Dear Friend,
I am sending you a piece that my college friend Chris Elwood and I wrote on the matter of the Heidelberg Catechism and homosexuality. We have tried to present the facts clearly with only the essential references. We have, in addition, a good deal of material with exact quotations, from the German, Latin, Dutch and English versions. If you would like to see any of this material, please request it from one of us. You are free to circulate this letter to as wide a network as you would like. A copy of the letter has gone to the office of the Stated Clerk of the denomination, and we have requested publication in Monday Morning. At the moment we are contacting folk in different presbyteries across the country, including Stated Clerks and Exec. Presbyters.
We would love to hear from you, of course. So, send us your reactions and comments.
Best wishes,
Johanna W.H.v.W.Bos
(Chris Elwood's E mail: Christopher_Elwood.parti@ecunet.org
Much of the debate in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) concerning homosexuality and ordination has focused on the interpretation of certain scriptural passages. Lately, elements in our confessional heritage have also been brought into the conversation. A correspondent in Monday Morning of April 22, 1996, for example, argued that the Presbyterian church should cling more closely to the confessions in barring homosexual persons from ordination. Most recently, the 208th General Assembly has drawn attention to the confessions in a proposed amendment to the Book of Order by calling for repentance of practices "which the confessions call sin."
Do the confessions speak unequivocally about homosexuality? A quick check of the index of The Book of Confessions turns up the following entry: "Homosexual perversion, and salvation, 4.087." the reference is to question 87 of the Heidelberg Catechism, which in the 1994 edition of The Book of Confessions reads as follows:
Question: Can those who do not turn to God from their ungrateful, impenitent life be saved:
Answer: Certainly not! Scripture says, "Surely you know that the unjust will never come into possession of the kingdom of God. Make no mistake: no fornicator, or idolater, none who are guilty either of adultery or of homosexual perversion, no thieves or grabbers or drunkards or slanderers or swindlers, will possess the kingdom of God."
Although there is no other place in the confessions one might point to for such an explicit treatment of the subject of homosexuality, this passage speaks plainly enough.
Yet, a discerning reader may ask: Does the Heidelberg Catechism, a document composed and first published in 1563, really say that? The very mention of "homosexual perversion" raises a red flag. "Homosexual" is a term that originated late in the nineteenth century and did not come into widespread use in European languages until the twentieth century. It sounds out of place in a sixteenth-century text. But then, perhaps the Catechism uses other terms for the same category of Behavior?
In fact, the original editions of the Heidelberg Catechism of 1573 make no mention of homosexual perversion or of same-sex relations in any terms. Neither do any subsequent German editions, including the critical edition edited by Wilhelm Niesel in 1938. The Latin edition of 1563 is similarly silent on the question of homosexuality. If one examines the many English translations of the Heidelberg Catechism made since the sixteenth century, all but one omit any reference to homosexuality. that single translation was prepared in 1962 as a 400th anniversary edition by Allen O. Miller and M. Eugene Osterhaven. It is the latter edition that the Presbyterian churches adopted and incorporated into the Book of Confessions.
How does the Heidelberg Catechism version of question and answer 87 read? A common English translation of the original German is as follows:
Can those who do not turn to God from their ungrateful, impenitent life be saved? By no means; for, as the Scripture says, no unchaste person, idolater, adulterer, thief, covetous man, drunkard, slanderer, robber, or any such like, shall inherit the kingdom of God.
The list of sinners as presented in the Heidelberg lacks quotations marks and is considerably shorter than the one found in the Book of Confessions. It omits any version of what Miller and Osterhaven render as "Surely you know that the unjust will never come into possession of the kingdom of God," as well as the phrase, "Make no mistake," which introduces the list of those excluded from God's kingdom. Finally, there is no mention of those "who are guilty of homosexual perversion." There is no counterpart for any of these readings in the original text.
Whence did the differences arise? Though the words "Surely you know that the unjust," etc., do not appear in the Heidelberg Catechism, they do appear in The New English Bible translation of 1 Cor. 6:9-10. In fact, this translation, first published in 1961, just when Miller and Osterhaven were working on their version of the Heidelberg, conforms exactly to what they supplied within the quotation marks. The list of sinners given in their translation is not taken from the original text of the Heidelberg or any subsequent edition of the Heidelberg Catechism. The rest of the answer is supplied not by the Heidelberg but by The New English Bible of 1961. While this translation refers to "homosexual perversion" in 1 Cor. 6:10, the Heidelberg Catechism refers nowhere to anything of the kind.
Because of this substitution, readers of the Book of Confessions might be forgiven for assuming that the Reformed confessions speak definitively on the question of same-sex relations, equating "homosexual practice" with sin. To the extent that interpretations of homosexuality and the life of the church are informed by a misreading of the confessions, they can certainly be corrected. For this reason, as the presbyteries take up the issue of sexuality and ordination and seek to be guided in their deliberations by Scripture and the confessions, it seems to us to be critically important that we are clear on what the confessions do and do not say about homosexuality and sin.