Harvard, Princeton, and Yale were originally founded as seminaries. They are seminaries once again. The doctrine they embrace is both insecure and oppressive in its prohibition of insiders and outsiders from pursuing free inquiry. Rather than wrestle with hard questions about human dignity, individual agency, and speech, many in the Ivy League seem poised to double down on fanaticism. Cults tend to excuse their failures: The world is ending, but our mystic math was a little off. As this crisis unfolds, America’s elite academics are tinkering with their doctrinal formulas. Rather than abandon their theology, they’re attempting to rejigger the charts and reweight the numerology.

In the spring of 1994, the top executives of the seven largest tobacco companies testified under oath before Congress that nicotine is not addictive. Nearly 30 years later, Americans remember their laughable claims, their callous indifference, their lawyerly inability to speak plainly, and the general sense that they did not regard themselves as part of a shared American community. Those pampered executives, behaving with such Olympian detachment, put the pejorative big in Big Tobacco.
Last week, something similar happened. Thirty years from now, Americans will likely recall a witness table of presidents—representing not top corporations in one single sector, but the nation’s most powerful educational institutions—refusing to speak plainly, defiantly rejecting any sense that they are part of a “we,” and exhibiting smug moralistic certainty even as they embraced bizarrely immoral positions about anti-Semitism and genocide.
Despite the stylistic similarity of these two images, they had a substantive distinction. Yes, both sets of presidents sat atop sectors experiencing a collapse of public trust. Higher education commanded the confidence of 57 percent of Americans a mere eight years ago, but only 36 percent of Americans by this summer, and a steeper decline is likely coming as a consequence of the grotesqueries of the past two months. And yes, both sets of testimonies—of the tobacco executives, and the elite-education executives—revealed a deep moral decline inside their respective cultures. But here’s a difference: The tobacco executives were lying, and subsequent legal discovery showed how extensive their understanding of nicotine was. The three university presidents, however—with their moral confusion on naked display—were likely not lying; instead, we saw a set of true believers in a new kind of religion.
It is important to note that the three presidents who testified before Congress—Liz Magill, who subsequently resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania; Sally Kornbluth, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Claudine Gay, of Harvard University—didn’t open themselves up to perjury charges. Instead, they revealed themselves as having drunk the Kool-Aid of a new and cultlike worldview. Along with so much of higher education, especially outside the hardest of sciences, they have become acolytes of a shallow new theology called “intersectionality.” This is neither a passing fad nor something that normies can roll our eyes at and ignore. As Andrew Sullivan presciently predicted a mere six years ago, the tenets of this all-encompassing ideology have quickly spilled beyond trendy humanities departments at top-30 universities, and its self-appointed priestly class tried tirelessly to enforce its ideology.
At root, intersectionality teaches that the relative victim status of various groups is the deepest truth, and this framework must drive our interpretation of both natural and built reality. Truth, moral claims, beauty, dignity, the explanatory value of a research insight—all of these must be subjugated to a prior determination of the historical power or powerlessness of certain sociological categories. This victimology decrees that the world, and every institution therein, must be divided by the awakened into categories of oppressors and oppressed. Immutable group identities, rather than the qualities, hopes, and yearnings of individuals, are the keys to unlocking the power structures behind any given moment: All the sheep and goats must be sorted.
The bullying certainty of this belief system is indeed boring, but that is not to say that every move is predictable. For instance, depending on their skin tone, sexual orientation, or religious views, tenured Ivy Leaguers earning five times the median American income may be categorized as oppressed. Conversely, depending on their skin tone, sexual orientation, or religious views, janitors at Walmart may be considered, within the intersectionality matrix, to be irredeemable oppressors.
By way of disclosure: I am a university president turned United States senator turned university president again. The institution I now lead, the University of Florida, faces all sorts of challenges, and Florida is the site of important battles about the responsibilities of academia to our society. As a public university, our incredibly talented and dedicated faculty aim to provide an elite education that promotes resilience and strength in our students so that they are tough enough, smart enough, and compassionate enough to engage big ideas in a world where people will always disagree.
Growing up, I idolized Martin Luther King Jr., who championed universal human dignity with clear-cut moral authority. From memory, writing in a jail cell in Birmingham, he synthesized, refined, and applied the Western canon’s greatest philosophers, from Socrates to Abraham Lincoln, to America’s predicament. While damning the original sin of white supremacy, he consistently offered hope that our country could overcome injustice with love. It’s gut-wrenching to think that America’s greatest civil-rights leader—one of the greatest Americans in the country’s entire history—would have his “Letter From Birmingham Jail” criticized and dismissed for citing only dead white males if it were written today. Too much of elite academia cares little for universal human dignity, leaves no space for forgiveness, and exhibits no interest in shared progress.
Today, free will, individual agency, forgiveness, personal improvement, and healthy cultural cross-pollination are all obliterated by omnipotent determinisms. This is why academics at the Smithsonian created a graphic for children that portrayed America as an irredeemably racist society, asserting that “rugged individualism,” “the nuclear family,” and “hard work” are “internalized … aspects of white culture.” The message is clear: Success is always a privilege given, never the result of hard work; virtues such as self-reliance are unattainable for minorities.
These elites believe that the world must be remade. Since the beginning of time, oppressors—the “privileged”—ran roughshod over the oppressed or marginalized. Now oppressors must be brought low to atone for history’s sins. It is a faith without guardrails, without grace, and certainly without reconciliation. It requires a life of moral struggle against the devil and the world, but with no eschatology of hope. There is no heaven coming here.
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There are indeed many reasons to continue to be hopeful, optimistic, and engaged in the work of the PCA courts. The PCA continues to move slowly but steadily in a direction that reflects greater faithfulness and integrity regarding our confessional commitments and Reformed distinctives. 

The PCA turns a half century this year, and the 50th General Assembly meets in Memphis, Tenn. June 12-16. Numerous elders (e.g. TEs Jon Payne and the late Harry Reeder) have noted the fifty-year mark is a crucial milestone for faithfulness as a Church. Fittingly, the PCA has been engaged in a lengthy family discussion over the last few years over what sort of communion we will be.
Will the PCA be a “big tent” with wide latitude regarding what it means to be “Reformed” and “Presbyterian” (as in David Cassidy’s blog here) or will she be a house, with well-defined, clearly demarcated boundaries of what is in and out, as RE Brad Isbell articulates in his helpful overview?
The Scripture uses both analogies to describe the Church:
Enlarge the place of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes. For you will spread abroad to the right and to the left, and your offspring will possess the nations and will people the desolate cities.(Isaiah 54:2–3)
That sounds like the design of the Church is to be a “big tent,” although perhaps without the clowns who normally populate such. But then again, in the New Covenant, we are exhorted not to long for a big tent:
We have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat.(Hebrews 13:10)
and
As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.(1 Peter 2:4–5)
The PCA is nonetheless trending in the direction not of a “big tent,” but of a distinctively Reformed communion committed to the historic expression of Presbyterianism articulated in the Westminster Standards. In an interview with TE George Sayour, the legendary churchman TE O. Palmer Robertson reflected on this trajectory during his time in the PCA since 1973 and how the PCA has steadily moved in a more solidly Reformed direction.
1. The State of the PCA
The founding generation of the PCA envisioned her being a confessionally Reformed and Presbyterian faith communion:
…committed without reservation to the Reformed Faith as set forth in the Westminster Confession and Catechisms. It is our conviction that the Reformed faith is not sectarian, but an authentic and valid expression of Biblical Christianity…We particularly wish to labor with other Christians committed to this theology.1
Over the last half-century, the PCA has indeed moved decidedly in that direction in terms of worship, polity, and piety. The founding generation of the PCA, largely educated in the institutions of the old PCUS, may not have had a rich theologically Reformed foundation, but it is clear they desired the new denomination to develop in that area and to raise up ministers who had such a foundation and could impart such commitments in the new denomination. Institutions such as Reformed Theological Seminary and fathers such as TE Morton Smith would instill in the first generation of men ordained in the PCA a love for the Reformed Faith and a desire for the nations to come to Christ to worship Him in Spirit and Truth.
This progress has been slow and not without regression or exception. But the PCA is becoming more distinctively Reformed with each passing decade.
A. Review of 2022 Overtures
TE Scott Edburg along with RE Joshua Torrey have maintained a helpful spreadsheet tracking each of the 49th General Assembly’s overtures. What follows is a brief overview of some of the most significant results of the last year.
The Character Overtures (Overtures 15, 29 & 31)
To the 50th General Assembly will come a number of overtures approved by the presbyteries for final ratification. While the presbyteries approved Overtures 29 and 31, which both serve to strengthen character requirements for ordination, the presbyteries failed to approve Overture 15, which would have added this clear and concise statement to the Book of Church Order:
Men who describe themselves as homosexual, even those who describe themselves as homosexual and claim to practice celibacy by refraining from homosexual conduct, are disqualified from holding office in the Presbyterian Church in America.
While this amendment passed nearly 60% of PCA presbyteries, it failed to reach the necessary 2/3 majority to enable final ratification by the 50th Assembly. Even if Overtures 29 and 31 are ratified by this Assembly, there will still be no clear standard barring men dominated by unnatural lusts from ordination. A few “do-overtures” will be considered by the 2023 General Assembly in an attempt to spare the PCA further discord resulting from the new ideas brought in by some in Saint Louis and elsewhere who dwell in the bulwarks of nuance and ambiguity.
The Jurisdiction Overture (Overture 8)
A valiant effort was made last year by Houston Metro Presbytery to codify how scandal in one presbytery or congregation may be addressed by the wider Church. Currently the language of the constitution is vague regarding how a higher court may intervene in a scandal within a lower court, which has allowed a number of men to avoid judicial scrutiny of views and practices that are clearly deviant.
Critics of the overture at last year’s Assembly expressed concern that such a change to clarify the PCA Constitution would enable “witch hunts.”
Except for Overtures 8 and 15, all others sent to the presbyteries for approval received overwhelming support and will likely be ratified by the Assembly in Memphis.
B. Signs of and Challenges to Confessional Health in the PCA
There are numerous reasons to be optimistic regarding the trajectory and continued fidelity of the PCA. Since 2019, the Assembly’s acts and deliverances have generally tended to strengthen our commitment to historic Christianity and distinctively Reformed Presbyterianism. But congregations must continue to send their full complements to General Assembly in order to participate in the work of the Church and contend for the faith against those who would broaden or weaken our constitutional commitments.
Good Faith or System Subscription?
Long ago, the PCA wisely determined she would not require full subscription to every proposition of the Westminster Standards by her officers. Instead the PCA enshrined in her constitution what has come to be called “Good Faith Subscription” (GFS). In GFS, all a candidate’s differences must be submitted to the Church court for assessment and it is expected – in good faith – that the man has no other differences with the system of doctrine other than those few that he has articulated. The Presbytery then must determine whether those differences are acceptable and whether/how they impact the rest of the system.
GFS is not loose subscription or “System Subscription” in which a wide variety of differences may be held, practiced, and taught. In GFS, a man’s stated differences are presumed not to impact the rest of the system and that he is in agreement with everything else within the Standards except where has he has narrowly stated a difference. GFS is one of the more strict forms of confessional subscription.
In “System Subscription,” a man simply states his agreement with the system, but in there is no necessary check or examination to ensure the system the man claims to hold actually conforms to the system of doctrine contained in the Westminster Standards. It is important to remember, the Westminster Standards are themselves a system and to disagree with or reject one portion often results in a series of other disagreements, since much of the Westminster Standards are interdependent.2
Recently there seems to be a blurring of the distinctions between GFS and System Subscription by some within the PCA, but the two are not the same. In his farewell / sabbatical blog, SemperRef editor TE Travis Scott inaccurately equated System Subscription with the Good Faith Subscription required by the PCA’s constitution:
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There is no statute of limitations on being an encouragement. Each day think of someone who might need a supportive word—perhaps a note, a visit, a phone call. Don’t wait then. Do it. Satan never stops his attempts to discourage the people of God; therefore, we should never stop in our work of comforting and encouraging and exhorting.

But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. — Hebrews 3:13

In this verse, the writer of Hebrews is encouraging the church to be the church. That is, he is telling us something of what it means to live in a community with brothers and sisters in Christ. There is a responsibility that is laid upon all of us once we join the family of faith. Here we learn what it is, when we’re to do it, and why it’s so important.
The What of Exhorting One Another
First, the “what.” The Greek word translated “exhort” (parakleite) is the word of strong encouragement. Maybe you recognize it from the word Paraclete, an older term referring to the Holy Spirit and referred to by Jesus as “the comforter” or “the helper” (John 14:16). This word is often used in secular Greek literature of the naval or military commander putting strength into his sailors or soldiers.
Thus, believers are expected to exercise a daily, cheering ministry to other Christians. We are not meant to be a burden: nitpicking at all the things we think people are doing wrong or could be doing better. We are not meant to sit in judgment over others either. We are called to be cheerleaders. We are to mimic those traits of the Holy Spirit and be a help and an encouragement.
The When of Exhorting One Another
In his commentary The Message of Hebrews, Raymond Brown writes,

It is never fitting for believers to adopt the depressing pessimistic outlook of a godless world. (p. 88)

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