PCUSA theology leader says ACSWP ignored office’s advice
By Paula R. Kincaid, The Layman Online, September 29, 2003
MONTREAT – The Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy refused to heed the advice of the Office of Theology and Worship when others were reviewing its controversial paper “Living Faithfully with Families in Transition,” Joe Small, associate director of the office, told a General Assembly Council committee during its meeting at Montreat.
In May, The 215th General Assembly rejected the report and told ACSWP committee to revise it – this time including a theological overview by Small’s office.
While his associate, Charles Wiley, was explaining Theology and Worship’s draft of its theological overview of “Families in Transition” at a meeting of ACSWP in Louisville, Small was doing the same in Montreat.
But Small alone expressed concern that the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy didn’t listen to the Office of Theology and Worship in the first place.
He told members of the General Assembly Council’s Congregational Ministries Division Committee that ACSWP had an exhaustive review process.
“It became clear that the advisory committee report was in trouble,” he said. “I and other people on the staff read the document through and let them know we shared some of the misgivings of the people who had reviewed the document beforehand. But the advisory committee went ahead and presented it to the assembly.”
“The best service we could render is to draft an alternative to the original Biblical/theological section,” said Small. “That part seemed not to be redeemable … it seemed better to start from scratch and that is what we have done.”
Small said the new draft by his office is “just an outline now.” He presented the outline to the committee and spoke briefly about each point.
The outline:
1. Biblical/confessional
2. Christian identity
3. The vocation of families
4. The unsettled situation of families
Small emphasized that it was “an exercise in descriptive theology … simply be descriptive about what the tradition sets forth for us.”
He said what he was presenting was a product primarily of staff work that has been developed with consultations with some Biblical and theological faculty at Princeton Seminary.
“This theological framework will then become the basis on which the rest of the advisory committee’s paper is altered and changed,” he said.
On the first try, Small said, ACSWP did all of the sociological work first and then did its own Biblical/theological section. The original ACSWP suggested that the PCUSA should not recognize traditional families as the ideal but also give equal validity to a number of alternatives, including unwed mothers, co-habitating couples and homosexual couples.
“That was an odd way to do it,” he said. “This time we’ll do the Biblical/theological work first.”
Biblical and confessional framework
The first point made in the Biblical/theological section is on “what it means to be human together before God,” said Small. In this section, Small quoted from the Confession of 1967, Genesis 2, and the Book of Common Worship, which sets forth the church’s understanding of marriage.
Small said that marriage is the basic shape of a relationship between a man and a woman, but saying it is the basic shape does not mean to say it exhausts the meaning of family. Marital family is just the basic shape, but it is neither exhaustive nor exclusive, he said.
Genesis 2 is followed by the fractured relationship between Adam and Eve and the story of Cain and Abel. “This is no the model of he ideal family life in Scripture,” said Small. “There is no sense in the Bible that those living outside the marital family are living outside the will of God. … While in Scripture there is affirmation of marital life, there are other affirmations,” said Small.
Some examples, said Small, include references in both the Old and New Testament of the “concept of the household which is both inclusive of family and yet goes beyond family. It includes not only parents, children and grandchildren, but also servants, slaves and sometimes strangers … That household operates with the same kind of kinship ties that Scripture expects of family.”
The household statements listed in Ephesians 5:21-6:9 break the bounds of the Roman world, said Small. The Roman house “tables” focused on he need of inferiors to be subject to their superiors, and only the men are addressed. In Paul’s house table, all parties are addressed directly, husband, wife, children, servants, and all are bound in this web of household relationships, he added.
Small mentioned all the “begats” in the Old Testament and said, “The Scriptures are very clear as well – included in this family structure is people who never married at all, men and women.”
He also spoke of what the New Testament had to say about adoption. “In adoption, a person not related is now part of the family,” Small said. “Adoption becomes a primary way of speaking to our relationship with God.”
Scripture is frank about family struggles, said Small, from the stories in Genesis, to David and Bathsheba to Mary’s pregnancy. “In Scripture, there is not a pristine Biblical ideal of family life,” said Small, but there are narratives of families and, in those narratives, we see what we experience in our own families and in the families that are part of our community.”
“This is not to say that Scriptures lift up every conceivable form of relationship lifted up as a model for family. David and Bathsheba is not an example of family,” said Small.
Christian identity
“Christian identity is formed in baptism,” said Small. “It’s an identity that is not based on family origins, gender or ethnic identity. … All of you are one in Christ Jesus. In baptism, God acts to incorporate us into the body of Christ, to bring us into the church, free us from sin, claim our identify as children of God.”
“The identity we have is given to us by God; it’s not given to us by place of birth, color of skin, our gender, but it is God-given,” he said. “But in the sacrament of baptism, who surrounds us? Our family surrounds us.”
Small told a story about John Calvin, that during the Reformation in Geneva, Calvin insisted that baptism occur during corporate workshop on Sunday morning and insisted that the parents be present at the baptism. In those days, Small said, the midwives brought the babies outside of corporate worship to be baptized.
Vocation of families
Small said that the vocation of families, based on Eph. 4:15-16, is to encourage on another in Christ. “This family vocation is not only that parents encourage their children in Christ, but children also encourage parents,” he said.
The unsettled situation of families
Saying he is not a historian, Small noted that he did know “that the culture in which we live is a culture that is singularly uncongenial to families. … So much in the culture works against it or fails to encourage it.”
“We have to be at least as honest as Scripture is in talking about the realities of family life,” said Small, “to dispel the myth there was – some place, some time, in the not to recent past – a golden age for family life.”
Small said economic pressures have increased for families, requiring both parents to work, and that well-intentioned laws adopted in the last 30-40 years have proved to be unsupportive if not dangerous to family life.
He said the challenge for the church includes:
- supporting the basic form of family life;
- recognizing that not all family life is equipped to handle the vocation of families and to find ways to equip and support those;
- recognizing that all forms of family life can be destructive and oppressive and that the church needs to be equipped to respond effectively.
- holding that marriage is good for the whole society. So the church needs not only to look after its own life and the life of those it baptizes, but look at society as a whole, where Christians are a distinct minority.