January 2024 BCO Amendments Update
Overture 23 (Item 2) on officers conforming to the biblical requirement for chastity has received the necessary 2/3 approval and WILL be considered for final formal ratification at the 51st General Assembly. With the hopeful ratification of this amendment, the PCA shall close the door on the Revoice Movement or so-called Side-B Christianity. Of the 64 presbyteries, 63 have affirmed this amendment and only 1 has rejected it. The raw tally for this item is 2336-181 (93%-7%).
Since the fall (see my November update), around 24 presbyteries have taken up the three proposed Book of Church Order (BCO) amendments sent from the 50th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) to the regional presbyteries. According to my records, 64 presbyteries have taken up the amendments. While these results are corroborated by actual data, they are nonetheless unofficial in nature. For official pronouncements, I defer to byFaith and the Stated Clerk’s Office, which will likely release official communications sometime before the 51st General Assembly.[1] For more information on these results, check out the 2023 BCO Amendment Tracker. As a general reminder, for an amendment to be ratified in our Book of Church Order, there is a three-step process:
- The General Assembly must approve it by a simple majority.
- Then it must pass 2/3 (currently 59 presbyteries) of the PCA’s 88 presbyteries by a simple majority.
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Everything Is Changing, and You Are Allowed to Object
Schools and public libraries and daycares organize drag queen events for children, but if parents dare to object, they are accused of violating the human rights of the LGBT community (that happened). These events were not happening just a few years ago. This is brand new. It didn’t used to happen, and now it does—and you are allowed to notice, and you are not crazy for objecting. Sex education curriculum, where it existed, used to be about the birds and the bees. Now, it involves LGBT books for kindergarteners, replete with books about transgender crayons.
Over fifteen or so years of writing about the culture war for a wide range of publications, I’ve been frequently asked why I report on “social issues” so consistently. And it is true—sometimes, many of the stories I write seem to be remarkably similar: another story about the sex education curriculum; or Drag Queen Story Hour for kids; or mandatory Pride events for children; or parents being maligned by progressive politicians for objecting. That, and the fact that the ideology of the transgender movement has gone from fringe belief to unquestionable dogma in less than a decade with virtually no discussion or even explanation whatsoever to the millions of parents whose children are now taught these beliefs as fact in state schools.
There are many reasons I cover these subjects, but one of my primary motivations is a simple one: I write about these social changes to affirm to average people that they are not, in fact, crazy. The things they see happening around them are in fact happening. The sex education curriculum is including how-to sex manuals, graphic novels with explicit depictions of sex acts, and other “education” that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. It has, overnight, become mandatory to accept that boys can become girls and girls can become boys and that giving children sex change surgeries and puberty blockers is “gender affirming care” rather than dangerous quackery.
It is important to state these things because we are being gaslit. Everything is changing around us, but if we notice, we are told that we are part of a “backlash” simply for pointing out what is happening in front of our very eyes.
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The Majestic Tenderness of Christ Removes Fear
We see the majestic tenderness of Christ in the first chapter of Revelation. When John beholds the glory of the Redeemer he falls at Christ’s feet as though he were dead (Revelation 1:17). John manifests weakness but Christ reveals much love, tenderness, and skilfulness in dealing with him (Revelation 1:17-18). Our fears can be real and debilitating, Christ graciously observes this and deals with the excessive fears of His people to remove them. In the following updated extract, James Durham shows what we can learn from this.
1. Christ’s Majesty Requires Humility
The effect which the vision had on John, in the beginning of verse 17. For as stately and lovingly as Jesus Christ represented Himself, he could not bear it, but faints when he sees Him, and he falls at His feet as dead. This is the first effect of the vision. “I fell down as dead”; that is, “I was benumbed (as it were) and stunned with the sight of the excellent majesty and glory that I saw in Him, and I was put out of capacity to act in body or mind, as if I had been dead. I could no more exercise or act the acts of a living man, than a dead man can.” It is like the experience of Daniel (Daniel 10:8, 9) and others. This is for two reasons.
(a) It is due to the exceeding great distance that is between the infinite majesty of God and finite creatures. The brightness of the glory, excellency, and majesty of God the Creator, burdens and over-burdens the weakness and infirmity of the best of creatures. For if the eyes of creatures be that weak that they cannot look on the Sun, what wonder that flesh and blood is not able to look on the Sun of Righteousness. This new wine is too strong for our old bottles [cf. Matt. 9:17].
(b) It is due to a sense of sin and so a fear to appear before Him, which makes the creature fear they will be undone (Isaiah 6:5). Although before the Fall, when God and Adam were friends, he could have endured God to speak to him, yet after the Fall, the appearance of God is terrible to Him. When he hears His voice, he is afraid and runs and hides himself. And there is something of this fear that raises hesitancy in the best; a fear that rises from the sight of sin, which nearness to God exposes. It is likely that something of both was the case with John, as may be gathered from the Lord’s application of the remedy, and the reasons He uses in comforting him.
2. Christ’s Majesty Requires Reverential Fear
This shows us the great disproportion that is between creatures and the majesty of God. The beloved disciple John, cannot stand before Him when He reveals Himself, but falls down as dead. A little nearness to God should leave a stamp of humility and an impression of the majesty and excellency of God upon us (Isaiah 40:15, 17 and 41:11, 12, 24). This is one of the fountain graces, humility, and a holy awe of the majesty of God. And this is the way to come to it, to get a right sight of that excellent majesty that is in Him.
Reverence and admire God’s wise and well-ordered governing of this world, especially the things that concern His church and people. Wonder that God has ordered such a way in the works of creation and providence, and in the dispensation of the gospel, and the mysteries of salvation suitable to our weakness. This is so as communion may be kept with Him. In Job 26:9, one of the stately steps of His power is that He holds back the face of His throne and spreads His cloud upon it. He draws the veil of the firmament before His throne, to keep His glory from breaking forth and consuming men. And in the dispensation of the gospel, He has chosen the ministry of weak men to reveal His mind to us. He does not speak to us directly Himself, because we could not endure it. If you heard Him speak, as He did on mount Sinai, you would say as Israel did, “Let not God speak to us lest we die” (Exodus 20:19). This way of revealing Himself should make us wonder at His condescendence in hedging Himself up (as it were) for our good. We ought to reverence the one that deals so tenderly with us, when a little glimpse of His glory, a look of His eye, a drawing by of the veil, would kill us and make us as if we had never been.
3. Christ’s Majesty Prohibits Excessive Fear
Humility and reverence even in the best of God’s people, is often ready to degenerate into servile fear and discouragement. Worshiping Jesus Christ in humble reverence was required of John. Yet this excessive fear was not called for. Such is our weakness and the slipperiness of our walking, that we can hardly keep the right path, but deviate to one side or other. Our faith is ready to degenerate into presumption, and our humility to fainting and despondency of spirit, and our fear to discouragement, heartlessness, and distrust. Our corruption is ready to abuse anything. For though there is no excess in these graces, yet there may be in us excess in our exercising them due to the corruption which is in us. There is an excessive fear that God will not allow in His people. Everything that passes for fear and humility should not be admitted.
Christ says to John, “fear not.” This is because:
(a) It is a degenerating fear that breeds mistakes concerning Christ and deters this from Him. It weakens and discourages them in their fellowship with Him. Christ will not allow John’s fear to mar that.
(b) It makes people incapable of hearing or receiving a message from Christ. When He speaks, they are benumbed, senseless and dead, they have ears, but hear not. It locks them up to such an extent that no word takes hold of them. Christ will not allow this in John.
(c) It disables, obstructs and mars in the duty that Christ requires. When John is called to write the vision, he falls as dead. Therefore, Christ tells him not to fear but rather rise up and write. He is required to reverence and fear Him but in a way that helps rather than hinders him in his duty.
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The Problem with So-Called “Antiracism”
Those who are in Christ, no matter which tongue or tribe or nation or language they represent, are reconciled to their Creator and thus, to each other. Only Christianity can anchor this beautiful vision of the human condition on solid ground, and it has incredible implications for individuals and nations, for people and for social structures.
In a recent piece in The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper, a black professor from Bates College, argued that so-called “anti-racism” has gone too far.
In their righteous crusade against the bad color-blindness of policies such as race-neutral college admissions, these contemporary anti-racists have also jettisoned the kind of good color-blindness that holds that we are more than our race, and that we should conduct our social life according to that idealized principle. Rather than balance a critique of color-blind law and policy with a continuing embrace of interpersonal color-blindness as a social etiquette, contemporary anti-racists throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The term “anti-racist” came from a recent explosion of writing such as Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, and it carries enormous ideological implications. According to Kendi, “One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of ‘not racist.’”
For figures like Kendi and DiAngelo, anti-racism isn’t just the commitment to combat racism wherever we happen to see it, it’s the commitment to see racism everywhere, entrenched in the heart of society and present in all its aspects. Even more, to be “anti-racist” requires the adoption of a very narrow set of policy prescriptions, all of which come from an increasingly left side of the political world.
In this world, white people must move from a position of “neutrality” to actively “centering” race in all their discourse. Only then can “whiteness” and “implicit bias” be identified, admitted, and confessed. In practice, Harper warns, this only obliterates any distinctions between “structural” racism, a term referring to racial injustices embedded in wider society, and the interpersonal interactions with people of different races.
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