Authority Gone Wrong | Theocast

Hi, this is Justin. Today on Theocast, John and I are gonna have a conversation about authority. In a fallen world, we all have an inherent distrust of authority. We tend to think it's bad, but in reality, authority in and of itself is good.

It's something that God has given us. The reality is, because we're sinners, we often abuse authority, and that is true even in the church. So John and I are gonna talk about these things, how to wield authority well, how, with the best of intentions, authority is often used poorly, and people, the sheep, the saints, are hurt as a result of it.

We hope this conversation is clarifying and helpful to you.

Stay tuned.

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Theocast, the Conference Setting, and the Conversation on Authority

Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ, conversations about the Christian life from a confessional, reformed, and pastoral perspective, at least most of the time, right, John?

That's right.

Your hosts today are John Moffitt, who is pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and I'm Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, but we are not recording from those respective locations today.

We are live together on location.

New location.

New location, a place that we've never recorded before, at least the two of us, a place where I've been before, though not in this particular dwelling. We are in Wake Forest, North Carolina. I think we can let the people know, and I'm here to speak at the Nine Marks Conference at Southeastern, and Theocast is here.

We've got a booth. We're giving away 500 copies of our book,.

Rest, to pastors and seminary students. We had several people donate to allow us to do that, so thank you.

Yeah, so we're really thrilled to be here at a conference like this, and for Theocast to have a presence at a conference like this. So you'll have already, or you'll be hearing this when the conference has already happened, so to ask you to pray for it may seem a little bit strange, but anyway, we'll trust that the Lord will do some good things through our time here the next couple days.

But since we're together, we thought we would record a podcast. Why would we not, John? It's always nice to record face-to-face, even though there's about 14 pieces of equipment between the two of us right now.

Trying to record remotely is a thing, guys. You can pray for us to that end. But I've said enough. John, let's let everybody know what we're gonna talk about today, and I'm looking forward to this conversation.

I think it should be good.

Justin and I, you guys might hear some noise in the background.

We have some of our guys from our church,.

So we're so thankful they're here.

We are.

Why Authority Is Good but Often Abused

Justin and I will typically start thinking about conversations that we find helpful, whether it's shepherding issues, something we're preaching on, and we were thinking through the podcast we had done on forgiveness, and Justin had preached on it, I had preached on it, and it led to a greater conversation, really just about authority and the abuse of authority, because sometimes the hardest thing to forgive is someone who has used authority incorrectly.

And that's where it's like, I forgive them, but do I stay underneath their authority? And what does all of that look like? So we wanted to have a conversation about the progression of, I would say, people who have good biblical authority.

Authority is not a bad thing. We'll talk about that here in a minute. I'll let you explain that. But how we often will take authority, and when the flesh gets involved, and pride gets involved, and money gets involved, and fame gets involved, all of a sudden we'll start putting rules and regulations on people, and we'll start requiring things of them that the Bible never gave the authority to do that.

So that's where we're at today. I know that this is a little bit different, but where I want you to stay tuned, don't tune us out, because Justin and I are gonna go back and talk about some historical theology about pietism, revivalism, fundamentalism, and how some of that is still infiltrating the church today.

And I think, you know, I gave this illustration,.

Justin.

If I may interject, how those things relate to authority gone wrong.

Authority gone wrong. One of the issues that's even coming out in different denominations in larger churches is the abuse of power. You hear this. Just leadership that is controlling is one word I've heard.

And you wonder, you know, someone asked me, I was talking with a pastor the other day, and we were talking about, is it better to not be in a church versus being in an abusive, like, harmful church, right?

Like, which one's worse, you know? And I said, if your experience of eating out, the only thing you've ever experienced is eating out is McDonald's. And I'm like, dude, we should go eat out. And you're kind of like, yeah, I'm good.

I ate McDonald's like four weeks ago. I don't really want to eat it again right now. And then someone says, yeah, but you should really be going to church every single week. And what pops into your head is that experience of McDonald's.

That's where a lot of people, I think this is an important conversation because their experience has been so horrific because the authority that they were underneath had gone so far off the rails that it's hard to stomach thinking about reentering in a relationship like that again.

And we may have to over the course of this podcast, because I'm immediately thinking in my mind about times where authority is actually wielded well according to the scriptures and according even to an historic confession.

And people just don't like that. And that we want to clarify maybe is not an abuse of authority. The problem there is not with the authority. The problem may very well be with us. And we may talk about it.

And there's a natural bent against authority.

Which is where we're going. So a few comments out of the gate here as we're starting to get this rock rolling downhill. Authority in general, in our world, in a fallen world, we all as fallen people have an inherent distrust of authority.

We don't like it. And I think in our day, on the one hand, it's no different than it's ever been in the history of the world. Though I think in ways it is uniquely manifesting itself. I think that's clear if you pick up the newspaper, if people even read such things anymore.

If you read it digitally online or if you listen to podcasts about the culture and the society and news and things that are happening, government, whatever. The distrust of authority has turned up to an 11 these days.

And there's all kinds of discussion about toxicity and the dynamics of oppression and power and all of that. And people are very attuned to this. And the antennas are up. And people are triggered easily to use more buzzwords as we think about all of these dynamics.

And so if you are in a position of authority in any kind of institution, whether that's the church or the family or a business or the government or whatever, there is an inherent suspicion of that right now, it seems.

And that's a concern, of course. I think what we need to acknowledge is that authority itself is good. Authority in and of itself is not the problem because God instituted it. Authority is a piece of the structure of the world that God has made.

It's a part of the grain and the fabric of creation if we want to even use that language. Let me just read a passage from scripture that would illustrate this. These are the final words of David from 2 Samuel 23.

So what would King David, this man who maybe more than anyone else in the Old Testament prefigures Christ and all of these things, was a good king, what would he say in his final moments that would be of value for us to hear?

Well, he talks this way. The Spirit of the Lord speaks by me. His word is on my tongue. The God of Israel has spoken. The rock of Israel has said to me, when one rules justly over men, ruling in the fear of God, he dawns on them like the morning light, like the sun shining forth on a cloudless morning, like rain that makes grass to sprout from the earth.

That's 2 Samuel 23, verses two to four. So he's saying when God has said, and God has set it up in such a way that when a man rules justly over others, ruling in the fear of God, he's like the dawn in the morning light.

He's like the sun shining forth on a cloudless morning. He's like rain that falls on the earth and causes things to grow. What a beautiful image of how authority used well is a blessing and it's a good thing from God.

So we wanna go ahead and say this out of the gate, that authority in and of itself is not the problem. You know, Lord Acton is famous for saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

And on the one hand, I agree with that, but the problem is not even with power. The problem is with the human heart. It's that we take something good, authority, and we abuse it. We use it in a way that the Lord has not attended and then harm as a result.

So let's start there, John. And I don't know if you have other thoughts about authority in general before we pivot to how this goes poorly even in the church, because obviously power is abused in a fallen world.

Authority is abused in a fallen world. The church is not exempt from that. The families that comprise churches are not exempt from that, you know? And we need to talk honestly about these things.

Pastoral Authority, Elders, and Congregational Oversight

Well, there's so many sections where both Peter and Paul write to pastors, those who have authority. And that authority, we have to, you know, we could do a whole podcast on this. And this is where it's crazy where people will, because of ignorance and because they have not been theologically trained, that they find themselves being led by leaders who can basically say and do whatever they want, because they've been told, don't you dare ever question the pastor.

That's certainly true in a fundamentalist context, like what you grew up in.

Yeah, yeah.

Don't question the man of God.

Right, and then 1 Peter 5 .3, you know, Peter tells them, do not lord over people.

Do not, speaking of pastors.

That's right.

Do not lord it over people.

Right, where all of us, you know, you were put in a place that in many ways, you're not speaking for God as if God is the one communicating to you, but you are responsible, as it says in Hebrews, to care for the souls of people.

And you'll give an account for that.

That's right. You know, I tell people all the time, you know, when we do new members classes, we talk about, we as elders, we take our role very, very serious. We aren't communicators. We're not organizers.

We're not community organizers. Our job is to feed and protect the souls of those to whom God has gathered in our local.

Exactly, to whom God has entrusted to your care.

That's right.

So the qualifications that are given to us by Paul are such like bottom-low level, you know, that's where we start, you know. And, you know, every context is different. And any church that takes time to make sure that their elders are trustworthy, they know what they're talking about, they're men of their word, they're not quick to anger, is going to do their congregation well.

So when I say, you know, because I'm sure you've experienced this, Justin, when you are in a new members class and you tell people, we are elder led, like we, the elders are off the front and they're feeding and caring for the sheep and they're guiding and protecting.

And the elders lead this congregation.

Right.

And we do believe that scripture says that you should submit to that leadership. And people, they hear that word submit and there's like a media buckle underneath it.

That's a trigger word these days. And it's important to say this, that, you know, for example, in our church, I mean, we are an elder led congregationally governed church in that we believe our membership speaks into matters of membership and doctrine.

Who's a part of the church and then what kind of doctrine do we teach? But the elders pastor the church.

That's right.

We lead the church. We teach, we make a lot of decisions. And there are very few things that we vote on as a congregation. And we need to understand that the congregation does not give us authority. God has actually given us authority.

And what the congregation is doing is recognizing that we've been set apart as elders to do this work. That's important. But in saying that, that doesn't mean that we just do whatever we want to do. We need to pastor according to the scriptures and we need to pastor according to our confession.

And we're very plain about those things, talking about membership classes. We teach through our confession so that our people understand here's what we believe and here's how we live together.

That's right.

And if we start saying things contrary to this and outside the bounds of this, then you should be concerned and we should be fired.

That's right.

Well, yeah. Going contrary to that or talking about things outside of scripture.

Yes.

I mean, look, we're just gonna go ahead and jump into this. But if a pastor starts going in, like, listen, Justin, you and I can use biblical broad perspectives on morality, the gospel and clear third use of the law.

Right? So, but when we start telling people their voting patterns, their dating patterns, how, which in ways people use their time, there's a lot of wisdom and discretion where a new law is placed upon people.

And there's a new burden that they have to live up to a certain expectation that you can't necessarily argue from scripture, but with much twisting of the scripture, which I have seen all of a sudden, if you're watching a football game on a Sunday afternoon, you're dishonoring the Lord.

And I'm like, whoa, we need to back up here for a moment.

I'll go ahead and say this. Sometimes, you know, when we jot things down prior, I thought I might say this later in the podcast,.

But it's okay.

It's maybe good to come on out with it now, given what you just said. I wanna help the listener think well about pastoral authority and what it looks like to be a careful and thoughtful pastor who does not abuse his authority.

Because I don't think that we think well about this in the church. To abuse authority is not to have a strong personality. It's not to be a strong communicator. That's not what we mean. But it's very important.

Our elders talk about this all the time. And one of our elders is here, and I know that he's agreeing with me. He's in my kind of peripheral view here. We take great pains in our church to stay in our lane pastorally.

What do we mean by that? It's like, well, we deal in matters of sin and repentance and law and gospel. And we are very clear and we're very, I don't know the right word to use, but we're very direct. We're very unequivocal when it comes to things like that.

When it comes to law and gospel, thus sayeth the Lord, when it comes to sin and repentance, those things are not ambiguous. They're not vague. They're not gray. But then as soon as we step outside of the lane of thus sayeth the Lord and what the confession is clearly articulated, and we're getting into the realm of wisdom and prudence, yes, maybe we can infer from biblical principle, but the Lord has not spoken specifically to the issue.

I don't care what it is.

That's right.

As soon as we start making very strong pronouncements about what congregants must do, we are abusing authority.

Yep.

To, and kind of to dovetail this with something that I alluded to earlier, to hold our membership and our elders to the standard of doctrine outlined in a confession, to hold ourselves to the doctrine clearly taught in the scriptures is not abuse.

It's just not. So if you want to live, if I want to live in a way that's contrary to the scriptures, that's contrary to the confession, and the elders in the church hold us to that standard,.

That is right.

That's right.

But if the pastors of the church begin to tell people how they're to live in very wisdom realm things, prudence decisions, and areas of their lives where they have a lot of latitude and freedom to do what seems good to them, but the pastors are binding consciences, we have a problem.

Binding Consciences Through Biblicism and Legalism

Well, there's a great example of this. There's a Netflix series about this, but I've been aware of this church for over 20 years. I remember when my mom introduced it to me years ago called the Way Down Church, and there's a series now about it, but this is here in Nashville.

And basically if you're overweight, you cannot go to this church. You can't be a member there. Oh, it's on Netflix. There was, unfortunately there was a plane crash and a lot of leadership died recently, but their whole theology was that if you're overweight at all, you're basically in sin.

And that's a great example of going into a realm where you're going to bind the conscience and cause someone to think that they're under the judgment of God in areas where, listen, I understand the Bible warns us about gluttony and the abuse of food, but you're taking it to a level that I'm like, wow, you have created an entire culture and an entire church on this.

Well, you know, that's easy to poke in the eye and like, oh, that is so ridiculous. I would never, and people look at false religions like Mormonism or whatever, and like, oh, that, but we have smaller areas in our life that we do this, where we create laws and regulations and we bind people to them.

And if they're not doing it, I mean, I know a couple that I was counseling and they were at a church and I gotta be careful, I guess how I say this, but every home group they went to, they were given this form of like, you know, did you faithfully read your Bible this week?

How often were you and your spouse intimate? Like they were regulating people's intimacy. And I was like, good, this is insanity. So there's a level where I was like, listen, we want to be helpful. We want to be there.

We want to shepherd and guide people, but there's a line that gets crossed. And I think we have to be careful and understanding like, what is the role of the person in the authority? And I would say, Justin, if I were to simplify it, kind of back up before we go forward again, ultimately elders in a church, their design is to protect the gospel and protect the sheep from false teaching.

And to also lead and guide them when they stumble.

When they are clearly stumbling into sin.

This is Galatians 6 .2.

Correct.

Yeah.

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Confessional Theology, Wisdom, and Pastoral Latitude

Yeah.

It's interesting to me how many people I've had conversations with over the last number of years who I'm going to be very general so that I'm not going to refer to any one conversation in particular. But there are people who have expressed frustration toward me for not speaking more strongly about certain issues in the church.

For example, politics.

I was going to say political.

This is one of the, this is low hanging fruit. Because we are, again, Mackenzie sitting here, he knows we take great pains to never speak politically in our church. Do we speak to moral issues in the scriptures?

Yes.

Do we uphold God's law? Yes, we do. So those things are not up for debate in our congregation. They're not up for debate amongst our elders. The confession is plain. The scripture is plain. But when it comes to something like politics and how a person might vote or how a person might view a particular social or political issue, where we are way down the stream and way down the chain from anything thus saith the Lord, and somebody is having to reason, how do we best pursue justice in a fallen world?

We aim to give people latitude to make that decision while being clear about the law of God. And there are many who have been in our context who are very concerned that our lack of speaking to particular political issues and telling people how to vote, for example, is us being negligent of our pastoral responsibility and duty, to which I would say, brother, sister, I could not disagree more strongly because as soon as we establish a pattern of going beyond the Bible and going beyond the confession to tell people what to do in a downstream wisdom call like voting, we have opened Pandora's box and we have taken ourselves to a place from which we may never recover, where we're gonna now be telling everyone what to do in all these specific areas of their lives.

I mean, like you were saying, how long before we have a checklist in our community groups or in our Sunday school classes or whatever about how many times have you done A, B, or C this week? Because this is clearly what faithfulness looks like.

And this is a test of orthodoxy and your fidelity to Christ. That is abusive.

It is.

I mean, how many people were, the virtue signaling of they canceled Disney or they canceled Netflix. And I always chuckle because I always go back and I'm like, so you have Netflix again? And they're always like, well, yeah.

So I just like, whatever. But I remember these ways. I can remember when I was a kid and we were no longer gonna go to Disneyland and we were, whatever. And we can, there's this, I do not want to suppress the heart behind wanting to honor and do what's right.

Of course not.

But creating a law and then requiring people to adhere to it, especially when it's coming from the place of authority, it is so dangerous. People, Justin, for those who understand and do appreciate the authority that God has placed in the church, there are people who

Which we should.

Right.

There are people who wrestle with like, wow, my pastor just said I should do this. And if I'm not, wow, maybe I'm not a Christian at this point.

To every pastor who's listening, whether you're the lead guy or not, it doesn't matter. You and we speaking as a pastor must understand that our words carry weight with them. And that there are gonna be many people in our congregation who, when they hear us say something, it will just hit different.

That's a good thing.

Yeah.

That's an appropriate thing in the economy of God, but we must wield that carefully, thoughtfully, and gently.

Said the words of Paul and Peter.

That cannot be overstated. So let me, you talked about not impugning the motivations. I don't either impugn the motivations of those who mean well, right, and want to live rightly and want the congregation to live rightly and not sin and all that.

But you talked about some historical categories of pietism and biblicism. We can maybe talk about this for a minute. With the best of intentions, there are people who do really bad things in this way, abuse their pastoral authority or abuse authority in the church or in the home, meaning to do well because they have some aberrant theological perspectives.

So biblicism, for example, and just to be very brief on this, biblicism is where you, it's kind of proof texting, right? And you isolate verses or you even just kind of, well, it says this here and this here and this here and this here, and you end up introducing all this apparent contradiction and mystery where there really isn't any.

And it makes the scriptures sound somewhat schizophrenic sometimes. And it's like, well, it says this here,.

So here's what we need to do.

That is not a sound theological framework. We've talked about that many times on the show.

But are I upset on biblicism?

Sure, or is your theological system any good? I mean, we've done some stuff on that.

Check the show notes, we'll put it in there.

Yeah, so having said that biblicism is not a sound way to do theology, people with the best of intentions bind consciences in really bad ways, all in the name of the scriptures. It's like, what's bad is that we're gonna blame God for this.

We're basically blaming Jesus for it because like, well, the scriptures say this and you have, in isolation, without a theological framework, drawn a conclusion that is abiblical or maybe unbiblical and are now binding the conscience of a dear saint with that.

And you're telling them, perhaps, to persevere in a situation that is horrific, where the Lord and his mercy might actually have them be delivered from it. But you're saying, hey, godliness looks like this.

Or you must do this. I know it's hard, I know it doesn't seem like it's gonna work, but you need to trust God and do A, B, or C. When in reality, there's no biblical warrant for it from a sound theological perspective.

But yet we have, in the name of God and in the name of God's word, bound the conscience of somebody to do it. And it's bad.

That's a horrible example.

Sure.

Because I hate this example.

We could use a number of bad ones.

But a spouse that's in an abusive relationship, like a real abusive, not pretend abuse, but real abuse.

Yeah, not that we don't like each other and I'm sort of disappointed in who I married.

I fell out of love and we yell at each other once in a while. But like real abuse. And we say, well, you need to just trust the Lord, that God, you're gonna be the light that's gonna be there to change their heart.

I don't mean to sound disrespectful or I don't even know, flippant. But we talked about this before we recorded it. First Peter three.

Yeah.

Like, sadly, there are many, many women who have been told across this land in churches on account of the scripture that they need to stay with a man who is quite literally beating them.

Yeah.

Horribly.

Verbally and.

Beating them up in various ways. You need to stay with him to demonstrate that your hope is in God.

Yeah.

And that's an example of a poor theological framework that's ignoring texts like first Corinthians seven, various passages in the Old Testament where the Lord is very clearly aiming to protect women in marriage and aiming to protect those who are vulnerable in general.

And that's one example that's, I know, cringe worthy.

It is.

And it triggers a lot of people in our modern context, but we shouldn't shy away from saying these things. But people will use the scriptures and manipulate them in all kinds of ways to bind people toward all kinds of things that are really horrible.

That's right.

And we want to avoid such a thing. And may the Lord spare us from that.

How to Respond When Authority Is Abused

Yeah.

So Justin, I think it would be good. We've got a few minutes here to kind of spin this. Like, what do we do if we find ourselves in a context where we can identify, like, man, I think I'm being told to adhere to things and I'm being shamed for it, I'm being guilted for it.

And I'm just not convinced this is of scripture. And we have to be careful here because it can't be one person's opinion against another. Listen, history is not authority. Confessions are not authority.

But if you've got a pastor, I'll clarify that in a second. But if you've got a pastor who is telling you that you must adhere to something, and this is like the first in history that anyone's ever heard of it.

You need to run as quickly as you can.

Well, you might want to back up and go, can you explain to me how this has not been really seen in Christianity anywhere else? And we believe and we love confessional theology. And as it comes to moral ethics, I think all confessions agree on what is the third use of the law and moral ethics and what we should be adhering to.

But at the same time, it's like, listen, I understand that these are not scripture, but we have godly people who have been examining these and upholding these and pulling this apart and looking at them for a long time now.

And we should use them to guide and protect us. And so I know you do this at your church, I do it at my church. I tell people, our confession is to protect you from me and to protect me from you. So that neither of us will abuse each other because we have sinful tendencies to do so.

Sure.

I mean, so I think the question could be asked in one of two ways. I mean, you could be asking, I'm in a context where my conscience is being bound outside of the scriptures. Or you could be saying, I'm in a context where my conscience is being just bound in a general sense.

Some of it may be good, some of it may be bad. And there's no real objective standard that we're both appealing to.

Yeah.

Like you're unwilling to adopt a child from another country.

Okay.

Yeah.

Let me start with the one. That's easy. This is one of the values of confessional theology. I'll just go ahead and say it. Because what we have is a confession of faith that is substantial and robust, that deals with primary and secondary matters and makes pretty plain what we're to believe and how we're to live.

And we appeal to that because we understand it to be biblical. So in our congregation, we appeal to the Second London Confession. And our congregants all have copies of this.

Yep.

And it's a public document. I mean, they can look at it anywhere. And so if we're, like we've said a couple of times, if we're as pastors asking people to do things or we're preaching something that's contrary to that, then they ought to be able to appeal to the confession and to the scriptures to say, brother, I disagree with you.

So if that's not the kind of environment you find yourself in, or if your church has some just very vague, ambiguous statement of faith, and it always ends up being sort of the pastor's opinion versus your opinion, that's tough.

And may the Lord give you wisdom.

And what you may hear as well, we just believe what the Bible says here.

Yeah.

Which is biblicism. You know, a lot of times, that's just a different way to frame it. We believe we're Bible people here. Well, that's great. But what do you understand the Bible to teach?

That's better.

Right, okay. So then, but then another thing more specifically, maybe I do find myself in a church context where there is a confession or there is a statement of faith. That's pretty good. And I feel like I'm being bound in all of these ways that go beyond that pertaining to how I deal with my adult children or pertaining to how I school my kids.

Yeah, homeschool versus public school.

You know, come November, whatever. Then what I think I wanna do is have a thoughtful conversation with leadership and make an appeal to the scripture, make an appeal to the confession or the statement of faith.