Mount Auburn pastor expected a challenge
The Layman Online, May 10, 2002
Steven Van Kuiken, the pastor of Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church, called on his congregation to stand fast in its defiance of the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA) long before formal action was filed against the congregation’s officers.
In a Feb. 17 sermon titled “Dissenting in Place,” Van Kuiken predicted that Mount Auburn’s defiance could be challenged in church courts.
“So far, this congregation has not had to face discipline for our disobedience,” Van Kuiken said in a sermon published on the Mount Auburn Web site. “Nor have we had any serious judicial proceedings initiated against us yet. It appears that this may change, however, as Amendment A. appears to head for defeat.”
Calling the fidelity/chastity ordination standard affirmed by 73 percent of the presbyteries a “scourge,” Van Kuiken told his congregation “it is important for us to examine and reaffirm our stance of noncompliance and dissent from the national Presbyterian Church (USA).”
Mount Auburn faces a number of challenges, including an overture to the Presbytery of Cincinnati that would require the session to rescind its resolutions of defiance or face administrative procedures that could result in declaring that Van Kuiken and the elders have renounced the jurisdiction of the PCUSA. In addition, a Reston, Va., Presbyterian has filed complaints in church courts seeking the removal of the Mount Auburn leaders from their offices.
Van Kuiken presents the case for defiance as a cause célèbre. “… To dissent and to suffer willingly the penalties for non-compliance is both a holy calling and an effective strategy,” he told his congregation.
He also insisted that the church’s defiance was a noble cause following Jesus’ way. “If we don’t have the courage to follow it, let’s just honestly confess that, but Jesus’ way is both principled and highly practical.”
In other sermons, Van Kuiken has suggested that Jesus’ way is not necessarily distinct from other religions and that the Bible is not always to be trusted.
On Oct. 28, 2001, in a sermon titled “Transformation: The Impossible Possibility,” Van Kuiken spoke of the “transforming power [that] is at work in all people, religious and non-religious alike, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and so forth. In our tradition, we name this power of transformation, ‘the Christ-Spirit.'”
His all inclusive view of religion was set forth in “Incarnation,” a sermon he preached on Christmas Eve 2001. “Everything that exists is an incarnation and is filled with God. God is in everything. Just as light makes up all things, so God’s spirit is the stuff of Reality. Without it, nothing can exist. Nothing.
“This incarnational view of reality can be found in most religious traditions. ‘God has a million faces,’ says the Bahavad Gita,” Van Kuiken added. “That God is manifest in every creature, every person, every religious tradition, is part of a spiritual perspective of which Jesus, himself, was a part.”
The Rev. Harold Porter, minister emeritus at Mount Auburn, has expressed similar universalist themes in his sermons.
In “The Alternative to Religion,” a Dec. 9, 2001, sermon, Porter said, “That God is neither Christian, Jew, Moslem, Hindu or whatever but is the One in whom we all are created for life and life abundantly – with no exceptions. As to other religions, how should we Christians view them? Simply with all the love we have found in God. We need to relate to them, commune with them, not compete or force them to become just as we are but to accept what is loving and tender in them and to affirm them when they seek the liberation of all people.”
As for Jesus, Porter said, “We need to know Jesus more as a brother than a Lord for he never lorded it over anyone. Mostly we need a faith like his more than a faith in him …”
Porter’s sermon also highlighted another theme popular at Mount Auburn: the untrustworthiness of some Scripture. “We need not agree with everything Paul said about religion, that itself would be unwise … We need to stop thinking that God wrote only one book and then stopped writing. And we need to see that not everything in our own Holy Scriptures is Holy but some of it, especially out of the context of the whole, is pretty bad. As Biblical professor Johanna Bos of Louisville recently said, ‘In the end, we must choose what word of God’s word we will live by – the word of exclusion and condemnation or the word of care and justice and protection for the unprotected.'”
In that same sermon, Porter defined sin as “arrested development,” not moral failure.
In his argument that homosexual activity is not sinful – contrary to the teaching of Scripture and the declaration of the General Assembly of the PCUSA – Van Kuiken quotes Reformed (liberal) Jewish rabbis.
“They go on to say that other [than marriage] proscribed sexual activity, such as homosexuality, is not an abhorrence because there is no convincing moral argument against it,” Van Kuiken said in “Holiness: Beyond Diets and Hairshirts,” a sermon he preached March 10. ” … holiness, is not always about what is ethical, and what is considered holy in one generation is not necessarily considered holy in another generation.”
In “Courage to Be Ourselves” on March 17, Van Kuiken spoke of the complaints being brought against him and the session.
“Officially the accusation is that we violated the jurisdiction of the PCUSA by refusing to comply with the constitution, by saying that same-sex unions are the same as marriages and by ordaining gay and lesbian persons who have the courage to be themselves. In other words, we have dared to believe that gay and lesbian persons are human beings, and we have the audacity to act on this belief,” he said.