The Upper Register Blog

Scott Clark responds:

There is a great deal embedded or implied in Lee’s (I assume partial) list of things that compose the “system of doctrine” but it shares one serious flaw that all such lists posses: it is necessarily subjective. These are the things the Lee thinks are essential but what if a WTS prof defines “system of doctrine” differently? What if, by “system of doctrine” a WTS prof has a much shorter list, say, predestination? What if justification sola gratia, sola fide weren’t on the list or what if the Reformed doctrine of worship or what if the doctrine of the covenant of works (which the Westminster Confession mentions several times but which many contemporary “Reformed” folk have felt at liberty to reject) are not included? … A seminary board might hear a candidates (or, if his views change a prof’s) objection to the teaching of the Reformed churches on this or that point, but the idea that a person can decide for himself what is the system of doctrine is the path of anarchy and chaos. 

Clark opposes system subscription — even though it is the unanimous Old Princeton position as advocated by Charles Hodge, B. B. Warfield, and even Machen himself. He fears it is subjective and leads to anarchy and chaos. But these fears are misguided. Any given seminary or church body can decide whether any given exception is one that they consider to be about non-essential matters or about matters that strike at the fundamentals of the system of doctrine.  A professor doesn’t get to decide for himself whether his exceptions are acceptable or not. He is required to submit them to the judgment of his colleagues and the board (that’s even part of the pledge). If they deem his exceptions to be acceptable, that is, not inimical to the system of doctrine, then everything is okay.

Someone may object, “Then that leaves it up to the faculty or the board to keep a school orthodox.” But is there any other way? Even on Clark’s view it would still be up to the faculty and the board to police the confessional orthodoxy of its faculty. And even Clark admits that there are minor points — e.g., Pauline authorship of Hebrews — where he is willing to permit deviations from the Three Forms, so he himself is admitting that exceptions are possible and potentially acceptable.

I do not know what is going on behind closed doors in the faculty discussions at WTS/P. So I won’t speculate as to whether or not any given faculty member is within the bounds of the system of doctrine as defined by WTS or by Clark or by me or anyone else. That is up to the WTS faculty to figure out.

In addition, it must asked whether, on Clark’s view, Meredith Kline would be an acceptable faculty member at WSC (which, of course, he was). Kline was not a strict Sabbatarian. He held that the fourth commandment was a sign of the covenant between God and Israel, but not part of the universal moral law. In fact, in his latest book (God, Heaven, and Har Magedon) he advocated the Lord’s Day position. Kline also disagreed with WCF VII.1 which speaks of the Adamic covenant of works as a product of God’s “voluntary condescension.” He also would have scrupled the Larger Catechism’s seeming conflation of the covenant of redemption with the covenant of grace (”The covenant of grace was made with Christ as the second Adam, and in him with all the elect as his seed,” WLC 31). Furthermore, he argued that the “two tablets” of the law referred to two whole copies of the Decalogue, not to the two tables concerning our duty toward God and our duty toward man. Not to mention Kline’s framework interpretation which some strict confessionalists think contradicts the Confession’s “in the space of six days” language. I could go on. I wonder whether Clark would consider Kline to be sufficiently confessional by his strict subscription standards.

But wasn’t Meredith the very kind of orthodox, Reformed, Christ-centered, gospel-inflamed, conservative biblical scholar that we need? Someone who is devoted to the Reformed faith, a staunch defender of sola fide, the two-Adams, forensic imputation, classic covenant/federal theology, yea the whole panoply of the Reformed understanding of the gospel, and yet constantly engaging in exegesis and bringing forth new light from the Word in light of modern knowledge (ANE studies, modern cosmology, etc.)?

We don’t want to repristinate the Reformed orthodoxy of the 17th century down to the defense of the Masoretic vowel points and the textus receptus, do we? What about the fact that the magisterial Reformers held to a pretty severe view of the civil magistrate as obligated to enforce the first table of the law? To be orthodox Reformed must we reject the very foundation of modern democratic, pluralistic society? Do we really want to place these pre-modern vestiges of by-gone years and fashion them into a yoke about the neck of the disciples, telling them that if they want to embrace of the glorious, liberating gospel of grace as understood in the context of Reformed covenant theology, they ALSO have to check their brains at the door and swallow a whole raft of mistaken ideas that were vogue in the 17th century but now deemed to be pre-critical scholarship and just plain wrong? Do we not believe that a person is justified by faith alone, not by chopping off our legs to fit into the Procrustean bed of 17th century orthodoxy down to the last jot and tittle?

No, that was not the Old Princeton ethos. The two Westminsters claim to be the heirs of Old Princeton. But Old Princeton didn’t repristinate every out-dated notion of 17th century Reformed orthodoxy. Hodge, Warfield and Machen accommodated themselves to the new science of textual criticism, to modern geology and biology, and so on. All while staunchly defending the Reformed understanding of the gospel — the great system of federal, two-Adam theology, the imputation of Adam’s guilt to the human race, the imputation of Christ’s active and passive obedience to the elect, etc. — all in the face of the New School innovations of the 19th century. They loved and embraced and taught the Pauline, Reformational gospel. They proclaimed it from the rooftops. They suffered ignominy and ecclesiastical tyranny to defend and promote it. But they were not obscurantists. They were not fundamentalists. They welcomed and engaged critical scholarship. They did not bury their heads in the sand and let the rest of the world pass them by.

So if the Old Princeton vision is to be maintained, we must allow some degree of academic freedom. The system of doctrine contained in the Westminster Standards must be upheld. Faculty ought to pledge themselves to love it, to embrace it ex animo, to teach and impart it with zeal to their students. But at the same time they must be able to engage in scholarship. They must be able to follow the text where it leads. They must be permitted to engage in critical dialogue with the intellectual currents and scientific developments of the 21st century. Otherwise the gospel itself will become wedded to an outdated and ossified paper pope. We ought to be loyal to Christ and his word, not to a particular set of propositions that reflects more a cultural nostalgia than anything else (see Richard Muller’s awful book The Study of Theology where he essentially says that’s what he’s all about – maintaining and passing on the paideia of the Reformed culture).

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Reformed, Tradition, Sola Scriptura. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.