Revised family paper gets bruising reception
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, January 22, 2004
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Proposed changes in a paper on family policy for the Presbyterian Church (USA) – changes that were mandated by the 215th General Assembly – began to unravel Thursday.
That General Assembly rejected the widely criticized paper after it was submitted to last year’s session and ordered that it be revised to reflect a Biblical and Reformed perspective.
The Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy complied with the General Assembly’s order by including a theological review prepared by Dr. Charles Wiley of the Office of Theology and Worship and adding to its writing team two Presbyterians who hold traditional Christian views about marriage and families.
The changes were substantial. The theological review anchored the paper in the denomination’s Reformed and confessional tradition. And the two outsiders named to the writing team – Alan Wisdom of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a conservative Christian think tank, and Beau Weston, a sociologist at Centre College in Danville, Va. – made substantial contributions.
The changes dramatically recast the paper, using the traditional language of the church in its declarations on marriage, cohabitation, same-sex relationships, having children out of wedlock and other issues. It even included a reference to the denomination’s 1978 authoritative interpretation that declared that homosexual behavior is sinful.
But on Thursday, several ACSWP members gave the paper a bruising reception and none defended the revisions. The question was raised whether there would be enough time to revise the paper again to their satisfaction, and still meet the deadline for submitting it to the 216th General Assembly, which will meet in June in Richmond, Va.
Peter Sulyok, the staff director of ACSWP, assured the committee that with hard and fast work by the remnant of the writing team, the policy paper could be revised and presented to ACSWP in time to meet the late-February deadline.
ACSWP members worked Thursday afternoon and evening to make changes needed to pass the full committee’s final review, which was scheduled this morning (Friday, January 23).
Meanwhile, the criticism that emerged Thursday was led by Ronald Stone, a retired professor of Christian ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and an elder at East Liberty Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh. East Liberty is a once-prominent Presbyterian Church in a declining neighborhood whose membership has dwindled from thousands to a few hundred. Yet, it has a $30 million foundation, of which Stone is a trustee. East Liberty’s leaders, especially its former minister Robert Chesnut, a member of the Covenant Network’s board of advisors, have figured prominently in homosexual activist causes.
On Wednesday, before Wiley left Louisville to attend a function in Indiana, Stone and Wiley had a confrontation over some parts of Wiley’s theological review. On Thursday, Stone was even more insistent that changes be made – even if they required that ACSWP delay its report until the 217th General Assembly, which will meet in 2006.
“This heavy confessional theology is overriding our empirical judgment,” Stone said. “This is very confessional, kerygmatic, almost gospel.”
Stone focused his criticism on Wiley’s essential point in his theological review – that, at baptism, one is initiated into the family of God, an act that provides the essential identity of a Christian, places claims on one’s life and responsibilities on the community of faith.
“I would abandon this whole discussion of baptism,” Stone said. “I don’t think putting it into connection with one of our two sacraments is a gain. We were not asked to do a theology of baptism.”
He proposed that ACSWP omit the entire section on baptism because it “overrides our common sense. I don’t think any member of this group would say our identity is not related to our family life.”
ACSWP member Jack Terry, a minister in Portland, Ore., expressed his agreement with some of Stone’s suggestions. “I think the theological section belongs at the end of the paper. I think the mandate is to talk about the social-cultural context.”
The original paper did focus entirely on the social-cultural context. It accepted as normative a multitude of living arrangements outside the traditional family model of a husband, wife and children, including cohabitation, unwed mothers and same-gender partners.
Stone also criticized Wiley’s suggestion that marriage was an essential part of the Christian community.
“I thought the cross was essential,” Stone said. “To ignore Paul’s advice, that it is better not to marry, is to ignore more than 16 centuries of the church’s history. The church’s tradition was written by single people who were living in same-gender communities. Those are the people who ruled the church. When you come to the Reformed tradition, you come to a different reality. The Reformed tradition said people should be married. I think this paper ignores the historical reality of the Christian Church.”
On several occasions, the revised paper used the terms “chaste and disciplined lives” to apply to single people, which reflects the historic Presbyterian view about sex outside of marriage.
“I would substitute ‘responsible’ for chaste and disciplined everytime it appears in the document,” Stone said. “I raised four children. I would never teach them to be chaste. That means a virgin. I always taught them to be responsible. Every pastor I talk with tells me the people who are not married are not virgins. I don’t believe we need that language. I don’t think that’s the common Presbyterian practice. I don’t think we want it in our document.”
Like Stone, committee member Donna Bradley of Tucson, Ariz., a lawyer and Presbyterian lay person, objected to the draft policy statement’s suggestion that sex should be confined to marriage of a man and a woman.
She said the old view of cohabitation is “only poor kids shacking up, but that’s not true anymore. There are older people, retired people who don’t want to get married. They’re in committed relationships.”
Stone expressed his concerns about the moral judgments in the paper. “This is a very important issue,” he said. “We need to keep in view our leadership cadres that are being trained now. We are losing young Presbyterians because of the attitude our church has taken against homosexuals.”
Sulyok remained confident that the paper could be reworked and pass muster with ACSWP – even with the deadline pressing on. “I’ve seen it in my years with ACSWP, to turn around a product. We did that with ‘Building Community.'”
What he did not mention is that the first edition of “Building Community” was also scuttled by the General Assembly because it presented an un-Biblical universalist theme – that Jesus was on par with many other gods and not the Way, the Truth and the Life.
Commissioners ordered ACSWP to rewrite “Building Community.” The final product was consistent with the denomination’s confessional standards, and the General Assembly gave it a stamp of approval.