Avdat

Left my heart in San Francisco

Gay, Catholic, conservative Andrew Sullivan is the go-to blogger today:

Ed Harrington, the general manager of the city's Public Utilities Commission, was one of the staff members in the mayor's office shortly after the decision was released. Harrington has lived with his partner for 35 years and in 2004 Harrington married about 40 same-sex couples.

"You wait for this your whole life," said Harrington, who said he planned to call his partner and say, "I love you. What more do you say on a day like this?"

I've spent the bulk of my ordained ministry dealing with guys who live by the "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" motto and gals who inexplicably accommodate them.  I'm finding it hard to get all that worked up over people who are eager to marry.

Mark Driscoll is a jerk

Avdat reader Bob W calls me out:

Mark Driscoll has preached hundreds of hours of sermons and it's a bit unfair to pin him down based on 2 or 3 sentences taken out of context. When you've listened to 7 or 8 complete sermons and then have a good feel of where he stands, come back and give an honest opinion. Until then, it seems like you may be scratching an itch.

Fair enough.  I begin by reading all of Driscoll's answers in the Relevant Magazine interview from which the "2 or 3 sentences" were lifted.  Judging from the first Q and A, I don't think I've taken anything out of context:

What trends in church and worship styles do you see? Are they positive or negative?

Mark Driscoll: I’ll be happy when we have more than just prom songs to Jesus sung by some effeminate guy on an acoustic guitar offered as mainstream worship music. Right now most worship music is still coming from the top down through such things as Christian radio and record labels. But the trend today in a lot of churches is writing your own music to reflect your culture and community, and I pray this trend of music from the bottom up continues.

This guy is a jerk.  A homophobic jerk.  Great--the guy who was giving swirlies in the locker room to the computer geeks and tuba players has grown up to run a megachurch in Seattle, and has defined sanctification as conformity to his own weird, hyper-masculine standards.

Does Driscoll know that 30% of teen suicides are attributable to young people struggling with their sexual orientation or gender identity?  Does he care?  Such casual nastiness gives ecclesiastical sanction to acts of violence.  Whether that would give someone like Driscoll pause is a question I can't answer yet.  Maybe the study series on Ruth and Nehemiah will enlighten me.

In the meantime, Driscoll still seems like a whacked out guy at the center of a personality cult, who inspires his minions not with calls to take up a cross, but with calls to lift up the girly men of the world in a group wedgie. 

Again I say, put your money where your mouth is.  There are at least ten Army Recruiting offices in metro Seattle.  I hear they need chaplains in Iraq.

Bush vs. Pittsburgh Presbytery

I'd been feeling better about the health of my denomination.  But this week, not so much. 

Some background for non-PC(USA) types:  Like a lot of Christians we Presbyterians have been duking it out over homosexuality for going on a generation.  1997 was a milestone year. The denomination amended its Constitution by adding specific language to bar the ordination of gays and lesbians:

Those who are called to office in the church are to lead a life in obedience to Scripture and in conformity to the historic confessional standards of the church. Among these standards is the requirement to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between one man and one woman (W-4.9001), or chastity in singleness. Persons refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin shall not be ordained and/or installed as deacons, elders, or ministers of the Word and Sacrament.

Most every year there have been votes to amend or rescind this language, all of which have failed by narrow margins.

In 2006 the denomination's Task Group on Peace, Unity and Purity made an interesting recommendation:  to resurrect the old concept of "scruples" for use in ordination standards.  Time was, candidates for ordination had to declare a scruple if they disagreed with a part of the Westminster Confession.  The governing body then had to decide whether or not said scruple was a significant enough departure from the essentials of the Reformed faith to warrant saying No to the candidate.

The PUP Report proposed letting elders and ministers declare a scruple about their ability to comply with the fidelity and chastity language.  The examining body, Sessions in the case of elders, and Presbyteries in the case of Ministers, would decide whether or not to allow the ordination to proceed.

It amounted to a states rights approach to the ordination issue, rather than a federalist approach.  It won approval by a strong majority.

I liked the compromise.  There is no consensus on homosexuality in the PC(USA).  And while this drives advocates on both sides nuts, it seems to make sense to simply acknowledge it and sidestep it, rather than suiting up year after year for more trench warfare that fails to break the stalemate.  By retaining the long-fought-over language but giving some flexibility in applying it on a case-by-case basis, neither the far left nor the far right got what they wanted, but the broad middle of the denomination did.  They got a way to walk the Church back from the precipice, and move forward by focusing on mission and not on bruising annual fights over ordination standards.

But last week the Permanent Judicial Commission of the PC(USA) (our Supreme Court) ruled that scruples are for opinions only, and not for behavior. 

This really stinks.  The denomination had finally found a way to agree to disagree, but the PJC has torn it all up, and so now we are almost certainly back to where we were in the late 90s, with our annual fight like hell over homosexuality date in early-February, the meeting when presbyteries usually vote on proposed changes to the Constitution.

"Activist judges" can be found on the right as well as the left.

I feel sorry for the members of the PUP Task Group who risked friendships with their respective allies in order to reach out across fault lines, found some way to compromise with people with whom they strongly disagree, showed the denomination a healthy way forward, and now have it all flung in their faces.

And I think that the right wing of the Church will rue the day they "won" this victory in court.  They are slowly losing the argument on the legitimacy of same-sex relationships.  A compromise that let them retain their ideal language while leaving the door ajar for a gay or lesbian ordination here and there was about the best that they could have hoped for.  But now that the battle is joined again, it will continue to be fought until the fidelity and chastity language is stripped from the Book of Order.  And then they will have lost the war.

A Pyhrric victory indeed, this case.

I don't get Baptists

It took the Southern Baptist Convention 150 years to apologize for slavery.  I suppose it'll take another 150 years for them to get around to apologizing for stuff like this, but by then the nation's largest and most hidebound denomination will have surely set itself to some new tomfoolery.

That said, Rev. Shoemaker's argument, that the gay-friendly Myers Park Baptist deserves a seat at the SBC table because, "We think the local (Baptist) church ought to be free to interpret Scripture itself ..." seems deficient.  If your sole unifying principle is that you get to agree to disagree on everything, well then, that seems a bit tenuous to me.

The early Church, beset by heretics on all sides, established some boundaries by fixing the canon (a Bible with two testaments), writing a rule of faith (a creed), and establishing a hierarchical authority structure (the episcopate).  This three-legged stool is a durable support for the healthy exercise of church order.

Baptists want to do away with two of those legs in favor of creedless, autonomous congregations who rely on scripture alone.  But you get problems.  In fact, no one is without a creed.  For Southern Baptists it's a creed with two articles:  the inerrancy of scripture, and social ethics that elevate post-war patriotism and gender roles to the level of sacred dogma.  Your reading of the Bible had better conform to that creed, or you're out of here. 

A one-legged stool is an inherently unstable piece of furniture.

My Head May Be in the Sand, But It Sure Is Cool Down Here

I received this email from a colleague in ministry:

It looks to me like the PCUSA is perilously close to breaking apart. Moderate congregations like mine may have to choose between jumping ship to the EPC or staying with what remains of the PCUSA. As one of my retired PCUSA minister friends said today “what remains will be like the UCC trying to do worship like the Episcopals.”

As I survey the situation, I find that the Presbyterians for Renewal, which I used to think of as a “right wing” group, is pressing for staying within the denomination – at least on their web page. I am thinking that this effort to try to rally around what is left of a center, emphasizing missions, education, evangelism and the other things that made us a great denomination – may be the only way forward. I genuinely fear joining an EPC with a grand total of zero ordained women ministers or debating the fractionalization of what is left until the cows come home – all the while the purposes God called us to in Seminary go unaddressed.

Therefore I am considering attending the PFR East Coast meeting. I have never been to a PFR meeting, or any meeting of any “side” in the current squabbles. (I did this way back in the 70’s promoting moderate ideas like women’s ordination and Bible translations other than the KJV when I was a Southern Baptist, and have had no desire to start back down that path.) So, let me ask you – Is my outlook off base? Is there a better effort to hold us together than PFR? Have you experience with PFR and any of their meetings? I really would appreciate your insight.

My insights:  First, I wasn't aware that the denomination was perilously close to falling apart.  Is that, in fact, the case?  I hear no talk of schism in my Session, in my congregation, or among the people gathered around the table at the presbytery office for Committee on Preparation for Ministry meetings.  What I do hear about is, "How can we care for all these people in our church who are in their 80s and in failing health?"  And, "Is this Candidate for ministry Reformed enough?"  not, "Is he/she conservative enough or liberal enough?"  Perhaps I'm out of the loop.  Perhaps my head is in the sand.

That said, being out of the loop is not a bad place to be.  While I'm not adverse to putting my own opinions about "The Issue" out there, I think that organizing one's Mission or ecclesiastical loyalty around "The Issue" is a great way to major in minors.  Now, if our small congregation had an opening gay or lesbian member, and if a Nominating Committee put that person's name up for service on the Session, then the battle, so to speak, would have to be joined.  But that's not the case.  So I think that the kinds of questions and anxieties I am hearing about are where we ought to focus our energy.  And I think that if other congregations did the same, rather than trying to impose their "progressive" or "traditional" stance on ordination standards on everyone, the denomination would be a healthier place.

In Titus 3: 9-10 we read

But avoid stupid controversies, geneaologies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless.  After a first and second admonition, have nothing more to do with anyone who causes such divisions, since you know that such a person is perverted and sinful, being self-condemned.

Titus is a pastoral epistle, and this is excellent advice for Presbyterian pastors at such a time as this.  The long and the short of it is, "Don't feed the beast."  That is, resist the impulse to choose sides.  Both the far left and the far right have an interest in maintaining an atmosphere of crisis in the denomination.  Put your energy where the crisis ain't, in the basic tasks of preaching, celebrating the sacraments, teaching faith, and shepherding the people.  You don't have to boycott presbytery meetings, but whenever "The Issue" comes up, listen to a couple of speakers on both sides and then move the previous question.  You'll be doing us all a favor.  At this point, we can recite the arguments by heart. 

If PFR represents the "radical center" of the denomination, then good for them.  I hear that their Wee Kirk conferences are simply great.  But even if PFR is the radical center, then that's still a camp, one of many, in this ongoing struggle of shifting alliances.  So my colleague would do well to attend their next conference, but he and the rest of us would do even better to recommit ourselves to doing the essentials well.

In this case perception is reality.  If we allow the far left and far right to decide for us that we are at the point of a great parting of the ways, then we will be.  But it doesn't have to be so.

Stuff...

Got this email in response to my post on same sex marriage.  Guess I should stop being a weenie and open up the comments, as this isn't the first time people have had trouble commenting on my blog.  Then maybe I'd get as many comments as Lee!  But the nice thing about the current setup is that it does keep spam to a minimum.

For some reason, I wasn't able to post a comment on your blog.  Even after I registered with Typekey, I was still getting an error message when I tried to post the comment.  Here is is ... do what you will with it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That's an interesting reference, Isaiah 56:4.

I am inclined to call attention to two principles that stand in tension with one another:  purity (an exclusionary principle;  i.e., keep the pure separate from the impure) and justice (an inclusionary principle).

We can see the tension between the two principles reflected throughout the Old Testament, as Walter Brueggemann has argued ( http://emergingfrombabel.blogspot.com/2007/07/problem-with-ten-commandments.html).  In my view, the split between Christianity and Judaism happened along that fault line, with Jesus opting for the "I eat with tax collectors and sinners", social justice model.

Jesus never addressed the topic of same sex relationships, but in my opinion it is legitimate for Christians to extend that inclusive, social justice approach to same sex couples.

Re Matthew Shepard:
There's some doubt whether Shepard actually propositioned the men who killed him.  The alternative theory is that it was a drug-fueled robbery attempt that turned violent for unknown reasons.  There's a good account of the dispute on Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard).

       Stephen (aka Q)
       http://emergingfrombabel.blogspot.com

I would add that you see this inclusive/exclusive tension in the post-exilic literature too, not just in the difference between Leviticus and Deuteronomy.  In Ezra and Nehemiah you get the Jewish men divorcing their gentile wives because mixing with foreigners is what got us in this jam in the first place.  But then you have Malachi directly contradicting that, and Third Isaiah making room for all sorts of outsiders within the covenant community, provided they observe the Sabbath.

What's interesting to me is that the canon didn't settle for either inclusion or purity, but made room for both voices.  That, in and of itself, may be an argument for inclusion, but not an airtight one.

I think I've said before that the issue of boundaries is important, and we simply can't tear down boundaries as some liberal voices would advocate.  No boundaries equals the death of the organism.  Rather, the boundary has to be (in the words of a member of my church who works in textiles) a semi-permeable membrane, tough enough to keep out contaminants and maintain the integrity of the organism, but permeable enough to allow for the exchange of information and nutrition with the outside.

Today's Church is not unlike Israel in the post-exilic period.  The political and economic powers are not hostile but largely indifferent to us.  Our institutions are in shambles, not due to a Babylonian military siege but due to the long, slow, steady hemorrhage of members.  We have to rebuild our institutions, maintain our distinct identity, and witness to the nations to the Lordship of Christ.

Whether the new understanding of same-sex relationships is a contaminant that the Church needs to keep out, or a vital new piece of data that needs to be incorporated into our DNA is, of course, up for debate.  I obviously lean toward the latter, but faithful people can see it the other way. 

It's the Monogamy, Stupid

When I arrived in seminary in 1991 the notorious Human Sexuality Report was, shall we say, hitting the fan. Among other things, The Report, in good liberal fashion, argued that much of the deviant behavior in the homosexual community was due to societal prejudice, which forced underground and thus distorted homosexual relations. 

Nonsense, snorted Camille Paglia.  She wrote an essay titled "The Joy of Presbyterian Sex" that faulted the Report's authors for being hopelessly repressed.  "Gay men don't have anonymous sex in rest area restroom stalls because they're oppressed," she wrote.  "They do it because it's fun!"  Paglia couldn't stand it that, in the name of liberal tolerance, Presbyterians wanted to turn drag queens and leather clad gay bar bouncers into Ozzie and Harriet.

Now the contrarian in me appreciated the irony of the beleaguered members of the Task Force being forced to suddenly defend their left flank while in full retreat from a vicious attack by everyone to the right of, say, Barney Frank.

But I found myself remembering those old arguments while reading this blog post by anti-liberal (both capital and lower case L) Craig Carter.  It reads as if it's been preserved in amber since around the time the Berlin Wall fell.  Blessing same sex relationships, says Carter, leads one down a slippery slope toward blessing anything, including, I suppose, "marriages" that expire when one or more of the copulators exits the restroom stall.  Most of all, it is a concession to the dread ideology liberalism, which, never mind the fact that it's obsession with proximate causes rather than ultimate causes did lead to some things, like... um... the modern medicine that's twice now saved my firstborn's life, is altogether evil.

Now we have engaged in something of a grand experiment with the human family since 1960 or so.  No fault divorce, teen pregnancy, abortion on demand, easy access to birth control, "swinging," equal rights for women (including ordination) and gay rights. 

A lot of these are in full retreat.  Divorce rates have flattened.  So has teen pregnancy.  Swinging happens on Desperate Housewives, but for us to mock, not emulate. 

Yet society (and some Christian denominations) seem to be pressing ahead with blessing same sex relations.  Carter's argument is something of a relic of a time when, except for Paglia, you tended to lump all these changes together and lay a pox on all of them.

Carter has a PhD, as he mentions to us in the post, so he really ought to know better.  In the last 15 years, gay rights advocates haven't fought tooth and nail for the bathhouses to be re-opened in San Francisco, or for tax deductions for the cover charges.  They've fought for the right to get married.  They want in on an old, traditional, conservative arrangement.  Yes, they and their liberal, Presbyterian allies are really quite as uptight as Paglia lamented.  And that's a good thing.  If Carter hasn't come across a single gay rights supporter who deplores adultery and heterosexual promiscuity, then he hasn't looked very hard.  Rather than ranting against "liberalism," perhaps Carter ought to have a conversation or two with, you know, real live liberals.

Two other comments.  Blessing same sex relationships isn't a capitulation to the great liberal boogeyman.  It's trying to make sense of credible testimony, both from the scientific community and from gay and lesbian people themselves, in light of scripture.  That may mean turning away from the heretofore go-to texts like Romans 1:26-7, and turning to Isaiah 56:4.  This is not unlike the move early Christians had to make, turning from traditional Messianic texts to others, such as Isaiah 52-3 to make sense of their experience of the crucified and risen Jesus. 

Clearly, not everyone is going to go along with this.  Some may find the testimony less than credible.  Others may find no safe quarter within the canon to validate the testimony, regardless of its credibility.  But please, let's not simply dismiss the other side without a hearing as libertines, gnostics, Arians, liberals or whatever your ideological bete noir is.

Lastly Carter writes,

Once homosexual "marriage" is well-established, "group marriage," "open marriage" and other deviant forms of so-called "marriage" will be promoted by small, well-organized lobby groups which will flaunt their victim status and demand equal treatment before the law.

This is insulting.  It implies that the gays and lesbians are crying wolf, "playing the race card" in the gender arena to use a nasty metaphor--that gay protests of discrimination are somehow less serious than they're made out to be.

Look, anyone who's ever attended a youth group meeting or a high school football game should know that gay teenagers are among the most reviled people on the planet. 

It doesn't get much better in adulthood.  Married men who hit on unwilling women get told to get lost.  Matthew Shepherd hit on a guy whom he thought was gay, and Shepherd got crucified to a fence post.  Was Shepherd "flaunting his victim status" when, the next morning, passers-by mistook him for a Scarecrow?

I think he was a victim.

Anti-Gay Backlash

All over but the shoutin'?

UPDATE:  Waldman's reflections on Kinsley point out that while Republicans have been very good at winning elections over the past generation, they haven't been so good at governing.  And that's measured by Republicans' own stated objectives, not by whatever Independents, Democrats and third party folk might think.  Republican Presidents have been appointing judges for years and years, but Roe vs. Wade is still the law of the land.  They've run against Big Gubmunt in every election since 1980, yet they're the ones who keep exploding the deficit.

Republicans are good at pandering to people's resentments (taxes, red tape) and fears (social change in the form of civil rights, women's rights, gay rights), but have been awfully ineffective at turning these fears and resentments into public policy.  Which is a good thing.  But the country would be better served by a Republican Party that pandered to peoples aspirations.

If You Can't fix It with a Casserole, It Can't Be Fixed

Princeton Seminary's Stacy Johnson, a member of the Presbyterian Church's Peace, Unity and Purity (PUP) Task Force, shared his take on the report and on prospects for greater ecclesiastical recognition of same-sex relationships in an April 3 Christian Century article.  Sorry, but I can't seem to find a web link for it.  But it's worth reading.  You can read the PUP report itself here.

I like the PUP report.  It cut the Gordian knot that the Presbyterian Church had tied itself into over homosexuality. 

For more than a quarter century, the denomination has been held hostage by increasingly shrill arguments from the left and right that never quite engage each other.  The right says that this is about the Authority of Scripture.  The left says that this is about Human Rights.  Well, no one wants to be against human rights, or against the authority of scripture.  Thus the middle has retreated in the face of equally unappealing options posed by, well, let's face it, some unappealing people.

The PUP Report rejected both of these options.  It didn't call for our constitution to be amended to allow the ordination of homosexuals.  That disappointed the left.  It did not assert that there is only one correct way to interpret the scriptures on this account.  That disappointed the right.  It said, "Here is the Bible, and here is the Constitution.  Now we trust you, Sessions and Presbyteries, to apply what you learn there with prudence and discretion on a case-by-case basis when it comes to the sexuality of a person being examined for ordination."

That seems just right to me.

The process that the committee embraced largely determined its unanimous, moderate conclusions.  They ate together and worshiped together long before they began studying and debating.  By all accounts, the experience was personally transformative for those who went through it.  That's as significant as the fact that these people, who continue to disagree about homosexuality, managed to all sign on to the final recommendations.

Before the General Assembly approved the PUP Report, a former professor of mine expressed reservations to me about the report's relevance to the larger church.  The larger church has not gone through this intense spiritual and personal experience, thus it would be unwise to expect them to embrace their recommendations.

But I think that such experiences happen all the time in healthy congregations.  In healthy congregations people eat together at church night suppers.  They get to know each other, and each other's families.  They pray for each other.  They don't always agree, but their relationship provides a framework for respectful disagreement, and consensus building. 

In unhealthy congregations people argue.  They debate.  They try to outvote and outmaneuver each other.  Parking lot meetings, anonymous letter-writing campaigns, and other tricks are stock in trade. 

Presbytery meetings this last quarter century have been dysfunctional congregations writ large.

Finally, somebody on the national stage adopted a healthy process that's worked from time out of mind at the congregational level.

As the Christian Century article title indicates, I think that prayerful, scholarly consideration of tough issues, backed up by a casserole or two, is the way forward for the denomination.  I feel better about our denomination's future now than I ever have.  Between the PUP report and what is called the emergent church movement (understood as the overlap between evangelicals hungering for more theological and liturgical depth, and mainliners hungering for more lively spirituality, not merely as Christians with soul patches and tattoos!), there are real signs of life in the PC(USA).

We'll never be what we were in the 50s.  But that's OK.  Just as there's no going back to the days when ABC, CBS and NBC monopolized the airwaves, there's no going back to the days when everyone was a Baptist, a Methodist or a Presbyterian.  But like public radio, or ESPN, we can carve out a healthy niche on the Christianity spectrum.

Picking Your Battles

I do agree with Jonathan who agrees with Richard Hays that issues of war and peace ought to get a lot more airtime in the Church than the homosexuality issue. 

The daily lectionary has plowed through 1 Timothy this week.  Definitely the road less-traveled for peace and justice types, but what I walked away with from that epistle is not consternation over Paul's ordination standards, but the repeated admonition to abstain from senseless quarrels and petty bickering.

The "homosexuality issue" has been thrust upon me in the past, and for the sake of my own conscience I had to push back.  I probably pushed back too hard.  But I've come to see "the issue" (not the people) as something of a senseless controversy.

As an issue, homosexuality is something like a Rorschach test.  People look at it and see all kinds of things.  If you've made your peace with the 60s, then you see it as the next great civil rights achievement, and if you haven't made your peace with the 60s, then it's the straw that broke the camel's back (the camel being weighed down with abortion on demand, no fault divorce, etc.)

I remember a session meeting once.  Which session I'll not say.  We were debating one of the Presbyterian Church's many proposed legislative fixes to this "problem."  It occurred to me that I could predict where people would fall out based on the marital status of their children.  If their grandchildren were being raised in intact households, they were opposed to the ordination of homosexuals, but with no great feeling.  If their kids were divorced, they were strongly opposed.  And if their kids had suffered through painful divorces, they were just about blind with fury over the whole issue.

I'd like us to talk about what's hurting us:  our divorces, not getting to see our grandchildren at holidays, guilt over a abortion once upon a time, instead of piling all this stuff up on "the homosexuality issue."  Which is what I think that we're doing.  And why "the issue" has become somewhat senseless.

I got a letter from the General Assembly Council this week.  It had to do with some Presbyterian congregations planning to leave the denomination over "the issue."  I've stayed far enough away from the drama that I didn't even know that such maneuvers were underfoot. 

So I Googled it.  I learned that the congregations who've signed onto the New Wineskins Initiative are basically negotiating with the Evangelical Presbyterian Church to receive them en masse as a non-geographical presbytery.  Refugees from the liberal PC(USA).

The GAC wanted me to read a letter aloud to the congregation deploring this sad turn of events.  Words to the effect of, "Our ordination standards haven't changed."  (Technically true, but we have been given some new wiggle room on applying them, at least on a case by case basis). 

"We still believe in the Trinity," says the letter.  Yes, we do.  I addressed the denomination's Trinity paper here.  That's a specious reason for getting out, if that's a reason they're floating.

But here's the point:  Why didn't the GA ask me to read a letter on Just War Theory when the Bush administration made war a first resort with their 2002 doctrine of pre-emption?  Since conservatives love all things 17th century, the liberals in Louisville could have quoted Hugo Grotius in their pastoral letter, summarized here in a Commonweal article:

Grotius conceded that the specter of a future attack might legitimate a preemptive action if it could be shown that the danger was immediate and certain. Still, he also insisted that “fear of an uncertainty cannot confer the right to resort to force.” Using armed force preventively, solely to eliminate an adversary’s ability to inflict future harm, he deemed illicit. It would punish crimes not yet committed, perhaps not even planned, and would make fear a principle of action in international relations, thereby opening a Pandora’s box of anticipatory first strikes. “That the possibility of being attacked confers the right to attack is abhorrent to every principle of equity,” he wrote. “Human life exists under such conditions that complete security is never guaranteed to us.”

OK, maybe Grotius' Calvinist credentials were a bit suspect, but he was Dutch, and he was the father of international law, and that's not chopped liver!

I didn't read the letter.  Why needlessly unsettle people?  Ours is not a congregation that closely follows denominational politics.  We're not Layman readers here.  Not even Outlook readers.  I tend to regard those publications as the ecclesiastical versions of Bill O'Reilly and Larry King, respectively. 

And that's not "functional congregationalism."  That's a congregation that doesn't have "a morbid craving for controversy."

I doubt that a pastoral letter in the fall of 2002 would have galvanized the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s ability to say No to the administration's unjust and "preventive" war.  But had they penned it, the good people in Louisville would have picked the right battle.