A Series on Westminster Chapter 23 and a Response to Kevin DeYoung
Be sure to check out part I and part II.
The next section of DeYoung’s article starts with the following.
“The fact that the 1788 version of WCF 23:3 was an almost complete revision of the 1646 text is well known (or should be). What’s less well known, and has been much less explored, is why the Presbyterians gathering in Philadelphia in 1788 considered, without any controversy, the original version so strikingly untenable and the amended version of their beloved Confession such a marked improvement. What happened from 1646 to 1788 that led most American Presbyterians to conclude that a thorough rethinking of the relationship between church and state was necessary?”
This section then seeks to prove by various ways about what led to these changes in 23:3. Before addressing the things cited, I want to note the things omitted. DeYoung in making a case for the changes in 1788 produces no minutes or conversations in courts that speak specifically to why the changes were made in 1788. Do you know why? The reason that no modern Presbyterian can produce the scriptural and confessional logic imposed in order to change the standards is because those conversations do not exist. There are no scriptural-exegetical reasons recorded for changing the standards because there were no reasons to do so. So let’s look at how DeYoung builds his case as to what led to 1788 changes.
DeYoung then says, “the first answer we must give is to make clear the rethinking happened long before 1788. The vision of the civil magistrate in the Confession was never successfully implemented in England and only frustratingly implemented in Scotland. Protestant social thought wasn’t static.” He here commits another fallacy. DeYoung believes that the Westminster standards not becoming the standard of the nation of England or the standard long term of Scotland proves some point as to why there was divergence in the reformed world about the establishment principle. Here is what is important to consider when the failure of the Westminster is spoken of in any nation; though Westminster failed to be the standard in these nations, none of these nations were perplexed about whether nations should be religious in the civil realm. In the Reformed orthodox world there was no debate nationally about voluntarism or establishment; the debate was always about what kind of established religion should mark a nation. The failure of establishing the Standards is no case for why establishment overall is debatable or questionable in the reformed tradition.
DeYoung then says,
“Pufendorf was far from the only thinker moving in this direction. In 1689, John Locke argued in his famous Letter Concerning Toleration that the magistrate was permitted to tolerate false religion. Locke asked the question, ‘What if a Church be idolatrous, is that also to be tolerated by the magistrate?’ His answer proved influential: ‘What power can be given to the magistrate for the suppression of an idolatrous Church, which may not in time and place be made use of to the ruin of an orthodox one?’”
DeYoung adds to why the Americans came to adjust the Standards in 1799 by citing a German Philosopher Pufendorf and John Locke who were in many ways philosophers of the enlightenment. Apparently, DeYoung believes that these superficial Christians promoting secularized worldviews are key thinkers that have helped bring us where we are here today theologically. DeYoung even claims that their secular thinking about the state was crucial in protecting the churches spiritual role. He says, “both Pufendorf and Locke were writing in response to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), which forced French Huguenots to convert to Catholicism, face life in prison, or flee the country. Toleration looked better and more conducive to Christianity’s aims than giving the sovereign final say over the church’s teaching and worship. The move away from the strict enforcement of religious nationalism was promoted most powerfully not by free thinkers and atheists but by committed Protestants.”
This what men like DeYoung are seeking to sell to the Confessional world and impose on the American Standards, namely that post enlightenment philosophy, picked up by Christians, is crucial to maintaining and preserving our tradition. Said another way, Christians picking up A Letter Concerning Toleration by John Locke is more essential to American Confessionalism about the magistrate than picking up Rutherford’s Lex Rex. DeYoung and men like him are regularly convincing us that a civil realm that is secular and voluntarism is essential to preserving our realm and its ministry. They blame the loss of the spirituality of the church and its ministry on the establishment principle and attribute the churches spiritual thriving to pluralistic magistrates. However, the reformed tradition has argued the absolute opposite. Consider James Gibson speaking to this point in his work called The Church in relation to the State. Gibson is addressing the assertion that the establishment principle, beginning in some way with Constantine, is why the church has erred theologically and missiologically.
Voluntarism, not the establishment principle, corrupts the church and the gospel.
Gibson however shows that it was actually the voluntary principle that has corrupted the church the most. He says firstly that the greatest extent of heresies in church history were before there was an establishment principle of any sort.
“That great corruptions prevailed in the Christian Church in the first century, even while it might be strictly called apostolical. That they had increased in the second century to a degree as great, and in some respects greater, than they have ever done in the Reformed Established Churches of Britain, with all their acknowledged abuses. That they became much greater in the third and beginning of the fourth centuries, before the conversion of Constantine.”
Heresies abounded in the church in the first 4 centuries without the establishment principle. One thing that church history students learn very quickly is how most gross heresies find their genesis in the pre-Constantine era. Secondly, he states that post Constantine, the church failed to fully embrace the establishment principle and was functionally more voluntarist.
“That whatever enhancements of corruptions arose from the imperial gifts of Constantine, these gifts were on the Voluntary Principle, and were not confined to Christians alone. Neither he nor any of his successors have ever given the Church a State endowment. In all probability an Establishment, could it have been erected, regulated on the principles of the Church of Scotland, would have prevented them. Rome was not established church. That the Church acquired her immense property and formidable power by the voluntary contributions and concessions of the superstitious of all ranks. In this she was aided by the monks—by the superior learning and dexterity, and even humanity of the clergy, in dark and barbarous ages; together with the reverence attached to the city of Rome, from many centuries of slavish habit.”
Gibson notes a few things. 1. That the post Constantine church grew in power not by formal state support but rather by private funding. 2. Rome was not the established church of the empire post Constantine. The Roman Empire had no established church. 3. If the state operated under religious establishment principles, it could have limited the Roman church from becoming all encompassing and all consuming. The establishment principle not only protects the church, but necessarily limits it from becoming universal ruler over realms. The voluntary principles post Constantine are what allowed Rome to become limitless and limited by no one. Voluntarism lead to Romanism. Gibson says,
“that, therefore, the Voluntary Principle, being a principle of entire independence of civil interference, even to prevent the undue wealth and power of the Church, if acquired from any other source than the State itself, which is in truth the Popish principle, is dangerous. For while the abuses of the Establishment Principle admit of national correction, the evils of the Voluntary system, which are inherent in human nature, do not; because it rejects all external interference, itself having no power whatever to preserve the purity or keep down the ambition of Churchmen.”
Gibson says that the establishment principle is biblical, supernatural but has erred, while the voluntary principle is natural and so inherently evil and always errs. The establishment principle limits the state and the church, the voluntary principle is what allows both states and the church to be deified and without limits. The voluntary principle in principle is the fall in Genesis 3, both church and state, depending on the time, can be as gods. Again, Gibson says and also refers to Owen,
“Had the Voluntary Principle—namely, the rejection of State interference in behalf of religion, been always acted upon, we should yet have been groaning under a Popish domination; (John Owen, in proving the necessity of magistratical interference about religion, gives, as one of the “pernicious consequences” of the opposite doctrine, the following:— “The condemnation and abrenunciation of the whole work of reformation, in this and other nations, so far as it hath been promoted by laws, or constitutions of supreme magistrates, as in the removal of idolatry, destroying of idols and images, prohibiting the mass, declaring and asserting the doctrine of the gospel, supporting the professors of it; which things have been visibly owned and blessed of God.”— Two Questions, &c.) with the wealth of Europe, America, and the Indies, under the control of the once arrogant, though now humbled, Bishop of Rome.”
“Many profess to feel more respect than to the Word of God, they will not think themselves absolved from this duty by plausible, though shallow and false notions, now so prevalent, on liberty and rights of conscience. It will always be found in the long run, that the truest liberty, and the truest freedom of conscience, paradoxical as it may seem, is when both are under the restraints of the principles of “pure and undefiled religion.”
“I profess to hold in abhorrence, as utterly impious, the doctrine that we ought to set up to a nation’s gaze, in its government stripped of all connection with religion, an institution that has thrown off the armour of truth, and declared itself, if not the champion of error, at least the patron of in difference, in other words, of atheism; for whoever or whatever is not with God, is against Him. Any notion of a medium is delusion.”
Reformed thinking looks to the scriptures and the reformed tradition to preserve the church’s sphere integrity by the establishment principle while DeYoung looks to Christians who look to enlightenment philosophy to embrace voluntarist principles which have proven themselves to destroy both church and state.
Adopting Act officially canned the establishment principle?
DeYoung’s next point about what allegedly led to the changes in 1788 goes as following, “Colonial Presbyterians had already broken with their Westminster forefathers in the matter of church-state relations by the time of the Adopting Act in 1729. When the ministers of the Synod of Philadelphia adopted the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms to be “the Confession of their faith” on September 19, 1729, they did so excepting only some Clauses in the 20 and 23 Chapters,
“concerning which Clauses, the Synod does unanimously declare, that they do not receive those Articles in any such sense as to suppose the civil Magistrate hath a controlling Power over Synods with Respect to the Exercise of their ministerial Authority; or power to persecute any for their Religion, or in any sense contrary to the Protestant succession to the Throne of Great-Britain. At the first moment that confessional subscription became an official reality in American Presbyterianism, Westminster’s doctrine of the civil magistrate had already been rendered null and void.”
It is here where DeYoung again begins to think presumptuously about the historical narratives. DeYoung believes that what occurred in the Adopting Act made the historic views on the magistrate, quote, “null and void.” Let me counter that by stating the following. 1. The Westminster Standards were not changed in the Adopting Act, but rather exception to parts of 23 and 20 were stated to be allowable exceptions. In 1788 the Standards were changed on magisterial matters in some ways, but in the Adopting Act those matters were allowable exceptions. The originally wording remained, but allowance to take exception sustained. The PCA currently has made various statements that allow for certain parts of our standards to not be affirmed, however this does not mean that those statements are null and void and no longer the Standard. Exceptions are NOT Standards. 2. The Presbyterians in America at this point in many places were persecuted politically by state established religion. Their allowance for ministers to take exception and not affirm WCF 23 is likely to have more to do with the British Erastianism that permeated the states, rather than some newfound exegesis or revision of the reformed tradition. This also would be related to the newfound freedom of America from the dominance of Prelacy. It seems that their language has more to do with the supremacy of Prelate England than their understanding of the establishment principle. Westminster 23:3 says more about Erastianism than the establishment principle. 3. As was the case in 1788, we do not have exegesis of scriptures and confessions that show why the Reformed believe the original 23:3 is in error.
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Leon is looking for a relative utopian state for the Church: a state that prevents heresies and other corruptions from arising. But if we look at the history of Israel, we see what we are seeing in the Visible Church: that God retains a remnant of people for Himself.
Having the government do the “dirty work” of the Church means that the Church is using the government as a proxy to punish people in ways that was never condoned in the New Testament. The New Testament already described how heresies are to be handled. It is eventually through excommunication. That implies a certain view of society by the Apostles. Leon wants to try to improve on the Apostles’, as well as Jesus’s, view of society. That is that though the government doesn’t have the power of the keys, it does the physical part of Church discipline. For who else could tell the government as to who to punish for blasphemies and heresies but the Church if the government doesn’t have the power of the keys.
But wasn’t it power that provided a corruptive influence in the Church? As pointed out in the article, it wasn’t the only corruptive influence, though I do not think that Volunteerism could be legitimately called a corrupting influence because, at worst, it only allowed corruptions to take place. Rather, one corrupting influence came through people who professed to believe but who were not God’s elect. Another corrupting influence is the world and our underestimation of its influence on elect believers. Another corrupting influence is our own sin.
Going back to power being a corrupting influence, the carrot that those who hold closely to the original WCF 23:3 are both looking to grab and are holding out in front of others is this idea is this ideas of being able to establish a relative utopian state for the Church where corruption is well controlled. But just as conservatives ask about who checks the fact checkers, who is there to check the Church when it grows more powerful by being able to use the government as a proxy disciplinary? We saw what power both did to and was exercised by Rome. We saw the same with the Puritans and their persecutors before they came to America. While Common Grace allows the people of the world to look in horror at the misuse of power and the extreme abusive treatment of people by Rome and the Puritans, among many others, some of us are blind despite having received saving grace. That tells us how corrupting the world can be on elect believers—a point made by Rev James Boice in his book about the two cities. And we are blind because of the carrots being held out in front of us by the views of people like Leon and of those who influenced him.
There is simply no justification for the part of WCF 23:3 that says that the government should punish blasphemers and heretics in the New Testament. Perhaps that is why not New Testament Scriptures are listed as proofs for that stance. Only Old Testament passages are and that occurred in the context of God’s people existing as a nation, or accurately as a remnant of a nation.