Derek Radney

@WVPitt @JonMcK1647 Agreed. I assume the situation described above suggests the church or one familiar with him would like to call him to be their pastor because of their knowledge of his character and competency. So I wasn't thinking a competitive resume mattered here.

@JonMcK1647 @derekradney I've yet to see a church call a guy in this situation who cared where his diploma was from.

I have known more than one ruling elder who should probably be minister but could not make it happen because they could not financially afford to do a career change as a family man in their 30s or 40s that would require a 3 year masters degree (even if they had free tuition). It's kind of a shame that there isn't a mechanism to solve this in the PCA other than "continue to work full time while neglecting your family to do 5 credit hours a semester and chip away at an internship." Most guys working full-time jobs with families are already really stretched thin and asking them to go down that path sounds like asking them to choose between the health of their family and a personal career aspiration.

@815C @JonMcK1647 I am not saying anyone should omit the whole education, but a presbytery could decide a man's degree from Lamp Seminary or Third Mill (for example), plus his work experience (substituting for a bachelor's degree) is sufficient.

@derekradney @JonMcK1647 "No Presbytery shall omit any of these parts of trial for ordination except in extraordinary cases, and then only with three-fourths approval of Presbytery." Hard to see how "parts" could mean the whole education. Does that kind of "exception" ever happen?

@JonMcK1647 There are a lot of cheap options to get training that presbyteries consider acceptable (LAMP, Third Mill, etc.). When you combine that with the extraordinary clause, we DO have avenues for the situation you described. It is just rare that people choose this route.

@derekradney While that may be the cheaper option for the denomination, I don't think ordaining uneducated men is the solution. Perhaps it may be different if one had a solid Bible college degree which included systemics and languages.

Christianity doesn’t require us to ignore objections, troubling evidence, or moral challenges. That sort of response to doubts is the stuff of man-made religion & ideology. Christians believe in order to understand, so doubts & challenges are a means to understanding. We have nothing to fear.

“That the natural world behaves with law-like regularity is the sort of fact that cries out for explanation, and a theological explanation of that fact is the sort of explanation that is ultimate: it explains everything else but itself has no need of explanation.” - @prof_tom_ward in After Stoicism: Last Words of the Last Roman Philosopher

Old School Presbyterian theologian Thomas Smyth on an overly strict understanding of the Regulative Principle of Worship: “Such an absolute rule as that which would require positive institution and authority from Christ for everything admitted into the Christian worship and order, is manifestly a tradition of the elders and a yoke which neither we nor our fathers are able to bear."

Very few people claim that wealth and money are the highest goods, but many, if not most, people live ordered towards them as if they are.

@WALarson123 Godspeed, Wayne. Thank you for your labors. I’ll miss seeing you at PCA meetings, but I look forward to seeing you again.

Today, the Iowa Presbytery of the PCA approved my request to demit my ordination. #PCA

@presbyterianpew Vows are solemn promises, pledges, or affirmations. So the vow is the response to the questions, just like at a wedding. Do you acknowledge…? Yes / I do. Do you promise…? Yes / I do.

Something curious a friend pointed out. We regularly refer to "vows" of membership, but the #pcaga BCO never does. (Nor are there "vows" for ordination or baptism of a covenant child). Was the word "vow" intentionally not used? (No secret agenda, just interested to know more.)

That's not accurate at all. I am not arguing the OC controls or determines the NC. I'm arguing that all covenants (from Adam through the NC) have the same structure regarding the inclusion of children (households even). It is explicit in every covenant that children are included. You are failing to understand the constrasts between the Old/Mosaic Covenant and the New Covanant. It isn't structural but qualitative. Old Covenant believers who had faith still did not experience the gift of the indwelling Spirit, the law on their hearts, immediate/personal knowledge of God, and forgiveness from a once and for all washing and sacrifice.

You wrongly believe the OC controls the NC. In so doing your soteriology is disconnected from your covenant theology. Covenant, aka, the promise of God, accomplishes nothing, or at best a chance at salvation that one must fulfill themselves by belief. Ironically you make the same mistake as dispensationalists, namely OC priority and obsession. Ancient Israel was the parenthesis.

Presbyterians: God made a promise to us and to our children Yet presbyterian nations that had up to 95% of their children baptised are all atheistic nations, did God fail to keep his promise? How do you understand the promise “to you and to your children” practically?

Romans 9:16 supports my point. Covenant membership does not determine the reception of covenant promises. Faith, which God gives freely according to his will, determines who experiences the new covenant blessings, which far exceed the blessings experienced by those with faith in the Old Covenant.

@derekradney @EddyEkofo Sooo it does not depend on God but on human will or exertion? One must keep themselves in the covenant?

Well, I think it's more than a non-statement. Frame, rightly I think, notes that the RPW allows a variety of forms (or "applications" as he calls them) in addition to liberty in circumstances. I honestly don't think there is tons of debate about the elements, at least not the primary ones.

@derekradney @DrJohnFrame This feels like a non-statement. Everyone holding the regulative principle already affirms liberty in circumstances. The real debate is what counts as an element of worship.

🧵 on the Regulative Principle of Worship by @DrJohnFrame from Worship in Spirit and in Truth “[T]he regulative principle limits what we may do in worship, but it also allows different sorts of applications, and therefore a significant area of liberty.”

@ZBreyten @Rev_Sasquatch I don't think so. The reason why so much tightening is going on has to do with men not being aware of or not wanting to live with the approach to subscription the PCA has always practiced and formally adopted in 2003.

@derekradney @Rev_Sasquatch With this reasoning there should be no surprise as to why there are so many BCO overtures to 'tighten' practices within the PCA.

If a man takes the "paedo-communion" exception in the PCA, and then goes and practices PC, we'd rightly be livid. YET-elders take exceptions to the 2nd and 4th commandment constantly, practice their exceptions, and we say NOTHING.

@DaveSmith2019 Yes

@derekradney So are hymns and musical instruments allowed in worship?

“The regulative principle sets us free, within limits, to worship God, in the language of our own time, to seek those applications of God‘s Commandments, which most identify worshipers in our contemporary cultures.”

“[T]he regulative principle is a charter of freedom, not a burdensome bondage. The regulative principle sets us free from human traditions, to worship God his way.”

@MamaToldYou3 @Rev_Sasquatch In fact, just the opposite.

@derekradney @Rev_Sasquatch Practicing exceptions to the WCF is much more serious than the BCO. 🤦‍♀️