Commentary in journal says PCUSA’s turmoil over sexuality is a symptom of deeper problems
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, January 25, 2006
A Presbyterian minister in New Mexico says the deep division over human sexuality in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and other mainline denominations is the “presenting symptom” of a dispute that reflects deeper problems.
In fact, says the Rev. Harry L. Chronis of White Rock Presbyterian Church in Los Alamos, the dispute is so deep and so grave that it approaches status confessionis, a Latin theological term that describes the state of a church when it must return to its confession of Christ and its commitment to orthodox, Biblical Christianity or lose its Christian identity.
Chronis’ views are in a commentary titled “Alexandria or Antioch? The Hermeneutical Choice Confronting the American Old-Line,” which was published in the fall 2005 Pro-Ecclesia journal of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology. He uses Alexandria orthodoxy as a model for the PCUSA and other mainline denominations, and Antioch heterodoxy as an example of the opposite and the cause of today’s turmoil.
Chronis expresses some hope that the PCUSA and other mainline denominations – which he describes as the old line – will return to orthodox Christian beliefs and practice, the Alexandrian model.
“Still, one hopes,” he says. “For if it is the Lord of the Church himself who commands us to follow him, then the choice before all of us in the old-line is fraught with promise as much as peril. And, if it proves impossible to get the bus oriented aright, one can envision a worse sight than watching several million Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, or Episcopal saints, or even heretofore unimaginable combinations of them, getting off and striking out toward Alexandria on foot.”
“I, for one … believe that a couple of contested issues, crucial to the health of the whole Christian enterprise, underlay the human sexuality debate. Disagreements about these matters – as I want to argue here, matters initially theological but finally hermeneutical – approximate the conditions for invoking status confessionis.”
Chronis argues that unity will not evolve out of dialogue. “Unity never comes naturally to any denomination in any age – presumably, the reason the Lord commands it and prays for it. But neither will any amount of dialogue be likely to restore unity to divided denominations in which adherents can no longer tap into the deep sources of Christian kinship: shared beliefs, rooted in and shaped by shared ways of receiving and understanding the Scriptures.”
“Unity has certainly been stretched thin in my denomination, the PCUSA,” he adds. “If there ever was a common sense of a deep kinship holding the denomination together it disappeared long ago. What remains is a largely bureaucratic ‘connectionalism,’ a union of those whose theological views and ethical practices are stunningly diverse (at the extremes, contradictory), held together by nothing other than a common polity.”
Chronis compares the controversy over human sexuality to two ancient debates centered in Alexandria, “the home to Nicene and Athanasian orthodoxy,” and Antioch, the home to “Arian heterodoxy in the early Trinitarian controversies.” He terms the “ethical confusion” about human sexuality “an Antiochene illness, for which only a Nicene cure of the 4th century proportions will do.”
He describes a presbytery meeting he attended that he says was tantamount to a reappearance of Arius:
- “We were treated to hearing (a) one of our ordained ministers reporting cheerfully about teaching the Bible (or, more precisely, Marcus Borg’s slant on the Bible) in her part-time position on the staff of a Unitarian church, (b) several new members of the presbytery sharing at some length what God was doing in their lives and ministries without once mentioning the name of Jesus Christ, and (c) our worship leader eschewing use of the triune name revealed by Christ (and substituting, with what is now nauseating predictability, the economic job-description ‘Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer’) in our closing doxology. Nor is mine the only presbytery tilting toward Antioch and the confusion that ensues once God is unyoked from Christ.”
Chronis said the “really disturbing Christological divide” that has opened in the PCUSA was evident in the 2001 General Assembly, which adopted a Christological statement that “was deeply flawed. The final wording of the affirmation, and much of the explicit testimony in the floor debate, made clear that our highest governing body was unable at that point in time, at least not unambiguously, to declare that Christ is, exclusively and alone, the Lord and Savior of the world. Lord and Savior ‘for us’ was as far as the affirmation could go, leaving many to wonder, ostensibly, whether God might not have any number of other salvific means, i.e., other than Christ.”
Even more “dreadful – more toxic even than the winds that are blowing steadily now through the old-line, straight out of those theological and Christological excesses to which Antioch was so prone – has emerged from all this …” he adds. “Authoritative interpretation has passed increasingly to academic specialists, many of whom are not and may never have been believers (at least not in the Nicene sense). Into their hands alone, nevertheless, we are supposed now to entrust ancient writ if there’s to be any promise of having some meaning wrung from it. Except that, in their hands, the Bible becomes increasingly unrecognizable as the same Bible that orthodox Christians have known and loved historically, and still know and love in the broad mainstream of world Christianity.”
In the debate over human sexuality, Chronis said the passages of Scripture that condemn homosexual behavior are “quarantined from one another … which mutes their harmony and intertextuality … isolated from the rest of the Scriptures … [and] divorced from Christ – as if our Lord was not himself thoroughly engaged (like all of Scripture) in teaching and upholding the conjugal heterosexual norm, did not himself proscribe homosexual practice … Most significantly, finally, these texts are separated from us, in this instance by a temporal and cultural divide that is alleged to be so deep and wide as to render them incapable of saying anything meaningful about so-called faithful and consensual homosexual unions today. And this goes on until, by a kind of hermeneutical alchemy, the consistent prohibition and condemnation in the Scriptures are made to yield their contradictories, permission and blessing.”
“Simple and faithful lovers of the Bible – among whom I am happy now to number myself – don’t know whether to laugh or cry at such hubris,” he adds.