The fact that the session views as “attacks” the criticism that Memorial Church and Greg Johnson have received, since hosting the 2018 Revoice conference, is very telling. It’s telling because it reveals the session’s mind set as being highly defensive of its position, instead of being open to counsel from Christian brethren. It also shows why Memorial’s session has not moved from their theological error despite all their prayer and fasting.

We have read the report that the congregation of Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, on November 18, 2022, voted by 92% to withdraw from the PCA. This was recommended by their session and agreed to by their pastor, Greg Johnson, who indicated that he will be leaving with the congregation.
The article noted that the session informed the congregation that their recommendation was coming “with a mixture of sorrow and hope … after fifteen months spent fasting, praying, waiting, consulting and listening.” The reason for withdrawing, the session explained, was “continued attacks” from within the denomination which were distracting the church from its mission.
The session’s statement is troubling to me. They claim to have spent fifteen months “fasting, praying, waiting, consulting and listening,” but still seem to have ended up with the same erroneous views as the ones they started with, namely, approving and promoting Revoice ideology in the church. Where is the repentance for, not only introducing the sinful impurity of Revoice into the PCA, but also violating the principle of maintaining peace in the church, by creating years of conflict trying to justify themselves. All their praying and fasting seems not to have had the corrective effect it should have had. Could that be because what they were praying for was not the will of God?
The fact that the session views as “attacks” the criticism that Memorial Church and Greg Johnson have received, since hosting the 2018 Revoice conference, is very telling. It’s telling because it reveals the session’s mind set as being highly defensive of its position, instead of being open to counsel from Christian brethren. It also shows why Memorial’s session has not moved from their theological error despite all their prayer and fasting. I believe that on this particular error, their minds are locked into what Paul describes in Romans 1 as truth suppression, where they’ve become futile in their thinking.
Critics have not been on the attack, but rather have been seeking to persuade Johnson, his session, Missouri Presbytery, and any others holding similar views, by speaking the truth out of love, in an effort to halt the slide into liberalism and return the PCA to the truth. There has been a noticeable movement in recent years of PCA slippage downward in a progressive direction. This has been led by progressives in the PCA who take an approving stance toward homosexuality, gender identity and other such priorities. Their support, even celebration, of Revoice is proof of that.
The Bible commands us to “speak the truth in love” (Eph 4:15), which is what critics of progressive views and actions are seeking to do in the present conflict. However, you can’t speak the truth in love, without having the truth. Truth comes first, then you can speak it in love.
Progressives reverse the biblical sequence when they, in loving concern for homosexuals, seek support in Scripture for teaching that agrees with their pre-conceived beliefs. Matthew Vines’s book, God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships, is a case in point. Note that starting with homosexuality, Vines seeks to show biblical support for it. He argues that homosexual orientation and committed same-sex relationships are consistent with a “high view” of the Bible and evangelical Christianity. I believe he is badly mistaken about that. There simply is no biblical teaching supporting the LGBT agenda; the reverse is true. Revoice doctrine on homosexuality is constructed to meet the need; but being constructed opinion, it isn’t biblical, and it isn’t true, objectively speaking.
PCA progressives are simply repeating and extending the same discredited biblical arguments as Vines did in their efforts to justify the Revoice movement, and in their opposition to conservative efforts to restore the PCA to biblical soundness, after some serious slippage in recent years.
Progressives appear to be post-modernists. As such, they have a fluid, subjective view of truth and reject the concept of absolute truth. They receive the Revoice doctrine subjectively as “their truth” even though it’s been refuted objectively as false. Francis Schaeffer used to distinguish objective truth from post-modern, subjective truth by calling the former true truth, in contrast to the false constructions of “my truth” or “your truth” or “their truth.” The post-modern view is aptly foreseen by the prophet Isaiah (59:14) as truth stumbling in the streets, and by Daniel (8:12) as truth cast to the ground.
Thus, when progressives seek to speak the truth in love to homosexuals, they are speaking “their truth” to homosexuals, not “true truth.” You can see the big problem here for progressives, because it’s never loving to speak falsehoods to someone to whom you are trying to express loving concern. It’s like quoting Ephesians 4:15 to say: “speaking falsehoods in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.”
Obviously, that’s bafflegab. It’s perverting to God’s Word and actually unloving to homosexuals. Yet that is what progressives get by starting with what they think is loving concern for homosexuals and then looking for supporting Scripture truth, which they can’t find because it isn’t there. They have to resort to post-modern hermeneutical gymnastics to construct their own truth. Hence, unsound Revoice doctrine.
The real sorrow here is that Greg Johnson and the elders of Memorial Presbyterian Church seem blind to the realities of Scripture, and bent on continuing to pursue the destructive course they’ve been on. Since they have refused to repent and desire to persist in error, it is no doubt best all-around that they withdraw the PCA.
Douglas B. Ostien is a member of Chestnut Mountain Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) in Chestnut Mountain, Ga.
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Written by Craig A. Carter |
Monday, October 18, 2021
The biggest obstacle to a recovery of confessional Protestant faith today is that, as moderns, we are cut off from our heritage by the philosophical naturalist metaphysics that we have unconsciously and uncritically absorbed from our environment. We desperately need to step outside of modernity long enough to perceive its weaknesses and limitations. But we only absorb contemporary media and read recently-published books and we rarely encounter premodern thought. Even more rarely do we encounter premodern thought that is profound and deep. Perhaps stepping into a Gothic cathedral or listening to Handel’s Messiah evokes that same longing for beauty and truth that we sense in Scripture on the rare occasion that we meditate on it without distraction.

Protestantism has been in crisis mode since the early nineteenth century. The effects of the Enlightenment began to affect Protestant theology in the eighteenth century, but after Kant, knowledge of God became increasingly problematic and Christianity, in general, began to pall as a result of the philosophical naturalism that settled over Western culture like a blanket snuffing out faith. This trend accelerated after the Darwinian revolution in the mid-century and Protestantism was most affected. The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the result.
Another Religion Altogether
Protestant liberal theology was a desperate attempt to save as much Christian content as possible from what Walter Lippmann would later term “the acids of modernity.” The liberal project involved restating Christianity within the constraints of modern metaphysics and modern metaphysics was essentially the rejection of the broadly Platonist metaphysics that had formed the mainstream of the Western philosophical tradition for well over 2000 years.
As the philosopher Lloyd Gerson has demonstrated with great scholarship in a series of books, the main alternative to Platonism historically has been philosophical naturalism and, in the nineteenth century, philosophical naturalism triumphed decisively over Platonism. This was the context in which liberal theology attempted to preserve at least some elements of the Bible and theology. Even though many Christian words such as “sin” and “redemption” were retained, their meaning was dramatically changed. The definitive judgment of the failure of the liberal project was pronounced by J. Gresham Machen in 1923 when he said that liberalism is not Christianity, but another religion altogether.
From Fundamentalism on through the period of Neo-orthodoxy to the rise of Evangelicalism, the search for a Biblical and orthodox expression of Christianity has been intense. If liberal theology is no answer, what is to be done? If modernity excludes Christian orthodoxy how can we live in the modern world as Christians?
What it Means to be Protestant
Our problem today is that we do not understand the Protestant confessions and so we do not really understand what it means to be Protestants. We believe that the Reformation recovered biblical teaching after centuries of decline in the late Medieval Roman church but we cannot give an account of how the content of the confessions expresses biblical truth. Contemporary Evangelicals are not really Protestants; for most of them, Protestantism is a movement in history.
That in turn means that the great Evangelical movement in the Anglo-Saxon, trans-Atlantic world is cut off from its own heritage. Some of us may read John Calvin and John Owen occasionally, but we do not comprehend them on certain points and much of their depth escapes us. We do not grasp what some have termed “reformed catholicity.” In what sense are we in communion with Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas? We cannot say.
Soft Theistic Mutualism
If you doubt me, consider the sad decline in the doctrine of God that we have seen over the past 50 years as documented in James Dolezal’s little book, All That is in God (Reformation Heritage Books, 2017). There Dolezal shows that “soft theistic mutualism,” a view of God in which God is in time and affects and changes the world and the world, in turn, affects and changes God. This is essentially a pagan, mythological understanding of God and yet it has wormed its way into otherwise orthodox and evangelical writers. This is astonishing!
It indicates that something very deep and fundamental is malfunctioning in contemporary theology and the danger is that this view of God will – if not corrected – metastasize into a spiritual life-threatening cancer in a generation or two. Every confession of the Reformation and post-preformation period, including the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Augsburg Confession, the Westminster Confession and the Second London Confession, teaches that God is immutable and impassible. And none see any contradiction between affirming those attributes of God and simultaneously affirming that God speaks and acts in history to judge and save. Moderns cannot, for the life of them, comprehend how they can be so inconsistent.
Moving Forward
My contention is that conservative Protestant theology today needs to undertake an alternative to the liberal project that is comparable in scope. We need to channel a great deal of time, energy and resources into a project of ressourcement. This French term brought over into English means a return to the classic sources of Christianity including the church fathers, Thomas Aquinas and other forms of premodern faith. Recently, in an encouraging development in the work of a number of theologians, many inspired by John Webster, the project of ressourcement has taken the form of looking back to the post-Reformation, Reformed scholastic tradition.
This movement is growing and spreading among many who find the shallow biblicism and ahistorical forms of evangelical faith that are so common today to be unsatisfying. Scholars like Richard Muller and Carl Trueman have led the way in recovering the riches of seventeenth-century continental and English pastors and theologians who utilized the metaphysics of the Great Tradition to do theology and write and expound the great confessions of Protestantism. We may not understand their philosophical assumptions, but we can see that they took the Bible seriously and wrote doctrinal treatises that need to be taken seriously by believers. CLICK TO TWEET
The biggest obstacle to a recovery of confessional Protestant faith today is that, as moderns, we are cut off from our heritage by the philosophical naturalist metaphysics that we have unconsciously and uncritically absorbed from our environment. We desperately need to step outside of modernity long enough to perceive its weaknesses and limitations. But we only absorb contemporary media and read recently-published books and we rarely encounter premodern thought. Even more rarely do we encounter premodern thought that is profound and deep. Perhaps stepping into a Gothic cathedral or listening to Handel’s Messiah evokes that same longing for beauty and truth that we sense in Scripture on the rare occasion that we meditate on it without distraction. But how do we get from here to there?
One practice John Webster urged on his students was that of reading sympathetically the great texts of the tradition. Even better, he suggested, was the practice of apprenticing ourselves to one of the great masters for a time by seeking to immerse ourselves in their thought. C. S. Lewis pointed out that reading old books is important, not because ancient writers never made mistakes, but because they tended to make different mistakes than our contemporaries do. We can spot those mistakes because they stand out to us, whereas the mistakes we and all our contemporaries commonly make seem like common sense to us.
So what to do? I believe that we need to do whatever it takes to break out of the cave of modernity and breath the free air of the premodern period where philosophical naturalism is not stifling the truth. But how? One way to do it is to engage in the study of ancient philosophical texts so as to be initiated into the great conversation that has gone on between the greatest minds in the Western tradition for 2000 years.
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As we hold to our God-given assumptions in a dark world, we can speak calmly and lovingly to people desperate for the two foundational desires of human beings: to be completely known and completely loved. Failing to have dialogue would preclude knowing others deeply; failing to stand on our assumptions would preclude loving them truly.

I’m a Matthew 5:9 child. Were my heart a forest, peace would be the log cabin deep in the woods, with a spindling smoke trail winding above the evergreen. Still. Settled. Quiet. And longing to stay that way.
But my heart isn’t a forest. Peace isn’t tucked away in the woods. The world is loud and broken. There is so much shouting, and sarcasm, and caricatures, and reductionism. In the loud world, my heart might as well be in Times Square—shaken by the decibels of discontent. Today’s controversies and disagreements literally make my stomach turn. Awkward pauses reeking with judgment swell my throat. Heart palpitations thunder when I watch people cut each other off. So, when I finished watching a recent documentary on identity, you can imagine how I felt.
But what struck me by the end of watching was how many unspoken assumptions weren’t voiced—assumptions that would’ve explained so much not just about what people thought but why. If we don’t know why someone thinks something, conversation is bound to get hijacked by misunderstanding, and offense isn’t far behind. Assumptions—our own—is where we need to start before we engage with anyone who differs from us. And in a culture where Christianity is continually marginalized, we’re going to meet a lot of people who differ from us.
Three Types of Assumptions
Assumptions are the countries we live in, the things we walk on. They are the patterns of thought and underlying conditions our feet always find. We live on our assumptions in order to function in the world. And there’s no one on the planet who doesn’t have the three main types of assumptions I’ll discuss in this article. The academic labels for these are metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. But we’re simply talking about what exists, how we know things, and what makes something right or wrong.
If we want to engage peaceably with people who differ from us, we need to know what our assumptions are in these areas, and then we can use conversation to discover where others stand in the same areas. This doesn’t mean we’ll then be more likely to agree with others in the broader culture. In fact, for Christians, what we assume about metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics will ensure we’ll likely disagree with most people. But at least we’ll know why. And we’ll also establish a clear means for our conversation partners to express their own views. This can at least provide civility in a world where polarization and the demonization of dissenters reigns.
Metaphysics
What exists and where did it come from? The first part of that question seems simple enough, but you’d be surprised (or maybe not) how much variation there is in today’s world of what Charles Taylor called expressive individualism. For now, let’s break up Christian assumptions about metaphysics into two points. And then we’ll need to draw a conclusion about our identity, which is the screaming topic of our culture and an important facet of public theology.
First, as Christians, our basic assumption is that this world isn’t all there is. There is God, who made and governs all things, and then there is the world, creation. Theologians call this the Creator-creature distinction, and Cornelius Van Til was adamant about its centrality. He said we must “begin our interpretation of reality upon the presupposition of theCreator-creature distinction as basic to everything else.”[1] As Christopher Watkin wrote recently,
This creator-creature distinction sets the biblical account apart from the dominant picture of reality in our own culture, which holds that there is only one sort of existence, often with conflict at its heart. This view is summed up in the words of Carl Sagan, ‘The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or evil will be.’ It is a monism, or what Van Til called a ‘one-circle’ view.[2]
There are two circles of reality, not one. And because of how God created all things—the Father voicing the Son in power of the Spirit—what exists in our world is dependent on and derivative of his character. Everything, including humans, reflects God—though humans do this in a special way. In short, we are not here on our own. The world is not a neutral playground. God is present and uses everything to point us to our eternal home in himself.
Second, everything we see around us came from and is sustained by the speech of God. This highlights not only the deeply personal nature of our world but also the centrality of Scripture, as God’s personal word to us. As Vern Poythress wrote, “Scripture is our natural instructor as to the metaphysics of the world, since the metaphysics of the world is completely determined and specified by God’s speech governing the world, and his speech takes place in Christ the Word (John1:1).”[3] The speech of the Trinity has shaped and stewarded every fleck of the material universe—from the silent stars to your cereal spoon. We exist because he spoke. We find our identity, purpose, and meaning in that speech. As Christians, we cannot account for what exists or even who we are apart from God speaking.
Now, third, what does this mean about our identity, about who we are? In looking to the speech of God for our answer, Christians must say image bearers, one of the earlier teachings of Scripture (Gen. 1:26–28). But we can go further, since many people (even Christians) don’t really know what this means. To be an image bearer of God means that we holistically resemble him on a creaturely level. We are, as Carl Trueman restated recently, mimetic creatures.[4] We imitate. We look at God’s hand in history and in our own lives. And then, by the power of God’s own Spirit, we do what he does as little reflectors of his eternal light, a light of truth, love, and beauty. The image of God covers everything that we think, say, or do.
But this holistic imitation always has a relational goal. Put in the words of the Dutch theologian Geerhardus Vos,
That man bears God’s image means much more than that he is spirit and possesses understanding, will, etc. It means above all that he is disposed for communion with God, that all the capacities of his soul can act in a way that corresponds to their destiny only if they rest in God…According to the deeper Protestant conception, the image does not exist only in correspondence with God but in being disposed toward God. God’s nature is, as it were, the stamp; our nature is the impression made by this stamp. Both fit together.[5]
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