Why was it that The Free Church of Scotland, apparently so safely moored to Scripture and the Westminster Confession of Faith, should within fifty years effectively have cut the mooring ropes and allowed herself to drift almost anywhere on the sea of religious heresy? Doubtless many contributory factors may be cited, but the fact still remains that the drift from religious orthodoxy took place with almost inexplicable speed.
Substantial light is shed on the course of that declension in a book published in 1988, Church and Creed in Scotland by Kenneth R. Ross, with the subtitle, The Free Church Case 1900-1904 and its Origins (Rutherford House Books, 424 pages). The book is a by-product of a PhD thesis by the author, who at the time of the book’s publication was a Church of Scotland missionary teaching theology in Malawi.
The Case referred to in the title is the law-suit brought by the remaining Free Church of Scotland, that part of the original Free Church which did not enter the union in 1900 with the United Presbyterian Church which resulted in the formation of the United Free Church of Scotland. After losing the case at each stage in the Scottish Courts the Free Church won the final appeal in the House of Lords; the Free Church was declared to be the rightful owner of all the churches, manses, colleges and all the other assets of the original Free Church. However, by an Act of Parliament a Royal Commission was set up to redistribute the property. This resulted in the vast bulk of the property being reassigned to the United Free Church.
All this is chronicled in this well-presented, but expensive, book, together with a summary of the arguments used by each side in the case. But the really valuable part of the book is his account of the changes that took place within the Free Church between 1843 and 1900. While the author does not share the position of the Constitutional party within the Free Church, the party which upheld its original constitution, he does show a clear understanding of its point of view. He quotes from a wide variety of original sources — from the writings of men such as John Kennedy, Hugh Martin and James Begg — to show how the Constitutionalists defended the scriptural positions which were being increasingly undermined as the years went by, at the same time showing with equal clarity the arguments of the other side.
In such an account as this it is necessary to devote considerable attention to the Voluntary controversy — the question being whether or not it is proper for a Christian Church to be an Established Church. Thomas Chalmers, easily the most prominent of the Disruption ministers, made it plain that in leaving the Established Church in Scotland they had not become Voluntaries. In his Moderator’s Address to the 1843 General Assembly he declared, “We hold by the duty of Government to give of their resources and of their means for the maintenance of a gospel ministry in the land. . . . We are advocates for a national recognition and a national support of religion.” The United Presbyterian Church, on the other hand, gave no support to this doctrine. And when union negotiations between the Free and United Presbyterian Churches were broken off in 1873, having lasted for ten years, this, along with uneasiness about the United Presbyterian view of the extent of the Atonement, was the rock on which these negotiations foundered.
The position of the Establishment Principle as a basic part of the Free Church constitution came to have a disproportionate place in the argument before the civil courts, at the expense of discussion of the wider declension from the Free Church’s original Scriptural position. It was doubtless in the interests of lawyers, to some extent out of their depth in understanding Biblical doctrine, to attempt to simplify the matter by focusing overly narrowly on this one doctrine. (It is probable that there is nothing in print today that gives a better idea of its Scriptural basis than Dr Ross’s quotations from the mass of pamphlets, speeches and magazine articles on the Establishment Principle, which flowed from the pens of such able men as Alexander Moody Stuart and James Begg, among many others).
It is perfectly true that the period under consideration in this book was an era of massive change, both in society in general and in the church in particular. Given that the spirit of change pervaded the whole of society to the extent that it did, the Free Church could not escape unscathed. It would seem that at least some of the Free Church leaders were largely motivated by a desire to avoid losing the attachment of the rising generation when they allowed their Church to change as it did. No doubt such a policy was reasonably successful at the time, but the passing years have made clear how disastrous it actually was. And it is clear that only a lack of spiritual ballast could have made such a policy possible.
This spirit of change affected the whole realm of Christian doctrine, but hardest hit was the doctrine of Scripture. And when the authority of the Bible on the minds of men, even outwardly, lost the firm hold that it once had, the authority of every other doctrine was equally definitely lost. It was a consequence of the widespread influence of the theory of Evolution, especially following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, that these ideas came to be applied to the Bible. If the position of the Creator more and more faded into the background with the increasing acceptance that the whole creation, and man in particular, had come into being through purely natural forces, it was only natural that the idea of the Bible as a revelation from God should also be replaced by the theory that the Bible only records the development of man’s conceptions of religion.
This theory was the basis of the destructive force of Higher Criticism, of which the Free Church was, sadly, to become one of the greatest strongholds in the nineteenth century. A. B. Davidson, Professor of Hebrew at New College, Edinburgh, and one of the earliest teachers of the new approach to the Bible, expressed his belief that the Bible must be treated in very much the same way as other books when looking into its origins. This meant, for instance, that no one need take the Bible’s word for it, as to who wrote particular books within Scripture, even if Christ Himself put His authority behind it. So careless were most of the leading men in the Church by the 1890’s about the doctrine of the absolute accuracy of Scripture that someone like James Denney — and others went farther than he did — could say, with the irreverence that follows naturally from such views, that he cared not one straw for mere verbal infallibility.
It was not a long step from saying that we cannot trust what the Bible says about itself to doubting what the Bible says about everything else, even what it says about the Person of Christ. The elevation of Marcus Dods to his professorship, after his years of retreat from Scriptural teaching, brought once more to the surface acute concern about the quality of theological training in the Free Church. He could only say about the One who is the Son of God in our nature, “Very often, I may say commonly, I cannot get further than the conviction that in Christ we see the best that our nature is capable of, and must make our own.”
What had such men to offer to their hearers? Certainly nothing that could satisfy a soul conscious of its need of a substitute who could bear the full weight of the punishment of his or her sins before an all-holy God, and nothing that would feed a living soul, especially one that could think back to the powerful and spiritual teaching of a race of preachers who were fast passing away. The sad thing is that those men — Dr Ross calls them the New Evangelists — thought that they alone could give the Church what could preserve it from extinction. They were willing to listen to the advancing unbelieving thought of their times, to read the Scriptures in its light and tell their generation just what they thought it would be prepared to listen to. Anything else could be safely jetisoned. The ship would sail all the better for being lighter. But they forgot to ask if the passengers on the ship, which was now being blown about by the winds of new doctrine, could possibly reach the expected destination of heaven — or else they simply blinded themselves to the consequences of their actions.
It was in this climate that the Declaratory Act was passed in the Free Church in 1892. Its effect was to alter completely the relationship of the Church to the Confession of Faith. A further result was the formation of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland as a separate body when the General Assembly of 1893 refused to repeal the Act. Dr Ross makes it clear that the New Evangelists were not aiming merely at the revision of matters of doctrinal detail, but aiming to alter the whole system of Calvinistic theology. Apart from the particular points made in the Act, it was at its most destructive when it drove a wedge between individual statements in the Confession and the “substance of the Reformed Faith”, a totally amorphous concept. Yet that distinction had its roots very much further back in the Free Church history. Years earlier Robert Candlish had claimed that the formula signed by all Free Church office-bearers “did not bind so much to every separate constituent of the Confession as the resulting ‘whole’.” It was now claimed that the Church had full authority to determine in any particular case which points fell into this category. It was a device which rendered a successful case of discipline on the grounds of doctrinal aberration almost impossible, something which for the same reason is acknowledged on all hands to be impossible in the Church of Scotland today. However, the writer’s own treatment of the theology lying behind the Act is the weakest part of this whole book. (For a clear analysis of the Declaratory Act see the Rev. J. S. Sinclair’s articles reprinted as the Supplement to the History of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland).
For Dr. Ross the vital question in the whole series of events leading up to the Free Church case is the relationship of a church to her creed. What the House of Lords decided was that not even an overwhelming majority in a church has any right to alter that relationship. Clearly there is a serious question about the moral integrity of those who take office in a church which holds to a particular position and then proceed to change it. There were large numbers of ministers and others in the Free Church by the end of the 1880’s who had sworn that the whole doctrine of the Westminster Confession of Faith was the confession of their own personal faith, when it manifestly did not express their faith. Dr Ross has no doubt about the weakness of the position of the United Free Church, which enshrined in her constitution her right to change her doctrinal position just as she wished. He comments, “With such abundant room for ‘open questions’ . . . she was left with little doctrinal anchor and was dangerously at the mercy of the tide.” Yet he does not seem able to accept that the Constitutionalism understanding of the relationship of an office-bearer to the Confession of Faith is the right one. The more is the pity, because there is no stable middle ground in this matter.
Samuel Miller’s Exposition on Creeds
It is interesting to notice at the same time an excellent exposition from the Reformed position of the responsibilities involved in subscription to a creed. Samuel Miller was only the second professor to be appointed (in 1813) to Princeton Theological Seminary in the USA. His The Utility of Creeds and Confessions is based on a lecture to his students. In it he answers the objections usually made against creeds and confessions of faith. On the positive side he argues that, among other reasons, a creed is necessary to maintain unity among ministers and members of a particular church, it enables them to maintain the truth once delivered to the saints, and it makes clear to other churches and to the world around what a particular church stands for.
The 1830’s in America was a time of considerable controversy about subscription to the Confession of Faith. In some parts of American Presbyterianism it became possible to subscribe to the Confession while adhering to a significantly different doctrinal position. At that time Miller wrote a series of 10 Letters to Presbyterians on the Present Crisis in the Presbyterian Church, which were first published in a periodical. The first three of these have recently been republished under the heading, Adherence to Our Doctrinal Standards, along with The Utility of Creeds and Confessions, to form an attractive and useful book. This book, Doctrinal Integrity, has a useful introductory Essay by Kevin Reed (Presbyterian Heritage Publications, 160 pages, 1989).
In combating the practice current in his own time of subscribing the Confession while having reservations about considerable parts of it, Miller advocates allowing men to subscribe who have difficulty with some detail or details of this document, provided they make their difficulties clear to the relevant church court. Miller himself at first subscribed the Confession in this way, expressing his doubts about a clause in the chapter on Marriage and Divorce. No harm followed in his case, because he came to see shortly afterwards that the Confession was right, this too is unsatisfactory; it is surely better to seek prayerfully to have one’s difficulties resolved first of all. In any case, there is a grave danger that before long serious reservations about the Confession would be passed over in the same way.
Miller also comments on those who make the reservation, explicitly or otherwise, that they subscribe to the Confession of Faith only so far as they consider that it agrees with the Scriptures. Into this category fall office-bearers of the Associated Presbyterian Churches when they accept office according to the Formula of their Church. It obliges the subscriber to state that he accepts the documents which form the constitution of that body, including the Confession, only “insofar as each and every one of the documents is consistent with the Holy Scriptures.”
“Upon this principle”, says Miller, “it is plain that any man might without scruple, subscribe any confession of faith whatever. For, surely a Socinian might, without the least hesitation, declare that he believed a rigidly Calvinistic Confession, so far as he considered it was coinciding with the Word of God. Besides, of what value is a subscription to any creed which is made upon this principle? The only object of subscribing a creed is to ascertain whether the subscriber believes a certain set of doctrines: or, in other words, whether he believes them to be taught in the Bible.” (p85). Now it is not our purpose to claim that any of these office-bearers has departed from the Confession in any particular doctrine. But what is manifestly clear is that if and when such a departure does arise, whether it be less or more serious, it will be impossible to bring any statement from the Confession of Faith to bear against that individual; its full force will be at once removed by that declaration, “I do not accept that that statement is scriptural.” By one apparently small change from the constitution of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland the Westminster Confession of Faith has been rendered ineffective in any process of discipline involving doctrine in the Associated Presbyterian Churches.
History has shown the vital importance of keeping a firm hold of the doctrines of the Bible. Without a doubt some doctrines are more vital than others, but when an individual or a body becomes careless about one doctrine there is always a danger of falling into another, and more serious, errors. It was not for nothing that Paul told Timothy, “Hold fast the form of sound words”. Perhaps nowhere was the slide into greater and greater error more dramatic than in the Free Church during the last century. But, however slow or fast the decline may be, the result is the same — unfaithfulness to God and to His grace.
There is a tremendous responsibility laid on churches, and on individuals within churches, to preserve inviolate the doctrinal heritage we have been given in the Scriptures, and which is summarised in the Westminster Confession of Faith. In this, as in every other duty, we need to remember the Saviour’s words, “Without Me ye can do nothing.”
N.B. The books referred to in this article are obtainable from the Church Bookroom.