“I love Christ, and you love Christ. At the end of the day, we are both Christians.” That saccharine sentiment is something we have heard often, sometimes paired with “Does it really matter?” or “We can agree to disagree.” Often, these phrases are said before or after a debate about doctrine. To our earthly ears, these words sound benevolent and loving. They also are easy to say and have the positive side effect of making one well-liked. These words sound nice, but they should send shivers down our spines.
The idea that two people can agree to disagree on doctrine is antichristian. That idea blurs right and wrong, disregards God’s commandments, and proposes a marriage of the church and the world. When a professing Christian says those things, it stems from a desire to find unity outside God’s covenant. The one who says this reveals that his or her desire for unity is really with the world. The antithesis is established in Genesis 3:15: “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”
The antithesis goes against every fiber of our beings. Being at enmity with Satan and the world is not self-serving. Standing up for the truth at the expense of our reputations, our families, and our friends goes against our natures. It is much easier not to rebuke someone for his or her lifestyle or doctrine. It is much easier to have peace with all men and to just get along.
Prof. David Engelsma beautifully expressed the truth of the antithesis in the past, before he gave it up for something easier. It is sad to see that the Protestant Reformed Churches (PRC), who once understood and acknowledged the antithesis, are now spewing it from their mouths and rejecting it. Many years ago, he wrote,
The warfare of Christ can come, O, so painfully close to us. We confess that Christ did not come to send peace on earth, but a sword, with broken hearts and copious tears. For He wields His sharp sword within our closest family-circle, cutting through the precious ties of flesh and blood. His doctrine and life set son against father, daughter against mother, daughter-in-law against mother-in-law. A man’s foes are those of his own household. Those who are Christ’s are called to endure hatred from their nearest and dearest and to hate their own loved ones for Christ’s sake (Matt. 10:34–37; Luke 14:26).1
Man wants to walk hand in hand with whomever he chooses—worldly coworkers, members of the false church, and family who have forsaken the truth. Man wants to create his own counterfeit unity. He wants to form his own disjointed body—a Frankenstein’s monster, really, with appendages akimbo, each doing what it deems best for itself. Man wants a body made up of individual parts that do not belong together.
This is a tale as old as time, as we see in the building of the tower of Babel.
The men of the earth gathered together in the plains of Shinar. They schemed up a grand plan to build a tower with a top reaching unto heaven, to establish themselves above God. They wanted to shake their fists in God’s face, to show how powerful mankind could be when they worked together. They wanted to build their own version of unity, crafted by brick, mortar, and hubris.
Seeing this, the triune God said, “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Gen. 11:7). This verse displays the folly of seeking earthly unity in contrast to the complete and perfect unity that exists only between the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—something that fallen man never can achieve or even begin to understand. So the Lord went down and scattered the people across the face of the earth, dividing them and proving, once again, that his will is supreme.
Nowadays, the corrupt church world is trying to rebuild the tower of Babel, brick by brick.
Recently, Rev. Martin Vander Wal was invited to give a lecture to a group of people that left the Reformed Protestant Churches, a group that seemed to have left mostly because of how the antithesis negatively impacted the people’s lives.2 Reverend Vander Wal began by speaking about how the PRC has defamed article 29 of the Belgic Confession. Article 29 is about the false church and her marks and about the true church and her marks—the pure preaching of the gospel, the faithful administration of the sacraments, and the exercise of church discipline. Vander Wal said that there are two sides in the argument about the true church: the “lighter side,” which believes that there are many true churches and which view is more general and broader; and the “darker side,” which believes that there is only one true church.
Vander Wal continued speaking about the marks of a true church, and confusion prevailed:
In church every Sunday, ask this question: Is the mark there? Well, then it [the marks of a true church] can’t possibly be a list. It can’t possibly be a number of things. It’s far more living. It’s far more dynamic. It’s far deeper than merely items on the list that can be counted out and talked about. But at the same time, we have to understand that in this way, these, uh, distinctives as mere models or signs is the source of legalism. That’s one of the saddest aspects of this entire matter. It becomes a form of legalism.
Vander Wal listed off distinctives that different churches have—such as Christian schools, the antithesis or “shunning,” as he called it, or exclusive psalmody—and he asked blatantly if those distinctives are even needed.
Do they really matter? Are they really that important? And are they understood to come out of scripture and are, therefore, true and worthy of your confession? Or are they just merely happenstance that they work, so we fasten on them? We make them work because it’s who we have to be? Do we need these distinctives?
By “distinctives” Vander Wal really means doctrines. He treats all these things—such as the Christian school, women in office, the sacraments, divorce and remarriage, and baptism—flippantly, as if they are just little gnats he wishes to swat away. They are minor inconveniences, differences that can be overlooked. Vander Wal lives in a world void of black and white lines. He wants everything to be murky, gray, and confusing so that nobody can say what the truth really is. This is seen especially in his answers from the question-and-answer portion of his speech.
Steve Kamps: But my question to you is, isn’t there a truth with a capital T when it comes to what is the gospel?
Vander Wal: Right.
Steve: So I guess, I ask that of you. What is the gospel, if that is the mark of the church?
Vander Wal: Yeah.
Steve: Is it fair to say that the five points of Calvinism is the gospel? In other words, if we have that right here in the true church, how do we identify? We all agree, “gospel,” until we all define it.
[Laughter]
Steve: What is your definition of the gospel?
Vander Wal: Um, I think what you said last is the most important thing. Creating and making a definition is a risky thing.
After Vander Wal’s non-answer, Steve continued to press him.
Steve: The problem is that we all could go to a different denomination, all meet in this room, and all say, “I heard the gospel.” And so if we don’t have an idea of what that gospel sounds like in a concrete way, then how do we say to our children, “I don’t want you going to that denomination; they’ve corrupted the gospel”?
Vander Wal: Yeah. Discernment. I think, uh, more powerful discernment than mere analysis. I like to analyze things and think an analysis is the answer. But to be spiritually sensitive sufficiently, so that you can say that there’s death here and there’s poison here and I can’t go here because it’s poisonous, um, to have it operate that way. Uh, it does remind me of something that I thought about. You know, I think you’re hearing more and more in the PRC, “There’s no perfect church.” Those are words we didn’t hear before. Um, and it’s true. You’re not going to hear perfect. Would you say, we can hear perfect gospel here? Um, if we’re going to enumerate and have the list, I think you can maybe always find a flaw, and that, you know, maybe if we have humility to understand there is not perfection in this life.
Finally, Vander Wal was asked what he would say to those who are struggling in the PRC. Shockingly, he responded,
Number one, you don’t have to leave. You don’t have to leave…You’re going to have to close your ears; you’re going to have to deal with things you don’t want to see in your church.
It is startling to hear it said so blatantly. Vander Wal has learned to be afraid of definitions, of distinctions, and of differences. He decided somewhere along the way that it is much safer to keep everything easy-breezy and open-ended, so that nobody ever has to break a sweat or disagree. He believes that there is a certain level of heresy that one can tolerate in a church, that the truth is more or less whatever one likes hearing, so that it does not matter where one goes to church or even if one belongs to a church at all, as long as he or she feels good about it.
It seems like any struggling members of the PRC certainly agree with Vander Wal’s advice and have closed their ears. They fit the following description of the false church:
The false church wants to have and enjoy the friendship of the world. The men of the false church seek the honor, the wealth, the pleasure, and the ease that cooperation with the world provides. In order to attain that, while remaining in the institute of the church, and still identifying themselves as Christians, they must rid themselves of absolute truth.3
I am sure we all have experienced the lack of the antithesis in the PRC, most of it firsthand. How many of us did not go to weddings and funerals of unbelievers? How many of us did not go to a family Christmas party with the happily divorced aunt there? Birthday parties, going out for drinks, all the rest of it—we see the lines between elect and reprobate being blurred.
With many of his writings and sermons, Rev. Martyn McGeown has also crafted this false unity, smearing mortar upon this modern-day tower of Babel. In a Standard Bearer article titled “Manifesting True Unity and Catholicity,” he demonstrated the PRC’s position regarding unity between churches:
The Contact Committee (CC) exists because the Protestant Reformed Churches (PRC) confess “one holy catholic church.” It is, as we read in the preamble of the CC’s Constitution, “the sacred duty” of the PRC “to manifest the true unity and catholicity of the church on earth in as far as possible…with all churches which have obtained like precious faith with us, both domestic and foreign.4
Interestingly, right after that, he warned his readers that in order to keep unity, they must not be hypercritical or suspicious, a sentence that does not bode well for the rest of his article.
We must keep that unity in the denomination…To that end, we must labor to put away from ourselves a suspicious attitude: that congregation is conservative, that congregation is liberal, that minister is suspect, that minister is sound; or a hyper-critical attitude or an attitude of favoritism.5
McGeown then went on to write about the various churches with whom the CC wants to maintain sister-church relationships, including Covenant Protestant Reformed Church in Northern Ireland, the Covenant Evangelical Reformed Church in Singapore, and the Protestant Reformed Churches in the Philippines. He also wrote that the PRC has sister-church relationships only with these churches and with the following caveats:
A sister church relationship is established, “only with those foreign churches of whom we are assured not only that they accept the Reformed standards [which include the Westminster Standards, see Synod 1985, Art. 23—MMcG] as their basis, but that they indeed maintain them in their ecclesiastical life.6
It is illuminating that McGeown slipped in his acceptance of the Westminster Standards—which is a compromised confession. Rev. Herman Hoeksema himself accused the Westminster Standards of containing a covenant of works, a dash of the well-meant gospel offer, and the support of divorce and remarriage.
Besides allowing sister-church relationships with churches that hold to the Westminster Standards, the PRC also has a corresponding relationship with the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Australia (EPCA). About this relationship, McGeown wrote,
[The] relationship is one where “significant and broad agreement exists” but where “differences are important enough to preclude a sister-church relationship.”7
But the PRC is still allowed to have some sort of relationship with the EPCA. The Protestant Reformed seminary has trained EPCA students, and the PRC has invited EPCA speakers to conferences organized by the seminary.
McGeown openly admitted that the PRC has doctrinal differences with some of these churches, and yet the PRC still maintains some form of a relationship with them!
Rev. Daniel Holstege is another Protestant Reformed minister who is helping to build the tower. His recent article published in The Standard Bearer inadvertently revealed his view of what it means to be a Christian.8 The article is entirely the shallow ponderings of a man, and most of the article is irrelevant. However, in the first section Holstege explained that some people do not believe the validity of the moon landing. He then made the argument that to dispute the validity of the moon landing is to call the astronauts liars. He claimed that the astronauts were Christians and thus should instantaneously be believed. He wrote that several of the astronauts “professed to be Christians and even quoted Scripture while in space”! Then Holstege informed his readers about the confession of one of those astronauts.
Mission pilot Victor Glover spoke about the Bible and said the earth was created “to give us a place to live,” showing his belief in God. Glover added, “…as we continue to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos, I would like to remind you of one of the most important mysteries there on Earth, and that’s love. Christ said, in response to what was the greatest commandment, that it was to love God with all that you are. And he, also being a great teacher, said the second is equal to it, and that is to love your neighbor as yourself…” Glover did not speak the gospel per se by those remarks. But he did confess before the whole world the name that is above all names.9
Although his article reads like it belongs in a history textbook rather than in a doctrinal magazine, Reverend Holstege revealed his absurdly loose standards for what makes someone a fellow believer. All it takes for Reverend Holstege to call someone a Christian is that that one says, “I believe in Christ.” Holstege even admitted that Glover did not “speak the gospel per se” but still “confess[ed]…the name of Christ.” By Holstege’s standards most of the people in the world are God’s elect. But God clearly teaches that not every one who simply confesses the name of Jesus Christ is his child.
21. Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.
22. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?
23. And then I will profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. (Matt. 7:21–23)
Just like at the tower of Babel, the PRC and the church world at large misunderstand what true fellowship and unity are. To them, every one who professes the name of Christ is a Christian, and you can have fellowship with anyone short of an atheist, which blatantly contradicts 2 Corinthians 6:14–17.
14. Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?
15. And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?
16. And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
17. Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you.
The tower of Babel, whether of old or of the modern day, will crumble and fall. Without even a word, God can scatter mankind across the face of the earth, toppling over the building crafted of measly stone. Our unity is rooted in something solid, unchangeable, and eternal: Jesus Christ.
True Christian fellowship is rooted only in the gospel. God’s word is a sword, dividing the world into reprobate and elect. There is no room to agree to disagree when it comes to doctrine. Only through Jesus Christ do the elect have true fellowship with each other. What a wonderful thing it is that wicked sinners, saved by grace, can experience such unity. Flawed people who would have had nothing to do with each other are now spiritual family. The love of the body of Christ goes beyond all earthly friendships. It will hold fast when all else fails, topples, and crumbles to dust.
4. There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling;
5. One Lord, one faith, one baptism,
6. One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.
7. But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ.
11. And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some pastors and teachers;
12. For the perfecting of the saints, for the works of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ:
13. Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ:
14. That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive;
15. But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ:
16. From whom the body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love. (Eph. 4:4–7, 11–16)
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