The clear teaching of Scripture or thinking for ourselves?

At the height of Christian Reformed Church’s (CRC) women in church office controversy in the 1990s, Dr. Neal Plantinga weighed in on a contentious question at the time. In “Ordination of Women and of Gays: Are They on a Par?” (Calvin Seminary Forum, Spring 1994), he answered with a definite “No.” Nobody at Synod “warns us that if we ordain women, then the next step will be to ordain thieves.” While Scripture calls homosexual practice an abomination (Lev. 18:22), he says, “lots of other things are abominations in Scripture too – including, in Proverbs 6:16-19 – lying and stirring up dissension among fellow believers. […] The Bible . . . bristles with warnings against sinful anger”; yet where are the warnings that ordaining women will lead to ordaining “unrepentant hot heads”?

The following Spring, in response to a colleague’s criticisms, Plantinga wrote in the same publication, “The sad fact is that people often misuse good movements or try to attach unhealthy riders to healthy proposals. […] Should Christians in the ‘60s have warned that civil rights for blacks would open the way for women and gays . . . and that Jim Crow therefore had to stay? […] Of course not. We must pick and choose among movements, and inside them, to find ‘whatever is true and honorable and just.’ That’s what the Holy Spirit’s gift of discernment is for.”

However, those now defending gay marriage have not endorsed his argument. Rather they are employing the same hermeneutic used for ordaining women as for gay persons living in covenanted, monogamous relationships. In short, that hermeneutic sees certain biblical texts as culturally bound in their entirety.

Confession or church order?

In a response paper available at socialtheory.com, noted philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff rejects the assertion of the CRC’s 2019 Human Sexuality Report (HSR) that “Scripture teaches in a clear, consistent and compelling way that homosexual acts of any kind are sinful” (112). According to Wolterstorff, “biblical writers, when condemning same-sex activity, were condemning specific forms of such activity, not such activity in general. Romans 1 clearly has in mind homosexual acts as part and parcel of the orgiastic, licentious lifestyle of idol-worshipping pagans. . . . It is untenable . . . to interpret Paul, in Romans, as condemning all same-sex behavior. . . . [W]e cannot just quote Bible verses that condemn same-sex behavior as if the writers knew and understood it. We have to think for ourselves as the church has done throughout the centuries on, for example, the fact that the Bible implicitly condones slavery.”

More recently, in the Reformed Journal (July 17, 2023), Dr. Wolterstorff wrote a response to Synod 2023’s endorsement of the previous synod’s finding that homosexual sex, including that of committed monogamous same sex married couples, is covered by the reference to “unchastity” in Heidenberg Catechism’s Q & A 108 and 109. He says that this finding makes him out to be either a knave or a fool, and even a heretic. This is because “slowly I have come to the conviction that love and justice, in the context of responsible biblical interpretation, requires that the church extend the offer of marriage to couples who find themselves with a same-sex orientation.”

Wolterstorff bemoans that “around 20 years ago, the CRC changed dramatically in the character of its decisions, in how it arrives at those decisions, and in how it deals with ongoing disagreements,” and so it became “no longer the church in which I was reared and educated.” Indeed, “it is impossible to overlook the similarity of the tactics of the conservatives in the CRC to the tactics of the Trump wing of the Republican party.”

A respondent suggested that it is not the CRC as a whole but Wolterstorff and several other prominent “progressives” that have changed, citing his acknowledged slow change of opinion on this issue. It might, however, be argued that Wolterstorff and others are following a trajectory that goes back to at least the CRC’s 1972 “Report 44: The Nature and Extent of Biblical Authority,” which limited the infallibility and abiding authority of Scripture to its redemptive message leading up to and centering on the person and work of Christ, thus encouraging toleration of exegetical and theological differences that do not conflict with the church’s basic confession(s). This seems reasonable enough as it applies to what are universally regarded as secondary issues, but it raises the question of what such issues truly are. The confessions written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries say nothing about the ordination of women or gay marriage. Does this make them necessarily secondary issues, or is this a way of elevating historically recognized confessions above “the clear teaching of Scripture”? The case has been frequently made, for instance, that the ordination of women is not a confessional issue but a church order one. Does the same now apply to committed same-sex relationships?

Scripture and society

Wolterstorff concedes that those in the denomination opposed to gay marriage are indeed defending “one component” of the Christan church’s tradition. “But there is another, more fundamental, component of the tradition that they are repudiating: the tradition of reform.” Examples of such reform include the church’s rejection of slavery in the 19th century and the CRC’s decision on women’s ordination.

The difficulty with this argument is that on both the issues of slavery and of women’s ministry there are apparently conflicting Scriptures in need of reconciliation. Thus, Plantinga claimed, “The main CRC arguments for women’s ordination depend on Reformed hermeneutical principles of great weight and authority – the analogy of Scripture, for example, as proposed by Louis Berkhof. These principles will not work for the ordination of gays because there isn’t any positive biblical case for that cause.” When Synod 1994 determined that the clear teaching of Scripture forbade women from holding office in the church, there was considerable pushback, resulting in the following year’s synod “recognizing that there are two different perspectives and convictions on this issue, both of which honor the Scriptures as the infallible Word of God. . .” (See “Women in Ecclesiastical Office” at crcna.org). Although there was pushback when the HSR made a similar statement about “homosexual acts of all kinds” (see quote above), it did not have a similar result.

Granted, the current debate is about gay marriage, not ordination, but it seems the logic of Plantinga’s argument still applies for what appears to be at present a sizeable majority of office-bearers in the CRC. In saying this, I am not making any judgment on how Dr. Plantinga might feel about the way the last two synods dealt with the issue of confessional status. I simply point out that the majority decision reflects the conviction that, unlike with slavery and women’s ordination, there is no positive biblical teaching to fall back on, other than what may be inferred from extra-biblical socio-cultural analysis coupled with a corresponding understanding of what biblical love and justice look like. This appears at present to be a bridge too far, even for many moderates who were prepared, a few decades ago, to accept the argument for women’s ordination. Whether or not that continues to be the case in years to come remains to be seen.

Author’s note: This article developed in conversation with CC‘s Board Chair, Jim Dekker.