Dull Hearts, Loving Thy Neighbor, and the PCA

Christians Under Assault

Unlike the rest of his teammates, San Francisco Giant pitcher Sam Coonrod did not kneel during Major League Baseball’s season opening tribute to Black Lives Matter, or perhaps to black lives matter.

Coonrod has been vilified by many, including NBC Sports writer Monte Poole. While Poole says Coonrod “did nothing wrong,” he vilified him for saying things that were “plenty wrong,” for “offering up an explanation that slid off his tongue and went dribbling down his chest like liquid contradiction.”

What reason for not kneeling did Coonrod give that was so offensive?

I am a Christian.

He continued:

I just can’t get on board with a couple things I’ve read about Black Lives Matter, how they lean towards Marxism. And … they said some negative things about the nuclear family. I just can’t get on board with that.

This was too much for Poole:

When did real Christianity opt out of humanity? Give a pass to injustice and inequality? Decide that it’s disrespectful to offer support, if not shelter, to those in need? Does Coonrod not realize that pastors of all faiths are joining crowds around the world fighting for these very ideals?

One question Poole and many others today fail to ask is, when did opposition to Marxism and attacks on the family become synonymous with supporting injustice and inequality? And being racist?

And it is not just the left that fails to ask these questions. Perhaps the one thing that Poole gets right in his article is pointing out that many in the Christian church, including some in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), have joined with the crowds fighting for unbiblical views of justice and equality.

The Counsel of the Church

Throughout America today, millions of Bible-believing Christians are under assault, hunkered down in fear, or uncertain about how to deal with the ongoing and often violent assault on our culture and the church. Yet when we look at many of the pronouncements of the church, we must wonder whether the counsel offered by church leaders to these Christians seeking comfort is grounded in a Christ-centered wisdom that teaches not just biblical justice and equality, but also biblical love.

In Coonrod’s case, what if he turned to a PCA minister for counsel? After first being welcomed as a brother in Christ, he might then be told to “prayerfully confess [his] own racial sins as led by the Spirit,” joining with elders who have offered “confessions of and repentances for racist language, attitudes and actions” (pastoral letter in Overture 55).

He would need to do this because, after further reflection, he would come to see the truth of his inherent, hidden racism, just like this PCA pastor:

You see, I didn’t hate Black people, but I was still a racist. I was a racist because I looked down on African Americans. I stereotyped them. I didn’t seek to know them or understand them. I may have never called them names or raised a Confederate flag or done anything overtly racist, but I was racist nonetheless—racist in ways that I am only now coming to understand.”

Almost certainly the white PCA pastor who counseled Coonrod would seek to love Coonrod as he loved himself. However, it would quite possibly be a love based not in a biblical concept of who he is, but rather a love based in his own world-driven self -conception of being a racist.

Then there are the business owners in downtown Charleston, SC who in early June were trapped in their own buildings by rioters, fearing for their lives without any support from the police. Like the owner who was reduced to tears as she asked the 911 operator, “Why, why are they not stopping them?” What counsel might she receive from the PCA?

If she met with any of the “PCA agency presidents and permanent committee coordinators,” she might be told, “We lament that peaceful protests, offered in good faith to highlight racial injustice, have occasionally turned violent, and we mourn with the victims of that violence, and pray for its end.”

As for how to cope with not only her own distress but with the distress we are all facing from these “occasional” violent protests, she might also be counseled to join the elders as “we repent of our ongoing racial sins. We repent of past silence in the face of racial injustice. We repent of a negligent and willful failure to account for our unearned privilege or to surface the unconscious biases that move us to protect our comfort rather than risk speaking against racial injustice. We repent of hearts that are dull to the suffering of others.”

I do not know the business owner in Charleston who cried out for help. But I can easily imagine hearing her responding to this by saying, “What about my suffering? Why are you so focused on the sufferings of the people who are destroying our cities and culture but not to those of people like me who are standing up for the many good things our country has accomplished?”

Truly, dullness of heart is sinful. When Isaiah responded to God’s call to “go for us,” God gave Him these marching orders:

“Go, and say to this people: “‘Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive.’ Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.” (Isaiah 6:9–10 ESV)

The problem is that today, in 2020, many in the church are perceiving white racism and white privilege (and other faults) where there is none, while their hearts are dulled to the suffering brought about by the assault of Marxist, i.e., godless, ideology on our world. This includes American federal, state, and local governments that are going far past their biblical authority.

This overreach is on full display today in the suffering of millions of people who have lost their jobs, health, and even lives because of the government shuttering of our economy in response to COVID-19.

Yet many in the PCA struggle with seeing this, including PCA member and political commentator David French. Their counsel to those suffering because of the lockdowns would seem to be that the shutdowns are necessary responses to COVID-19, and that anything they might have heard otherwise is simply an example of the many Christian “conspiracy theories” out there, such as claims “that the lockdowns weren’t designed for public health, but rather to destroy the Trump economy.”

French continues:

I can list some of the cultural and sociological reasons for the willingness to believe, well, virtually anything about our political and cultural opponents. Combine negative polarization—where partisan Americans often believe the worst about their opponents—with undeniable political and media failures, and you’ve got a recipe for suspicion and mistrust that can spiral out of control. 

Yet if those “partisan Americans” (Trump supporters, it seems, are French’s primary target based on the list of conspiracies he presents) who “believe the worst” about the motives for the shutdowns are just pushing conspiracy theories, how do French and friends explain the refusal by just about anyone in the mainstream to engage in a debate about the efficacy of masks or lockdowns?

Or explain the virulent attacks on doctors who are trying to treat COVID-19 with hydroxychloroquine or other alternative treatments? Like the Texas State Pharmacy Board’s effort to stop Dr. Ivette Lozano from using hydroxychloroquine? Or the hit piece from KHOU-11 in Houston on Dr. Richard Bartlett who is administering budesonide through a nebulizer to his COVID-19 patients? Or the censoring by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube of the press conference held on the steps of the U.S. Capitol by Dr. Stella Immanuel and other frontline COVID-19 physicians?

The answer is they do not seek to explain these things. Rather, they lecture the questioners about being “a sponge for the worst and most paranoid accusations” and their “moral and theological” failures.

Is the PCA Loving its Neighbor?

But what if the people in the PCA and other churches providing counsel as detailed above have it backwards? What if they are the ones who are sponges? In their case, sponges for the wisdom of the world that are being pushed on the church by unbelievers.

If that is the case, then we might see other examples of questionable counsel coming from the church in other areas. Like:

• Abortion: Back in 2008, some PCA members who were concerned about abortion were counseled by pastors that is was okay to vote for the rabid pro-abortion presidential candidate Barak Obama because of the need for “racial reconciliation.”
• Darwinism: PCA members who are seeking counsel about their concerns about how Darwinism is leading to the rejection of a historical Adam, to boys (and their doctors) who think that they can become girls–and vice versa, and to a general rejection of God the Creator probably have a better than even chance of running across a pastor who has rejected the Bible’s six days of creation, thus accommodating the billions of years needed for Darwin’s theory to work (not that it actually works even then).
• Homosexuality: The support–or disinterest–of many elders in the PCA of the “same sex-attracted Christian” movement, e.g., Revoice, along with the PCA’s support of its first openly gay pastor, leave many members concerned about the effects of the gay movement on families and culture with few places to seek good counsel on this issue.

Connecting the counsel on all these seemingly disparate issues is a focus on loving the weak, the poor, and the oppressed. For instance, when the PCA’s 44th General Assembly (2016) decided to “recognize, confess, condemn and repent of corporate and historical sins, including those committed during the Civil Rights era, and continuing racial sins of ourselves and our fathers,” it confessed to:

• “failure to live out the gospel imperative that ‘love does no wrong to a neighbor.’”
• past failures to love brothers and sisters from minority cultures in accordance with what the Gospel requires
• failures to lovingly confront our brothers and sisters concerning racial sins and personal bigotry

It also urged PCA members to “prayerfully confess their own racial sins as led by the Spirit and strive towards racial reconciliation for the advancement of the gospel, the love of Christ, and the glory of God.”

Of course, focusing on biblical love is a good thing. But what is happening in much of the PCA and the church catholic today is akin to the “compassionate conservatism” movement that took hold of the GOP in the George W. Bush years. While holding forth a model that brought biblical love to their neighbors, their big-government responses to the social problems they sought to fix were neither compassionate, conservative, or loving.

Similarly, abandoning sound exegesis of Scripture to accommodate worldly wisdom is not loving our neighbors.

For instance, blaming the condition of blacks and other minorities in America today on white racism and privilege takes the focus of the church and its teaching off of Christ, the Gospel and true reconciliation while fostering a blindness about the harm done to blacks–and the rest of us–by unbiblical laws like the Civil Rights Act, welfare, the minimum wage, Sarbanes-Oxley, and many others that have wildly overstepped biblical guidance.

Additionally, as Americans in Charleston, Portland, Austin, and dozens of other American cities have personally experienced, the focus of the love coming from the church is often narrowed to “protected classes” promoted by the modern left.

Samuel Sey describes what is happening:

… the Reformed movement today is also guilty of seeking approval from the world and approval from coveted groups in our culture. We seem happy to embrace worldly philosophies and social justice as a means of attracting some people to our churches. We seem willing to sacrifice biblical theology to keep some of our church-members or church-visitors from being offended. 

Why is this happening?

Douglas Wilson explains part of the problem:

The reason why evangelicals can look at race riots, and defend them as expressing frustration over the “root causes” of poverty is because they need to be born again. The reason why countless sermons across the nation are starting to go woke is because the men preaching them are dead in their sins. The reason why the atmosphere of many churches has reached such intolerable levels of humidity is because the controls for the AC are located in the middle of the women’s ministry.

Of course, there are also many believers who nonetheless have also succumbed to worldly wisdom. Samuel Say discusses one one reason for this:

… many local churches—especially Young, Restless, and Reformed churches—failed to address the whole counsel of God. In their attempt to dissociate themselves from fundamentalists, they became uncomfortable addressing some burgeoning and controversial issues within our culture. Therefore they failed address what the Bible says about racism, justice, and politics—to disastrous consequences. This produced what Voddie Baucham refers to as a “false unity” within some circles in the Church. 

He goes on to explore this in depth:

When I became Reformed thirteen years ago, I was the only Reformed Black person in my community. That compelled me to become close friends with other unaccompanied Reformed black people in Britain and America.

We eventually multiplied with others in our respective nations and joined Reformed churches. And for several years, all Reformed people enjoyed and boasted over our increasingly multiethnic churches, and we didn’t recognize our false unity—until Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were killed and Black Lives Matter emerged in America, Britain, and Canada. 

Black Lives Matter’s emergence exposed our false unity, a false unity enabled by our failure to address race, politics, and justice in our local churches. 

When Black Lives Matter became a major social justice group during the Ferguson riots—many Reformed black people were shocked to learn most of their white pastors and white church-members did not share their support for Black Lives Matter and social justice. 

However, since the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement had invested so much into a seeker-sensitive-style pragmatism and an invested in redeeming the culture, it became vulnerable to conforming to the culture on social justice. 

In both scenarios laid out by Sey and Wilson, the problems with the church’s ability to love stem from an unwillingness to “address the whole counsel of God.” This is true when it comes to race, and when it comes to government and politics. Douglas Wilson says that many evangelical leaders

have spent so much time telling us that there is no such thing as political theology that when a moment arises when there is a manifest need for a robust political theology, one that is grounded in Scripture, they choked. And when they choked, they simply defaulted to whatever the spirit of the age was demanding — take a knee, put on this mask, cancel worship services, whatever. 

Yet rather than broaden their review of Scripture, French and others in the PCA would narrow the foundation for our love even further down to the Ninth Commandment so that the church’s conspiracy theorists can begin “addressing claims of wrongdoing with charitable skepticism—and the wilder the claim, the greater the skepticism.” In other words, if we white, conservative Christians will simply accept what experts and leaders tell us and offer ourselves up as a sacrifice, all will be well.

The Path Forward for Biblical Love

Clearly, self-sacrifice is at the center of the Christian life; it is what our Lord Jesus Christ modeled for us. But Christ’s sacrifice had a purpose, and He did not go down in silence. For the entire three years of His ministry He confronted the rulers of the world order in His day. As did Peter, Paul, Stephen, and many other disciples before they gave up their lives. In fact, Christ gave up His life not just to pay the price for our sins but to defeat the powers and principalities (Ephesians 6:12) of His day. These included not only Satan and His fallen angels but their human followers such as the rulers of Jerusalem (Revelation 17-18). Christ was in the business of establishing a new world order with Himself as its King. 

There is a role for Christians to speak boldly into the culture in support of our King as we seek to live lives of sacrifice. So in light of the worldly wisdom emanating from much of the church today, we must ask: how do Christians holding to historical and confessional biblical doctrine who believe they are becoming minorities not just in the culture but in their churches and denominations move forward in loving their neighbors and the world?

The Whole Counsel of God

The place to start is by embracing the whole counsel of God. One of the problems facing the reformed church today is that many elders look at the fact that justification by faith alone is not subject to much debate and thus believe that the reformation is going strong. But reformation in the reformed church is much needed in other places under assault from Christ’ enemies. Christians must apply the whole counsel of God to the battles we are faced with today, even when that means extending biblical wisdom beyond where our reformed fathers took it. To support that effort we’ll find many roots and kernels and direction from our reformed fathers that provide the foundation for the fights we are engaging in today–there is nothing new under the sun.

Doctrine is a Matter of the Heart

Believers also must remember that doctrine is a matter of the heart (Proverbs 3:5). Those who wander off into faulty doctrine first and foremost need a heart correction, whether it be little or big. So we must pray for the hearts of our elders and friends who we believe are taking us down some very dangerous paths. And for our own hearts as well.

Be Strong and Courageous

We must also be strong and courageous. Yahweh sent Joshua and Israel to conquer the Promised Land with the assurance that Joshua “shall cause this people to inherit the land that I swore to their fathers to give them” and give them “a place of rest.” Likewise, we have been sent to conquer the Promised Land–the whole earth–with a better Joshua, Jesus, as our head with the same promise: “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Deuteronomy 31:6 and Hebrews 13:5). “So we can confidently say, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?’” (Hebrews 13:6)

In Christ, we will be victorious. We will conquer God’s enemies; many of whom will become His children. But it will not always be pretty. So at times we will need to speak boldly and humbly to our friends and foes alike to bring the whole counsel of God to an unbelieving world.

Worship and Prayer

Finally, we must worship and pray. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” is a call for us to worship here on earth as they do in heaven. So as the Garden of Eden and the Holy of Holies were copies of the heavenly throne room, we are to patiently construct the final copy over the entire earth throughout history so we will have a conducive setting for our worship.

The main direction we are given for this work is for us to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19–20). And the foundation of this is worshipping God “on earth as [they do] in heaven.” Thus the cornerstone of our success in fulfilling the cultural mandate and Great Commission is our heaven-like worship today.

The Good News here is that because it is impossible for us to do any of this on our own, we are driven to our knees in search of Christ, the ultimate Cornerstone, who will accomplish all this through us. For He is “with [us] always, to the end of the age,” “making all things new,” including His beautiful “bride adorned for her husband.” We must turn to Him in prayer without ceasing.

Conclusion

Just like the church, the world is also being perfected. One day, it will no longer be a copy of the heavenly throne room but will be the authentic and eternal “dwelling place of God … with man” (Revelation 21:3). At that point, we will all love our neighbors as ourselves. Until then, doing so will be an uphill struggle, a struggle which the PCA is in the midst of at the present. Let us pray for our denomination and the entire church that the water of life would flow from our hearts and water the entire world (Revelation 22:1-2 and Ezekiel 47:1-12).