Revisiting the Essential Tenets and Reformed Distinctives
November 21, 2005
If you’re Presbyterian, you may have heard about San Diego Presbytery’s “Essential Tenets and Reformed Distinctives” document. You can download it here. I blogged about it over a year and a half ago here. It’s something that is coming up more and more, and it’s interesting to see other Presbyteries pick up this document, and start to use it as a “gatekeeping” device, basically a ‘theological check-list’ that those coming under the care of that Presbytery will have to be able to check-off. I know that my Presbytery in Idaho has looked into using this document, and I recently saw another southern California Presbytery who basically just took the text of this document, and now are passing it around as their own Presbytery document. Which, from what I understand, is basically what San Diego would love to start happening in Presbyteries around the US.
I’m going to be looking at this in the next few weeks and trying to think more about these “essential tenets” and what a document like this means for those of us who are in the ordination process. PTS seminary professor (PCUSA-ordained) recently mentioned how opposed they were to this document, primarily because it is one Presbytery attempting to assert their confession over the PCUSA’s Book of Confession. What do you think of that statement?
Tags: Ordination, PC(USA), Presbyterian
Posted in 
Adam Walker Cleaveland: 
November 21st, 2005 at 9:37 am
I found the San Diego document helpful when writing my own statement of faith as well as when I was preparing for ords. So for those two purposes, I think its good. As for a list of the “Essential Tenets” for us as a checklist for candidates, I think its a disasterous idea and a misappropriation of our confessional heritage. In my view Confessions are not timeless documents, they are written in a specific historical time and setting. They are incredibly valuable and we should be “guided by our confessions” but it is not 1646 anymore, of even 1967. We are called to “Confess the Faith Today” with guidance from the confessions of the past. They are our “historical trajectory” as Grenz/Franke put it. Hence, to cut individual articles out and say “this is an essential tenet” is bogus in my opinion.
Two of the most respected profs here at the “other PTS” have voiced opposition to any list of essential tenets. In the words of Andrew Purves, “There is but one essential tenet and he is Jesus Christ - and he is not reducible to a check list composed in our langauge”.
If Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life then a uniform “objective” standard cannot be used to test canidates. Things such as the San Diego document may prove helpful in that process, but it should not serve as the standard to which candidates are held.
November 21st, 2005 at 10:45 am
Ditto what Brian said.
For what it’s worth, the report of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church speaks out pretty clearly against this sort of thing. Its proposed authoritative interpretation of G-6.0108 makes it clear that the conscience is bound not to a document but rather to the discernment of the ordaining/installing body. It’s a polity way of achieving what seems to elude us in other ways.
November 21st, 2005 at 12:08 pm
No Creed but Christ…bro!
November 21st, 2005 at 2:57 pm
Brian Wallace speaks very clearly to the issue–the value and danger of such documents.
What the San Diego presbytery folks demonstrate is a lack of understanding of our own history. Our current construction of requiring acceptance of “essential tenets” while allowing each presbytery to decide for itself what is essential emerged from the Presbyterian solution to the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy in 1925. Rejecting the establishment of “five fundamentals,” the church instead pointed to its own confession (then Westminster, today the whole book) and said that presbyteries, on a case-by-case basis, must do the hard work of determining whether each person’s beliefs (which, in every case, are almost certainly going to be in tension if not outright conflict with *something* contained therein) are acceptable. Seem inconsistent? It is! And no one said discerning vocation was neat and tidy or easy.
San Diego protests that this document is only for them–this is their listing of essentials, simply declared in advance so that candidates know what to expect. Baloney. It is, as Adam asks and Andrew Purves apparently said, a new confession–an uber-confession that they have placed above the ones they vowed to be guided by. To me, much like the Confessing Church movements three stipulations, it is in itself a schismatic act, a declaration that they are not part of the rest of us–they do not trust others to exercise the case-by-case discernment that the drafters of such a document seem to think they alone are capable of. Such individualistic lack of trust threatens an already fragile unity in our denomination in an all-too familiar way.
(By the way, if I were a member of San Diego Presbytery, I would have considered filing a remedial case through the church judicial process to see the policy struck down, which I’m almost sure it would have been. It would have stood as a study document for people to use as they chose, and that’s what it should have been in the first place.)