“It really comes down to that. Is it Sola Scriptura or Nolo Scriptura? If Sola Scriptura, then the judicial process must uphold what Scripture teaches and judicial commissions must be willing to apply it in real-life cases. If Nolo Scriptura, then so much of what makes us Presbyterians becomes meaningless: church discipline, our ordination vows, the Book of Confessions as arbiter of what the Scriptures teach, seminary education”

The question of whether or not a West Coast presbytery erred in approving the ordination an openly gay woman will once again be the focus of the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s highest court later this month.

The PCUSA’s General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission (GAPJC) will hear what will likely be the final decision in the case of Parnell (et. al.) v. Presbytery of San Francisco on April 27 in Louisville.

The “ultimate remedy” or outcome of the hearing, said Mary Naegeli, lead attorney for the complainants, would be for the GAPJC to “instruct the presbytery to remove its approval of the ordination.” She said the issue is whether or not the “Scriptures are compelling enough to order our life together.”

She called the 2011 judicial decision “un-Presbyterian,” and filed an appeal in October after the case had been thrown out by the Synod of the Pacific’s Permanent Judicial Commission (SPJC) in September.

The SPJC said the presbytery ruled correctly after it approved the ordination of ministerial candidate Lisa Larges in 2009. The commission ruled in favor of the presbytery in two remaining claims of error after the GAPJC had earlier ruled in the presbytery’s favor in nine of 11 other points.

Before the 2011 passage of Amendment 10A deleted them, ordination standards in the PCUSA Book of Order required ordained ministers to live in chastity in singleness or fidelity in marriage, effectively banning those in homosexual relationships to be ordained.

Larges filed a statement of departure, stating the denomination’s chastity-fidelity clause was a non-essential after seeking ordination in 2004.

The departure concept stems from a report released by the PCUSA’s Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity (PUP) and adopted by the General Assembly in 2006. PUP allows candidates to declare they will not obey ordination standards they deem to be non-essential.

Following the initial filing of the Parnell complaint in 2009, the case eventually made its way to the GAPJC in 2011.

In that ruling, the GAPJC charged the synod commission with determining whether or not the presbytery’s actions violated either Scriptural or confessional standards.

The SPJC ruled in September that the presbytery could choose which interpretation of Scripture to use in determining how to decide upon Larges’ qualifications for ordination.

Read More

[Editor’s note: Some of the original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid, so the links have been removed.]