The following Letter to the Editor, concerning overtures passed by a PCUSA Presbytery, was addressed to and first printed in the online version of The Layman.

On Feb. 20, Heartland Presbytery, which to my profound shame is the presbytery to which my Bible-believing, Bible-preaching church belongs, passed three overtures. Two of them seek to remove G-6.0106b from the Book of Order, and the third seeks to redefine marriage from God’s definition in Genesis 2:24 in order to allow same-gender “marriage.” This, of course, is nothing new for many members of Heartland Presbytery have long sought to reverse the denomination’s Biblically-based policies regarding the ordination of practicing homosexuals and marriage.

However, in the rationale for the first of these, the authors wrote, “the hierarchy of the church’s authority … is subverted by the current language of G-6.0106b, which substitutes for our obedience to Christ two concepts that are foreign to Reformed understanding: ‘obedience’ to Scripture and ‘conformity’ to the confessions. We do not confess, ‘Scripture is Lord’ nor ‘the Confessions are Lord. Instead, we boldly confess that ‘Christ is Lord!’” As if this radical divorce of Christ from Scripture were not enough, the authors brazenly proclaim, “In order to be able to rely on Jesus Christ as its Head and its chief guide in all of life, the church must shed any human-made, subordinate source of authority that would bind its ability to follow where our Savior leads.”

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