Theater: Presbyterians on Marriage

"The one flesh unity of male and female is a gift from God, who is concerned with this union which has a significance of its own," said the report on Responsible Marriage and Parenthood adopted last week by the 174th General Assembly of the 3,250,000-member United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., meeting in Denver. Deploring "euphemism" and "prudishness," the report made the assumption that the church cannot maintain its "embarrassed silence" of the past because Protestant men and women today need clear stands on sex—as was shown, for example, by the violent pros and cons Vassar President Sarah Blanding provoked a fortnight ago when she called premarital sex dishonorable and offensive.

The report, product of a two-year study by a committee of gynecologists and theologians, thereupon took some clear stands.

Artificial insemination won acceptance in the most positive approval yet by a major Protestant group. The report approved sperm donation both by husbands and by anonymous males, but suggested that physicians should be convinced of the "intelligence and emotional stability" of couples before recommending this "radical social procedure." The assembly also urged Presbyterians to work for uniform state laws that would protect the rights of test-tube babies. Its conclusion: "To discover in artificial insemination by an anonymous donor an act of adultery is certainly to give the word a meaning that it does not have in the New Testament." Upholding the right of married couples to practice birth control, the report condemned state laws prohibiting the sale of contraceptives to married persons. Nonetheless it warned against the tendency to regard the sex relationship as a "mechanism" unconnected with personal responsibility, and deplored the increase in early marriages often followed by early divorces. The committee urged the Presbyterian Board of Christian Education to start a sex-teaching program for young churchgoers.

Skirting gingerly the question of possible heresy, the assembly ruled that the Synod of New Jersey had exceeded its judicial authority in barring Dr. John Hick from membership in the Presbytery of New Brunswick. A professor of Christian philosophy at Princeton Theological Seminary, Hick was voted into membership of the presbytery last year; the synod rejected the election action because Hick had refused to affirm his belief in the virgin birth of Christ. The assembly decided that the synod had erred procedurely in questioning a presbytery's right to choose its own members.