Tag: John Witherspoon

Why You Don’t Need the Westminster Confession (or Calvin or Winthrop) to do Protestant Politics?

Published on by D. G. HartLeave a comment

One of the tendencies in the critics of Kevin DeYoung’s defense of John Witherspoon and the American revision of the Westminster Confession (not mentioned here) is a need to base contemporary political reflection and action – even – on past Protestant models. The critics of DeYoung did this by reference to the meaning of the Westminster Confession. Others at American Reformer have also argued for a recovery of early modern Protestant politics. The advantage of this argument is that it paints Witherspoon, American Presbyterians, and always 2k advocates in the corner of departing from Reformed orthodoxy.

But what if you don’t need pre-Lockean understandings of politics and the good society to have a Protestant voice in liberal political structures? What if today’s Protestants who want to advocate for Christian norms looked to Presbyterians who both accepted the terms of liberal democracy and free markets and advocated Protestant-friendly positions on matters of political debate? What if you could be a kind of Christian nationalist without needing to read all of the pre- or early-modern Protestant theologians on the divine mandate for the Christian magistrate and a godly commonwealth?

That is what happened in the 19th century in England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and the United States. Presbyterianism began in 16th century England and Scotland as a force of opposition to rule by bishops and continued as a form of checks upon elites in both government and the church, Presbyterians saw overcoming injustices of the past with improvements that led to a fairer future. Such a disposition almost always places Presbyterians on the side of freedom and limited government whether in the form of freedom of conscience or ecclesiastical autonomy from meddling magistrates. This cast of mind nurtured in Presbyterians at least sympathy if not outright support for political and economic reforms that reduced the authority and wealth of the few and expanded society’s benefits as broadly as possible. Such an outlook, as in the case of the United States, could lend support for small government and reliance on voluntary associations for improving social conditions. But even where the state’s footprint in managing the forces of modernization was larger than the American form of government, Presbyterians generally supported those “good” governments whose rule extended the blessings of modern society as widely as possible.

For this reason, increase in suffrage, more extensive representation in government, free trade and better distribution of goods for more affordable prices, higher rates of literacy and advanced learning, and greater suppression of vices, not to mention the separation of church and state were all policies on Presbyterians’ horizon on the phase of their particular nation’s evolution.

Among the proponents of these views were Charles Hodge in the United States, William McKerrow in England, Thomas Chalmers in Scotland, Henry Cooke in Ireland, George Monro Grant in Canada, and James McCosh – can you believe it – in Scotland, Ireland, and the United States. These Presbyterians may have been on different places on the page of Reformed theology and Presbyterian worship, but their outlook on government and society stemmed from their understanding of Presbyterianism in its modern, liberal, political version. Advocates of the spirituality of the church or its 2k nomenclature may take issue with these Presbyterians, but they show you don’t need to turn the clock back before 1789 to have Presbyterian politics.

It goes without saying that the constellation of political and economic positions adopted by these Presbyterians was a long way from the godly commonwealth of the Scottish Reformation or England’s Second Reformation. But after the Glorious Revolution (1689), Presbyterians learned by experience and reflection that the same political arrangements that lightened the church’s burden from an overreaching magistrate were also among the tools by which modern nations could fashion a generically Christian society.

Rev Kev vs. The American Reformers (who POUNCED!!)

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

Kevin DeYoung deserves praise for defending John Witherspoon and the American revisions to the Westminster Standards. Some of us were doing this back in the day when the Federal Vision was echoing the theonomists. But the post-liberal turn among Protestant Christian nationalists and Roman Catholic integralists has increased the need for a defense of the American revisions and their harmonization of Reformed teaching and the American Founding (republicanism, constitutional federalism, religious liberty).

The post-liberal Protestants at American Reformer have not welcomed DeYoung’s understanding of American Presbyterians’ revisions of Westminster. Some argue for continuity between the original Westminster Confession and the 1789 revision. Others go farther and assert that even the American Revisions require an affirmation of a religious establishment.

What is largely missing from the critics of DeYoung is attention to the Covenanters (or Reformed Presbyterians) whose views are similar to theirs — the American Founding is seriously flawed — and whose understanding of the civil magistrate was the dominant view among Presbyterians at the time of the Westminster Assembly. DeYoung’s first article does in fact address the corner into which the Covenanters had painted Presbyterians. He wrote:

In 1707, the Act of Union brought together England and Scotland under the name of Great Britain. Many Presbyterians opposed the union as inconsistent with the principles celebrated in the National Covenant (1638) and the Solemn League and Covenant (1643) and as undermining the Revolution Settlement (1690) which restored Presbyterian government to the Established Church in Scotland.

DeYoung later adds the change in Presbyterianism that transpired after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He uses John Coffey, the leading scholar of Samuel Rutherford, to describe that change:

“With the exception of the Reformed Presbyterian Covenanters and some Seceders, eighteenth-century Presbyterians found ways of distancing themselves from the Westminster Assembly’s teaching on the coercive powers of the godly magistrate in matters of religion…. In every part of the English-speaking world, Lockean ideas of religious liberty looked increasingly attractive to Presbyterians who feared Anglican hegemony or saw little prospect of becoming the dominant majority.”

Zachary Garris says the Covenanters are not in the mainstream — that’s true for America today. But it was not true for the people who wrote the Westminster Confession — Presbyterians, Puritans, and Independents from England and Scotland. In fact, Scotland’s covenants with her kings (the Stuarts) who became the kings of England as well set the standard for political theology at the Westminster Assembly. Here’s why:

The Scottish Reformation gained a victory in 1581 with King’s Confession of 1581 by which James VI (later James I of England) vowed, with Parliament, the Kirk, and the people to uphold and defend the true religion (Reformed) and oppose the false religion (Roman Catholicism).

In 1638, this time with Charles I (James’ son) imposing the Book of Common Prayer on the Scottish Kirk, Parliament, the Kirk, and the people ratified the National Covenant. The expectation was for Charles to pledge his allegiance to this covenant because of the original (King’s) covenant with his father.

Soon after the National Covenant, Scottish military went to war with Charles — you guessed it, he didn’t take the vow — in the first of two “Bishop’s Wars” (1639-1640). The Scots’ covenants and war with Charles were the trial run for the English Parliament’s civil war with the king (1642-1649), the same Parliament that called for an overhaul of the Church of England and gave the responsibility to the Westminster Assembly. The English Parliament needed military help from the Scots who in turn gave it conditioned on Parliament’s ratifying an international covenant — the Solemn League and Covenant (1643). Although that covenant had different legal justification from the Scots’ National Covenant, the Solemn League and Covenant extended to England and Wales the same cooperation among the civil government, the church, and the people to uphold the true faith (and oppose the false religion of Rome) in Scotland.

Covenanting and national covenants were hardly peripheral to seventeenth-century Presbyterianism of the Westminster Confession. Covenanting likely explains one of the oddest chapters in the Confession of Faith — chapter 22 on Oaths and Vows. (If you are in a covenanting mind set, you may likely clarify the theological import of promises taken in the civil and ecclesiastical realms.)

If you wonder where Christian Nationalism among Presbyterians comes from, you may well want to look to the Covenanters.

This covenanting backdrop is especially important for understanding the American revision of the Westminster Confession. By the 1780s, the covenanting position was not part of the Presbyterians who comprised the first General Assembly of the PCUSA. That is because the Covenanters had formed their own communion, the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America. Which is also to say that everyone in the Presbyterian world (England, Scotland, Ireland, the United States, and eventually Canada) gave up on covenants with Scottish monarchs. The lone exceptions were the Covenanters and certain sectors of the Seceders (Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church).

Why the critics of Dr. DeYoung do not resonate with or follow the Covenanters is a mystery. So is their unwillingness to acknowledge that they desire a relationship between the church and civil magistrate like the ones the Covenanters briefly had between 1638 and 1650. There is also a good chance that the American Reformers who pounced on Dr. DeYoung agree with Covenanter assessments of the American Founding. This is the Covenanter understanding of the U.S. Constitution (which puts a dent in American patriotism):

There are moral evils essential to the constitution of the United States, which render it necessary to refuse allegiance to the whole system. In this remarkable instrument, there is contained no acknowledgment of the being or authority of God —there is no acknowledgment of the Christian religion, or professed submission to the kingdom of Messiah. It gives support to the enemies of the Redeemer, and admits to its honours and emoluments Jews, Mahometans, deists, and atheists—It establishes that system of robbery, by which men are held in slavery, despoiled of liberty, and property, and protection. It violates the principles of representation, by bestowing upon the domesticity rant who holds hundreds of his fellow creatures in bondage, an influence in making laws for freemen proportioned to the number of his own slaves. This constitution is, notwithstanding its numerous excellencies, in many instances inconsistent, oppressive, and impious.

Since the adoption of the constitution in the year 1789, the members of the Reformed Presbyterian Church have maintained a constant Testimony against these evils. They have refused to serve in any office which implies an approbation of the constitution, or which is placed under the direction of an immoral law. They have abstained from giving their votes at elections for legislators or officers who must be qualified to act by an oath of allegiance to this immoral system. They could not themselves consistently swear allegiance to that government, in the constitution of which there is contained so much immorality. (Reformation Principles Exhibited, 1807)

The differences between the PCUSA and the RPCNA reflect the changes that occurred throughout the Presbyterian world once most communions abandoned Scotland’s National Covenants. Locke made a lot more sense of British society for accommodating religious diversity than insisting on promises Stuart monarchs had made to Scotland and England. And that difference was an important factor in Witherspoon’s role in revising the Westminster Confession and Catechisms.

Dr. RevKev understands that both the moderates and the evangelicals in the Church of Scotland, as well as the Old Side and New Side Presbyterians in America had no sympathy for Scotland’s covenants. They had move on.

Critics of Dr. RevKev may refuse to be lumped with the Covenanters. That’s fine. But they do need to take the Scottish background into account both to understand the context for the Westminster Assembly and the reasons behind American Presbyterians revising the Confession of Faith.

Orthodox Presbyterian Lady

Published on by D. G. Hart15 Comments

At one point in our church life the missus and I were part of a missional work whose name we might have a hand in choosing. To avoid the common and somewhat tired names such as Redeemer or Calvary, I wanted to invoke the name of saints and was thinking especially of a set of Presbyterians with the name John — Muether, Machen, Witherspoon, Knox, and Calvin. To claim their names, I wanted to use Sts. Johns Church, a name that reflected a debt to these Presbyterians and that also acknowledged the Protestant conviction of the sainthood of all believers.

Needless to say, Sts. Johns was an epic fail.

A recent sermon on 2 (two?) John reminded me of this old idea. The epistle begins with this odd construction:

The elder to the elect lady and her children, whom I love in truth, and not only I, but also all who know the truth, 2 because of the truth that abides in us and will be with us forever

Our pastor plausibly argued that this was not an individual communication between the apostle John and a certain woman in the early church. Instead, “lady” was a word synonymous with a congregation or set of congregations in a city. (I also perked up that John referred to himself as an elder — “hey, that’s my office!”)

The last two verses of the epistle also make sense of this rendering of “lady”:

12 Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete.

13 The children of your elect sister greet you.

If John were simply writing to one person, then this would be an odd communication to reach the status of canonical writing. And if it were also about one lady, then John was apparently writing to a set of sisters akin to Jane and Cassandra Austen.

So if lady does refer to a church, then it’s time (#metoo) that we put the word to ecclesiastical use.

What If Historical Inquiry Isn't Comforting

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

Kevin DeYoung has a pretty positive spin on John Witherspoon’s commitment to Protestant unity without lapsing into doctrinal indifferentism:

Although he remained staunchly committed to and invested in Presbyterianism his whole life, Witherspoon was not a man of narrow party spirit. In his Treatise on Regeneration (1764), Witherspoon noted, “I am fully convinced, that many of very different parties and denominations are building upon the one ‘foundation laid in Zion’ for a sinner’s hope, and that their distance and alienation from one another in affection, is very much to be regretted.”[9] In his farewell sermon in Paisley, Witherspoon warned against “going too much into controversy” and developing “a litigious and wrangling disposition” that would lead Christians—and here he is quick to add the qualification “I mean real Christians”—into “innumerable little parties and factions.”[10] He longed for the day when the “unhappy divisions” among “protestants in general” would be “abolished” and those truly centered on Christ crucified would “be no longer ranked in parties and marshaled under names” but only strive with each other to see “who shall love our Redeemer most, and who shall serve him with the greatest zeal.”[11]

This ecumenical streak in Witherspoon was not borne out of doctrinal indifferentism. His desire for unity, for example, did not encompass Socinians, Pelagians, Catholics or any other group holding religious views he deemed antithetical to true biblical Christianity.[12] Witherspoon had no patience for the latitudinarian kind of unity he found among his colleagues in the Moderate Party.[13] In conjunction with the publication of his St. Giles’ sermon before the SSPCK (1758), Witherspoon penned a robust defense for pointing out error entitled “An Inquiry into the Scripture Meaning of Charity.”[14] With characteristic verve, Witherspoon attacked the increasingly popular notion among enlightened clergy that “charity was a far more important and valuable bond among Christians than exact agreement on particular points of doctrine.”[15] For Witherspoon, Christian unity was not rooted in downplaying doctrinal distinctives (least of all among those who could not be counted true believers), but in stressing the theological similarities that existed among born again Christians from a variety of denominations. “No man, indeed,” Witherspoon wrote, “deny it to be just, that every one should endeavor to support that plan of the discipline and government of the church of Christ, and even the minutest parts of it, which appear to him to be founded upon the word of God. But still sound doctrine is more to be esteemed than any form.”[16]

This is a plausible reading of some of the material, though Witherspoon remains a mystery to many who have studied him — Mark Noll is still puzzled why Witherspoon threw out Edwards’ idealist philosophy when he started as president of the College of New Jersey. Explaining Witherspoon can be almost as difficult as reading Pope Francis’ tea leaves.

But what Kevin needs to keep in mind is what Witherspoon’s politics and civil religion might have done to facilitate doctrinal indifferentism. In his widely circulated sermon on behalf of independence, the Scotsman said this:

. . . he is the best friend to American liberty, who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion, and who sets himself with the greatest firmness to bear down profanity and immorality of every kind. Whoever is an avowed enemy to God, I scruple not to call him an enemy to his country. Do not suppose, my brethren, that I mean to recommend a furious and angry zeal for the circumstantials of religion, or the contentions of one sect with another about their peculiar distinctions. I do not wish you to oppose any body’s religion, but every body’s wickedness. Perhaps there are few surer marks of the reality of religion, than when a man feels himself more joined in spirit to a true holy person of a different denomination, than to an irregular liver of his own. It is therefore your duty in this important and critical season to exert yourselves, every one in his proper sphere, to stem the tide of prevailing vice, to promote the knowledge of God, the reverence of his name and worship, and obedience to his laws.

One way of reading that is that Witherspoon felt more in common with a Methodist who lived an upright life than a Presbyterian who insisted on perseverance of the saints. The kicker here is that Witherspoon aligns such a pursuit of holiness with the American cause, thereby enlisting a form of moralistic Protestantism on the side of patriotism and nationalism.

Witherspoon is not necessarily to blame for crafting a recipe that liberated a devotion that supported American independence from the “circumstantials” of Presbyterianism. He had help — lots of it. But since we live at a time where unsexy America promotes both Christian morality and American exceptionalism to the detriment of sound moral theology and ecclesiology, I do tend to conclude that in Witherspoon we have the seeds of Protestant liberalism and its Christian Right progeny.

Everywhere you turn in history, you step on Sideshow Bob’s rakes.

All Down Hill After John Witherspoon?

Published on by D. G. Hart22 Comments

Anthony Bradley wonders (again) what has happened to Presbyterians and why they lost their momentum. First it was as popular voices among evangelicals, now it’s as dispensers of wisdom about the world:

I am wondering, then, for those who are raising their children in the Presbyterian tradition what resources exists for forming Presbyterian identity in terms of an understanding marriage & family (i.e., the relationship between covenant marriage & covenant baptism in America’s marriage debate), issues related to social & political power & federal political theory (which is derivative of federal theology), divorce and remarriage, war and social conflict, apologetics, and so on? How does a covenantal world-and-life view, and Presbyterian understandings of power structures, unlock the implications for a theology of work & economics when applied to international third world development, and so on?

By extension, I am also wondering what happened to Presbyterians as known and normative leaders of culturally leveraged institutions in American society and culture? Mark Twain and William Faulkner were Presbyterian. More Vice-Presidents of the United States have been Presbyterian more than any other denomination (Presbyterians rank 2nd for the US Presidency). Presbyterians rank 2nd in terms of placement on the Supreme Court in US History. I could go on. . . .

An initial thought is to wonder why Presbyterians need to go to another Presbyterian for instruction on the federal government. Isn’t reading the Federalists and Anti-Federalists (Presbyterian or not?) good enough?

Another wonder is whether Presbyterians have ever been all that influential as Bradley’s post assumes. To meet his criteria — “what Presbyterians are speaking to these issues or leading institutions that are (like think tanks or colleges and universities” — at least three sets of circumstances need to be in play. First, a person needs to be Presbyterian (what kind — Old Side, New Life, Neo-Calvinist — is another question)? Second, such a person needs to be writing on a vast number of public policy type subjects. So far Tim and David Bayly suffice. But then, third, and this is the kicker, the person needs to be sufficiently well known for folks in the pew to consult him or her (sorry, Tim and David). As it stands, lots of Presbyterians have lots of thoughts on all sorts of subjects and publish them (on the interweb). But no one of them stands out with Francis Schaeffer notoriety.

The problem, then, may have less to do with Presbyterian decline than with the diversification of communication technology and the formation of diverse pockets of affinity.

At the same time, Presbyterians need not feel so bad, at least if misery loves company. Bradley’s question applies just as much to Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, and — boy does it ever — to Congregationalists (nee Puritans). Among Western Christians, Rome stands out as distinctly different in this regard since Roman Catholics have an endless supply of public intellectuals who are doing their best imitations of popes, who speak constantly to a host of issues below their pay grade. This may explain much of Rome’s contemporary appeal to converts. If you want a church with all the answers to life’s pressing questions — don’t go to Guy Noir but to the Vatican. But if you believe in the spirituality of the church and the sufficiency of Scripture, you don’t need a Presbyterian pontiff to tell you how to live. You go to church, say your prayers, work dutifully at your callings, and take your lumps.

One last thought about Anthony’s question comes from a period I know relatively well. During the first half of the twentieth century we did have Presbyterians who spoke on any number of issues, were well known and so had pretty large followings. These were William Jennings Bryan, Billy Sunday, J. Gresham Machen, and Carl McIntire. Maybe 1 in 4 isn’t bad. But if that’s going to be the percentage of Presbyterians we should heed when they start to pontificate about all of life, I’ll take my chances with guys who write for American Conservative.