Appendix B HOW TO IMMUNIZE PRESBYTERIANISM Modern liberalism in the Church, whatever judgment may be passed upon it, is at any rate no longer merely an academic matter. It is no longer a matter merely of theological seminaries or universities. . . . At the theological seminaries and universities, however, the roots of the great issue are more clearly seen than in the world at large; among students the reassuring employment of traditional phrases is often abandoned, and the advocates of a new religion are not at pains, as they are in the Church at large, to maintain an appearance of conformity to the past. But such frankness, we are convinced, ought to be extended to the people as a whole. Few desires on the part of religious teachers have been more harmfully exaggerated than the desire to "avoid giving offense."
J. Gresham Machen (1923)(1)
It is time for me to give offense (again). It is time for me to say what is wrong structurally with American Presbyterianism, a system of Church government that did not provide the defenders of the Westminster Confession with the weapons they needed to defend the Church against its mortal enemies, once the Church grew large enough and wealthy enough to be worth capturing. The evolution of Presbyterianism from Calvinism to Arminianism to liberalism was accompanied by Church growth. There were institutional reasons for this.The typical Presbyterian Calvinist will insist that Church growth, liberalism, and Presbyterian government are not inextricably linked. This pattern in Church history is not a uniquely Presbyterian problem, he says. He has a good point: Church growth and theological liberalism have accompanied each other in other denominational traditions. But the question remains: Why did the most theologically rigorous Protestant confessional tradition succumb to Arminianism and then to liberalism? Other ecclesiastical traditions did not have Calvinist confessions to defend them. Presumably, their theological defenses were weaker than Presbyterianism's. Nevertheless, one by one, Presbyterian denominations have gone liberal except when they started small and have stayed small.
The reason has to be institutional. We know this because the various Presbyterian Churches' confessions have remained intact for decades after the liberals' theological conquest was functionally complete. Formal Presbyterian confessions have lagged behind pulpit confessions by at least a generation. These rigorous confessions could not overcome Presbyterianism's structural weaknesses. Why not?
It is this question that Presbyterian Calvinists have steadfastly resisted dealing with in print. The fact that they refuse to address it in print indicates that they are afraid to mention it, for fear of being labeled anti-Presbyterian when they propose institutional solutions. Instead of proposing structural reforms, they take the easy way out. They recommend policies that are guaranteed to keep the Church small. This implicitly hands over the world to non-Presbyterians. The world, of course, appreciates this indirect subsidy.
Conservative Presbyterian denominations eventually become divided between Confessionalists and Church growth advocates. In our era, the Confessionalists regard the Church growth people as touchy-feelie sell-outs, while the Church growth people regard the Confessionalists as nit-picking, low-pension losers. Liturgically, the war between two extremes is a debate over the psalm book vs. the overhead projector.(2) Each side wishes the other would just go away.
Once this division appears, the Confessionalists always lose control of the denomination. There are no known exceptions. The lure of large churches, large pensions, and assistants who do most of the marriage counselling prevails. The Church growth people concentrate on what they do best: growing their churches by whatever works. The Confessionalists concentrate on what they do best: overwhelming one-time visitors with unfamiliar theology. In Presbyterian government, votes count. The Church growth people eventually gain more votes. The Confessionalists then have three choices: (1) spend their lives being outvoted at General Assembly; (2) quit attending General Assembly; or (3) leave to form a new denomination, which will subsequently divide at least once--the Machen-McIntire phenomenon. In the two (or more) new groups, the cycle then begins anew.
The problem is point two of the biblical covenant model: representation/authority. Presbyterians like to pretend that all votes are equal. This is an old Whig belief, and it has always flourished in the face of the facts. Twentieth-century modernists have known better: elite core groups provide direction for the voters. The elite core groups in Presbyterianism have not changed significantly for over four centuries: ordained men who possess advanced academic degrees issued by non-Presbyterian institutions ("doctors") -- John Calvin is the classic example -- and pastors of large congregations. Over the last century, the former have had a tendency to go liberal; the latter have had a tendency to go pietistic, i.e., non-controversial. To these two groups has been added a third in the twentieth century: senior bureaucrats in the permanent denominational boards. These three groups have become the operational models of success in Presbyterianism.
Young men seeking to enter the Presbyterian ministry must first go through the screening process controlled by the first group. The doctors, not the presbyteries, impose the sanctions. If the students survive, they are then forced to seek jobs. Who has jobs to offer? Hardly anyone; we are talking about Presbyterians, not Baptists. But if there are any jobs available, they will be offered by the remaining two elite groups: pastors of large congregations and senior bureaucrats. The small-congregation Confessional preachers have only this to say: "Silver and gold have we none, and not many Federal Reserve Notes, either." Men respond to positive sanctions. They can see who has positive sanctions to offer. They can also see who doesn't.
Dust-Eating as a Way of Institutional Life Let us go back to what happened in the United States after 1800. The Baptists and the Methodists captured America west of the Allegheny Mountains. They accomplished this because, first, they did not require their ministers to attend college or seminary. Second, they adopted circuit-riding: a pastor was a pastor of several churches at once. Elders ran the local churches in between pastoral visits. Both of these practices were foreign to Presbyterianism and the other Calvinist denominations. What Paul did with the churches he planted, so did the Methodists and Baptists do in the Western United States, 1800 to 1860.
Very early, American Calvinists made an implicit decision: to allow the Baptists and Methodists to take over the nation's ecclesiastical tradition in preference to abandoning the principle of the academically certified minister and the two-office view of the eldership: ruling and teaching. Presbyterians preferred (and still prefer) to see eternally lost people go to hell rather than modify these two Presbyterian distinctives. Presbyterians would also rather see Baptists take over a society rather than modify these two distinctives. Presumably, they would rather see sinners become Arminian Baptists or charismatics rather than see them go to hell, but these are the only options available to most sinners. The third option, namely, that most sinners will be converted to Presbyterianism, is institutionally impossible because of the academic lag time between the increased demand for ministers and the supply thereof.
Having made this decision in the late eighteenth century, Presbyterians went a step farther in the nineteenth: requiring the members of their seminary faculties first to run the gauntlet in humanistic institutions. Unofficially, they required all candidates for seminary faculty positions to study in Germany. Later, after Johns Hopkins University set the pattern for graduate education by importing German academic humanism, Presbyterians allowed these candidates to substitute an advanced degree from an American humanist institution in place of spending a year or two in a German university. In the twentieth century, Presbyterians have required their colleges' faculty members to earn a Ph.D. from a humanist-accredited secular university. The key word here is accredited. Every candidate for high teaching authority must first be accredited by humanists. Also, the Church's teaching institutions are accredited by humanists: colleges and seminaries. The surrender to Rockefeller's system of collegiate accreditation is as ingrained today as it was in Machen's day:
Because it is highly reproachful to religion and dangerous to the church to trust the holy ministry to weak and ignorant men, the presbytery shall admit a candidate to licensure only if he has received a bachelor of arts degree, or its academic equivalent, from an accredited college or university. He must also have completed at least two years of study in a theological seminary.(3)
Presbyterians from the very beginning self-consciously made a decision to conform to the academic standards of their mortal enemies. In the twentieth century, they have voluntarily placed their institutions of higher learning under the judicial authority of liberal humanists: accrediting boards dominated by people who espouse the same liberalism that Machen called a rival religion. This is an open admission on the part of Calvinist Presbyterians that theologically liberal humanists, not Christians, and surely not Calvinists, know what is best in education. The first principle of Presbyterian ordination is the requirement that the Presbyterian Church crawl on its belly, serpent-like, eating the dust of death--humanism's dust. Yet for me to say this, even after what I have demonstrated in this book regarding the surrender of the Presbyterian Church to the liberals, will outrage the professional dust-eaters who run the institutions of Presbyterian higher learning. Meanwhile, most Presbyterian laymen will shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, that's just the way it is. It has always been this way." Yes, it has, but this does not make it right.
This mental attitude--this self-conscious surrender to humanist academic dust-eating--is what led to the transfer of the United States into the hands of the pietist-humanist alliance. It led to the abandonment of the ideal of Christendom. It led to the idea of trickle-down knowledge: from the humanists to the Church. "Truth, Lord," Presbyterians have said in this century to humanist academics, "yet the dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their masters' table."
Christians have self-consciously and forthrightly insisted in the twentieth century that God will deliver history progressively into the hands of covenant-breakers. Nowhere outside of Eastern Orthodoxy has this pessimism been more devastating than in Presbyterianism. Presbyterians know that the only thing that can reverse the covenant-breakers' present visible control over this world is a massive Christian revival. They also know that in past revivals, Presbyterianism has not kept up with the local church-planting activities of Arminian Baptists and Methodists, who have a different concept of the eldership. In a widespread revival, the demand for local churches and elders grows more rapidly than the supply of pastors who have survived four years in a humanist-accredited university and three years in a humanist-accredited Presbyterian (i.e., ecclesiastically independent) seminary. While the Baptists are busy planting churches, the Presbyterians are busy eating dust.
Today, there are about six billion people on earth. The vast majority of them will go to hell unless a revival comes very soon. If, by the sovereign grace of God, a great revival does come, Presbyterianism, Episcopalianism, Lutheranism, and all the other hierarchical Church traditions that require humanist-certified ministers will be dwarfed by the explosion of growth of Arminian Baptist and charismatic churches. Baptists and charismatics can ordain ministers to keep up with demand. Because of Presbyterianism's term-paper-based ordination requirements, Presbyterians implicitly announce to the lost: "Our ministers are humanist-certified, as God prefers that all ministers should be; therefore, you must go either to hell or to an Arminian church around the corner. God cares far more about ministers with degrees from humanist-accredited universities than He cares for the souls of the lost, and we Presbyterians honor this ultimate concern. We have our priorities correct. We always have."
Am I exaggerating? I challenge you: without writing to the Church's national board of home missions, can you identify three skid row rescue missions anywhere in the United States that are run by Calvinistic Presbyterian churches? (Frankly, I doubt that the board of home missions can name three.) When you think "rescue mission," do you think Presbyterian Church or Salvation Army? When you think "creeping liberalism," do you think Presbyterian Church or Salvation Army? When you think "academically certified preachers," do you think Presbyterian Church or Salvation Army?
A worldwide revival will put an Arminian church on just about every corner. Calvinistic Presbyterians know this. They do not pray for revival because to pray for revival is to pray for the engulfing of Presbyterianism by Arminian independents. Psychologically, very few Christians can pray regularly and fervently for the visible defeat of their own denominational tradition by another denominational tradition. They prefer instead to believe that God has predestined every church tradition to cultural defeat and, if they are amillennialists, maybe even to persecution by covenant-breakers. They mutter to themselves: "You're no better than we are. You're going to fail, too!" So, they decide that true revival is impossible in history, that Jesus will inevitably return to a spiritually dark world in which covenant-breakers rule supreme. Presbyterian Calvinists believe that God has condemned billions upon billions of souls to the agonies of eternal torment for the sake of preserving a humanist-accredited Presbyterian ministry--a ministry that has gone liberal without exception in every large Presbyterian denomination, unlike the Southern Baptists, who merely went Arminian. It is far easier for Calvinists to accept the idea of the eschatologically predestined cultural failure of Christianity in history than it is for them to pray that God will send showers of blessing that will multiply Arminian Baptists like weeds and Presbyterians like prize rose bushes: magnificent but rare.
The only technique that has kept Presbyterian ministers as a group from going theologically liberal has been to keep Presbyterian denominations tiny, so that the ministers can more easily screen out theologically lax ministerial candidates. Because its members do not expect the denomination to grow, the Church's presbyteries resist the urge to ordain lots of ministerial candidates. "We run a tight ship around here: lean and mean." To the Baptists, this sounds more like "slim and grim." These Presbyterian denominations are sometimes smaller in national membership than a pair of First Baptist Church congregations in two large Southern cities. This has produced an outlook hostile to the idea of mass revival, even if such a revival alone can lead to the salvation of the souls of over five billion people. This outlook must change if Presbyterianism is to remain true to its own confession:
Q. 191. What do we pray for in the second petition?A. In the second petition, (which is, Thy kingdom come,) acknowledging ourselves and all mankind to be by nature under the dominion of sin and Satan, we pray, that the kingdom of sin and Satan may be destroyed, the gospel propagated throughout the world, the Jews called, the fulness of the Gentiles brought in; the church furnished with all gospel-officers and ordinances, purged from corruption, countenanced and maintained by the civil magistrate; that the ordinances of Christ may be purely dispensed, and made effectual to the converting of those yet in their sins, and the confirming, comforting, and building up of those that are already converted: that Christ would rule in our hearts here, and hasten the time of his second coming, and our reigning with him for ever: and that he would be pleased so to exercise the kingdom of power in all the world, as may best conduce to these ends. (Larger Catechism.)
When was the last time you heard this prayer or anything remotely like it prayed from the pulpit of a Presbyterian Church? My guess: the next time will be the first.
Structural Reform Without structural reform, Presbyterianism will never break out of its cultural despair, a despair born of academic dust-eating. Good intentions are not enough. The Old School had good intentions in 1908. That did them no good when they consented to the bureaucratization of the Church. I realize that no Presbyterian will take seriously all of my recommendations in this appendix. I doubt that any Presbyterian leader will take seriously even a majority of them. These recommendations are designed to hold in check centralized power, which I believe is a goal basic to Presbyterian government. While every generation of Presbyterian leaders voices its affirmation of Presbyterianism's system of checks and balances, every generation seems to centralize power. Those employed by the national boards want checks and money orders far more than checks and balances.
There is an anomaly here. I think this anomaly comes from a refusal of Presbyterians to examine the prevailing system of Presbyterian Church government in terms of one overarching task: follow the money. They do not analyze Church structures in terms of their sources of funding. That surely was the case during the Presbyterian conflict. Here is the rule: the agency that writes the paychecks holds the institutional hammer. For example, if local churches write the paychecks to the missionaries, then they are in control of missions. If a presbytery writes the checks, it is in control. If a denominational Church board writes the checks, then it is in control. Similarly, if a local congregation pays its minister to train an apprentice minister, then the local church is in control of screening candidates for ordination. If a presbytery pays the minister to train the candidate, then it is in control of the screening process. If a seminary pays faculty members to train candidates for ordination, then it is in control of the screening process.
"Follow the money" is a very simple principle to understand; it is just not easy for Presbyterians to believe. Even those few who believe it refuse to act upon it. They do not have the votes to change the system, so they shrug their shoulders and pretend that the funding of the system does not shape it. Warning: when Presbyterian Calvinists play "let's pretend," Presbyterian inclusivists play "let's take over."
If Presbyterians ever become serious about immunizing the Church from a takeover by those who do not believe in the Westminster standards, there are ways to achieve this. Here is a two-part rule for the reform of Presbyterian government: (1) match ordination vows with judicial sanctions; (2) match judicial responsibility with money (economic sanctions). This may sound easy, but it has revolutionary implications.
Membership: Communicant Who gets access to the Lord's Supper in Presbyterianism? Presbyterianism's foundational documents are virtually silent on this. No explicit theological profession is required for local church membership. There is no denomination-wide standard. Local congregational sessions determine who gets access. This may be by giving a testimony of conversion. When it is, back the local church goes to experientialism and away from Calvin's standards: confession of faith and a scandal-free life. Or this may be by the recitation of answers found in a catechism. When it is, back the local church goes to a modified version of Roman Catholicism's confirmation: the sacrament of baptism without the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Undergirding this delay in the case of children is some version of what the Baptists call "the age of accountability."
When discussing communicant membership, Presbyterians must deal with baptism. Baptism is by covenantal oath. An oath to what? Presbyterianism does not say, other than an unspecified, zero-content faith in Jesus and a promise to obey Him. The baptismal oath should be taken in terms of one of the historic Church's creeds. Why? Because Presbyterians are not Donatists. They renounce the Anabaptist doctrine of re-baptism. Presbyterians affirm that the baptisms imposed by all creedally orthodox churches are valid. God's covenantal sanctions are the same, so the confessional stipulations of the oath should be the same. Whatever minimum Trinitarian confession validates an acceptable baptism outside Presbyterianism should also validate baptism inside Presbyterianism. Presbyterian baptism should therefore be by one of the common oaths of Christendom, e.g., Apostles' Creed or Nicene Creed. This creed must be affirmed by the person being baptized or by the person speaking as his judicial agent, i.e., a parent.
Membership: Voting The communicant member should not automatically be given the right to vote. He is not formally under the sanctions of the Westminster Confession. He has sworn no oath to it. He should therefore not be allowed to impose judicial sanctions in terms of it. People who impose covenantal sanctions should also be under these sanctions. If a local church member is not by oath consigned under the stipulations that govern the imposition of Church sanctions, then he should not impose Church sanctions. If he cannot be deprived of his authority to impose sanctions for publicly denying or compromising the stipulations enforced by these sanctions, he should not be allowed to exercise them.
This seems obvious to me, but it has not been obvious to the Presbyterians who have compiled the rule books. Presbyterian communicant members who have not sworn allegiance to the Westminster standards are allowed to vote for or against ruling elders. When ordained by a presbytery, these ruling elders are instructed to govern in terms of the Westminster standards. But those communicant members who impose periodically the congregation's sanctions on these ruling elders are not under any obligation to honor the Westminster standards. They can impose final judicial sanction on those whose governing is not to their liking: "You're fired."
When searching for the locus of real institutional authority, always follow the money. Voting members hire and fire teaching elders. They have the authority to impose the supreme economic sanction: "You're fired."
In Presbyterianism, only sporadically and unpredictably is oath-bound judicial authority closely matched to economic authority, either at the local level or at the level of the Church's boards. This is the supreme unsolved problem with Presbyterian government. First, Presbyterian voting members are not by oath consigned to the Westminster Confession and its two catechisms. Second, Presbyterian voting members can refuse to pay their tithes and still retain the vote. He who pays the piper calls the tune. In Presbyterianism, those who control all of the economic sanctions (check-writers) and also the final local judicial sanctions (voters) are not formally under the stipulations of the Westminster Confession. They are under sanctions imposed by the session, but they control who gets on the session. Their confession is institutionally sovereign, but their confession is not explicitly Presbyterian. They control final local judicial authority.
This is why Presbyterian Churches again and again have moved from Calvinism to experientialism to Arminianism to liberalism. Oaths count. So do votes. Calvinism's rigid theology is not judicially protected by an equally rigid representative oath. The lowest common denominator eventually triumphs. The Westminster Confession of Faith is watered down in practice. An antique copy of the Confession may remain in the local church's library, but nobody is required to read it or enforce discipline in terms of it.
Membership: Presbytery Judicial sovereignty in Presbyterianism is officially lodged in the presbytery, but the presbytery has never been acknowledged as having a moral or legal claim on anyone's money. This system is inherently schizophrenic: a division between judicial sovereignty and economic sovereignty. The non-oath-bound local church members have all of the economic sovereignty and the lion's share of the judicial sovereignty. This dual sovereignty is manifested in the words: "You're fired." He who pays the piper calls the tune.
Every member of the presbytery must take an oath of allegiance to the Westminster standards and the denomination's Form of Government. This is standard in Presbyterianism. But this oath is not deemed sufficient for teaching elders. An extra-Confessional standard is also imposed. This extra-Confessional standard was the wedge that the liberals used to gain entrance into the Church: a seminary degree.
The presbyteries of the PCUSA officially transferred the preliminary ordination sanctions to the faculties of the seminaries, including Union, which was outside the Church after 1892. This unofficially transferred primary sovereignty over ordination from the presbyteries to the seminaries. The presbyteries remained mute about this transfer of primary sovereignty, but the liberals fully understood the nature of the transfer. They began targeting the seminaries. They learned how to pass written examinations, especially exams in German. This strategy was completely successful. In 1929, they captured Princeton, the last bastion. The likes of Machen, Allis, Wilson, Van Til, and Vos proved helpless to stop it. If they proved helpless, who wouldn't?
Calvinists believe that a ministerial apprentice cannot learn the skills needed to be a successful minister by studying first-hand with a successful minister, but must instead be trained for at least four years in college by atheists and those certified academically by atheists, followed by three years in a seminary staffed by men with advanced academic degrees who have never served in a pastorate. This belief was crucial to the replacement of Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists by Baptists and Methodists in the United States, 1800-1860.
Here is a judicial solution. Every candidate for the teaching eldership must pass an examination or series of examinations, including (at the discretion of the presbytery) a period of apprenticeship with a minister under the direct authority of the presbytery, but no outside institutional requirements may be imposed. The presbytery must maintain exclusive, monopolistic control over the sanctions governing the ordination of every candidate. It may not lawfully delegate any aspect of the screening process to an outside agency, e.g., a seminary. This means that the seminary system must be deprived of its positive judicial sanction--the special blessing of the presbyteries--and its negative judicial sanction: the ability to veto a candidate's eligibility for ordination.
Every fifth year, every minister in the presbytery must take the presbytery's series of written examinations required of the candidates. This honors the principle that everyone who imposes sanctions must be under the same sanctions. This keeps the exams honest, and it monitors the belief system and intellectual competence of all ministers. If the exams are not worth imposing on every minister, they are not worth imposing on any minister. If they are "cram and forget" exams, they are irrelevant to the ministry. Such exams are little more than disguised subsidies to further the expansion of Arminian culture. Drop them.
Funding Each lower unit of Church government must tithe to the next higher unit. Why? Because the flow of funds must match the flow of authority. This process must begin with voting members of the local congregation (self-government). Any unit of government can lawfully solicit more money than the tithe from individual members or congregations, but there is no automatic funding for any agency of government beyond the tithe of the next lower unit. This honors the principle of the tithe. This principle keeps central government small. Here is an unbreakable defensive rule:
To lodge both money and judicial authority in a permanent, oath-bound agency of government is to invite a takeover of that agency. Conclusion: if any agency is lawfully entitled to exercise significant judicial authority, keep it poor.
The enforcement of this rule keeps power-seekers from gaining power with other people's money. Power-seekers are rarely able to fund their own projects. They always seek funding by their enemies. The best way to screen out liberal power religionists is to prevent them from gaining automatic institutional access to conservatives' money.
Meetings Should Settle Disputes The hierarchical appeals court system in Exodus 18 was civil. To the extent that Exodus 18 is a valid guide for Church government, it serves as a testimony against legislative authority. Israel's civil courts applied God's law; they did not write it. There is no indication that they were required to meet automatically, although this might have been allowed for predictability's sake. They settled problems that could not be settled by a lower court. The Jerusalem Council (Acts 15) was called to deal with a problem. It was not an annual meeting.
Parkinson's law teaches that work expands so as to fill time allotted for its completion. This law applies to all scheduled meetings. The best way to reduce the number of meetings and the length of meetings is to specify in advance what kind of work must be accomplished: no issue to be settled-no meeting.
A court should only meet when there is a case to decide or a dispute to be resolved that lower courts find too difficult. If a Presbyterian Church court is legitimately a legislative assembly, then the two functions--judicial and legislative--had better be clearly distinguished in Church law and procedure, and the meetings should be held separately, if not in separate weeks, then (to save transportation costs) at least on separate days.
When there is a problem to solve, hold a meeting to solve that problem. Then adjourn the meeting. Any meeting that becomes a scheduled fellowship event for good old boys has moved from being God's earthly high court to a something resembling a Rotary Club meeting. Save the fellowship meetings for heaven. A Church court that is assembled to do anything except solve an existing problem will eventually become a problem. When it does, there will be a host of power-seekers who offer to sell their services to the court on a full-time basis to head off problems before they start. That is when the Church's problems really start.
There are no free lunches and no free courts. Lower courts that call for a special appeals court session must be willing to fund the special session. The assessment of court costs should be made on a pro-rated basis at a fixed percentage: the larger the tithe income (but not gifts and offerings) received by the lower court (presbytery or synod), the larger its share of the special court's expenses. With greater blessing comes greater responsibility (Luke 12:47-48): the principle of the tithe. Those lower courts that refuse to pay their pro-rated share of the special session cannot vote at the session meeting: no money-no vote. Finally, if it is known in advance that there will not be enough representatives to constitute a quorum, do not hold the meeting.
National Church Spokesmen The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., fell to the liberals because Presbyterians expected someone to represent the Church nationally, and this had to be the General Assembly. But the General Assembly was not in session 51 weeks out of each year. So, the infiltrators proposed a permanent Executive Commission (after 1924, a General Council) to function as a bishopric. But no Presbyterian would say the dreaded B-word. The Executive Commission was a layer of bureaucracy that was ripe to be picked off by the liberals. As with the U.S. Presidency, which proposes the annual budget which the Constitution explicitly says is the responsibility of the House of Representatives to pass, so it was with the Executive Commission: it absorbed a judicially sovereign agency's operational authority.
Except during the annual General Assembly meeting, it must be either bishops or silence: take your pick. If your vote is against bishops, then if the General Assembly has not spoken on a topic, every inquiry should be answered by a form letter: "This issue has not been addressed by the denomination or the General Assembly." (I suggest that this form letter already exists with respect to one hot-potato issue: abortion.)
The Church does not need a lot of people on a national staff to send out such form letters. The Stated Clerk can do this easily. All he needs is an executive secretary, someone to answer the phone, and a computerized data base on the past decisions of the General Assembly. It does not take a supercomputer or a large staff to print out form letters.
Ask yourself: What are all those people doing back there, anyway? Where is all that money going? Why?
Denominational Colleges The General Assembly must create institutional means of policing the denomination's institutions of higher learning. Here is a starting point: every course that assigns a book that was not published by the denomination's press must include a printed outline written by the professor who assigned it. It must refute in detail the theological errors or omissions in the book's assumptions. Every student must be given such an outline for each assigned book or assigned journal article at the beginning of the course: no outlines, no course. I know of no better way for a Church to monitor the real-world theological commitment of its academic employees.
I can think of nothing that will gain more resistance by the professorial class. "Those narrow-minded Bible-thumpers will know exactly what I'm actually teaching their children! This must be stopped, and stopped now!" Sanction: for each one-semester course offered without the outline(s), the denomination cuts 1% of next year's financial support to the institution. If your denomination refuses to do this, or something equally painful for those professors who resist, your denomination is being sold out. It will take the infiltrators no more than two generations to capture it.
If you are personally unwilling to suggest this in writing to someone who is in authority, you are part of the sell-out process. When you get stonewalled--count on it--you must then take your suggestion to someone in authority over the stonewaller. If you hear the phrase "academic freedom," you will know that the sell-out is in progress. If you hear the phrase, "The faculty will all quit if we do this," you will know that you have identified the soft underbelly of the infiltrators--and, if nothing is done, this will remain the soft underbelly of orthodoxy. If they all quit, orthodoxy wins this round. If some department cannot be replaced, drop that major for the time being. Better to have no academic major than a department run by liberal infiltrators. (Do you really believe this? Those who now run your denomination's college or seminary probably do not.) Lutheran liberals quit in the mid-1970's when they left the Missouri Synod's Concordia Seminary to established Seminex.(4) It sounded like a non-prescription sleeping pill, and academically, it was. It went out of existence within a few years.
If you refuse to take such action, please don't complain when Billy-Bob or Jenny Sue comes home from the denominational college with a purse full of condoms (especially in Billy-Bob's purse).
Here is another solution to the problem of higher education, although too utopian to be realistic. However, it is what is really needed. The solution to education is negative sanctions: the formal abolition of both academic freedom and tenure. Those who pay the professorial pipers must call the tune. In practice, this means that the professors, not a board of laymen, should own the academic institutions. The board should not be expected to be able to exercise authority over specialists, i.e., a faculty. Dilettantes cannot control experts. So, the faculty must learn to meet the market: tuitions, donations, and contracts from information buyers. There is only one sure way to learn this: to become an owner. Faculties should own the schools on a profit-seeking basis.(5)
What is there that inherently makes higher education a non-profit venture? Only tradition. Faculties prefer low-risk ventures which they secretly control, but without the responsibilities of ownership. Academic accrediting agencies enforce this tradition. But why should Calvinists ever seek to be accredited academically by modernists? (Ask the Board of Trustees of your own denomination's seminary, which is, I assure you, academically accredited by modernists. They have gone to the accreditation agencies with this message: "We come in the name of the absolutely sovereign Judge of history to beg you to accredit us. You're OK; we're OK! OK?")
Seminaries The operational authority of the academic degree in Presbyterianism can be seen to the original Form of Presbyterial Church-Government (1645), which was never formally adopted by either the Westminster Assembly or the Church of Scotland. The document referred to a Church office not mentioned in the Bible: doctor. It announced: "A teacher, or doctor, is of most excellent use in schools and universities; as of old in the schools of the prophets, and at Jerusalem, where Gamaliel and others taught as doctors" (Teacher or Doctor). Problem: the school of prophets granted no academic degrees, and Gamaliel was a Pharisee. Gamaliel's school was indeed the model, and that baleful influence has undermined every hierarchical Western denomination, as surely as it helped undermine Old Covenant Israel.
The school of the prophets was personal. The prophets had apprentices who served them and learned on the job. Jesus operated such a school. There were no formal entry requirements. There were no degrees required to get in or granted upon leaving. There were no committee-approved catalogues. There were no textbooks written by pagan authors. But Athens since the late eleventh century has conquered the New Jerusalem as surely as Babylon conquered the Old Jerusalem. Apprenticeship is the biblical model, not the school of Gamaliel by way of the University of Paris.
To reduce the power of seminaries in their unofficial but universal quest to become the ordaining agents, presbyteries must not discriminate against ministerial candidates who have had no formal education. This would destroy the certification difference between teaching elders and ruling elders. This has been too radical a step for Presbyterians, who equate formal education with ministerial education. Thus, Presbyterianism has steadily gone liberal whenever higher education has gone liberal, i.e., constantly.
Solutions
High technology is now about to undermine the monopoly enjoyed by Athens. A CD-ROM disc contains up to 250,000 pages of fully indexed material.(6) It costs less than $2 each to produce 1,000 CD-ROM disks, once the electronic material is put onto a master disk. The library problem is all but solved technologically. When the Internet can link students and teachers around the world for a few dollars per hour, and with the price of telephone time steadily dropping, the problem of the classroom is all but solved. Wait until fiber optics arrives. Then television will link these classrooms.
Here is a simple reform program for the curriculum of Calvinist seminaries. Teach Calvin's Institutes as the required text in a three-year course in systematic theology. Forget about Charles Hodge; John Calvin was better, especially on the doctrine of creation. Second, teach the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Larger Catechism. Here is the rule: nobody graduates who does not have a thorough working knowledge of the content and historical background of Calvin and the Confession. Nobody graduates who cannot use the Bible to defend Calvin's Institutes and the Confession. To graduate, each student must pass at least one week of written exams in the Institutes and the Westminster documents. Presbyterian seminaries should produce masters of the foundational documents of Presbyterianism.
Such a curriculum has never been attempted by any Presbyterian seminary in history. There is one thing that all Calvinist seminaries have avoided like the plague: Calvin's Institutes. Dead German theologians -- that's the thing! Practical theology -- that's the thing! Or courses in Greek that 80 percent of the students have forgotten three years after graduation. Academic tradition must be upheld. There are two things that Calvinist Presbyterian seminaries with more than about 50 students do not teach: Calvin's Institutes and historic Presbyterianism. Anyone who would attempt such a reform would wind up as Morton Smith did, when he required his students at Reformed Theological Seminary to master the Westminster Confession: unemployed. If you think Calvinist seminaries are ready to teach Calvin, think again. Why should they start now? There is no market for Calvin in American Christianity. There hasn't been since the Second Great Awakening, when the seminary was invented. It would break too much tradition to start teaching Calvin at this late date.
Of course, I could be wrong. Send for a copy of your favorite Calvinist seminary's catalogue. Go through the course listings. Look for a required course on Calvin's Institutes. Look for a required course on one of the historic Calvinist confessions. I don't mean a full year's course in each, which would not be nearly enough. I mean just one semester per course, i.e., two required courses out of 30 in a typical three-year curriculum. Send me a photocopy when you find them. But if you don't find them, stop sending that seminary any donations. Otherwise, you will continue to finance something other than Calvinism-Presbyterianism. Your seminary will continue to use your money to train ministers for non-Presbyterian pulpits. When it comes to the ecclesiology of their graduates, Presbyterian seminaries have their students sing only one hymn for three years: "Just as I am." John Witherspoon's rule governing the College of New Jersey still holds: "Every question about forms of church government is so entirely excluded that . . . if they [the students] know nothing more of religious controversy than what they have learned here, they have that Science wholly to begin."(7)
These are technical solutions. They will not solve the more fundamental problem, which is an institutional conflict over the true nature of the seminary's mission. Laymen do not understand this truth: every Presbyterian seminary lives a dual existence. Like a bigamist, the seminary seeks to operate two households. To one wife, it declares: "We train ministers; send us money." To the other wife--like Rachel, the beloved wife--it declares: "We train Christian scholars; send us academically certified young men." This dual institutional role--ministerial screening and graduate school of theology--cannot be successfully achieved by a single institution, especially with a faculty screened by the humanist university rather than the pastorate. The seminary hires as faculty members men whose only calling in life has been to write graduate school term papers and then articles for the seminary's in-house academic journal. It places these men in charge of training young men with no practical leadership experience, who need to be taught how to wage the war of faith in the trenches: local churches. But how are they actually taught this unique skill? By writing term papers.
Conservative Presbyterian seminaries in the twentieth century have trained their students to reject the conclusions of dead German theologians. Meanwhile, Presbyterian congregations are filled with followers of C. I. Scofield. The typical Presbyterian layman's problem is not the historie/heilsgeschichte dualism of Karl Barth; it is the history/Rapture dualism of Hal Lindsey. The pastor is rarely afflicted by the mindlessness of the Christ-event of neo-orthodoxy; he is afflicted by the mindlessness of some updated version of Edgar Whisnant's 88 Reasons Why the Rapture is in 1988. Amillennialists indulged themselves with Harold Camping's 1994? in 1993 and 1994. The underlying message is the same: long-term missionary activities cannot change this world for the better; the Great Commission is the Great Impossible Dream.
This leads us to the question of missions.
Missions Presbyterians since 1812 have pretended against overwhelming evidence that their seminary graduates are equipped both ministerially and scholastically. Yet since 1812, we have seen the results of such self-delusion: small Calvinist churches, larger Arminian churches, shrinking liberal churches, and ever-more liberal colleges and seminaries, all labeled "Presbyterian." Presbyterian Calvinist scholarship has fallen on hard times in our day, but Presbyterian home missions--except for the Arminian Cumberland Presbyterians--fell on hard times much earlier: about 1797.
The first attempt to overcome the failure of Presbyterian home missions was the Plan of Union with the Congregationalists in 1801; that lasted until 1837. It split the Church. Then, in 1857--58, came the secondary revival that converted Charles Briggs. That revival did not survive the Civil War. Then, in the late 1880's and 1890's, came the Collegiate Great Awakening under Robert E. Speer and John R. Mott, which was foreign missions-oriented. In each case, the immediate result was the erosion of Calvinism.
What went wrong? A failure to match ordinational authority with money. The presbytery ordains the minister, so the presbytery should send him out, either to the home missions field or the foreign missions field. Judicial authority and economic authority are matched. The presbytery retains both sanctions. Simple, isn't it? Nothing judicially anti-Presbyterian about this! Yet it is utterly opposed to the American Presbyterian tradition. This is why the American Presbyterian Church has never solved the problem of missions: from 1801 to right now.
From 1801 until the split in 1837, Arminians short-circuited the Church's system of authority by adding a layer of bureaucracy: national missions boards. The anti-Confessionalists saw the opportunity: access to other people's money and control over whoever represented the Church on the missions field. The New School copied this system after the reunion of 1869. The liberals steadily took over the Foreign Missions Board under Robert E. Speer after 1890.
This is the age-old Presbyterian problem of government: the addition of layers of bureaucracy that are outside the formal structure of authority, i.e., from the local congregation to the General Assembly and back to the presbyteries. To discover who really has the authority, follow the money. Authority flows with money, and most of the missions money since 1801 has flowed directly to the ministers who are under the authority of the boards, or directly to the boards, or from the General Assembly to the boards.
Should fund-raising for missions be centralized? Only if the intention of the Church is to repeat the experience of Old School Presbyterianism.
My proposed system does contain an anomaly. What happens when the missionary establishes a local presbytery? He joins that presbytery, but his funding comes from his home presbytery. This was the problem the PCUSA faced: liberal missionaries in the field under presbyteries too far away to monitor them. Without making the missionary into a bishop, how can the home presbytery allocate his authority: as a man being funded from the initiating presbytery but under the authority of the foreign presbytery? Does this break the rule of matching funding with judicial authority? Yes, it does. This is Presbyterianism's price for not having bishops. But if the Church's solution to this problem is to create national boards that both fund and monitor the missionaries, Presbyterian missions will again go liberal. The board will break the presbytery's operational authority as surely as a foreign presbytery will. Better for the funding presbytery to trust the foreign presbytery's judgment rather than to trust a centralized national missions board's judgment. The foreign presbytery is a far better agent than the national board to monitor what the missionary is doing. It has a direct interest in suppressing heresy, an interest that a national missions board has to a far lesser degree. Keep judicial authority local. Let presbyteries deal with presbyteries. Centralized missions boards muddy the waters of authority. This is why they eventually muddy the theological waters.
National Boards Here are a few general rules that should govern all national Presbyterian boards:
Presbyteries or synods should elect new trustees to all of the boards every three years: one representative per judicial unit. No board of trustees should be larger than 12 people. That was as large a group as Jesus managed, and there was a ringer in even in that carefully screened group. Large boards always fall under the domination of one person. Keep boards small and under control of the presbyteries and synods.
No trustee may be paid from funds generated by the board. His salary and expenses are paid by the synod or presbytery that elected him. He reports back to his synod or presbytery. He is a judicial agent of his synod or presbytery, not an independent agent.
Do not allow existing trustees to nominate successor trustees. Stop the "old boy network" before it begins.
All employees of the boards must annually re-affirm their commitment to the Church's confessional standards. They must note in writing any personal exceptions. These exceptions must be made public.
No employee of any board may serve as a trustee of any other board or of his own board. Separate the paychecks from the vote.
The board must raise all of its funding each year through direct appeals. No overall budget guarantee may be given to any board of the Church by any agency of the Church, especially the General Assembly.
To which a Presbyterian with any experience with Church boards will respond: "Fat providence." Or, citing John Wayne: "That'll be the day."
Robert's Rules of Order If any level of Church government becomes so complex or so divided by factions that it needs Robert's Rules of Order to operate, that unit of government should be immediately downsized through a budget cut.
A Technical Solution to Confessional Revision How can the Presbyterian Church deal with this problem? How can those desiring revision be given an opportunity to express their views in preparation for a vote to revise?
If sanctions are automatically imposed by a presbytery's court for an ordained man's subsequent reversal of opinion, those who want to revise the Confession on any point will never have the votes to do so. How could they even identify themselves as desiring a revision without identifying themselves as doubters in the Confession? In such a case, Confessional revision would take place only through starting a new denomination: Protestantism's notorious splintering effect. But if a candidate is lawfully ordained in spite of his rejection of portions of the Confession, what is to be done about a presbytery such as the New York Presbytery of 1891 or 1913? As Machen asked: How far will this go?
There is an institutional solution to this dilemma. It is judicial rather than legislative, as Presbyterian assemblies officially are. It is a two-stage process. First, allow any person who has been convicted of heresy by the General Assembly to appeal his conviction to the presbyteries immediately following that General Assembly. He does so in the following manner. He proposes what he regards as a true statement of the doctrine. Meanwhile, he remains suspended from office and possibly excommunicated. He is guilty until declared innocent by a two-thirds vote of the presbyteries.
In stage one of the appeal, the General Assembly automatically sends down the man's overture to the presbyteries, calling for a vote on whether to begin the revision process. There must be a majority vote by the presbyteries to begin the process. If they vote against beginning the revision process, the heretic's conviction stands. Obviously, most convictions will stand.
Second, if a simple majority of the presbyteries vote to begin debating a revision of the Confession on the disputed point (and no other), the next General Assembly automatically must send down the convicted man's proposed revision of the creed according to the language originally suggested by him.
There is now a major institutional problem. If the presbyteries vote to revise the Confession, those who disagree with this change are no longer in agreement with the new version. On the other hand, if they vote to leave the Confession as it is, those voting to change it have now identified themselves as being in agreement with the convicted heretic. There is no neutrality possible. The stipulations governing the oath must be enforced, unless new stipulations are imposed. In the latter case, the new stipulations must be enforced. The oath has changed.
Here is one way to sort it out. The final vote in each presbytery is taken by means of a letter of resignation from each person actually voting. Each elder who decides that this is worth voting on drops his letter of resignation into a box. These letters are retained by the presbytery.
At the end of the year, when the votes of the presbyteries are tallied, the change either passes or is rejected. Each person voting on the losing side nationally has his letter of resignation accepted by his presbytery. He is no longer a presbytery officer or a voting member of a local congregation. He is no longer by oath consigned to Presbyterian office.
Those who do not want to risk voting--the famous 80 percent--are assumed to agree with the standards, whatever the outcome. They really do not care one way or the other--not enough to risk their ordination. Those who really do care will determine the outcome of the election, as it should be. Those who want the privilege of re-writing the Confession's standards must place themselves under the standards that they say they believe in. So must those who wish to defend the old Confession. If anyone cares enough about the issue to impose sanctions (the vote) in the revision process, he must pay the price for having lost.
Such a system would keep the General Assembly from becoming a final court of appeal. This decentralizes power. The GA can be vetoed by the presbyteries, but only at high institutional cost and high risk for those who take part in the actual voting.
Risky, isn't it? So is taking a covenantal oath. But this system or Confessional revision would retain the characteristic legal feature of the General Assembly as a court of appeal rather than a legislative body.
If there has not been a heresy trial in your denomination in a generation, there had better be a good reason: not one person has been suspected of being heretical. The larger the denomination, the truer this is. Respect the 10-80-10 rule: ten percent of the ministers will be liberals compared to the Church's operational (i.e., enforced by sanctions) confession. The Church had better find out how liberal.
Conclusion An 18-year-old Presbyterian who has been catechized faithfully and has been trained in a Christian school is better trained theologically than nine-tenths (or more) of those Baptist and Methodist pastors who restructured religion in the United States, 1800 to 1860. So, why not ordain him if he wants to be a minister? Because he is too young? Charles Spurgeon was ordained at age 19. By the time he was 20, he had 500 people regularly attending his weekly prayer meetings. (Poor lad; he never went to college. Crippled for life!) Because he is too inexperienced? Then apprentice him. Because he has not yet been certified by academic humanists? Does this answer really impress you? It doesn't impress the Mormons, who yearly send thousands of young men on bicycles into the highways and byways of the world to knock on doors, and who have built a huge organization through this practice.
Presbyterians are the people of the catechism. They catechize their children for years. Then, when the child is fully conversant with the details of the Christian faith, Presbyterian parents send him off to a humanist institution of higher learning to educate him and certify him as educated, where he is taught a worldview absolutely foreign to the catechism. If a young man survives this ordeal and still seeks ordination, he will be asked to spend three more years training in some seminary (not necessarily a Calvinist one), none of which in this century has required that all of its graduates take a class in Calvin's Institutes, let alone read half a dozen of Calvin's commentaries. He will be taught to become a minister by men whose only institutionally fixed requirement for employment as teachers is their possession of a Ph.D. or Th.D. degree issued by a humanist institution of higher learning--men who probably have never spent so much as a year in the pastorate. Then, new degree fresh in hand, he will probably be ordained by a presbytery that has never seen him before the day he takes his one-hour oral licensure exam.
If the prayer of welcome into the presbytery were honest, it would go something like this:
Having survived at least four years of training by state-certified humanists who are clearly on the road to perdition, and having survived three years of additional training by men certified by those same perdition-bound humanists, and having survived this afternoon's written exams in Greek and Hebrew, which you will now be allowed to forget, just as the rest of us have forgotten, except for the two men in this presbytery who examined you, and having passed your one-hour oral exam, which you could have done at age 18 if you had memorized the Larger Catechism, we now welcome you into the bonds of fellowship in this presbytery. As your token of covenantal authority, we have presented you with a copy of Robert's Rules of Order, which you had better master if you intend to have any influence in these meetings over the next three and a half decades. Amen.
This ministerial screening system is so utterly self-defeating that only the best-educated, humanist-certified Protestants in history could have devised it. There has to be a better way.
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Footnotes:
1. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1923), pp. 17-18.
2. Two centuries ago, the psalm book had no musical notation. Today, the overhead projector songs have no musical notation.
3. The Form of Government (1941), in The Standards of Government Discipline and Worship of The Orthodox Presbyterian Church (Philadelphia: Committee on Christian Education, The Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1965), p. 19.
4. Seminary in Exile.
5. Henry Manne, "The Political Economy of Modern Universities," in Education in a Free Society, edited by Anne Husted Burleigh (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1973).
6. In 1996, this is expected to rise to 2.5 million pages.
7. Cited in Leonard Trinterud, The Forming of an American Tradition: A Re-examination of COLONIAL PRESBYTERIANISM (Salem, New Hampshire: Ayer, [1949] 1978), p. 256.