Just as the notion of “harm” is being used to limit freedom of speech, so the notion of health and safety (and its expansion beyond the physical to the psycho-social) will be used to limit the freedom of the Church to govern itself. We must not wait until it is too late. Now is the time to declare that we stand under the Bible, and that the State too stands under the judgement of God’s word.

The Two Kingdoms
In 1596 one of the most famous scenes in Presbyterian history took place. Andrew Melville, a well-known Scottish minister was summoned to appear before King James to answer for his opposition to the ‘Black Acts’, which sought to impose the King’s desire for bishops on the Church of Scotland. Melville told the King: “I must tell you, there are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland: there is King James the head of this commonwealth, and there is Christ Jesus the King of the church, whose subject James the sixth is, and of whose kingdom he is not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member. Sir, those whom Christ has called and commanded to watch over his church, have power and authority from him to govern his spiritual kingdom both jointly and severally; the which no Christian king or prince should control and discharge, but fortify and assist; otherwise, they are not faithful subjects of Christ and members of his church.”
The history of Scottish Presbyterianism, from the Reformation, through to the Covenanters and the Free Church Disruption of 1843, is the history of the two kingdoms. This is also true of Presbyterians throughout the world. We are not theocrats. We do not believe that the Church has the right to tell the State how to govern. But neither are we Erastians—we do not accept that the State has the right to tell the Church how we should be governed.
The Australian Presbyterian church was set up on that basis. So was the Australian constitution, which declares in section 116 that the Commonwealth was banned from making any law which would prohibit the free exercise of religion.
However, there is an enormous danger that the Presbyterian churches in Australia could forget their historical, confessional and biblical roots—by adopting a 21st century version of Erastian Church/State relations.
Today’s Cultural Background
The cultural background to this situation is that we live in a society which is rejecting its Christian roots. Rather than there being two kingdoms, there is in effect only one—that of the State. The government, instead of accepting that it has a limited role, is now setting itself up as God, determining what is right and wrong, for everyone. This is seen in terms of business, academia, media, sport and most significantly for us—education, the family and the church. Ultimately Caesar does not mind if we exist, as long as we acknowledge Caesar as Lord (i.e. the Supreme Authority) in everything.
Chaos and Confusion
As an observer to last week’s New South Wales General Assembly, I saw at first hand the confusion and chaos that the acceptance of this Erastian doctrine causes us.
The situation arose out of a decision which in effect binds the Assembly from making any decisions without first of all, conforming with the NSW government’s Work Health and Safety Act. Under this Act we were told that all office bearers, staff and volunteers were to be considered workers—and therefore the Act would apply to them. Accordingly, no change can occur without consulting all workers and addressing any concerns they may have. The Assembly were told that all members of the Assembly were to be regarded as PCBU’s (Persons Conducting a Business Undertaking) and were individually legally responsible to consult every ‘worker’. We were also told that this includes not only actual volunteers but those who might ‘aspire to the role’. In other words, everyone. By requiring ‘consultation with all workers’ (i.e. anyone who does anything within the Church), we are in danger of forsaking the basic principles of Presbyterianism, that we have government by elders and that we are not Independents or governed by votes on each issue. Nor are we be governed by ‘experts’, lawyers or focus groups.
This is all done with the worthy aim of protecting workers’ health. Health in the Act includes psychosocial effects. Counselling should be offered and, in some cases, even the consultation should not take place until the relevant risks were minimised. This all arose because of a threatening letter which the General Office received before the 2023 Assembly. In response, everything was put on hold.
The presenting issue was the decision of the Assembly to seek to draw up legislation which would permit only male elders. I have no desire to get into that issue in this article—(although I think it is important, especially where the biblical teaching has been misused to disguise or justify misogyny.) My whole point is that that is a question for the Church to determine, not the State. My concern is with people who use the civil law in order to control what the Church can and cannot do—on whatever side of whatever issue.
The Assembly decided that, amongst other things, “that the sex qualifications of elders shall not be the subject of questions, speeches, comments or debate for the duration of this session of Assembly.”The result of this decision was to make the Assembly one of the most confused and chaotic I have ever witnessed. We had reports on the Women’s committee and from the Elders committee, which we were not allowed to discuss fully. Decisions were made on the basis of legal advice that we were not allowed to see (although we were told that we were legally liable for it!). A second legal opinion was asked for and refused. A motion limiting discussion was itself passed without discussion. (I am not telling tales out of court. This was all done and decided in public. As an observer, I observed).
State-Sponsored Pharisaism
I am sure that most of this was done with good intentions. The decision makers wanted to protect the Church, and also to deal with some of the injustices that some women have faced over the years. In that they were right. The trouble is that the decision did neither, and in fact may have made both worse. If you can’t talk about a subject, then you can’t deal with it. And if you limit the discussion to the confines of the WHS Act, you have placed the Church in an unbiblical bind. The root meaning of the word ‘religio’ means ‘to bind’. Ironically, by allowing the State to be our rule maker and supreme governor we have ended up in a bind that will cripple us—a kind of State-sponsored Pharisaism. To paraphrase an article in the Spectator (on a different subject): “Our Presbyterianism is in danger of wrapping ourselves in bureaucratic bandages to manufacture the visage of life and competence, even as holiness and courage evaporate”.
What’s Wrong with Wanting to Obey the State?
Why do I say this? What can be wrong with just simply obeying the law of the State, especially when that law is designed to prevent harm? That is a good and reasonable question. But it all depends on:
a) how much you trust the State to make the laws of the Church,b) what is meant by harm?c) whether the State has authority over the Church.
Some of the arguments made in the Assembly were quite disturbing. For example, we were told that we should always want to follow the Word of God first, but it should not be the first box to tick. On the contrary, it should be the first and the last tick in the order—the alpha and omega of all we decide!
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Written by David S. Schrock |
Friday, November 26, 2021
For Christians, knowing what God did in the cross of Christ is vital for understanding our faith. Moreover, if we intend to share the gospel, make disciples, or defend the faith, we need to understand these truths as well, starting with the necessity and the nature of the cross. Therefore, learning why and what the cross achieved is foundational for the faith.

In 1955 John Murray released his classic work on the cross and salvation, Redemption Accomplished and Applied. This week, the men in our church are discussing this book. And in preparation, I re-read the opening chapters on the necessity and the nature of the cross.
For those who have asked questions about why the cross was needful and what the cross accomplished, Murray is a great start—even if you might need to keep Dictionary.com close at hand. In his book, he gives a solid defense of the faith and he offers cogent from a Reformed perspective. Over the years, I have often assigned this book for class and returned to it myself.
In what follows I offer sixteen quotations from the book organized around seven truths related to the necessity and nature of the cross. Indeed, if you want to know what the cross achieved, Murray’s book is a great introduction. And hopefully what follows will give you a helpful introduction to Murray.
(N.B. The page numbers that follow are based on the 1955 Eerdmans copy, the one without Carl Trueman’s forward. Additionally, if you are interested you can find the e-book on Hoopla.)
Seven Truths about the Cross

The Necessity of the Cross

John Murray begins his book with a chapter on the necessity of the cross, where he identifies two kinds of necessity—hypothetical necessity and consequent absolute necessity (11). Murray recognizes the former as something held by those like Augustine and Aquinas, while arguing for the latter. Regarding, “consequent absolute necessity,” he writes,
[1] The word “consequent” in this designation points to the fact that God’s will or decree to save any is of free and sovereign grace. To save lost men was not of absolute necessity but of the sovereign good pleasure of God. The terms “absolute necessity,” however, indicate that God, having elected some to everlasting life out of his mere good pleasure, was under the necessity of accomplishing this purpose through the sacrifice of his own Son, a necessity arising from the perfections of his own nature. In a word, while it was not inherently necessary for God to save, yet, since salvation had been purposed, it was necessary to secure this salvation through a satisfaction that could be rendered only through substitutionary sacrifice and blood-bought redemption. (11)
This point is important because it matches the justice of God with his mercy. God would not be unrighteous to put sinners to death, for the wages of sin is death, but he would be unrighteous to save sinners without the cross of Christ. Hence, the cross is necessary. Yet, instead of simply drawing a logical deduction about the cross, he turns to prove his point from Scripture, and he concludes in this way,
[2] For these reasons we are constrained to conclude that the kind of necessity which the Scriptural considerations support is that which may be described as absolute or indispensable. The proponents of hypothetical necessity do not reckon sufficiently with the exigencies involved in salvation from sin unto eternal life; they do not take proper account of the Godward aspects of Christ’s accomplishment. If we keep in view the gravity of sin and the exigencies arising from the holiness of God which must be met in salvation from it, then the doctrine of indispensable necessity makes Calvary intelligible to us and enhances the incomprehensible marvel of both Calvary itself and the sovereign purpose of love which Calvary fulfilled. The more we emphasize the inflexible demands of justice and holiness the more marvelous become the love of God and its provisions. (18)

Passive and Active Obedience

When discussing the nature of the cross, Murray makes obedience the theological umbrella under which every aspect of the cross (e.g., sacrifice, propitiation, reconciliation, redemption, etc.) is considered (19ff). Fine-tuning his point, he appeals to the historic distinction between active and passive obedience. Clarifying these terms, he writes,
[3] The distinction between the active and passive obedience is not a distinction of periods. It is our Lord’s whole work of obedience in every phase and period that is described as active and passive, and we must avoid the mistake of thinking that the active obedience applies to the obedience of his life and the passive to the obedience of his final sufferings and death.  The real use and purpose of the formula [passive and active obedience] is to emphasize the two distinct aspects of our Lord’s vicarious obedience. The truth expressed rests upon the recognition that the law of God has both penal sanctions and positive demands. (21)

The Personal Obedience of Christ

Next, Murray stresses the personal nature of Christ’s obedience. In other words, it is not simply Christ’s act of dying that saves sinners, it is also his inner disposition and obedience.
[4] When we speak of obedience we are thinking not merely of formal acts of accomplishment but also of the disposition, will, determination, and volition which lie back of and are registered in these formal acts. And when we speak of the death of our Lord upon the cross as the supreme act of his obedience we are thinking not merely of the overt act of dying upon the tree but also of the disposition, will, and determinate volition which lay back of the overt act. (22)

The Cross as Sacrifice

After tackling the overarching theme of Christ’s obedience, Murray moves on to cover four biblical metaphors for the cross. The first is sacrifice. Starting with the sacrificial system in Israel, he writes,
[5] The Old Testament sacrifices were basically expiatory. This means that they had reference to sin and guilt. Sin involves a certain liability, a liability arising from the holiness of God, on the one hand, and the gravity of sin as the contradiction of that holiness, on the other. The sacrifice was the divinely instituted provision whereby the sin might be covered and the liability to divine wrath and curse removed. The Old Testament worshiper when he brought his oblation to the altar substituted an animal victim in his place. (25)
Acknowledging the great distance between an animal and a man, Murray explains how these “shadows and patterns” prepared the way for Christ. And in Christ, we have the fulfillment of the sacrificial system.
[6] Jesus, therefore, offered himself a sacrifice and that most particularly under the form or pattern supplied by the sin-offering of the Levitical economy. In thus offering himself he expiated guilt and purged away sin so that we may draw near to God in full assurance of faith and enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. (26–27)
While I would take issue with Murray’s reduction of Christ’s sacrifice to that of the sin offering, he is correct to say that Christ died to purge away sin. Moreover, he is right to affirm our need to look to the Levitical patterns of sacrifice to understand the cross. As he notes, “We must interpret the sacrifice of Christ in terms of the Levitical patterns because they were themselves patterned after Christ’s offering” (27). Without them, we cannot make sense of the meaning of Christ’s cross. But with them, we are given a multi-faceted object lesson explaining the logic of sacrifice, as well as confidence that what God began typologically has been completed Christologically. That is to say,
[7] If the Levitical sacrifices were expiatory, how much more must the archetypal offering have been expiatory, and expiatory, be it remembered, not on the plane of the temporary, provisional, preparatory, and partial but on the plane of the eternal, the permanently real, the final, and the complete. (27)
In asking what did the cross achieve? Or what is the essence of the cross? We must begin with sacrifice. And not just the word, but the whole system of sacrifice outlined in the Law of Moses. At the heart of this logic is God’s provision for wiping away sin. This  is called expiation, and it promises that the blood of a perfect sacrifice can wipe clean our guilt by covering our sin.

The Cross as Propitiation

If the cross expiates our sin, it also propitiates the wrath of God. While these words have been confused and often juxtaposed to one another, they are actually two independent-but-related ideas that both have a place in Christ’s cross. Christ’s death deals with sin (expiation) and by means of expiation, the wrath of God is propitiated. Taking these ideas together, Murray is right to define propitiation in personal terms.
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Written by Andrew T. Walker |
Friday, June 16, 2023
For practicing Christians, fidelity to God may mean recommitting ourselves to the practices that habituate us into deeper relationship. Even when we do not feel like it, we must read our Bibles and pray as a ritual reminder that the first thing about each of us is our ultimate end, not our temporal end. Contemplating God’s works in His Word is good for you. We must go to church, catechize ourselves and our families, and love each other.

One of the most important sentences in the entire Western canon comes from Augustine. It is a statement written in the indicative voice that many are doubtless familiar with, given its ubiquity. From The Confessions, Augustine states, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” Though this sentence is an indicative statement of truth, it also assumes an imperative: we are meant to be in communion with God. For homo religiosus, knowing God is to be human at its fullest. We are to commune with God not because we seek our own supremacy, but because communing with God is what brings peaceful rectitude to the soul. Knowing God quenches our deepest desires to know the glorious and be known by the glorious.
The First Pillar
In the planning and execution for Fidelity Month, it became clear that dedication to God needed to be the first pillar of fidelity. This first pillar reminds us of an architectonic truth: whatever the goods of family, community, and nation represent, their intelligibility must be ordered and understood by what created them and, in turn, best illuminates them: God. The “ordo amoris,” or “order of loves” spoken of in the Christian tradition, insists on the inherent goods of family, community, and nation as ends to be pursued for their own sake. The love they are given, however, is proportionate to the love they are owed. But we owe God our highest affections because it is He who has made us. As we come to know God and conform ourselves to His divine plan, fullness of being comes into view. Scripture deems the knowledge of God as a resplendent good that colors every other experience of our humanity. As Psalm 36:9 states, “For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.” Communion with God is what lights our path (Psalm 119:105). If we shall not walk in darkness, we must turn ourselves to the light (Isaiah 9:2; John 8:12).
Never more than now is the time ripe to rededicate ourselves to God. It’s what our culture needs most. With religion on the decline, it should come as no surprise that mental health appears more statistically volatile than ever before. Excise or trivialize the most important foundation of a person’s existence—their relationship to God—and it is to be expected that humanity’s sense of balance and purpose would be torn asunder.
Furthermore, in an age of cascading “identities” on endless offer, knowledge of God bequeaths a right and definitive knowledge of the self. Christian theology has a rich tradition of delineating the relationship between epistemology and anthropology, insisting on their essential unity. The two subjects ask: how do we know who we are? Theologians believe that philosophy on its own cannot adequately answer this question. In John Calvin’s Institutes, his famous opening lines sought to demarcate how knowledge of God spills over into an accurate knowledge of the self. For Calvin, they are inextricably bound in a helix-like structure. As Calvin says:
Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But, while they are joined by many bonds, which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern. In the first place, no one can look upon himself without immediately turning his thoughts to the contemplation of God, in whom he “lives and moves” (Acts 17:28). For quite clearly, the mighty gifts with which we are endowed are hardly from ourselves; indeed, our very being shares in God’s own being. Then, by these benefits shed like dew from heaven upon us, we are led as by rivulets to the spring itself.
Here Calvin restates that architectonic truth: God is the font of all meaningful knowledge. Apart from him, we fumble around in the darkness. We cannot explain the obligations that beset us without God as the source of those obligations.
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