Tag: New School Presbyterianism

Making Sense of the PCA

Published on by D. G. HartLeave a comment

From the Archives: Nicotine Theological Journal (Spring, 2009)

Making Sense of the PCA

I have been a minister of the Presbyterian Church in America from its founding. I attended the Convocation of Sessions, the Advisory Convention, and the first General Assembly in 1973. I have not been what one would call “a player” over the past 30 years, but I have been “involved.” I was one of the early Reformed University Ministry (RUM) campus ministers, had a full term as a member of the Committee on Mission to the World, and served on the Creation Study Committee. I edited work for children’s curriculum for Great Commission Publications. I have traveled to Japan, Philippines, Ukraine, France, and Turkey in connection with MTW mission work.

As our denomination has experienced recent tensions about confessional subscription, our mission, and worship, I have struggled to understand how we got here. My working hypothesis is that the PCA is a majority New Side/New School Presbyterian Church, with a substantial minority that is either New Side/Old School or Old Side/Old School.

The differences between the Old and New Side Presbyterians focused primarily on their differing views of revivals. The New Side believed the revivals or George Whitefield, which first disturbed and then converted sinners within and without the church and awakened and stirred to holiness and action true believers, had biblical precedents. Itinerant ordained and non-ordained speakers were often the instruments of revival. Religious experience was intensely personal and greatly concerned with whether or not one had been genuinely converted.

Old Siders had a higher view of the church as an institution, more confidence in the work of settled, ordained ministers carrying out the ordinary ministry of word and sacrament, and a greater emphasis on corporate religious life. Tensions over subscription pushed New Siders toward a looser view, with the Old Side arguing for strictness. Neither side was monolithic.

If the First Great Awakening balkanized the Old and New Sides, the Second Great Awakening returned the favor for the Old and New School Presbyterians. Despite this similarity, the major issue in the nineteenth century was not revivalism but confessionalism. Old Schoolers had differing appraisals of the earlier awakenings, but they shared a growing unease about the Second Great Awakening with its Arminian theology and its new measures.

In order to defend the theology of the Second Awakening New Schoolers had to take a broad view of the Westminster Standards and a much weaker view of what was involved in an officer’s ordination vows. The New School strongly favored mission over theology while the Old School held that theology defines and directs mission. Because of its emphasis on mission the New School favored working with parachurch societies to accomplish evangelism and missions, while the Old School believed the church alone was responsible for spreading the gospel and building up the saints. Part of the mission-orientation of the New School was its commitment to engage social issues, such as slavery and temperance, as part of an effort to Christianize America. Old Schoolers countered with the spirituality of the church. Not surprisingly, the New School had a low view of the church while the Old School maintained and defended jure divino Presbyterianism.

How does this explain the PCA? In my view, the majority of the PCA consists of three groups all of which share a New Side/New School orientation: the Columbia Seminary founding generation, the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod (RPCES) influx, and the rising leadership consisting primarily of large urban/metropolitan church pastors and denominational executives.

Most of the founders of the PCA had been educated at the most conservative of the PCUS (Southern Presbyterian) seminaries in the 1950s and 1960s. While Columbia could trace her heritage all the way back to Thornwell, the most eloquent Southern Old School voice, little remained of Thornwell’s influence (William Childs Robinson being the exception) by the time PCA leaders received their training at Columbia. Students were considerably more conservative than the faculty at Columbia, but they were never much exposed to the old Confessional orthodoxy of the Southern Church. They believed in the Bible, in “the fundamentals,” in the gospel, and in evangelism and missions. They took their ordination vows with sincerity but they did not consider how those vows bound them to the Westminster Confession. In fact, many of these brothers were influenced by teachings that were inconsistent with Calvinism. I think of semi-Pelagianian, Invitation System revivalism, dispensationalism, and perfectionism. In addition, they were suspicious of church institutions and authority (having witnessed and experienced the corruption and abuse of the mainline Southern church) and were eager to cooperate with any evangelicals to win the world for Christ, maybe even “in this generation.”

It was not clear at the time of Joining and Receiving (J&R) in 1982 what the impact of the influx of the RPCES would be, but time has proved that it broadened and strengthened the New Side/New School segment of the PCA. The RPCES was the result of the union of the dwindling Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America, General Synod (a “new light” break-off from the Covenanters), and the larger Evangelical Presbyterian Church (from the McIntire wing of 1936.) Although RPCES was more Reformed and Presbyterian than McIntire’s Bible Presbyterians, its roots remained New School, and, though there was some indication the RPCES might move toward Princeton Old School positions, this did not materialize. The RPCES was and remains New Side/New School and so injected into the PCA another dose of New Side/New Schoolism.

What then of the rising leadership? The one word, which best catches the outlook and agenda of this group, consisting primarily of large urban pastors and denominational executives, is “missional.” In the New Side/New School tradition, mission is the church’s defining characteristic and responsible for its vitality and unity.

This “missional” orientation has been notably evident in recent worship services at the General Assembly. Mission requires us to rethink what it means to be church and to sit loose on doctrinal formulations, on polity issues, on how we worship, and on what the nature of the mission of the church is, so that as we understand more of this “post-everything” culture and figure out how to respond, we can make the necessary adjustments to further the church’s mission. This is decidedly the New Side/New School outlook, dressed in new clothes, but with the substance of the body unchanged.

This represents the majority of the PCA’ teaching and ruling elders. A majority holds to the New Side/New School type of Presbyterianism. At the same time a substantial minority in our church, with Old and New Side proclivities, holds to Old School Presbyterianism. This means that issues of doctrine, polity, subscription, worship, and mission remain live ones for the foreseeable future. The soul of the church is at stake for both the majority and minority.

William H. Smith is pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Louisville, Mississippi.

See What Keller Did Now?

Published on by D. G. Hart74 Comments

Tim Keller has made the history of Presbyterianism obsolete. Look at the way Jake Meador describes the challenges facing young pastors in the PCA:

… young Presbyterian pastors, many of whom are on university campuses with RUF or working in gentrifying urban neighborhoods, face enormous class-based pressure to conform to certain progressive cultural norms. These pressures make themselves felt in a variety of ways.

First, there is a strong and classic American pull toward being dismissive of the past, toward what is established, and to embrace what is new. This temptation exerts an even stronger pull than normal on many young PCA pastors because many younger pastors and RUF guys have strong entrepreneurial tendencies. While this is often a very good thing—indeed, it’s what makes it possible for them to succeed as church planters and RUF pastors—this same trait can make them naturally inclined to be dismissive toward established norms, policies, and beliefs, especially when they are surrounded by other young people with the same entrepreneurial sensibilities. It is probably not a coincidence, in other words, that the most famous “Kellerite” to go progressive is pastoring in San Francisco, the capital of Silicon Valley.

In addition to the disregard for things that are older, established, etc. there is also strong cultural pressure to embrace a kind of bourgeois bohemian lifestyle—buy a cute house in the gentrifying neighborhood, embrace the careerism, food and exercise regimen, lifestyle trends, and broadly progressive ethos of your neighbors. You can even say you’re just being outreach-focused as you do it. While none of these things are bad in isolation, taken together they’re all steps that involve embracing the norms of a younger bobo sub-culture. And if you’re embracing those norms out of a desire to be liked rather than a pure desire to make the Gospel sensible, it will be disastrous.

But, of course, it is all very complicated: Essentially, these are young pastors being handed different cultural scripts and asked to choose which ones to follow. But these clashing scripts cannot be simplistically labeled “good” and “bad” such that we can tell young pastors to follow the “good” script and avoid the “bad.” It is more complicated than that.

This is similar to the point that Ron Belgau made in his response to Rod Dreher earlier this week: It’s not that we have a legacy PCA script that is unambiguously good that we need to cling to. That script has problems—it’s awful on race issues, for starters. So figuring out the cultural scripts question in the PCA is challenging: The young white bobo script you’re pushed toward culturally and according to class is bad, but then you don’t necessarily have a good alternative script, particularly if you’re trying to plant a church or RUF in a more hostile environment. There simply aren’t good evangelical templates for how to do that because we have for the most part been really bad at it.

In such a situation, the draw toward Keller and the ham-handed attempts to mimic him are quite understandable. What other models do these pastors have? Driscollism? Straight-up progressive Episcopalianism?

Certainly, you can argue that there actually are other models out there—Calvin basically turned Geneva into a booming intellectual hub. Someone like Richard Sibbes was a very successful preacher in Cambridge at the university in the 17th century. Richard Baxter could be helpful in that we know more about his routines as a pastor than any other minister of his era. Bucer and his colleagues in Strasbourg did good and faithful work in a major intellectual, cultural, and scholastic hub. But these examples are all either from radically different cultural contexts, much more obscure, or both.

It isn’t unreasonable that these pastors would look to Keller and, being young and failing to understand their context, fail to mimic him well. But that isn’t Keller’s fault and it isn’t entirely the young pastor’s fault either. It’s a predictable outcome given all the factors I have mentioned already.

Whatever happened to vanilla Presbyterianism? A pastor ministers the word, administers the sacraments, catechizes the youth, shepherds the flock, and goes to presbytery. What does all this worry about culture have to do with it? Meador doesn’t think Keller is responsible for leading the PCA down a misguided path of Kellerism. That is mostly true. What happened it seems to meeeeEEEE, is that Keller fulfilled the aspirations of some PCA leaders who wanted to “engage” the culture — marriage is still up for grabs.

What is happening in the PCA is what always happens to denominations that Americanize and try to adapt to the culture. The Presbyterian version of this is not whether to be Baptist or Episcopalian — though why don’t the boho’s seem to notice that Keller’s urban ways draw him to Baptists at TGC and other urban pastors like John Piper and Mark Dever? The Presbyterian version of assimilation is New School and New Life. In the 19th century, those who wanted to Christianize the culture were the New Schoolers (Lyman Beecher and Charles Finney), and their opponents were Old School Presbyterians who tried to maintain creedal theology and presbyterian governance. In the twentieth century (let’s leave aside the modernists for now), the assimilationists were New Lifers (in the OPC mind you) who wanted Orthodox Presbyterians to join with the wider evangelical world and also reach the young people with long hair. In case no one noticed, Tim Keller’s origins are in the New Life wing of the OPC, with Harvie Conn supplying a theology of the city, and Jack Miller providing a relaxed Presbyterianism that could adjust to the culture (Miller’s tastes ran less to ballet and more to Jesus people. Keller went to New Life Glenside while he taught at WTS, if I am not mistaken.) Not to mention that the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod (which goes back to the Bible Presbyterians) side of the PCA that gave it Covenant College and Covenant Seminary, is not the same slice southern Presbyterianism that produced Reformed Seminary and the original PCA.

In other words, the history is thick behind Keller and simply looking at the PCA from the perspective of Baptists and Episcopalians doesn’t take you very far into the weeds.

Yet, when you apply the categories of Baptist and Episcopalian, you wind up rendering Old School (or vanilla) Presbyterianism as a couple clicks away from strange:

During times when progressivism is ascendant, as it certainly is in our day, there is a natural temptation amongst conservatives to want to double down on their most strident rhetoric, add purity tests to protect their institutions, and to begin attacking people not only for holding wrong ideas, but for holding ideas which they suspect could lead to wrong ideas (even if they won’t inevitably lead to them).

Is this a plea for Erdmanesque tranquility so that the boat won’t rock? Ministry unites, doctrine divides?

Whether Keller is responsible or no, he has not helped to prepare the PCA for the predicament that Meador thinks the denomination faces:

You’re in this weird denomination that aspires to being the church that can reach secular bobo-types in upwardly mobile neighborhoods but that also aspires to be faithful to theological orthodoxy and even to be theologically evangelical, all the way down to not ordaining women. That is an awkward position to be in from the beginning.

If Keller had left the impression that working through presbyterian channels was not weird but normal, and had achieved his fame not as a pastor with one foot in presbyterianism and another in networked Protestantism but as a regular Presbyterian minister, he might have communicated an important lesson to young pastors, namely, that it’s okay to be simply a pastor. But that is not what he did. And his fellow Presbyterian Church in Americans are sorting out what the Age of Keller means.

What If We Are In Communion with Celebrity Pastors?

Published on by D. G. Hart61 Comments

Carl Trueman takes stock of the celebrity pastor phenomenon and calls on the revived Presbyterians to spend some of their leadership capital (is Tim Keller paying attention?):

But here is the rub: If there are people out there who still believe that there is such a thing as reformed evangelicalism as a trans-denominational movement, if they believe that this movement will play a key role in the future of the church, and if they believe that they are important leaders in this movement, then they need to speak directly, clearly, and firmly to precisely these issues. You cannot be a leader without leading publicly on the major issues and major personalities of the day who impact your movement and your chosen constituency. It is not enough to say ‘That person is no longer one of us’ when you helped to create a culture in which accountability is not transparent and where your public silence encouraged the big names to think they could do what they wanted and not be held publicly to account. That is where today’s problems started.

That accountability question has always been the Achilles’ Heel of the evangelical parachurch movement. Now that there are huge sums of money involved, that question is far more pressing and yet far more complicated than ever before. We who are associated with the so-called reformed evangelical movement, whether because we want to be or because others just make the connection, now look as corrupt and worldly as the despicable televangelists of a previous generation.

I’ll see Carl’s rub and raise him one. The problem is not one simply for the heavy artillery in the Gospel Coalition. This is also a Presbyterian and Reformed problem. The reason is that some Presbyterian ministers are celebrity pastors and these celebrities are accountable (supposedly) to the assemblies of their communions. So what are officers in the PCA, for instance, to do with someone like Tim Keller who needs, as Trueman argues, to speak directly and precisely to the issues involved in the recent controversies surrounding Mark Driscoll and others? But this is not merely a PCA problem. It is also one for folks like Carl and me, who are in the OPC and are in fellowship with Keller and the PCA, or for men like Scott Clark and Mike Horton, who are in the URC and in fellowship with Keller and the PCA.

I don’t know what the answer is, even though I have tried to point out the dilemmas posed by a prominent PCA pastor’s poor ecclesiology. But if connectionalism is one of the aspects of Presbyterian church government, then all of us, celebrity or not, are connected to the problem of celebrity pastors.

New Schoolers, Neo-Calvinists, and Fundamentalists

Published on by D. G. Hart147 Comments

After Darrell Todd Maurina kicked up some dust with his post at the Baylyblog on 2k, he made the following comment:

Men such as Dr. Darryl Hart have accused me in the past of holding the same position as the Bible Presbyterians and Carl McIntyre. That is an important accusation and it needs to be rebutted. If men such as Clark, Horton, Hart, and Van Drunen manage to successfully argue that they are in the heritage of Old School Presbyterianism while their opponents are New Schoolers, great damage will be done to the cause of those who oppose “Two Kingdoms” theology within the conservative Reformed world.

Well, if you look at the historical scholarship, Darrell, it gets even worse than you imagine. Consider first of all one inference that George Marsden drew in his first book, a study of New School Presbyterianism:

The most striking illustration of the similarities between nineteenth-century New Schoolism and twentieth-century fundamentalism is found in the sequel to the Presbyterian division of 1936. The newly formed Presbyterian Church of America itself was divided over a complex set of issues remarkably similar to those of 1837. The majority in the new denomination, led by J. Gresham Machen until his death . . . and then by his immediate associates at Westminster Seminary, took clearly Old School positions on each of the issues. The minority, which withdrew to form the Bible Presbyterian Synod, was led by the militant fundamentalist, Carl McIntire. McIntire, who had envisaged the Presbyterian Church of America as part of a wider “twentieth century Reformation,” soon found that he was not at home in a strict Old School tradition. The specific programs for which he fought were 1) toleration of a doctrine (dispenstational premillennialism) that the majority in the Church considered incompatible with the Westminster Confession of Faith; 2) continuation of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, rather than forming an official denominational mission board; and 3) adoption by the General Assembly of a statement that total abstinence from all that may intoxicate is “the only truth principle of temperance – exactly the same statement first adopted by the New School General Assembly of 1840. These programs, together with McIntires’s claim to represent “American Presbyterianism (a former New School phrase), his avid (anti-Communist) patriotism, his zeal for revivalism and legalistic reforms, his emphasis on interdenominational cooperation, and his lack of concern for strict Presbyterian polity – all indicate a continuation of the distinctly New School traditions with the fundamentalist wing of Presbyterianism. . . .

Perhaps the greatest difference between the New School evangelical movement and fundamentalist was that the nineteenth-century movement was largely successful, while the twentieth-century movement was not. The New School was not characterized by an almost total repudiation of the cultural and scientific advances of the age. Rather, it met those challenges without losing its own respectability. The New School thus advanced toward the center of American cultural and religious life, while fundamentalism was forced to retreat to the hinterlands. This, of course, is a crucial difference and makes a characterization of the New School as proto-fundamentalist s misleading as proto-liberal. The New School was in many respects a constructive and progressive religious intellectual movement with marked success in shaping American culture at large. (247, 249)

In case Darrell and other New School-like Protestants get bogged down in McIntire’s peculiarities, the point here is not that Maurina or the Baylys are dispensationalists or tee-totalers. The point is that they put the nation and its politics ahead of their theological and confessional commitments the way New Schoolers did. They want an American Presbyterianism, a faith that shapes America. In contrast, the Old School was willing to consider Reformed Protestantism as something independent or a matter than transcended the nation. The New Schoolers were Americans first and Americans second. Old Schoolers (at least some of them) were Presbyterians first and Americans second. If the United States and Presbyterianism are not the same, the order in which you put “Presbyterian” and “American” matters. (For Presbyterians from Canada or Ireland that makes perfect sense.)

But for those inclined to think that Dutch-American (notice the order) Reformed Protestants escape these parallels and analogies, consider this point that James Bratt made in an article about Kuyper and Machen:

Put in Dutch Calvinist terms: if forced to choose, Machen would let the Christian cultural task give way to the confessional church; Kuyper would force the confessional church to take up the cultural task. Put in American Presbyterian terms, Kuyper had some strong New School traits where Machen had none. To be sure Kuyper’s predestinarianism was at odds with the New Schools Arminian tints and his movement had a low impetus for “soul-saving,” but his organizational zeal was like Lyman Beecher’s in purpose and scale, his educational purposes at the Free University recalled Timothy Dwight’s at Yale, and his invocation of the “city on a hill” to describe the church’s place in a world recalled the charter image of Puritan New England which was ever the New Schools’ aspiration. In fact Kuyper honored New England as the “core of the American nation” and shared its definition of Christian liberty as a communal opportunity to do the right thing. At that Machen would only shudder. He indicted the “angry passions of 1861″ by which New England trampled on southern rights, and defined Christian liberty as the individual’s protection from the wrong thing. When put to the test, Machen endorsed the political model of Thomas Jefferson. At that Kuyper would only shudder back. (“Abraham Kuyper, J. Gresham Machen, and the Dynamics of Reformed Anti-Modernism,” Journal of Presbyterian History Winter 1997 75.4, 254)

So if folks like Maurina are going to talk about lines of historical continuity in the Reformed world, they may want to get their ducks in a row. And by the likes of these historians who taught/teach at Calvin College, the ties among Lyman Beecher, Abraham Kuyper, Carl McIntire, Francis Schaeffer may be stronger than the anti-2kers imagine.