11 comments

1. Dr. Clark, this is a response to a part of Dr. Kevin DeYoung’s article outside of what you posted here. I don’t see a way on the original article page to send this directly to Dr. DeYoung.

   From his article: “We know that several of the men were zealous Christians. It’s also important to remember that, unlike in Scotland, where the church was already divided between the Popular Party (evangelicals) and the Moderate Party, the Presbyterian congregations in the United States did not yet suffer from the theological declension. The lingering divisions in American Presbyterianism had to do with the revivals, not with the acceptance of the Westminster Confession. There were no Unitarian Presbyterian churches, only varying shades of confessional Calvinism.”

   I wish I could agree with Dr. DeYoung, but the facts of Unitarianism in America are not quite so clear.

   Yes, it’s true that there was not a “non-subscribing Presbyterian” denomination in the United States, as there was in Britain, which became de facto Unitarian since the items to which the “nonsubscribing” Presbyterians objected in the Westminster Standards were largely those related to the Trinity, original sin, and similar doctrines.

   However, a number of churches that later became Unitarian, including Kings Chapel in Boston and the Federal Street Church in Boston, were originally Anglican (Kings Chapel) or Presbyterian. The Federal Street Church was originally known as the Church of the Presbyterian Strangers, and a good case can be made that its decision to leave Presbyterianism was due at least in part to Witherspoon’s success in beginning an effective ecclesiastical structure for Presbyterians that would bring problematic churches in line with the Westminster Standards. It was one thing to be “nonsubscribing” to the original WCF in the 1770s when a church and pastor objected to state authority over the church. It was a very different matter to be “nonsubscribing” once the WCF was revised to remove items that most American Presbyterians, by the 1780s, no longer believed. Federal Street Church left Presbyterianism during that period when the Presbyterian structure was beginning to extend itself into areas such as New England where it had historically been weak to nonexistent. While it’s true that Federal Street became Congregational before it became Unitarian, the local Congregational churches in Boston were by the 1780s not just friendly to Unitarianism but almost all became Unitarian, eventually forcing the creation of Park Street Church as a brand-new Trinitarian Congregational church.

   It would take time to do the research, but I believe at least two other New England Presbyterian churches became Unitarian during the Unitarian Schism. There weren’t many, but there were some.

   The simple fact is that Presbyterianism of the 1700s was not the socially accepted mainline body it later became. It had been within memory the church of the pastors who had been trained in “log colleges,” was usually Scottish or Scots-Irish rather than English, and was not the church of well-educated laymen and ministers. To the extent that Presbyterians were well-educated by the time of the Unitarian Schism, it usually meant they had studied under Witherspoon or his successors who had done a great deal to raise the academic standards of what later became Princeton because they needed to be raised.

   Liberalism prior to Marx’s emphasis on the “proletariat” was not a movement of the poor but of the well-educated, and Unitarianism did not flourish among the people who, in the mid-to-late 1700s, were likely to be Presbyterians.

   That doesn’t mean there weren’t some who became Unitarians, but not many. Benjamin Rush and others like him who flirted with Unitarian and “freethinking” ideas were exceptions.

   It’s a simple fact of American history that rural working-class people with less education tend to be more orthodox than urban educated people who hold professional rather than blue collar jobs. Marx was wrong about many things, but one of the areas where he was most wrong was his belief that less-affluent people could easily be weaned from the “opiate of religion.” That tends to be the trajectory for educated elites, not the working class, and in colonial America, that meant Congregationalists in the North were far more susceptible to the siren song of liberalism than their Presbyterian neighbors, who if they left Presbyterian doctrine, were far more likely to become revivalist New Schoolers, Baptists, Methodists, or Campbellites than to become Unitarians.

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2. I’m always a bit skeptical of the Presbyterian backgrounds of some like Benjamin Rush and John Witherspoon because while they (especially Witherspoon) were committed Presbyterians, they hardly adhered to the tradition of the Reformed Scholastics. They both dabbled in the thought of Locke, Shaftesbury, etc., and generally developed a political philosophy that was much more contractual than the Scholastics. Some, like Rush, seemed to heavily lean towards deism. He was also connected to Thomas Paine’s (also a deist) famous “Common Sense.” There is an interesting, and I would argue stronger, case to be made with James Wilson, who is in many ways a successor to Thomas Reid (also a Presbyterian). His Lectures on Law are in my estimation a later articulation of the Scholastics’ two kingdoms theory, although he does seem influenced by both Richard Hooker (whom he calls “the most excellent”) and also republican motherhood–both I would argue stray from traditional R2K.

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   • Isaac,

     Are you arguing that anyone who rejected establishmentarianism is not truly Presbyterian?

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   • Rev. John Witherspoon was a Church of Scotland minister before he came to the American colonies. His father was a Church of Scotland minister. He came to the American colonies to head what was, at that time, a Presbyterian college, now Princeton University. He preached the first sermon at the First General Assembly in 1789 of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.

     How can you possibly say that “I’m always a bit skeptical of the Presbyterian backgrounds of some like Benjamin Rush and John Witherspoon…” given Witherspoon’s background?

     Now if you want to argue for whatever reason that he wasn’t a good Presbyterian, there may be a case for that. But is it not patently obvious that he was not only from a “Presbyterian background” but a major leader of American Presbyterianism?

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     • Darrell and Isaac,

       I meant to reply to the comment re Witherspoon. He is typically regarded as being somewhat influenced by Scottish Commonsense Realism (as am I, as is Alvin Plantinga, Kim Riddlebarger et al) but generally orthodox. I’ve not read his work on Witherspoon yet (I just ordered it) but it seems as though Kevin regards him as orthodox. The Princeton theologians seemed to have regarded him as orthodox.

       Is there some compelling evidence as to heterodoxy in his theology?

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       • Dr. Clark, I’m not aware of any problems with Witherspoon’s orthodoxy and I didn’t in any way mean to imply that I had problems with him.

         Quite the opposite, actually.

         I had the opportunity to buy the multivolume set of Witherspoon’s works shortly before the Sprinkle Publications series went out of print. I’ve learned over the years that, particularly with people who are important for reasons other than their religious views and whose biographies have largely been written by people who are outside their own theological circles, the “received opinion” about those people may have significant problems because the people writing about their religious views may not understand the implications of what they are reading and may miss warning flags. I want to read for myself, from the original sources, what Witherspoon actually wrote, because he was probably the most important confessionally Reformed man among the Founders who was theologically trained. A lot of Reformed people like to cite Puritans from the 1600s and 1700s and their political views, and that’s not a bad idea considering that many were directly interacting with the Cromwellian and Parliamentary opposition to the Royalists back in England, or trying to preserve colonial liberties following the Restoration. Why aren’t we spending more time reading what Witherspoon wrote? I don’t have a good answer and I want to make sure the reason isn’t that Witherspoon’s views were known to fellow conservative Presbyterians to be problematic. He did argue with some of his co-religionists on various issues, but so far, I haven’t found anything particularly problematic, at least not from a 21st-century perspective.

         I’m well aware that reading the body of literature that an important person wrote, even his public writing, is often impossible for anyone other than academic specialists. Even for some of the most important people in church history, many of their works may never have been published and exist only in university archives, or even if they were published, they may have written in Latin or another language which during their era was more important than English, or even if they were published in English, they may be long out of print.

         Way back in the 1990s, Dr. John Gerstner described his experience reading some of Jonathan Edwards’ unpublished sermons which were handwritten on non-standard material — if I remember right, tree bark. The sermon existed in one and only one copy, and Gerstner had it in his hand, and it was the physical copy Edwards had used himself nearly three centuries ago. That’s more of a problem than we think, even after the printing press had been available for centuries.

         That means we need to be careful when we say so-and-so person was theologically orthodox. We can be embarrassed years later when long-forgotten books show up that were well known at the time, or when private correspondence gets found.

         This isn’t a new problem. The depth of President Jefferson’s deism wasn’t widely known during much of his lifetime and I remember reading some comments by one of his major conservative Presbyterian political supporters who, after Jefferson’s actual views became better known, publicly apologized for the political support he had given to Jefferson, who had sought Presbyterian and other dissenter assistance to reduce the political power of Anglicanism.

         But at least so far, I just don’t see a problem with Witherspoon. Other than, of course, that I object to his views on church government. But Presbyterians would view that as a feature, not a flaw, that one of the most important men in American revolutionary history took the time to try to get a functioning General Assembly with regional synods started after he had spent years fighting a literal war to get a functioning United States government started independent from Britain.

         Most people only get to do a national project like that once. Witherspoon did it TWICE. Once in the civil sphere and once in the ecclesiastical sphere.

         I don’t have to agree with his views on church polity to recognize the tremendousness of that achievement. I can’t think of any other modern parallel besides that of Abraham Kuyper — and Witherspoon might be viewed in that category if America had been dominated by Reformed theology rather than what happened with lack of ministers after the opening of the frontier and especially after the Second Great Awakening. If the Scots-Irish frontiersmen moving west of the Appalachians and the New Englanders moving west of the Alleghenies had remained Reformed, Witherspoon would likely be far better known than he is today, and viewed much as the Dutch Reformed view Kuyper, and for many of the same reasons.

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3. As a descendant of both the Scots Irish and Scottish, I love this essay written by Kevin DeYoung and hope folks will read it. My roots go back to the founding of this nation with a Scottish 5x Great Grandfather fighting at Kings Mountain. It is said he was actually a Jacobite who was sent to America as an indentured servant. The story also goes that once he served his time, he became a farmer who so loved the taste of freedom, he joined the Overmountain men and helped win it for future generations. I guess we Americans are a freedom loving breed. 🙂

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4. I’ve always been amused by the claim that the American Revolution was a Presbyterian endeavor, perhaps for English Speakers but not for Scottish Gaels. Presbyterian Gaels uniformly rejected revolt against the Crown and remained loyal. Historically Presbyterian Gaels had supported the Crown against Covenanters, Puritans and Jacobites, a fact largely ignored by English Speakers. Why? Because the Crown guarantied our worship and culture whereas these others wanted to erase us from society. It is interesting to read the negative comments by many of the Founders against the Scottish Gaels. The triumph of the American rebels led to the demise of the thriving Gàidhealtachd in the Carolinas and Georgia and the diversion of immigration from the Scottish Gàidhealtachd to Canada.

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5. In the 5/12 Heidelcast, Dr. Clark noted that the Reformed have always submitted to the magistrate under the 5th Commandment, as evidenced by de Bres going to his death rather than challenging the authorities. How does that square with these Presbyterians declaring their independence from the magistrate? King George was taxing them and making life hard, but he was not requiring them to violate their conscience or God’s law, unless I’ve missed something in my American history classes.

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   • Steve,

     de Bres view was one view among the Reformed but at the very same time he took his position, there was a developing theory of resistance to tyranny. The Lutherans had begun working on this in the 1540s and by the 60s and 70s the Reformed had developed the view that it is possible to resist a tyrannical magistrate. Calvin had articulated a conservative theory of resistance in Institutes book 4. Beza elaborated on Calvin’s view in his On the Right of Magistrates. Then a certain “Brutus” (a pseudonym) published his Vindication Against Tyrants.

     The American Revolution fits Calvin’s criteria insofar as the Continental Congress was a lesser magistrate. Would Calvin have approved of the Revolution? That is a question to which we will never know the answer.

     King George was abusing his authority is a variety of ways, of which taxes were one. He also resitricted religious liberty and punished the dissenting churches, including the Presbyterians.

     de Bres would probably not have agreed with the American Revolution and we would not have agreed with our disestablishment of the church but the founders were right. History has vindicated them. We’ve been here since the early 17th century and we’ve yet to have a religious war. The establishmentarians cannot make that claim.

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     • Thank you for the clarification and the extra information.

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