"OPCHistory" Tagged Sermons
Hebrews 13:14, seeking a city not yet seen, frames a survey of the PCUSA, RCA, and OPC each chasing worldly pursuits in their own ways, beginning with the 1924 PCUSA General Assembly. Nationalism’s quiet compromise of the Westminster Confession gets specific attention. Church discipline, or its absence, is where that compromise eventually shows up.
Hebrews 11:16’s longing for a better, heavenly country supplies the lens for Machen’s own eschatological theology, set against an America in the 1920s eager to put the church to its own nationalist use. Machen’s Biblical orthodoxy is read as resistance to exactly that use. His own hope, in the end, was fixed on heaven rather than on America’s approval.
Colossians 3:1-2’s call to set the mind on things above governs a look at the OPC’s forced name change in 1939, and at what it meant for the new denomination to describe itself as ‘Orthodox’ rather than as simply American. Not being ‘in America’ by name, the lecture argues, was itself a confession about which city the church actually belongs to. What confirmed that choice was God’s own sovereignty, not the denomination’s survival.
Christ’s own words to Pilate, ‘my kingdom is not of this world,’ frame the OPC’s own heavenly-mindedness as it entered the 1940s, still finding its identity against the old-school Presbyterian establishment. Geerhardus Vos’s own theology, unique and largely ignored in his lifetime, is read as the resource the young denomination did not yet know how much it needed. The series closes where it began: with a kingdom not measured by earthly success.
J. Gresham Machen’s genuine admiration for the Christian Reformed Church sits alongside the OPC’s own early, difficult years between 1936 and 1962, caught between fundamentalism and a Kuyperian alternative represented by the clash of McIntyre and Kuyper’s own heirs. Secularism’s advance forms the pressure both movements were reacting against. Machen’s own end is read as tragedy in the full sense, more than an unfortunate ending.
The young OPC’s struggle with ecumenism gets a specific test case in the Peniel Movement and the disputed errors associated with Beers, with Ned Stonehouse and Sloyer landing on opposite sides. The Penielists’ own claims to deeper spirituality are weighed and found wanting. That same ambivalence, the lecture suggests, still shows up in how modern evangelicalism handles similar movements.