Worship what is true. Give God the holy worship He commands, being ready to join in the fellowship of Christ’s suffering. Repent daily. Be a covenant member of a faithful church. Sing psalms. Feast in the presence of your enemies. If you are in Christ, your enemies are Christ’s enemies. And this means we have nothing to fear.

The table was set with unfussy Corelle dishes, yellow paisley cloth napkins, and water glasses. One of the pastor’s sons, a colleague of mine from the university, pulled a gallon plastic jug of water out of the refrigerator and started filling the water glasses. “It’s not filtered water. I just like it cold,” Pastor Ken Smith laughed as he greeted me with a warm handshake and pulled me gently but firmly over the threshold. This was one of my first experiences of a Christian family feast, one that included the Smith family, other brothers and sisters from the church, and me. The room hummed with grown-up laughter and the sing-song of children’s voices. It had been so very long since I had experienced the sound of men’s voices laughing and the delight of a child’s giggle. While I proclaimed the value of diversity, my community was entirely composed of white thirty-something lesbian Ph.D.s in the humanities. Children dragged in extra chairs. Bowls were overflowing with Floy Smith’s steaming and savory sweet-and-sour soybeans, and Ken herded us to the table with a gentle but firm touch. When we all sat down and pulled up our mix-and-match chairs to the long family table, no elbow room remained. It was intimate but not stuffy. The conversation was marked with edgy questions of the day (on which I took an opposing side) and Bible verses and principles, some that stood as answers and others that opened more questions. It seemed to me that Pastor Ken Smith and these other Christians used the Bible both for reference and for lingering long. We ate and talked and laughed. And then we sang Psalm 23.

Voices in all four parts to the tune of Crimond rang strong and right as rain. And when we sang, “A table Thou has furnished me, in presence of my foes,” I started to lose my sense of which way was up. I started to get all turned around, as if I had absentmindedly taken the wrong path on a well-walked trail. I was trained to play the part of the victim and to perceive myself as a “sexual minority,” voiceless among the voiced. As we sang, I said to myself, “Yes, dear victim, here you are in the presence of your foes, these awful hateful people who want to trample on your rights.” But even though victimhood served as my catechism, I couldn’t make myself believe this while singing Psalm 23. Something wasn’t right. And that’s when it dawned on me that I, the English professor, was misreading the text. I wasn’t the one dining in the presence of my enemies. I was the enemy.
Dinner concluded with prayer. Prayer was reverent and steady. There were natural pauses and unhurried reflections as these Christians shared their hearts with each other and with God. The unyielding and unanswered questions that had marked the earlier part of this evening were now put into the hand of God. They were neither swept under the rug nor turned into objects of obsession and grief. At the final “amen,” someone said, “Let’s sing Psalm 122.” Most of the people had this one memorized too, but Floy gently touched my arm and placed an open Psalter in my hands. And so with gusto and confidence, voices raised in song once again: “I was glad to hear them saying ‘to the Lord’s house let us go.’ For our feet will soon be standing in your gates Jerusalem.

It’s well understood that institutional presences like seminaries and colleges need to be protected; reputation is everything. But sometimes truth is another thing and we do need to be careful to maintain some unblinking history. The stories of the OPC and PCA are not well ordered or manicured; they were rough cut. Their men were not always angels and their institutions not always perfect.

There are a lot of secrets in the theological world. The secrets aren’t really being kept from you. They are esoteric secrets of the guild and priesthood because they are strange and hard to understand, in a different language and sit in institutional cultures. It’s not that different from the way we hire lawyers and doctors that know the procedures and a special language they’ve memorized. We would love have everyone understand but it takes a lot of work to get in on the game.
I’ve served in the OPC, the PCA and the ARP but first I was in the PCUSA. And that’s the way a life in the church often is; we are where we are because we don’t know any better at the time. We grow through different phases and end up in different places. Each church and denomination has its own theological culture but more than that its own social culture. You hear people say, “Why do the people at that church act that way?” When you know the denomination you know there are social traits of that group that are manifesting themselves in that individual church. The social culture is something you can’t learn in a book and there are unwritten rules against exposing the soft underbelly of presbyteries and synods. We understand in secret what must have been going on at those famous assemblies we read about in the histories. The meetings of the Westminster Divines. The Synod of Dort. The writing of the Nicene Creed must have been a hoot; so many intense personalities!
Coming into the OPC some 30 years ago I was introduced to a gathering of minsters and elders as, “He’s a Sproul guy…” There was immediate concern and one audible groan. That was the official inoculation at the Presbytery level against Sproul guys. I didn’t know what it meant or how deep that well went but it stuck. I didn’t understand the deep contrast between the PCA tradition and the OPC tradition and why they were often fire and water. As the years went by I found that it was true. I was indeed a Sproul guy… according to the unwritten rules that come along with being Presbyterian. And it came with invisible fences; you can’t have some free range Sproul guy walking around causing theology.
Sproul and Gerstner had recently published their celebrated, “Classical Apologetics” criticizing Van Til’s apologetic methodology. Sproul and Gerstner were mother’s milk for me; I loved them so much but I wasn’t from that hometown. As a kid I attended Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel, Hal Lindsey’s Tetelestai and John MacArthur’s Grace Community Church. Like many that grew up in eccentric theological environments I might have become an agnostic if not for an intervention. Mine was by Francis Schaeffer. I read his books and watched his videos “How Shall We Then Live” and felt that someone had meaningfully heard my serious questions about the Christian faith. Schaeffer and MacArthur led me to Sproul and that was my segue into the reformational world.
And it is a world to itself, a separate and distinct theological and cultural enclave. People tend to think they’re just joining a church but really they’re joining a church, a presbytery and a denomination that each have their own “personality”. Which presbytery and Synod or General Assembly you join will have an effect upon your spiritual well being and that of your family, so it’s good to take these things seriously. The individual church you join will not be able to shield you from the consequences of the institutional setting in which they exist.
In the reformed world there are birthright economies and deep traditions, a kind of a deep state of theological institutions and positions of influence. In the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, one is being Dutch. It’s not that you have to be Dutch to thrive but it doesn’t hurt. You have to go to the right schools, study under the right people, marry into the right families and approve of the right names. Van Til is so influential that he is written into the OPC Book of Church Order itself as presenting the uniquely OPC apologetic methodology.
But the big name in the OPC is Gresham Machen and all of us love Machen. Machen’s “Christianity and Liberalism” was formative upon me from my theological youth. But in pretty obvious ways Machen was cut from a different cloth than the later development of the institutions he created. He was a man of the conservative Princeton wing and that’s not a controversial claim. He was trying to go backwards to get forward and the birth of the OPC and Westminster Philadelphia can’t be understood without him. He was a 1920s Presbyterian conservative in an era of theological liberalism looking back at the very best of the tradition and watching its disintegration.
In 1923 when things were going to pot Machen said:
“So it is with faith. Faith is so very useful, they tell us, that we must not scrutinize its basis in truth. But, the great trouble is, such an avoidance of scrutiny itself involves the destruction of faith. For faith is essentially dogmatic.
Despite all you can do, you cannot remove the element of intellectual assent from it…. Very different is the conception of faith which prevails in the liberal Church. According to modern liberalism, faith is essentially the  same as “making Christ Master” in one’s life; at least it is by making Christ Master in the life that the welfare of men is sought. But that simply means that salvation is thought to be obtained by our own obedience to the commands of Christ. Such teaching is just a sublimated form of legalism. Not the sacrifice of Christ, on this view, but our own obedience to God’s law, is the ground of hope.
In this way the whole achievement of the Reformation has been given up, and there has been a return to the religion of the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, God raised up a man who began to read the Epistle to the Galatians with his own eyes. The result was the rediscovery of the doctrine of justification by faith. Upon that rediscovery has been based the whole of our evangelical freedom. As expounded by Luther and Calvin the Epistle to the Galatians became the “Magna Charta of Christian liberty.” Gresham Machen, “Christianity and Liberalism”.
We could go on with this in great detail but we can say this, for Machen and all of the theological conservatives of his era that faith was essentially about what you believe and that replacing that with ethics, morality and the lordship of God was the essence of liberalism.
The integration of legal obedience into our justification was exactly on point as the disease because when that shift takes place it will consume everything. Nothing of the Gospel will survive. Machen had the diagnosis but he was also aware that the golden age had passed. He looks back 100 years earlier when he says Western Civilization was still passively Christian and laments that in his day the culture was already dominated by paganism. He said this came first theologically then culturally. He started Westminster Theological Seminary to hold ground with an intent of retaking the castle.
In this of course, Sproul was part of this Machen lineage, not as being in the OPC but very self consciously from a similar perspective on the Bible as the word of God, faith as believing the Gospel and salvation as by grace alone through faith. Faith not being interpreted as good works or legal obedience to the moral law but faith taken as the condition of the covenant of grace, as distinguished and different from the nature and conditions of the covenant of works which requires perfect obedience to the law.
Keith Mathison, professor of systematic theology at Reformation Bible College writes this:
I recently watched a short video of a lecture by my mentor and former pastor Dr. R.C. Sproul… He said that the broad evangelical church has been “pervasively antinomian.”… One of the doctrinal issues that separates broadly evangelical theology from confessional Reformed theology is covenant theology… This is where Dr. Sproul’s charge of “pervasive antinomianism” arises. Reformed theology historically has a way of approaching ethical questions. This approach includes careful examination of God’s law as revealed in Scripture. It includes examination of biblical wisdom literature. It includes consideration of natural law. It includes examining how other Reformed pastors and theologians of the past dealt with similar issues. In other words, it looks at Scripture as understood within our Reformed theological and confessional heritage. As an example, if an ethical question not explicitly addressed by Scripture arises, the Reformed would first go to the biblical law and wisdom literature to find applicable biblical principles. Natural law issues would be taken into consideration. Then we would look at how our confessions address this issue. The questions and answers on the Ten Commandments in the Westminster Larger Catechism, for example, are a rich resource on ethical questions.”
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Friday, September 17, 2021
The Bible is a divine book—but it’s also a very human book, not in that it is filled with human errors but in that it reflects how human beings tell stories. No two people write in exactly the same way, and no two human beings report their perspectives on the same event identically. Two people can accurately represent the same event without covering all the same details. That’s the kind of thing we find in Scripture.

We live in a day when consistency of thought is demeaned by many people, and individuals maintain that contradiction is the hallmark of truth, particularly in religious matters. Yet, in practice, human beings seek consistency. Consider liberal Protestantism. Decades ago, most of the mainline denominations abandoned the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture. Originally, these denominations thought they could continue affirming the other core tenets of Christianity. As the years passed, however, it became clear that the rejection of the infallibility and inerrancy of the Scriptures leads to the denial of Christian orthodoxy on other matters. Most churches that abandoned biblical inerrancy and infallibility eventually rejected the atonement, biblical sexual ethics, and other teachings. Those denominations had to do that for consistency’s sake. To deny that God’s Word is without error is to deny that we have a trustworthy revelation from Him. Thus, it doesn’t ultimately matter what the Bible says about anything.
When it comes to studying the actual consistency of Scripture, it’s not long before we have to deal with allegations that the Bible is full of contradictions. This can be devastating to the Christian faith, because we know that if the Bible has real contradictions, it’s not a consistent account, and if it’s not a consistent account, it can’t be divinely inspired.
The main thing I want to say about this issue is that most alleged contradictions turn out not to be contradictions at all. When I was a seminary student, my professors frequently taught the theories of “higher” critics who refused to affirm the infallibility of Scripture. One of my fellow seminarians, a brilliant fellow, struggled with these theories. He had come to seminary believing in Scripture’s consistency, but by the time he was a senior, he was one of the casualties of the exposure to this relentless skepticism about the Bible. I remember one discussion in the hallway of the seminary where he said: “R.C., how can you still believe in the inerrancy of Scripture after all we’ve gone through here? Don’t you see that the Bible is full of contradictions?”
At the time, he couldn’t list even ten examples of contradictions in the Bible.
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