Papists in PCA Clothing

John Otis over at the Aquila Report has stumbled on another Federal Vision PCA “pastor” coming out of closet.   Otis titles his piece, “Roman Catholic Tendencies Among Professing Reformed Churches,” but this is really just understatement.   There is no doubt that men like Leithart, Wilson, Wilkins, Meyers, Horne, Moon, Lawrence, Smith, Cassidy (only 2 of those mentioned are not PCA) and the rest of the FV men are just proto-papists who are all, aside from some minor differences,  as sensate and apostate as the pope himself.  However, their “Roman Catholic Tendencies” are generally kept close to their vestments as they proclaim the virtues of their  “objective covenant” which  is nothing more than the Roman Catholic false gospel of salvation by faith and works.   Of course, even FV men are generally not willing to come that far out of the closet and instead maintain  salvation by “faithful obedience to the demands of the covenant.”   As those familiar with the FV false gospel know, you are ushered into a tentative but very real “union with Christ” through the waters of baptism and the mumblings of some “authorized representative of the church” (read preistling), and you remain in this worthless “photographable” covenant by availing yourself of God’s imagined grace appropriated by faith as you do your best to persevere in good works (non-meritorious of course) in the vain hope that you will one day achieve “final justification.”   As OPC and exonerated Sheperdite pastor John Kinnaird once said, “it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous on that Day of Judgment.”

Yet, while the vast majority of FV and No Perspectives false teachers at least play the game of trying to appear as good P&R men in order to fool the feeble minded washcloths that make up the majority of femminized Presbyteries throughout the PCA, OPC and beyond, Otis came across one particular FV man complete with purple vestments and wearing a mitre.   His name is Craig Higgins of Trinity Presbyterian Church (PCA) of Rye, New York. You’ll notice on the church’s website that none other than former WTS  professor, Peter Enns,  is listed as their “Visiting Scholar” and who “comes to Trinity Church and teaches several times each year.”  Those poor people.  Enns, some might recall, is infamous for his attack on the doctrine of inerrancy in his book Inspiration and Incarnation (for a good summary of the Enns controversy see here ). Miraculously, even the WTS trustees could see  Enns is selling poison and voted 18–9 to suspend Enns from his position in 2008, which obviously makes him fit to teach “several times a year” in the PCA.  I guess having Enns teach in a PCA church “several times a year” can’t do any harm after the poor souls in the pews have been subjected to Higgins.   You can find a number of articles by Higgins at the wrongly named PCA Conversations website, like his recommending various forms of popish acts of asceticism done all in the service of “Keeping Holy Lent.”  You can also find Higgins’ doctoral thesis here.   I also highly recommend Otis’ Aquila Report where I found this little gem from Higgins:

Therefore, if we are to work toward the visible unity of the Church, we should, I am increasingly convinced, defer to the wisdom of the majority in the Great Tradition and embrace the ministry of bishops.

One last comment: In Ut Unum Sint, Pope John Paul II has invited all the churches to discuss how the Petrine office should function in a reunited Church, and Reformed churchmen should welcome this conversation. Our idea of concentric circles of conciliar accountability would lead us to teach that, if the Church were visibly united around the world, there would need to be an ecumenical council, meeting as necessary to govern and guide the Church. The above argument for a (reformed) episcopacy would also lead us to teach that such a council would need a “presiding bishop,” serving as primus inter pares among his brothers, and historically such a position of honor has fallen to the bishop of Rome.

Can’t you just see Luther, Calvin and Knox spinning in their graves?  Yet this is the PCA today.  Needless to say the P&R world has slid a great distance from the great days of the Protestant Reformation where the Westminster Confession and Christians everywhere once exclaimed:

“There is no other head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ. Nor can the Pope of Rome, in any sense, be head thereof, but is that Antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalts himself, in the Church, against Christ and all that is called God.”

As John Robbins wrote in 2003; “The cancer of Neolegalism … has now metastasized throughout Reformed and Presbyterian churches in America.” I think PCA erstaz-“pastor” Craig Higgins is proof that things are a lot worse than even John Robbins could have imagined.

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