As Christians, we follow the Lord Jesus Christ, who, for the joy set before Him, endured the most wanton and senseless violence in order to bring about the most tremendous peace. As soldiers of the Living Christ, let us shine as lights in this dark and decaying world.

To the Church
Dear Christian,
As I write to you this day, my heart is filled with tremendous grief and sadness over the events that have transpired in Nashville, Tennessee. On Monday morning, a mentally ill biological woman, who identified as a transgender male, shot her way inside The Covenant School, a Presbyterian school in East Tennessee, firing indiscriminate rounds at both helpless children and adults before being gunned down by local police officers. In fourteen horrifying minutes, 6 innocent people were brutally killed, including three little ones aged nine and 3 adults in their sixties. One of the children who tragically perished was the daughter of Chad Scruggs, who serves as lead pastor over Covenant Presbyterian Church, the church that founded the school.
During such awful instances of darkness, we must remember we are children of the light. We are living examples of Christ to all who are perishing. How we respond to tragedies like this will say much about how we think, believe, and cherish the Gospel. Thus, as we pray for the victims, let us also pray for the victimizers. As we pray for affected families, let us diligently pray for the shooter’s family. And as we are bombarded with all sorts of opinions on this subject, let us be slow to speak, quick to listen, and ready to pattern our response in accordance with Scripture.
With that, I would like to consider how a Christian is supposed to respond to awful tragedies such as this.
This Memes War
Whether you like it or not, you will be inundated in the coming days with a cacophony of “hot-takes” from trolls on Twitter, rants by activists and personalities on social media, biased coverage by the news, and shots fired from both sides of the Left / Right culture war. You will also see this situation entirely weaponized by gun control activists, the news trying to play up the perpetrator’s victim status, and the trans community crying out for justice and days of vengeance, as we have seen in Virginia. Yesterday and today, instead of seeing an empathetic president consoling a wounded nation or addressing the victims, we saw a depraved dottering dolt making inappropriate jokes about what flavor of ice cream he stacks in his fridge before blaming republicans for this incident of gun violence. (Sadly, this was not the only occasion our dunderhead-in-chief quipped sardonically when doing so was both vile and inappropriate). Perhaps you also saw the despicable and insensitive meme posted by Arizona press secretary, Jocelyn Berry, depicting a woman holding two handguns in a threatening pose, captioned: “Us when we see transphobes.” Or maybe you saw any number of shameless responses on the vast interwebs, such as I have found here.
This Means War
From such a smattering of debased opinions, I believe it is obvious that we are in a war. But let me be unequivocally clear here, we are not in the Left / Right “culture war” that has captivated this nation for decades. We are not on the left; we are not on the right; we are on the side of Christ. When the pundits, politicians, and the ideological left blame Christians and gun laws for this attack, we must not respond with the equal and opposite fury displayed among activists on the right. As Christians, we must respond as Christians and not as activists! We are citizens of heaven, not paupers, in this pitiful and polarized political war game.
We have been called to war, but not that one. Instead, the battle that we have been called into is a war – first and foremost – against the flesh (Romans 8:13). We are to be killing that which is wicked and depraved in us, mortifying it by the Spirit so that we may live. As Christians, we do not begin a plank-eyed campaign against a horde of sawdusty sinners without first pointing the lens of Biblical truth upon our own hearts and our own soul. We must make war through repentance, not hollow pharisaism.
But, this does not mean we have nothing to say. In fact, the Bible does call us to a kind of warfare with the world. According to Scripture, for the love of God and the redemption of the planet, we are called to expose the damnable misdeeds of darkness (Ephesians 5:5-13) and to call out pagan philosophies such as transgenderism with the light of the Gospel of Christ (Colossians 2:8; Jude 3). We are to be salt, which preserves the decaying world. We are to be light in the midst of a crooked people, which means exposing and chasing away the darkness (Matthew 5:13-16; Philippians 2:14-15) And if we do that work faithfully, meeting mistruth with love (Ephesians 4:15), we fully understand that the world will still hate us because it first hated Christ (John 15:18). No matter how the world views us, we labor on until every nation has been discipled according to the vision and Biblical standards of Christ (Matthew 28:18-20).
It is also a battle fought against the demonic principalities and satanic powers who wage war against the plain truth of God (Ephesians 6:12). We must remember that the transgender community is not our enemy. Likewise, the LGBTQLMNOP activists are not our foe. We do not wage our warfare against them but for them! We wage a spiritual war against spiritual opponents with unique non-violent weapons that will advance the Gospel of Jesus Christ and take back dominion for our King in a world that is hopelessly lost and dead (Ephesians 6:13-17).
The Christians’ warfare brings life and light to the world, not death and hot-takes, which brings us to an apropos passage for such a time as this. In light of the events that occurred in Nashville, and whenever the next grisly evil is unleashed upon the world, may the words of Romans 12:14-21 become our guide on how to respond to the world, the flesh, and the devil, with uniquely and poignantly Christian warfare. This is our battle guide:
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What happens when the culture moves in a less theocentric direction?  The middle also moves with it. While William Childs Robinson may have been pugnacious in his defense of traditional Calvinism, he was right about the effects of loosening confessional subscription on the institution and the church. The story of Columbia Theological Seminary is mixed.  There were many days of greatness followed by mediocrity.  There were movements to improve the institution by moving in a more elite direction, but there was a loss of confessional stability.

Erskine Clarke, To Count Our Days: A History of Columbia Theological Seminary. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 369.
Erskine Clarke, a former professor of American Religion at Columbia Theological Seminary, has written a readable and thought-provoking history of one of the preeminent seminaries of the Southern Presbyterian Church.  In its 369 pages, he gives the reader a critical view of the seminary.  What separates it from David Calhoun’s volume on Columbia, Our Southern Zion, is the connections with southern culture and his critical analysis of some of the theologians connected to the institution—especially over the issues of race.  Also, unlike Calhoun’s volume, he goes into the history of the seminary when it moved to Atlanta.  For Clarke, Columbia is a seminary that struggled financially and intellectually with its past.  He traces the changes to the seminary from strict Calvinism to a seminary that is now loosely associated with the Presbyterian Church and dominated by a theology of diversity.
Clarke begins his history with the founding of the seminary in Columbia, South Carolina.  While there are other histories of the institution that can give the names, dates, and synodical actions that brought the seminary into existence, Clarke goes beyond that by bringing out the influence of the plantation system and slavery in Columbia’s founding.
Ainsley-Hall, the centerpiece of the seminary, was a southern mansion whose physical characteristics pointed to an elitist institution that trained the gentlemen theologians of the south.  But the institution and the building were “to help hide the harsh realities of slavery and to help legitimize the power and wealth of slave owners and the social order that kept them powerful” (p. 7).  Clarke is somewhat justified in his opinion because the seminary was intertwined with the plantation system and its slaves.  The seminary in its early years may have had a brilliant faculty with John Henley Thornwell, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, and John Adger, but slavery was also there.  While some Columbia professors may have disliked slavery as an institution, they were still paternalistic towards African Americans.  The approach of the Columbia theologians as described by Clarke, was a middle way between abolition and radical proslavery opinions which was dehumanizing. But the middle way would be abandoned during the Civil War for an extreme position.
With the advent of the Civil War and reconstruction, the seminary suffered through poverty and destruction with the dismantling of the plantation system.  As a way to survive the war intellectually, John Girardeau and other faculty created a milieu in which they maintained southern culture and used language to preserve the “lost cause.”  Clarke sees this era as one of not only economic but also intellectual impoverishment.  He notes that John Girardeau’s theology represented a “theological shift.”  “Girardeau’s scholasticism represented a narrowing of the spirit that animated the seminary and that he shaped the tone of what was taught and learned on the seminary campus” (p. 111).  He contrasts Girardeau to Adger, who followed the sacramental mystery of Calvin.
Another event was the James Woodrow affair which was a retreat from openness to science.  Woodrow was called to the Perkins Professorship of Natural Science in Connection with Revelation which was established in 1859.  The scientifically trained Woodrow was to show that there were no conflicts between biblical revelation and science.  Woodrow was a proponent of evolution and “insisted science was neither religious nor irreligious…” (p. 119).  But for R. L. Dabney and other southern theologians, the ramifications were an assault of modernism.  Clarke believes that the real issue was that Woodrow called into question not only the received orthodoxy, but also “Their self-understanding as white Southern Presbyterian” (p. 123). It was a further narrowing of the intellect.
The fortunes of the seminary changed in the twentieth century with the re-emergence of the south’s economy.  The seminary moved from Columbia to Atlanta in 1927 and with significant changes.  The architecture changed from a southern mansion in Columbia which was its main building to architecture that was reminiscent of Cambridge and Oxford.  The physical plant resembled a college which gave the tincture of elite academics. Under the long serving president McDowell Richards, there was a move towards academic professionalization and a broader perspective as new faculty was hired.  Eventually, Columbia turned to Neo-Orthodoxy, feminism, and diversity.  The seminary that once saw itself in service to the Southern Presbyterian Church loosened its ties to Presbyterianism and in 2012 its revised mission statement said that “Columbia Theological Seminary exists to educate and nurture the faithful, imaginative, and effective leaders for the sake of the Church and the world” (pg. 285). Clarke sees Columbia now as “post-denominational” (p. 285).
Conservatives during this period are not portrayed positively.  William Childs Robinson is portrayed as arrogant and overly zealous in his defense of traditional doctrine.  George Manford Gutzke comes off as an academic lightweight. As the 1960s approached with the problems of segregation, conservative students were seen as intolerant when it came to the issue of race and theological liberalism.  Some of those students included the founders of the P.C.A., such as Morton Smith and Kennedy Smartt.  In the epilogue to his volume, Clark asks the question whether Columbia is trying to rid itself of its tradition which was heavily influenced by antebellum southern culture only to be replaced by a cosmopolitan culture (pp. 291-292).
This book should encourage readers to ponder Erskine Clarke’s work due to his investigation of the influence of culture on seminary education.  As one reads about the impact of slavery and racism, one cannot help but mourn.  And while one may focus on the glories of the southern presbyterian tradition, one may want to also groan over its shortcoming.
Yet, while conservatives have their own sins to bear, progressives also have much to ponder. The loss of confessional fidelity has led the seminary away from it primary mission of not just equipping ministers for the Presbyterian church, but also its own unique Christian witness.  Besides vocational training, Columbia’s modern ethos makes it more like a modern university.  One set of cultural values has been exchanged for another.
There are issues that some readers will take issue with this volume.  Clarke comes close to stating that the adoption of Old School Calvinism contributed to the establishment of slavery.  He writes that the “theological traditions taught at Columbia offered students and their parishioners’ explanations of the incongruent and contradictory character of life in a slave society and provided ethical standards for living in such a world” (p. 25). To some extent this may be true, but it also needs to be kept in mind that there have been a variety of responses to slavey amongst the proponents of Old School Theology even during the Civil War period.
While this volume gives some idea of the changes that occurred theologically at Columbia, it makes the reader ponder how the seminary wandered so far from its past.  Perhaps part of the reason is that Columbia, according to the author, tried to forge a “middle way” between extremes.  During the Civil War, they didn’t follow that mindset.  With the recovery of the south after the war, that genteel mindset may be a significant reason for the change. What happens when the culture moves in a less theocentric direction?  The middle also moves with it. While William Childs Robinson may have been pugnacious in his defense of traditional Calvinism, he was right about the effects of loosening confessional subscription on the institution and the church.
The story of Columbia Theological Seminary is mixed.  There were many days of greatness followed by mediocrity.  There were movements to improve the institution by moving in a more elite direction, but there was a loss of confessional stability.
Dr. Jerry Robbins is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is Pastor of Warrington PCA in Pensacola, Fla.
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15 of the 24 men on the SJC have now, to some extent, gone on official record to express concern over TE Johnson’s views. This development contradicts claims that TE Johnson’s views were exonerated by the SJC in Speck v. Missouri Presbytery. In the case, the SJC decision represented an adjudication regarding a particular presbytery’s process by evaluating the investigative process of Missouri Presbytery. This case was chiefly about Missouri Presbytery and not about TE Johnson or his views. The case was about evaluating Missouri Presbytery’s investigation of TE Johnson. At the very least, the SJC has not vindicated TE Johnson (as Johnson claims), and this case has not made the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) into a Side-B denomination….

Earlier this week, byFaith Online published an article entitled SJC Answers Dissent in Greg Johnson Case. This comes several months after the majority made a ruling on a complaint against Missouri Presbytery that sided with Missouri Presbytery over how the Presbytery conducted an investigation of one of its members, TE Greg Johnson. On October 21, 2021, the majority concluded, “based on the Record, there was no reversible error in the decisions reached by Missouri Presbytery regarding the four allegations. It was not unreasonable for Presbytery to judge that TE Johnson’s ‘explanations’ on the four allegations were ‘satisfactory’.”[1] The Standing Judicial Commission (SJC) believes that the investigation led by Missouri Presbytery was done in a reasonable and procedurally sound fashion. The SJC vote was 16-7-0 (with one member unable to attend the meeting).
On October 31, 2021, the seven dissenters submitted their dissent in writing. The dissent concludes:
The SJC overlooked the clear deficiencies of Presbytery’s investigation, which is proven by re-opening the record and admitting additional information that sought the “present” positions of TE Johnson, extending consideration of facts well beyond the events complained against. Moreover, it was incumbent on the SJC to deal with the matters raised by the Complainant as issues of Constitutional interpretation instead of deferring to the lower court in this case.[2]
In other words, they believe the SJC erred by submitting new questions for TE Johnson to answer regarding his views on sexuality. To the minority, this is proof that Missouri Presbytery failed to conduct a proper investigation of TE Johnson concerning his views and statements on sexuality.
This week, it was revealed that the SJC chose to reconvene on February 1, 2022 in order to adopt a response to the dissenting opinion. In this response, the majority commends the dissenters “zeal for truth, and their evident desire to promote the peace and purity of the Church,”[3] but also claim that the dissenters do “not accurately reflect either the Record in this Case or the ruling and opinion of the SJC.”[4] The SJC chose to adopt a response to the dissent due to the majority’s belief that the dissenters misrepresented the case in their dissent.
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[1] Standing Judicial Commission, “Decision on the Complaint of TE Ryan Speck v. Missouri Presbytery,” 2021, 28.
[2] Steve Dowling et al., “Dissenting Opinion on the Complain of TR Ryan Speck v. Missouri Presbytery,” 2021, 8.
[3] Standing Judicial Commission, “SJC Answer to the Dissenting Opinion of RE Steve Dowling et Al.,” 2022, 13.
[4] Ibid.