Leaking to the Left
“Isn’t it good that egalitarian or less confessional ministers leave?” We would answer in the affirmative, but we’d also note that the precipitating change in convictions probably didn’t arrive with lightning-bolt speed. The number leaving left suggests that men with egalitarian convictions operated in the PCA for a number of years before departing.
When PCA ministers leave for other denominations, where do they go? Our friend Zack Groff has tracked this and takes a slightly different approach in his analysis than do we. He uses more peaceful/less peaceful to describe the receiving denominations. We will use the flawed left/right descriptor.
For our purposes left will basically mean less doctrinally precise and/or more egalitarian than the PCA. Right indicates denominations more doctrinally precise or socially conservative than the PCA. Far fewer congregations leave for other denominations than do ministers, thus the ministerial numbers are more significant than the congregational data. Here is the section of the General Assembly minutes from 2023 that reflects ministerial moves in 2022:1
The data suggests that when PCA ministers leave, they go left. More than half of the leavers went to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC – 9)) and ECO (A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians – 2) are less concerned2 with confessional Reformed doctrine and both allow women elders and pastors. The same is true for the hard-to-categorize Anglican Church in North America (ACNA – 1). And the Episcopal Church (1) is simply a liberal mainline church. It should be noted that all of these “left” denominations (Except the Episcopal) were late 20th/early 21st-century institutions meant primarily to serve as landing zones for “conservative” refugees from the mainline.
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When Belief is Agony
In the midst of the worst of this, I don’t think I doubted the truth of the scriptures, either. That was part of the problem: scary passages felt like chains binding me, guns pointed at my head. But it meant also that I could hang on to the passages of unequivocal grace. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” “The LORD is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made.” There is nothing original that I can offer here: these are uncompromising promises about God’s trustworthiness in his character and in his love of each of us, and of those we love. I held on to these white-knuckled. And then, gradually, you realize that you don’t need to hold on that tightly, because you yourself are held.
I love being a Christian.
I mean, I love Jesus too. But I also love all the rest of it: Brunch after church with friends, hylomorphism, late-night Eucharist on Christmas Eve, and carols and stollen and roast beef and friends’ children whom I have known and loved since they were born, dressed in deeply miscellaneous animal and animal-adjacent costumes for the pageant. C.S. Lewis and John Donne and Charles De Koninck, Durham Cathedral and St. Cuthbert’s tomb, tucked away absentmindedly behind the high altar, the Aksum Empire and the Holy Roman Empire and all the little communes of monks and anabaptists, who read Acts 2 and 4 and decided to just go ahead and do it; stoles and copes and incense and candles; neoplatonism and canon law and postliberalism and hot cross buns.
And knowing that I am called to a high calling, that nothing good will be lost, that there are no ordinary people, that death has been killed, that our God and King has given us his body to eat, his blood to drink. I love it. I love the experience of being a Christian, and I also think it’s true, so there’s that.
But there have been times when I have found belief to be almost unbearable. And I’ve met enough other people who have shared this particular difficulty that I think my story might be worth writing down.
I was sixteen when I was baptized, but it wasn’t until grad school that I started more seriously to try to follow Jesus. In the decade after that grad school conversion, I went through various … well, in retrospect I’d call them attacks, or something. Episodes. Times I couldn’t stop thinking. I would call them, now, ruminations, though I didn’t have that language then. They came in three varieties:
First, an inability to stop thinking about the idea that God might not be good, might not be trustworthy, if Calvinism was right. Second, a sense of “I can’t live in a world where some people may be going to hell.”
Third, I also at various points felt intensely guilty about things which an objective observer would not say that I ought to feel guilty about. Can I spend time doing anything other than evangelism, or serving the poor? Does God want me to enjoy nature and read novels, or are these things worldly, of the flesh? How can I enjoy anything while abortion is an ongoing reality in this world, in my country?
These circling thoughts led to a kind of exhaustion about my own attempts to make sense of everything, and a sort of grief, a nostalgia for a time when I was just a secular person, not needing to worry about any of this stuff. I felt alienated from non-Christians and even from Christians who didn’t share my intensity and anguish.
And maybe a couple of times, at the worst of these moments, I felt like I was presented with a choice: you can cease to believe, or you can pray for faith. And I prayed for faith.
That choice didn’t feel like it would change reality. What it felt like was that I was given the option to become … a non-player character, somehow. Taking the blue pill, and so on: living in the psychological comfort apostasy offered.
Scrupulosity is agonizing. I had the worried-I-was-sinning kind, too, though usually I worried I was sinning by omission. But the ruminations: those are a real bear.
I’m not sure when I first heard that word — scrupulosity. I think at some point I probably googled “religious OCD,” which is more or less what it is, and what I could feel that it was. It’s been a weird blessing in my life that before my adult conversion, I’d experienced what might be called secular OCD: obsessive-compulsive disorder unrelated to Christianity. How OCD works is that it makes what feel like moral threats: your moral safety, or physical safety, is at risk; you are both unsafe and in the wrong, and performing various rituals (handwashing, not stepping on cracks: the disorder is varied in what it comes up with but it does seem to come up with the same things frequently) is what will put you morally and physically right again.
Very frequently what you care about most is what the disorder “chooses” to threaten you about: “wash your hands just right or your child will die and it will be your fault,” that kind of thing. Those with this disorder are not delusional: You always know on some level that the threat isn’t real, it’s irrational, and because of that, the disorder can be profoundly embarrassing. “Don’t mind me, just going to ummm… wash my hands seven times and then turn off the tap with the backs of my hands… for… reasons… you go ahead and start dinner.”
It started when I was around twelve, and I got a diagnosis fairly briskly and ended up at various points doing various kinds of treatments — medication, cognitive behavioral therapy — which all helped enormously. Because I am who I am, I also, in my teens, became deeply emotionally connected to Samuel Johnson, who had it pretty bad: he felt the need to touch each lamp-post as he passed it, walking the streets of London; he feared hell profoundly and often couldn’t find peace about that. I used to imagine inventing a time machine and going back in time to bring Dr. Johnson Prozac-spiked brownies; I figured that would be less likely to cause unfortunate changing-the-timeline butterfly effects than trying to explain enough contemporary neuroscience to him to convince him to take pills. I also didn’t want him to worry about what the implication of the efficacy of meds on this anxiety disorder was for the existence of the soul — he had enough religious ruminations of his own — but I worried about it. (I also, full disclosure, had a pretty intense crush on him).
The solution to that (the worry about the implication of the efficacy of the meds on the existence of the soul, not the crush) at least was to get better theology. If wine can make your heart merry, or doing shots of Jägermeister can disastrously lower your inhibitions, it’s not a problem in theological anthropology that a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) can dial down the anxiety enough to let you make the choice to ignore the OCD-threat.
The way this works, as best we can tell, is that it’s the repeated ignoring of those threats, that disciplined exercise of the will, that ultimately rewires those neural pathways; the meds just make the threats… quieter, the choice to ignore easier to make. That systematic building of good habits, of evaluating your own thoughts and feelings and being able to choose how to respond to them is what cognitive behavioral therapy does. You use your mind, reason, and will to physically reshape your brain.
It’s not actually very different than what a Book-of-Proverbs approach to becoming better at being a human being might be. The whole package of treatment begins to look, in fact, precisely the way one would expect if we were in fact bodysouls, rather than souls inhabiting bodies, and if we were rational creatures with an immaterial intellect which can operate via the will; in other words as if human anthropology and ethics work the way St. Thomas says they do when he talks about virtue. Just to say.
So anyway, post-high school, the OCD was pretty much dealt with. And then, after college, I started going to a Vineyard church (I’m Anglican now, if you couldn’t tell from all the flagrant scholasticism) and started actually spending time with people who believed that Jesus was, for real, not at all dead. And then I found that I really actually believed that too. And the stakes in life suddenly became much higher.
Conversion is always disorienting. But God gave me a time to work through the normal confusions of new Christianity: the sense that there is nothing that one can hold back, the realization that there are no guarantees that God will make ahead of time, for example, that you won’t eventually need to be martyred; all the normal pricks of an awakened conscience; all the joy and amazement of the first Christmas where you find out that the carols you’ve been singing your whole life contain treasures which had somehow been hidden from you, lines that are suddenly alive and blazing with glory: “veiled in flesh the Godhead see/hail th’incarnate Deity/pleased as man with man to dwell/Jesus, our Emmanuel.”
But within the first two years after I converted, I had my first major bout of scrupulosity.
As I’ve said, the feeling of OCD is one of profound danger and also of a bad conscience, in a way. It can overlap with “real conscience,” but it’s distinct enough, if you know it, to recognize. There was something going on here that was not just “what reality is like,” “what being a sinner and having a bad conscience is like,” or “what Christianity is like.”
I’m an extremely curious person and I’m also a nerd, particularly when it comes to history and historical theology. What I found, after I started digging, is that scrupulosity is a known spiritual malady that pastors have been saying “oy, not this again” about for two thousand years. It’s also a neurological OCD-related condition that can be treated on that basis, and confessors and spiritual directors have used cognitive behavioral therapy-like tools for most of the last two millennia to do just that.
The classical Protestant experience of scrupulosity is the lack of “assurance” of salvation which is read as evidence of a lack of election. A more contemporary Protestant experience is the fear that one hasn’t “been saved” properly, that sure, you said the Sinner’s Prayer but it kinda seems like maybe it didn’t … take. It is not, however, the case that Catholic spirituality is without its own specific pitfalls about scrupulosity. A classical Catholic experience is the fear that you didn’t remember everything you needed to confess and that therefore you are not safe in taking the Eucharist; this has kept many people away from the Mass for years.
As I mentioned above, there are two pretty distinct versions of scrupulosity. There’s the one that resembles “secular” OCD and which leads sufferers to either perform repetitive prayers (not as in liturgical prayer, but as in a self-imposed “I have to say exactly these words with exactly the right emphasis and feelings for it to count”) or to confess over and over again (Luther’s poor confessor!) in order to “feel like they’ve gotten it right.” And then there’s the delightful experience of repetitive, racing thoughts, ruminations over theological questions, which one feels like one must resolve in order to be at peace. Neither makes for a particularly good time.
OCD has been called the “doubting disease.” Did I really turn off that gas burner? Did I really lock the door? I think I did, I remember doing it… but if I did, why do I doubt so profoundly that I did, why do I feel in danger? Better check. In other words, subjective uncertainty presents itself as something to pay attention to, something that gives good information. In non-religious OCD, one learns to talk back to one’s mind: “yes, I know you are subjectively uncertain, but that has nothing to do with reality.”
The Puritanism which is so beloved of the New Calvinism has, as one of its signature ideas (although one might, and many have, argued that this is a distortion of the actual teaching) that a subjective assurance of salvation is a necessary mark of true salvation. This idea was carried over into some versions of the revivalism of both Great Awakenings. Anxiety becomes part of the process. One sits on the “anxious bench,” until one receives assurance. Those with an unaddressed anxiety disorder can sit there for a long, long time.
Am I saved? Am I right before God? It is a question that can lead to repentance, to baptism, to a life of discipleship. It can also, in a baptized person with every reason to trust that God’s promises apply to him, now adopted into Christ’s family, be the content of irrational ruminations. But so can “Can God be trusted?” and “Does God want my family to be saved?” And this can get very very refined indeed — as refined as your theology: “is ‘good’ meant equivocally or analogically when we predicate it of God? Are you sure? But are you sure? How about ‘love’? Is monergism true? What can it mean that God desires all men to be saved if monergism is true? How can I trust that he wants me to be? Better think about this for five hours in the middle of the night to try to solve it.”
I suppose most Christians have bouts of something like this at some point; we’re all on something of a spectrum, with many of these kinds of mental distress. Anxious hearts are a common human malady, which God addresses; and of course some anxiety is good, some fears are real. How to distinguish between this and scrupulosity which ought to be treated as such? I can only tell my story. Probably the best thing would be to talk to your pastor; ask him if he even knows the word scrupulosity; that’s a good start. Above all, do not attempt to go it alone.
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One Hundred Years Ago, “Following the Science” Meant Supporting Eugenics
The eugenics movement, as Chesterton predicted, became a wretched story of the negation of democratic ideals to serve a utopian vision. “Hence the tyranny has taken but a single stride to reach the secret and sacred places of personal freedom,” he wrote, “where no sane man ever dreamed of seeing it.” Wittingly or not, the eugenic dream unleashed a cataract of deeply rooted fears and hatreds — sanctified this time by a secular priesthood, the scientific community.
In the 1920s, when he was still an agnostic, C. S. Lewis noted in his diary his latest reading: “Began G. K. Chesterton’s Eugenics and Other Evils.”
A controversial English Catholic writer, Chesterton published his book in 1922, when the popularity of eugenics was at flood tide. Respectable opinion on both sides of the Atlantic embraced the concept: a scientific approach to selective breeding to reduce, and eventually eliminate, the category of people considered mentally and morally deficient. From U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, eugenics policies — including involuntary sterilization — were hailed as a “progressive” and “compassionate” solution to mounting social problems.
A hundred years ago, Chesterton discerned something altogether different: “terrorism by tenth-rate professors.” For a time, he stood nearly alone in his prophetic assault on the eugenics movement and the pseudo-scientific theory by which it was defended.
“People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late,” Chesterton warned. “I know that it numbers many disciples whose intentions are entirely innocent and humane; and who would be sincerely astonished at my describing it as I do. But that is only because evil always wins through the strength of its dupes.”
Chesterton declared his aim openly, without qualification or compromise: The ideology of eugenics must be destroyed if human freedom is to be preserved. The eugenic idea, he wrote, “is a thing no more to be bargained about than poisoning.” In the end, it would require the discoveries at the death camps at Auschwitz and Dachau for most of the world to finally reject the horrific logic of eugenics. Yet Chesterton was one of the first to see it coming: when the machinery of the state would invoke the authority of science to deprive individuals — both the “unfit” and the unborn — of their fundamental human rights.
It is hard to overstate the degree to which eugenics captured the imagination of the medical and scientific communities in the early 20th century. Anthropologist Francis Galton, who coined the term — from the Greek for “good birth” — argued that scientific techniques for breeding healthier animals should be applied to human beings. Those considered to be “degenerates,” “imbeciles,” or “feebleminded” would be targeted. Anticipating public opposition, Galton told scientific gatherings that eugenics “must be introduced into the national conscience like a new religion.” Premier scientific organizations, such as the American Museum of Natural History, and institutions such as Harvard and Princeton, preached the eugenics gospel: They held conferences, published papers, provided research funding, and advocated for sterilization laws.
To many thinkers in the West, the catastrophe of the First World War, in addition to the problems of poverty, crime, and social breakdown, suggested a sickness in the racial stock. Book titles help tell the story: Social Decay and Degeneration; The Need for Eugenic Reform; Racial Decay; Sterilization of the Unfit; and The Twilight of the White Races. The American Eugenics Society, founded in 1922 — the same year Chesterton published Eugenics and Other Evils — was supported by Nobel Prize–winning scientists whose stated objective was to sterilize a tenth of the U.S. population.
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Redemptive Historical Preaching Under Fire
What does that plan of redemption involve? Scripture teaches us to trust in Christ for the forgiveness of our sins, it teaches us about grace, it teaches us about the fruits of grace in that Christ teaches us how to live in this world as He also saves us from our old ways and patterns of life, it also teaches us to hope in the future as history comes to its close wherein we will be finally delivered from this sinful world. Christ is all over the pages of Scripture as He teaches us how to serve and witness to Him in a sinful and evil world.
One of the debates that has entered the Presbyterian & Reformed part of Christendom over the last 50 years is the debate over preaching. And one of those fields of debate is over what is called “Redemptive Historical Preaching.” The debate is especially in the area of RH preaching as it pertains to moral teaching in the church. Some believe that moral teaching should be emphasized more than often happens in RH preaching. Others believe that RH preaching is a guard against moralism.
It is always good to pick a fiery example of the opposition to rigid redemptive historical preaching, since everyone’s heart starts to beat a little faster and the temperature in the room starts to rise. One of those opponents is the Presbyterian pastor down in the States, Pastor Tim Bayly (This brother has done good work within the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches at large). He writes in one article: “Redemptive-historical browbeaters are scholastics out to destroy the Reformation doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture.” He continues (commenting on the history of David and Goliath): “But nowhere and never does such lifting up of Christ require silence concerning the many vices, virtues, morals, and laws these same stories record.”
Redemptive Historical Preaching heavily emphasizes the reading of Scripture through the grid of history at the center of which is Christ. It provides an emphasis on the metanarrative for a postmodern world. Tim Bayly rightly points out that men like Michael Horton, Tim Keller and Bryan Chappell all espouse redemptive historical preaching. He forgets too mention in this article that the early proponents of this homiletical style came from the Netherlands: men like Klaas Schilder.
My dad and uncles and many pastors that I grew up around were trained within the Redemptive Historical method at Mid-America Reformed Seminary. I was also trained within this tradition at the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary. It runs thick through the churches that come from the Dutch tradition and has caught on especially among those who desire that preaching be Christ-centered.
I don’t necessarily buy Pastor Bayly’s critique of the redemptive historical method as much as I can see how there may be a critique of some redemptive historical preaching.
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