It's The End Of A Denomination As We Know It (and I feel fine)

So the Presbyterian Church (USA) has changed their stance on gay marriage and has now voted (with 76% voting for the change) to allow clergy to perform same sex marriages wherever it is legal to do so…. and this apparently is controversial?

Don’t get me wrong; I am a firm believer in the definition of marriage being between one man and one woman. God will not be mocked and this development is another sign of the growing apostasy within the PCUSA denomination. The key word in that last sentence is “another”.

When I first learned of the news that this vote had happened, I was surprised not at the fact that they voted in favor of gay marriages, but that everyone else was surprised. Do we not know the long history of the PCUSA’s practice of throwing out the gospel? And by long history, I mean close to a century. 100 years. To demonstrate my reasoning behind my lack of shock and awe at this, let’s go back in time and see why this “news” is just another tasting of poison in an already terminally cancerous denomination.

In 1936 a man by the name of John Gresham Machen started the Orthodox Presbyterian Church due to the growing acceptance of modernism within. By this time, churches were rejecting the virgin birth, the resurrection of Jesus, the miracles of Jesus etc. Nearly every essential doctrine of the church was being rejected in favor of more social doctrines that were gaining popularity. Even before then there was a clear rejecting of the gospel. In 1922 it was the First Presbyterian Church (Manhattan), a PCUSA church, that allowed Harry Emerson Fosdick to preach what was probably the most liberal sermon ever preached; the aptly titled Shall the Fundamentalists Win? Indeed. The sermon is littered with the familiar language of liberalism. “Tolerance” is the theme of the sermon. Not the classical notion of tolerance, that of loving your neighbor despite disagreement, but of adoption. The sermon argues thoroughly of constantly updating the faith as it moves through time and taking a firm stance on the actual teaching of the apostles is nothing less than intolerance. That was 1922.

Moving ahead, the denomination has not gotten any better. Last year the church dropped In Christ Alone from their hymnals because the authors refused to change the words “The wrath of God was satisfied” to “the love of God was magnified”. The atonement is already an embarrassment to the church.

To further solidify how this new development isn’t really news, the denomination has allowed the ordination of homosexuals since 2011. They ordained their first gay minister, Scott Anderson, in October that same year. Anderson’s own comments on CNN on the ordination are telling:

"I think what's happening in the Presbyterian church is happening also in the Christian church across our nation right now," Anderson told Malveaux. "Our church is recognizing there are a variety of viewpoints on scripture. There's no longer a right viewpoint and a wrong viewpoint but several faithful viewpoints, one of which includes me in terms of being a minister in the Presbyterian church. So we're honoring a diversity of viewpoints in our church."

These are the words of a minister, a leading member of the PCUSA denomination. It is clear, as if it wasn’t back in 1922 and again 1936 that the PCUSA is not a church, as scripture defines it, but a social petri dish where all social experiments are welcome and may find their home and growth. So I must ask, why is this surprising? Is it surprising that gospel-less church does heretical things? Is it surprising that a worldly church behaves worldly?

It’s not that gay marriage is not an important issue. It is. But it would be more shocking, more dreadful, and more worrisome to see this kind of change in gospel centered denominations. It would be a serious concern to see troubling signs and slippery slopes in the PCA or the OPC, denominations that have a long history of teaching and spreading the gospel. The PCUSA is the Mt. Saint Helens of slippery slope activity (or perhaps, Krakatoa, destroying everything around it). So it’s not particularly surprising or dreadful to see people kicking away at the dirt of an already destroyed mountain. When you abandon the fundamentals of the gospel, everything is fair game. Machen knew that, and it was just as bad in his time. What we’re seeing now from the PCUSA, are the ripple effects of an eruption that destroyed them long ago.