ECO and Adhering to the Essential Tenets
I was pleasantly surprised to see this recent post by ECO’s Synod Executive, Dana Allin, about going beyond ECO’s Essential Tenets. He celebrates the Essential Tenets, but wonders whether “perhaps we should desire more from our leaders than simply ‘Adhering, receiving, and adopting’ the Essential Tenets.” What prompted this was a series of spiritual conversations where Allin realized that the Essential Tenets were simply too basic to provide enough thoughtful direction.
Why was this a pleasant surprise? Because, as I have previously written, ECO’s confessionalism is too simple and underdeveloped to guide pastoral and theological conversations. They need something more robust, like the historic confessional approaches of the Reformed tradition. A public recognition from ECO’s main leader that the Essential Tenets are inadequate to the task of confessing ECO’s biblical faith to the world is a good first step in that direction.
Liberty In Non-Essentials: Sin in the EPC
What is sin? Sin is many things, but at its core sin is lack of conformity to and violation of God’s law (cf. WSC 14, WLC 24). Doing what God forbids is sinful and not obeying what God commands is sinful. Christians often disagree about what God has required in his word, which is why confessions of faith are valuable. A confession of faith is a statement of belief about what God’s word teaches. For the EPC, we believe that the Westminster Confession of Faith with the Larger and Shorter catechisms contain the system of doctrine found in the scriptures. We confess that these documents faithfully represent the truth of God’s word. Other churches may disagree with us, and some in the EPC may disagree with parts of these documents (more on that in a minute), but this is the chief role of a confessional system: affirming what the church believes God has revealed to us about himself and our duties towards him.
The EPC’s motto includes “In Non-Essentials: Liberty”. The idea in the motto, and very much the reality in the EPC’s culture, is that we foster liberty towards one another in areas of non-essential doctrines. People have the freedom to not only disagree with each other on these non-essentials, but are also able to have different non-essential practices. The most notable example of this is the ordination of women…
Of COVID and Guns
I was talking to some friends recently about churches and COVID and churches and armed security. The evil in Uvalde seemed to confirm to them the wisdom for increased security at the church (requiring concealed carry for security, locking church doors during worship, putting security cameras around the church). The questions I asked were, What is the threat level? Is there a reasonable likelihood of a violent threat to the church?
I have found that those who advocate this kind of church security overlap with those who are done with COVID. Done with masks, social distancing, temperature checks, living in fear. Do the masks work? Maybe. But people are deeply social and lose something with the masks. Instead of creating real security from the virus, it provides a false sense of security; virtue signalling, if you will. Masks might even be counter-productive for all sort of reasons…
Gardening in the Negative World
Alan Jacobs has argued that parts of American culture and history have always been hostile to certain orthodox Christian beliefs. In this case, he points to the hostility shown to those who spoke out against racism, Jim Crow, and segregation. He is rejecting the premise of Aaron Renn’s Three Worlds Evangelicalism model: there never was truly a positive world and the negative world of today is not uniquely negative. Point taken. However, there are two key differences between the abolitionist and integrationist movements and our current situation. The first is that the church, particularly the Black church, was challenging an historically embedded establishment. Currently, the cultural establishment has shifted while the church has not…
Religious Liberty and Abortions
I have argued that the Satanic Temple’s claims that abortion restrictions are expressions of religious values to be correct, though I think the restrictions should still stand. Last year the Satanic Temple challenged Texas’ abortion restrictions on religious liberty grounds. The argument goes that Congress and the States may not restrict religious liberty, and abortion is a Satanic, religious practice: ergo, restricting abortion is a restriction on religious liberty. With the news that Roe v. Wade may be overturned, this argument has suddenly gained mainstream appeal.
I was happy to see Josh Blackman over at Reason explain why this approach to rolling back abortion restrictions is unlikely to succeed.
