Written by J. Lance Acree |
Monday, April 17, 2023
Forgiveness is an act of worship in which a believer, acting as an authorized imperial agent, formally invokes the profound, transcendent goodness and immanence of God, beginning with His perfect justice—either on the cross for the elect, or in the future for those passed by.  Forgiveness is practiced without waiting for any particular emotional state on the part of the victim, nor for any action on the part of the perpetrator.  Our profoundly broken hearts learn forgiving: by meditation, on God’s sovereign immanence in this angry moment, on His justice and on His relentless agenda of transcendent good for His own; and by practice, choosing to verbally invoke His actions in His name.

Should the Christian community overcome its current confusion by developing and adopting a Biblical explanation of forgiving each other, this concept could be introduced in ordinary conversation with unbelievers about forgiving as a means of clarifying the difference between Biblical thinking and other worldviews, while inviting a deeper investigation into the gospel.
Orthodoxy: The Theological Foundation for Forgiving Others in Practice
It is worth noting that the Reformation is credited with a significant change in the orthopraxy of forgiveness.[i]  In a sense, five centuries later the Reformed community is still working out the ramifications of God’s immanence, transcendence and sovereignty over three elements in play in every conflict (and consequently in every attempt to forgive): the individual; the situation; the law.[ii]
Christ’s Perspective on Forgiveness and Time
Returning to Colossians 3:13 and Ephesians 4:32, we can see it is important to note how God exercises His sovereignty from outside of both space and time (“from all eternity”).[iii]  This can be seen clearly in the way Jesus responds to the evidence of faith, a gift of God, in the paralytic and his friends (Matt 9:2; Mark 2:5; Luke 5:20) and in the woman who washed His feet with her tears (Luke 7:47, 48): “Your sins are forgiven.”  Given that these two conversations occur prior to the cross, one would expect the verb tense He selects to be the future tense; but none of the five instances in Scripture use the future tense.
In Luke’s account, where three of the five instances occur, the verb tense Jesus selects (the perfect tense) is particularly striking.  This tense is used to convey “action terminated in the past with effects continuing into the present.”[iv]  That is, He neither declares instantaneous forgiveness (effective beginning in the moment He spoke), nor potential future forgiveness (contingent on His self-sacrifice on the cross, and/or contingent on some repentance or behavior on the part of the paralytic and the weeping woman).  At the moment He spoke, in Christ’s mind the action of forgiving was a completed action; and the effects of that completed forgiveness continued into the present.
It is also important to note that bloodshed is required for forgiveness (Hebrews 9:22b), and that the temple sacrifices never take away sins (Hebrews 10:4).  Therefore, we can conclude that Christ was not referring to a completed forgiveness based on Mosaic law and its ceremonial sacrifices.  Nor, despite the scribes’ misconstruing of His choice of verb tense, was He declaring an instantaneous action solely based on His own authority; such an action would not fulfill the requirement to shed blood.[v]  If we unwittingly misinterpret His verb tense (like the scribes apparently did) to be about His authority, one obviates His imperative to go the cross—and die on it.
For the redeemed, forgiveness is granted because of the sovereign actions of God, who is working both outside the constraints of time and space and within the timeline of history.  To this end God employs the governance office of firstborn.[vi]  He appoints Christ to this unique office, just as He originally appointed Adam (Colossians 1:15, 18; 1 Corinthians 15:22, 45), to both govern the elect and represent them before Him.  Because Christ is serving as their firstborn, He assigns each of the elect to the judicial status of “in Christ”, a phrase repeated throughout the epistles (e.g., Ephesians 1:4; Colossians 1:12-13).
The result is that the death of Christ applies to all the elect: in judicial terms they were executed when their firstborn was executed; sentence of death has been carried out, so any case against one of the elect is already closed (Romans 8:1, 33-34).  For the elect, perfect justice has been completed.  Likewise, because the elect have the covenant status of “in Christ” not only is His death imputed to them but also His perfect obedience (Hebrews 4:14-16).  In terms of the debt analogy, this “payment” of death and obedience by Christ cancels our “certificate of debt” (Colossians 2:13-14).  Since Christ fulfills the role of firstborn for all those regenerated from the dead, He is the sole means by which God forgives the elect.
A Reformed Perspective on Forgiving Debts in the Lord’s Prayer
As it appears in the Lord’s prayer (Matthew 6:12) the metaphor of debt begs two questions: What do humans owe to God, and What do humans owe each other?  The most obvious answer to both is “more than money.”  There are many things one could list that men owe to God that are not merely financial: their attention; their loyalty; their obedience; their affection; their worship; their thanks and gratitude, etc.  These are inherent in the primary command to love God with all our heart, mind, and strength.  More to the point, men owe God these things continually, in every moment, simply because He created them.  Likewise, since all men bear the image of God, they owe to each other respect, justice, compassion, service, etc.
Applying these debt concepts to our daily activities, as clearly intended by the language of the Lord’s prayer, we can see that we are continually in debt—both to God and to each other.  The result of this wide perspective is humility: as we consider another’s deficient payment of what we think is owed to us (respect, for example), we simultaneously consider how we fail to pay God the respect He is due.  This leads to contemplating how we will never be able to pay that debt off because day by day we fall further short and our debt to Him (and by extension, to His image bearers, our fellow men) continues to accrue.  In turn, this leads to contemplating how Christ our firstborn pays God the honor and respect He is due, and since we are “in Christ” that perfect payment is credited to our account.
The Individual: What is the nature of the person attempting to forgive, and the nature of the perpetrator?
Fortunately, we are informed by the anthropology revealed in the scriptures.  We can fully embrace passages that describe humanity as profoundly and completely broken and enslaved to sin (Isaiah 1:5; Isaiah 61:1; Romans 7:14-25; Romans 8:5-8).[vii]  In the context of human relationships, this pervasive brokenness of both victim and perpetrator must be taken into consideration.  For both victim and perpetrator all three core faculties (thinking, feeling, choosing) are profoundly flawed and unreliable.  For example, we don’t emote accurately; we may feel angry, but the driving emotion might be sorrow or loneliness or fear.  For the victim, this means that the strong feelings experienced in conflict are just as suspect as the spurious reasoning of self-justification.  More specifically, feeling angry does not necessarily mean that one has in fact been wronged; nor does concluding one has been wronged necessarily mean that all the logic one has employed to reach that conclusion is sound and the premises true.
In addition to being profoundly and completely broken, both perpetrator and victim lack intrinsic rights before God.  Both are slaves, either to sin or to righteousness (Romans 6), but slaves nevertheless.  Any privileges we enjoy are not self-generated; they are gifts from God.  Some have argued that God’s prohibition of stealing implies a right to own property; however, while property rights make sense in the presence of a human judge, they don’t make sense in the presence of the Lord.  The concept falls flat.  Stewardship, yes (1 Cor 4:7, Titus 1:7, 1 Peter 4:10); ownership, no (1 Corinthians 4:7).  Any temptation to claim what we deserve from our fellow man must take into consideration as the starting point this fact: both victim and perpetrator have no intrinsic rights apart from God’s condescending to grant them subordinate roles under His sovereignty.  And since both perpetrator and victim are guilty of sin (Romans 3:23), it must be remembered that they both intrinsically deserve death followed by eternity in hell.
Both victim and perpetrator are subjects under the sovereign governance of God.  For the redeemed, the “outer man” is subject to any decay and affliction He directs; but He preserves and renews the “inner man” (2 Corinthians 4:1-12, 16-17).  This phrase (“inner man”) probably refers to what in the Old Testament is called the “heart”—the essential core of a person, from which flow thoughts, emotions and decisions (Proverbs 4:23).  This is also where idolatry takes root (Ezekiel 14) as our sin natures embrace the lies of the enemy, causing us to become demanding, and to sacrifice invaluable relationships.[viii]  For the elect, this essential core has a new identity that is hidden from view and protected by the Trinity (Colossians 3:3).  It will be fitted with a new “outer man” (body) at the resurrection for life in the new heavens and the new earth (Isaiah 65:17; 66:22; John 5:25-29; 2 Peter 3:13).
That His sovereignty is immanent is frequently forgotten by those churned up in conflict.  He is with His people, not separated from them, as some depict in a triangle diagram widely used to depict interpersonal relationships between three parties (you and me at the lower apexes, and God at the upper apex).  This triangle illustration is tainted with a hint of the Gnostic spectrum, where the pure divine is kept separate from us mere dirty mortals by a spectrum (in the vertical dimension).  It implies that He is “up there somewhere”; aloof and waiting in His purity for you and I to sort our dirty things out, just between our dirty little selves.
He is certainly the “most high God” in the sense of transcending all He has created.  This is the most profound meaning behind “holy—holy—holy”.  But He (in His transcendent holiness) is not aloof from the sinful conflicts of His elect; on the contrary, He is personally and directly involved in the least of them—as outrageous an idea as you will ever find.  His transcendence is comprehensively coupled with His immanence.  Because of His immanence the triangle, if we have been taught that picture, should be completely (and permanently, as with a sledgehammer) flattened into a linear relation:
You—God—Me
No more triangle.  I contend that the only way you and I can relate to each other—even down to conversing together—is through our God.  We will further explore this outrageous, anti-Gnostic idea as we examine the situation and our God’s commands.
The Situation: What is the nature of the details and the context of the conflict?
Experientially, conflict seems to pop up out of nowhere; both its sudden appearance and its effects seem chaotic.  This makes conflict, for those embroiled in it, seem to occur outside the sovereignty of God.  Typically, the last thing on their minds is how God is controlling the conflict and the situation and using them to accomplish His transcendent agenda.
From the Reformed perspective, we see that all things are under His dynamic control.[ix]  It’s important also to understand that God’s sovereignty is what makes human choices possible; to what degree we exercise “free will,” He is the sole enabler. [x]  In simple terms, He is forcing His electrons in our nerve cells—our outer man—to obey our biology-transcendent wills—our inner man.  Moreover, while He respects the will of the creature, He exercises this sovereign control to prosecute His grand agenda: to make “all things work together” (including the details of our sin and conflict) for the good of the redeemed (Romans 8:28).  Joseph experienced this transformation personally (Genesis 50:20); he knew God was transforming his many years of pain-filled injustice into His transcendent good for His people.  In the thick of a conflict, this is a difficult truth to grasp: how God is relentlessly transforming the worst we can do to each other into His transcendent, infinite good.  As the human mind grapples with this truth, however, the self-shriveling smallness of evil begins to emerge—a perspective C. S. Lewis offers in The Great Divorce.
The Law: What is the nature of the offenses we are attempting to forgive?
There is only one Lawgiver (James 4:12; Isaiah 33:22).  The ethics of the universe belong to God and God alone (Genesis 2:16-17; Deuteronomy 8:11; 10:14).  Despite our tendency to generate the 11th and 12th Commandments (e.g., “Thou shalt not leave random bits of junk on my workbench” and “Thou shalt not disappoint me, neither shalt thou disrupt my hopes and dreams…”) and get angry about them, we do not have the authority to define ethical absolutes for our interpersonal relationships; only He does.  Therefore, we must distinguish between our routine usurping of God’s authority to define right and wrong—the “knowledge of good and evil”[xi]—and His recorded commands and definitions of sin.  Further, sins committed “against one another” are always committed against God (Matthew 25:40, 45) and God alone.[xii]  For example, although David used the phrase (sin against men) in conversation with Saul (1 Samuel 24:11), when confronted by Nathan he recognized that God alone is the only offended party (2 Samuel 12:13; Psalm 51:4).[xiii]
This means that our talk of sinning “against one another” may be phenomenological only; language that captures the appearance of events, but not the essence of them.  This kind of language uses the apparent form of a thing to allude to its substance, but can end up confusing the two in our minds.  Like the phrase “the sun is rising,” the phrase “sin against one another” is useful in conversation as a kind of sloppy shorthand for limited local contexts but is not technically accurate.  It’s missing its proper cosmic-scale context.  In larger, more comprehensive contexts such as the solar system or the Milky Way galaxy, to speak of the sun rising is to say nothing useful.  Because God is directly and immanently involved in every offense, we must expand our perspective to include Him in the context of the offense, and in any concept of forgiving each other.  Remember that we flattened the triangle.  That means we must consider that the offenses we are attempting to forgive, while they appear to be committed against us, are not, even if we are harmed.  Indeed, to say that one man sinned only against another man is to reveal a perspective that is too small.
Like Uriah, one may suffer harmful consequences from another’s sins, but those consequences are under the sovereign control of God; He alone decides what the impact of the perpetrator’s sin will be on the victim’s “outer man” (2 Corinthians 4:16), including losses of life, limb, reputation and possessions (Job 1:21).  He alone determines what we will suffer, and to what degree.  This is perhaps the most difficult and at the same time the most important concept to grasp regarding the nature of offenses: as we are getting hammered out on the anvil of suffering, the hand holding that hammer is His, and the final outcome of the suffering will serve His transcendently good purposes.
The final point to consider about offenses is that they must be carried by someone (Genesis 50:17).[xiv]  While the secular world (and some Christian authors) speak of “letting go” of offenses, Scripture never speaks that way.  On the contrary, sins are always spoken of as judicial facts that require justice.  Every offense is carried to that justice either by the individual who committed it, or by their covenant community representative, if they have one—the one who holds the office of firstborn.
What does it mean to forgive “as God in Christ has forgiven you”?
Having examined the way God is directly involved in every aspect of an offense, we now come to the crux of the issue.  One can rapidly dismiss the secular voices attempting to tell us how to forgive by simply comparing them to the two key verses mentioned earlier in this paper, Colossians 3:13 and Ephesians 4:32.  For example, it is clear from multiple Scriptures that God did not just “let it go” or “change the narrative” in His mind to forgive the elect.
Adopting the same attitude/disposition
There are two distinctly different views for interpreting the two key verses mentioned earlier: Colossians 3:13 and Ephesians 4:32. The view that seems most widely adopted among Christian authors is that the critical word “as” (kathos) in these verses means “by adopting the same attitude.”  The phrase “as God in Christ” is interpreted to employ Christ as an illustration of the love and mental forbearance necessary to forgive.   I will call this the isopsychic (from isopsuchos) interpretation; it seems to be the foundation for the two-stage approach of separating attitudinal from transacted forgiveness.   This view may draw support from a widely accepted but flawed inference that 1 John 1:9 is stating a cause-and-effect relationship between confession and forgiveness.  Likewise, this view may infer from Mark 11:25 a cause-and-effect relationship between our forgiving others and God granting us forgiveness.  The Reformed view categorically rejects any such cause-and-effect notions; these are not asserting causation, but correlation.[xv]
Some Christians assert that forgiveness is always contingent on the perpetrator’s repentance, so that forgiveness and reconciliation (and restoration) are identical: “The sinner forgiven is the sinner reconciled.”[xvi]  This view may be based on an understanding that God’s forgiveness of the sinner is contingent on the sinner’s repentance.  In contrast, the Reformed view asserts that God grants forgiveness of sins independent of any action or condition on the part of the recipient.[xvii]
Another weakness in this view is that it imposes on God a two-step process, where forgiveness is separated into dispositional (attitudinal) and transacted events.  While this separation may make sense from human experience, it is nowhere described in Scripture as applicable to our transcendent God.  It seems presumptuous to impose on God something that makes sense to broken-hearted, finite humans but lacks explicit special revelation to support it.  We must consider that we may be viewing forgiveness in this fractured way simply because our hearts are still profoundly fractured, and that causes us to consider forgiving in a disjoint and fragmented way.
Finally, this view in practice tends to puff up the mind of the one granting forgiveness, in that we tend to take credit for our magnanimity.  We unconsciously pat ourselves on the back for having wrestled our anger and disappointment into something other than biting sarcasm and at least allows a few polite words in a mild tone of voice.  We are prone to take pride in condescending to speak kindly, as one having acted on our own power to absorb a debt or insult, and/or releasing the perpetrator from liability.  That troublesome triangle tends to reinforce this self-aggrandizement; squash it back flat in your mind.  Use a bigger hammer this time.
Applying the same means
This leads us to examine the alternative view: that the critical “as” might well be interpreted as “using the same means” or “using the same mechanism/working.”  I can’t make up my mind whether to call this an isomechani (from μηχανή) or isoenergic (from ἐνέργεια) view.  It considers the phrase “as God in Christ” to draw on its covenantal scripture-wide context: Christ our covenant head, our firstborn, is the means by which we forgive others.  It is clear from multiple Scriptures that use this phrase that Christ is far more than merely an illustration of God’s attitude; Christ is the sole means by which God works out forgiveness for the elect (e.g., 1 Timothy 2:5).
The ramifications of adopting an isomechani/isoenergic view (applying the same means) over against the first view (adopting the same attitude/disposition) are significant.  First, forgiving other believers works only through our Lord on the cross, the sole means by which we are forgiven by God.  We have authority to forgive sins “in the name of the Lord Jesus” (John 20:23; Colossians 3:17), an authority He formally delegated to His agents to invoke the just actions of their God regarding the firstborn in whom they stand.  This delegated authority implies that we as kingdom agents are formally invoking our king’s completed/time-independent action—as opposed to declaring our own.
This invoking action necessarily also includes invoking His relentless transformation of our sins into His transcendent good for His elect, as Joseph demonstrates in Genesis 50:19-20 (see also Romans 8:28).  Therefore, in this view we forgive others by invoking both God’s perfect justice (in Christ’s propitiation) and His relentless transcendent good that transforms even sinful action into good.  We grab His transcendence and His immanence out of their academic glass cases and insert them into our hot, angry moment; theology in action.  Forgiving the elect is therefore equivalent to preaching the gospel; to ourselves always, and if they happen to be present, to the other believer.
Second, in this view forgiving is not a process, or a sequence of actions; it is a single act.  The language of Mark 11:25 implies that forgiving can be done on the spot, the instant one realizes that one holds a grudge.  There is no indication in this verse of two or more stages.  Feelings are not mentioned—only an action.  It is a stretch to assert that God separates His transacted forgiveness from His attitudinal forgiveness, as if He waits either for His emotions to rise to compassion, or for some action on the part of the sinner.  He acted once for all time to forgive the elect, without waiting for their repentance; that action was the execution of Christ, their firstborn.  Therefore, the orthopraxis for this view is to forgive in the name of the Lord Jesus without waiting—for better feelings on our part, nor for any action on the part of the perpetrator.
Third, our forgiving unbelievers works only through the action of God, not our own.  Like the cross, the action invoked in this case is also an act of justice, but instead of a past event it is an event future to us: either the final judgement (2 Thessalonians 2:12; Revelation 20:12-13) or the (future to us in this moment) evidence of the application of Christ’s death to the perpetrator’s sins.  Since Christ is also directly involved in the final judgement as firstborn of all creation, we are to invoke that perfect justice in His name.  As before, no credit accrues to us; we are not the prime actor in view.  In this view, forgiving means invoking the perfect justice of God, either on the cross for the elect, or in the future for everyone else.[xviii]  And as before, it means invoking God’s immanence and transcendence, transforming even sins into His transcendent good for His beloved.
Fourth, forgiving in this invoking sense is accessible only to the elect.  No one else has authority to use the name of the Lord Jesus to invoke either the judicial action of the cross or the judicial action of the final judgement.  No one else has official authority to invoke His great transforming good on behalf of His beloved.  Any unbeliever may speak the phrase “I forgive you” but it does not have the same meaning or effect of the same words spoken by a believer.
What does it mean to forgive “from the heart”?
Using the Jewish sense of the term, we can see that “from the heart” means using all faculties of the new self—mind, will and emotions—to forgive, even as broken as these faculties are.  While the act of forgiving is a single event, there is a sequence the Holy Spirit uses to train broken hearts to forgive.  The broken mind is involved first (Romans 12:2) by meditating (Psalm 1) methodically on His sovereignty, His perfect justice and His relentless agenda of forging the good of the elect.  Psalm 73 is a clear illustration of this pattern of meditation.  The Holy Spirit uses this meditation to prepare the broken heart for absorbing the consequences voluntarily rather than choose litigation (1 Corinthians 6:7) or revenge when offenses come.  The broken will is drawn into these meditations and responds by formally invoking both His justice and His relentless good, an imperial action by the King’s authorized agent.  Lastly, and after what may seem an inordinately long time, our broken emotions find their rest and healing in His relentless agenda of creating transcendent good.
In practice, this may require us to use more explicit language so that we are clearly using a forgiveness concept that differs profoundly from that of the secular world.  For example, we might practice replacing the ambiguous “I forgive you” with cosmic context language that clearly defines our meaning: “I forgive you forever in Christ, because our God has already dealt with this sin for all time, by impaling Christ with it on the cross, and He’s already transforming it into His transcendent good for our benefit.”
This approach also leads to a practice that is more effective when confronting others about a particular sin: stating the cosmic context up front.  It disarms both the rebuker and the rebuked, both of whom need to hear the gospel preached in the moment.  It sounds something like the following:
“Lance, I have good news for you: from outside of time God has collected all your sins from across your entire life, from your first sin to your last: the sins you committed last month and last year, and those you will commit next year and five years from now.  He has impaled Christ with each and every one, and while you were yet a sinner, Christ paid your penalty of death in full on the cross. 
“I want you to know that right next to your sins are all my sins—billions of them.  All of our debts to God have been satisfied by Christ, our covenant representative before God.  He has imputed Christ’s perfect obedience to you and me, and promised to transform everything, including our sinful actions, into His transcendent good for us. 
“He is here with us now, moving us both to keep His commandments; and with His help you and I need to talk together about one of those sins.  Some of my trust in you has been destroyed, but you and the Holy Spirit can rebuild it, and transform our relationship into something even more beautiful and fulfilling than it was before this incident.”
This invoking approach, when applied to a perpetrator who is not evidently a believer, also leads us to pray for their salvation.  In forgiving them we are formally invoking His perfect justice, but as far as we know, there are still two ways that justice is performed.  We know that unless God selects them to receive His affection, they will suffer judgment and eternal punishment; they will glorify Him as a trophy of His perfect justice.  We recall “And such were some of you.”  As we contemplate our God’s kindness and mercy on wretched sinners such as ourselves, we are moved to ask Him to put His covenant affection on the perpetrator and make them, like us, another “trophy of His grace,” washing them with regeneration and giving them gifts of faith and repentance.
A Proposed Summary Statement
To seed further debate and discussion, I tentatively offer this summary and invite your open comment and critique:
Forgiveness is an act of worship in which a believer, acting as an authorized imperial agent, formally invokes the profound, transcendent goodness and immanence of God, beginning with His perfect justice—either on the cross for the elect, or in the future for those passed by.  Forgiveness is practiced without waiting for any particular emotional state on the part of the victim, nor for any action on the part of the perpetrator.  Our profoundly broken hearts learn forgiving: by meditation, on God’s sovereign immanence in this angry moment, on His justice and on His relentless agenda of transcendent good for His own; and by practice, choosing to verbally invoke His actions in His name.
If that triangle pops up again, you know what to do.
J. Lance Acree is in his 34th year of service as a Ruling Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America. He researches preventable human error; he and his wife of 42 years live in Clinton, Tennessee.

[i] Beckwith, S. (2011). Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
[ii] Frame, J. M. (1987). The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God. Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co.
[iii] Westminster Confession of Faith, III.1
[iv] Moulton, H. K. (1978). The Analytical Greek Lexicon, Revised. (H. K. Moulton, Ed.) Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
[v] Luke’s account is clearly the more difficult reading, and therefore (humanly speaking) the more unlikely to have been written as we see it now. For this reason, one may conclude that Luke’s is probably the most accurate, and the extant manuscripts of both Matthew’s and Mark’s record of the conversation probably carry copyist-induced errors with respect to the verb tense.  It also seems more probable that Luke, who grew up speaking Greek and whose grammar is precise, recorded the correct verb tense (perfect) despite its difficult implications.
[vi] The term firstborn as used in the Scriptures usually denotes chronological order, but some uses denote an achronological preeminence and supremacy in a representative role.  This can be clearly seen in Psalm 89:27.  In Colossians 1 we see it in two ways: while Christ was not the first chronologically to be resurrected from the dead, He bears the title of “firstborn from the dead”; Christ was not created, yet He bears the title of “firstborn of all creation.”
[vii] Westminster Confession of Faith, VI.2
[viii] I recommend Sande’s discussion of the progression of an idol (https://rw360.org/getting-to-the-heart-of-conflict/#cure) with one modification.  For believers, I would insert I deserve into his sequence; long before I become demanding in my behavior, I find that I have embraced a lie as a premise—a lie about what I deserve.  I may have started with a righteous, God-given desire but the lie makes that desire sinful.  The sequence would read “I desire; I deserve; I demand; I judge; I punish.”  The I deserve step is where the sequence becomes sinful—where my idolatry begins; it is the reason why we are to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor 10:5).  For the unregenerate, all desires are twisted and sinful because they are by nature children of wrath (Eph 2), unable to please God, and none seek God (Rom 8); see Westminster Confession of Faith VI.2.
[ix] Westminster Confession of Faith, V
[x] Westminster Confession of Faith, III.1; V.1.
[xi] The use of “knowledge” in Genesis seems to imply that the underlying Hebrew term carries with it not just cognition (of facts), but also willful choice and even affection.
[xii] The earliest uses do not reference any human victims of sin (Gen 13:13; Gen 20:6; Gen 39:9).  Abimelech, a pagan, is the first recorded person to use the phrase “sin against you” to indicate a man is among the ones sinned against (Gen 20:9).  The first Israelite to do so is Reuben (Gen 42:22).
[xiii] It is interesting to note that Thomas Hobbes, in chapter XIX of The Leviathan, attempted to explain Psalm 51:4 by means of both Uriah’s voluntary but comprehensive service to David, in which his life was always in David’s hands, and God’s kingly authority prohibiting sin of all kinds:
“For though the action be against the law of nature, as being contrary to equity (as was the killing of Uriah by David); yet it was not an injury to Uriah, but to God.  Not to Uriah, because the right to do what he pleased was given him by Uriah himself; and yet to God, because David was God’s subject and prohibited all iniquity by the law of nature.  Which distinction, David himself, when he repented the fact, evidently confirmed, saying, “To thee only have I sinned.”
[xiv] It is significant that the first recorded request for forgiveness (Gen 50:17, literally “please carry the transgression”) was addressed to one holding the temporal office of firstborn on behalf of a community: Joseph, who was in his day representing all Israel before Pharoah.  This is probably a prefiguring of Christ carrying the sins of the elect in fulfillment of the eternal office of firstborn of all creation (Colossians 1:15), firstborn from the dead (Colossians 1:18), and the last Adam (1 Corinthians 15: 20-22, 45).
[xv] Romans 8 and Ephesians 2 reveal that the causality is actually the reverse of the first impression from the English translations.  Specifically, God’s initiative to forgive us causes us to behave differently: freely confessing our sins and freely forgiving others.  This means we can correlate between our behaviors and His actions with a profound assurance.  For example, I would contend that 1 John 1:9 should be read as asserting a certainty about what cannot be observed, as evidenced by our observable change in behavior: “If we [observe that we are faithful enough to] confess our sins, [we can know with certainty that the invisible, transcendent thing has happened:] He is [certainly] faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
[xvi] Barnes, L. P. (2011, February). Talking politics, talking forgiveness. Scottish Journal of Theology; Edinburgh, 64(1), 64-79. doi:10.1017/S0036930610001067
[xvii] Westminster Confession of Faith, XI
[xviii] In this view, “I forgive you” works much like the shorthand phrase “I’ll write you a check”, in that “write…a check” invokes sophisticated systems operating behind the scenes—a financial system of banks and bank accounts that functions to ensure money is transferred with high precision, all of which is governed by a judicial system of financial statutes and courts.
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Written by J. Lance Acree |
Monday, April 10, 2023
While we have innumerable sermons and published works that explain Christ’s command to forgive each other, and that explore the benefits of doing so, practical explanations of what explicitly is meant by “forgiving each other” are few, and these tend to use ambiguous language when attempting to describe a corresponding orthopraxy.  The absence of corporately adopted doctrinal explanations in clear didactic language means that Christians are not challenged to think about and practice forgiving each other the way God directs in scripture.

This article in two parts is a call for doctrine: I contend that we need a corporate effort to develop a doctrinal explanation of what we are doing when we forgive others and ask them to forgive us.  The first part establishes the need by exploring the confusing array of popular concepts afflicting the Church; the second offers a Reformed framework on which to build such a doctrine; the purpose is to stimulate critique and discussion with a view to better enabling elders to “equip the saints for works of service” as people who forgive effectively and completely.  In Part Two, we will examining—from a Reformed perspective, and using John Frame’s approach—the theological foundation on which we might build a sound doctrine for a biblical orthopraxis.
“But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world.  We want to know something about him.
“He was a hero.  He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock and as sweet as the fragrance of roses.  The angels appeared to his mother and predicted that the son whom she would conceive would become the greatest the stars had ever seen.  He was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life.  His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived.  Tell us of that man.” — Circassian tribal chief to Leo Tolstoy, as related by Count Stakelberg[i]
“He was so great that he even forgave…”  The lyrical words of a remote mountain chieftain in Central Asia are striking for many reasons, but one that readily stands out is how eminently powerful—to the point of leaping effortlessly across enormous cultural and linguistic divides—is the power to forgive other men.  Small wonder that Christ Himself described this powerful effect on our watching neighbors, for whom this ability is unmistakably a manifestation of divine working: “…for they shall be called the sons of God.” (Matt 5:9)
In our personal and ministry experience, however, we find forgiving every bit as difficult and frustrating as Peter did.[ii]  Forgiving others is clearly a highly public mark of the Christian; a biblical understanding of forgiving involves the depths of our souls to a comprehensive degree.  The term forgive appears over 50 times in the New Testament alone.  But tied to some stinging offenses, Christians feel strong and persistent emotions such as anger; these persisting emotions are frequently interpreted as a failure to forgive “from the heart” as Christ requires (Matt 18:35).  The resulting emotional drain becomes a fertile ground for doubt if not bitterness and disillusionment.
Clearly, we are doing something wrong.
I contend that this situation is like a man driving his family to their favorite vacation spot and encountering a flat tire along the way.  He knows where to look in the trunk for the spare tire and jack. But he has never seen a tire iron employed to turn the lug nuts; so he grabs a pair of pliers that are ready to hand.  That is, our family man has a valid general concept of turning the lug nuts, and all the right intentions, but not the right tool.  The result is going to be frustrating for all concerned.  Busted knuckles and hot language are highly probable, but a completed tire change and a pleasant and successful journey remain highly improbable.  By analogy, I propose that our confusion and frustration in forgiving each other may simply arise because most of us are trying to use the wrong (and therefore inadequate) concept of forgiving.
I further propose that the right tool is there in Scripture, waiting for us to explore and become accustomed to working with it.  It just needs a corporate effort to clarify.  In short, it is a sound doctrine waiting to happen.
In addition to Christian leaders, secular and Muslim professionals—lawyers, social researchers, psychologists and psychiatrists—consider the term to convey a potentially powerful meaning.  However, there is much confusion about forgiving in both the secular and the Christian communities; the disparity among conflicting concepts among Christians speaks to the need for a clear and comprehensive doctrine.
It is the role of doctrine to help people both understand and apply Scripture.[iii]  As with any sound doctrine such an explanation will need to summarize not just a few cherry-picked verses, but all that the Bible has to say that is relevant to the question.  Even though the truths of Scripture do not change, over time the need for doctrine changes because the societal context changes.  The history of the Church demonstrates an expanding body of doctrine (orthodoxy) as Christians progressively worked out the practical application (orthopraxis) of biblical truths to an ever-expanding cultural horizon.
For example, in the present turbulent culture Christians struggle to think clearly and biblically about homosexuality and gender issues than they do with the issue of swearing oaths of loyalty to government.  But in the 1640s Christians in England and Scotland were struggling with this issue of oaths.  We know this because their Elders corporately worked out a clear and comprehensive doctrinal statement to help their congregants both understand and employ a biblical understanding of oaths.[iv]  Today, questions about swearing oaths are not prevalent, but we are inundated with questions about homosexual desire and gender; accordingly, if we updated the Westminster Confession today we would most likely add a section on regeneration[v] with respect to homosexuality and gender dysphoria, among other issues Christians now face in our societal context.
The Need for a Doctrine of Forgiving Each Other
I assert that forgiving each other is such an issue.  While we have innumerable sermons and published works that explain Christ’s command to forgive each other, and that explore the benefits of doing so, practical explanations of what explicitly is meant by “forgiving each other” are few, and these tend to use ambiguous language when attempting to describe a corresponding orthopraxy.  The absence of corporately adopted doctrinal explanations in clear didactic language means that Christians are not challenged to think about and practice forgiving each other the way God directs in scripture.  In this vacuum, secular thinking is found to pervade the Church in the form of phrases commonly used as equivalents to forgive: “get over it”; “let it go”; “stop pretending that the past could be any different.”  Attempts to provide a clear technical explanation usually fall short and end up getting replaced with ambiguous metaphor.
For example, in the pop-theology novel and movie The Shack (2008)—a best-seller—forgiving others in practice is the central issue.  The author first explains it in judicial language (“release from judgment”) but later depicts that concept as inadequate for practical use.  He then substitutes metaphorical language: “letting go of another person’s throat” and “removing your hands from around his neck”.[vi]  The result is less clarity, not more.  At the end of the novel, we still don’t know what forgiving means.  And while conservative criticism of The Shack abounds, few critics offer constructive and clear biblical explanations of how to forgive others.  In short, the absence of orthodoxy about forgiving others means that Christians are left to think and live no differently from the secular community.
As to how to live out our orthodoxy, competing views exist on the question of whether explicit confession, apology and/or repentance on the part of the perpetrator must be evident before one should grant forgiveness.  Similarly, competing views exist on the question of how the relationship should be conducted after forgiveness is verbally granted.  Worse yet, trust is frequently confounded with forgiveness: “If you really forgive me, then you have to trust me.”  This confounding of two different things can leads to susceptibility to manipulation by predatory narcissists—into destructive codependency (2 Tim 3:1-9).
In summary, the orthodoxy of biblical forgiveness has not yet been made clear, and without clear orthodoxy on the subject, our orthopraxis is as wildly diverse as that of our secular culture. The emotions corresponding to this ambiguous orthodoxy of forgiving for most Christians is currently chaotic and disturbing if not deeply discouraging; the peace and joy of orthopathy remains beyond our reach.  Therefore, this issue is an opportunity for the Church to develop doctrine to help Christians both understand and employ a Biblical concept.
Confusion in the Secular Community about the Meaning of “Forgive”
While we Christians are being taught by our Elders to think biblically (Romans 12:2; Ephesians 4:11-16), as history readily demonstrates, our thinking is strongly affected by secular concepts endemic to the popular culture in which we live.[vii]  Elders attempting to equip their congregants to forgive will therefore need to be aware of the competing secular concepts; these concepts need to be explicitly identified, rejected and replaced with an integrated biblical concept.
Popular Secular Literature
In popular secular literature, schools of thought range from “let it go” to “change the narrative” to “cultivate feelings of compassion”, and various blends of these activities have been proposed.[viii]  Ambiguous terminology and metaphor are the norm; technical definitions of forgiving are conspicuously absent.  It is this ambiguity and diversity of concepts that we Christians will most likely bring with us into our attempts to forgive.[ix]
Secular Professional Literature
Philosophers and lawyers are examining forgiveness in secular professional publications.[x]  The definition of forgiveness has long been an issue for psychologists attempting to research its function and effects.[xi]  Twenty-five different process (or “task-stage”) models of forgiveness have been identified in a review that found “little consensus as to what constitutes the process” and concluded it’s “not clear how forgiveness occurs.”[xii]  In response to this ambiguity, Strelan and Covic proposed a definition of forgiveness based on coping: “Forgiveness is the process of neutralizing a stressor that has resulted from a perception of interpersonal hurt.”
Secular professions have proposed models of forgiving for debate and research.  In the past decade, three major models of forgiveness have emerged: McCullough’s process model, Worthington’s pyramid model, and Enright’s transformational model.[xiii]  Forgiveness as a system that opposes revenge systems, based on the concept of Welfare Tradeoff Ratios developed from evolutionary psychology, has been proposed and debated in open peer commentary.[xiv]  More recently, the role of perspective-taking self-manipulations (i.e., Recall-Self-as-Transgressor, Imagine-Other, Imagine-Self) and their effect on the emotional aspect of forgiveness has become the subject of quantitative research.[xv]
Some researchers have developed survey instruments to assess forgiveness, such as the Forgiveness of Others (FOO) scale, the Transgression Narrative Test of Forgiveness (TNTF) and the Tendency to Forgive (TTF) scale.[xvi]  Others have researched behavioral indicators of the degree of forgiveness, such as latency of response to questions about an incident, using some of these instruments.[xvii]  Strelan et al. examined the role of post-transgression trust and transgression-specific forgiveness in close relationships.[xviii]   A wide range of definitions and corresponding discussion is available in a 32-chapter Handbook of Forgiveness[xix], and as recently as 2022 the correlations between divine-, self- and interpersonal forgiveness were studied, along with correlations with depressive symptoms.[xx]
The existence of competing, incompatible models for forgiving, coupled with the wide diversity of definitions in popular and professional literature indicate both continuing respect for the existential power of the term but also pervasive uncertainty about its meaning and substance.  Consequently, secular sources are contributing to the confusion among Christians as to how to forgive each other.
Confusion in the Christian Community about the Meaning of “Forgive”
Among theologically liberal Christian authors, similar ambiguity and diversity of concepts prevail.  Archbishop Tutu and his daughter proposed a “four-fold path” that begins once a choice is made: (1) telling the story; (2) naming the hurt; (3) recognizing shared humanity; and (4) renewing or releasing the relations.[xxi]  Thompson advocated a three-step internal process (challenge the supremacy of our small ego-kingdoms; discover our common humanity; wake up to the deeper reality of our identity in Christ) followed by a prayerful ritual involving stones and a bowl.[xxii]  In general, these authors employ concepts derived more from popular psychology than from Scripture, and they frequently employ ambiguous language.
Among theologically conservative Christian authors, forgiveness concepts are more aligned by a focus on biblical texts and terminology, but these authors also exhibit disparate views and tend to use ambiguous metaphorical language.  For example, Sande devoted considerable attention (a full chapter in The Peacemaker) to explaining forgiveness beginning with two verses, Colossians 3:13 and Ephesians 4:32.[xxiii]  These verses are key because they emphasize the direct relationship between how God forgives us and how we forgive each other.  It is significant that both verses use similar (and non-metaphorical) language to make that relationship explicit. These verses will be examined more thoroughly later in this article.
Sande explained what forgiveness is not (feeling, forgetting, excusing) before stating what forgiveness is: a decision “to release” the other person “from liability to suffer punishment or penalty.”  He based this definition primarily on an interpretation of two Greek words (aphiemi, charizomai) found in passages related to forgiving, and centered his explanation on the metaphor of debt:
“…forgiveness can be a costly activity.  When someone sins, they create a debt, and someone must pay it.  Most of this debt is owed to God… 
“But if someone sinned against you, part of their debt is owed to you.  This means you have a choice to make.  You can either take payments on the debt or make payments.” [Emphasis in the original.]
Sande explained that to “make payments”, Christians draw on the work of Christ on their behalf, because He “established an account of abundant grace in your name.”  “By going to the cross…you will find that you have all you need to make the payments of forgiveness for those who have wronged you.”  This metaphor of bank accounts and debt payments can be helpful in some ways, but dangerous in others, especially as it tends to reduce grace conceptually from a transcendent characteristic to the level of a mere commodity.   While the financial metaphor is helpful in illustrating the extent of forgiving, it does little to explain how the transaction is to be put into effect.  The debt analogy in Scripture will be examined in detail later in this article.
Using this release-from-debt analogy, Sande offers an orthopraxis consisting of four promises: “I will not dwell on this incident; I will not bring up this incident again and use it against you; I will not talk to others about this incident; I will not let this incident stand between us or hinder our personal relationship.”  It is significant that all four promise actions that will not be taken—a negation approach to defining the action of forgiving.  He concludes that “forgiveness is both an event and a process” where reciting the four promises is the event that begins the process of reconciliation.
Like Sande, Poirier described biblical forgiveness as a promise or promises centered on the analogy of debt.[xxiv]  His orthopraxis implements forgiveness in two stages (dispositional and transactional); the first stage is unilateral, and the second is bilateral, or face-to-face between victim and perpetrator.  In this view, the second (transactional) stage completes the forgiveness process, but is contingent on the perpetrator’s presence and cooperation.  Brauns similarly asserts that our forgiving is always tied to reconciling, and so is conditional.[xxv]  Likewise, R. Jones separates forgiveness into two levels (attitudinal and transacted) and uses metaphorical language (“empty our hearts of bitterness”) to describe the actions necessary to achieve necessary attitudinal forgiveness.[xxvi]  The transactional level Jones proposes appears to be identical to that proposed by Poirier; it too is dependent on the cooperation of the perpetrator.
Musekura carefully examined the four Hebrew and the four Greek terms that appear in passages that speak to forgiving; he also reviewed the work of Smedes, L. G. Jones and Volf among other authors in his survey of contemporary models of forgiveness.  He then proposed a community-centric process model of forgiveness, using the metaphor of “cancellation of interpersonal debt.”  Barnes examined the Greek terms in order to assess the idea of “political forgiveness” and whether it should be endorsed by Christians.[xxvii]  G. Jones further explains the Musekura model as a “dance” with six steps or stages.[xxviii]
In summary, while conservative Christian authors start with scripture, like their liberal counterparts, they employ metaphors and analogies as their primary tools to explain how we are to forgive each other.  Both groups tend to propose process or task-stage models.  The preferred analogy among more conservative authors appears to be interpersonal debt.  This extensive reliance on metaphor and analogy means that we have illustrations, but not explanations sufficiently explicit to frame a clear orthopraxis.  These analogies fail to provide a clear orthopraxis because neither metaphor nor analogy alone can substitute for an explicitly worded didactic.[xxix]  Metaphor does not provide the vivid clarity in orthodoxy that we need to drive a clear orthopraxis and its associated orthopathy.  Neither does a negative approach (defining forgiving by stating what we won’t do); a positive statement is essential.  Further, we need an approach that illuminates our existential experience starting from explicit scripture, rather than giving our existential experience the dominant role over scripture.
Forgiving Each Other is a Touch Point for Evangelism
Because conflict is a normal part of life in a world filled with broken sinners, forgiving is a door for personal conversations about the gospel.  In addition to secular psychologists and philosophers, Muslim scholars are discussing forgiveness between parties in conflict.[xxx]  Several verses in the Quran stipulate forgiving offenses between Muslims.[xxxi]  The Arabic term sulh refers to formal dispute resolution that may or may not include mediators in civil disputes, but may also be used in criminal cases.  More importantly, forgiveness is considered intrinsic to sulh:
Forgiveness is not an element of sulh, but plays an integral part in sulh.  Not all cases can be withdrawn with forgiveness as it depends on type of offences committed and when forgiveness is given.  The criminal case that has infringed the right of individuals may be withdrawn if the victim has forgiven the accused.  The court cannot simply pardon the accused if the offence has infringed the right of individuals.  Nevertheless, in cases that involve the right of Allah, the court may pardon the accused and substitutes with a lesser punishment.[xxxii]
This open discussion in secular and Islamic scholarly literature indicates a common respect both for the word “forgive” and for the power this word holds in common conversation.  This common respect means there is a strong potential for non-threatening, relational evangelism in the form of What and How questions.  For example, the question “How do Muslims forgive each other, exactly?” demonstrates respect for Islam while seeking understanding of it, both of which are disarming.  “What are you actually doing when you forgive your Muslim brother?” is a more personal way to say the same thing.
Lance Acree is in his 34th year of service as a Ruling Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America. He researches preventable human error; he and his wife of 42 years live in Clinton, Tennessee.

[i] Stakelberg, C. S. (1909). Tolstoi Holds Lincoln World’s Greatest Hero. The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy, 1860 to Now, 389.
[ii] Matt 18:21
[iii] Frame, J. M. (1987). The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God. Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co.
[iv] See Chapter XXII, “Of Lawful Oaths and Vows,” in The Westminster Confession of Faith, 1647.
[v] See Ezek. 11:19, 36:26; Titus 3:5; 2 Cor. 5:17; John 3:3-8; Eph 2:3-9
[vi] Mittelstadt, M. W., & Sutton, G. W. (2010). Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Restoration: Multidisciplinary Studies from a Pentecostal Perspective. Wipf and Stock Publishers.
[vii] Schaeffer, F. A. (1976). How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. Westchester, Illinois: Crossway Books.
[viii] Hamilton, A. (2012), Forgiveness: Finding Peace Through Letting Go. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Luskin, F. (2003), Forgive for Good. San Francisco: HarperOne. Tipping, C. (2010), Radical Forgiveness: A Revolutionary Five-Stage Process to Heal Relationships Boulder: Sounds True. Khazan, O. (2015, January 28), The forgiveness boost. The Atlantic. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/the-forgiveness-boost/384796/
[ix] Kaminskiene, N., Tvaronaviciene, A., & Sirgediene, R. (2015). Apology and forgiveness in mediation as factors for its success. International Academic Conference on Social Sciences 2015 Conference Proceedings (pp. 223-232). Istanbul, Turkey: The International Institute for Academic Development. Retrieved from www.socscienceconf.com
[x] Kekes, J. (2009). Blame versus forgiveness. The Monist: An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry; Oxford, 488-506.  Mouzon, F. (2008). Forgive us our trespasses: The need for federal expungement legislation. The University of Memphis Law Review, 1-46.
[xi] Denton, R. T., & Martin, M. W. (1998). Defining forgiveness: An empirical exploration of process and role. The American Journal of Family Therapy, 281-292. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/230097154/abstract/51B76848BEE142B5PQ/6. Sandage, S. J. (2005). Intersubjectivity and the many faces of forgiveness: Commentary on paper by Stephen Wangh. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 17-32. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/233298671/abstract/51B76848BEE142B5PQ/2. Cochran, K. (2014, May 1). How do we forgive?: An empirical framework for the underlying processes of overcoming interpersonal betrayal. Retrieved June 8, 2017, from University of North Carolina Greensboro Digital Online Collection of Knowledge and Scholarship: https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/asu/f/Cochran,%20Karly_2014_Thesis.pdf
[xii] Strelan, P., & Covic, T. (2006). A review of forgiveness process models and a coping framework to guide future research. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 1059-1085. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/224853094/abstract/83BFA357935C464BPQ/1
[xiii] Musekura, C. (2010). An Assessment of Contemporary Models of Forgiveness. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
[xiv] McCullough, M. E., Kursban, R., & Tabak, B. A. (2013). Cognitive systems for revenge and forgiveness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1-15. doi:10.1017/S0140525X11002160
[xv] Cochran, K. A. (2014). How do we forgive?: An empirical framework for the underlying processes of overcoming interpersonal betrayal [Appalachian State University]. https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/asu/f/Cochran,%20Karly_2014_Thesis.pdf
[xvi] Brown, R. P. (2002). Measuring individual differences in the tendency to forgive: construct validity and links with depression. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 759-771.
[xvii] Fatfouta, R. (2015). How forgiveness affects processing time: Mediation by rumination about the transgression. Personality and Individual Differences, 90-95. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2015.03.016
[xviii] Strelan, P., Karremans, J. C., & Krieg, J. (2017). What determines forgiveness in close relationships? The role of post-transgression trust. British Journal of Social Psychology, 161-180. doi:10.1111/bjso.12173
[xix] Worthington, E. L. (Ed.) (2005) Handbook of Forgiveness, Routledge.  See also the survey of models in Worthington, E. L. (2006), Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Theory and Application, Routledge.
[xx] Fincham, F. D., & May, R. W. (2022). No type of forgiveness is an island: Divine forgiveness, self-forgiveness and interpersonal forgiveness. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 17(5), 620–627. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2021.1913643. Fincham, F. D., & May, R. W. (2020). Divine, interpersonal and self-forgiveness: Independently related to depressive symptoms? The Journal of Positive Psychology, 15(4), 448–454. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2019.1639798
[xxi] Tutu, D., & Tutu, M. (2014). The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World. (D. C. Abrams, Ed.) New York, New York: HarperOne.
[xxii] Thompson, M. J. (2014). Forgiveness: A Lenten Study. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press.
[xxiii] Sande, K. (2004). The Peacemaker: A Biblical Guide to Resolving Personal Conflict. Grand Rapids: Baker Books.
[xxiv] Poirier, A. (2006). The Peacemaking Pastor: A Biblical Guide to Resolving Church Conflict. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.
[xxv] Brauns, C. (2008). Unpacking Forgiveness: Biblical Answers for Complex Questions and Deep Wounds. Crossway Books.
[xxvi] Jones, R. D. (2012). Pursuing Peace: a Christian Guide to Handling Our Conflicts. Wheaton Ill: Crossway.
[xxvii] Barnes, L. P. (2011, February). Talking politics, talking forgiveness. Scottish Journal of Theology; Edinburgh, 64(1), 64-79. doi:10.1017/S0036930610001067
[xxviii] Jones, G. L., & Musekura, C. (2010). Forgiving As We’ve Been Forgiven: Community Practices for Making Peace. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
[xxix] For a thorough and illuminating discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of metaphor, analogy and technical language in theology, see Frame’s The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, p. 226-232.
[xxx] Iqbal, K. (n.d.). Premarital and Marriage Advise/Counseling. Retrieved June 17, 2017, from Rahmaa Institute: http://www.rahmaa.org/domestic-violence/islamic-mediation/.
[xxxi] Surah al-Shura: 40; Surah An-Nur 24:22; Surah Al-A’raf 7:199; Surah Al-Hijr 15:85; Surah Ash-Shura 42:43
[xxxii] Aziz, N., & Hussin, N. (2016). The application of mediation (sulh) in Islamic criminal law. Shariah Journal, 115-136.

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Written by J. Lance Acree |
Sunday, June 12, 2022
The Bible I read gives a strong impression that the King and Head of the Church  looks none too kindly on this kind of brazen rebellion—especially when perpetrated by those who claim to be His shepherds.  “It belongs to His Majesty,” reads the BCO Preface, “from His throne of glory to rule and teach the Church…” 

A funny thing happened on the way to prodding my Presbytery to explain why it approved the ordination of pedophiles and homosexuals as pastors.
I am not making this up.
Not to bury the lede, I discovered that the highest court in this supposedly conservative denomination—the Standing Judicial Commission (SJC) of the General Assembly—has been routinely violating the PCA Constitution and its Standards, for nearly three decades.
This is a bold and unusual claim to make.  But relatively few people in the PCA have been on the strange journey that reveals this bizarre phenomenon.  Not everyone travels to Australia, and accordingly, few see a black swan in the wild, or a mammal that lays eggs.  But we’re not in Australia just yet; I am getting ahead of myself.  Every journey, no matter how strange, needs a starting point.  So let me follow the advice of Vizzini (The Princess Bride) and “go back to the beginning.”
When your correspondent was a college student (getting invaluable training from The Navigators™ college ministry), close at hand there were PCA giants roaming the earth: Frank Barker Jr. and Peter Doyle.  With my Navigator buddies I studied Romans chapter by chapter, and in the process adopted the reformed perspective—long before I found out there was a word for it.  Since then, I have served as an ordained Ruling Elder (RE) in the PCA for well over 30 years.  As we moved about the country courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, my wife and I transferred our membership among a string of PCA churches in Arkansas, Ohio, South Carolina, Maryland and Tennessee.  I have served on three church Sessions in three different states; at the Presbytery level, on two committees and a judicial commission; and at General Assembly (GA) as a commissioner from my church.
In short, I am about as loyal as one can reasonable be to the Presbyterian form of government[i] in general and to the PCA’s original philosophy of ministry in particular.  For more than three decades, I have explored both the beautiful and the ugly side of the PCA.  I still enjoy serving the people God loves so lavishly in this denomination.
My first experience with the ugly side of the PCA occurred while serving on a judicial commission of Chesapeake Presbytery.  As a commissioner going through meeting minutes, I had discovered that a Session had ruled that a Deacon and his wife (neither of whom had I met) could not host in their home a woman in distress.  Now, no PCA Session has authority over who can or can’t be hosted in a particular home.  This kind of ruling is called “binding the conscience” in the PCA, and it is prohibited in explicit terms[ii]; it means this Session usurped authority no church court possesses[iii].  Although this flawed ruling was well-documented—a “clean kill,” so to speak—my fellow commissioners proceeded to ignore the finding.  They offered no explanation; then they voted to keep this finding out of the report.  I felt this was a dereliction of our duty to the Deacon if not to the entire Presbytery that commissioned us.
The PCA’s Book of Church Order (BCO), a component of its Constitution, offers a formal way to raise such issues and get them addressed: the formal complaint (BCO 43).  When I filed complaints about this dereliction of duty with the Presbytery, the Moderator responded by claiming that since I was not a member of the Presbytery I did not have grounds for filing a complaint.  He cited no reference for this assertion, nor did he offer any supporting rationale or inference chain[iv].  His fiat ruling was sustained by majority vote—my first experience with what I will call The Great Presbytery Smackdown, a crude kind of internal cancel culture unique to the PCA.  It’s a kind of ad hominem assault that leverages a widespread confusion about authority—a confusion we will explore in this article.  If you have not seen one in person, a Smackdown looks more like something drawn from Rules for Radicals or The Prince[v] than from anything Christ Jesus said.[vi]  Later I appealed my complaints to the SJC, who found that I “certainly had the right to file a complaint” but did not direct any specific corrective action for Chesapeake Presbytery.[vii]
More recently, Tennessee Valley Presbytery approved a licensure candidate who, during his oral examination, explicitly approved the ordination of homosexuals and pedophiles as pastors (Teaching Elders).  Licensure is the formal authorization to preach.  As one who suspected an effort to syncretize pagan “social justice” religious dogma[viii] with Christianity or practice a kind of selective antinomianism, I had a question: How does the Presbytery make this position fit with the Scriptures on the subject?  As a church member within the geographical jurisdiction of this Presbytery I filed a one-page complaint.[ix]
At the time I was a PCA church member but not elected and installed on a Session, and so could not have served as a commissioner from my church.  But I made sure to attend the next Presbytery meeting as a visitor; I wanted to be available either to answer questions from the floor or meet with a committee.  This was my first interaction with this particular Presbytery, and I was curious whether they would refer the complaint to committee or conduct an open discussion on the issues I raised.
Fat chance.  The first announcement of the complaint as an item on the agenda was followed, not by a motion to refer to committee, but a brief and baldly stated motion: “to deny the complaint.”  In what passed for “discussion”, not one speaker discussed any point in the substance of the complaint, nor asked that the complaint be read.  From previous experience I recognized the pattern; an imminent Smackdown was in the works.
The sole, single and solitary argument raised (in support of the Smackdown motion) was that the complaint was based on hearsay.  The speaker (a Teaching Elder) argued that as I was not present when the Presbytery voted to approve the candidate espousing homosexual and pedophile pastors, the complaint was just hearsay.  Despite the fact that such an argument is a logical fallacy[x] employing a tactfully hidden but patently false premise (and as such is prohibited by God in the Scriptures[xi]), no one pointed out its illegitimate nature.  No other argument was offered.  True to form, the now-familiar Presbytery Smackdown ran its predictable course.  Alinsky and Machiavelli would have been proud: no Golden Rule practiced here.
The message was clear: You’re a nice guy, Mr. Acree, but Tennessee Valley Presbytery does not care to answer sticky questions that would likely expose antinomianism or a creeping syncretism of a pagan dogma with Christianity, thank you very much.  We’re done with you.  And the horse you rode in on.
Later I was informed by the Stated Clerk via email that the Presbytery had consulted with Dr. Roy L. Taylor on this matter of Presbyterian polity.  The Stated Clerk offered an attempt at a justification for the Smackdown:
Please also note, that after consultation with the General Assembly’s Stated Clerk Emeritus, Dr. Roy Taylor, the Presbytery was advised that according to BCO 43-1 and 13-1 only members (TEs) and elected ruling elders sent as commissioners to Presbytery may file a complaint against an action of Presbytery.  The court of original jurisdiction for a church member is the Session, not the Presbytery.  Despite this, the Presbytery did read and discuss the content of your complaint at the most immediate stated meeting and approved a motion to deny your complaint. 
While I am sure that individual members of Presbytery may have read and discussed the complaint in whatever informal groups they may care to cluster in, I am sure also that Tennessee Valley Presbytery—the formal deliberative body defined by the term “Presbytery”—never discussed the content of my complaint in any way[xii] at “the most immediate meeting.”  I know this with absolute certainty because all the through their brute force Smackdown, I was sitting there with them all, listening carefully.  I would have noticed.  My friends and fellow Elders from my church, who were also there, would have noticed.  The Stated Clerk’s assertion is demonstrably false, and so is a violation of the PCA Standards.  This attempt at an explanation also includes a compound fallacy (about original jurisdiction) that we will examine in detail later in this article.  But let’s put that aside—there are much bigger fish to fry.
It will help to review some important concepts.  Jurisdiction is usually a well-understood concept in the United States; the term has a plain meaning that originates as early as Exodus 18, and is widely used in civil government.  In the hierarchy of ecclesiastical courts that constitute the PCA, each component court is given primacy of governance over its particular jurisdiction, but the court one step up also has jurisdiction in a secondary way that might be called oversight.  More specifically, a church Session has primary governance (jurisdiction) over its congregation, but the Session operates within the jurisdiction of Presbytery; likewise, a Presbytery has jurisdiction over a geographic area, but operates within the jurisdiction of the General Assembly (and its Standing Judicial Commission).
Thus, the various jurisdictions are nested in a hierarchy.  The churches within the geographic bounds of a Presbytery A—its constituent churches—are held accountable to the Presbytery because their governance oversight role has been reserved for Presbytery A.  That means Presbytery B can’t assert its authority over the churches in the jurisdiction of Presbytery A; in the same way, Presbytery A can’t try to govern all the other Presbyteries because that is the role reserved solely for General Assembly.  But it also means that General Assembly would not normally interfere directly with Presbytery A’s governance of its constituent churches; similarly, Presbytery A would not normally interfere with a church Session’s governance of its congregation.
This plain meaning is replicated in the United States Constitution: New York’s state government can’t try to govern a town in New Jersey; and New Jersey can’t try to govern all the 50 states the way the Federal government does.  And the Federal government can’t tell New Jersey to adjust their state income tax.
When a case that originated within the jurisdiction of a lower court is appealed to a higher court, the higher court is described as having appellate jurisdiction; it has the right to hear the appeal.  But in unusual circumstances, a superior court may, temporarily but properly, take to itself the jurisdiction that would normally belong to an inferior court.  For example, if Presbytery A has been found to have severely mismanaged a case within its jurisdiction, the SJC may properly take original jurisdiction—i.e., take the case away from Presbytery A and retry that case at the higher (SJC) level—as if the SJC had the normal jurisdiction at the moment the case originated.  And a Presbytery can in similar fashion take original jurisdiction from one of its constituent church courts (a Session).
These processes are stipulated in the PCA Constitution, which includes the Book of Church Order (BCO).  In case you aren’t familiar with the BCO, you can easily see it at https://www.pcaac.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/BCO-2019-with-bookmarks-for-website-1.pdf.   The Preface to the BCO is well worth reading.  To save you time looking up what the Stated Clerk referred me to, here is BCO paragraph 43-1 in full:
43-1. A complaint is a written representation made against some act or decision of a court of the Church. It is the right of any communing member of the Church in good standing to make complaint against any action of a court to whose jurisdiction he is subject, except that no complaint is allowable in a judicial case in which an appeal is pending.
As you can see, there is no mention of a requirement to be a commissioner or a Teaching Elder in this text; those terms are conspicuously absent.  Please note for later that “jurisdiction” appears in the context of “any communing member”; very different from the SJC’s restriction to “commissioners or Teaching Elders”.  The only possible way to twist this wording into what the Stated Clerk sent me is to alter the meaning of “jurisdiction”, or by using some logic chain or extended syllogism.  That may be why he included a statement about “original jurisdiction.”  We will return to these two later.  But lest we forget, the Stated Clerk also referenced BCO 13-1, which appears in a chapter entitled The Presbytery:
13-1. The Presbytery consists of all the teaching elders and churches within its bounds that have been accepted by the Presbytery. When the Presbytery meets as a court it shall comprise all teaching elders and ruling elders as elected by their Session. Each congregation is entitled to two (2) ruling elder representatives for the first 350 communing members or fraction thereof, and one additional ruling elder for each additional 500 communing members or fraction thereof.
As with 43-1, you can see that BCO 13-1 contains no requirement to be a commissioner or a Teaching Elder to have standing within in the jurisdiction of a Presbytery.
But the Stated Clerk mentioned “original jurisdiction”; what logic would make him do that, when neither of the texts in the BCO he referenced use this phrase?  One possibility is that he and others are equivocating, by implying that the use of “jurisdiction” in 43-1 is the semantic equivalent of “original jurisdiction”.  But confounding “jurisdiction” and “original jurisdiction” would result in some serious confusion if for consistency we tried to use the same confounding in other parts of the BCO that use these terms.  This equivocation fallacy is easily exposed by reductio ad absurdum.
As we have seen, the concept of jurisdiction is rather critical to the Presbyterian form of government, whether liberal or conservative, civil or ecclesiastic.  Accordingly, the term appears no less than 77 times in the BCO.  We have seen that it has two distinct qualifiers (original; appellate) added to distinguish which direction one is moving (under special circumstances) among the arrangement of court jurisdictions. This is necessary because the jurisdictions of the various courts nest together in a hierarchical order.   It should be no surprise that two whole chapters are devoted to the concept (Chapters 11 and 46)—which chapters are curiously missing from the Stated Clerk’s attempt at an explanation.  Surely, if their view has support anywhere in the BCO at all, something in these key chapters should support their position.  But alas, no mention of either chapter 11 or 46.  Just thin air.
Another possibility is that they have inserted a hidden qualifier (in this case, “original”) that does not appear in the text—something I am sure in seminary they were all taught not to do.  I never went to seminary, but even I learned this is illegitimate.  The more subtle form is called eisegesis, and it means injecting a meaning into the text that is not actually there, by verbal sleight of hand.  It is a kind of dealing falsely—with the author of the text, with the intended audience, etc.—and that is prohibited by God for His people, as we have seen earlier.  It’s a clear violation of the PCA Standards.
Without explicit mention in BCO texts for a foundation, there is another possibility: that there exists some logic chain or extended syllogism that supports their critical idea.  To do that, it would have to start with authoritative BCO excerpts, and then proceed “by good and necessary inference” (i.e., sound logic that has no other possible alternative) to end up with their final argument.  Each step in the logic chain would have to be clearly stated and must logically follow from the preceding statements.  The final line in the chain would have to be something like “Therefore, complaints against actions of Presbytery can only be filed by either Teaching Elders who are members of that Presbytery, or by Ruling Elders commissioned to attend the meeting in which the action was completed.”
You may have noticed that their explanation offered no such logic chain.  I noticed.  And I suspect that many fathers and mothers who attend PCA churches in the jurisdiction of Tennessee Valley Presbytery would like to know that in the near future their children may soon be exposed to pedophiles and homosexuals wearing the (formerly) trusted title of PCA pastor.  So in 2021 I filed an appeal of my complaint with the Stated Clerk of the General Assembly.  Such an appeal goes to “the higher court”, which in this case is also the highest court of the PCA, the Standing Judicial Commission (SJC) of the General Assembly.  After a bit of introduction and background for context, I explained to the SJC the process errors and logical fallacy committed by my Presbytery.
And now we come to the strange episode in which the Standing Judicial Commission violates the PCA Constitution and Standards, not to mention the vows of ordination—not just once, but repeatedly.  After nearly a year, the SJC responded to my appeal, and minus the voting of the particular Officers of the Commission, it reads as follows:
This case began as an attempt by a Ruling Elder to file a BCO 43-1 Complaint with Presbytery as the original court, even though he was not a commissioner at the Presbytery meeting where the action was taken. The Officers reviewed the Complaint and recommended the Case be found Administratively Out of Order. (OMSJC 9.1.a) The Officers determined that the Case could not be put in order (OMSJC 9.2), because the Complainant was not identified in the roster of Ruling Elder Commissioners at the April 2021 meeting of the Presbytery in which the action was taken from which his Complaint arises. The Presbytery Clerk confirmed he was not a commissioner at that meeting. The Officers notified RE Acree that they were making this recommendation to the SJC. Therefore, the SJC rules the Complainant did not have standing to file a BCO 43-1 complaint with Presbytery. Presbytery should have also found his Complaint out of order and declined to adjudicate at its July 2021 meeting. See similar SJC rulings on standing in:
Case 2020-13, Benyola v. Central Florida, (M48GA, 2021, p. 817),Case 2020-01, Benyola v. Central Florida (M48GA, 2021, p. 801),Case 2012-08, RE Warren Jackson v. Northwest Georgia (M43GA, 2015, p. 568),Case 2012-06, Deacon Don Bethel v. Southeast Alabama (M41GA, 2013, p. 614), andCase 92-9b, Mr. Overman v. Eastern Carolina (M21GA, 1993, p. 223).
In reviewing the SJC ruling above, a couple of things should stand out.  First, the entire SJC ruling hinges on just one critical idea: that Ruling Elders cannot complain about an action of Presbytery unless they are commissioned by their Session to attend the particular meeting when that action occurred.  The key term, used twice in the SJC ruling, is “standing.”  How the SJC rationally supports this position on “standing,” which as we have seen earlier has no explicit basis in the BCO, the SJC failed to provide.  It is simply asserted here without support, floating on nothing.
Second, the SJC seems to be astonished and possibly annoyed at the failure of Tennessee Valley Presbytery to administratively adjudicate my complaint as Out of Order based on the SJC’s critical idea.  It appears that the SJC has assumed that every Presbytery in the PCA has been officially informed about the SJC’s restriction on standing.  Yet, the SJC provides no reference to any widely publicized and GA-authorized document in which a Presbytery might find an official description of this novel restriction.
Third, the only clue as to where some authoritative basis and explanation for this critical idea might be found is in the list of “similar SJC rulings on standing”.  This list starts with a case in 2013 and works its way back to the minutes (page 223) of the 21st GA meeting in 1993, so it seems reasonable to expect to find an explicit motion, or at least a logic chain recorded in the 1993 minutes.  Those minutes are found here: Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America (pcahistory.org).
A review of the 21st GA Minutes shows 82 instances of “jurisdiction” (including “jurisdictional” etc.)—but not one instance redefining “jurisdiction” as hinging on meeting attendance as a commissioner.  The term “standing” occurs 85 times, and one of these instances is the case cited by the SJC above (92-9b, pages 223-224).  As such it appears to be the foundational case for the entire string of “similar SJC rulings” between 1993 and the present.  The key paragraph in this allegedly foundational SJC ruling is:
92-9b was found not in order. Recommendation to the full Commission: that 92-9b be found not in order because of lack of standing since the complainant is not subject to the jurisdiction of the Eastern Carolina Presbytery (BCO 43-1; MSJC 6.2).
That’s it.  No supporting rationale, just an assertion connecting lack of standing to some unnamed aspect of jurisdiction, presumably using some logic—but logic that is held out of view.  I have looked at each of the other four cases on the SJC list of “similar rulings” as they are recorded in GA minutes; none offer anything better than this one.
As we have seen earlier, without indulging in an illegitimate eisegesis or fallacy of equivocation, the first reference (BCO 43-1) cannot logically be construed as an explicit and authoritative basis for the critical idea.  That leaves “MSJC 6.2” as a possible source document.
Right.  I think we can agree that an Operating Manual, which is usually just a collection of procedures, is not a sufficiently authoritative source for a governing principle wherein “jurisdiction” and “standing” are significantly altered from their plain meaning in the BCO texts.  More significantly, the current SJC, in their ruling on my complaint appeal, did not cite a single paragraph in the current operating manual (the OMSJC).  Taken together, these two points indicate that we can discard the citation of “MSJC 6.2” as a possible authoritative source document for the critical idea; it’s clearly irrelevant.
But let’s be generous.  Perhaps the SJC’s 1993 ruling on case 92-9b was based on a motion approved by GA the previous year.  A review of the previous GA meeting minutes (in 1992) shows 91 instances of “standing.”  Not a single instance restricts standing with regard to filing a complaint.  There are 62 instances of “jurisdiction.”  Again, not a single instance restricts standing with regard to filing a complaint.  As I stated earlier, I have read the GA minutes for each of the “similar rulings” on the list they provided and found nothing of substance—no explicit authorization in the BCO or motions of the GA, and no logic chains.  But you don’t have to take my word for it; you can download the pdf files and use the search function yourself.
But let’s not give up; perhaps the Office of the Stated Clerk can help us locate some rationale in the form of a logic chain, perhaps in a PCA position paper.  In response to my subsequent inquiries with the Office of the Stated Clerk of the General Assembly, Dr. Roy L. Taylor offered this:
“To summarize my logic.

BCO 15-4 and 15-5 are part of the PCA Constitution.
The process of amending the BCO was followed by the General Assembly, the approval of two-thirds of Presbyteries, and a subsequent General Assembly in accordance with BCO 26-2.
Because BCO 15-4 and 15-5 are now part of the PCA Constitution, I do not need to provide you with motions adopted by the General Assembly or additional rationale.”

That’s it.  Two paragraphs in the BCO.  In case you’re wondering, BCO 15-4 starts this way:
15-4. The General Assembly shall elect a Standing Judicial Commission to which it shall commit all matters governed by the Rules of Discipline, except for the annual review of Presbytery records, which may come before the Assembly. This commission shall consist of twenty-four…
BCO 15-5 continues in the same vein, just procedures.  In other words, BCO 15-4 and BCO 15-5 are descriptions of procedure, not descriptions or restrictions on standing or jurisdiction.  Nowhere in this relatively short two-paragraph section will you find the slightest reference to the SJC’s critical idea.  Nor will you find authorization deputed to the SJC to ignore the plain meaning or modify foundational definitions (such as “standing” and “jurisdiction”) so crucial to the presbyterian form of government.  Recall that the SJC did not cite either of these paragraphs as a source in their ruling.
To summarize thus far, your correspondent found no explicit GA direction or authorization to restrict standing or modify “jurisdiction”, nor did he find any “good and necessary inference” by which such a restriction might be deduced from GA-approved motions.  The SJC’s critical idea appears only in its rulings, without authoritative foundation; it floats without anchor on nothing but thin air.
That leaves one remaining possibility, as bizarre as it may seem: the SJC usurped legislative authority.[xiii]  The Officers surreptitiously ignored the plain meaning of “jurisdiction” in the BCO, and without any proper authorization they made up a completely new restriction on foundational concepts (standing; jurisdiction), fabricated out of thin air, and substituted it for the plain meaning.  Modifying two foundational definitions is a role restricted to legislative authority—the GA itself.  In case you’re wondering, at no point in its history has the GA deputized its SJC to act with legislative authority; if the GA had, no one would bother to attend GA, because the SJC would be in complete charge.
Any review of legislation reveals that it is chock full of definitions—legal definitions—to be used by attorneys and judges as they apply the force of enacted law to particular cases.  Legislators routinely fabricate definitions for terms like Sole Proprietorship and Limited Liability Corporation; if they didn’t no one would be able to understand what they were talking about, much less how to apply their laws once enacted.  The Book of Church Order is another example of legislation, with definitions embedded throughout.  These legislative definitions supply us with the plain meaning of the terms.
An illustration might help.  If a civil judge, in the process of adjudicating a case involving a Sole Proprietorship or a Limited Liability Corporation, modified the definition of either of these terms with his own restriction, say to exclude blacks or Hispanics, or to include only the owners of pickup trucks, we know with crystal clarity and absolute certainty that this judge has ignored the plain meaning of the legal text.  In modifying a definition in the legislation he has “legislated from the bench” (usurped legislative authority).  He has committed a professional foul for which he may properly be impeached.
Since the GA officially deputized the SCJ with judicial authority only, usurping legislative authority is a clear violation of the PCA Constitution and Standards, not to mention a violation of the respective Officer’s oaths of ordination[xiv].  Their eisegesis on the Book of Church Order, among other logical fallacies that comprise a deceptive attempt to give these rulings an appearance of legitimacy, is also a violation of God’s explicit commands.  In short, all of the cited list of SJC rulings that employ the SJC-fabricated restriction are illegitimate, and the current SJC Officers, by continuing an illegitimate practice (as they did with my appeal), are equally as guilty as the SJC was in 1993 of violating both the Constitution and the Standards.
Analysis
I think it’s obvious that the Presbytery Smackdown practice is the natural result of the unconstitutional SJC Smackdown practice that began in 1993.  One large-scale negative effect is to discourage PCA Elders from working through issues in their own Presbytery with careful, diligent statesmanship.  The threat of a Smackdown is too great to invest the effort.  The Smackdown means that instead of getting proper discussion in a Presbytery, critical issues get polarized in unofficial caucuses such as the Gospel Reformation Network and the National Partnership.  The PCA loses to a significant degree the great benefit of an entire intermediate level of polity discourse.  Another effect is to discourage Presbyterian officers from learning the arduous but noble work of statesmanship in His Church; brute force thuggery precludes the fine art of statecraft.
Now I know what you’re thinking: “Presbyterians love committees, so surely there is some committee of the GA whose job it is to catch these things.”  If there is, it would probably be the Committee on Constitutional Business (CCB).  But you have to realize that, aside from the occasional Presbytery Smackdown, the culture of Southern Church-ianity[xv] is passive.  Many don’t like confrontation in any form.  Many church officers can’t conceive that God routinely uses unpleasant things like conflict to construct His transcendent good for the benefit of His Beloved.  Many more do not know how to file a complaint.  In practice, that means that those who make this journey, the people with the temerity to file a complaint against a whole Presbytery will face a steep climb and possibly social castigation, labelled as “contentious” or “angry”.
Then there is the art and science of writing up a sound complaint and a proper appeal; few are trained or equipped with these skills of statecraft.  Such intrepid statesmen of deep conviction and skill are few and far between, and so this kind of complaint—and its corresponding illegitimate SJC response—are relatively rare.  So the CCB may be completely unaware of this brazen, if intermittent, arrogation of legislative power, simply because it might only rarely (if ever) come to their attention.
I have made some striking charges against the SJC and my Presbytery in this article, and I am fully prepared to face an ecclesiastic court on countercharges of libel.[xvi]  Consider this public rebuke[xvii] an open invitation for any of the SJC Officers and various Stated Clerks I mentioned to respond in an equally public forum.  I am concerned for the welfare of my fellow officers, but more for the future welfare of children in Tennessee Valley Presbytery.  I don’t think it wise to allow any surreptitious monkeying around with foundational concepts like jurisdiction or standing.  Especially when used to beat down an honest question from a fellow servant of Christ.  But I really don’t think it wise to expose minors and young adults to male homosexuals and pedophiles who are awarded a title of public trust.  The Boy Scouts went this way.  So did the Roman Catholic Church.  I don’t think it wise, either for Sessions or Presbyteries or Standing Commissions, to traffic in false premises and logical fallacies.
o              “Let us not fear the opposition of men; every great movement in the Church from Paul down to modern times has been criticized on the ground that it promoted censoriousness and intolerance and disputing.  Of course the gospel of Christ, in a world of sin and doubt will cause disputing; and if does not cause disputing and arouse bitter opposition, that is a fairly sure sign that it is not being faithfully proclaimed.”
o              “In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight.”
o              “It is impossible to be a true soldier of Jesus Christ and not fight.”
 — John Gresham Machen
The Bible I read gives a strong impression that the King and Head of the Church[xviii] looks none too kindly on this kind of brazen rebellion—especially when perpetrated by those who claim to be His shepherds.  “It belongs to His Majesty,” reads the BCO Preface, “from His throne of glory to rule and teach the Church…”  His Majesty has spoken rather bluntly about His views, and on several occasions.  His descriptions of the outcome for the perpetrators are always memorable, terse and stark.  Not to mention unpleasant.
But perhaps my fellow PCA Elders have forgotten, among other important things like their ordination vows, that It belongs to His Majesty.  Perhaps they have forgotten that His Majesty is coming back.  That when He does come back He will judge every word.
Until He appears, I predict that some PCA Ruling Elders will be dodging accountability with “Hey, I did not attend the meeting in question as a commissioner, so according to the PCA I’m not under your jurisdiction.”  And I predict that parents and their lawyers will be lining up to file suit, not just against churches of Tennessee Valley Presbytery but against the whole of the PCA (the deep pocket) now that the SJC has made the denomination arguably complicit and equally culpable—for materially aiding the sexual molestation of their minor children.
Easy money; like shooting fish in a barrel.  Just ask the Scouts.
J. Lance Acree is in his 33rd year of service as a Ruling Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America. He researches preventable human error and lives with his wife of 41 years in Clinton, Tennessee.

[i] If you are not familiar with the presbyterian form of church government, it has been hammered out over four and a half centuries as a systematic application of scripture, beginning primarily among Scottish churches in the 1560s.
[ii] Preface to the PCA Book of Church Order (BCO), Preliminary Principles, item 7; and BCO 11-2
[iii] BCO 7-3
[iv] For an example of an inference chain relating to standing, see the Minutes of the 21st General Assembly, page 188-189; a Presbytery supplied its well-constructed logic chain for all to see.
[v] See the chapter “Of Means and Ends” in Saul D. Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971), or Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince.
[vi] To the contrary, see Christ’s command in Matt 20:25-28 / Mark 10:42-45.
[vii] In obedience to Christ’s command to “tell it to the church” (Matt 18) I published this experience in a booklet: Practicing the Truth: A Post Mortem.
[viii] See Carpenter, W. (2021). Woke Religion: Unmasking the False Gospel of Social Justice. Ambassador Int’l.
[ix] BCO 43
[x] The implied question of who might have been an eyewitness is a distracting deception; we all know that it’s highly probable every officer on the attendance roster was an eyewitness to the event in question.
[xi] See Leviticus 19:11.
[xii] Commissioners present tell me that the content of my complaint was not discussed during Executive Session.
[xiii] Example of a legal analysis of legislating from the bench: “By allowing a court to order restitution, for the first time, after the ninety-day deadline has lapsed, the Court has essentially deleted a provision from the MVRA and replaced it with its own judicially created provision, ignoring the plain meaning of the statute as explicitly embodied in § 3664(d)(5), and thereby legislating from the bench.”  Sisemore, A. J. (2012). Straying from the Written Path: How the Supreme Court Eviscerated the Plain Meaning of the MVRA’s Ninety-Day Deadline Provision and Legislated from the Bench in Dolan v. United States. Oklahoma Law Review, 64(2), 211–233.
[xiv] For one example: Do you promise subjection to your brethren in the Lord?
[xv] Church-ianity is where orthodoxy is strong but orthopraxis is weak; selective antinomianism is the order of the day.  These churches are about Christ but not of Him; He stands outside the door and knocks, because His Lordship is being systematically ignored.  Churches where obedience to Christ is both preached and practiced are full of Christ-ians; these are churches of Christ.  I make this distinction because of a trend among PCA churches of de-emphasizing simple obedience to Christ.
[xvi] Amusingly, such a charge would rely on the plain meaning of jurisdiction, instead of the SJC’s distortion that requires my prior attendance as a commissioner at a specific meeting.
[xvii] In Matt 18, “tell it to the church” clearly means a public rebuke.
[xviii] Preface to the PCA Book of Church Order
 
 
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Written by J. Lance Acree |
Monday, December 13, 2021
For example, Francis S. Collins wrote a foreword for Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, in which he espoused a theology of Christianity free of any historical interest in the Genesis creation account.  But as we see in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, without a historical First Adam as our first covenantal representative there can be no historical Last Adam, and hence no salvation—for anyone, at any point in history.

Christians do not need to adopt the Neo-Marxist theory of race as a social construct in order to do battle against the CRT of Neo-Marxism. It is better to recognize the truth that distinct races do exist in objective reality, and that good and bad attributes become characteristics of races as a result of the religion that dominates them.  This includes both black and white. 
After reading a number of books on Critical Race Theory (CRT) by evangelical and reformed authors, I have become convinced that sometimes good men get it wrong.  Some of the writers I respect the most are saying that the existence of distinct human races is not real.  It is just a social construct.
In his recent post (Race is Real and Not a Social Construct, October 14, 2021), Larry Ball referenced writers quoted above, who are doubtless asserting that race is not real because its scientific basis is in debate.  The debate among scientists rages around values of an abstract probability (Fst) and what constitutes a “sub-species.”[i]
In western culture, the concept of race was given a veneer of scientific legitimacy by Charles Darwin, the title of whose best-known work is usually abbreviated as On the Origin of Species, but the title continues with race-grounding language: by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.  The theory of evolution he espoused was, and remains to this day, inherently race-centric and inextricably racist.  He himself acknowledged this racist element when he pointed out (in his less well-known work The Descent of Man) his theory’s implications with regard to white supremacy:[ii]
The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinct or living species, has often been advanced as a grave objection to the belief that man is descended from some lower form; but this objection will not appear of much weight to those who, from general reasons, believe in the general principle of evolution.  Breaks often occur in all parts of the series, some being wide, sharp and defined, others less so in various degrees; as between the orang and its nearest allies—between the Tarsius and the other Lemuridæ—between the elephants, and in a more striking manner between the Ornithorhynchus or Echidna, and all other mammals.  But these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms which have become extinct.  At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.  At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Prof. Shaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated.  The break between man and his nearest allies will then be the wider, or it will intervene between man and a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
Close reading of the final half of this section reveals that Darwin considered only white-skinned Caucasians to be civilized, and therefore destined (through “the general principle of evolution”) to “almost certainly” exterminate and replace the “savage” (non-Caucasian) races.  Scholarly research shows that this intrinsic white supremacy was a driving force in the formulation of Nazi racism.[iii]  ‘There is a way that seems right to a man, but it ends in death.’
Since Darwin published his theory, many have attempted to forge a savvy syncretism between Christianity and evolution, perhaps feeling intellectually ashamed under the constant bombardment of evolution propaganda.  That kind of effort inevitably leads to gutting Christianity until it is unrecognizable.  For example, Francis S. Collins wrote a foreword for Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution,[iv] in which he espoused a theology of Christianity free of any historical interest in the Genesis creation account.  But as we see in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, without a historical First Adam as our first covenantal representative there can be no historical Last Adam, and hence no salvation—for anyone, at any point in history.
The person who avidly endorsed this book to me also asked me, “Why save Genesis?”  They clearly felt the hopelessness of rationally integrating evolution with biblical history—and had decided to throw Genesis away.  If I remember correctly, I responded, “I can think of about fifty reasons to ‘save’ Genesis.”  One of them would be to preserve an alternative to the metanarrative and religious dogma of evolution (with its two Big Invisible Friends, MegaTime and Chance).  This has become the Theory of Everything, the Religion of the Age, despite the obvious fact that it requires believing the Gambler’s Fallacy to be true when we know scientifically that it is false.
Devotion to evolution also requires persistently avoiding a glaringly obvious scientific fact: the origin of a species has never been observed and recorded, even though the species generation rate must be significant.  This is the classic null result. A couple of null results in the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 abruptly ended the theory of “luminiferous aether.”  Not so with the supposedly scientific theory of evolution.  Across all the fishponds and aquariums, all the pastures and backyard chicken houses around the world, we see a continuous stream of null results.  Where is a newly originated and reproductively independent species?
We all hear when someone discovers the two-headed calf or a two-headed snake in the barn; but we never hear of a completely new and reproductively independent species appearing among the cattle in the pasture or the goldfish in the bowl.  Over millennia of livestock domestication and managed breeding across the animal and plant kingdoms across the globe, not one record has emerged that indicates the spontaneous origin of a new and independent species from an existing one.  We are told that evolution is one of the most powerful forces among all living things; yet no one has won a Nobel prize for documenting a recent origin.  No ancient texts supply a hint of an observed origin.  All we get instead is romanticized but ambiguous “flex-splanations” such as “speciation” among interbreeding finches in the Galapagos.[v]  I have often thought of writing a book entitled The Beak of the Acrees: A Romantic Story of Scholastic Sleight of Hand.
But there is something else curiously missing.  Despite the estimation that over 99% of earth’s species have gone extinct, no evolutionist publishes a mathematical (Fibonacci) model of species origins; the correspondingly high species origination rate (that must necessarily exceed the high extinction rate) to produce the millions of species we now observe alive and well.  We are bombarded with the output of population models and climate models, but no species origination models.
And with any systemic outcome like racism, we should (if we are rational and system thinkers) look for systemic inputs.  And few inputs to our society have been more systematic than the fawning exaltation of evolution in just about every high school and college biology class.  What student makes it to a diploma without multiple doses of this theory crammed down their throats?  The state has installed its one religion.  This formal propaganda is reinforced with a steady stream of film and song riddled with evolution dogma.  The pope must be jealous.
This may be what Ball is thinking of when he says race is real, but that would require him to confound race with racism.  Racism is certainly real—it’s a real and measurable characteristic of a population systemically indoctrinated with the inherently racist theory of evolution.  If all of humanity were, as Ball says, of one race, then the term is useless slang; “race” becomes a synonym of “human.”  Like the word “stuff,” it denotes a categorical distinction without significance.  But race is a fiction that persists, a fiction useful for secular propaganda purposes.
All this means that for Christians the widespread use of the phrase “systemic racism” offers an opportunity: to (graciously but firmly) point out to our pagan friends the systematic indoctrination in the intrinsically racist theory/religion of evolution.  This is a kind of paraclete work, and it’s a work of love: walking hand in hand with our friend while he walks in the wrong direction.  The path seems right to him, but we know it leads to death.  And when our friend is standing at the end of the path, staring into the empty pit and feeling the devastating death in his soul, we must be standing there with him, holding his hand.
What, Where, When and How questions are how we walk alongside.[vi]  We may politely ask, Francis Schaeffer fashion, where and when the origin of a reproductively independent species has been scientifically documented?  How many more billions of null results are required to make evolution a suspect theory?  To ask what is preventing people from tearing down the two statues of the well-known white supremacist Charles Darwin?  To ask what “chance” really is?  To lovingly hold their hand as their intellectual house of cards collapses in their hands—and then offer them real hope through the historical last Adam who has mercifully fulfilled the covenant office of the first Adam.
J. Lance Acree is in his 33rd year of service as a Ruling Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America.  He researches preventable human error and lives with his wife of 41 years in Clinton, Tennessee.

[i] Faulk, Ryan. “Variation Within and Between Races – The Alternative Hypothesis.” Accessed December 7, 2021, https://thealternativehypothesis.org/index.php/2016/04/15/variation-within-and-between-races/.
[ii] See Chapter VI, “On the Affinities and Genealogy of Man”, 1871
[iii] Weikart, Richard. “The Role of Darwinism in Nazi Racial Thought.” German Studies Review 36, no. 3 (2013): 537–56. https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2013.0106.  Kelly, Alfred. The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860-1914. UNC Press Books, 2012.  Bergman, Jerry. The Darwin Effect: It’s Influence on Nazism, Eugenics, Racism, Communism, Capitalism & Sexism. New Leaf Publishing Group, 2014.
[iv] Giberson, Karl W., Harper One, 2008.,
[v] Weiner, Jonathan. The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time. Reprint edition. New York, NY: Vintage, 1995.
[vi] Good, Mark C. Real Talk: Creating Space for Hearts to Change. Sisters, OR: Deep River Books LLC, 2017.