That they who desire our denomination to be diverse in its practices – that is, to be a so-called ‘big tent’ and nationwide church – ought to take heed, for this exulting in practical diversity lends itself quite easily to a spirit which regards a broad church as being more important than a doctrinally sound one. History everywhere attests that such a latitudinarian disposition ill serves denominations of all stripes, and that union among those with different doctrines or practices – as between the Old and New Schools, or of the northern church after its union with the Cumberland Presbyterians in the early 1900s – stirs up all manner of difficulty and frequently leads to doctrinal decline.

[Read Part Part One, Part Two, and Part Three]

That a group of elders meeting in organized fashion to discuss or decide upon the affairs of the church or of some part thereof may be rightly termed a presbytery.
That the National Partnership, as it meets the criteria above, may be fairly termed a presbytery.
That presbyteries should be formally organized and should operate according to normal prescribed processes, as provided for by the constitution of the church.
That the normal affairs of presbyteries should be reasonably public and open, and that secrecy should be used only in cases of true need, as for example to protect the privacy of individuals involved in ministry in hostile nations, or in the early stages of discipline.
That irregular presbyterial operations, such as the use of secrecy when it is not needed, are out of accord with the practice of good church government.
That internal factions undermine the good order, unity, and peace of the church and confound its operations by leading men to form strong opinions on various issues prior to and apart from discussions upon them at stated meetings conducted for that purpose. What is meant to be done by the church in her courts is instead done by sundry factions behind the scenes, the courts being then not occasions for deliberation but rather occasions to act out what has already been decided.
That secretive formal or de facto factions within the denomination among her ministers and members were not intended by the founders of the church, and are not provided for by its constitution.
That the constitution not providing for such factions ought to call into question their validity and propriety, and that some such groups, if not formally unlawful, are yet contrary to the spirit and right practice of presbyterian polity, and threaten to undermine or corrupt it.
That needless secrecy in political organization cannot be defended in the Christian church, unless it be to avoid grave persecution by hostile governments or by others who would afflict God’s people. The avoidance of slander or unpopular controversy alone is not reason enough to act clandestinely, for the sufferance of such things is a part of the Christian life, and because there are means available to redress such sin if one is assailed by it.
That the publication of anonymous manifestos or open letters is out of accord with the conspicuous and forthcoming honesty that ought to characterize ministers of the gospel and other leaders in the church.
That the use of unnecessary anonymity bespeaks a spirit of cowardice or mischief and ill intentions – for why should a man hide his identity from his brethren if his words be true?
That the use of anonymity breeds distrust and suspicion and destroys all credibility as regards a letter’s claims or as regards the personal character of its author if he is discovered.
That the use of anonymity insults the audience, for it intimates that they are so unfair in judgment that they cannot be trusted to know an author’s name. It further denies them the opportunity of a personal response; for to whom does one address a response to an anonymous letter?
That the use of anonymity and secrecy, as they have recently been used by some in the denomination, is indefensible and suggests a poor character for those involved, and a probable unfitness for office.
That any right to secrecy in political organization in the Presbyterian Church in America is forfeit owing to the fact that the denomination from which we separated, the former Presbyterian Church in the United States, is believed to have been hastened in its doctrinal decline by the politicking of the clandestine “Fellowship of Saint James.”
That those who hide their machinations can little object if others, feeling suspicious because of their secrecy, are moved by an understandable concern to disregard their imagined right to privacy in such matters and to avail themselves of their secrets when they are brought to the light.
That they who accuse others of bad faith and ‘toxicity’ for prying into their secrets ought to consider that they should have no such secrets into which to pry, and that it was their own bad faith in clandestinely organizing that provoked such behavior in others. He who acts dishonorably has but little ground for complaint if others do likewise.
That such secrecy may be interpreted as involving its participants in undermining the peace and purity of the church, and that the denomination would be within its rights and the dictates of prudence to legislate against it going forward, and to punish judicially those that are involved in it.
That the National Partnership meets the foregoing description and owes it to the church either to disband, or else to at least forgo its secrecy and to do as honor and honesty demand and come forth into the public eye as an open organization.
That those organizations and groups which have a formal, public character must take great heed lest they fall and become mere political factions whose efforts are wholly taken up with questions of intradenominational politics.
That this, which applies to such groups, applies also to the individuals associated therewith. Many a man has ruined his effectiveness as a minister by giving too much of his effort to polemics.
That the slowness by which the courts of the church operate is neither just nor wise, and is a disservice to all parties involved. He who would remove leaven from a lump must move quickly, else the possibility of doing so is lost. For the church to move as slowly as it has hithertofore done is to yield the momentum to wrongdoing, which has much occasion to multiply itself while awaiting the adjudication of cases involving it.
That the slowness and ineffectiveness of our courts demoralizes the pious, who see in the advance of wickedness and the weakness of all official responses to it the certain triumph of such wrongdoing.
That the apparent slowness wherewith God often moves in judging wickedness provides no warrant for the church to move with equal slowness. For God is longsuffering and patient, and he has his purposes which are often hidden from us or that are best accomplished by forbearing the prevalence of wickedness for a time. The judgments of God’s people are often quick (Ex. 32:25-28, Nov. 25:6-8, 2 Sam. 4:11), a principle that the Presbyterian Church in America ought to embody as well, lest she be found to be guilty of sloth and a lack of the commanded zeal for holiness.
That no one has any right to office, office existing rather for the benefit of those who are served than for that of those who would hold it (Mk. 10:42-45).
That many yet act as though there is a right to office, and that any qualifications respecting it are an infringement upon their rights, not least their rights of conscience.
That those who elevate their own rights above the rights of the church, whether as a whole or in its sundry presbyteries, proceed from a principle that is contrary to the heritage of the Reformed churches and which owes its character to other, more radical Protestant traditions, and to the values of contemporary American society at large.
That the standard of ordination is not the practice of other denominations, least of all those that are looser in doctrine or broader in practice than ourselves. Many men of great talent and just character are yet not eligible for ordination in the Presbyterian Church in America because of their incomplete adherence to our doctrinal standards, or for other reasons determined by the presbyteries.
That the freedom of the conscience applies to those things which are either contrary to Scripture (as some of the practices of Rome), or else ungoverned by it (Book of Church Order, Preliminary Principle 1).
That the individual’s conscience is not free in those matters – as questions of vital doctrine or gravely consequential practice – in which God has endowed his church with ministerial power or with the power to govern itself. No man may teach whatever he deems right and expect for it to have the approval of the church, for it is the essence of church government that it exists to provide good order and to suppress the teaching of that which tends to cause confusion or disorder.
That presbyteries may sometimes exercise this power to forbid the teaching of that which is not obviously false, if it is thought that such teaching would have an ill effect upon the church. For not all truths are equally profitable, and the manner in which they are taught matters greatly.
That they who desire our denomination to be diverse in its practices – that is, to be a so-called ‘big tent’ and nationwide church – ought to take heed, for this exulting in practical diversity lends itself quite easily to a spirit which regards a broad church as being more important than a doctrinally sound one. History everywhere attests that such a latitudinarian disposition ill serves denominations of all stripes, and that union among those with different doctrines or practices – as between the Old and New Schools, or of the northern church after its union with the Cumberland Presbyterians in the early 1900s – stirs up all manner of difficulty and frequently leads to doctrinal decline.
That the bluntness of speech of these theses, and of other dissenting opinions, is not motivated by hatred.
That these theses are not intended to offend anyone, but are offered as a humble and sincere reproof. For both Scripture and common human experience teach that flatterers are vile and that it is a kindness to speak frankly with one who has erred. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy” (Prov. 27:6).

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

Written by T. M. Suffield |
Friday, May 12, 2023
Putting aside that it’s easier to understand a text when you read it all, it is how they were written. Paul expected his letters to be read as a whole and for the church to hear them like this. There’s nothing wrong with reading shorter passages and expounding them—the Bible itself does this frequently—but if we do so without ever catching the whole then we are missing something we’re supposed to have.

A couple of weeks ago I ran an event in Birmingham called ‘Reading 2 Timothy‘, where we did exactly that: read the book of 2 Timothy over the course of a Saturday morning.
It’s a Bible study, which probably doesn’t seem that revolutionary. It probably isn’t that revolutionary, to be honest, but I’ve not seen it done like this elsewhere.
The aim is to read all of the book, within the timeframe we’ve given ourselves so that we can read it in context.
There are six reasons why that’s a good idea:
Context
When we read a particular passage in the context of the surrounding sentences, we understand get insight into what that particular passage does or doesn’t mean.
We can widen the same principle out to the book as a whole: when we read a passage in the context of the whole book we get insight into what it means.
Thread
But, more importantly, when we read books of the Bible as a whole we start to understand the thread of the argument they’re making. Most people I know struggle to grasp a sense of a book as a book, there are multiple reasons here, but one of them is that we read in an atomistic way. When we read as a whole, we can follow the story that’s laid out for us.
Structure
We also then get to ask questions like, “why did the author put this paragraph here” assuming that the structure of the book itself will teach us.
It’s also difficult to notice the literary artistry of a book without being able to read it through in a sitting (or in four gulps across a morning in this specific case).
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There is a reason why when Christians give up Christian sexual morality, they sooner or later give up Christianity. The Biblical rules of Christian sexual conduct are inextricably rooted in a particular vision of what the human person is, under God, and how believers are supposed to treat the material world, their bodies (and the bodies of others) first of all. Whatever the German Catholic and Anglican bishops think, it is not possible to reconcile contemporary sexual morality, including homosexuality, with Christianity. It simply cannot be done. Those who believe it can are lying to themselves.

That image above is a sculpture of the early church virgin martyr Cecilia in the Roman church that bears her name, in the city’s Trastevere neighborhood. The photo is by Richard Stracke. The sculpture is made from a description of an eyewitness who said the saint’s incorrupt body looked like this when the tomb was opened in 1599.
As I’ve written in this space in recent days, my trip last week to the ruins of the ancient Asia Minor cities, where the Seven Churches of Revelation met, jarred me into considering the vast difference between early Christian ideas about sex and sexuality, and that of the polytheistic Roman world in which the Christians lived. Curious to know more, I bought and read historian Kyle Harper’s 2013 book about how the advent of Christianity caused a sexual revolution in Rome of late antiquity. It’s really quite something. Let me tell you what I learned, and what it has to do with our situation today. It’s more complicated than you might think.

In Rome (the term I will use to describe the entire Empire), sex was seen as something very different than how even post-Christian morality sees it today. Harper says that sexual acts were judged solely as a matter of “social reproduction” — that is, affirming and reproducing the social order. That was an order that gave maximum privilege to freeborn Roman men; freeborn Roman women, though, were strictly confined to matron status. Freeborn men were entitled to have sex with unmarried women not of their social class, and also with men — but they were strictly forbidden from being the passive partner in gay sex. (Indeed, the word “gay” is inappropriate here, as male sexual desire was considered to be fluid; you were not thought to be exclusively homosexual just because you enjoyed sex with males.) The fundamental principle governing sex acts was that “a sexual act was composed of an active and a passive partner, and masculinity required the insertive role.” Sex with boys and girls was considered normal. Slaves and prostitutes were treated as subhuman under Roman law and custom, and were the sexual playthings of free Roman men.

It is hard to overstate the mass suffering this social order caused. Writes Harper:
Slave ownership was not just the preserve of such super-rich aristocrats, though; the sheer extent of slave owning meant that the mechanics of Roman sexuality were shaped by the presence of unfree bodies across the social spectrum. One in ten families in the empire owned slaves; the number in the towns was probably twice that. The ubiquity of slaves meant pervasive sexual availability. “If your loins are swollen, and there’s some homeborn slave boy or girl around where you can quickly stick it, would you rather burst with tension? Not I—I like an easy lay.” Slaves played something like the part that masturbation has played in most cultures: we learn in a book on dream interpretation that if a man dreams “he is stroking his genitals with his hands, he will obtain a slave or slave-woman.”
Nothing summarized the abject depravity of Tiberius as his use of young slave children on Capri. Nero’s reputation for philhellenism and debauchery fused in his three reputed marriages to eastern eunuchs. Eunuchs did in fact come to occupy an ever more important place in pederastic practices of the Roman Empire; Domitian, whose favorite was a eunuch cupbearer named Earinus, banned castration within the empire, but the transfrontier trade was able to pump eunuchs into the empire at a sufficient level that their prominence continued to gain into late antiquity. The outsized villainy of Commodus could be seen in his incest and voyeurism, his three hundred concubines, and his infamous behavior, in which he “polluted every part of his body and hi mouth, with both sexes.
Nobody cared about slaves and prostitutes. They were non-persons. But their presence in society was absolutely required to maintain the social order. Sex for the Romans was all about the erotic embodiment of class and gender roles. Harper puts it succinctly here:
The sexual culture of the high Roman Empire was dominated by the imperatives of social reproduction. The symphony of sexual values, in all its various movements and complex harmonies, was set to the rhythms of the material world: early marriage for women, jealous guarding of honorable female sexuality, an expansive slave system, late marriage for men, and basically relaxed attitudes toward male sexual potential, so long as it was consonant with masculine protocols and social hierarchies. Moral expectations were in tune with social roles, and social roles strictly determined both the points of release and the rigid constraints in ancient sexual culture. The value of a sexual act derived, first and foremost, from its objective location within a matrix of social relationships.

Homosexuality, understood as male-on-male sex, was everywhere present in Rome — but again, it would be an error to think of pre-Christian Rome as the French Quarter with togas. Harper:

Yet despite the vitality of various forms of same-sex erotics in the high empire, it would be a grave mistake to say that the Romans had anything resembling tolerance for homosexuality. The code of manliness that governed the access to pleasures in the classical world was severe and unforgiving, and deviance from it was socially mortal. The viciousness of mainstream attitudes toward passivity is startling for anyone who approaches the ancient sources with the false anticipation that pre-Christian cultures were somehow reliably civilized toward sexual minorities.
The most despised sexual figure of all in Roman society was the kinaidos, an effeminate male who was the passive partner in male-male couplings, and always ready for sex. This is but one example of how the reality of Roman mores confounds any attempt to read contemporary sexual values onto late antiquity. Sex back then was what you did, not who you were. Modern notions of “sexual identity” would have made no sense to the Romans.
Harper writes with banked horror at the enormity of prostitution in Rome, and its connection to the slave trade, and to Roman economic life. Sex trafficking, as we would call it today, was a fundamental part of Roman social and economic life. The historian’s tone is even throughout the book, but he is at his most passionate imagining the immense suffering of countless enslaved women and girls, compelled to service Roman men, even to the point where, in the words of one observer of the era, the exhausted women looked like corpses. Is there any wonder why Christian sexual morality was greeted by the poor as liberation?
It is true that a small minority of Roman philosophers opposed the robust eroticism of their culture, but Harper says it’s a serious mistake to think of the early Christians as simply siding with the few Roman conservatives. Christianity’s conception of sex and eros, an essentially Hebraic one, was radically different, and opposed to Rome’s. For St. Paul and the early Christians, sex was bounded by gender. It cannot be overstated how much they despised homosexuality. And like the Romans, sex expressed a concept of the social order that entailed a concept of the human person. In the world of antiquity, people were fatalistic, chalking up their behavior to destiny written in the stars. Not so with Christians, who taught that every soul bears the image of God, and is morally responsible:
For Christians, there could be no ambiguity about a matter so fundamental, and so eternally consequential, as the cause of sin. Nothing—not the stars, not physical violence, not even the quiet undertow of social expectation— could be held responsible for the individual’s choice of good and evil. The Christians of the second and third centuries invented the notion of free will.
(Harper discusses briefly the teaching of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus on free will, but dismisses it as meaningfully connected to Christian teaching, which was of course vastly more influential.)
Moreover, for the early Christians, sex had everything to do with cosmic reality. That is, it mattered very much to God what one did with one’s body, because He expected His servants to subdue the passions of the flesh to the divinely mandated order. Christian marriage, for example, is an icon of Christ’s relationship to the Church. Prostitution and other forms of porneia (Paul’s catch-all term for illicit sex) are tied to idolatry — the worship of false gods. For the Christian, the sexual disorder of the Roman world was inextricable from its polytheism.
The severity of early Christian writing on sex had a lot to do with the fact that the apostles needed to convince the tiny new religious community to keep itself separated from the corrupt majority culture. After Christianity became the religion of Late Empire, the tone would moderate somewhat. Harper:
Indeed, the strident tone of so much early Christian writing on sexuality was nurtured in an atmosphere where the advocates of the religion were a small, persecuted minority. Christian sexual morality of the second century has a shrill tone precisely because it is the urgent message of an embattled, if confident, group of dissenters.
… For three centuries, Christian sexual ideology was the property of a persecuted minority, and it was deeply stamped by the ability of Christians to stand apart from the world, to reject the world. From the fourth century on, Christian sexual morality would be ever more deeply enmeshed in the world. The break was not necessarily sharp: there were married Christian householders from the earliest days of the church, and the ascetic movement carried on the world-rejecting style of the early church. But the changing center of gravity was decisive.
As Philip Rieff has elsewhere observed, sex was the linchpin of the Christian social imaginary. Harper writes, “Nowhere did the moral expectations of the Jesus movement stand in such stark contrast to the world in which its adherents moved.” The Romans might well have asked the same question as our modern post-Christians: Why does the Church care so much about sex? The answer then, as now, is: Because the way we exercise eros has everything to do with how we regard the human person, and even cosmic reality.
Harper does not like the word “fornication,” for good reason: it sounds so churchy and stilted. Its use by St. Paul, though, refers to all illicit use of sex. Harper:
Paul’s reflections on fornication, like a stone on the river bottom that suddenly catches the light, reveals the unexpected depths of the term’s meaning. Fornication was not just a marker of ethnic differentiation, providing a template of sexual rules setting God’s faithful apart from the heathens. Paul’s understanding of fornication made the body into a consecrated space, a point of mediation between the individual and the divine.
You see? Early Christian teaching did not come out of hating the body, but from regarding it as holy. More:
In the thundering introit of the letter, it becomes evident that for Paul the sexual disorder of Roman society was the single most powerful symbol of the world’s alienation from God. Paul draws on the deeply rooted association between idolatry and sexual immorality: sexual fidelity was the corollary of monotheism, while the worship of many gods was, in every way, promiscuous. But in Paul’s hands the association was transfigured into a fearful comment on the human condition.
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