R. Scott Clark recently published a case for confessional church membership. Confessional church membership is when a requirement for becoming a member of local church entails the applicant affirming agreement with the church’s doctrinal conviction, which in the case of historic Reformed churches can be quite extensive. I was in the midst of leading a new members call at my church when Clark published the essay, which combined with my past focus on the topic (here at Reformation 21; here in the EPC’s Westminster Society Journal; here on the blog), piqued my interest.
Clark’s argument turns on three points. First, that local church membership is a biblical idea and that the elders of the local church are tasked with overseeing admission into this membership. He has my full agreement on this. Second, that in the early church and among many of the historic Reformed churches there was an extensive catechetical process for new members far more intensive than the normal Reformed approach today, and that this membership process culminated in the catechumans confessing (i.e. reciting and affirming) the creeds/confessions of the church. I grant that this occurred and was often the formal standard, though I am skeptical how frequently this really happened…
Eric Davis and Aleah Marsden have written a well outlined vision for what a Reformed Catholic vision of the CRC would entail. They are happy that the CRC seems to be avoiding mainline liberalism but are wary that in doing so seems to be headed towards evangelicalism. Their proposal for a thicker set of identity markers (not just doctrine, but covenant, ecclesiology, and kingdom) and their articulation of it are excellent. In many ways their proposal maps onto my argument for how evangelicalism and pietiesm differ from confessionalism. There’s a lot they say worth commending, but these two lines in particular are excellent, “We applaud the desire by some to turn more toward evangelism, but we don’t think it requires turning to evangelicalism. A Reformed catholic emphasis on a covenant-keeping God is properly evangelistic in tone and tenor, and precisely what an exhausted culture desperately needs.”
An interesting difference between the CRC and my own EPC on this is the nature of confessionalism and doctrine. In the EPC the Westminster Standards are often relegated to the background. For us to become more Reformed Catholic would include recovering our confessional heritage and making Westminsterian logic our primary vocabulary. Davis and Marsden are concerned that the CRC is headed towards confessionalism (other CRC/RCA critics of the recent shift think that this is CRC moving from the Neo-Calvinism of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck to the New Calvinism of John Piper and Kevin DeYoung) stripped of the other dimensions necessary to hold a denomination together and keep congregations richly rooted. I don’t disagree with them that the church is more than its doctrine, but my experience with the Reformed Catholic movement is that historic Reformed dogma gets set aside in favor of shared practices. Reformed Catholicism is certainly more than shared confessions of faith, but it is not less than that and requires robust confessionalism to stay Reformed.
Back in October, 2022 I noted that abortions were down nationally since the overturn of Roe v Wade and argued that anti-abortion laws saved lives on the whole. Since then there have been a number of headlines about how abortion numbers have gone way up compared to the pre-Dobbs era, which seems to indicate that women in states that banned abortions simply went elsewhere, undermining my 2022 observation.
However, John McCormack at The Dispatch yesterday argues that abortions are down in states that have banned it and are up in states that have increased funding for it. “While the number of abortions may indeed be up overall—in part due to trends that began before the Dobbs decision—it can also be true that laws restricting abortion since Dobbs have kept those numbers lower than they would be otherwise.” In short, the increase in abortions since Dobbs is not from women leaving anti-abortion states, but pro-abortion states increasing access and funding for their citizens. “The Society for Family Planning study estimates there were 208,000 fewer abortions performed in states with abortion bans since the Dobbs decision.” Abortion restrictions save lives.
Kevin DeYoung has a piece up at Themelios arguing that the 1788 American revisions to the Westminster Confession of Faith surrounding the civil government’s relationship to the church are substantially and irreconcilably different from the original 1647 version. Stephen Wolfe’s rejoinder I think gets the better of it: removal doesn’t imply denial. The 1788 version of the WCF only ceased requiring ministerial belief in the government’s responsibility to ensure doctrinal purity in the church, enforcement of Christianity in society, and the establishment of a national church. The revisions don’t rule those views out. Back in 2019 (pre-Christian nationalism debates) I wrote
“The 1788 version [of the WCF] does not explicitly contradict the 1647 version, it just does not specifically hold [its assertions], which means someone who agrees with 1647 may faithfully subscribe to 1788. The 1647 version of the WCF… taught that the civil government was also instituted by God, and therefore there should be no separation of church and state in a Christian society. Since both church and government were instituted by God for the ordering of society there were levels of interaction and accountability between the two. The 1647 WCF is not Erastian, but neither does it grant secular authority over the church.”
This week my denomination, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, held its 44th stated General Assembly in Memphis, Tennessee. This is the annual meeting and council (synod) of my church, and every pastor has a right to attend and every congregation may send elder representatives. This was a busy and lively assembly. Many things went on at the assembly, but below is a summary of its official actions.
To amend the EPC’s constitution requires a majority vote of one assembly, a majority vote of three-fourths of the presbyteries over the next year, and then a majority vote of the subsequent assembly. The assembly completed this process for an area that is essentially cleaning up language. The Book of Government places the authority over a local church’s budget in the hands of the Session (board of elders). The GA voted to delete a section from the BoG on the grounds of redundancy and to clarify that a church’s financial and budgetary authority are always vested with the Session unless the Session delegates otherwise. The GA also completed the amendment process for part of the Book of Discipline to include this line: “Church discipline does not supersede or negate the legal responsibility to report cases of suspected abuse to civil authorities according to local and state requirements.” This is part of the denomination’s ongoing work of proactively addressing abuse in the church…
