The Upper Register Blog

Last week, Scott Clark wrote on the topic of Bible and Confession. He was reacting to a comment posted by Tremper Longman on Save Our Seminary and which had been reposted on the Puritan Board. Longman had written:

I like to say that there is no institution I love as much as Westminster Seminary [Philadelphia]. However one of the reasons why I left in 1998 was my perception that the seminary was beginning to change from the deeply Reformed but outward facing institution that it was from the time that I first knew it in the 1970’s to a more inward defensive institution. I remember talking to one colleague, for instance, who told me that if I felt the Bible taught something that the Confession did not that I had to side with the Confession. That’s not the Reformed approach to the study of the Bible that I know and love. However it is a perspective that I think has only grown with time.

A couple of posters on the Puritan Board were troubled by the comment of this unnamed colleague as reported by Longman. One said, “Frankly, it sounds like something that would come out of Rome.” I would have to agree. Accordingly, then, I did not find Clark’s defense of the unnamed colleague’s comments to be helpful. I will quote some of Clark’s statements and give my response.

First, Clark writes:

The question here is not whether the bible is normative. The question is whether one person’s reading of Scripture is normative for everyone else.

This is not a helpful way of framing the question. I doubt that Longman or any other WTS faculty member who has exceptions to the Westminster Standards is asking his views to be “normative for everyone else.” He is merely asking that his views be tolerated. There is a big difference. The official position of the seminary is stated in the Confession. But if an individual professor has an exception or scruple at a certain point – say on the Sabbath or the threefold division of the Law – he wants to have the freedom to teach his understanding of the Scripture on that point, thus respectfully disagreeing with the Confession’s interpretation of Scripture on that point, while acknowledging that his view is not the view taught in the Confession and thus not the official position of the seminary.  I do not understand how Clark can say that this makes the exception or scruple ”normative for everyone else.”

Now Clark does have a valid point in one sense. Clark’s valid point is that a confessional Presbyterian seminary has the right to ensure that its students are taught confessional Presbyterian doctrine. In other words, Clark is pointing out that a confessional seminary cannot allow unfettered academic freedom, otherwise it would cease to be a confessional seminary. This, of course, is true of all sorts of confessional schools, and is not limited to Presbyterian ones. He provides an example: 

In a previous post I quoted Andrew Sullivan’s insight that no one can escape the contingency of their upbringing, nor should we regard this as a bad thing. Technically, Presbyterianism isn’t the contingency in which I was born and raised. It is, rather, one that I have adopted when I was a young adult, and in which I have lived for the past 15 years. So the question naturally arises, how does the contingency of my childhood relate to the contingency of my adulthood? There was a break, to be sure, when I abandoned my dispensational, Arminian, higher-life, Plymouth Brethren background and became covenantal, Reformed, and Presbyterian. But there are also important areas of continuity:

(1) I continue to believe that the Bible is the only infallible rule of faith and practice, the touchstone of all that we do and believe. The church in which I was raised instilled in me a high regard for the Scriptures. It was certainly wrong in its interpretation, but right in principle. We were steeped in the Bible. We did Bible studies several times a week using the Navigator’s chapter summary method. When listening to sermons, we were exhorted to turn in our Bibles to every passage that the preacher read, and this often meant turning to what seemed like hundreds of passages every Sunday. And we took notes too, filling up reems of paper over the years. I did this as a child and so my mind was chock-full of Scripture.

(2) I continue to be an evangelical, that is, one who believes in the centrality of the cross and the necessity of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. This is probably the most important thing. One can have all kinds of head knowledge, but without a personal, saving, intimate relationship with Christ such knowledge is vain. The leader of the church in which I was raised often railed against “dead orthodoxy” and emphasized a mystical form of higher-life piety. Unfortunately, the constant striving for this higher experience had an unintended consequence — it actually produced despair in those who could not achieve it, and hypocrisy and arrogance in those who thought they had. As a result, when I first joined the Presbyterian fold I reacted against that and embraced doctrinalism, which I perceived to be the only safeguard against subjectivism. I have now come full circle and realize that my old church was right — dead orthodoxy is a very real danger, especially for conservative Presbyterians. Doctrine and life must go hand-in-hand. It is absolutely vital to have a personal relationship with Christ as one’s personal Lord and Savior, and to commune with him in prayer. Paul put it best: “I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil 3:8).The famous revivalist Presbyterian pastor Gilbert Tennent is remembered as having taught that ”We can preach the gospel of Christ no further than we have experienced the power of it in our own hearts.”

These, then, are crucial elements of the invaluable inheritance that I received from the church in which my parents raised me, and which I continue to carry with me into my Presbyterian context. Since Presbyterians (at least the ones I know) tend to be weak in these two areas, I like the idea of reaching back into my past and carrying forward these two elements into the present. We need a chastened Presbyterianism in which basic things like personal prayer and Bible reading are encouraged rather than set aside as bad ”evangelical” habits. Presbyterians of an earlier day knew that doctrine, in and of itself, is barren unless rooted in the soil of a vital relationship with the risen Christ.

Earlier this year, Andrew Sullivan engaged in a blog debate with militant atheist Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation. Harris raised the problem of “contingency,” charging that Andrew Sullivan’s Roman Catholic faith was merely a contingency, an accident of being born to certain parents, at a certain time, in a certain place. If he had been raised by Buddhists, more than likely he would have been a Buddhist. I found Andrew’s reply to be helpful to me personally. I’ll explain how below.

Read the whole reply to get the context. But here are a few snippets. Andrew begins by pointing out the obvious:

I have never met a human being or a human mind that is “contingency-free”, and never will. No child grows up without the contingent facts of their family, place, genes, and any number of details that make us who we are. You and I would be very different people if we had different contingent genetics and different contingent histories.

Not only is there no such thing as a “contingency-free” human being, such contingency is for the most part a good thing. Andrew embraces the contingency of his Roman Catholic upbringing and the long history that lies behind it:

Why would I want to forget all of that precious inheritance - the humility of Mary, the foolishness of Peter, the genius of Paul, the candor of Augustine, the genius of Francis, the glory of Chartres cathedral, the haunting music of Tallis, the art of Michelangelo, the ecstasies of Teresa, the rigor of Ignatius, the whole astonishing, ravishing panoply of ancient Christianity that suddenly arrived at my door, in a banal little town in an ordinary family in the grim nights of the 1970s in England?

You want to be contingency-free? Maybe you need a richer slice of contingency. There is more wisdom, depth, range, glory, nuance and truth in my tradition than can be dreamt of in your rationalism. In answer to your question, “why not leave all this behind?” my answer is simply: why on earth would I?

Another phrase used in the debate is “the unclean glass,” which seems to be another term for “contingency,” highlighting the fact that the contingency isn’t always pure. In Andrew’s case, he has to admit that the Roman Catholic Church has engaged in bad behavior both in the past and in the present. So the glass isn’t pristine. But it should not for that reason be cast aside as worthless.

So how did I, as a Presbyterian, find Andrew’s comments helpful? It helped me to realize that I can still be a Presbyterian even though I am critical of aspects of it.

I wasn’t raised a Presbyterian. I was raised in a dispensational, Arminian, higher-life sect with Plymouth Brethren ecclesiology called The Assembly. It was a group with cultic tendencies – authoritarian leadership, communal living, a system of punishments called “consequences,” and so on. But in my college days, God converted me to the Calvinistic understanding of the gospel through exegesis and the guidance of various Reformed writers. Through my study of the scriptures, God led me out of the church in which I was brought up. 

After college, my wife and I joined the PCA in 1992 when we were just starting at Westminster Seminary California. We then switched to the OPC in 1995. We came full circle and returned to the PCA in 2003. We have been through many experiences in conservative Presbyterianism, some good and some bad. It’s an imperfect, flawed, human tradition. My run-ins with the darker side of Presbyterianism have not been pleasant, and have made me question my commitment to being Presbyterian.

But (American) Presbyterianism is the tradition I understand best and in which I have been providentially placed, foibles and all. Rather than focusing on how the glass is unclean, I’d rather focus on how this human tradition can be a legitimate expression of the Christian faith in a historic community that traces its roots back to Old Princeton, B. B. Warfield, Charles Hodge, John Witherspoon, the Log College, Francis Makemie, and the other Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who immigrated to this land and founded American Presbyterianism in the 1700s. Of course, this tradition can be traced back even farther to the continent, to Calvin and Luther, and to the medieval church before them.

Recognizing the contingency of the fact that God has placed me within this ecclesiastical tradition does not bind me to a specific set of answers to every problem. It doesn’t mean that I cannot critically evaluate and appropriate that tradition. But it does mean that I begin with certain theological assumptions, a well-stocked universe of discourse, without which it is hard to have a meaningful discussion to begin with. The Presbyterian tradition is more than the Westminster Confession and Catechisms. It is bigger than any particular Presbyterian denomination, be it the OPC, PCA, EPC or whatever. It is a living tradition, an embodiment of the evangelical, Christian faith in one branch of the universal visible church of Jesus Christ.

To quote Andrew again:

Why would a human being not look at the unclean glass he is born with and ask: what is this that I have been given? Who passed this down to me? Why? Who died to give this to me? Who suffered? Who spent their lives transcribing texts to keep the memory of this man alive? Who built these churches and composed these chants and wrote these books for me to engage long after they have all disappeared from the earth? How does this amazing cultural, intellectual, spiritual inheritance connect with that inchoate sense of the divine that still permeates my soul? Could it be that what I sense in my soul is what Augustine sensed? What Dominic sensed? What John actually saw and loved and rested his head against?

Lane Keister has responded to my “Confession = Scripture” post with a red herring. In brief, he affirms that the Confession can be amended, at least in theory. But my post did not address this issue directly. I did mention, as a subordinate point, that I disagreed with his interpretation of the vow of subscription. (I thought he too strongly identified the system of doctrine with the Confession itself, thus binding an officer to never compare the Confession with Scripture.) But the meaning of the vow is distinct from the question of whether the Confession can be amended.  

So what was my primary point? Let me explain by reviewing the context of my post. The context was Lane’s defense of the PCA Ad Interim Report against Reggie Kidd’s criticism that the Report did not examine the FV on the biblical merits but only on whether the FV passes the confessional standard — a complaint I’m sympathetic with, even though I agree with the Report’s conclusions. Lane Keister responded by arguing that by examining the Confession, the Report did examine the biblical merits, since a consideration of the Confession is a consideration of Scripture. This bald statement, which I hope he retracts, is what prompted my original post.

My concern is threefold:  (1) this statement reflects a dangerous elevation of the Confession that should be unacceptable to Protestants; (2) it justifies laziness in combatting error, as if we can skip exegesis, quote the Confession, and then claim that we have thereby proved that an error is contrary to Scripture; and (3) it concedes the moral high ground by making it appear that our concerns with the FV are merely that it isn’t Reformed, rather than that it is contrary to the apostolic gospel.

Interestingly, PCA pastor Andy Webb understands my primary point, but objects to my call for exegesis when pursuing doctrinal discipline on the ground that it’s just too much work: 

whenever there was a doctrinal disagreement, we would need to form a study committee, have them create their own theological study of the subject and then we’d decide the matter based on what the majority at the moment thought of the study. Under this system, discipline cases would become few and far between simply because of the enormous effort involved with each case (not to mention the arguments afterwards).

Instead, the greater wisdom of our forebears was that we should have a Constitution that we agreed was an accurate summary of the doctrines taught in scripture. Thus, in a matter of discipline all we had to do was compare the teaching of the officer to our fixed standard.

Note the irony of his position. The very Confession he claims to uphold compels us to “determine” all controveries of religion by appeal to Scripture (WCF I:10). According to the Confession, then, it isn’t acceptable to simply compare an erroneous teaching with the Confession and be done with it — as I fear that the PCA Ad Interim Report did, and as Andy Webb recommends we do as a matter of policy. The Confession itself protests against making it the ultimate arbiter of our theological debates.

I’m not denying that the Confession can be used in a subordinate role as one of the tools in pursuing doctrinal discipline. I’m convinced the FV is contrary to the system of doctrine contained in the Confession, and I think the Ad Interim Report made that case well. My concern is that this not be the only case we make. If we are to be good Presbyterians, we have an obligation to do what Reggie Kidd and many FV men have requested, namely, to engage them on the biblical merits. 

This is precisely how Presbyterianism works, or at least how it ought to work. For example, both the OPC and PCA Book of Church Order state that

All church power is only ministerial and declarative, for the Holy Scriptures are the only infallible rule of faith and practice. No church judicatory may presume to bind the conscience by making laws on the basis of its own authority; all its decisions should be founded upon the Word of God.

(OPC Form of Government III:3; see PCA BCO, Preface II.7, for nearly identical language.)

The OPC Book of Discipline (IV.A.1) states that at the beginning of every trial the moderator shall announce:

This body is about to sit in a judicial capacity and I exhort you, the members, to bear in mind your solemn duty faithfully to minister and declare the Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice, and to subordinate all human judgments to that infallible rule.

I don’t know if the PCA has a similar exhortation before trials, but it might as well, since BCO 29-1 clearly states:

Nothing, therefore, ought to be considered by any court as an offense, or admitted as a matter of accusation, which cannot be proved to be such from Scripture.

And, of course, there’s the teaching of the Confession itself that the Scripture is ”the supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined” (WCF I:10; quoted in PCA BCO 39-3) — a crucial Confessional directive that Lane Keister and Andy Webb have so far failed to address. The Confession won’t allow us to take any shortcuts. It directs us to engage error by means of biblical argumentation. It does so in order (1) to safeguard the principle that Scripture is the only infallible rule of faith and practice, and (2) to ensure that the exercise of our ecclesiastical authority is not legislative in character but ministerial and declarative of the Word of God.

Another reason it’s important to engage error by biblical argumentation (in addition to Confessional citation) is that the Confession was written at a particular time and in a particular place, and the errors it rejects are not necessarily identical to the ones we confront today. For example, there may be similarities between the FV and the Roman Catholic view of justification or the sacraments, but there are also important differences. In order to ensure that we are correctly applying the Confession, we have to examine the biblical exegesis that lies behind the Confession, as well as the exegetical arguments being put forward in support of the contemporary error we’re trying to address. Thus, even if we were convinced that we could do indirect exegesis of Scripture via study of the exegesis contained in the Confession, direct exegesis would still be unavoidable due to our historical distance from the Confession.