Finney & Nettleton 

While Charles Finney’s revivalism came to dominate popular memory of the Second Great Awakening, Asahel Nettleton represented a continuation of the Calvinistic evangelicalism inherited from the First Great Awakening. More importantly, Nettleton’s conduct during the controversy over Finney’s “new measures” reveals the difficulty of maintaining pastoral faithfulness, doctrinal integrity, and Christian charity amid growing theological division. 

Charles Finney began his ministry under the care of the St. Lawrence Presbytery in western New York. Although ordained within Presbyterianism, he increasingly rejected central doctrines associated with Calvinism, especially original sin and total depravity. Finney even declined the opportunity to study at Princeton because of its teaching on depravity. Over time, he came to view traditional Presbyterian theology as an obstacle to genuine revival. His “new measures,” including the anxious bench and emotionally charged preaching, reflected this theological shift. Critics believed these methods confused true conversion with outward response and placed too much confidence in human methods rather than the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit. 

Among Finney’s critics, Asahel Nettleton stands out because he himself was a successful revival preacher. Influenced deeply by Jonathan Edwards and the legacy of the First Great Awakening, Nettleton preached extensively on sin, depravity, and the necessity of regeneration. Nettleton’s ministry demonstrated that revival could flourish without Finney’s innovations. He believed revival must remain grounded in doctrinal orthodoxy and careful pastoral oversight. Though he never employed the anxious bench or manipulative techniques, thousands professed faith under his preaching throughout New England. His preaching was doctrinal, experiential, and pastoral. Rather than seeking immediate professions of faith, Nettleton carefully distinguished between emotional distress and genuine conversion brought about by the Holy Spirit. Nettleton feared that Finney’s methods encouraged ministers to rely upon technique and emotional pressure instead of the ordinary means of grace and the sovereign work of God. 

New Lebanon Conference 

As Finney’s popularity grew outside of Oneida County, the need for action from dissenting ministers intensified. Nettleton’s dear friend Lyman Beecher and Finney’s close associate Nathan Beman organized a meeting of Presbyterian and Congregationalist ministers in New Lebanon, NY in July 1827. The meeting brought together Finney, Nettleton, Beecher, Beman, and other ministers to discuss the growing divisions caused by the new measures. By this point, tensions had already escalated through public letters and sermons. Finney accused his opponents of spiritual deadness, while Nettleton warned that Finney misunderstood true religion and was in danger of spiritual pride. 

The conference itself proved revealing. Finney’s popularity was rapidly growing, and many ministers were increasingly unwilling to oppose methods that appeared numerically successful. At New Lebanon, the disagreements became clear. The issue was not whether revival should occur, but what revival truly was. For Nettleton, revival was a sovereign work of the Holy Spirit producing conviction of sin and lasting transformation. For Finney, revival increasingly appeared connected to the proper use of means and methods capable of producing results. Nettleton feared these innovations would leave lasting damage upon American Christianity. 

If there was anyone to take Finney to task, it was going to be Nettleton. Though he was the most respected revival preacher of the old Calvinist persuasion, he remained largely silent during the proceedings. His silence was not indifference, but caution. This would prove to be a tactical mistake. Nettleton hoped to preserve peace within the church and still believed Finney might be corrected without creating a larger division among evangelicals. 

His concerns ultimately proved correct, but it appeared to be too late. Finney’s influence spread rapidly through Presbyterian and Congregational churches, while opposition to the new measures steadily weakened. Finney was influencing key ministers in various presbyteries, leading to seismic shifts in reformed churches in a short matter of time. Beecher, who during the conference told Finney that if he ever came to Massachusetts for a revival Beecher would, “meet you at the state line, and call out the artillery men, and fight every inch of the way to Boston.”¹ Only a year later, Beecher ceased publicly resisting Finney and ended up inviting him to preach at his church in Boston. 

Nettleton, however, remained committed to the Calvinistic evangelical tradition inherited from the First Great Awakening. Yet, since he was not the victor in this theological struggle, Nettleton faded into obscurity the rest of his life. His influence remained while he was alive, and he stayed faithful, but his legacy was not remembered. He has been dubbed by those who know him as the “Forgotten Evangelist.” We would do well to remember this Calvinist preacher of Revival. 

Lessons for Today 

What are we to make of this? Nettleton was one of the last significant voices opposing Finneyism. I believe there are some lessons we can learn. 

#1 Pastoral courage means speaking at the right time 

This might be the biggest lesson to learn from Nettleton. He knew the truth and defended it wholeheartedly, yet when it mattered most he failed to leverage his influence by speaking sufficiently to the issues at the New Lebanon Conference. There is a time to be quiet and a time to speak—we need God’s help and wisdom to know the difference. 

To be clear, although Finney was ordained into Reformed pastoral ministry, he eventually denied original sin, monergism, and penal-substitionary atonement. Finney’s doctrine was an all-out assault on historic protestant Christianity. This is to say nothing of his problematic “new measures.” 

We ought to have courage to call a spade a spade, whether that be the abortion clinic down the street, the errors of Rome, the compromise of the charismatic movement, or politicians who manipulate Scripture. 

We must be shepherds who tenderly guard our flocks, but we must also warn them of the attacks of the wolves. Courage often looks like standing against error. Nettleton can be credited with doing this. However, his error was that he did not speak at the most opportune time. We often think that to be charitable is to remain silent. But there is a way forward, where we are kind to our theological opponents, while being very clear on the danger they pose. 

#2 Pastoral courage means not purchasing peace at the expense of truth 

Nettleton was a very admirable churchman. His desire for unity in the churches came from good motivations. Yet, the peace he sowed allowed for Finney’s errors to go unchecked and to begin the slow process of evangelical churches abandoning their traditions steeped in the old Calvinism that Nettleton taught. Many of the churches Finney was allowed to preach in are no longer faithful to their original evangelical convictions. Even Finney’s flagship institution, Oberlin College, is no longer considered Christian in any meaningful sense. 

#3 Pastoral courage means fighting for the church’s future 

Pastors are watchmen and they have a duty to observe the rising tide of our culture before it becomes a flood. We must observe false teaching today to help the church in the future. Cowardice in the present will be costly in the future. We do not know Nettleton’s heart; Was he naive? Was he a coward? We cannot know. But we can safely say that he missed the opportunity that was presented to him. 

We must learn from Nettleton. Sometimes the right man speaks too little, and the wrong man speaks too much. Nettleton was far too gentle to Finney’s bombastic argumentation. Being a pastor sometimes means not allowing misdirected charity to prevent boldness. Fellow pastor, you may have sound doctrine, you may strive for peace, and you may love the church, but you must also be courageous for the truth. Nettleton opposed Finney’s error, but the question remains was he loud enough, clear enough, and soon enough in that opposition? Every generation of pastors will face this choice. Will we have public pastoral courage in our own day? 

1. “Finney, I know your plan, and you know I do; you mean to come into Connecticut and carry a streak of fire into Boston. But if you attempt it, as the Lord liveth, I’ll meet you at the state line, and call out the artillery men, and fight every inch of the way to Boston, and then I’ll fight you there.”, God Sent Revival, 178. Cited in Beecher’s Autobiography, 1.101.
   – Thornbury, John F., God Sent Revival. Darlington, UK: Evangelical Press, 1993.
   – Beecher, Lyman. Autobiography of Beecher. 2 Volumes. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1865.  ︎

The post When the Right Man Speaks Too Little: Lessons from Asahel Nettleton appeared first on Founders Ministries.

In the previous post, we looked at Dr. Wright’s claim that Francis Turretin and Petrus van Mastricht believed in a “decline narrative” of the Middle Ages. This is true in one sense—they both believed the early church was purer than the medieval church. But this claim is also misleading when used to dissuade people from substantial reliance on medieval theology—something both Turretin and Mastricht did.

In this final post, I want to highlight two more points in Dr. Wright’s lecture that I believe lack necessary precision and context.

Calvin, Thomas, and the Reformed

Dr. Wright points to Calvin as an early Reformed writer who did not show much interest in Thomas Aquinas. Yet, as we have seen, this is because Calvin had no direct knowledge of Thomas, not because he knowingly rejected Thomas. But in contrast to Calvin, how did early Reformed theologians who did have knowledge of Thomas view the medieval theologian?

David Sytsma answers this very question in an essay on Reformed reception of Thomas. Martin Bucer (1491–1551), a former Dominican with great knowledge of Thomas, regularly affirms Thomas in his biblical commentaries and theological works.^[1] Johannes Oecolampadius (1482–1531) positively appropriated Thomas while writing biblical commentaries. Peter Martyr Vermigli’s (1499–1562) positive use of Thomas is well known and thoroughly documented on topics like predestination, providence, and anthropology. Girolamo Zanchi (1516–1590), a student of Vermigli, positively appropriates Thomas in all his works and even structured his massive work on theology proper in accordance with him.

In the previous two posts (Part 1, Part 2), we saw that both Calvin and Turretin use the category of “sounder scholastics.” This category probably originates with Bucer, who includes Thomas among the “sounder scholastics.” Vermigli does likewise and nearly states that Thomas is the greatest of the scholastics. Theodore Beza (1519–1605), Lambert Daneau (1535–1595), and Zanchi continue this trend.

Although Calvin did not show high regard for Thomas, his contemporaries, who had greater knowledge of Thomas, did. And these were no strangers to Calvin or fringe figures in the Reformation. Bucer and Beza were close acquaintances with Calvin. Vermigli was highly regarded by Calvin and occasionally shaped Calvin’s theology. Daneau taught in the Genevan Academy.

Recent scholarly work also shows that later Reformed writers continued in their consistent and intentional use of Thomas. Christopher Cleveland records how John Owen follows Thomas on pure actuality, infused habits, and Christology.^[2] Seung-Joo Lee shows where Franciscus Junius received and modified Thomas’s moral philosophy.^[3]Carl Trueman demonstrates that various seventeenth-century Reformed writers follow Thomas on theology proper, predestination, natural law, and ethics.^[4]

Considering this evidence, I think it is fair to say that Dr. Wright’s lecture suffers at three points. First, his picture of Calvin against Thomas emphasizes Calvin’s role in the Reformed tradition in a way reminiscent of the Calvin against the Calvinist thesis. Calvin was not the central or most important figure of the Reformed tradition.^[5] Second, because of that first point, Dr. Wright does not consider the large contingent of the Reformed tradition that was acquainted with Thomas and appropriated him consistently. Their writings severely undermine Dr. Wright’s argument. Third, consider these statements from Dr. Wright:

“Thomas’s theology is a system.” (The implication being that it cannot be appropriated piecemeal)

“Here’s my concern: In classical theism’s elevation of Thomas to almost the patron saint of orthodoxy, they’ve unwittingly opened the way for much more than Thomas’s doctrine of God proper to come into the evangelical stream of consciousness.”

“By elevating Thomas to almost canonical status, well-intentioned retrieval theologians may well have opened a floodgate that won’t be shut before many have abandoned Protestantism.”

Hyperbole aside, Dr. Wright seems to think that embracing Thomas on theology proper will inevitably lead to embracing Thomas’s conclusions on other undesirable doctrines (like the sacraments). Sadly, Dr. Wright never puts forward an argument to defend this point. He merely asserts it without showing a necessary connection between Thomas’s theology proper and his sacramentology or other heretical conclusions.

Furthermore, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformed embraced Thomas on a wide range of topics well beyond “classical theism,” but they never departed from a Reformed view of justification or the sacraments. Thus, it is not merely against modern retrievalists that Dr. Wright argues, but against the greater lights of the Reformed tradition. 

Theology and Economy

One final point in Dr. Wright’s lecture that requires greater explanation is his ordering of theology in general. A main point in his lecture is “justification by faith alone and assurance of salvation are still central.” Unfortunately, this point is extremely muddled. Dr. Wright seems to have two theses under this heading: 1) overly speculative theology proper is bad and 2) Thomas got justification and assurance wrong. It is difficult for me to decipher the connection between these two points.^[6] Because the second point is largely unobjectionable, I would like to focus on the first.

Dr. Wright explains, “Those advocating a returning to classical theism and the Great Tradition of the church insist that we need to begin all things with God Himself, examining who He is ad intra, that is intrinsically to Himself, rather than with what God thinks about or how He acts towards creation—especially humanity ad extra.” And again, “This, they assert, is what the Nicene tradition, Augustine, Aquinas, Owen, and Turretin did.”

Here Dr. Wright correctly highlights an ordering among many retrievalists of theology (who God is) before economy(what God has done in creation). He cites John Webster and James Dolezal as two examples. Correct theological thinking, retrievalists say, must begin with God Himself and only then consider all other topics in relation to him.

Surprisingly, Dr. Wright bucks against this idea. He criticizes this ordering of theology and economy with another reference to Calvin, “Calvin did not include a lengthy discussion of theology proper in the institutes.” Unfortunately, Dr. Wright is quite unclear on this point as well. Is he criticizing the very practice of considering the doctrine of God in Himself as the foundation for all of theology? Or is he merely criticizing what he considers to be the overly speculative nature of Thomas’s doctrine of God? He appears to criticize both without distinction. In both cases, however, he misses the target.

First, his aversion to considering God in Himself as the starting point for theology is at odds with nearly the entire Reformed tradition. Consider how the Reformed doctrinal standards are organized. The French Confession (1559), Scots Confession (1560), and Belgic Confession (1561) all begin with chapters on theology proper. The Second Helvetic Confession (1536) begins with two chapters on Scripture and revelation, then turns to theology proper. These confessions, among others, represent the codification of Reformation doctrine, and each one considers God Himself (theology) before moving on to God’s works or to the gospel (economy).^[7]

The Baptists followed suit. The First London Baptist Confession (1646) begins with theology proper and The Second London Baptist Confession (1689) begins with Scripture followed by theology proper. The Baptist Catechism (1695), arranged by Benjamin Keach and based on the Westminster Shorter Catechism, emphasizes theology proper by swapping out the famous first question of WSC with questions that more explicitly highlight theology proper.^[8]

This practice in the Baptist standards accords well with the opening words of John Gill’s Body of Doctrinal Divinity,

Having undertaken to write a System of Theology, or a Body of Doctrinal Divinity; and Theology being nothing else than a speaking of God, or a discoursing concerning him; his nature, names, perfections, and persons; his purposes, providences, ways, works, and word: I shall begin with the Being of God, and the proof and evidence of it; which is the foundation of all religion; for if there is no God, religion is a vain thing; and it matters not neither what we believe, nor what we do; since there is no superior Being to whom we are accountable for either faith or practice.^[9]

Second, Dr. Wright does not define what he means by “speculative” doctrine of God, other than saying Thomas is speculative and Calvin is not. But again, Dr. Wright fails to consider that Calvin is not the central figure of Reformed or Protestant thought. That there is significant difference in style and purpose between Thomas (a high medieval theologian writing an academic work) and Calvin (a humanist with no theological training writing a popular work) is unsurprising.^[10] However, other Reformed figures do favor Thomas as much as Calvin when it comes to theology proper, such as Girolamo Zanchi, John Owen, Francis Turretin, and a host of other Reformed scholastics. It is not clear how Dr. Wright can reject Thomas’s “speculative” doctrine of God without rejecting theirs also. Here again Dr. Wright paints himself in a corner that echoes the Calvin against the Calvinist thesis (i.e., Calvin was a warm-hearted biblical humanist but other Reformed writers returned to cold scholasticism).

In summary, I believe Dr. Wright thinks that a speculative (or sophisticated) doctrine of God is incompatible with a “relational” view of God. As he says, “to move from Thomas to Calvin on the doctrine of God is to move from idea to relationship.” Yet, many Reformed theologians have faithfully combined scholastic consideration of God ad intra with Reformed soteriology and piety.

Concluding Thoughts

In the end, I believe this lecture by Dr. Wright was well-intended but tried to accomplish too much and, in doing so, lacked precision at crucial points. For instance, in a lecture so dedicated to criticizing positive use of Thomas, why not interact with his theology directly? Why rely solely on secondary sources? Without any serious interaction with Thomas, the tone of this lecture is largely a “see no evil” approach to the medieval theologian characteristic of what Mary Herrington recently dubbed “Thomophobia.” 

But Dr. Wright’s shallow handling of sources extends beyond Thomas to Reformed writers. His presentation of Calvin, Turretin, and Mastricht is a half-depiction of these great men that leaves out crucial data. Dr. Wright also ignores Calvin’s elders and contemporaries who are better guides on early Reformed reception of Thomas. 

Furthermore, Dr. Wright’s shallow interaction with sources continues to modern writers. He variously references James Dolezal, John Webster, Matthew Barrett, and Craig Carter, but he avoids substantial interaction with any of them. In doing so, he glosses over the noteworthy differences between them. By arguing with everyone in general, Dr. Wright argues against no one in particular. Combine this with Dr. Wright’s hyperbolic misrepresentation of his opponents: Are retrievalists really guilty of “elevating Thomas to almost canonical status” and the “elevation of Thomas to almost the patron saint of orthodoxy?”^[11] Such characterizations may be rhetorically powerful, but they are unserious and lack the precision that befits Christian academic disagreement.

Dr. Wright’s primary concern is valid: There is a way of doing retrieval theology that is bad. Sadly, I do not think he elaborates this concern in a precise or substantial way. Instead, he presents a superficial summary of both historic and contemporary literature and theology. Perhaps Dr. Wright will get a chance to fully develop his thoughts in future publications. If so, I look forward to reviewing his work and understanding him better.

^[1] The data in this paragraph and the next two is primarily taken from Sytsma’s essay. David S. Sytsma “Sixteenth-Century Reformed Reception of Aquinas,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Reception of Thomas Aquinas, eds. Matthew Levering and Marcus Plested (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 122, 125.

^[2] Christopher Cleveland, Thomism in John Owen (New York: Routledge, 2013).

^[3] Seung-Joo Lee, Orders of Nature and Grace: Thomistic Concepts in the Moral Thought of Franciscus Junius (1545–1602)(Leiden: Brill, 2024).

^[4] Carl R. Trueman, “The Reception of Thomas Aquinas in Seventeenth-Century Reformed Orthodoxy and Anglicanism,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Reception of Thomas Aquinas, eds. Matthew Levering and Marcus Plested (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

^[5] Carl Trueman writes, “it is too often assumed that Calvin’s theology has, or had at some point in the past, some kind of normative status within the Reformed tradition. This is historically and ecclesiastically not so. While it is certainly true that the writings of Luther enjoyed unique influence among Lutheran confessional communities, the writings of Calvin never occupied anything approaching such a position.” Carl R. Trueman, “Calvin and Calvinism,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 225.

^[6] If I understand him correctly, Dr. Wright relies on a quote from Michael Reeves to interpret Thomas’s “Aristotelian” doctrine of God as a non-relation account. However, Dr. Wright does not develop this thought beyond a mere quotation of Reeves.

^[7] The only significant exception to this pattern is the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), which was a catechism designed with a slightly different purpose than these confessions.

^[8] Orrick explains, “The Baptists were making plain a fundamental truth that the authors of the Shorter Catechism assumed could be taken for granted. Namely, all truth is founded on God and His character, and therefore any summary of Christian teaching must begin with God.” Jim Scott Orrick, A Commentary on the Baptist Catechism (Cape Coral, FL: Founders Press, 2025), 8–9.

^[9] See also James P. Boyce, who begins a fifteen-chapter exposition of theology proper with these words, “The fundamental doctrine of theology is that there is a God, for if this is not true, there can be no science of God. The first duty of theology, therefore, is to set forth the reasons men have for believing that such a being exists and is a true object of dependence and worship.” James P. Boyce, Abstract of Systematic Theology (Cape Coral, FL: Founders Press, 2025), 27.

^[10] Indeed, as Gordon writes, “Calvin would have hated the designation of his Institutes as a book of academic theology. That was precisely what it was not.” Bruce Gordon, John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), xiii.

^[11] Perhaps you can name certain persons who have done this (I know I can), but they are the exception to the rule and, thus, not a worthy target for Dr. Wright’s critique.

The post A Friendly Response to Dr. Wright Part 3: Thomas, the Reformed, and Theology Proper appeared first on Founders Ministries.

After arguing that Calvin did not hold Thomas Aquinas in high regard, Dr. Wright turns to the Reformed tradition to argue that a “decline narrative” of the Middle Ages extended beyond Calvin. The decline narrative simply says that the first six centuries of the church were purer than the corrupted medieval period, which was in turn corrected by the Reformation. Thus, the church Fathers through Augustine and the Reformation are the more important periods of church history when it comes to theological study and formulation. Dr. Wright suggests emphasizing these two periods (patristic and Reformation) can safeguard retrieval theology. He lists four figures who supposedly agree with the decline narrative. We will examine just two of them here.

Turretin and Mastricht

First on Dr. Wright’s list is Francis Turretin. Dr. Wright states,

In the seventeenth century, Francis Turretin highlighted the significance of the fathers of the early church going up to Augustine, but included no one after him. He referred to the first six centuries of the church’s history as “the period of purer (or at least less impure) Christianity.”

The first quote from Turretin arises from the question, Where was our church before Luther and Zwingli, and how was it preserved? Here are Turretin’s words with fuller context: 

Where was the papacy in the first six centuries of purer (or at least of less impure) Christianity? For although various errors began gradually to creep into the church, still it is certain that far more numerous and grievous errors were introduced in the following ages or received strength: the worship of images, transubstantiation, communion under one species, the infallibility and monarchy of the pope, the use of foreign language in the sacred service, etc.^[1]

Obviously Turretin highlights specific impurities in the medieval church that are associated with Roman Catholicism. But recognizing impurities in the medieval church is not the same as calling the medieval church irrelevant or unimportant for theological formulation—a conclusion which Turretin does not even address here. 

Later in the same question which Dr. Wright quotes, Turretin compares the popish church to Socinians and concludes that the Socinian error is worse because it “directly destroys the foundation of Christianity by denying the mystery of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ and the truth of his satisfaction.” On the other hand, the popish church “did not destroy the foundation formally by denying and opposing it, but by adding other things to it which were incompatible with it.” He concludes by asking, “who does not see that it is far easier to reject what exceeds by separating the true from the false, than to supply, not only what is deficient, but also what is rejected and attacked by any ministry?”^[2] In short, Turretin says the popish medieval church did not destroy the foundation of the church (the Trinity, the Incarnation, etc.) and that we are able to separate true from false in their doctrine. This is a far cry from teaching that the medieval period lost the truths of Christianity entirely or that it is less worthy of study (even though Turretin never diminishes his attacks on popish errors).

Next, quoting from another passage in Turretin’s Institutes, Dr. Wright says,

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, [Turretin] argues, is nothing else than the purging of corruptions and errors wrought by the papacy into the doctrine of faith and practice delivered by Christ.

This quotation comes from Turretin’s question, Is the Reformed Church the True Church?^[3] However, I think Dr. Wright demands too much from this quotation. A recognition that the papacy wrought errors in the medieval church is not the same thing as dismissing the entire medieval church as unimportant or practically useless for theological formulation in the present. On the contrary, as Turretin himself says above, there was truth mixed with error in the medieval church.

This is precisely how Turretin approached a figure like Thomas Aquinas. Consider the following citations by Turretin.

• Turretin recognizes that “Thomas Aquinas aptly expresses” an aspect of the definition of “theology.”^[4]

• On providence, Turretin states, “Thomas Aquinas well remarks, it is essential to a first principle that it can act without the help or influence of a prior agent.”^[5]
  
• On another fine point of the doctrine of providence, Turretin notes, “The sounder Scholastics agree with us. Thomas Aquinas says . . .”^[6] Here Turretin refers to the “sounder scholastics” as Calvin did, but he clearly includes Thomas in their number.
  
• Still further on the doctrine of providence, Turretin references Thomas along with “Thomists” and “Dominicans” as whole categories that agree with the Reformed on a particular issue.^[7]
  
• Turretin cites Thomas with a bevy of other scholastics to criticize a certain Jesuit practice.^[8]
  
• Turretin quotes Thomas favorably alongside Durandus or Saint-Pourçain (1275–1332), a later Dominican, in his exposition of the ninth commandment.^[9]

• Turretin approvingly cites Thomas’s interpretation of verses like Romans 1:4, Hebrews 1:9, and 1 Timothy 3:16 to support his own interpretation of 1 Peter 3:19.^[10]
  
• Turretin positively quotes Thomas’s commentary on Romans while explicating justification apart from works.^[11]

This brief and incomplete survey shows that Turretin regularly cited Thomas positively on a variety of doctrines, from theology proper to justification, and from a variety of sources, such as Thomas’s Summa Theologica and his commentaries. To say that Thomas and medieval theology were insignificant for or not useful in theological formulation to Turretin is simply incorrect and only possible through misleading and cherry-picked quotations. Obviously Turretin disagreed with Thomas often, but he also agreed with him often. This is to say nothing of Turretin’s non-explicit allusions to Thomas or his informed and critical use of other medievals like Lombard and Durandus.^[12]Sadly, Dr. Wright distorts the image of Turretin by only highlighting Turretin’s affirmation of a “decline narrative of the Middle Ages” due to popish influence.

The next example Dr. Wright gives is Petrus van Mastricht. Dr. Wright states,

Petrus van Mastricht . . . also posited a decline narrative: “The New Testament marked the beginnings of the six pure centuries of the church’s history. The period from the sixth to the bleak tenth century was a rapid decline interrupted in the centuries before the Reformation only occasionally by reform movements like the Waldensians.”^[13]

Here again Dr. Wright mistakes (1) the fact that errors were introduced in the medieval church for (2) a devaluing of the usefulness of this entire era. Mastricht, like Turretin, does not make this claim. Also like Turretin, Mastricht cites Thomas regularly—both positively and negatively. One could create a survey for Mastricht like the one listed above for Turretin.^[14]

As you would expect, Mastricht’s use of Thomas and other medieval sources is sophisticated and precise. Adriaan Neele notes Mastricht’s positive use of both Thomas and Scotus, then writes, 

both are used in a critical way by Mastricht. This critical and positive use of the schoolmen is also noticed when Mastricht cites Anselm (1033–1109), Bonaventure, and Gabriel Biel (1425–1495) but especially when he refers to Bernard of Clairvaux. Contrary to this, Mastricht is rarely negative towards the schoolmen—the doctrine of transubstantiation excluded. Thus, Mastricht attests to a vast reservoir of medieval scholastic works, which he uses according to the ‘middle way’ of his scholastic method.^[15]

Dr. Wright gives the impression that Turretin and Mastricht were not particularly interested in medieval theology—that they would rather simply study the more important parts of history like the Fathers and the Reformation. But, considering this cursory survey of Turretin and Mastricht’s actual interaction with medieval sources, is it fair to summarize their views by merely stating, “they believed in a decline narrative?” Is that a faithful representation of their approach to the Middle Ages? Given Turretin and Mastricht’s sophisticated and near ubiquitous use of the medieval theological milieu—including Thomas—I believe Dr. Wright’s comments are misleading and present a superficial reading of these Reformed titans. Ironically, this kind of shallow interaction with great thinkers of the past is part of what drives young men to retrieval theology in the first place.

^[1] Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, trans. George Musgrave Giger, ed. James T. Dennison Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1993), 3:59.

^[2] Turretin, Institutes, 3:68.

^[3] Turretin, Institutes, 3:142.

^[4] Turretin, Institutes, 1:2.

^[5] Turretin, Institutes, 1:503.

^[6] Turretin, Institutes, 1:510.

^[7] Turretin, Institutes, 1:530.

^[8] Turretin, Institutes, 2:72.

^[9] Turretin, Institutes, 2:130.

^[10] Turretin, Institutes, 2:360.

^[11] Turretin, Institutes, 2:641, 644.

^[12] For a recent study showing non-explicit influence of Thomas on Turretin, see Toni C. Saad, “Francis Turretin’s Thomistic Theory of Natural Law,” in Journal of Reformed Theology 16 (2022): 27–47.

^[13] I am not sure if this is a direct quotation or a gloss by Dr. Wright.

^[14] For instance, see Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, trans. Todd M. Rester, ed. Joel R. Beeke (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage, 2019–2024) 1:68; 2:414–415; 2:517–518; 4:466; 2:518.

^[15] Adriaan Neele, Petrus van Mastricht (1630–1706) (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 92.

The post A Friendly Response to Dr. Wright Part 2: The Reformed Tradition appeared first on Founders Ministries.

If you doubt me, you can find and read Brandon Sholwalter’s recent report¹ of lessons he has learned from the ten years he has spent covering the trans madness that is rampant in our world. It is devastating. It is also hard to read. But Christian families are not immune to the insidious LGBTQI+ movement. I have tried to offer hope and counsel to more than a few parents and grandparents who have seen their young family members taken captive by this agenda.

We must not close our eyes to the wicked reality around us. We must see it in the light of Scripture.

This plot has been forced on us in the name of the highest virtue. After all, “love is love.” Who are we to question anyone who does anything in the name of “love?” The most depraved perversions imaginable—including some that until recently were unimaginable—are being championed among us as expressions of love. This perverted love has resulted in men, women, boys, and girls being routinely mutilated in ways that just a few decades ago would have resulted in shocking headlines and demands that the perpetrators be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Today, those criminals have MD behind their names. They teach and practice medicine in prestigious medical centers where they are regarded as oracles and high priests of our dystopia. 

We have been forced to increase our vocabulary to keep up. We have long known of castrations and mastectomies but medical shamans have invented new procedures like “intestinal vaginoplasty” and “radial forearm phalloplasty” (look them up because your tax dollars have helped pay for them; or don’t and save that portion of your mind that has remained blissfully ignorant of the cascading debauchery being promoted in the name of science—and love, of course—in surgical theaters across our nation). To soften the assault on natural affections these surgical mutilations are euphemistically referred to as “top surgeries” and “bottom surgeries.” This language always reminds me of the “showers” in Auschwitz that the Nazis warmly commended in 1942. Hitler would be envious.

It is not just the medical profession that has promoted the mutilation fields of our modern mayhem, the dystopia is being undergirded by legal, educational, political, and religious systems as well. In fact, the ubiquity of “pride flags” draping everything from schoolrooms, city halls, pulpits, and restaurants to town squares, airports, and the White House demonstrates just how unbridled the LGBTQI+ depravity has become. 

This vile, demonic, body and soul-destroying agenda is one of the main planks in the Democratic Party Platform. Two pages of that sordid document (pp. 56-57) honestly explains their unbridled commitment to the destruction of our society in general and mentally broken people in particular in the name of equality, rights, and freedom. And, of course, they demand that you pay for it with your taxes. The commitment of the DNC to this wicked agenda is so unapologetically pronounced that anyone who supports any Democratic candidate for any office is guilty of promoting the mutilation of children. It may be done ignorantly but, make no mistake, those who vote for a Democratic candidate are supporting unbridled depravity. 

The Republican Party is not immune from this depravity. Though support of it has not been ensconced in their platform, the Log Cabin Republicans work tirelessly to normalize LGBT perversion (they currently stop short, at least officially, of listing QI+ in their endorsement). And don’t forget that President Trump said he was “honored” to be known as “the most pro-gay president in American history.” Though immeasurably better than the DNC, the GOP has not yet come close to renouncing the destructive wickedness of this movement. 

Much more could be said about the ways that the hellish LGBTQI+ dystopia is being supported and advanced across our society today, but what I am most deeply burdened about is the complicity of the one institution that bears the greatest responsibility and opportunity for stopping this holocaust. The church of Jesus Christ must awaken and honestly face the horrific realities of our day—realities that have incubated and given birth to the transgender movement. As a pastor I feel the weight of this burden and want my fellow pastors to feel it, too.

The church of Jesus Christ must awaken and honestly face the horrific realities of our day—realities that have incubated and given birth to the transgender movement.

Christians listened too long to feckless leaders who tried to convince us that “pronoun hospitality” (using a transgender person’s chosen pronouns, in the name of love, of course) is the Christian way to engage those who have been taken captive by the devil to believe that they are something other than what God created them to be. Pastors have been too timid to declare loudly and boldly that the emperor has no clothes. The result is that we are now living in a nightmare where children have been butchered in research hospitals by credentialed professionals who openly advertise their specialized services. To add insult to the vileness American tax payers have been forced to pay for these procedures and are also enticed to celebrate this vileness, intimidated to accept it, or at the very minimum to be silent about it. 

Jesus commands His church to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all” that He commanded us (Matthew 28:19-20). God has blessed America through the effective ministry of His Word and Spirit within our borders from our inception as a nation. The gospel motivated those early pilgrims to settle in this land. The grace of God caused that gospel to run throughout the early colonies in the eighteenth-century Great Awakening preparing the way for the American Revolution and the national government that arose from it. The Second Great Awakening and the waves of revival that followed it in the nineteenth century helped humble our nation and preserve it leading up to, during, and after the costly Civil War. The twentieth century witnessed some early stirrings of God’s Spirit on the west coast and later on some college campuses, but these revivals—if they may be called that—were not nearly of the magnitude of those that preceded them.

The undeniable reality is that we are in desperate need of a powerful work of God’s Spirit in our day. Our prayer should be that of the sons of Korah, pleading with God, “Will you be angry with us forever? Will you prolong your anger to all generations? Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?” (Psalm 85:5-6). When we consider how un-discipled our nation is and how the church’s apathy and impotence have contributed to that, we should be humbled to the dust before our sovereign, loving Lord. Not only is our nation’s grievous sin an affront to Him, we must see that it is also His judgment against us. As the Apostle Paul explains, when people give themselves over to vile practices and approve such wickedness, it is because they have provoked Him to such a degree that “God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity.…to dishonorable passions….to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done” (Romans 1:24-32).

We must not close our eyes to the wicked reality around us. We must see it in the light of Scripture. The unbridle depravity of the LGBTQI+ movement destroys people and defies God. So we must speak and pray. We must refuse to be silent or even to soften the truth of this abominable agenda that is destroying lives. With love and pity we must not hide the righteousness of God’s law and the powerful, life-transforming grace of His gospel in Jesus Christ from those whose minds have been twisted into believing that they are something other than God has created them to be. We must also boldly warn those who actively insist or even passively allow transgenderism to be regarded as acceptable in our society. And we must ignore those who think themselves our betters who stand on the sidelines tsk-tsking such warnings as too political and straying from the gospel.

Finally, we must pray. We must fast and pray. For, ultimately, it is with God with whom we must do. Heaven is not indifferent to our plight. Neither is our sovereign Lord inactive. He is able and willing to revive His work in His world. He has done so repeatedly throughout history. He has done it in the brief history of this nation.

Habakkuk, that prophet who saw the increasing godlessness of Judah in the last part of the seventh-century BC, understood this. So must we. And with that prophet we should pray, 

O Lord, I have heard the report of you,

and your work, O Lord, do I fear.

In the midst of the years revive it;

in the midst of the years make it known;

in wrath remember mercy.

Habakkuk 3:2

1.  I am not linking to the report not because it is inaccurate or sensational but because the compilation of gruesome, vile practices that Sholwalter documents assaults the conscience. Christians are called to face reality with faith but admonitions like Colossians 3:1-2 must also be heeded. On the other hand, so must Ephesians 5:11-12.  ︎

The post The Unbridled Depravity of LGBTQI+ and Our Desperate Need of Revival appeared first on Founders Ministries.

It is easier to be enthusiastic about Humanity with a capital ‘H’ than it is to love individual men and women, especially those who are uninteresting, exasperating, depraved, or otherwise unattractive. Loving everybody in general may be an excuse for loving nobody in particular. It is when general love becomes particular that we find it so difficult to love the man next door.

—Greville P. Lewis^[1]

Renee Bach was only nineteen years old when she left rural Virginia to arrive as a missionary in Jinja, Uganda, in 2009, after a ten-month missions trip two years prior. She later recounted, “God was, like, ‘You’re supposed to go back to Uganda.’ . . . This sounds like such a white-savior thing to say, but I wanted to try to meet a need that wasn’t being met.”^[2] That same year she founded Serving His Children, a nonprofit ministry dedicated to addressing physical needs among underprivileged children in the country’s southeast.

Those needs began to confront Bach directly, one notable encounter being with a nine-month-old baby girl in 2011 named Patricia, frail and swollen from malnutrition, whose parents presented her to Bach bundled in a blanket. Bach wrote later that she, ushering the girl and her parents into her facility, “hooked the baby up to oxygen and got to work. . . . Took her temperature, started an IV, checked her blood sugar, tested for malaria, and looked at her [hemoglobin] count.” She continued, “I was attempting to diagnose the many problems that could potentially be at hand. . . . She needed a blood transfusion. And fast.”^[3]

Yet Bach was not a physician. She was not a nurse. In fact, Bach had no formal medical training at all.

Between 2010 and 2015, Bach oversaw the treatment of 940 severely malnourished Ugandan children. She referred to the facility as a “clinic” on her blog. During this period, 105 children died under the organization’s care, reflecting a mortality rate of approximately 11 percent. In 2019, two Ugandan mothers, Gimbo Zubeda and Kakai Annet, whose children died following treatment at the center, filed a civil lawsuit against Bach and her organization. The case concluded in 2020 with an out-of-court settlement. Each mother received approximately $9,500, with no admission of liability from Bach or Serving His Children.^[4] As for Patricia, she survived—but only after receiving hospital treatment following a botched transfusion.^[5]

Bach’s story bears multiple lessons for contemporary observers—from the perils of sending minimally trained, single female missionaries overseas with little oversight, to the perniciousness of so-called “white guilt” and its effects. But it also prompts us to raise several crucial questions. What is the Christian’s obligation when faced with immense need in a faraway place? How do one’s qualifications, ability, and proximity factor into such obligation? And at what point does helping actually hurt or charity become toxic?^[6] Or, even more simply, what is love, and is it subject to any limitations?

Love and Its Limits

Few concepts are more overused and contested in contemporary society than the idea of love. Without blushing, the contemporary English speaker can unironically use the same word to describe his affection for his wife, his relationship to God, and his sentiments toward ballpark franks. An estimated two-thirds of all top-forty songs from 1960 to 2010 concern the topic of love.^[7] From 1922 to 2022, according to the Google Books Ngram Viewer, the use of the word love grew roughly six times more than the traditional term charity—with love increasing by about 405 percent compared to charity’s 69 percent rise.^[8] And from 2004 to 2024, Google Trends shows that internet search interest in the neologism “love is love”—a newspeak shibboleth wielded to silence dissent from any and all sexual perversions—spiked in the United States by 91 percent.^[9] It would not be overstating the case to argue that the postmodern West has an idolatrous infatuation with love.

But this claim must be qualified. What the secularized, English-speaking world so highly prizes is not the vision of charity^[10] set forth in Scripture, but rather an abstracted conception of love unmoored from any discernable moral framework and reduced, in effect, to mere positive feeling or infatuation. As to how we arrived in our predicament, Rusty Reno helpfully summarizes, in his popular 2019 work Return of the Strong Gods, the way in which the postwar consensus, following Karl Popper and others, recoiled from the horrors of twentieth-century totalitarian movements by opting instead for an international liberal order committed to openness and toleration (weak gods, says Reno) over traditional objects of loyalty (the titular strong gods).^[11] This happened, ironically enough, under the guise and language of love itself. Such degradation, incidentally, is the case with all idolatries—that which is prized above God or regarded as ultimate in a given value structure takes on a caricatured, ghastly visage compared to its ordinary form as a gift or creature of God. Love is no exception.

At the risk of appearing pedantic, it is necessary to lay a theological foundation defining Christian love before proceeding further. First Corinthians 13, the biblical locus classicus on love, reveals that true love is self-effacing, self-forgetful, and ultimately self-sacrificing: “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (vv. 4–7). By inference, we can define Christian love thus as unconditional commitment to the ultimate good of another, even at cost to itself. It is unconditional in that it depends upon the will of the lover and not the merit of the beloved. It is a commitment in that it is a conscious choice and not simply an emotional state. Its aim is the ultimate good in that it pursues the highest good for its object, which may or may not be comprehended by the beloved—such as the way in which God sanctifies us through suffering or a parent disciplines a child for his maturity. Love’s object is another in that its fundamental orientation is outward, not inward. And it does all this even at cost to itself in that it places the good of the beloved above its own.

Yet even that crucial passage focuses on love’s expression more than its essence. To understand the latter, we must backtrack to one of Scripture’s earliest and most prominent references to love—the Hebrew Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4–5). This summons to all-encompassing devotion to the true and living God is the necessary precondition of what the Lord Jesus identified as the second greatest commandment: to love one’s neighbor as oneself (Lev. 19:18; Matt. 22:39). Human love cannot ultimately be understood without reference to God, who is most deserving of our love and who is Himself love (1 John 4:8). Augustine recognized this when he defined love as “that affection of the mind which aims at the enjoyment of God for His own sake, and the enjoyment of one’s self and one’s neighbor in subordination to God.”^[12] He further explained that “what [love] does with a view to a neighbor’s advantage is called benevolence”—distinguishing between love’s expression and its root.^[13] And, as to love’s expression, we find no deeper demonstration than that of the Lord Jesus Christ’s willing self-giving on the cross at Calvary. Indeed, “greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

Returning to our initial illustration, virtually no one in the realm of mainstream evangelical missionary activity—including Renee Bach herself, presumably—would dispute any of the above. They would further argue that it is precisely this definition of love that impels them to cross land and sea to make even a single proselyte. But the way in which this biblical love unfolds contains a clue as to our limitations as creatures. Consider what the apostle of love, John, writes in his first epistle:

We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother. (1 John 4:19–21)

The fruit of Christian love, with all the contours of virtue considered above, proceeds only from the root of divine love. Concerning this relation, John Calvin comments,

As God has freely loved us, we also ought now to love him. But this love cannot exist, except it generates brotherly love. Hence he says, that they are liars who boast that they love God, when they hate their brethren. . . . [John] meant to shew how fallacious is the boast of every one who says that he loves God, and yet loves not God’s image which is before his eyes.^[14]

Note Calvin’s final phrase. God has enjoined us not only to render Him love in the form of worship in spirit and in truth; He has also set His image before our eyes in flesh and blood—men, women, and children around us who bear the divine image. In this sense, we indeed love God by loving our neighbors. The only problem is that our sight, like our very selves, is limited; we are not capable of beholding the whole of humanity in our physical view at once, although perhaps we may do so in our mind’s eye. Instead, those closest to us fill our view. We see God’s image refracted like light through a prism—not all at once, but in glimpses, as reflected by each person we encounter. From our closest loved ones to a stranger by the roadside, every neighbor offers us a partial glimpse of Him. Thus, as we will explore further, our love must follow an ordered pattern, beginning with those directly before us—the ones whose ultimate good we are both able and responsible to seek. To love our neighbor means to love particular neighbors, individuals with faces and names, those with whom we can or should come into contact.

Yet in the twenty-first century West, to suggest that charity can or should be subject to limitation at all is virtually anathema. Love, understood fundamentally as the expression of individual preference and not as self-sacrifice, cannot be ordered, for to do so would be to constrain the free, expressive self. Love cannot express itself through distinct acts, duties, and responsibilities according to each type of social relation or sphere of life in which humans engage. Rather, it must be diluted and spread as thin gruel across vast populations through simplistic, ideologically driven social movements promising equity and justice—to the exclusion of individual, flesh-and-blood neighbors in proximity to one another. One need not look far back in our history to see that this has been the case. In the twentieth century, communist and socialist ideologies, despite their professed love for the benighted working class and great claims of compassion for the disenfranchised, left one hundred million dead in their wake. Beginning under the New Deal and continuing to this day, the modern welfare state in the United States makes great charitable boasts, yet despite these noble intentions, its perverse incentive system has contributed to intergenerational cycles of poverty, promiscuity, and lawlessness for millions of Americans.

In our recent past, the summer of 2020 stands as one of the consummate examples of this phenomenon. In the wake of the viral video capturing George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, while in police custody, riots starting as “mostly peaceful” demonstrations—conducted ostensibly in sympathy toward the African-American cause—killed at least 19 people, led to more than 17,000 arrests, injured more than 2,000 officers, caused more than $2 billion in damages, and resulted in more than 2,400 incidents of looting, many of which detrimentally affected persons of color.^[15] Clearly, baptizing a social movement in the language of love, empathy, and social concern is insufficient to guarantee the consequent good of its stated beneficiaries. And on the examples go, demonstrating the way modern society, like Esau trading his birthright for porridge, sacrifices tangible, particular love—or loves—for mere sentiment.

Where do we go from here? Or, put differently—how do we walk in love, not in word only but also in deed, among both our near relations and our more distant neighbors to the ends of the earth?

A Particular Love

To live faithfully in a world of such increasing confusion requires a vision of love that is more than a feeling. We do not just need love in the abstract, but loves—particular, distinct objects of love and relations in which we may see this chief theological virtue embodied.^[16] Thus, before we can grasp the order of love and its bearing on the Christian’s duty to the world, our thinking must be anchored in the love of God.

One frequently overlooked aspect of the love of God in redemption is its glorious particularity. It is true that God demonstrates His love for created humanity in broad and sweeping ways—He is good to all, and His mercy is over all that He has made (Ps. 145:9), causing the sun to rise and the rain to fall on the just and unjust alike (Matt. 5:45). But Scripture also unfolds the astonishing lengths to which God goes to ensure His love is never merely abstract or distant. Before the foundation of the world, God the Father foreknew, chose, and ordained the salvation of a particular people, setting His affection on men, women, and children from every nation and language (Rom. 8:29; Eph. 1:4; Rev. 7:9). After man’s fall, God revealed His intent to accomplish salvation through a particular man and his offspring (Gen. 12:1–3). The result of this redemptive plan was an initial focus on the purposes of God among a particular nation, inhabiting a particular land, under particular laws, and preserving a particular language and culture.^[17] Then, in the fullness of time, the divine Son came in the flesh, expressing the boundless love of an infinite Creator in a localized, finite human nature (John 1:14, Gal. 4:4–5).

The Father then gave His particular, elect people to the Son, entrusting the Lord Jesus Christ with the mission of securing their redemption (John 6:39) and not simply making salvation theoretically possible for anyone. The Son then laid down his life for His particular sheep (John 10:15), such that the individual believer can say definitively that Christ “loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20, emphasis mine). After His resurrection, Christ ascended to the heavenly places, where He presently intercedes for His particular people and none other (Rom. 8:34; Heb. 7:25). From heaven, Christ poured out the Holy Spirit upon His church in particular, in love marking them as His own (Acts 2:33; Eph. 1:14). And in the eternal state following the final judgment, the earliest covenant promise to God’s particular saints will be fully manifest: “They will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (Rev. 21:3; cf. Gen. 17:7–8; Ex. 6:7; Lev. 26:11–12; Jer. 31:33; Ezek. 37:26–27; 2 Cor. 6:16).

In sum, the love of God, which constitutes both the principle of and power animating human charity, is irrefutably particular—from the decree of redemption, through the accomplishment and application of redemption, all the way to the consummation of redemption. There is nothing generic about it.

The challenges posed by twentieth-century ideologies, twenty-first-century social movements, or naïve twenty-one-year-old missionaries, though diverse, all call for the same solution: a biblical vision of love that is not abstracted but rightly ordered—the ordo amoris—starting with God and flowing to real neighbors in the proper hierarchy. By understanding this, we may learn how God would have us to rightly love our nation and the nations. This book will defend the following thesis: Because grace in the Christian life renews rather than destroys nature, rightly ordered love for family, church, community, and nation therefore works in harmony with compassion and the mission to the nations—that Christ be made known to all peoples, beginning with those near and extending to those far off. The overflow of the Christian’s natural affections, in other words, should be a genuine regard for those outside his personal fold, while his immediate sphere of duty serves as the channel through which this broader Christian love is to flow. The application of this thesis will result in the order of love correcting many modern assumptions about mission and compassion as well as Scripture’s missionary imperatives safeguarding that order of love against corrosive “openness.” But before this thesis can be taken up and further examined, it is first necessary to show that a hierarchy of love is no theological or political novum, but the rightful inheritance of all Bible believers, especially in the Western tradition.

This article is an excerpt from Ordered to Love: Recovering the Order of Affections from the Home to the Ends of the Earth (Founders Press, 2026) by Alex Kocman. Available to order now from founderspress.org

^[1]This quote is popularly misattributed to C. S. Lewis, but its actual source is the far lesser-known Methodist expositor, Greville P. Lewis, The Johannine Epistles (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2017), 86.

^[2]Ariel Levy, “A Missionary on Trial,” The New Yorker, April 13, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/a-missionary-on-trial.

^[3]Nurith Aizenman and Malaka Gharib, “American With No Medical Training Ran Center for Malnourished Ugandan Kids. 105 Died,” NPR, August 9, 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/08/09/749005287/american-with-no-medical-training-ran-center-for-malnourished-ugandan-kids-105-d.

^[4]“American accused in death of children in Eastern Uganda settles out of court,” The Independent, July 29, 2020, https://www.independent.co.ug/american-accused-in-death-of-children-in-eastern-uganda-settles-out-of-court.

^[5]Aizenman and Gharib, “American With No Medical Training . . .”

^[6]I am alluding to two influential works on this topic: Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2009); and Robert D. Lupton, Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It) (New York: HarperOne, 2011).

^[7]Peter G. Christenson, Silvia de Haan-Rietdijk, Tom F.M. ter Bogt, et al., “What Has America Been Singing About? Trends in Themes in the U.S. Top-40 Songs: 1960–2010,” Psychology of Music 47, no. 2 (2018): 194–212, https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735617748205.

^[8]Google Books Ngram Viewer, “love, charity, 1922–2022,” accessed May 24, 2025, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=love%2Ccharity&year_start=1922&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=0&case_insensitive=false.

^[9]Google Trends, “Love is Love,” accessed April 26, 2025, https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=love%20is%20love&hl=en.

^[10]Throughout this volume, I intend to use the terms charity and love interchangeably, in accord with their classic usage, to emphasize a traditional, Christian understanding of love in contrast with its modern cheapening.

^[11]R. R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 2019).

^[12]Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. James Shaw, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 2, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887), III.10.16.

^[13]Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, III.10.16.

^[14]John Calvin, Commentary on 1 John 4, accessed May 25, 2025, https://biblehub.com/commentaries/calvin/1_john/4.htm.

^[15]Jeremy Carl, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2024), Kindle edition, 12.

^[16]Classically, scholastic theology has distinguished between the theological virtues—faith, hope, and love—and the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. The theological virtues are understood as gifts from God that direct the soul toward Him, while the cardinal virtues are natural moral excellences that ground and give tangible expression to the theological virtues in daily life. While Protestants reject the Catholic system of salvation that integrates virtue into justification, they have generally affirmed the validity of these traditional distinctions and the biblical teaching that love is the greatest of the theological virtues.

^[17]For an insightful explanation of the Old Testament’s theology of nationhood, see Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (New York: Basic Books, 2018).

The post Loving Everybody in General, Loving Nobody in Particular appeared first on Founders Ministries.

There are several points in his lecture that any Protestant should be able to affirm (and I am happy to stand with Dr. Wright on those points). I appreciate his charge to do retrieval theology without abandoning Protestant convictions. However, the lecture as a whole was marked more by historical and theological imprecision than practical caution. In his handling of Calvin, the Reformed tradition, and medieval theology, I believe Dr. Wright’s imprecision paints an incomplete and misleading picture. In this post, along with two others, I hope to highlight some key points of this faculty address that I believe lack necessary clarity. 

Calvin and the Medievals

After noting that many retrievalists show appreciation for Thomas Aquinas, Dr. Wright states that this lauding of Thomas “has not been the view of many significant Protestant thinkers.” Chief among his examples is John Calvin.

Dr. Wright begins by noting who Calvin does appreciate—certain church fathers (like Augustine and Chrysostom) and the first four ecumenical councils. He also quotes Anthony Lane: “The significant figures to whom Calvin appealed had all died by the middle of the fifth century.”^[2] This is indisputable and understandable since Calvin used these early sources polemically to prove the legitimacy of Protestantism. His frequent use of the Fathers and early councils was a strategic response to those who claimed Protestantism had no historical pedigree.

Next Dr. Wright, following Lane, notes the two medieval sources that Calvin most appreciated: Bernard of Clairvaux and Gregory I. This is another indisputable point—Calvin’s appreciation for Bernard grew over time and overshadowed any other medieval source. Dr. Wright again quotes Lane, “Calvin judges that only Gregory I and Bernard of Clairvaux were great champions of truth in the Middle Ages.”^[3]

After noting the theologians that Calvin appreciates, Dr. Wright turns to Calvin’s non-use of Thomas Aquinas. He states, “Absent from Calvin’s consideration is Thomas Aquinas, whom Calvin only cited four times.” And again, “To Calvin, it seems that Thomas and most of the medieval period was [sic] quite irrelevant.” 

But is it true that the only theologians Calvin appreciated from the medieval period were Bernard and Gregory? And is it true that Calvin considered Thomas to be irrelevant? We can address these questions in order.

First, Calvin did not teach that Bernard and Gregory were the “only” worthwhile medieval theologians. Dr. Wright misrepresents Lane on this point. Dr. Wright says, “Calvin judges that only Gregory I and Bernard of Clairvaux were great champions of truth in the Middle Ages.” However, this is a misquotation of Lane, who writes, “For Calvin, Gregory and Bernard are the two great champions of the truth in the Middle Ages.” Dr. Wright inserts the word “only” where Lane does not. Dr. Wright’s gloss emphasizes exclusivity (there were no other champions of truth apart from Gregory and Bernard) but Lane’s original quote emphasizes supremacy (Bernard and Gregory were the greatest). I believe this was an honest mistake by Dr. Wright, but it was a flub that bolsters his thesis. 

Furthermore, Lane documents Calvin’s nuanced interaction with Peter Lombard (1100–1160), author of the most important medieval theology textbook. Lane writes, “[Lombard] is repeatedly attacked as the spokesman for scholasticism. But Calvin was also aware of the contrast between Peter Lombard and later scholasticism and noted occasions where Lombard was sounder than his successors.”^[4] And again, in his more recent work, Lane analyzes Calvin’s category of saniores scholastici (sounder scholastics), which Calvin likely learned from Martin Bucer and referenced on three occasions. Lane concludes that “Lombard is likely included in each of the three references to saniores scholastici (sounder scholastics).”^[5]

So not only did Calvin not teach that Bernard and Gregory were the “only” worthwhile medieval theologians, but he also affirmed a category of “sounder scholastics,” which almost certainly included Peter Lombard. Calvin was far more critical of Lombard than he was of Bernard or Gregory, but he was not wholly critical. We might even say that he exemplifies a healthy model of retrieval by both affirming and denying Lombard when necessary. In short, Dr. Wright’s presentation of Calvin’s relation to the medieval period flattens out the historical record and, I think, misreads Lane. Dr. Wright is correct that Calvin highly favored Bernard and Gregory, but that is not the whole story.

Our second question, is it true that Calvin considered Thomas to be irrelevant, also requires a bit of nuance. It might be true that Calvin considered Thomas to be irrelevant, but stating it this way without any further explanation is very misleading. The truth is, Calvin never even read Thomas. Unlike Peter Martyr Vermigli, Martin Bucer, or some other Reformers, Calvin did not receive a theological education that would have included Thomas Aquinas.^[6] Additionally, Calvin’s four citations of Thomas (which Dr. Wright references) are sloppy and indicate that Calvin did not have direct knowledge of Thomas.

In fact, just four pages after the quotation Dr. Wright uses from Lane, Lane writes, “It is possible that Calvin never read Thomas for himself and that the two citations in the Institutio are derived from intermediate sources.”^[7] Indeed, in his more recent work from 2026, Lane claims the idea that “Calvin was familiar with Thomas and regularly interacted with him” is “now widely recognised to be a fallacy.”^[8] And again, “The evidence suggests that Calvin’s knowledge of Aquinas was minimal, inaccurate and mediated and that Thomas meant very little to him.”^[9]

This is where Dr. Wright’s claim lacks precision. On the one hand, it may be correct to say that Calvin did not have high regard for Thomas. On the other hand, it is spurious to say that Calvin’s rejection of Aquinas was an informed rejection. It may be said that Calvin disagreed with or rejected Aquinas if that simply means he came to contrary conclusions independent of any interaction with Aquinas. However, it is wrong to say that Calvin knowingly rejected Aquinas. Perhaps Dr. Wright did not intend to imply this. But he seems to paint a picture of a Calvin who was acquainted with Aquinas and knowingly rejected his theology. At a minimum, Dr. Wright overstates the significance of Calvin’s non-use of Thomas.

One final significant nuance that I believe Dr. Wright overlooks is how Calvin interacts with Bernard. Calvin does not merely reference Bernard’s more palatable work On Grace and Free Choice—he most frequently cites Bernard’s quite fanciful sermons on Song of Solomon.^[10] I cannot imagine that Dr. Wright would approve of Bernard’s medieval method of interpretation of Song of Solomon (perhaps I am mistaken). Yet, this is the medieval author and work which Calvin most approves.

In summary, all of Dr. Wright’s claims concerning Calvin and medieval theology require much greater nuance. First, Calvin highly favors Bernard, but he also recognized “sounder scholastics” like Lombard and did not fear using them critically. Second, Calvin’s non-use of Thomas must be understood through his non-understanding of Thomas. It is not that Calvin had an informed rejection of Thomas, but an uninformed non-use. Finally, even Calvin’s use of Bernard must be nuanced—Bernard was a medieval man, and he wrote like one. Yet Calvin did not hesitate to use Bernard’s sermons which were marked by a medieval approach to biblical interpretation.

^[1] Dr. Wright does not define what he means by “aggressive” retrieval theology. I think he intends to criticize “uncritical” retrieval theology.

^[2] Anthony N.S. Lane, John Calvin: Student of the Church Fathers (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999), 41.

^[3] This is Dr. Wright’s gloss of Lane. Lane, John Calvin, 43. Emphasis added.

^[4] Lane, John Calvin, 44.

^[5] Anthony N.S. Lane, John Calvin: Student of the Church Fathers, Vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2026), 163.

^[6] Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 8 and David Sytsma, “Sixteenth-Century Reformed Reception of Aquinas” in The Oxford Handbook of The Reception of Aquinas, eds. Matthew Levering and Marcus Plested (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 127.

^[7] Lane, John Calvin, 45.

^[8] Lane, John Calvin, Vol. 2, 161.

^[9] Lane, John Calvin, Vol. 2, 172.

^[10] Lane, John Calvin, 57.

The post A Friendly Response to Dr. Shawn Wright Part 1: Calvin and the Medievals appeared first on Founders Ministries.

The United States of America is an amazing nation. Recent video testimonies of visitors from around the world following the World Cup are stark reminders of the blessings God has showered on our country. These sojourners have reminded us, often with appropriate humor but always with deep appreciation of the wonder of smoked beef ribs and brisket, massive supermarkets, safe streets, and southern hospitality (not to mention Waffle House and Buccee’s). These and other advantages that are easily taken for granted are true “blessings of liberty.”

There are many, weightier blessings, of course, such as the recognition of God-given rights including those enshrined in the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution. America’s Semiquincentennial provides an opportunity to pause and ask, “Whence all these blessings we enjoy?”

The short answer is that they were embedded into the very foundation of our nation. The longer answer is that God providentially ordered the birth of this nation and lavished His grace on us in ways that most nations in the history of nations could not conceive. At the heart of God’s providential actions in establishing the USA are His gifts of God-fearing men who believed that it had become “necessary for one people [the citizens of the thirteen colonies of the United States] to dissolve the political bands which [had] connected them with another [England], and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”

God providentially ordered the birth of this nation and lavished His grace on us in ways that most nations in the history of nations could not conceive.

When the second Continental Congress adopted that Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, they knew they were committing treason against the British crown. Yet, they were convinced that the providential hand of God had brought them to that monumental moment. The years leading to that declaration and the ones following in the Revolutionary War and establishment of a new government are filled with stories of God’s powerful intervention. From battlefields, shipping lanes, wagon trails, and to the very halls of Congress itself, God’s guidance in the establishment of this nation is beyond dispute. 

The first President of the United States, George Washington, certainly interpreted events this way. After the British forces had been defeated and he led the Continental Army to secure victory for the new nation, the newly installed President Washington said, “The Man must be bad indeed who can look upon the events of the American Revolution without feeling the warmest gratitude towards the great Author of the Universe whose divine interposition was so frequently manifested in our behalf.”

The story of the United States is the story of God’s grace shed abroad on a people and a place. One must be able to admit this without succumbing to the irrational fear that such a claim is tantamount to believing America has some kind of covenantal relationship with God. There has only been one geopolitical nation to whom God gave such status, and Israel fulfilled her role in God’s redemptive history by providing Jesus Christ to the world. But the special relationship that God had with Old Testament Israel does not mean that He has no relationship with other nations.

“For kingship belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations” (Psalm 22:28). “And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place” (Acts 17:26). “God reigns over the nations” (Psalm 47:8). Furthermore, “He makes nations great, and he destroys them; he enlarges nations, and leads them away” (Job 12:23). God holds nations accountable, as the book of Amos makes clear, and He favors some nations more than others, as the ministry of Jonah to the capital city of Assyria demonstrates. 

Who can deny that God has blessed America in ways far greater than we can measure? Pilgrims made their way to this land because of their devotion to the gospel of Jesus Christ. The early colonies established their governments with a stated awareness of their dependence on the God of the Bible. The framers of our nation’s constitution were not ashamed to acknowledge their need of God. This was true even among those whom we have no reason to believe had a saving knowledge of that God.

Nothing illustrates this better than the well-known story of Benjamin Franklin’s “Prayer Speech” on June 28, 1787, during the Constitutional Convention. After several weeks of frustration and making little headway in revising the Articles of Confederation that governed their infant nation, the eighty-one-year-old statesmen took the floor and, according to the journal of James Madison, made the following appeal:

In this situation of this Assembly, groping as it were in the dark to find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has it happened, Sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings? In the beginning of the Contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger we had daily prayer in this room for the divine protection. Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a Superintending providence in our favor. To that kind providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth- that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings, that “except the Lord build the House they labour in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel: We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and byword down to future ages. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing Governments be Human Wisdom and leave it to chance, war and conquest.

The freedoms we enjoy are blessings hard to measure. 

From this assembly came the Constitution of the United States. The government that has operated by that constitution (not always with careful faithfulness) has served the people of the United States in ways that have at times made us the envy of the world. The freedoms we enjoy, the opportunities that abound, the ready access to the Christian religion and true Christian churches, the resources to send the Christian gospel to the far reaches of the earth, and the privilege every citizen has to influence government officials and policies are blessings hard to measure. 

Yet, those blessings are so abundant that for most Americans, for most of our lives, we have taken them for granted. I certainly have. With the contempt of familiarity, we grow used to liberty of conscience, freedom to worship, opportunities to vote for our leaders, and the smoky goodness of Texas barbecue. We forget to stop and give thanks for these and hundreds of other blessings to the God from Whom they all flow. 

The benefits of age, coupled with our nation’s Semiquincentennial, afford me an opportunity to do what I wish I had been mature enough to do fifty years ago—celebrate with thanksgiving what God has graciously done in establishing and preserving this great nation. So I will gather with friends and family to sing, pray, eat hot dogs, set off fireworks, and salute Old Glory. I will try to impress on the children in my life the lessons that I have been much too late in learning. As we gather on the auspicious anniversary, I will do my best to help them recognize God’s sovereignty and grace in creating America and making them her citizens, and remind them that to whom much is given, much is required. 

The post Reflecting on 250 Years of America appeared first on Founders Ministries.

There is a long-standing tradition in the history of the Anglo-Western church of calling upon the civil magistrate to promote the public good of its citizens.

The 2nd London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689, that 350-year-old confession of my church, says, “God, the supreme Lord and King of all the world, has ordained civil magistrates to be under Him, over the people, for His own glory and the public good; and to this end He has armed them with the power of the sword, for the defense and encouragement of them that do good, and for the punishment of evil doers.”

This echoes the language of the Westminster Confession, and both statements of faith are restatements of God’s demands placed upon civil servants. In Romans 13:4, Paul tells Christians that the civil magistrate is “God’s servant for your good.”

As those entrusted by God with authority for the purpose of obtaining the public good, I can see nothing more fitting than that the board of commissioners of our great County should declare June to be Faith and Family Month.

This declaration tends toward the public good for several reasons.

1. First, there can be no society that is not, at its heart, religious. The post-war experiment in secular humanism has not given us a flourishing and prosperous, non-religious society as many thought that it would; rather, it has replaced the true religion w/ a false, man-centered religion that has degraded our society and led to social decay, immorality, and the harm of the innocent and most vulnerable among us.

On the contrary, our 2nd president, John Adams, said that our constitutional government was “made only for a religious and moral people, being wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” It is no mystery which religion he was referring to. Furthermore, the scriptures declare in Ps. 33:12 “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” If we want the blessings of Almighty God bestowed on us once again, as in the days of our fathers, we must honor Christ as Lord, confess and repent of our sins, and seek His goodwill. If we desire to be a free society, able to govern ourselves in virtue and wisdom, we must return to the true religion of our founders and live according to that ancient faith. So yes, it is for the public good that we celebrate the Christian faith in Lee County this June.

2. Secondly, the failed social experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries have demonstrated what God has already revealed to be true in nature and in holy scripture: civil society cannot function and cannot flourish without intact and healthy nuclear families.

Children need a mother and a father to mature and grow into wise, virtuous, and capable citizens. They need the love of a mother and a father to protect them and provide for them what is truly good. They especially need the gentle nurture of a mother and the strong leadership of a father to become courageous, just, kind, and wise. The church cannot take the place of mothers and fathers, nor can the school or the welfare state. Only mothers and fathers together can give children what they need to flourish in life. And as parents give of themselves for the sake of their children, they themselves become more virtuous citizens, knowing that the society of which they are members and which they are building is the society that their beloved children will inherit.

But in a society that dishonors the nuclear family, that eradicates distinctions between mother and father, man and woman, masculinity and femininity; in a society that praises individual autonomy and elevates sexual desire to the status of an immutable and essential property at the cost of children, in a society that slaughters the unborn en masse, in this society, the family is devalued, degraded, and will eventually be destroyed, and our great nation with it.

So, it is particularly appropriate and right that Lee County honors families in the month of June, when for decades the celebration of pride and sexual desire has, like an acid, eaten away at the foundations of the nuclear family. It is time we stopped celebrating that which is unnatural and started celebrating the glorious, natural, and Biblical family as God has made it. This is for the public good.

Why does it matter that our county and our state officially proclaim June to be Faith and Family month? Because the government’s actions teach society.

In his Ethics, Aristotle says that “magistrates make their citizens good by habituation; this is the intention of every magistrate, and those who do not carry it out fail of their object. This is what makes the difference between a good constitution and a bad one.” Governments train their citizenry in either virtue or vice by their laws and proclamations. This proclamation not only trains us in virtue but also causes us to look to Christ, the God of that ‘faith that has played such a vital role in constructing our constitution, laws, and ideals.’ In Him is hope, healing, and forgiveness, and life, not only for our nation, but for every single one of us individually.

Proverbs 29:2 says that “when the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice.” Right now, the people of Lee County rejoice and thank our board of commissioners for their righteous stand in this month of Faith and Family.

The post A Proclamation for Faith and Family Month appeared first on Founders Ministries.

Others, guided more by the feminist zeitgeist than the plain teaching of Scripture, sometimes suggest that the issue is really about the value of women. Unless a church is willing to have women pastors then, the reasoning goes, they are oppressing women. That argument is specious.

God created both men and women in His image (Genesis 1:26-27). Both men and women, therefore, are worthy of dignity, respect and honor. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith says exactly this. 2LC: 4.2: “He created man, male and female, with reasonable and immortal souls, … being made after the image of God, in knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness…” (4.2). Likewise, the Baptist Faith and Message states,  “Man is the special creation of God, made in His own image. He created them male and female as the crowning work of His creation. The gift of gender is thus part of the goodness of God’s creation” (Article 3).

To submit to Scripture’s requirement that only qualified men may be pastors does not deny the valuable services in God’s kingdom that women can and have performed. In the Old Testament, as the late Roger Nicole wrote, “Miriam the prophetess, sister of Moses, wrote a song recorded in Scripture (Exodus 15:21). She was followed by Deborah (Judges 4:4), Huldah (2 Kings 22:14, 2 Chronicles. 34:22), Isaiah’s wife (Isaiah 8:3),…all of whom also were called prophetesses” (Priscilla Papers, Vol. 20, No. 2; Spring 2006, p. 5).

Similarly, in the New Testament we read of Anna, “a prophetess” (Luke 2:36) and Philip’s 4 daughters “who prophesied” (Acts 21:9). Add to them Mary, Martha, Euodia, Synteche, Phoebe, Priscilla, Tryphena Tryphosa, Persis, Rufus’ mother, Junia, and others, and you see immediately that women played important roles in the early church. This pattern has continued throughout history. Perpetua, Felicitas, Anthusa, the mother of John Chrysostom, and Monica, the relentless, praying mother of Augustine, are all representative of mighty women of God who served Christ well throughout history. It is no wonder that the fourth century pagan, Libanius said, “What women these Christians have!”

Christ has not been unclear about who may serve as a pastor in any church that bears His Name.

As the father of five godly daughters (and one godly daughter-in-law) and husband of a godly wife, I have a front row seat to the important roles that women have been assigned in the kingdom of God. All these women are boldly devout, theologically astute, wonderfully gifted, and joyfully committed to serving Christ in their local church. Because they are strong, spiritually mature, and biblically grounded, none of them has ever aspired to be a pastor or ever felt in any way slighted because that job is not open to them. They delight in being women of God and celebrate the differences between themselves and their brothers in the Lord.

Christ has not been unclear about who may serve as a pastor in any church that bears His Name. He cares deeply about how His churches are organized and operate. We see this in the language that the Apostle Paul uses to instruct Timothy about giving leadership in the church at Ephesus. He writes, “I am writing these things to you so that, 15 if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:14-15). God cares about how His people conduct themselves in His house. In other words, His house—His rules.

And God has made it a rule that only qualified men can serve as pastors in His church. This is abundantly evident from the plain teaching of the New Testament both in the examples we have (no church was led by women pastors) and in the qualifications prescribed for pastors—“he must be…the husband of one wife” (μιᾶς γυναικὸς ἄνδρα, a “one woman man;” emphasis added), 1 Timothy 3:2. Additionally, the Apostle Paul addresses the question directly in 1 Timothy 2:9-14.

Verses 11-12 are simple and clear: “Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. This prohibition against women teaching or exercising authority over men comes amid Paul’s instructions about how believers are to conduct themselves “in every place” (v. 8), which is a reference either to the house churches in Ephesus or quite possibly to all the churches where Paul taught. With the modern rise of feminist hermeneutics this passage has been increasingly subjected to critique and reinterpretation in modern times. However, prior to this, there has been a remarkable consensus of its understanding across all of church history.

Paul identifies two positive activities that he does not permit women to engage in with respect to men—teaching and exercising authority. Some see this as one activity—that of teaching men with authority, believing that such an interpretation allows for women to teach men in the church as long as they don’t do it in an authoritative or “an elder-like way.” Yet, the word for “teach” (διδάσκειν) is normally used in the New Testament to denote the accurate teaching of the gospel. Douglas Moo says that it denotes “the authoritative proclamation of God’s will to believers.”[1] In the pastoral epistles, “teaching” always refers to “authoritative doctrinal instruction,”[2] as seen, for instance in 1 Timothy 4:11, “Command and teach these things.”

The second activity that this passage forbids to women is “exercising authority” over men in the church. The word Paul uses (αὐθεντεῖν) has been the subject of much research over the last forty years. Egalitarian scholars have tried to demonstrate that etymologically it has an ingressive or even pejorative connotation, so that it should be understood as “to assume authority” or “to lord it over.” Since this word is used only here in the New Testament and rarely elsewhere, etymological studies are tenuous at best. What is far more helpful is to note the way Paul uses it in the context.

Consider the rationale on which he bases his apostolic prohibition in vv. 13-14. “For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.” He does NOT ground this prohibition in the cult of Artemis or anything else that might be unique to the cultural setting of Ephesus where Timothy was. Rather, he says that the reason that women are not to teach or exercise authority over men in the church is because of what happened at creation and what happened at the fall.

Just as there was order between men and women at the beginning—by God’s design—so there is to be order in the church, again, by God’s design.

Paul appeals to the divinely created order that God established in the beginning. Adam was created as Eve’s head by God’s design. When Eve was deceived by the devil it was because God’s created order was overturned. She took to herself a responsibility she did not have, and Adam abdicated a responsibility that he did have by God’s design.

Just as there was order between men and women at the beginning—by God’s design—so there is to be order in the church, again, by God’s design. We have seen the devastating consequences of forsaking that order in the Garden. We should not be surprised by more grievous consequences when His order is forsaken in the church. If anyone would like real time examples of the latter simply consider the last century of the Unite Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church in the USA. They did not become LGBTQIA+ celebrants overnight. Rather, their steady decline began with a rejection of God’s rules for His house.

Once God’s Word is rejected in the ordering God’s church, God’s judgment falls on God’s people. Those who love Christ and fear God should never stand idly by and let such perversion of the Word of God take place without a fight.

For a fuller discussion of the issues involved, a debate that Dwight McKissic and I had on women preachers can be found here.

[1] Douglas Moo, “What Does it Mean” in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, edited by John Piper and Wayne Grudem, Crossway: Wheaton, IL, 241).

[2] Ibid.

The post Why Women Cannot Be Pastors of Christ’s Churches appeared first on Founders Ministries.

My text was 1 Corinthians 2:2, “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” The church was organized three years prior out of a split from another church in town. In its brief existence, it had experienced three significant splits of its own. Before extending a call to me, the church had been turned down by at least 10 other candidates.

The founding pastor, my predecessor, had been fired eight or nine months before I arrived. I knew that he had been fired. What I didn’t know was that his termination happened during a raucous members’ meeting while he was away on vacation (it is no surprise that it took a long time before I was willing to take a vacation with my family). The man who was primarily responsible for his termination (who had initially been his biggest supporter) held several key leadership positions in the church as well as an $80,000 note that he could (and did) call to be paid in full eleven months after my arrival.

After the church called me but before I started the trip from Texas to Florida, the man who led the charge against the founding pastor (let’s call him “Carl”), decided that the church had made a mistake and I should not be their pastor. He planned to meet me upon my arrival with a notice that they had rescinded my call, but he could not get enough signatures on the petition to obtain his objective. That did not stop him from working vigorously for the next eight months to get me fired.

Fortunately (a word that I can unironically use with the perspective that forty years gives), God had prepared me for the trials of being the new pastor of a dysfunctional church. Four months before accepting the call, I had resigned from my responsibilities as an assistant pastor in a church in Dallas over ethical issues and disagreements with the leadership. That marked, at the time, the lowest point of my ministry. In fact, I was convinced that I was washed up as a pastor.

In short, I was a pastor nobody wanted, and Grace was a church nobody wanted. It was a match made in heaven.

God intervened in specific and powerful ways to thwart Carl’s efforts to get rid of me, and over the next seven years, the church slowly moved down pathways toward a healthier life of devotion to the lordship of Jesus Christ. The foundation laid in those early years prepared the church to survive and, in many respects, to thrive the next thirty-three years. 

As is true in the life of any church (or person, relationship, or institution), there have been many ups and downs in Grace Baptist Church over the last four decades. In so many ways, the life of my family is completely intertwined in the life of the church. Donna and I arrived with a two-year-old & an infant. Today we have six children (all but one of whom is married) and twenty-three grandchildren. By God’s amazing grace, they are all actively involved in the life of the church.

So, I have much for which to be thankful as I reflect on the last forty years. Each of those years is filled with testimonies of God’s love, patience, mercy, and power. While there is no way to calculate God’s blessings over that time and the many lessons I have learned, I have reflected on many of them. I want to note them and to remember them as clear markers of the mercy and faithfulness of Jesus Christ to a hell-deserving sinner whom He made a trophy of His grace.

Here, in no particular order, are forty brief thoughts, lessons, and reflections that have come to mind over the last few weeks.

1. What the late James Boice said is absolutely true: we tend to overestimate what God will do in two years and underestimate what He will do in twenty. That is even more true when you stretch the horizon to forty. 

2. God often does His deepest work of sanctification in His people through trials that seem unbearable. 

3. Though I have often mixed up my priorities, having them clearly articulated (Christ, Donna, family, church, Founders, other ministries) has been a great help when I have needed course corrections.

4. A faithful, godly wife is an invaluable gift from the Lord. Marriage to Donna has been a constant reminder of God’s love and grace to me. Her wisdom and strength have been sources of immeasurable encouragement to me through the years.

5. The most difficult challenge I have faced as a pastor has never changed—dealing with my own heart. Proverb 4:23 is true: “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.” 

6. Having children who love Christ and His church is one of the greatest gifts God can give to parents. It is a testimony to God’s sovereign grace when any parent sees his children walking in truth. It is also true that there is no greater joy for a parent than to experience such a blessing (3 John 4).

7. Strong, godly elders and deacons are gifts from God and inevitably help a church grow in strength and godliness. I have been blessed to serve with some of the best men I have ever known and to help shepherd a church that is filled with many strong, godly men.

8. Charles Spurgeon was right when he told his students that learning to say “no” is more valuable to a pastor than learning Latin. Every time I say “yes” to something, I am necessarily saying “no” to other things. Learning intentionally to decline worthwhile opportunities has been a hard, invaluable lesson that I wish I had learned earlier.

9. All my counsel boils down to this: Be a real Christian and act like it. That is the only string I have on my banjo and I have learned to play it no matter what the song.

10. The gospel really is the power of God to save all who believe it. It is also what God uses to empower His people to persevere and grow in grace.

11. You can’t make old friends, and if you live long enough, you will be left with fewer of them. But God does at times give life-giving friendships in the latter years. Those should be cherished.

12. Ministry has pivotal moments and they are rarely seen as such until sometime later. 

13. Unseen realities are more important than those we can see. Learning to access them and live on the basis of them is essential to joyful perseverance in difficult duties.

14. Growing in the fear of the Lord liberates you from fearing people or craving their approval.

15. The Lord is a wise and good shepherd. He always provides what we need. Sometimes He very pointedly (and painfully) “makes me lie down.”

16. If a Christian does not intentionally seek to grow through the ordinary means of grace that God provides in the church, then he is unlikely to be helped much by extraordinary means.

17. Leading a church to embrace, maintain, and practice corrective discipline is difficult, vital work. It is heartbreaking when a member refuses to repent and must be excommunicated, and a joy like no other when such a person repents and is restored to communion with the church, sometimes after years.

18. God’s Spirit has proven Himself more personal, patient, and powerful than I could have imagined when I began serving as a pastor.

19. Seeing multi-generational faithfulness in church families is a great blessing. Baptizing parents, their children, and their grandchildren is an incredible privilege.

20. Raising children is humbling, sanctifying, and perspective-adjusting.

21. Children are wonderful teachers of faith, joy, simplicity, and wonder. 

22. Beauty should not be neglected in the pursuit of truth and goodness. 

23. Pilgrim’s Progress is a much better psychology book than any textbook on the subject I have ever read.

24. Fasting is a discipline that catalyzes prayer and facilitates focus and fervency.

25. It is sanctifying to remember what God has saved us from. I shudder to think what evil I would have perpetrated on this world had He not arrested me by sovereign grace.

26. Great blessings are often accompanied by great problems, and when working those problems, it is good to remember why you have them.

27. Sometimes there is no easy way forward and you must resolve as quickly as you can to find and execute the best hard way.

28. Having fellow elders who know how and are willing to both encourage and correct you is an incalculable blessing. 

29. Receiving and giving criticism helpfully are skills worth learning and will serve you and others well.

30. It is a testimony to the power of God’s grace in her life that Donna intimately knows my faults and frailties and yet continues humbly to receive God’s Word through my preaching.

31. Watching saints grow in their devotion to Christ as their bodies slow down has been a great means of strengthening my faith and hope.

32. Burying godly church members has made me hate death more and long more deeply for the resurrection.

33. Watching those who profess Christ reject godly counsel and head down paths that inevitably lead to destruction is one of the most painful experiences a pastor faces.

34. Watching those who have shipwrecked their lives repent and live humbly in faith and obedience is one of the greatest joys a pastor can experience.

35. Grandchildren are a great blessing—a crown to the aged (Proverbs 17:9)—and provide great joy and motivation to finish my race without stumbling.

36. Sometimes trials and opposition are reasons to stay put and keep preaching the gospel rather than leaving or looking for an easier assignment (1 Corinthians 16:9). Do not leave a church in the middle of a controversy. See it through with resolve to honor Scripture and leave the consequences with God.

37. The cross sets me free from being undone by what negative things people may think or say about me because it declares to the whole world that Tom Ascol is such a vile scoundrel that it took the death of God’s only begotten Son to save me.

38. No matter how wicked you think you are, you are always worse than you know, but no matter how great you think Jesus is, He is always far greater than your best thoughts.

39. Being a pastor is the greatest calling in the world. I am stunned that God called me to be a minister of His Word and sacraments and that God’s people have sacrificially given their hard-earned money to allow me to give myself to this calling.

40. If God were to give me the opportunity, I would gladly give another forty years to serving the grace-filled people of Grace Baptist Church.

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