Table of Contents

1. Turning Points in American Presbyterian History

2. Origins and Identity, 1706-1729

3. Old Side versus New Side, 1741-1758

4. A National Presbyterian Church, 1789

5. The Plan of Union, 1801

6. Old School Presbyterianism, 1838

7. The Reunion of 1869

8. Confessional Revision in 1903

9. The Special Commission of 1925

10. 1936: A Continuing Presbyterian Church

11. The Confession of 1967

12. 1973: The Presbyterian Church in America

13. Presbyterian Reunion in 1983

14. Conclusion: Without Illusions

1. Turning Points in American Presbyterian History

Americans, let us admit, have a problem with history. History is bunk, said Henry Ford. A disdain for the past is a long-established feature of the American temperament. Ours is a culture that achieved political independence and evolved into a world power by jettisoning old-world values.

American evangelicals also have a problem with history. For most of them, history is bunk too. The American religious experiment was conceived in nearly Edenic terms: the New Adam and the New Eve starting afresh in a new world. Moreover, American evangelicals are activists and not contemplatives, crusaders and not pilgrims, which only adds to their disregard for the past.

In contrast, Orthodox Presbyterians have a far better appreciation for history. It is impressive to see how many members of our churches are familiar with the events surrounding the founding of our church. They know about the Auburn Affirmation and the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. Some can even identify Eritrea on a map of Africa and know how to pronounce Peniel.

Still, we in the OPC have our own problem with history. While well-versed on the life of Machen, his struggles in the Presbyterian church, and the controversies that gave birth to our denomination, we may know little of the history before Machen. The events surrounding the founding of our church are so central to our identity, that the tendency is to reflect less on our American Presbyterian antecedents. The impression is left that the story of Presbyterianism in American was one of orthodoxy and stability until the turbulent events of the early twentieth century.

Consider this example, from an OPC brochure: “In the 1800s and early 1900s the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. was, for the most part, a strong and faithful church. One could point to able theologians on its seminary faculties and gifted preachers in its pulpits. It was definitely holding forth a light in this world.” While historical shorthand is necessary in a brief evangelistic tract, such a simplistic overview may generate confusion and misunderstanding about our Presbyterian past.

Historical amnesia in the OPC also arises from two surprising sources: Geerhardus Vos and Cornelius Van Til. Among their followers, there is a great appreciation for their exegetical and apologetical insights, which made deep impressions on the history and identity of the OPC. We share that respect and admiration. However, a strong temptation exists, especially among students and younger ministers within the church, to regard the insights of these men as so Copernican that developments in the church prior to Van Tillianism and redemptive history become an unusable past. It is as if Vos and Van Til have rendered Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield passé—a sentiment, of course, that Vos and Van Til did not share.

So there is a form of OPC exceptionalism which may not say that history is bunk, but implies that history before 1936 is bunk. We are writing this series of articles to challenge that mind-set, by surveying key events or “turning points” throughout three centuries of American Presbyterian history. These events include unions and divisions, from colonial times to contemporary times. We believe that it is important for OPCers to remember that we are American Presbyterians. We must locate ourselves within Presbyterian developments in North America, understanding that our denomination’s history is part of a larger story. We need, in short, to put the “Presbyterian” back in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Of course, the nature of that larger American Presbyterian tradition is strongly contested, even within the OPC. At its founding, the OPC sought very self-consciously to identify itself with its American Presbyterian past. It was, according to J. Gresham Machen, the “spiritual successor” of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. But what did Machen mean by those words? What inheritance was the OPC claiming? Many voices in our church’s past have left the OPC because of their perception that it had abandoned the American Presbyterian tradition. For example, Carl McIntire insisted that the young church had to keep the 1903 revisions to the Westminster standards if it was to lay legitimate claim to American Presbyterian succession. And Gordon Clark and his sympathizers argued that the OPC had to be culturally engaged with other evangelicals in fighting modernism if it was to “preserve the American tradition in Presbyterianism.”

The church had forsaken its inheritance, in the eyes of McIntire, Clark, and others, because of the un-American leadership within it, especially from the faculty of Westminster Seminary, including Van Til, R. B. Kuiper, and Ned Stonehouse (all Dutchmen) and John Murray (a Scotsman). This influence, they feared, diverted the church from its mission to America and into a narrow sectarian oddity. For their part, these men, though equally committed to Machen’s ideal of “spiritual succession,” pled innocent of that charge, and they turned their opponent’s argument around. They saw in the Americanism of McIntire, Clark, and others merely a more subtle form of sectarian provincialism. The Old School Presbyterian of the American past that they sought to preserve provided a grander, richer, and more glorious expression of Reformed faith and life.

In reflecting on its American Presbyterian heritage in these and other debates, the OPC continues to wrestle with the question of how the adjective American relates to the noun Presbyterian. Where have Presbyterians carefully adapted to (“contextualized”) their American environment? Where have they foolishly assimilated? What features of American culture either support or undermine the church’s cultivation of self-consciously Reformed piety? These are questions that a close study of history will help to answer and which we want to explore in our study.

We cannot speak intelligently of the American Presbyterian tradition unless we know that tradition better. In describing that tradition, this series is designed to interpret its significance for Orthodox Presbyterians. Our aim is less to win readers over to our interpretation of these events (although that would be nice), than to get Orthodox Presbyterians to focus more carefully on Presbyterian history.

The chart of Presbyterian family connections portrays the diversity within American Presbyterianism. This will be an important theme in our study. Presbyterians came to the new world at different times for different causes. Some immigration, such as the Covenanters and the Seceders, owed to particular circumstances in Scottish Presbyterian history. The tensions among these groups, the unions and divisions that they generated, the willingness of some to Americanize, and the insistence of others to cling to old-world values—all of this sheds important light on the present picture of American Presbyterian diversity in which the OPC is located.

Finally, in presenting these studies, we want to make a case for memory and not nostalgia. Nostalgia, as the American historian Christopher Lasch argued, creates an idealized and frozen past that serves to undermine a proper use of the past. Memory, on the other hand, draws lessons from the past in order to enrich an understanding of our times. That will be our goal for these studies. Our desire is not to return to 1936 or to 1861 or to 1789, nor to restore any “golden age” of American Presbyterianism. American Presbyterianism cannot be reduced to a Thomas Kincaid landscape. Rather, what will unfold is three centuries of Presbyterian struggles over strikingly familiar issues, such as biblical interpretation, ecumenicity, social activism, confessional subscription, and worship.

We may discover that the very debates that our church is presently engaged in are old debates, and that they are part of a perennial challenge to be Reformed and Presbyterian in American culture.

2. Origins and Identity, 1706-1729

American Presbyterianism officially began in 1706, when the Presbytery of Philadelphia held its first meeting. But some accounts of the Presbyterian Church in the New World speak of Presbyterian congregations going back into the seventeenth century.

For instance, several churches on Long Island trace their origins back to the 1640s. The very first Presbyterian minister in New York was Francis Doughty, a New England Puritan who in 1642 came to New York because of differences over the practice of infant baptism. Doughty represents the dominant strain of Presbyterianism north of Pennsylvania. It was heavily influenced by, and oriented toward, Puritanism and its practical brand of Christian devotion. In fact, New York’s earliest Presbyterian congregations in eastern Long Island originated when Puritans migrated from New England into the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in search of greater prosperity.

The most obvious difference between Puritanism and Presbyterianism had to do with church government. As Congregationalists, Puritans located the power of decision making in the local congregation’s officers. Presbyterians, in contrast, delegated church power to the presbytery, a regional and representative body of officers from surrounding congregations. Without a presbytery, the Puritan congregations that preferred Presbyterian to Congregational church polity could not technically be Presbyterian. For this reason, when American Presbyterians celebrate their tercentenary in 2006, they will be remembering the date of the first meeting of a presbytery—in 1706.

The date that church historians use for American Presbyterianism’s origin is actually of some relevance to the question of Presbyterian identity in Colonial America. When the Presbytery of Philadelphia met, its members came from two different backgrounds. One was the strain of Presbyterianism found among English Puritans, although only one Philadelphia minister, Jedediah Andrews, fit that profile. The most dominant strain was Scottish or Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism. Four of the original ministerial members of the presbytery hailed directly from Scotland, and the other three were from Northern Ireland. The most prominent of the Scotch-Irish was Francis Makemie (1658-1708), the so-called father of American Presbyterianism. He was born in Northern Ireland, graduated from the University of Glasgow, and ministered in his native land before coming to the Colonies and laboring in various congregations on the Eastern seaboard, from Maryland to New York. Makemie was the first moderator of the Presbytery of Philadelphia, and he became the leader of the Presbyterians partly because he defended the rights of Presbyterians like himself to minister without a license, even though Presbyterianism had no official standing in the Colonies.

Makemie’s defense of religious liberty has been a source of pride among American Presbyterians. But as much as his arguments would later become part of the American ideology of religious toleration, his labors also revealed American Presbyterianism’s humble origins. The theological descendants of John Calvin and John Knox did not arrive in the New World with vast resources and influential connections. Unlike Anglicanism and Congregationalism, Presbyterianism had no state support in the New World.

This explains in part why Philadelphia has been the traditional capital of Presbyterianism in the United States. The colony established by William Penn granted religious liberty to a variety of persecuted believers, Presbyterians among them. In fact, Presbyterianism in Scotland would not rebound from English-Scottish rivalries to become the national kirk until 1690, thus making American Presbyterianism only seventeen years younger than its European sibling. For the Presbyterian church to gain a foothold in America required the goodwill and kind assistance of Pennsylvania Quakers. Scottish and Scotch-Irish immigration to the New World brought Presbyterians primarily to the middle colonies, especially southeastern Pennsylvania. By 1716, the date of the first Synod (Philadelphia), four presbyteries had been established: Philadelphia, New York, New Castle (Delaware), and Snow Hill (Maryland).

Because presbyteries were established first, not synods or general assemblies, American Presbyterianism is characterized by the power of presbytery. The American church, unlike its Scottish analogue, has delegated greater power to presbyteries than to higher courts. This is particularly evident in ordination, where presbyteries still enjoy remarkable autonomy in calling men to the ministry. This feature of American Presbyterianism may reflect sound polity and good theology, but it is also an accident of history. One of the reasons for forming a presbytery in Philadelphia in 1706 was to license and ordain men for the gospel ministry. Ever since then, presbyteries in America have been jealous to guard that prerogative.

The ethnic composition of the early churches and presbyteries had a significant impact on the development of American Presbyterianism. Although the Presbytery of Philadelphia was overwhelmingly Scottish and Scotch-Irish, the same being true for the Presbytery of New Castle, the English Puritan strand of Presbyterianism was also present from the beginning. Its center of strength was in New York and northern New Jersey, and its approach to the Presbyterian faith was at times markedly different from that of the Scotch-Irish element.

The strain between these two groups first appeared in the 1720s during the debates about subscription. Prior to the Adopting Act of 1729, Presbyterianism in America lacked a constitution and coherent order. Consequently, standards for ordination varied. As early as 1724, the Presbytery of New Castle began requiring ministers to subscribe to the Westminster standards, which followed Old World practice. John Thomson (1690-1753), a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, argued for creedal subscription as something fully within the power that Christ delegated to the church, and as one way of restraining erroneous views. Presbyterians of Puritan background, however, resisted subscription because it smacked of ecclesiastical tyranny. Jonathan Dickinson (1688-1747), a Massachusetts native who ministered in New Brunswick, New Jersey, argued that subscription conflicted with liberty of conscience, and that the way to prevent error from harming the church was to examine candidates thoroughly.

These competing views of subscription informed the Synod of Philadelphia’s decision in 1729 to adopt the Westminster standards as the confessional basis for office holders. Their Adopting Act appears to be a compromise document. On the one hand, it states the need “to take care that the faith once delivered to the saints be kept pure and uncorrupt among us.” All ministers were required to “declare their agreement in, and approbation of” the Westminster standards. On the other hand, the Act limited subscription to “all essential and necessary articles” of the Confession of Faith and catechisms. Ever since then, American Presbyterians have disputed the meaning of “essential and necessary.” Some have argued for strict subscription, while others have taken those words to allow some flexibility.

In the second part of the Adopting Act, the Synod of Philadelphia appears to have tried to clarify which parts of the standards were not “essential and necessary.” Here the body referred to the Westminster Confession’s teaching on the civil magistrate in chapters twenty and twenty-three, particularly the state’s power over synods, as doctrines which ministers could reasonably scruple. But if the Synod’s intention was to clarify this matter, it failed, because Presbyterians have been divided over the nature of subscription ever since then.

During their first twenty-five years in the New World, American Presbyterians struggled to form a church that was Reformed according to the Word of God. Almost three hundred years later, American Presbyterians eager for encouragement would be glad to know that their ecclesiastical tradition’s origins in North America were noble, heroic, and magnificent.

However, the heroes produced by the Colonial church were not the legends of church history. Instead, they were men who labored in obscurity and under difficult circumstances. Even the major accomplishments of the American church during those years were less than dazzling. The first presbytery was a modest body of ministers struggling to carve out a Presbyterian witness in a religiously diverse environment. Moreover, the Adopting Act of 1729 sent a mixed signal about the nature of creedal subscription. Instead of adding up to a story of Presbyterian triumph, the origins of American Presbyterianism reinforce the truth that the history of the church on this side of glory is not marked by might and glory, but by militancy and strife.

3. Old Side versus New Side, 1741-1758

Almost like clockwork, once every hundred years or so, American Presbyterians have endured a major division in their ranks, resulting in the formation of two separate denominations.

Most Orthodox Presbyterians are aware of their own break with the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. in 1936 under the leadership of J. Gresham Machen. Many are also aware of the split in 1837 between the Old School and the New School (still to be featured in this series). Few, however, know much about the split between the Old Side and the New Side Presbyterians.

That split occurred in 1741, only thirty-five years after the formation of the Presbytery of Philadelphia. It pitted the anti-revival Old Side against the pro-revival New Side. But the pro-revival party could not claim the mantle of conservative Presbyterianism, as has often been thought. The revivalists were generally the innovators (if one can be novel in a church so young), while their Old Side opponents were not the proto-liberals that many have assumed them to be.

The differences that emerged over the nature and value of subscription at the time of the Adopting Act of 1729 (see part 2 of this series) revealed two types of piety within the young Presbyterian communion. On the one side, many Presbyterians to the north of Philadelphia, in New Jersey and New York, who shared theological sympathies with New England, were less enthusiastic about subscription than their Scotch-Irish and Southeastern Pennsylvania peers. For the Presbyterians of New England descent, subscription was a violation of the liberty of conscience, a way of binding the conscience with the words of men rather than the yoke of Christ.

On the other side, those Presbyterians who were recent immigrants to the New World and generally of Scotch-Irish descent, having settled in Philadelphia and beyond to Chester and New Castle, believed subscription to be valuable for protecting the church from error among her ministers. Creedal subscription had become the practice in the Old World, and these pro-subscriptionist Presbyterians held that it should also be the practice in America.

The revivals that broke out during the First Great Awakening only contributed to this relatively minor tension. Smaller awakenings had already occurred locally in 1729 among the Dutch Reformed in northern New Jersey under the ministry of Theodore Freylinghuysen, and then again among New England Congregationalists in 1735 under Jonathan Edwards’s preaching. Presbyterians also experienced the effects of these local revivals firsthand, when Gilbert Tennent followed the example of Freylinghuysen and began to preach the “terrors of the law” to Presbyterians in Pennsylvania in the 1730s. These minor awakenings turned into a great one when George Whitefield visited North America in 1739. His itinerancy and powerful preaching caused an immediate sensation that in turn generated controversy within the churches and also in the broader society.

Whitefield complicated the tension that existed between those Presbyterians who favored subscription and those who did not. Three specific issues emerged between 1739 and 1741, and not one of them had to do with the gospel and its denial or with the personal holiness of Presbyterian ministers, as some have claimed. Instead, all three concerned the nature and authority of the Christian ministry.

The first issue that Whitefield’s revivals brought to a head was the question of itinerancy. Whitefield perfected the practice of itinerant preaching, that is, of traveling from place to place, speaking to crowds of believers and unchurched people anywhere-whether inside a church building or outside in the market square or out in a pasture. But itinerancy had been an issue before his arrival. The specific conflict stemmed from pastors, such as Gilbert Tennent, who went into a community and began to preach without the invitation of the local pastor. Revivalists felt justified in so doing because souls were at stake. Established pastors, however, rightly considered such preaching as a rebuke to their own ministry. After all, if a church was already in place with a duly ordained minister, why were the revivalists necessary?

A second issue, much related to Gilbert Tennent, concerned the proper training of pastors. William Tennent, Sr., with support from his sons, had founded the Log College just north of Philadelphia in 1735 as a “school of the prophets.” It was a forerunner of the American Protestant seminary, and schooled its students in revivalistic Presbyterianism. Many of the pastors in Philadelphia and southeastern Pennsylvania, who were Scottish or Scotch-Irish, had trained at Scottish universities. Accordingly, they put a premium on European educational standards. For some of those opposed to revivals, the issue of theological education was a smoke screen, since it gave conservatives a way of opposing the Log College men without addressing the issue of revivalism itself. Still, the Log College raised important questions about the proper theological education for ordination.

Here the second issue, theological education, merged with the third, qualifications for ordination. The pro-revivalist party, led by the Tennents, insisted that candidates for ordination give evidence of a conversion experience. Presbyterian conservatives, such as John Thomson, the author of The Government of the Church of Christ (1741), disagreed. They argued that presbyteries could well dispense with such personal questions since licentiates were coming before presbytery as church members. Instead, church officers needed to consider during ordination exams how well trained candidates for the ministry were. Log College graduates were suspect, in the conservatives’ view, because they were better schooled in experimental religion than in Calvinist dogma. Related to this debate was the older one about subscription. Those who took a softer view of subscription tended to stress the need for ministers to give evidence of a personal religious experience. Those who thought that the creeds gave the church proper boundaries wanted to hear candidates’ understanding of theology, not their personal testimonies.

These matters came to a head in 1740, when Gilbert Tennent preached the controversial sermon, “The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry.” He accused those who were critical of revivals of being unconverted-a group that included those who had plausible scruples about itinerancy, the Log College, and the necessity of ministerial candidates to relate a conversion experience. Tennent also encouraged church members to flee the congregations of such anti-revival ministers and find safe ecclesiastical havens.

Thomson shot back by asserting that ministers and presbyteries had legitimate authority, delegated by Christ, to execute the Christian ministry. Tennent and other pro-revival Presbyterians were usurping Christ’s authority by either refusing to submit to the judgments of presbytery or synod, or by telling church members to resist the ministrations of their own pastors. “The relation between a minister of the gospel and his flock, yea and every person belonging to it,” Thomson wrote, is “a sacred and religious tie.” Revivalism was merely a “newfangled method of religion.”

With fighting words like these, a split was inevitable. In May 1741, in a move that foreshadowed the action of the Old School Presbyterians a century later, the Old Side declared that the Presbytery of New Brunswick, the judicatory established as a release valve for Log College graduates, was no longer part of the Synod of Philadelphia. And with that decision, the Old Side and New Side Presbyterians would remain separate until 1758. The Old Side was strongest among the recent Scotch-Irish settlers in the Susquehanna and Shenandoah river valleys and in parts of the Philadelphia region. The New Side prospered in upper New Jersey and the New York City area.

As has often been the case after church splits, a change of personalities brought about the Reunion of 1758. Some of the old antagonists died, and others, like Gilbert Tennent, apologized for their youthful obstreperousness. Even so, the reunion was generally a victory for the New Side. Although the terms affirmed the Old Side’s concerns about subscription and the legitimate authority of church officers and judicatories, the Plan of Reunion overwhelmingly affirmed the New Side’s understanding of revivals and the piety fostered by them. It stated that candidates for the ministry would have to demonstrate an “experimental acquaintance” with the gospel in addition to having the requisite learning. The Plan also declared that the Great Awakening was “a blessed work of God’s Holy Spirit”—which was very much at issue at the time of the split.

The Reunion of 1758 was significant, then, for settling the identity of American Presbyterianism. Two versions had vied with each other during the Colonial period, one shaped by pietism (the New Side), the other content with Old World forms of creed and polity (the Old Side). The Plan of Reunion, to be sure, represented a compromise between the two sides, trying to affirm both. But, as the subsequent history of American Presbyterianism would reveal, the combination of pietism and confessionalism is an unstable compound.

4. A National Presbyterian Church, 1789

With political independence for the nation came the opportunity for greater stability within the church. When in 1789 the first General Assembly convened in Philadelphia, it held out the promise of a more uniform and well-organized Presbyterian ministry to the new republic. It named itself the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (PCUSA). At that time, it consisted of 419 congregations, 111 licentiates, 177 ministers, sixteen presbyteries, and four synods (Philadelphia, New York and New Jersey, Virginia, and the Carolinas).

Indicative of the affinities between the new nation and the PCUSA was the election of John Witherspoon to be the moderator of the first General Assembly. He was notable for being the only minister to sign the Declaration of Independence. A native Scotsman, he had been a prominent leader in the so-called evangelical party in the Kirk. His defense of the faith came to the attention of the trustees of the College of New Jersey (later called Princeton University), who in 1768 called him to be president of the institution. In that position, Witherspoon became a significant mediator of the Scottish Enlightenment to the American colonists. One of his students was James Madison, the fourth president of the United States.

Witherspoon’s critique of British imperialism and his defense of a republican form of government qualified him to hold public office, first as a member of the New Jersey state legislature, then as a member of Congress (while also presiding over the Princeton school). Presbyterian and Congregationalist ministers supplied much of the intellectual support for political independence among the major Protestant denominations, yet he alone emerged as a ministerial member of the nation’s Founding Fathers. His election as moderator of the first General Assembly was a fitting recognition of his public service.

As much as the Presbyterian Church’s mission appeared to be bound up with the cause of the American nation during the 1780s, the formation of a national church was also the logical response to the new political realities. Other Reformed communions, such as the Reformed Church in America (Dutch) and the German Reformed Church, also used the new political autonomy of the United States to form denominations that were no longer tied to, or governed by, their Old World mother churches.

The advantages of American ecclesiastical autonomy were obvious. American churches could respond more directly to American conditions without having to gain European approval. Even though the Presbyterians who launched the first General Assembly had never belonged officially to the Scottish Kirk, the principle was still the same. An autonomous national church would more easily handle the responsibilities and needs of Presbyterian churches throughout the nation, not to mention the administrative convenience of following the laws and policies of one national government.

With the formation of the General Assembly also came formal readjustments in the Presbyterian Church’s constitution. Prior to the first Assembly, the Synod of New York and Philadelphia as early as 1785 had called for revisions to the Confession of Faith and Catechisms, the Form of Government and Discipline, and the Directory for Public Worship. Of the changes made to the various documents that were adopted as the church’s constitution, the revision of the Westminster Confession was arguably the most significant—even though it is the least studied aspect of the first Assembly.

The substance of the revision was to reformulate the Westminster Divines’ teaching on the civil magistrate. The Westminster Assembly had been called by Parliament, and its affirmations about the role and function of the government, especially in ecclesiastical matters, reflected a situation in which the state exerted control over the church as part of the price of religious establishment. The American revision of 1787-1789 took into account the new situation in the United States, where the state had no authority over the church.

The most notable revisions were made in the chapters on the civil magistrate and synods and councils in the Confession of Faith. In the original version of chapter 23, the Divines declared that “for the better effecting whereof, [the civil magistrate] has the power to call synods, to be present at them, and to provide that whatsoever is transacted in them be according to the mind of God” (23.3). Reverence for George Washington aside, the prospect of giving him the power to call an assembly or synod did not make much sense by 1789. So the American revision changed that section to assert that civil magistrates, as “nursing fathers,” had the duty “to protect the church of our common Lord, without giving the preference to any denomination of Christians above the rest, in such a manner that all ecclesiastical persons whatever shall enjoy the full, free, and unquestioned liberty of discharging every part of their sacred functions, without violence or danger” (23.3). Gone was the power of the state to convene an assembly and the duty to insure that such church bodies conducted their business “according to the mind of God.”

Furthermore, the American revision went on to affirm the principle of religious freedom and asserted that the civil magistrate had a duty to protect that liberty, even including the freedom of infidels: “It is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the person and good name of all their people, in such an effectual manner as that no person be suffered, either upon pretense of religion or of infidelity, to offer any indignity, violence, abuse, or injury.”

American Presbyterians undertook a similar revision in chapter 31 on synods and councils. Here they deleted entirely section 2 from the original version, which gave further direction to civil magistrates about their participation in ecclesiastical assemblies. The civil magistrate was mentioned in the revised chapter only in paragraph 4 (old number 5), which now stated that the church is not to “handle or conclude” any matter of civil polity, except for “cases extraordinary,” to satisfy the conscience of the church, or to comply with a request from the civil magistrate.

Some critics of the American revision have seen in these changes an occasion of the Presbyterian Church aping the new religious politics of the United States. To be sure, these revisions corresponded directly to the relatively novel arrangement of religious disestablishment; not since Constantine had Christianity been out of power in the West. At the same time, the revision of the Confession and the reduction of the civil magistrate’s power over the church was entirely in line with any number of Presbyterian efforts going back to the Covenanters in seventeenth-century Scotland, the Seceders in the eighteenth century, and again the Free Church, which left the Scottish Kirk in the 1840s. In each of these cases, a fundamental point of debate was whether Christ alone was head of the church or whether the church needed to submit as well to the civil magistrate.

The 1789 revision of the Westminster standards stripped the state of any authority over the church beyond that of seeking its freedom from hostile interference. Although this revision did raise important questions about the responsibility of the church in the public realm, the clear meaning of the revised Confession was to remove the powers of the civil magistrate over the church that had been previously granted by ecclesiastical establishment.

The irony was that by affirming the independence of the church from state authority, the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. actually moved more in the direction of being an American, as opposed to a Presbyterian, communion. With its newfound autonomy, a freedom to let the church be the church, the Presbyterian Church could well have used the situation to develop fully all the implications of Presbyterian government, theology, and worship. Eventually some would, such as the Old School Presbyterians during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, who cultivated a Presbyterian identity far richer than that of the European churches that were still part of the ecclesiastical establishment and so subservient to the state.

But instead, the revision, accompanied as it was by the euphoria over political liberty, encouraged excessive loyalty to the new nation, and that eventually eroded its Presbyterian identity. The very name of the new church spoke to this reality—“the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.” This was the Presbyterian denomination of the United States. Consequently, although the War of Independence and religious disestablishment presented the church with a new opportunity for ministry free from state oversight, the process of so closely identifying with that war and its political ideals yielded a Presbyterian Church intent upon ministering in the state’s service.

5. The Plan of Union, 1801

In 1801, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. entered into a “Plan of Union” with New England Congregationalists that has long baffled Presbyterians concerned about the well-being of their communion. The purpose of the agreement was to strengthen Presbyterian home missions and prevent divisive competition between Presbyterians and Congregationalists.

The first of the four articles in the Plan reads as follows:

It is strictly enjoined on all their missionaries to the new settlements, to endeavour, by all proper means, to promote mutual forbearance, and a spirit of accommodation between those inhabitants of the new settlements who hold the Presbyterian, and those who hold the Congregational, form of Church government.

The rest of the Plan specified how congregations were to call ministers, relate to presbyteries or Congregationalist associations, and conduct discipline. It all sounded good, but within thirty years many Presbyterians would rue this agreement.

Reasons for cooperating with the descendants of New England Puritanism were not hard to find. The Presbyterian Church was facing a real shortage of ministers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It would not found its first seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, until 1812. At the time of the first General Assembly in 1789, the Presbyterian Church had 419 congregations, but only 111 ministers. By 1803, the number of congregations had grown to 511. The Plan of Union opened up New England’s considerable resources, both for pastors and for schools, that could train more.

But the Plan also opened the Presbyterian Church to influences from New England. To be sure, New England Calvinism had remained basically sound during the eighteenth century. But it also possessed certain characteristics that invited theological novelty. Jonathan Edwards himself, although a vigorous defender of Calvinism, displayed a theological style that was quite different from the creedalism of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and that encouraged doctrinal experimentation.

For instance, Mark A. Noll writes that New England’s theologians followed more closely in Edwards’s “intellectual spirit” than did the Presbyterian theologians who would eventually teach at Princeton. Samuel Hopkins, one of those New England theologians, wrote that the Northampton pastor “took his religious principles from the Bible, and not from any human system or body of divinity.” Hopkins added that although Edwards was Calvinistic, “he called no man father.” Edwards “thought and judged for himself, and was truly very much an original.” In contrast, Presbyterians treated theology as a “conserving effort.” Princeton Seminary’s original professors were “willing to say ‘father’ to a whole host of orthodox divines.” (See Noll’s essay in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, edited by Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout.)

The implications of these different theological styles would become especially noticeable during the three decades after the Plan of Union was adopted. During this period, while Presbyterians were still trying to coordinate and consolidate the structures of a national church, New England’s Calvinism was in flux. Unitarianism began to assert itself as a viable option for ministers in Massachusetts. Arminianism was also making inroads within Congregationalist ranks. In response, New England Calvinists attempted to modify their theology in order to steer between hyper-Calvinism on the one side and the rationalism of Unitarianism on the other.

The most important modifier of Calvinism during the first half of the nineteenth century was Nathaniel W. Taylor (1786-1858), who taught at Yale Divinity School and became the father of the so-called New Haven Theology. Out of a concern for evangelism and revivals, he altered the idea of original sin. Taylor still believed that men and women were basically sinful. But to teach that they were born in sin, he argued, removed any hope for their coming to Christ and their moral renovation. Consequently, he understood sin to be strictly active and personal, rather than covenantal or hereditary. The key statement for him was, “Sin consists in the sinning.”

Taylor’s rejection of the classic Calvinist idea of original sin also involved a modification of the doctrine of the Atonement. These two revisions were connected by the rejection of imputation. If Adam’s sin was not imputed to all of his posterity (“by ordinary generation”), then neither did Christ’s righteousness need to be imputed to believers. Instead, Taylor opted for a moral or governmental theory of the Atonement. Christ did not take the sins of the church upon himself at the cross; rather, his death showed how greatly God detested violations of his law. In this view, the cross becomes a symbol of the consequences of sin, but not the payment for it.

Through the Plan of Union, Taylor’s views gained entry into the Presbyterian Church. The New Haven Theology also became popular (and possibly attractive to some Presbyterians) through the revivals of Charles G. Finney, who basically adopted Taylor’s theology for his program of mass evangelism.

Taylor’s influence in Presbyterian circles was most evident in the preaching of Albert Barnes (1798-1870). This Presbyterian pastor hailed from western New York, the region through which New Englanders traveled as they moved west. He trained at Princeton Seminary before taking his first call in Morristown, New Jersey. In 1829, he delivered his most famous sermon, “The Way of Salvation,” which showed that the New Haven Theology had found a home in the Presbyterian Church. In this sermon, Barnes denied the doctrine of original sin much as Taylor did. He declared that the Bible did not say

that the sinner is held to be personally answerable for the transgressions of Adam, or of any other man; or that God has given a law which man has no power to obey. Such a charge, and such a requirement, would be most clearly unjust. The law requiring love to God, supreme and unqualified, and love to man, is supposed to be equitable; fully within the reach of every mortal, if there was first a willing mind.

Although no charges were brought against Barnes for teaching doctrines contrary to the Westminster standards, the situation changed dramatically when he moved to Philadelphia in 1830 to become pastor of that city’s First Church. New England views had trespassed upon old Scotch-Irish turf.

The Presbytery of Philadelphia in 1831 condemned the ideas contained in Barnes’s sermon, “The Way of Salvation.” He appealed the ruling to the General Assembly in ways remarkably similar to the spirit of New England’s theologians. Barnes claimed that his sermon reflected an honest investigation of the Bible, “to look at that book as a source of independent information.” He added that he never examined Scripture according to “what particular opinions have been held or denied by any class of men.” If this made his views heretical, then he was as much a heretic at the time of his appeal as when he first wrote the sermon. Barnes clearly stood in that theological trajectory that “called no man father,” even if his subscribing to the Westminster standards might have implied otherwise.

The controversy over Barnes was largely responsible for the formation of a party of Presbyterian conservatives who would eventually start the Old School Presbyterian Church. These churchmen were concerned about the increasing disparity between New England Calvinism and the teachings of the Presbyterian Church. Opposition to Barnes was the initial outlet for this concern. But it also percolated up to the level of the General Assembly and resulted in several contentious meetings between 1834 and 1838. Barnes himself would never be formally condemned by the Assembly. But if the Presbyterian Church had rejected his teaching as contrary to the Westminster standards, it might have escaped the division that was looming on the horizon. As it happened, Barnes made inevitable a referendum on the Presbyterian Church’s relationship to New England’s Congregationalist churches.

Ironically, then, the plan for cooperation between Presbyterians and Congregationalists ended in antagonism and ultimately in division (see the next chapter). The Presbyterians who approved the Plan of Union were swept up in the patriotism of the Revolution’s aftermath and the expansion of the new nation, and assumed that their Congregationalist counterparts were reliable partners in establishing new churches in the new states and territories. After all, Presbyterians and Congregationalists had been the two denominations that overwhelmingly supported independence from England. But the political bonds that drew them together were insufficient to cover important theological differences. When Presbyterians of a later generation declared that doctrine divides but ministry unites, they were clearly forgetting the Plan of Union and its aftermath.

6. Old School Presbyterianism, 1838

At the General Assembly in 1837, the Old School party of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. pushed through a motion that abrogated the 1801 Plan of Union (see chapter 5) and declared the Western Reserve region of the Presbyterian Church to be “no longer a part” of the denomination. This area included presbyteries and synods in New York State and the upper Midwest (primarily Ohio). Twenty-eight presbyteries, 509 ministers, and 60,000 church members were removed from the church.

But the Old School believed that the crisis in their communion required such drastic measures. In 1834, during preparations for that year’s General Assembly, the leaders of the Old School party circulated a petition, the “Western Memorial,” that set forth the Old School’s concerns and gained the signatures of eighteen ministers and ninety-nine elders. The Memorial listed eight items that addressed the abnormalities and errors that were present in the church, thanks to the cooperative venture with the New England Congregationalists. In sum, Old School Presbyterians believed that the Plan of Union had compromised the polity and theology of their church. After several years of failing to receive an adequate response from the General Assembly, Old Schoolers found themselves to be in the majority at the 1837 Assembly. They took matters into their own hands and terminated their awkward cooperation with the Congregationalists.

For the revocation of the Plan of Union to go into effect, the next General Assembly would have to approve it, and that necessity brought out the less seemly side of the usually dignified Presbyterians. The gathering in 1838 was scheduled to be held at Seventh Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, the unofficial capital of American Presbyterianism. Political intrigue characterized both parties as they laid plans for the Assembly.

When Old School Presbyterians heard of the New School’s scheming to prevent the ratification of the 1837 decision, they arrived at Seventh Church ahead of the appointed time to convene and took all the seats at the front of the church, so they could control the proceedings. Their plan was a partial success, and it was assisted by the fact that the previous year’s moderator was an Old School Presbyterian. When the New School commissioners arrived and tried to participate in the Assembly, the moderator refused to recognize them. One presbyter from western New York asked the moderator for the privilege of being enrolled. But the moderator responded with the polite but stern assertion, “We do not know you, sir.”

The 1838 General Assembly quickly fell apart. Seeing that they had no standing at the Assembly, the New School commissioners convened their own General Assembly at the back of the church. But the strain of holding two deliberative meetings in one building proved to be too much for these antagonistic Presbyterians. Eventually the New School commissioners withdrew to meet at nearby First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. The New Schoolers called themselves the “Constitutional Assembly,” while the Old Schoolers called themselves the “Reforming Assembly.” Despite the New School’s effort to claim the constitutional high ground, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which heard a complaint from the New School members, declared that the revocation of the Plan of Union and the subsequent excluding of New School commissioners was “certainly constitutional and strictly just.”

Today the term Old School Presbyterian has a variety of meanings, but at the time of the division of 1837 it reflected the effort of American Presbyterians to resist being absorbed into the general mainstream of generic American Protestantism. Contemporary Presbyterians may think that being Old School involves certain views on creation, Scripture, sabbatarianism, or worship, but during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as the Western Memorial indicated, it stood for Presbyterianism that was self-conscious about Calvinism and Presbyterian church polity. In fact, Old School Presbyterianism was opposed to New School Presbyterian views and impulses as much as it was committed to definite views of soteriology and ecclesiology.

In his first book, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience (1970), George Marsden identified three themes that characterized the New School, and which the Old School rejected as being at odds with Presbyterian faith and practice. The first was a nationalistic outlook that blended a concern for society with the promotion of revivals. New School Presbyterians, as part of the New England Puritan tradition, believed that the health of America depended upon its spiritual well-being. Second, these Presbyterians favored the use of voluntary associations—tract and Bible societies, nondenominational missions agencies, organizations to promote moral reforms such as temperance and the abolition of slavery—to spread the benefits of Christian civilization. Finally, the New School modified Calvinist theology by developing doctrines that would support both revivals and moral reform. This theology was associated with such New School Presbyterians as Albert Barnes and Lyman Beecher. It took the jagged edges off Calvinism’s depiction of human depravity, so that people might be more inclined to choose Christ and try to lead holy lives by some of their own power, rather than having to wait for divine initiative.

Although diversity existed within the ranks of Old School Presbyterians, the threat of the New School elicited thoughtful and forthright insistence upon historic Presbyterian convictions. In addition to defending the importance of human sinfulness, divine sovereignty, and justification for understanding salvation aright, the Old School developed a high view of the church that distinguished the ministry’s purposes from those of national well-being. In other words, the task of the church was not explicitly to reform society. Christianity, Old Schoolers admitted, might well benefit the nation. But the church’s chief aim was the salvation and edification of God’s people, no matter what their nationality.

Attention to the mission of the church also involved careful reflection on the authority and order of church assemblies and institutions. Several Old School theologians developed a highly learned doctrine of the church that conceived of Presbyterian polity as the divine pattern for Christ’s rule in his body, not merely as a wise or practical way of ordering the church. Some of the better-known Old School Presbyterian theologians, many of whom are still read today, are Charles Hodge (1797-1878), who taught at Princeton Seminary, James Henley Thornwell (1812-1862), who taught at Columbia Theological Seminary in South Carolina, and Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898), who taught at seminaries in Virginia and Texas. Lesser known, but equally gifted, theologians were such Old Schoolers as Stuart Robinson (1814-1881), who taught and pastored in Kentucky, Thomas Peck (1822-1893), who taught at Union Seminary in Richmond, and Samuel Miller (1769-1850), who taught at Princeton Seminary. This list shows the importance of regionalism, with the Old School prospering in Pennsylvania, parts of New Jersey, and the South, in contrast to the New School, which drew its strength from New York and New England.

The temptation for conservative Presbyterians today is to identify the Old School with the golden age of American Presbyterianism. For this reason, a measure of caution is in order when evaluating the Old School. It was by no means a monolithic communion, nor was Old School Presbyterianism immune from certain problems that affected many Protestant denominations during the nineteenth century—particularly a reliance upon human reason in theological reflection, which sometimes ignored the importance of the Holy Spirit in apprehending divine truth.

Even so, the Old School Presbyterian Church was a rare moment in American Presbyterian history, when the desire to let the church be the church overrode competing distractions involving political and social affairs. After a period of infancy and meager resources, American Presbyterianism came into its own in the form of the Old School church. Ironically, despite the threat that the separation of church and state in America posed to the church’s witness and spiritual authority, the Old School demonstrated that without either the crutch or the impediment of state sponsorship and support, Presbyterianism could mature into a vigorously confessional and churchly expression of Christianity.

7. The Reunion of 1869

These church officers were gathering to ratify the merger of the Old School and New School branches of the Presbyterian Church. The New School commissioners, who had been meeting at Third Presbyterian Church, marched single file toward First Presbyterian Church. Their Old School counterparts, who had been meeting at First Church, started marching at the same time toward Third Church. When the commissioners reached the same city block, according to George Hays, they “halted, and facing each other, met in the middle of the street, shook hands, and in double file, led by their Moderators arm in arm, proceeded to the Third Church for a mass meeting celebrating the event.”

The reunion of 1869 was obviously an effort to heal the division of 1837-1838. But the reunion was not as simple as sending cheerful Presbyterian commissioners to Pittsburgh for a parade. Coming on the heels of the Civil War, this merger was closely bound up with the affairs of the nation. In fact, the 1869 reunion was the last of four Presbyterian reactions to the sectional crisis that divided the North and the South.

The first was the 1857 withdrawal of the New School’s six southern synods to form the United Synod of the PCUSA. This separation stemmed from the growing tension between the anti-slavery sentiments within the New School and those presbyteries and synods located in slave-holding regions. Here it is important to remember that New England and New York supplied the intellectual muscle for both abolitionism and New School Presbyterianism. This made it almost inevitable that southern New Schoolers, for whom slavery was a way of life, would feel out of place among abolition-minded Presbyterians.

The second event that mirrored America’s political crisis was the 1861 division within the Old School Presbyterian Church. At the General Assembly that convened shortly after the Confederacy’s attack on Ft. Sumter, Gardiner Spring, a highly respected pastor from New York City, proposed a set of resolutions that called upon the church to affirm its loyalty to the federal government in Washington, D.C. Charles Hodge of Princeton Seminary faulted the so-called Spring Resolutions for introducing politics into the spiritual affairs of the church. Backing the Union, Hodge explained, was akin to singing the national anthem at the observance of the Lord’s Supper. Despite objections like these, Spring’s proposal prevailed, and in response the Southerners withdrew to form the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States (P.C.C.S.).

Three years later, the P.C.C.S. merged with the United Synod to form the Presbyterian Church in the U.S., also known as the Southern Presbyterian Church. This was the third event in the Presbyterian encounter with the Civil War.

Although the 1864 merger in the South resulted in a denomination that would last for almost 125 years, the 1869 reunion in the North, the fourth event in this sequence, generated greater fanfare and had a more profound influence on American Protestantism. In fact, the Northern reunion illustrated that war has been the chief catalyst for ecumenical relations in America. For that reason, the deliberations that culminated in the northern reunion are worth exploring.

At the start of the Civil War, reunion in the North between the Old and New Schools was basically unthinkable. To the Old School, the New School’s theology was still suspect. Influential New School pastors, such as Albert Barnes and Nathan Beman, were still active and had never disavowed their denials, at least implicitly, of the imputation of Adam’s sin. To be sure, the New School had tempered some of its views and had severed ties in 1855 with the Congregationalist churches of New England. Still, Old School leaders like Charles Hodge and Samuel Baird insisted throughout the debates that even if defective teachings were no longer prominent, the New School’s history of tolerating such erroneous teaching was a sufficient reason to reject reunion.

But folks like Hodge and Baird had fewer sympathetic listeners than they had in 1837. The split among Old Schoolers in 1861 over the Spring Resolutions was one factor; the Old School in the North lost some of its ablest theologians and churchmen. Also, after thirty years, a new generation of pastors and elders, who knew not the debates of the 1830s, was active in church proceedings. Also important was the Western element in the Old School, which had emphatically supported the Union during the war and which took at face value most, if not all, of the New School’s assertions of its own orthodoxy.

Even if there were theological sticking points in the reunion discussions, Northern politics proved to be the proverbial grease that quieted the squeaky doctrinal wheel. “The jolt,” as Lewis G. Vander Velde called it (The Presbyterian Churches and the Federal Union, 1932), that caused the bitterness of the 1830s to fade from memory was the Civil War. “For four years, while this struggle absorbed men’s attention, religious and ecclesiastical bickerings could be, if not forgotten, at least relegated to a secondary place.”

Starting in 1862, the Old and New School Assemblies exchanged fraternal delegates, and that began to thaw relations. Accompanying these exchanges was greater conformity on political issues. Both churches issued declarations pledging their loyalty to the federal government. Although the New School had long been on record in condemning slavery, the Old School began to catch up after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Then, after the war, both churches arrived at similar views on Reconstruction, that is, on what to do with the “rebels,” how to treat the freed slaves, and the terms for ecclesiastical fellowship with Southern Presbyterians.

As Vander Velde writes, “The Old School did not, it is true, emulate the New School Assembly in undertaking the role of coach to the Federal Government in the matter of political reconstruction,” but both sides “expressed identical opinions ... though with differing degrees of violence of language.” For example the editor of the Christian Herald and Presbyterian Recorder wrote in July 1865 that “the great duty of the hour” was “the vindication of the powers ordained by God and of His law by punishing traitors.” For some reason, these same sentiments did not extend to the “rebels” of 1776.

In 1866, both General Assemblies appointed committees to study reunion and suggest suitable measures for executing it. The following year witnessed the greatest opposition to reunion at the Old School Assembly. Hodge was particularly adamant that the Old School church possessed distinct traditions that would be lost after the merger.

But in 1867 the Reformed Presbyterian Church sponsored a weeklong convention in Philadelphia that brought together leaders from most of the American Presbyterian denominations to seek more effective means of cooperation and fellowship. According to many, this gathering was pivotal in bringing important Old and New School officials together and in creating enthusiasm for the reunion of their churches.

When the plans for merger finally came to a vote of presbyteries in 1869, support for the venture was overwhelming. Of the Old School’s 144 presbyteries, 126 favored the plan and only 3 voted against it (while 15 abstained). The New School’s 113 presbyteries all cast their ballots for reunion.

The significance of these votes in 1869 would not emerge for several decades. Hodge would be vindicated in his prediction that merger would mean the loss of the Old School’s distinct ways. Only Princeton Seminary would keep alive the Old School’s outlook in the Northern Presbyterian Church.

Equally significant was the trend in interdenominational cooperation and ecumenical efforts that the 1869 reunion launched. Presbyterians in the reunited church established various organizations to nurture greater cooperation among all the Presbyterian and Reformed denominations. At the same time, these Presbyterians were at the forefront of endeavors to unite all American Protestants in a variety of interdenominational and ecumenical agencies. The logic behind these efforts was similar to that which led to the reunion of the Old and New School Presbyterians. The spiritual needs of the nation were so great—from materialism and secularism to Roman Catholicism—and the resources of Protestants were so scattered that closer cooperation and better organization was imperative.

The merger of 1869, then, marked the beginning of a new period in American Presbyterian history, characterized by cooperation and fellowship. The motto of the era was essentially, “Doctrine divides, mission unites.” Just as the War for Independence had done, so the Civil War swayed Presbyterians to set aside some of their religious convictions for the seemingly greater good of preserving a Christian society.

8. Confessional Revision in 1903

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, industrial development and technological progress promised to usher in an age of unprecedented opportunity for America. Northern Presbyterians, recently reunited, were prepared to serve the spiritual needs of the nation with a spirit of self-confidence.

The greatest apostle of Presbyterian progress was Charles A. Briggs (1841-1913). As professor of Hebrew and cognate languages at Union Theological Seminary in New York, Briggs actively promoted higher-critical approaches to the Bible. He was also a leading advocate of Protestant church union. Both of these causes were in the interest of religious progress. “Progress in religion, in doctrine, and in life,” he wrote, “is demanded of our age of the world more than any other age.”

But there was an obstacle that prevented Presbyterians from fully embracing the spirit of the age, and that was their rigid commitment to a theology of the past. So Briggs also went around promoting revision to the Westminster Confession of Faith, especially in his 1889 book Whither? A Theological Question for the Times.

Briggs’s argument was twofold. First, he claimed that the contemporary supporters of the Confession had actually distorted the spirit of its teaching. “Modern Presbyterianism,” he charged, “had departed from the Westminster Standards” and a “false orthodoxy had obtruded itself” in its place. That false teaching—what he labeled “orthodoxism”—was coming from Princeton Seminary, principally in the defense of biblical authority championed by A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield. Briggs wrote:

Orthodoxism assumes to know the truth and is unwilling to learn; it is haughty and arrogant, assuming the divine prerogatives of infallibility and inerrancy; it hates the truth that is unfamiliar to it, and prosecutes it to the uttermost. But orthodoxy loves the truth. It is ever anxious to learn, for it knows how greatly the truth of God transcends human knowledge.... It is meek, lowly, and reverent. It is full of charity and love. It does not recognize an infallible pope; it does not bow to an infallible theologian.

Although critical of the alleged innovations from Princeton Seminary, Union Seminary’s Old School rival, Briggs did not advocate merely removing a supposed Princetonian gloss from the Westminster Confession. Presbyterians, he argued, must also acknowledge the inadequacies and errors of the Confession. Since progress was of the essence of genuine Presbyterianism, the Confession itself encouraged its adjustment “to the higher knowledge of our times and the still higher knowledge that the coming period of progress in theology will give us.” Failure to take this step would be to retreat to the errors of Rome and to abandon the very principles of the Reformation.

Briggs was tapping into a growing consensus in the church, which had begun to form no later than the reunion of 1869, that the harder Calvinistic edges of the Confession needed to be softened. In the words of Benjamin J. Lake, “Some of the time-honored rigidity in the Westminster Confession seemed obsolete to many Presbyterians.” Typically, Presbyterian rigidity was spelled p-r-e-d-e-s-t-i-n-a-t-i-o-n.

At the same time, former Old Schoolers feared the rise of “broad churchism” and anticonfessionalism. But if Briggs’s proposals outraged conservatives, the spirit and the terms of the 1869 reunion discouraged efforts to discipline him. That reticence ended in 1891, however, when Briggs delivered an address on “The Authority of Holy Scripture.” Given upon the occasion of his induction to the chair of biblical studies at Union, immediately after his solemn resubscribing to the Westminster standards, this lecture was a broadside against the verbal inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture taught in them. “I shall venture to affirm that, so far as I can see, there are errors in the Scriptures that no one has been able to explain away; and the theory that they are not in the original text is a sheer assumption.”

Conservative reaction was swift. Sixty-three presbyteries presented overtures to the General Assembly, calling for action. The 1891 Assembly voted overwhelmingly (449 to 60) to veto Briggs’s appointment at Union, and the 1893 Assembly found him guilty of heresy and suspended him from the ministry. Union’s board of directors refused to accept the decision, and so it “divorced” itself from denominational oversight and retained Briggs on its faculty.

The Briggs trial prompted the defeat of a plan for confessional revision in 1893. Briggs himself eventually left for the Episcopalian Church, but the push for revision continued. Thirty-four presbyteries sent overtures for revision to the 1900 Assembly, and that Assembly appointed a study committee of fifteen, which included a former U.S. President (Benjamin Harrison) and a sitting Supreme Court justice (John Harlan). One who was invited, but declined to serve, was Princeton’s Benjamin B. Warfield. “It is an inexpressible grief,” he wrote, to see the church “spending its energies in a vain attempt to lower its testimony to suit the ever changing sentiment of the world around it.” Warfield’s lament would persuade few. In an era when change was a sign of health, his dissent sounded, in the words of an opponent, as a call for the “harmony of standing still.” Briggs may have left the church, but clearly his spirit lived on.

Despite some support for a major overhaul, a compromise prevailed that effected minor revisions to the Confession. In 1903 the church added two chapters on “The Holy Spirit” and “The Love of God and Missions.” Both were crafted with language that was vaguely biblical and not distinctively Reformed. In addition, the church revised chapter 16, article 7, which described the works of the unregenerate. Where these works were formerly described as “sinful and cannot please God,” the revised language described them as “praiseworthy.” Perhaps of greatest significance was the inclusion of a “Declaratory Statement” that sought to explain the Confession’s doctrine of election. In words that many accused of being deliberately ambiguous, the statement offered an “avowal ... of certain inferences” about predestination, softening the doctrine for those who found it offensive and contradictory to the doctrine of human freedom.

Presbyterians for the most part reacted enthusiastically to these changes. It was a preservation of “generic Calvinism” in the judgment of many. Henry Van Dyke carefully framed the results within the mainstream of Calvinist orthodoxy: “These two truths,” he wrote, “God’s sovereignty in the bestowal of his grace, and his infinite love for all men, are the hinges and turning points of all Christian theology. The anti-Calvinist decries the first. The hyper-Calvinist or Supralapsarian decries the second, holding that God creates some men on purpose to damn them, for his glory. The true Calvinist believes both and insists that they are consistent.” The Philadelphia Public Ledger echoed Van Dyke’s sentiments. The revisions to the Confession left its basic Calvinism intact while managing “to render it instantly so much more congenial to the modern mind.”

Years later, Princeton historian Lefferts Loetscher was more candid when he described alterations as a “change to Arminianism.” By these revisions, he wrote, “the Remonstrants of the Synod of Dort ... finally won recognition” in American Presbyterianism. Evidence for Loetscher’s interpretation can be found in the reunion that took place on the heels of revision, when the Arminian prodigals of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church reunited with the Northern Presbyterians in 1906. Two years later, Presbyterians were leaders in the formation of the Federal Council of Churches, the institution that would emerge as the voice for mainline or (as evangelicals called it) “liberal” Protestantism.

Confessional revision, then, opened the church to an ecumenical age. But that was not its only consequence. Equally significant was the effect it generated among conservatives, who began at this time to adopt new strategies for fighting the rise of liberalism in the Presbyterian Church. Beginning with the Portland Deliverance, which was adopted by the 1892 Assembly and affirmed the verbal inspiration of Scripture in opposition to the heresy of Briggs, resistance to modernism in the Presbyterian Church took the form of defending the “necessary and essential” elements of the church’s teaching, especially the so-called fundamentals of the faith. In the Portland Deliverance and other declarations that followed in 1910, 1916, and 1923, conservative Presbyterians sought to italicize certain doctrines as the Bible’s truly nonnegotiables, rather than the Confession itself as containing the system of doctrine found in the Scriptures. In one sense, then, the progressives were right: the Confession was becoming obsolete for many Presbyterians, and confessional identity was vanishing, not only quickly on the left, but also gradually on the right.

9. The Special Commission of 1925

Progressive Presbyterians were not content with the revisions to the Westminster Confession that were approved in 1903. There was more work to be done to bring the Presbyterian Church into greater harmony with the modern world. The center of the progressive movement was in the Presbytery of New York, which pressed the liberal agenda on three fronts. First, on May 21, 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick, the Baptist supply pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in the City of New York, rallied liberals with his famous sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Although the sermon was a plea for tolerance, most Presbyterians—liberal and conservative—would have answered the title’s rhetorical question in the affirmative, because it appeared that the conservatives were strong enough to force the liberals out of the church. A year later, the Presbytery took the provocative step of ordaining two graduates of Union Seminary who could not affirm the virgin birth of Christ.

Finally, the Presbytery convened a gathering in Auburn, New York, in December 1923. It produced “An Affirmation designed to safeguard the unity and liberty of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.” The Auburn Affirmation questioned the constitutionality of General Assembly deliverances that proclaimed certain doctrines as necessary and essential beliefs for Presbyterian ministers, and it went on to describe those doctrines (the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, the vicarious atonement, Jesus’ resurrection, and his miracles) merely as theories about the Bible’s message. Within a year, the Auburn Affirmation secured the signatures of 1,300 Presbyterian ministers.

Conservatives fought back in the General Assembly of 1924, when they narrowly elected a conservative moderator, Clarence Macartney, and managed to secure the dismissal of Fosdick from the First Presbyterian pulpit. The Assembly failed to take action against the Auburn Affirmationists, however, as many conservatives believed that they lacked sufficient votes to win that battle.

Instead, a showdown took place a year later at the General Assembly of 1925, meeting in Columbus, Ohio. Many commissioners were convinced of the creedal infidelity of the Presbytery of New York. Henry Sloane Coffin, however, was prepared to defend the Presbytery. He preached the preceding Sunday at the First Congregational Church of Columbus, the former pulpit of social gospeler Washington Gladden. In his sermon, “What Liberal Presbyterians Are Standing For,” he put forth his case: “We question whether we have any right to call ourselves a Christian Church, if we exclude from its ministry any whom Christ manifestly does not exclude from the gift of His Holy Spirit.”

The Assembly elected Charles Erdman of Princeton Seminary as its moderator. Although Erdman’s theology was evangelical, J. Gresham Machen considered him to be the candidate of modernists and indifferentists. Upon his election, Erdman quickly proved Machen right. He held a two-hour private meeting with Coffin, listening to his plan to lead the Presbytery of New York and its sympathizers out of the Assembly, should the Judicial Commission rule unfavorably.

Desperately seeking to avoid a walkout, Erdman agreed to permit Coffin to read a protest if the Judicial Commission ruled against the Presbytery. The Commission did, in fact, determine that the Presbytery had acted improperly in ordaining men who could not affirm the virgin birth of Christ, which was “the established law” of the Church. Conservatives seemed to be on the brink of victory, and liberals prepared to leave.

Then Coffin approached the platform of the assembly, as his biographer describes:

He was pale and showed the effects of the strained and sleepless nights during which he had been in conference seeking to avert this action. In a firm voice he read a prepared statement on behalf of the Commissioners of the Presbytery of New York protesting the decision as contrary to the constitution of the church and declaring the purpose of the New York Presbytery to maintain its constitutional rights in licensure.

But Coffin’s threatened exodus did not take place, because of a bold and desperate move by Erdman. Yielding the chair to the vice moderator, Erdman proposed from the floor that the Assembly establish a special commission “to study the present spiritual condition of our Church and the causes making for unrest, and to report to the next General Assembly, to the end that the purity, peace, unity and progress of the Church may be assured.”

Erdman’s stroke of parliamentary genius was unanimously approved. Later that night he met with liberal commissioners and urged them not to leave the church until the Special Commission reported to the next assembly. Erdman then appointed fifteen committee members, mostly “respected loyalists.” The most well known and influential member of the committee was his close friend, Robert E. Speer, secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions, who would later clash with Machen over the latter’s claim of modernism on the Board.

In the ensuing year, the Special Commission met four times. Machen argued before the Commission that the cause of the unrest in the church was “reducible to the one great underlying cause,” which was the presence of modernism in it. Coffin countered that the differences were due to “misapprehension.” Fighting this battle would “plunge the church into calamitous litigation and hinder us from doing our work and building the kingdom of God.” “It is ruinous,” he continued, “to divide existing forces. We ought to work harmoniously together and emphasize those things in which we agree.”

In the unanimous report that the Commission presented to the 1926 Assembly, it agreed with Coffin that there was “evangelical unity” in the church. American Presbyterianism stood for toleration and progress, shaped by “two controlling factors”:

One is, that the Presbyterian system admits to diversity of view where the core of truth is identical. Another is, the church has flourished best and showed most clearly the good hand of God upon it, when it laid aside its tendencies to stress these differences, and put the emphasis on the spirit of unity.

Coffin could not have authored a more agreeable conclusion. “It seems to be everyone’s wish to keep the peace,” he wrote.

When the Commission presented its report, Clarence Macartney, two years removed as the Assembly moderator, moved to excise certain sections and to dismiss the Commission. His older brother, Albert J. McCartney, rose in rebuttal with withering words of ridicule: “Clarence is all right, friends. The only trouble is he isn’t married. If that old bachelor would marry, he would have less time to worry over other people’s theology.... I know that if mother could come back, there would be room for him and for me to say our prayers in the same words on her knee at that old home of ours in western Pennsylvania. I believe there is room for him and for you and me, to say our prayers in identical language in the Presbyterian Church.”

The younger Macartney’s motion was denied, and in 1927 the General Assembly approved the final report of the Commission with only one dissenting vote. The effect was to grant freedom to the Presbytery of New York to reject the virgin birth of Christ as an essential tenet of the church, and to vindicate the signers of the Auburn Affirmation.

The report underscored that Presbyterian unity required the end of “all slander and misrepresentation” within the church. The focus of attention, then, fell on one particular source of recent unrest: the factions within the faculty of Princeton Seminary. The school’s reorganization in 1929 brought two signers of the Auburn Affirmation onto its new, thirty-member Board. Convinced that this would lead the school into a decline into theological liberalism, Machen left Princeton and formed Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia.

The General Assembly of 1925 marked the decline of conservative strength in the Presbyterian Church; no subsequent assembly elected a conservative moderator. It also raised Henry Sloane Coffin’s visibility in the church. Together with Erdman, he forestalled the liberal exodus that most observers regarded as inevitable. According to Time magazine, Coffin went to the General Assembly “as he had gone before, one of the many commissioners from the Presbytery of New York. He returned the acknowledged leader of the liberal elements of his church.”

Nearly two decades later, in 1943, the General Assembly would elect Coffin as moderator, a symbolic vote in two respects. First, it confirmed Coffin’s role in the church he nearly walked out of in 1925. Second, since he was president of Union Seminary at the time, the vote represented a healing of the breach between the Presbyterian Church and the Seminary in the liberal Presbytery of New York, and a vindication of Charles A. Briggs, fifty years after his heresy trial.

10. 1936: A Continuing Presbyterian Church

“On Thursday, June 11, 1936, the hopes of many long years were realized. We became members, at last, of a true Presbyterian Church; we recovered, at last, the blessing of true Christian fellowship. What a joyous moment it was! How the long years of struggle seemed to sink into nothingness compared with the peace and joy that filled our hearts!”

With those words, J. Gresham Machen announced the formation of the Presbyterian Church of America in the June 22, 1936, issue of the Presbyterian Guardian. (The church’s name was changed to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1939.) Guardian readers had followed the progress of the Presbyterian conflict during the previous dozen years: The liberal Auburn Affirmation of 1924 was vindicated by the Special Commission of 1925. Princeton Seminary was reorganized and Westminster Seminary was founded in 1929. The Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions was formed in 1933, and Machen and his associates were tried in 1934 for their involvement with it. The 1936 General Assembly denied his appeal and defrocked him and other ministers.

All of that lay behind the thirty-three ministers and seventeen elders who joined Machen to form the OPC on June 11. “With what lively hope does our gaze now turn to the future!” Machen exclaimed. But the start of a new church was also the continuation of an old church. The Act of Association that formed the new church read:

In order to continue what we believe to be the true spiritual succession of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., which we hold to have been abandoned by the present organization of that body, ... we, a company of ministers and ruling elders, having been removed from that organization in contravention (as we believe) of its constitution, or having severed our connection with that organization, ... do hereby associate ourselves together with all Christian people who do and will adhere to us, in a body to be known and styled as the Presbyterian Church of America.

The PCUSA had become Presbyterian in name only, and the task of the new church was to maintain what the PCUSA had forfeited. As Machen explained later in the pages of the Guardian, “We withdrew from the Presbyterian Church in order that we might continue to be Presbyterian.” Thus the language of “spiritual succession” was heavily invoked in the rationale for the founding of the OPC.

In what sense would the OPC become the spiritual successor to the PCUSA? Would it mark a return to Old School confessionalism? Would it zealously defend the fundamentals of the faith? Would it become the conservative version of the American Presbyterian establishment? What was a true Presbyterian church?

These questions revealed that the Presbyterian controversy was far from over. The battle against modernism had created a small coalition of antimodernists. Now it was left for the new church positively to define the Reformed faith that it intended to maintain. In anticipation of this challenge, Machen had emphasized (in the Guardian in the previous November) that Presbyterian ministers were obliged to maintain their vows both to an infallible Bible and to the Calvinistic interpretation of the Bible. “There is great danger to our Christian testimony,” he warned, “if we forget the second part of the ordination pledge in our eagerness to defend the first.” If the church failed to defend the Reformed faith, the movement would be reduced to a “vague interdenominationalism.”

One minister in the new church who was keenly interested in maintaining continuity with the American Presbyterian past was Carl McIntire. The best case for that continuity could be made, he claimed, if the church stayed within the confessional tradition of the PCUSA. That meant adopting the Westminster Confession with the 1903 revisions. While most commissioners identified those Arminianizing revisions as the beginning of the decline of orthodoxy in the PCUSA, McIntire pressed the pragmatic argument that their inclusion would help congregations in their legal battle to keep their church property.

When the Second General Assembly of the church met in November 1936, Machen privately expressed concern that what lay ahead for the church was a “calamity beyond words.” Cornelius Van Til, professor at Westminster Seminary, rose in opposition to the appeals he heard for expediency. “Shall we be Arminians before the courts this year, with the full expectation of being Calvinists next year?” His and similar arguments eventually prevailed, as the church adopted the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms, without the 1903 revisions (with two minor exceptions), by a resounding majority.

Other debates accompanied the definition of spiritual succession. One of them had to do with premillennialism. When John Murray and R. B. Kuiper took on the errors of dispensationalism, they were shocked at the ministers who rose to their defense-including McIntire, who refused to distinguish between dispensationalism and premillennialism.

For his part, McIntire warned that the new church, like the old church, was in danger of being overtaken by an “unpresbyterian machine.” That machine was located primarily at Westminster Seminary, whose faculty, including Murray, Kuiper, Ned B. Stonehouse, and Van Til (a Scotsman and three Dutchmen), was out of touch with the American Presbyterian tradition and unable to lead a continuing American Presbyterian church. The charge was pointedly made by Professor Allan A. MacRae. When he resigned from the Westminster faculty, he described his former colleagues as “a small alien group without American Presbyterian background.”

There was a sense in which the fundamentalists were right. After all, premillennialism had been part of the American Presbyterian heritage, and had been represented at Princeton Seminary at least since 1905, when Charles Erdman joined the faculty. Van Til especially struggled to understand how premillennialism could command a following in a self-consciously Reformed church. “This is not the historical attitude of the Reformed churches,” he wrote to his friend John DeWaard. “In the Dutch tradition at least those holding the premillennial view were merely geduld [tolerated].”

After Machen’s untimely death on January 1, 1937, the battle for the identity of the church focused on the use of alcoholic beverages. The Presbytery of the Chicago Area presented an overture to the Third General Assembly in 1937 that expanded on the definition of spiritual succession: “In maintaining the true spiritual succession to which we have adverted we hold that we are successors not only as to the Calvinistic system of doctrine (to which we earnestly adhere) but as well to all other elements of that true spiritual succession, including those which related to the Christian life and conduct of all the people of God committed to our care.” The overture went on to recommend total abstinence for all members of the church, and it cited ample Presbyterian precedent, including General Assembly deliverances in 1818, 1829, 1837 (New School), 1865 (Old School), and finally an 1877 declaration “that total abstinence from all intoxicating drinks as a beverage is demanded from every Christian by the condition of society, the purity of the Church and the Word of God.”

The General Assembly debate was long and passionate. McIntire argued that Machen, himself a teetotaler, would have approved the overture. John Murray countered that Machen would have abominated such a disregard for Christian liberty. Nowhere in Scripture, he argued, was there any authority by which the church could impose total abstinence on all Christians. Eventually the overture was defeated by over two-thirds of the Assembly. McIntire, MacRae, and other fundamentalists then departed to form the Bible Presbyterian Church, persuaded that the OPC’s direction was irreconcilable with their vision for American Presbyterianism.

Thirty years later, in his book The Death of a Church, McIntire continued to press his claims. He described the Orthodox Presbyterian Church as one with “decided Christian Reformed traditions and desires in contrast to the position and heritage of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.” The OPC had charted a new course and rejected its calling to be a continuing Presbyterian church. The Bible Presbyterian Church, on the other hand, represented a “straight line” of “spiritual succession which they were determined to help maintain and preserve for God’s glory.”

The early debates in the life of the OPC indicate that its formation raised as many questions about Presbyterian identity as it settled. While dissenters broke fellowship to defend features of American Presbyterianism that had become prominent between 1869 and 1930, the OPC set out in a direction that was not only antimodernist but also militantly Reformed. Its founders were convinced that they needed to recover the nobler part of the Presbyterian Church’s heritage. Staying on course, however, would be a constant problem facing the OPC.

11. The Confession of 1967

In 1958, the United Presbyterian Church of North America ended one hundred years of denominational life when it merged with the northern mainline Presbyterian church (PCUSA) to form the United Presbyterian Church in the USA (UPCUSA). For the PCUSA, the union marked the partial success of its ecumenical ambitions.

What began as three-way discussions was reduced when the Southern Presbyterians pulled out. North-South reunion would have to wait another quarter century. For the former United Presbyterians, this was an astonishingly quick assimilation from their Covenanter past into the American Presbyterian mainstream. Among the terms of the union was an agreement to write a new confessional standard in order to offer contemporary advice for American Presbyterians. Although the United Presbyterians were generally considered to be the more conservative party in the union, they were eager to craft a new confession. In that denomination’s history, the Testimony of 1858 and the Confession Statement of 1925 sanctioned the idea of writing contemporary statements in order to guard the church against the perception of creedal obsolescence.

The committee assigned to this task was quick to identify supposed flaws in the Westminster standards. It was considered too legalistic (especially in the moral casuistry of the Larger Catechism), and there was little social dimension to its teaching. (The chief evidence for critics was the absence of the word neighbor in the standards, although the ill-regarded Larger Catechism’s treatment of the Decalogue provided much instruction about loving one’s neighbor.) Most objectionable was its decretal theology, which starkly separated the elect from the reprobate. In all of these respects, Westminster was badly dated. John Mackay of Princeton Seminary urged loyal Presbyterians of the twentieth century not to adopt the absolutism or sectarianism of the seventeenth century.

Nearly a decade later, what emerged was the Confession of 1967. In neo-orthodox fashion, the Confession affirmed God’s transcendence over creation, humanity’s fall into sin, and the call to faith as a response to God’s grace in Jesus Christ. It also described the Bible as the “word of God,” subordinating it to Jesus as the incarnate “Word of God,” to whom Scripture was a faithful and “normative” (though fallible) witness. Moreover, the Confession endorsed modern biblical scholarship, encouraging Presbyterians to read the Bible historically and not literally, thus liberating it from the doctrine of inerrancy.

The heart of the Confession focused on reconciliation-but, as Westminster Seminary’s Edmund Clowney pointed out, this was not the biblical doctrine of reconciliation between sinners and a wrathful God through the merits of Christ. Rather, the Confession described the calling of the church in terms of the social gospel: the church “is entrusted with God’s message of reconciliation and shares his labor of healing the enmities of mankind.” In outlining what was crucial for the church to testify to the world in its age, the Confession omitted biblical infallibility, the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ, and all of the other essentials that American Presbyterians had debated a half-century earlier. The “stunning” effect of the Confession of 1967, Clowney concluded, was to “open the church wide to unbelief.”

Clowney’s colleague, Cornelius Van Til, took the Confession of 1967 as proof of his charge (made in a 1946 book) that the theology of Karl Barth had infiltrated the PCUSA as the “new modernism.” Indeed, neo-orthodoxy had proved to be more triumphant in the Presbyterian Church than liberalism. Liberalism undermined the church’s confidence in the Westminster standards, but never to the point of crafting a new confession. However, the largely Barthian Confession of 1967 entailed the rejection of the Westminster standards-and indeed of all that the historic Christian creeds affirmed.

Evangelical Barthians disagreed with this assessment. They charged that Van Til exaggerated the new confession’s Barthian roots. Geoffrey Bromiley of Fuller Seminary conceded that there were parallels to Barth’s theology. But upon closer inspection, he claimed, Barth’s teaching on Scripture and the Trinity was far more orthodox. Bromiley went on to argue that the Confession of 1967 accommodated itself to liberalism and Romanism in ways that Barth never did.

The full measure of the significance of the Confession of 1967 must take into account other confessional changes by the UPCUSA. The church did not replace the Westminster Confession, but rather joined it and several other confessions in The Book of Confessions. The UPCUSA now received multiple documents from the ancient church (Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds), the Reformation (Scots Confession, Heidelberg Catechism, Second Helvetic Confession, and Westminster Confession and Shorter Catechism), and the modern church (Barmen Declaration and Confession of 1967). Presbyterians united them in one book to remind the church of the cloud of witnesses from its Christian heritage, and also to remind it that no single creed could capture the fullness of the Christian faith, because each of them was a product of particular historical circumstances. For Van Til and other critics, however, The Book of Confessions was a book of discord—a collection of mutually exclusive gospels.

The overt conflicts among these various creeds were resolved by rewriting the church’s ordination vows. Presbyterian officers were now required to perform their ecclesiastical duties “under the authority of the Scriptures and the guidance of the confessions” of the church (emphasis added). No longer were they to receive confessional standards as “containing the system of doctrine found in Scripture.”

By making these changes, the PCUSA arguably abandoned its confessional identity, because the confession no longer bound the officers of the church by determining what was within or beyond the pale of Reformed orthodoxy. The new role of the confessions (as Presbyterians learned to express them in the plural) was to instruct, to lead, and to guide. If Presbyterians sympathetically studied how the faith was once confessed in these windows into their Reformed heritage, they would be better equipped to confess their faith today.

The Confession of 1967, then, marked the end of the Northern Presbyterian Church as a confessional church. In Clowney’s memorable phrase, the Confession of 1967 relegated the Westminster standards to a creedal museum, its value restricted to its historical significance. Van Til added that the mainline church would recognize the Westminster Confession as much as modern highways would permit the traffic of Amish buggies.

One reason that Clowney, Van Til, and other Orthodox Presbyterians devoted so much attention to the Confession of 1967 was their anticipation of a windfall of congregations joining the OPC, anxious to escape the established neo-orthodoxy of the mainline church. However, the exodus involved only a handful of churches, largely because mainline conservatives were able to put a positive spin on the new confession and its accompanying terms of subscription.

No one tried harder than John Gerstner of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. In evaluating a preliminary draft of the confession, Gerstner labeled it “the greatest doctrinal disaster in the history of Presbyterianism” and a “slander to our Presbyterian fathers.” But when he later focused on the change in the subscription vow as approved by the General Assembly of 1966, he claimed that the intent of that Assembly made the “instruction and guidance” to be “tantamount to believing what is catholic, evangelical, and reformed in the Book of Confessions.” That eliminated, he reasoned, the neo-orthodox elements of the Confession. Gerstner concluded that the new vow rendered the UPCUSA, “in its officially subscribed documents, more catholic, evangelical, and reformed than ever before.” Rhetoric like this was all the rationale that conservative churches needed for staying in, anxious as they were to retain their property.

But even as they suggested that the Confession of 1967 would usher in a new phase in the life of American Presbyterians, observers like Clowney and Van Til may actually have underestimated the effects of the actions of 1967. When the OPC perceived modernism as the greatest threat to Christian faith and practice, it insisted on the importance of confessional fidelity for ecclesiastical health. In its constant sparring with the PCUSA during the first quarter century of its history, the OPC maintained a consistent tone of Reformed militancy, commending its confessional integrity in contrast to the counterfeit confessionalism of the mainline church.

But 1967 may have ushered the OPC into its own confessional crisis. Once the UPCUSA changed its confessional standard and its constitution, the OPC could no longer accuse the UPCUSA of intellectual dishonesty. From that point on, the OPC expended less energy contrasting itself with mainline Presbyterianism, with which it differed. Instead, it increasingly compared itself with American evangelicalism, and sought to emphasize the things they had in common.

12. 1973: The Presbyterian Church in America

The Presbyterian Church in America was born in 1973, but the rationale for its founding dated back more than a hundred years. The American Civil War provoked the division of Presbyterians along the Mason-Dixon line.

On December 4, 1861, commissioners from Southern presbyteries met in Augusta, Georgia, to renounce the jurisdiction of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Old School) and to form the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America. (After the war, the church changed its name to the Presbyterian Church in the United States.) In its “Address to All the Churches of Jesus Christ throughout the Earth,” the church outlined the Northern ecclesiastical indiscretions that forced its separation, especially the Gardiner Springs Resolutions of the previous General Assembly that declared the church’s obligation to uphold the Union and support the federal constitution. In the minds of Southern Presbyterians, this was a violation of the spirituality of the church by an unwarranted engagement in partisan politics.

Northern and Southern Presbyterianism remained divided for well over a century. In the North, after the Old School-New School reunion, there was an eagerness to embrace the progressive spirit of the modern age, including Darwinism and biblical higher criticism. In contrast, Southern Presbyterians were anxious to preserve their heritage, which included biblical inerrancy, strict subscription to the Westminster Confession and Catechisms, jure divino (divine right) Presbyterianism, and, most distinctively, the spiritual mission of the church.

Over time, a progressive spirit also took root in the South, and some ministers urged the church’s liberation from the “dead hand of the past.” In 1931, church historian Ernest Trice Thompson at Union Seminary in Virginia posed this question in the title of a Union Seminary Quarterly Review article: “Is the Northern Church Theologically Sound?” He gave the Northern church a clean bill of spiritual health and urged his Southern colleagues to pursue reunion. “Our sister denomination is fundamentally sound in the faith,” he concluded, “and is just as likely to remain so as our own.”

Assessments like this prompted concern among conservatives in the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) that modernism had infiltrated the South. Their fears were confirmed when efforts were launched (beginning in 1939) to follow the Northern church in softening the robust Calvinism of the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms. (Additional confessional revisions took place in 1942 and 1959.)

Further decline in the South was marked by the inroads of neo-orthodoxy—what Cornelius Van Til described as “the new modernism.” Many Southern Presbyterian elders recalled the shock of returning home after service in World War II to a different church. By mid-century, it was a common lament that Dabney, Girardeau, Palmer, and Thornwell would not recognize what the PCUS had become.

Conservative opposition to neo-orthodoxy began to take organized form in 1942, when Nelson Bell, a longtime Southern Presbyterian medical missionary to China (and father-in-law of Billy Graham), launched a new magazine, the Southern Presbyterian Journal. It was a lay-oriented weekly magazine designed “to call our Southern Presbyterian Church back to her original position, a position unequivocally loyal to the Word of God and the Standards of our church which God has so signally blessed and which He will bless again.” (Eventually the magazine would drop “Southern” from its name.)

Other conservative renewal groups formed, including Concerned Presbyterians, Presbyterian Churchmen United, and the Presbyterian Evangelistic Fellowship. The PEF, founded in 1964, sought to reestablish the doctrine of the spirituality of the church and to turn away from the social gospel in the conduct of foreign missions. Its agenda resembled that of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions founded by J. Gresham Machen.

These groups met with a measure of success, especially in thwarting several plans to unite the Southern church with the modernists in the North. But merger seemed inevitable, especially after 1964, when the PCUS approved the ordination of women to ministry. Paul Settle described the sense of despair that had set in by the end of the decade: “Practically every doctrine held precious by God’s people had been denied, rejected, ridiculed, or at least called into question in the denomination’s official publications, pronouncements, policies, and programs.”

Southern Presbyterian conservatives, like their counterparts earlier in the century in the North, represented a mixture of doctrinal viewpoints that ranged from firmly committed Old School Presbyterians to fundamentalists who resisted social change. Moreover, there were divisions between those who sought reform from within and others who urged the need to separate. All parties seemed to agree, however, that a seminary was needed to provide ministers for the conservative cause, given their suspicions about the teaching at the four seminaries of the South (Austin, Columbia, Louisville, and Union). A key step in the promotion of the conservative cause was taken in 1966, when Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, was established on explicitly Old School Presbyterian grounds, especially underscoring the spirituality of the church.

When yet another plan to unite the Northern and Southern mainline Presbyterian churches took shape in 1973, conservatives sensed the futility of mounting any further opposition. Instead, they focused their attention on withdrawing from a united church while maintaining legal possession of their church property. In the spring of that year, the drafters of the plan of union surprised both churches by announcing that they needed two more years to finish their work. Conservatives charged duplicity in the delay: the ultimate reason for the delay, they suspected, was to present a plan without the promised “escape clause” that would allow Southern congregations to leave the denomination with their property.

And so, practicing what Francis Schaeffer described as “discipline in reverse,” Presbyterian conservatives, by this time united in a Continuing Church umbrella organization, mobilized quickly to organize a new church. Delegates from 260 churches gathered in Birmingham, Alabama, on December 4, 1973, to form the Presbyterian Church in America—122 years to the day after the founding of the old Southern Presbyterian Church. In its “Message to All Churches of Jesus Christ throughout the World,” the new church announced that “we have called ourselves ‘Continuing’ Presbyterian because we seek to continue the faith of the founding fathers” of the PCUS.

The parallels between the founding of the OPC and the founding of the PCA are worth noting. Both stories involved controversies in foreign missions that led to the temporary establishment of parachurch mission agencies. Both saw a seminary formed exactly seven years before the birth of the church. Yet the continuing church movement in the South was different in significant ways from the covenant union in the North. The threat to the South, neo-orthodoxy, was more subtle than liberalism, and seemed less overtly hostile to confessional orthodoxy. Moreover, independent missionary work in the South proceeded without the threat of church discipline that confronted the members of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions in the North. As a result, the Southern continuing church movement was able to develop slowly over several decades, and did not explode as quickly into a crisis. This permitted the formation of a constituency that was larger, if more theologically diverse.

The symmetry between the actions of 1861 and those of 1973 prompted some to accentuate the Old School identity of the PCA (citing, for example, the church’s return to the 1861 version of the Westminster Confession and Catechisms). However, the PCA was a diverse body of conflicting theological agendas from its founding. Many of its founders were more eager to escape from the liberalism of the Southern church’s bureaucracy and seminaries than to reestablish the high Calvinism of its Southern Presbyterian past. As Paul Settle observed, “The real unity of the church was remarkably unrealized in the PCA’s early years.”

Although it has struggled with theological controversies from theonomy to the charismatic gifts, the PCA has grown tenfold in thirty years. This was partly the result of the 1982 union with the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, and the voluntary realignment of some Orthodox Presbyterian congregations. What is less clear is the extent to which it is growing as a Presbyterian denomination. The distinct convictions of Southern Presbyterian orthodoxy have receded in most quarters of the church. The Presbyterian Journal evolved into World magazine, and “word and deed ministry” has begun to eclipse the “spirituality of the church” in the vocabulary of the PCA. These are signs that the denomination may be more eager to locate itself on the cutting edge of culture reformation than to foster a coherently Reformed and Presbyterian identity.

13. Presbyterian Reunion in 1983

For over three million American Presbyterians, the Civil War ended on June 10, 1983, when the Northern Presbyterian Church (UPCUSA) merged with the Southern Presbyterian Church (PCUS) to form the Presbyterian Church (USA). The union was celebrated in Georgia, the state where the division occurred 122 years before.

Union was a long time in coming. Sporadic Northern-initiated efforts started as early as 1870, but earnest discussions began after World War II, with the establishment of comity agreements on home and foreign soil, union churches, and eventually union presbyteries. More significantly, Southern Presbyterians gradually caught up to the progressive agenda of the North, approving the ordination of women to the ministry in 1964 and adopting a book of multiple confessions in 1975. In taking the latter step, they followed the North in redefining a confession as a “witness to God’s saving activity,” rather than the affirmation of specific doctrines.

Two controversial judicial cases set the stage for union. In 1975, the Permanent Judicial Commission of the UPCUSA General Assembly outraged conservatives by overturning the Pittsburgh Presbytery’s ordination of Wynn Kenyon. Kenyon had informed his Presbytery that he could not participate in services of ordination for women. The PJC ruled that the church must deny the ordination of someone who refused to follow “an explicit constitutional provision.” That decision prompted the departure of forty conservative congregations, including Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia.

The second case involved the reception of Mansfield Kaseman, a minister in the United Church of Christ, by the National Capitol Union Presbytery in 1981. Although Kasemen denied the deity of Christ, the PJC decided that his beliefs fell within the “acceptable range of interpretation” of the denomination’s confessions. The ruling persuaded a dozen renewal-minded congregations (in the North and South) that it was time to leave mainline Presbyterianism. Because these churches were open to women’s ordination and the exercise of charismatic gifts, there was no denomination for them to join, and so they formed the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.

These divisive cases actually promoted union by consigning the most vocal conservative voices to separatist denominations. Yet when the mainline merger finally took place in 1983, it was ironically beaten by a year when the eight-year-old Presbyterian Church in America absorbed the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod. This could also claim to be a North-South reunion and even an Old School-New School reunion, as system subscriptionists in the RPCES joined the mainly strict subscriptionists in the PCA. (The Orthodox Presbyterian Church was a participant in this “joining and receiving” process, but an insufficient number of PCA presbyteries approved the receiving of the OPC. Four years later, the PCA did extend a “J and R” invitation to the OPC, but the OPC declined the invitation.)

As in the American Presbyterian reunions of the past, great fanfare accompanied the mainline merger, including a communion service with 13,000 in attendance. But whereas the Old School-New School reunion of 1869 prompted ambitious planning for a new era of Presbyterian service to the nation, the 1983 reunion was accompanied by concern for denominational decline. Since 1983, there have been three areas of hemorrhaging in the PC(USA).

Most obvious has been the steep decline in membership. In 1965, the combined membership of the predecessor denominations was over four million. By the turn of the millennium, membership was barely over two million. Remaining conservatives placed the blame on a liberal church bureaucracy that was out of touch with the laity. For evidence, they cited the denomination’s advocacy of liberal political causes, from abortion on demand to a nuclear freeze. For their part, Presbyterian liberals desperately attempted to explain away the decline, citing such factors as declining birthrates and the social mobility of the (highly educated) Presbyterian laity.

Yet mobility had greater consequences than they imagined, and membership decline pointed to the church’s loss of theological identity. The PC(USA) was the victim of its own ecumenical efforts, which diminished the significance of Presbyterian identity. The church could not at the same time drink from the well of the ecumenical movement and perform a coherent job of boundary maintenance. Children growing up in the church had no compelling reason to remain Presbyterian when reaching adulthood.

The Presbyterians were reaping the consequences of a broadening church that subjected its Reformed heritage to constant modification. Confessions were not absolute and timeless statements of doctrine, but situational expressions of experience. This was not only the settlement of the Presbyterian controversy of the 1930s; beyond that, it was the revivalist heritage that made the experiential elements of the Christian life more important than confessional affirmations. As an ever-broadening church, it could forge no response to its children who exited for individualist, consumerist, or therapeutic forms of spirituality.

A yet more serious issue was the denomination’s loss of any capacity for corporate theological reflection. A moratorium on theological debate was another legacy of the Presbyterian controversy of the 1920s and 1930s. After the fracture of the fragile Barthian consensus in the 1960s, mainline Presbyterianism was reduced to a loose coalition of subcultures. If heresy trials became a distant memory in American Presbyterianism, it was only because groups in the church relocated their energy in advocacy groups and special interest caucuses.

To be sure, defenders of what some euphemistically described as “theological decentralization” argued with some justification that diversity was a perennial feature of American Presbyterianism. What was novel, however, was the extent to which Presbyterians embraced pluralism as part of their identity. No longer were theological differences something to overcome in order to progress in the unity of the faith.

Because debate could no longer resolve controversy, polity decisions, often ruthlessly enforced, were the only means to achieve theological uniformity. Church bureaucrats could force compliance on issues such as women’s ordination (Kenyon), even within a church that could not commonly affirm the deity of Christ.

Many observers are now predicting that the 1983 Presbyterian reunion will be short-lived, and that the fourth century of Presbyterianism in America, just like the previous three, will witness another major split. This is plausible when one considers the deeply divisive issues pertaining to human sexuality. Before the reunion, the 1978 General Assembly of the UPCUSA overwhelmingly passed the “definitive guidance” that “unrepentant homosexual practice does not accord with the requirements of ordination as set forth in the Book of Church Order.” Many Southern conservatives were heartened at the vote and interpreted it as a sign of renewal in the North. Yet the decision also galvanized pro-gay interest groups.

Evangelical interest groups have managed to preserve the 1978 ruling against challenges at subsequent general assemblies. In 2001, the presbyteries of the church defeated “Amendment A,” which would have permitted the ordination of practicing homosexuals, and a recommendation at the 2004 Assembly to set aside the 1978 guidance went down to defeat by the narrow margin of 259 to 255. More challenges are certain to come.

The leadership of Presbyterian conservatives is spearheaded by the Presbyterian Lay Committee and its affiliated group, the Confessing Church Movement. To identify with the latter, a Presbyterian congregation must affirm a minimalist three-point “confession” of the lordship of Christ, the infallibility of Scripture, and the sanctity of monogamous, heterosexual marriage. That the sanctity of marriage has proven to be more precious to conservatives than the deity of Christ (which was no cause to leave the church) may be the biggest indication of the theological bankruptcy of the church.

Meanwhile, the Presbyterian liberals have recently expressed their intention to achieve the full recognition of homosexual rights in the church. There has been recent talk of drafting a new Auburn Affirmation of the church’s liberty and progress on this issue.

In the end, a division in the Presbyterian mainline denomination will likely await the resolution of issues regarding ministerial pensions and church property to the satisfaction of all parties. While those were the “goods and kindred” that Machen and his separatist allies were willing to let go in 1936, both conservatives and liberals in the mainline denomination have proven more eager to maintain the prestige of establishment Presbyterianism. This is but another reminder that the real loser in the reunion of 1983 was Presbyterian confessionalism. Current Presbyterian debates about liberty and unity in the church fail to acknowledge the way in which genuine confessionalism ultimately protects both.

14. Conclusion: Without Illusions

American Presbyterianism turns three hundred this year. But do we have a heritage worth celebrating? Does the Orthodox Presbyterian Church stand on the shoulders of venerable Presbyterian ancestors? Anniversaries provide a good occasion for reflection, not only on the successes of the past, but also on the failings that the study of the past makes all too obvious.

One way to assess the strength and vitality of American Presbyterianism is to look at membership statistics. In 2001, there were nearly 5.6 million Americans who identified themselves as Presbyterian—the sixth largest religious affiliation in the United States, behind Roman Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, and Pentecostals. But that accounts for only 2 percent of the entire American population. Furthermore, only 49 percent of these Presbyterians attend church weekly. The largest denomination, the mainline Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), has 2.4 million members, which makes it the tenth largest denomination in the United States. However, between 1983 and 2004, that church lost 1.8 million members.

Some of these mainline Presbyterians entered new denominations, such as the Presbyterian Church in America and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. But these denominations have not shown remarkable growth. Since 1999, the PCA has grown from around 300,000 members to approximately 330,000. The EPC ranged between 50,000 and 60,000 during the 1990s, and has now reached 70,000. Meanwhile, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church has been growing slowly in the middle to upper 20,000s.

Whatever these denominational statistics may suggest about Presbyterian realignments in recent decades, they cannot neutralize what is arguably the most sobering historical statistic: namely, that in 1776 Presbyterians accounted for roughly 25 percent of the American population, but 225 years later were a drop in the bucket at 2 percent. Aside from what these figures suggest about evangelism, they point up the inability of Presbyterians to hold on to their own covenant children. Even if Presbyterians had declined from 25 to 15 percent of the population, they would still have close to 45 million adherents, eight times as many as they claimed at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Of course, statistics are not always the best measure of success—though with more church members Presbyterians could form more institutions such as schools, publishing endeavors, and associations that might contribute to a heightened sense and more vigorous expression of Presbyterian identity. Other gauges of Presbyterian vitality are theological convictions and devotional practices. Here again the vital signs of Presbyterianism are not encouraging. For example, sufficient confusion about the doctrine of justification has prompted the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, an archconservative denomination by some standards, to appoint a study committee to clarify what was long recognized as the material principle of the Protestant Reformation. Furthermore, as John R. Muether has shown elsewhere, the Sabbath-keeping practices of American Presbyterians have declined considerably since the time when sanctifying the Lord’s Day was a chief characteristic of Presbyterian devotion. Perhaps it is as much a function of decline as it is an explanation for it, but the fact that most conservative Presbyterians today identify themselves more readily as evangelical than Presbyterian is another indication of the relative weakness of contemporary American Presbyterianism.

The pivotal episodes covered in these chapters help to explain the current predicament of American Presbyterianism. Presbyterianism in America can be divided into three eras. The first, which runs from the founding of the Presbytery of Philadelphia in 1706 to the formation of the first general assembly in 1789, was a period of organizational consolidation. In the colonial era, the basic rules governing the American church were established. The second era extends from 1789 to 1869, when the northern Old and New School churches reunited. It was a time characterized by expansion of the church outside the Northeast, the founding of educational institutions, and the development of Presbyterian self-awareness through doctrinal controversies and theological reflection. The final period of American Presbyterianism’s first three centuries runs from 1869 to the present. Here the dominant theme has been ecumenism and social reform, with liberal and conservative Presbyterians coming down on different sides of those issues.

Each of these periods witnessed a major ecclesiastical controversy and subsequent split of the church. In the first era, the debates between the Old and New Sides concerned the qualifications for holding ministerial office, with questions about subscription, theological education, and religious experience giving shape to the debates. In the second period, the division between the Old and New Schools stemmed from disagreements about Calvinist theology and Presbyterian polity, and prompted both branches to embrace Presbyterian convictions more tenaciously than the colonial church had. In the recent period, the controversy between fundamentalists and modernists, or, less pejoratively, between conservatives and liberals, emerged from debates about the church’s responsibility to society and the degree to which those duties required cooperation with other denominations and the relative threat of compromising distinctive Presbyterian convictions.

From one angle, the history of American Presbyterianism is a narrative of decline. In the eighteenth century, a struggling colonial denomination carved out a place for its ministry in a new society and eventually a new nation. By the early nineteenth century, this Presbyterian church had achieved sufficient stability and status to be one of the leading Protestant denominations in the United States, all the while preserving its Reformed heritage of theology, church polity, and worship. But with respectability and clout came the temptation to look for relevance or influence in spheres of American life that distracted Presbyterians from the teachings and practices that defined them as Reformed Christians. Consequently, by the early twentieth century the achievements of the previous two centuries had run aground on the ambitions of the American Protestant establishment. In this context, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church came into existence. Its purpose was, to a large degree, to preserve an older Presbyterian witness in the face of an American Protestantism that had confused cultural and political hopes with religious mission. As worthwhile as this division between conservative and liberal Presbyterians was, it did leave the OPC in relative obscurity, without a larger forum to articulate and clarify its beliefs, while the mainline denomination lost its ties to its Presbyterian past.

However, this narrative of decline is not the complete story. American Presbyterianism has always been marked by struggle, controversy, and hardship. There has never been a “golden age”—a time when the church was solid, faithful, and substantial. This is why we refer to the church during the time between the first and second advents of Christ as the “church militant.” Indeed, the history of American Presbyterianism is an illustration of a profound stanza from the hymn “The Church’s One Foundation”:

’Mid toil and tribulation,
And tumult of her war,
She waits the consummation
Of peace forevermore;
Till with the vision glorious
Her longing eyes are blest,
And the great church victorious
Shall be the church at rest.

For three centuries, American Presbyterians have worked to commune and worship in a Presbyterian manner. In each generation, the labor has been difficult. And so it will be until the coming of the new heavens and the new earth.

We tend to look to the past for inspiration, for examples of courage and wisdom, for models of virtue and sacrifice. As valuable as that may be, it is equally important to recognize that the current age of redemptive history is one of exile and pilgrimage. If we identify a particular era as “golden,” the temptation is to try to return to it, rather than to press ahead in the place where God has called us and hope for our arrival at our true and eternal place of residence. As the writer to the Hebrews puts it, “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (13:14). If the history of American Presbyterianism teaches any single lesson, this one may be the most compelling: Our hope is not in the past, but in the world to come. This does not mean that remembering the past, both its accomplishments and its failings, is worthless. In fact, by so remembering our American Presbyterian heritage, Orthodox Presbyterians will be mindful, just as the great saints of Hebrews 11 were, of why we “desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (11:16).

Dr. Hart and Mr. Muether are OP ruling elders and members of the OPC Committee on Christian Education. Reprinted from New Horizons, January 2005–April 2006.