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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Because functional liberalism detests claims to authority that do not leave the ultimacy of the individual intact, they turn gospel-centered theology into “gospel-only theology.” The technical term for this is antinomianism. They forget that sin is lawlessness (1 John 3:4) and that Christ came to save us from lawlessness (Titus 2:14) and for the obedience of faith (Rom. 1:5; cf. Gal. 6:2). 

During the summer of 2023, a group of cardinals from every continent posed a series of dubia (a Latin word meaning “doubts” in the sense of questions born of concern or reservation) to the supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church. The dubia addressed a range of pressing contemporary matters, from the possibility of women’s ordination to the blessing of same-sex unions. As one commentator put it, the cardinals ultimately wanted to know, “Is the Roman Catholic Church going to go the same direction as liberal Protestantism—adapting Scripture to suit contemporary culture, ordaining women, and accepting the legitimacy of same-sex unions?” The pope’s evasive reply provoked a follow-up from the cardinals, who reformulated the dubia to be easily answerable with a clear “yes” or “no.” As of the time of writing this article, there has been no further response.
Earlier that year, the Church of England voted to permit the blessing of same-sex “marriages” and civil partnerships.1 The move prompted a strong response from the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA), who condemned the development as a schismatic choice “to break communion with those provinces who remain faithful to the historic biblical faith.” Furthermore, the bishops of GSFA denounced the Archbishop of Canterbury, no longer recognizing him as primus inter pares (“first among equals”), while calling for his global “admonishment in love.”
Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, in September of 2023—a year that will live in infamy?—the de facto bishop of the evangelical megachurch, Andy Stanley, hosted Embracing the Journey’s Unconditional Conference. The event was advertised as being “for parents of LGBTQ+ children and for ministry leaders looking to discover ways to support parents and LGBTQ+ children in their churches.” The conference featured speakers who either are in same-sex relationships themselves or are supportive of others in the same. While Stanley did tip his hat to the biblical teaching on homosexuality—saying, “It was a sin then, and it is a sin now”—he simultaneously undermined that position by affirming Justin Lee and Brian Nietzel, “two married gay men” whom Stanley called faithful followers of Christ. Apparently, Stanley thinks faithful followers of Christ can persist in flagrantly unrepentant abominations before the Lord (Lev. 18:22; 20:13), contrary to the solemn warnings of Scripture in many places (e.g., Rom. 1:26–27, 32; 1 Cor. 6:9–10).
What are we to make of this rapid, cross-denominational apostasy?2 The fact of this phenomenon is a clear example of culture reporter Megan Basham’s recent warning: “You may have wanted to avoid this subject, but you cannot avoid it any longer. [LGBT ideology] is coming to your church, no matter how solid you think it is.”3 Those who cannot see this are woefully ignorant of the times. Yet the cause of this phenomenon is anything but recent. Indeed, the “journey” that leads to this dead end (let the reader understand) is so well worn that one can see it from space.
We’ve Been Here Before: Christianity and Liberalism
J. Gresham Machen wrote his classic book, Christianity and Liberalism, 4 exactly a century before Catholics, Anglicans, and Evangellyfish failed to uphold biblical sexuality.5 The book’s title is none too subtle, though Machen’s point is sometimes missed in these days of decreasing reading comprehension levels. (To spell it out is no trouble for us and is a safeguard for you.) In his own words, “The chief modern rival of Christianity is ‘liberalism.’ An examination of the teachings of liberalism in comparison with those of Christianity will show that at every point the two movements are in direct opposition.”6
Machen is not saying that liberal Christianity is a terrible perversion of the faith; he is saying that liberalism is another faith entirely. To give an analogy, liberal “Christianity” is more like a virus than a sick or wounded form of the body of Christ. For a body remains a body, even when it suffers from illness or (self-inflicted) injury. But a virus is an alien entity that merely uses the body for its own self-perpetuation. If a Christian church is a body, therefore, liberalism is a virus.
We can see this distinction clearly when Machen addresses “the division between the Church of Rome [in his day] and evangelical Protestantism.” Protestants and Catholics have substantial disagreements, viewing the other body of believers as significantly ill or impaired. Still, Machen writes, “Yet how great is the common heritage which unites the Roman Catholic Church, with its maintenance of the authority of Holy Scripture and with its acceptance of the great early creeds, to devout Protestants today! We would not indeed obscure the difference which divides us from Rome. The gulf is indeed profound. But profound as it is, it seems almost trifling compared to the abyss which stands between us and many ministers of our own Church. The Church of Rome may represent a perversion of the Christian religion; but naturalistic liberalism is not Christianity at all.”7
Machen highlights many reasons why “liberalism is totally different from Christianity,”8 but the central reason is a matter of authority: “Christianity is founded upon the Bible. It bases upon the Bible both its thinking and its life. Liberalism on the other hand is founded upon the shifting emotions of sinful men.”9 By “shifting emotions,” Machen means the subjective assessments of men, which are tossed to and fro by the zeitgeist (Eph. 4:14). In this way, for liberals, “It is not Jesus who is the real authority, but the modern principle by which the selection within Jesus’ recorded teaching has been made. Certain isolated ethical principles of the Sermon on the Mount are accepted, not at all because they are teachings of Jesus, but because they agree with modern ideas.”10
Machen concludes, “The real authority, for liberalism, can only be ‘the Christian consciousness’ or ‘Christian experience.’”11 This raises the question of how a Christian consensus could ever be established. Liberals are loath to appeal to church history, for that would bolster a decidedly non-modern verdict as well as trump their radical conception of the liberty of conscience. Thus, Machen writes, “The only authority, then, can be individual experience; truth can only be that which ‘helps’ the individual man. Such an authority is obviously no authority at all; for individual experience is endlessly diverse, and once truth is regarded only as that which works at any particular time, it ceases to be truth. The Christian man, on the other hand, finds in the Bible the very Word of God.”12
Christianity and Functional Liberalism
Whereas Machen wrote about Christianity and liberalism, we are writing something of an appendix on Christianity and functional liberalism.13 We call it “functional liberalism” (and not liberalism simpliciter) because, unlike the threat of Machen’s day, this strain of the virus does not share the same set of symptoms (even if it has a similar underlying cause). Machen’s liberals were modernists who openly denied the accuracy of the Scriptures, the reality of the supernatural, the necessity of the atonement, and the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. As E.J. Pace’s famous cartoon illustrated in 1922, liberal departure from the faith often happened in stages, with the truthfulness of the Bible being the first to go. A few such liberals are still around, but those who hold to the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3) are—thanks in large part to Machen and his heirs—not tempted to regard them as part of the body of Christ (1 John 2:19).
The problem we face today is of a slightly different sort. If liberalism entailed an overt denial of core Christian doctrines, the essence of functional liberalism is consent to doctrinal confessions on paper while subverting them in practice—whether by downplaying their significance, reinterpreting their meaning, or rejecting the logical implications. We are not the first to make this observation. Somewhere in the annals of D.A. Carson’s prodigious output,14 he gave a lecture in which he issued a strong warning along these lines: ‘The future of liberalism in the American church will not look like it did a century ago. Conservative seminaries and churches will not see brazen denials of the core doctrines that were the battleground of yesteryear. Instead, they will see people who claim to affirm the doctrines while undermining them through subtle but substantial reinterpretation.’15
At least the old liberals had the courage to say, “The Bible is false, the Trinity is bunk, Jesus isn’t divine, the cross wasn’t substitutionary, and the resurrection didn’t happen.” The new liberals—that is, the functional liberals—are worse in this critical respect: they claim to agree with the faith once for all delivered to the saints while simultaneously reinterpreting its doctrines into meaningless statements or else ignoring the same as they press ahead with whatever they want to do.
A Case in (North) Point
Take the statement of faith for Stanley’s Northpoint Community Church as an example of what we have been describing. All the usual suspects are there, including a clear statement that the Bible is “inspired” and “without error.” But, as Sam Allberry points out in his write-up on Stanley and the Unconditional Conference:
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What Schaeffer wrote there nearly 40 years ago was prophetic in nature. But as is so often the case, such prophetic words are ignored and rejected. As we look around the West today we see the sad fulfilment of what he had warned against.

On May 15, 1984, the great evangelical thinker, Presbyterian pastor, and noted apologist Francis Schaeffer passed away. Just a few months earlier his last book was released: The Great Evangelical Disaster (Crossway). Anyone who is familiar with his life and work knows that this volume very much followed in the same vein as his previous 21 books.
It continued the basic themes he had always preached on and written about, which include: an infinite personal God exists; he has revealed himself to us; Scripture is his inspired and infallible word; we can come to this holy God based on the finished work of Christ; Christians are called to model the truth and beauty of God in our relations with others, and the church must refuse to compromise and accommodate with the surrounding culture.
His final book certainly hammers home these key truths. In the dedication page he says the following:
To a new, young generation—and to those in the older generation—who will stand and be countedas radicals for truth and for Christ.
That is emphasised throughout this crucial volume. Plenty of quotes could be offered here. Let me feature just a few. On pages 31-32 he speaks about how utterly important all this is, and what a massive war we are in:
Make no mistake. We as Bible-believing evangelical Christians are locked in a battle. This is not a friendly gentleman’s discussion. It is a life and death conflict between the spiritual hosts of wickedness and those who claim the name of Christ. It is a conflict on the level of ideas between two fundamentally opposed views of truth and reality. It is a conflict on the level of actions between a complete moral perversion and chaos and God’s absolutes. But do we really believe that we are in a life and death battle? Do we really believe that the part we play in the battle has consequences for whether or not men and women will spend eternity in hell? Or whether or not in this life people will live with meaning or meaninglessness? Or whether or not those who do live will live in a climate of moral perversion and degradation? Sadly, we must say that very few in the evangelical world have acted as if these things are true. Rather than trumpet our accomplishments and revel in our growing numbers, it would be closer to the truth to admit that our response has been a disaster.
And on pages 48-49 he warns about which way we will go: with humanistic relativism or God’s absolutes:
Soft days for evangelical Christians are past, and only a strong view of Scripture is sufficient to withstand the pressure of an all-pervasive culture built upon relativism and relativistic thinking. We must remember that it was a strong view of the absolutes which the infinite-personal God gave to the early church in the Old Testament, in the revelation of Christ through the Incarnation, and in the then growing New Testament — absolutes which enabled the early church to withstand the pressure of the Roman Empire. Without a strong commitment to God’s absolutes, the early church could never have remained faithful in the face of the constant Roman harassment and persecution. And our situation today is remarkably similar as our own legal, moral, and social structure is based on an increasingly anti-Christian, secularist consensus.
On page 60 he discusses what happens when cultural infiltration saps the strength and vitality of the church. Everything that we have now experienced – including the evangelical acceptance of homosexuality and fake marriage, was all foreseen by Schaeffer: