Am I A Bad Presbyterian?

Predestination

Predestination must be understood only against a God who is eternally in the “present.” Words like “knowledge”, “choice”, and “will” are all contingent on a function of time. In God there is no “time.” Before we are born, the relationship between the world and God has been eternally reconciled in Christ. It is in this grace that all people are born. All people are therefore capable of making a choice to enter into union with God through the reconciling act that Christ has already enacted in eternity. The presence of the Holy Spirit everywhere bears witness to this reconciliation drawing everything into union with God. But people still have to choose that union.

Marriage

The church needs to get out of the business of ratifying marriage licenses for the state. It also has to get beyond the link between the penis and the vagina as a basis for marriage. Clearly marriage is not the same as it once was where women were property. This is a good thing. Nor is marriage for the purpose of pro-creation alone. But, as the inter-penetration of the hypostases of the Trinity in a bond of love reveal, human beings are created to find a bond of love with others. To deny that bond of love based on anatomy alone not only misses the point of marital union theologically, it also places far to much cultural currency on the taboo of same gender relationships.

If God is love and God has no gender (but for symbolic gender), then it is only theologically responsible to confer that same bond of love to human beings regardless of gender and regardless of sex positions in which a couple may engage. What is required is a self-limitation of those in a bond of union no matter how conceived where egoistic ambition takes a back seat to the discipline of loving each other.

So there you have it. I remember none of this in the Book of Order. I haven’t even discussed baptism and communion which I think are more symbolic as social rituals to nourish our belief and remember these and other facets of our theology.

So I am a bad Presbyterian. Are you?

Andrew Tatusko is an academic administrator and grant activity director at Mount Aloysius College in Cresson, PA. He also earned the M.Div. and Th.M. degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary where he also was awarded the Fellowship in Practical Theology.  This blog originally appeared at his blog, Notes from Off Center and is reprinted with permission.