r/eformed

I'm a member of an EPC church. I've worked at ECO chuches. I don't love ECO but it was fine. You can disagree with me if you like (which would be pretty funny) but the PCA and OPC and ARP seem too contentious to me. I also don't see 1 Timothy 2 or 3 to be about women pastors. On the other hand, I think the PCUSA has some meaningful problems in the long run. Even if I disagree about what a few passages mean, I'm not a liberal.

I've recently moved to a city with no EPC churches and I don't like either ECO church. Is there another faithful Bible-thumping Reformed denomination that's cool with egalitarians?

For lack of a better term, I'm a "returning prodigal" looking for a church home.

A while back I visited a RPCNA church in my area. I was a little hesitant going in because I'm a little "rough around the edges" from a visual presentation standpoint & I'd gotten the impression that RPCNA was a little...buttoned up?

Anyway, I had nothing to worry about on that front. In fact, I found the welcome at this church to be perhaps the most genuine of any place I've visited. I enjoyed the message and Psalm singing. I've been checking some other places out & haven't been back in a while, but it's definitely marked as a church I'd like to return to.

(As an aside, I haven't regularly attended church since the late 90s so it was refreshing to encounter something resembling church music as I remembered it - all these rock bands are pretty weird to me.)

A few days ago (still on the front page as I'm posting this) someone with an RPCNA flair posted on r/Reformed about preaching at a church plant. For some random reason, I clicked on the poster's profile.

I was shocked to see their most recent comment read, "Femboys are (homophobic slur)." Posted 2 days ago.

I'm not 100% what a "femboy" is and I'm not sure I want to find out. I subscribe to a Biblical perspective on human sexuality. Maybe you can hand-wave this as "speaking the truth plainly." But, I've been around enough non-believers (& was one, for long enough) that using slurs is only going to reinforce trite slogans like, "There's no hate like Christian love", etc.

More disturbingly, a few comments down this person posted "You're literally safer in a country at war than you are around black people."

There's no hand-waving that. To me, it's beyond that pale that someone is preaching within 11 months of posting that. (I get maybe it's an old profile and maybe there's been some conviction/repentance/reflection since then, but I think that'd be a naively charitable interpretation given the other recent comment.)

I remember a while back I read that the RPCNA excommunicated a pastor for preaching white supremacy. I figured that was probably a one-off, but now this kinda has me thinking in a different light.

So my question for RPCNA members is - is this sort of thing...normal?

I'm willing to hear from all perspectives from, "I don't see any problem with that" to "I love our denomination but yeah we have some guys like that you have to watch out for" to "This is completely uncharacteristic". Or anything in between.

^(Chat about whatever y'all want.)

I was reading Romans 1-4 again and got stuck on the word righteousness.

For a long time I just heard it as being a good person. The righteous guy was the one doing better than everybody else. More obedient, fewer things to be embarrassed about. That's not totally off, but I think it made Romans harder to follow than it needed to be.

Paul says the gospel reveals "the righteousness of God" in 1:17. Then in 3:10 he says nobody is righteous. Then eleven verses later he says "the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law." And in chapter 4, Abraham's faith gets counted to him as righteousness.

If the word only means my own track record, that stops working pretty fast. Nobody has it, and yet it keeps getting handed to people.

The Greek word is dikaiosyne. I don't want to make too much out of one word, since Paul is building a much bigger argument than a single definition. But it does seem wider than "being a good person." Depending on where it shows up it can mean righteousness, justice, or right standing with someone. In Romans it keeps pointing back to God's own rightness and to what he does to put guilty people right.

That helped me with 3:26, where Paul says God is "just and the justifier" of the one who has faith in Jesus. Same word family, twice in one line. His point seems to be that God stays right in the act of justifying the ungodly, rather than setting his own standard aside to pull it off.

I checked this in the Sola Bible App and on Bible Hub, mostly because I didn't want to overstate the Greek or act like a lexicon entry settles Paul's argument.

Romans 4 is where it got more personal for me. Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. That happens back in Genesis 15, before the law and before circumcision, and before anyone can hold Abraham up as a clean example. Genesis doesn't really let you do that with him anyway.

So righteousness in Romans is the standard I can't meet and also the thing God hands over. Getting put right with him first, then learning to live from there instead of trying to build my own case.

I'm still working out how to say that without swinging too far the other way. Reformed folks tend to have sharper categories here than I grew up with, so I'm curious how you read it.

When you hear "the righteousness of God" in 1:17, are you mostly hearing something about God himself, or something he does, or the thing he gives? Or is that a false split?

^(Chat about whatever y'all want.)