Proposed Changes to the Creed of the Church of Scotland
Moves are afoot for the Church of Scotland to modify her creed subscription. Since 1910, her ministers and elders have given a very loose subscription to “the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith contained in the Westminster Confession”. What these “fundamental doctrines” are has never been declared, and apparently no office-bearer since 1910 has been found to have breached the terms of this vow. The only “clarification” has been that, in 1986, the General Assembly declared that certain points in the Westminster Confession (the rejection of monasticism, the evil of the mass, the Pope as the antichrist, and the prohibition on marrying “infidels, papists, and other idolators”) were not part of the confession of the Church.
The proposal is to replace the Westminster Confession by a “Book of Confessions” containing the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed of 325 AD, the Scots Confession of 1560, the Westminster Confession, and a 1992 Statement of Faith which was affirmed by the General Assembly. The new vows would be: “1. Do you believe the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith expressed in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds? 2. Do you confess the catholic and reformed faith of the Church as contained in its Book of Confessions, and promise to be guided by the said Book in your life and doctrine?” The proposal has been accepted by the General Assembly and has been sent down to the Presbyteries for discussion.
The inclusion of the Scots Confession of 1560 comes as a surprise. If the language of the Westminster Confession was too strong for the General Assembly in 1986, how much more the language of John Knox and his companions – for example, when the Scots Confession describes the false Church, and especially Romanism, as “that horrible harlot, the Kirk malignant”; or when it states that “we flee the society with the Papistical Kirk in participation of their Sacraments; first, because their ministers are no ministers of Christ Jesus; yea (which is more horrible) they suffer women, whom the Holy Ghost will not suffer to teach in the congregation, to baptize”. The fact is that, if the office-bearers of the Church of Scotland were really guided in their “life and doctrine” by the 1560 Confession, they would instantly repudiate liberalism, sodomy, women ministers, Romanism, and many other evils presently tolerated by the Church of Scotland.
The odd-man-out in the proposed Book of Confessions is the 1992 Statement of Faith. This is one of these productions – so popular with liberals – which sounds religious but has very little meaning. For example: “We praise God the Father: Who created the universe and keeps it in being. He has made us his sons and daughters to share his joy, Living together in justice and peace, Caring for his world and for each other” (the capital letters are used because it is supposed to be set out as a poem). Who is “us” in this statement, one wonders? Is it just Christians, or does it include Muslims? Does “justice and peace” allow for other religions and for abortion, or forbid them? What happens to all these supposed “sons and daughters” when they die, especially if they die in open rejection of Christ? Do they go to hell, and are they punished eternally for their sins? What place does Satan have in God’s created order?
It would be interesting to see an honest statement of the doctrine of a typical Church of Scotland minister. Do they really “believe the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith expressed in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds?” There have certainly been ministers and bishops in the Church of England who did not. What Church of Scotland office-bearers ought to believe, and subscribe, is the doctrines of The Westminster Confession of Faith; and if they do not believe them, the error is not with the Confession but with them.
DWBS
Age of the Pliosaur
It was with great excitement that in December 2023 the massive skull of a long-dead sea creature was dug out of a cliff on the “Jurassic Coast” in Dorset, an area famous for the many fossils which can be found on its beach. This particular fossil, of the skull of the huge creature known as a pliosaur, is the largest intact example ever found.
The famous naturalist, Sir David Attenborough, presented a documentary for the BBC which followed the very difficult extraction of the fossil from halfway up the cliff face. The program is very interesting but, as usual, contains a lot of speculation about the evolution of such a creature and claimed that the pliosaur lived 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic period.
The scientists who study the fossils of these long-extinct creatures are clever and knowledgeable, but the Scriptures prove wrong the timescales they use. The standard method of dating organic (carbon-based) materials is Carbon Dating. In a living organism, the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 is constant but, when the organism dies, the radioactive carbon-14 starts to decay until it becomes carbon-12. The half-life of carbon-14 (the time taken for half of it to disappear) is 5730 years. It can be calculated that after approximately 50-60 000 years carbon-14 would no longer be detectable.
The age of dead matter is calculated on the basis of the ratio of the remaining carbon-14 to the amount of carbon-12. Technically therefore, if an organism is dead for 60 000 years, such a small amount of carbon-14 would be left that it would not be possible to establish a date. It follows that the dating of rocks which are claimed to be many millions of years old requires another method. These are measured by radiometric dating, by measuring the presence of, for example, uranium, which decays to lead; or potassium, which decays to argon. Potassium-40 has a half-life of 1.3 billion years and uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.47 billion years. All of these methods of radiodating take little account of serious catastrophes such as the Flood and make a great many assumptions which bring the whole process into question. Also the six-day period of Creation was a wholly different geological event, and those carrying out these calculations take no account of it.
Many of the samples of fossilised trees, oil and shale oil deposits, which are dated at millions, if not billions, of years old, are found to contain carbon-14, which makes it impossible for them to be older than 50 to 60,000 years. It is argued that in those cases the carbon-14 is the product of contamination either from younger materials, or from the atmosphere (carbon-14 is ever present in the atmosphere). However, materials which have been carefully dug up, or oil which has been pumped up from deep inside the earth, are very unlikely to have such contamination. Diamond is the hardest natural substance and very chemically resistant, and yet diamonds from deep inside the earth are found to have carbon-14 present. This is impossible for something claimed to be billions of years old.
We know, from the Word of God, that none of these materials can be more than about 6000 years old, and this is confirmed by the scientists’ own readily accepted dating method – carbon-14 dating shows that these fossils or materials cannot be millions or billions of years old.
An American archaeologist, Professor J O Brew, of Harvard University, (quoted in a scientific paper in 1970) summarised a common attitude among archaeologists towards carbon-14 dating as follows: “If a carbon-14 date supports our theories we put it in the main text; if it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a footnote, and if it is completely ‘out of date’ we just drop it”.
The only way that we can know the true age of the earth is by what is revealed to us in the Word of God. FRD
Royal Family Health Issues
“Let’s pray that they’re both OK”, was the front-page Daily Mail headline, after the announcement was made that King Charles needed a hospital procedure and that the Princess of Wales had undergone an operation that left her in hospital for almost a fortnight. And while the King was in hospital, a further, cancer-related problem was discovered. The royal family are, of course, not immune to health problems.
But they do need prayer; so Scripture calls us to “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks . . . for kings, and for all that are in authority” (1 Tim 2:1,2). They very much need the prayers of the Lord’s people as they go about their duties. But especially they need prayer for their souls, that they may be saved from their sins and live truly godly lives.
Yet in this ungodly age, when any religious activity is likely to provoke rejection and scorn, it was a welcome surprise to see the newspaper headline. Would that there was more of a focus everywhere on prayer and a sincere desire to have real communion with God through Jesus Christ!
We are to pray also for “all that are in authority”, not least “that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty”. Governments do have a responsibility to rule in the fear of God, though we see so little of it. How we need to pray for godly attitudes among the leaders of the nations!