In a recent issue on Reformed scholasticism there is an article arguing that John Owen was a scholastic by Christopher Cleveland. That article consists in the main of the author’s analysis of how Owen used scholastic methods in his own work, but also mentions how he used concepts taken from the thought of Aquinas. Hence we read that “Owen demonstrates several of the characteristics of the scholastic approach in his writings” and that “the Thomistic distinction between God’s simple intelligence and knowledge of vision . . . found in Thomas’ Summa Theologica[,] is used by Owen in Display of Arminianism.”

The online magazine Credo, about whose notions I have written before, when it is not declaring the alleged glories of Platonism (comp. Col. 2:8), allowing Lutheran interim pastors to imply Anglo-Romanists are Reformed, or publishing materials by members of Romanist religious orders (participation in which we regard as sinful, Westminster Confession XXII.7), has been straining to re-popularize scholasticism, and has especially been commending the thought of Thomas Aquinas.
In a recent issue on Reformed scholasticism there is an article arguing that John Owen was a scholastic by Christopher Cleveland. That article consists in the main of the author’s analysis of how Owen used scholastic methods in his own work, but also mentions how he used concepts taken from the thought of Aquinas. Hence we read that “Owen demonstrates several of the characteristics of the scholastic approach in his writings” and that “the Thomistic distinction between God’s simple intelligence and knowledge of vision . . . found in Thomas’ Summa Theologica[,] is used by Owen in Display of Arminianism.” As concerns the latter statement this analysis may be correct; I am not sufficiently well read in Owen or Aquinas (two notably difficult authors) to say. But the method seems wanting, and fairness commends allowing Owen to speak for himself. Following are a series of mentions of Aquinas and the scholastics in some of Owen’s works so that you may judge, dear reader, whether Owen would concur with his description as a scholastic. All works cited are hyperlinked and are available through the Post Reformation Digital Library, a wonderful resource whose executive board is moderated by a sometime Credo contributor, David Sytsma. In some cases I have regularized capitalization and spelling somewhat for readability.
Before proceeding, note that what we now call the scholastics were referred to as ‘schoolmen’ or ‘school doctors’ in Owen’s day, and that instead of scholasticism he speaks of ‘the schools.’ Owen did refer to Aquinas with appreciation in some occasions at least. In A Vindication of the Animadversions on Fiat Lux he spoke of “Thomas of Aquine, who without question is the best and most sober of all your school doctors.” Given what follows I am not sure that is quite as much a compliment as it first seems, however. Then too, Vindication is a polemic work written against a Romanist author: telling his correspondent that Aquinas is one of “your school doctors” seems to be saying he belongs in the camp of the papists, not the Reformation.
That is borne out elsewhere, as in his work Of Schisme Owen refers to “Thomas Aquinas and such vassals of the Papacy,” and says of him and others of like opinion on schism that “we are not concerned in them; what the Lord speaks of it, that we judge concerning it.” Note carefully Owen’s rejection of Aquinas’ opinion as false and as contradicted by the Lord’s revelation in scripture. In that same work Owen says that Aquinas regarded schism as damning sin: “Schism, as it is declared by S. Austin and S. Thomas of Aquin, being so great and damnable a sin.” That makes it a bit of an oddity that so many Protestants are falling all over themselves to lay claim to Aquinas, since his published works condemn us as lost schismatics laying under the threat of damnation for our ‘sin’ in refusing to submit to Rome.
Elsewhere in the work, discussing the enormous differences of opinion that exist within the Roman communion, Owen quotes the great Roman controversialist Bellarmine’s opinion that one of Aquinas’ teachings was “idolatricall” (fun phrase), namely “that of Thomas about the worship of the cross with latria.” On that same subject Owen says in Vindication that “Thomas contendeth that the cross is to be worshipped with latria, p. 3. q. 25. a. 4. which is a word that he and you suppose to express religious worship of the highest sort.” And again, that “the most prevalent opinion of your doctors is that of Thomas and his followers, that images are to be adored with the same kind of worship wherewith that which they represent is to be worshipped.”
(This is why I have elsewhere opposed the Aquinas craze on the grounds that it is not appropriate for God’s people to be so zealous about someone who commends idolatry, which is what is entailed in worshiping the cross.)
Owen’s opinion of the scholastics in general does not seem to be very positive. In one of the works that Credo’s article quotes, A Display of Arminianism, we find Owen discussing the question of whether before the Incarnation men living “according to the dictates of right reason, might be saved without faith in Christ,” a matter he says “hath also since, (as what hath not) been drawn into dispute among the wrangling Schoolmen: and yet, which is rarely seen, their verdict in this particular, almost unanimously passeth for the truth,” a statement he immediately follows with a quote from Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae (2. 2 ae. q. 2. a. 7. c.) as evidence. Perhaps my understanding of seventeenth century English is errant, but that reads to me as though Owen is saying ‘even the schoolmen, who argue about everything, seldom agree amongst themselves, and are seldom entirely right, concur that this idea is false.’ (And that that was Owen’s position as well is abundantly confirmed by his subsequent statement that asserting men can be saved apart from faith in Christ is “a wicked Pelagian Socinian heresy.”) It is noteworthy, however, that the several other mentions of the ‘schoolemen’ in that work are not so dismissive, some citing them approvingly.
Elsewhere Owen speaks of the principle reformers as being superior to the scholastics in defending trinitarian doctrine. Discussing his Romanist opponent’s arguments in Animadversions on Fiat Lux, he says that “from them [anti-trinitarian heretics like Servetus] a return is made again, to Luther, Brenz, Calvin, Zwingli, who are said to nibble at Arianism, and shoot secrets darts at the Trinity.” He rebuts this by saying that “all impartial men must needs confess, that they have asserted and proved the doctrine of it, far more solidly then all the schoolmen in the world were able to do.”
Yet such statements are rather weak in comparison to the extended condemnations of the scholastics that appear in Animadversions and Vindication of Animadversions. In the first he speaks of his papist opponent’s “gallant commendation of the ingenuity, charity, candor, and sublime science of the school-men.” Owen’s response to this “gallant commendation” is strong:
I confess, they have deserved good words at his hands: These are the men, who out of a mixture of philosophy, traditions, and scripture, all corrupted and perverted, have hammered that faith, which was afterwards confirmed under so many anathemas at Trent. So that upon the matter, he is beholden to them for his religion; which I find he loves, and hath therefore reason to be thankful to its contrivers. For my part, I am as far from envying them their commendation, as I have reason to be, which I am sure is far enough. But yet before we admit this testimony, hand over head; I could wish he would take a course to stop the mouths of some of his own church, and those no small ones neither, who have declared them to the world, to be a pack of egregious sophisters, neither good philosophers, nor any divines at all; men who seem not to have had the least reverence of God, nor much regard to the truth in any of their disputations, but were wholly influenced by a vain reputation of subtility, desire of conquest, of leading and denominating parties, and that in a barbarous science, barbarously expressed, until they had driven all learning and divinity almost out of the world. But I will not contend about these fathers of contention: let every man esteem of them as he seems good.
A similar passage in Vindication is equally strong and expounds this theme:
I confess the language of your schoolmen is so corrupt and barbarous, many of the things they sweat about, so vain, curious, unprofitable, their way of handling things, and expressing the notions of their minds, so perplexed, dark, obscure, and oftentimes unintelligible, divers of their assertions and suppositions so horrid and monstrous; the whole system of their pretended divinity, so alien and foreign unto the mystery of the Gospel that I know no great reason that any man hath much to delight in them. These things have made them the sport and scorn of the learnedest men that ever lived in the communion of your own church.
And further, after some obscure Latin and ancient allusions:
They are not like to do mischief to any, unless they are resolved aforehand to give up their faith in the things of God to the authority of this or that philosopher, and forego all solid rational consideration of things, to betake themselves to sophistical canting, and the winding up of subtility into plain non-sense; which oftentimes befalls the best of them; Whence Melchior Canus one of yourselves says of some of your learned disputes, Puderet me dicere non intelligere, si ipsi intelligerent qui tractarunt. ‘I should be ashamed to say I did not understand them, but that they understood not themselves.’ Others may be entangled by them, who if they cannot untie your knots, they may break your webs, especially when they find the conclusions, as oftentimes they are, directly contrary to scripture, right reason, and natural sense itself.
And following more allusions:
But whatever I said of them, or your church, is perfectly consistent with itself, and the truth. I grant that before the schoolmen set forth in the world, many unsound opinions were broached in, and many superstitious practices admitted into your church: and a great pretense raised unto a superintendency over other churches, which were parts of that mass out of which your popery is formed. But before the schoolmen took it in hand, it was rudis indigesta (que) moles, ‘a heap, not a house.’ As Rabbi Juda Hakkadosh gathered the passant traditions of his own time among the Jews, into a body or system, which is called the Mishnae or duplicate of their law, wherein he composed a new religion for them, sufficiently distant from that which was professed by their fore-fathers; so have your schoolmen done also. Out of the passant traditions of the days wherein they lived, blended with sophistical corrupted notions of their own, countenanced and gilded with the sayings of some ancient writers of the church, for the most part wrested or misunderstood, they have hammered out that system of philosophical traditional divinity, which is now enstamped with the authority of the Tridentine Council, being as far distant from the divinity of the New Testament, as the farrago of traditions collected by Rabbi Juda, and improved in the Talmuds, is from that of the old.
Lastly, he says in Vindication:
Some learn their divinity out of the late, and modern schools, both in the Reformed and Papal Church; in both which a science is proposed under that name, consisting in a farrago of credible propositions, asserted in terms suited unto that philosophy that is variously predominant in them. What a kind of theology this hath produced in the Papacy, Agricola, Erasmus, Vives, Jansenius, with innumerable other learned men of your own, have sufficiently declared. And that it hath any better success in the Reformed churches, many things which I shall not now instance in, give me cause to doubt.
The folks at Credo will say that such vehement anti-scholastic rhetoric is directed against later scholastics like Gabriel Biel, not Aquinas or other “sounder scholastics.” The above make that seem doubtful, however, especially that last quote, and they draw into question whether Owen would concur with his classification as a Reformed scholastic of Thomistic inclinations. Let the reader judge for himself.
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name. He is also author of Reflections on the Word: Essays in Protestant Scriptural Contemplation, available through Amazon.
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If this were an isolated occurrence it would be one thing; regrettably, this does not seem to be the case. If one were to summarize the crisis of evangelicalism in America today, he could probably do so best by saying that its internal struggles arise because its institutions do not represent the vast majority of its people, and that their actions do not put into practice the beliefs or preferred actions of those people.

In a previous article I responded to a claim published at byFaith, the official magazine of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), which stated that “gun violence” is “the leading cause of death among children in this nation.” I referenced CDC cause of death data by age which showed this is false, and in a subsequent article requested that readers contact byFaith and urge them to retract. An unclear but apparently significant number of people did so, for which I am grateful.
As of this writing byFaith has not retracted the original claim, however. Their reason? Per the response to my complaint from some of their leadership, they maintain the original claim’s accuracy. They appeal to a study by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that discusses how “firearm-related deaths” are the leading cause of death “among children and adolescents,” a group it defines as “persons 1 to 19 years of age.” That is an insufficient defense.
Problem one is that infants under the age of one are children, and that 18 and 19 year old adults are not. To give an idea of how much this statistical sleight of hand skews the results, consider that infants under one accounted for about 56% of child deaths in 2020, while 18 and 19 year olds had more firearm homicide deaths between them than the entire 0-17 age group (1,435 v. 1,376), and nearly as many suicides (~79% as many). One can only claim that firearms-related deaths were the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in 2020 by denying the majority of child deaths, in other words, and by also including many adults of an age particularly prone to criminal violence and self-harm.
Problem two is that “firearms-related deaths” and “gun violence” are not synonymous, as the former appears to include accidental deaths, whereas the CDC distinguishes between unintentional and violence-related injuries when it categorizes causes of death.
Problem three is that there is an implicit denial of the personhood of infants in any study that talks about children’s deaths that intentionally omits them from its findings. If one truly cares about children’s wellbeing and wishes to empirically study causes of its destruction, one must include all children. As the NEJM study did not do that, we can only include that they either do not regard such infants as truly being children, or else that they are more interested in pursuing a political agenda than in handling the data in a dispassionate manner. Neither of those commends the study in question as reliable, and yet byFaith has hedged its defense upon it.
Now let us trace the sequence of events up to this point. First, byFaith published an inaccurate claim. Second, it was publicly contradicted and was publicly and privately requested to retract the claim. Third, it refused to retract and attempted to defend its original statement by appealing to a source that speaks of a different category of deaths among a different group of people, and which seems to espouse sentiments – i.e., that infants under one do not count as children – that could be used to justify infanticide.
There is no gentle way of putting this, but suffice it to say that such actions do not constitute good journalism. It is one thing to make a mistaken claim of fact, though editors ought to verify the accuracy of articles before publishing them. It is another thing, and worse still, to try to justify one’s mistake by appealing to sources that do not, by their own description, purport to discuss the same thing or the same group of people as one’s own claims. Again, “children” are a different group than “children and adolescents,” and the proper definition of the former is people in the 0-17 age range, not the 1-19 age range that the NEJM uses (inaccurately) for the latter group. (Actually in common parlance children means either pre-pubescent people, but I am using it in its widest sense to refer to what the law typically calls minors.)[1]
It is worse still to justify all of this on the ground that the original article was an impassioned pro-life plea, as byFaith’s response to my private complaint attempted to do. Defending life by appealing to a source that has published pro-infanticide material in the past (compare this and this), and that appears to maintain infanticide-compatible notions about the personhood of infants in the particular study to which one appeals is a strange method, surely. And it is all the worse in that it distracts from what is an indisputably worse cause of death among children, abortion. In 2020 the top 20 leading causes of death for children counted by the CDC totaled 27,054 deaths; abortion accounted for 620,327, or nearly 23 times as many as all those others combined.
Two things before I proceed. One, miscarriage appears to be the largest killer of children, though unlike abortion it is not clear that it is directly preventable in many cases. (If anyone with a medical background believes that I am mistaken here, please drop me a line of correction.) Two, my own writings up to this point had the same effect as byFaith’s, in that they ignored prenatal deaths, which are vastly more common than deaths among children after they are born. Insofar as I believe that byFaith erred by distorting the nature of the matters in view, it is a thing of which I also am guilty. Mark that well, reader: Tom Hervey was wrong too, in that he lost sight of the larger picture.
There is a bit of a difference, however, in that I did not attempt to cast my position as being part of a larger, thoroughly pro-life plea as byFaith has done: my concern was with the inaccuracy of the original claim, and of how publishing it risked bringing our denomination into disrepute and played (if unwittingly) into the hands of political agitators who wish to heckle people into doing their bidding by the use of the same original claim about children and gun violence (often verbatim). Now to summarize, the PCA’s denominational magazine has been engaged in poor journalism, and has willfully persisted in that poor journalism in a way that unhelpfully distorts the nature of our thinking about pro-life matters.
If this were an isolated occurrence it would be one thing; regrettably, this does not seem to be the case. If one were to summarize the crisis of evangelicalism in America today, he could probably do so best by saying that its internal struggles arise because its institutions do not represent the vast majority of its people, and that their actions do not put into practice the beliefs or preferred actions of those people. We keep putting up institutions and celebrating, often more than is warranted, various individuals in our midst, and like clockwork they keep turning about and taking their cues rather from our wider society and its discourse and current events than from the people whom they are supposed to serve.
An example of that appears here as well. For some time now many evangelicals have been sorely embarrassed at the suggestion that preventing defenseless children from being murdered in utero is our foremost concern in questions of life and death. Our opponents frequently accuse of us of not caring about human life after it enters this world, and say things like ‘you talk about the sanctity of life for fetuses, but after they are born you are content to let them languish in oppressive and abusive familial and socio-economic circumstances – some love of life that is!’ And so now our prominent people have begun talking about a larger pro-life vision, and shift the focus from the first point of defending life (logically and chronologically), to talking about promoting a culture of life in general. That is not necessarily wrong as such, but it has the potential to become so by a) suggesting as true what is in many cases baseless slander by our opponents; and b) shifting the definition of what constitutes pro-life action.
It is the latter that is entailed in byFaith’s position here. Their original article regards it as imperative to “stop excusing our lack of progress in reducing mass shootings and work on creating and implementing the solutions that will foster a safer society for all,” and deems the present public safety situation for children in America as a “hellish” and “unsustainable” crisis that demands immediate action by everyone (“we must all start working for a safer society”).  In byFaith’s personal response to me one of their staff explicitly connected advocating to protect “elementary school children” (his phrase) to advocating against abortion.
There is no comparing abortion to criminal violence against children in general, or to school shootings in particular, and the attempt to do so is an exercise in moral blindness. Elective abortion is legal murder that is encouraged, protected, and subsidized by our government, and in the last 50 years has accounted for the deaths of tens of millions of children. By contrast, gun murder (and suicide) is in contravention of our laws. Legality and social celebration on the one hand and criminality and social deprecation on the other make the two things, abortion and firearm murder, vastly different in nature; and alas for us, the socially approved one is the more common by far, which is the real crisis that calls for our action.
If we limit our focus to school shootings, which were an important emphasis for byFaith (per the original article and their subsequent response), there is no comparison at all. In the entire 52 year period for which the Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS) has analyzed school shooting deaths they identified 371 that involved minors (and that includes suicides, accidents, self defense, and justifiable homicides by law enforcement). In that same period probably at least 223 million people have been students;[2] and 371 out of 223,000,000 across half a century is not a crisis, but an extreme rarity (comp. footnote), even granting there is probably some undercounting for the pre-Internet era.[3]
And yet, these things notwithstanding, byFaith would have us “get on with the good work that needs to be done” viz. gun violence and children’s safety in this country, whatever that entails (and neither they nor Cassidy have said, as others have noted). I think I speak for a great many people in the PCA when I say that we expect better from our official news agency, and that it is a point of some embarrassment and frustration that it not only published inaccurate claims that are popular with political factions that are in most respects our enemies, but has persisted in mistakenly asserting their accuracy in a way which draws their journalistic competence yet further into question and which, worst of all, redefines what is entailed in the single most important moral movement with which evangelicalism is involved.
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name.
[1]     Adolescents (ages 13-19) accounted for 2,543 firearm homicides and 1,239 firearm suicides during 2020, out of a total of 2,811 and 1,293, respectively, or about 90.5 and 95.8% of deaths among people in the 0-19 age group in those categories.
[2]     Figured by subtracting foreign-born residents and people over 65 and under 5 years of age from the nation’s total population as estimated by the Census Bureau, an admittedly rough estimate.
[3]     Figures for minors computed from CHDS’s raw data excel file. For comparison of firearm homicides in general among minors, per the Census Bureau persons under 18 accounted for an estimated 22.2% of the population in 2021, or approximately 73,989,838 people. The 1,376 firearm homicides in this group in 2020 (the last year available) represented the death of 1 in 53,772. Nothing which is so rare can be justly deemed an urgent crisis of the utmost importance. Abortion is vastly more common: 620,237 incidences against 3,605,201 births in 2020, per the CDC.
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Does he believe sexual immorality is shameful (Eph. 5:12) and corrosive (1 Cor. 6:18) and ought not to be discussed, or does he believe that being a ‘[insert sin here] Christian’ is just another form of Christian experience? Does he believe that it is blasphemy to associate Christ’s holy name with enduring sin and to make that sin central to one’s identity, experience, personhood, or ‘authentic self,’ or does he think it is needless alarmism and decidedly unwinsome to object strenuously to such obviously worldly notions?

It is one of the ironies of life that the writings of dead men often contain a better understanding of contemporary affairs, albeit unwittingly, than do many contemporary observers. They have the advantage of being immune to the distorted thought patterns, banal conventional wisdom, and often imbalanced priorities and mistaken values that frequently cause contemporary pundits to see only a part of any given matter, and to see even that askew. To understand the present one must read from the past. One must get away from our debates even to understand them, just as one must sometimes leave his workplace – say, by taking a walk around the building – to understand what is going on in that workplace. One must leave the atmosphere of urgency, raw emotion, conflicting perspectives, unhelpful advice, differing personalities, and other thought-corrupting elements in order to see them rightly and to think with one’s reasonable faculties rather than by spontaneous habit or emotion.
So it is that one of the best critiques of that contemporary social movement that is called, with doubtful accuracy, ‘social justice,’ appears in the lectures of a Dutch historian from the mid-19th century.[1] So it is that one of the best criticisms of what is now called postmodernism appeared in Chapter III (“The Suicide of Thought”) of the English journalist G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 partly autobiographical book Orthodoxy. So it is that many a Presbyterian professor of yesteryear has left us thoughts which bear an abiding vitality even now. To our purposes here is an excerpt from Chesterton’s 1905 book of social criticism, Heretics, but before quoting it I must note that he is a not wholly reliable thinker who failed to understand the Reformed tradition and who entered the Roman communion in later life. In that work he wrote:
Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.
We live in an age of wide unbelief, with the result that we live in an age of obliviousness to the evil nature of many words and deeds. To be clear, Chesterton was not speaking of the objective reality and severity of blasphemy, but rather about how it is perceived by those that have committed or witnessed it. The evil of blasphemy in no way depends upon the conscience or faith (or rather, lack thereof) of its human subjects in order to be blasphemous. It is a terrible offense against God, whose eternal majesty and omniscience never change, even where the sinner is ignorant of the real nature of what he has said. In order for one to realize that someone has committed blasphemy it is necessary for him to have a measure of faith; and where there is a lack of awareness of blasphemy, there is occasion to fear that true faith is lacking as well.
It is with sadness then that I say that there is blasphemy present in the evangelical world, and that it does not receive the censure it deserves or which we would expect if it were recognized in its true nature. The other day I passed a car with a bumper sticker that read, in total: BINGE JESUS. Undoubtedly this was an attempt to commend him to the public, a praiseworthy goal. And yet it seems to be lost on the vehicle owner that putting our Lord in the same category as junk food and cheap thrills is quite irreverent, and that there is something terribly amiss in suggesting that people should relate to him in the same way as many people relate to Netflix. I doubt the car owner would concur that his sticker could be paraphrased as ‘approach Jesus like you approach your weekend drinking habit,’ and yet given the actual meaning of ‘binging’ in our culture it is more likely to be interpreted in that way (if subconsciously) than met with the thought that Jesus is God Incarnate and worthy of total submission.
Binging anything is an intentional loss of self-restraint, the deliberate consumption of something in excess for pleasure. It is a contemporary form of revelry and a species of that seldom condemned sin of gluttony to which Scripture ascribes such woeful consequences (Prov. 23:21). That is emphatically the opposite of what is involved in following Christ, who expects steadfastness at all times (Mk. 13:13) and who presents following him as an act of self-denial fraught with hardship rather than an easy thrill whose appeal soon fades (Rev. 2:10; Heb. 3:14; 10:39).
To associate binging with Christ is then a sort of casual blasphemy which, however well intended, actually portrays Christ in a very misleading way. Elsewhere we see ministers, including some in the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA), use certain four-letter words to express themselves. The case can be made that all cursing is blasphemy, because the one who does it arrogates to himself something which is the prerogative of God alone, and directs it toward circumstances which God has sovereignly ordained for the good of the sufferer (Rom. 8:28), or toward people who are made in his likeness (Jas. 3:9). It is a bitter truth to remember that our sufferings are ordained by God, and it is a truth which must be used with immense tact and prudence; but still, to curse our hard circumstances is to curse God’s providence, which is a grievous evil indeed. And yet some of the men who represent God and serve him actually do such things themselves! They who should be calling men out of such sins of the tongue are giving an example of them to the wayward. “These things ought not to be” (Jas. 3:10).
This which we are discussing is a large part of the ongoing fitness for office controversy in the PCA. There are many who have criticized certain forms of self-description for denying progress in sanctification or for other errors, which are serious faults. But there has been too little denunciation of such terms on the ground that they are simply blasphemous. Well might a man stop his ears and tear his clothes to hear some of the phrases which people have used to describe themselves even in prominent forums and in our General Assembly. Words which have a well understood meaning in contemporary English as referring to people whose lives revolve around transgressing (or wanting to transgress) Leviticus 18:22 are applied to our new life in Christ, and those who object are accused of petty, inconsiderate Pharisaism for wanting to ‘police language’ and ‘argue over terms.’ God says to not even name such things (Eph. 5:3), and yet many among us assert that they have an indisputable right to refer to themselves with such terms, and do so brazenly without shame or fear (comp. Jude 12). And many others have not the spiritual understanding to see that this is brazen blasphemy, and do not join in efforts to forbid it.
“Blasphemy depends upon belief” — and if one does not see the blasphemy he ought to examine his heart to see what are his actual beliefs. What are his beliefs about holiness and sin, judgment and redemption, the nature of the flesh and the nature of our new lives in Christ? Does he believe that “to live is Christ” (Phil. 1:21) and that following him involves a life of suffering and sacrifice (Matt. 10:16-24), and of denying oneself (Matt. 16:24-26) and following him in a way that involves endless war upon one’s remaining sin nature (Gal. 5:17; Jas. 3:2)? Or does he believe that it is acceptable to name oneself by his indwelling sin, sin which is abominable in God’s sight and for which he subjects the nations that approve it to his wrathful judgment? Does he believe sexual immorality is shameful (Eph. 5:12) and corrosive (1 Cor. 6:18) and ought not to be discussed, or does he believe that being a ‘[insert sin here] Christian’ is just another form of Christian experience? Does he believe that it is blasphemy to associate Christ’s holy name with enduring sin and to make that sin central to one’s identity, experience, personhood, or ‘authentic self,’ or does he think it is needless alarmism and decidedly unwinsome to object strenuously to such obviously worldly notions? “Blasphemy depends upon belief” – and where there is no objection to blasphemy, well might we suspect the beliefs of the silent and suggest they test themselves to see whether they are Christ’s (2 Cor. 13:5). For it is written of him: “Zeal for your house has consumed me” (Ps. 69:9). The church is his house (1 Cor. 3:16-17) and we his people are to imitate him (11:1; Eph. 5:1-2). Where then is our zeal to silence blasphemy in our own house?
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name.
[1]     Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer’s Unbelief and Revolution
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The church has a definite purpose to accomplish, which her Lord has provided her with the authority, gifts, and power to achieve. It is her business to make disciples of all nations, baptizing and teaching them to observe all that Christ has commanded. This will often result in great social, economic, and political consequences, yet the church’s purpose is not to seek socio-political reform as such, but to reconcile men to God so that, being in the right relation to him, they may in turn stand in the right relation to their fellow men.

What is called ‘the spirituality of the church’ seems to be rather unfashionable at present. In its most recent consideration we find longtime PCA minister Larry Ball inveighing against what he regards as its weaknesses. He says:
The term “spirituality of the church” has become one of those phrases that often stops all further conversation about the relationship between church and state. Few Christians ever question the meaning of the phrase. It assumes that the church should remain silent about all political matters. Although the expression does not appear in any of our confessional standards, it has become a doctrine of Presbyterianism as sacrosanct as any one of the five points of Calvinism. No one is allowed to challenge it without being labeled with a pejorative term.
I fear, as a supporter of the truth which this purports to challenge, that I shall contradict nearly everything above. I shall question the meaning of the phrase spirituality of the church. I shall deny that the concept requires silence about all political matters. I shall dissent from the suggestion that it is as sacrosanct as the doctrines of grace, and shall ponder its church-state implications. Above all, I shall forgo labeling Larry Ball pejoratively for challenging it.
Ball first inveighs against interpreting the term in light of “Greek dualism” that “assumes that the spiritual is the higher good and that the physical is the source of evil.” That would be mistaken, but I am not aware that anyone does such a thing.[1] The spirituality of the church does not refer to the church’s essence, as such, nor posit that other institutions like the state have a lower essence. Its corollary is not ‘the physicality of the state.’ A solely spiritual, non-corporeal essence can only be asserted of the church triumphant in heaven. The church militant on earth is a physical, visible institution that does indeed have physical concerns that fall under its purview, not least in its charitable and diaconal affairs.
He then inveighs against the church’s spirituality if it “means that the church must not speak to political issues because we live in a pluralistic society, and we must not impose our views on others.” This is a large topic, full consideration of which is not possible here. He is correct that the church should not refrain from truth-telling merely for fear of offending infidels. If we keep silent we may rest assured that others will not. However, there is scriptural warrant for not giving needless offense (Acts 15:19-22) and for not taking the side of any political faction (1 Cor. 1:10-16; 3:3-4; see footnote).[2] The spirituality of the church does not mean keeping quiet to avoid offending per se, but it does mean refraining from behavior that does not directly fall under her duty of making disciples. The question in any case of proposed church action is whether it is a part of that duty, and if it is not then she ought to refrain from it.
Third, he says that the concept is sound if it “means that there are two realms ordained by God and they must remain separate.” This is close to what is properly in view in the ‘spirituality of the church.’ The state and the church are both ordained by God (Matt. 22:21), the former to rule in civil and the latter in spiritual affairs. There is some overlap in their respective concerns, however, which makes it somewhat unhelpful to speak of two realms that “must remain separate.” In addition, there are other authorities established by God (especially the parental/familial) that have their place in human affairs.
While the church does not have any business administering the affairs of the state or family, and vice versa, the church is nonetheless still subject to the state’s authority. She must comply with fire codes, abuse reporting requirements, etc., and her officers are as liable to criminal prosecution and civil liability as other citizens. In addition, there are matters which fall under the jurisdiction of both church and state. An abuser would incur the church’s censure and the state’s indictment, for example, and there are many matters that receive the ban of both church and state in their respective capacities as ministerial/declarative and force-wielding authorities (say, polygamy). It would perhaps be better to say that there are different aspects of life in this world that are governed by these various authorities in their different ways.
Now I assert the following. First, the term ‘spirituality of the church’ is not the best available. Its weakness is that ‘spirituality’ has several meanings, and that it is not obvious which of these is in view. Spirituality/spiritual can mean having a spiritual essence; being guided by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 2:13, 15); dealing with the invisible realm that includes angels (Eph. 6:12); or can refer to the part of man that animates his body.
Many of the proponents of what is called the spirituality of the church do not use that exact term: it does not appear in Thornwell, who gave the doctrine in “its most classic form” (in Sean Lucas’ phrase), nor in Stuart Robinson’s The Church of God As An Essential Element of the Gospel that David Coffin – probably our most learned minister on this topic – regards as the masterpiece on the doctrine. Dabney refers to the concept as “the church’s spiritual independence” in discussing a minister who suffered on its account. Elsewhere C.R. Vaughn called it “the non-secular character of the church.” The exact phrase “spirituality of the church” first appears, as near as I can tell (but I am no authority here), in Henry Van Dyke Sr.’s speech objecting to the General Assembly’s actions regarding the United States’ war aims in 1864. (And inconveniently for the scholars who like to imagine that the concept was dreamed up by southerners to justify slavery, he happened to be a minister in Brooklyn.) It occurs only twice in that speech, which is called “The Spirituality and Independence of the Church.”
What term is preferable then? The truth in view does arise from the church’s concern with spiritual affairs and its powers of government and teaching being spiritual in nature. Yet it also arises from the church’s independence viz., other authorities, as well as from its role as an ambassador of Christ that represents his claims to the world (which also implies its independence and otherness). For my part, I do not think the concept requires a single term, nor that it is always advantageous to summarize all that it entails with a single phrase. It is an inferred doctrine, in many respects, that arises from various aspects of the church’s nature, role, and relations, and in many cases, it is best discussed at length.
Second, the concept does not preclude all political involvement. The church reserves the right to treat those things that would infringe upon her independence, such as laws restricting her freedom of speech or ability to assemble. Vaughn speaks of the church having “political duties,” says “these duties when done involve no breach whatever on its true spiritual sphere,” and objects to the northern church’s “political deliverances” because they were excessive and “entirely transcended the duty of the church” (emphasis mine).
Third, the doctrine is largely useless as a defense against ‘social justice’ in the church if taken in isolation. For on the conception of our would-be reformers, all matters are moral and have spiritual significance: for them politics is the highest expression of piety, for they believe that the prophetic injunctions to seek justice entail their version of justice, rather than the particular requirements of God’s law (Isa. 8:20). To be useful the doctrine has to be abetted by polemics that show the social activists’ aims and notions are incorrect. It is insufficient to simply say the church is a spiritual/redemptive institution, for they believe social justice is of the essence of redemption and pure spirituality. The concept must not proceed alone, then, but in company with other arguments and teachings about the nature of justice, salvation, individual responsibility before God, etc.
Fourth, the doctrine assumes the separation of church and state, but is not strictly synonymous with it. Saying that church and state are separate does not necessarily say anything about the proper nature and function of each, nor discuss their proper relations in those matters in which both have a part (e.g., morality). Even established churches have the duty of not meddling in most affairs of state, hence Van Dyke quotes the Anglican Toplady criticizing the divines of his church for bumbling by involvement in politics.
Fifth, the doctrine is meant to defend the church from being co-opted by politicians and the state, to the neglect of its concern with redemptive affairs. Those people who are infamous for their expediency and lack of scruples, for whom even plain honesty and simplicity of speech are too much to ask, would not hesitate to use the holy church of God for mere political advantage, thus making it worldly, profaning its message, and turning its focus from heaven to earth. In such an unholy alliance of the spiritual and the political the church would be reduced to a propaganda arm to a certain wing of their constituents, but would receive little of spiritual significance in return.
Sixth, the concept is somewhat embattled in that its greatest opponent, the revolutionary spirit, wishes to subsume everything under itself and has, as such, brought practically all matters into controversy. We live in an age in which everything is political because there is a great body of men in this country who wish for everything to be subjected to the control of the state down to the most minute particulars. It is a matter of political controversy to assert there are only two sexes. It is a matter of politics to spank one’s own offspring. It is a matter of politics for the church to exist or operate at all; and that arises, not because she has transgressed the distinction between the civil and the ecclesiastical, but because her enemies have done so. She may expect to be accused of indefensible meddling where she does not belong as a matter of course, for her very existence is hateful to many. Yet that does not mean that she should regard the matter of civil/ecclesiastical distinctions as a moot point and throw herself wholly into the arms of the enemies of her enemies. She has a proper mission of spiritual redemption even where she is the target of political opposition.
Now I have been writing inductively, as it were, discussing various facets of this important concept without giving a clear definition of it. In sum, what is in view is that the church has a definite purpose to accomplish, which her Lord has provided her with the authority (2 Cor. 10:8; 13:10), gifts (Eph. 4:7-16), and power (Acts 1:8) to achieve. It is her business to make disciples of all nations, baptizing and teaching them to observe all that Christ has commanded (Matt. 28:19-20). This will often result in great social (Acts 17:6; 19:19), economic (Acts 19:25-28), and political consequences, yet the church’s purpose is not to seek socio-political reform as such (Jn. 18:36), but to reconcile men to God so that, being in the right relation to him, they may in turn stand in the right relation to their fellow men (Matt. 22:37-40; Jn. 13:34-35; Gal. 5:13-14; 1 Tim. 1:5; 1 Pet. 1:13-25; 1 Jn. 4:4-20). The corollary of this is that activities which are not directly involved in this mission are excluded from the proper realm of church action. This includes all questions of a purely political or social character, and many others (educational, philanthropic, artistic, etc.) besides. For the church to give itself to such affairs is to transgress the proper bounds of its task and to risk being weighed down with the affairs of this life (Lk. 21:34) to the neglect of fulfilling its appointed task.
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name.
[1]     The real dualistic conception is between the kingdom of Christ and that of Satan.
[2]     If intra-ecclesiastical factions are forbidden, as the passages from 1 Corinthians here suggest, how much more alliances between believers and unbelievers in questions of temporal politics (comp. 2 Cor. 6:14-16) in which believers themselves might be divided (comp. 1 Cor. 6:1-8)!
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As fallible humans we all sometimes succumb to haste, emotion, and the influence of others, especially the media, whose sole occupation lies in seeking to get us to believe its narratives and to think and act along its preferred lines. Add in the rigors and tedium of pastoral and publishing work and mistakes are apt to happen sometimes, even large ones. In such cases a little public or private contradiction that seeks to set one right is justified, provided it is moved by charity and expressed courteously.

On April 24th, byFaith, the official magazine of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), published an article titled “Prayer and Work in the Face of Violence,” in which it was claimed that “gun violence” is “the leading cause of death among children in this nation.” I published an article showing that was false on the basis of mortality statistics provided by the CDC (available here). Others also took umbrage to the April 24th article, and I dispatched a personal message to byFaith requesting a removal of the article and a full retraction. That has not occurred, and as of May 24th the article is still available at byFaith, unamended and unaccompanied by any editorial clarifications.
Mistaken claims are rather common in the world of the published word. The careful observer will note, for instance, that I misnamed David Cassidy’s church in the first sentence of my first Aquila Report article, accidentally referring to it as Spanish River Presbyterian rather than Spanish River Church due to an editing error. Are Dominic Aquila and I to then be regarded as wholly unreliable in our claims? Hardly. But the answer in all such cases is to correct the mistake when it is brought to one’s attention and to be more careful in future, hence why I have mentioned my fault here and why I have checked with a former professional proofreader to ensure my pronoun usage is correct in the phrase above about the proprietor of this site and me. (And in fairness, I reversed them the first time around.)
It is a rather more serious fault, however, to make a claim as large and consequential as that gun violence is the leading cause of death of children in this nation when it is easily verified that it is not. And it is significant as well that this claim seems to be that of a certain political faction in our nation, as evidenced by the fact that I passed by a waiting room the other day and found a pair of activists making the claim verbatim on a major news outlet. The PCA’s magazine should not be parroting the false claims of the political left. Nor should it be repeating the claims of any other political faction, unless they involve questions in which the church has a vital interest or unambiguous questions of public morality, such as matters of liberty of conscience, the free exercise of our faith, abortion, euthanasia, and the like; and even in those questions I think the church’s involvement should be as an independent witness of right and wrong, and that she should never allow herself to become a de facto organ of any political party.
But even granting that it is a more serious offense, we need not assume the worst as to its reasons. As fallible humans we all sometimes succumb to haste, emotion, and the influence of others, especially the media, whose sole occupation lies in seeking to get us to believe its narratives and to think and act along its preferred lines. Add in the rigors and tedium of pastoral and publishing work and mistakes are apt to happen sometimes, even large ones. In such cases a little public or private contradiction that seeks to set one right is justified, provided it is moved by charity and expressed courteously.
What I am suggesting, then, is that we provide a collective remonstrance against byFaith’s error of fact. If you are reading this and are a member of the PCA I ask you, dear reader, to take a moment to drop byFaith a line here or via email at [email protected], and to tell them that you are disappointed that the public news outlet of our church has done poorly by its departure from its proper mission, and that it needs to retract its errors by removing the source of offense in question and offering a public acknowledgment and correction of its published errors of fact. The reason I suggest this is simple: byFaith is an official agency of the PCA, paid for by her funds and subordinate to her government. Our magazine should not be publishing false claims which venture into the territory of the purely political and have no direct relation to the church or her duties of disciple making.
I believe, moreover, that any PCA member should be able to do this in good conscience, regardless of his or her beliefs about criminal justice policy. For while we may differ as to our beliefs about civil or political questions, yet the proper focus of the church is a matter which we should all respect, and upon which we should all insist. Christ’s “kingdom is not of this world” (Jn. 18:36), and when the people of Israel were about to make him king he withdrew from them (Jn. 6:15), lest their mistaken popular enthusiasm should distract from his true mission of redeeming his elect. The PCA (including her agencies like byFaith), being a manifestation of Christ’s body, the church, ought to take heed and beware lest in her concern with the things of this life she diverts people’s attention from things above (Col. 3:1-2; comp. Matt. 16:23).
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name.
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This is the social justice gospel exposing itself openly, without modesty and without regard to how repulsive it is to the many other PCA members who believe in the spirituality of the church (Col. 3:1-3), the prudence of minding one’s own affairs rather than those of other communities (Prov. 26:17), and the propriety of an armed citizenry (Neh. 4:7-23). It has nothing to do with the duties of Cassidy’s office, not anything to do with our denomination or its faith: it is contemporary urban political preference presented as edifying Christian teaching, a coercion to agree masquerading as earnest Christian appeal.

David Cassidy is very animated about what he perceives as the insufficiency of our nation’s response to criminal homicides, particularly those which involve firearms. In an article at By Faith, the online magazine of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), he inveighs against what he regards as a mistaken attitude about prayer, vehemently asserting that prayer which is unaccompanied by work is “presumptuous theism” and a far cry from the need of the moment, which is, on his view, the “diligent, bi-partisan work of elected officials and citizens ready to tackle the legion of issues that have created this plague” of gun-related crime. Pondering his claims, one might fancy that his feelings have gotten the better of his reason and led him into writing an article of which we might say, in the words of Proverbs 19:2, that “desire without knowledge is not good, and whoever makes haste with his feet misses his way.”
He makes some strange claims. He says that  “neither the individual Christian nor the elected official . . . can go on using prayer as a cover for inaction.” Yet the case which inspired his article, the Ralph Yarl shooting in Kansas City, Missouri, has not been attended by inaction: the shooter has been charged with felonious assault and if convicted will probably be imprisoned for the rest of his life. When Cassidy talks of inaction he must mean something else then, though he is short on particulars and speaks in generalities like this:
We must all start working for a safer society. It’s time to stop excusing our lack of progress in reducing mass shootings and work on creating and implementing the solutions that will foster a safer society for all. With the first responders, medical personnel, police, and all who in every way work to preserve life, let’s get on with the good work that needs to be done.
Elsewhere he says, “We can’t merely pray about a kid being gunned down for no reason other than he rang the wrong doorbell.” One wonders how it is that Cassidy knows that Ralph Yarl was shot because “he rang the wrong doorbell” when his accused assailant has not yet had a chance to present his side or to defend himself in court. To be sure, such information as is available suggests (key word) that this was a senseless act, but it is not just to tacitly assume that the media’s narrative of events is accurate, not least given its record for inaccuracy in reporting; and much less is it just to condemn a man in the court of public opinion before he has been tried in the court of law (comp. Jn. 7:51; Prov. 18:13, 17). “You shall not be partial in judgment. You shall hear the small and the great alike” (Deut. 1:17). By assuming the truth of the media’s narrative Cassidy is not being an impartial judge, nor is he hearing everyone alike.
Yet such claims pale in comparison to four others that Cassidy makes. He says that “elected officials in this country need a timeout on calls to prayer and should instead get to work on the problem of gun violence, the leading cause of death among children in this nation.” We do indeed need a “timeout on [politician’s] calls for prayer,” but not for the reason Cassidy suggests. We need such a thing because such displays savor of hypocrisy and receive our Lord’s explicit condemnation (Matt. 6:5-7) – a thing which Cassidy and By Faith seem to have elsewhere forgotten.
As for gun violence being “the leading cause of death among children,” this is factually false. Using CDC data on causes of death by age, available here, we see that in 2020, the last year available, homicide by any means fell in fourth place for deaths among minors, with 2,059, behind unintentional injuries (5,746), congenital anomalies (4,860), and short gestation (3,141). Even subtracting infants it is second in the 1 to 17 age group, being outnumbered by accidental deaths by a factor of 2.51 to 1. Going back farther or widening the time range pushes it farther down the list. In the 2010-2020 period Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), suicide, malignant neoplasms (cancer), and pregnancy complications all outnumbered it in number of deaths, and its ratio in relation to accidental deaths was 1 to 4.21. And of course not all homicides were conducted with firearms: in 2020 the 1,376 known firearm homicides similarly trail SIDS (1,389) and cancer (1,407) deaths. Such an enormous error of fact exposes not only Cassidy but also By Faith and its editors and, indeed, our whole denomination to ridicule, for they should have not allowed such a statement to be published, and it suggests that he and they do not understand this matter about which they feel so strongly.
Also, using the Census Bureau’s low estimates, there were about 74.4 million minors in 2020, meaning about 1 in 36,145 of them died of homicide that year. Hardly a crisis, yet it does not prevent Cassidy from saying that “our current situation is as hellish as it is unsustainable.” In fact, if one compares total homicides among minors in the 1981-1998 and 1999-2020 periods he will see that there were more homicides in the former (shorter) era, the first for which the CDC’s WISQARS provides data, and yet our nation did not collapse and has seen its population increase from about 229 million in 1981 to about 330 million in 2020. The vast majority of minors have made it to adulthood, in other words, which means that Cassidy’s talk about the situation being “unsustainable” is nothing more than grossly exaggerated and irresponsible rhetoric.
In addition, we might object to his rhetoric on the ground that no man should make light of hell, least of all a minister of the gospel. Such language is far beneath his office, and is vulgar and implicitly impious: for unlike our society, hell is a place of perfect justice, a place where sin is punished as it deserves, not one where it runs amok. The misery of hell is a deserved misery inflicted by God’s holy wrath and resulting from his retributive justice, not an inexplicable, woe-inducing misery that results from human sin such as is bewailed by psalmists and prophets.
For one to speak of our earthly crime situation as “hellish” when what is meant seems to mean simply “miserable” is to misuse the word and to distort the concept in the popular understanding, which is a serious fault in a churchman. This nation is not hell, and we should not be quick to compare it to that dreadful place of eternal perdition, even in flights of impassioned literary rhetoric. No one who is truly impressed by the awful nature of hell can so easily use it to describe social affairs, even displeasing ones like youth homicides, yet Cassidy did not hesitate to do so, to our shame.
His statement here is an example of that profane speech which our shorter catechism condemns in Question 55 when it says that, “The third commandment forbiddeth all profaning or abusing of anything whereby God maketh himself known.” Who can deny that hell is a means whereby God has revealed himself to us as the God who judges the earth in righteousness? And yet Cassidy uses the term, not to call men to repentance, as our Lord would have him to do (Lk. 12:4-5), but to call for political reform, and that in terms so vague as to be practically useless. I tell you, my dear reader, as a man of unclean lips who dwells among a people of unclean lips (Isa. 6:5), and as a man who has said similar and worse things and is trying to repent the evil habit, that such a thing is a great evil and a cheapening of the gospel of which Cassidy has been ordained a minister. Speaking of our crime situation as “hellish” does not bring me around to his view on that matter; but it does make me think, given the statistics above, that perhaps hell is not such a terrible place after all, seeing as Cassidy can use it, not to warn me of its terrors, but rather as a comment about affairs in this life. To profane a thing is to convert it from a sacred use to a common one, and Cassidy has done it here with hell, by taking it from a solemn ground for urging men to convert to Christ in faith to a mere bit of angry rhetoric about our domestic affairs.
That is a serious thing, and it is worse still that a foul-tongued sinner such as myself, whose sins of the tongue are so frequent that he often doubts his union with Christ on that account (Matt. 12:34-27; Jas.1:26), can yet angrily say, as I do now: ‘I may be lost, and my sins of speech may burn brighter than anything James could suggest in his epistle (Jas. 3:5-12); yet even this vile sinner can see that Cassidy’s speech is profane and tends rather to men’s harm than their edification.’ And if, as is more frequent still, I think the grace of God is greater than my own sin, then we are in the territory of ‘causing little ones to stumble’ (Matt. 18:6), and the offense is scarcely less. Either way I object, as a repentant blasphemer, to Cassidy’s language – for I understand that if I am to be saved from such sin it can only occur in a church whose ministers are characterized by holiness of speech and who would never dare profane such a dreadful doctrine as that of hell by using it as mere political rhetoric.
Lastly, Cassidy says that, “Now is the time to work on curtailing the violence and ending this insanity — that’s authentic holiness in action.” Mark that well reader: for Cassidy “authentic holiness in action” is found in political activism. Not in personal righteousness in one’s dealings with other people (Lev. 19:35-36; Deut. 25:13-16; Prov. 11:1; Am. 8:4-7, Mic. 6:8, 10-12), nor conformity to the image of Christ (Rom. 12:1; 2 Cor. 7:1; 1 Thess. 4:2-7; 2 Tim. 1:9; 1 Pet. 1:15-16), but rather in agitating for legislative change. The New Testament says that we are to aspire to live quiet lives (1 Thess. 4:11) and Christ himself refused to judge in temporal questions (Lk. 12:13-14), said his kingdom was not of this world (Jn. 18:36), and avoided the popular movement to give him earthly power (Jn. 6:15), yet Cassidy would have us believe that we are under a moral and spiritual obligation to engage in political activism, conducted, no doubt, along his preferred lines.
Let me be clear that this ought to be a scandal. The PCA’s ministers should not use her magazine to push political propaganda dressed up in Christian garb which is long on emotional rhetoric and at odds with the facts about the crimes which it purportedly wishes to solve. This is the social justice gospel exposing itself openly, without modesty and without regard to how repulsive it is to the many other PCA members who believe in the spirituality of the church (Col. 3:1-3), the prudence of minding one’s own affairs rather than those of other communities (Prov. 26:17), and the propriety of an armed citizenry (Neh. 4:7-23). It has nothing to do with the duties of Cassidy’s office, not anything to do with our denomination or its faith: it is contemporary urban political preference presented as edifying Christian teaching, a coercion to agree masquerading as earnest Christian appeal. And while I think believers can disagree about most questions of domestic politics, I also think we should be able to agree that we should do so as citizens and in the proper (civil) forums, not as church officers or members or in official church publications.
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name.
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If things such as Moore’s article represent the best that public theology can offer, then perhaps that project simply needs to be abandoned. For it seems to me that it entails conceding much ground to our opponents (who are craftier than we, Lk. 16:8) and attempting to put our beliefs in the language of our wider society, with the result that they get twisted out of shape and end up being largely shorn of their usefulness. They lose their distinctly Christian character and become mere moralism or rather banal political and cultural prescriptions, and frequently they contradict other statements of Scripture.

In a previous article I asserted that it is improper for those who have no acquaintance with the survivors of the Nashville Massacre to discuss that sad affair. I reiterate that now, but I have since stumbled across Russell Moore’s opinion upon the affair, which justifies a response, albeit one that seeks to elide as much as possible the matter of the late outrage itself. I offer this response because Moore’s article represents an attempt to engage the cultural moment that, like many others, simply fails.
If Moore had contented himself with saying that hatred is wrong and must be mortified lest it lead farther down the path of strife and bloodshed, his case would have thoroughly accorded with Christ’s teaching and been a useful reminder in a society riven with quarreling. Regrettably, Moore did not limit himself to that orthodox position but accompanied it with political ruminations that were mediocre and naive at best, and which gave practical aid to leftism at worst. Those are hard words, but they are given, not to disparage the gentleman, but because his recent article does not represent one of his finer contributions to evangelical discourse.
There was a time when he was conspicuous in arguing that the cult of personality and character of a certain businessman-come-presidential candidate were damaging the church’s witness, a position which required much fortitude and exposed Moore to much opprobrium – and in which he had a fair point. He was not alone in the wilderness of evangelical dissent from Trump, but of that set he was amongst the most vigorous and steadfast. But like many of Trump’s critics, Moore reacted by moving away from previous associates and institutional affiliations and to a position to the left of most evangelicals.[1]
He begins his article by taking a view of the recent outrage that regards it as representative of a larger problem of national concern, the same basic view of the left, whose utopianism aspires for universal reign: ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’ as one of its trite and dubious sayings puts it. If an evil thing is done in one place it is not the concern merely of those who have been affected by it, but of everyone, even strangers and outsiders who have no familiarity with the matter, place, or people involved; who live in cultures far different; who cannot directly do anything in response; or who gain nothing by knowing about it.
There is an alternate perspective on such matters, though it is practically unheard in our public discourse. This perspective holds that the view above entails ignorant, arrogant, and feckless (if well-meaning) meddling in the affairs of others and madness in one’s own mind. It holds that the mind and heart have a very limited capacity for grief and that, as creatures bound by space and time, humans are ordained by God to live in one place (Acts 17:26) and to concern themselves primarily with its affairs. In practice this means taking a vital interest only in one’s closest associates (family, friends, immediate neighbors) and affairs (work, community, etc.), and taking a vaguer interest the farther one moves out from the realm of personal familiarity. It also means refusing to take an interest in matters which one cannot control and the knowledge of which serves only to make one miserable.
Moore believes that we have become numb to grievous evil. But for many of us it is not apathy but prudence that is in view: if one disregards all limits of time, space, and personal familiarity and thinks that he is obligated to lament and ‘do something’ about every evil in the world he will find, if he is consistent, that he has no time for anything else and that he is perpetually miserable because of the difficulties of life. But of course, we do not lament every great evil, but only the few which the media bring to our attention because of their own business and political interests; and even being limited to this small number of incidents to bewail, there are multitudes in our society who are in continual despair because such things predominate in their minds.
Again, knowing one’s limits and guarding one’s heart from being overwhelmed by grief is not reprehensible apathy but good sense. As Proverbs 4:23 puts it, “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.” If one allows those springs to be poisoned with despair and unrealistic thinking foisted upon him by the often-misleading narratives of popular media (of all factions), he will not be able to love or aid those nearest to him, but will become morose and withdrawn, wallowing in misery and bewailing life. Moore himself is eager to discourage “resignation and cynicism, where we shrug our shoulders in an attitude of ‘What can you do?’”
And yet by urging people to care about things that are outside of their proper realm of responsibility, Moore is actually feeding a destructive social phenomenon that is filling our society with miserable people who are neglecting their actual social relations and responsibilities because they have allowed themselves to be incapacitated with worry related to events far removed from their control. And it is important to note as well that there are several other things which are not apathy that might appear in such cases. Love of liberty, distrust of shameless political opportunists, a refusal to panic or to act in haste, and respect for the dead, and grieving all come to mind in this respect.
When it comes to particulars Moore stumbles badly by asking “can we not all agree that something is seriously wrong when a person with this many “red flags” can purchase multiple weapons of that capacity without anyone noticing?” No, we most certainly cannot all agree on that point, and it is an example of that naivete and giving practical aid to leftism that I mentioned earlier. America has 330 million residents, quite a lot of whom have some of the characteristics considered red flags for violent behavior. A government large enough to monitor all those people would be enormous and expensive and would have wide-ranging powers that could be easily abused at the expense of long-established rights and legal processes. Just whom does Moore believe are likely to be the foremost targets of such a government, given the speed with which our nation is turning hostile toward our faith and the zeal and frequency with which those who most hate us attain to power and government employment?
In fact, we have such a government already, and it went from combating Al Qaeda to investigating people who get mad at school board meetings in the span of twenty years. Yet Moore wants an even bigger government with even more powers – for that is the practical effect of his argument, whether or not he realizes it. Also, it is a material fact of great importance that the vast, vast, vast – and I might justly write ‘vast’ about nine hundred times here – vast majority of people with red flags do not commit acts of mass murder, nor even contemplate them.
Moore then engages in some cultural commentary that asserts we have a culture in which opponents are needlessly regarded as “an existential threat to everything that ‘people like us’ (however that’s defined) hold dear.” This fails insofar as it presents a real phenomenon as an absurd exaggeration. No doubt there is much irresponsible hyperbole in our political rhetoric, but there are people whose desired policies do pose an existential threat to certain classes of people and their values. There are many people who wish to disarm the citizenry, eliminate the police, and abolish cash bail and incarceration for many offenses. There are people who wish to crush all dissent from the normalization of sexual debauchery with criminal penalties, and others who are allowing men to compete in women’s sports. All those things represent existential threats to gun owners, police officers, prison guards, bail bondsmen, people with traditional morals, and female athletes; and other examples could be provided. Moore is right that such things do not justify murder (nothing does), but his argument would be better if it remained in the realm of morality and did not mistakenly try to deny what is real in at least some cases.
Moore stumbles similarly when he says we should “put aside our theatrical hatred . . . to ask, ‘How can we stop this?’” Much contemporary hatred is not theatrical but, alas, real. And being real it does not lend itself to the “genuine discussions on public policy, justice, and safety” that Moore believes are needed. Such notions are naive in the extreme. The left does not want discussion but compliance; even when it says it wants dialogue what it really means is that it wants everyone else to keep quiet and nod their heads in agreement with everything it says. ‘Join our revolution – or else’ is the whole animus and manner of its public demeanor, as evidenced by the zeal with which it utters absurd slanders like ‘silence is violence,’ a bit of false testimony in which it accuses widows who knit at home of being as morally corrupt as highwaymen for not protesting in the streets.
One might be forgiven for thinking that the events of the last several days suffice to demonstrate the left’s essential incivility. It brooks no dissent and has no qualms about using behavior that is meant to silence, intimidate, or defame its opponents. Yet Moore would have us attempt dialogue with such people, as though prudence fails to commend refusing to interact with such people who only desire a pretext for forcing their will upon others (Prov. 9:7; 23:9; 26:4; Matt. 7:6).
If things such as Moore’s article represent the best that public theology can offer, then perhaps that project simply needs to be abandoned. For it seems to me that it entails conceding much ground to our opponents (who are craftier than we, Lk. 16:8) and attempting to put our beliefs in the language of our wider society, with the result that they get twisted out of shape and end up being largely shorn of their usefulness. They lose their distinctly Christian character and become mere moralism or rather banal political and cultural prescriptions, and frequently they contradict other statements of Scripture. Jesus did not come into the world to engage society or reform it, but to call his elect out of darkness (Lk. 12:13-15; 13:1-5; 17:20-21; 19:10; Jn. 6:15, 35-59; 18:36; Rom. 14:17).
And as I read Moore’s conclusion that “it’s never right to assume this is just the way things must be,” the words of our Lord echo through my mind that he “did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10:34) and that we “will be hated by all nations” for his sake (24:9). And with great somberness of heart do I recollect our call to endurance, that “if anyone is to be taken captive, to captivity he goes; if anyone is to be slain with the sword, with the sword must he be slain (Rev. 13:9). Contra Moore, whose article savors of the notion that if only we are winsome and reasonable our opponents will join us in mutual good will and meaningful social improvement, Christ’s aim is not for us to improve our society with good faith discussions about public safety. In his providence he is sovereign over all things, and he intends for many of us to suffer hatred for his sake (Matt 10:16-39; Jn. 15:18-16:4). He has sent us out as sheep among wolves (Matt. 10:16), with the caution to be “wise as serpents.” I fear that in articles such as Moore’s it is the sheepishness that predominates, not the serpentine wisdom; and that will not suffice to protect us from those who would devour us.
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name.
[1] In truth, Moore and other prominent evangelicals were already to the left of most of us before 2016, but since that time they seem to have moved yet farther in that direction.
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This massacre was perpetrated by one person in one place and toward one group of people. Even granting that we share a faith and formal ecclesiastical ties, there is a case for many of us keeping silent and not presuming to advise or to otherwise discuss the matter. In a matter so awful even consolation can come across as callous, especially when it comes from strangers and via digital means.

The year that I graduated high school the county in which I lived was greatly affected by a jeep wreck that killed two young men who attended that same school. I suppose the news outlets in Charlotte were strapped for news that day, so at least one of them apparently sent a reporter out into the hinterlands to ‘get the scoop’ on what had happened. That caused no little furor among some of the locals, who objected that such a thing was an inconsiderate and insulting thing to do at a time when many people were in shock at such a sad affair.
I am paraphrasing/filling in the blanks and working from secondhand testimony here, but the objection was that under normal circumstances the media paid no attention to the county. Indeed, many of them were probably unaware that it existed, and even those that had a vague idea were probably not inclined to visit or to generally think or speak well of it: the meteorologists in particular caused an irritation every time there was a major thunderstorm and they mispronounced the name of one of our communities. And yet when something tragic – read: newsworthy – happened they acted as though they had a right to invade the community and interrogate total strangers about their feelings about the situation. Strangers, it might be added, whom they would probably look down upon under normal circumstances. The local rejoinder to all of this was something along the lines of ‘mind your business and leave us to grieve in peace, for we are hurting and have no interest in our pain being used as a revenue-generating spectacle in your news program.’
This affair came to mind after the recent outrage in Nashville. And as I watch people fall all over themselves analyzing, discussing, well-wishing, and politicking in response to that sad episode I am inclined to think that the response of my fellow citizens in the former case is wise and well-suited to the present moment as well. There is an important difference in that the former case dealt with a tragedy in the form of a vehicular accident, whereas in Nashville a heinous crime was willfully perpetrated by a person as a responsible moral agent. Still, the basic response in the first case is useful here as well.
This massacre was perpetrated by one person in one place and toward one group of people. Even granting that we share a faith and formal ecclesiastical ties, there is a case for many of us keeping silent and not presuming to advise or to otherwise discuss the matter. In a matter so awful even consolation can come across as callous, especially when it comes from strangers and via digital means. Those who have actual relationships with the grieving have an obligation to “weep with those who weep” (Rom. 12:15), but those of us who do not have such relationships would probably do well to keep silence and to let our efforts be restricted to interceding with God for mercy for the grieving: this is a “go into your room and shut the door and pray” moment (Matt. 6:5-6).
Job’s friends are a helpful example here. They did not come from afar to console a stranger, but one whom they knew well. And they did not come in speech that presumed to comfort but sat speechless in the elements, exposed for seven days to the Near Eastern sun and the desert nights in torn garments while they waited for Job to break the silence with his laments (Job 2:11-13). That forms a remarkable contrast to our present situation, and it involved a sacrifice far greater than what I am suggesting. I do not ask you, dear reader, to lay aside your temporal affairs to travel to Nashville to sit in sackcloth and silence. But I do suggest real good might be done by simply not talking about the matter on the internet, and I think that you might consider whether your own behavior until now falls short of that of those who have otherwise become a byword for people who fail to comfort in a time of need.
Central to my thinking on this matter are several points. One, it is not appropriate to discuss the suffering of others in public. It is in fact rather rude, being actually a form of gossip. Two, there is such a thing as respect for the dead and for the survivors and the grieving, and such respect includes a solemn refusal to speak in the presence of or about those who have been killed or who have lost loved ones. Presence in our day includes not only real presence, but the digital sphere as well. I fear that such respect is in short supply at present, perhaps even among some believers. Three, it is not right to pretend that one knows or cares about people and places that one does not know and would not know or care about absent exceptional events that bring them to one’s attention. (That remark is directed to those in our wider society who have no relation to the victims whatsoever, not those of us that share a faith and ought to feel a general compassion for all our fellow believers, whether they are personally known or not: Rom. 1:10-13; Col. 1:29-2:5.) Four, opportunism is always revolting, and there seem to be many in our society who have no qualms about using a crime perpetrated against strangers as an occasion for sounding compassionate and important, or for their advantage otherwise.
Lastly, as for the specifically political opportunism, there is much in the present case that shows the civil affairs of our nation are in a poor state. It is the depth of brazen knavishness to use a massacre committed by someone in one of your side’s favored groups as an occasion to demand that your own preferred policies be enacted posthaste, especially when those policies would tend to make the victims more defenseless against those and other groups that conspicuously hate them. Then too, the concepts of dignity of office and proper civil decorum seem to be wholly unknown to many in our society, including some who have attained to high office: we have many of whom it can be said that they “neither fear God nor respect man” (Lk. 18:4). I have no interest in entering too much into a partisan political discussion of that, but it does much to reiterate that we are as sheep among wolves (Matt. 10:17), and that we ought to be diligent in prayer that the ruling authorities will be just and wise, and that we might “lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Tim. 2:2). And as for the larger matter at hand, let us recognize that this is for many of us “a time to keep silence” (Ecc. 3:7) and act accordingly.
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name.
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Hopefully I am wrong on that point, but to pivot back from the hypothetical to the real, the fact remains that the PCA, like the broader church in America, is not flourishing at the moment and is beset with real problems. If we wish to receive God’s blessing, we shall have to rely on his strength (Jn. 15:5) and submit to his requirements. And that means, as I have said above, that we cannot allow serious public wrongdoing to go unpunished, lest we also incur his wrath

There are many frustrating characteristics about the modern world, one of which is the tendency for people to needlessly complicate things. Anyone who has worked for a large corporation will know what I mean. Suppose that department A has failed to meet its goals because one of its employees has become unreliable and been slack in completing his work. The obvious remedy would be for leadership to pull the slacker aside and tell him that his performance is unacceptable and must promptly improve, or else he will be replaced.
But that is not how most corporations work. Instead of dealing with the troublemaker directly, leadership will call an all-department meeting to discuss the problem, thus taking the productive employees away from their work, dodging the real issue, and putting the department even farther behind. The meeting itself will take any of a variety of forms. Probably it will be suggested that the failure is that of the whole department and everyone will have to hear a lecture about how they need to ‘prioritize’ and work harder to get done what needs accomplished. The people who are working diligently will resent being taken away from their work to get berated about someone else’s wrongdoing, their relations with leadership and the slacker will deteriorate, morale will plummet, and the department will be even farther from accomplishing its goals. The slacker will either a) be oblivious to the fact that all of this talk about working harder is meant for him; or b) realize it is meant for him but not care because he is a selfish, dishonest person who does not care about how his behavior affects others.
Another possibility is that the whole situation will be seized as an ‘opportunity’ for management to lobby for something they want like increased staffing, or else for them to spend much time talking about how department processes need to be improved to increase efficiency. At no point will the attention, authority, and power of leadership be brought to bear on the troublemaker. Anyone who dares to suggest the problem is with a particular person rather than the collective department or its processes, tools, etc. will be promptly silenced and chided for ‘rocking the boat,’ ‘not being a team player,’ or some other trite corporate jargon, and will be solemnly told to ‘be positive.’
That response, so common in the workplace, is essentially that of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) as regards her internal difficulties. For some time now there has been a tendency to normalize and make acceptable the experience of certain unmentionable sexual desires by failing to meaningfully combat them. The matter has been debated, discussed, studied, and investigated for almost five years now with an enormous quantity of words. Missouri Presbytery’s reports on Greg Johnson and Revoice contain about 145,000 words (combined), while the 2021 “Human Sexuality Report” is another 30,000 or so. For comparison, the New Testament is about 138,000 words in Greek.
Now I say that all of this excess of time and words has been in great measure an endeavor in dodging the essential issue. Whatever the merits of its formal content, as a method of responding to something that has unsettled the church it has been as tedious and misdirected as the typical corporate response mentioned above. It carefully skirted the root issue and did not hold the offender to account.
And its results have been the same as in a corporation. In the workplace the strained relationships, bad morale, and culture of no accountability for wrongdoing persist even if the original instigator eventually leaves the company. In our case the original instigator of the church’s severe disruption of peace and purity left voluntarily, but the disruption persists and threatens to fester for the foreseeable future in the form of factions, continued debates and overtures at the General Assembly and presbytery levels, and in a general atmosphere of wide-ranging public disagreement.
In the workplace the result of a persistently bad culture is that many employees tire of carrying more than their share of work and of seeing brazen laziness go unrestrained. Many of them reduce their own productivity in response, and many of them leave the company in search of a more disciplined work environment. Bad employees degrade and drive out good ones, in other words.
We seem to be witnessing a similar result. People are leaving the PCA in significant numbers, both as individuals and as churches. A review of the denomination’s most recent five-year summary shows as much when combined with external demographic data. In the 2018-2021 period the PCA baptized 31,070 people. Assuming, what is admittedly imperfect, that our death rate for those years was the same as the national age-adjusted death rate as reported in the CDC’s annual mortality briefs, we lost about 11,890 members to glory in that period. Thus, while our aggregate membership declined by 6,404 from 2018 to 2021, our actual membership loss was almost triple that, and there were about 19,180 people who theoretically should have been in our fold in 2021 who were not. Absent such a membership loss, our actual membership in 2021 would’ve been about 5.1% higher than it was.
I will not be so churlish as to suggest that all of this loss has been a protest against the PCA’s ineffectiveness in maintaining discipline, since there are obviously other possible causes and since there is no way of knowing for certain how much loss is due to what particular causes. Still, there is reason to think that much of that loss is due to people giving up on the denomination and dismissing it as hopelessly ineffective and compromised by worldliness. I have a fair bit of correspondence from people who have done so, and there are other things, including the denominational grapevine and testimonies published at this site, which indicate the same. Indeed, the top three most read Aquila Report stories of 2020 were about people leaving and the newly-forming, independent Vanguard Presbytery, which shows where the attention of at least one segment of the denomination’s membership is focused.
What then should be done in response? First, we must recognize that our current problems are attributable to specific people, not defects in our internal organizational arrangements. It will do precisely no good whatever to amend the Book of Church Order if presbyteries and churches can flaunt it with impunity by ‘creatively complying’ with it or appealing to its (imagined) ‘lack of clarity’ and tying any objections to their disobedience up in years of committee debates, studies, and reports, and in painstakingly slow judicial processes.
Wrongdoers must be confronted and exhorted to repentance, and if this fails the matter must be pursued further, including the institution of formal process against them. It is every elder’s sworn duty to combat serious error (BCO 21-5, 24-6) – such a thing is inherent in maintaining the purity and peace of the church. By serious error I do not mean differences of opinion regarding worship style, whether or not a church has a Sunday evening service, etc. I mean wrongdoing like was involved in some of the deeds of Memorial Presbyterian in St. Louis, like giving practical aid to things that promote such a destructive social phenomenon as sexual confusion, as well as things like slander, blasphemy, rebellion, and unholy public speech.  Such egregious wrong must be opposed – a little leaven leavens the whole lump (Gal. 5:9) – or the PCA is certain to fall into apostasy. There seems to have been some of this one-on-one confrontation already, but there needs to be more of it, and we must not content ourselves was hoping that people who disagree concerning things like sexual morality will leave the denomination of their own volition.
Lastly, the time is right to slow our ordination of teaching elders. From 2018 to 2021 the denomination’s number of teaching elders, candidates, and licentiates increased by 208 (4.2%), 167 (31.1%), and 30 (15.6%), respectively, while our total number of churches only increased by 21 (1.3%), missions dropped by 37 (-10.4%), and membership decreased 6,404 (-1.7%). Maybe some of that is due to more teaching elders serving out of bounds in domestic or foreign missions, but a review of recent general assembly minutes did not suggest, insofar as they are able, that such a thing is to account for most of the difference. In any event, my correspondence from presbyteries that rejected overtures like 23 and 15 concerning fitness for office tells me that the failure was due to the opposition of teaching elders where many ruling elders were in favor. Should we then create more such officers when our membership is declining, our churches are increasing only slightly, and their seminary education seems to place them pretty reliably to the left of our ruling elders and membership?
If I am right that the inclinations of our leaders are essentially the same as those of leaders in corporate America, they would answer with an unequivocal ‘yes,’ and I suspect that I can anticipate their larger response. The loss of members and slow growth of churches just prove that we need to put all that much more effort into church planting. And as for the losses, they are probably largely due to COVID and will settle out in a year or two. Sure, some people have some exaggerated concerns owing to ‘gossip outlets’ and fundamentalist fear-mongering, and a few people have perhaps left on that account. But such people simply didn’t believe in the vision, had bad attitudes that negatively impacted the rest of us, and have plenty of other places they can go like the Bible Presbyterian Church and whatnot. All these lost people that we are winning with our beautiful orthodoxy and winsome, contextualized, nuanced, and culturally-competent missions will make up for the loss of the naysayers, so we should view all of this as an opportunity to invest more in our denominational agencies and programs, be even more ambitious in our missions goals, accelerate our diversity initiatives, and maybe even consider whether this proves that deaconesses and other practical and constitutional innovations are in order.
Hopefully I am wrong on that point, but to pivot back from the hypothetical to the real, the fact remains that the PCA, like the broader church in America, is not flourishing at the moment and is beset with real problems. If we wish to receive God’s blessing, we shall have to rely on his strength (Jn. 15:5) and submit to his requirements. And that means, as I have said above, that we cannot allow serious public wrongdoing to go unpunished, lest we also incur his wrath (1 Sam. 2:12-27; Rev. 2:14-16, 20-23). Especially is this the case with those who hold office and have sworn to maintain the church’s purity, for this word stands: “If you make a vow to the LORD your God, you shall not delay fulfilling it, for the LORD your God will surely require it of you, and you will be guilty of sin” (Deut. 23:21). If we will not be true to our vows and maintain our own standards in our own midst, I see no reason to think that he will bless us in our efforts to expand or plant new churches. It takes but a little sin to besmirch much righteousness (Ecc. 9:18). One man sparing what is devoted to destruction brought defeat to the whole nation of Israel (Josh. 7). One man’s census brought calamity on the whole of Israel (2 Sam. 24). And of course, a single act of rebellion plunged our whole race into ruin in Eden. And as I review our denomination’s state and deeds – again, see the last few paragraphs and links here – I think we have more to anger God than a little hidden contraband or an ill-advised census.
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name.
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In sum, LeCroy was wrong and did well to retract his claims and apologize, and Stover was right to publicly oppose him. But in the process he stumbled and suggested things are more hopeful than they are just now. For it is written that we will know men by their fruits (Matt. 7:15-20), and who can deny that the fruits of Revoice and Transluminate and the like have been vile? Strife and quarreling, the driving of people and churches from our fold, the threat of a denominational split, and the shameless public discussion of what it is shameful and dangerous to mention publicly (Eph. 5:3), and which was previously unthinkable, have all hobbled our church. All this has happened because the leaven was not purged at the first infection (1 Cor. 5:6-7; Gal. 5:9), and for that there is much occasion for grief on the part of all of us.

In a recent article Tim LeCroy made some claims to which another Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) minister, Charles Stover, objected in a response. LeCroy’s original article has been withdrawn and replaced with an apology, so I have little inclination to address it directly. But having read the two articles and pondered the matter for a few days I find myself thinking that it is Stover’s article that is the more alarming.
That is perhaps a startling statement, and if you are familiar with my previous writing you will know that I have been quite blunt in responding to LeCroy and to the purportedly now defunct National Partnership of which he was a prominent member. Permit me an explanation. I do not object to Stover’s rebuttals, which accord with the truth and were justified by LeCroy’s original claims. It is rather statements like these that unsettle my conscience terribly:
I had no idea that Missouri Presbytery was meeting regularly to investigate Memorial Presbyterian Church, Transluminate, and Greg Johnson. I was not aware of the impassioned debates and floor speeches being conducted at Presbytery.
And:
I am quick to correct detractors when they accuse our presbytery as being liberal.
For it would seem to me that investigations and impassioned debates do not justice make, at least not as a matter of course. They perhaps produce the appearance of energy and life, but it is their end result that matters, not they themselves.
And what was the end result of all Missouri’s debating and investigating? Were the Presbyterian Church in America’s (PCA) purity and peace increased? No indeed, and it was very much the opposite. The accused seized the investigation as a vindication. He went before the whole nation and exposed his own denomination and his ostensible brethren to ridicule in the eyes of unbelievers – something no believer should ever do to another – and appealed to these investigations and debates as proof that he was guiltless and was subject to needless opposition on the part of others in the PCA.
Let me state it plainly: the many words and the passion notwithstanding, those debates and investigations accomplished nothing beneficial, at least as far as the PCA as a whole is concerned. They did not punish wrong, but rather forced the opponents of wrong to pursue the matter by other means and in other forums. Even now the denomination is greatly absorbed in the matter as it seeks to amend its Book of Church Order to hopefully prevent another similar debacle, a matter which will drag on for the foreseeable future. What should have been put to rest efficiently long ago has festered and spread throughout the whole denomination and occasioned continued disagreements, with no end in sight.
That passion and those debates and investigations do not, as such, suggest that the presbytery in question is solidly orthodox/conservative/sound/faithful or whatever we wish to call it; nor do they commend our processes as fair, efficient, and apt to produce a good result. To the contrary, they suggest inefficiency, delay, and an excessive fondness of words, wrangling, and procedural minutiae, as well as an elevation of process over result and of procedure over its proper end. If it be objected that the churches and elders in question nonetheless confess sound doctrine as expressed in Scripture and in our standards, let me rejoin with a paraphrase of James: ‘You say that you have sound doctrine and holiness apart from discipline; should you not rather show me your soundness in the faith and your zeal for holiness by your discipline?’ For professions of orthodoxy notwithstanding, such an orthodoxy is as dead and useless as the purported faith of James’ readers (2:14-26). It may sparkle in the sun and have the appearance of great majesty; but in the time of testing it proved no more than a façade. It failed utterly, and it did not even do that efficiently.
Now one might say that these are only the rants of a fundamentalist doom monger who has in espousing them committed slander himself. If one is so inclined I invite her or him to look at this and to make the case that this is anything other than slander (my contact info is in the bio line) or that objecting to such a thing is somehow inherently ‘fundamentalist’ or sinful. And I would invite such a person to ask himself these questions: was John a fundamentalist when he objected to Diotrephes “talking wicked nonsense” about him and his companions (3 Jn. 10)? If the answer is no, why then should I be deemed a fundamentalist for opposing someone who showed his character in such unjust malignment as in the tweet linked above?
As for Stover’s claim that Missouri Presbytery is not liberal, let us grant, for the sake of argument, that the public profession of faith of its members is indeed sound. About the most generous thing that can be said in such a case is that, as far as the maintenance of public orthodoxy and discipline is concerned (key phrase), such a conservatism gives cause to say ‘with conservatives such as these, who needs liberals?’ That sounds excessively harsh and uncharitable; but I do not make it, if you can accept it, because I am a hateful fundamentalist provocateur who revels in quarreling. Remember what was being investigated by Missouri Presbytery. Memorial Presbyterian allowed its property to be used for a series of plays promoting and celebrating unnatural sexual confusion (what is called, with doubtful accuracy, ‘transgenderism’).
Now God says in his law that “a woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God” (Deut. 22:5). How much worse do you think it is when someone puts on the physique of the other sex and subjects himself or herself to physical mutilation by surgical or chemical means to attain it? Such a thing involves a revolt against nature and against God’s created order itself – which is to say that it is about the pinnacle of impiety. That it is often a result of mental disturbances and past trauma and is attended by a plethora of other miserable mental maladies I grant; but the thing clearly propagates by example. The more acceptable it is, the more common it is; and if anything, the misery to which it reduces its sufferers is all the more reason to refuse to do anything, no matter how slight, that in any way encourages the existence and spread of such a dangerous thing.
Now God also abundantly attests that when his people use that which he has given them to commit abominations in his sight they arouse his anger and jealousy, defile the places in question, and bring God’s curse and just condemnation upon themselves (Lev. 18:24-29; 20:22; Deut. 27:15-68; Isa. 1:28; Jer. 2:7; 16:18; Eze. 36:17-18). He attests further that those who have authority and responsibility to restrain wrong in such cases are solemnly obligated to do so, and that they themselves will suffer his wrath if they fail in this (Ex. 32:25; 1 Sam. 2:12-36; 3:11-13; 2 Chron. 28:19; Rev. 2:14, 20). Now a church in Missouri Presbytery did what was abominable in God’s sight and did what must be considered an act of apostasy after the fashion of the ancient Israelites. And the presbytery’s response was to investigate and issue a report, and not to meaningfully punish the church or its leadership or restrain the evil. Its response was about as effective as Eli’s to his wayward sons, and we see how that ended (1 Sam. 4:17-21).
All of which is to say that conservative or not, professedly orthodox or not, the actual nature of Missouri’s deeds was not productive of orthodoxy and tended strongly in the other direction. That’s a bold claim, admittedly, and it is not everyday that I – who am an insignificant man and vile sinner – accuse an entire presbytery of being derelict in its duty. That is defensible only if my view of things is correct. But if my view is correct, then it would seem to me that Scripture (Zech. 7:9; 8:16; Eph. 4:25) and our standards (WLC Q. 144) require me to speak in such a way, but with much sorrow and the strong hope that there will sincere and full repentance for the future.
In sum, LeCroy was wrong and did well to retract his claims and apologize, and Stover was right to publicly oppose him. But in the process he stumbled and suggested things are more hopeful than they are just now. For it is written that we will know men by their fruits (Matt. 7:15-20), and who can deny that the fruits of Revoice and Transluminate and the like have been vile? Strife and quarreling, the driving of people and churches from our fold, the threat of a denominational split, and the shameless public discussion of what it is shameful and dangerous to mention publicly (Eph. 5:3), and which was previously unthinkable, have all hobbled our church. All this has happened because the leaven was not purged at the first infection (1 Cor. 5:6-7; Gal. 5:9), and for that there is much occasion for grief on the part of all of us.
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name.
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