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)!
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[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.
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If politicians and public health officials want more people to trust them, they would do better to try to refute opposing arguments rather than arrogantly dismiss them as “misinformation.” In spite of concerted efforts by civil leaders, public health officials, big media, and big tech to silence dissent during this pandemic, there have been a number of scientists who have contended that the prolonged use of government-imposed NPIs in a pandemic does far more harm than good. 

Framing Everything in Life as a Matter of Empirical Science Disregards the Immaterial and Transcendent Aspects of Human Existence, Succumbs to the Illusion of Control, Enthrones Experts, and Leads to Tyranny.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, one of the many repeated mantras has been that we need to “follow the science” when determining the public policy response to this highly infectious disease. While many have welcomed this assertion, it has not been without its critics. For example, one writer points out the danger to such an approach by noting the following:
As President Dwight Eisenhower said in his 1961 farewell address, public policy can ‘become the captive of a scientific-technological elite,’ which by nature lacks the temperament and broad thinking necessary to steer a democratic society. Instead, this elite’s conceptual blindspots and ignorance of broader human and spiritual concerns mean it is likely to steer us into the ditch of never-ending lockdown cycles to ‘slow the spread’ of a virus that is demonstrably uncontainable by governments and their edicts.
Similarly, former Bureau of Justice Statistics director Jeffrey Anderson argues that, while public health officials now play a prominent role in our governance, such people do not make for good rulers because “it is in the nature of their art to focus on the body in lieu of higher concerns,” and because they “are naturally enthusiastic about public health interventions.”
He adds,
Their guiding light is the avoidance of risk — narrowly defined as the risk of becoming sick or dying. The risk of stifling, enervating, or devitalizing human society is not even part of their calculation. Under their influence, America has been conducting an experiment in mask-wearing based largely on unsupported scientific claims and an impoverished understanding of human existence.
(For data on mask-wearing, see this, this, this, this, this, and this. It is important to remember that the controversy over masks is not whether people should be able to wear them without being given a hard time. Of course they should. Rather, the controversy pertains to whether some people should be allowed to force other people to wear masks against their will.)
“Experiment” is the proper word to describe much of what has been done in response to this pandemic. One wonders why previous generations did not respond to their pandemics by employing the strategies that have been implemented during the COVID-19 outbreak. After all, it is not as though there is anything technologically advanced about non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) like stay at home orders, closures, compulsory mask-wearing, gathering restrictions, contact tracing, and physical distancing mandates. People had a basic knowledge of the way infectious diseases spread during the pandemics that took place in the late 1950s and late 1960s.
Why weren’t those pandemics dealt with in the way we have dealt with this one? What is it that has made so many people see the COVID response as reasonable even though the data has shown for some time that the virus is not deadly for the vast majority of those who contract it?
While there are surely a variety of factors that have contributed to what has happened with COVID-19, one of them may be connected with the fact that our society is significantly more secularized today than it was in earlier eras. That is, the widespread acceptance of prolonged, government-imposed NPIs that radically disrupt ordinary life and suppress civil and religious liberties is due in part to the waning influence of the notion that human life has a transcendent meaning, along with the increasing acceptance of a scientism that is focused entirely on controlling the material world.
C.S. Lewis had some important things to say about the threat of scientism. This does not mean that he was anti-science, though he knew that charge would be leveled against him. In a letter written in response to such criticism, he defined scientism as “the belief that the supreme moral end is the perpetuation of our own species, and this is to be pursued even if, in the process of being fitted for survival, our species has to be stripped of all those things for which we value it — of pity, of happiness, and of freedom.” One writer aptly summarizes Lewis’s concerns about scientism by saying that he “feared what might be done to all nature and especially to mankind if scientific knowledge were to be applied by the power of government without the restraints of traditional values.”
Lewis’s most focused treatments of scientism are found in his brief nonfiction work The Abolition of Man and in his fictional Space Trilogy. In the first volume of the trilogy, the scientist-villain (Weston) justifies his mistreatment of the hero (Ransom) by telling him:
I admit that we have had to infringe your rights. My only defense is that small claims must give way to great. As far as we know, we are doing what has never been done in the history of the universe… You cannot be so small-minded as to think that the rights or the life of an individual or of a million individuals are of the slightest importance in comparison with this.[1]
In the last volume of the trilogy, the plot revolves around how an organization called the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE) “follows the science” in its social planning efforts, with ruthless disregard for both animal and human life. At one point in the story, the narrator makes this observation:
The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly maneuvered in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result.[2]
This is what Lewis sets his sights upon in The Abolition of Man, the main thesis of which is summed up in this quote: “When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains.”[3] Michael Aeschliman unpacks this assertion as follows:
Without a doctrine of objective validity, only subjective, individual desire remains as a standard to determine action. In the hands of an empowered elite, the capacity to reorder society with the techniques of a vastly powerful and unchecked science is virtually limitless and, of course, open to monstrous misuses.[4]
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Written by A.W. Workman |
Sunday, August 4, 2024
When Jesus says, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone,” he is really saying that he is indeed good, and therefore he is God. The rich young ruler, merely intending to be respectful, was speaking more truly than he knew. His standard of goodness was woefully insufficient, as proved by his assessment of his own life. But God allowed him to address Jesus in a way that was utterly and ironically spot on. Jesus is a good teacher; in fact, the only good teacher.

“But Jesus himself says he is not God!” In Mark 10 and Luke 18, he says, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.’”
This is one of the more common arguments from the Bible that Muslims will try to use to disprove the divinity of Jesus. Not too long ago, a Muslim commenter on this blog said this very thing. If you spend any time at all doing evangelism with Muslims you are bound to hear this claim. So, how should a Christian respond?
I actually like it when my Muslim friends bring up this passage. This is because instead of Jesus denying his divinity here, I think there’s a case to be made that this passage is an example of the direct opposite – of Jesus in fact claiming to be God.
First, the context. Jesus is here responding to the rich young ruler who asks him what he must do to inherit eternal life. But this young man has begun his question by addressing Jesus as, “Good Teacher.” So, Jesus’ response to him is in two parts. First, he calls into question the way in which he addressed him. Then, he goes on to answer what is required for this man to inherit eternal life. Those of us familiar with this passage know that the young man goes on to claim that he’s kept all of the commandments that Jesus draws out of him. But then, when Jesus tells him to sell everything that he has, to give the funds to the poor, and to follow him, the young man goes away sad because he cannot bring himself to part with his wealth. You can read the passage for yourself here and here.
When I’m talking with my Central Asian friends about this, I will often respond first by saying. “Well, what’s going on here is that Jesus is a good teacher, and you of all people should know that the best teachers teach not only direct lessons, but also indirect lessons.”
Usually, this response is met with some level of furrowed brows. So, I’ll go on to explain.
“Here, in Central Asia, you use indirect communication all the time. In little things like saying yes to an offer of tea, you actually don’t say ‘Yes.’ Instead, you say, ‘No,’ then, ‘Don’t trouble yourself.’ Even more, you greatly value the ability of indirect communication to teach profound lessons. So, you should be able to appreciate when Jesus is using indirect communication to make a point – and not all of a sudden become like Westerners who insist something be communicated simply and directly in order to be understood.”
Here, I might remind them of a folk story of their people where a father has seven sons who are always fighting. Fed up, one day he lines his sons up and hands six of them a single stick. Then, one by one, he commands them to break the stick. Each of the six sons breaks his stick easily. But on the seventh son, the father hands him the bundle of broken sticks and commands him to break them.
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