in ministry in Los Alamos than to some of you? Your preferences mirror mine in many cases, I’m sure. And why is it less than loving to face this squarely together? And to act accordingly?
But even if I thought that these arguments could get more traction than I believe they can, I cannot agree with a recommendation that encourages me to countenance the ordination of – again, let me be painfully frank – self-affirming and practicing homosexual persons as, at worst, a departure in non-essential matters. That view is only available to those who believe that God has not revealed unambiguously the truth about who we are as sexual creatures. I am not one of them, and cannot be. (Nor, might I add, could any of the believing Jews and Christians over the last 4,000 years, until a generation ago. Nor can 99.9 percent of world Christians today, who cannot imagine how we got so confused.)
But you must understand: The reason that this is a matter of essentials for me has nothing to do with sexuality per se. It has to do with the Bible.
There is absolutely no ambiguity in the Scriptures about human sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular. With respect to the latter, to transmute the consistent prohibition and condemnation of homosexual practice into their contradictories, permission and blessing, requires a kind of hermeneutical “alchemy” that I cannot, and no faithful church should, tolerate.
Simple Bible-loving Christians – and I am happy to number myself among them – readily recognize that such sophisticated hermeneutical moves put at risk what the Reformers called the “perspicuity” of Scripture, its reliability to mean what it says. And if what God’s Word says unambiguously about human sexuality can be rendered so easily ambiguous, then far more central things that it affirms unambiguously – up to and including that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself” – may be rendered ambiguous, as well. And where then has the Good News gone, the news by which we live and on which we stand?
This is by way of saying that the great failure – it seems to me – of the Task Force report is the way it cites but then glosses over and minimizes what are, I think, irreconcilable differences in the interpretation of Scripture.
Tertullian was far wiser about not minimizing these differences and laid down early on a crucial first principle: “Where diversity of doctrine is found, there must be some corruption of the Scriptures or expositions thereof.”
And I predict that no “season of discernment” will be long enough and no amount of dialogue will be sufficient to restore unity to a divided denomination in which adherents can no longer tap into the deep, and only, sources of true Christian kinship: shared beliefs, rooted in and shaped by shared ways of receiving and understanding the Scriptures.
I am not a schismatic, no matter how you think this sounds. I love our church; it is the only church I have ever known.
I am grieved at this hard place we have come to, and I’m more than a little afraid, I confess, of what lies ahead.
But I, for one, cannot go – not now, and possibly not ever – where the Task Force invites. And if I must, I will stand where Luther reluctantly stood, at a time perhaps more akin to ours than we recognize.
When asked once why it wasn’t self-righteous of him and his followers to stand so resolutely over against their peers and superiors in the Roman church, he replied:
- Life is as bad among us as among the papists, so we do not fight with and damn them because of their moral failures. And I certainly do not consider myself to be more pious. But when it comes to whether one teaches correctly about the Word of God, there I take my stand and fight. …[For] when the Word of God remains pure, even if the quality of life fails us, life is placed in a position to become what it ought. That is why everything hinges on the purity of the Word. I have succeeded only if I have taught correctly.