Sometimes to Move Forward, You Have to Go Back
A dilemma has arisen among those of us committed to recovering the ideas and practices of historic Protestantism to strengthen the modern church. Protestant retrieval finally seems possible. A new generation desires tradition. Increasingly more Protestants (at this publication and others) are delving into seventeenth-century sermons and eighteenth-century political tracts to reconstruct how the old Protestant establishments functioned. COVID, Trump, and transgenderism together proved that the hackneyed emotionalism of contemporary American Christianity has no future.
And suddenly, with victory perhaps in our grasp, we discover that for many of our allies, “Protestant retrieval” involves reviving Knox’s First Blast Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women and Luther’s The Jews and their Lies.
That is not what I meant at all. Protestants over the centuries said, wrote, and did many things that I now find distasteful—even outrageous. I am glad those ideas and practices are dead, and if they are now reanimating, I wish to keep them shut up in their graves. But I had no compelling reason why Protestant retrieval does not include retrieving all the bigotry, misogyny, antisemitism, and crass anti-popery that unquestionably existed in the works of some old Protestant churchmen. That is, I—like most of us committed to retrieval—had no compelling Protestant reason why retrieval does not mean those things. Implicitly, I trusted that the people doing the retrieval had grown up in liberal societies and thus would have internalized particular values, class loyalties, and a sense of etiquette that would ward off harmful retrieval. And I was a fool. Good taste is no protection.
Instead, what is needed is meta-retrieval. We must reexamine traditional Protestant theologies of doctrine development to revive the methods historically used to distinguish neglected ideas and practices that ought to be recovered from those that have rightly been left behind by the advance of dogma.
Of course, Catholic theologians—for instance, Vincent of Lérins or John Henry Newman—have devoted much attention to doctrinal development. But development in Roman Catholicism is an entirely different matter. Despite all Catholicism’s panegyrics to the authority of “traditions,” the present-day Magisterium or a Pope speaking ex cathedra can condemn (and in a number of instances has condemned) Catholic doctrines and practices with the longest and most eminent historical pedigrees when church authorities today judge those traditions in conflict with divine revelation. The Magisterium always limits Catholic ressourcement.
For Protestants, in contrast, retrieval too often descends into slavish adherence to whatever Martin Chemnitz or the Westminster Divines happened to think. Yet during the nineteenth century, doctrinal development was a major focus of Protestant reflection. The Mercersburg school of Philip Schaff and John Williamson Nevin, with its Hegelian tendencies, is perhaps the best example. But, as one historical study found, even an institution supposedly as hidebound as Old Princeton embraced developmentalism in its approach to scripture and the history of doctrine, even as it defended the traditional Reformed creeds.
For this article, let me provide one short example of meta-retrieval. In October 1936, two months before his death, the Presbyterian scholar J. Gresham Machen delivered a speech entitled “The Creeds and Doctrinal Advance,” setting forth the “principles” by which “all real doctrinal advance” can be observed. (This talk has been reprinted in many collections of Machen’s work and is also available online: for instance, here.)
In June 1936, the new denomination that Machen founded (now the Orthodox Presbyterian Church) elected him to a three-member committee tasked with revising the Westminster Confession. The Presbyterian Church in the United States of America had amended the Confession (originally written in 1646) three times since American Independence: in 1788, in 1887, and again, most extensively, in 1903. As a result, the newly formed Orthodox Presbyterian Church charged Machen and the other committee members with evaluating these amendments to ensure that theological modernism had not corrupted the Confession or moved it away from Reformed doctrines. In November 1936—a few weeks after Machen’s speech on doctrinal advance—the committee recommended that the OPC adopt a revised version of the Confession which retained the amendments made in 1788 and 1887 but removed all but two of the 1903 revisions (thus restoring a text similar to the 1887 version). The denomination accepted this recommendation, and Machen’s revision of the Westminster Confession remains the text used in both the OPC and the PCA today.
Doctrinal development and the methods for distinguishing proper from improper confessional changes were on Machen’s mind in the fall of 1936. “The Creeds and Doctrinal Advance” can be read as Machen’s programmatic statement of how any Protestant denomination ought to assess dogmatic changes, going forward.
Machen began by insisting that doctrinal advance is part of the history of the church. Machen utterly rejected perspectives on church history that glorify the primitive Ante-Nicene church as pure and interpret all deviations from early church patterns as corruption. The development from second-century rules of faith to the creeds of the early ecumenical councils and the writings of fathers like Augustine to Reformation creeds like the Heidelberg Catechism is a “grand progress,” and “there is no essential reason” why the church “should [] now not proceed still further on its onward march.”
Machen emphasized, however, that doctrinal advance must “accord with the fundamental laws of the mind.” All human disciplines—whether science, or art, or theology—must progress according to certain principles, by which intellectual progress and degradation can be distinguished. In theology, “[t]he first prerequisite …is that those who would engage in it should believe in the full truthfulness of the Bible and should endeavour to make their doctrine simply a presentation of what the Bible teaches.” Machen understood sola scriptura to mean that Christian doctrine is “just a [more explicit] setting forth of what the Bible teaches.” The Bible is Archimedes’ fixed point, from which progress becomes possible.
Biblicism, however, did not suffice. Machen knew well that his Modernist opponents included many of the greatest biblical scholars of his era. Other hallmarks are necessary. “[A]ll real doctrinal advance proceeds in the direction of greater precision and fullness of doctrinal statement.” And this “increasing precision” and “increasing richness” comes about through careful definitions “arrived at particularly by way of refutation of errors as they successively arose.” According to Machen, the church will maintain only implicit beliefs about any doctrinal issue until “some new teaching” (i.e., a heresy or schism) forces the church to reflect explicitly about that point.
“All definition proceeds by way of exclusion,” so “the great revivals of religion” and the “increasing richness and the increasing precision of Christian doctrine” arise “very largely by the necessity of excluding one alien element after another from the teaching of the church.” Machen’s theory of doctrinal progress, then, is indebted to Hegel. There is a dialectic between the thesis of implicit convictions and the antithesis of heresy. Without Arius, no Nicaea. Without medieval indulgences, no Calvin.
For Machen, modernism and the ecumenical movement employed methods that were the opposite of doctrinal advance. Instead of writing more precise, well-defined, and intellectually rich confessions, the ecumenical movement wrote vague, inclusive, inoffensive statements that all nominal Christians could support, in order to promote common social work and “church-unionism.” “[W]hen I read some of these statements,” Machen joked, “I am amazed at the amount of printer’s ink which it is possible to use up without saying anything at all.” Although Machen believed that future doctrinal advance was possible, he thought the “widespread intellectual as well as moral decadence” of his time would prevent any advance during his own life. “[O]urs is not a creed-making age.”
Machen’s theology of doctrinal development has weaknesses and limitations; far more meta-retrieval is needed. Machen, for instance, analogizes doctrinal advance partly to progress in the natural sciences. As a result, it is a theology of doctrinal purification, in which doctrine properly develops only in one direction towards increasingly precise definitions, finer distinctions, and sharper borders excluding error. Strikingly, despite the Hegelianism of his method, Machen does not seem to have room for synthesis—for Hegel’s view that the new understanding arising from the clash between thesis and antithesis resolves the tensions between them by incorporating elements of both. Meta-retrieval must look to many more Protestant thinkers than Machen.
Nevertheless, Machen’s theology does, at least, supply compelling reasons why “Protestant retrieval” does not entail reviving Luther’s The Jews and their Lies. Some past teachings—even past teachings by great Protestant leaders—are part of the antithesis that the church’s rich definitions and explicit reflections have progressed beyond. The end of Protestant retrieval must be to restore the church to the precise doctrinal statements that existed before modernism, emotionalism, secularism, and ecumenicalism caused doctrine to retrograde. Once we have eradicated the decadence of our age, the goal is progress—not retrieval.
If you take a wrong turn in a journey, sometimes you must turn around and go back to search for the right road. But once you find that road again, you go forward. To keep always going back along your journey is never to start.
