The vote, after two long days of debate, approves a list of what the denomination calls sexual immorality it won’t tolerate, including “adultery, premarital sex, extra-marital sex, polyamory, pornography, and homosexual sex.” “The church must warn its members that those who refuse to repent of these sins—as well as of idolatry, greed, and other such sins—will not inherit the kingdom of God,” the report says.

The Christian Reformed Church, a small evangelical denomination of US and Canadian churches, voted Wednesday at its annual synod to codify its opposition to homosexual sex by elevating it to the status of confession, or declaration of faith.
The 123-53 vote at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, caps a process begun in 2016 when a previous synod voted to form a study committee to bring a report on the “biblical theology” of sexuality.
The vote, after two long days of debate, approves a list of what the denomination calls sexual immorality it won’t tolerate, including “adultery, premarital sex, extra-marital sex, polyamory, pornography, and homosexual sex.”
“The church must warn its members that those who refuse to repent of these sins—as well as of idolatry, greed, and other such sins—will not inherit the kingdom of God,” the report says. “It must discipline those who refuse to repent of such sins for the sake of their souls.”
But 190 delegates to the synod spent the preponderance of time debating homosexuality, with many warning that passage of the so-called Human Sexuality Report and elevating its teachings to the status of confession would alienate LGBTQ people as well as younger generations of CRC members who have a different understanding of sexuality.
“This motion harms LGBTQ people, harms the church’s witness, and naming this as confession will have disastrous consequences for people and institutions,” said one delegate to the synod who voted against the motion.
The vote will also have profound consequences for its flagship university, Calvin. In December, one-third of Calvin faculty signed a letter expressing concerns about the Human Sexuality Report, and some are now expected to leave. Faculty at Calvin University must sign a document saying they align with the historical creeds and confessions of the Christian Reformed Church.
It was not clear what the status of the document might be moving forward.
“Many people are polishing their CVs, starting to look at what else is out there and preparing themselves to leave,” said Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University and one of its star faculty.
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Christian psychology is flawed because it reveals a loyalty to man’s wisdom as opposed to a pure, childlike trust in the Word of God. It is nothing short of a subtle strategy of Satan to keep the gospel of Christ hidden from men by cloaking it within the arrogance of human wisdom. When human wisdom is blended with the pure truth of Christ, the result is only confusion and the supplanting of faith in the sufficiency of Scripture with trust in man.

The wisdom of man is foolishness to God, and the wisdom of God is foolishness to the unregenerate man. This means that the more man tries to find God or true wholeness through his own wisdom, the more he worships the creature rather than the Creator. Subsequently, the more the church seeks solutions to soul care needs by integrating theology with psychology, the farther we drift from the God of truth and undermine the work of the Spirit, who is committed to working through the Word.
Psychology Is Antagonistic to the Cross of Christ
The revelation of God in Christ is radically distinct from anything the world of psychological counseling can offer. By its very nature, worldly psychology is antagonistic to the cross since it exalts man’s wisdom and diminishes Jesus, the very source of truth (John 14:6). David Powlison testifies,
After years in the psychotherapeutic world, I found that Christ turned my life upside down. Then I started to see that he turned the whole world upside down: everything was God-centered, not man-centered. That meant that counseling needed a fundamental realignment to inhabit the real world, not the world fabricated by unbelief.”[1]
To attempt to integrate biblical theology with psychology is, therefore, utterly foolish and will only lead to the exaltation of man, which in turn will ultimately lead to the spiritual ruin of others.
In our day, as in Paul’s, those who elevate worldly psychology to be equal to or above God’s Word consider themselves to be the enlightened ones, and we who stand solely on the Scriptures are the archaic, unenlightened ones. Looking to secular psychology for new insight, rather than doing the more laborious work of mining wisdom from Scripture, produces the elitism which bubbles up from pride. Though the theories of worldly psychology are constantly changing, the wisdom of God in the gospel is inflexible and superior because it is rooted in Jesus Christ, who is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8).
The integration of psychology and theology is nothing less than a silent admission of a lack of confidence in the sufficiency of the Word of God, both living and written. For this reason, biblical counselors must be faithful to engage in active combat with every form of human wisdom “raised up against the knowledge of God” (2 Cor. 10:5). Regardless of the subtlety of Christian psychology’s assault or the sincerity of its advocates, it is an attack on the sufficiency of Christ, nonetheless.
Integrationism is Flawed on Two Basic Levels
The integration of psychology and Christian theology is flawed on at least two basic levels.
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, November 3, 2021
Jesus walked out of a tomb and nothing have been the same since…Down and down and then up and up is the shape of the Bible’s story and of many of its stories. It’s the shape of our lives, repeated deaths and resurrections until the Lord returns to raise the faithful dead.

David Foster Wallace starts his famous speech This is Water by describing two young fish.
They’re happily swimming along and meet an older fish coming the other way, who nods in greeting and says:
‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’
By which Foster-Wallace wanted to simply point out that the largest, most obvious realities are the hardest to see and talk about. Culture is like this. We’re all inculcated in a way of doing and a way of thinking that it’s particularly hard to spot because we’ve never known anything else.
We’re formed by that culture—that water—in a myriad of ways. I’ve written before about the work of James K. A. Smith on cultural liturgies, that our cultures act like a liturgy in forming us, and the work of Charles Taylor on social imaginaries, that our setting influences what we can plausibly imagine to be true. I’ve spun both together to suggest that the stories we live shape the pattern of our thoughts. They shape what is and isn’t plausible.
When identifying some of the more negative aspects of our culture I’ve suggested that we need to engage in counter-formation, or engage in ‘reliturgy’ to push back on the dominant narratives in which we live and breathe and have our being (Acts 17).
I know that isn’t what Acts is saying at all—but that’s sort of the point.
To reliturgise or engage in counter-formation is a task of reframing our stories. We are all made of stories. We need to tell stories and then inhabit and live stories that will earn richer fruit than what grows on the cultural coral reef. We need stories of good loam, well fertilised, carefully tilled and expertly farmed by pastor-storytellers.
The best way to do this is with the stories the Bible gives us. This works because these stories are true. If I have one, this is my theological project. Read the cultures’ stories well, retell the Bible’s better.
The Bible has a set of overarching stories—more than I’m about to list—that when lived deliberately reshape our lives. Here are some examples that you’ll notice overlap with all of my common themes.
Table
Why do I think the answer to so many of our modern problems is to get around the table and share a meal?
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