If confessional congregations determine that a denomination is not presently confessional or if groups that find themselves alienated from the confession and unable to subscribe honestly to the standards, if all churchly efforts have been exhausted, and that there is no reasonable expectation of a return to the confession (theology, piety, and practice) in future, then there are grounds for a division.

Almost from the moment I came into contact with the PCA, in 1984, people were talking about whether the PCA should split. So it’s not entirely surprising that informal talk of splitting the PCA should still exist. Nevertheless, it was a little surprising to see a post by Sam DeSocio suggesting that the various groups in the PCA might benefit from a split.

You should read and consider the arguments for yourself. From the outside it seems as if there probably are several groups within the PCA with distinct identities. Some of what distinguishes these groups is geography, some of it is theological, and some is sociological. What is striking, however, is how prominent the word “philosophy” is in the post. We do speak of philosophy of ministry or philosophy of worship but those are colloquial ways of speaking that don’t have much warrant in Scripture or in the confession. There is a hierarchy of authority in Reformed and Presbyterian churches: Scripture->confession->church order. The perspicuous Word of God norms all. The church confesses an understanding of God’s Word in binding ecclesiastical documents and articulates certain principles of polity in the application of the Word to the daily life of the institutional church. Philosophies of ministry are interesting but they have no ecclesiastical standing. They aren’t primary, secondary, or even tertiary authorities. They are nothing more than potentially interesting (or tedious) theories.

What unites the Reformed and Presbyterian churches is not a philosophy of ministry but the Word of God as confessed by the churches. There’s no denying that real differences do develop in the life of a denomination but as these surface the first response should not be to divide but to re-form around God’s Word as confessed by the churches.

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