Presbyterian Church in America Beliefs

1. What the Presbyterian Church in America Is

The Presbyterian Church in America, usually abbreviated PCA, is an American Reformed denomination constituted in December 1973 by congregations that left the Presbyterian Church in the United States. Its constitution has two parts: the Westminster Confession of Faith with the Larger and Shorter Catechisms as its doctrinal standard, and the Book of Church Order as its book of government, discipline and worship. Every teaching elder, ruling elder and deacon in the PCA vows at ordination that he receives and adopts the Westminster Standards as containing the system of doctrine taught in Holy Scripture.

Three features distinguish the PCA from the other bodies in the Presbyterian family. It is confessional, meaning that its officers are bound to a defined text and are examined on it. It is complementarian, meaning that it restricts ordained office to men on the ground of the New Testament qualifications for elders and deacons. And it is evangelical in the sense that it inherited the church-planting and campus-mission energy of American evangelicalism, which is why a PCA congregation often looks and sounds nothing like a Scottish kirk while confessing the same seventeenth-century document.

The PCA is the largest of the conservative confessional Presbyterian denominations in the United States, larger than the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, and smaller than the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). It belongs to the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council, and it does not belong to the National Council of Churches or the World Council of Churches.

Comparative sizes above follow the membership statistics each denomination publishes for itself in the annual minutes of its own General Assembly. This page gives no membership figure of its own, because denominational totals move every year and a stale number is worse than none.

How This Page Relates to Our Presbyterian Hub

Presbyterian government, the office of ruling elder, the Disruption of 1843 and the wider map of Presbyterian bodies worldwide are covered in our guide to Presbyterian beliefs and churches, which also sets out the Catholic answer to the claim that bishop and elder are one New Testament office. The Westminster Confession itself, chapter by chapter, is treated in our guide to the Westminster Confession. This page stays on one denomination: how the PCA came to exist, what it requires of its officers, and how a Catholic should read it.

2. Why the PCA Was Founded in 1973

The PCA came out of a twenty-year conflict inside the Presbyterian Church in the United States, the southern Presbyterian denomination that had existed separately since the Civil War division of 1861. Conservatives in that church believed its seminaries, its Board of Christian Education and its mission agencies had moved away from the full truthfulness of Scripture and from the Westminster Standards, and that the leadership was steering toward reunion with the northern United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America on terms that would make the confessional position permanent minority opinion. The reunion they feared was completed in 1983, ten years after they left, forming the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

The Continuing Church Movement

Conservative opposition organised itself around institutions rather than around a single leader. The Presbyterian Journal, edited by G. Aiken Taylor, was the movement's paper. Presbyterian Churchmen United circulated a declaration of conservative commitments in 1969. A Steering Committee for a Continuing Presbyterian Church was formed in 1971, and its language matters for understanding the PCA's self-description: the founders described themselves as continuing the church the PCUS had been, and leaving behind an institution they judged to have departed from its own standards. The PCUS rejected that description, and a Catholic reader should be aware that both bodies claimed continuity.

The Issues Named at the Time

Four issues recur in the founding documents and in the addresses given at the first Assembly.

• Biblical authority. The founders held that the denomination's seminaries and literature had accommodated historical-critical conclusions that undercut the inerrancy of Scripture.
• Confessional subscription. They held that ministers were being ordained who did not in fact receive the Westminster Standards as the system of doctrine taught in Scripture.
• The ordination of women. The PCUS opened ordination as ruling elder and minister to women in 1964, and the conservatives regarded that as a departure from the New Testament qualifications for office.
• Ecclesiastical direction. They objected to the denomination's social and political pronouncements, to its ecumenical commitments, and to what they saw as an increasingly centralised bureaucracy.

The First General Assembly

Delegates from withdrawing congregations met at Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in December 1973 and constituted a new denomination. Jack Williamson, a ruling elder and attorney, was elected the first moderator, and Morton Smith served as the first Stated Clerk. The Assembly adopted the Westminster Standards in the American revision and set to work on a book of church order. The body first took the name National Presbyterian Church and changed it to Presbyterian Church in America at its second General Assembly in 1974, in part to avoid confusion with an existing congregation of that name in Washington.

Property and Departure

Congregations leaving the PCUS had to answer the property question, and the answers varied by state and by presbytery. Some congregations left with their buildings by negotiated release, some by civil litigation, and some walked away and started again in rented rooms. That history is worth naming because it shaped the PCA's temperament: a denomination whose founding congregations had paid a price for leaving tends to take subscription seriously and to watch its own institutions closely. The same instinct explains why questions about the drift of agencies and seminaries recur in PCA assemblies to this day.

3. Joining and Receiving: the RPCES in 1982

The PCA grew in its first decade by absorbing an older Reformed body through a procedure it calls joining and receiving. In 1982 the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod voted to dissolve itself into the PCA, and the PCA received it whole: ministers, congregations, and institutions. The RPCES itself had been formed in 1965 by the merger of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America, General Synod, which traced its line to the Scottish Covenanters, with the Evangelical Presbyterian Church that had separated from the Bible Presbyterian Church.

What the Merger Brought

Two institutions came with the RPCES and changed the PCA's centre of gravity. Covenant College, on Lookout Mountain in Georgia, became the denomination's college. Covenant Theological Seminary, in St. Louis, became its seminary. The RPCES also brought a northern and midwestern constituency into a denomination whose founding congregations were overwhelmingly southern, and it brought the theological lineage of Francis Schaeffer, who had been an RPCES minister and whose apologetic work at L'Abri shaped a generation of American evangelical converts to Reformed theology.

The Merger That Did Not Happen

The Orthodox Presbyterian Church was invited into the same 1982 joining and receiving and declined, its assembly falling short of the required vote. The OPC, founded in 1936 under J. Gresham Machen, remains a separate denomination in close fraternal relations with the PCA, and the two bodies share pulpits, transfer ministers and sit together in the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council. The differences between them are real and small: the OPC is generally stricter on subscription and more cautious about church-growth method, and the PCA is larger and more varied.

A reader trying to keep the American Presbyterian bodies straight will find the whole family tree, with the divisions each denomination came out of, in our guide to Presbyterian beliefs and churches.

4. What the PCA Believes

The PCA's doctrine is the Westminster Confession of Faith with the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, held in the American revision. Nothing in PCA teaching is peculiar to the PCA. What the denomination adds to the confessional tradition is the requirement that its officers actually hold the text and be examined on it, which is the point of the word confessional in its self-description.

Scripture

Westminster chapter 1 teaches that Holy Scripture is the only infallible rule of faith and practice, that the whole counsel of God is either expressly set down in Scripture or by good and necessary consequence deduced from it, and that the authority of Scripture depends on God alone rather than on the testimony of any man or church. The PCA holds that text without qualification and adds the vocabulary of inerrancy to it: its ministers are ordinarily expected to affirm that Scripture is without error in all it affirms. The Confession's canon is the sixty-six books, and chapter 1.3 states that the books commonly called Apocrypha are of no authority in the Church.

God, Decree and Election

Westminster chapter 3 teaches that God from all eternity did freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass, in a way that does not make God the author of sin and does not remove the liberty or contingency of second causes. It teaches that some men and angels are predestinated to everlasting life and others foreordained to everlasting death, and that the elect are chosen out of God's free grace without any foresight of faith or good works in them. The PCA holds this, and PCA preaching normally frames it pastorally, as assurance for the believer rather than as speculation about anyone else. The five points that summarise the Reformed position are set out in our guide to the five points of Calvinism, and the wider system in our guide to Calvinism.

Covenant Theology

Covenant theology is the frame the PCA reads the Bible in, and it explains several practices that puzzle outsiders. Westminster chapter 7 sets out a covenant of works with Adam and a covenant of grace in Christ, and chapter 27 teaches that the sacraments of the Old Testament and the New signify the same spiritual things. Circumcision applied to infants under the old covenant; baptism therefore applies to the infant children of believers under the new. In PCA teaching the baptism of a covenant child marks him as belonging to the covenant community and places an obligation on the parents and the congregation, and it asserts nothing about whether that child is already regenerate.

Justification and Assurance

Westminster chapter 11 teaches that God justifies the elect by pardoning their sins and accounting their persons righteous, not for anything wrought in them or done by them, but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ to them, faith being the instrument and itself the gift of God. Chapter 16 teaches that good works are the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith. Chapter 17 teaches the perseverance of the saints, and chapter 18 teaches that assurance is attainable in this life and may be shaken. Read together, these chapters answer the standard objection that Reformed doctrine licenses careless living: Westminster requires works and denies that they justify.

The Catholic Answer in Brief

The Catholic Church affirms with Westminster that salvation begins with God's initiative and that no one merits the grace of justification. The Council of Trent taught in its Decree on Justification that the sinner is justified freely, that nothing preceding justification merits it, and that faith is the beginning of human salvation. Where Trent and Westminster part is over whether justification includes the real interior renewal of the person, which the Catholic Church affirms, and over whether the justified can grow in that righteousness and can lose it by mortal sin, which the Catholic Church also affirms. The Catechism of the Catholic Church treats grace and justification in paragraphs 1987 to 2011. Our full treatment of the dispute is in our guide to faith and works, and the 1999 Lutheran and Catholic agreement that reframed parts of the argument is covered in our guide to the Joint Declaration on Justification.

On Scripture, the Catholic Church holds that Scripture and Tradition flow from the same divine wellspring and are received with equal devotion, and that the task of authentic interpretation is entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church, which serves the word rather than standing above it. That is the teaching of the Second Vatican Council in Dei Verbum 9 and 10. Paul told the Thessalonians to hold fast the traditions taught by word of mouth or by letter (2 Thessalonians 2:15), and the canon of Scripture itself was received from the Church's judgment rather than from a list inside the Bible. The full case is in our guide to Sacred Tradition and Scripture, and the question of the seven books Westminster excludes is treated in our guide to the deuterocanonical books.

5. Good Faith Subscription

Good faith subscription is the PCA's rule for how tightly an officer is bound to the Westminster Standards, and it is one of the few places where the denomination has genuinely legislated something of its own. The ordination vow asks a candidate to receive and adopt the Confession and Catechisms as containing the system of doctrine taught in Holy Scripture. The question every Presbyterian body has to answer is what happens when a candidate does not hold some particular sentence in it.

The Three Historic Options

Presbyterian bodies have answered that question in three ways. Strict subscription requires assent to every proposition of the Confession. Loose or system subscription requires assent only to a general Reformed outline, leaving wide latitude on the details. Good faith subscription, which the PCA adopted by constitutional amendment in the early 2000s, requires the candidate to state every difference he has with the Standards, and then requires the court to judge each stated difference.

How the Procedure Works

A candidate for ordination declares his differences to the presbytery in his own words. The presbytery then classifies each one. A difference may be judged merely semantic, in which case the candidate is held to agree with the Confession in substance. It may be judged a real difference that is neither out of accord with any fundamental of the system of doctrine nor striking at the vitals of religion, in which case the presbytery may allow it and must record it in its minutes. Or it may be judged hostile to the system or striking at the vitals of religion, in which case the candidate cannot be ordained. The presbytery's judgment is subject to review by the General Assembly through the ordinary process of reviewing presbytery records.

The differences most commonly stated and allowed concern the Confession's teaching on the Sabbath in chapter 21, particularly the prohibition of recreation on the Lord's Day, and the six days of creation in chapter 4. Differences on justification, on the Trinity or on the authority of Scripture would not survive.

The subscription procedure described here is set out in the PCA's own Book of Church Order, in the chapters on the ordination of teaching elders and on the election and ordination of ruling elders and deacons. The Book of Church Order is amended by the General Assembly with the advice and consent of the presbyteries, so a reader who needs the operative wording should consult the current edition the denomination publishes.

Why a Catholic Should Care About This

Good faith subscription is a live illustration of the problem the Reformation created for itself, and PCA officers discuss it in those terms. A church that holds Scripture as its only infallible rule still needs a way to say what Scripture teaches, so it writes a confession. The confession is then declared subordinate to Scripture, so the church needs a rule for how far an officer may depart from it. That rule is then itself contested, so the church needs a court to apply it, and the court's decisions accumulate into a body of precedent that functions rather like a magisterium with none of the claims of one. The Catholic answer is that Christ gave the Church a living teaching office precisely because texts require authoritative interpreters (Matthew 18:17-18, Acts 15:28), and that a confession without such an office postpones the problem rather than solving it. The point is made without triumph: Catholics have their own history of contested interpretation, and the argument is about where the final word rests.

6. How the PCA Governs Itself

The PCA is governed by three courts rather than the four that the older Presbyterian pattern allowed. Authority rests in the session of each congregation, the presbytery of each region, and the General Assembly of the whole denomination. The PCA has never erected synods between presbytery and Assembly, which keeps the structure flat and gives presbyteries a large role.

The Session

The session is the court of the local congregation, composed of the teaching elder or elders and the ruling elders elected by the congregation. It receives and dismisses members, examines children and adults who wish to profess faith and come to the Lord's Supper, oversees worship, exercises discipline, and directs the work of the congregation. In PCA practice the pastor moderates the session and holds a single vote in it, so a PCA pastor governs alongside the ruling elders rather than over them.

The Presbytery

The presbytery is the court that ordains. It is composed of all the teaching elders within its bounds and ruling elders commissioned by the sessions, and it examines candidates, ordains and installs ministers, receives and dismisses ministers, organises and dissolves congregations, hears appeals from sessions, and takes original jurisdiction over its ministers in discipline. A PCA minister's membership is in the presbytery rather than in his congregation, which is the structural point that distinguishes presbyterian government from congregational government. Alongside its geographic presbyteries the PCA has Korean-language presbyteries, which is how a denomination with a substantial Korean-speaking constituency keeps courts that can conduct business in the language its members actually speak.

The General Assembly

The General Assembly meets annually and is composed of commissioners sent by the presbyteries, both teaching and ruling elders. It receives reports from the denomination's committees and agencies, hears appeals and complaints through its Standing Judicial Commission, erects study committees, and proposes amendments to the constitution. An amendment to the Book of Church Order approved by the Assembly does not take effect until the presbyteries have given their advice and consent by the required majority and a later Assembly has declared it adopted. That two-stage process is why PCA constitutional change is slow and why a controversial amendment can pass an Assembly and still fail.

The Agencies

The PCA's work outside the local congregation runs through committees and agencies answerable to the General Assembly. Mission to the World is the foreign mission agency. Mission to North America handles church planting and domestic ministry. Reformed University Fellowship is the campus ministry, and it is one of the main routes by which the PCA has grown among students. The Committee on Discipleship Ministries handles Christian education. Covenant College and Covenant Theological Seminary are the denomination's college and seminary, both received from the RPCES in 1982. Reformed Theological Seminary, where many PCA ministers train, is an independent institution rather than a denominational agency.

What Presbyterian Government Denies

Presbyterian government rests on the claim that the New Testament words episkopos and presbyteros name one office, so there is no order of bishop above the presbyter and ordination belongs to the presbytery acting as a body. The Catholic Church answers that the episcopate is the fullness of the sacrament of Holy Orders, received from the apostles and handed on by the laying on of hands, as the Second Vatican Council taught in Lumen Gentium 21, and that Ignatius of Antioch was already writing about bishop, presbyters and deacons as three distinct things within a generation of the apostles. Both arguments are set out at length, with the texts on both sides, in our guides to Presbyterian beliefs and churches and the Catholic priesthood.

7. The PCA's Complementarian Order

The PCA ordains only men. Its Book of Church Order sets out two ordained offices, elder and deacon, with the eldership held in the two orders of teaching elder and ruling elder, and it requires that the officers of the Church be male members of the congregation. That restriction was one of the reasons the denomination came into existence in 1973. Complementarian is the word the PCA and its allies use for the position: men and women are equal in dignity and in salvation, and the offices of teaching and rule in the Church are restricted to qualified men.

The Texts the PCA Cites

The argument rests on three passages, read together. In 1 Timothy 2:12 Paul writes that he does not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man, and grounds it in the order of creation rather than in local custom. In 1 Timothy 3 the overseer and the deacon are each described as the husband of one wife, managing his own household well. In Titus 1:6 the same qualification is repeated for the elders Titus is to appoint in every town. PCA writers add 1 Corinthians 11:3 on headship and 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 on order in the assembly, and they argue that the restriction is a matter of created order and therefore not culturally reversible.

What Women Do in the PCA

Stating this accurately matters, because the caricature of a complementarian denomination is that women do nothing. In the PCA women teach women and children, direct women's ministries, serve on the mission field through Mission to the World, work in campus ministry, counsel, administer congregations, sing and play in worship, and are frequently the most visible workers in a congregation's mercy ministry. What is closed to them is ordination and the government of the congregation.

The Deaconess Question

The one place where PCA practice varies is the diaconate. Some congregations appoint women as unordained deaconesses, or as commissioned assistants to the deacons, on the ground of Romans 16:1, where Paul commends Phoebe as a diakonos of the church at Cenchreae, and of 1 Timothy 3:11, which some read as describing women in the diaconal work. Other congregations and presbyteries hold that any such appointment blurs an ordained office and should not be permitted. The General Assembly erected an ad interim committee on women serving in the ministry of the church, which reported in 2017; its recommendations were advisory and the constitutional rule on ordination was not changed. The question recurs at Assemblies.

The Catholic Comparison, Which Is Not a Simple One

Catholics reading the PCA position often assume Rome agrees straightforwardly, and the picture is more mixed than that. The Catholic Church reserves priestly ordination to men, and John Paul II taught in the 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis that the Church has no authority whatever to confer priestly ordination on women; the Catechism of the Catholic Church states the same in paragraph 1577. On that point the two bodies agree in conclusion while reasoning differently, since the Catholic argument runs through the priest acting in the person of Christ the head and the choice of the Twelve rather than through a general rule about teaching and authority.

The differences follow immediately. The Catholic Church has no office of ruling elder, so the question of lay government does not arise in the same form; Catholic laywomen serve as chancellors of dioceses, as canon lawyers, as theologians, as heads of Vatican offices, and as superiors of religious institutes with real jurisdiction over their members. Catholic women preach in many settings short of the liturgical homily, and four women are among the Doctors of the Church: Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, Therese of Lisieux and Hildegard of Bingen. On the female diaconate the Catholic Church has not settled the historical question and has appointed study commissions on it, which is a different posture from the PCA's. A Catholic and a PCA elder agree that ordination to the priesthood or the presbyterate is for men, and they do not agree on much else about the place of women in church governance.

8. Worship and the Two Sacraments

The PCA holds two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, on the Westminster ground that only these two were instituted by Christ in the Gospel. Confirmation, penance, orders, marriage and anointing are honoured as good things and denied the name of sacrament. Westminster chapter 27 defines a sacrament as a holy sign and seal of the covenant of grace, and the PCA's Book of Church Order carries the directory for administering both.

Baptism

The PCA baptises the infant children of believing parents and adults who come to faith, ordinarily by sprinkling or pouring, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Westminster chapter 28 teaches that baptism is a sacrament of admission into the visible Church, a sign and seal of the covenant of grace, of engrafting into Christ and of regeneration, and it states plainly that grace is not so tied to the moment of administration that no one can be saved without it or that everyone baptised is regenerated. Baptism is administered once and never repeated.

The Catholic Church recognises PCA baptism as valid, since it is performed with water and the Trinitarian formula by someone intending to do what the Church does. That recognition is practical rather than theoretical: a PCA member received into the Catholic Church is not baptised again. Where the two churches differ is over what baptism accomplishes. The Catholic Church teaches that baptism truly effects what it signifies, remitting original sin and all personal sins, conferring sanctifying grace and configuring the person to Christ (CCC 1262 to 1274), while Westminster keeps a distance between the sign and the grace it seals. Our guide to baptism works through the texts.

The Lord's Supper

Westminster chapter 29 teaches that worthy receivers really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally but spiritually, receive and feed upon Christ crucified. The bread and wine remain in substance bread and wine. The chapter denies transubstantiation in strong terms and calls the Mass abominable in its account of the sacrifice. Calvin's own emphasis is preserved: the believer at the table is genuinely fed on Christ by the Holy Spirit, and the sacrament is a real means of grace rather than a bare memorial, which distinguishes the Reformed position from the Zwinglian and Baptist ones.

Practice in the PCA varies. Some congregations celebrate weekly, more commonly monthly, and some quarterly. The table is ordinarily fenced by an invitation to baptised Christians who have professed faith and are members in good standing of an evangelical church, with the session responsible for admitting its own members. Children are admitted after the session examines their profession of faith, and paedocommunion, the practice of admitting baptised infants to the table, is not permitted in the PCA.

The Catholic Church teaches that by the consecration the whole substance of the bread becomes the Body of Christ and the whole substance of the wine his Blood, the appearances of bread and wine remaining, and that Christ is present whole and entire under each species (CCC 1373 to 1381). The Church holds the Mass to be the same sacrifice as Calvary offered in an unbloody manner, a re-presentation rather than a repetition, which answers the objection Westminster 29 raises. Our guide to the Eucharist sets out the case from John 6, 1 Corinthians 10 and 11, and the earliest Christian writers.

The Style of PCA Worship

PCA worship covers a wide range, and a visitor should expect variety. Westminster chapter 21 holds the regulative principle, that the acceptable way of worshipping God is instituted by God himself and limited by his own revealed will, and PCA congregations interpret that principle broadly enough to accommodate hymns, contemporary songs, choirs, organs and bands. A typical service includes a call to worship, congregational singing, confession of sin and assurance of pardon, Scripture reading, a sermon of substantial length that is the centre of the service, prayer, an offering, and the Lord's Supper when it is celebrated. The Directory for Worship in the Book of Church Order is largely advisory, with the sections governing the administration of the sacraments carrying constitutional force.

Descriptions of PCA worship practice here are drawn from the denomination's own constitutional documents, the Westminster Confession as the PCA holds it and the Book of Church Order. Frequency of communion and musical style vary by congregation and are set by each session, so the only reliable guide to a particular church is that church.

9. What the PCA Leaves Open

A confessional denomination binds its officers on a defined list and leaves everything else free, and knowing which questions the PCA leaves open prevents a lot of misunderstanding. Three areas in particular are open where outsiders often assume they are closed.

The Days of Creation

The PCA permits several readings of Genesis 1 among its officers. A study committee reported to the General Assembly in 2000 on the days of creation, surveying the calendar-day view, the day-age view, the framework view and the analogical-day view, and concluded that each had been held within the Reformed tradition and that none should be a bar to ordination. Presbyteries examine candidates on the point and record stated differences from the Confession's language, and candidates holding any of these views are ordained. The PCA holds firmly to the historicity of Adam and Eve as the first human pair and to the historical fall. Our guide to creation gives the Catholic position, and our guide to science and faith covers the wider question.

Eschatology

The Westminster Standards teach the second coming, the resurrection of the dead and the last judgment, and they take no position on the millennium. PCA ministers accordingly hold amillennial, postmillennial and historic premillennial views. Dispensationalism, with its separate programmes for Israel and the Church and its pretribulation rapture, sits awkwardly with covenant theology and is uncommon in the PCA, though the denomination has not legislated against it. A reader who wants the Catholic reading of the thousand years should see our guide to the millennium, and our guide to the rapture explains why the Catholic Church and most historic Protestant confessions reject the dispensationalist scheme.

Politics and Social Questions

The PCA holds the spirituality of the church, a southern Presbyterian doctrine that the church as an institution should confine itself to what Scripture commits to it and refrain from pronouncing on questions of civil policy. In practice the denomination has spoken on abortion, on marriage and on racial reconciliation, and it declines to speak on most legislative questions. That restraint is a deliberate inheritance rather than indifference, and it distinguishes the PCA from denominations that issue regular policy statements.

What Is Not Open

The list of closed questions is short and firm. The Trinity, the deity and bodily resurrection of Christ, the inerrancy of Scripture, justification by faith alone through the imputed righteousness of Christ, the two sacraments, the male officership, and the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman are all settled. The 2007 General Assembly received a study committee report on the Federal Vision and New Perspective theologies and declared several of their propositions out of accord with the Westminster Standards, particularly those touching the covenant of works, the imputation of Christ's active obedience and the ground of justification. Ministers holding those views have since been tried or have left.

10. Chapter 25.6 and the Papacy

The original 1646 text of Westminster chapter 25, section 6, states that there is no other head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ, that the Pope of Rome cannot in any sense be head of it, and that he is that Antichrist, that man of sin and son of perdition, that exalts himself in the Church against Christ and all that is called God. The PCA does not confess that last clause. Its edition of the Confession is the American revision, in which the sentence identifying the Pope as antichrist has been removed, leaving the denial that the Pope is head of the Church.

What the PCA Actually Confesses

Two things stand in the PCA's text and both should be stated exactly. First, that Christ alone is head of the Church, a sentence a Catholic can affirm in the sense the Catholic Church intends it, since Catholic teaching holds Christ to be the head of his body and the pope to be his vicar and the visible principle of unity among the bishops. Second, that the Pope of Rome cannot in any sense be head of the Church, which is a direct denial of the papal claim and is where the disagreement is real. American Presbyterians revised the Confession in stages. The 1788 revision rewrote chapter 23 on the civil magistrate, removing the powers over the church that the seventeenth-century text had given the state, and the clause naming the Pope as antichrist was dropped from chapter 25 in a later American amendment.

How a Presbytery Handles an Officer Who Holds the Old Clause

Because the antichrist clause is absent from the PCA's constitutional text, the question of what to do with a minister who holds it is a question about private opinion rather than about subscription. A candidate is examined on what the Confession says as the PCA holds it, so believing something the Confession no longer states creates no difference to declare and no exception to record. In practice a PCA presbytery examining a candidate who volunteered a historicist identification of the papacy with the man of sin would treat it as a private eschatological opinion outside the Standards, and the candidate's ordination would turn on his answers about Scripture, justification and the sacraments. Some smaller Presbyterian bodies do retain the seventeenth-century wording, and there the clause is confessional.

Why This Matters for Catholic Readers

Quoting the 1646 text at a PCA elder is arguing with a document he does not hold, and it wastes the conversation. The productive question is the second clause, whether the Bishop of Rome holds the office Catholics claim for him. The Catholic case rests on Christ giving Simon a new name and the keys of the kingdom with the power of binding and loosing (Matthew 16:18-19), on the charge to strengthen his brothers (Luke 22:32) and to feed the sheep (John 21:15-17), and on the way the early Church treated the Roman see. Our guide to the papacy makes that case, and our guide to the antichrist covers how the Fathers read 2 Thessalonians 2 and why this site holds firmly that no living person is ever to be identified as the antichrist.

11. The PCA's Own Live Debates

The PCA argues with itself in public every June at its General Assembly, and its debates are worth knowing because they explain what the denomination is becoming. Reporting them accurately is the point here; a Catholic site has no business scoring points off another church's internal conflicts.

Race and the 1973 Inheritance

The PCA has confronted the racial history of the church it came out of. The 2002 General Assembly adopted a resolution on racial reconciliation. The 2016 Assembly, meeting in Mobile, adopted a further resolution confessing the denomination's and its founders' failures during the civil rights era, including the sin of segregation in congregations and the failure to oppose it. An ad interim committee on racial and ethnic reconciliation reported in 2018 with recommendations on church planting, leadership development and congregational practice. Some in the denomination judge the process complete, others judge it unfinished, and the argument continues.

Resolutions and study committee reports named in this section are recorded in the Minutes of the PCA General Assembly for the years given, which the denomination publishes. Dates and titles here should be checked against those minutes before being quoted in any formal setting.

Sexuality and the Officer Qualifications

The most contested question of the last decade has concerned how the PCA describes and ordains men who experience same-sex attraction while holding the denomination's teaching on chastity. An ad interim study committee on human sexuality was erected in 2019 and issued its report in 2020, and the General Assembly received that report in 2021. It affirmed the traditional teaching on marriage and chastity and gave pastoral guidance on identity language. Amendments to the Book of Church Order on officer qualifications were approved by the General Assembly in 2021 and failed to secure the required consent of the presbyteries. A revised amendment approved the following year was ratified by the presbyteries and declared part of the constitution. The debate has continued at subsequent Assemblies over enforcement and over the language officers may use about themselves.

Ecclesiology and Method

A quieter argument runs through the denomination about method. One tendency, associated with urban church planting and with the ministry model Timothy Keller developed at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, emphasises cultural engagement, contextualised preaching and mercy ministry in cities. Another tendency emphasises confessional precision, traditional worship and denominational discipline, and worries that contextualisation costs more in doctrine than it gains in attendance. Most PCA congregations sit somewhere between the two, and every Assembly reflects the tension.

The Structural Question Underneath

These debates share a structure worth noticing. In each case the denomination must decide what its confession requires on a question the confession does not directly address, and the deciding is done by an assembly of elders voting, then by presbyteries ratifying, then by courts applying. Catholics watching should recognise the difficulty rather than enjoy it. Every Christian body faces new questions and must answer them from an inheritance that did not anticipate them. The Catholic Church answers through a magisterium it holds to be divinely assisted, and the PCA answers through the deliberation of its courts under Scripture. Which account is true is the argument between us, and it is not an argument about whether the questions are hard.

12. Where a Catholic and a PCA Presbyterian Differ

A Catholic and a PCA Presbyterian share the Nicene faith, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the bodily resurrection of Christ, the authority of Scripture, the necessity of grace, and a common baptism the Catholic Church recognises as valid. The differences are serious and they are specific. The table below sets each one out in the terms each body uses for itself.

The PCA column quotes the Westminster Confession as the PCA holds it, in the American revision, with chapter numbers given. The Catholic column cites the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Second Vatican Council. Neither column is a paraphrase written to lose the argument for the other side; readers who want the primary texts should read both.

Where the Two Bodies Actually Meet

Formal dialogue between the Catholic Church and Reformed Christians runs through the World Communion of Reformed Churches, which the PCA does not belong to, so there is no PCA and Vatican dialogue as such. What exists instead is local: PCA and Catholic congregations working together on crisis pregnancy centres, food banks, disaster relief and religious liberty cases. The Second Vatican Council's Decree on Ecumenism calls Protestant Christians separated brethren who are joined to the Catholic Church in a real though imperfect communion by their baptism and their faith in Christ, and it asks Catholics to recognise the genuine Christian life among them. Our guide to ecumenism sets out what that recognition does and does not mean, and our guide to Catholic and Protestant differences gives the broader comparison.

13. What a Catholic Reader Should Do With This

Most people who reach a page like this are in one of three situations: a Catholic with PCA friends or in-laws, a PCA member reading the Catholic account of his own church, or someone moving between the two. The practical advice differs for each, and it starts in the same place, which is accuracy.

If You Are a Catholic Talking to a PCA Presbyterian

Learn what he actually holds before answering it. Read Westminster chapters 11, 25, 28 and 29 in the American revision, since those are the four that carry the live disagreements. Do not quote the 1646 antichrist clause, which his church removed. Do not accuse Reformed doctrine of licensing sin, since Westminster 16 requires good works as the evidence of faith. Do not assume that faith alone means the Reformed believer expects no change in himself, since Westminster 13 teaches sanctification. Ask instead about the two questions that carry the weight: how a church without a teaching office knows which reading of Scripture is the right one, and what happens at the table on Sunday.

If You Are in the PCA and Reading This

You have been described here from your own constitutional documents, and the Catholic answers have been given plainly. The Catholic Church regards your baptism as valid, your faith in Christ as real, and your congregation as a place where the Gospel is preached. The Catholic Church also holds that the fullness of the means of salvation is found in the visible communion governed by the successor of Peter, which is a claim you deny and which we have set out with its texts rather than assumed. If you want the Catholic case at full strength, our guides to the Eucharist, the papacy, Sacred Tradition and faith and works are the four to read, in that order.

If You Are Moving Between Them

A PCA member entering the Catholic Church is not baptised again. He makes a profession of faith, is confirmed and receives the Eucharist, ordinarily after a period of preparation with a parish. A Catholic joining a PCA congregation is received by the session on profession of faith. In both directions, families are involved and the decision costs something, and neither church regards a change of communion as a small matter. Do it slowly, do it with the primary texts in front of you, and talk to a priest and a pastor rather than to the internet.

The Urgency Underneath the Argument

No one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32), and the question of where the Church is that Christ founded is not one to postpone indefinitely because it is uncomfortable. Christ prayed that his disciples would all be one so that the world might believe (John 17:21), and division among Christians is a wound that ordinary believers can do something about by learning the other side well enough to argue with it honestly and by praying for unity. Start on that today rather than next year.

14. Related Topics