Two themes dominate the hymn the Tongans sang 160 Pentecosts ago: the universal reach of Jesus’s reign, and the unrivaled blessings of that reign. The risen Christ is on the move, undeterred until his blessed foot treads every coastland and continent, every inland and island, from Israel to England to Tonga. The Tongans sang because Christ’s reign had reached even them, and because his was the kind of reign to make one sing.

On Pentecost Sunday 1862, as Western eyes watched civil war rip through America, an event just as momentous unfolded half a world away, hidden from every headline. Some five thousand men and women, many of them former cannibals, gathered on a South Pacific island to worship Jesus Christ.
George Tupou I, the first Christian king of Tonga, had assembled his citizens as part of a ceremony commemorating a new code of laws. And there, “under the spreading branches of the banyan trees,” writes George John Stevenson, with the king surrounded by “old chiefs and warriors who had shared with him the dangers and fortunes of many a battle,” five thousand voices sang,
Jesus shall reign where e’re the sunDoes his successive journeys run;His kingdom stretch from shore to shore,Till moons shall wax and wane no more.
For centuries, the sun had run from east to west, the moon had waxed and waned, over a Tonga without Christ. His gospel had not yet reached Tonga’s shores; his kingdom had not yet touched Tongan hearts. But now, a new nation rose to sing his reign.
First Missionary Hymn
Although the words were not in the Tongans’ mother tongue (the song having been taught to them by Methodist missionaries), few lyrics could have described the situation in Tonga more fittingly. For by 1862, the hymn told their history.
“Christ’s Kingdom Among the Gentiles” — or, more commonly today, “Jesus Shall Reign” — has been labeled by some “the first missionary hymn.” Almost a century before the modern missionary movement, before William Carey sailed to India, and Adoniram Judson to Burma, and Hudson Taylor to China, and Methodist missionaries to Tonga, the English minister Isaac Watts (1674–1748) penned a hymn of Christ’s coming reign: a reign that would reach islands far beyond Britain and gather tongues far different from English.
To look out over unreached lands and sing “Jesus shall reign” is always a cry of faith, but Watts needed far more faith than we do today. The mustard seed of the kingdom had grown large by 1719 (when Watts published the hymn), but its branches had not yet spread far beyond the Western world (Matthew 13:31–32). It was not the kind of tree we see today, sheltering multitudes of peoples far south and east of Europe and North America.
Nevertheless, Watts knew his Bible — and in particular, he knew Psalm 72, of which “Jesus Shall Reign” is a Christian paraphrase. And so, by faith he sang of the day when “the whole earth [would] be filled with his glory” (Psalm 72:19).
Song in the South Seas
Two themes dominate the hymn the Tongans sang 160 Pentecosts ago: the universal reach of Jesus’s reign, and the unrivaled blessings of that reign.
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Written by I. C. Light |
Wednesday, November 10, 2021
It is clear that, regardless of whatever disclaimers they proffer, and whatever misgivings its members have expressed in the past concerning the church’s enthusiasm for partisan politics in the national sphere, the National Partnership has essentially become a political party within its own denomination. It is time that the leadership of the National Partnership at least own up to what is a clear distinction between what the emails reveal they have been doing, and what other dissimilar groups (like the GRN) do.

One of the more intriguing classes I took as a nascent undergraduate in business school was a two-credit-hour primer on common law. The instructor – a practicing attorney – availed himself of several opportunities to illustrate a concept that legal practitioners well understand namely, that activities which may be legal may not always be ethical.  For our purposes, one may assume that whatever abides by the letter of the law is legal, and that which abides by the spirit of the law may be considered ethical.  For the sake of my interest today, there’s another considerable aspect to the political-moral calculus – that of norms.  Norms are those conventions we adhere to in the social sphere that signal to others that we’re engaging them in good faith.  We do it as a means of reducing the burden of anxiety among all members of the group. For example, although it’s rarely codified, every culture has its own conception of what “personal space” means, and it makes us nervous when someone broaches ours.
The National Partnership, while established in “confidence,” is a clearly organized political apparatus within the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). The recently unveiled trove of 9 years’ worth of email communication among its members demonstrates at least this much.  No, it doesn’t reveal anything nefarious, per se, as one of its members pointed out in a blog post. And perhaps there is nothing unethical revealed, either. But it clear that the members of the National Partnership have expediently eschewed the political norms of the PCA in a way that doesn’t bode well for the seemliness of the church’s future political timbre – especially if their particular brand of politics becomes normalized in the PCA.
Another categorical distinction needs to be made, given that National Partnership members have publicly espoused the belief that their organizing efforts amount to nothing more than garden variety denominational politics. But many of us disagree on that point. There are politics and then there is realpolitik. Politics, writ large, is founded on principles that are essentially moral or ideological in nature. The one who engages in realpolitik, on the other hand, usually claims to be motivated by certain tenets, but doesn’t shrink back from questionable methodology so long as it achieves practical goals – even if long-held norms may be violated in the process. The manifold principle which undergirds PCA politics is that we be “Faithful to the Scriptures, True to the Reformed Faith, and Obedient to the Great Commission” – all well and good.  But realpolitik is what’s happening within the National Partnership, despite its many disclaimers to the contrary.
Browsing the emails in the leak, I was struck by the apparent lengths that the members of the National Partnership have gone in their own minds to convince themselves that they are not a political party. Its cognoscenti repeatedly assert that their purpose is not to function as a bloc. Given the blowback likely generated after one of the organization’s helmsmen made the bold proclamation: “if unified, we can win every vote [at this year’s GA]!” – it would have been a mere matter of future prudence to disclaim any intention to facilitate bloc voting. Apparently, they acknowledge that bloc voting is frowned upon in our ecclesiastical context, and it behooves such a group to ward off any accusations of impropriety or partisanship, especially since our milieu ought to be thoroughly animated by spiritual concerns.
But elsewhere in the of emails, the pretense that the NP disavows the practice of bloc voting was blown to smithereens by a terse plea from its leadership. Agitated by the loss of key votes during a meeting of the General Assembly, NP leadership emailed its members with an urgent plea for reinforcements: “Get into the hall and be counted!” Now, ask yourself – would you send out such an unmistakable signal if you weren’t certain that the recipients of such an email would vote along with you? (Hint: this is realpolitik.) The point is that the National Partnership doesn’t need to facilitate bloc voting because it is already assumed that its members will vote according to the “advice” issued ahead of the assembly, without respect to whether its members have any knowledge of or interest in the individuals for whom they are voting.
Another disturbing characteristic of the National Partnership, at least as far as it is represented in in the emails, is a conspicuous reference to miscellaneous “NP Presbyteries.”  This is the sort of ad-hoc terminology a person utilizes when he sees institutional capture as a legitimate means to the advancement of his agenda.  The emails also reveal that NP leadership make a regular habit of analyzing their numerical strength on various boards, committees, and presbyteries so as to prioritize where they ought best to marshal their resources for maximum political advantage. One particular email even boasts glowingly about the NP’s perceived ability to alter the composition of the Standing Judicial Commission in a way that they wouldn’t be able to, absent their activism (and bloc voting).  Again, this is realpolitik. 
In all fairness, realpolitik is exactly what we expect of our elected representatives.  We expect them to operate according to the agenda of whatever constituency supports them. But everyone knows that, while a governor may claim to want to “be a leader who governs on behalf of all Gondorians,” it is clear that their principles and mission stand in opposition to those of competing groups.  That is the norm in secular politics – it’s what you expect from your rotary club, HOA, or the United States Congress. But it is not, and ought not be the norm in the PCA – at least, that is, if we’re all going to carry in common the banner of being “Faithful to the Scriptures, True to the Reformed Faith, and Obedient to the Great Commission.”  And given the high ethical standard becoming of the members of Christ’s church, it could be unethical for churchmen to embrace realpolitik.
An NP member recently blogged that the content of the emails revealed much ado about nothing – that they merely confirmed what we’ve all known about the National Partnership for a long time.  I agree with him in substance, but I would say this is a bad thing, not a good thing. There is more at play in the emails than whether one statement or another crosses the “Ninth Commandment” line.  The question is not one of whether NP members brazenly broke the law of the Church, but one of the kind of ethics and norms the church should embrace. This should not be a logical leap for those who preach about living according to the spirit rather than the law.
A rift occurs when one group, having convinced themselves that they (and not others) are the true defenders of the “founders’ vision of the PCA.” This implicit claim, of course, is an unfalsifiable appeal to the authority of men (many of whom are no longer with us) who likely would have disagreed among themselves if they’d been asked what a faithful manifestation of their vision might look like 50 years later. (I remain unpersuaded that even the most “missional” among them ever envisioned that it might include ministers who identify themselves as “gay” in the public square, but that’s another story.)  But when members of a group adopt such a lofty self-conception as the National Partnership has, it’s not long before such a group becomes convinced that “denominational health” (how I wearied of seeing that phrase in the emails that I read!) ultimately depends upon the throughgoing implementation of one’s own high-minded agenda. The ends justify the means. After all, if others cared about reaching the lost as much as we do, then they would certainly agree with our methods.
There seems to be no openness within the National Partnership to the possibility that a broader conception of “denominational health” – one which reflects the opinions of the whole church, rather than the vision of the anointed few – might mean that certain aspirations in the National Partnership agenda are rejected according to the providential will of God.  There seems to be no room in the mind of NP leaders for a category of presbyter who knows his American church history and understands that small doctrinal compromises today will give way to larger compromises down the road, and that if we sacrifice orthodoxy for mission then eventually both will be lost – regardless of whether that sacrifice is misidentified as “contextualization.”
It is clear that, regardless of whatever disclaimers they proffer, and whatever misgivings its members have expressed in the past concerning the church’s enthusiasm for partisan politics in the national sphere, the National Partnership has essentially become a political party within its own denomination. It is time that the leadership of the National Partnership at least own up to what is a clear distinction between what the emails reveal they have been doing, and what other dissimilar groups (like the GRN) do.
In all fairness, having an annual fellowship dinner (like the NP does) that anyone can attend is open and aboveboard.  Conducting a webcasted conference (a la the GRN) in which speakers openly defend their positions on ecclesiastical matters, seeking to persuade others to think likewise, is also open and aboveboard. And as long as democracy is our modus operandi there will always be friends talking amongst teach other, exhorting one another to vote for the “good guy” whom they are assured will do a good job. This is normal in the course of politics as such.  Engagement with PCA polity in good faith means attending GA with the openness to having your mind changed by floor debates, and considering abstention from voting for men whom you know nothing about (or have only heard about from one group’s “advice”). This is organic engagement with the process according to its simplest possible conception in the trust that whatever providence comes about in the outcome of the process is truly God’s will and not the product of the sort of realpolitik which has become the norm in the secular sphere.
Secular politics is always subject to shifting norms, because it is usually a zero-sum game and its participants don’t share the same mission or presuppositions. This generates constant political innovation as each side tries to get an edge on its opponent. It also necessitates all manner of 2nd and 3rd order regulations to govern the use of these instruments so that matters don’t break down entirely.  But in the PCA, any inclination to establish an apparatus within the denomination – believing that, in so doing, a group can wield an outsized influence over the actual majority – ought to be resisted for the sake of the “denominational health” which National Partnership members claim to desire. Health, after all, is about the integrity with which the body works as a whole, not just what a subset of its high-minded members want.
The National Partnership ought to cease the realpolitik which they have thus far embraced, and they ought to do it publicly.  If the National Partnership really wants the “healthy denomination” they claim to want, they should abandon whatever political machinery they’ve thus far constructed, and its members should – in “good faith” – return to engaging the body politic according to the simplicity for which it was implemented.
Either that, or they should just go ahead and declare themselves to be a political party in order to alleviate the concerns of impropriety shared by those who would otherwise organize to oppose them. In other words, if realpolitik is going to be the norm, then let’s go ahead and formalize it.  Continued assertions that what the NP does are within the established norms of the PCA only turn the temperature up.  Again, nobody is asserting that what they’re doing is illegal in terms of the laws of the church, but it should be clear to all that they are at least in violation of norms that we’ve all embraced, at least until recently.
So far, many in the PCA who oppose the National Partnership’s agenda (including ranking members of the GRN) have expressed their distaste for these controversial and decidedly un-Presbyterian methods and declined to adopt them in tit-for-tat fashion.  But it stands to reason that if the National Partnership persists, then power politics of the most naked sort will inevitably become the modus operandi of the PCA’s courts. How would we feel about filibusters and cloture as part of our parliamentary procedure?  What about constant, obnoxious abuses of parliamentary procedure by those who well understand Robert’s Rules but believe that their vision of “denominational health” is just too important to God’s cause to abandon merely because it’s opposed by the majority?

C. Light is a member of the Presbyterian Church in America in the greater Dallas, Texas area.

Love is not what valorizes a human sexual relationship in God’s eyes. Love, of course, is related to the idea of a deep and lasting bond between two human beings. But given how widespread the mantra “love is love” has become in valorizing various types of human sexual relationships, it needs to be mentioned separately. The rightness and goodness of a human sexual relationship is not to be found in the subjective feelings of the two human beings. Rather, it is to be found in the objective characteristics of God’s design for human bodies, minds, and relationships. If one is to find love in a sexual relationship, it will not be found in any structure of sexual relationship one chooses. Instead, it will be found by placing oneself within a sexual relationship designed by God.

Every day brings new evidence that the LGBTQ+ movement is capturing more and more territory in American life, and that more and more hearts and minds are being won over to the movement’s ideology, including among Christians. Confusion about sex runs rampant and threatens to trample traditional Christians in its path.
It might seem there is nothing for those of us who are traditionally minded Christians to do but look forward in anxiety. Yet, we would do well instead to look back at what God teaches us about human sexuality through his Word in the Old Testament. The culture today offers only shifting sands about the definition of words, the purpose of bodies, the nature of reality and identity, and truth itself. The Old Testament, in contrast, is direct and firm about these things, in ways that are directly relevant to our current predicament.
The Old Testament tells us that the world was created in a certain way, that it fell apart in a certain way, and that it continued on in a certain fallen way.
The way God created the world and how he wanted it to be can be seen in Genesis 1 and 2.
In Genesis 1:26-28, God created human beings. In particular, to render the Hebrew of Gen 1:27 literally, God “created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created it, male and female he created them.” Thus, God formed a gender binary of male and female (the “them”), and together that binary formed a human singularity (the “it”). He then instructed man and woman, acting together, to reproduce.
From this passage we see several things about how God designed human sexuality. First, there was no spectrum of sexes (or one could say genders; traditionally both words are inseparable from human reproduction); rather, God designed the world such that a person was created in one of two distinct and different human sexual forms – male or female. Second, the sex of a person was not determined by a person’s subjective state, not “assigned” at birth, nor was it changeable; rather, God designed the world such that a person’s sex is an objective and fixed fact of his or her existence from conception. Third, human reproduction cannot be accomplished in a variety of ways; rather, God designed the world for human reproduction to take place when one human male and one human female have sexual intercourse. Fourth, reproduction was a main purpose for God’s creation of two distinct and different sexual forms. Fifth, the distinct and different physical and sexual characteristics and reproductive roles of human males and human females were not in need of description or definition in the biblical text, nor waiting for an academic theory to make sense of them; rather, God designed males and females, and the human capacity to observe and gain knowledge, such that these things are clear, obvious, and objectively knowable facts of human existence.
Next, in Genesis 2:4-25, God creates a man, and states that it is not good for the man to be alone, the problem being the man’s inability by himself to be the image of God (Gen 1:26-28), reproduce (Gen 1:26-28), govern the world (Gen 1:26-28), tend the garden (Gen 2:15), and be psychologically and emotionally whole, a set of things which collectively will be referred to below as the pair-bond complex. God states that a special living being he will create will resolve the problem of the man’s aloneness. God then creates animals and brings them to the man, but the man does not identify any of them as the special living being. God then makes a woman, a female human, for the man. God brings her to the man, and the man identifies her as the special living being. The narrator then says that a man will cling to a woman and that the two of them will become one flesh, and so describes a male/female relationship as one of deep attachment, and the two as fitted for each other.
This passage shows us several things about how God designed human sexuality. First, God designed the human sexual relationship to involve one male and one female, not multiple males or females, or even a “spectrum” of sexualities. Second, this male/female pair was not a social arrangement which existed temporarily or periodically; rather, it entailed a lasting and continuous bond between a male/female pair seeking to live out the elements of the pair-bond complex. Third, God designed the world such that the only pair of living beings which would be able to fulfill all elements of the pair-bond complex would be a human male and a human female. This can be seen in the phrase God uses to describe the special living being. God says that this special living being was going to be kenegdô (Genesis 2:18; “I will make a helper kenegdô”). The Hebrew word kenegdô is a compound of the particle ke, meaning ‘like,’ the word neged, meaning ‘opposite,’ and the pronoun ô, meaning ‘him.’ This special living being was, therefore, to be “like opposite him.” It is, of course, important to be cautious about defining the meaning of a compound word by looking at the meanings of the word’s individual parts. In the case of kenegdô, however, its parts reveal why the woman is the special living being. An animal cannot be the special living being because, though an animal and a man are opposite each other (that is to say, different), an animal is not like a man because it is not a human being, and so an animal and a man cannot fulfill all elements of the pair-bond complex. Another man cannot be the special living being because, though a man and a man are like each other in being human beings, a man and a man are not opposite each other, and so a man and a man cannot fulfill all elements of the pair-bond complex. A woman is the special living being because a woman and a man are opposite each other, and a woman and a man are also like each other in being human beings, and so a woman and a man, and only a woman and a man, can fulfill all elements of the pair-bond complex together.
Turning now to how the world fell apart from what God intended, this is described in Genesis 3. Here we see that God gave the man and the woman instructions for how he wanted them to live and behave in the world. God also gave them the freedom to abide by these instructions or not. Using this freedom, they violated one of the instructions. God then punished the woman and the man, punishments which carried forward in time and affected the human beings who came after them, and indeed the whole created order.
We can learn several things from Genesis 3 regarding human sexuality. First, God established a moral framework for the first two human beings to live by. Their decision to go their own way and create their own moral framework had terrible consequences for them and their descendants, who carry on the family tradition of creating their own moral frameworks, especially in the area of sexual behavior and ethics, always with terrible consequences. Second, one of the punishments God gave is that there would be difficulties in the process of reproduction (Genesis 3:16). The text refers to childbirth becoming painful for women. Surrounding that pain would be all sorts of other reproductive problems such as infertility for women and men, miscarriage, and maternal/infant death. Third, another punishment which God gave is that the male/female relationship would become troubled and characterized by struggle thereafter (Genesis 3:16).
Turning now to how the world continued on in its fallen state, this is described in Genesis 4 and in the texts which follow. Here we see several things about human sexuality in the fallen world.
First, the appearance of reproductive difficulties led humans to devise various mechanisms to deal with infertility, mechanisms such as levirate marriage (Deuteronomy 25:5-10) and the use of surrogates (Genesis 29:31-30:24). Although their intention accorded with God’s instructions to reproduce in the face of reproductive difficulties, these mechanisms lay outside the bounds of the creational design of a deeply bonded male/female pair of human beings.
Second, the disruption of order in the male/female relationship led to humans developing numerous configurations of the human sexual relationship which were at variance with the creational structure of a deeply bonded male/female human pair, configurations such as polygyny (1 Samuel 1:1-8), concubinage (Judges 19), and random sexual relationships (Judges 19). The disruption also led to the objectification and (ab)use of women by men, as seen in their abduction (Judges 21), their being divorceable (Deuteronomy 24:1-4), their being raped (2 Sam 13:1-22), and their being collected by powerful males (1 Kings 11:1-3) (for more on these configurations, and the reproductive mechanisms mentioned in the preceding paragraph, see here and here).
Third, the supplanting of God’s moral framework with self-constructed moral frameworks led to sexual behaviors which transgressed the creational design of a deeply bonded male/female pair. In response, God articulated laws which condemned and prohibited transgressive sexual behaviors such as the following: a human male with a human male (Leviticus 18:22; 20:13); a human male with an animal (Leviticus 18:23; 20:15); a human female with an animal (Leviticus 18:23; 20;16); adultery (Exodus 20:14; Deuteronomy 5:18); prostitution (Leviticus 19:29; 21:9; Deuteronomy 23:17-18).
As to why God prohibited these particular behaviors, remember that God’s creational design for the human person was for both the mind and the body of a human male to be intertwined with the mind and the body of a human female in a deeply bonded relationship. Each of the prohibited sexual interactions fails to conform to this design, and transgresses how God created and designed human bodies, minds, and relationships to work. Thus, God was using these laws to restrain prohibited behavior, but also, and more importantly, to bring into greater relief what his ideal, harmony-oriented design for sexual activity was, and to guide people back to that.
One way to appreciate more fully what God is getting at in these laws is to think in terms of the mechanics of sexual activity. Regarding this, there are two issues which these laws are concerned with:
1)  what type of body human male genitals correctly and incorrectly penetrate, and what type of male genitals correctly and incorrectly penetrate a human female body
2)  what type of body is human male semen correctly and incorrectly deposited in, and what type of male semen is correctly and incorrectly deposited in a human female body
The following diagram shows how the laws adjudicate these issues:

When the sexual behaviors which God prohibits and permits are looked at in this way, the bedrock role of anatomy and physiology in God’s design for a sexual relationship comes into stark relief. God’s design for a human sexual relationship entails a specific anatomical and physiological relationship between two human beings when they physically couple. This specific anatomy and physiology is heterosexual, and heterosexual anatomy and physiology is reproductive, and, as seen in Genesis 1, reproduction is a central purpose of the two sexual forms of human beings which God creates. Reproduction, however, is not possible in several of the prohibited sexual relationships (human male/human male, human male/animal, human female/animal), or welcome in others (adultery, prostitution). These sexual behaviors do not then comport with the fundamental physical and purposive aspects of God’s design for a human sexual relationship.
Something which highlights God’s focus on these visceral issues of penetration and deposit of semen is the absence of a prohibition against the sexual interaction of a human female with a human female. Such behavior transgresses God’s design for the female body and mind, but the genitals of a human female cannot deposit semen in the other female body. Thus, female/female sexual behavior is not topically relevant at this point in Scripture. It will, however, be dealt with elsewhere, namely, in Romans 1:26-27, where it is identified as not conforming to God’s creational design and thus as a transgressive type of sexual interaction.
But having said all of this about anatomy and physiology, that is not the only thing which has a bedrock role in God’s design for a human sexual relationship. There is also relationality. God’s design for a human sexual relationship entails a deep and lasting bond between two human beings, something which emerges from and is physicalized and perpetuated by the visceral qualities of heterosexual intercourse between them. This bond is important to the relationship between the man and the woman, but it also ensures that any offspring resulting from their union will come into the world within a structure designed to be stable and oriented to caring for them. Such a deep and lasting human male/female bond, however, is not possible in several of the prohibited sexual relationships (human male/animal, human female/animal), or welcomed in others (some cases of adultery, some cases of human male/human male, prostitution), or undistracted and single-minded in others (adultery). These sexual behaviors do not then comport with the fundamental relational aspect of God’s design for a human sexual relationship.
Two things follow these observations about the essential elements of God’s design for a human sexual relationship.
First, God’s design for a human sexual relationship does not entail solely a certain anatomy and physiology or solely a certain relationality. It entails both. One cannot have only one of the two and call the relationship good and right. Both aspects must be present for the bond to be in accord with God’s design. Thus, for example, no sexual activity between a man and woman in a structure of slavery can be called good and right; so too, a deep and lasting bond between two male sexual partners cannot be called good and right.
Second, love is not what valorizes a human sexual relationship in God’s eyes. Love, of course, is related to the idea of a deep and lasting bond between two human beings. But given how widespread the mantra “love is love” has become in valorizing various types of human sexual relationships, it needs to be mentioned separately. The rightness and goodness of a human sexual relationship is not to be found in the subjective feelings of the two human beings. Rather, it is to be found in the objective characteristics of God’s design for human bodies, minds, and relationships. If one is to find love in a sexual relationship, it will not be found in any structure of sexual relationship one chooses. Instead, it will be found by placing oneself within a sexual relationship designed by God – a deep and lasting pair-bond relationship of like/opposites who seek to live out the elements of the pair-bond complex together.
Dr. Richard Whitekettle and a Professor of Religion in the Religion Department at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, MI.
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