Volume 3 Issue 1
Page 2

February 1998

EDITORIAL UPDATE . . .

Since the above article was submitted, the hearing referred to at the beginning of the article has taken place, and the full SJC reversed the finding of its panel that the complaint of the Mt. Carmel Session was well-founded. By a vote of 12 in favor, 8 opposed, with 2 recusals and with 2 men absent, the Commission found that the action of the New Jersey Presbytery in adopting affirmations and denials which, in effect, allow for other than literal views of the days of Genesis one was constitutional. The SJC stated that it was "not making a judgment with regard to the interpretation of the days of creation but on the right of a church court to determine questions of doctrine and discipline properly brought before it." Thus, we see that the same pattern of protecting modernism on technical grounds which led to the demise of the large Presbyterian bodies, north and south, in this country, is now clearly in evidence in the PCA. It remains only for the General Assembly itself to confirm this step toward apostasy. Like Pastor Cameron, we have little confidence, given the recent history of the PCA, that truth will prevail. There is a glimmer of hope afforded by the fact that it is apparently likely that there will be a minority report on this case presented to the Assembly. We expect, however, that every effort will be made to keep the PCA from making any clear pronouncement on the central issue -- the length of the days of creation -- until the modernists have complete confidence that they can prevail in an up or down vote on that question. This is the way it has always worked, as is demonstrated at length in Gary North's recent book, CROSSED FINGERS, and there is every indication that the same wheels are in motion in the PCA.

There is another factor at work, too -- namely, the unwillingness of many who want, personally, to be considered conservative Bible-believers, but who are unwilling to take a stand against modernism clothed in Presbyterian proceduralism. As North also points out in his book, the modernists in what was the Old School Northern Presbyterian Church could count on one thing more than any other -- that, with a few "contentious" exceptions, the conservatives in the Church could be counted on to do nothing while the modernists lick them all around for the big swallow to come.