Civil unions being studied by Presbyterians

A Special Committee to Study Issues of Civil Union and Christian Marriage has been appointed by the Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow, Moderator of the 218th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

The committee will study and offer policy recommendations regarding:

• The history of the laws governing marriage and civil union, including current policy
• How the theology and practice of marriage have developed in the Reformed and broader Christian tradition.
• The relationship between civil union and Christian marriage.
• The effects of current laws on same-gender partners and their children.
• The place of covenanted same-gender partnerships in the Christian community.

The resulting report will be made to the 219th General Assembly (2010) next summer in Minneapolis.

The Presbyterian Church (USA) still defines Christian marriage as between “a man and a woman,” while at the same time recognizing and calling for legal codification of equal rights for families of same-gender partners.

Saving/digitizing Bonhoeffer’s papers

Bonhoeffer

The fate Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s papers hangs on whether the Berlin State Library can raise $52,500 to preserve and digitize them. The collection consists of more than 10,000 pages threatened by rusting paper clips and aging paper.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was an anti-Nazi Protestant theologian who was executed for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler. In his book The Cost of Discipleship, he wrote the words that are still clarion call for many:

“Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace.”

You may consider helping give the future access to his thought by visiting the project page, ( It is in German, but readily translated.) and arranging a donation.

When the project is completed, they are to be published on the Web for all the freely read.

Tulips get a reprieve at SWBTS: Inquisition delayed

Oklahoma pastor Wade Burleson stood his ground today regarding the planned purge of Calvinist professors from the ranks at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The former Southern Baptist International Mission Board member also provided more detail and made it clear that he isn’t just fighting for Calvinists — he’s fighting for fair treatment in Baptist life and healthy diversity in Baptist faith culture.

Tulips for the next generation of Southern Baptists

He reported a victory this week for fair treatment and diversity:

There will be faculty reductions at SWBTS as there will be at Southern and other educational institutions of the Southern Baptist Convention. But, due to the uproar over the exposure of removing only the Calvinists at SWBTS, the chosen method of reduction, at least as of today, will be different.

One march is not the war. He admonishes:

Southern Baptists better realize the path being taken by some leaders, and by God’s grace, we better do all within our power to stop the forced removal of those people from SBC service and employment who don’t agree with particular ecclesiological, soteriological and eschatological idealogues leading our Convention. This week was a solid step in the right direction. And, as the picture above shows, saving the tulips at SWBTS is on behalf of the next generation of Southern Baptists.

Whether or not you’re a Southern Baptist, we recommend the entire piece to you here.

Part one of the debate, with its stream of sometimes harshly accusatory comments attached, is here.

Sanity break: After the crisis corporate logo

Not just the church copier any more.

There are others. [Thanks @mikeforjesus]

Vatican demands that Holocaust-denier repudiate his positions [Updated]

Besieged by angry response to the un-excommunication of four right-wing bishops, the Vatican demanded today for the first time that the Holocaust-denier Bishop Richard Williamson repudiate his “previous statements in ‘an absolutely, unequivocal and public manner.’”

The National Catholic Register reported:

In addition, said the statement from the Vatican Secretariat of State, Pope Benedict XVI did not know about the controversial statements by British-born Bishop Richard Williamson when he lifted the excommunication of him and three other traditionalist bishops ordained illicitly in 1988.

. . .

“The positions of Bishop Williamson on the Holocaust are absolutely unacceptable and are strongly rejected by the Holy Father,” the statement said.

U.S. Bishops and others are in effect getting the appropriately high standard for reconciliation that they have demanded.

Addendum

The Associated Press reported Wednesday afternoon that the requirement is not for Williamson alone:

In addition to its demand of Williamson, the Vatican said the society as a whole must fully recognize the teachings of Vatican II and all the popes who came during and after it in order to have a legitimate canonical function in the church.

Enforced, that should dispose of concerns that this reconciliation involves either acceptance of formerly rejected far-right ideologies into the church, or a sharp rightward shift by the church itself.

It was of overarching importance. “This was the sign the Jewish world has been waiting for,” said Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress.

When clerical leaders resist anti-predator reforms …

When clerical leaders resist readily-implemented reforms that would protect parishioners from sexual predators, we cannot help but think of cases like the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado.

He was a successful, conservative lion of the faith whose victims were, perhaps until public apologies began this week as the facts emerged, themselves widely accused.

Power and trust need not come with a license to abuse, no matter what the denomination.

People mugs

For/Against benches called attention to Washington, D.C., area artist Linda Hesh.

Take it or leave it as you will. We like the mugs:

Art with something to say.

Guidestone to predator-free SBC churches

Christa Brown sees the Southern Baptist Convention’s big Guidestone program as a model for making the denomination more predator-free.

For nine decades Guidestone has leapt lightly over any nagging SBC concerns about church autonomy to provide retirement, health care and financial assistance services to SBC ministers.

They need those services, and it is in fact no fatal breach of individual church autonomy to systematically provide those services, denomination-wide.

Nor would it be a fatal breach of church autonomy to provide denomination-wide protection from clerical sexual predators, as Christa explains:

If local church autonomy doesn’t preclude the denomination from creating an entity to assure retirement security for ministers, why does local church autonomy preclude the denomination from creating an entity — i.e., an independent review board — to assure that those who report clergy sex abuse are compassionately received and that local churches are warned about credibly accused clergy?

Why don’t Southern Baptist leaders care just as much about protecting kids and congregants against clergy sex predators as they do about protecting the security of ministers in retirement?

There is no lack of need.

News of SBC clergy and staff predators is commonplace, despite church efforts to hush things up. By conservative estimate there are more than 3,000 active, Southern Baptist, pedophile ministers at work in the church, now. And private investigative services available to churches aren’t up to the job of winnowing them out.

All that truly bars the denomination-wide solution is the SBC decision not to create a service to protect congregations from abuses which inevitably attend deployment of wayward ministers.

Just a matter of priorities.

That’s all.

Papal fear of schism

Pope Benedict’s obsessive “horror” of schism may have lit the un-excommunication wildfire, suggests Martin E. Marty of the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Certainly papal efforts to damp the fire following his Jan. 24 un-excommunications of four right-wing bishops have made it hotter, especially now in Germany.

Today Bild reported:

Theologian Hermann Haering went so far as to say that the Pope should resign: “If the Pope wants to do something good for the church, he should step down.”
But Hamburg bishop Hans-Jochen Jaschke told BILD:
“A mistake was made and it was in his name. He was probably badly advised. There is now a need for damage limitation, the rehabilitation process should be stopped. People want to hear clear words. If he had known what the unenlightened Williamson had said, he would not have undone the excommunication. The matter was badly dealt with.”

Marty approaches it tongue in cheek, asking:

How and why did he get into this situation?
Theories abound, as they did when the Vatican-Muslim flap occurred.
This time is different, says Father [Edwart T.] Oakes, [writing in the Jan. 30 Wall Street Journal], since the offenders are not medieval Byzantine rulers (as in the Muslim case) but living, breathing excommunicated schismatics for whom the pope will do anything, including offend the whole Jewish world and millions of bystanders, among them those who do remember the Holocaust, in order to reincorporate Bishop Williamson and his three Episcopal leaders in the Pius X society.
Put simply, as Father Oakes and numerous Catholic commentators have thus put it:
Benedict XVI has such a horror of schism that he and his team can let almost anything else go – including Pius X Society’s insults to the Vatican II bishops and their successors, and interpretations of Catholicism which the previous pope and team adjudged to be heretical – in order to stall or demolish schismatic movements.

Unlike Bishop Jaschke, Marty doesn’t lay blame at the feet of Vatican curia who should somehow have better advised their pope. Instead Marty asks:

“Is Benedict XVI” too much the history-preoccupied German scholar, driven by the memory of Martin Luther and “other 16th century ‘schismatics’” and consumed by “an inordinate fear of repetition?”

“We’ll wait and see,” he teases, leaving us with the contingent vision of an irrational, obsession-driven pope. Very much the man who should, as Haering said, “step down.”

Update:

Vatican demands holocaust-denier repudiate his positions.