In our day it is especially important to be confessional.  When we looked at the dismal state of theology in the American Church, we saw significant and disheartening errors in the average Christian’s views of Scripture, God, man and sin, salvation, the Church, and current issues like extramarital sex, abortion, gender identity, and homosexuality.  Basically all of these errors are clearly addressed in the confessions, so adherents to the confessions can easily avoid them.

Teach and urge these things. If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain.
-1 Timothy 6:2-5, ESV
In our series on Reformed theology, we have covered the Reformed view of salvation through the five solas and the five points of Calvinism.  But salvation is only one part of theology, so Reformed theology must go beyond the five solas and Calvinistic soteriology (salvation) by subscribing to a theologically-holistic Reformed confession.  Therefore a Reformed church must not only be Calvinistic but confessional. This post will look at the impIortance of confessions and the relation between the need to be always reforming with the need to follow a historic confession in order to avoid straying from what Scripture clearly teaches.
The Importance of Confessions
From the earliest days of the Church, defining what we believe has been extremely important.  Throughout the epistles, we see evidence of various heresies that dogged the Church, requiring divinely-inspired reiteration of what Scripture teaches.  One extra-persistent early heresy was Arianism, which denied the divinity of Christ.  In large part to refute this, the early Church adopted the various creeds: the Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed, Athanasian Creed, and Chalcedon Definition.  When we consider this context, it is easy to see why these creeds so strongly affirm Christ’s divinity.  Each generation faces new challenges to the faith, forcing the Church to strongly state what Scripture clearly teaches about those specific topics.  An example in our day is the challenge to biblical manhood and womanhood from feminism, homosexuality, and transgenderism.  To address this, a pair of ecumenical councils quite similar to Nicaea produced the Danvers and Nashville Statements that we addressed here.  Since such statements address particular heresies, they are somewhat limited in their scope.  But by the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church had strayed so far from the teachings of Scripture into a wide variety of heresies that a complete and robust definition of what Scripture teaches on all of faith and life was required.  As the Reformation spread, different groups began to form with varying interpretations regarding secondary doctrines, so those groups needed to define their beliefs.  This as the origin of the various confessions of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries which ultimately became the defining documents of various Reformed denominations.
We have need of the same comprehensive definition of beliefs. Many Christians do not venture beyond soteriology in defining their doctrines, thus leaving themselves open to various errors.  They chant “no creed but Christ”, and therefore stumble into all manner of heresy.  Lacking a Scriptural foundation, they ultimately worship a god so different than the God of the Bible that their worship is idolatry.  The confessions like the ancient creeds prevent such errors by keeping us grounded in the faith, providing vital guardrails against new and strange teachings.  It is true that only Scripture is inerrant and timeless while the confessions are the product of men.  However, this does not prevent them from being useful to us.  Error comes not only from the denial of what Scripture clearly teaches but from new and creative interpretations of Scripture. There is nothing new under the sun, so any new error derived from a creative interpretation is likely just a restatement of an error that has appeared at some point in Church history.  Therefore, most of these errors are addressed in the Reformed confessions.  But when we ignore Church history, we exalt ourselves over our spiritual ancestors as if we are far wiser and more enlightened than they were, only to fall prey to the folly that they have already so wisely and eloquently addressed.  The errors of Rome at the time of the Reformation were so pernicious and comprehensive that God was especially gracious to gift the Church at the time with many wise scholars well versed in Scripture to create the confessions. We would be foolish to ignore them.
The Reformed Confessions
Last time, I mentioned the importance of John Calvin documenting all of the doctrines that characterized the Reformation—not just soteriology—in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, which was essentially the first Reformed systematic theology.  Others built upon this by codifying what Scripture teaches on all topics of faith and life.  As the different Reformed groups began to distinguish themselves from each other, it became vital to distill these beliefs down into a single, Scripture-based document that all of the ministers within the group could agree on.  These were their confessions, which laid out their beliefs on Scripture, God, man, sin, the church and sacraments, civil authorities, the home, and eschatology (the end times).  They are often accompanied by catechisms, which are sets of questions and answers used to teach what the confession contains.  Together, these form a robust theology for faith and life.  The confessions were so important to this period that it has been called “confessionalization”.[1]  They became even more important during the rise of liberalism and the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, at which point many churches abandoned the robust theology of the confessions in favor of conversion-focus and individual experience.[2]  That mentality has persisted to this day such that many churches reject the notion of confessions altogether, dismissing them as antiquated human works of little value today.  But the historic confessions provide a necessary bulwark against the liberalism of mainline denominations and the individualistic emotionalism of seeker-sensitive American evangelicalism just as they have historically defended the Church against Roman Catholicism and other heresies.  Therefore, to be truly Reformed is to be confessional.
To be confessional requires understanding the Reformed confessions enough to subscribe to one of them.
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In the end, Basham desires not to tear the church down but to build it up. She desires to see the pure gospel truth that saved her soul taken up and preached without compromise, without apology. It is that saving gospel, undiluted by political pandering and corporate double-speak, that “still brings dead girls to life.”

Sometimes, a book comes along that creates irreconcilable differences between sociopolitical factions. Other times, a book comes along that diagnoses them. Megan Basham’s Shepherds for Sale is the second kind of book. According to its critics, it’s a shrill, dissident right propaganda screed, designed to foment civil war within the evangelical church. But to anyone who hasn’t spent the past decade in a particular kind of echo chamber, Basham’s thesis will ring true: Civil war has been upon evangelicals for a long time, whether it was welcomed or not.
To say the book has hit a nerve would be an understatement. Its heated reception was inevitable, given its audaciously wide scope; chapter topics include antiracism, the #ChurchToo movement, Covid, LGBTQ issues, and more. Much of the material was not new to me, because I have been independently logging these rifts in real time, not just among evangelicals but within my own Anglican tradition. (Parts of the LGBTQ chapter follow my First Things article on the many errors of the “Side B” movement.)
Despite the juicy title, not everyone in the book’s large cast of evangelical characters will emerge as a pure heretical sell-out. This has been a common critique, but Basham herself pre-empts it in the introduction, where she acknowledges that people’s motives can be complex, and degrees of compromise can vary. As she’s documented, big leftist money has certainly changed hands, yet not every commentator will follow David French to the point of stumping for Kamala Harris, and not every pastor will follow Andy Stanley to the point of guiding his flock over a cliff into blatant heresy. Even so, there remain many ways for a “shepherd” to be stubbornly blind.
Basham’s highest-profile rebuttal so far has come from megachurch pastor J. D. Greear, who appears in several chapters. The chapter on “critical race prophets” details how he participated in a witch-hunt against members of First Baptist Church Naples who rejected a black pastoral candidate. Their swift and ruthless excommunication as racists, cheered on by multiple high-profile Southern Baptist voices like Greear’s, is the most shocking injustice Basham documents in her book. Greear pleads ignorance in his long complaint, claiming that he accepted the account of church leaders “in good faith.” In a detailed reply, Basham responded, “No. One cannot in good faith publicly label ordinary members of a church racists without clear evidence.” Their exchange vividly demonstrates why the loss of institutional trust among rank-and-file evangelicals is so profound, and most likely irrevocable.
One way to crystallize Basham’s thesis is that for far too long, certain “elite” evangelicals have seen themselves as a kind of Protestant magisterium, delivering wisdom to the rank and file while mutually refraining from in-house criticism. Meanwhile, they themselves have uncritically deferred to people who claim “expert” authority, whether on behalf of an “oppressed” group (immigrants, women, black people, gay people) or on behalf of science (environmental science, epidemiology). Not every member of the new magisterium has been equally vulnerable on every issue, but all have sought approval in the eyes of their preferred experts, and all have bought into some manifestation of the leftist logic that if one doesn’t subscribe to a particular political solution, one must not care about the problem it claims to solve. Whether as dupes or as willing collaborators, they opened all manner of doors that should have been firmly shut, and ordinary churchgoers have reaped the consequences—
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Written by M. D. Perkins |
Monday, May 16, 2022
The mainline denominations were riddled with theological liberalism, particularly in their view of Scripture. Theological liberalism doubted the Bible’s relevance for modern times and sought to make it more palatable for the modern man. When psychiatric professionals said homosexuality was healthy and normal, the push by theological liberals was to rethink the Bible in light of it. Gradually over the next 40 years, the mainline churches would become affirming of homosexuality – ordaining gay clergy, solemnizing gay marriages, promoting LGBT political causes, and declaring homosexuality no longer sinful.

Over the past 50 years, homosexuality has been one of the most controversial topics among Christians. Is it a sin? Does the Bible endorse gay marriage? Is homosexuality an expression of God’s design? These questions have obvious answers and yet they have swirled around us incessantly – causing confusion and calling us to change our historic views. The confusion is not a result of the Bible being unclear – rather, it is the fruit of decades of targeted debates and attempts to shift conservative Christian views.
A Brief History of “Gay Christianity”
For two thousand years of Church history, homosexuality was understood to be an abomination (Leviticus 18:22), an incitement of God’s wrath (Genesis 19), a dishonorable passion (Romans 1:26), unnatural relating (Romans 1:27), and a lifestyle that kept a person from inheriting God’s Kingdom (1 Corinthians 6:9-11). This biblical understanding shaped Western social views until the 19th century as the influence of naturalism began to diminish biblical thinking. But it wasn’t until the 20th and 21st centuries that the Christian church would come to rethink homosexuality as well.
The first Christian book to directly challenge the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality was published in Britain in 1955 but the ideas surrounding “gay Christianity” (the movement to affirm homosexuality in the Church) would not find a broad voice in America until the 1970s. This was due, in part, to the American Psychiatric Association – under direct pressure from gay activists – removing homosexuality from their list of mental disorders in 1973. Even though this was not a religious decision, the ripple effects throughout the Church would be enormous.
The mainline denominations were riddled with theological liberalism, particularly in their view of Scripture. Theological liberalism doubted the Bible’s relevance for modern times and sought to make it more palatable for the modern man. When psychiatric professionals said homosexuality was healthy and normal, the push by theological liberals was to rethink the Bible in light of it. Gradually over the next 40 years, the mainline churches would become affirming of homosexuality – ordaining gay clergy, solemnizing gay marriages, promoting LGBT political causes, and declaring homosexuality no longer sinful.
Evangelicals did not immediately follow suit. Many actively pushed back against the onslaught of gay social causes while also lamenting the worldliness of the mainline denominations. But, as debates surrounding gay marriage intensified in the 2000s and 2010s, more evangelical leaders began to openly embrace affirming theology. Other leaders simply became vague about their views – refusing to give straightforward answers when asked. As the culture has been won over to the LGBT agenda, there is tremendous pressure on evangelicals to rethink their strident positions.
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