Ralph Erskine (1685 – 1752) is known with men like Thomas Boston and his Brother Ebeneezer Erskine as one of the Marrow Men, who stood for Justification by Faith Alone and against the spread of legalism and Arminianism in the 18th century Scottish Presbyterian church. What he is less well known for however, are his wonderful gospel poems, few of which are still in print. Here is one particularly moving example:

The bride with open eyes, that once were dim,
Sees now her whole salvation lies in him;
The Prince, who is not in dispensing nice,
But freely gives without her pains or price.
This magnifies the wonder in her eye,
Who not a farthing has wherewith to buy ;
For now her humbled mind can disavow,
Her boasted beauty and assuming brow;
With conscious eye discern her emptiness,
With candid lips her poverty confess.
O glory to the Lord that grace is free,
Else never would it light on guilty me.
I nothing have with me to be its price,
But hellish blackness, enmity and vice.

Most Presbyterian and Reformed Denominations theoretically have a strong view of the doctrine of vocation. For instance the PCA Book of Church Order (BCO) states the following in chapter 16 “Church Orders – The Doctrine of Vocation“:

16-1. Ordinary vocation to office in the Church is the calling of God by the
Spirit, through the inward testimony of a good conscience, the manifest
approbation of God’s people, and the concurring judgment of a lawful court
of the Church.

and

16-3. Upon those whom God calls to bear office in His Church He bestows
suitable gifts for the discharge of their various duties. And it is indispensable
that, besides possessing the necessary gifts and abilities, natural and
acquired, every one admitted to an office should be sound in the faith, and
his life be according to godliness. Wherefore every candidate for office is to
be approved by the court by which he is to be ordained.

Thus making it quite clear that church officers are only those men whom God has clearly called and gifted. Therefore, conversely, if a man isn’t manifestly gifted for an office by God, then no matter how much he may want it, he should not be allowed to serve in it.

Unfortunately that is the theory, in actual practice we’ve been laboring for far too long under the delusion that men can put in what God leaves out. If a man honestly isn’t called to the ministry, he will not have been given gifts to preach and teach. However, we have a multitude of for-profit seminaries that will attempt to teach anyone to do both (including a growing number of women) regardless of whether they are honestly called to do so. Since most presbyteries these days view an M.Div. as proof positive of a man’s calling to the ministry, it is virtually unheard of to deny a man with a degree “his” call, and in my 11 years as a Presbyter, I’ve never seen a man denied on the grounds that he can’t preach. These days the sermon part of the ordination trial is generally pro-forma. In essence, we have for all intents and purposes lost the doctrine of vocation and have ceded the  right to determine who can and who can’t be a Pastor to the academy.

And speaking of the academy, the process of actually of getting your M.Div is getting easier all the time. At one particular  Candidates committee meeting this was graphically illustrated when an RE held up a candidate’s two transcripts. The first was his transcript from a seminary in the RTS system – it was all A’s and B’s, the other was his previous transcript from a community college which was all Cs, Ds, incompletes, and even an F or two. The RE’s comment was “Look! It’s a miracle!” CTS President Bryan Chapell acknowledged in an interview for the White Horse Inn that it used to be that 1/3 of the incoming CTS class failed the English Bible Exam, now 2/3 of the class does, Chapell rightly noted that this indicates a profound ignorance of the bible amongst our churches and our future pastors – yet the vast majority of these “profoundly ignorant of the bible when they got here” applicants still graduate and go on to the ministry!

Many of our candidates for ministry spend their entire lives essentially “training” for ministry in the same way one might train for a position in which God’s calling is not a consideration. They go from Christian College directly to Seminary without ever passing through the real world or even having a chance to determine if they really have been gifted. Unfortunately, this process also tends to leave them soft, without much discernment, and usually naive.

All of these factors have actually combined to create a glut of pastoral candidates in the PCA. We have more candidates than open pulpits at present and as such there is no real pressure that might lead us to fill pulpits with barely qualified candidates. The pressure, if it exists, comes from the seminaries who would be aghast if Presbyteries started rejecting the majority of their graduates instead of dutifully plugging them into whatever positions they can find. Because of this many a Presbytery is in danger of becoming merely the final rubber stamp that a man receives after training for ministry.

The sad truth of the matter is that the pulpit committee is really the only gatekeeper in this process. Therefore, here’s a few hints I’d offer to a pulpit committee:

1) Aside from the fact that the candidate has a seminary degree, you can disregard it’s importance. It simply means he had enough money to pay for his education and enough diligence to complete it. Anyone who can get through college can get through seminary, it has no bearing on whether he is actually called. My wife could easily have gotten the same degree from the same institution I did (in fact I have no doubt she would have done better in several courses), this does not, however, make her equally qualified to be a pastor.

2) When it comes to the candidate’s preaching, take the liberty of actually assigning him a text to preach on instead of allowing him to preach his “best” sermon on a safe text. Make your text choice something controversial that should actually extract his views on subjects you consider to be of critical importance.

3) When you call his references don’t ask questions related to personality, you can safely assume that everyone he listed thinks he’s a nice guy. Ask questions related to calling – “what signs do you see that the Lord has called and gifted this man?” and “What examples can you think of where he took a hard stand for the truth?”

4) Keep in mind, you aren’t under pressure to accept any one man. Be willing to keep searching until you find a candidate you are confident the Lord has called and gifted to be your shepherd. There are plenty of nice guys who speak well and have nice families looking for callings, not all of them are actually called though and consequently an embarrassingly large number of these “nice men” will fail and leave the ministry in their first 7 years. More disturbingly, many will labor on, damaging churches, people, and denominations as they do so.

5) Finally remember, there are plenty of conservatives who graduate but don’t have a calling as well. Just because a man is Old School in his views, knows his theology, and isn’t soft about anything doesn’t necessarily mean he’s called either. History is full of thoroughly conservative guys couldn’t preach or pastor their way out of a paper bag.

Pastors are sometimes more reticent than reporters when it comes to revealing their sources. But I’ll go ahead and and let you know that I first encountered EM Bound’s advice regarding the link between the pastor’s piety and the power of his preaching through Iain Hamilton, who in turn discovered it via Eric Alexander. But that particular emphasis certainly isn’t original to to modern preachers like Alexander or even 19th century writers like Bounds, you’ll find it in the writings of experimental Calvinists through the ages, including Princetonians like Archibald Alexander, Puritans like Watson, Baxter, and Owen, and even Reformers of the 16th century (there is a great vein of this in the writings of Tyndale and even Calvin, for instance)

In any event, given the modern day cynicism regarding the notion that there might be a link between prayer, piety, and the efficacy of preaching, I want to strongly recommend a wonderful little booklet recently published by P&R as part of their Basics of the Reformed Faith series entitled “What is Biblical Preaching?” The booklet is by the aforementioned Eric Alexander, and while the series itself is intended to introduce laymen to Reformed doctrine, this particular pamphlet is more applicable to the needs of pastors. Indeed, it is actually based on a series of lectures originally delivered to pastors on the subject of preaching. entitled

Anyway, in keeping with the theme of the earlier post, here’s a section from the booklet, in which Alexander discusses the vital spiritual dimension in preaching. I hope this will help to sharpen and clarify the previous post:

It was Robert Murray M’Cheyne who penned the immortal lines “It is not great talents God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus. A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God.”

That sentiment remains just as true 168 years later but the lesson still needs to be learned by the church. Are we perhaps guilty of thinking that all that is needed to make a good preacher is charisma, people skills, and a seminary education? Have we too been deluded into thinking that the ingredients that make a great salesman or CEO will also inevitably make a great pastor? Or do we believe that if we could just find the right methods and programs we could overcome all our personal weaknesses? Certainly if we look at the broadly evangelical church, we’d find copious examples of that kind of thinking. But what was it that made great preachers in the New Testament? Well, it wasn’t education alone. With the exception of Paul most of the Apostles were uneducated men. It also wasn’t programs, personality, charm, or business acumen that spread the gospel. Rather the Apostles were above all men of prayer and holiness who strove simply to minister like their Master and to be conformed to His image. I am convinced that one of the greatest weaknesses even in Reformed churches is a lack of men of the apostolic mold. To piggy-back on the title of a book by John Piper, we have far too many “professionals” and far too few humble men of prayer and piety. As EM Bounds points out in the following article, men of that type are desperately needed if we are ever to see revival…

Men of Prayer Needed

Study universal holiness of life. Your whole usefulness depends on this, for your sermons last but an hour or two; your life preaches all the week. If Satan can only make a covetous minister a lover of praise, of pleasure, of good eating, he has ruined your ministry. Give yourself to prayer, and get your texts, your thoughts, your words from God. Luther spent his best three hours in prayer.—Robert Murray McCheyne

We are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new methods, new plans, new organizations to advance the Church and secure enlargement and efficiency for the gospel. This trend of the day has a tendency to lose sight of the man or sink the man in the plan or organization. God’s plan is to make much of the man, far more of him than of anything else. Men are God’s method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men. “There was a man sent from God whose name was John.” The dispensation that heralded and prepared the way for Christ was bound up in that man John. … When God declares that “the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him,” he declares the necessity of men and his dependence on them as a channel through which to exert his power upon the world. This vital, urgent truth is one that this age of machinery is apt to forget. The forgetting of it is as baneful on the work of God as would be the striking of the sun from his sphere. Darkness, confusion, and death would ensue.

Should the teaching of a minister of the Lord Jesus Christ be clear and easy to understand or difficult and inscrutable to fathom? Should understanding his teaching require that one have at the very least a post-graduate degree and copious training in the subject he is discussing? While those might sound like easy questions to answer, history is full of examples of men who have served in both the ministry and the seminary whose teaching was anything but clear and easy to understand. Often the teaching of such men has been so unclear that they have been thought to be saying things they have later denied they taught. In the case of the recent Federal Vision controversy, for instance, the teachers of the Federal Vision are constantly claiming that even men with advanced theological degrees have not understood their teaching.

What is the real value of teaching that is either unclear, confusing, or unintelligible to most listeners, especially when that teaching is supposed to be an exposition of the clear and perspicuous content of scripture? If a man cannot explain what scripture teaches on subjects like salvation and the sacraments in a manner that even a trained theologian can understand, then surely the problem is likely to be that either the matter or manner of his teaching is confused and quite possibly erroneous.

The Reformed have long held that scripture teaches us that a true church of the Lord Jesus Christ will manifest three definite marks by which all men might know that it is truly a church. The Belgic Confession summed up these three marks this way:

“The marks by which the true Church is known are these: If the pure doctrine of the gospel is preached therein; if it maintains the pure administration of the sacraments as instituted by Christ; if church discipline is exercised in chastening of sin; in short, if all things are managed according to the pure Word of God, all things contrary thereto rejected, and Jesus Christ acknowledged as the only Head of the Church. Hereby the true Church may certainly be known, from which no man has a right to separate himself.” (The Belgic Confession of Faith, Article XXIX )

Now in the present day if we look at the problems of the evangelical churches, we would have to say that gospel preaching is at a low ebb, and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the administration of the sacraments has fallen into a sad state in many a church. For instance, I heard one brother say that at one church he visited in California, they served the Lord’s Supper by putting out juice and crackers on tables on the sides of the auditorium and then flashed an invitation for people to take some when they wanted to on the screens up front.

With the Jewish celebration of Chanukkah just around the corner, I thought it might be worthwhile to briefly consider that portion of the history of God’s people, and determine if there is anything we can learn from the villian and (small “a”) antichrist in the Channukah story, Antiochus Epiphanes (215 BC-164 BC), ruler of the Seleucid empire.

Antiochus was a sinister schemer (Daniel 8:23), a deceitful man, and quite crafty in the way he attempted to overthrow the worship of the living God. First, he did it through cultural influence. He wanted his empire to have one culture and one religion that he would be at the center of.

Almost every antichrist (1 John 2:18) has attempted to do that; Stalin with his program of Russianization and the spread of Communism, Napoleon who attempted to bring the philosophy of the French Revolution to every state in Europe, Hitler with his Pagan vision of an empire of Aryan Nordic peoples, Muhammad with his vision of one world-wide Dar-El-Islam. Now, what were these antichrists doing? They were creating a counterfeit kingdom of God, where instead of Christ at the center, these men who styled themselves as gods were at the center. That’s important to note about the devil – the best he can do is create a counterfeit by perverting that which is true and the good, he can create nothing.

But Israel and the Jewish people stood in the way of Antiochus’ counterfeit kingdom of god. So his aim was to corrupt the culture of the people of God, to Hellenize them, to replace a Jewish culture based on the teaching of the Bible with a Greek culture, based on humanism and Greek religion.

Those who desire to keep the Lord’s Day Holy are necessarily faced with the question of deciding when it begins. Should we consider the Lord’s day to begin at sundown on Saturday or 12:00 AM on Sunday Morning, or is there, as I would argue, another and better option?

Surprisingly, very few Reformed commentators have sought to answer this question, and I believe the reason for that is related to the broader concern that we not develop the same kind of petty legalism that marked the Pharisees. I’ve known people who will literally wait with TV remote in hand for the clock to strike 12 before turning on the TV.  If we are constantly watching the hands of the clock to see when the Sabbath begins and ends, is it not possible that we have a little too much in common with the merchants who camped outside the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath anticipating the moment when the gates would open again and they could get on with their trade? (Neh. 13:19-21) If we are looking forward to the end of the Sabbath so we can get on with what we want to do how are we really keeping the spirit of Isaiah 58:13? After all, we are preparing for an eternal Sabbath, are we not? (Heb. 4:9-11)  Shouldn’t we rather be saddened when the best day of the week ends and desire that it would last longer?

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

For some time now, I’ve wanted to put together a conference specifically aimed at planting and building Old School Presbyterian Churches and it looks like we will finally be able to host such a conference some time next year. The details are slowly coming together and we currently have three speakers lined up (we’ll probably have four speakers total). The conference will be three days long and will cover aspects of the history, theology, and practice of building an Old School Congregation.

More details will follow, including the date, the speakers, and the location.

Please feel free to comment if you have questions or if you would be interested in attending.

Over the next few months it’s my intention (D.V.) to post links to helpful audio resources on the subject of Pastoral ministry. I’d like to start by posting a link to an amazingly helpful lecture by J.I. Packer on preaching methodology of the Puritans. It’s mistakenly labeled on Sermon Audio as “Elizabethan Puritans”

Just as a teaser for the content, here’s a quote from the lecture which concerns the sound Puritan belief that one should carefully prepare one’s sermons and carry notes into the pulpit. This ran against the belief of enthusiasts like the Quakers that all preaching should simply be done in the moment and without preparation (this is also the belief of some Pentecostals today). In replying to this erroneous view Richard Baxter proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that Puritans were not devoid of a sense of humor!

“Richard Baxter got into a controversy with the Quakers and they accused him of not having the Spirit and not preaching in the Spirit because, they said, you read your sermons out of a paper, you use notes, you have a script and Baxter replied ‘as wisely should the Quakers argue that because we use spectacles and hourglasses and pulpits we have not the Spirit. It is not want of your abilities that makes ministers use notes but its regard to the work and the good of the hearers. I use notes as much as any man when I take pains and as little as any man when I am lazy or busy and haven’t leisure to prepare. It’s easier to preach three sermons without notes than one with them. He is a simple preacher that isn’t able to preach all day without preparation if he preacheth your way.‘ In other words if you intend to get up and blather in the name of the Lord, then there is no limit to what you can do!“

Those of you who are pastors or elders of old school conviction may already be very familiar with the experience of ministerial loneliness. This is not a loneliness that comes because of a lack of friends or family, but rather it is a feeling of being alone in one’s convictions and of being an outsider in a larger society. For instance, the Old School pastor can be a member of a large denomination such as the PCA, and yet when he goes to the Presbytery or the General Assembly of that denomination he has an overwhelming sense of being different and not really an accepted part of the larger body. It is a feeling similar to Elijah’s, who even when he was in his own country surrounded by his own countrymen, lamented repeatedly “I alone am left…” (1 Kings 18:22, 19:10, 19:14)

To walk in the old paths is not to walk in the easy or the broad way, and it means going against the prevailing tendency present in every age to tell men what they want to hear by preaching “smooth things”” (Isa. 30:10) and saying ‘Peace, peace!’ When there is no peace” (Jer. 6:14) it should not be surprising then, that one meets with this loneliness, or what we could call “the Elijah complex,” again and again in the biographies of the spiritual giants.

For instance, in his biography of D. Martyn Lloyd Jones, Iain Murray writes:

Given Dr Lloyd-Jones’ family, his congregation, and such constant invitations from all parts of the country as are only received by very few preachers, it may seem absurd to describe him as lonely. Had he been able to multiply himself tenfold he could scarcely have fulfilled the hopes of the multitude of correspondents who sought his help on behalf of their churches or organizations. Yet loneliness was to be the accompaniment of his ministry. Not in any physical sense, nor in any lack of company. It lay deeper, in his conscious isolation from the prevailing thought of the church at large.

When people sought to explain what set ML-J apart in terms of his convictions they usually did so in terms of ‘Calvinism’. ‘Dr Jones must almost be last of the Calvinistic preachers,’ reported the Merthyr Express, after he had visited Merthyr in 1947. Kenneth Slack, one of the rising leaders in the Free Churches, was thinking of the same thing when he said of the minister of Westminster Chapel, ‘His systems of thought were too rigid to enter into the thought-world of others’.

[Iain Murray, Life of D. Martyn Lloyd Jones, Vol. 2 - The Fight of Faith, Banner of Truth, (p.192-193)]

While to a certain extent this ministerial loneliness will be inevitable for Old Schoolers, we should remember certain things.

For almost twenty years a cadre of brave, but largely unheeded, commentators such as David Wells and Udo Middelmann have been striving to alert Christians to the fact that church marketing gurus have fundamentally changed the pattern of evangelical churches. Instead of taking the commands of God as the starting place for determining how to go about structuring the church, the trend these gurus introduced was to remold the church after the model of the modern retail business. In the world of American commerce, first the homogeneous chain-store began to replace the smaller local mom and pop store, and then the chain stores were brought together in the one-stop shopping experience of the modern American shopping-mall. Following this model, church marketers have replaced smaller local congregations with larger, homogeneous, seeker-sensitive churches and in turn these seeker-sensitive churches have grown to become the modern megachurch offering a “one stop” shopping experience for the modern worshipper. It is not uncommon to find everything from a coffee-bar to exercise classes all housed in these large modern worship facilities. But commerce, as always, has moved on, and even the trip to the mall (with all its attendant parking and walking problems) has become a hassle for many modern consumers. The solution to those hassles is to do your shopping from home via the internet. Even the chain stores view it as a must to have internet commerce alongside of their traditional “brick and mortar” locations. Modern megachurches have followed the same trends, first by introducing “satellite locations” which allowed worshipers to experience the finely crafted worship of the main church on large screens in a smaller congregation and without having to travel long distances or deal with the parking difficulties that come when thousands of congregants assemble. According to Outreach magazine in 2000 only 5% of megachurches were “multi-site” but by 2010 it is expected that over half will be.

Now as a recent article in the Orlando Sentinel entitled Finding the Divine Online points out, the megachurches are taking the logical next step in following commercial trends – Online Worship.

The Following quote is from William Hendriksen’s commentary on Matthew and seems particularly apt, not only because of the various kinds of politicking going on in American churches at election time, but also because evangelicals in particular once again seem to be turning their desire from the pursuit of the heavenly country to the old social gospel lie that we can build heaven here on earth and undo the effects of the fall  without waiting for the eschaton.  Once again we are turning from the spiritual to the earthly, from the proclamation of the gospel to the pursuit of trendy political and economic causes. As one evangelical put it using phraseology that would have been pleasing to the old modernists but not at all in keeping with what Peter teaches us in 2 Peter 3:10-14 about God’s final plan for the world  – “What if the Church began to understand that God wants to fix this entire planet?”

Now since it is the business of the church to shine for Jesus, it should not permit itself to be thrown off its course. It is not the task of the church to specialize in and deliver all kinds of pronouncements concerning economic, social, and political problems. “The great hope for society today is in an increasing number of individual Christians. Let the Church of God concentrate on that and not waste her time and energy on matters outside her province.”²⁷⁵ This is not to say that an ecclesiastical pronouncement revealing the bearing of the gospel upon this or that not specifically theological problem is always to be condemned. There may be situations in which such an illuminating public testimony becomes advisable and even necessary, for the gospel must be proclaimed “in all its fullness” and not narrowly restricted to the salvation of souls. But the primary duty of the church remains the spreading forth of the message of salvation, that the lost may be found (Luke 15:4; I Cor. 9:16, 22; 10:33), those found may be strengthened in the faith (Eph. 4:15; I Thess. 3:11–13; I Peter 2:2; II Peter 3:18), and God may be glorified (John 17:4; I Cor. 10:31). Those who, through the example, message, and prayers of believers, have been converted will show the genuine character of their faith and love by exerting their influence for good in every sphere.

275 D. M. Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, Grand Rapids, Mich., 1959, Vol. I, p. 158. The two volumes of this excellent series should be in everyone’s library!

.

What if the church actually began to understand that God wants them to “make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you” and not waste precious redemptive time with utopian political schemes or playing at being Captain Planet and the Planeteers? If the church would simply do the work she has been called to, then society might be filled with individuals who were ready to obey the command: “let us do good to all, especially to those who are of the household of faith.”

The Elements of Public Worship

Appendix: Vestments

“Under the apostles there was great simplicity in administering the Lord’s Supper. Their immediate successors made some additions to the dignity of the ordinance, which are not to be disapproved. Afterwards came foolish imitators, who, by ever and anon patching various fragments together, have left us those sacerdotal vestments which we see in the mass, those altar ornaments, those gesticulations, and whole farrago of useless observances.” – John Calvin

“Not only has the Church of Rome corrupted the worship of God by a multitude of insignificant ceremonies, but even some Protestant Churches retain many of the usages of Popery, and enjoin the wearing of particular vestments by the ministers of religion, the observation of numerous festival days, the erection of altars in churches, the sign of the cross in baptism, bowing at the name of Jesus, and kneeling at the Lord’s Supper. These practices we justly reckon superstitious, because there is no scriptural warrant for them, and they are the inventions of men.” – Robert Shaw, The Reformed Faith

Christ and His Apostles did not wear any sort of special garments in the discharge of their ministerial duties, neither did the Elders and Deacons of the early church. For a long time after the church began the shift towards Episcopacy, all evidence indicates that the Christian clergy simply wore the normal attire of the populace. As even the Catholic Encyclopedia acknowledges: “In that period the priestly dress did not yet differ from the secular costume in form and ornament. The dress of daily life was worn at the offices of the Church”.  The period when this began to change was around the time of Constantine (324 AD). At that time, for a number of reasons distinctive liturgical garments began to be adopted.

Sometimes people ask if might be possible to take the elements of the Lord’s Supper to those who were not in the worship service or to simply have the pastor do a small “Lord’s Supper” service with the sick and the shut-ins.  In order to properly answer that question we need to first consider the nature of communion.

Communion is what happens in the midst of the gathering of the church to worship and that as such it cannot be “carried out” to those who were not present . As Charles Hodge explains:

“the Reformed Churches, teach that the Lord’s Supper is essentially a communion, in which the fellowship of the believer with Christ and with his fellow-believers is set forth by their eating and drinking of the same bread and the same cup. It follows that it should not be sent to persons not present at the administration, nor administered by the officiating priest to himself alone.”

However, this does not mean that it is impossible to administer the Lord’s Supper to those who are shut-in and cannot come to church. Rather than merely carrying the elements to them as the Roman Catholic church does, the solution is to bring the church to them, as Hodge explains:

To be honest, I don’t spend a lot of time defending drinking or smoking and none at all promoting it. In fact my only reasons for commenting on the subject at this time are the fact that:

1) I believe Old School Presbyterian Churches (OSPCs) should be (note I did not say must)  using wine in communion, and although this position was something of a “no-brainer “before the abstinence movement of the 19th century and prohibition, today it has become somewhat controversial as the majority of American evangelical churches use grape juice.

2) It is directly related to the broader and more important topic of Christian liberty and that those who would  prohibit all use of alcohol are guilty of making human judgment, and not the word of God, the final standard. John Murray warned in this regard:

The progress of knowledge, of faith, of edification, and of fellowship within the body of Christ is not to be secured by legislation that prohibits the strong from the exercise of their God-given privileges and liberties, whether this legislation be civil or ecclesiastical. Legislation can never be based upon the conscience of the weak or motivated by consideration for the conscience of the weak. If we once allow such considerations to dictate law enactment or enforcement, then we have removed the ground of law from the sphere of right and wrong to the sphere of erring human judgment. God has given us a norm of right and wrong, and by that norm laws are to be made and enforced. When we in the interests of apparent expediency erect laws or barriers which God has not erected, then we presume to act the role of law-givers. There is one lawgiver. When we observe the hard and fast lines of distinction which God has established for us and refuse to legislate on those matters that in themselves are not wrong, then we promote the interests of Christian ethics. When we violate these lines of distinction we confuse and perplex the whole question of ethics and jeopardize the cause of truth and righteousness. We dare not attempt to be holier than God’s law, and we dare not impose upon the Christian’s conscience what does not have the authority of divine institution.

[From "The Weak and the Strong" By Professor John Murray, The Westminster Theological Journal, Vol. 12, 1950.]

For some time now I’ve been thinking that if I were to write a book on current trends in Reformed and Evangelical theology, it would be entitled Reinventing Liberalism.

If one were to trace the course of Evangelicalism as it has stumbled along from the days of Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy and the split with the mainline churches to the present day, I believe we would find that the path that it navigated was actually circular. At the time of the break between Fundamentalists and Modernists, the root issues were the authority and inerrancy of the bible and the role of the culture in the church. Would the church continue to embrace Sola Scriptura, or would it succumb to the siren call of Homo Mensura and once again follow human wisdom into apostasy and oblivion? For years, even as they argued over what the Word taught, Evangelicals did their best to resist being absorbed by the culture and setting human wisdom over the teaching of scripture. Now however, evangelicalism seems to be succumbing on several different levels and in doing so we are actually repeating the fatal errors of the liberals we broke with.

Every minister must examine his motives for preaching the gospel in light of the final judgment as this anecdote from John Whitecross reminds us:

“A minister, in the early part of the 17th century was preaching before an assembly of his brethren; and in order to direct their attention to the great motive from which they should act, he represented to them something of the great day of judgment. Having spoken of Christ as seated on His throne, he described Him as speaking to His ministers; examining how they had preached, and with what views they had undertaken and discharged the duties of the ministry. ‘What did you preach for?’ ‘I preached, Lord, that I might keep a good living that was left me by my father; which, if I had not entered the ministry, would have been wholly lost to me and my family.’ Christ addresses him, ‘Stand by, thou hast had thy reward.’ The question is put to another, ‘And what did you preach for?’ ‘Lord, I was applauded as a learned man, and I preached to keep up the reputation of an excellent orator, and an ingenious preacher.’ The answer of Christ to him also is, ‘Stand by, thou hast had thy reward.’ The Judge puts the question to a third. ‘And what did you preach for?’ ‘Lord,’ saith he, ‘I neither aimed at the great things of this world, though I was thankful for the conveniences of life which Thou gavest me; nor did I preach that I might gain the character of a wit, or of a man of parts, or of a fine scholar; but I preached in compassion to souls, and to please and honour Thee; my design, Lord, in preaching, was that I might win souls to Thy blessed Majesty.’ The Judge was now described as calling out, ‘Room, men; room, angels! let this man come and sit with me on my throne; he has owned and honoured me on earth, and I will own and honour him through all the ages of eternity.’ The ministers went home much affected; resolving, that through the help of God, they would attend more diligently to the motives and work of the ministry than they had before done.”

- John Whitecross, The Shorter Catechism Illustrated

With my preceding post on Neo-Darwinianism in mind, I wanted to share the following quote from R.L. Dabney. I hope it will be an encouragement to OSP pastors who are sometimes wearied by having to labor in the midst of a culture virtually overrun by secular humanism:

While I was on vacation last week my daughter and I went into NYC and one of the places we visited was the Museum of Natural History. As we were walking around, I couldn’t help but reflect that if Neo-Darwinians set out to self-consciously build a Neo-Darwinian Cathedral, it would be the Museum of Natural History.

Everywhere you looked the displays and exhibits put evolution and materialism front and center. It was almost as though the curators wanted to make absolutely sure that anyone entering into the building might have a chance to take in the materialist gospel – “from nothing, came everything, and to nothing, everything shall return.” This was glaringly apparent in displays like “The Hall of Human Origins” which supposedly traces

Up until recently, commenting and interaction on Building Old School Churches (hereafter BOSC) has been fairly good. Obviously not everyone has agreed with the theology or individual stands taken by this blog and the various writers, but even that has led to some edifying discussion and good interaction.

Recently however, I published a piece talking about the historic Old School Presbyterian position regarding the validity of Roman Catholic baptism. This post was found and criticized by a Roman Catholic blogger who goes by the name “Oso Famoso” on his blog You are Cephas. This resulted in a good deal of negative comments, including a number from Roman Catholics who wanted to enter into Protestant vs. Roman Catholic apologetics or who simply wished to inform me in the strongest possible terms of how intellectually and spiritually deficient I am. I responded to some of the posts but most of the comments weren’t published for reasons which I gave at length in my replies. Mr. Famoso was not happy about this and indirectly accused me of Bloviating and then running away from an argument

Then something odd happened, we started getting over-the-top and frankly dopey anti-Roman Catholic comments from “Protestants” with oddly rednecky names who hadn’t been published on the net before and who weren’t generally the kind of protestant who would be at all interested in this blog. I published one of the less offensive ones and over on his blog Mr. Famoso followed up his blog with this comment:

I’m sure most of you already aware of this, but some Old School Presbyterian church planting efforts fail. The church fails to grow, and eventually the effort comes to an end.

Obviously we need to acknowledge that even this was the will of God and will ultimately be used for the good of His people, but at the same time we need to be zealous to ask whether there were factors that contributed to the failure of the plant.

More often than not, one of the simplest reasons the church plant failed was that it started from the wrong premise, namely that we are going to plant an Old School Presbyterian church that will meet the needs of the conservative Reformed people in the area. This premise is fatally flawed on two counts:

After beginning their 2008 General Assembly by announcing the largest one year drop in their membership since 1981 (57,000 members), the PCUSA has continued a banner year by deciding to also drop the ban on the ordination of practicing homosexuals and fornicators. AP reports – “The denomination’s General Assembly, meeting in San Jose, Calif., voted 54 percent to 46 percent Friday to drop the requirement that would-be ministers, deacons and elders live in “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between and a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness.” The ban, it should be noted, along with the gay “blessing ceremonies” but no gay “marriages” ban is roundly ignored in many presbyteries. For instance, the PCUSA church Joy and I attended in Falls Church back in 1993 had an openly gay associate minister who would often mention or even bring forward his “partner” when he spoke to the church.

At this point we should be weary of their pretending to pay any attention to the scriptures at all. As usual we have plenty of quotes from progressive ministers in the PCUSA about how this “paves the way for a vibrant church” (despite the fact that it is paving the way for an empty church) and how they are advancing the faith, etc. One wonders why on earth they can’t just declare that henceforth they are going to do what is right in their own eyes, which is, after all, what they’ve been doing for a century. But none of this is new. Christ’s church has had to put up with the same kind of doggerel since the Socianians of the 17th century. Despite their claims of a bright future via liberalism, the clear and incontrovertible evidence is that liberalism kills the church dead every time and merely ushers in atheism. I know the Devil never changes his playbook, and generally never shows his hand (he’s not called the deceiver for nothing after all) but at this point we should be thoroughly sick of the endless charade.

The simple lesson we can take away from this is that a liberalizing agenda has no end, no bottom and no stopping point until the church has simply been absorbed by the surrounding culture. Either adopt a self-consciously conservative line and fight tooth and nail to maintain and advance it, or your denomination is doomed.

It’s always either Old Paths or Broad Path, Sola Scriptura or Sola Cultura.

In the late 1980s a debate arose within the PCA that has troubled Presbyterians for centuries, namely is Roman Catholic Baptism valid, or should we baptize someone who was sprinkled in a Roman Catholic Church when we admit them to membership in a PCA church? In 1987 the PCA majority report of the Ad Hoc committee appointed to study the validity of certain baptisms determined that Roman Catholic baptism was indeed invalid, and thus no true baptism at all. This report was prepared by Frank M. Barker, Jr., Carl W. Bogue, Jr., George W. Knight, III, Chairman, and Paul G. Settle so it represented a fairly wide diversity of views within the PCA. They noted that the American Presbyterians in their GAs of 1790 and 1835 had determined that the Roman Catholic Church (hereafter RCC) was an apostate organization, and therefore no part of the true church. The almost unanimous opinion of the Old School GA of 1845 was also that being no part of the true church, the RCC could not administer a valid baptism.

If we were to go against the opinion of prior Old School Presbyterians by contending that the baptism of the RCC is valid, most modern Presbyterians would be put in the exceedingly odd position of admitting that they would not receive a member of the RCC into one’s own church by letter of transfer, because they judge them not to be members of a true church, but that they would acknowledge that their baptism, the sign and seal of entrance into the visible church, was valid. In fact, this silly situation would be only heightened by the fact that we specifically do not allow members of the RCC to come to Lord’s Supper because we do not consider them to be members in good standing of an evangelical church. In short in everything we do, we deny the RCC to be a part of the visible church. So to acknowledge their baptism as valid would be impossibly inconsistent – it simply has no possible foundation other than the highly suspect argument, “well the Reformers didn’t repudiate RCC baptism.”

Building Old School Churches

Last week I did an interview with the extremely patient guys from the Reformed Podcast Radio Show “Christ the Center” on the subject of Building Old School Churches.

If you can persevere past the point where “my mouth runneth over” in the beginning, it’s not a bad interview.

One of the most frequently debated questions amongst pastors in denominations that seem to trending ever more liberal is when they should leave. What is the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back? While some conservative men have been willing to stay in liberal denominations until they were forced out is such a policy really wise or biblical?

Before I attempt to tackle this question, let me state in the clearest possible terms that Pastors should deplore schism and not be seeking an excuse to abandon their denomination. Of all Christians, it should be the elders of the church who are least likely to be changing denominations like socks. If the government and constitution of their church remains the same as it was when they were first ordained, and their own beliefs remain the same then there are very few circumstances that should cause them to leave.

Let’s start the discussion by listing reasons that we should not leave our present denomination. Too many men have in Christian history have left their denominations or in a few cases refused to join themselves to any denomination merely because there are wolves within the sheepfold (Acts 20:29-31). When men do this they are failing to take into account that the visible church has always had a mixture of wheat and tares within her gates, and indeed that it is impossible to find an entirely pure church this side of glory. The church in every age, including that of the Apostles, has been afflicted with heretics and heresies, and yet God has always providentially preserved both His word and a godly remnant that has not “bowed the knee to Baal.” We have His assurance that death and Hell will never prevail over His church, but though she is “by schisms rent asunder and by heresies distressed,” she will ultimately triumph through Jesus Christ her Lord (Mat. 16:18).

The Elements of Public Worship Part VIII

Occasional Elements of Worship:

Religious Oaths, Vows, Solemn Fastings, and Thanksgivings Upon Special Occasions

“Stated festival-days, commonly called holy-days, have no warrant in the Word of God; but a day may be set apart, by competent authority, for fasting or thanksgiving, when extraordinary dispensations of Providence administer cause for them. When judgments are threatened or inflicted, or when some special blessing is to be sought and obtained, fasting is eminently seasonable. When some remarkable mercy or deliverance has been received, there is a special call to thanksgiving.” – Robert Shaw, The Reformed Faith

As we have been examining Old School Presbyterian worship our attention in previous installments has been focused on the ordinary elements of worship. That is, those elements that we are taught in the Bible to regularly observe in Lord’s Day services, regardless of what is going on in the world around us. Now, we turn our attention to those elements in our worship that are occasional. These are elements warranted in the Word of God, but which are only observed on special occasions dictated by God’s providence.

RUNNING UNSENT[1]

Introduction: Many of you will recognize Carl Bogue’s name. Carl has been a pastor in the PCA almost since it’s formation, and was for many years a stalwart defender of old school principles in that denomination. In addition to lecturing and teaching, Carl’s work has been published in a number of different venues and I have always been impressed by his grasp of Reformed history and biblical theology. I’m also glad that Carl has never hesitated to speak the truth about developments in the church, even when doing so made him decidedly unpopular. In that sense, Carl is an “Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!”

The following article by Pastor Bogue dealing with critical question of calling to the ministry and the problems associated with those who serve without having been genuinely called has been out of print for some time now, but when I heard about it in connection to online discussion of this post I recognized that the material in it was more relevant than ever and asked for his permission to reprint it, which he graciously granted, even going so far as to entirely retype it as it was first produced in the era of the typewriter! 

 

Carl W. Bogue

“I did not send these prophets,

But they ran.

I did not speak to them,

But they prophesied.”

Jeremiah 23:21

Throughout the Scriptures there is a continuing theme of what we generally refer to as the doctrine of the call to the gospel ministry. Some were called and sent; others were not. For those called there was a promise of blessing. Judgment and lack of blessing were promised to those who ran unsent.

While many OSP churches have come round to using wine in the Lord’s Supper, there is a common misunderstanding among many churches that the kind of bread we use in communion should be unleavened. The biblical data does not support this position however, and the Old School Presbyterian consensus was always that the common leavened bread of our every-day use was the element we should be using at the Lord’s Supper.

Leaven itself is not sinful, even in the Old Testament it was used in the worship of the Lord. In Lev. 7:13 and Lev. 23:16-17 worshippers were commanded to bring sacrifices of leavened bread to the Temple. In the New Testament, leaven was used as an analogy for the gospel and the spread of the kingdom (Matt. 13:33, Luke 13:21) Although the Apostles were instructed by Christ to avoid the leaven of the Pharisees, Herodians, and Saducess, which was a reference to their doctrine and hypocrisy (Matthew 16:11-12, Mark 8:15, Luke 12:1), nowhere in the NT are believers instructed to avoid the leaven of bread or observe the Passover. The ceremonial avoidance of leaven in the Passover was one of the signs and shadows of the Old Testament and a part of the ceremonial law which Jesus fulfilled. It is bread and wine as ordinary elements that have an abiding value on earth and in heaven.

For those of you who may have read the On Deciding Whether A Child is Ready to Receive the Lord’s Supper and Contra Schenck posts and who are now looking for further resources on the status of the children of believers, I’d like to recommend the following audio resource:

Children of the Covenant – What is the Status of the Children of Believers?

This is a lecture given by Dr. Mark Herzer at the “Signs of Redemption” conference at Providence PCA in 2005. The conference discussed the Old School Presbyterian view of the sacraments and in so doing discussed a host of associated subjects including the status of Covenant Children, Paedocommunion, etc. I wish I had printed versions of the lectures to share, but unfortunately none are available.