The Confession offers guardrails, of course. It would be wrong to conclude justification by works of the law, for instance. What grounds the unity between elders, however, is not individual agreement on matters untouched by the Confession, but the Confession itself as a faithful summary of the Bible. Every session in the PCA, therefore, has a formal view on everything about which the Confession of Faith and its Catechisms speak. Those Standards are the official statement of faith for every session in the PCA. Those Standards unite the brothers.

Yesterday we considered the danger of familial fidelity over loyalty to truth. When Sola Familia rules the roost, many are roasted by the fire of unholy zeal. We have natural affections for our families, and we are (expectedly) faithful to friendships that took decades to form and develop. However, when these commitments get in the way of truth, we’ve lost our way. When we cover for someone’s sin, do what we can to minimize the problem they’ve created, or go on the attack of the person who brought the sin to light, we are valuing earthly relationships over eternal ones.

I want to return to something I broached yesterday. I wrote about people’s exceptions to a confession of faith and the possible frustration that may come about when this difference of perspective clashes with someone who doesn’t take the same exception. We looked at the Sabbath as a test case. If someone in a Presbyterian and Reformed context, for example, deviates from the recreation clause, he has no ground on which to object to his pastor or fellow elders who affirm the recreation clause. Admittedly, if he takes this exception, it’s because he believes his view is supported by the Bible and that the Westminster Confession or Catechisms goes further than the Bible warrants. Nevertheless, in this context, it is this Confession that we affirm as a faithful summary of Christian teaching. If there are questions about what we believe the Bible says, we refer, fundamentally, to the Bible and also, faithfully, to the Westminster Confession of Faith and its Larger and Shorter Catechisms (collectively, the Standards). It’s this confessional unity that I want to explore a little here.

The Bible is a big book, and a solid confession of faith (along with its catechisms) will serve well to summarize the inspired Word. I’ve been on a few sessions (groups of elders). Some have been small, whereas others have been large. It’s not a stretch to observe that not every elder believes exactly the same thing. The session doesn’t have to be large to prove this observation to be true. Small or large, because individuals make up a session, and these individual men have views on a lot of topics, no single session is going to agree on everything, doctrinally speaking. How can they work well together? What unites them? In short, it’s the confession they have vowed to subscribe to and receive as the summary of Christian doctrine. When we think of unity among a group of elders, it’s not agreement among individual elders per se that unites, but the Confession of Faith they have agreed to share in common. This is the baseline of unity, but much more could be added to this unity.

Let me clarify. When I was in the process of leaving one church to serve another, a fundamental concern of mine was unity among the prospective churches’ sessions. As I thought about co-laboring with this or that session, I asked myself, “Do we agree not only on the essentials, but on other matters that are not explicit in the Confession but would be helpful to agree on?” Basically, I have my own distinctives, my own subset of labels, and I wondered if Session A or Session B agreed or disagreed on this subset. Can a postmillennial pastor co-labor with a Two Kingdoms advocate? Of course, I’ve done it before. It takes humility on everyone’s part, an openness to discuss, and a sensitivity to each person’s commitments. Would it be easier, and more united, if the whole session were either Two Kingdoms or Postmillennial? Yes.

I submit, however, that even though distinctive eschatological agreements, for example, lend to greater unity, they are not the foundation of sessional unity. Instead, it’s the Confession of Faith that ties the men together in unity. The position of elder is a teaching position, so any Ruling Elder (RE) or Teaching Elder (TE) is bound to teach from time to time, especially if he’s the TE (pastor). As he prepares, must each elder poll the others on the session before teaching on topic X, Y, or Z? No, even though this may help him.

Read More