Who remembers Benjamin Harrison? The 23rd U.S. president, Republican Benjamin Harrison served one term (1888-1893), wedged between Grover Cleveland’s two terms. The Indiana native’s high ethical standards brought him into office, and his support of disastrous tariff acts contributed to his downfall. Harrison welcomed six states into the union, created national forest reserves, modernized our Navy and provided federal aid to disabled veterans and their widows. He pushed for federal protection of African-American voting rights and federal financing of African-American education, although these efforts in the post-Reconstruction era were unsuccessful.
Perhaps even less known is that Harrison was a devout Presbyterian elder. In 1900, responding to numerous presbytery requests for changes in our sole creedal statement, The Westminster Confession, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. appointed a committee to study revision. The appointees included popular New York City pastor Henry Van Dyke (a future president of the Presbyterian Historical Society), Supreme Court associate justice John M. Harlan and former president Benjamin Harrison.
Harrison died of influenza on March 13, 1901, before the committee completed its report. According to a “memorial minute” submitted by the committee to the 113th General Assembly meeting in Philadelphia two months later, Harrison would have heartily approved the suggested changes to the confession that included adding statements about God’s love for all humanity, missions and the Holy Spirit.
The committee eulogized Harrison in terms with which presidential historians do not quibble, even if many rank him among the least effective of presidents. Harrison was “highly gifted, wise in counsel, fearless in expressing his convictions, incorruptible in his integrity and thoroughly conscientious in his conduct” and “genuinely Christian.” The committee underlined his wisdom by sharing a snippet from Harrison’s keynote at the 1900 World’s Conference of Christian Missions that reverberates like a mash up of Ecclesiastes and the Gospels: “Agencies of man’s devising may elevate, but they cannot cure. Christ in the heart and His Gospel of love and ministry in all the activities of life are the only cure.”
Integrity, thoughtfulness and commitment to the gospel of love and ministry shaped the assembly’s intense debate over revision. Some feared that changes to the Westminster Confession would lead to “a long period of controversy and unrest” in the church. Others wanted our confessional standards to reflect deepened understandings of God’s work and our own.
John De Witt, a pastor commissioner from New Brunswick Presbytery, opposed any revisions. Yet he called upon the assembly to emulate Harrison by remembering that whatever our differences, our “unity is real and fundamental.” He offered sage advice for the General Assembly in 1901 — and for this year’s 2018 General Assembly. It’s vital to remain “deeply conscious of this unity. … In sharp debate we look at our differences microscopically. They enlarge themselves indefinitely in our consciousness. In this way the sense of our unity becomes dulled, and the sense of our differences is transformed into a conviction of division.”
De Witt’s discernment led to his appointment to the new committee charged to write the revisions, despite his opposition to revision. In 1902, the Committee on Revision presented changes including two new chapters on the Holy Spirit, and the “love of God and missions.” Incorporating the last chapter into the Westminster Confession served as a clarion call to the northern Presbyterian Church that its primary purpose, as Harrison had contended, was to enact in life, mission and testimony the salvific love of God in Jesus Christ. All human organizations and bureaucracies only existed to further that purpose.
From the riches of our shared history: wisdom to guide us.
BETH SHALOM HESSEL is the executive director of the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia. For 166 years, PHS has been the national archives of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and its predecessor denominations.
