“His reasoning: “The action of the 2014 General Assembly to permit same-sex marriages by ministers of the PCUSA and to redefine marriage as a covenantal relationship between ‘two people’ rather than between a man and a woman places the PCUSA in irreconcilable conflict with both Scripture and its confessional tradition. As a consequence of this action, I can no longer endorse or be governed by the polity of the PCUSA.”

Rev. Dr. James R. Edwards, a professor at Whitworth University in Washington, has sent a letter to his presbytery stating that because he “must obey God rather than man,” he must demit his ordination as a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

His reasoning: “The action of the 2014 General Assembly to permit same-sex marriages by ministers of the PCUSA and to redefine marriage as a covenantal relationship between ‘two people’ rather than between a man and a woman places the PCUSA in irreconcilable conflict with both Scripture and its confessional tradition. As a consequence of this action, I can no longer endorse or be governed by the polity of the PCUSA.”

Edwards sent his letter to the Presbytery of the Inland Northwest less than two weeks after the PCUSA’s 221st General Assembly approved both an Authoritative Interpretation of the constitution and an amendment of it which resulted in allowing PCUSA pastors to perform same-sex marriages in states where it is legal.

Edwards is the Bruner-Welch Chair, Bruner-Welch Professor of Theology at Whitworth. His areas of specialization and expertise are listed as the Old and New Testament; the Gospels and life of Jesus; Biblical Hebrew; Koine Greek; history of early Christianity; Reformation; German church struggle, communist East Germany; the Holocaust. He has written numerous books, commentaries and articles.

In his letter, Edwards wrote, “I know of no doctrine or practice in Christianity that better qualifies for Vincent of Lerins’s famous definition of orthodoxy – that which has been believed and practiced ‘everywhere, always, and by all’ – than the definition of marriage as one man and one woman before God.”

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