Give Belhar a Chance

Committee 18 will be one of the more exciting places to be this year for GA.  Committee 18 is the Committee on Confessions of the Church.  They are tasked with receiving the report of the Heidelberg Catechism re-translation.  This group has worked very hard over their term to bring a faithful translation of this often overlooked part of our Book of Confessions.  Their work reflects current scholarship and linguistic nuance and they are to be commended for their work.  And, if the way be clear, the church will have a new and more accurate translation of this historic document for our day.

Another piece of business before this committee is an overture from Twin Cities Presbytery and concurred with by New York City Presbytery.  This item, 18-1, asks the GA to form a special committee to educate the denomination on the Confession of Belhar prior to it's (hopefully) being proposed to the presbyteries for an up or down vote following the 221st GA in Detroit in 2014. 

Belhar was approved by the 219th GA in Minneapolis in 2010.  Because the Book of Confessions bears such great historical and theological weight, amending it requires concurrence of a GA, 2/3 of the presbyteries and the following GA.  Belhar was approved by a good margin at the GA but fell 8 short of the required 116 affirmative presbytery votes. 

The reintroduction of Belhar makes good sense for a few reasons.

First, the central controversy that led to its defeat in some presbyteries has been removed.  It was thought that Belhar's language would provide an "end around" on the former language on ordination and the requirement that ordinands and candidates for ordination live in "fidelity in the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or chastity in singleness."  That language has now been removed and that particular fear is now mostly moot.  Belhar might now have a fair chance to be judged on its merits rather than a perceived possible misuse.

Second, Belhar has been adopted by the Reformed Church in America in 2010 and will hopefully (likely?) be adopted by the Christian Reformed Church this year.  At a time in our denominational history when we find ourselves at odds with some of our Reformed brothers and sisters on matters of human sexuality, the Belhar Confession is an opportunity to declare not what divides but what unites us; faith in Jesus Christ. (See the previous post on the Lund Principle for more on this ideal of holding on to what unites rather than divides.)

Third, this confession addresses a central concern facing the church today.  Often we think of racism in the static terms of Jim Crow and 20th century American Civil Rights struggles.  In truth, the sin of racism runs much wider and deeper.  Belhar was written in the South African church in the wake of a generation of titanic change in race relations.  It was written to express both the church's failures in race relations and its hope in Jesus Christ as we struggle to mend broken relationships and bridge divides between peoples. 

Finally, the act of adoption itself will be a healthy thing for the church.  Since the inclusion of the Brief Statement of Faith at the time of reunion, the world and church have changed dramatically.  By adding this new elegant statement to our historic documents, the church witnesses to its own theology that we are indeed ecclesia reformta semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei.

With the many controversies and struggles facing the church, we find in Belhar a place that we can rally as a community and recapture some articulation of the faith that unites us.