Written by J. Chase Davis |
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
On our heavenly pilgrimage, we don’t settle for the ghettoization of Christian communities….We stand ready to defend our own with all the biblical masculine virtue we have to throw ourselves into the battle wherever it rages. We march forth, taking ground; we live with strength and courage because the Lord is with us. We don’t aim to lose. We aim to win because our victory is secure in Christ. 

[American Reformer] Editor’s note: The following is a lightly edited version of a speech delivered at the Burn the Ships Conference in Boulder, Colorado on July 27, 2024.
In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.—C.S. Lewis
Because modern Christians have been taught and believed lies about reality, they have completely misunderstood the nature of reality. One of those lies involves the nature of our heavenly pilgrimage, or our spiritual life. We have been taught that our heavenly pilgrimage is solely immaterial or “spiritual.” Meaning that the things that concern our pursuit of Christ are only immaterial concerns or soul level questions. I believe two tools have been used to reduce our heavenly pilgrimage to such a state. First, the induction of egalitarianism and, second, its subsequent demonic sister, the vice of tolerance.
Egalitarianism
Here, we are not merely talking about the theological concept of egalitarianism. We are talking about that, but it is much bigger than that. In our day, there is a wildly held falsity propagated about the nature of reality and mankind. This is the notion that we are all equal, all people and all cultures are equal. We are told that all people are equal in any and every way.
In more conservative contexts, this is sometimes laundered under biblical teachings about the imago Dei. In more liberal streams, it is glossed over with verses about there being neither male nor female, no Greek or Jew in Christ. We are taught to believe that men and women are equal in any and every respect. The worst stage of this cancer has been revealed in transgenderism, thinking that men can become women or women can become men. No longer, we are told, is there any biological reality to maleness or femaleness. It is all a social construct.
More broadly, this falsity flies under the radar, using verses such as “judge not” when referring to various cultures. We are told that we cannot judge the morality or immorality of any culture or people other than our own. Why? Because they are only doing what they have been taught how to do. We are told that if given the same opportunities and privileges, they could be successful; in fact, they might even be better than us. All cultures are equal.
Closer to home, we are taught to feel an inherent shame about our very biological makeup as men. Your testosterone is not given by God, but instead a cancer you must rid yourself of. Your assertiveness and aggression are not Christlike. Your confidence and desire to win is anti-biblical. Your willingness to fight is not reflective of the meekness of Christ. On and on, they drone.
This is the lie of egalitarianism that even among men, there is no one better or worse, no one stronger or weaker; we are all one and the same. And Christians have bought this lie hook, line, and sinker. But nature abhors a vacuum, and all men know this is a lie. When you play a game of pickup basketball or throw the football, you remember the old ways. And the old ways are designed by God. Like a dog who instinctually chases a cat, even the most effeminate man will somehow discover a prior to undisclosed masculine drive when he enters the area. Because God designed men to be this way. Christ did not come to obliterate your masculinity, and he did not come to lower your T-level. Grace does not destroy nature. Christ came to restore your manhood.
Egalitarianism reduces Christianity to a consumer good. By twisting the Bible into an egalitarian framework, we have deceived ourselves into thinking that Christianity is just one option among others, which are all equal. The Christian religion is just believed to be another option among many. We adopt the anti-Christian ideal of principled pluralism and subjugate our religion to market demands. Our churches become branded such that we compete with others, not in terms of holiness or excellence but in programs and marketing. Christians themselves conceive of the church in market terms, determining the goodness of the church only in terms of success in reaching the lost.
Tolerance
The second lie is what I call the vice of tolerance—we have represented Christianity in terms of its emotional effect on other people, namely pleasure. Therefore, if people have a negative emotional experience or feel pain from our witness and our journey to the heavenly city, then we assume we must be doing something wrong. Why? Because Jesus is not mean.
We have remade Jesus in our own image regarding what it means to be a good person. There is a version of Christian tolerance that is virtuous, but today, that is not what is lauded. Instead, we see hypocrisy from those who claim tolerance and yet display nothing but contempt for Christians, particularly Christian men. It is good to overlook an offense. It is good to live in peace and harmony. This is a blessing from the Lord. But the enemies of God do not intend to live in peace and harmony with you.
G K Chesterton wrote, “Tolerance is the virtue of those who believe in nothing.”
Excessive tolerance or the vice of tolerance is more tempting than intolerance. Why? Because the coward risks no pain. It is a vice of pleasure. The person guilty of the vice of tolerance risks nothing and, therefore, can gain nothing. But they can at least preserve some sense of pleasure in knowing that they don’t have to endure pain, whether the pain of social ostracization or the pain inflicted on someone else by openly disagreeing with them. In a culture of pleasure and decadence, the idea of ever causing any pain to someone else, like what they call emotional distress, is seen as wicked.
Much of our conception of our Christian witness and sharing the gospel cannot fathom this reality today. The idea that we should cause another pain in what we tell them is seen as anti-gospel. We live in a world obsessed with pleasure. Avoid pain at all costs. Comfort by any means.
And yet, the comfort we truly need only comes from God, who comforts us with his salvation and presence. And we can only receive that comfort by facing the pain of our condemnation and the reality of our human condition apart from God. We rightly conceive of the gospel as good news. But there is no good news to speak of if people have no concept of there being bad news. The good news of the gospel is not perceived to be good if people have no familiarity with what is bad, to begin with.
There is no gospel without pain. Without pain, the news we share is simply one option in the marketplace of ideas at best. But to preach the gospel, people must hear the law to understand their standing before God. There must be condemnation in order for there to be reconciliation. This is not legalism. This is just faithful gospel preaching.
It is not cruel to speak the truth about sin plainly. In fact, to avoid speaking about sin plainly leads people to hell. Yes, this will create enemies. That is part of the deal when you come to Christ. You will have enemies. There will be people who hate hearing the good news. The aim is not necessarily to make enemies for the sake of making enemies. The aim is to proclaim the truth of God, knowing that enemies will be made. And we should pray for our enemies, especially by praying the imprecatory Psalms.
Christ says that we will have enemies, but because of these lies of reality, egalitarianism, and the vice of tolerance, which create what we might refer to as an unreality or anti-reality version of Christianity, we cannot even conceive of other people as enemies. After all, who are we to judge?
What a pox on this house of ours. We have twisted ourselves in knots to butcher the Bible to justify pacified men, a pacified church, and, therefore, a pacified society that is easy to control. We submit to the yoke of tyranny, so long as we can just conveniently order something to our doorstep. Christ did not die for his church to be pacified. He died for his church to march to the beat of his drum as we go forth into the world, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them, and teaching them to obey what He has commanded. But we have traded this vision of the church at war for a utopian vision of a pacified church filled with pacified men, just hoping if we are winsome enough, they won’t take our children from us and put them on puberty blockers.
This was one of the critiques Nietzsche made against Christianity, or his conception of it at least. For many, Christianity has become a pacifier, like you would give a baby. Churches gather in the name of self-soothing. Sermons cater to people’s felt needs. Worship services are created to fill one with good emotions that soothe one from the pain of life.
Nietzsche saw this. He conceived of a concept called ressentiment. This is the concept that if one is filled with such jealousy because of an inferiority complex, one becomes hostile to others. Furthermore, projecting their own insecurity, they will conclude that those who are superior to them are morally repugnant and inferior themselves. To understand Ressentiment, you must understand master and slave morality in Nietzsche. He’s telling a story about the origins of humanity that challenges Christianity.
It goes like this. There were people, and the bigger, stronger people took from the little weak people. Think like Conan the Barbarian. These bigger strong people Nietzsche conceived of as masters and the weaker people he conceived of as slaves. The master conceives of the good and not good in different terms than the slave. What’s good is getting food, being stronger, getting women. What’s not good: not eating, being smol, not getting women. This is the mindset of the master for Nietzsche.
When the master sees the slave, he doesn’t even think of the slave. “I don’t even think about you.” When the master encounters another master, they admire them, even if they end up fighting each other. The master, this big, strong brute, might give things to other masters to show his power.
How do the slaves feel? The slaves are naturally conflicted. Why? The slaves also think that getting food, house, and women are good, BUT they look at the master and think he is bad because he wants what they want, but the slave cannot prevent it. The master takes what they have, and they can do nothing to stop it. They are filled with resentment. The slaves can’t see the desires in their hearts as naturally good because the master has the same desire. The slave can’t look at another slave and respect them.
This resentment leads to slave morality. Master mentality honors who you are and your natural goods. Because it is good to get food, be strong, and get a wife. Slave morality looks at good things and is suspicious of them. They can’t imagine life as a master because they resent the master. They hate that the master is strong, gets food, and gets the woman. They resent him and create an entire moral framework to justify it. They end up filled with jealousy and contempt for anyone with money, power, and sex.
Nietzsche thinks the world is filled with slave morality and hatred of anyone who is rich, powerful, and competent. And he says that the point at which the slaves began running society began with Christianity. He suggests that Christianity creates this slave morality because in his day the liberal churches were doing this. They were creating entire theological frameworks based on sentimentality, not reality. Of course we as Christians not believe this, but his critique based on the evaluation of many churches and Christian men seems to have some truth to it.
This slave mentality leads people to build the world around them in such a way to accommodate their slave morality. They build a cage to cope and seethe with their conception of reality. They will construct a reality in which they can cope and seethe in their resentment. Slave morality resents those with money, power and success. In fact, from many pulpits and articles you would get the idea that Jesus does not want you to have money, power, success, or find a wife. We are told that being like Jesus means the only good thing to do with power is to give it away. The only good use of our natural God-given ambitions is to avoid them because they might become an idol. And that you should just settle for singleness.
Boiling under the surface of all of this, many Christian men live with a disquieting resentment. They are taught to hate themselves and deny how God made them all in the name of following Jesus. Is it any wonder that men oftentimes want nothing to do with a church that, by all accounts, hates them? Rather than encouraging men towards excellence, churches often just teach men that they are defunct women. Men are taught that they are spiritually deficient if they didn’t cry during church or talk about Jesus as they would a boyfriend.
This all creates a pacified church obsessed with soothing our pitiful state. In the name of egalitarianism and the vice of tolerance, Christian men are deceived into thinking something is wrong with them in their creational design.
Because of this anti-reality teaching, egalitarianism, and the vice of tolerance, Christians live in the undesirable state of having no principles on which to fight, no enemies who they are to fight, and therefore can not even fathom praying the imprecatory Psalms, much less being animated by Christian virtue and honor in manly warfare in our pilgrimage to the heavenly city.
Instead, our heavenly pilgrimage is conceived exclusively in quietist and anabaptist terms. This is not a call to arms or a call to revolt. It is simply to say that everyone who came before us had no qualms conceiving of reality according to God’s design. I often wonder about the fortitude of the men who came before us, who took up arms against a British Empire that was far less tyrannical than the American empire. It bothers me when I look around; we seem to lack the moral conviction and clarity that the men who came before us possessed.
It was common in the old days to understand that Christians, churches, and Christian societies would have enemies that must be defeated. The Puritans often provided a type of chaplain service to their town or colony before they went to battle. Even today, Christian chaplains pray for their men’s success on the field of battle. In sports, chaplains pray for the success and victory of their football team.
We must recover and appreciate these simple acts as reflections of what we should be doing in all of life, whether in business or politics. We must recover a martial spirit of victory or death. We must embrace the conflict of a world that wars against the Creator. And to that, we must reject egalitarianism, which flies under the guise of feminism most prominently, and reject the vice of tolerance. We must embrace God’s design for the world. God’s world is built hierarchically. And it is built to flourish where wickedness is not tolerated, and righteousness abounds.
In a world of hierarchy, there will be conflict. There are tribes and factions, some stronger and some weaker. God’s Word maps onto reality and describes how to navigate these waters. However, the utopian egalitarian vision of the world in which everyone is equal in any and every respect also produces conflict. But because it is not reality-based but a fantasy, Christians are often at a loss as to how to navigate the conflict because the Bible assumes hierarchy, not egalitarianism. It would be like trying to look at the rule book for golf when you are playing football. You won’t succeed. Many Christians struggle and fail in their heavenly pilgrimage and all that it entails because rather than conceiving of the world according to God’s word, they have assumed the lies and tried to apply the Bible to the lie. They try to apply God’s reality to anti-reality and wonder why they fail. They assume they are playing a sport the Bible was not created for. We accept the rules of the enemy and wonder why we fail. In the worst cases, the Bible becomes a manipulative cudgel to suppress the actual conflicts we need to have. Now, instead of making war against Satan and his demons, we are called to monger peace, avoid conflict at all costs, play nice, and never offend anyone. What man would be drawn to such a religion?
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What does this mean for the Christian living in a given neighborhood? What does this mean for a Christian going to work? What does this mean for a Christian taking their child to soccer practice and how they mix with other parents? What does this mean for the children themselves and how they act towards their friends on the team who are not Christians? This is where the rubber meets the road, isn’t it? And from 1 Peter the answer should be quite obvious. The kind of true revolution we are talking about, the one that Paul himself spoke about in 1 Corinthians, where it is truly a work of God in people, not just a work of humans, is one where the Holy Spirit transforms lives and those lives shine out to others. No gimmicks, no shortcuts.

When the first Christians were in process of becoming something big, something substantial from the perspective of all around them, a Jew named Gamaliel stood up and gave this speech:
35 And he said to them, “Men of Israel, take care what you are about to do with these men. 36 For before these days Theudas rose up, claiming to be somebody, and a number of men, about four hundred, joined him. He was killed, and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing. 37 After him Judas the Galilean rose up in the days of the census and drew away some of the people after him. He too perished, and all who followed him were scattered. 38 So in the present case I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone, for if this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail; 39 but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God!” (Acts 5:35-39)
From this it seems that there can be no “theories” of effective revolutions. They just are. They must just happen. The Holy Spirit either will or won’t blow with gale force strength in the direction he intends, carrying along the otherwise pathetic little boat, taking it to exactly the place he intends it. This is about absolute divine agency. Paul writes about this too by way of his strategy in evangelism:
And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, 4 and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. (1 Corinthians 2:2-5)
Note, however, there is still a strategy here, its just a strategy to focus on the right things, things that will rightly direct people towards God and his power, not towards human powers.
Not too long ago I was inspired by something I read in Fredrick Nietzsche. (I know, but stick with me….) It was in a section on how to learn from history. Nietzsche was walking a tight rope – on the one hand, as a true modernist, he wanted everyone to find their own way, not looking always backwards to tradition, yet on the other hand he recognized that to take a completely renegade attitude risked failing to learn good lessons from the past. So, Nietzsche advocated a balance, sifting through what is good and inspirational from the past and taking it on board, while at the same time never being bound by the parameters of the past. As an example of such inspiration, Nietzsche gave the Renaissance, a movement form the 13th century, predominantly in Florence, wherein roughly two hundred people had a common vision which they worked out together. Pause and consider! If one knows anything about the effects of the Renaissance on the history of Western Civilization, it is quite extraordinary to realize that it all started with roughly two hundred people.
Also not long ago I read Immanuel Kant’s little essay, Was ist Äufklarung? (“What is Enlightenment?”). In this powerful little essay Kant effectively warned that the Enlightenment would never become an effective movement while people in their enthusiasm were just dislocated, just running madly in their own individual directions. The world traditions, the systems of society, will take such enthusiasm and simply crunch it up, grind it to dust. So, in order to really have an Enlightenment movement, Kant argues, what is needed is group support, people striving together for the cause.
What both Nietzsche and Kant say is quite similar: we must all at least have a vision and know where we are going.
None of this will sound very novel. It is simply the stuff of good management. One needs to set a vision of which people can grab hold, and one needs to unify people around that vision. But missing are Gamaliel and Paul’s insights: respectively, things failing unless God is in them and making sure that God is at the center, not people.
The danger here is that we see both Gamaliel and Paul as presenting an alternative to what we learn from Kant and Nietzsche: worldly effective revolutions have vision and commonality, but Christian ones have neither, they are just carried by a force bigger than any human force.
In this essay I want to briefly explore 1 Peter, because it seems to me that 1 Peter presents us with something of a middle-ground in this whole debate (and possibly also then a middle ground between James Hunter and his critics). 1 Peter is a letter about a Christian revolution, a revolution that is anticipated and expected to impact the whole of society. What Peter touts is quite clearly a God-centered Christian revolution, but it is not at all “disorganized” in a kind of “let-go and let-God” kind of way. It has definite structure to it. It is also revolutionary in the truest sense of the word too. In other words, it is not just a benign kind of pattern being presented. Everything in 1 Peter shouts: “Here is how Christianity will turn the world upside down!” So what does it say? What is the message?
Ancient letters kept a standard form, a normal way to write them. Just as children in more modern times have been taught to start a letter with “Dear John” and finish it with “Yours Sincerely,” so in the ancient world letters had a form. What is often unrecognized is that this form included a section where the author was meant to tell the audience why they were writing. This is gold! This is extraordinary, because if we are able to learn to pay attention to this it will make it a whole lot easier trying to understand the purposes of the many letters in the New Testament of the Bible. 1 Peter was a letter, and it also followed the form-guide in terms of having a section intended to disclose the purpose for writing. Here is the relevant section, according to letter theory:
11 Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. 12 Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation. (1 Peter 2:11-12)
Three clues show the first readers (and us) that this is meant to be Peter’s statement for writing: the position of these verses (coming after the prayer of thanksgiving), the word “urge,” and the direct address to the readers.
So, what is the outcome Peter hopes to see? A revolution. He hopes that when God comes to visit an expansive number of people will glorify God. This sounds an awful lot like the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, which asks: “What is the chief end of man?” The answer: “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” 1 Peter 2:11-12 is revolutionary in that it describes a movement throughout humanity, among not just Christians but the wider society, such that those who are not Christians will either become Christians or at least be directed towards God’s overall glory in the future.
Then notice here is what comes next. 1 Peter has much in common with other New Testament letters, especially Ephesians and Colossians. All these letters have large sections at the end where they go through different classes of people and tell them how they should behave. But interestingly in 1 Peter there is a difference. Whereas in Ephesians and Colossians the direction of discussion seems to be about unity of the body of Christ and also protection against future attacks—do these things and you will be an effective Church for effectiveness sake—in 1 Peter pretty much everything is directed towards the impact such behavior will have on the outside world.
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Despite the “unfair” process deployed against the Jonesboro 7 by the Temporary Session, the men nonetheless demonstrated the strength of their commitment to the Scripture, to their membership vows, to Presbyterian Church government, and to the Reformed Faith. After the Jonesboro 7 appealed the decision of the Temporary Session to Covenant Presbytery, the Temporary Session resigned and recommended the church plant be closed. This left the congregation with little spiritual care and oversight.

Zach Lott and six other men from a small church plant in Jonesboro, Ark. wanted to see a Reformed and Presbyterian church in their town; they wanted to be part of the PCA. Covenant Presbytery had dispatched TE Jeff Wreyford to the small city as the organizing pastor. The work was going well, but Lott and several others were concerned about the trajectory of the work and the philosophy of ministry of TE Wreyford.
They had detected some “progressive” tendencies in the organizing pastor.1 They perceived a “controlling and unyielding nature” in TE Wreyford’s ministry. They also believed TE Wreyford’s philosophy of ministry did not sufficiently emphasize Reformed and Presbyterian distinctives, but instead focused on what would make the “church most appealing to the masses.”2 And finally they were frustrated by how frequently TE Wreyford was absent from the pulpit; they wanted a pastor who would preach the whole counsel of God, but TE Wreyford seemed “quick to give up the pulpit,” they believed.3
Accordingly, when it seemed the church plant was moving closer to particularizing as a congregation of the PCA, Lott and six other men approached both the organizing pastor and the Session expressing their desire for other candidates to be considered when the time came to call a pastor.
The Session’s response to their concerns was not what they anticipated.
In response to the concerns expressed by the Jonesboro 7, members of the Session emphasized the qualifications and credentials possessed by TE Wreyford.
Also present at the meeting was TE Clint Wilcke of the Midsouth Church Planting Network; he suggested that if the men did not agree with Pastor Wreyford’s philosophy of ministry, then they might need to find “another denomination” and “the PCA isn’t it.”4
The men wanted an ordinary Presbyterian and Reformed Church. One of the men put it this way,
…we wanted that teaching, we wanted that meat. We wanted something of… substance. We wanted a reformed Presbyterian church here, PCA church.5
How curious that the “Coordinator/Catalyst” for the PCA’s Midsouth Church Planting Network, TE Clint Wilcke, would suggest that such people find a different denomination if that was the sort of church they wanted.
Despite the objections and concerns of the seven church members, the Session continued to press forward with their belief TE Jeff Wreyford should be offered to the congregation for the position of pastor.
When the men, the Jonesboro 7, did not withdraw their objections to TE Jeff Wreyford being offered as pastor, the Session investigated, indicted, and found them guilty of violating their membership vows as well as sins against the Fifth and Ninth Commandments. The men appealed the Session’s judgment, but the Session – largely comprised of pastors and ruling elders from IPC Memphis – took the added step of leaving the men suspended from the Lord’s Table even while their appeal made its way through the courts.
After the Jonesboro 7 appealed the Session’s judgment, the Session resigned.
Suspended from Communion at Christmas
As noted in other articles, the judicial philosophy apparently embraced by the elders on the Session was peculiar. They had not provided the men with specifics as to their alleged sins. A panel of the SJC would note later the men could not mount a defense at trial, since Session had not told them what their sins were particularly, but instead only that they had generally and vaguely violated the Fifth and Ninth Commandments at some point in “the days leading up to and following August 3, 2020.”6
But nonetheless, despite suffering under a Session which the SJC would note “abused” the process, the men were committed to being PCA. So they submitted to the discipline and waited on the Lord’s deliverance.
The weight of the Session’s actions hit home for Zach Lott on Christmas Eve. He and his family were visiting an ARP congregation in North Carolina where his brother was a pastor. He tells it this way,
I approached [my brother] to ask whether or not I could take communion, knowing that my prospects were not good. Even though my brother is an ARP minister, he has many friends in the PCA, and he keeps a PDF of the BCO on his iPad. He wanted to know specifically what the censure entailed. I explained that, even though the judgment is technically suspended during an appeal, there was a provision in the BCO permitting the Session to withhold the Table from us during the appeal process.
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