Covenant workshop seeks to discredit anti-A analysts
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, November 7, 2001
PASADENA, Calif. – The Covenant Network has decided to try to win the vote on Amendment 01-A by picking apart the opponents’ arguments and discrediting the evangelical theologians who cite Scripture.
That strategy was highlighted during a workshop led by Tricia Dykers Koenig, the network’s national organizer, at the Network’s 2001 Conference.
She showed a video produced by Presbyterians for Renewal that featured an interview by the Rev. William Vanderbloemen with Thomas Gillespie, president of Princeton Theological Seminary; Roberta Hestenes, a California minister and former Fuller Theological Seminary professor; and Kenneth Bailey, a retired missionary and author of four books.
In addition, the film included comments by two youth advisory delegates to the 2001 General Assembly; Harold Kurtz, retired executive director of Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship; and Bob Davies, a former homosexual who for 20 years has headed Exodus House, an ecumenical ministry to people confused about their sexuality.
During the 2000 Covenant Network Conference in Pittsburgh, Koenig conducted a similar workshop to oppose Amendment O, which would have prohibited Presbyterian ministers from conducting services to bless same-sex unions. She said then that she would have defied the constitution if the presbyteries approved Amendment O, which they didn’t.
This time, Koenig made no such threats, but she did aggressively attack the views of her opponents. She claimed they were mostly motivated by fear.
“Their main argument is that homosexuality is sin,” she said. “I think that’s their only real argument, and I don’t think it’s true.”
Like others in the Covenant Network, Koenig contends that clear Biblical admonitions against homosexual activity are not clear at all. Depending on who’s arguing against what the Bible says, the Covenant Network approach is that suggest that:
- There’s “more light” from today’s culture and experience.
- Biblical writers were merely reflecting the views of their time.
- The only homosexuality condemned by the Bible was related to temple prostitution and pagan practices, and not directed at people in committed relationships.
- God didn’t speak against homosexuality (Sodom and Gomorrah) but against inhospitality.
- Homosexuality is genetic, therefore part of God’s creative purpose.
- That the “letter” of the Word is dead; and the Spirit provides new understandings.
Gillespie says in the PFR video that the 1978 General Assembly adopted a statement that defined homosexual behavior as a sin and barred “self-affirming, practicing homosexuals” from ordination.
But Koenig said Gillespie “fails to make clear that what the GA thought they were offering – and, indeed, what he himself asked the GA to give was guidance – not a hard-and-fast rule.”
She disputed Roberta Hestenes’ comments about the denomination engaging in an “intensive study” of the ordination issue before presbyteries voted in 1997 to include the “fidelity/chastity” clause in the Book of Order.
“Hestenes makes distinctions between sexual orientation and behavior, and between membership and ordination,” Koenig says. “She claims that the question was, and is, whether to overturn Scripture, confessions, and tradition. An equally relevant question is, how we are church together? How do Scripture, confessions and tradition show us we need to treat each other when there is disagreement in the church?”
She disputed Gillespie’s argument that the Church is under pressure from the American culture to redefine sexual ethics and that the new ethic is “mutual consent and no bodily harm.”
Koenig responds, “No proponent of Amendment 01-A advocates ‘free sex … Amendment 01-A would continue to require that churches seek officers whose ‘manner of life should be a demonstration of the Christian gospel in the church and in the world.'”
She dismissed the remarks of the two youth advisory delegates, who urged the denomination to set high ethical standards, “not abandoning them and Scripture in attempts to be nice.” One delegate called on the Church to be “better” than the culture.
“The Church should call us to ‘be better’ – indeed!” Koenig said. “We disagree about what that means. Apparent dismissal or disdain of a whole class of people does not recommend the gospel or the church to many young people; nor do simplistic answers that ignore the complexities of the real decisions youth face.” She said most of the youth advisory delegates and theological student advisory delegates at the 2001 General Assembly favored Amendment A.
In his interviews, Bailey appeals to Biblical principles of creation and God’s created order for marriage of man and woman.
Koenig’s response: There is no acknowledgement that lots of biblical families fail to meet this standard … Why the assumption that affirmation of one pattern means prohibition of all others? The implication of ‘male and female’ imaging God for sexual ethics seems to be that, without a partner of the opposite sex, an individual cannot be fully in God’s image.”
She also quotes “notes from some [unidentified] Columbia faculty” in which Bailey is described as “a retired missionary who served all his ministry in the area of the Arabian Gulf. His four books about the parables in Luke all argue essentially that if you know about contemporary Bedouin life, you can understand what the historical Jesus was talking about in the first century. His hermeneutic of granting great weight to analogies between the past and the present is very far from being universally accepted among scholars.”
She also responded to Kurtz’s remarks that “out of 35,000 denominations worldwide, only four have approved gay ordination.”
“We certainly are in the minority,” Koenig said. “But there are clearly more than four. She cited a Presbyterian Church (USA) News Service story that identified four denominations in Europe and four in North America, as well as “others that are more congregational.”
Bailey also expressed concern that the Presbyterian Church (USA), by ordaining homosexuals, “would damage relations with the worldwide church, where Christians would be horrified, dismayed, embarrassed and shamed.”
She declared Bailey’s comment “hyperbole bordering on abusive language.” And she said 78 percent of the ecumenical advisory delegates and 57 percent of the Missionary Advisory Delegates at the 2001 General Assembly voted forAmendment 01-A.
“This is not a large total number of individuals, but commissioners were ‘advised’ by ecumenical partners and by persons serving on the mission field and voted consistently with them,” she added.