Though Gen Z-ers have all but replaced Millennials as the dazzling object of scrutiny and cultural analysis, it’s not because Millennials are no longer struggling. Rates of addiction, depression, burnout, and loneliness are all disproportionately high among the demographic born between 1981 and 1996. Since 2013, in fact, Millennials have seen a 47 percent increase in major depression diagnoses.
For their part, evangelical Millennials are in a season of deconstruction and deconversion, or reeling from the many influential and high profile leaders that have recently either left the faith or fallen from grace. Disillusionment is now a dominant feature of this group that was once convinced it could change the world.
In his influential book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt uses a rider and an elephant to illustrate moral psychology. The rider represents intellectual reasoning. The elephant represents immediate perceptions, intuitions and instincts. Most modern people, Haidt argues, think that their own moral frameworks are derived from objective, rational reasoning. In other words, it’s the rider who tells the elephant where to go and what to eat. In reality, however, moral decisions primarily come from our gut instincts, and we use intellectual reasoning to justify those decisions. Or, back to our metaphor, the elephant wants bananas, and the rider explains why bananas are good after the decision to get bananas has already been made.
If Haidt is right, we can better understand the beauty and power of Christianity. To borrow his metaphor, Christ speaks to both the rider and the elephant. “Like newborn babies,” the Apostle Peter tells us, “crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.” Christianity is not only ultimately true, it is also ultimately satisfying. It is satisfying, in fact, because it is true.
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That the whole testimony of Scripture stands against those who would make homosexual lust an acceptable trait of ministers. For Scripture is uniform in denouncing everything to do with homosexual desire or deeds as sinful, and it is unthinkable that anyone whose thought was formed solely by Scripture would ever conclude that something like Revoice is a proper endeavor of the church, or of any who claim Christ as their Lord.

[Read Part One and Part Two]

That the Presbyterian Church in America has been deaf to the frequent exhortation to be watchful and discerning. Already the first stages of a slide into infidelity are being entered, and yet we seem blind to the frequent exhortation to not be deceived by those who, with smooth words and many assurances of good intention, yet labor to “pervert the grace of our God into sensuality” (Jude 4) and to make acceptable all manner of immorality with “empty words” (Eph. 5:6).
That we show a willful and remarkable ignorance of history and of the course of other denominations on this matter. Every church which has tolerated homosexual sin has reduced its size by driving away the faithful. The Presbyterian Church in the United States of America is an example, as is the United Methodist Church, which is actively splitting because of this matter. Also, the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, the Brethren Church, the Disciples of Christ, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Moravian Church, the Christian Reformed Church, and the Reformed Church in America.
That our denomination risks replicating the career of the Church of Scotland: faithful and zealous at first, but soon overrun with a refined worldliness similar to that of our wider society.
That the world interprets matters very differently than the church. The knowledge that the Presbyterian Church in America allows the ordination of men who publicly identify themselves as homosexual is not likely to impress or please the world, which will be satisfied with nothing less than absolute defection from our beliefs and a complete embrace of its own.
That in an age in which people are conspicuous for the haste, superficiality, and inaccuracy of their judgments, it is likely that the fact of same-sex attracted Presbyterian ministers will not be met with more conversions of those that are ensnared in homosexual sin. It is feared that it instead makes their repentance less likely because it sends them a confused message. For on the one hand, we say that homosexual behavior is damning sin, and yet on the other we permit at least the desire for it in our church’s leaders. The unbeliever can scarcely be blamed if he interprets this to mean that the Presbyterian Church in America is confused in its teachings and therefore unworthy of being regarded as credible.
That there is an active campaign to normalize homosexual sin in the church, and that we are witnessing the first stages in the controversies surrounding such things as the Revoice conferences.
That Satan acts in this matter, as in every other, with cunning, patiently moving in steps and always disguising his position as good (2 Cor. 11:14-15). His first move has been to make acceptable the thought of what was previously unthinkable. Next was to make acceptable the utterance of what was in previous times unmentionable. We may expect future stages in which he gradually changes the question from one of the permissibility of those with same-sex attraction serving as ministers to one in which blatant sin is accepted totally.
That false teachers are not open and forthright but secretive and deceptive. As Peter says, it is the method of false teachers to “secretly bring in destructive heresies” (2 Pet. 2:1). Jude says of false teachers that they “crept in unnoticed” (Jude 4) and our Lord says of such people that they “come to you in sheep’s clothing” (Matt. 7:11).
That they who think they stand should take heed lest they fall (1 Cor. 10:12). As homosexual (and other) sin has found gradual acceptance in many other denominations until its goodness has become an unquestionable dogma, and until the powers of the church are used rather to silence sin’s critics than its proponents, so also is it possible for the Presbyterian Church in America to fall in this matter. We would be fools to imagine that we are inherently or incontrovertibly faithful, or to imagine we will persevere where others – including those with whom we have previously been associated – have fallen.
That the course of the acceptance of homosexuality has nowhere halted itself. In society it immediately yielded to the push to normalize yet worse abominations. In those denominations where it has been accepted it did not content itself with the stage at which it was simply tolerable or simply a question of temptation or celibate experience, but demanded – and seems everywhere to have received – a full acceptance in time. Sin advances until it dominates absolutely all that it touches. It can be resisted and beaten, but it nowhere checks itself.
That there are things which disqualify one from ministry – as age, sex, length of time as a believer, or lack of the needed gifts – which are not themselves sinful.
That there are sins, temptations, and past misdeeds which unfit one for ministry, because their association with the church’s leaders would bring scandal on the church.
That homosexual lust is one such disqualifying temptation and sin, for if acted upon it would destroy the church’s credibility in this matter and give much occasion to infidels to blaspheme.
That homosexual lust is thus disqualifying is proved by Scripture forbidding office to those whose course of life is unchaste, as for example he who is not a ‘man of one woman’ (1 Tim. 3:2, 12; Titus 1:6).
That such lust is disqualifying is seen also in that Scripture denies office to those that have especially dangerous sins of the heart. Scripture says that elders must be above reproach and forbids office to the greedy or arrogant (Titus 1:7) because these sins, though ones of internal disposition, yet tend to show themselves as scandalous external deeds. So also with sexual temptation, which is notoriously voracious and destructive of the personal holiness that one must have if he is to minister to Christ’s church (1 Pet. 2:11). If common sins such as arrogance disqualify, how much more sexual perversions.
That same-sex lust unfits one for ministry can be seen in that Scripture forbids office to those whose external sins are of a less scandalous character, such as those that fail to show hospitality (1 Tim. 3:3).
That homosexual attraction is disqualifying can be seen also in this, that Scripture presents homosexuality as being of a worse severity of sin than many others, a result of God removing the restraints of civil righteousness as a punishment for rank impiety (Rom. 1:24, 26-27). It is experienced in societies that have fallen into utter depravity (as Sodom or Gibeah) that are ripe for the calamitous judgment of God. Would we draw such things near to our own denomination?
That homosexual sin is not the only sin mentioned as proof of severe societal decline (Rom. 1:21-32), and that some of the other sins Paul mentions (as gossip, Rom. 1:29) have a lamentable currency among professing believers, in no way means the church should soften its message about the depravity of sexual perversion. Rather, it ought to be more diligent in declaring with appropriate vigor the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27) as regards the evils of all sins.
That the whole testimony of Scripture stands against those who would make homosexual lust an acceptable trait of ministers. For Scripture is uniform in denouncing everything to do with homosexual desire or deeds as sinful, and it is unthinkable that anyone whose thought was formed solely by Scripture would ever conclude that something like Revoice is a proper endeavor of the church, or of any who claim Christ as their Lord.
That the testimony of the church is against those who would have ministers with perverse sexual desires. For it is everywhere the case that the church has regarded homosexual sin as shameful and especially depraved and has treated it with ardent and uncompromising disapproval. There was no church council that had the character of Revoice in the ancient or medieval church, and those groups that permitted sexual indecency (as antinomians or the Adamites) were roundly condemned.
That the testimony of the church and of Scripture being uniformly against even the slightest acceptance of anything to do with any perverse sexuality, any endeavor to that end is inspired by external sources.

Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Simpsonville, S.C.

Written by Ben C. Dunson |
Friday, May 19, 2023
Politics is just as self-evidently important from a biblical perspective as it is the case that the Bible is not a detailed manual for political action. If the Bible speaks to living together with others in society (which it does) it speaks to politics.

The Bible is not a political manual, which is obvious on a moment’s reflection. Many Christians—including influential pastors and scholars—emphasize this today. They are not wrong to do so in the abstract, although there are two fundamentally divergent paths that are usually taken once this platitude leaves one’s lips. Some say (or at least live as if it is true) that because the Bible is not a political handbook Christians should not get involved in politics; their lives should be about spiritual things.
Others, although agreeing that the Bible wasn’t written to give us a detailed blueprint for political action today, go in a completely different direction: Christians should indeed care about politics because the state is an important divine institution in the world. Recognizing that the Bible isn’t written to provide detailed instructions for things like precise tax rates, exact immigration quotas, percentage of GDP to be spent on infrastructure, military strategy, and so on, they turn instead to arguments from natural law, the voice of conscience, and even simple observations about governance derived through trial and error over many centuries.
I am firmly in this latter group. And yet I still recognize that the Bible has much to say about the state, which God created for the good of humanity. Scripture does this in a variety of ways. In the next article I will work through what I take to be the building blocks of a Christian approach to politics. I’ll do so by looking at God’s purposes for the world as seen in the opening chapters of Genesis, where we encounter man’s divine mandate to rule over the world God made.
But for now we must begin with a definition of politics. I take mine from the great seventeenth century Protestant political theorist Johannes Althusius (Politica 1.1-3):
Politics is the art of associating men for the purpose of establishing, cultivating, and conserving social life among them. Whence it is called ‘symbiotics.’ The subject matter of politics is therefore association, in which the symbiotes (= “people who live together”), pledge themselves each to the other, by explicit or tacit agreement, to mutual communication of whatever is useful and necessary for the harmonious exercise of social life. The end of political ‘symbiotic’ man is holy, just, comfortable, and happy symbiosis (= “living together”), a life lacking nothing either necessary or useful.
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