When the PSC wont let me be, wont let me be me

While I tend to agree with your basic thesis, aren't we tending a bit towards cynicism at the end?

Wow. This is all news to me. Lee Irons left the denomination under discipline. Did he leave for the PCA by chance?

Josiah, why don't you just go all the way and emasculate yourself ... in the name of love?

If anyone's interested in the Lee Irons' trial, I highly suggest www.upper-register.com. You can read all of the letters and information about it here.

Scott/Jeff/Ryan -

Scott: I dont' think he's picked a denomination yet. I'm fairly certain he's waiting till the dust settles, at least, that's the little I can gather from his letter to the PSC.

Jeff: we had a discussion face to face 'bout this, but for the sake of those who may or may not care, I tried to draw out the distinction between my feelings about the misguided nature of the debate and how I also feel like an arrogant prick for telling a group of Godly ministers that they're misguided.

I hope I'm not emasculating myself in the name of love as you probably think many are doing in the PSC in the name of the law. I tried to avoid this in my second to last paragraph: pointing out that we must hold things in tension.

Ryan: I certainly don't feel cynical about it in the end. I just feel sad that many in the Reformed/Presbyterian community spend a great deal of time offing one another. Mebbe I feel it a bit more close to home than some since growing up in a pastors family we had to deal with struggles like this all the time. I didn't understand it at the time, but I remember many times my Dad feeling like folks just missed the point of this whole Christianity thing with all the in-fighting. I've seen the damage it causes, and it's quite sad.

But hey, this sorta thing is, I'm convinced, a necessary ramification of the Reformation. We started with a brutal & violent split. And like it was recently put in the Luther movie: "you didnt really think there wouldn't be a cost did you?"

With living in southern california for over ten years and being part of both the PCA and OPC there, I have just one comment....Both of those presbyteries need alot of prayer. I have been involved in both presbyteries, espically as my father was clerk of the PCA presbytery for several years. I know Lee and his wife personally from their time at Westminster and he being an intern in my church. It will be interesting to see how all these trials will go. In a way, I am not surprised at what is going on.

Josiah, I have not heard about New Life leaving the OPC. Hmm......we have a family in our church that is very close to that church. Are they going to the PCA? What reasons are they leaving the OPC?

This was a great post, Josiah. I feel largely the same way. Obviously, we don't want to paint everyone in the PSC with the same brush, but it seems as if there were some vindictive types who didn't just want Lee to stop teaching, they wanted to hurt him.

The whole deal about not accepting his resignation until they censured him seems pretty mean-spirited to me. It's not enough for him to leave the PSC; they want to screw him over for dealing with other denominations as well.

It's sad to see Christians treating each other this way. And over what? The deity of Christ? The virgin birth? The resurrection? Nope. Some guy felt the WCF shouldn't place the locus of New Covenant morality in the Old Covenant, even though he agreed the moral rules revealed were the same.

Oh horrors. How ever will the Church survive such heresies?

Somehow, reading this didn't make feel all that discouraged or cynical. It just seemed like a strong reminder to the more community-minded folks in the OPC that we need to light a fire under our own asses to urge our denomination, on the most local level, to make active love for the body into a daily, practical reality. Maybe if we get cracking on that, some good changes could spread to the rest of the OPC, even them crazy Californians. Of course, we could get ourselves kicked out for the effort, too. But if we're going to get in trouble for something, it might as well be this, eh?

I'm sorry, I know these optimistic comments are terribly out of character. Maybe I'm typing too close to Lang's desk. But I think we're running out of excuses for not doing more, right now, to actively pursue community in the OPC.

Man, his letter written to the OPC both repenting and defending his views (I'm only on page 2, of 6) is heartbreaking. I think I realized, in reading it, that I am a lot closer to what Irons is saying about the gospel/law distinction than a lot of Reformed individuals. From the moment of my conversion, I was taught precisely Irons' view of the covenant of works/covenant of grace. In recent years, I've been told that there is a diversity of views within the Reformed tradition, and so have been trying to get a better sense of the relationship between gospel and law, etc. But until then, how I have always interpreted Galatians is essentially in a Lutheran fashion.

For some reason, I was thinking that what prompted this charge of discipline had to do with Irons' wife's view on homosexual marriage - which I'm thinking does at least somewhat flow out of Iron's redemptive-historical view of the two testaments. But I didn't realize it was more general in nature - that he was actually being brought under discipline for even his views on the mosaic covenant, faith, gospel, etc.

Having said that, reading this reminds me of an old article I read in a book on 50 years of history in the OPC. The article dealt with the Van Til/Gordon Clark controversy. Reading that article was one of many factors that eventually led me to a somewhat skeptical view of Van Tillian views on epistemology. But, more generally, the article seemed to me to paint an interesting view of the OPC. If you could stand back from the OPC and get a sense of the diversity of views in Christendeom, in Protestantism, in Reformed theology, and then in very specific strains of Calvinism, you would find that debate between Clark and Van Til very bizarre since the differences between what they were pushing was in many ways quite esoteric, and possibly even irrelevant and secondary. Yet it was not merely that Clark was eventually informally escorted out of the denomination (I know he left voluntarily, but he seemed also to have been asked to leave, if only by the nature of the debate itself), but it was to see these broader things going on in the denomination - they were going to be a very specific type of Reformed denomination, following a very specific strain, or current, of Reformed tradition. It would be the Princeton/Westminster strain of Dutch-American theology. Clark, and other guys, seemed at times to have different goals, different worldviews even. They saw modernism as a principal enemy strong enough to merit alliances larger than specific parties, yet some in the denomination saw it more important that the denomination be specifically a kind of Reformed denomination.

This makes me think that possibly it is a wiser course of action in my denomination (PCA) where we've (hopefully) been able to skirt around the strict subscriptionism campaign. Pastors have to be committed to some broad "system of doctrine" inherent, allegedly, in the Westminster Confession of Faith. This seems wiser, especially given the fact that the WCF and the Standards were documents produced not by a single mind, and therefore with one single purpose, but collectively through negotiation, debate and compromise.

Still, it's really sad. My impression from reading this letter is that Irons makes numerous legitimate points. But I've only just begun reading.

Just so I am clear - Irons makes a distinction between the Decalogue and the moral law. He argues that the Decalogue is no longer binding on the lives of believers. But, he does argue (hopefully) that the "moral law" is, correct? So, he's not an antinomian in the strongest sense, but rather, rejects the attempt to superimpose the moral law onto the Decalogue (or rather, the other way around). How problematic is that exactly from yall's perspective? But then secondly, isn't he correct that the Reformed tradition does have precedent for his view? He seems awfully close to Luther here, and even contemporaries like Jack Miller and Richard Lovelace.

On a totally different note, the minutes from the Presbytery meeting are really, really cool. I've never read something like this before. It's so parliamentary in how things progress. I wish I knew the procedures for stuff like this. It's amazing how much debate and thought goes into every little thing - even something like the granting of forgiveness. On one level, there's a sense in which this seems contrived, but I think this is because I'm not accustomed to seeing repentance and forgiveness played out in an ecclesiastical setting. I'm used to seeing it in relationships - "I'm really sorry." "It's cool." That's more what I'm used tos eeing. But this is actually really interesting, because I imagine when Irons was forgiven, and its recorded, and the specific acts of repentance are recorded, then it becomes a source of healing for all parties involved. A record is produced showing what Irons was guilty of, what he repented of, and of the people's forgiveness. It seems like some healing is coming out of this process (but again, I'm posting on here before having read the whole thing. I am so impatient to talk to someone when I'm reading something interesting).

I finished reading the minutes of his trial. But I can't figure out how it ends. The motion was whether he would receive censure or erasure. He is censured, I'm assuming, as it says Irons comes forward to receive his censure.

What exactly now does this mean for Irons? What does "censure" mean exactly? There are grades to discipline, so where does this fall? And what is the spiritual meaning of it, apart from the jurisdictional meaning?

It is interesting that Lee Irons was originally charged by teaching and/or ruling elders in a presbytery where they hold to a very extreme view of the law: the theonomic view. Now, it seems to me that if the OPC is going to permit the theonomic interpretation of the law, then it should also allow for the redemptive historical extreme (which, in effect, is the the jist of Irons' interpretation).

This concept is what is so troubling to me. Are we going to define the theonomic interpretation as the middle-of-the-road norm? And, more importantly, are we going to submit to the authority and wisdom of those who are above us in the denomination?

I agree with Josiah that one part of the problem is a lack of brotherly love. But there may also be a purely intellectual component to it.

Someone makes a statement S, that I disagree with. Then I draw all sorts of conclusions C from that statement, and say "To say S is in effect to say C", and since C is antithetical to the reformed system of doctrine, I conclude that somebody needs to be censured. (Irons does a magnificent job of this when, in his letter, he accuses Kinaird of denying the basic reformed teaching of justification by faith alone.) But normally, these consequences do not in fact follow unless we assume certain other propositions which the person who said S may not accept. I suppose many of those who voted to censure Irons did so because they really did think that his teachings were dangerously heretical, not because they were mean-hearted, but because they made this intellectual mistake: they failed to distinguish the content of a proposition from the consequences that may or may not follow from it.

In this case a humble heart and right reason point us in the same direction: don't be so quick to censure.

Scott,

To put my cards on the table, I agree wholeheartedly with Irons' view on the law (although I came to those conclusions as you did before I even knew there was a Lee Irons), and I am an OPC member. You asked the most interesting question of what are the ramifications of not allowing us to equate the moral law with the decalogue. I don't think there are any, except it jacknifes about a third of the Larger Cat. I don't care about that at all, but some do.

You put your finger directly on the issue, though. Someone says that the decalogue is not synonymous with "moral law" and get called antinomian which, as McCartney the Younger has shown, is not a necessary conclusion. The New Covenant is full of moral laws, some of which are even restatements of the ones we find in the Old Covenant. We would expect that the more "moral" laws would overlap in both, in fact.

However, the decalogue casts these principles into a specific covenant specifically for Israel. For example, the decalogue commands worship on Saturday (yom shabbat). Failing to keep Saturday holy is a direct breaking of that commandment, and so on for the yom shabbat commands throughout the Old Covenant.

Since God is a holy God, and He is the same God of both the Old and New Covenants, we would expect to find significant moral continuities between the covenant with Israel at Sinai and the covenant with the new Israel whose home is the Jerusalem above. Lee just made the mistake of pointing out that Israel had a particular arrangement in a particular form for a particular time, and everyone got their dispensations in a wad.

Oh, one more ramification. It undercuts all those evangelical books on Christian Principles for Education/Raising Children/Money Management/Home Schooling/Soccer Tactics/Dentistry/Dance Dance Revolution Moves/Etc. that build their cases on a mass of quotes from the Old Covenant.

So this is basically a case of theonomy vs. redemptive-historical? I certainly hope that the theonomic perspective doesn't become the middle ground. I don't know how it could, however, since the southern California presbytery isn't the only one in the OPC.

Presbyterians are so good at fighting over little things that are only marginally important, and they stand by their doctrinal positions so dogmatically that they sacrifice the unity of the body. Hence, my church keeps losing members....