Two and one-quarter centuries ago, the founders of the United States secured their independence from Great Britain. Then came the ominous task of developing a form of government. The states initially created the Articles of Confederation. Under this form of government, each state could choose whether to participate in the new nation. They could dissolve their relationship if they deemed it in their best interest.
Furthermore, if a state had a scruple with some aspect of the Articles, they didn't comply since there was little central authority. There was no means of enforcement. It was entirely up to each state to determine to what degree they would comply. As any student of American History knows, the Articles of Confederation was an unqualified failure.
After ten years of struggling with the Articles the founders created the Constitution. What is not always appreciated is the impact the Presbyterian Reformed idea of sphere sovereignty (called subsidiarity in the Roman Catholic tradition) had on the formation of the Constitution. The concept holds that there are institutions (ex., family, government, church) with sovereignty over certain aspects of life. Deeply embedded in the concept is the assumption of sin and the tendency for power to breed corruption. Separating powers into sovereign spheres reduces the possibility of a totalitarian power seizing control of society's institutions. The challenge is to develop a system that both honors the sovereignty of each sphere and allows for intervention by one sphere into another sphere for the restoration of justice when corruption emerges. This Reformed thinking entered directly into the discussion about the balance of power between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government and the balance of power between states and the federal government. The framers learned from the Articles of Confederation that some centralized authority must compel compliance with essential issues. The ratification of the Constitution was the state's affirmation of the federal government's authority on these key issues. Of so much influence was Presbyterian Reformed thought on the founding documents that some historians have referred to the American Revolution as the Presbyterian Revolution.
There have been many divisive issues for Presbyterianism over the past two centuries. Slavery, fundamentalism, and women in ministry are just a few. From the beginning, our Presbyterian system has allowed for a considerable exercise of conscience. With that conscience has come considerable responsibility. It is perfectly acceptable for a Presbyterian to dissent from the majority and work for change through the persuasion of others, but there is a caveat: The majority's decisions are to be honored and willfully obeyed. If one disagrees with the majority and cannot abide by the decisions as they work for reform, they are to leave the denomination.
Over the past thirty years, the central issue that has gripped Presbyterianism is homosexuality. Many advocating accepting homosexual behavior have done anything but live by the model I just described. They have openly rebelled disrupted General Assembly meetings, and defied the Constitution, and some judicial commissions have made a mockery of simple logic in adjudicating cases. Furthermore, the denominational authorities have usually done little in the face of open defiance. With this open defiance, we should have had court cases and other actions that increasingly clarified the lines on these issues for the denomination. From there, the denomination would have been able to reflect and pray about the wisdom of the church's positions. Instead, what we have had is an ever-escalating power struggle as those in the minority who have not gotten their way through majority votes at the General Assembly and have not embodied their interpretation within the body politic have resorted to procedural tactics and manipulation of processes to force their minority position on the denomination.
The crisis of the PCUSA is not rooted in homosexuality and ordination standards. We have always had controversial issues and always will. The crisis of the PCUSA lies in the unwillingness of a vocal minority to abide by their Presbyterian vows to live peaceably within the denomination or withdraw. It is exacerbated by the absence of resolve by our highest judicatories to hold people accountable.
The answer to the present crisis is clarity and accountability. What the PUP report offers is confusion and chaos. Some have suggested that the PUP report merely encourages us to trust presbyteries with making discernments about circumstances that may be at the edge of constitutional boundaries and trust presbyteries in those decisions. It doesn't. We already do that. What it does is give each presbytery the power to decide which parts of the Constitution it deems essential and whether it will abide by those portions of the Constitution. The higher governing bodies will be prohibited from reviewing content and restricted to the reviewing process. Rather than presbyteries deciding about issues at the margins, the Constitution becomes a cafeteria buffet from which each presbytery selects which items it will take.
The parallel between the forming of the United States and the present crisis of the PCUSA should be clear. The PCUSA is contemplating a devolution from a Constitution to an Articles of Confederation. It is grounded in the same idealistic utopian hope the writers of the Articles of Confederation had that we can make it work if we just trust each other to do the right things. After centuries of living under a constitution that has wisely recognized the issues of sphere sovereignty and transferred that powerful insight to the American experiment, the PCUSA is now willing to sell its birthright because of a vocal minority and leadership that abdicates its responsibility. How ironic.
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