New Warhorn Media post by Tim Bayly:
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Great point. I’m frustrated with friends who have drawn a line in the sand over women’s ordination. They are waiting to leave the PCA over that issue. I told him that his line was equivalent to the Maginot Line in France, and that he has been flanked by Revoice. It was to no avail. He was sticking with his line. That was the mark for when he should leave.
So, is there a new/old PCA on the horizon, or is it just talk at this point?
Have any of these men expressed interest in the Evangel Presbytery?
Over the decades I’ve observed that there is a persistent belief that if we simply set up the right system, it will be foolproof against bad men.
I don’t worry myself about the future direction of the PCA. Our church does as much as can be reasonably expected by sending commissioners to Presbytery and GA to fight the good fight. If the ship rights itself, then that’s great, thanks be to God. If it sinks, then our church will move on. I doubt whether our members would have any awareness of Revoice or whatever else is going on in the wider PCA if we didn’t tell them. And our church has never fit the mainstream PCA culture. We haven’t followed the fads and conventional wisdom, and of the six men who have interned at our church and gone on to pastor a church, five are now in the OPC and the sixth in the Korean PCA.
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That’s is a great metaphor. The other flanking maneuver on the topic is “women can do anything an unordained man can do.” You wake up one day and women are behind your Maginot line as non-elders-who-do-everything-elders-do and non-preachers-who-preach-sermons-that-we-don’t-call-sermons.
Let that bake for a generation or so and there’s no more reason to oppose ordination or even sodomite marriage.
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This is what flabbergasts me about the PCA.
I watched the Episcopal Church up close and personal as an Episcopal layman back in the 1990s. The ordination of women had occurred in the 70s, and from that point onwards, the “conservatives” could only fight a rearguard resistence (in other words huffing and puffing and whining themselves into a frenzy of more huffing and puffing).
Then the gay lobby rode into the chancel on the skirts of the ladies (who were, of course, well tinctured with lesbians).
But will you just look at the PCA!! Those campaigning (overtly or subvertingly) for the admission of women as deacons (and then, of course, as elders) have only reached the place where their incessant submission of overtures at GAs has become more or less expected.
And, then, WHAMO! A gay elder steps forth to the cheers of the General Assembly while an elder reading Romans 1 out loud is jeered by the same General Assembly.
Sheesh!! Why NOT ordain women as elders?? It’s check and mate, already.
Those who left the Episcopal Church (or were later expelled by the apostate winners) are a pitful and disunified lot, mostly given to pointing fingers at one another. I wonder if the departing Presbyterian orthodox will end up the same - pitifully disunified and reduced to finger pointing?
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Great point. This connects well to a point Douglas Wilson made in his recent post about Rosaria Butterfield where he noted that in fights like these the three identifiable groups of people are the conservatives who get it, the progressives who get it, and the “accommodating mediocrities” in the middle (or “Champions, churls, and chumps”).
So what would happen if a bunch of the “accommodating mediocrities” finally get fed up and form a new protest denomination? Well, let’s give it… 10… 9… 8…
Perhaps we are getting to the point in which traditional denominational structures have become an irrelevance. Once again, the centre cannot hold.
I think this is part of why I appreciated Barr’s talk of the founding fathers’ definition of self-rule and emphasis on “micro morality” over macro and not looking to the government to fix the consequences of our bad actions.
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