In the third major address to the Covenant Network gathering in Pittsburgh, on Saturday November 4, Brian Blount, Associate Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, urged his audience to respect the difference between God's living Spirit, which is a constant, and human experience and thought, which are always changing and always rooted in particular contexts.

We humans are "wired for God," he said -- open to the presence and word of God, especially when "God's whisper takes on flesh" in the biblical texts. But the texts are always given in particular situations, and only by understanding those contexts can we discern which biblical words can really live for us today.

Yet our temptation is to settle for simpler messages -- "Do this, don't do that." We want absolutes, clarity, finality. We want, in other words, to reduce the living Word of God to "a last word (which) cannot breathe, it cannot live." And so we turn the Word of God into a literary artifact. Yet nothing that is living is ever "last." He went on to add that "even death is not the last word, because God is a God of the living."

Pointing to the experience of the African-American slave community, Blount cited the experience of Howard Thurman, once dean of the chapel at Howard University and later at Harvard. Thurman tells of reading the Bible to his grandmother, who could neither read nor write. He asked her once why she wouldn't let him read from Paul's letters. It was, she explained, because long ago her master held religious services for his slaves, and often read Paul's words, "Slaves, obey your masters." She had promised a friend that if she ever learned to read, she would never read Paul.

A "last word," commented Blount, would not allow such choices, but a living Word invites such treatment. It is, he implied, not because the words are not true, but because they are not true for particular people in their particular situations.

The writers of the New Testament did the same thing, he added. They read the Psalms on the kingship; of David as pointing to the kingship of Christ -- reading the old words for their new context. And Paul, dealing with divorce in I Corinthians 7:10-15, even goes so far as to go beyond Jesus' own condemnation of divorce to offer a living word of advice that one who is married to a pagan might well need to separate -- divorce!

So today as we deal with homosexuality, he said, we need to acknowledge that there are words in the New Testament that condemn it. But the context shaped those words of Paul, who saw homosexuality, like all sex, as a matter of individual sex acts, chosen by the person, who was driven by dehumanizing lust. And it was the lust that was the real problem. Paul followed the views of his culture, then, seeing sexuality as rooted in lust, and as meant for the sole purpose of procreation.

Yet Paul did break from his culture in some ways, particularly as he challenged the Jewish notion that inclusion among the people of God could come only through adherence to God's law. So he came to his radical countercultural statement in Galatians 3:28, that in Christ all secular categories (slave and free, male and female, Gentile or Jew) have been transcended. Even categories establish by God in creation are now rendered irrelevant; all people are equally included in God's people, and are to be treated equally. "This is Paul's living word," he concluded.

The continuing process of interpreting and re-interpreting the living word is difficult. There's an appealing simplicity about taking every biblical word as "the last word." But Blount quoted a line from the character played by Tom Hanks in "A League of Our Own." When one of his players complained that playing baseball was too hard, he answered her, "It's baseball. It's supposed to be hard. If it weren't hard, then everyone would do it."

It's easy to tell women to sit down and be quiet in church. It's hard to struggle with the living word, seeing it afresh in our own changing situations. But to those who are reluctant to engage in such hard work we should respond that we are not taking away their faith, but inviting them into a living faith.

He concluded, "This is how the first Christians did faith, aggressively using it to interpret, not just recite their traditions. ... Because the biblical words are not the Last Word. They are the Living Word."

GA actions ratified (or not) by  the presbyteries   

A number of the most important actions of the 219^th General Assembly have now been acted upon by the presbyteries, confirming most of them as amendments to the PC(USA) Book of Order.

We provided resources to help inform the reflection and debate, along with updates on the voting.

Our three areas of primary interest have been:

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