A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article appears below. Reverend Dr. W.J. Clyde Ervine is minister of St. Giles Kingsway Presbyterian Church, and current convenor of the Church Doctrine Committee, which presented the Human Sexuality Report to the 118th General Assembly this past June.
SEX is old! Both as God’s gift and as human problem, sex is as old as homo sapiens. Even among Presbyterians, sex is not something we have just lately stumbled upon. And yet, sexual issues press in on the contemporary church with intense and unrelenting force.
Technically, the origins of the current Human Sexuality Report, (see Acts and Proceedings 1992, pp. 253-271), lie in various overtures sent to General Assembly during the 1980s. The task of replying to these was delegated to the Church Doctrine Committee – a group of fifteen – plus a number of ex-officio and corresponding members, representative of our denomination from coast to coast. The Church Doctrine committee was also asked to consult with the then Board of Congregational Life, though no one ever seems to define what consultation really means.
In this case, the Church Doctrine Committee established a Human Sexuality sub-committee, half of whom were appointed by the Church Doctrine Committee, the other half appointed by the Board of Congregational Life. This sub-committee tackled the big issues of biblical exegesis and interpretation, and struggled with contemporary insights into sexuality and current sexual behaviour. The sub-committee’s final report back to the Church Doctrine Committee was a substantial piece of work, embodying substantial agreement on how Reformed Christians ought to engage in thinking about sexual ethics. On the area of homosexual relationships, there was not full agreement. Some wanted the church’s traditional prohibition of homosexual genital activity upheld; others wanted to leave this issue more open-ended.
It was left to the whole Church Doctrine Committee to work on the final Report to be sent to General Assembly. The sub-committee’s report became our basis, but much was added, some material subtracted, and the whole document transposed into a less academic and more pastoral key.
The Human Sexuality Report, adopted as an Interim Report by the 118th General Assembly, is certainly not exhaustive. Perhaps too modestly, we commend the report as useful to the Church “in discussing Christian ethics.” Our concern throughout was primarily theological and ethical, as befits a Church Doctrine Committee. We did not involve ourselves at length in sexual issues which are primarily medical or sociopsychological; for example, the debate over whether homosexuality is physiologically determined or a result of particular psychological development. Nor did we go on to develop answers to a whole host of counselling issues which naturally arise from our conclusions; for example, details about the discipline of church leaders who are sexually abusive, the pastoral care of those in our congregations who fail to live within the boundaries of the sexual ethic elaborated in our Report, or the question of ordaining homosexual clergy. These questions have been raised in responses we have received, and may be dealt with more fully when the Report is submitted again to the General Assembly.
The real tension point in our prolonged debate, as I have seen it, has been between the authority of Scripture and the authority of personal experience. If the Reformation was a struggle between Scripture and tradition, and the Enlightenment a struggle between Scripture and reason, our current liberationist era constitutes a struggle between the proper roles of Scripture and experience. For example, if a person experiences himself or herself as a homosexual person, if that is how they see the world, if that is their social and sexual orientation, if that is who they are, is their personhood to be eliminated, because Scripture, often in remote passages, condemns ancient homosexual practice? The temptation to qualify the voice of Scripture in some way, and to legitimize the inner experience of homosexuals, for so long silenced and repudiated, is almost overwhelming. Some in our denomination are prepared for such an ethical shift, moved by a desire to be pastorally sensitive, culturally relevant and genuinely Christian. Besides, in a great deal of the counselling tradition in North America, minimal attention has been paid to either Scripture or tradition. Most therapies seek, in some way, to avoid a judgment of personal experience, and some seek to legitimize it.
The real tension point in our prolonged debate, as I have seen it, has been between the authority of Scripture and the authority of personal experience.
Thomas Oden has written: “The prevailing theological method of recent pastoral care has followed the intuition of pietism in placing its stress largely on personal experience, often to the exclusion of historical experience, reason, Scripture and tradition.”
If this is symptomatic of the current theological climate, it is reinforced by our current Canadian political climate. Since the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, there has been a deluge of rights claims on behalf of various individuals and groups, the direction of which has been to challenge longstanding societal norms, which has their origins in a Judaeo-Christian ethic.
Our report therefore begins with a survey of the relationship between Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience and places itself decidedly in the Reformed tradition of appealing to the supreme authority of Scripture. As Living Faith puts it so succinctly:
The Bible has been given to us by the inspiration of God to be the rule of faith and life.
It is the standard of all doctrine by which we must test any word that come to us from church, world, or inner experience.
We subject to its judgment all we believe and do.
Through the Scriptures the church is bound only to Jesus Christ its King and Head.
He is the living Word of God to whom the written word bears witness.
(from Section 5.1, The Bible)
It is one thing to state this; it is another to call our church and society to subject its sexual experience to the Word of God.
What does Scripture have to say about sexuality and sexual expression? At this point, I feel that our Report is weaker than it could be partly because we had to edit severely. The Creation narratives of Genesis 1 and 2 need a fuller treatment, for it is from the sexual joy and sexual complimentarity of man and woman in Genesis 2 that Scripture’s “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24), heterosexual union, finds its basis. The sexual complimentarity of Adam and Eve, capable of both pleasure and procreation, becomes the fundamental sexual trajectory of Scripture, which Jesus endorsed (Mark 10:8). All other sexual expressions in Scripture either adhere to or deviate from this norm. It is what God intended in nature, and why, therefore, St. Paul calls homosexual relations unnatural (Romans 1:26). For similar reasons, Scripture condemns adultery and incest.
While members of both the subcommittee and our full committee examined alternative interpretations of biblical texts, and in particular those interpretations by scholars offering a more lenient understanding of homosexuality, we fail in large part to be persuaded. For most of us, Scripture’s direction in sexual matters provides a clear and consistent pattern.
The result of our Report attempted to apply our biblical conclusions to various sexual issues with integrity and compassion.
To write our Report has not been easy. And to endorse its conclusions is to distance our Christian communities even further from the current ethical values and practices of the country we live in. The church, under the Lordship of Christ, will have to be prepared to pay a social price for such obedience.