Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, September 3, 2022
We also learn by hearing the struggles of people who are still in the pit, describe the nightmares they’re living through, and tell us how on earth they’re continuing to worship God despite it making no sense at all. I learn as much, if not more, from these gnarled saints. Their struggles teach, and you don’t have to be out of the other side of your struggles to have learned wisdom. You see, treasure lives at the bottom of the pit, and like the inverse of Plato’s cave, those who have suffered much and still love the Lord can teach the rest of us how to live. Which shouldn’t surprise us, the Christian life is one of death and resurrection, after all.

When Christians suffer, when we experience pain, it often gives rise to doubt. We begin to wonder if it’s meant to be like this. One of the most quoted reasons to disbelieve in God is what’s usually called ‘the problem of evil.’ For most of us though it’s not the existence of conspicuous evil that’s the problem, it’s the pain in our lives and the lives of those we love. There’s a reason that C. S. Lewis formulated the challenge as The Problem of Pain.
Why does it make us doubt? I’m sure there are as many variations as there are sufferers, but broadly because if we truly believe that we are the beloved children of the most high God it raises some questions when, as best we can tell, he could improve our lot but hasn’t done so.
These questions are then painfully pressed on in many churches Sunday by Sunday as we preach a Christian life that sounds remarkably pain-free—this is certainly true in my charismatic tradition, but I’ve seen it much more broadly across evangelicalism in the UK. We preach what amounts to a prosperity gospel, where Christians are promised nice middle-classed lives.
Some readers might want to object that they haven’t heard this sort of preaching in their church, and thank the Lord if that’s the case, but for clarity I don’t mean that this is explicitly taught in the sermon, though that can happen. It’s often preached through the stories we share, through those we platform and those we don’t, through the questions our preaching does and doesn’t address, through the words of the songs we pick to sing, through so-called vulnerability that sufferers see right through, and through the reactions to those who are in acute pain.
We speak like the grand plan is that we’re all free from pain right now. Which, dear friends, it is not. You can quote Psalm 27 all you like but that isn’t what it means. There will be no more pain after the resurrection of the dead (Revelation 21), and that is a promise worth gripping to until your hands bleed. One day every ounce of existential dread, every lash of life’s cruel calumny, and every private howl you flung into the uncaring heavens, will melt in the face of the Lord Jesus as he smiles and embraces you, his little brother or sister.
And when I say it will melt, I don’t mean that as a nice verb to describe ‘going away.’ When the eyes of Jesus the consuming fire (Hebrews 12) look upon you tenderly, they will look on the root of Hell that has afflicted you with the force of a thousand suns and it will die.
One day our pain will go. But not yet. We aren’t promised that. In fact, the Bible tells us that our pain still has work to do—for suffering produces character (Romans 5). But even that can be a weight to bear, we are not responsible for ensuring we have achieved anyone’s definition of ‘adequate growth’ through our trials than the Lord’s.
Pain is required for growth. Ask any athlete. We immediately might have questions about how that death or that vile sting will cause us to grow, and it’s important to face them. They do not have clear and simple answers. Our struggles teach us.
I think I could be misread here. We often hear stories of challenge in our churches, and invariably they are told once those challenges are over, the people involved aren’t feeling the rawest edge of the pain, and it all sounds a bit neat and tidy.
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Understanding God as Beauty, the most beautiful and the One against whom we define all other beauties, allows our experiences of beauty here in this world to draw us towards him. 

When writing or speaking about beauty, one of the first major hurdles to arise is a definition. What is beauty? While most people would say that they know it when they see it, articulating exactly what it is, and what it is not, is a challenge. Philosophers, theologians, and artists have argued about beauty’s definition for millenia, and it would be arrogant to think that what I have to say will end the discussion.
Still, we need to work towards something. Many go back to Plato, and his claim that beauty is objective, and that it has to do with symmetry, order, balance, and proportion. Others, particularly in modern and postmodern Western culture, would argue that beauty is subjective—it depends on your perspective, tastes, experiences, and that there isn’t one true definition for all people and all time.
But perhaps we are asking the wrong question. What if, instead of asking, “what is beauty?” we asked, “who is beauty?”
Beauty has a Name
Augustine of Hippo, an African bishop and theologian living in the fourth century, answers this question. In one of the most famous lines in his memoir of conversion, he laments, “Belatedly I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new, belatedly I loved you.” Here, Augustine addresses God, and he does so by calling God “Beauty.”
He’s in good company: his words echo that of David and Moses. In Psalm 27, David declares that he seeks one thing: “that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple” (27:4, NIV). Later, in Psalm 29, he instructs the people to “worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness” (29:2, KJV). Moses, too, identifies God as beautiful in his benediction to Psalm 90: “let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us” (90:17, KJV).[1] David and Moses agree: the Lord is beautiful.
If the Lord is beautiful, then it follows that he is the most beautiful. As Anselm argues, “whatever good thing the supreme Nature is, it is in the highest degree. It is, therefore,…supreme Beauty…” Jonathan Edwards goes further, arguing not only that “as God is infinitely the greatest Being, so is allowed to be infinitely the most beautiful and excellent” but that because of this, “all the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being who hath an infinite fullness of brightness and glory; God…is the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty.”
Our Beautiful God
We have identified, now, not simply an idea of beauty, but beauty itself. God, in his attributes and actions, grounds all definitions of beauty. Whether beautiful in small measure or great, something or someone may only be said to be beautiful if it is consonant in some way with who God is.
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The General Assembly retained one critical aspect of control over its judicial affairs by appointing CCB to review SJC’s minutes and report any possible exceptions, so that the General Assembly may direct SJC to retry cases where exceptions may arise. Within our procedural rules, the Assembly also retains the right to hear a minority report from CCB, and to substitute that minority report for the committee’s report…The General Assembly has delegated tremendous power to the SJC, and absent the ability of CCB to conduct a robust review of the SJC’s minutes — including the presentation of minority views to the Assembly — the SJC could violate its rules, leaving the parties to a case with no recourse.

In my last article, I detailed the parliamentary rules[1] which require minority reports from the Committee on Constitutional Business (CCB) the right to be presented to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) for consideration. Further, I showed how our parliamentary rules for handling such minority reports establish a process for the Assembly to substitute the minority report from CCB’s (majority) committee report.
This process is important, because it gives the Assembly its full freedom to oversee the procedural accuracy of the Standing Judicial Commission’s (SJC) business. If the final CCB report — whether the original committee report, or a substituted minority report — discovers procedural errors in the operations of the SJC, our Book of Church Order (BCO) enables the Assembly to redress any errors by directing the SJC to retry a case if the Assembly judges such a step to be necessary for justice to be realized in the proceedings of church courts.
In this article, I lay out three reasons for why it is important for the PCA’s General Assembly to protect this procedure within the Church’s polity.

The General Assembly has Retained Oversight over the SJC by the Review of the SJC’s Minutes

We must remember that the General Assembly has delegated to the SJC nearly absolute authority to conclude judicial appeals and complaints that arise from the Presbyteries. Unlike judicial commissions designated at the presbytery level, the General Assembly has not reserved to itself the right of approving or disapproving the decisions of the SJC (BCO 15-3, 5).
Nevertheless, the Assembly has retained one crucial aspect of direct control over the SJC: the annual review of SJC’s minutes through CCB (BCO 15-5.a; RAO 17-1). As some noted during floor debate at the 49th General Assembly, the review of the SJC’s minutes is very different from the work of the Committee on the Review of Presbytery Records (RPR). Our polity tasks RPR with reviewing the minutes of the PCA’s 88 presbyteries as one feature of the Assembly’s proactive work of “General Review and Control” of the lower courts of the presbyteries (BCO 40; RAO 16-1). Thus, RPR brings recommendations that the Assembly must approve.
The annual review of the SJC’s minutes, however, is not the proactive review of the proceedings of a lower court. Instead, it is a reactive identification of any issues (within a very limited scope) that the General Assembly then may cite as grounds for directing the SJC to retry a case (RAO 14-11.d.(2); 17-1). The report of CCB is non-binding, advisory, and for information only; however, without a report from CCB identifying possible exceptions in the SJC minutes (whether in the committee report, or in a substituted minority report), no motion is in order for the General Assembly to direct the SJC to retry a case. The identification of possible exceptions in a CCB report is the necessary prerequisite for a motion to retry a case.
Since this review of the SJC’s minutes is the only line of defense against an error in the SJC, it is a crucial check that the Assembly must not abdicate.

The General Assembly has Authority over its Committees and their Reports

Retaining the Assembly’s constitutional check on the SJC necessarily includes the right to substitute a minority report from CCB for the committee’s (majority) report. Therefore, minority reports differ from dissenting opinions by providing a procedural mechanism to give the full Assembly the final say in the case of differing opinions within the committee. The PCA’s committees operate under the authority of the Assembly, and not the other way around.
The authority of the Assembly over its committees rests on a fundamental principle of parliamentary law articulated in Robert’s Rules of Order, Newly Revised, that a deliberative assembly may “establish and empower an effective leadership as it wishes, and at the same time to retain exactly the degree of direct control over its affairs that it chooses to reserve to itself” (RONR [12th ed.], “Principles Underlying Parliamentary Law,” emphasis added).
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[1] That is, the parliamentary rules governing the deliberations of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), namely those procedures outlined in Robert’s Rules of Order, Newly Revised (RONR) and the PCA’s Rules of Assembly Operation (RAO).
[2] I am thankful to RE Matt Fender for suggesting this paragraph.
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