Written by Jon D. Payne |
Monday, June 20, 2022
The temptation for the church to broker God’s truth for the sake of ecclesiastical unity and cultural acceptance is a perennial one. The evangelical world has already made that deal. It’s disgraceful. But we must not! My fellow elders in the Presbyterian Church in America, we must firmly resist the temptation to negotiate biblical fidelity and confessional integrity. The erosion of orthodoxy often begins with the pursuit of counterfeit unity.[6] True unity, however, is always founded upon the unadulterated truth of Scripture.

The book of Hebrews is full of strong exhortations and sobering warnings for the Church throughout the ages.[1] It was originally written to encourage first-century Jewish Christians not to abandon gospel orthodoxy. It was a call to resist the seductive enticements of religious and cultural syncretism. This urgent message to persevere in the truth — no matter what — is a profoundly relevant one for our current cultural moment. It is a remarkably fitting word for the Presbyterian Church in America, as we gather together in Birmingham for the 49th General Assembly.
Resist the Via Media
Intense cultural pressure and religious persecution made life difficult for Jewish believers in the first century. Being a Christian was never easy. Sometimes the biggest threats to the peace, purity, and unity of the church came from parties within the church. The same challenges were true for the great cloud of witnesses who preceded them— those resolute believers “of whom the world was not worthy.”[2]
Faithfulness to Christ was an arduous and costly road for the Hebrew Christians. Consequently, the temptation to compromise and negotiate the truth was ever before them. The satanic invitation to accommodate doctrinal error, syncretize truth with falsehood, and even apostatize, could at times be palpable. Christian profession meant persecution on some level.[3] There was a very real possibility of social, economic, and physical hardship for those who devoted themselves to Jesus Christ and His objective truth.
There was also a temptation for these early Christians to grow discouraged with the conflict and division within the Church. For the sake of peace and unity, some attempted to forge a theological via media, seeking to amalgamate old covenant shadows with new covenant realities.[4] The move to foster a middle-way with those who taught doctrinal error, however, would only eclipse the glory of the heavenly High Priesthood of Christ, subvert the true gospel, and sabotage the Church’s mission. Therefore, God’s people were admonished in the book of Hebrews not to explore third-way options for the sake of religious respectability, cultural approval, or peace in the church. Rather, they were exhorted to persevere in God’s way, to “hold fast the confession of [their] hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.”[5]
The temptation for the church to broker God’s truth for the sake of ecclesiastical unity and cultural acceptance is a perennial one. The evangelical world has already made that deal. It’s disgraceful. But we must not! My fellow elders in the Presbyterian Church in America, we must firmly resist the temptation to negotiate biblical fidelity and confessional integrity. The erosion of orthodoxy often begins with the pursuit of counterfeit unity.[6] True unity, however, is always founded upon the unadulterated truth of Scripture.
Lift Your Drooping Hands | Hebrews 12:12-17
In God’s providence, my devotions have recently been in the book of Hebrews. It’s a theological treasure, rich with gospel truth — a ravishing portrait of the preeminence of Christ and His all-sufficient mediatorial work. The church would do well to become more familiar with it. After reading Hebrews 12:12-17, and the corresponding commentary in John Owen’s works, it strongly occurred to me that the passage is an especially relevant word for our current moment in the PCA.
Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed. Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled; that no one is sexually immoral or unholy like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal. For you know that afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears. ~ Heb. 12:12-17
The author or preacher of Hebrews is fully aware of the church’s problems. He understands that there are deadly diseases plaguing the body of Christ. Rather than ignore or dismiss the spiritual contagions, however, he confronts them head-on. He doesn’t want them to take root and spread. He is a faithful pastor. He loves the church. John Owen writes:
It is the duty of all faithful ministers of the gospel to consider diligently what failures and temptations their flocks are liable or exposed unto, so as to apply suitable means for their perseveration.[7]
In this section of Hebrews, the church is being exhorted and admonished through powerful metaphors; that is, metaphors related to his athletic metaphor at the outset of the chapter.
Therefore … let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us (12:1)
The preacher compares the Christian life to a race, and his athletics metaphor resumes in verses 12-14 when he exhorts God’s people to “lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather healed.” In other words, he is urging the church to be roused from its spiritual lameness, due to doctrinal compromise, and to return to the straight paths of Christian truth and practice. He urges them to “be healed” before they are “put out of joint”, and it’s too late to recover.
Some in the church were like distance runners who had wandered off course. They were lost, slumped over with spiritual exhaustion, hands hanging down, and knees devoid of strength. They were unsteady, accommodating error for the sake of unity and peace. Owen explains that by the preacher’s words
“that which is lame,” the apostle peculiarly intends those that would retain the [Jewish] ceremonies and worship together with the doctrine of the gospel. For hereby they were made weak and infirm in their profession, as being defective in light, resolution, and steadiness; as also, seemed to halt between two opinions, as the Israelites of old between Jehovah and Baal. This was that which was lame at that time among these Hebrews. And it may, by analogy, be extended unto all those who are under the power of such vicious habits, inclinations, or neglects, as weaken and hinder men in their spiritual progress.[8]
Dear fellow PCA elders, shouldn’t we be compelled to ask— In what ways might we, as a denomination, be “made weak and infirm in [our] profession, as being defective in light, resolution, and steadiness?” I would argue that the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) accommodation of certain aspects of the current moral revolution has made us “weak and infirm” and is close to putting us “out of joint.” The accommodation of particular facets of the cultural revolution is the biggest threat to the spiritual health and future viability of our denomination.[9]
The moral revolution has overwhelmed western civilization, and is especially manifested in the LGBTQ+ and critical social justice movements.[10] Intersectionality is the new reigning religion in the West, and her prophets, priests, and rulers are seated on the highest thrones of earthly power. The evidence of the moral revolution is ubiquitous. Sadly, this insidious revolution has found a foothold in a growing number of our churches, presbyteries, agencies, and ministries through side B gay Christianity/Revoice, and critical social justice (It gives me absolutely no pleasure to express it. I wish it wasn’t true). What is, perhaps, even more concerning than the ministers who positively and publicly affirm aspects of these false ideologies, are those who quietly acquiesce to them, reluctantly accepting error without protest. This quiet acquiescence is a spiritual cancer to ministers, and to denominations. Owen is right: “A hesitation or doubtfulness in or about important doctrines of truth, will make men lame, weak, and infirm in their profession.”[11] Therefore, there must be no hesitation as it concerns the sufficiency of the gospel, and the divinely appointed means of grace, for the discipleship and mission of the church. We don’t need side B or CRT. In fact, no one needs it. We have the gospel— the power of God unto salvation for all who believe (Rom. 1:16; I Cor. 1:18)!
Read More

[1] The author refers to his epistle as “a word of exhortation” in Hebrews 13:22.
[2] See Hebrews 11:1 – 12:2.
[3] “Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” II Timothy 3:12
[4] See Hebrews 8:1-6; 10:1-39
[5] Hebrews 10:23; c.f. 3:6; 4:14; 6:18.
[6] Counterfeit unity is a pseudo unity created by mixing truth with error for the sake of peace. Ironically, it’s a “unity” that eventually leads to deeper and more permanent division.
[7] John Owen, Commentary on Hebrews, Works, vol. xxiii (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1991; first published 1684) p. 277.
[8] Ibid., 283.
[9] This is true for all denominations.
[10] Two recommended primers on these issues are Carl Trueman’s Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2022), and Thaddeus Williams’ Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice (Zondervan Academic, 2020).
[11] Ibid., 283.
Related Posts:

Christ told us where we would encounter him in this world, whether to our credit or shame, among the hungry, thirsty, naked, stranger, sick, and imprisoned (Matthew 25:31–46); he declares, that “whoever receives the one I send receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me” (John 13:20).

In the summer of 2021 I began driving an ice cream truck. My small contribution to Howdy Homemade Ice Cream, an ice cream shop that deliberately employs workers with intellectual, emotional, and/or physical disabilities, such as Down Syndrome, was to simply provide transportation for catered events so that Howdy Homemade’s workers were not only included but actively contributing their gifts in service for others to receive. At catered events in public parks, office buildings, private birthday parties, churches, soup kitchens, and more, young and old formed queues for ice cream that at times reminded me of the diverse crowd that processes to receive the Eucharist. The recent “Hiring Chain” advertisement by CoorDown well depicts my own aspiration, that some of these customers might observe Howdy Homemade’s workers in these different contexts and consider how they might create similar jobs in their places of employment, especially since so few good jobs with adequate pay and health insurance exist for people with significant disabilities.
There is probably a more technically efficient way to run an ice cream store than Howdy Homemade’s mode of operation. As John Swinton well describes in Becoming Friends of Time, people with disabilities tend to relate to time differently than those of us who have become habituated by modern life to following a clock, functioning more like machines than humans. But the reason Howdy Homemade narrowly survived the economic challenges of the pandemic is because the broader community of which the store is a part valued the humanizing goods HH contributes to the broader public, such as joy and hospitality, which derive from its founder’s self-consciously Christian aims and disposition.
Sadly, Howdy Homemade is an extraordinary exception to how people with Down Syndrome and other physical, emotional, and intellectual disabilities are regarded in the world today. Remembering how Christians throughout the centuries have understood humanity to have been created in the image of God is a continual need in order for us to rightly discern our time and place in this world of wonders and perils. Not only can such a vision clarify our obligations towards our fellow human beings. It must also unsettle and re-make how we imagine what it means to be a human being.
Down Syndrome and Inhospitality
In her December 2020 piece in The Atlantic, “The Last Children of Down Syndrome,” Sarah Zhang interviewed persons with Down Syndrome and families around the world who care for children with a range of more and less severe physical, emotional, and intellectual disabilities related to Down Syndrome. Alongside her nuanced and intimate depiction of their plight, Zhang’s analysis raises a disturbing prospect, that we might have a future altogether without human beings who have Down Syndrome:
Denmark is unusual for the universality of its screening program and the comprehensiveness of its data, but the pattern of high abortion rates after a Down syndrome diagnosis holds true across Western Europe and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in the United States. In wealthy countries, it seems to be at once the best and the worst time for Down syndrome. Better health care has more than doubled life expectancy. Better access to education means most children with Down syndrome will learn to read and write. Few people speak publicly about wanting to “eliminate” Down syndrome. Yet individual choices are adding up to something very close to that.
The complexities of abortion in the contemporary world are manifold; writing in Plough, Kirsten Sanders describes the decision making process of women considering an abortion as wrestling with ghosts. But the arrangement of our common life, encompassing vast healthcare systems and individual decisions, prevent most – and in some places, nearly all – people with Down Syndrome from ever being welcomed into this world. Routinely, pro-choice or pro-abortion advocates will criticize conservatives for trying to make abortion illegal while also advocating for austerity with respect to the welfare state, and rightly so. The conservative preference for an informal but strong network of local support from churches, family members, and friends is theoretically desirable. But in our increasingly fragmented and isolated modern world, where bonds that traditionally wove communities together are increasingly frayed, these networks are harder to form and maintain, such that policies of economic austerity can foster child poverty. Consequently, pro-life advocates are routinely stereotyped as valuing human dignity within the womb but not outside of it, not least when it comes to matters of poverty and justice in other arenas of political and socio-economical life.
However, a serious problem with that line of criticism is that countries with the very best social safety nets and the very best public health insurance in the world – the Nordic countries – have a slightly higher abortion rate than the United States. According to the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, “Some 57,000 induced abortions were performed in Finland, Sweden and Norway in 2019, that is, 12.4 abortions per thousand women of childbearing age (15–49 years).” According to the Centers for Disease Control, in the United States “in 2018, a total of 614,820 abortions were reported, the abortion rate was 11.3 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years, and the abortion ratio was 189 abortions per 1,000 live births.” So, while it is worthwhile to undertake whatever costs are needed to so support families in their material needs, to the benefit of parents concerned about their financial ability to care for children with intellectual and physical disabilities, it is not the case that public healthcare would necessarily solve this problem. In Iceland, the abortion rate is virtually one hundred percent where pre-natal screening indicates the child has Down Syndrome; in Denmark it is ninety-eight percent. As Zhang notes, there can be peer pressure not to end these pregnancies. Even if we regard universal public healthcare as a good worth pursuing, it not only does not reduce abortion rates but can actually increase them. According to a March 2022 report for the United States Senate Joint Economic Committee’s Social Capital Project, while medical advances have vastly expanded the life expectancy of people with Down Syndrome, up from 10 years of age in the 1960s to around 52 years of age in 2020, selective abortion means that in the last ten years about 67 percent of Down Syndrome pregnancies were aborted.
What’s So Great About Theological Anthropology in Pluralistic Societies?
In response to such trends, some point to the wonderful things people with Down Syndrome can do, accomplish, or enjoy. These truly significant accomplishments are indeed worth celebrating. Yet, as Justin Hawkins delicately warns, human worth and dignity are not determined by our perceived usefulness to others. People with Down Syndrome are not reducible to their achievements or capacity to enjoy things, nor is their existence reducible to inspirational examples for the ambition of others. But as wonderful as it is to find examples of people with intellectual and physical disabilities still accomplishing truly wonderful achievements despite all adversity, there are a great many parents of children with significant disabilities who may not ever accomplishment an athletic feat, hold a job, or speak – yet, even so, such people are no less human than you or I.
Our perceived utility to others, however great or small, might prove to be little more than the extent to which we can be exploited by dehumanizing forces and soon discarded, not least in the throwaway culture of land, animals, and human beings in the age of globalization.[1] Rather than envisioning the systems and tools of society as serving the good of humanity, instead conditions can emerge where human beings serve the ends of the systems and tools of society in a vicious, deleterious cycle. Historically, humanity has shown ourselves more than capable of confusing real virtues such as compassion and mercy with violence and brutality, taking it upon ourselves to put people deemed worthless out of their misery, as Lebensunwertes Leben, life unworthy of life. The marginalization and disposal of the lonely elderly, ethnic minorities, the supposedly unproductive, and especially those human beings with physical or intellectual disabilities is not only tolerated but becomes celebrated and championed as humane and dignified. We not only forget, but actively avoid realizing, that even the most fortunate, affluent, and privileged among us, in time, will become utterly useless to our own selves and depend upon the compassion of others as our mortal bodies decay. We are taken from dust, and to dust we shall return, despite all presumption, accomplishment, distraction, or protestation to the contrary.
Cultivating a self-consciously theological account of human dignity might seem like a non-starter to cure the ills of our common life, a confusion of categories as sectarian private values are imposed upon the so-called neutral liberal order of our pluralist societies. The rhetorical moves possible within public reason tend to create a neat distinction between public goods, such as individual liberty, and private values, such as one’s religious preferences. A metaphysical account of what human beings are, particularly one that explicitly draws upon the discourse of Christian theology, indeed breaks the rules of the liberal game for acceptable public discourse.
Yet, it is no secret that everyone who participates in the procedures of public reason does so not only despite, but often precisely because of, their sincerely held private values. One might argue in public for sincerely held, private values on moral and social questions, but must find seemingly neutral ways to argue for this vision in public, perhaps advancing a technocratic argument about how a political ruling on a moral and social question would affect the gross domestic product. But the political organization of our common life inevitably involves some understanding or another of what human beings are, which necessarily exceeds the constraints and limits of supposedly value-free, public neutrality. We might conclude, with Justice Anthony Kennedy, that “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” but this raises significant questions about what the rights and liberties for those who due to intellectual disabilities are scarcely capable of conceptualizing existence.
Liberty in personal preferences, commitment to one’s local community, and consumer choices have their place. But purportedly value-free claims to neutrality are ill-suited tools for understanding and criticizing the market forces and organization of our common life which degrade the earth and deem some human beings as unworthy of life itself. For some problems, comprehensive doctrines and value claims are inescapable, not least on the question of which kinds of human beings should be welcomed and loved on the earth as our common home, or why persons who have Down Syndrome and other intellectual disabilities increasingly are unwelcome in this world.
Read More

While friends do (and should) encourage and uplift us, they should also create edifying wounds. These wounds aren’t meant to break or destroy us but, through their pain, lead us to growth. Like a vinedresser cutting away the dead vines or the sculptor carving away imperfections, our friendships should sharpen us—but such sharpening isn’t always comfortable.

“I have good news and bad news. God has called us to move back home.”
Our friend’s words stunned me. He told us God was leading him and his family, whom we had grown to see as our own family, to move back to his hometown.
My emotions moved like the sea line. One hour I fought sadness, another I struggled with loneliness, another moment fear surged through me, and yet another anger boiled in me. Though I initially directed my feelings at my friends, I later saw they were truly directed at God.
Why did you give us these close friends? I cried out to him. Why did you bring us together in such deep friendships only to tear them away from us two years later?
In the wake of that announcement, I’m not sure I loved my friends as well as I would have said I did.
Love Grows with Knowledge and Discernment
On earth, we will never reach a point of loving one another perfectly (because we are each still in our sinful flesh), yet we can always be growing in our love for one another.
The Thessalonians modelled this. In his first letter to them, Paul exclaimed his gratitude for their labor of love (1 Thess. 1:2–3), and in his second letter he declared that their love had grown ever greater (2 Thess. 1:3). Could someone say the same of your love for others? Has your love grown ever greater?
Perhaps we must first consider: How does our love grow? It grows in knowledge and discernment, which can only be produced from Scripture. As Paul wrote to the Philippians, “And I pray this: that your love will keep on growing in knowledge and every kind of discernment, so that you may approve the things that are superior and may be pure and blameless in the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God” (Phil. 1:9–11).
Our love should be based on knowledge—our knowledge of how we were first loved by the Savior (1 John 4:19). It’s according to this love by which God covered us that we love others—with grace, selflessness, and truth. We love one another with knowledge of the truth, always seeking to encourage them in further holiness.
Is your love founded in this kind of knowledge and discernment? What does it look like to live this way?
Allowing God to Lead Them
A week after my dear friend told me they were moving, God led me to a passage in Acts:

While we were staying [in Caesarea] for many days, a prophet named Agabus came down from Judea. And coming to us, he took Paul’s belt and bound his own feet and hands and said, ‘Thus says the Holy Spirit, “This is how the Jews at Jerusalem will bind the man who owns this belt and deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles.” When we heard this, we and the people there urged him not to go up to Jerusalem. Then Paul answered, “What are you doing, weeping and breaking my heart? For I am ready not only to be imprisoned but even to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.” (Acts 21:9–14)

Read More
Related Posts: