The assumption of the General Assembly appears to be that the current economic and conditions of many blacks today are manifestations of racism by whites, past and present, and only through repentance by whites from this past and current (inherent?) sin can blacks escape the negative effects of these sins and find their way out of the ghetto and into today’s prosperous, cosmopolitan society.

Just like the 1980’s era TV commercial picturing senior citizens helpless after fall and unable to get up to call for help, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) appears helpless to address its ongoing theological errors related to any number of cultural issues facing our country today.

Founded in 1973 to escape the growing liberalism in the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS), it took about a quarter of a century for the liberalism to work its way back into the PCA as reflected in the report of the Creation Study Committee to the PCA’s General Assembly in 2000. And it has continued to spread as we approach the end of our second quarter century.

In this series, I am providing a brief history of the errors of the PCA in exegesis and application that have led us to where we are today. In Part 2, we will look at race and racism. Specifically, the work on this of the PCA’s General Assembly in 2004 and 2016.

In its response to Overture 43 from the Potomac Presbytery, the 44th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America (2016) corporately recognized, confessed, condemned, and repented of various historical and continuing racial sins in the PCA and its predecessor denominations. After confessing and repenting of these racial sins, the General Assembly “praises and recommits itself to the gospel task of racial reconciliation.”

However, the PCA’s actions seem to have missed the mark of biblical repentance. It repented of past categories of sins–mostly committed by other people–without cataloguing any specific historic sins. And it did not present any evidence of any current racial sins. As PCA members we are left to guess which sins committed by which parent churches or denominations or ourselves we are repenting of.

This does not follow the biblical model of repentance. For instance, in the case of Israel in wandering through the desert for forty years, the people born in the desert were suffering some of the consequences for the sins of their fathers who didn’t trust God to give them the land, But they didn’t have to confess and repent of their fathers’ sins to receive God’s blessings and finally enter the land; instead, they had to live faithfully themselves by believing God’s promises (Joshua 2:24, 4:8-10).

One suspects that the PCA is taking this approach because it is really attempting to repent of being white. The foundation for calling out the nonspecific guilt of whites today is based in the PCA Pastoral Letter on the Gospel and Race (2004):

We [address the issue of racism] not because it is politically correct, or out of any pressure from outward society, but simply because it is our desire that the convicting and restoring power of God’s grace in the Gospel be applied to the manifestations of racial sin of which we ourselves are guilty, and that those who experience the negative effects of these sins might know the healing power of God’s grace. (emphasis added)

The assumption of the General Assembly appears to be that the current economic and conditions of many blacks today are manifestations of racism by whites, past and present, and only through repentance by whites from this past and current (inherent?) sin can blacks escape the negative effects of these sins and find their way out of the ghetto and into today’s prosperous, cosmopolitan society.

This appears to be what drives the 2004 Pastoral Letter of making the fatal mistake in its discussion and exegesis of excluding without explanation all distinctions except race. It drops the national, cultural, and ethnic distinctions of the Bible and focuses exclusively on “racial distinctives.” While it is certainly acceptable to focus on one aspect of a situation in order to provide greater clarity in that specific area, the flaw in the letter is that proceeds as if all of the distinctions identified in scripture can be summed up and treated as racial distinctions.

For instance, in pointing out that “racial distinctives” are “distinguishable categories” but “not irrelevant,” the 2004 letter uses Acts 13:1: “In the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen (who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch) and Saul.” However, despite the presence of Simon called Niger, the diversity in this list is not primarily racial. It encompasses national, geographic, and cultural distinctions, among which race is only one.

Similarly, the 2004 letter uses Galatians 5:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” to note that “racial distinctives … are not defining categories.” Yet nothing in this passage is even related to race, as it is largely treated by the letter, in the context of the color of one’s skin.

The reading of race into everything continues in Overture 55 (2016), which the General Assembly commended to churches and presbyteries “as an example of how a presbytery might provide shepherding leadership for its churches toward racial reconciliation.” Overture 55 tells us that:

Westminster Larger Catechism (WLC) exposition of the moral law, from Question 91 to 152, has much to teach us about this current discussion [on race], and especially Questions 122-152. We daresay that if the commands and prohibitions of this section of the Westminster Larger Catechism had been but applied to our relationships with other and minority ethnicities, it would have meant a death knell for racism among us.

Well, yes, that would certainly be the case. But application of the commands and prohibitions of this section of the WLC to our relationships with others would also mean the death knell for abortion, crime, war, socialism, exploitation of labor, pollution, oppressive government, and most of the other ills of man.

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