 Confessing Church of Germany provides lessons for PCUSA today By John H. Adams The Layman Online Friday, May 18, 2001
Dr. Ulrich Mauser, who was raised in Germany, lived there for 33 years and recently retired from the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary, addresses those issues in a 16-page assessment in Theology Matters, a publication of Presbyterians for Faith, Family and Ministry. He concludes that "homosexuality and same-sex unions cannot be reconciled to the will and work of God the creator" – just as German's Confessing Church, through the Theological Declaration of Barmen in 1934, rejected the cultural principles adopted by the state-sanctioned church of the Third Reich. Response to heretical teachings Contrary to some opinion, the Theological Declaration of Barmen was not essentially a polemic against the government under Adolf Hitler, but was a response to German Christians whose accommodation to culture and "heretical teaching" distorted their commitment to Christ, Scripture and their own confessions. "Barmen is, at one and the same time, the promulgation of a miracle discovering a new unity and the announcement of a separation on principle from heretical teaching," Mauser wrote. "In its original intention, Barmen called for vigilance in a struggle involving opposing movements within one church." Mauser said Barmen is carefully framed: first with a statement of Scripture, second with a positive, doctrinal statement and third with a corresponding rejection. "The scriptural phrase is the voice that wants to be heard before all else," Mauser said. "It is not a printed relic from an ancient period of history, but a living voice which affirms truth that, outside of this voice, would remain unknown and unknowable. The doctrinal sentences of position and rejection are echoes to the voice of Scripture sounded by those who receive that voice." A different Jesus Mauser said Jesus Christ was included in the language of the German Christians, but it was not the Christ of the Bible. "He had become a figment of nationalistic dreams and desires that imposed on him the clothing of a hero" – not the Jesus Christ, as Barmen declared, whose "lordship is universal, all inclusive and incomparable." Mauser summarized the second thesis of Barmen: "As Jesus Christ is God's assurance of the forgiveness of all our sins, so in the same way and with the same seriousness is he also God's mighty claim on our whole life." He applied that to today's debate in the Presbyterian Church (USA). "Nothing can be taken away from the height and the depth of Jesus' estimation that sees in the union of male and female the original, creational will of God that must not be set aside by provisions of law that are engendered by the hardening of the human hearts," Mauser said. "Placed in the light of that vision, homosexuality and same-sex unions cannot be reconciled to the will and work of God the creator. "Sexual unions that disregard the most fundamental difference in the physical structure of male and female cannot be considered forms of obedience to the claims of the one Word of God." Today's false teaching Mauser quotes representatives of the Covenant Network of Presbyterians: "'Homosexual acts are morally equivalent to heterosexual ones. In some circumstances, both may be deeply sinful. Under other conditions, both may be used in God's service. Gay and lesbian people are natural. They are made this way by God's providence.'" Mauser disagrees. "The care of homosexual people in the church is a mandate inherent in the Gospel," he said. "But the thesis must be denied that homosexual practice and same-sex unions are an equivalent to heterosexual marriages, morally or otherwise. Advocacy of that thesis is false teaching." |
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