Everyone's talking about gravamina

Beliefs about beliefs about beliefs

One of the major items that will be discussed at Synod 2024 are gravamina, the plural of gravamen, which is a fancy Latin word for:

Basically, a gravamen is a way for an office-bear to register doubt about a doctrinal matter in the confessions.

Gravamina come in two forms:

1. There’s a confessional-difficulty gravamen, in which an office-bearer registers their question.

2. There’s a confessional-revision gravamen, in which an officer-bearer requests a change to the confession or the interpretation of the confession.

Gravamina are about the confessions, but mostly about Q&A 108

Though gravamina are technically about the confessions, in our current moment they’re really about whether it’s okay to take exception to Synod’s declarations about human sexuality. Specifically, Synod declared the word “unchastity” in Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 108 to include homosexual sex. Here’s the full text:

Q. What does the seventh commandment teach us?
A. That God condemns all unchastity,
and that therefore we should thoroughly detest it
and live decent and chaste lives,
within or outside of the holy state of marriage.

If you don’t share this view—that the word “unchastity” includes homosexual sex—then you have a big problem if you’re a pastor, elder, or deacon. That’s because you’ve agreed to the Covenant for Office-bearers in the Christian Reformed Church, which includes this sentence:

We also affirm three confessions—the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort—as historic Reformed expressions of the Christian faith, whose doctrines fully agree with the Word of God. These confessions continue to define the way we understand Scripture, direct the way we live in response to the gospel, and locate us within the larger body of Christ.

Grateful for these expressions of faith, we promise to be formed and governed by them. We heartily believe and will promote and defend their doctrines faithfully, conforming our preaching, teaching, writing, serving, and living to them.

In other words, if you are an office-bearer in the CRC and you do not think or are not sure “unchastity” in Q&A 108 includes homosexual sex, then you, by definition, cannot do what you have agreed to, namely, “heartily believe and will promote and defend their doctrines faithfully.”

If that’s you, then what do you do? Resign?

Confessional-difficulty and Confessional-revision gravamen

Until recently, way around having a problem with the confessions was to file a confessional-difficulty gravamen. The CRC’s website says that:

“A confessional-difficulty gravamen indicates that an office-bearer personally has difficulty with something in the confessions or an interpretation of the confessions and wishes to go on record with his or her church council in that regard…. The confessional difficulty gravamen is a ‘personal request for information and/or clarification of the confession.’”

There are also confessional-revision gravamina:

“A confessional-revision gravamen indicates that an office-bearer has difficulty with something in the confessions or an interpretation of the confessions and believes it should be revised. Such a gravamen would be submitted to the office-bearer’s council and, if adopted, it would go to classis and synod as “an overture to the broader assemblies and therefore it becomes open for discussion in the whole church.”

Usually, gravamina are submitted and resolved quietly, in the form of a conversation between, say, an elder and a pastor about some matter of doctrine. It doesn’t become A Big Thing. That’s because these matters have mostly covered only minor points of doctrine that didn’t interfere with that office-bearers ability to carry out his or her duties.

Though most are resolved quietly, there have been a few well-known cases, too. There’s the 1947 case of D.H. Kromminga, who was a professor at Calvin Seminary and a premillennialist. Then, there’s the case of Harry Boer, who took objection to the doctrine of reprobation in the Canons of Dort, and sent a communication to Synod. This set in motion a series of study committees and votes that resulted in the paradigm we have today. Since then, gravamina have taken the form of unofficial, perpetual disagreement, as in the case of Alvin Plantinga, an elder at South Bend CRC who submitted a gravamen objecting to the Canons of Dort on election and reprobation. (Both Cedric Parsels and Kathy Smith have several fascinate articles on these cases.)

Another common example might be someone whose gifts make them eligible for church office as an elder or deacon, but, for example, they may have come from a tradition that does not hold to infant baptism. In such cases, these elders and deacons are allowed to serve, so long as they promise not to publicly promote ideas that conflict with or teach against the stated positions of the confessions.

Are gravamen for office-bearers to get around Synod 2022’s decision on unchastity?

After Synod 2022 declared the word “unchastity” in Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 108 included homosexual sex, it was now no longer possible to be an office-bearer in the CRC and hold positions that, for example, support full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in the CRC, or even have questions about whether the Bible could condone two people of the same sex entering a committed relationship. This doesn’t mean you actually need to be an inclusive or affirming church, you just need to hold the position. That, alone, puts you in violation of what the confessions teach, according to Synod 2022.

But what about office-bearers who disagree? What about pastors, elders, and deacons who either hold affirming positions, or they’re not quite sure what to think? Well, based on historical precedent and how those precedents are interpreted, the solution is to deal with objections to what the confessions say about human sexuality the same way Kromminga and Boer dealt with their objections to what the confessions said about premillennialism and election. File a confessional-difficulty gravamen, and continue to serve.

There are two problems with this. One, it turns gravamina into a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card that allows office-bearers to continue to serve indefinitely despite having objections to something the confessions say. You can’t “heartly believe” the confessions and then file an indefinite gravamen. And two, a flood of gravamina undermines Synod in a significant way. If Synod declares an interpretation of a confession—which it has the right to do—then there shouldn’t be easy ways to get around this. Synod loses authority and credibility, and that harms the church.

A summary Committee 8’s Majority Report on gravamen

To clear this up, 21 overtures about gravamina were sent to Synod 2023. When Synod 2023 ran out of time, they were forwarded to Synod 2024, along with 9 more overtures, plus the majority and minority reports of Committee 8, which was tasked with trying to make sense of all these Overtures. (Jason Ruis, chair of Committee 8, and Todd Kuperus, reporter for the majority report, give an excellent summary of the material on the Messy Reformation podcast.)

It seems likely that the substance of what the Committee 8A Majority Report recommended to Synod 2023 will be adopted by Synod 2024. Among other things, this committee recommended “that synod amend the Church Order Supplement to clarify the proper use of a CDG and provide a timeline for its process.” Specifically, a confessional-difficulty gravamen would be defined as “a personal request for help in resolving a subscriber’s doubts about a doctrine contained in the confessions” instead of the way it’s been typically used, as “a request for an assembly to tolerate a subscriber’s settled conviction that a doctrine contained in the confessions is wrong.” In other words, Alvin Plantinga’s difficulty with what the Canons of Dort say about election and reprobation would prohibit him from serving as an elder. And current office-bearers who disagree that “unchastity” in Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 108 includes “homosexual sex” would also not be eligible to serve.

And for those currently serving? They must appeal to Synod to change the confessions. Well, not right away. The first appeal goes to council, the next to classis, and the final one to Synod. The entire process could take from 18 to 36 months.

But this is a bit of a catch-22 for anyone who doesn’t or can’t agree with Synod 2022’s decision about Q&A 108 defining “unchastity” to include homosexual sex, because the committee also recommended that those who file a confessional-difficulty gravamina on this matter actually do not have the right to make such an appeal. This is because “synod has already made a judgment regarding the definition of ‘unchastity.’” For these officers, their only option is to resign from office by the end of 2023—though the debacle at the end of Synod 2024 meant this recommendation was never voted on and has been deferred to Synod 2024.

So that’s gravamina. It’ll be a big item at Synod this year and probably for the next few. I doubt there’s a middle ground.

5 problems with the current discussion about gravamina

Here are the five key problems with the direction Synod 2023 almost went and where Synod 2024 will likely go:

1. The discussion of gravamina misunderstands how people acquire beliefs, hold beliefs, and change beliefs.

2. Committee 8 relies too much on historical precedent that is thin at best and ambiguous at worst.

3. The threat of special discipline (office bearers would be suspended and then deposed) for those who file gravamina will promote dishonesty by making it more likely for office-bearers to keep quiet about doubts and questions they may have about the confessions.

4. Assemblies will become self-selecting groups of people who are firm in their convictions, without doubts, and unaccustomed to examining and questioning even their most strongly held beliefs. That’s not bad in itself: there’s nothing inherently wrong with being certain. But being certain tends to correlate with a number of negative traits that make certain kinds of deliberation and decision-making more difficult and lead to worse outcomes for certain kinds of problems.

5. How Synod solves the widespread difficulty with this specific issue will be precedent-setting for how future Synods solve future difficulties with different parts of the confession. I worry we haven’t fully thought through the ways we might be making the future more complicated.

I plan to write about these items in the coming days.

Thanks for reading,

Kent