I was encouraged to see two recent articles posted on The Aquila Report—one by an OPC pastor and the other by an ARP pastor—both of which address the church’s response to COVID and the need for us to reflect and repent. This has been a concern of mine since 2020, and it was the reason why I published a short book in 2021 with the clunky but Puritanesque title, Theses for Recovering Ecclesiastical Authority.
The title is intended to bring attention to the fact we have lost ecclesiastical authority. 2020 was a modern watershed in that regard. As more and more truth about the pandemic comes to light, hindsight proves that our uneasy suspicions were correct. The COVID pandemic was not a viral pandemic. It was a pandemic of tyranny.
In no small part, government officials used this pandemic as an attempt to strip authority away from the church.
The lynchpin of my argument is found in thesis #15:
The civil magistrate has no lawful authority in the church to command its worship, to forbid it, to regulate it, or to redefine it. (Theses, p. 16)
The motivation for this little book is that by July 2020, not only had my confessionally-Reformed church closed its worship services—twice—but it had split the congregation into pieces and imposed a long list of new rules for worship and fellowship which were written (and dutifully enforced) by the deacons (an ordained office, we note with alarm, which has no biblical authority over the members of the congregation). It was almost comical that our leadership was urging unity in the church while they were divvying up the congregation among multiple worship services and imposing strict distancing requirements for everyone in attendance. At that time, we were literally not permitted to interact with each other on church property.
In mid-July, I left this church in frustration and started looking elsewhere—starting with a small country chapel that I knew was gathering for worship.
Now it turned out that nearly every church in the land had done many of the same things, and even worse. Some closed for the rest of the year. Some imposed contact tracing protocols and mandatory registration for worship. I began work on my Theses in the summer of 2020 because I was doubting the official (government) narrative and beginning to distrust the judgment of the church, as well.
What was my diagnosis? That
Under the pressure of the moment, even the confessionally Reformed churches—with their rich history of civil disobedience—seem[ed] to be abandoning the foundational principle of scripture as the ultimate authority. (Theses, p. 4)
Three years later, the pandemic is over and the panic has mostly dissipated. But I am hard pressed to find a pastor who’s willing to admit that his church over-reacted and brought harm on his congregation. Most of them, it seems, simply want to “move on” as if nothing happened. Nothing to see here.
It’s no surprise that the litany of abusive government officials intend to escape accountability for their destructive actions. This is what politicians always do. But we cannot give the church a free pass if we care about her future. We cannot safely assume that 2020 was a once-in-a-lifetime event that none of us will live to see a second time.
Looking back on 2020 we see that:
- the church failed in her duty to rebuke the civil magistrate for an assortment of destructive abuses;
- the church simultaneously neglected and abused the authority she has by the charter of Christ;
- the church embraced the idolatries of virtual worship and virtual communion;
- the church made a mockery of biblical interpretation by approving the abusive authority of the state;
- the church became complicit in the state’s authoritarian surveillance tactics;
- the church fragmented her congregations into an assortment of real and “virtual” subgroups;
Even the “in-person” church services were fragmented by masked and unmasked divisions gathering in different parts of the church property. This is what “unity” looks like in an age of fear.
Of course, the church persisted in “virtual” worship long after the lockdowns ended. And we simultaneously wondered why many people were not coming back. If nothing else, the vacant pews demonstrate that we did not take time to consider the negative consequences of trying to virtualize the church. This was a completely predictable outcome.
In 2020, we forgot what it means to be Reformed.
What happened to sola scriptura?
What happened to our confessional standards?
What happened to the Regulative Principle of Worship?
It seem that they were all set aside in 2020.
After visiting nearly every church in my area with a “Reformed” stamp on it—as well as several independent churches—I settled on a small PCA church that hadn’t lost its marbles during the pandemic. This looked like the right landing place until an internal uprising last year resulted in the loss of the pastor, most of the officers, and a large part of the congregation. The church is now in a very tenuous condition and I am once again looking for a new place of worship. All that to say that I share in the frustration of those who have been displaced by their churches since the pandemic and who may still be unsettled in regard of church membership. I recently coined the term “Reformed Nomads” to describe a large group of us who have been wandering since 2020.
The two articles linked at the beginning of this post come from the perspectives of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) and the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (ARP). Meanwhile, here in the PCA, we have been preoccupied with an assortment of disciplinary and procedural concerns that started long before 2020. As we finally bring some of these matters to a satisfactory conclusion—and continue to put measures into place that will guard against the same happening again—it behooves us to now consider our actions in 2020 with the same level of concern.
What went wrong?
Our confessional standards help answer the question. The Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) traces some broad outlines regarding the authority of church and state, and how authorities are intended to work in harmony with each other and with individual conscience. We must combine parts of several chapters in order to assemble the basic framework. The picture remains incomplete insofar as the office of deacon is not mentioned, nor is the office of the householder; the Catechisms help fill in some of these gaps, particularly the overarching principles of institutional authority which are grounded in the Fifth Commandment (WLC #123-133). Authority starts in the home and radiates outward from there. “Honor your father and mother.” The authority structure in the home provides a framework for the charitable exercise of authority in all other spheres of society. Consequently, Larger Catechism #123-133 establishes the common ground that pertains to all spheres of institutional authority.
Two additional important principles are found in WCF Chapter 20 (Christian Liberty and Liberty of Conscience) that address the extremes: (1) submission to institutional authority does not mean absolute and blind obedience; and (2) individual Christian liberty of conscience does not nullify lawful institutional authorities. Whatever authorities God has established are designed “mutually to uphold and preserve one another” (WCF 20.4). In other words, it is a system. I would venture to call it the system of civilization.
The chief hermeneutical error of 2020 was interpreting Romans 13 as a statement of the relationship between church and state.
Every person is to be in subjection to the governing [civil] authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist have been appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists that authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves. For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of that authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same; for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword in vain, for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil. Therefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of that wrath, but also because of conscience. For because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing. Render to all what is due them: tax to whom tax is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor. (Rom 13:1-7 LSB, with emphasis)
This passage outlines the duty of the Christian citizen in relation to the civilian state, not the relation of church and civil authorities to one another. In other words, Romans 13 does not make any allowance for the lawful authority of the state to overrule the lawful authority of the church. Each one rules in its own sphere without “intermeddling” in the affairs of the other (WCF 31.5). Even the Americanized version of WCF Chapter 23 makes it clear that the state has no authority to interfere in matters of religious observance.
Civil magistrates may not assume to themselves the administration of the Word and sacraments; or the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven; or, in the least, interfere in matters of faith. Yet, as nursing fathers, it is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the church of our common Lord, without giving the preference to any denomination of Christians above the rest, in such a manner that all ecclesiastical persons whatever shall enjoy the full, free, and unquestioned liberty of discharging every part of their sacred functions, without violence or danger. And, as Jesus Christ hath appointed a regular government and discipline in his church, no law of any commonwealth should interfere with, let, or hinder, the due exercise thereof, among the voluntary members of any denomination of Christians, according to their own profession and belief. It is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the person and good name of all their people, in such an effectual manner as that no person be suffered, either upon pretense of religion or of infidelity, to offer any indignity, violence, abuse, or injury to any other person whatsoever: and to take order, that all religious and ecclesiastical assemblies be held without molestation or disturbance. (WCF 23.3, PCA version with emphasis)
This has to be understood as a hard line of separated responsibilities. Romans 13 gives us the basis for the separation of church and state, not the elevation of the state as a near-absolute authority in regard of everything else it wants to rule over. And that also means that Romans 13 can be understood, by necessary consequence, as a framework for civil resistance. The state is never absolute—it is always under the authority of God who establishes it (Rom 13:1).
In spite of the knee-jerk response of the church to the pandemic, there was never any need to do things “differently” in 2020. Everything necessary for the management of this outbreak was already in place. And the bulk of it was always with the individual and with heads of individual households.
If you’re sick, stay home.
If your kids are sick, stay home with them.
In other words, self-quarantine until you’re well—just like you’ve always done when illness visits.
It wasn’t until 2020 that the new rule was for everyone to stay home until he gets sick—and then to stay home some more. And it was imposed by the state on nearly everyone except those arbitrarily labeled “essential” workers for “essential” businesses. Church, as we know, was not deemed an essential business. The church gladly went along with the lockdown charade (even allowing herself to be redefined as a business). Lives and livelihoods were wrecked. And the church was wrecked as well—both in terms of her work, and in terms of her credibility.
Along the way, the church embraced an assortment of lies and false arguments:
The inclination of Christians to embrace irrational and sloganistic explanations for drastic social isolation is an example of the lack of discernment in the church and the inability of God’s people to think in a biblical manner. (Theses, p. 23)
My personal favorite sloganistic logical fallacy was “Stay at Home, Save a Life.” It weighs on my conscience to this very day. I may never know how many people I carelessly killed while shopping for groceries at Walmart. It was unbelievably selfish of me.
The damage to the church goes much deeper than falling for the absurd propaganda. Most people in the church—even to the present moment—excuse the abomination of streaming worship services.
Perhaps because it was already commonplace before 2020.
Perhaps because it seemed like the best alternative.
Perhaps because it seemed like a new way to reach the unchurched.
Or perhaps because, in actual practice, we already had a low view of worship . . . and of scripture.
When one attempts to engage in corporate worship by electronic means (such as television or the internet), the practice is a violation of the Regulative Principle of Worship in several important respects: (1) failing to call the saints together into the public assembly; (2) negligence in administration of the sacraments; (3) hindering the saints from bringing their individual offerings; and (4) attempting to introduce a means of worship that is neither commanded nor sanctioned in scripture. (Theses, p. 25, emphasis in original)
Item #2 is quite serious, as our Confession reminds us regarding church discipline:
Church censures are necessary . . . for vindicating the honor of Christ, and the holy profession of the gospel; and for preventing the wrath of God, which might justly fall upon the Church, if they should suffer his covenant, and the seals thereof, to be profaned by notorious and obstinate offenders. (WCF 30.3, with emphasis)
But the last item in my list is the big one. Innovative worship is disastrous. Ask Jeroboam, who as a matter of convenience (pragmatism) set up worship sites in the northern kingdom so that folks wouldn’t have to trek all the way back to Jerusalem to worship God in his appointed manner.
And Jeroboam said in his heart, “Now the kingdom will return to the house of David. If this people go up to offer sacrifices in the house of Yahweh at Jerusalem, then the heart of this people will return to their lord, even to Rehoboam king of Judah; and they will kill me and return to Rehoboam king of Judah.” So the king took counsel, and made two golden calves, and he said to them, “It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem; behold your gods, O Israel, that brought you up from the land of Egypt.” And he set one in Bethel, and one he put in Dan. Now this thing became a sin, for the people went to worship before the one as far as Dan. And he made houses on high places, and made priests from among all the people who were not of the sons of Levi. (1 Kings 12:26-31 LSB, with emphasis)
Jeroboam foolishly prostituted worship and religious order as a matter of expediency.
There is another aspect to the restrictions on worship that I suspect is little considered:
Restrictions on public worship not only violate the conscience of the Christian who is commanded to appear in the assembly, they also have the effect of depriving God of the worship due to him by his creatures. (Ps 50:1, 66:1-4, 95:1-7, 111:1; Matt 23:13; Rev 5:13) (Theses, p. 33)
During the lockdown I spent a lot of time thinking about the issue of livestreaming and ended up with the following conclusions:
Instructing the saints to worship electronically is twice a violation of conscience: firstly, in forbidding what is commanded (public assembly), and secondly, by encouraging what is forbidden (idolatry). In this way, the church leadership becomes a stumbling block to the saints. (Matt 18:6; Luke 18:16) (Theses, p. 28, emphasis in original)
My views about virtual worship seem to be in the extreme. But my observation is that the arguments for virtual worship are (as in the case of King Jeroboam) all pragmatic, not biblical. And we must notice that we embrace a relativistic utilitarian ends-justify-the-means ethic at that point. Our mother Eve was the first one to fall for that trick. Shall we sin so that grace may abound? Paul frowns on that rationale, but as pragmatic Americans, we are willing to try just about anything. And after we’ve done it a few times, it becomes an accepted part of our tradition.
I am in favor of using the means that we have at our disposal as a way to extend the ministry of the church in the 21st century. But I am against crossing the line into the sacred space of worship and treating it like the weekly studio broadcast of our favorite TV show. Some of you may remember that Neil Postman made the salient point 40 years ago that for TV, the medium is the message. And that regarding the broadcasting of church, the medium of TV strips away the transcendence of the church service.
Everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana. . . . What makes these television preachers the enemy of religious experience is not so much their weaknesses but the weakness of the medium in which they work. (Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, pp. 116-117, emphasis in original)
This from a secular sociologist.
Let me now take a step back and land an even harder blow in my criticism. 2020 did not “create” a problem in the church. 2020 only exposed the existing problems in the church:
- it exposed the church’s weak understanding of ecclesiology;
- it exposed the church’s willingness to compromise with culture and state;
- it exposed the church’s willingness to abuse the authority that Christ has entrusted to his shepherds;
- it showed that even in the Reformed church we are disconnected from a Protestant heritage that stood against the abuses of both church and state;
- it showed that we have little biblical discernment as it regards new innovations like streaming media;
- it showed that we can just as easily be gripped by a spirit of fear and deception as the rest of society;
- and it is even now showing that we can make an assortment of critical mistakes and then pretend as though they never happened.
The Bible teaches that spiritual trials expose our faith. In 2020, we discovered a flabby faith under the musty layers of 500 years of accreted Protestant tradition.
Perhaps the most alarming result of 2020 is illustrated by a famous psychology experiment from the 1960s. The behavior of the subjects was so startling that the experiment was discontinued before it was completed. I’m referring to the Milgram experiments. Stanley Milgram discovered the human capacity to inflict torture on fellow human beings when directed to do so by someone in a position of authority. The parallel to 2020 is that our leaders—in government, in business, and in the church—under the spell of “experts,” were so quick to impose harm to fellow human beings with the pretense of benevolent protection. In other words, we got just a little glimpse into the depth of our moral depravity. The fallen heart of man is always bent toward control. And the mask of love is used to cover the face of evil. Tyrants justify their abuses by telling everyone it’s for their own good.
Let me say it out loud: we are all sadists at heart. And all it takes is a little jolt of fear to bring that darkness up to the surface. When God begins to loosen the cords of common grace, we start to manifest the worst parts of ourselves.
Have We Learned from Failure?
Disasters have long held a macabre fascination for me. Last week’s tragic news involves the loss of the submersible Titan which was diving on the Titanic wreck in the north Atlantic. Like the Titanic itself, there will be no single cause that resulted in the loss of the ship and her occupants. Any number of contributing factors will eventually be identified, and it is almost an axiom of disasters that with hindsight they were preventable with a minimum of time and cost. The paradox of prevention is that we could have prevented failure if we had only known when and how the system was going to fail. Complex systems all fail in the long run because the number of failure pathways is incalculable. The best remedy is to design systems that are robust so that they fail in a way that limits the damage and avoids catastrophe. There must also be mechanisms of detection and correction. Church government must follow the same principles.
After the cascade of failures in 2020, it’s apparent that the Protestant church needs to be more robust—in her theology and in her practice. She needs to remember from whence she came—a tradition born of men like Luther and Calvin and Knox, courageously standing against abusive authorities and confidently declaring the supremacy of Christ speaking through the authority of scripture. If the church again totters like a wooden idol, it is almost certainly because she has neglected the principle of sola scriptura.
The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men. (from WCF 1.6)
The Supreme Judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture. (WCF 1.10)
The church’s clumsy response to the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns is not a matter of indifference—the kind of offenses or errors in judgment that are best ignored rather than dwelt upon, as if we might have chosen an unfortunate color for the carpet in the sanctuary but we can all learn to live with it. No. The matters we’re discussing here are quite grave—“touching holy things” as Van Doodewaard fittingly describes it. Anything that so deeply affects the life and ministry of the church in her worship and in her witness must be a matter for reflection and repentance. Nearly every church made the same mistakes—and most still have a hangover in the form of streaming church service as an alternative to gathered worship in the Lord’s sanctuary. But like David, whose desire to restore the ark of the covenant to its proper place in the tabernacle was only realized after returning to the commandments of God, we too can rejoice and give thanks that a tragedy of our own making brought us back to faithfulness in the word of God.
And the sons of the Levites carried the ark of God on their shoulders with the poles thereon, as Moses had commanded according to the word of Yahweh. (1 Chr 15:15 LSB, with emphasis)
Thus all Israel was bringing up the ark of the covenant of Yahweh with shouting, and with sound of the horn, with trumpets, with loud-sounding cymbals, with harps, and lyres. (1 Chr 15:28 LSB)
And so we still urgently need to understand the institutional authority structures that God has established and how they are intended to work together for the good of society according to scripture. None of them are absolute. But all are necessary for a properly functioning society. The church particularly must understand her role as an authority that rejects interference from the state in matters of worship.
I will close with an anecdote that helps illustrate the importance of gathering together for worship. After initially closing the doors to its congregation, Grace Community Church began to spontaneously reconvene, and a short time afterward, when it became well-known that the doors were open again, most of the church came back and hundreds of new people showed up for the first time. More visitors continued to attend in the weeks and months afterward. They came to GCC when their own churches remained closed. Isn’t it interesting? No one had to explain to them the importance of gathering on the Lord’s day with the people of God. And even John MacArthur made the salient point more than a year later:
Zoom church is not Church. It’s not Church. It’s watching TV. There’s nothing about that that fulfills the biblical definition of coming together. (Oct 31, 2021)
How right he was.
