Presbyterian leaders back off statement conflicting with confessional standards
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, September 25, 2000
MONTREAT, N.C. – Peter Pizor, chairman of the General Assembly Council, and John Detterick, the council’s executive director, have backed off a joint statement they made in response to a controversial keynote address to the denomination’s 2000 Peacemaking Conference.
With their original statement, Pizor and Detterick tried to extinguish a firestorm that ignited after a keynote speaker at the PCUSA’s 2000 Peacemaking Conference said there are valid paths to God outside of Jesus Christ. The Pizor-Detterick statement seemed to agree with the keynote speaker’s view that other religions lead to the same God.
The keynote speaker, Dirk Ficca, a Presbyterian minister and executive director of an inter-faith organization in Chicago, asked rhetorically at the peacemaking conference, “What’s the big deal about Jesus Christ?”
Ficca challenged Christians to find “a way to maintain the integrity of our own Christian faith, yet not feel that we have to convert others. God’s ability to work in our lives is not determined by becoming Christian….”
Pizor and Detterick originally issued a similar joint statement saying, “We believe that God’s love and grace for us was revealed through the life, death and resurrection of Christ….”
Copies of the September-October Presbyterian Layman were made available during the council’s meeting. The lead story in The Layman showed how Ficca’s remarks – and the joint statement of Pizor and Detterick – conflicted with the denomination’s confessions.
The Layman asked Pizor and Detterick individually if they stood by their statement. Both said no. Without detailing how they might have rewritten the statement, both said they would not have included the qualifying phrase “for us.”
Later, Pizor acknowledged to the General Assembly Council that their statement was amiss. “I am certainly not a theologian,” he said. “Nevertheless, I think it’s important for us to state clearly what we believe.”
He said the joint statement was “not the most elegant” and that it “caused some consternation for some members of our denomination.”
Pizor then described what he called his personal walk of faith, based on the fact that “Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior. He is the son of God.” He declared his belief in Jesus’ assertion that “I am the way, the truth and the life.”
Pizor then asked Detterick if he wished to comment. Detterick said, “That has been spoken for both of us.”
The issue of the Pizor-Detterick statement was important because several members of the General Assembly Council thought it had been appropriate and that it ended the controversy.
Although the peacemaking conference was on the agenda, with the possibility that the council might consider some theological guidelines for future events sponsored by the PCUSA, no action was taken.
One council member, Atlanta Brown of Wilmington, Del., expressed the sentiment of many. “Since the issue is simmering down, just leave it be.”
The council’s Peacemaking Advisory Committee weighed in with a letter expressing its thanks to “the 2000 Peacemaking Conference planning team, conference speakers and all of the participants for their willingness to explore how we Christians can faithfully dialogue and interact with persons of other faiths.”
But that letter, which required no concurring action, was written before Pizor and Detterick backed off their joint statement.
Coverage of the peacemaking conference by the Presbyterian News Service, which described Ficca’s comments as a “radical brand of ecumenism,” touched off the firestorm.