Homophobia
The term “homophobia” could be used to describe sinful attitudes or actions towards homosexuals. Its typical use, though, is to describe opposition to homosexual practices and beliefs, which is assumed to be irrational. Used in this way, it is an unfair rhetorical ploy to discredit any opposition to homosexuality.
Debates are rarely won on the battlefield of terminology, but they are frequently lost there. This is certainly the case in today’s debates over sexuality. Virtually all of the key terms are so freighted with ideological ordnance that entire regiments of exegetical and philosophical argument can be wiped out at a moment’s notice by a careless choice of words.
One word that we must handle with care is “homophobia.” Of course, this term is frequently leveled at anyone who dissents from the mainstream view affirming homosexual practices. Frequently, though, the term is also used by Christians to describe sinful attitudes or attitudes toward homosexuals. The problem is that when Christians use this term, we are either using it in a highly restricted sense that our secular culture does not recognize, or we are buying into some unbiblical assumptions about homosexuality.
The second half of the term, “phobia,” signifies an irrational fear. For instance, “arachnophobia” is an irrational fear of spiders. You might have arachnophobia if you avoid opening cupboards because years ago you found a dead spider in one. On the other hand, running away from a tarantula is evidence of healthy fear, not arachnophobia.
But what exactly does a homophobe fear? What does the “homo” refer to? It could refer to homosexual people. In this case, “homophobia” would be a useful term to describe someone’s fear of speaking to a homosexual, of stepping on their lawn, or of eating one table over from them at a restaurant.
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The Fragile Shield of Cynicism
God’s people, with all our faults and immaturities, are God’s glorious works in progress. Though our hearts are often fickle, they are also cleansed. Therefore, we don’t write one another off, but commit to one another, rejoice with one another, give grace to one another. In the process, we will certainly be disappointed, but Jesus will even more certainly be a sufficient salve for our wounds.
We’ve all been disappointed by someone. We’ve all known what it feels like to be let down. The bitter taste, the sharp sting, the nagging sense of betrayal — it hurts when people fail us. It hurts even more when the people who fail us are our friends. The deeper the relationship, the deeper the potential wounds from disappointment. David knew that deeper pain:
For it is not an enemy who taunts me — then I could bear it; it is not an adversary who deals insolently with me — then I could hide from him. But it is you, a man, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend. (Psalm 55:12–13)
In another psalm, he says, “Even my close friend in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted his heel against me” (Psalm 41:9).
As Christians, our deepest relationships are often those found and cultivated within the local church. And rightfully so, for, as the church, we are “members one of another” (Romans 12:5). Unlike all our other relationships, we are called to “love one another with brotherly affection (and) outdo one another in showing honor” (Romans 12:10). This makes church relationships uniquely deep and glorious. That means they can also be uniquely, deeply disappointing.
Do you know this by experience? If so, how have you sought to handle it?
The Way of the Cynic
One way to handle this potential for disappointment is cynicism. As a defense mechanism, cynicism markets itself as a way to avoid future disappointment by assuming everyone’s an imposter. The cynic leans on his familiar formula: “You only do (action), because you want (result).” He can attribute impure motives to just about anyone, even those in the local church.The young man volunteering in childcare is only trying to impress his girlfriend.
The older woman attending multiple Bible studies is only trying to earn the respect and admiration of her peers.
The pastor preaching God’s word is only trying to grow his church (and his salary).No one in our churches, whether in the pulpit, or on the platform, or in the pews, can evade the cynic’s accusations.
Sadly, cynicism often seems to work, at least for the moment. The one who views the whole world as a fraud is very rarely disappointed. Instead, he appears to have exchanged his potential of future disappointment for the present impression of power (“Now I’m the one who gets to criticize”), and control (“I decide if and when to trust them”), and courage (“I don’t need anyone but me”). And yet, those impressions of power, control, and courage, are only just that: counterfeits of the real things. And as counterfeits, they take more than they give.
Consider, after all, the glorious works of God that any cynic must disregard. When face-to-face with a man who has been radically transformed by God, or a woman who has found her happiness in Jesus despite all the suffering she’s endured, or a whole host of elderly believers who have held on faithfully to God since childhood — what can the cynic do but scoff?
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The Pleasure of God in Ordinary Work
The God of the universe genuinely enjoys the universe he’s made — the one we get to live and work in every day, the one he designed as a gift for his Son (Hebrews 1:2). He rejoices to see what normal humans can do in a day — and all the more so when that work rises from a heart set on him. Even when everyone else seems to completely overlook what we’ve done, he sees and he smiles, because he sees the dim, but brilliant reflection of his own work.
I wonder how many people in his day knew the apostle Paul as a guy who made and fixed tents. Surely many did. When he went to Corinth, he went to see Aquila and Priscilla, “and because he was of the same trade he stayed with them and worked, for they were tentmakers by trade” (Acts 18:3). He had been doing this for a while. He was well-acquainted with goat’s hair. He could probably tie his favorite knots without looking. He knew all the ways holes were made and how to mend them. I imagine, as it is with most trades, that some days he wished he could choose another one.
I wonder how many knew the apostle Peter as a guy who caught fish. Surely many did. Even after Jesus died and rose and appeared to his disciples, where did he go to find his friend? Where Peter had spent so many long days and longer nights, where Jesus had first found him years before — fishing (John 21:3). He knew what each kind of fish smelled like (and if he forgot, his clothes could remind him). He had been through serious storms. He knew the best place to drop an anchor and the best times to cast the nets — and he knew what it was like to lift an empty one (like that night the risen Jesus suddenly appeared).
I wonder how many knew Jesus as a guy who built tables and chairs. We know some did. When he returned to his hometown to preach, his former neighbors asked, “What is the wisdom given to him? How are such mighty works done by his hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” (Mark 6:2–3). They were surprised by his words because they had grown so used to seeing him with saws and hammers and nails. He came not only in flesh and blood, but in sweat and toil. A man of splinters and acquainted with setbacks.
Each of them altered history with their ministry (and none more than the God-man). Each of them also spent much of their life doing ordinary, even tedious work (perhaps even more ordinary than what lies before you). And each of them knew that work like theirs, done well, is anything but ordinary.
Man Goes Out to Work
We would do our work differently next year, wouldn’t we, if we could see even our ordinary work through the wider eyes of God. So where could we go to see what God sees in our work? I love the glimpses we get in the wild and wondrous world of Psalm 104.
The psalm, like so many psalms, is meant to awaken awe and joy in our souls. It opens, verse 1, “Bless the Lord, O my soul!” But this psalm takes a less-traveled road to worship. When the psalmist sees the disconnect between what he believes about God and how he feels about God, he lets his mind wander over hills and through valleys (verse 8). He walks along springs and wades into oceans (verses 10, 25). He watches for badgers and listens for birds (verses 12, 18). Creation was his chosen hymnal, with all its familiar melodies and surprising key changes.
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Secret Caucuses & the PCA
Whatever the motivations and intent behind secretive caucus groups, the reactions within the PCA follow a similar pattern: widening tribal differences, amplifying arguments between perceived camps, and breaking affinities into parties.
Every Christian ought to heed Paul’s warnings to “have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths” (1 Timothy 4:7) and not to be found in “quarreling, jealousy, anger, hostility, slander, gossip, conceit, and disorder.” (2 Corinthians 12:20). Thus, we must be especially cautious when approaching a subject such as “Secret political caucuses” in the history of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA).
My aim in this post is to present a brief history of secret political caucuses in the PCA with only what can be sourced and deduced from information that is openly accessible. Because secret organizations are secret, this topic is difficult to study, and subject to vain speculation.
In the History of the PCA, we can be certain of the existence of three major organizations that have influenced the creation and the history of the PCA up to the present day. Here are the relevant criteria for evaluating whether or not an organization is a secret political caucus:confidentiality in communication between participants,
confidentiality either over the group’s existence, its nature, its membership, and/or over the matters and strategy discussed to achieve its polity-related goals,
an ideological ethos or goal,
an agenda to accomplish its goals by staffing denominational agencies and committees, and
a strategy to accomplish those goals by coordination of votes in the courts and committees of the Church.We begin our study with an organization that has influenced how people in the PCA have viewed such groups Though antedating the PCA itself, this organization was undeniably a catalyst for the creation of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA).
The Fellowship of St. James
The Fellowship of St. James was a secret organization that functioned in the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS – the old Southern Presbyterian church that was the origin of the PCA) during the middle of the 20th Century. Most secondary sources relay the following basic details: The Fellowship was the brainchild of Ernest Trice Thompson, a professor at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. This organization was committed to broadening the theological tent of the PCUS, to working more ecumenically in the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches, and to eventually merge with the more liberal Northern Presbyterian Church.[1]
In 1963, the Fellowship was revealed and a group named the “Concerned Presbyterians” organized against it, publishing their first “Bulletin,” raising the alarm:
“Very few laymen are aware of the fact that over the last 15 years there has been a secret organization in our Church working quietly behind the scenes to gain control of the political machinery of our denomination. This group, composed mostly of ministers, called themselves the Fellowship of St. James. This relatively small but determined group influences and seeks to control the various agencies of the courts of our Church. In recent years they have succeeded in electing enough men of their choosing to enable them to control many of the important committees of the various Church courts and to have effective majorities on the governing bodies of many of the boards, agencies, and other institutions of the church.”[2]
In his history of the PCA, Sean Lucas reproduces the counter conclusion of Dr. Peter Hobbie, a professor at Presbyterian College and defender of Dr. Thompson, that the Fellowship was a dinner party and “they were largely focused on the work of the Presbyterian of the South, which later became the PO [ed: Presbyterian Outlook]. That they discussed denomination politics there is little doubt. But their work was no secret – it was evident in the editorial policy of the PO.”[3] PCA Historian Frank J. Smith received a correspondence from Ernest Trice Thompson himself insisting “We were all active churchmen, but we didn’t draw up goals or plans for the church courts.”[4]
So was the Fellowship of St. James not a secret political caucus? Certainly, since we know about it today, the Fellowship of St. James did not remain secret about its existence. However, it undoubtedly began in secret, its membership was not public, the methods of the group were not publicized, and history only knows about it because it was revealed in 1963 and publicly recorded in the Bulletins of the Concerned Presbyterians. That a group called “The Fellowship of Concern” would form later with many of the same actors, to do what the Fellowship of St. James was said to do in private is also curious. And while they worked in and were largely in agreement with the “Presbyterian of the South,” which became the “Presbyterian Outlook,” the Fellowship was suggested as the means to accomplish goals in a confidential and organized way apart from the activities of the Presbyterian Outlook. Ultimately, Frank Smith notes: “Half a century from now when closed archives are opened the exact nature of the group will be more obvious.”[5]
We see with the Fellowship of St. James another feature of such organizations in Presbyterian History, and that is the cross-pollination between the group and public faces. This cross-pollination becomes especially evident once the existence of the secret group has been made public. After the Fellowship of St. James was made public, soon a public face named the “Fellowship of Concern” enabled a measure of legitimacy for members who desired a public voice in addition to the private planning and coordination in the courts of the church.
The Concerned Presbyterians were in turn denounced as alarmist, and were condemned by PCUS presbyteries in Tennessee and Texas. [citation needed] The Concerned Presbyterians were easier targets for formal critique, largely due to being public with their concerns. Meanwhile, while the Fellowship of St. James remained shrouded in much secrecy. This fact frustrated many conservatives who believed at certain points they were the majority, yet they did not control policy or the polity of the PCUS, and their protests against such machinations of a secret group were met with condemnations of their concerns rather than investigations into the secret group.
The Concerned Presbyterian response to an organized secret society was to organize and leave the PCUS on the belief that the administrative machinery of the denomination was hopelessly lost to a small but well-organized caucus. Eventually, Concerned Presbyterians would make up one of the four major groups founding the PCA
The Vision Caucus—“Partisanship in the PCA”
The first two decades of the PCA’s existence were not without strong disagreement between elders in the Church. There is little evidence of formal organized factions in the first fifteen years of the Church’s history. Soon, however, two competing visions for the PCA emerged. Some elders developed concerns that the denomination was not consistently living up to its confessional positions. Others believed the PCA’s original goal was to be a big tent of conservative and orthodox evangelical Christians who allow for a diversity of ministry approaches (and a certain latitude of theological conviction).
In 1987, Founding Fathers Paul Settle and Jim Baird invited fifty people in the PCA to spend time together to discuss and understand “genuine differences.”[6] The event was not to be repeated, and instead many “big steeple people” formed a new Caucus that Frank Smith called “The Vision 2000 Caucus,”[7] Paul Settle termed the “Vision Caucus,”[8] and others have referred to it as the “Original Vision Caucus.” Participation was by “invitation only.”[9]
Paul Settle was obviously distressed that the efforts at open discussion were rejected for secret politicking, as he remarked in his History of the PCA: “Partisanship reared its ugly head.” The level of direction and organization was not known until 1991, when the Presbyterian Advocate printed a copy of the Caucus’s slate of candidates for agencies and committees in the PCA.[10] It became evident now that the Vision Caucus, in the words of Settle, “composed and circulated a list that identified some men on the Nominating Committee’s slate as undesirable. Then they arranged to have their own picks placed in opposition to those they deemed unfit.”[11]
While many knew that the Vision Caucus existed, the methods, membership, and efforts were secret, giving it enough in common with the Fellowship of St. James to prompt conservative elders to form a public group in response. This group was conspicuously named “Concerned Presbyterians.” The name was obviously chosen to assert the parallel these men saw between the Fellowship of St. James and the Vision Caucus.
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