My perception of the precipice of the slippery slope in the PCA is the endorsing of and/or the practice of Good Faith Subscription in the Presbyteries of the PCA. Let me quote Vos one more time from this letter. Speaking about the New School/Old School reunion in 1871 and the accommodations made therein he says, “At that time they permitted a non-Reformed way of thinking to exist within the church, and what they have justified in principle, they will not be able to stop the consequences of.”
As a Ruling Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), currently inactive, it is my opinion that the current trends in the PCA are remarkably similar to that of other Presbyterian denominations out of which she came. Having been bred from the illegitimate union of the Southern Presbyterian Church and a host of other communions along the way, she has been debased from the once glimmering Southern Zion, from which great men such as Thornwell, Dabney, Palmer, and Girardeau sought the peace of the church by the maintenance of purity. She has flirted with the nations, has taken on the likeness of many false gods, and spawned children in their likeness. These children have grown up to know nothing of their ancestry in the faith.
Ecumenism in doctrine and practice, the PCA engages with parachurch ministries, which ask the Presbyterian to give up everything and the Baptistic to give up nothing, and promotes a Neo-Calvinistic/Neo-Kuyperian redemption of culture. Further, the Missional Theological proposition of its own seminary, the reception of the report of the Ad Interim Committee on Racial and Ethnic Reconciliation, encouraging the legitimizing of the Roman Catholic doctrine of concupiscence, and the redemption and transformation of the city, are all ideas that wreak of pragmatic cultural accommodation to produce numbers, nickels, and noise. My purpose here is to show that the entropy evident in the PCA is proof that the Slippery Slope Argument is not fallacious but veracious.
To use the abbreviation SSA (same-sex attracted) in the context of the PCA is somewhat ironic. Especially as the abbreviation is synonymous with the current hot button issue of Same Sex Attraction. Just imagine our spiritual forefathers writing about this issue in the in the Southern Presbyterian Review. Imagine a Zoom meeting of Thornwell, Adger, and Breckenridge discussing who was going to defend from Scripture and the Westminster Standards the errors of Side B Gay Christianity. I suppose the first order of business would have been to ask the question, “Side B of what?” since the two-sided vinyl audio storage system had not yet been invented. A second question would have been why the term “Gay,” which had as far back as Chaucer referred to all sexual promiscuity, now having been only linked to sodomites.
Though I consider myself a consummate Southern Presbyterian, baptized in the PCUS over a half century ago, catechized with the 1840 A.W. Mitchell “Catechism for Young Children,” and, with only a temporary foray in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (ARP), I have now been a member of the PCA for 22 years. I enjoy worshipping each Lord’s Day with my wife, children and grandson, and all my brothers and sisters in the Lord. I am grateful for my particular church, Grace PCA in Conway, SC, for its founding Pastor John Randolph “Randy” Riddle, for its elders past and present, and for its now 38 years of solid Presbyterian and Reformed Christian witness.
However, it was not a Southern Presbyterian who aroused in me the desire to make known this downgrade in my beloved denomination. Interestingly, it was a Dutch immigrant to the U.S., a man greatly used by God to instruct the Presbyterian church as the eventual chair of Biblical Theology at Old Princeton, and now only kept relevant by a few brothers in the OPC who seek to continue his legacy. Geerhardus Vos spoke prophetically and directly to the issue before us.
In February of 2018 while reading The Letters of Geerhardus Vos by James Dennison, I ran across a letter to Abraham Kuyper, a friend and mentor of the then young and ambitious professor at the Theological School in Grand Rapids. This letter dated July 12, 1890 was primarily intended to convey to Kuyper an invitation from B. B. Warfield, then editor of the Presbyterian and Reformed Review, to write an article on any a topic of his choosing. The context of the times is significant here. Kuyper was the editor of two periodicals in the Netherlands. “De Heraut” was the one which was ecclesiastically focused. Mid-way in the letter it is as if Vos drops a few bread crumbs in front of Kuyper. He says, “It gladdens me that you sometimes mention the happenings and situations here (the United states) in ‘De Heraut.’ As you might have read, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church set up a committee in her recently held session in Saratoga to draft a plan of modification that might meet as much as possible the objections which are raised against the Confession.” Vos continues breaking down for Kuyper the issues behind and before such an action.
I need not go into the history of the revision of the Westminster confession of Faith which would follow a several years later. What I should point out is that Vos, still being in the Dutch Reformed branch of the church, and still over a decade away from Princeton and the Presbyterian Church, is anxiously concerned about what is transpiring in the mainline American reformed denomination. The question is, why. Why is Vos intentionally trying to draw Kuyper, and by proxy, the Continental Reformed world into this intramural debate?
I think it is because of his own personal experience, which consisted of being uprooted from his native land by his parents and dropped into the pilgrim culture of a Dutch Christian immigrant enclave in Michigan, all because the progressive Reformed Church movement in Europe had made them persona non grata. He had seen firsthand the tearing apart of lives and family because of a Church which had compromised its doctrine to accommodate a modernist secular movement. His parents lost friends, and he himself suffered the loss of interaction with loved ones. Most notable being the Vos and the Bavinck families.
Vos continues to unpack for Kuyper the critical doctrinal issues which were at stake with the attack on the Standards such as Amyraldianism/Universalism, imputation of original sin, and moral impotence of man in the fallen state. He seems to be illustrating to Kuyper the similarity of the plight of the two branches of the church. He even proposes the only solution which he sees viable when he remarks, “It seems to me that isolation is the only thing that can protect us against washing away with the current.”
So, what does this have to do with the PCA? More specifically, how does a letter 130 years ago affect me, Grace PCA, or Pee Dee Presbytery? Don’t worry, Vos is as contemporary as if he were here with us today when he shows Kuyper the cunning with which these 19th century wolves tried to cloak their real intentions. He says, “The General Assembly confined the freedom of her committee by the regulation that the Calvinistic character of the confession has to stay intact. In my opinion, however, that does not matter much. It is not easy to say how strict or how broad the term ‘Calvinistic System’ has to be taken. Also, the terms ‘spirit of the confession’ and ‘system of doctrine’ are used so often in all kinds of ways these last years, even at the signing of the creed, and they are practiced and interpreted so freely, that such a phrase, added as a restriction with the revision assignment, cannot inspire much confidence.” Thirty-five years later a student of Vos would set off a powder keg echoing the truths in this letter. J. Gresham Machen would fight the fight his tired old professor had warned about.
So, what do you think Vos would say if we told him about the “Good Faith Subscription” in the PCA? How about if we could tell Dr. Vos that the Pee Dee Presbytery has under the Good Faith practice ordained men who have taken exceptions to the impeccability of the Human Nature Christ, the use of images of the Second Person of the Trinity for educational purposes, and practices other than worship, necessity, and mercy on the Lord’s Day? Do you think he might say, “I told you so”? Do you think he would say, “Why didn’t you men pay attention to the last couple of times these issues raised their ugly head?” Why have you left the door open for these same issues to creep into your local flocks by training men at corrupt seminaries, or by accepting candidates who thumbed their noses at the subordinate standards by applying modern notions of interpretation and contextualization?
My perception of the precipice of the slippery slope in the PCA is the endorsing of and/or the practice of Good Faith Subscription in the Presbyteries of the PCA. Let me quote Vos one more time from this letter. Speaking about the New School/Old School reunion in 1871 and the accommodations made therein he says, “At that time they permitted a non-Reformed way of thinking to exist within the church, and what they have justified in principle, they will not be able to stop the consequences of.” Vos may not have had the Slippery Slope Argument in his vernacular, or maybe the translator from the Dutch chose not to use it, but that is what Vos is implying. To borrow from the infamous Brad Isbell of Presbycast fame, “If you don’t believe in the Slippery Slope Argument, just ask the guy who’s broken and bleeding at the bottom of the hill.”
Shortly after reading this and other letters by Vos, which show his insight into the slippery slope which began to carry not only the Northern, but also the Southern, Presbyterians into the chasm from which there was no possibility of return, I began a campaign of urgency to inform and energize my own Session to become educated on the issues facing the PCA and make the congregation aware of their position on the issues.
Now, over three years later, I am satisfied that congregations in the PCA are nearing a day of reckoning. Plans have to be formulated. Contingencies for where to look for safe harbor for the Confessionally Reformed Church must be sought. I am encouraged by what is transpiring in the Pee Dee Presbytery. Men are putting their heads together for the good of their flocks. Teaching Elders are trying to motivate the Ruling Elders to get involved. My thanks go to those who are acting as responsible representatives of Christ to His bride. Some who have sounded the clarion call for many years, only to be put off and scoffed at, still cry out. Although my hope is that in the coming months many more will rise up and join the fight, I believe it will be too little too late to turn the denomination as a whole. A system of commissioned delegates to the General Assembly which affords every Teaching Elder, the primary source of the progressive agenda, a vote does not allow for the more conservative voices, the Ruling Elders, to have an equal impact. Leadership is needed by the local Sessions. Unified direction from the Presbyteries in the form of pamphlets, letters, video messages, or even intra-presbytery meetings or conferences. Informed congregations will be the tool to spark apathetic men to action. Connectional Presbyterianism with an emphasis upon the unity of the regional Church will bring about a groundswell of support. Whole Presbyteries looking for exit strategies together will be the grease to make the inevitable choices easier and transitions go more smoothly.
I hope that Vos and I are proven wrong and that the Slippery Slope Fallacy might be applied in the PCA. I hope that God will no longer strive with those who seek to destroy her and that they might be put to shame and silence. I would willingly eat crow, but I think a vegetarian diet is in my future.
William H. Duncan V is a Ruling Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America and is a member of Grace PCA in Conway, SC.