It’s well understood that institutional presences like seminaries and colleges need to be protected; reputation is everything. But sometimes truth is another thing and we do need to be careful to maintain some unblinking history. The stories of the OPC and PCA are not well ordered or manicured; they were rough cut. Their men were not always angels and their institutions not always perfect.

There are a lot of secrets in the theological world. The secrets aren’t really being kept from you. They are esoteric secrets of the guild and priesthood because they are strange and hard to understand, in a different language and sit in institutional cultures. It’s not that different from the way we hire lawyers and doctors that know the procedures and a special language they’ve memorized. We would love have everyone understand but it takes a lot of work to get in on the game.
I’ve served in the OPC, the PCA and the ARP but first I was in the PCUSA. And that’s the way a life in the church often is; we are where we are because we don’t know any better at the time. We grow through different phases and end up in different places. Each church and denomination has its own theological culture but more than that its own social culture. You hear people say, “Why do the people at that church act that way?” When you know the denomination you know there are social traits of that group that are manifesting themselves in that individual church. The social culture is something you can’t learn in a book and there are unwritten rules against exposing the soft underbelly of presbyteries and synods. We understand in secret what must have been going on at those famous assemblies we read about in the histories. The meetings of the Westminster Divines. The Synod of Dort. The writing of the Nicene Creed must have been a hoot; so many intense personalities!
Coming into the OPC some 30 years ago I was introduced to a gathering of minsters and elders as, “He’s a Sproul guy…” There was immediate concern and one audible groan. That was the official inoculation at the Presbytery level against Sproul guys. I didn’t know what it meant or how deep that well went but it stuck. I didn’t understand the deep contrast between the PCA tradition and the OPC tradition and why they were often fire and water. As the years went by I found that it was true. I was indeed a Sproul guy… according to the unwritten rules that come along with being Presbyterian. And it came with invisible fences; you can’t have some free range Sproul guy walking around causing theology.
Sproul and Gerstner had recently published their celebrated, “Classical Apologetics” criticizing Van Til’s apologetic methodology. Sproul and Gerstner were mother’s milk for me; I loved them so much but I wasn’t from that hometown. As a kid I attended Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel, Hal Lindsey’s Tetelestai and John MacArthur’s Grace Community Church. Like many that grew up in eccentric theological environments I might have become an agnostic if not for an intervention. Mine was by Francis Schaeffer. I read his books and watched his videos “How Shall We Then Live” and felt that someone had meaningfully heard my serious questions about the Christian faith. Schaeffer and MacArthur led me to Sproul and that was my segue into the reformational world.
And it is a world to itself, a separate and distinct theological and cultural enclave. People tend to think they’re just joining a church but really they’re joining a church, a presbytery and a denomination that each have their own “personality”. Which presbytery and Synod or General Assembly you join will have an effect upon your spiritual well being and that of your family, so it’s good to take these things seriously. The individual church you join will not be able to shield you from the consequences of the institutional setting in which they exist.
In the reformed world there are birthright economies and deep traditions, a kind of a deep state of theological institutions and positions of influence. In the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, one is being Dutch. It’s not that you have to be Dutch to thrive but it doesn’t hurt. You have to go to the right schools, study under the right people, marry into the right families and approve of the right names. Van Til is so influential that he is written into the OPC Book of Church Order itself as presenting the uniquely OPC apologetic methodology.
But the big name in the OPC is Gresham Machen and all of us love Machen. Machen’s “Christianity and Liberalism” was formative upon me from my theological youth. But in pretty obvious ways Machen was cut from a different cloth than the later development of the institutions he created. He was a man of the conservative Princeton wing and that’s not a controversial claim. He was trying to go backwards to get forward and the birth of the OPC and Westminster Philadelphia can’t be understood without him. He was a 1920s Presbyterian conservative in an era of theological liberalism looking back at the very best of the tradition and watching its disintegration.
In 1923 when things were going to pot Machen said:
“So it is with faith. Faith is so very useful, they tell us, that we must not scrutinize its basis in truth. But, the great trouble is, such an avoidance of scrutiny itself involves the destruction of faith. For faith is essentially dogmatic.
Despite all you can do, you cannot remove the element of intellectual assent from it…. Very different is the conception of faith which prevails in the liberal Church. According to modern liberalism, faith is essentially the  same as “making Christ Master” in one’s life; at least it is by making Christ Master in the life that the welfare of men is sought. But that simply means that salvation is thought to be obtained by our own obedience to the commands of Christ. Such teaching is just a sublimated form of legalism. Not the sacrifice of Christ, on this view, but our own obedience to God’s law, is the ground of hope.
In this way the whole achievement of the Reformation has been given up, and there has been a return to the religion of the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, God raised up a man who began to read the Epistle to the Galatians with his own eyes. The result was the rediscovery of the doctrine of justification by faith. Upon that rediscovery has been based the whole of our evangelical freedom. As expounded by Luther and Calvin the Epistle to the Galatians became the “Magna Charta of Christian liberty.” Gresham Machen, “Christianity and Liberalism”.
We could go on with this in great detail but we can say this, for Machen and all of the theological conservatives of his era that faith was essentially about what you believe and that replacing that with ethics, morality and the lordship of God was the essence of liberalism.
The integration of legal obedience into our justification was exactly on point as the disease because when that shift takes place it will consume everything. Nothing of the Gospel will survive. Machen had the diagnosis but he was also aware that the golden age had passed. He looks back 100 years earlier when he says Western Civilization was still passively Christian and laments that in his day the culture was already dominated by paganism. He said this came first theologically then culturally. He started Westminster Theological Seminary to hold ground with an intent of retaking the castle.
In this of course, Sproul was part of this Machen lineage, not as being in the OPC but very self consciously from a similar perspective on the Bible as the word of God, faith as believing the Gospel and salvation as by grace alone through faith. Faith not being interpreted as good works or legal obedience to the moral law but faith taken as the condition of the covenant of grace, as distinguished and different from the nature and conditions of the covenant of works which requires perfect obedience to the law.
Keith Mathison, professor of systematic theology at Reformation Bible College writes this:
I recently watched a short video of a lecture by my mentor and former pastor Dr. R.C. Sproul… He said that the broad evangelical church has been “pervasively antinomian.”… One of the doctrinal issues that separates broadly evangelical theology from confessional Reformed theology is covenant theology… This is where Dr. Sproul’s charge of “pervasive antinomianism” arises. Reformed theology historically has a way of approaching ethical questions. This approach includes careful examination of God’s law as revealed in Scripture. It includes examination of biblical wisdom literature. It includes consideration of natural law. It includes examining how other Reformed pastors and theologians of the past dealt with similar issues. In other words, it looks at Scripture as understood within our Reformed theological and confessional heritage. As an example, if an ethical question not explicitly addressed by Scripture arises, the Reformed would first go to the biblical law and wisdom literature to find applicable biblical principles. Natural law issues would be taken into consideration. Then we would look at how our confessions address this issue. The questions and answers on the Ten Commandments in the Westminster Larger Catechism, for example, are a rich resource on ethical questions.”
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The doctrine of imputation is one of the most under-taught teachings in the church today, and every Christian needs to know it. God credits to us the righteousness of Christ, and this comes through faith alone, which is also God’s gift to us in Christ (Eph. 2:8-9). Additionally, our sin is credited to Christ, who, though he knew no sin, was punished for the sins of all who trust in him for salvation (2 Cor. 5:21).

Here are 10 words every Christian should know—and be able to explain—in order to “be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15).
1. Faith
Saving faith is not, as is commonly believed, a blind faith. There are three aspects of saving faith:

knowledge of Christ and his salvific work;

agreement that the claims of Christianity are true;

hearty trust in Christ alone for our salvation.

Faith is the instrument through which, by God’s grace, Christ’s perfect righteousness and atoning sacrifice are credited to us. It is God’s gift, not a work of any kind (Eph. 2:8-9). For more on the definition of faith, please click here.
2. Grace
Grace is one of God’s attributes. According to theologian Louis Berkhof, the grace of God in our redemption in Christ

is God’s free, sovereign undeserved favor or love to man, in his state of sin and guilt, which manifests itself in the forgiveness of sin and deliverance from His justice. (Systematic Theology, p. 427).

There is nothing we have done or could ever do to merit God’s grace. We receive it by God’s sovereign choice alone (Rom. 11:5-6).
3. Peace
There are two aspects to peace—objective and subjective. Just as two countries have a status of peace with each other through official agreements, so Christians are declared at peace with God through Jesus Christ (Rom. 5:1). This means that we still have the status of peace with God regardless of how we feel or how well we keep his commands at any given time.
It is normal for Christians to still feel anxious in this troubled world and to feel a lack of peace from the sin in their lives. These feelings should spur us on to trust in God, repent of our sins, and seek to live in such a manner that honors our Lord. Christians should always be exceedingly thankful and find unfathomable comfort in the fact that the blood of Christ sufficiently atones for all their guilt and sin.
4. Cross
God in his perfection must uphold all his attributes. We cannot separate God’s love from his holiness, or his mercy from his justice. God must be true to all his attributes, because to do otherwise would be to deny his own self.
As theologian Michael Horton so aptly states in his book The Christian Faith, “God would not be God if he did not possess all his attributes in the simplicity and perfection of his essence” (229). Jesus was born in the flesh so he could fulfill the whole law and be the perfect sacrifice on behalf of all who put their faith in him (Heb. 10:11-14).
At the cross Jesus offered up his life as the perfect, once-for-all sacrifice for all who trust in him for salvation (e.g. John 10:14, 15). According to Horton we observe, “the clearest evidence of the complete consistency between God’s goodness and his sovereignty, justice, wrath, and righteousness in Christ’s cross” (p. 266). At the cross we see God’s “righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:26).
5. Law
According to theologian R. C. Sproul, the law is like a mirror: it shows us our sin, but it can do nothing to save us. In fact, the law condemns everyone who is not in Christ. Jesus was born in the flesh in order to be the perfect Son whom God had promised since the fall of Adam in the garden (Gen. 3:15).

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (Rom. 8:3-4)

Jesus kept the law perfectly on behalf of all who trust in him for salvation, and they are counted righteous in God’s sight through faith alone by God’s grace alone.
The law also serves the purposes of restraining evil and showing us what is pleasing to God.
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The overture enables the PCA to speak into an urgent issue, while mitigating the perception that Christians condone or support political violence. And if such acts happen in the future, the Statement will distance the denomination from any violence done in the name of Christ.

Four days before Christmas of 2021, the adult child of a Loudoun County, Virginia, school board member received an anonymous note saying, “It is too bad that your mama is an ugly communist wh*re. If she doesn’t quit or resign before the end of the year, we will kill her, but first, we will kill you!”
Loudoun County is within the boundaries of the PCA’s Potomac Presbytery, which also includes our nation’s capital. In recent years, Washington D.C. has witnessed various displays of violence, from across the political spectrum. On one end of the divide, rioters vandalized buildings, set cars on fire, and assaulted police. On the other end, rioters also assaulted police to storm the U.S. Capitol and disrupt certification of election results.
But Washington D.C. is hardly alone. Election officials in several states have been threatened. A police precinct building in Portland, Oregon, was set on fire. An actionable plot to kidnap to the governor of Michigan was thwarted by the F.B.I.
And some of these acts of violence and intimidation have been done in the name of Jesus.
Concerned by this downward slide in American political discourse, Chris Hutchinson (pastoring in Blacksburg, VA) and I (pastoring in Arlington, VA) felt it was time for the Church to speak, through a “Statement on Political Violence” calling members of the PCA, the broader Church, and a watching world to peaceful expressions of political objectives. Our initial draft soon became a group effort, representing a broad spectrum of teaching and ruling elders. As a combat veteran, Chris particularly encouraged soliciting input from military veterans, who have thought long and hard about the proper and improper use of force. Once the overture was submitted to Potomac Presbytery in January, the MNA Committee sponsored two forums for members of the presbytery to carefully consider every word and refine the document. The MNA Committee unanimously recommended the overture to Potomac, which approved the Statement by a very large majority.
The Statement asks the General Assembly to approve four resolutions:

To remind the PCA that our highest allegiance is to Jesus Christ
To condemn political violence, especially that which is done in the name of Jesus
To pray for peace in our country during the General Assembly
To encourage the PCA to pursue peace in the public square

Throughout the process of drafting the overture, important questions were raised:

What is the biblical and confessional support for these resolutions?

The overture cites several passages from Scripture and the Westminster Standards, such as Jesus’ command to his followers to “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.” (Luke 6:27). How the Apostle Paul exhorted Christians facing opposition in the capital of the Roman empire, “if possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” (Romans 12:18). How the Westminster Larger Catechism states the duties required in the sixth commandment include “peaceable, mild and courteous speeches and behavior, forbearance, readiness to be reconciled, patient bearing and forgiving of injuries, and requiting good for evil.” (WLC 135).

Why is this overture necessary?

The United States has witnessed a striking increase in political violence and intimidation in recent years, from across the political spectrum, including arson, assaults on government buildings, and a growing number of personal threats to public officials. Why the increase?
Experts who have studied the causes of political violence cite several factors, including polarization, marginalization, and despair. Polarization not only pushes people towards political extremes but also portrays opponents as existential threats. Marginalization occurs when various groups perceive they have lost status or influence. And ultimately, despair sets in when hope in the peaceful political process is lost.
Unfortunately, all such factors are present today, and increasing. The Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other national and state agencies report they are anticipating more acts of political violence.
Recent polls underscore this concern. A January 2022 poll by Quinnipiac University showed that 58% of Americans believe “the nation’s democracy is in danger of collapse.” A November 2021 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute indicated that 18% of all Americans, i.e. members of both major parties and independents, agreed that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save the country.” Pause for a moment to think what that means. Nearly one in five Americans—roughly 52 million adults—think political violence may be necessary. One might be tempted to dismiss such an extraordinarily large number as an exaggeration. But what if merely 1% of those who condone political violence were willing to act on their beliefs? That would mean 500,000 adults would be willing to assault a police officer. 500,000 adults would be willing to vandalize a government building. 500,000 adults might even be willing to assassinate an election official or member of Congress. And even more terrifying, what if the actual percentage were higher than 1%? Clearly, there is reason for concern.

Does this overture call for pacifism?

The Statement rejects acts of violence by private individuals, but it does not advocate pacifism. The overture expressly affirms the Lord has granted the power of the sword to civil governments and honors the service of members of law enforcement and the military. It also cites the Westminster Larger Catechism, which states the sins forbidden in the sixth commandment include “all taking away the life of ourselves, or of others, except in case of public justice, lawful war, or necessary defense; the neglecting or withdrawing the lawful and necessary means of preservation of life; sinful anger, hatred, envy, desire of revenge; all excessive passions.” (WLC 136).

Does the Statement delegitimize the American Revolution?

Before we put pen to paper, we considered whether a statement rejecting political violence might appear to question the legitimacy of the American Revolution. Ultimately, we chose not to refer to the War of Independence as we weren’t asking the courts of the PCA to render a political judgment on matters that properly belong to individuals and civil magistrates. Instead, we wanted to speak into the situation before us—one in which Americans are condoning or supporting political violence and intimidation.
At the same time, we wanted to avoid language where someone might infer the overture questioned the American Revolution. Thus, the Statement explicitly condemns “unlawful expressions” of political violence. In contrast, the Declaration of Independence was unanimously approved by the Second Continental Congress, which consisted of elected representatives of the 13 states. That same Congress established a Continental army, elected a commander-in-chief of the army, and oversaw the war effort. Such actions are a far cry from the “unlawful expressions” of political violence by unelected, private citizens we see today.

What does the overture actually hope to achieve?

First, the overture enables the PCA to speak into an urgent issue, while mitigating the perception that Christians condone or support political violence. And if such acts happen in the future, the Statement will distance the denomination from any violence done in the name of Christ.
Second, the overture provides guidance to our members how to engage in debates in the public square, namely by rejecting violence and intimidation, and instead, by speaking with wisdom, love and grace. By modeling civility, the Church has an opportunity to be salt and light in our divisive culture.
Third, if the overture prevents even one act of violence, it will be well worth our discussion. We aren’t so naïve as to think an overture from the PCA is going to heal our country. But if the Statement results in one less threatening note, one less assault, one less building vandalized, one less life needlessly ended, the effort would be more than worth it.
And most importantly, we hope to honor Christ by affirming to one another and a watching world that Jesus is worthy of our highest allegiance, and that we trust him as our sovereign and gracious King.
Read Overture 26
Scott Seaton is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is Pastor of Emmanuel PCA in Alexandria, VA
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