Today there appeared in the columns of the ‘Belfast Newsletter’ a letter berating the disciplinary actions taken against those in the Sandymount congregation of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland who were involved in the electing and ordaining an openly sodomite man as an elder. The writer is Professor Ruth Whelan.
Here is a link to my comments on a report which appeared in the press earlier this month.
“Presbyterian minister faces sanctions over gay couple support”
Here is Professor Ruth Whelan’s letter.
I was most anxious to answer this wicked and deceitful letter. Here is my reply, submitted a few minutes ago to the ‘Belfast Newsletter’. Pray that it will be published and that good will come of it.
Sir,
I would like to comment on two statements contained in the letter by Professor Ruth Whelan of Dublin which appears in your newspaper today.
The internal wrangling within the Presbyterian Church in Ireland is sourced in its apostasy from the truth of God, dating back to the days in 1927 when the Presbyterian Church in Ireland exonerated Professor J E Davey from charges of heresy. Davey was later elected Moderator of his denomination, thus doubly endorsing his exoneration. Without a doubt, Davey was a heretic for he mocked the deity of Christ, His blood atonement at Calvary and the divine inspiration of the Holy Scriptures. All of this is on record in the writings of men like Rev James Edgar, a contemporary of Davey and one of the 83 who voted against Davey.
The two statements I would like to make a brief comment on are these:
1. Second, a reminder: there are in every Presbyterian congregation on this island people who walk humbly with their God and who are also members of the LGBT+ community — unless they have been driven away by the relentless homophobia.
Those who are members of the ‘LGBT+ community’, who are to be found, it is claimed, in every Presbyterian Church in Ireland congregation, cannot walk humbly with the God of the Bible since, as the prophet says: “Can two walk together, except they be agreed?” Amos 3:3. Members of this ‘community’ most certainly are not in agreement with the Lord’s view of the activities in which they indulge! God calls abominable that which they love and glory in! (Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:17-32). The ‘god’ they walk with is the one spoken of by Paul in 2 Corinthians 4:4. “In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.”
2. It is our Reformed conviction that our consciences are bound by scripture alone and not by any single interpretation that is presented as “the truth” and, therefore, not open to being revisited.
The Professor claims for herself to be of those who hold a ‘Reformed conviction’ That is a deceitful claim in that those who hold to Reformed theology utterly repudiate the wickedness of all that comes under the heading of the ‘LGBT+community’!
Furthermore, for her to claim that her theological position is born out of an interpretation of Holy Scripture is arrant nonsense. Throughout the centuries of orthodoxy, there are few if any who dared to claim that the Bible in any way endorsed the vile wickedness of sodomy and its allied corruptions!
While I am glad at the action taken against those in the Sandymount congregation who endorsed the sin of the elder presently the subject of discipline by the PCI, I fear that it is too little and far too late to avoid the continuing downgrade within that body. The full harvest of their of wicked folly, begun in the 1920s, will most certainly yet be reaped.
Rev Ivan Foster (Rtd)
16th December 2021.