I have often complained about the poor quality of debate in public discussion and also among Christians. My forth-coming publication about the Book of Job draws attention to this perennial, long-standing human failure.

Intelligent, informed debate is essential for progress and community cohesion. As long as the Presbyterian church is unable to debate properly or to pass on the Gospel to the next generation, so surely the church will continue to lose its children into the floodwaters of global opinions.

A recent example may help to illustrate the point. Within the same week I recently came across two opposite assessments of what the history of the Reformed Church in Scotland teaches us. One assessment said that we should aim for one uniform, Reformed national church. The other assessment concluded the exact opposite. Each proponent had a lifetime of reading Scottish church history.

So what? The starting point was wrong for each of them. They began with the events as they understood them and drew their conclusions therefrom.

The background theme of their studies was how to progress the Reformed Church today. Neither of them began with the Bible nor did they articulate the biblical vision. Of course, there were quotations from the Bible – selective quotations. In one assessment, the variety of denominations was interpreted as the judgment of God upon the church and nation.  In the other assessment the denominations were viewed as the inevitable outcome of liberty of conscience and pointed out that 17th-century Presbyterianism altered the original vision of the Christian Church articulated by the Reformers and the Second Reformation in the Westminster Confession of Faith.

The historical debate about the headship of Christ over His church focused on Christ being the Head and the church being His body. Samuel Rutherford was cited quoting: “Is Christ divided?” 1Cor 1:13, suggesting that His body should not be divided and thus there should be one national Church, separation from which was reckoned to be schism. This led, throughout  later centuries, to the scramble to prove that one’s own denomination was the one, true Reformed Church in Scotland, with the inevitable charges laid against the separatists, the seceders or schismatics in the other churches.

Scripture or history?

The purpose of historical study, historical theology and systematic theology is not to show how many books one has read, nor how learned one is, nor to create followers of one’s line of argumentation, but to make the student more familiar with Scripture so that one can argue one’s case from Scripture rather than appealing to the plethora of historians and theologians – the scribal method of debate that Jesus cut through and contradicted Mat 7:24

These historical reviews were interesting, informative and useful, but beside the point.

How so? The premise is wrong and can be easily demonstrated – from the Bible. The squabbling debate is inadequately formed, formulated and conducted, both then and now.

This illustrates a difficulty in such historical assessments because it shows the different and inadequate starting points. One assessment looked at the history of the Church in Scotland and its breaking points with the aim of returning to the original Church of Scotland, more or less by ignoring what had caused the divisions. Back to the beginning.

The other sought to explain the breaking points. Useful, but not showing the biblical way forward.

Not all Christians can be biblical exegetes and many will never be competent historians, but we are all theologians, for better or worse Rom 1:18-19, with some better than others Ps 14:1, Ps 53:1. We cannot commend ourselves to every man’s conscience 2Cor 4:2 by such theological or historical methodology, but only by biblical exposition.

Biblical debate

So what do we make of this? Which historian(s) should we follow? Must we read all these books to find out which one is right?especially when they come to completely different views about a national Reformed church?

Jesus cut through this type of argumentation which was typical of the scribes of His day and which continues among the academics of our day. So how do we cut through this argument? By showing that their biblical analysis is deficient and partial.

For example, another figure of the Christian Church is that Jesus is the Vine and we are the branches Jn 15:1-8.  This figure began in the Old Testament Ps 80:8, Isa 5:1-7. The figure was developed by Jesus Who continued to develop the concept with different parables Mat 13:24,31, and Scripture continues it until the day when the Jews will be grafted back into their own olive tree Rom 11:24.

There are different branches to Christ’s visible church but this was completely absent from the historical accounts that I read providentially in the same week.

The authors of each of these productions are firmly biblical and know their Bible, but they did not begin with their Bible but with church history. They have not balanced their assessments with all the biblical concepts. This is why I see them as partial and inadequate. To be fair, they were following the historical narrative, but this narrative was itself partial and inadeqate. Rather, they should have applied biblical assessment to balance the skewed narrative. In other words, centuries of inadequate Presbyterian debate. Are we any futher forward?

The vision?

A unified Christian church is one feature of Christ’s vision for His church on Earth, but the biblical vision is quite different from this partial analysis, and it is much grander Eph 2:19-22, Eph 1:10.

It is often noted that those Christians who disagreed on Earth will be united in heaven, so why has this vision not worked effectively in the hearts of earthly saints? Because of the ungodly denominationalism that refuses to acknowledge that “the eye cannot say to the hand I have no need of thee” 1Cor 12:21.

We need to see the biblical vision for Christ’s church and work towards it, not by unattainable knocking of denominational heads together but by biblical principles of church growth.

It is not a modern problem. In Scotland, the 18th-century Marrow Controversy was a longstanding dispute with ecclesiastical, theological and spiritual consequences in the Church of Scotland, but the debate used confusing terminology and led to misunderstanding and an ecclesiastical split from the Church of Scotland. Similarly in North America. After the 18th-century Second Great Awakening, the 19th-century ‘back-to-basics’ attempt to recover the apostolic church loosened attachments to creedal formulations already attained. The subsequent debates demonstrated that the Presbyterian churches were rudderless to deal with the challenges of biblical and Higher Criticism, the hypothesis of evolution, the demand for contemporary and ‘more relevant’ worship form in this climate for change and relaxing confessional subscription. It continued through the 20th century and the NAPARC North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council continues to focus on organisational unity. The biblical vision is noticeable by its absence. The focus on history and academia rather than biblical exegesis and application confuses the non-academic minds who wonder which leader to follow – are you “for or against” such-and-such. Conferences and ecclesiastical or denominational debates are the same problem writ-small. Presbyterians need to learn how to debate in a biblical fashion.

We need to begin with the Bible and not with academia. This is what Jesus did, and ordinary people could see the difference Mat 7:28-29.

Links:

21 Nov 2023: Reforming the Reformed Church.

24 Jul 2026: The spirit and form of Presbyterianism.

20 Aug 2026: The Reformation of Presbyterianism.

7 Oct 2026: Presbyterian prejudices.

30 Oct 2026: Inadequate Presbyterian debate.