Text of overture to delete gay-unfriendly AI statements
The Layman Online, January 17, 2006
The overture approved Saturday by the Presbytery of Cincinnati calls on the General Assembly to delete passages deemed unfriendly to homosexuals from the assembly’s current Authoritative Interpretation.
The full text of the overture was not available to The Layman Online when it published its story about the overture on Tuesday.
The following is the full text of the overture sent by the sessions of Community of Faith Presbyterian Church, Covington, Ky., and Mt. Auburn Presbyterian Church, Cincinnati, Ohio, a More Light Presbyterian Church.
- The Presbytery of Cincinnati respectfully overtures the 217th General Assembly (2006) to approve the following:
- The General Assembly amends the Policy Statement adopted by the 190th General Assembly (1978) of the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America by deleting the following statements, as found in the Minutes of that General Assembly; and further, it amends the “position paper,” “Homosexuality and the Church,” adopted in 1979 by the 119th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States by deleting these same statements.
- (1) “We conclude that homosexuality is not God’s wish for humanity. This we affirm, despite the fact that some of its forms may be deeply rooted in an individual’s personality structure.” (Minutes, page 262).
- (2) “In many cases homosexuality is more a sign of the brokenness of God’s world than of willful rebellion. In other cases homosexual behavior is freely chosen or framed in environments where normal development is thwarted.” (Minutes, page 262).
- (3) “Even where the homosexual orientation has not been consciously sought or chosen, it is neither a gift from God nor a state nor a condition like race; it is a result of our living in a fallen world.” (Minutes, page 262).
- (4) “As we examine the whole framework of teaching bearing upon our sexuality from Genesis onward, we find that homosexuality is a contradiction of God’s wise and beautiful pattern for human sexual relationships revealed in Scripture and affirmed in God’s ongoing will for our life in the Spirit of Christ.”(Minutes, page 262).
- (5) “Homosexual persons who will strive toward God’s revealed will in this area of their lives, and make use of all the resources of grace, can receive God’s power to transform their desires or arrest their active expression.” (Minutes, page 263).
- (6) “The New Testament declares that all homosexual practice is incompatible with Christian faith and life.” (Minutes, page 263).
- (7) “On the basis of our understanding that the practice of homosexuality is sin, we are concerned that homosexual believers and the observing world should not be left in doubt about the church’s mind on this matter during any further period of study.” (Minutes, page 264).
- Rationale
- 1. Having read this series of quotations, readers of this overture may think that seeking to remove them is confrontational, at odds with cultivating the “disciplines of patience, mutual forbearance, and dedicated communal discernment” recommended in The Final Report of the Task Force on Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church (lines 740-41). We remind our readers that the passages above, adopted in 1978 and 1979 by a majority, have been read in the decades since by a homosexual minority as well. Indeed, the seventh passage is specifically addressed to this minority. We ask our readers to consider whether it was not this minority that was entitled to feel confronted – insulted, even injured.
- 2. As The Final Report of the Task Force rightly points out, “The Reformed family of churches believes that there is no teacher but Jesus Christ” (line 52). If Jesus taught us anything, it is that we must love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Like the Samaritan, our neighbor may be quite different from us and unpopular. Because mainline Christianity has not always felt the inclusive love of Jesus, it has lived to regret every one of its exclusionary practices.
- Under our Constitution, it is our Book of Confessions that declares “what [the church] believes” – our “convictions” and our “doctrines” (Book of Order G-2.0100). Nothing in our whole Book of Confessions, that “cloud of witnesses to one true faith,” declares homosexual practice per se to be sin. Their authors were surely aware of Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:26-27, and the like. For example, the author of the Heidelberg Catechism (1573) specifically omits a possible reference to homosexual practice while otherwise incorporating a list of sins from 1 Corinthians 6:9. We are entitled to believe that the authors of our Confessions are silent here because they have been instructed by the great Teacher, first, on what it is that God really requires of us and then on how to read Scripture to begin with. The Book of Order rightly makes The Book of Confessions our church’s “guide in its study and interpretation of the Scriptures”(G-2.0100b).