If the intention of the American revision was to commend a biblical principle of pluralism, then it seems odd that non-pluralistic (theonomic) principles within the American standards were not reworked along with WCF 23.3.

Kevin DeYoung recently wrote that in 1788, American Presbyterians revised chapter 23 of the original Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) because many “grew wary of granting coercive powers to the civil magistrate and were drawn to more robust notions of religious liberty”. DeYoung reasons that by virtue of the revision, “Presbyterians in America rejected an older, European model of church-state relations whereby the magistrate was obligated to suppress heresies, reform the church, and provide for church establishments.” DeYoung goes on to say that “it’s important to recognize that the two versions of WCF 23:3 represent two different and irreconcilable views of the civil magistrate.”
DeYoung cites other changes to the American standards outside chapter 23 and observes that “[the] most significant change is in chapter 23, where the third article was almost completely rewritten, reflecting a new understanding of church and state that allowed for more toleration and gave much less power to the magistrate over the realm of religion.”
First, a clarification is in order, which is not a criticism per se. Given the religious nature of the Westminster standards and sound Presbyterian polity, the church’s subordinate standards neither grant nor deny coercive powers to the civil magistrate. Nor is it true that they “gave much less power to the magistrate over the realm of religion.”
By the nature of the case, confessions are not in a position to do either, though they may acknowledge civil power and declare that it comes from God.
Not to belabor the point but the purpose of the Confession is to put forth the system of doctrine taught in Scripture, which includes general principles pertaining to the duty and power of the civil magistrate. Consequently, whether the civil magistrate has certain dutiful powers over the church or not, such power is not transferred or taken back by the will of the church. The church may only declare the biblical boundaries of such power. If she tries to grant (or give) it because it is not hers, then it is not hers to give. (In other words, it would have already belonged to the civil magistrate and couldn’t be granted to it by the church.) Yet if the church tries to take it back because it is rightfully hers by divine appointment, then it never truly left her. (The church would merely need to recognize her power and act according to it.)
Consequently, we must be careful in saying that our Presbyterian forefathers “gave much less power to the magistrate over the realm of religion” and “grew wary of granting coercive powers to the civil magistrate and were drawn to more robust notions of religious liberty.” If “granting” and “gave” means allowing, permitting, bestowing etc., then hopefully they didn’t think they granted or gave coercive powers to the civil magistrate. If what was intended by “granting” and “gave” is that they got tired of acknowledging the civil magistrate’s coercive powers, then fine. (Again, this is merely intended to be point of clarification given the common confusion over the ministerial and declarative functions of the church.)
With that clarification aside, my focus as it relates to the article will be on the WCF’s revision that pertains to church and state, with particular attention given to the claim that the two versions (England’s and America’s) are irreconcilable on the matter of religious pluralism. That specific concern will be considered in the larger context of Westminster’s civil ethics. (For brevity sake, I won’t spend time on points of agreement or possible agreement as they relate to the principles of civil ethics.)
The American Revision:
The American revision confesses that Protestant denominations should be protected from being prevented to assemble and worship without violence or danger. The standards further state: “It is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the person and good name of all their people… and to take order, that all religious and ecclesiastical assemblies be held without molestation or disturbance.”
Some have tried to maintain that “all religious and ecclesiastical assemblies” refers back to the duty of civil magistrates to protect only Christian denominations and, therefore, may not be applied to non-evangelical assemblies whether trinitarian or not. For instance, some have argued that the revision does not suggest in any context that public synagogue worship as well as the sacrilege of the Romish mass is to be protected under the law. It seems to me that such a reading of the revision is not only strained but would render the American emendation awkwardly superfluous. If so, then the Confession is stating now, by its revision, that false worship is to be protected under the law. Notwithstanding, if that contradicts the original standards, then it necessarily contradicts WCF 19.4 along with Westminster Larger Catechism 108 (WLC 108).
Before delving into the reason why the revision does not contradict the original with respect to religious pluralism, it might be helpful to consider those two portions of the standards (WCF 19.4 and WLC 108) in order to see how they complement both the original and the revision.
The duties required in the Second Commandment are…the disapproving, detesting, opposing, all false worship; and, according to each one’s place and calling, removing it, and all monuments of idolatry.WLC 108
Surprising to most, elders and deacons who subscribe to the Westminsters standards vow to disapprove of all false worship and seek its removal, even through the civil magistrate. Ordained servants also vow, according to WCF 29.4, to consider the mass a corruption of the Lord’s Supper. Consequently, faithful elders and deacons desire to see the centerpiece of Roman Catholic experience lawfully removed from the land. Consequently, faithful ordained servants are in this sense theonomic and do not advocate for a principle of religious pluralism. Accordingly, I find this troubling:
Gone from WCF 23:3 in the American revision are any references to the civil magistrate’s role in suppressing heresies and blasphemies, in reforming the church, in maintaining a church establishment, and in calling and providing for synods…. In its place, the American revision lists four basic functions for the civil magistrate relative to the church…(4) protect all people so no one is injured or maligned based on his or her religion or lack of religion.Kevin DeYoung
Given WLC 108 (along with WCF 19.4, which will be touched on momentarily), Christian citizens should do all within their influence to ensure that all heresies, blasphemies and false religions are suppressed. Consequently, if DeYoung is correct regarding the American standards, then not only does it contradict the original, it also contradicts itself!
Because of what WLC 108 clearly states, consistent antinomians who have taken up a similar position to DeYoung‘s have been constrained to limit the scope of WLC 108 to families and the Christian church in order to relieve any possible inconsistency between the alleged pluralism of chapter 23 and the theonomic import of WLC 108, which without qualification declares opposition to all false worship. In other words, in order not to allow the revised standards to contradict itself, WLC 108 has been reinterpreted to mean that only heads of family and presbyters may purge false worship in the home and Christian church respectively, but civil magistrates may not do so as WLC 108 plainly teaches when it speaks of removing all false worship and monuments of idolatry.
Additionally, WCF 19.4 must be reinterpreted as to now oppose its originally intended meaning.
To them also, as a body politic, he gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the State of that people; not obliging any other now, further than the general equity thereof may require.WCF 19.4
Ordained servants who subscribe to the Westminster standards have vowed to believe and teach that civil magistrates are obliged to apply Israel’s civil laws according to their general equity.
In order to reconcile WCF 19.4 with the alleged advocacy of the principle of pluralism found in WCF 23.3, the general equity of Israel’s civil sanctions can no longer apply to modern day civil sanctions. Instead, as Rick Phillips, representative of many ordained servants in the Reformed tradition, has unabashedly stated:
While there is an undisputed wisdom contained in this civil law it can not be made applicable to any nation today, since there are no biblically sanctioned theocracies now…They are transformed into the judicious application of church discipline.Rick Phillips
Such a rendering cannot be derived from the standards. The claim is exegetically preposterous and has suffered from philosophically dubious argumentation. The translation defies the plain meaning of words and the proof-texts, while cashing out as an outright abrogation of the civil law as opposed to preserving its general equity in the civil sphere. (See also discussion on William Perkins’ use of general equity, the epistemological conundrum and logical incoherence of R2K, and an overview of the disagreement.)
If the intention of the American revision was to commend a biblical principle of pluralism, then it seems odd that non-pluralistic (theonomic) principles within the American standards were not reworked along with WCF 23.3. It seems highly unlikely that the unambiguous requirement of the second commandment should no longer be applied to the civil sphere without a word of explanation by American Presbyterians. Moreover, if American Presbyterians sought to teach that the plain teaching of WCF 19.4 no longer applies to the civil magistrate but instead applies to the church, then it seems axiomatic that such a bald claim must be deduced from the standards and not just assumed and asserted. (Special Pleading: If x then y, but not when it hurts my position.) However, if revision 23.3 does not contradict the original, then we can continue to take WLC 108 and WCF 19.4 at face value without contradiction. That is the common sense approach, especially if it can be shown that the American revision does not oppose the original Confession on the subject of religious pluralism. However, if the revision denies the original, then the revision is inconsistent with other portions of the Westminster standards (given the plain and unaltered portions of WCF 19.4 and WLC 108).
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Written by John Stonestreet and Timothy D. Padgett |
Tuesday, February 28, 2023
Wherever it has gone, Christianity has transformed the indigenous culture to the better. The growth of this faith around the world has brought goods we can now see among Chinese Calvinists, African Anglicans, Native American Roman Catholics, and other tongues, tribes, nations, and languages whose great train of treasures will one day be offered as tribute to King Jesus in the New Jerusalem. 

Last month, according to the Congolese military, a militant group attacked a Pentecostal church, killing at least 10 and wounding scores of others. Though incidents like this are hardly new, they rarely make the news. Many in the Western world simply don’t realize how prevalent Christianity and Christian persecution are outside of Europe and North America. Plus, the creeping influence of “the critical theory mood” leaves the impression that because Christianity has been so influential in Western history, Christians must always be villains and can never be victims.  
This caricature of Christianity as a sort-of tribal faith of Westerners is flawed at the core. As Philip Jenkins argued in his book The Next Christendom, it took nearly a millennium and a half before the majority of Christians were Europeans. Even today, that is no longer the case. If we were true to the actual demographic realities, the “stereotypical” Christian would not be a white male but an African woman. In fact, from its inception, Christianity has always been a multiethnic, multilingual, and multicontinental faith. 
In part to oppose these false stereotypes of the Christian faith, apologist Abdu Murray has written the helpful book More Than a White Man’s Religion: Why the Gospel Has Never Been Merely White, Male-Centered, or Just Another Religion. As the title indicates, Murray challenges the widely held idea that the Christianity to which he converted from Islam is just a tool for Western civilization, that it’s oppressive to women, or that it’s just a fabricated ideology determined to crush the human spirit. This book is especially important at a cultural moment like this, when so many misnomers about Christianity are repeated and unquestioned. 
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At this point in time, one may legitimately ask just how sharp the dividing line remains between “Side A” and “Side B,” when it seems almost no expression of gay identity is out of bounds for Side B Christians. This question was openly raised in a Religion News report last year, in which Collins suggested some in the Side B camp might feel they have more “shared ground” with “Side A people who are Christians” than with more conservative same-sex attracted Christians, some of whom might have roots in the old “ex-gay” movement.

In 2018, Wesley Hill published a report in First Things on a movement that claimed to be breaking new ground in the Christian discourse around faith and sexuality. It was the inaugural year of the Revoice conference, which billed itself as an ecumenical orthodox space for same-sex attracted Christians who wanted to honor a traditional sexual ethic, yet believed the Church’s approach to the issue needed to be rethought—“revoiced.” Such Christians needed more than a “vocation of no,” Hill argued. They needed a way to integrate their sexuality into their Christianity. They needed a “vocation of yes.”
Carl R. Trueman was an early critic of the Revoice project, although he was sympathetic in theory. Despite some concerns, he hoped the movement would self-correct and mature in response to good-faith criticism. But following a World magazine report on the conference’s 2022 convention, Trueman offered a less than favorable updated assessment: So far from self-correcting, the movement had ignored its critics and taken on board all the trappings of sexual identitarianism, from “preferred pronouns” to queer theory to the splintering of attendees into “affinity groups” based on their particular orientation. Cautiously hopeful as he’d once been, Trueman could no longer see anything to salvage. Besides all this, the conference’s inaugural host church, Memorial Presbyterian, recently voted to leave the PCA amid swirling controversy around its LGBT community outreach and its openly gay lead pastor, Greg Johnson.
The speed of this decline naturally prompts a question: Was there ever anything to salvage? In its current incarnation, are we witnessing a radical moral turn? Or are we witnessing the inevitable end of an inherently flawed project?
Before the first Revoice conference, Wesley Hill and Ron Belgau co-founded the group blog Spiritual Friendship in 2012, where they developed their new philosophy together with an ecumenical group of contributors. Catholic writer Eve Tushnet also contributed thoughts at her Patheos blog. As a shorthand for groups with divergent views on the topic, they used the metaphor of a record’s “A” and “B” sides. “Side A Christians” believed God would bless their gay relationships, while “Side B Christians” pursued chastity, some through heterosexual marriage, but most through celibacy.
Yet, even in celibacy, they proposed that they could still accept and sublimate their sexuality as a kind of gift. Perhaps they could even recover a covenantal model of “spiritual friendship” that would offer a chaste relational substitute for marital permanence, even if both parties were same-sex attracted. Tushnet, who first coined the phrase “a vocation of yes,” has recently written about her own exclusive commitment to another woman, the sort of commitment she has argued can strengthen a gay person’s walk with God. They openly identify as “a lesbian couple.”
In developing this philosophy, various Side B writers have rejected the idea that homosexual temptation is uniquely disordered. In his 2017 book All But Invisible, Revoice founder Nate Collins argued that the word “disordered” should apply equally to any sexual attraction outside monogamous male-female marriage. That same year, future Revoice collaborator Gregory Coles published his memoir Single, Gay, Christian, in which he speculated that his homosexual proclivity was not even a result of the Fall. Meanwhile, Hill, Belgau, and Tushnet all consistently normalized certain manifestations of same-sex desire, blurring the lines between proto-romance and “spiritual friendship.”
This normalization has been succinctly crystallized by Revoice charter speaker Grant Hartley, who has asserted explicitly that not all same-sex romance is “off limits” in a Side B framework, only same-sex sex. He goes on to elaborate that some “Side B folks” might “pursue relationships with the same sex which might be called ‘romantic’—the category of ‘romance’ is vague.” Hartley first provoked controversy with his inaugural Revoice talk, endorsed by Hill, which proposed that Christians could mine gay culture for “queer treasure.” For example, he analogizes “coming out of the closet” to death and resurrection. Even in spaces like a gay club, he feels a sense of “homecoming.”
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