I just got an email from my son-in-law Ben, to whom the credit for this insight belongs. He was responding to the current PCA embarrassment and, here . . . let him talk.
I was thinking about how for the last generation the thing that has always been presbyterianism’s real strength has been its intellectualism. Liberals could be intellectuals but unorthodox and evangelicals could be orthodox but were always goofy. The Reformed always managed to be orthodox and intellectually engaging. But with the death of Falwell and the retirement of that generation of evangelicalism, it seems like our presbyterians, with their willful ignorance on the FV issue, are shifting over to take the place of orthodox shallow thinkers. If that happens it is going to leave a real vacuum for orthodox believers looking for challenging thinkers . . .
This is a new angle for me. Perhaps these men are doing all this because they are applying for another job opening entirely. What Jim Jordan refers to as the closing of the Calvinistic mind may not be theological Alzheimers. It might be a career move.