Monthly Archives: October 2008

Action By The Pacific Northwest Presbytery, PCA, Related To Federal Vision Theology

As long as I am on the topic of doctrine and judicial cases in the PCA, here is the latest on another…

This past Friday, at the regular stated meeting of the Pacific Northwest Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in America, the Presbytery acted upon a report from a study/examining committee concerning the doctrinal views of one of its members related to Federal Vision Theology. The controversy over this topic has been relatively quiet since things were settled last March in Louisiana Presbytery regarding the Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church in Monroe, Louisiana. However, the Pacific Northwest case has been active for over a year, it has just been progressing quietly in the usual Presbyterian “decently and in order” way. Going forward from here it may gain a higher profile.

At this point there has been enough written about the Federal Vision Theology and controversy that I will not rehearse all of that. A good starting point for that is the web site www.federal-vision.com, or check out what I have written over the last, almost, two years. This particular case began in June, 2007, when the 35th General Assembly of the PCA adopted a Study Committee Report on “Federal Vision, New Perspective, and Auburn Avenue Theology.” In accord with the report Teaching Elder Peter Leithart immediately sent a letter to his Stated Clerk in Pacific Northwest Presbytery outlining his doctrinal views. He simultaneously published the letter on his blog as well. In our usual Presbyterian fashion a study committee was established to examine TE Leithart and report back to the Presbytery on how well his views align with the Standards of the PCA. It is also important to point out that while TE Leithart is a member of the PCA, he serves at Trinity Reformed Church in Moscow, Idaho, which is a member church of the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), of which many of the other Federal Vision Theology churches are now members, including Auburn Avenue.

I will not go into details about the action of Pacific Northwest Presbytery since we have the good fortune that T.E. Jason J. Stellman, who gave the report to the Presbytery as the acting chairman of the study committee, has provided a wealth of information on his blog De Regnis Duobus. To briefly summarize his most detailed post, the committee presented both a majority report and minority report, Mr. Stellman being a signatory on the minority report.

The majority report concludes:

In the committee’s view Dr. Leithart’s views are
compatible with the teaching of our standards though there are certainly some
differences in statement, emphasis, and elaboration. Our brief was to determine
whether he denied or contradicted the teaching of our Standards, not to object
if he wished to say more than they say or even, in confessing the same truth,
to improve upon their form of words. That his positive constructions may seem
in some respects difficult to reconcile with the language of our standards is
not itself evidence that he denies their teaching. The dialectical character of
biblical teaching famously produces tensions that remain difficult, if not
impossible to resolve. We further take note of the several assertions of
loyalty to the teaching of the Standards that are scattered among Dr.
Leithart’s published works. He explicitly confesses his agreement with the
Standards’ doctrine of decretal election, forensic justification, and so on.

So, TE Leithart has some differences in doctrine, but not enough to be at odds with the Standards.

It is interesting to note that the minority report is about the same length as the majority report, but the total length was doubled, 27 pages versus 13, by analyses included as Appendices. The minority report saw things differently:

We recommend
the following:

1. That Presbytery find TE Peter
Leithart’s views, as summarized in the Minority Report, to be out of accord
with the fundamentals of the system of doctrine taught in the Westminster Standards.

2. That Presbytery direct TE Peter
Leithart to reconsider his views, as summarized in the Minority Report, and to
report the results of this reconsideration to the next meeting of Presbytery,
with the understanding that if his views continue to be out of accord with the
fundamentals of the system of doctrine taught in the Westminster Standards,
Presbytery will proceed to depose him from its ministry without censure.

The Presbytery adopted the majority report. From Mr. Stellman’s account a major argument was “theological innovation:”

The real concern on the part of the presbyters who spoke in favor of
Leithart was that we not become overly narrow and that we do not
discourage bold, pioneering theology.

Since the detailed post came out Mr. Stellman has responded to a public allegation that this is part of a “witch hunt” to rid the PCA of the Federal Vision Theology.

What will happen with this case? The next step, according to Mr. Stellman, is to formally complain
against the Presbytery and they expect the complaint to be dismissed at the next
regular meeting in January. If dismissed the next step will be an
appeal to the General Assembly level where this case could look a lot
like the Louisiana Presbytery one.

Another Case Of “Since ‘X’ Is By Definition Impossible, What You Saw Could Not Have Been ‘X'”

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Over on the PuritanBoard there has been an active discussion about the Edwards v. Pittsburgh Presbytery PJC Decision. But one of the contributors to the discussion, Tim Vaughn, brought up a Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) case from Tennessee where an interpretation of the defense, not the verdict, used the concept that since something was by definition impossible it could not have happened. As Mr. Vaughn puts it:

I read through a PCA court case from Tennessee where a pastor let a
woman preach during Sunday night service, and after being brought up on
charges his defense was that since the PCA doesn’t allow woman
preachers, and she was a woman, she couldn’t have been preaching.

Mr. Vaughn provides the link to the September-October, 2000, issue of Presbyterian & Reformed News that details the case and the judicial commission’s decision not to proceed to trial, but telling the pastor and the church at large to not let it happen again.

Part of the investigating panel’s work was to determine if the views of the pastor, Teaching Elder John Wood, were in line with the standards of the PCA. The committee found:

TE Wood stated to the panel that he holds to a view that: 1) excludes women from ordination; 2) excludes women from preaching (authoritative teaching); 3) permits women to do basically whatever unordained men can do in the church. Also, the panel found no evidence of Mr. Wood’s agitation regarding or promotion of a view that women should be ordained or that women should preach in the PCA, either locally at CSPC [Cedar Springs Presbyterian Church] or in the PCA generally.

And while the GA Standing Judicial Commission concluded from the Investigating Panel report that there was not a “strong presumption of guilt,” they did caution the church:

However, in making this determination the SJC is not endorsing the view of TE Wood that “women may do basically whatever unordained men can do in the Church,” and PCA ministers and elders are cautioned, for the peace and unity of the Church, to take great care in the teaching and implementing of views that might give the appearance of promoting a view that women may be ordained, or that women may preach the authoritative Word of God in a worship service.

Within the body of the Report of the Investigating Panel, reproduced in the newsletter, TE Wood told the panel about an earlier conversation he had with some concerned church leaders:

…he was using the word “preach” in a broad, but he believes Biblical, sense–the witness that each Christian bears before the church and the world, but he also stated that he should have been more careful to articulate his belief that women should not be ordained to the teaching or ruling eldership and that they should not be permitted to “preach” in the traditional sense of authoritative teaching from the word of God, as teaching elders are called and ordained to do.

Reacting to this in another article in the newsletter, Pastor David Coffin is reported to be the one suggesting the twisted or confusing logic:

Regarding Mr. Wood’s views, the pastor from Fairfax, Virginia, said, “Though as I understand them his views in this matter appear clearly contrary to Scripture, I don’t find myself too exercised over the possibility of such views having a great impact in the PCA. I expect that the obvious internal tensions are simply too much for most of our men to bear.” He stated that he understood Mr. Wood’s view to be that a woman by definition cannot preach because she does not hold the preaching office, even though she may perform precisely the same act in the same setting. In response, Mr. Coffin referred to the views of Jonathan Edwards, who supposed it was obvious to all that if there was an office authorized to preach then there must be some activity called preaching forbidden to those who do not hold the office.

I included the Jonathan Edwards reference since Janet Edwards, of the Edwards v. Pittsburgh case that started this discussion, is a direct descendant of his.

Interesting to see this logic as part of a very different polity and doctrine debate.

Pittsburgh PJC Decision Appears To Be Based on Spahr v Redwoods

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(See the evening update at the end of the post)

Word is being relayed on the internet that in the Pittsburgh Presbytery PJC case, where the Rev. Janet Edwards was being tried for conducting a same-sex wedding, the PJC unanimously acquitted her. (More Light Presbyterians, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) While the full decision is not available yet the early indications are that this decision was based upon the confusing decision in the Spahr v. Redwoods case and I have trouble seeing how anyone can claim a real victory in this case. (If you want the background check out my post from August on the topic.)

To quote the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s early report:

The court, meeting on the North Side in the second day of a trial for
the Rev. Janet Edwards, ruled that the constitutions of the church and
the state of Pennsylvania define marriage as an act between a man and a
woman. Therefore, judges said, the minister could not have done what
she was accused of doing.

This appears to be based on the decision rendered in the GA PJC Spahr v. Redwoods case that no minister in the Presbyterian Church can be found guilty of conducting a same-sex wedding ceremony because no such thing exists. A wedding is between a man and a woman so a same-sex wedding is a contradiction in terms. As you can probably guess this legal reasoning did not really satisfy anyone.

It seems reasonable to me that the lower Presbytery PJC relied on this legal decision, a reasonable thing to do even if it is not a particularly satisfying decision. Hence, my feeling that there are no real winners in this case. No new legal territory is broken and the situation is none the clearer. From a personal perspective, the Rev. Edwards was cleared of the charges. From a polity/legal point of view, the ceremony she openly admits conducting was not a wedding according to the PJC. So guess what, we have to wait for another appeal, maybe not in this case though, to make its way to the top.

The Rev. Edwards, in her defense brief, said that she would invoke the Spahr v. Redwoods case, but certain of the other parts of the decision. Be careful what you ask for because it looks like she got a clear decision that there are no same-sex weddings.

Finally, I see this case in the light of the previous GAPJC decisions. Clearly the news media has not seen that yet and a lot of the “people in the pews” won’t see the connection either. Because it lines up so closely with Spahr v. Redwoods I see this as pretty much a “non-decision” in terms of the big picture of resolving this issue. But most of the Presbyterian world will not see the nuances in here. Hold on tight for the stormy seas.

UPDATE – 8:30 PM: The verdict has been posted by More Light Presbyterians and pretty much holds to my inference above with one significant exception: The verdict makes it clear that the prosecution, with whom the burden of proof lies, did not prove their case. The verdict does rely heavily on Spahr v. Redwoods and the says, in part:

“The Prosecuting Committee has failed to meet the burden of proof that the accused carried out a marriage ceremony at all.”

Pennsylvania
civil law defines marriage as male-female, so a marriage between two
women cannot be a marriage regardless of what occurred in the ceremony.
Because the Book of Order does not recognize a same-sex marriage, it cannot be an offense to attempt to do the impossible.

Therefore,
the commission does not find that the accused committed an offense by
performing a ceremony between two people of the same gender.

Also,
there is no evidence that the accused held out the ceremony as a
marriage. It could be inferred from the order of service, but it has
not been proved. The accused’s belief about whether the ceremony was a
marriage has not been proved, either.

The decision in Spahr
states that “one cannot construe same-sex ceremonies as marriages for
the purpose of disciplining someone, but not as marriages for ecclesial
purposes.”

It does leave open the question of whether this PJC would have convicted if better evidence had been presented, even though “it cannot be an offense to attempt to do the impossible.”

From reading this over if the evidence is not there I’m not sure that there are procedural grounds to appeal. We will see if the prosecution thinks otherwise.

Watching the Pittsburgh PJC Trial and Inaccurate Media Headlines

Connectedness in the Covenant Community: Part 1 — The Big Picture

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This is a two-parter where I will ask and reflect on a couple of uncomfortable questions related to the Covenant Community of the church. (And with a little luck I’ll get both parts written in the next 36 hours.)

In this part I want to ask a question that might just get me labeled a heretic; there is a bit of that going around at the moment.

Part of what got me thinking about this is that “PresbyFest,” as Michael Kruse has labeled it, is going on in Snowbird, Utah, with back-to-back-to-back-to-back meetings of the “PC(USA) Establishment” including the annual polity conference, Association of Executive Presbyters Meeting, joint Middle Governing Body and General Assembly Council meeting, and GAC alone. That is a lot of meetings for relatively few people for a denomination of about 2.2 million people.

This in part got me wondering…

Is the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) too big?
Let me ask this question another way: How can we be effectively connected in a denomination this large?

The “Presbyterian” answer of course is that

the congregation’s connected to the session,
the session’s connected to the presbytery,
the presbytery’s connected to the synod,
the synod’s connected to the General Assembly…

But how does this play out in reality? In the past I have commented on what I saw as the disconnect between the “people in the pews” and “the folks in Louisville.” And this past General Assembly has raised a lot of questions and uncertainty based on what I hear when I talk with churches and groups about what the General Assembly did, or did not do. Is the PC(USA) too big to be a truly connectional church?

And when I use the term “big,” I do mean our size both in terms of total numbers and in terms of the institution and its many branches, offices, and agencies. Most of the people in the pews have never heard of ACSWP or MRTI, to say nothing of being able to tell you where the scope of one group’s work ends and the other’s begins.

In his 1994 book, The Body, Charles Colson tells the story of a church, a story that has stuck in my mind for almost 15 years now. He tells of talking to a pastor who, with some reticence, admitted that he and his board of elders were trying to shrink the church. This was not for physical or logistical reasons, but they felt God was calling them to reduce their congregational membership to those individuals who were committed to the church’s vision for mission. The elders faithfully prayed and membership dropped. But once the core group was left the church started growing again and with their unity of vision the mission of the church was strengthened. Do we take our Book of Order seriously when we say “The Church is called to undertake this mission even at the risk of losing its own life.”

Another way that our size may get in the way of our connectedness is the small sampling represented at General Assembly. With about 750 commissioners for 10,000 churches that is less than one commissioner per ten churches. For medium and small Presbyterian branches every pastor is a commissioner to GA and every church gets to send a ruling elder. It seems that this would improve the knowledge of GA actions and increase the “buy-in” of congregations in denominational actions. I am not sure we could fund or organize a 20,000+ person GA, but there may be a lesson in it. (And yes, I am aware that doing this does not eliminate the doctrinal disagreements, but it does seem to have them handled more smoothly.)

Please do not take this as an argument strictly in favor of the continued decline in the PC(USA) and the realignment of churches with other Presbyterian branches, but I will admit that an interpretation like that is within what I have said here.

But, what I am mostly thinking about is how the large denomination can “feel” better connected, can feel smaller to the membership. Sending four commissioners to GA or the Executive to Snowbird is a start, but only represents a small sample of the churches in the denomination. Lines of communication need to be opened in new ways and the blogging by officials is a start. But does even Bruce have 10,000 readers, one from each church? The PC(USA) fan site on Facebook only has around 2,500 fans.

How can we better connect? Should we consider regional gatherings that each church is required, or highly encouraged, to send representatives to. It would need to be worthwhile for it to get the audience that would connect each congregation to the wider church and to the other churches in a region larger than a presbytery. Do we have events that blur presbytery borders, where neighboring churches get together irregardless of the presbyteries they are in? In a dense area like Southern California could neighboring presbyteries hold joint meetings once a year? Or are we meetinged out and want to stick with the status quo?

In this case size is not just a membership or institutional measurement but a “people” measurement as well. We are too big if we lose sight of each other across the table. We need to find ways and be intentional about our connectionalism so we are truly connected on many different scales.

Next time, connectedness in the congregation: Are we too small?

The GA Junkie

The Politics of Presbyterianism