In Jesus, we hear the only name that saves. We can, if we want, nurture offense or embarrassment about God’s giving only one name. Or we can thank God for that name, treasure that name, and join God himself in spreading that name wherever it is not sung. If we do, we join a mission that cannot fail. 

In a world of tolerance and pluralism, few truth claims taste as sour as this one: Jesus is the only way to God. Or as the apostle Peter so boldly says,
There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved. (Acts 4:12)
Just one name for eight billion people? Just one Savior for almost seven thousand people groups? Just one heavenward path for men and women, young and old, urban and rural, Asian and American and African and European?
Peter, apparently, felt unashamed of the claim. “Let it be known to all of you,” he began (Acts 4:10). But what Peter proclaimed, many of us whisper, especially among those who take offense. “No other name” may sound fine in small group, but our voices can crack at a neighbor’s kitchen table. Embarrassment, not boldness, might mark even the lovers of Jesus’s name.
Perhaps, then, we need help feeling the wonder that there is any name at all. Into this world of curse and sin, where half our house hangs over the cliff edge of judgment, God has given a name.
World with No Name
By all just reckonings, we ought to live in a world with no name.
We ought to walk east of Eden, with no promise of a coming son. We ought to toil under Pharaoh, with no outstretched arm to rescue. We ought to tremble before Goliath, with no David to sling his stones. We ought to hang our harps in Babylon, with no hope of a future song.
On our own, of course, we struggle to consent to such dismal oughts. We feel, even if we do not speak, not that we ought to perish, but that God ought to save. We sense that heaven, not hell, is humanity’s default destination. We talk of a hundred paths up the mountain because we assume, deep down, that most (if not all) deserve to reach the top.
Yet we feel, sense, and assume like this only when we feel, sense, and assume that our sin is smaller than God says. To those with slight views of sin, little could be more offensive than there being only one name. But for those who, like Job (Job 42:6), or Isaiah (Isaiah 6:5), or Peter (Luke 5:8), or John (Revelation 1:17), have found themselves thrust into the presence of the Holy One, little could be more wonderfully surprising.
Why should God send a sunrise to pierce our chosen darkness? Why should the Father rise and race to meet his wayward son? Why should Christ become our Hosea to redeem us from the brothel? Why should heaven’s blood be shed to win back heaven’s haters? Why should Jesus give his name to rescue crucifiers?
Only because the reckonings of heaven reach beyond mere justice.
There Is a Name
Now, hear again the words that so often offend or embarrass:
There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. (Acts 4:12)
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The conclusion of the 1982 Assembly marked the end of an era of expansion, optimism, and pioneering. Most of those initial leaders would pass on by the time of the half-century mark. Still, the Church had now absorbed an entire denomination with its various agencies, missions, presbyteries, and churches. Most realized that true union was not merely organizational and that large sub-cultures would need to continue in mutual trust for the PCA to grow as wished. The next decade would test those values and unity. 

Below is another excerpt from TE David Hall’s new book, Irony and the Presbyterian Church in America. Dr. Hall has graciously provided a few samples of his latest volume to give the readers of Mid the Pines a fresh look at the first history published in conjunction with the PCA’s 50th Anniversary.
David Hall joins a long line of scholars to chart God’s faithfulness to His Church. The excerpt below details the efforts to build on the union between the PCA with the RPCES in joining and receiving. The now larger PCA experienced growth and growing pains as new questions regarding confessional subscription emerged. Read on below or purchase TE Hall’s volume available as kindle or hardcopy.
The 1982 (10th) Assembly: Union to Avoid Duplication
By David W. Hall
By the time that the 10th GA convened, returning to the campus of Calvin College with several other NAPARC partners, it was clear that enough PCA presbyteries had approved joining with the RPCES. Leading up to this Assembly, though, proponents on both sides of the issue were recruiting supporters to the very beginning of RPCES Synod. The new denomination had nearly quadrupled its membership in its first decade and doubled the number of presbyteries. Teaching elders, as had become the norm, had a nearly 2:1 ratio to ruling elders for these important debates.
When the Assembly began, Francis Schaeffer was invited to give a keynote address to this Assembly as part of the celebration of the J&R. Retiring Moderator Paul Settle announced that by more than a 3/4 margin the RPCES had approved the J&R with a 322-90 vote. Similarly, the PCA had obtained the requisite votes to effect union (25 presbyteries in favor, with none opposing); thus, the RPCES commissioners were soon included as registered commissioners of the 10th GA.  Notwithstanding, by an 18-7[1] vote of the PCA presbyteries, the invitation to the OPC failed by one presbytery vote to receive the needed supermajority support and was discontinued for a time.[2]
Before Dr. Schaeffer spoke to the now-united churches, a few border disputes among presbyteries needed adjustment, and this was assigned to a sub-committee to reconcile as soon as possible. The other largely formal matters below (Min10GA, 320) were approved as this committee concluded its work and was dissolved.
The Committee requested the Committee on Administration also to appoint legal counsel to work with the general counsel of the RPCES to assure that wills, trusts, corporations, and property matters are properly cared for in the transition process.
Steps were taken to assure that trustees in the RPCES with fiduciary responsibilities will not be placed in jeopardy when their responsibilities are transferred to corresponding members in the PCA.
The Ad Interim Committee wishes to thank the Coordinators, staff members, committee chairmen and others in the PCA who cooperated so willingly and fully with the efforts to facilitate the transition procedures of the Joining and Receiving. Appreciation is also expressed to our brethren in the OPC and RPCES who have so graciously worked with us as we have explored the possibility of ‘effecting one church.’
Though we regret that the OPC will not at this time be participating in the Joining and Receiving process, we pray that our sovereign God will allow us to continue already successful joint efforts in ministry and to expand our common witnessunto a day when we may indeed realize the hope of organizational unity to His glory.
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Our duty right now isn’t just to fight the pagans in courtrooms and voting booths and anyplace else where we can make a difference in civic life. We have a higher calling, that of obedience to God’s will. This obedience allows us to consecrate all that has been desecrated.

Addressing senior SS officers in Poznań on October 4, 1943, Heinrich Himmler was in a cheerful mood. The total extermination of the Jews, he told his minions, was going swimmingly; how unfortunate, though, that Nazism’s biggest triumph must be forever concealed. The mass murder, he said, was “an unwritten and never-to-be-written page of glory in our history,” doomed to be denied and obscured because, well, most people just felt icky when confronted with the sight of naked, starved corpses piled high.
A committed pagan who had his SS erect several memorials to the Germanic tribes and warlords who had fought Christianity throughout the ages, Himmler held the idolator’s primitive belief that to become God, a man must show utter indifference to human life. Smash a child’s skull, and you’ve moved beyond good and evil, to a place of sovereignty reserved only for deities—and demons. But never let the world catch you red-handed, Himmler knew, lest humanity’s irritating insistence on human dignity drive folks to rise up and resist.
I’ve been thinking about Himmler’s dark path to transcendence a lot this past month, especially after viewing many of the atrocities committed on October 7, captured by the Hamas terrorists themselves on their GoPro body cameras. The marauders breached an internationally recognized border to rape women, behead babies, and bind parents to children before burning them alive. These acts would have thrilled Himmler and his men. But Hamas went a step further. They had no patience for the arch-Nazi’s bashfulness. They wanted the world to see their atrocities, in close-up and real time. Because the intolerable desecration of the human body was precisely the point.
At the end of October, Carl R. Trueman reminded the participants of a seminar that followed his Erasmus Lecture that the decades that separate Himmler from Hamas are marked by the effort to sever the ties between personhood and embodiment. A fetus is undeniably embodied but, according to abortion advocates, not yet a person. And transgender ideologues insist that a person may also decide that he was born into the wrong body, and choose to mutilate his body at will, a practice doctors and educators call “gender-affirming care.” These convictions are of a piece. The sexual revolution makes little sense unless you adhere to the potent pagan principle that flesh and self are separable.
Which, if you reject that whole bit about being created in the image of God, is easy enough to believe! After all, what is a human body, if it possesses not a divinely ordained soul but some kind of operating system, one that is entirely earthly? Believe that materialist account of what it means to be human, and the body becomes not a shrine but a battlefield, each mutilation a triumph and a testament to our godlike ability to shape our future as we, and only we, see fit.
The devils who slaughtered more than 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped more than 240 were merely taking this logic to its conclusion. They’re neither nihilists nor serious believers in Islam, a religion that, even in its more rigid forms, does not recognize such atrocities as acceptable. They are, simply and terrifyingly, pagans, fighting the very same war described so lucidly in Leviticus, the war against God and those who believe in his mercy.
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