Category: Christian politics

Maybe it’s me, but I don’t understand the point of an organization that is not a church whose purpose is to gather pastors, who are in churches that already promote the gospel, for an undertaking called Gospel Coalition. What were the members of GC doing before when they were merely pastors preaching week-in and week-out, sometimes in independent congregations, sometimes in denominations? Were they Gospel Cobelligerents? Or by not being co-aligned were they not as much for the gospel as when belonging to GC? Is the import of GC that it is a cooperative endeavor or that it is promoting the gospel? But are people who don’t join GC guilty of being uncooperative or of not being sufficiently committed to the gospel?  Maybe both?

These were questions that came to mind when reading D. A. Carson’s attempt to clarify GC for the editors of Christianity Today. For instance, when Carson explained, “In some ways we’re almost a coalition of coalitions. Tim represents a whole network. John Piper represents a whole network. And because we share a common vision of what the gospel is and common aims and so on, it’s not, in some sense, just individual churches. It’s all the networks that are linked with that,” I wondered if the real entree into GC was being a fan of Carson, Keller, or Piper. In which case, should it be called, “Coalition of Readers of Evangelical Popular Authors”?

Then when asked if GC purposefully shared the characteristics of a denomination, Carson responded:

It does, but it purposely disallows others. Sociologically, there is a lot less loyalty to denominations today than 20 years ago. In one sense we’re growing because of that. We are meeting a sense of dislocation. On the other hand, in a denomination there will also be, for example, means of ordering who is ordained and who is not. There are going to be agreed standards on who becomes a member or not. Whereas we’re a center-bounded set. We’re not a boundary-bounded set.

Tim Keller is a deeply committed PCA man. He’s a paedobaptist. My ordination is Baptist. And we’re not going to agree on everything. We’re happy to talk about anything, but we’re not going to make one standard or the other the touchstone for the organization.

That left me wondering if GC is really “Baptists and Presbyterian Coaligned for Parts But Not All of the Great Commission.” That’s a mouthful — BPCPBNAGC —  but the leaders of GC may be up to it since in addition to their day jobs as Baptists and Presbyterians they are leading a super-coalition.

One does wonder if church matters to coalition.

Over at First Principles, Lynn Robinson has a good review essay of a new IVP book by Greg Foster, The Contested Public Square: The Crisis of Christianity and Politics.  Robinson quotes Foster to good effect about the political theology of the New Testament (or the lack thereof):

Almost the only political teaching it provides is that a person’s ordinary political duties (behaving peacefully, obeying the law, paying taxes, etc.) continue to apply when rulers deny God and persecute believers. . . . The New Testament’s silence on politics combined with the apostles’ setting aside the political order of the Old Testament leaves the faithful with no revelatory instruction as to how their political affairs are to be ordered.

Why is this so hard to understand? I guess the one consolation for theonomists, whether soft or hard, is the support they get from the good bishop Tom Wright who interprets the Lordship of Christ in ways remarkably similar to our politically challenged friends.

And makes a very good point about ecclesiology, as opposed to sexual misconduct, along the way.

No presbytery just wakes up one morning and, out of the blue, declares `I’m going to ordain a practising homosexual today.’  As every presbyterian knows, our church courts change very, very slowly.  So the question to ask is: how did the C of S come to such a pass?  The answer, in part (and I stress ‘in part’ — I am interested here only in the evangelical dimension), lies with the policy of William Still and his followers, which was essentially built on the notion that the courts of the church could be conceded to the liberals as long as the evangelicals were allowed to keep preaching the gospel from their own pulpits.  This was the very antithesis of the Southern Baptist policy and ironically, meant that, while the baptists acted like quasi-presbyterians, the Stillites acted like Independents.

The policy worked well for the big C of S churches — e.g. the Tron, Gilcomston South, Holyrood — who were large enough to keep the hawks from George Street at bay; what it meant, however, was that the smaller churches, the anonymous evangelical pastors, and the lowly ministerial students candidates frequently came under huge pressure from presbyteries.  Since my first post, I have heard from one old friend who, as a student, was roasted in a presbytery on the gay issue while the evangelicals present literally sat in silence; another who was told by an evangelical leader to ordain a woman elder against his conscience because women’s ordination was not the hill to die on.  Both have since left the C of S, at considerable personal hardship.

If the Reformation 21 Blog were a blog, this conversation could go on over there. But seeing how its authors have chosen only to mix it up among themselves, reactions to their posts turn into posts on other blogs.

So Carl Trueman makes a good point about the inconsistency of evangelicals in the Church of Scotland objecting to the ordination of a gay minister but being fairly silent about the ordination and ministry of liberals. Trueman wrote, “Evangelicals who have not fought denials of the resurrection among office bearers — and some of whom stood by in silence as fellow evangelicals were beaten up by the church courts over refusals to ordain women — should not fight homosexuality. Indeed, they have absolutely no grounds upon which so to do; and it just looks like bigotry to the onlooking world. Too little, too late.”

This is a legitimate point and one the NTJ has made often about evangelicals in the PCUSA. It seems that mainline Presbyterian evangelicals get worked up on matters of sex, but matters of orthodoxy do not receive the same sort of diligence, as if the second table of the law were really the first.

In response, Michael Bird, says that Trueman doesn’t know the true state of evangelicalism in the Church of Scotland (thanks to Art Boulet for the link).   For instance, Trueman doesn’t give any credit to groups like Forward Together that are fighting the good fight in the Church of Scotland.  Nor does Trueman apparently know the wisdom of Kenny Rogers who sung about knowing when to call your opponents’ bluff in a poker game.  Bird also accuses Trueman of inconsistency himself.  It’s one thing to see the problems on the left when conservatives have plenty of problems to their right.  According to Bird, “those who hold to a KJV-onlyism, mandate that unaccompanied metrical psalms (sometimes it is exclusively the Scottish Psalter and not the modern Sing Psalms) is the only form of acceptable worship, those who won’t let women pray in church, professors who teach that ‘God has a covenant with America’, or those who treat the Westminster Confession with a greater authority than Scripture.”

Bird’s list of whacky right-wingers is curious, since something like the Westminster Confession is (or used to be) one of the standards in the Church of Scotland and the KJV and Christian America were not.   Could it be that if the Church of Scotland actually upheld Reformed, as opposed to evangelical standards, the ordination of gay ministers would not be an issue for the Kirk?  In fact, would Bird really turn away from the Church of Scotland men who affirmed the Westminster Confession, preached from the King James Version, chose to sing only psalms from the hymnal, and opposed women’s ordination?  It would appear that Trueman really does have a point about the incoherence of evangelicals in the Church of Scotland.  Do the folks at Forward Together really welcome only those ministers who have Jesus in their heart but then will ordain people that fall outside the qualifications Jesus revealed?  Is working with a psalm singer really as bad as working with a homosexual?  That’s a pretty arbitrary call, not to mention a much narrower standard than the apparently exclusive terrain on the Right.  In fact, the folks who oppose women’s ordination, who preach from the KJV, and who adhere closely to the Westminster Standards are capable of rallying behind Reformed orthodoxy.  It remains clear whether evangelicals in the Kirk are or ever will be.

Of course, that raises another question, one that boomerangs back on Trueman.  Why do some conservative Presbyterians continue to defend evangelicalism and at the same time voice some of the most telling criticisms of born-again Protestantism all the while maintaining a reputation as a good evangelical?  If Ref 21 would ever open itself up for comments, we might get an answer.

Update: the plot thickens.  Trueman calls attention to a petition on behalf of the evangelical position on homosexuality within the Church of Scotland.  He then appropriately has reservations about making homosexuality rather adultery the defining issue in the case before the Kirk.   Phil Ryken then takes Trueman mildly to task and explains why he signed the petition.   I guess that’s why they call it an Alliance.

That is a plausibly drawn conclusion after the kerfuffle created by Mark Dever’s post on “Things He Can and Cannot Live With.”   Like others to comment on this post, I admire Mark and count him a friend.  During a recent conference at Southern Baptist Seminary, where Mark is chairman of the board,  he and I enjoyed several pleasant conversations.  He is not only the pastor of the church where Jay and Ellen Hart were married (TMI – alert), but he is a Calvinist and says a lot of sensible and valuable things about congregational life, church membership, and discipline.  He is one of my favorite Baptists, most of whom orbit around Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville.

It should also be said that Mark deserves real credit for saying what he did about paedobaptism being a sin.  I disagree with him.  What do you expect from a Presbyterian elder?  But I’m not offended, much less annoyed.  If you take the sacraments seriously, not to mention being a faithful minister of the word, you need to say that the wrong practice of baptism is sinful.  (It should also be pointed out that Mark was not singling out paedobaptism.  He did mention it along with racism and universalism, but his list actually ran to 15 and included drum, organs, and female elders, none of which hit the threshold of paedobaptism but this was a free-flowing column.)

What is curious about the post is what it means for the variety of evangelical parachurch agencies like the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Together for the Gospel, and Gospel Coalition, all of which find credo- and paedobaptists inhabiting membership cheek by jowel under the umbrella of a lower-common denominator evangelicalism.  Mark actually has a very good interview with a fundamentalist pastor who questions Mark’s own participation in these alliances and coalitions on the grounds of not participating with those who observe sinful practices.  It was a frank even if friendly exchange.  (Why do conservative Presbyterians today keep wanting to “hang” with Baptists who think paedobaptism is a sin?) Continue reading “At Least One Alliance Knows Where It Stands on Baptism” →