I am part of something much bigger and much grander than myself. It is when we get our eyes off of these spiritual truths that we can become discouraged and depressed. Satan will try to convince us that we are all alone, that no one knows we even exist, and that no one cares if we live or die. It is during these times especially that we need to keep in mind the heavenly parade. We are marching right now in it. It may not seem that way. But one day we will see just how real this has been. 

Parades have sort of fallen out of favour in recent times in the West. Sure, we still have some more modern and trendy versions such as a homosexual pride parade that some folks will get into. But the older, more traditional parades that celebrated things like our fallen soldiers and historical milestones are less important today it seems.
Memorial Day parades or Fourth of July parades (at least in America) were once largely attended events. We used to love to celebrate and commemorate great events and important achievements. But today patriotism, heroism and related virtues are now on the wane. At best, we are now prone instead to celebrate perversions and debauchery.
Thus June is supposed to be “Pride Month”. Well, I for one will certainly not be celebrating that. As some memes making the rounds have pointed out, the first pride event was when Satan fell from heaven, or when God rained fire on Sodom and Gomorrah. I do not want to be on the wrong side of history here – that is, God’s history.
My thoughts on public processions and celebrations of key events are because of a dream I had last night. If you don’t mind, I can share parts of it here. I was in a large, multi-roomed building, and I saw a lengthy group of people parading through the hallways and rooms. Soon it was outside, and I had joined in with it. It seemed to have been a group of believers, perhaps celebrating something like Easter.
Upon awakening it occurred to me that there has always been one long parade of God’s people. It was there in Old Testament times. And certainly since Christ came we have had a continuous, non-stop parade of Christians throughout human history.
There has never been a time in the past 2000 years when the light of Christ and those bearing witness to him have been fully extinguished. There have always been God’s people celebrating the great things of God. And just as I joined in with this already-in-progress march in my dream, so too, all of God’s people are part of this ongoing event.
And since I am now reading again in the book of Job, I am reminded that he too was a part of this massive parade. He too had a role to play in all this. He may not have seen the bigger picture, but he was one of the millions of participants, bearing witness to God and his Kingdom.
One of course thinks here of Hebrews 11. We call this the ‘Hall of Faith’. It speaks of so many great heroes of faith who have gone before, people such as Noah or Abraham or Moses or Gideon or David. Even the pagan prostitute Rahab who protected some Israelites is included in this list of great men and women of God.
Indeed, in the genealogy of Jesus mentioned in Matthew 1 we find three foreign women included: Tamar, Rahab and Ruth. And my point is, if there is a heavenly list of all God’s people throughout the ages, my name will be included there – as well yours, if you have let Christ give you newness of life and forgiveness of sins. So many people…
In fact, before I fell asleep last night and had my dream, I was thinking of ALL the people who have ever lived on earth. Right now there are 8 billion on this planet. How many more were around over the centuries? What I found to be so amazing is that if God knows everything about me, if he knows me by name, if he is intimately aware of my every thought and action, this is true of every other person who has ever lived.
That alone should do our heads in. What an amazing God we have who knows in exhaustive detail everything there is to be known about every single human being ever born. Yet he treats each one of us as if we were the only person on earth. He is able to give us individually his complete and undivided attention. And he does that with everyone!
So if you are thinking that no one knows about you or cares about you, well, there is at least one person who does: God. And if you are one of those people who feels alone, unloved, unwanted and unknown, be aware that there are so many others as well who might feel this way.
As mentioned, I am back in the book of Job, and early on it really struck me to read what he said soon after God allowed him to be afflicted so very greatly. Consider just a few passages:
“Why did I not die at birth,come out from the womb and expire?” (3:11)
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Any paradigm of “care” that does not manifest itself in encouraging one’s brother to pursue comprehensive, Spirit-wrought change is caring only in name. Calling on a fellow believer earnestly to desire and actively to seek change at the level of sexual desire is not abusive; it is our duty. As believers we are called to hate our sin, turn from it to God, with full purpose of, and endeavor after, new obedience (WSC Q. 87) and to call on our brothers and sisters in Christ to do the same.2 Repentance unto life is the pulse of God’s people individually and corporately. No desire, no matter how consistent or persistent, is exempt from Scripture’s call to mortification and vivification.

Since the inaugural meeting of Revoice in 2018 the Reformed and evangelical world has been holding its breath wondering, “Where will all of this lead?” In four years we have seen three successive Revoice conferences with the fourth forthcoming, hotly debated BCO amendments with more to be debated at the 2022 PCA General Assembly, and the recent decision of the Standing Judicial Commission concerning Missouri Presbytery’s investigation of Memorial Presbyterian Church. All of these together suggest that matters will get worse before they get better. Only the sovereign God knows exactly how everything will fall out, but we now know where the most prominent figure of the Revoice movement wants to see things go. In the concluding chapters of Still Time to Care, Greg Johnson offers his vision for the church’s future: he wants us to pick up the ball that we dropped forty years ago and return to the “paradigm of care” that he sees exemplified in the ministries of C. S. Lewis, Billy Graham, Francis Schaeffer, and Richard Lovelace (216). The “paradigm of care” is Johnson’s antidote to the “paradigm of cure” that undergirded the ex-gay movement of the last 50 years. To be sure, the ex-gay movement was fraught with serious theological and methodological errors from the start but, as one examines Johnson’s “paradigm of care,” one will find a host of other issues that will do more harm than good to the one who adopts it. For the sake of our sheep, I encourage pastors to consider different paradigm, a third way that I believe better adheres to the teaching of Scripture: a paradigm of change.
“But wait, change? That’s the same empty promise of the ex-gay movement. They tried to change peoples’ sexual orientation before, but it was an utter failure. Why turn back to a defunct paradigm like that?”  In Johnson’s eyes, the language of “change” has become so poisoned by the ex-gay movement that calls to change are all but off limits. In fact, he goes so far as to call them abusive.
While Exodus in the United States is largely buried and dead, change-focused ministries continue to exist. And in much of the world, the ex-gay movement is still very much alive. As we ask what a path to care looks like for gay people who become Christians, we have to confront the ways the ex-gay movement is still moving about undead among us. The relics of the ex-gay movement continue to foster emotionally unsafe and even abusive spaces within conservative Christianity. Any path to care must root out the emotional abuse within our churches and ministries (190).
To be sure, if the only change that is pursued is a change in one’s sexual orientation, that is setting the bar for holiness woefully, woefully low.1 I am not here to advocate for mere behavioral change as was common among the purveyors of the ex-gay movement. As Christians we are called to aim higher and seek change that is deeper— change at the level of our hearts, affections, and yes, even our sexual desires. I agree, by and large, with Dr. Johnson’s assessment of the ex-gay movement and find many of its measures misguided and some even abusive. It pains me to hear that anyone would be told they must not be a Christian if they continue to struggle with a particular besetting sin. This represents an unfortunate and painful chapter in the history of American evangelicalism and it is one to which I hope we never return.
Johnson’s reaction, however, to the excesses of the ex-gay movement and its promise of orientation change inflicts a new damage all its own: it cuts the hope for meaningful change at the knees. Johnson writes:
Lewis, Schaeffer, Graham, and Stott viewed the homosexual condition not as a cognitive behavioral challenge to be cured but as an unchosen orientation with no reliable cure in this life (32; emphasis added).
What is a paradigm of care?…Be honest about the relative fixity of sexual orientation for most people (33; emphasis added).
In this positive gospel vision for gay people and the church, we see a focus not on curing homosexuality but on caring for people. We see that the locus of hope lies in the coming age. This present age is not for cure but for care (35; emphasis added).
There were some individuals who experienced profound shifts in their sexual preference. Jill Rennick recalls several cases that could be deemed orientation change. She counts eight women and one man whose stories she is confident pan out. I spoke with one woman, named Debra, who has experienced a significant shift in her sexual orientation. So it’s not impossible in some instances, but the rarity of these cases is still striking (123–4; emphasis added).
Our struggle to confirm even a couple handfuls of cases of true gay-to-straight orientation change is telling. God has the power to do anything. It appears this is something he has chosen to do only very rarely in this era (127; emphasis added).
For me (Johnson), the sexualized pull toward people of the same sex is not likely to go away. This is a lifetime calling not to let it rule over me (136; emphasis added).
Paul wrote to the Corinthians to stress just how limited our transformation is in this life. Yet many well-meaning believers, having drunk the ex-gay Kool-Aid, continue to twist Paul’s letter to say something very different (143; emphasis added).
Can we not find a way to acknowledge the reality and persistence of sexual orientations that seldom change and are part of our lowercase, secondary identities, while still locating homoerotic temptation as an affect of the fall and manifestation of indwelling sin? I think we can and must (207; emphasis added).
We learned that sexual orientation is real. It’s not an addiction. And any shifts within it are fairly rare and incremental (243; emphasis added).
Whatever hope Johnson gives with one hand, he immediately takes away with the other. One can feel the walls closing in on the believer who wrestles with homosexual desire and longs to be freed from its bondage. “Sexual orientation is relatively fixed…change is so rare…hope is beyond our grasp until we reach the eschaton…look at all these statistics of people who tried and failed to change their orientation,” what other choice does the homosexual struggler have than to wave the white flag and adopt their homosexual desires as a “secondary identity” (199)?
Johnson is very careful in his walk along the terminological tightrope. Nowhere does he say that a homosexual orientation is altogether fixed, which would certainly open him up to ecclesiastical investigation. Instead he speaks of homosexuality’s “relative fixity” (33) which doesn’t violate the letter of progressive sanctification, but when all the individual pieces above are brought into focus, the spirit of progressive sanctification is consistently undermined throughout the book. The cumulative effect of Johnson’s countless qualifications and reminders that change is “fairly rare” and that “the locus of our hope lies in the coming age” feels like death by a thousand paper cuts instead of blunt force heterodoxy. Either way, the sexual struggler is left with virtually no encouragement to war against his sin.
Is “Change” a Biblical Paradigm?
Any paradigm of “care” that does not manifest itself in encouraging one’s brother to pursue comprehensive, Spirit-wrought change is caring only in name. Calling on a fellow believer earnestly to desire and actively to seek change at the level of sexual desire is not abusive; it is our duty. As believers we are called to hate our sin, turn from it to God, with full purpose of, and endeavor after, new obedience (WSC Q. 87) and to call on our brothers and sisters in Christ to do the same.2 Repentance unto life is the pulse of God’s people individually and corporately. No desire, no matter how consistent or persistent, is exempt from Scripture’s call to mortification and vivification. Consider Paul’s exhortations to the saints in Rome and Colossae:
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind…” (Rom 12:2; emphasis added).
“Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Col 3:5; emphasis added).
Paul didn’t seem to think that calling on believers to mortify evil desires in their hearts and minds was abusive, so who is Greg Johnson to say that it is? Paul’s call to “put to death” the earthly within sounds very differently from the way Johnson speaks about homosexual desire, “God has called me to steward my sexual orientation in obedience to him” (199). How can one steward that which Scripture commands be put to death? How can Johnson’s paradigm of care peacefully coexist beside Scripture’s obvious paradigm of change?3 It cannot.
Is “Change” a Confessional Paradigm?
Change, however, is not only the expectation of Scripture. It is the expectation of the Reformed churches. Consider the Westminster Standards’ stress on the necessity of holistic sanctification, i.e., change not in part but in the whole man. They taught that sanctification cannot be selective or piecemeal, it must be comprehensive. If we exempt a handful of our besetting sinful desires from the process of progressive sanctification then we are guilty of two perilous errors:

Thinking too much of the power of our sin;
Thinking too little of the transformative power of the Holy Spirit.

In our Standards we confess God’s Word to teach:
WSC Q.35 What is Sanctification?

Sanctification is the work of God’s free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole manafter the image of God,and are enabled more and moreto die unto sin, and live unto righteousness (emphasis added).

WLC Q. 75. What is sanctification?

Sanctification is a work of God’s grace, whereby they whom God hath, before the foundation of the world, chosen to be holy, are in time, through the powerful operation of his Spirit applying the death and resurrection of Christ unto them, renewed in their whole man after the image of God; having the seeds of repentance unto life, and all other saving graces, put into their hearts, and those graces so stirred up, increased, and strengthened, as that they more and more die unto sin, and rise unto newness of life (emphasis added).

WCF 13.2  This sanctification is throughout in the whole man, yet imperfect in this life; there abideth still some remnants of corruption in every part: whence ariseth a continual and irreconcilable war; the flesh lusting against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh (emphasis added).
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Which councils are we to accept, and which are we to reject? Evangelicals have a coherent, practical answer: we are to “test everything” in light of Scripture and “hold fast what is good” and abhor “what is evil,” including all falsehood (1 Thess. 5:21; Rom. 12:9; Eph. 4:25). Those who wish to embrace the Great Tradition are going to be sorely tried at this point, for there will be a tension between tradition and Scripture which will be resolvable only by choosing between the two.

Writing in light of his recent delivery of the inaugural lecture for the Center for Classical Theology (CCT), Carl Trueman has issued an appeal for modern Protestants, especially evangelicals, to “go back to basics” by recovering “classical theology,” which he defines as “orthodox Christian doctrines as set forth by the creeds, the Great Tradition of theology exemplified by the ancient ecumenical councils, and traditional Protestant confessions such as the Westminster Confession.” That definition will not suffice. One, the Great Tradition, so named, does not merely include creeds, confessions, and councils. It also includes the teaching of ancient and medieval teachers, hence the CCT’s popular outlet, Credo, has published issues titled “What Can Protestants Learn From Thomas Aquinas?” and “The Great Tradition: Patristic Edition.” This Great Tradition also includes Platonism, hence Credo also says “the Great Tradition believed Platonism’s metaphysical commitments could serve Christianity,” and explicitly links both to early church teachers (the next sentence says “consider Augustine, for example, whose conversion to Christianity may have been an impossibility apart from Platonism”).
Again, this is not my conception, but that of the Great Tradition’s proponents themselves, and as such the abbreviated definition Trueman gives fails to apprise the reader of what all is entailed in “classical theology” and the Great Tradition. (Brief aside: those quotation marks around classical theology are not snide, but are original to Trueman, for whom I have a warm respect.) And as I have written elsewhere, there are grounds for concern about some of the teachers of this Great Tradition. For example, Aquinas was an idolater, and Scripture’s instructions on that point are plain (“I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is . . .  an idolater,” 1 Cor. 5:11).
The second problem with Trueman’s definition here is that bit about councils. Which councils are we to accept, and which are we to reject? Evangelicals have a coherent, practical answer: we are to “test everything” in light of Scripture and “hold fast what is good” and abhor “what is evil,” including all falsehood (1 Thess. 5:21; Rom. 12:9; Eph. 4:25). Those who wish to embrace the Great Tradition are going to be sorely tried at this point, for there will be a tension between tradition and Scripture which will be resolvable only by choosing between the two. For example, the seventh ecumenical council, Nicea II, anathematized people who reject worshiping images (i.e., idolatry), and so Scripture (Ex. 20:4-5; Lev. 26:1; Deut. 5:8-9; 27:15; Acts 17:29) leads us to reject it as erroneous and unauthoritative. Such cases prompt us to assert that all of us ought to be able to sincerely say, with Luther, that we are we bound to the Word of God alone, since councils “have often erred and contradicted each other.”
In addition, Trueman’s conception is a strange one. He speaks of going back to basics when it seems that in many cases this idiom does not suffice at all. There are many evangelicals who have a notion of initial conversion but who do not have much doctrine beyond that: their whole effort in ministry is bringing people to faith and repentance, but they do not have a robust body of doctrine to teach the disciples they make by their evangelistic activities. In such cases it is not going back to the basics but rather moving beyond them that is needed; such people are in the milk stage and need to move along to solids (1 Cor. 3:2; Heb. 5:11-14). Given his passing mention of contemporary evangelical doctrine owing much to revivalism and his keen historical and doctrinal acumen, I suspect Trueman would agree on this point.
Others do indeed need to go back to basics, but not in the way that Trueman suggests. There are those who are ensnared in pedantry who need to return to the basics of the faith as including practice and not being merely a matter of knowledge in the head (Eph. 2:10; 1 Tim. 6:18-19; Tit. 2:14; 3:8; Jas. 2; 2 Pet. 1:5-10; 1 Jn. 3:17). In addition, we might forgive any evangelical who felt a certain perturbance at Trueman’s suggestion here. Well might one rejoin:
Go back to the basics? What is the Reformation if not a large and enduring plea for people to go back to the basics of the faith as revealed in Scripture and practiced and believed by the primitive church? For over half a millennium now we have been calling people to lay aside the corruptions of human tradition, needlessly convoluted, impossible to perform, and antithetical to the truth as they are, and to return to basic doctrine and practice. We have been calling people to the basics of authority (Scripture alone instead of what a corrupt and fabulously wealthy institutional church says Scripture and tradition teach); of how to be saved (grace alone through faith alone, not submission to priestcraft and participation in manmade practices that contradict Scripture and leave one with no assured hope); of the only means of maintaining a right relation to God (through the merit and intercession of Christ alone, not via the intercession or merits of the earthly church, dead saints in glory, angels, or Mary); of the purpose of human life (to give glory only to the jealous God who will share his glory with no other, not to build an ostentatious earthly institution that revels in its own power); of the dignity of all lawful earthly vocations, the priesthood of all believers, church polity conducted along scriptural lines, of a right understanding of the means of grace and how to act in the world (all against Rome’s dizzying hierarchy and multitude of offices, its elevation of a ‘religious’ life above common earthly labors, its distorted notions of the number and nature of the sacraments, and its commendation of asceticism and monastic lifestyles). Our whole aim and modus operandi is to call people out of burdensome, false, soul-crushing human accretions and back to the basics of the faith God has given us in his word.
This last point touches something which is concerning in Trueman’s article. In his commendation of classical theology he asks:
Why do Protestants, especially those of an evangelical stripe, typically prioritize the doctrine of salvation over the doctrine of God? If an evangelical rejects simplicity or impassibility or eternal generation, he is typically free to do so. But why should those properly committed to the creeds and confessions consider that person closer spiritually to them than those who affirm classical theism but share a different understanding of justification? 
The answer to the first question is that if you botch salvation a pristine doctrine of theology proper will not avail you – for “even the demons believe” (Jas. 2:19). To know God in truth we must first believe and enter into eternal life (Jn. 17:3; 1 Jn. 5:20); a theoretical knowledge about him does not require this. As for the second, Trueman subsequently elaborates:
At an Association of Theological Schools accreditation meeting I once found myself placed among the “evangelical” attendees. In that group was someone who denied simplicity, impassibility, and the fact that God knows the future—all doctrines that I affirm. Those are not minor differences. Wistfully my eyes wandered to the Dominicans at another table, all of whom would at least have agreed with me on who God is, even if not on how he saves his church. We would at least have shared some common ground upon which to set forth our significant differences. The Reformed Orthodox of the Westminster Assembly would have considered deviance on the doctrine of God to be anathema and, if forced to choose, would certainly have preferred the company of a Thomist to that of someone who denied simplicity, eternal generation, or God’s foreknowledge. Why do we not think the same? The modern Protestant imagination is oddly different from that of our ancestors. 
One might opine that such an episode says more about the classification tendencies of accreditation agencies than of the relative propriety of associating with either Dominicans or so-called ‘evangelicals’ that deny essential divine attributes. And one might further opine that such a tendency to be sloppy in their classifications – and for that matter, to accredit such divergent bodies as Westminster Theological Seminary (Trueman’s former institution), Dominican institutions, and schools that employ open theists – calls into question the usefulness and desirability of having the approval of such an agency, but I digress. Much of the difficulty here arises from the term ‘evangelical’ being used too loosely, and even being applied to people whom we consider heretics and whose teaching we avoid, such as the man in Trueman’s example who denies God’s foreknowledge.
I am not sure, however, that it would be just or prudent to regard as heretical people who do not understand or reject something like impassibility. That would be tantamount to condemning pretty much all professing believers to perdition over a doctrine which is neither easily understood nor obvious from a simple reading of Scripture. Growth in understanding being a process, it seems we should gently and patiently commend sound doctrine on this point and not be so frustrated by current affairs regarding it that we wistfully yearn for others to associate us with Dominicans.
That last point is particularly concerning. The Dominicans are a Romanist order, with all the associated false doctrine and practices. For a Protestant to wistfully want to be associated with them is to forget just how badly Rome distorts the truth and subjects people to tyranny, and of how “bad company ruins good morals (1 Cor. 15:33). For him to do so in the midst of an article calling for a return to “traditional Protestant confessions such as the Westminster” is especially curious, since that confession says participation in oathbound orders like the Dominicans is “superstitious and sinful” (WCF 22.7).
As for the “Reformed Orthodox of the Westminster Assembly . . . preferr[ing] the company of a Thomist to that of someone who denied simplicity, eternal generation, or God’s foreknowledge,” that seems like begging the question, depending upon what is meant by a Thomist. The Reformed Orthodox were keen on rejecting the errors of all who stumbled from the truth, regardless of what way or direction in which they fell. In WCF 1.6, for example, they say of Scripture that “nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men,” the latter being aimed against Rome and the former against the radical sects that believed in continuing revelation.[1]
So also with WCF 1.7’s statement asserting Scripture’s perspicuity, which says that “not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them,” which is directed against both Rome and the sects that emphasized the “inner light,” as well as WCF 1.8’s assertion that Scripture had been transmitted and preserved faithfully.[2] And recall that the open practice of Romanism was forbidden by law at the time in which the Westminster Assembly was meeting, and that the radical sects such as the Quakers often fell afoul of the law as well in those days. This leads me to suspect that the difference between us and our forebears on this point is not that we keep company with one rather than the other, but that we keep company with one where they would not have kept company with either. Trueman’s broad point about many evangelicals needing to further clarify (or purify) their theology proper is indeed sound, but well might we fear that the movement urging them to do so sometimes leans a bit too far in the other direction, keeps the wrong company, or presents itself, as here, in a garb that is not wholly accurate to the case at hand.
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name. He is also author of Reflections on the Word: Essays in Protestant Scriptural Contemplation. 
[1] The Westminster Assembly and Its Work, B.B. Warfield, p.199
[2] Ibid., pp. 209, 212
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