Written by R. Scott Clark |
Wednesday, July 27, 2022
Paul was “set apart” for the Good News that Christ has saved sinners. Christ justifies sinners. He sanctifies sinners and he glorifies sinners by sola gratia, sola fide. Does that scandalize you? That is a warning sign, is it not? If it scandalizes you, if that sounds a little Antinomian to you, then perhaps you are not yet a gospel-man like Paul.

Paul Was A Gospel Man
Gospel means good news and Paul was a “gospel man.” I am uncertain where I first heard this expression but it is a good expression because it captures a basic orientation to the faith. There are those Christians who are perpetually glum, whether about the state of the world (this is a big pothole into which it is easy to fall) or about the state of their sins. To be sure, there are plenty of examples in the Psalms and elsewhere of believers reckoning with both and crying out to the Lord, but there is a difference between realism and honesty before the Lord and others about the state of things or the state of one’s soul and perpetual, relentless misery. I am increasingly convinced that those whose spiritual environment (e.g., church, Christian friends, the spiritual culture in which one lives) is dominated by the law (e.g., “do this” “you need to get better at that”) tend toward glumness. Eeyore (the fictional donkey in Winnie the Pooh) is amusing because he represents such a contrast to the generally upbeat characters in the stories. Christopher Robin is generally cheery. Of course, Pooh, so long has he has had his honey, is cheery. Eeyore is the exception and we only have to bear with him briefly.
A gospel-oriented spiritual culture makes a real difference in a congregation and in one’s outlook generally. Paul was a gospel-oriented Christian. To be a gospel-man, of course, means that one is utterly committed to the Good News of Jesus Christ. Paul was that. He brooked no corruption of the good news by anyone, not even by a fellow apostle (e.g., Peter. See Gal. 2:11–14). When the Apostle Peter compromised the gospel by refusing to eat with Gentile Christians (for fear of offending the Judaizers), the Apostle Paul rebuked him publicly and to good effect. If the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15) happened after the rebuke, then we see the fruit of it. Peter stoutly defended the gospel against the Judaizers and insisted on their full inclusion into the visible church. After all, in Christ the dividing wall (contra the Dispensationalists) has been torn down (Eph. 2:11‐22). In Christ there is no Jew nor Gentile (Col 3:11; Gal. 3:28–29).
Because he was a gospel-man, Paul preached the Good News. He preached the law in its three uses (pedagogical, civil—contra the theocrats, we never see him calling any magistrate to enforce the 1st table—and the normative, i.e., as the rule of the Christian life) but the thing that got him into trouble with the civil authorities, with the Jews, and with some Christians was that he was relentless about preaching the good news. We may infer from Romans 6:1 that some were accusing him of antinomianism. “The Doctor,” Martyn Lloyd-Jones, is famous for his comments on Romans 6:1:
If your presentation of the Gospel does not expose it to the charge of Antinomianism, you are probably not putting it correctly. What do I mean by that? Just this: The Gospel, you see, comes as this free gift of God–irrespective of what man does. Now, the moment you say a thing like that, you are liable to provoke somebody to say, “Well, if that is so it doesn’t matter what I do.” The Apostle takes up that argument more than once in this great epistle. “What then,” he says at the beginning of chapter 6, “shall we do evil–commit sin–that grace might abound?”… So, let all of us test our preaching, our conversation, our talk to others about the Gospel by that particular test…If you don’t make people say things like that sometimes, if you’re not misunderstood and slanderously reported from the standpoint of Antinomianism, it’s because you don’t believe the Gospel truly and you don’t preach it truly.
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Written by William E. Boyce and K. J. Drake |
Saturday, February 18, 2023
The pew Bible has a valuable place. It is a celebration of the gospel, the triumph of the early church, and the spirit of the Reformation. And for a generation of digital burnouts, the pew Bible helps us connect with a crucial truth: that salvation is physical, tangible, earthly, and available for all.

Do pew Bibles matter? Churches of all styles have had to ask this question in recent years. The increase of church plants using secular spaces for worship means that church planters must contemplate the extra weight, hassle, and expense of providing Bibles for their congregants each Sunday. The rise of technology means that many congregants come to church with merely their phone for a Bible. On top of those societal factors, the pandemic forced most churches to remove pew Bibles for a season, leaving room to reevaluate their utility in worship.
But these questions are not just theoretical; they can be profoundly personal and pastoral. Recently, I (Billy) had the opportunity to worship in the pews with my kids. As a pastor, my preaching schedule rarely affords me the opportunity to spend the entire service with my family. So it was a special treat to watch my kids interact, not only with the liturgy, but with the liturgical tools around them. What grabbed my attention most was this: at some point, each of my four kids (ages 5.5 through 11.5), took out a pew Bible for personal use.
So, we must ask: in this post-COVID, post-modern, post-literate, technological, consumer society, do pew Bibles matter? Does the connection between the Word and the form of accessing the Word matter? Is something lost when we depend on digital media for our Scripture consumption? Is projecting the Scripture passage onto the screen adequate for whole-person and whole-church discipleship and mission, or can a case be made that pew Bibles are an essential part of making God’s Word accessible for all?
Part 1: The Accessible Word: Christian History
The physicality and accessibility of the Word of God is a continual theme across Christian history. From the Scriptures themselves through the Early Church and Reformation, there has been a constant mandate for spiritual leaders: make God’s Word physically accessible. God’s people are a people of the book.
In Deuteronomy 17, for example, Moses makes an odd requirement for Israel’s future king: “he shall write for himself in a book a copy of the law … it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them.” (Deut 17:18-19) Such a bookishness was unknown as a requirement of the Ancient Near East ruling class, and yet before all things — military power, courtly procedure, or administration — the king ought to write by his own hand the Law of God. For the king, the Word was to be accessible.This theme recurs throughout Scripture. The biblical authors presume that meditating on the Law, which is the precursor to actually obeying it, requires the external composition of a literary work. Oral culture was not enough; God’s spoken Word needed to be written and re-written as a whole, in order to be absorbed (e.g. Deut 6:9; Jer 30:2).
This focus on the written text has been a prominent feature of Christianity throughout the centuries. One of the key characteristics of early Christianity, according to scholar Larry Hurtado, was its unusual bookishness. The early Christians were committed to making God’s Word physically accessible for others, going so far as to eschew dominant forms of producing texts by using the codex, rather than bookrolls or scrolls. Says Hurtado,
The bookroll was the prestige bookform of the day, and so, if Christians wanted to commend their texts to the wider culture, especially the texts that they read as scripture, it would seem an odd and counterintuitive choice to prefer the codex bookform for these texts. Indeed, it would seem like a deliberately countercultural move. … It certainly had the effect of distinguishing early Christian books physically, especially Christian copies of their sacred books.[1]
This shift had several advantages. First, because of the cheaper production of the codex, more physical copies of Scripture could be produced. The codex made the sacred Scriptures more physically available to the people of God. Second, the codex form allowed for greater ease of study and cross reference as opposed to the cumbersome nature of the scroll. In God’s providence, this widespread availability of the codex empowered later Christians to more accurately translate and further propagate God’s Word. Indeed, the widespread historical attestation of Scripture — far more than any other classical text — owes to the early church’s commitment to the accessible Word.
This emphasis on the availability of the Bible is shot through the Reformation as well.
As Luther was hiding in the Wartburg, avoiding the wrath of the emperor and pope, he turned his attention to translating the New Testament in German, which would definitively shape the national tongue. Luther’s motivation was to make the very words of the Lord accessible to Christians: “Neither have I sought my own honor by it; God, my Lord, knows this. Rather I have done it as a service to the dear Christians and to the honor of One who sitteth above, who blesses me so much.”[2] William Tyndale, the famed English Bible translator, is said to have aspired, according to John Foxe, “If God spared him life, ere many years he would cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than [a learned Catholic theologian] did.”[3] As these few examples show, the Church has a historical commitment to making Scripture available in written form. The accessibility of Bibles is a venerable part of Christian history.
Part 2: The Accessible Word: Phenomenology
At the same time, pew Bibles make a valuable contribution to the experience of worship. Without pew Bibles, something is tangibly missing from our liturgical space. As we see constantly in the Old Testament, and reaffirmed through the Reformation, liturgical space has a catechetical effect. The physical things in our worship space teach us about God and about the anticipated experience of worship.
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Regarding the meaning of the Overture 15 wording: “This language if inserted in the BCO would not serve to disqualify a man who merely experiences same-sex attraction… it’s a question of how you relate to your same-sex attraction, someone who has repented of their same-sex attraction, who has denied it, is seeking to mortify it and does not claim it as a way to describe himself is the difference.”

It has been over four years since a congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) hosted the inaugural Revoice Conference which promoted “Side B Gay Christianity.”  The PCA has been debating the issues regarding Side B ever since.  After last year’s proposed amendments to the Book of Church Order (BCO) failed to meet the 2/3 threshold of Presbyteries required to pass them, a slurry of new Overtures seeking to amend the BCO to address the Side B issue came before the 49th General Assembly held earlier this year.  Three results of the Assembly’s deliberations this year is that Overtures 15, 29, and 31 passed and are on their way (as Items 1, 4, and 5) to deliberations and votes in the PCA’s 88 Presbyteries.
Since the close of the 49th General Assembly, Stated Clerk Bryan Chapell has shared his summary of the State of the PCA in various ways.  In this document entitled “STATED CLERK’S SUMMARY AND REFLECTIONS ON THE 49TH GENERAL ASSEMBLY,” Dr. Chapell writes:
“Still, we have struggled to apply our standards to ordination requirements if a man pledges and practices sexual obedience but honestly acknowledges some degree of same sex attraction. Despite statements in the Study Report that attempted to clarify our stance on this, we have subsequently differed among ourselves about whether the same sex attraction itself should disqualify from church office.”
In this presentation at Southwood Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Huntsville, AL, Dr. Chapell explains:
“Here’s where we’re struggling, how do we deal with a minister who says ‘I believe that homosexuality is a sin,  I will not practice it,  I will remain celibate but I confess I struggle with this desire?’ Can the desire itself be allowed? And that is the present division, that is what we are presently arguing about: is the desire itself disqualifying?“
I strongly disagree with Dr. Chapell’s assessment of the current debate. While I cannot say that no one holds the strict position which Dr. Chapell describes, I am very familiar with the debates. I have had countless conversations with men on both sides of the issue for the last three years. I do not know of one single person that believes that “the desire itself is disqualifying,” and yet there is a very real and sharp disagreement in the PCA over Side B.
Dr. Chapell graciously spoke with me about his characterization of the issue. He was prompt to get back to me within a day of my contacting him, and we spoke for a half hour. Dr. Chapell was patient as always, and he listened well.  While I think we disagree as to what the debate’s central issue is, Dr. Chapell apologized for not representing my position (in favor of PCAGA49’s Overture 15) as I would.  He also said it was never his intent to give his opinion on the matter, but rather he believed he was accurately representing the debate.  We exchanged subsequent emails and he knows I am writing this article.
I also want to say unequivocally that Dr. Chapell affirmed his commitment to the biblical gender and sexual ethic, the sinfulness of both homosexual activity and desire, and everything he wrote in the AIC Report on Human Sexuality. Those things are not at issue here.
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