Applying Progressive Covenantalism to the Errant Demands for Corporate Confession: My 2023 ETS Paper

ETS Paper Link:

Waking Up to Corporate Confession: What Scripture Does and Does Not Say About Corporate Guilt and Repentance

It has been some time since I have posted here. Actually, it has longer than I remembered (May 2023). But that does not mean writing has slowed. You can find regular content that I am writing and/or editing at Christ Over All, where for the last six months we have looked at a number of pertinent issues, including

• Civil Rights and Civil Wrongs
• Genesis 1–11
• Progressive Covenantalism
• Christian Nationalism
• And now, Toward Biblical Nationhood

At the same time, my new book Dividing the Faithful: How a Little Book on Race Fractured a Movement Founded on Grace released in September. This book responds to Michael Emerson and Christian Smith's book Divided by Faith. I believe their sociological study surveying black and white relations in the American church is poison pill. Undergirded by progressive views of culture and liberal theology, it leeched Critical Race Theory into the evangelical water supply. And churches, pastors, and scholars have been trying to catch up since. At the same time that I wrote Divided by Faith, I also wrote an article on the demand for white churches and their pastors to publicly confess their white supremacy and complicity in racism. These demands reached fever pitch in 2020, and to help our church think about these matters I wrote up the attached paper. It just so happens that my paper followed very closely to the progressive covenantalism advocated by Stephen Wellum and Peter Gentry. And so today, at the Evangelical Theological Society, I am reading this paper---or at least, a portion of it. You can find the whole thing here. And if you read it, let me know what you think. For a teaser, here's the opening page:

In 2020, the death of George Floyd touched off a series of questions about racism and corporate guilt, not to mention justice and the justice system. In churches across the country, decisions split as to the right public response. Similarly, academics took up the issue, albeit often in more popular platforms. For instance, Michael Rhodes asked online, “Should We Repent of Our Grandparents’ Racism?” And Kyle Dillon wrote for The Gospel Coalition, “Are We Held Accountable for the Sins of Our Forefathers?” In both articles, biblical theology was used to affirm the need for modern individuals to identify with the sins of their fathers.

What can be appreciated in these articles was the way these men applied Scripture, especially the Old Testament, to contemporary questions. What was problematic, however, was the way they made applications that did not address the covenantal differences between Israel and today. As Stephen Wellum has demonstrated in his chapter on doing ethics from the perspectives of Progressive Covenantalism, the Old Testament remains needful for instruction, correction, reproof, and training in righteousness (2 Tim. 3:16–17), but biblical ethicists must recognize covenantal differences when they apply God’s Word.

In this paper, I will pick up where Wellum left off and apply progressive covenantal categories to questions about corporate guilt and repentance. In particular, I will seek to answer some of the following questions:

• • Are new covenant believers responsible for the sins of their ancestors?
  • How should we apply Leviticus 26:40–44, which calls for the need to confess the sins of our fathers?
  • Do the corporate confessions of Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah call us to do the same?
  • How does the New Testament understand confession in the corporate sense?
  • And most specifically, if we were to turn the clock back to 2020, what might we say from Scripture about the practice of corporate confessions.

In what follows, I will answer these questions and show how progressive covenantalism provides a more robust biblical answer to ethical questions concerning corporate guilt, generational sin, and corporate repentance.

Again, you can keep going here. For now, I will keep working on writing and editing at Christ Over All. But Lord willing, in the near future, I will be back on this site to add more biblical and theological reflections. Until then . . . Soli Deo Gloria, ds