Word: creed
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After nine years of debate, study and revision, the United Presbyterian Church last week approved the "Confession of 1967"-the first new Presbyterian creed in 320 years. By a 4-to-l margin, the 829 delegates to the 179th General Assembly in Portland, Ore., voted to accept the Confession, a 4,500-word document that commits the church, in the name of Christ, to labor for such causes as world peace and the elimination of poverty and injustice, and describes the Bible as simply the "witness without parallel" to God's word rather than his inerrant utterance...
...creed passed after a lively two-hour debate at which four presbyteries challenged the constitutionality of the Confession, unsuccessfully arguing that the Confession illegally eliminated the archaic, little-used Larger Catechism of 1648 from church doctrine. Still an other dispute arose over the creed's statement that the church is bound to work for peace "even at risk to national security." The Rev. Edward L. R. Elson of the Washington, D.C., presbytery proposed that the "unnecessarily provocative" passage should be expunged, since it might create security clearance problems for church members in Government service; though Elson...
...unequivocal terms, the traditional Apostles' Creed sums up one of the central mysteries of Christianity: God's promise of eternal paradise or perdition beyond the grave. Millions of Christians recite the Creed as an affirmation of their faith. Yet many theologians are now attempting to redefine heaven and hell in this-worldly terms-not as places where humans somehow survive after death, but as states of mind and modes of being that begin here on earth. As they see it, the world itself is the supreme opportunity for man's fulfillment and salvation, and the afterlife...
...denomination's long-standing restriction on remarriage of the guilty party in divorce, decided to permit Lutheran pastors to remarry any divorced person who showed repentance. Marriage is a "lifelong, indissoluble union," declared the delegates, "but God in his love does accept the sinner." The Methodist Social Creed was similarly revised to allow a minister to perform a marriage when the divorced person "is sufficiently aware of the factors leading to the failure of the previous marriage" and "sincerely preparing to make the proposed marriage truly Christian...
...subject of birth control, the Methodists' 1944 creed is totally silent, while that of 1964 declares that "planned parenthood, practiced in Christian conscience, fulfills the will of God." Before World War I, the U.S. Episcopalians, like the Anglicans, still called birth control "demoralizing." In October 1966, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church declared that "we affirm and support programs of population control." Even the Roman Catholic Church, until recently a staunch battler against liberalized birth control and divorce laws wherever they turned up, has begun to soft-pedal its opposition. Last year such liberalized laws have been...