Fifty years later, perhaps it is time for us to revisit this document.  Are we living in times where some, on behalf of all, have determined what society should look like?  Do we see a mounting pressure to conform with what ‘they say’ is acceptable human thought and belief? Indeed, we should not be so naïve as to assume that the absence of marching military on our streets means we face no ideological threat. The pressure is growing for everyone quietly to conform.  More than that, the pressure is growing to affirm openly and celebrate what we know to be false.  

January does not just bring a new page on the calendar but a whole new calendar.  And with the new year, we tend to generate renewed commitments.  Maybe you have already determined what 2024 will mean for you.  Perhaps your mind has already pondered daily step counts, gym visits, dietary changes, or other healthy habits.  Or maybe you are thinking about Bible reading, daily prayer routines, or other spiritual goals.  May your resolutions last and bear good fruit!  But perhaps the resolution we need for 2024 is more foundational than healthy habits and more straightforward than spiritual practices.
As I write this, I am in Budapest, where I have just visited a museum of the political terror of the twentieth century.  As you can imagine, it is a sobering experience to see the vast walls of victims, the displays focused on the political prisoners, a room commemorating the persecution of the religious leaders, the torture chambers, the prison cells, and the gallows.  But perhaps the lingering memory for me will be the final room.  With red walls and hundreds of pictures, it felt like yet another presentation of victims.  But it was not.  It was a room of “victimizers” – ordinary people who were merely doing their job, simply following orders, just playing along, and thereby facilitating the evil machine.  We can remember the victims, and we must.  Yet we must also face the uncomfortable reality that most cogs in the cruel machine of death were ordinary people.
Fifty years ago, in February 1974, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was arrested in the Soviet Union and exiled to the West.  There, he was welcomed as a hero.  On the day of his arrest, he released a document entitled “Live Not by Lies.”  He knew the power of an ideology that sought to reshape society.  He also knew the power of individuals who simply refuse to lie (and the even greater power of a crowd joining together in this conviction).  He knew that the ideological system would totter and collapse when it ran up against the brick wall of reality, exemplified by many individuals refusing to play along with the evil fantasy.
Fifty years later, perhaps it is time for us to revisit this document.  Are we living in times where some, on behalf of all, have determined what society should look like?  Do we see a mounting pressure to conform with what ‘they say’ is acceptable human thought and belief? Indeed, we should not be so naïve as to assume that the absence of marching military on our streets means we face no ideological threat.
The pressure is growing for everyone quietly to conform.  More than that, the pressure is growing to affirm openly and celebrate what we know to be false.  Surely, it would be better to speak the truth now instead of growing our tendency to fit in and play it safe as the stakes mount.
Truth and Lies – Choosing not to lie was not an original idea for Solzhenitsyn.  Paul urged the Colossians not to lie to one another.  Not only had they put off their old self, but they had put on the new self to reflect their creator’s image (Colossians 3:9-10).  He told the Ephesian believers to speak the truth to one another since they were no longer defined by the lie (Ephesians 4:25).
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus addresses the anger underneath murder, the lust underneath adultery, and the daily consistency of speech beneath more flamboyant oaths (Matthew 5:21-37).  There is plenty of Old Testament support for the expectation that God’s people should be consistent speakers of truth (Exodus 20:16; Leviticus 19:11; Proverbs 14:5).
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The Waldensians likewise sprang from a reform movement. They arose around Lyons in the twelfth century and spread into southern France and north-western Italy. They too ran afoul of the Inquisition. (Waldensian Protestants continue to live and worship in northern Italy. The Italian author Bruna Peyrot, who in 1997 wrote an historical novel about Durand, Prigioniere della Torre, is a Waldensian.)
All of this means that long before the Reformation, the Vivarais, the Durands’ home region in the south which roughly corresponds to modern-day Ardèche, bore a strong bent towards cultural separation from the north, religious non-conformity, and political autonomy.
If the south of France felt a sense of proud geographical and cultural autonomy from the north, a great many in France as a whole felt a proud sense of religious autonomy from the Pope and Italy. This divided the late-medieval French church into two groups. The Ultramontanes—literally “over the mountains”were fiercely loyal to the Pope, who resided across the alps in Italy. The opposing Gallicans resented the church being ruled by distant Italians and preferred all things Gallic, French. (Gaul is an ancient name for France.) Needless to say, French monarchs were proud Gallicans, and in 1516 Francis I secured the Concordat of Bologna, which removed the right to appoint senior church positions in the French church from the Pope to the French kings.
The other big social movement that played such a key role in the rise of French Protestantism was the fourteenth and fifteenth-century European Renaissance, which means “re-birth.” Beginning in northern Italy, great minds and artists looked to recover and build upon the achievements of Classical Greece and Rome. This brought tremendous developments in painting, sculpture, music, architecture, historical and textual scholarship, literature, mechanical invention, and political theory.
Renaissance flowered in fifteenth-century Europe into Humanism, a scholarly movement which looked ad fontes, “back to the sources.” From the time of the Crusades, ancient books and parchments flowed into western Europe from Palestine and southern Europe. Scholars strove to grasp the thought of the ancients by mastering their languages—especially Greek, Hebrew, and classical Latinand by searching for and copying and comparing the oldest manuscripts that they could get their hands on.
Gutenberg’s development of the printing press around 1436 supercharged the whole Humanist project. It permitted the cheap, massive, and rapid multiplication of books and pamphlets and the ideas they carried. Western European scholarship was shaken by the content of this tidal wave of fresh thought and the exhilarating spirit of personal intellectual responsibility, of searching out the truth for oneself.
The re-examination of the biblical texts in their original languages sparked a major rethink of Christian thought and practice. A German Augustinian monk at the University of Wittenberg, who was lecturing in the early sixteenth century on the Psalms, Galatians, and Romans, rediscovered the Bible’s teaching about the way of salvation. The teachings of Martin Luther, and especially his recovery of the biblical doctrine of salvation by grace alone through faith in Christ alone, began to be debated in France in the 1520s. Luther’s critique of the papacy and all things Rome appealed to those with Gallican tendencies. They also appealed to a growing intelligentsia with a newly acquired taste for self-education and the new humanism.
Reformation in France was sparked in Paris in the 1520s in the diocese of Meaux around bishop Guillaume Briçonnet (1472–1534), the humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (1455–1536), and the brilliant author Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), sister of the French King Francis I. There was however one great figure who would far eclipse them all.
Visit the 1909 Monument international de la réformation, built into the wall of Geneva’s Old Town, and you will see among the granite statues of such Reformers as Guillaume Farel, Theodore Beza, and John Knox, a five-meter-tall representation of John Calvin. Calvin’s figure stands slightly forward of the others and dominates the monument.

Do not the vows taken by elders regarding the constitution of the PCA and submission to brethren require that we (all of us) follow and abide by the polity of our church (in letter and spirit) until such time as that polity is changed through orderly constitutional process rather than by the drip-drip normalization-by-tolerated-violation approach of ecclesial antinomians—no matter how winsome and missional they be?

The fact that a significant number (likely hundreds) of Presbyterian Church in America congregations “have” female deacons or deaconesses or present females as holding the office of deacon or the imaginary office of deaconess is indisputable.* Also beyond question is the fact that a number of PCA churches do not ordain male deacons (presumably to create a unisex, egalitarian board of deaconing persons) is also beyond dispute.
Questions for PCA officers:
1. Has anyone considered the incremental-but-inevitable effect of allowing quasi-/non-ordained “officers” in a denomination?
2. How many members of PCA churches with female “deacons” or deaconesses (a term with no set meaning in our polity) know that the female deaconing persons are not actually officers? If members are confused it may be because some churches use the same nomination, training, and election processes for females who are called deacons or deaconesses as they do for men who are part of the diaconate.
3. What is the long-term effect of allowing churches to forego the ordination of one of the two offices our polity requires?
4. Have the de facto three-office/three-office-attracted pastors considered the effect that their position may have on our supposed firewall against ordaining female elders (of one kind or another)? In other words, will we move from “women can never be elders” to “women can never be preaching (or senior) pastors.”
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