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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Written by DouglasJ. Douma |
Monday, April 4, 2022
This is a valuable book which holds the interest of the reader, no small feat for a book on Presbyterian history. The value of the book comes not from any new thesis, but in its concise and informative account of American Presbyterian history.

Reformed & Evangelical across Four Centuries, The Presbyterian Story in America by Nathan P. Feldmuth, S. Donald Fortson III, Garth M. Rosell, and Kenneth J. Stewart. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2022, 364 pp.
This is a valuable book which holds the interest of the reader, no small feat for a book on Presbyterian history. The value of the book comes not from any new thesis, but in its concise and informative account of American Presbyterian history.
While this volume is subtitled “The Presbyterian Story in America,” it actually doesn’t get to America until a section on “The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England” in Chapter 5 (page 72) and finally settling on Presbyterianism on this country only in Chapter 6 (page 81). This is a substantial part of a book on “The Presbyterian Story in America” to not be on the Presbyterian story in America. But, perhaps ironically, I found this to be the best section of the volume. Naturally the story cannot just begin in America, but needs to reach back to the British Isles. In both places we see that church history is messy and, especially in the England and Scotland, much intertwined with national politics.
The connection between Presbyterianism in the Old World and that in the New World is especially valuable in the section on page 94 describing how views on subscriptionism (to the Westminster Confession) that arose in Ireland were carried over to the American scene. The debate over subscription in American Presbyterian history plays a major part in this book, and while the authors are fair to the issue, the writing, it seems to me, tends to favor the “system” or “loose” view over the “full” or “strict.”
Chapters on “Debate on the Question of Slavery,” “Presbyterians, Civil War, and Reunions,” and “The Darwinian Challenge” highlight some of the major issues of the 19th century Presbyterian churches. Chapters on 20th century issues felt more scattered and tended to veer away from the subject at hand (American Presbyterianism) as significant space was given to such diverse topics as Walter Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel, Asian immigration, and rationalism in German Universities. Certainly these are connected to American Presbyterian in some way (isn’t everything connected to everything in some way?) but the authors tended to relate the topics back more to Protestantism in general than Presbyterianism specifically.
The change (I’d argue decline) of the PCUSA’s theology in the 20th century is noted (pp. 288 and 293 for example) and the decline of the denomination’s membership is also mentioned (p. 307). But never are these two facts related. This really is the elephant in the room.
As for the PCA, I think the authors get it quite right when they contend, “The group of ministers that shaped the PCA was roughly divided into two groups: those who had a vision of the PCA as a historically confessional Presbyterian body and a larger group who found their primary identity in being evangelical Presbyterians driven by the concerns of evangelism and world missions.” (p. 301)
Appendix I titled “American Presbyterian Denominations Ranked by Membership” includes some smaller denominational like the OPC and RPCNA but does not include what some may call “micro” denominations (such as the Bible Presbyterian Church, Reformed Presbyterian Church General Assembly, Reformed Presbyterian Church – Hanover, John Knox Presbyterian Church, Covenant Presbyterian Church, Bible Presbyterian Church – Faith Presbytery, Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, American Presbyterian Church, Presbyterian Reformed Church, Evangel Presbytery, and Vanguard Presbytery). Some comment on these smaller confessional groups seems warranted in the history. As the PCUSA inevitably continues its precipitous decline (and the referenced 1.2 million PCUSA members is highly doubtable), the confessional churches, NAPARC members or not, are generally stable or growing and are likely to play a more significant role in the fifth century of American Presbyterianism.
Douglas J. Douma is a Minister in the Bible Presbyterian Church and Pastor of the Unionville, NY BPC. This article is used with permission.

The United States isn’t special because it’s a nation chosen by God; it’s special because it’s a nation that chose God. The implications are entirely biblical. Holy Scripture invites individuals from every race, tribe, nation, and language to freely enter into a personal relationship with the Savior, to live by His commandments, and worship Him as King.

If you want to know what the establishment’s all-seeing eye is maniacally fixated on, the amount of energy the corporate media orcs spend bludgeoning “Christian nationalists” provides a clue. Over the past 48 months, there have been dozens of hit jobs on the terror of “Christian nationalism”; there have been about a score of these smear pieces just this past month alone.
Their Pavlovian function is to condition Americans to associate the term with a bunch of extremists and racists who pose a Hitleresque threat to this country’s democratic institutions so that they will dutifully freak out. These articles rely on the same tactics: straw man arguments that misrepresent both Christianity and nationalism, and phony attempts to depict the movement as white.
“Christian Nationalism is an un-Christian concept,” opines the New York Times. The Christian right “is beginning to part with democratic norms,” laments NPR. “Christian nationalism has a long dark history … of white supremacy, bigotry and ties to the Nazi party,” warns MSNBC. “The movement uses Christian language to cloak sexism and hostility to Black people and non-White immigrants in its quest to create a White Christian America,” explains CNN.
The trusted media sources who sold you Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation hoax, and “transitory” inflation, are at least this time right about one thing: Christian nationalism is real, and it’s gaining traction. It’s biblical, it’s America First, but it’s not “white.” It’s not about a white supremacist “Christian Taliban” installing a theocracy, idolizing the nation, or in any way rewriting this country’s great Republican constitutional model.
In fact, Christian nationalism is entirely consistent with that model. The Declaration of Independence vests the sovereign power with the people, on loan to the government, and entrusts the state with the responsibility of safeguarding the individual’s Creator-endowed rights. In asserting that “the United Colonies are and ought to be Free and Independent States,” the signers appealed to the “Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of [their] intentions” and committed themselves to “the protection of Divine Providence.” If nationalists believe that government should prioritize the interests of the country and the people, Christian nationalists believe, as did the Founders, they should do so under the banner of God.
The United States isn’t special because it’s a nation chosen by God; it’s special because it’s a nation that chose God. The implications are entirely biblical. Holy Scripture invites individuals from every race, tribe, nation, and language to freely enter into a personal relationship with the Savior, to live by His commandments, and worship Him as King.

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