They Believed It Was Love
We will let that case make its strongest argument, in its own words — and then hold it to the Word that made marriage in the first place.
The Church and the Christian Church • Part Three: Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) • By the Virginia Christian Alliance Editorial Board
The Big Three
- Marriage was not built by a church and cannot be redefined by one. It was made in the garden, and Christ grounded it there.
- The affirming case is not wicked at its root — it is a Christian impulse aimed the wrong way. We give it its strongest hearing here, in its own voice.
- What that case removed was never the welcome. It was the turning. It kept “come” and struck “repent” — and a gospel without repentance is a false gospel.
We have laid out the record, and we have marked the redline. Now comes the only question that finally matters. Not what the Assembly did. Not what the Book of Order says. What does the Word of God say — and does the church still stand where it stands?
This is the part of the measuring where we stop counting votes and hold the wall to the line itself.
The Line We Did Not Draw
Marriage was not invented by a church, and it cannot be redefined by one. It was made in the garden, before there was a temple or a priest or a single page of law.
“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” — Genesis 2:24 (ESV)
One man. One woman. One flesh. It is stated as a given of creation, woven into how God made us male and female — not a rule imposed on marriage from outside, but the description of what marriage is. And when the question was put to Jesus directly, He did not soften it or set it aside. He reached back past every later argument to the beginning:
“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” — Matthew 19:4–6 (ESV)
Notice what Christ does. He settles a dispute about marriage not by consulting the culture or counting opinions, but by returning to how God made it at the start. That is the plumb line. It hangs from creation, and no assembly of any century has been given the authority to cut the cord.
Their Strongest Case
Now we owe the other side its fairest hearing, in its own voice, at full strength. To do less would be to fight a shadow.
They did not set out to defy God, and most did not think they were. They looked at people they loved — sons and daughters, friends, faithful members who had sat in their pews for decades — and they saw sincere devotion, real commitment, lives of evident kindness. They asked how a God of love could be honored by shutting such people out. They read the Scriptures that speak of welcome, of the last being first, of a gospel that breaks down dividing walls. They concluded that the older reading was a wall God never built, and that the loving thing — the Christlike thing — was to take it down. Many believed, and still believe, that the Spirit was leading them to a wider grace. They believed it was love.
That case deserves to be met with respect, not caricature. The impulse behind it — do not turn away the one who comes — is not itself wicked. It is a Christian impulse aimed in the wrong direction. And that is precisely why it has persuaded so many sincere people. A lie that had nothing true in it would deceive no one.
The One Thing the Argument Removed
Here is where the line falls, and it does not fall where most people expect.
The error was never welcome. A faithful church has always welcomed sinners — it is made of nothing else. The doors of the true church stand open to the adulterer, the thief, the proud, the greedy, the drunkard, and every kind of sexual sinner, without exception, because every one of us walked in through those same doors. If welcoming sinners were the offense, the gospel itself would be the offense.
What the affirming argument removed was not the welcome. It was the turning. The true gospel keeps both words — “come” and “repent” — and the whole New Testament joins them and never separates them. The first word of Jesus’ public ministry was not “be affirmed.” It was “repent” (Matthew 4:17). The first invitation of the first sermon of the church was “repent and be baptized” (Acts 2:38). Strike the turning, and what remains is not a kinder gospel. It is a false one — the counterfeit wearing the manners of the real.
Paul names this exact thing, and then says the one word that answers the whole debate:
“Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?… And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” — 1 Corinthians 6:9–11 (ESV)
Read the tense. Such were some of you. Were. Past. The Corinthian church was full of people who had lived in every sin Paul had just named, sexual sin among them — and they were welcomed, fully, into the body of Christ. But they were washed. Washed out of it, not affirmed in it. The grace that received them did not leave them where it found them; it cleansed them. That is the gospel: not a locked door, and not an unwashed welcome, but an open door into a washing.
This is the measure laid against the wall. A faithful church says to every sinner alive: come, be washed, and go and sin no more. What the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has now written into its constitution says: come, and be affirmed as you are, for there is nothing here to be washed from. It has kept the water and denied what the water is for. Same font. Opposite gospel.
Repentance Is the Hinge
We must say this plainly, because it is the hinge on which everything in this series turns. Repentance is not a harsh add-on to the good news. It is the good news — the turn from death toward life, the one motion by which any of us, and any church, comes home.
Strike it, and there is no road back, for anyone. A church that will not name sin cannot offer cleansing from it, because you cannot be washed of what you have been told is clean. This is why the affirming turn is not a small adjustment of policy but a wound at the center: it removes the very door through which the leaning wall could return to true. The plumb line has not moved. But the way back to it is repentance, and repentance is the word this movement has quietly struck from its vocabulary — struck from its rulings, and from the standard it now asks its officers to affirm.
So we sound it, because someone must: not as accusation, but as the only key that fits the lock. The call to repent is not the opposite of love. It is the shape love takes when it refuses to leave the beloved in the fire.
The Lampstand, and the Word That Does Not Return Empty
We have measured, and the verdict is not ours; it is Scripture’s. Held to the Word that made marriage, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is found leaning, and far. We say it in grief, not triumph, and we say it to a church we would rather see restored than record.
And restoration is possible, because the same Christ who warns still walks among the lampstands and holds them in His hand. He said to a fallen church not “you are finished,” but “repent, and do the works you did at first” (Revelation 2:5). The warning is the mercy. The door is the turn. And the God who set the plumb line has never yet spoken a word that came back to Him empty.
The Word says what marriage is. The Word says what sin is. And the Word says what the way home is — the same for a wayward soul and a wayward church: turn, and be washed.
No verdict of any assembly can overturn the verdict of Scripture, and no vote of men can wash a single soul. But the God who set the plumb line still stands over His house — and the wall He measures crooked, He is able, if it will turn, to make straight.
Next in the series — Part Four: Weighed and Found Wanting. The whole slide, from the standard once held to the standard reversed, and what the numbers testify.
For Further Study
- The Church and the Christian Church — the introduction to the series, where the plumb line is first hung.
- Part One: The Receipts — the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s 2026 General Assembly, in its own record.
- Part Two: The Redline in the Book of Order — the words struck from the church’s own constitution.
— The Editorial Board, Virginia Christian Alliance
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).
