By: Thomas F. Booher
There are conservative, confessional, parliament/BCO sticklers who know the "playbook" but not how the other side is thwarting their playbook with tricks. They fail to recognize that keeping the rules sometimes promote breaking the rules, that nefarious forces can twist upholding the letter of the law to destroy the spirit and actual intent of the law's letter.
I'd argue this is why it is actually good in the PCA that overture 37 is not going to pass. I have just now come to that position, but knowing how slippery the liberals are, they'll take "racism" to mean "being white unrepentantly". Many of the conservatives would have considered overture 37 passing to be a great victory, but then there jaw would hit the floor when they see the liberals twisting it to their advantage, excluding white men from candidacy for the ministry in the PCA unless they repented in sackcloth and ashes for being white.
But that's what liberals do, they twist things, especially the true and good words. Like Satan. Do we understand that a Satanic spirit is at work in some of our pastors and elders in our Reformed denominations?
Probably the best analogy is not that the other team has outmaneuvered our playbook, but rather the enemy has our playbook and is now exploiting it, but cleverly so. They aren't making it obvious that they have our playbook. Just like when the opposing baseball team steals signs, they don't make it apparent that they are stealing signs the catcher is putting down. But they know which pitch is coming.
Likewise, conservatives are predictable. We run the same plays from the BCO playbook, the same way, without an inch of variance/flexibility of interpretation given the PLAYS run against us, and the fact that the other side has ceased to fight fair and in good faith. The self-appointed "umpires" thus always become the conservatives, since they actually care about rules. The liberals are glad to let the scrupulous conservative umpires fill that position, because they will break and bend the rules with reckless abandon.
Progressives know that conservatives are more squeamish to bend rules, or a better way of putting it than "bending", to read the room and what is happening and realize there has to be some built-in flexibility in our rules for the spirit of the law to uphold the letter of the law, especially when it is necessary to fight fire with fire.
But the conservative spirit is not fiery floor speeches and fighting fire with fire. It is fighting fire with parliamentary procedures, and the progressives have learned to turn parliamentary procedures into gasoline. Yet, we conservatives keep pouring on the gasoline, pleased that we stay above the fray and are doing things "decently and in order". But behold, doing things thus has now produced indecency and disorder, but we somehow keep missing that!
So conservatives often fight disorder and confusion with the same sort of weakness a father has when his five young children are spitting and yelling and screaming at each other over spilled milk, but the father is too righteous to yell as loud as he can over the fray and the fracas in order to restore order and bring down discipline. And why? Because he read in a good Reformed book on parenting that you must NEVER yell at your children. So the father pats himself on the back for never yelling (which in general, yes, you shouldn't yell), meanwhile the kids continue to descend the steps of hell as they exhibit all forms of greed, jealousy, anger, hatred, fratricide, eye-gouging, you name it.
Sometimes, the only way to restore order is to "break" the rules of decorum. Sometimes fashioning a chord of whips and turning over tables really is the only righteous solution.
As some others have pithily pointed out, "The Order of Worship has become the Worship of Order." May it be so no more.
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