I’ve been spending a lot of time lately studying Robert’s Rules of Order. It is necessary for my work as Moderator of our Presbytery, and I will admit the material is interesting… to a point. The various rules for order, debate, and conduct of a meeting are grounded in principles of reason and fairness, consistent with the Bible’s own concern for the rights of the majority, minority, and each member of an assembly. I have no desire to become an expert parliamentarian, but insofar as this study is helpful in my service as a presbyter, I am happy to add such knowledge to my skill set. At the same time, I cannot help but regret, just a little bit, how many other books I could have been reading while studying the rules for deliberative assemblies.
One thing that is fascinating about Robert’s Rules is their generally objective nature. I’ve attended Presbytery and General Assembly long enough to have seen debate and disagreement over how to interpret a specific rule, but in most cases the order to be followed is straightforward and admitted by all, even when it leads to an outcome that a minority of the assembly may disapprove. The book says what it says, and once the citations are examined, all sides will submit to it most of the time.
It occurred to me recently how very different this is from how we approach Scripture. Now, let me quickly acknowledge that part of the reason is that the Bible is not written like Robert’s Rules, with explicit prescriptions and indexed rules outlining almost every possible scenario a deliberative body may face. The Bible is God’s self-revelation in the form of story, poetry, prophecy, preaching, epistles, and law, yet even the law portions are not exactly like Robert’s Rules. The various genres in which Scripture is written allows the kind of interpretive anarchy that is all too common in Christian circles.
At the same time, it seems to me that we often are a bit more honest in our interpretation of Robert’s Rules than we are about the Bible. There are some things in the Scripture that are debatable or unclear, but there is a great deal that is far more straightforward than we might care to admit. Christians might quibble over the proper mode of baptism or even over its proper subjects, but there really is no grounds for saying that the Bible’s prohibition on women preachers (2Tim. 2:11-12; 1Cor. 14:34-35) is at all unclear or means something other than what it seems to so clearly say. I realize some Baptists may immediately insist the Bible’s teaching requiring immersion and precluding the baptism of pre-verbal children is just as clear, but I hope most of us can admit there is a very real difference between those questions of interpretation regarding application and the plain teaching of Scripture on matters like gender roles. Bible believing Christians may disagree on a host of things, but matters like the historicity of biblical miracles, the resurrection of Christ, the inspiration and authority of Scripture, biblical ethics regarding sexuality, the creation and existence of man and woman in two distinct and unalterable sexes, these kinds of issues are so plain in the Bible that no one who professes to be a Christian and yet dissents from the teaching of Scripture on these matters should be taken seriously.
If we are to believe the Bible, we cannot imagine that we are permitted to pick and choose what parts we will believe. Either it is all the word of God, inspired, infallible, and authoritative, or we cannot have confidence that any of it is. A female pastor is an oxymoron, the same as a same sex marriage or a transgender person. If we believe Jesus died and rose again, then we are obligated to say, “Yes, and amen” to everything in the Bible, all of it, no matter how out-dated or politically incorrect or personally inconvenient it may seem.
Tomorrow we will gather for worship, and when the Bible is read we will say, “Thanks be to God!” But we will not only say it; we will mean it. Because the Bible is the word of God, written down and preserved for our edification and instruction, and we are committed to treating it with reverence and seriousness. We will not merely be presbyterians interested in carefully following Robert’s Rules. We will be children of God, servants of Christ, those led by the Spirit, and so we will receive Yahweh’s Revelation with reverence and joy, following it more diligently, carefully, and cheerfully than any rules given to us by men. --JME
