Written by Derek J. Brown |
Sunday, October 23, 2022
A growing understanding of the gospel is the most important component in our battle with unhealthy introspection. We need to understand what God has done for us in Christ, so that we will look to Christ and his completed work for us, instead of constantly looking to ourselves.

The following is a response to an email I received a while ago.  A dear brother contacted me and asked me if I could expand on an entry I had posted. Specifically, he wanted to know if and how the Lord had helped me make progress in dealing with unhealthy introspective tendencies and spiritual depression. Below is the letter with a few slight edits for clarity.
Dear Friend,
Thank you again for your email. An inclination toward severe introspection and spiritual depression is something that has affected me since early in my Christian life, and I still find myself battling introspective tendencies and spiritual depression.
When I first came to Christ, I noticed immediately that I tended toward a severe examination of my inner life—my motives, my affections for God and for others, my faith in Christ, my holiness. Far from bringing me peace and assurance in my relationship with Christ, this propensity to question every inner-working of my heart instead brought much doubt, confusion and, inevitably, depression.
Yet, I can say that, by God’s grace, I have made significant progress in this area. As I reflect on the past several years, I can see specific means of grace that God has used to help me turn from an unhealthy preoccupation with self and sin—with the depression that inevitably follows—to a growing focus on the gospel and others. The following are several disciplines I have found to be particularly helpful in my fight against what Martin Lloyd Jones calls “morbid introspection” and the resultant spiritual depression.
A few words, first, about the following points. First, it is important to remember that overcoming introspective tendencies does not mean that we are to disregard all forms of self-examination. Sober-minded, thoughtful, doctrinally informed self-examination is required for believers (2 Cor. 13:5), and is, when conducted correctly, a means of real joy and peace.
Second, the following list includes those things I have found to be beneficial to me. It is a personal list. I hope and trust that much of what I offer here is grounded in Scripture. Nevertheless, it will be important for you to not receive this as an infallible map to spiritual health but rather as helpful suggestions as you continue to walk daily with the Lord, learning from his Word and from other counselors.
The first point (a robust understanding of the gospel), however, lays the foundation for everything else. Without this important point, our battle against morbid introspection and depression will malfunction at a fundamental level. With those two cautions in mind, let’s turn to considering the following points.
1. We need a robust understanding of the gospel.
I put this first because it is the most important. I have found that my tendency toward severe introspection is compounded to the degree that I am not seeing the gospel in all its beauty and doctrinal fullness. Specifically, this has meant understanding and embracing the important doctrines of justification, sanctification, and indwelling sin.
Justification: Scripture teaches that justification is the act of God by which he declares us wholly forgiven and righteous in his sight and on the basis of Christ’s perfect life and substitutionary death on the cross (Rom. 3:21-26; 5:1; 8:1), not upon any work that we have done or will do (Rom. 4:5; II Tim. 1:9; Tit. 3:4-7).
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It’s well understood that institutional presences like seminaries and colleges need to be protected; reputation is everything. But sometimes truth is another thing and we do need to be careful to maintain some unblinking history. The stories of the OPC and PCA are not well ordered or manicured; they were rough cut. Their men were not always angels and their institutions not always perfect.

There are a lot of secrets in the theological world. The secrets aren’t really being kept from you. They are esoteric secrets of the guild and priesthood because they are strange and hard to understand, in a different language and sit in institutional cultures. It’s not that different from the way we hire lawyers and doctors that know the procedures and a special language they’ve memorized. We would love have everyone understand but it takes a lot of work to get in on the game.
I’ve served in the OPC, the PCA and the ARP but first I was in the PCUSA. And that’s the way a life in the church often is; we are where we are because we don’t know any better at the time. We grow through different phases and end up in different places. Each church and denomination has its own theological culture but more than that its own social culture. You hear people say, “Why do the people at that church act that way?” When you know the denomination you know there are social traits of that group that are manifesting themselves in that individual church. The social culture is something you can’t learn in a book and there are unwritten rules against exposing the soft underbelly of presbyteries and synods. We understand in secret what must have been going on at those famous assemblies we read about in the histories. The meetings of the Westminster Divines. The Synod of Dort. The writing of the Nicene Creed must have been a hoot; so many intense personalities!
Coming into the OPC some 30 years ago I was introduced to a gathering of minsters and elders as, “He’s a Sproul guy…” There was immediate concern and one audible groan. That was the official inoculation at the Presbytery level against Sproul guys. I didn’t know what it meant or how deep that well went but it stuck. I didn’t understand the deep contrast between the PCA tradition and the OPC tradition and why they were often fire and water. As the years went by I found that it was true. I was indeed a Sproul guy… according to the unwritten rules that come along with being Presbyterian. And it came with invisible fences; you can’t have some free range Sproul guy walking around causing theology.
Sproul and Gerstner had recently published their celebrated, “Classical Apologetics” criticizing Van Til’s apologetic methodology. Sproul and Gerstner were mother’s milk for me; I loved them so much but I wasn’t from that hometown. As a kid I attended Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel, Hal Lindsey’s Tetelestai and John MacArthur’s Grace Community Church. Like many that grew up in eccentric theological environments I might have become an agnostic if not for an intervention. Mine was by Francis Schaeffer. I read his books and watched his videos “How Shall We Then Live” and felt that someone had meaningfully heard my serious questions about the Christian faith. Schaeffer and MacArthur led me to Sproul and that was my segue into the reformational world.
And it is a world to itself, a separate and distinct theological and cultural enclave. People tend to think they’re just joining a church but really they’re joining a church, a presbytery and a denomination that each have their own “personality”. Which presbytery and Synod or General Assembly you join will have an effect upon your spiritual well being and that of your family, so it’s good to take these things seriously. The individual church you join will not be able to shield you from the consequences of the institutional setting in which they exist.
In the reformed world there are birthright economies and deep traditions, a kind of a deep state of theological institutions and positions of influence. In the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, one is being Dutch. It’s not that you have to be Dutch to thrive but it doesn’t hurt. You have to go to the right schools, study under the right people, marry into the right families and approve of the right names. Van Til is so influential that he is written into the OPC Book of Church Order itself as presenting the uniquely OPC apologetic methodology.
But the big name in the OPC is Gresham Machen and all of us love Machen. Machen’s “Christianity and Liberalism” was formative upon me from my theological youth. But in pretty obvious ways Machen was cut from a different cloth than the later development of the institutions he created. He was a man of the conservative Princeton wing and that’s not a controversial claim. He was trying to go backwards to get forward and the birth of the OPC and Westminster Philadelphia can’t be understood without him. He was a 1920s Presbyterian conservative in an era of theological liberalism looking back at the very best of the tradition and watching its disintegration.
In 1923 when things were going to pot Machen said:
“So it is with faith. Faith is so very useful, they tell us, that we must not scrutinize its basis in truth. But, the great trouble is, such an avoidance of scrutiny itself involves the destruction of faith. For faith is essentially dogmatic.
Despite all you can do, you cannot remove the element of intellectual assent from it…. Very different is the conception of faith which prevails in the liberal Church. According to modern liberalism, faith is essentially the  same as “making Christ Master” in one’s life; at least it is by making Christ Master in the life that the welfare of men is sought. But that simply means that salvation is thought to be obtained by our own obedience to the commands of Christ. Such teaching is just a sublimated form of legalism. Not the sacrifice of Christ, on this view, but our own obedience to God’s law, is the ground of hope.
In this way the whole achievement of the Reformation has been given up, and there has been a return to the religion of the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, God raised up a man who began to read the Epistle to the Galatians with his own eyes. The result was the rediscovery of the doctrine of justification by faith. Upon that rediscovery has been based the whole of our evangelical freedom. As expounded by Luther and Calvin the Epistle to the Galatians became the “Magna Charta of Christian liberty.” Gresham Machen, “Christianity and Liberalism”.
We could go on with this in great detail but we can say this, for Machen and all of the theological conservatives of his era that faith was essentially about what you believe and that replacing that with ethics, morality and the lordship of God was the essence of liberalism.
The integration of legal obedience into our justification was exactly on point as the disease because when that shift takes place it will consume everything. Nothing of the Gospel will survive. Machen had the diagnosis but he was also aware that the golden age had passed. He looks back 100 years earlier when he says Western Civilization was still passively Christian and laments that in his day the culture was already dominated by paganism. He said this came first theologically then culturally. He started Westminster Theological Seminary to hold ground with an intent of retaking the castle.
In this of course, Sproul was part of this Machen lineage, not as being in the OPC but very self consciously from a similar perspective on the Bible as the word of God, faith as believing the Gospel and salvation as by grace alone through faith. Faith not being interpreted as good works or legal obedience to the moral law but faith taken as the condition of the covenant of grace, as distinguished and different from the nature and conditions of the covenant of works which requires perfect obedience to the law.
Keith Mathison, professor of systematic theology at Reformation Bible College writes this:
I recently watched a short video of a lecture by my mentor and former pastor Dr. R.C. Sproul… He said that the broad evangelical church has been “pervasively antinomian.”… One of the doctrinal issues that separates broadly evangelical theology from confessional Reformed theology is covenant theology… This is where Dr. Sproul’s charge of “pervasive antinomianism” arises. Reformed theology historically has a way of approaching ethical questions. This approach includes careful examination of God’s law as revealed in Scripture. It includes examination of biblical wisdom literature. It includes consideration of natural law. It includes examining how other Reformed pastors and theologians of the past dealt with similar issues. In other words, it looks at Scripture as understood within our Reformed theological and confessional heritage. As an example, if an ethical question not explicitly addressed by Scripture arises, the Reformed would first go to the biblical law and wisdom literature to find applicable biblical principles. Natural law issues would be taken into consideration. Then we would look at how our confessions address this issue. The questions and answers on the Ten Commandments in the Westminster Larger Catechism, for example, are a rich resource on ethical questions.”
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He had consecrated his life to the Master’s service; and often said if it were not for the great need in his own Territory, and his adaptability to that work, he would unhesitatingly go to the foreign field. His life was full of promise, and he looked forward with joy to winning many souls to the Savior. He had just completed a home, but the Lord called him to the place prepared for him in the Father’s house. Had he lived, no doubt but that he would have won many precious souls; but his death may be the means of leading many prodigals back to the Father’s house. “No man dieth unto himself.” “He rests from his labors and his works do follow him.”

From the very earliest days of Presbyterianism in Colonial America there were ministers involved in evangelism among their Indian neighbors. One missionary was Presbyterian minister David Brainerd who established a church for Indians near Freehold, New Jersey, but his ministry was short-lived because he died of tuberculosis when but twenty-nine years old. Jonathan Edwards’s family in Northampton cared for him during his last days and he was so impressed with Brainerd’s work that he published his journal in 1749. Brainerd’s influence on Edwards contributed to his decision to pastor the Congregational Church in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, while also serving as a missionary to the Mohican people.
Evangelism among the native nations by pastors continued but it was in 1803 that the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) appointed its first minister responsible for Indian missions. He was Gideon Blackburn who was fittingly qualified for work among the Cherokees in rugged eastern Tennessee because his ministerial gifts were enhanced by frontiersman knowledge and skills. When he preached his Bible was in hand with a musket leaning against the pulpit. It had to be challenging to show compassionate gospel ministry to the Cherokees while keeping an eye out for one’s own safety. Blackburn not only provided pastoral ministry but also operated schools for the Cherokee children.
Following the Civil War both the PCUSA and the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) operated missions in the Indian Territory in what became Oklahoma in 1907. The Territory was established in conjunction with the Indian Removal Act of May 28, 1830 that was enacted during the administration of President Andrew Jackson. Relocation between 1830 and 1850 included over a hundred thousand members of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations forced from their homes to the Territory with many dying along the way. Given the history of the Territory and resentment of these nations toward the Federal Government, the Presbyterians were challenged gaining the trust of those gathered on reservations in Oklahoma.
The PCUS experienced difficulties and setbacks with its missions in Indian Territory from about 1865 into the 1880s. The denomination determined that the best solution for handling the problems was to train native men for ministry among their own people. E. T. Thompson notes that by 1889 the PCUS had ten Indian clergy working with three missionaries to serve twenty-two churches. The greatest challenge was educating Native Americans for ordination, however, candidates from the Indian Territory most often grew up in Presbyterian schools and were better prepared for further study. Added to the challenges for missionaries was prejudice because the Little Big Horn massacre of George A. Custer’s troops in 1876 was still on people’s minds, and United States troops would continue fighting native peoples as the nineteenth century ended. Missionaries had to gain the Indians’ trust while suffering rebuke by their own people for ministering to those viewed only as enemies by many Americans.
Now, the subject turns to Joshua Bohannon. Unfortunately, the information accessed regarding his life is limited, so there are few facts to provide and some of his story is guess work. He was born in 1864 in the Choctaw Nation (lower right corner in the map), but his parents’ identities remain a mystery. It is possible he was an orphan, and his Bohannon surname was assigned to him by the orphanage, or he may have been adopted or sponsored by Bohannons.
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