Another tendency in the Reformed world is pastors using “expository” preaching as a tactic to avoid courting controversy, as Pastor Matt Marino discussed during the most recent episode of the Old Paths Podcast. In a piece Marino wrote that sparked excellent conversation on the podcast, he explained, “Sermons are not expositional unless and until they expose not only God’s meaning but our obstacles. God’s meaning must penetrate our whole heart and permeate our whole lives.” Explaining a passage’s context, history of interpretation—and even the passage’s connection to Christ—is essential, but it’s not enough.

Following up on my piece from last week, much more can be said about the general state of the modern Reformed movement. While there are certainly good aspects of it, from its general reverence in worship to its theological rigor, there are also shortcomings that need to be addressed. These problems include rhetorical traps, not always preaching the full counsel of God, and the prevalence of gatekeepers who seem more interested in condemning their Reformed enemies than promoting a historically based understanding of the Reformed tradition as a whole. 
One such rhetorical snare is hiding behind confessionalism to excuse questionable theology that parrots the pieties of our age. After being outraged that anyone would dare question their Reformed credentials, these types like to claim that they’re “confessional” and therefore beyond criticism.
Confessionalism is a good and necessary thing. Confessions bind us to the faith as delivered by the church throughout the ages. In the Reformed tradition, they 1) outline the key doctrines of orthodoxy as taught in Scripture (as well as being ecumenical about certain second- and third-order issues), 2) establish methods of discipline should the teachers of the church subvert those doctrines, and 3) catechize congregants and their children in patterns that should pervade all areas of life. 
Importantly, confessions do not overturn the principle that, in the language of Article Six of the Thirty-Nine Articles, “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation.” Confessions, along with the ecumenical creeds, are subordinate in authority to Scripture. They are derived from it and are held accountable to it. What the Southern Presbyterian theologian Robert Lewis Dabney has written about creeds applies just as much to confessions and other secondary statements of basic Christian doctrine: “He who would consistently banish creeds must silence all preaching and reduce the teaching of the church to the recital of the exact words of Holy Scripture without note or comment.” 
Confessions are also the answer to the problem of “Calvinism,” or making one theologian the standard of Reformed orthodoxy as I pointed out last week. As J.V. Fesko argues, doing this means diving headlong “into the pitfall of theological genius—defining doctrine by the cult of personality rather than through the church’s careful and prayerful deliberation on Scripture in dialogue with the church throughout the ages.” Reformed confessions are the products of the best theological minds of their eras. They carefully summarize the doctrines of the faith for the broader church, ensuring that the theological issues of their time are given due attention and correction.
As good as confessions are, however, they can be weaponized. Some individuals can hide behind a strict literalism that fails to engage with the underlying anthropological foundations on which those doctrines rest. One of the most famous memes from Philip Derrida’s collection of evangelical countersignaling memes shows a man saying that he affirms the ecumenical creeds but rejects the basic, commonsense truths of sex and gender. This is clearly occurring in the controversy over Side-B and Revoice. Like in a game of Jenga, followers of these movements subtly remove the foundational pillars of the created order, one by one, until the edifice suddenly collapses.
Some also fail to heed the straightforward teachings of their confessions. It would be interesting to see how many so-called strict subscriptionists who have later deconstructed ever assented to the Westminster Larger Catechism’s teaching on the duties that inferiors, superiors, and equals owe to each other as part of the Fifth Commandment. My guess is, they never did. And their pastors either neglected to discuss those points or actually helped undermine the teachings of their confessions.
Like the U.S. Constitution, confessions are functionally useless absent good men who will ensure that those under their care stay within its boundaries. What American Reformer’s own Timon Cline has written about the case of “strict subscriptionists” who blanch at their confession’s teaching on the civil magistrate holds true no matter the specific doctrine being jettisoned. 
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God has given us a source of truth that reigns over every book, every dictionary, every source of information. God has given us his truth in his Word and it reigns supreme…And when even the best and greatest dictionaries have become defunct and crumbled into dust, that Word will remain fixed and constant, inerrant and infallible, as trustworthy then as it is right now and has always been.

There is something morbidly fascinating about watching dictionaries slowly but surely change their definitions of common words. It raises some questions, not the least of which strike to the very purpose of a dictionary. Is a dictionary meant to be an objective arbiter of the meaning of words? Or is a dictionary meant to subjectively list the ways in which words are used among the speakers of a particular language at a particular time? These are valid questions, especially in moments when certain key words are being intensely debated.
It is not without significance that Dictionary.com’s word of the year for 2022 was woman. “It’s one of the oldest words in the English language,” they say. “One that’s fundamental not just to our vocabulary but to who we are as humans. And yet it’s a word that continues to be a source of intense personal importance and societal debate. It’s a word that’s inseparable from the story of 2022.” They explain that searches for the word spiked last year, first when Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked to provide her definition of the term—a request she denied—, then again at the overturning of Roe v. Wade and, though they don’t mention it, probably also when Matt Walsh released his film What Is a Woman?.
It was a rare case of not just a word in the spotlight, but a definition. We at Dictionary.com weren’t the only ones to take notice. The prominence of the question and the attention it received demonstrate how issues of transgender identity and rights are now frequently at the forefront of our national discourse. More than ever, we are all faced with questions about who gets to identify as a woman (or a man, or neither). The policies that these questions inform transcend the importance of any dictionary definition—they directly impact people’s lives.
They make their position on dictionaries clear when they insist that the purpose of theirs is to reflect “how people use words in the real world” and they make their position on gender identity clear when they insist that a “dictionary is not the last word on what defines a woman. The word belongs to each and every woman—however they define themselves.” In other words, they believe people are free to define themselves however they see fit and that a good dictionary will serve people by ensuring it defines words in such a way as to affirm individuals’ self-identity.
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We really ought to appreciate how overt the religious themes in the ad are. Humans sacrifice and perform good works in order to placate an angry deity. Modern neo-paganism has rarely been as well-represented in such a short video. I half-expected one of the employees to slaughter a ram on top of an altar of MacBook Pros. But the divinization of nature, the condemnation of religious hypocrisy, the works of supererogation, the appeasement of the goddess—all of these underscore that beneath many of our public policy debates are fundamental religious differences about the nature of God, sin, humanity, and atonement.

It’s mid-September, which means another annual Apple Event has come and gone, complete with the new iPhone 15 and Vision Pro, a new spatial computing device. But what grabbed the attention of many last week was Apple’s five-minute Mother Nature ad.
In the ad, a group of Apple employees nervously await the arrival of a peevish and snappy Mother Nature, who is dropping by for the annual corporate responsibility review. Mother Nature expects the same old empty song and dance, in which corporations make grandiose promises about reducing their environmental impact only to offer superficial efforts while kicking the can down the road.
However, over the course of the ad, sharp-tongued Mother Nature slowly softens as she realizes that Apple is in fact “doing the work” and making real progress to reduce their impact on the planet (even though, as Apple CEO Tim Cook says at the end, “there’s still a lot more work to do”). The ad closes with the sun emerging from behind a cloud and a dead plant coming back to life as Mother Nature approves their progress and the employees sigh in relief.
While some Christians might want to condemn the ad, I, for one, would like to express my (limited) appreciation for it, and invite my fellow Christians to do the same. Why, you ask? Let me count the ways.
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