Tom Oden, writing in his book Requiem way back in 1995, explains how it happens.
The first step is always a study committee.
If the first study committee comes back with a traditional reading of the text, or if the legislative body dismisses the committee’s progressive interpretation, you can always assign another study committee amidst outcries that the recalcitrant conservatives suffer from “homophobia and reactionary stupidity” (153).
And if the traditional view cannot be overturned right away, try dismissing the whole controversy by telling people (with no small amount of chronological snobbery) that saner Christians understand this is nothing worth fighting over.
The next step is admonish “the people of God to wait for a firm ‘scientific consensus'” on the matter (154).
Then some leading lights in the denomination can offer new exegetical avenues for avoiding the traditional understanding of familiar texts. Three evasions in particular are quite popular.
If all else fails, the final step is to announce triumphantly and with a terrific celebration of grace that “Christ is, in an amoral fashion, the end of the law” and charge others with legalism if they don’t share in your antinomianism (156).
Sadly, Oden’s warning has been prescient. With a lesbian minister installed in an RCA classis in New Jersey, more than twenty open and affirming congregations, a prominent professor at our more conservative seminary publishing a new revisionist book on homosexuality, and a number of overtures heading to Synod asking for new study committees, we in the RCA find ourselves in the middle of so much that Oden lamented.
