The PCA Has Fallen into Error, and Can’t Get Back Up: Part 2-Racism

Just like the 1980’s era TV commercial picturing senior citizens struggling after fall and unable to get up to call for help, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), like all churches, struggles to address the cultural issues facing our country today.

In this series, I am providing a brief history of the errors of the PCA in exegesis and application that have led us to where we are today. In Part 2, we will look at race and racism. Specifically, the work on this of the PCA’s General Assembly in 2004 and 2016.

In its response to Overture 43 from the Potomac Presbytery, the 44th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America (2016) corporately recognized, confessed, condemned, and repented of various historical and continuing racial sins in the PCA and its predecessor denominations. After confessing and repenting of these racial sins, the General Assembly “praises and recommits itself to the gospel task of racial reconciliation.”

The PCA did not catalogue specific historic sins or present any evidence of any current racial sins. PCA members might seek more direction about which sins committed by which parent churches or denominations.

This does not follow the biblical model of repentance. For instance, in the case of Israel in wandering through the desert for forty years, the people born in the desert were suffering some of the consequences for the sins of their fathers who didn’t trust God to give them the land, But they didn’t have to confess and repent of their fathers’ sins to receive God’s blessings and finally enter the land; instead, they had to live faithfully themselves by believing God’s promises (Joshua 2:24, 4:8-10).

The foundation for calling out the nonspecific guilt of whites today is based in the PCA Pastoral Letter on the Gospel and Race (2004):

we [address the issue of racism] not because it is politically correct, or out of any pressure from outward society, but simply because it is our desire that the convicting and restoring power of God’s grace in the Gospel be applied to the manifestations of racial sin of which we ourselves are guilty, and that those who experience the negative effects of these sins might know the healing power of God’s grace. (emphasis added)

The assumption of the General Assembly appears to be that the current economic and conditions of many blacks today are manifestations of racism by whites, past and present, and only through repentance by whites from this past and current (inherent?) sin can blacks escape the negative effects of these sins and find their way out of the ghetto and into today’s prosperous, cosmopolitan society.

This appears to be what drives the 2004 Pastoral Letter of making the fatal mistake in its discussion and exegesis of excluding without explanation all distinctions except race. It drops the national, cultural, and ethnic distinctions of the Bible and focuses exclusively on “racial distinctives.” While it is certainly acceptable to focus on one aspect of a situation in order to provide greater clarity in that specific area, the flaw in the letter is that proceeds as if all of the distinctions identified in scripture can be summed up and treated as racial distinctions.

For instance, in pointing out that “racial distinctives” are “distinguishable categories” but “not irrelevant,” the 2004 letter uses Acts 13:1: “In the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen (who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch) and Saul.” However, despite the presence of Simon called Niger, the diversity in this list is not primarily racial. It encompasses national, geographic, and cultural distinctions, among which race is only one.

Similarly, the 2004 letter uses Galatians 5:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” to note that “racial distinctives … are not defining categories.” Yet nothing in this passage is even related to race, as it is largely treated by the letter, in the context of the color of one’s skin.

The reading of race into everything continues in Overture 55 (2016), which the General Assembly commended to churches and presbyteries “as an example of how a presbytery might provide shepherding leadership for its churches toward racial reconciliation.” Overture 55 tells us that

Westminster Larger Catechism (WLC) exposition of the moral law, from Question 91 to 152, has much to teach us about this current discussion [on race], and especially Questions 122-152. We daresay that if the commands and prohibitions of this section of the Westminster Larger Catechism had been but applied to our relationships with other and minority ethnicities, it would have meant a death knell for racism among us.

Well, yes, that would certainly be the case. But application of the commands and prohibitions of this section of the WLC to our relationships with others would also mean the death knell for abortion, crime, war, socialism, exploitation of labor, pollution, oppressive government, and most of the other ills of man.

Thomas Sowell’s examination of historical relationships between those of various racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds in his book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, helps us better understand the error of the PCA General Assembly in making everything about race. He begins with this quote:

These people are creating a terrible problem in our cities. They can’t or won’t hold a job, they flout the law constantly and neglect their children, they drink too much and their moral standards would shame an alley cat. For some reason or other, they absolutely refuse to accommodate themselves to any kind of decent, civilized life.

Sowell observes that this is not a quote “about blacks or other minorities, but about poor whites from the South” made in Indianapolis in 1956. He continues:

More is involved here than a mere parallel between blacks and Southern whites. What is involved is a common subculture that goes back for centuries, which has encompassed everything from ways of talking to attitudes toward education, violence, and sex—and which originated not in the South, but in those parts of the British Isles from which white Southerners came. That culture long ago died out where it originated in Britain, while surviving in the American South. Then it largely died out among both white and black Southerners, while still surviving today in the poorest and worst of the urban black ghettos.

Many people attempt to trace the culture of poverty, violence, and single mothers in black ghettos today all the way back to slavery and blame its continued existence on racism. But Sowell says these explanations “will not stand up under a closer scrutiny of history.”

From this we see the two-fold nature of the error many of the elders in the PCA General Assembly and many evangelicals are making. First, they often attribute animosity, disregard, or even simple disagreement between different groups to racial rather than cultural distinctives. Second, they tend to attribute the current economic and social problems that minorities–especially blacks–are experiencing to racism rather than cultural factors, including public policies such as welfare, minimum wage laws, legal abortion, and public education.

Why have many elders in the PCA and other evangelicals fallen into this almost obsessive-compulsive focus on racism over the last 20 years or so?

Part of it appears to be driven by impatience with God. Yes, the day is coming when all cultures will be reconciled, but that day is not yet with us. There is certainly nothing wrong with longing for reconciliation and striving for it, but those who push for its coming in its entirety today and chastise those who have failed to bring it about are not trusting in God’s provision. Much like Achan, who could have had his booty if he had just waited until the conquest of Ai.

Another factor is influence of the secular culture, particularly the Marxist-based tenets of critical race theory (CRT). While perhaps denying the theory itself, many evangelicals today–even those who might otherwise be called conservative–have embraced concepts that flow out of CRT such as white supremacy and white privilege. Yet as Samuel Sey explains

Christians who embrace critical race theory are right about one thing: many white Christians are not loving black people. Except, they don’t know they are speaking about themselves.

If you love black people, you should hate critical race theory. If you love critical race theory, you’ll be tempted to hate people—especially black people who hate critical race theory. 

When we choose to disagree with God to agree with critical race theorists, we’re not loving God and we’re not loving black people. When we choose to love critical race theory, we’re not choosing to love people, we’re choosing to love a philosophy—a philosophy that encourages us to love sin.

This is why some of the most hateful words I’ve ever received are from white people who believe they are loving black people by hating me.

So much of what the church is doing today on race, including much of what is in PCA Overtures 43 and 55 and the PCA Pastoral Letter on the Gospel and Race, is the “wisdom of the world [but] folly with God,” working against Christ’s ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5). Yet we can have hope that God can and will turn our folly into His wisdom and bring us–sometimes kicking and screaming–to the place of perfect reconciliation with Him and our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.