Singh believed that people in different environments had different questions, most of which had not been addressed in the Western church. In fact, his voice as a native of India added weight to Duff’s efforts to present missions as an integral part of the church and to raise consciousness about their concerns. For a long time after this conference, many Scottish missionaries continued to uphold Duff’s and Singh’s vision.

Only one representative from Asia appeared in 1860 at the overwhelmingly British Conference on Missions in Liverpool. It was Behari Lal Singh, who had become a Christian under the guidance of the Scottish missionary Alexander Duff. By then, Singh had been serving in the Scottish Reformed Church for almost twenty years.
While grateful for all the service and sacrifices of foreign missionaries in India, Singh humbly submitted his suggestion that they should give more room and better training to Indian converts, allowing them to evangelize their own country.
He gave the example of translations. Until then, he said, “the plan of translating the Bible had been conducted as though foreign missionaries were the only successful or competent translators.” Wasn’t it time for the foreigners who had so commendably “expended their time, strength, talents, and accomplishments in the work of translation” to spend now “their time and strength in raising an effective native agency to translate the Bible with far greater purity and precision than it had ever been done before?”[1]
He also suggested that native converts be given better education so they could confidently explain Christianity to learned Hindus and Muslims. At that time, most missionaries were only given a minimal education. Because of the scarcity of workers, most of them didn’t have to attend a seminary or undergo serious studies. The assumption was that they would be speaking to uneducated people in so-called third-world countries.
But missionaries to India often discovered that the common people referred their religious decisions to the highly-educated Brahmins. While the Brahmins represented a small percentage of the population, they were held in high esteem, and few people would venture to embrace Christianity without their approval.
Not everyone at the Liverpool Conference shared Singh’s views. Many thought that higher education was unnecessary and a poor investment of time and money. In case anyone thought that he was moved by personal money interests, he clarified that he taught for free for the first two years in the mission and, “if it would concede to the welfare of the native churches, he was willing to surrender anything.”[2]
Providing high education and reaching the influential classes had already been Duff’s vision from the start. With the help of the Hindu reformer Ram Mohun Roy, Duff had been accepted by the Hindu community and had been able to bring the gospel to many young Brahmins who were dissatisfied with traditional Hinduism. Until then, many of these young people had found a confirmation of their objections in Western atheistic Enlightenment literature. That is, until they understood the radical message of the gospel.
Duff, who was probably the most renowned missionary at that time after William Carey, raised money to endow a missionary chair at New College, Edinburgh to prepare missionaries to face the new questions raised by people who lived in different cultures and environments. The goal was to give missionaries a thorough knowledge of the history, geography, languages, literature, and beliefs of different countries. He served there as the first professor.
Moved by Christian Example
Singh was one of the young men who learned under Duff’s teaching ministry. It was Singh’s father, eager to give his sons a thorough knowledge of the English language, to send Singh and his brother to Duff’s school in Calcutta.
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A church can display the flag of the magistrate in good conscience. As the history of the practice indicates, a national flag in a church is not a sign of idolatry, but a reminder to the faithful to remember the specific magistrate we pray for, and what we rightfully expect from him.

This summer, Christianity Today ran an article about Protestant pastors’ views on displaying national flags in sanctuaries and on church property. Many American evangelicals, especially white-collar evangelicals, increasingly view flags in churches as garish and idolatrous, signs of the benighted “Christian nationalism” they fear is sweeping through evangelicalism in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidency. At The Gospel Coalition, Joe Carter has argued that “the symbols of the American nation don’t have a place in the embassy of the kingdom of God.” “Such veneration for our country within our churches detracts from the glory of the gospel,” he wrote. If “we pledge allegiance to a flag in the house of God, we should question whether we aren’t skirting the edges of idolatry.”
But according to the article in Christianity Today, global pastors disagree with the reflexive denunciation of flags as idolatrous. The piece included comments from pastors around the world. Arab ministers affirmed the presence of national flags in their churches. An Egyptian pastor said he agreed “with displaying the flag of my country in the church. The flag of my country only and not other countries, as it is a spiritual and not a political orientation.” The purpose of raising his flag, he argued, was to keep his heart united with his people in “prayer for the salvation of their souls. It’s to remember that I must stand in the gap for my people, that they may know the Lord and see the light of the gospel and to tell my country and my people how much I love them and pray for them.”
A Jordanian minister said he “strongly” believed “that each church building should post the flag on the building and in the sanctuary.” He and his elders made the decision to do so “in order to show our loyalty as citizens to the country of Jordan. We believe that by doing so, we are a good example and testimony to others and also following the teachings of the Bible.” An Indonesian minister said that “when we display the flag in our church, it is not to express idolatry. We want to honor our national identity. It reminds us of our responsibilities as Christian citizens. It’s also a sign of gratitude for living in Indonesia.” A pastor from Nigeria noted that a flag was a “symbol of a country and flying it indicates the importance of the country.”
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Written by R. Scott Clark |
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
What animates the confessional Reformed churches is a holistic theology, piety, and practice lived out in the context of congregations and in the life of the broader institutional church. We are animated by a theology that we share with our Reformed forebears, which we have not amputated or substantially revised. We are animated by our commitment to gathering Sabbath by Sabbath with the covenant community to hear the law and the gospel preached, the sacraments administered, and grace and mercy lived out during the week.

Recently, Trevin Wax crystalized the case for preserving the neo-evangelical coalition, which emerged after World War II and in so doing, for Reformed confessionalists, he has also made the case against the neo-evangelical coalition. What is that the coalition and what are its attractions and problems? Let us go back to the Reformation for a moment to set a baseline. As the Luther began to recover Augustine’s doctrines of sin (i.e., total depravity) and grace (sola gratia), Paul’s doctrine of imputation and his definition of faith (sola fide), along with the biblical distinction between law and gospel (with some help from Augustine) and the doctrine of sola Scriptura the Reformation message spread from Wittenberg throughout Europe and the British Isles. In the Reformation an evangelical was one who confessed those truths and others. To be an evangelical was to be about the gospel and a very particular understanding of it but, in the Reformation, the evangelicals were so within increasingly distinct ecclesiastical traditions and confessions. That process of distinction is known to scholars as confessionalism, when it is considered as a bottom-up movement and as confessionalization, when it is considered as a top-down movement. By the 1550s there were two distinct Reformation churches: the Lutherans and the Reformed. They had distinct views of the two natures of Christ, the way Scripture regulates worship, and the sacraments among other things.
The Rise Of Trans-Denominational Movements
There did develop in the seventeenth century a trans-denominational movement centering on religious experience, Pietism. This movement was the seedbed for the modern evangelical and neo-evangelical movements. In the eighteenth century another trans-denominational movement emerged, which was related to the Pietists: the revivalists. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries revivals of varying kinds swept across the American Colonies (the First Great Awakening), then Europe to a lesser degree, and again in the USA (i.e.,  the Second Great Awakening) and Europe (e.g., the Réveil).
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even as Pietism and Revivalism producing great fervor and social activity (e.g., poverty relief, anti-slavery movements, temperance movements) the eighteenth-century Enlightenment movements were conquering the universities, the intellectuals, and the elites. By the late nineteenth century most in those sets had accepted the rationalism (the superiority of reason over all other authorities), empiricism (the superiority of sense experience over all other authorities), or romanticism (the superiority of the inner life over all other authorities) and had lost confidence in Scripture and the historic Christian faith. In response the children of Pietism, Revivalism, and those who still affirmed the old Protestant confessions, theology, piety, and practice sought to defend the fundamentals of the historic Christian faith.
By the end of World War II, the West was tired of near constant conflict, whether marital or ecclesiastical and the fundamentalist movement had become increasingly narrow. The great hero of the early fundamentalist movement, J. Gresham Machen, was dead and some of those who had studied with him wanted to retain his high view of Scripture but they also wanted to move on. They wanted to influence the broader culture and to leave behind his commitment to the Westminster Standards and his Presbyterian view of the church and sacraments. Scholars call this movement, led by Carl F. H. Henry, Henry Ockenga, and Bill Graham, among others, neo-evangelicalism. This movement would seek to be both faithful to a small number of core theological commitments and culturally influential. To that end they began to build institutions. They built Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California where they would seek to produce theologically conservative graduates who were solid like Old Westminster (Machen’s school) but not ecclesiastically narrow like Machen nor pugnacious as he was accused of being. They founded a magazine and located it in Washington, D.C. the capitol of the USA and of the world.
That project lasted about three decades. The Baby-Boomer children of the neo-evangelical founders were a generation that knew not Machen. They did not see the point of holding on to the historic doctrine of Scripture while jettisoning so much of the rest of Christian history (e.g., the Reformation confessions, churches, and sacramental convictions). This move, symbolized by Fuller’s revision of their view of Scripture (i.e., “limited inerrancy”) provoked the “Battle for the Bible” in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At the same time, the leading edges of the progressive movement within the neo-evangelical establishment was also pushing the boundaries on the doctrine of God by arguing that God cannot know or control the future. They called themselves “Open Theists.” Others revised the doctrine of the Trinity so argue that the divine unity was more one of society than one of being. There were other revisions such as Daniel Fuller’s proposal that justification is not through faith alone but through faithfulness, which, mutatis mutandis, continues to reverberate in the theology of John Piper, one of the fathers of the so-called Young Restless and Reformed movement. About the same time, in the early 1990s, some of the older neo-evangelicals (e.g., J. I. Packer) along with their more progressive evangelical children sought to negotiate a settlement on the Reformation doctrine of justification in order to facilitate a cultural common cause in the face of an increasingly hostile and post-Christian culture. The late 1990s saw another wave of progressive evangelical movements, now increasingly led by Generation Xers. They called themselves “emergent” and they developed two factions, one slightly more conservative of the past and the other more critical of the past.
The YRR movement, which was stimulated by the theological drift among the evangelical children of the neo-evangelicals, sought to get the old neo-evangelical band back together. This impulse in the 1990s and early 200s produced a flurry of coalitions, e.g., The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, which was a response, c. 1995, to the “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” documents and movement. About a decade later we saw the emergence of The Gospel Coalition, and Together for the Gospel, among others.
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