Fundamentalism, Evangelicalism, and Modernity in the EPC
This year marks the 100th anniversary of Henry Fosdick’s “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” The past century, and especially the years since the founding of Westminster Seminary and the OPC, has seen an almost cyclical effect.
Beginning with the Portland Deliverance in 1890, the PCUSA no longer regarded the Westminster Standards as a necessary summation of biblical teaching, but instead pushed for a reduced set of 5 “fundamentals of the faith.” Following Fosdick’s sermon of 1922, a number of pastors in 1924 issued the Auburn Affirmation in which they argued that requiring conformity to the fundamentals violated their liberty of conscience. These modernists argued that this was imposing an interpretation of the confessional standards on the church, instead of the standards themselves, which went beyond the power of the church’s courts.
So a doctrinal system was reduced to a smaller set of foundational beliefs, whose authority in turn was rejected as violating liberty of conscience. As Lefferts Loetscher documents in The Broadening Church (1954), his history of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy centered on Princeton, the modernists themselves were a tiny proportion of the PCUSA. It was the moderates, who agreed with the fundamentalists in doctrine but disliked their militancy, who set the course for the church. The argument for conscience made by the modernists was also persuasive to the moderates, but only because the Standards were no longer the standards…
Thanksgiving as a Presbyterian Political Plot
John Adams thought that his Thanksgiving proclamation cost him reelection. Or at least that’s what he told Benjamin Rush in an 1812 letter. During his term in office, Adams had asked that Americans mark Thursday April 25 “as a day of solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer.” He wanted the American people to give thanks to God for “the countless favors which He is still continuing to the people of the United States, and which render their condition as a nation eminently happy when compared with the lot of others.”
You might be thinking: Why would this mark him for electoral disaster? Presidents now announce their forthcoming attempts to subvert Congress with a pen and a phone, or join the nation to semi-treaties, or declare war with a Declaration of War. Why in the world would the use of the 18th-century presidential bully-quill be such a misstep?
Well . . . it made him look like a Presbyterian. Adams said that Presbyterians had “allarmed and alienated Quakers, Anabaptists, Mennonists, Moravians, Sweedenborgians, Methodist, Catholicks, Protestant Episcopalians, Arians Socinians, Arminians . . .” and that “a general Suspicion prevailed that the Presbyterian Church . . . aimed at an Establishment as a National Church.” All that fasting and thanksgiving on a marked day. Mighty suspicious.
-Michael Brendan Dougherty in today’s National Review. This made me laugh.
Basil on the Spirit’s Procession from the Son
I was surprised while reading Basil’s On the Faith that he teaches that the Son sends the Holy Spirit in the same way the Father sends the Son, “The Holy Spirit does not speak from himself, nor does the Son do anything from himself, but the Father sends the Son, and the Son sends the Holy Spirit.” Basil is held in very high regard in Eastern Orthodoxy, which designates him the greatest of their three holy hierarchs. He’s a big deal in their tradition, which rejects the filioque clause on multiple grounds, including doctrinal. Yet Basil’s affirmation goes further than the contested filioque clause in the Nicene Creed, as he does not teach that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, just that the Son sends the Spirit.
The creed speaks of the Spirit coming from (ἐκπορευόμενον, a compound of ἐκ and πορεύομαι) and Basil speaks of the Son sending (πέμοντος). The cognitive similarities are clear, indicating that the doctrine in view is the same. But the dating here matters. On the Faith was likely written around 360 A.D., while the version of the Nicene Creed held by the church was not finished until the Council of Constantinople in 381. Basil’s terminology does not have the disputes surrounding the filioque clause in sight. However, Gregory of Nazianzus, in his important Oration 39 (Oration on the Holy Lights; §12) says “The Holy Spirit is truly spirit, coming forth from (προϊὸν; from προϊέναι) the Father indeed, but not after the manner of the Son, for it is not by generation but by ‘procession’ (ἐκπορευτῶς), since I must coin a word for the sake of clearness.” Gregory Nazianzen preached this in January 381, just before he led the Council of Constantinople. He crafted the term ἐκπορευτῶς for the economic relationship of the Holy Spirit to the Father, meaning that Basil would not have had those semantic nuances in mind 20 years earlier. Basil is not distinguishing the manners in which the Son and Spirit are sent (generation versus procession), respectively, but teaching that it is the Son who sends the Spirit as the Father sends the Son. Since ἐκπορευόμενον had not yet been coined, it is impossible to say whether Basil saw πέμοντος as closer to Nazianzen’s “procession” or προϊὸν. Be that as it may, Nazianzen is not ruling out the Son’s role in the Spirit’s procession, but asserting that the Spirit proceeds (ἐκπορευτῶς) from the Father, not that he is begotten (γεννητῶς) like the Son…
‘Sola Scriptura’ in St. Basil the Great
“Now faith is unwavering assent to what is heard [from Christ], in full assurance of the truth of what is proclaimed by the grace of God. This was shown by what what was testified to Abraham, that ‘he did not waver in unbelief, rather he was strengthened in faith, giving glory to God, and was fully assured that what he promised he is able to do.’ But if ‘the Lord is faithful in all his words’ and ‘all his commandments are faithful, established unto ages of ages, made in truth and uprightness,’ it is a clear indictment of abandoning the faith and of arrogance either to supplant anything that is written or to introduce anything not written. For our Lord Jesus Christ said, ‘My sheep hear my voice,’ and before this he said likewise, ‘A stranger they will not follow but will flee from him, because they do not know the voice of strangers.’ And the Apostle, using an example from human affairs, more emphatically forbids adding or subtracting anything in the God-breathed Scripture, which he has in mind when he says, ‘Though a covenant be confirmed by human agency, no one denies it or makes addition to it.”
-St. Basil the Great, ‘On the Faith’, page 73 in his On Christian Ethics. Similarly, §26.1 of Basil’s ethics, “That it is necessary to confirm every word or matter with the testimony of the God-breathed Scripture, so that the good is established and the evil reproached.” He cites Matthew 4:3-4 and Acts 2:12-17ff for this latter rule.
This is not only sola scriptura, but the regulative principle. Faith in Christ includes faith in his words, which cannot be subtracted from or added to in faith or practice without modifying faith in Christ. Ethical conduct in faith demands that all faith and practice (word or matter) be ruled by God speaking in scripture: the Bible is the norming norm, because “It is necessary not to be fixed on one’s own reasonings to the rejection of what is said by the Lord, but to understand that the words of the Lord are worthier of belief than one’s own convictions” (§8.3). This is the practice of faith.
