No Country for Old Men? - Reformation21
Just read this. The section below; does it cut only against the liberal PCUSA (which is I assume the church in question in the piece)?
Just read this. The section below; does it cut only against the liberal PCUSA (which is I assume the church in question in the piece)?
Second, I responded to the gentleman by asking what exactly it means for the standards to remain in place. We need, after all, to be wary of what we might call the 'ecclesiastical root' fallacy which sees the orthodox origins of the denomination as permanently sanctifying, or at least relativising, any subsequent developments regarding confessional documents and their function.
Thus, if a church never enforces its confessional standards, or so attenuates its ministerial vows that the substance of the standards has no practical significance, then those standards have gone, whatever nostalgic function they might still fulfill on paper. To put the matter in blunt, judicial terms: you can tell a church's real confessional standards, theological and moral, by looking at the minutes of disciplinary proceedings and seeing what the church disciplines people for teaching or doing. When a church's procedures are uncoupled from orthodoxy, the game is more or less over. If I can hold office in a church and teach with impunity that the Virgin Birth is a fiction or that there is universal salvation, then these things are part of the functional creed of that church.