Sir
@darrellmaurina thank you for your thoughtful and respectful response. The ideal: leadership by old devout men. The next best thing: challenge to leadership of old non-devout men by young devout men. Instead, we are being advised to heed the challenge to old men, including some who are devout, by young non-devout men.
As touching Redeemed Zoomer, whatever good points that he makes are undone by the railing public accusations that he makes against men that he knows to be believers. Further, Redeemed Zoomer knows that the people who left his PCUSA were not schismatic. The actual Biblical definition of a schismatic: someone who leaves a good church for no valid reason. But when it comes to a church that people legitimately believe to have turned against the Bible, this same Bible tells us to leave in texts such as 2 John 1:10-11 says that we are not supposed to so much as tell such people "God speed" or invite them into our homes because if we do then we share in their wicked works. Zoomer knows that these texts exist which is why he has to resort to all of his elegant arguments designed to mock and shame people who choose to obey God rather than man. Applying Zoomer's arguments to himself would mean Presbyterianism not existing at all. Instead, Presbyterians would be schismatic for breaking with Rome.
Thank you, J.E.
I do think it's important, when dealing with a position with which we disagree, to try to understand the position and its own inherent logic and any inherent contradictions that undermine it. When you write, "Redeemed Zoomer knows that the people who left his PCUSA were not schismatic. The actual Biblical definition of a schismatic: someone who leaves a good church for no valid reason," you are presuming what must first be proved to Zoomer.
We may be dealing here with a fundamental point in question between the Baptist view of ecclesiology and an older Reformed view of a "national church." Much of what you write is what I would expect a Baptist to write. You do not think in the older Reformed category of there being a national church to which all (or most, with some permitted exceptions) should belong. If you did, you would not be a Baptist and would not believe in the church as being a "gathered church" of professed believers. This is not a new Baptist position -- even if we argue that the English Baptists were NOT Anabaptists, and instead come out of Cromwell's view of Congregational polity, which is a view of Baptist origins that I'm quite sympathetic to, you aren't coming at this issue from the perspective of the older Reformed writers who predate the English Puritans who **DID** believe in a national church.
Now we can argue that Zoomer is being utterly unrealistic in his view of the "mainline" being the established national church. I live in the rural Missouri Ozarks. If we have anything close to an "established church" around here, it's the Southern Baptist Convention and related Baptist subgroups. A close second, due to Springfield being the home of Evangel University and the denominational headquarters of the Assemblies of God, would be the charismatic movement in which the AG is the largest but far from the only representative.
The PC(USA) barely registers as a factor around here. Yes, Scots-Irish Presbyterians from Appalachia settled these "hills and hollers" in the early 1800s, but the Presbyterians were utterly unable and/or unwilling to provide ministers for the impoverished "mountain folk," so most of the Scots-Irish people who settled the Ozarks, if they hadn't already become Baptists in Appalachia, became Baptists here, or sometimes Methodists.
We can also argue that he is factually wrong, and that Anglicans and Congregationalists can make a claim to being the "American Establishment," and maybe the Reformed Church in America given its Dutch colonial origins. But the Presbyterians were harassed in the South, and they were tolerated in Pennsylvania mostly because the Quakers who founded the colony and ran it for generations wanted the "fighting Scots-Irish from Ulster" to do what they refused to do to defend themselves.
I am a member of a Waldensian church. I have an elder (inactive) in his 90s who can trace his ancestry back to a guerilla war leader and pastor who, with an army of 800 men, fought the far larger armies of the Duke of Savoy to a draw and literally saved the Waldensian Valleys of Italy for the Reformation with force of arms. Multiple armies, multiple commanders, often with ten thousand or more men, marched into the Italian Alps and fled in utter disorder, defeated with most of their men dead. Things were so bad for the armies of the Duke that they could come up with no other explanation than black magic, sorcery, and devils. Of course, as adherents to sovereign grace, the Waldensians attributed their victories to divine providence.
But if you want to think in purely secular terms, Napoleon himself, when he visited the Waldensian Valleys and received a tour of the great Waldensian military victories over their opponents, was amazed and believed the Waldensian use of mountain terrain, while perhaps miraculous, was combined with a marvel of military leadership and use of terrain known deeply by the native population. To use a modern example, think Afghanistan, in which mountain terrain and religious zeal and willingness to die for one's faith combined to allow the Afghans to fight off three of the most important military forces of their eras, the British, the Soviet Union, and most recently, we Americans.
My church sign says we have been preaching Sola Scriptura since 1173 AD. I can make a far better case than Zoomer to antiquity. The PC(USA)? Meh. Newbies, barely two and a half centuries old. Want to go back to John Knox? Okay, now you're going back four and a half centuries. Want to go back to John Calvin? Okay, I'll play a gotcha game with Zoomer. Who introduced Calvin to sovereign grace? Calvin's landlord when he was in what today would be called law school. Who was that landlord? An underground Waldensian who was living and working in France as a merchant. So Zoomer, if he really wants to avoid separation, should recognize his Waldensian heritage, learn to eat pasta and speak Italian, and move to Italy.
Of course, that argument is ridiculous, but it would be consistent with Zoomer's logic. It shows the inherent contradiction of his view of unjustified separation and schism.
There are sound factual arguments rebutting Zoomer's core claims.
But what if this were Scotland? Or the Netherlands? Or Hungary? Or the Protestant cantons of Switzerland?
Zoomer has a case there. Those are countries which DO have a long tradition of a Reformed "national church."
His case is based, however, on a wrong view of a national church.
Zoomer's presuppositions are based on historic Reformed views of church-state relations, and on a national church, which are positions that the Congregational wing of Puritanism, and as far as I know all historic English Baptists, rejected.
He has far more in common with the older establishmentarian views of European Calvinism than he does with anything practiced by Presbyterians in America, even in the colonial era.
Take Zoomer at his own logic, and he can intelligently debate with Doug Wilson and men like him who, ironically, share some of his presuppositions that nearly all American evangelicals reject, and most modern Reformed people do.
My personal read is that Zoomer is going to flame out and fail.
But I'm willing to take a wait, watch, and see approach.
Strange things sometimes happen and revival and Reformation in the medieval church of the 1100s and the 1400s was far harder than it would be in today's PC(USA).
Go ask Jan Hus and Peter Waldo.
