In your reaction against others in the denomination you have given yourselves to a form of organization and methods that are not acceptable, and now the only way that you can you remove the offense of your unjustified secret political machinations is by openly repenting of them. Write a letter and post it at A Faithful PCA, ByFaith, or some such suitable place.

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The Practical Consequences of Secrecy
In your activism you have been very zealous; but “desire without knowledge is not good” (Prov. 19:2), and the knowledge that you lack is the knowledge that forming a secret organization offends your brothers, causes scandal, and is not an acceptable way of achieving your desired ends. You wish to see the PCA make inroads into previously underrepresented areas and groups, but in so doing you approach the matter wrongly and offend those who are already your brothers for the sake of unbelievers who may never repent. One should “give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God” (1 Cor. 10:32), but should labor carefully after the example of Paul (v. 32; comp. Acts 24:16) and others to “give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all” (Rom. 12:17) and to avoid giving offense insofar as it is possible (1 Tim. 3:15; 1Pet. 2:12-17).
This is not what you have done. You were under no obligation to form your organization at all, much less to do it in secret, and much less still to persist in this secrecy for years and in the face of much criticism. This is not striving to “live peaceably with all” (Rom. 12:18) or pursuing “what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding” (14:19). This is offending the brother and stirring up strife needlessly. Such secrecy gives a poor testimony: if one is right, it is cowardice and hiding one’s lamp (Matt. 5:14-16); and if others are wrong, it is failing to confront them appropriately in a suitably blunt, manful way.
A Further Objection Considered
Perhaps you will object and say that the reason for your secrecy is to avoid slander, because others are in the habit of publicly misrepresenting your character. In such a case you have two recourses. One, you can avail yourself of the process of reconciliation that our Lord has prescribed for us to deal with personal offenses (Matt. 18:15-20), appealing to the church courts if personal admonition proves insufficient. Two, you may elect to forbear the offense, knowing that the sufferance of slander is a mark of the believer’s life in this world, and that it is a gracious thing (1 Pet. 3:13-17) to endure it patiently. Scripture does not say that you are permitted to withdraw into secret enclaves to avoid slander, and as a practical question such secrecy rather gives more occasion to the suspicion of others than reduces it.
An Apology for this Letter
But perhaps all of this is too much. You little like such blunt public criticism of your secret doings. What offense has anyone done you in criticizing or opposing you? Have we not labored to faithfully reprove you for what we believe are your failings? Is such not our duty to you as fellow members of Christ’s church? Perhaps we are wrong to one degree or another, or as regards some matters, or in some of our methods. Perhaps some have even descended from just confrontation to something as heinous as slander, as you allege. I do not make excuses for that, if indeed it is true – I know nothing of such incidents to judge either way – but speak for the many who have disagreed with you whose intent and aims have been good. If you like not the plainness of our speech or its content may it be fairly asked whether the source of offense lies in the remonstrances or in the ones who receive them?
Test your hearts and consider whether there be any pride there that prejudices you in this matter and that closes your minds and hardens your hearts against reproof. You set yourselves up as the proponents of a ‘beautiful orthodoxy’ and ‘a faithful PCA,’ and you write public letters of disagreement defending yourselves, while at all levels of the church courts you work ceaselessly to fashion its polity as you will. Is it unthinkable this has made you blind to your own faults or to the justice of the criticisms that others level against you? It is hard, as a matter of practical human nature, to zealously work for a great scheme of reform without becoming proud, stubborn, and slow to listen. Have you considered whether this is the case with you? Have you tested yourselves and taken the logs out of your own eyes, or do you make haste in assailing others?
It is the latter. Your sincerity is not doubted, nor, for that matter, are some of your claims. The Presbyterian Church in America is a human institution, rife with weakness and sin. It has, as such, many grounds upon which it may be criticized and sundry points at which it needs to amend its deeds. It is not denied that we have often had a poor record in our dealings with various groups, nor that we are prone to complacency, pride, and sundry sins that involve how we conceive of ourselves and relate to others and to material things.
A Call to Repentance
But where some have fallen too far to the right into worldly respectability and have come perilously close to a dead orthodoxy that is but a veneer over a substance that is more of a piece with a WASP-ish country club than the church of Christ, your danger is to fall too far in the other direction. In your reaction against others in the denomination you have given yourselves to a form of organization and methods that are not acceptable, and now the only way that you can you remove the offense of your unjustified secret political machinations is by openly repenting of them. Write a letter and post it at A Faithful PCA, ByFaith, or some such suitable place. Sign it and declare yourselves openly, and as a part of it renounce secrecy and promise to surrender office forever if you are caught in it again and to faithfully reveal anyone whom you know that persists in or returns to it. Apologize also for the offense you have caused your brethren and extol others to not follow in the way of your wrongdoing. Such is the way of honor and honesty, and if you will not take it there are many who will think of you as guilty of impenitent contumacy against the peace and purity of the church.
Further Concerns
It is not only your secretive tendencies that are an occasion for concern. To be blunt – not in an effort to be rude, mind you, but in the interests of speaking the truth faithfully – you come across as rather arrogant and hypocritical. You are rather snidely dismissive of others that disagree with you: The Aquila Report is just a “gossip outlet,” a mere handful of writers against your own robust multitude of elders, while the concerns of others are repeatedly brushed aside as just so much social media outrage. The Nashville Statement is, not a faithful summary of historic teachings about sexuality, but rather “simply the latest stick being used to whack away the unclean,” and it stretches the bounds of credulity to think that anyone regards it as anything “more than empty words.” Any notion of the PCA sliding into liberalism is just a “myth” that you regard as an inconvenience, as it requires you to justify your deeds to others, while in discussing homosexual lust you sarcastically ask whether those that experience such lust should not be “allowed in the fellowship of half-blind [donkeys] looking for the Glory of the Lord?”
There is little charity in such statements, casting aspersions upon the motives and character of others as they do. If The Aquila Report and other sites are just “gossip outlets” aren’t you implicitly accusing their proprietors and contributors of sin? And as for calling your fellow Presbyterians “half-blind [donkeys],” you seem to have forgotten the testimony of Scripture on this point, that “if anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless” (Jas. 1:26), and, further, that you ought to “let your speech always be gracious” (Col. 4:6) and “let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up” (Eph. 4:29). It is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks (Lk. 6:45), and so, by extension, that the fingers type.
But perhaps the best example of arrogance can be seen in a tweet by your founder, in which he retweeted a video of a sheep perpetually running into a ditch and becoming stuck each time it was freed, a video whose original comment was a bit of foul language unacceptable in the eyes of many unbelievers, and which received the further comment from your founder that this was “the pastoral care process, explained.” God says that you are to “shepherd the flock of God that is among you . . . not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock” (1 Pet. 5:2-3) and that you are to “show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching show integrity, dignity, and sound speech that cannot be condemned” (Tit. 2:7-8). He does not commend that you use bad language and make light of your holy calling and arrogantly belittle the sheep in the process. By your words here you sound rather like the shepherds of Israel whom God condemned for arrogance and selfishness (Eze. 34), for you have fun at the expense of those whose slaves you are (Mk. 10:42-45).
As for your hypocrisy, you speak with much emotion of our common brotherhood, with many pious phrases decrying division and extolling unity and peace in both public (e.g., “The Open Letter” at A Faithful PCA) and in your own midst, yet by your deeds and other internal statements – such as those mentioned above – you draw all of this into suspicion. Again, you want the PCA to be a big tent that includes within its midst every substrata of American society, but you seem little concerned that in your desire for expansion according to your tastes you are actively alienating many of our own members and churches even now, and in some cases inducing them to leave.
At the 2019 General Assembly one of your number stated, in effect, that we should be greatly concerned that the world thinks our foremost trait is hatred of homosexuals and that we should work to rehabilitate our image; and yet when fellow PCA elders attempt to remonstrate with you over your perceived failings you dismiss them pretty much categorically as engaged in so much fear mongering and alarmist nonsense. Thus do you say that we should listen to the wicked who are blinded by the lies of Satan, and yet you would also close your ears to the reproofs of the faithful. Do you believe that you may pay lip service to unity while acting in a dismissive way that makes it impossible, or that you may leave your ears open to culture, even unbelieving and wholly immoral culture, and yet close them to your fellow presbyters and not come to a bad end?
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Simpsonville, S.C.

The only way to find the right fear of God is through the Person and Work of Jesus Christ. The cross of Christ is where majestic holiness and infinite mercy find their perfect conjunction as far as man is concerned. It is in the gospel that men can look at blinding holiness and glorious love and see them in light of each other. When the gospel is rightly taught, there is neither the dilution of God’s wrath, power and majesty, nor a grudging admission or dismissive assent to God’s love, grace, and mercy. As surely as the Incarnation requires belief that Christ is truly God and truly man, so the gospel (and the doctrine of simplicity) requires we believe that God is infinitely great and infinitely good. 

Here’s a short test. What follows is a list of several words associated with fear. Which of these have to do with the fear of the Lord?
Horror, awe, terror, quiet, despair, seriousness, intimidation, dread, timidity, scariness, panic, astonishment, trepidation, anxiety, reverence. The exercise is not primarily to get it exactly “right”, for even these words carry connotations that will differ from person to person. Generally speaking, most thoughtful Christians will weed out the most negative and destructive of fears (despair, horror, panic) while retaining the ones that suggest seriousness.
Understanding the inner affection of reverence is as difficult as trying to define any human emotion. Our best chance of understanding it well is to begin negatively: eliminating the wrong kinds of fear on either end of the spectrum. From there, we will likely find the kind of fear the mixes elements of both sides.
What is the fear “spectrum”? On one extreme, we would have the kind of fear that a sinner would face should he experience the pure, unmitigated greatness of an infuriated omnipotent god, were that god his enemy. This fear would be terror and horror of the most agonising kind. Nothing except the despair of the sinner’s inevitable destruction looms over him. No hope is here, only panic, for there is nothing but threat to one’s being.
The opposite extreme would be the over-familiarity that a friend or relative might have with one in a position of authority. The position of authority is known to the friend, but the close relationship leads the friend to almost scoff at his position, as if it is an inside joke that such authority does not rule over friends. The ‘goodness’ of his friend, their relationship of friendship does not simply render his authority friendly; it neutralises it altogether.
Of these two, we know which is in the ascendancy today when it comes to worshipping God.
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Hospitality must be carefully measured out, lest the family or nation dissolve under the burden of too many guests, and those welcomed become dependent in a way that corrupts their characters. Why is the conclusion that we may (and perhaps must, given judgments of prudence) limit immigration so hard to voice in polite company? Why, in many churches, are arguments for enforcing borders greeted with an appalled gasp? 

Speaking to a gymnasium full of high schoolers in 2015, Angela Merkel sought to explain why Germany needed to close its borders to the tide of Syrian refugees. She was brought up short by Reem Sahwil, a refugee girl facing deportation. The girl’s tears accomplished what no lobbyist or newspaper could: a volte-face in Germany’s immigration policy. Soon the country was welcoming 10,000 refugees per day, stoking a heated political debate that continues to roil much of Europe. The same influx of newcomers helped spur Trump to victory in 2016, and with nearly 300,000 migrants per month trying to cross our southern border, it may well do so again in 2024. The debate over immigration is also likely to continue tearing the Church apart, as mainline congregations post signs declaring “Love has no borders,” while evangelical Christians demand a wall, the national guard, secession—anything to stop the flow.
In Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, historian Tom Holland concludes his two-thousand-year narrative with Merkel’s encounter with Reem Sahwil. Nowhere is the impact of the Christian revolution so apparent, he argues. The willingness of Western nations to open their borders to the huddled masses at their doorsteps is imaginable only because of Christianity. Throughout human history, almost no one other than Christians has felt this way: Outsiders remain outside, and that is that. As a pastor’s daughter, however, Merkel internalized Jesus’s imperative: “‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ God loves not just German people. God loves everybody.” In this interpretation, Christianity has always offered a vision of radical hospitality; tearing down of ethnic boundaries was at the heart of St. Paul’s gospel.
Why then do so many evangelical Christians today intuit that something is wrong with Merkel’s reasoning? Is the call for control of the border simply a nativist reflex that we must stifle, a manifestation of sinful pride and selfishness that we must mortify? Or does the globalist war on borders constitute, rather, an idolatrous striving to transcend our finitude, to be as gods unbound in time or space?
In my estimation, secure borders, national sovereignty, and limited immigration are affirmed by traditional Christian moral theology. Of course, there is nothing sacred about lines on a map; they are human constructions, which serve human goods. But these goods—the goods of hearth and homeland—are not to be despised, for without them we would lose our humanity.
The language of “hospitality” is often invoked on the progressive side of the debate. Openness to immigrants, we are told, is a simple duty of Christian hospitality. We must welcome the stranger into our national home and see that he is clothed and fed. “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares,” admonishes the Epistle to the Hebrews. The notion of hospitality has much to commend it, and indeed the analogy between the home and the polity is almost as old as politics itself.
But does the appeal to “hospitality” entail a call to abolish or open our borders? To show hospitality in my own home, I must have a home—that is, a house with four walls and doors that open, close, and (ideally) can be locked. To invite people into this home, I must maintain a clear distinction between residents and guests. If every passing drug addict can crash on the couch, I may be running a worthy ministry, but I am not maintaining a home. In fact, if I have children (and it is striking how many of the progressive advocates of open borders do not—Merkel included), I will know instinctively that I must sometimes put their needs above the practice of hospitality. Some strangers will be too dangerous to allow into my home. Others may be safe enough, but they will compete for the limited temporal and financial resources that I owe to my wife and children before all others. Of course, a residence totally closed to neighbors and strangers would likewise be a travesty; it might be a beautiful house, but we would rightly hesitate to call it a home.
Hospitality, then, is an essential function of a home, and yet an unlimited, revolving-door hospitality would quickly destroy most homes. The lesson is clear enough: a nation, likewise, ought to be open to strangers, but it will soon have little to offer either residents or visitors if it does not establish appropriate limits. A nation without borders is no better than a house without walls. Common sense, therefore, shows us that, like every creaturely good, hospitality (whether by household or nation) is made possible only by recognition of its limits.
This intuition is fortified by Scripture. Israel is called to be a separate, bounded nation among the nations, and yet a nation for the nations, offering hospitality to “the sojourner.” The Israelites are repeatedly reminded, “You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Exod. 22:21).
The vision of hospitality made possible to a consolidated and bounded people is mirrored in the relationship of individual Israelite families to the land. Each family and tribe has its particular portion and inheritance, to be secured throughout the generations. Yet this possession serves a wider good. The surplus of each Israelite’s fields is “for the poor and the sojourner” (Lev. 19:10), as is the surplus of the whole nation (Deut. 26:12). Hospitality and charity are not boundless. Although naturalization is possible (for example, Ruth), ordinarily the sojourner remains a sojourner and does not receive a portion of the land. In his time of residence, the sojourner is expected to abide by Israel’s laws, both criminal (Lev. 24:22) and ceremonial (Num. 15:15).
Biblical Israel is an imperfect analogue for modern nation-states. Its national boundaries were defined above all by circumcision, not border checkpoints, and justice was administered by elders at the gate, not by centralized courts and bureaucracies. But the Bible’s account of Israel’s norms for treating strangers tells us at least that the call to hospitality does not abolish property lines or territorial distinctions.
What about the New Testament? Understandably, given that its contents were written by and for small and disempowered communities of believers, it provides little direction for the conduct of states. But the analogy between polity and household allows us to draw wisdom about statecraft from its teaching on private property.
Interpretation of the New Testament’s statements about property is famously vexed. Christian socialists have pointed to Christ’s direction to the rich young ruler, and to the sharing of goods within the Church in Acts 4, as evidence that believers are called to live without private property, giving in accord with capacity, taking in accord with need. However, much of the rest of the New Testament takes ongoing inequalities of property for granted (e.g., Acts 5:4; 1 Cor. 9:1–12; 1 Tim. 5:8). Possessing wealth is permitted, so long as property is ordered toward the goods of hospitality and charity.
As is the case with many questions in social ethics, we cannot resolve the biblical status of private property by exegesis alone; we must frame it with reference to basic theological categories. Is private property a necessary evil, a response to the Fall’s disordering of human affections, which the community of the redeemed is called to overcome? Or is it a God-given good, a natural feature of created humanity?
In our answer to this question about property, we will have our answer to the question of national borders. For the doctors of the Church and later medieval theologians, who debated the issue fiercely, recognized that private property and political authority evoke the same theological question: In a world made up of divine image-bearers, equally sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, by what right could some humans ever claim to limit, exclude, or command other humans? By what right could a householder say, “This is my property; if you want to use it, you may do so only on my terms”? And by what right could a king say, “This is my territory; if you want to live here or pass through, you may do so only under my laws”? The word for both kinds of authority is the same: dominium, lordship.
The Church Fathers, for the most part, took a more pessimistic line on dominium. In a world without sin, there would be no occasion for either private property or political authority. In the Garden of Eden, all the good gifts of creation were available to all in common, and, untainted by greed, each human being freely shared with one another as each had need. There was no distinction between meum and tuum. In Edenic innocence, no one would ask for anything unless he really needed it, and no one would withhold anything in the face of such need. Thus, there would have been no occasion for governments to apportion goods or mediate disputes.
The Fall destroyed this primordial harmony of affections, pitting men against one another. It also introduced scarcity into the equation. Man must toil, and the cursed ground fails to yield fruits sufficient for our ever-expanding wants.
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