Charles Featherstone e-mails to point out that decisions made at a “pastoral” synod can, over time, evolve into doctrinal changes. This is fascinating:

I’m by no means a rigorist — I think too many rigorists have turned people away by failing to be compassionate or empathetic enough (the rules are not a gate or door, follow the rules and join the group; God gathers his people first, and THEN gives the teaching/rules to them, and so being in the community of those called to follow is not conditioned upon adhering to the rules; this is what makes the rules a gift, blessing, and struggle) — I do know there can be awful consequences to even compassionate pastoral theology.

After the first Dutch settlers arrived in the Cape Province in what would eventually become South Africa, they brought their fairly stern and rigorous Calvinism with them. But like a lot of European settlers living in frontier colonies, the institutional church didn’t quickly follow as as faith did. The Dutch East India Company had a hard time recruiting pastors to work in the Cape, and the few they could rode long and difficult circuits. Reformed worshipers then focused on their Bibles and their hymnals, because communion and baptism — the sacraments — were the sole responsibility of ordained clergy.

It might be years between visits to a particular congregation by an ordained pastor. Years between opportunities for baptism. What to do, how to minister, to families when newborns and young children died before being baptized? Early post-reformation Calvinism tended to focus on reception of sacraments as the sign of election. But if a child died before baptism, what of its fate? Its election? So, the church in the Cape slowly began to devise a notion of “double election” or “partial election,” in which one sign of being elected by God was birth into a family of those already elected (it would eventually be replaced by baptism when that was administered). It was a pastoral answer to intensely felt grief, designed to calm and to comfort, to provide care and assurance of the blessing of God at a time of deeply felt loss.

And yet, it was a pastoral practice that would soon evolve into a doctrine, especially as those Dutch settlers found themselves living side-by-side with Africans. To be born a child of white settlers became itself a sign of one’s election, an election that eventually even baptized Africans could not claim. What began as a pastoral practice in the late 1600s and early 1700s became full-fledged white supremacy in the 19th century (and, actually, Boer supremacy, thanks largely to the suffering the British inflicted upon the Afrikaaners in the Boer War) and, eventually, apartheid.

I’m not saying the pastoral practice of including homosexuals, of blessing their relationships, will become something akin to apartheid. Most pastoral practices, even those with dubious doctrinal or theological standing, don’t evolve into monstrous doctrines. But some do. And we won’t know the consequences of these changes — being wrought throughout most of Western Christendom at this point — for decades, or even centuries, to come.