Jonathan Dickinson and the subscription controversy

MICHAEL BAUMAN*

The uses to which churches and parachurch organizations put their creeds, confessions and statements of faith are varied and multiform. So also is the degree of prudence attending those uses, as subsequent events seem always to demonstrate. To be wiser than we are, to make the best use we can of the creeds, confessions and statements we have devised, we must learn to listen to the churchmen and theologians of the past, deducing from them and their experience how best to apply our fundamental documents to churchly endeavor in a fallen world. We seldom do better than when we make good use of the hard-won wisdom of the ages, without which we are consigned to ignorance and to reinventing the ecclesiastical or theological wheel. The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to examine one such illustrative episode in American Church history-namely, the subscription controversy that surrounded the Adopting Act in colonial Presbyterianism-and to glean from it the prudence needed to address more effectively the double menace of clerical misconduct and doctrinal deviation, two of the most pernicious ecclesiastical problems to which we have applied our fundamental theological texts, though not always with good effect. In so doing we shall examine the Act's cultural and ecclesiastical background, its historical unfolding, its intention, and its wisdom-or lack thereof.

I. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Like most of the colonials who attempted to transplant Old-World institutions to the American wilderness, the Presbyterians of the middle colonies tended to address emerging threats or challenges on the basis of the models inherited from their own particular backgrounds. Whether those models were readily transferable was a question that remained abstract, indeed unanswerable, until a concrete situation called forth a solution. When those difficulties surfaced, the arduous process of applying, modifying and reapplying those models began.

The ecclesiastical challenge that most fully initiated this process for the young Presbyterian church in America centered around the moral laxity of two of its ordained members, Robert Cross and John Clement. Cross' infraction was fornication. Believing it a single and momentary lapse, and aware of the quick and full confession made by the offender, the Synod of Philadelphia administered only a slight penalty: Cross was suspended from clerical duties for four Sundays. 1 The next year, 1721, Clement was found guilty of being "overtaken with drink," using "abusive language," "quarreling" and "stabbing a man," for which he was suspended for one year.2 This shocking moral erosion in its ranks caused the synod to take stock of itself and to formulate proposals designed to forestall or remedy these and other failures. Not surprisingly the various proposals offered to the synod reflected the religious heritage of the parties proposing them.

In the early eighteenth century the Synod of Philadelphia was a unique blend of two ecclesiastical traditions and theological mind-sets. Within its small compass the synod was home to both a Scotch-Irish contingent, whose training and heritage rendered its members more likely to be the traditionalists or conservatives on each newly rising issue, and a New England party, whose emphasis was on personalized religion bound only by the Word of God and individual conscience. The confluence of these two traditions within the infant synod meant that controversy was inevitable. As new problems arose, the Scotch-Irish naturally tended to impose the structure and rigidity of Old-World Presbyterianism while the New Englanders opted for a freer, less hierarchical approach. The Scotch-Irish tended to translate the Old-World model of a strong, centralized ecclesiastical government and rigid creedal conformity into a world as yet ecclesiastically unshaped. The New Englanders, by contrast, fearing a return to what they considered the too-rigid control over religion from which their forefathers had narrowly escaped, naturally sought theological and moral protection in places other than tight ecclesiastical control. They advocated the open-church model that had lately evolved in Massachusetts under the influence of Solomon Stoddard, the illustrious grandfather of Jonathan Edwards and the so-called "Pope of the Connecticut River Valley."

As the Synod of Philadelphia expanded, it naturally experienced the inevitable growing pains associated with ecclesiastical bodies-namely, the problem of maintaining purity in doctrine and practice. The questions that loomed largest for the Presbyterians in the earliest years were those triggered by the Cross and Clement affairs, questions concerned with what and how disciplinary authority should be vested with the synod and what standards ought to be adopted, the debate surrounding which is known as the subscription controversy.

The alignment of forces in this controversy tended to follow ethnic lines, as it did on almost every major issue facing the synod in years to come. The vigorous orthodoxy of the Scotch-Irish, which to the New Englanders seemed dangerously exaggerated, was intended to keep the Church doctrinally pure and experientially holy by insisting on unqualified orthodoxy from ministers and candidates, by means of enforced subscription to certain creedal formulae, in this case the Westminster Confession and Catechisms.3 Because no properly established or sufficiently powerful church court yet existed in American Presbyterianism before which such issues could be determined, mandatory subscription, imposed at the synodical level, appeared to the Scotch-Irish as a practical necessity. The Scotch-Irish were exceedingly wary of any minister or candidate for ordination who refused to submit to subscription. Experience in Scotland taught them that, more often than not, those who refused (or even balked at) confessional subscription eventually wound up within the more liberal Church of England. Refusal to subscribe was considered the first step toward Arminianism or something worse. To the Scotch-Irish, rigorous doctrinal requirements seemed the best antidote for clerical immorality and theological deviation.