Gay preacher speaks of an ‘unfamiliar Jesus’
Volume 41, Number 5, The Layman, October 14, 2008
Don Stroud of Baltimore is one of a number of Presbyterian Church (USA) ministers who have beaten the system. He became ordained and remains ordained, with a call approved by the Baltimore Presbytery, despite being an unrepentant, publicly outspoken, practicing homosexual.
He is on the staff of That All May Freely Serve, an organization that has worked for years to secure ordination “rights” for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender Presbyterians. His office is down the hall from the Presbytery of Baltimore, and presbytery leaders have been among his key backers. The cozy good-neighbor policy once resulted in Baltimore Presbytery, despite the evidence, determining that Mr. Stroud should not be brought to trial in a church court even though he violates the constitution and counsels others to do the same.
Recently, Mr. Stroud wrote an assessment of the 218th General Assembly for the Witherspoon Society, an organization that unworthily appropriates the good name of a great Presbyterian. But that’s another story.
Part of what Mr. Stroud said in his assessment reflects the theological attitude that deeply troubles people who take seriously the Reformed heritage. Describing the “fidelity in marriage and chastity in singleness” ordination requirement as “aberrant language,” Stroud says the constitutional standard includes concepts that are “foreign to Reformed understanding.”
Those concepts are the call for “obedience to Scripture” and “conformity to the confessions.” In other words, one is mis-Reformed if he or she is obedient to Scripture and seeks to be spiritually and intellectually informed and conformed by the historic doctrines of the church. But, Stroud objects, such language “has the effect of limiting Christ’s freedom to call and use his servants as he would choose.”
Whoa! In a few words, Stroud has mired himself in antinomianism and conjectured a Jesus with whom the Scriptures are unfamiliar. Nothing can limit Christ’s freedom.
He is God, and has been from before the beginning and will be after the finish – forevermore! He never lies and never acts contrary to his perfect will.
The Reformed heritage – albeit all of Christianity – draws from Scripture and the witness of the Spirit the reassurance that our Trinitarian God practices neither whimsy nor deceit. Those are the domains of the devil. Furthermore, the God of the Old Testament, fully revealed to his Church in Jesus Christ, doesn’t adjust his moral standards to satisfy the American Psychiatric Association, today’s culture, Don Stroud, or the persistent GLBT lobby.
Obedience to the Bible’s moral standards is not optional. It’s not always easy, which is why, Paul said to the church at Rome, “we received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith.” We cannot obey without the grace and faith that enable us to trust that God is right.
For Stroud and others who believe our obedience to Scripture restrains Jesus from being “free” to cancel his own commandments, there’s a serious danger. They are concluding that the church has the authority to reinterpret Scripture in ways that deny its clear testimony. The Reformed tradition issues a stern warning: “We affirm, therefore, that those who say the Scriptures have no other authority save that which they have received from the Kirk are blasphemous against God and injurious to the true Kirk, which always hears and obeys the voice of her own Spouse and Pastor, but takes not upon her to be mistress over the same” (Scots Confession).
But the Presbyterian Church (USA) cannot blame Stroud alone for his belief that Jesus changes the moral code. That’s exactly what the 218th General Assembly decided when it approved two authoritative interpretations that allow the ordination of people who are sexually active outside of marriage and a fourth referendum on G-6.0106b.
John Calvin had much to say about the church’s ability to define or limit the authority of Scripture. Please note this quote from the Institutes of the Christian Religion:
“Nothing therefore can be more absurd than the fiction that the power of judging Scripture is in the Church, and that on her nod its certainty depends. When the Church receives it, and gives it the stamp of her authority, she does not make that authentic which was otherwise doubtful or controverted but, acknowledging it as the truth of God, she, as in duty bounds shows her reverence by an unhesitating assent” (Institutes, Chapter 6).
Stroud has chosen a different path. He has decided to “unhesitatingly” follow his inner voice and the clamor of culture.