There Is Yet Hope Here: A Response to Ed Koster

In a recent Outlook guest editorial, Rev. Ed Koster brought his considerable experience with Presbyterian polity to bear in an indicting portrayal of the current state of discipline in the PC(USA).  Koster explores issues ranging from the adoption of the Book of Confessions by the United Presbyterian Church to recent decisions by the GAPJC to demonstrate what he sees as an epidemic of disobedience to church polity.   Reading his bleak and despairing words about a church in which, “(T)here is no discipline in the land, and everyone does what is right in his own eyes,”  one wonders if there is any hope for the PC(USA).

Despite the prognostications of doom and demise from Koster and others, I believe there is. 

In fact, there is hope for the church found in the very places Koster sees only decline and doom.

Koster takes issue first with the language of the new F-1.0303 which identifies the three marks of the church; proclamation and hearing of the Word of God, administration of the sacraments and nurturing a covenant community of disciples of Christ.  It is the third mark of the church that appears to worry Koster.  He points out that the former language referred not to building covenant community but ensuring that “ecclesiastical discipline is uprightly administered.”  The change in language, he claims, represents a rejection of the notion of discipline in the church; that somehow the the church has rejected this important part of our Reformed heritage.  In fact, this premise, that discipline and order are no more, underlies most of Koster's expressed concern about the church.

I disagree.

The change in language adopted in F-1.0303 represents not a refutation of our Reformed heritage but a reclaiming of the theological role of the church in the right ordering of our spiritual lives.  Over the last two decades, ecclesiastical discipline in the PC(USA) has been reduced to a court for the punishment of unpopular opinions.  Whether against progressives who fought for full inclusion in the church or conservatives who have withheld per-capita funding out of a sense of conscience, the courts of the church have been used less to order than to punish. 

The purpose of ecclesiastical discipline, according to the language of the Scots Confession, is not merely to punish vice but to simultaneously nurture virtue. (Scots 3.18)  That our understanding of discipline had become consumed with the former and neglectful of the latter was a matter of grave theological concern.  The adoption of the new language in F-1.0303 represents a reclaiming of discipline as a tool for building up the community of faith and not merely beating down individuals within it.  True ecclesiastical discipline orders, it does not merely punish.

Koster next turns his attention to a second concern, what he calls “the notion that a person has the right to disobey a church rule when he or she thinks it wrong.” 

On this point, he is absolutely right. 

This is a pervasive idea in the church and thank God it is!  One of the great pillars of our Reformed tradition is the rejection that any human institution or visible combination of persons or powers can ever be deemed infallible.  The rules and policies and, yes, polity of those institutions must be resisted when, in good conscience, the individual believer finds it necessary.

The problem is not that we have a tradition of “civil disobedience” in our shared ecclesiastical life.  The trouble comes when that civil disobedience is not paired with a willingness to pay the price of one's actions.  

The misstep in Koster’s argument is his assumption that those who, in good conscience, decline to be governed by a rule they believe to be unjust believe that their resistance should come with no consequence.  That is not the case.  Jane Spahr who has resisted the church’s policies denying full fellowship to GLBTQ Presbyterians knew and faced the consequences of her resistance.  She acted as her conscience dictated and paid the price required by the courts of the church.  Wynn Kenyon famously did the same in the 1970’s.  He stood on principle (one with which I personally disagree) and suffered the consequence of his stance.

The Reformed tradition, indeed the whole history of Protestantism, rests on the shoulders of courageous people of faith who resisted.  They knew and paid the price, often dearly.  Disobedience rooted in conscience is a time honored and valuable part of our church's history. 

Koster’s third argument points to what he sees as the result of a permissive attitude within the church for such disobedience.  He points to the decision in Parnell, et al v. Presbytery of San Francisco (220-10) as evidence that the PC(USA) has rejected any sort of standard rooted in scripture or the confessions.

This is a profound misreading of what the GAPJC did.

In Parnell, the GAPJC ruled that “(T)he Book of Confessions, much like Scripture itself, requires discernment and interpretation when its standards are to be applied in the life and mission of the church.”  Far from ruling that scripture or the Confessions are insufficient to be used as a standard; the GAPJC ruled that they cannot be reduced to a static list of essentials without doing violence to the breadth of witness in each.  

The place of scripture and the Confessions as standards in the church is not diminished but enhanced by this affirmation.  In a world in which every aspect of human life and relationship is persistently reduced to formulae and lowest-common-denominator sound bites, that the PC(USA) continues to cherish the complexity and depth of scripture and the Confessions is a reason to celebrate.  The standard in the PC(USA) is an insistence that God’s word in scripture and the heritage of the church in the Confessions will not be reduced or redacted to meet the desires of a world addicted to simple answers.  The theological evaluation of candidates for ministry in Christ’s church is worth the effort.

Finally, Koster turns to “the ethos…that an individual’s wisdom is deemed greater than that of the church assembled.”

Given that the issues with which Koster takes the greatest issue are rulings by the GAPJC, actions by the General Assembly and the general direction of the church, he seems at risk of being hoisted on his own theological petard if his actions are misunderstood the way he evidently misunderstands the actions of others in the church.

For my part, I find no theological threat in an ethos that individual wisdom should be proclaimed in the midst of the church.  I do not sense that Koster seeks to substitute his own perspective for that of the church nor do I think that is a pervasive ethos among those whose voices may not be in the mainstream of current church thinking.

Instead he is doing what so many in the church have done for centuries.  He is speaking what he believes to be a faithful word in the midst of a church that has discerned a different faithful direction. 

He is certainly right that there are instances in which individuals and councils have flaunted the authority of the church.   As has happened in the past and will no doubt in the future, those situations will right themselves in time.  To say that these isolated incidents define the whole culture of the church or that they risk the unraveling of the church requires an incredible leap of imagination.

That the PC(USA) has recaptured its role as a body meant to build up the community of Christ rather than simply keep human vice in check; continues to embrace the importance of individual conscience in the midst of that community; cherishes and lifts up both scripture and the Confessions as standards that will not be diminished by reductive standardization; and remains a church in which a voice ringing out counter to the current of the church may be heard and valued is elegant proof that the PC(USA) remains filled by the life of the Spirit.

That is not a doomed church. 

That is a living and breathing community of the Spirit.

That is the Presbyterian Church I know and love and thank God for it!