THERE is something about gender and sexuality that seems to split asunder one church after another these days.Last year the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion failed to resolve profound differences over whether gays and women should be made bishops.
This month the Catholic church in Ireland has been pilloried for years of mistreatment, including sexual abuse, of children in its care.
This week, less dramatically, it was only some deft manoeuvring that kept the Church of Scotland in one piece.
The Kirk’s general assembly, the annual gathering of ministers and lay folk who dictate policy for the church as a whole, decided by 326 votes to 267 that an Aberdeen congregation had broken no rules in choosing the Rev Scott Rennie, a divorced father who lives with his male partner, to be their pastor.
But it also said that no more gays should be ordained for two years, while a church commission ponders whether the practice ought in fact to be allowed. Mr Rennie claims that there are already “tens” of ministers who dare not admit openly to being gay.
Some think this convoluted outcome may presage a breakthrough for sexual tolerance in the Presbyterian church.
The Scottish Kirk, founded in 1560 by John Knox, is regarded by many, especially among the Americans, Africans and Caribbeans who trace their Christian origins to emigrant Scottish clerics, as the mother church of this brand of reformed Christianity.
With a few exceptions, such as the United Church of Canada, most Presbyterian churches officially regard gays as sinners who need re-education. A vote for tolerance by the Kirk’s general assembly could start to change that view.
But politics, rather than high theology, produced this week’s decision. Church higher-ups were anxious to avoid discussing a demand launched by a presbytery in the Highlands, where biblical injunctions against sodomy tend to be taken literally, that all non-heterosexuals be banned from the ministry.
And the outcome has greatly displeased the Church of Scotland’s sizeable evangelical and traditionalist wing, whose ministers have resorted not to the Bible but to Mammon in carrying on their battle against the liberals.
They are threatening to withhold their congregations’ collections from the church’s central funds, claiming to have given a big slice of the £42m that the church’s 472,000 members contributed in 2008.
They sound most unlikely to be pacified if the commission comes up with a clever theological way of admitting gays to the Kirk’s ministry.
That would be unfortunate.
Many historians argue that the rise of Protestantism and its questioning of centrally imposed orthodoxies paved the way for the Scottish Enlightenment and thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith.
A different history now looks likely to repeat itself: more division in a church whose past is dominated by secession.
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Source (Economist)
SV (ED)