A Sermon on Christian Unity: The Proto-Kinism of PCA Founder John E. Richards

(The founding of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) was the work of many men, but in any list of those most essential to its founding, along with names like Kenneth Keyes, Paul Settle, Morton Smith, and Jack Williamson, the name of Dr. John Edwards Richards would most certainly be found in a prominent position. Richards helped organize and lead Presbyterian Churchmen United, one of the four bodies that brought the PCA into being. In 1969, Richards and an associate led this group in publishing a Declaration of Commitment to the Word of God in 30 major newspapers, which was signed by over 500 ministers. In 1972, he retired from the pastorate to serve as the administrator for the Steering Committee for a Continuing Presbyterian Church, and spent much of his time traveling to churches to present the issues and debate liberal opponents. He was elected to prepare the docket for the first ever General Assembly, and literally wrote the book on the founding of the PCA, The Historical Birth of the Presbyterian Church in America, from which the following is extracted. At the main campus of Reformed Theological Seminary, the professorial chair for systematic and historical theology is named in his honor (ironically, a position held today by social justice warrior Ligon Duncan). It is difficult to overstate Richards’ contribution to the founding of the PCA. read more

A Dozen Quick Arguments Against Interracial Marriage

Race is a blood relationship that can be succinctly and Biblically defined as a group of people sharing common descent from a particular man. As such, it is a pattern that repeats at any scale. In the broadest sense, there is one race, the race of Adam. In the narrowest sense, my son is of the race of me. In truth, the Bible doesn’t deal too much with races, but predominantly uses the broader concept of nations. A nation is a group of people sharing a common race, religion, location, and history. Simply put, the people of a nation share a common identity that forms the basis of a shared understanding. read more

God’s Law is the Rule of Life in All Spheres of Authority

The following was prompted by a discussion with a friend regarding the Westminster Confession of Faith’s treatment of the judicial/civil division of the Law, as well as the 1788 American revisions to WCF 23:3. Despite the digression at the end to focus on these specific issues, I hope it might serve as a general introduction to the continuing and general applicability of God’s Law in the modern world. ~ Mickey Henry

In order for a worldview to be a worldview, it must possess some conception of metaphysics (nature of reality: origins, mind/matter, time, causation, etc.), teleology (purpose/ultimate ends), and epistemology (how we know what we know), as well as a system of ethics; that is, a code of right behavior. The source of a worldview’s code of right behavior, its ethics/morals/law, is the ultimate authority of that worldview (i.e., its “god”). For example, if man or one of man’s institutions determines right behavior, then man is the ultimate authority of that worldview. Within any worldview, there are multiple spheres of authority: individual, family, church, civil government, association, business, etc. The nature of sphere authority, its source, order of precedence, degree of autonomy, and so forth, may be different from one worldview to the next, but these basic categories are inescapable for man (attempts by communists and other egalitarian revolutionaries to annihilate any one of these spheres has always ultimately resulted in failure). In a non-syncretic worldview, that is, one that is self-consistent, homogeneous, and stable, all authority spheres operate within the same ethical framework. While there is variability between authority spheres in emphasis as well as permissible penal sanctions, in a self-consistent worldview there is one law system for all. Since all ethical/legal systems, by nature, distinguish between should and should not, neutrality is a metaphysical impossibility. read more

TT Interview 33: Shout At The Devil, Not With The Devil – And Other False Ideas About Hard Rock And Heavy Metal, Part II

Interviewer John MacGregor and guest Robert Fingolfin have over eighty years between them of being fans of heavy metal and hard rock dating back to the mid-1970s. John has extensive experience as a serious guitar player, music theorist, and maintains a vast archival collection of music (numbering in the thousands of CDs). Robert functioned as a radio broadcast disc jockey for The Total Rock Hour program which used to air on an East Texas radio station and tried out for the lead vocalist position of a heavy metal band near Tyler, TX (and failed spectacularly). read more

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TT Interview 32: Shout At The Devil, Not With The Devil – And Other False Ideas About Hard Rock And Heavy Metal, Part I

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Guest Post: A Response to Rev. Gregory A. Ward

In a veritable orgy of moral exhibitionism, the 44th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America ratified Overture 43, a resolution ostensibly about racial reconciliation, but whose true purpose was considerably less high-minded. In response, a group of laymen known as the Concerned Presbyterians distributed a flier to the parking lots of a number of PCA churches. Predictably, the enlightened gatekeepers of the PCA were not pleased that their Byzantine bureaucracy had been bypassed, and the case made directly to the pew warmers. While 99% of the PCA’s reaction has amounted to little more than point-and-sputter, Utopian globalist Rev. Gregory A. Ward repurposed an essay he’d written for the recently published compendium Heal Us, MLK: A Call for White Guilt, Privilege Checking, and Virtue Signaling in the Church (well, that may not be the actual title), and posted it on the PCA-oriented blog, Vintage73. Fellow Concerned Presbyterian, Clive Sanguis, has written a point-by-point rebuttal to Ward’s screed, and I obtained his generous permission to post it here. ~ Mickey Henry read more

PCA Prepares to Anathematize the Sin of Noticing at 44th GA

The many social justice warriors in leadership positions with the Presbyterian Church in America are working furiously to prepare new and exciting overtures for the 44th General Assembly, upcoming in June. The PCA is hopeful that these new resolutions will atone for the many sins of the old Southern Presbyterians while helping the burgeoning denomination to win social acceptance and the approval of popularly recognized authority figures. Top on the list of new proposals: a formal anathematization of the sin of noticing. The proposal’s co-author, Dr. Sean Lucas, explained, “While the contemptible baseness of noticing is evident to any Christian with a social conscience, we in the PCA want to be at the forefront of formally denouncing this great evil. Too long, we in the faith community have tolerated noticing when we should have been the first to condemn it. As Dr. Tim Keller taught us in Deconstructing Defeater Beliefs, an integral part of Gospel Neighboring is increasing Gospel Attractiveness by connecting the Gospel with baseline cultural narratives, and thereby diminishing Gospel Exclusiveness. We want to make our cities great places for everyone. Nothing I can think of would more broadly increase the appeal of the Gospel to our postmodern society than condemning the sin of noticing.” read more

Satan’s Conspiratorial War on Man

The foundation for comprehending a conspiratorial view of human events is a proper understanding of Satanology. The greatest trick Satan ever pulled was convincing people he doesn’t exist, and the modern church is complicit in this, having allowed the influence of anti-supernatural rationalism to make demonology and Satanology taboo topics. In the high churches, if mentioned at all, Satan has been abstracted to the level of irrelevance. In the low churches, where some mention does still occur, he has been demoted to a meddlesome provocateur of ordinary human sinfulness, and made a scapegoat thereof. read more

American Vision’s Joel McDurmon Turns His Back on the South

The noisome corpse of institutional theonomy just keeps moldering, but no one seems to care enough to bury it. When I was first introduced to Christian Reconstruction in the early ‘90s, Rushdoony was for the sociologists, Bahnsen the philosophers, North the economists, and American Vision for the neophytes. Today, the heirs of Rushdoony and Bahnsen are in archive mode while North busies himself spawning zany get-rich-quick schemes and writing three and four word sentences extolling the virtues of Walmart to the disciples of anti-Christ Ludwig Von Mises. American Vision is the only organization that is not obviously moribund, though its eternal sophomore president, Gary Demar, continues to disappoint. read more