There was a time when Presbyterians knew what they believed,’ Williamson tells audience
By Craig M. Kibler, February 9, 2007
ORLANDO, Fla. – “There was a time when Presbyterians knew what they believed,” the Rev. Parker T. Williamson told the New Wineskins Association of Churches’ Convocation on Thursday.
Williamson, editor emeritus and senior correspondent of the Presbyterian Lay Committee’s publications, told more than 500 people at First Presbyterian Church that, “rooted in Scripture, denominational leaders guarded the truth that had been entrusted to them. Aspiring ministers were tested for an unequivocal commitment to the church’s faith.”
Parallels between the
1926 and the 2006
General Assemblies
“Both assemblies,” Williamson said, “received recommendations from politically appointed, ‘peace and unity’ task forces. In both cases, majority members of the task force embraced theological liberalism. Each included minority members from the ‘evangelical’ sector of the denomination, but those ‘evangelicals’ represented the most moderate, institutionally compliant, and easily manipulated members of their sector. In both 1926 and 2006, institutional preservation won the day over doctrinal integrity.” Essential beliefs, he said, were specified and candidates for ordination subscribed to them in writing. “No scruples, no behind-the-back-finger-crossing, no ‘wink, wink’ reservations, no private definitions of Biblically conceived and confessionally affirmed doctrine.”
The lines between belief and unbelief, Williamson said, “were clearly drawn and commonly understood. If you wanted to be ordained a Presbyterian, you had to believe what Presbyterians believe.”
He said the Presbyterian Church (USA) has lost more than half its membership in the past few decades, “decimated its budget, consumed its endowments and jettisoned most of its missionary force” so that, today, the denomination’s managers “are clinging to the vestiges of a vanishing institution.”
What happened? Williamson asked. “What caused an unparalleled witness to the Gospel in the United States of America to be so rapidly swept toward oblivion?”
These are questions of history, he said, not conjecture.
Williamson then recounted the story of the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, who, on May 22, 1922, stepped into the pulpit of First Presbyterian Church in New York City and delivered a sermon titled, “Shall the fundamentalists win?”
Fosdick, who was a Baptist, was the “ideal front for Presbyterian leaders who chafed when required to subscribe to the denomination’s five ‘fundamental’ beliefs,” he said. Modernists wanted more flexible standards, “and preferably no standards at all. Finding the historic doctrines of Christianity too confining, they insisted that the essence of Christian faith lies not in specified beliefs, but in one’s ‘Christian experience.'”
Williamson said Fosdick and his supporters in the Presbyterian Church were challenged by J. Gresham Machen, a professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. In his book Christianity and Liberalism, he said Machen “argued that liberalism represented by Fosdick and his friends was not merely a different emphasis within Christianity, but a different faith altogether.”
In slides played on screens in the sanctuary, Williamson illustrated how Machen demonstrated that liberalism affirms:
- A different God (an immanent rather than transcendent ‘deity’).
- A different anthropology (human beings are essentially good).
- A different Jesus (a model human rather than Savior).
- A different Scripture (of human, not divine origin).
- A different church (a political body whose primary mission is to change societal structures, not make disciples).
Machen, he said, argued that if the Presbyterian Church set aside fundamental Christian doctrines in favor of experience-based ideologies, “it would no longer be ‘Presbyterian,’ nor could it even be called ‘the Church.'”
Williamson then revisited The Auburn Affirmation, a 1924 document signed by Presbyterians who sought to “free the denomination from being tethered by ‘fundamental’ Christian doctrines, denied the inerrancy of Scripture and declared the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ ‘theories.'”
The Auburn Affirmation forces won control of the General Assembly, forced Machen to resign his Princeton professorship, ultimately revoked his ordination and, in a landmark 1926 General Assembly, “abandoned the denomination’s requirement that ordained leaders subscribe to any particular beliefs,” Williamson said. “This removal of ‘fundamental doctrines,’ more recently referred to as ‘essential tenets,’ was destined to have a seismic impact on the future of the Presbyterian Church.”
How did this happen? he asked. There were only 1,000 original signers of The Auburn Affirmation while Machen, “a prolific writer and a founding editor of Christianity Today, enjoyed enormous support from Presbyterians in the pews and he spoke for a decisive majority of the Princeton faculty.”
How did this small minority take control of the church’s infrastructure, Williamson asked, so that they could “dump the denomination’s commitment to essential tenets of the Christian faith and destroy the career of that faith’s primary Presbyterian spokesman?”
The Auburn Affirmation forces, he said, “knew that the only way to gain control of the denomination would be to forge an alliance with moderates, Presbyterians who loved institutional unity more than theology. Thus, they devised a plan to turn the debate away from doctrine, which they could not win, and toward a strategy for preserving institutional peace, a plan that they believed would attract moderate evangelicals.”
Willamson said these forces knew that Machen, “whose writings had shown their position not only to be non-Presbyterian but non-Christian as well, would never play ball with them. But might it be possible to recruit someone close to Machen’s camp, someone whose tone was more irenic, a recognized evangelical whose passion for preserving the denomination might trump his theological integrity?”
That person, he said, would not have to agree theologically with The Auburn Affirmation forces. “In fact, they would be better served if he did not. All they needed was for that known evangelical to make room for their views and help them recast the denomination’s focus from doctrinal differences (‘essential beliefs’) to unity (there’s room under this tent for everybody). Such a person could tip the balance by pulling middle-of-the-road Presbyterians, albeit unknowingly, into the liberal camp.”
Williamson said Machen’s colleague at Princeton Seminary, Charles Erdman, “fit that mold perfectly. Erdman was named moderator of the General Assembly in 1925, running on a peace platform. He urged the Presbyterian Church to get on with its ministry and not be distracted by troublesome doctrinal disputes.”
Once elected, he said, Erdman appointed a 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, Williamson said, opened the 1926 General Assembly “with a sermon that called on commissioners to work for peace and avoid being influenced by those who foment disunity. Then the commission made its report. It called for doctrinal toleration, and it castigated unnamed Presbyterians who undermine church unity. In a tide-turning vote, the 1926 General Assembly adopted the commission’s report, which, according to church historian Bradley Longfield, “made it clear that the five essentials had no binding authority and the arguments of The Auburn Affirmation had essentially been accepted in toto.”
That General Assembly, Williamson said, “was a watershed moment in the life of the Presbyterian Church. From this moment on, presbyteries ordained persons who said they affirmed ‘the essential tenets’ of Christian faith, but would not specify what those essentials are. Soon, it became clear that what one presbytery deemed ‘essential’ might be regarded by another as ‘discretionary.'”
The present situation in the Presbyterian Church (USA), he said, “is precisely what Machen predicted: We have become a broadly inclusive body that defies theological definition. We Presbyterians no longer know what we believe. Thus, the inevitable consequence: We no longer know who we are.”
Williamson said there are parallels between the 1926 General Assembly and the 2006 General Assembly. “Both assemblies,” he said, “received recommendations from politically appointed ‘peace and unity’ task forces. In both cases, majority members of the task force embraced theological liberalism. Each included minority members from the ‘evangelical’ sector of the denomination, but those ‘evangelicals’ represented the most moderate, institutionally compliant and easily manipulated members of their sector. In both 1926 and 2006, institutional preservation won the day over doctrinal integrity.”
No “political deals” will renew the denomination, he said. ” No more compromise. No more rejection of essential tenets of Christian faith. No more optional theology and optional ethics. No more appeals to ‘middle-way Presbyterians,’ who – surely you have noticed – are now rapidly losing market share. We are at impasse. There are only two parties at the table. The time of partial, win/win, both/and compromise solutions is over.”
“Nothing short of falling on one’s knees, confessing one’s sin and pleading for mercy – nothing short of metanoia – will do.
“Sadly,” Williamson said, “I see no sign of repentance among those who have so badly mismanaged this denomination’s infrastructure; only a belligerence that curses the darkness on its way to the grave, and will not repent.
“So be it: the Kingdom of God is at hand. The Lord Jesus will not leave this world without a witness. Even now, he is lifting up voices in a worldwide resurgence of his Word. In Africa, in Asia, in Latin America and, yes, even here in America, the new wine of the Gospel is bubbling forth, bursting at the seams. Do you see it?”
Craig M. Kibler is the Director of Publications for the Presbyterian Lay Committee and Executive Editor of The Layman and The Layman Online. He can be reached at cmkibler@www.layman.org.