If we are to move beyond the theological impasse tearing at our church today, it may be wise to revisit the lessons American Presbyterians have learned over the decades concerning the confessional nature of the church. That there is a dispute about Presbyterian confessional identity today is nothing new. Such disagreement goes all the way back to the colonial experience. From the early 1700s there were two ways of thinking of Presbyterian confessional identity.
One party demanded strict doctrinal subscription to the Westminster Confession, together with a tight form of discipline. There was another party, however, that felt a literal subscription to a confessional document was a poor substitute for living with one’s confession. Led by the man who was to become Princeton’s first president, Jonathan Dickinson, many in this party were steeped in the new spiritual revival unleashed in the Great Awakening. Dickinson himself adopted a nuanced, moderate view toward the revivals. Dickinson and his colleagues argued that, instead of demanding subscription, candidates for ordination should be examined by presbytery in the nuances and details of their theological beliefs — a practice, of course, that has been carried forward to the present day. The concern of the non-subscriptionists was by no means to avoid doctrinal integrity, but rather to insist upon it. They insisted that the integrity of confession was to be found in lived experience.
As a theologian of the church, Jonathan Dickinson was second only to the great Jonathan Edwards in insisting on what we today would call a “constructive” form of theology, bound to what they were calling an “experimental” brand of religion. A theology of the living God must be alive to the exigencies of the present day. In the preface to his masterpiece, Freedom of the Will, Jonathan Edwards owned that his theological work resonated with that of John Calvin but did not simply repristinate it: “I should not take it at all amiss,” Edwards proclaimed, “to be called a Calvinist, for distinction’s sake: though I utterly disclaim a dependence on Calvin, or believing the doctrines which I hold, because he believed and taught them.”
In the Adopting Act of 1729, which is one of the founding documents of our church, early Presbyterians tried to accommodate the concerns of both sides of this subscriptionist-constructivist debate. That is, they did not choose one side or the other but reached a consensus that attended to the concerns of both subscriptionists and non-subscriptionists. On the one hand, there were to be doctrinal standards for Presbyterian ministers based in the Westminster Confession. On the other hand, candidates were not asked to subscribe to the confession literally but only to its “essential and necessary articles.” In addition, candidates were permitted to express any “scruples” they may have had concerning those “articles not essential and necessary in doctrine, worship, or government.” It was up to the presbytery to judge whether a particular candidate’s “scruples” fell inside or outside the boundary of what was acceptable.
Learning from the Past
It would be a grave mistake if Presbyterians today were to forget this mediating history and force people to choose one side or the other of this perennial debate, for the history of Presbyterian controversy teaches a third way: it teaches that the church needs what is true on both sides of the subscriptionist-constructivist divide in order to fulfill its mission and to thrive. There are confessional standards, and they need ongoing interpretation in light of the ongoing proclamation of the Word in the Spirit.
Just as the disputes of Presbyterians today exhibit both a theological and a polity aspect, the same was true of our colonial forebears. What they were arguing about materially was the legitimacy of experimental knowledge of Christ versus adherence to doctrinal orthodoxy. Then as now, the polity dispute centered on the authority of the presbytery to ordain. (On this point see Sidney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, p. 271.)
Notwithstanding the artful balance achieved in the 1729 Adopting Act, tensions continued and hardened into the “Old Side-New Side” schism. Many of the revivalist, “New Side” pastors were home-grown and some of them lacked the European or New England educations of their more doctrinaire “Old Side” compatriots. This led the Old Side to worry about ordination standards and a potential dilution in qualifications for the ministry. For their part, New Side ministers appealed to experience of the Spirit; preached the necessity of narrating a conversion experience; and provoked a frenzy of irritation when Gilbert Tennant questioned whether the Old Side truly had a converted ministry. The tensions came to a head in 1741 when the Old Side imperiously sought, without due process, to remove New Side ministers unless they strictly subscribed to the Westminster standards. This insistence on subscription prompted the New Side to withdraw, whereupon they formed the New Brunswick Presbytery. In sympathy with the New Side and concerned about the lack of due process, ministers from New York in 1745 withdrew from the Philadelphia Synod to form the New York Synod. Though they formed an allegiance with the New Side, their ultimate goal was to bring the New Side back into the fold and effect reconciliation. The efforts of these early moderates paid off, and reconciliation was finally achieved in 1758.
Several features of this reconciliation are important as we consider what is going on today.
First, peace was found through a return to the equilibrium achieved by the Adopting Act, which is to say there was no resort to strict subscriptionism.
Second, the principle was reiterated that the power of ordination centered in the discretion of the presbytery.
Third, there was a clear affirmation of religious experience as forged in the revivals.
Fourth, those who could not submit to church authority were to “peaceably withdraw” and to do so “without attempting to make any schism.” However, the duty to withdraw extended “only to such determination as the [governing] body shall judge indispensable in doctrine or Presbyterian government.” In other words, disagreement over non-essential matters should not precipitate a breach of fellowship.
Fifth, it was considered by many to be out-of-bounds for anyone to accuse a minister of doctrinal or moral error without going to the person in private first, and only then was a resort to the church courts appropriate.
Another major schism occurred in 1837. Again the controversy pitted a sub-scriptionist party (what came to be called the “Old School”) against a more moderate group (the “New School”) that did not want differences in doctrine to undermine the church’s mission on the Western frontier. In 1801 Presbyterians and Congregationalists had agreed to work together in this new mission field. However, over time this arrangement became suspect to the Old School, especially because they felt it tended to further dilute adherence to Westminster. Then in 1836 the General Assembly acquitted the theologian, biblical commentator and pastor Albert Barnes of a heresy conviction that had been entered the previous year. (Barnes held views considered “Arminian,” including the view that “original” sin meant only that sin was universal and not a particular view about the transmission of original guilt.) The acquittal further inflamed conservative tempers. In addition to this, a growing anti-slavery sentiment among some of the revivalists in the New School drove the Southern presbyteries politically into the arms of kindred spirits in the Old School, thus setting up a showdown in the 1837 General Assembly.
Taking advantage of their growing alliance with the voting power of the South, conservatives at the 1837 Assembly secured the repeal of the 1801 Plan of Union and, by unconstitutionally making the repeal retroactive, were able in one fell swoop to expel 4 synods, 28 presbyteries, 509 ministers and some 60,000 members. Incensed by this action, the remaining New School ministers responded by withdrawing and publishing a defense of their theological position in the “Auburn Declaration” (not to be confused with the later “Auburn Affirmation”). The next year there would be two General Assemblies meeting in Philadelphia, each claiming to be the true Presbyterian Church.
That the Old School’s majority came only with the support of the pro-slavery Southern vote is something worth pondering. There was strong anti-slavery sentiment in some corners of the New School, including Albert Barnes and the revivalist Charles Finney. Others were outright abolitionists. The church as a whole, however, favored a more moderate, gradual approach to the issue. Yet the center could not hold. In 1857 a split occurred between North and South in the New School church, and in 1861 the Old School body divided along sectional lines. Now there were four Presbyterian Churches! At the close of the Civil War the southern branches of what would become the Presbyterian Church, U.S., came together. And in 1869 the Northern elements of the Old and New schools reunited to form the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. It was not until 1983, however, that the Southern church — the old PCUS — was reunited with its estranged Northern partner — the UPCUSA.
The Lessons of the 1920s and 1967
In the Northern church another major controversy came to a boiling point in the 1920s, a controversy that has received a good bit of attention lately. The seeds of this dispute had been planted in the late 19th century in another conservative push for strict doctrinal conformity. In 1892 the General Assembly in the PCUSA adopted the “inerrancy” theory of the authority of Scripture advanced by Charles Hodge and Benjamin B. Warfield of Princeton Seminary. According to this view, the Scriptures were claimed to be “without error,” at least in the original autographs. This new “Princeton” theology, centered now in the seminary rather than in the college, pointed the church in a different direction from the original non-subscriptionist Princeton theology of Jonathan Dickinson.
The hard edge to which the emerging form of conservatism was prone led to heresy trials and the removal of several noted scholars from the Presbyterian ministry. Foremost among these was Charles Briggs, Old Testament professor at Union Seminary in New York, who was suspended from the ministry by the PCUSA GA in 1893. Among Briggs’s “heresies” was the denial that Moses was the author of all five books of the Pentateuch and his positing a multiple authorship of the book of Isaiah — beliefs that are standard and largely non-controversial among most biblical faculties today. That very same year, to give some sense of the mindset of the day, the PCUS declared dancing to be grounds for excommunication.
In 1910 the PCUSA Assembly carried the effort to tighten the reins on confession a step further, listing five doctrines that were considered to be “essential and necessary” for ordination. These five articles, reiterated by the General Assembly in 1916 and 1923, were: scriptural inerrancy; the Virgin Birth (more accurately, the virginal conception of Jesus); the “satisfaction” theory of atonement (i.e., Jesus died to satisfy divine justice concerning humanity’s sin); the bodily resurrection of Jesus; and the reality of Jesus’ miracles. This new Presbyterian fundamentalism had the result, ironically, of turning the focus away from the whole witness of the Scriptures and toward a narrow set of theories about that witness. This was not only subscriptionism but subscriptionism in its narrowest and most reductionist form.
In 1924, 1,274 ministers signed the “Auburn Affirmation,” rejecting the right of the General Assembly to define what is essential and necessary. It was not so much that the signers were out to reject biblical authority, the resurrection, etc. as that they rejected attempts to define these matters in a singular way. Just as the New Side had withdrawn in the 18th century to protest a subscriptionism without due process, so now liberals were making implicit threats to withdraw over a subscriptionism without due attention to the dynamism of the gospel.
As is now well known, a resolution to this conflict was forged by the so-called 1925 Special Commission. The commission argued that the confessional unity of the Presbyterian Church consists neither in the doctrinal uniformity of sub-scriptionism nor in a loose connection-alism; rather, the church is a spiritual body in which the membership is united in a single Head, who is Jesus Christ. As a corollary, it affirmed the element of truth contained in both sides: both unity and diversity are necessary. The net result was the reaffirmation of the presbytery as the authoritative seat of ordination decisions, denying to the General Assembly the power to impose upon the presbyteries a definition of “necessary and essential articles.”
In addition, the Special Commission advanced the same view of the Adopting Act that I have lifted up here, namely that its language of “essential and necessary articles” was an effort to weave together the concerns of both strict subscriptionists and constructivists. As the Special Commission put it, the Adopting Act’s phraseology “was a conciliatory measure designed to bridge a chasm between minds which otherwise could not meet.” Much more than a mere “compromise,” this “conciliatory” phrase was crafted with a special wisdom, for it was a formula by which the presbytery was to exercise discernment in individual cases. That is, the language of “essential and necessary articles” was meant not to dilute the church’s confession but to strengthen it. A candidate was not to come before presbytery and assent to a list of doctrines; the candidate was asked to affirm those articles essential and necessary to a comprehensive “system of doctrine” (as the ordination vows then read) as taught in the Scriptures. To affirm the articles was one thing, to explicate and interpret them was a different matter altogether. For example, belief in reconciliation or atonement would arguably be essential and necessary to Christian belief, but there is more than one legitimate way to understand or make sense of that belief, as the diversity of the Scriptures themselves attest.
Although the Special Commission dealt specifically with whether the GA had authority to name essential articles, the rationale for the commission’s judgment would also seem to extend to presbyteries themselves. To be sure, the presbyteries exercise discretion as to whether a candidate has denied any beliefs that are essential and necessary. But if the language of “necessary and essential articles” is, as the Special Commission seems to suggest, an interpretive lens through which to discern whether a candidate embraces the theological witness of the Scriptures, then it would be a contradiction for a presbytery, no less than a General Assembly, to generate a list of articles in the manner of a shibboleth. That some presbyteries in our own day are either doing this or considering doing this is cause for serious concern. In the words of the commission, as applied to the General Assembly, it would be one thing for that body “to decide that, in view of all the conditions surrounding this particular case, the opinions which the candidate holds are not such as fit him [or her] for the office of the ministry . . . but this is quite different from deciding, as a general proposition, that certain articles, when considered abstractly and logically, are essential and necessary to the system of doctrine contained in Holy Scripture.” In other words, it is a misunderstanding of the living nature of biblical theology to impose essential tenets in the abstract. Any particular candidate’s articulation of the gospel — just as any given sermon — can be a faithful explication of Scripture without any reference at all to a certain doctrinal theory.
In addition, the commission was concerned about lists that were extra-confessional and ad hoc. Given its dynamic way of understanding the “essential and necessary articles” language, the Special Commission went on to declare that if ever a governing body were to “declare broadly that an article is essential and necessary, it would be required to quote the exact language of the article as it appears in the Confession of Faith. It could not paraphrase the language nor use other terms than those employed within the Constitution, much less could it erect into essential and necessary articles doctrines which are only derived as inferences from the statements of the Confession” (all quotes from Report of the Special Commission of 1925 to the General Assembly). To put it succinctly, it is only the church’s confessional literature itself that forms the basis of an examination of a particular person’s theology and not a set of formulas generated ad hoc and at a distance from what has already united the church confessionally.
It is often said that the consensus struck in the 1920s broadened the church by making it more inclusive, and in particular by making a place for theological liberals (see Lefferts Loetscher’s influential book, The Broadening Church). There is truth in this characterization, though it did so not by changing the confessional basis of Presbyterianism but by calling Presbyterianism back to its earliest roots in the Adopting Act. If what the consensus of the 1920s called for was a broadening, it was also a deepening. The claim being advanced today that the decision of the 1920s bequeathed to the church a watered-down or vague confessional identity needs to be challenged. The truth is just the reverse. The 1920s consensus enabled the church to regain its original confessional equilibrium.
What the consensus of the 1920s achieved in the PCUSA regarding polity, the Confession of 1967 (C-67) and the adoption of a Book of Confessions has now achieved for the whole church regarding theology. Whereas the polity consensus turned the church’s attention back to the Adopting Act of the 18th century, C-67 under the leadership of Edward A. Dowey Jr. turned its attention back to the fountainhead of Reformed theology in the 16th century. From its beginnings, Reformed theology had no unitary doctrinal norm along the lines of the Lutheran Formula of Concord (1577) and Book of Concord (1580). Instead, Reformed theology was distinguished, in part, by its diversity of confessions. In Zürich, to name just one example, the Second Helvetic Confession articulated a symbolic rather than an instrumental understanding of the Lord’s Supper, as prevailed in Geneva.
In keeping with a dynamic understanding of what constitutes the church, then, Reformed theology should never be understood as a closed body of doctrine. For this reason the Book of Confessions includes a range of witnesses to the gospel through the centuries. That confessional witness is central, but it is also provisional and open to revision. Thus, C-67 declares that “no one type of confession is exclusively valid, no one statement is irreformable” (Book of Confessions, 9.03). Similarly, the Book of Order holds that “[t]he church, in obedience to Jesus Christ, is open to the reform of its standards of doctrine as well as of governance. The church affirms Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, that is ‘The church reformed, always reforming,’ according to the Word of God and the call of the Spirit” (Book of Order, 2.0200). To put it another way, simply to ask the church to think anew about its historic convictions is not in and of itself an offense.
Let me then try to sum up what this brief look into our Presbyterian past means for us today theologically. It means, first, that our confession is living and ongoing. I have spoken of a “diversity” of confessions rather than a “pluralism” to avoid the implication that a Christian and Presbyterian confession can mean just anything. But in sharpening and expanding that theological identity over time, the centrality of discernment in presbyteries has proven to be pivotal, not just as a blind adherence to polity but as a means by which presbyters gather to hear the Word of God. The nature of Presbyterian theology is a response to the Word of God, which may be guided by but can never be captured in simple confessional formulae. Hence, religious experience is not to be dismissed, nor are regional distinctives to be ignored. And in all events, we are to respect one another’s confessions and one another’s deeply held convictions. To speak superficially of “connectionalism” as what holds the Presbyterian Church together, as is commonplace in the jargon today, is to miss a major point. Such jargon ignores the richness of our confessional tradition and misreads what the consensus of the 1920s was all about. Neither suscriptionism nor connection-alism constitutes the church, but it is the grace we receive as the people of God, the body of Christ and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
The “third way” for which the church has been so painfully groping these days is not the way of a mere “compromise,” but it is a way of hearing the Word of God together in the diversity of our confessional witness. Perhaps this third way stands within our reach, if we will but reach a little farther and more faithfully — farther into the past to learn its wisdom, and more faithfully toward one another as we seek to learn from those with whom we differ. It is this complex third way that has been carefully and sometimes painfully woven into the fabric of the Presbyterian Church’s polity and more recently into its confessional standards — in particular through the Adopting Act of 1729, the polity consensus of the 1920s, and the confessional rebalancing of 1967 and 1983. To retrieve the best of this Reformed and reforming tradition will lead not just to a “broadening” but to a deepening of Presbyterian confession.
NEXT: Toward a Confessing Church: The Key Question
William Stacy Johnson is the Arthur M. Adams Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Seminary.
