PCUSA constitutionalists respond to GA decision
June 28, 2006
A group called Constitutional Presbyterians in the Presbyterian Church (USA) has issued a call for affirming the constitution and taking actions to ensure that its requirements are upheld as mandates.
The CPPC document also advises sessions and presbyteries to “work together to discern the future of your relationship with the institutional Presbyterian Church.”
The group’s statement is posted on its Web site as a “Declaration of Constitutional Presbyterians.”
Its primary authors are two Erskine, S.C., seminary professors: Dr. Richard Burnett and Dr. Michael Bush, both of whom are PCUSA ministers and theologians. While Burnett and Bush wrote the original draft of the declaration, Bush said a group of 39 elders and ministers made numerous changes to produce the final document.
They build their case for adherence to the constitution in response to the 217th General Assembly’s Authoritative Interpretation that gives ordaining bodies the leeway to ordain practicing homosexuals and adulterers contrary to the “fidelity/chastity” requirement in the Book of Order.
The Authoritative Interpretation, which did not require the consent of presbyteries, “amounts to a basic change in our Constitution,” they say, “more basic than when its text is changed by amendment.”
By a vote of the General Assembly, they add, “the terms shall, shall not and may not in our ordination standards have been made to mean the same as may” and the standards are “mere possibilities, to be applied or not applied to each ordinand at the option of each local ordaining body. … It is an unmaking not only of the Constitution’s integrity, but of Presbyterian polity.”
The paper asks sessions to adopt its “Theological Declaration of Constitutional Presbyterians,” “not as a constitutional confession, but as a statement of faith and commitment for this time and place.”
It also calls on sessions and presbyteries to “adopt policies clarifying that the ordination standards of the Presbyterian Church (USA), including G-6.0106b, are all essential, and no exceptions to them will be offered or recognized within their jurisdictions, as the Presbytery of Mississippi is doing.”