PFR executive faults New Wineskins for including ‘gnosticism’ in materials
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, July 6, 2005
MONTREAT, N.C. – Michael Walker, the executive director of Presbyterians for Renewal, says renewal is already under way in the Presbyterian Church (USA), but he yellow-flagged another evangelical thrust: the New Wineskins Initiative.
In response to a minister’s question posed during a seminar, Walker said some of the language in the New Wineskins constitution sounds like gnosticism – a belief that the world was created, not by God, but by powers or other means arising out of God – and that New Wineskins needs to think “more deeply and carefully.”
Walker was speaking during a seminar that was part of PFR’ s Christian Life Conference July 1-4 at Montreat Conference Center. The question about New Wineskins was posed by the Rev. Tommy Nance of Mechanicsville, Va., pastor of one of 85 congregations whose sessions endorsed the initiative.
Both Walker, as an observer, and Nance, as a voting delegate, attended the New Wineskins Convocation June 18-21 in Edina, Minn., but they seemed to have different impressions.
The New Wineskins Initiative offers a “lot in agreement” with the aims of PFR, Walker said, and some PFR members want their organization to take a leadership role in the initiative. But he declared that he is not ready to make such a recommendation.
He said he is still evaluating the movement. At the current stage of the New Wineskins documents, however, Walker said he has some reservations.
In his reference to “gnosticsm,” he zeroed in on No.10 of the NWI’s theological essentials: “In death, the believer is made whole, and enters eternally the loving presence of the Father and the Son. Finally, in the fullness of time, Jesus Christ will leave the Father’s side to return to earth in glory. Christ will liberate creation from its bondage to corruption, judge the living and the dead, usher in a new heaven and earth, and establish God’s everlasting Kingdom. ‘Even so, come Lord Jesus!'”
Walker contended that the language “made whole” has a gnostic flavor and that the essentials fail to include an important credal statement affirming the bodily resurrection of Christians after they die. But Walker emphasized that “it is not as though I think they don’t believe in the resurrection.”
He also expressed concern about the NWI language about the Trinity.
Walker added, “I don’t think we need to feel that this [the NWI Initiative] is the only thing we have and if you don’t sign on now you’re going to miss the boat.”
Walker also said he was concerned about the “three reasons” some in New Wineskins gave that would justify separating from the PCUSA. He said those three reasons were 1) repeal of G-6.0106b, the fidelity-chastity ordination requirement in the denomination’s constitution; 2) the repeal of the Authoritative Interpretation that undergirds that standard; and 3) the failure of the 2006 General Assembly to adopt the New Wineskins’ 10 “essential tenets.”
But the Rev. Dean Weaver of Kenmore, N.Y., co-moderator of the New Wineskins, did not specify the same three “breaking points” when he addressed a plenary session of the NWI Convocation. Weaver cited what Walker listed as 1) and 2), but Weaver’s third breaking point was an unbiblical “Christology.”
While saying he was “still processing” what he heard at the New Wineskins Convocation, Walker noted that “I share their frustration. I think they’re asking all the right questions.”
Walker said both the New Wineskins and the denomination were considering major changes for the denomination. He did not elaborate on the New Wineskins’ call for a major transformation that would re-establish congregations as the primary agents of mission, with higher governing bodies existing to support, not control, them. But he did speak well of a restructuring study being conducted by the denomination’s Office of Theology and Worship, presbytery executives and seminary professors. “I have a lot of hope for that,” he said.
In contending that renewal is already happening in the PCUSA – which has lost more than 131,000 members in the last three years – Walker said now is not the time for disengagement from the denomination. “Coherent liberalism that used to exist in the Presbyterian Church is much less coherent now and is declining,” he said.
If evangelicals hold tight, they will at least win the attrition war, he said. Walker urged churches to support PFR financially and follow its legislative leadership. He singled PFR’s proposed constitutional amendment that would add a sentence to G-6.0106b: “This paragraph may not be amended prior to 2016.” Walker said there is a precedent for that amendment.
As for signs of renewal, Walker cited the number of evangelicals attending seminaries such as Fuller and Gordon Conwell with plans to serve in the PCUSA and the legislative history on G-6.0106b, which has been affirmed in three national referendums.
An outline that Walker handed out for his presentation declares that, “The church has held the line!” Three lines later, the outline mentions the “Struggle to enforce the constitution,” but Walker did not elaborate. He made no reference to the dozens of congregations that are willfully and repeatedly violating the prohibition against ordaining self-acknowledged, practicing homosexuals with no intervention from the Office of the Stated Clerk.
Walker expressed his concern that “some folk” are saying there are “two faiths” in the Presbyterian Church (USA). He said that there once were two distinct, coherent faiths, back in the 1920s when orthodox Christianity was confronted by “naturalism,” but that problem does not exist today. He said that naturalism has been replaced by postmodernism, which is not necessarily a distinctly different faith. He said that the current context is “a much more confusing reality … We can’t just simply define it as two distinct faiths in the Presbyterian Church because the postmodern realities are much more complex.”
In a monograph, Can Two Faiths Embrace One Future? published in June 2005, the Presbyterian Lay Committee argued that postmodernism, which holds that there is no absolute truth, is a distinctly different faith from Christianity, which holds that Jesus Christ is the truth. The monograph contends that these two faiths affirm “different Christs, different scriptures, and different moral standards,” that they are incompatible, and that both logic and integrity require Presbyterians to make a choice between them.