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THE DESCENT OF THE SYMBOLS

For the Church, the appeal of a creedal structure gains value. Rising fundamentalism and entrenching liberalism, both aiding and abetting post-Christianity, make the worth in black and white of a sound statement of faith necessary. Consider two reasons:

1

Since Christ may never be divided by schismatic works, that is, denominationalism, we need in the Church growing unity on the nature and authority of the Scriptures as well as on God (the Son, the Father, and the Holy Spirit), on the Kingdom, on the Church, and within the communion of saints, on covenantally manifested salvation, grace, commandments, sacraments, ecclesiastical authority, the coming of the Kingdom, the significance of life, as well as many other scriptural themes. A comprehensive and succinct symbol binds all of the Church to administer the glory of God.

Also, in the light of the biblical teachings, we may define major and minor anguishes of the ages—racial hatred, power politics, warring, ecological pollution, social brokenness, poverty, etc. The more all of the Lord Jesus identify sin and its results, the easier in grace intercontinental cooperation to alleviate sufferings.

Thus, we set the parameters for what the Church believes for all times and places, plus the consequences of failure to abide by all biblical teachings. At the same time, we may instruct new generations: This is Christianity. And to potential converts we may declare: This is the Faith to which Christ Jesus summons all. Simultaneously, we give critics, anti-Christs, an unambiguous target.

The criticality of a goal-intensifying standard of faith is impossible to overestimate.

2

With a confessional standard, preachers know themselves within boundaries, the biblical circle throughout which they may express freedom of exegesis and, clearly, beyond its perimeter they sink into swamps of heresy and apostasy. As long as ministers of the Word oppose and contradict the Scriptures in line with fundamentalism and liberalism, centrifugal forces of unbelief disrupt and distort the Church of Jesus Christ.

For obvious reasons, the value of a sound standard of faith reaches out into all the Church to overcome overrated values of post-Christianity.

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Since the arrival of the first Western European immigrants, North America proved to be an infertile continent for then current ecclesiastical confessions of faith, or standards of belief; steadily, symbols of the Church faded before the spurious processes of anti-creedalism. From the open-ended vision of the Anglicans/Episcopalians and Puritans with the Thirty-Nine Articles in hand and heart to twentieth-century confession-making, all such creedal statements fell into poor, rocky soil.

FIRST STUDY:ANTI-CONFESSING ACROSS NORTH AMERICA

In North America, from coast to coast, north-south/east-west, immigrant believers planted confessions in rocky ground, land without depth of soil and amidst proliferating thorns. To make matters worse, over the imported creedal plants swept searing winds of liberalism, conservatism, revivalism, fundamentalism, individualism, neo-orthodoxy, ecumenism, etc.; with varying degrees of intensity and violence, these dry winds sucked precious moisture out of the symbols struggling, indeed, eventually gasping for life. In effect, the history of confessions of faith consisted of defeated hopes and broken commitments. As more waves of immigrants landed,21 rightly expecting to live respective standards of belief, subsequent generations opted for anti-confessionalism. In fact, North American proved to be an impossible, if not hostile, landscape to statements of faith.

THE ARRIVAL OF FUNDAMENTAL CREEDS

Three fundamental creeds—the Apostles, the Nicene, and the Athanasian—recited or sung still reflect flickers of life. But who knows the historical circumstances and birthing pains of even one? These creeds survive in barren atmospheres. Beaten by winds of anti-confessionalism, death throes mark the slow demise of these global creedal statements. Decline into death characterizes even more four mighty sixteenth-century traditions—the Episcopalian/Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles, the Presbyterian Westminster Standards, the Lutheran Book of Concord, specifically the Augsburg Confession (the formidable Augustana), and the Reformed Forms of Unity.22

1

The Church of England shaped her Thirty-Nine Articles (1571) slowly during the sixteenth century, a work in content deeply indebted to Huldreich Zwingli, John Calvin, Martin Bucer (Butzer), and Henry Bullinger for basic theological orientation.23 In the 1610s Virginia-settling and in the 1750s Nova Scotia-dwelling Anglicans placed the Articles central to Episcopalianism, the life-force of the Church of England, “the English Church.”24

Demonstrating wane in commitment to the Thirty-Nine, the proprietors of the King’s Chapel in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1782 set aside certain trinitarian references in the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds to accommodate dissident scruples of a Harvard-trained minister.25 Thereafter the denomination as an entity omitted the Athanasian from its creedal foundation.26 This anti-confessionalism continued apace in the nineteenth century.

Much stabilized by the Anglican Book of Common Prayer,27 nevertheless, the decennial Lambeth Conference, “though it has no legislative power,”28 interpreted the Articles in the light of current questions, theological trends, and denominational pressures, exerting further commanding demands on the integrity of the Thirty-Nine. The Conferences’ Episcopal decrees, heavily influencing North American Episcopalianism, slowly surrendered to mortifying anti-confessionalism.

Moving fast forward, the 1963 Anglican Congress confronted modern issues. “The agenda covered the whole gamut of missionary and pastoral responsibilities. These had to be faced in the light of modern realities and recent theological findings. Confronting every church sensitive to world needs and ecumenical growth is the perennial question: Can the Christian message, as expounded by Christ and His Apostles, be adapted to current situations without thereby diluting the ‘kerygma’ or essential Christian truth to which all responsible churches are committed? This tension between an unalterable norm and a facile expediency always pervades church and council deliberations, not unlike a ghost at a banquet.”29 As poor in taste as the ghost-at-a-banquet analogy, so negligent the Anglican/Episcopalian Church in her North American provinces at reforming herself to the Scriptures, eviscerating the venerable lead of the Thirty-Nine Articles.

Again, accommodation to Bishop John A.T. Robinson’s 1963 Honest to God, his 1965 The New Reformation?, and his 1967 But That I Can’t Belief, etc., as well as Bishop John Spong’s 1991 Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism, 1992 Born of a Woman, 1998 Why Christianity Must Change or Die, etc., depreciated more the fundamental intent and relevance of the Thirty-Nine. Such latter-day attacks provisionally concluded any liveliness in the Anglicans’ original identification and central heritage, adding this once powerful confession to other valuable, now considered useless artifacts, stored indefinitely in the cavernous Episcopalian garage.

2

In the Westminster Assembly of Divines (1643–1647) the Presbyterians forged the Westminster Standards, the creedal structure also adopted by American Congregationalists, a denomination strong in the pre-Civil War New England area. Several mutations contemporized these Standards—the Congregationalists’ Savoy Confession (England, 1658), the Puritan’s Cambridge Platform (1648), and the Congregationalists’ Saybrook Platform (1708), etc. Whatever form or modest reconfiguration, the Standards across North America identified Presbyterianism, per Synod of Philadelphia, 1729.30 In fact, numerically, the Standards dominated over other creedal establishments, the Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed.31 More people believed these Standards than the Episcopalians the Thirty-Nine, the Lutherans the Book of Concord, and the Reformed the Forms of Unity.

Upon the first Great Awakening, often identified with Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), Evangelicalism overshadowed Presbyterianism. “Evangelicalism, to use the term by which this new surge of spiritual life is usually described, has often been interpreted as a revolt against Calvinism. While this may have been its ultimate consequence, it was far from that in the beginning. The understanding of the Christian faith as set forth in the great Reformed Confessions was taken for granted. John Wesley was an important exception, but in many respects even he stood firmly within the Genevan tradition. Evangelicalism, however, was much more a mood and an emphasis than a theological system. Its stress was upon the importance of personal religious experience. If it was a revolt against anything, it was revolt against the notion that the Christian life involved little more than observing the outward formalities of religion.”32 Seepage in strength from the Standards in favor of personal experience softened Presbyterianism for the bludgeoning impacts of revivalism and its post-Civil War, that is, after 1865, burgeoning and popular camp meetings.33 Camp-meeting enthusiasts pummeled the Standards to no end, deteriorating Presbyterians’ primary evidence, confessional integrity.

Throughout North America, biblical doctrines as predestination and total depravity failed before the onslaught of optimistic and evangelical forces, Arminian fervors lauding the essential goodness of human beings; thus manipulative advocacy of freewill swept east to west, south to north. “If the Presbyterians had trouble handling the energies generated by the camp meetings, the Methodists did not. They had long been accustomed to the noise and excitement and they were equally accustomed to ‘on-the-job’ training for their preachers. Furthermore, the theology of the camp-meeting exhorters with its implicit rejection of predestination and its explicit emphasis upon salvation as potentially available to all, which proved to be so divisive among Presbyterians, posed no problem for the Methodists.”34 As revivalistic storms surged hither and yon, subjectivism dominated. Presbyterian orthodoxy was openly opposed and rejected, or quietly ignored.

These anti-Presbyterian sentiments spread far and wide, catching more heart-attention. ”Deeply interested in the subject of religious liberty, [Rev. Thomas Campbell, 1763–1854] was appalled at the number of sects and churches all about him, each making loud claims for its own interpretation of Christian truth. In his celebrated ‘Declaration’ of 1807, shortly after his arrival in America, Campbell stressed the two pillars of his outlook. One was individual freedom and autonomy of action, which required less stress on precise creeds as a test of fellowship in the church. The other was the need for greater unity among Christian believers.”35 Less stress on creedal formulation fitted dominant frontier moods. Greater unity softened, in Campbell’s estimation, the Standards’ effectiveness for ecclesiastical homogeneity. More and more church people opted for such conventional wisdom.

In the post-Civil War decades, discoveries initiated by Charles Darwin’s biological evolution theories and Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism, each totally devoid of creedal appreciation, took North America’s Westminster congregations by storm; resistance, often strong, floundered, its dogmatic demands spurned. Charles Hodge (1797–1878) of Princeton Seminary led this opposition. However, larger resistance to (Social) Darwinism took on forms of pietistic indifference36 (what we don’t know won’t hurt us). This conservatism, or Old School Presbyterianism, helped deterioration of interest in and respect for the Westminster tradition. At the same time, Darwinian-tainted New School Presbyterianism further damaged respect and love for the soundness of the Confession of Faith, the Larger Catechism, and the Shorter Catechism.

A sideline: Colonial-era Baptists had adopted a modified Presbyterianism. General Baptists, largest and strongest such denomination then, advocated a global atonement; beyond that, they at first rooted themselves in Westminster’s fervent Calvinist tradition.37 “The Philadelphia Confession of Faith of these American Baptists was a slightly emended version of the Westminster Confession of Faith, following the changes introduced by the Savoy Declaration (1658) of the English Congregationalists with an additional modification at the point of baptism.”38 Arminian priorities, however, had led to complacency in doctrine and confession. “The doctrine of human ability, [Jonathan Edwards] was convinced, destroyed the very foundation of the Christian faith. To counter this threat, he preached a series of five sermons in 1734 on justification by faith alone.”39 But damages had been done, and slanted Jonathan Edwards’s heritage to lay unwonted stress on personal religious experience. Once legitimate confessions conform to human ideas, symbols lose respect, as the anti-confessional history of Baptist denominations and sects proved. Thus Baptists first confessionally rooted in Presbyterianism worked at undermining the Standards.

Northwards, late nineteenth, early twentieth-century Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Methodists produced the Basis of Union. “This was considered a sound document by all concerned, emphasizing a harmony of views with a minimum creedal novelty.”40 Everywhere across Canada’s West large majorities perceived creedal unity on paper less a necessity than evangelical oneness, confirming continental religious moods. “The Western communities . . . were heterogeneous in religious loyalties. They couldn’t have cared less which denomination served them but they did want church services. There sprang up, therefore, a demand for ‘community’ or ‘union’ churches without any specific denominational tag. The ‘Basis of Union’ drafted in 1908 seemed an adequate guide.”41 Reflecting this anti-confessional mood, people everywhere, excepting committed Presbyterians, demanded life in action, or action in life, not theological fine points.

Early on in the twentieth century, Canadian ecumenical sentiments reflected much of the North American ecclesiastical currents. “The project of church union took shape during a period when traditional ways had little prestige. During the first decade of this century many writers were predicting that dogmatic theology would yield its place to sociology and the comparative study of religions. The social gospel was the excitement of the hour, and in Canada the church was preoccupied with the task of evangelizing new cities and a new west largely populated by settlers from abroad. Impressed by the urgency of planning for the future, Christians had little regard for ecclesiastical heirlooms. They were looking for ideas and methods that would work.”42 Rooted in subjectivism, this unity drive took its confessional toll. Only in 1940 did the United Church of Canada accept a more developed Statement of Belief.

The Presbyterians’ 1967 Living Faith and 1976 A Declaration of Faith proved the anti-confessional point: Once human ideas and notions are creedalized, these, if not stillborn, soon lose any glamor bestowed at birth. More stuff for the massive Presbyterian garage: too good to throw away, too bad for direction-setting endeavors. As the Anglicans, also the Presbyterians were largely carried away by anti-confessionalism.

3

Lutherans, institutionally, started in Canada circa 1775, prior to this in America. Canadian Lutherans from the beginning suffered ecclesiastical instability. “The Lutherans were hampered in those early days by the transference of loyalty by both clergymen and laymen to the prevailing Anglican Church—the more so as English became the dominant language and German-speaking pastors were few.”43 When German-language proficiency in colonial Canada died away, Lutherans no longer owned a living language for second and third generations, the appeal of the Book of Concord (1530), the Augsburg Confession (1530), and several Helvetian Confessions failed, and therewith then these Lutheran identification symbols yielded to anti-confessionalism.

3–1

During post-immigration decades the Augsburg Confession symbolized and activated the distinctive that held Lutheran hearts. But with a qualifier: “. . . Lutherans are free to address themselves to any given situation, to the issues involved, and to the persons or corporate bodies thereto related, without any necessary prior reference to tradition or precedent. Operationally speaking, the Lutheran Church normally fulfils these functions in and through congregations. It thus has the potential capability of expressing its confessional genius anew in each particular situation. As a result, Lutheran practice allows for considerable latitude and flexibility in its address to problematic situations in such areas as manners and morals, polity and administration, education and worship, society and culture. Since no two situations are alike, one will find within the confines of Lutheranism virtually every conceivable position on such matters.”44 With consequences for Lutheran symbols, since “. . . the apparent rigidity in the confessional posture is functionally dynamic in fact.”45 More likely, pragmatic. Lutheranism’s traditionalism, which contained the Augsburg Confession, early on leached away into the North American soil without fertilizing the land.

However, dynamic and flexible Lutheranism may have been with respect to its Book of Concord, an encircling traditionalism weakened these early North American churches. “The crucial difficulty for Lutheranism by its freedom of expression is the danger either of procrastination or of unreflective dependence on precedent. Over against this risk, however, we must set the responsibility that this very freedom imposes. In general, it may be said that accountability for actions taken requires careful judgment no less than cautious execution. No wonder that tradition is often considered suspect, especially since it carried within itself an inner momentum toward fixity. At risk of oversimplification, we may affirm that Lutheranism will tolerate much as long as the confessional tradition is not despised and matters are dealt with in decency and good order.”46 Given these vicissitudes and constructs of Lutheranism, Lutheran congregations in North America suffered, unable to withstand Arminian storms of revivalism.

3–2

By mid-nineteenth century, though better prepared with pastors and leaders, nevertheless forces of Americanism breached linguistic barriers. “S.S. Schmucker, graduate of Princeton and president of the Lutheran seminary at Gettysburg, was the great symbol of the Lutheran adjustment to the American theological climate. It was Schmucker who issued in 1838 a Fraternal Appeal summoning all branches of evangelical Protestantism in America to unite in a single Apostolic Protestant Church, and who with other ‘liberal’ leaders exerted strong influence on behalf of ‘new-measures’ revivalism.”47 New measures consisted of pressures, means, and tactics imposed by such as Charles G. Finney (1792–1875) and Billy Sunday (1862–1935) to compel conversions. As infuriating spirits of revivalism swept through North America and ruptured Lutheran safe havens, its adherents suffered the religious trauma of immigrants.

When acculturation broke Lutheran solidarity, an event occurred that changed descent into revivalism. “The defeat of the Americanizing Lutherans, however, was foreshadowed by the arrival in Missouri of a group of immigrants [in 1839]. They had left Germany because they could ‘see no possibility of retaining in their present home’ the ‘pure and undefiled’ faith of the historic Lutheran confessions and thus had felt “‘duty bound to emigrate and to look for a country where this Lutheran faith is not endangered.’”48 These stalwarts founded the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, 1847. With other also conservative synods—Buffalo, 1845; Wisconsin, 1850; Iowa, 1854—they reshaped American Lutheranism “. . . to maintain their fidelity to the traditional Lutheran standards.”49 Holding on to the Book of Concord and the German language, these synods lived isolated from the Evangelicalism and revivalism, rampant anti-confessional storms, which hammered North America,50 against which the Thirty-Nine had not protected Anglicans or the Westminster Standards Presbyterians and Congregationalists.

Post-Civil War. “The Lutherans, in contrast to these other denominations, maintained an almost solidly unbroken orthodox front. The most liberal of the major Lutheran bodies—the General Synod of the Lutheran Church in the United States—tightened its discipline in 1895 and affirmed that its doctrinal basis was “the Word of God as the infallible rule of faith and practice, and the unaltered Augsburg Confession as throughout in perfect consistence with it—nothing more, nothing less.”51 They, then, at this time, withstood symbol-toppling tempests of heterodoxy, revivalism, and Arminianism, which rampaged across the continent, east to west.

Profound changes, however, with loss of confessional unity and wholeness, altered Lutheran homogeneity. Post-World War Two, whirlwinds of religious hostility to standards of faith breached Lutheranism. “In the 1960’s two large Lutheran bodies came into being: ALC and LCA. The LCA’s Confession of Faith, greatly influenced by historical criticism (neo-Lutheranism) represented a departure from the historic position, while the ALC’s Confession clearly rejected modern studies.”52 While some held the Lutheran faith, clearly, others gradually and irrevocably forsook the historic creeds, storms of acculturation too strong to withstand.

Over decades Lutherans split and merged—for standing strong, for Americanization, against Americanization, for Higher Criticism, against Higher Criticism—until for an outsider the divisions and schisms seemed insuperable and undecipherable: ELCA, LC-MS, WELS, AFLC, ELS, CLB, AALC, CLC, WLCA, LAC, ALC, ELCIC, NALC, LCME; etc.

Of course, in North America the same had happened to the Presbyterians53 and the Reformed.54 Each of these three confessional traditions under assimilative pressures separated into multiple schismatic denominations, all contributing to current anti-confessionalism. In all, even those who honored the Augsburger, the Standards, or the Forms of Unity failed to see eye to eye, thereby mocking the very symbols they upheld.

Meantime, more Lutherans deposited respective historical documents into a community-held colossal garage for storage—until the next spring cleaning.

4

Reformed people came to North America early seventeenth century, settling first Manhattan (1628). The Reformed Church in America at her beginning on this continent upheld the Forms of Unity—the 1561 Confession of Faith (the Belgica), the 1563 Heidelberg Catechism, and the 1618–19 Canons of Dort. In the nineteenth century, she too suffered mangling onslaughts of revivalism and Evangelicalism, thereby surrendering creedal wholeness. Defeat before anti-confessionalism turned into confessional renewal only as waves of Dutch immigrants settled in and about the City of New York as well as in Michigan and Iowa, culminating in the 1857 institution of the Christian Reformed Church. “Not only did the new church prosper; its influence had the effect of drawing the Old Dutch church back to a more conservative position.”55 Between the 1860’s and World War One, North America’s Reformed people preferred isolation to avoid Americanization, eventually Canadianization too, specifically revivalism, Evangelicalism, and Higher Criticism. But tempests of Americanization and Canadianization in the twentieth century overshadowed and overtook motivations for confessional integrity.

As language usage moved to English and children learned North American ways, notably Arminian piety/revivalism, more church leaders worked for the reassertion of old, European values centering on the Forms of Unity, minimally succeeding at orthodoxy.56 And failed at that too. For Higher Criticism, post-World War I, blew the Forms of Unity down, preventing these symbols from forming barriers against revivalism and Evangelicalism, and therefore Arminianism.

During post-World War One decades, more immigrants joined the Reformed Church in America and the Christian Reformed Church who “. . . prided themselves on strictness of creed and code,”57 or founded smaller denominations to resist Americanization, Canadianization, and Higher Criticism (liberalism), but often sensing a sort of kinship with conservative Evangelical powers. Contrary to intentions and hopes, commitments of confessional integrity waned and faltered.58 Rather, confessional latitudinarianism advocated Canadianization north of the 49th Parallel, Americanization south of the ideologically porous international boundary line. In the CRCNA, for instance, the Confessional faction lost out by 1967.59 Even the 1970’s Reformed Church in America’s 1978 Our Song of Hope and the Christian Reformed Church’s 1984 Our World Belongs to God, even as the 1976 Presbyterians’ A Declaration of Faith, the Confession of 1967, and the 1984 Living Faith failed at turning away anti-confessional tempers, both liberal and conservative (Evangelical). The denominational ruptures still drift about and apart, despite upholding the same confessions, each an easy prey to every sort of anti-creedal wind storm. The Forms-of-Unity heritage, too, rests in an enormous garage, subdivided into a number of smaller storage units.

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The four confessional traditions on North American soils—Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Reformed—came to similar grief, each one in its own time and space. Fact is: North American fields and meadows abetted by ideological storm winds reject all symbols of the Church. Worse, all who believe the necessity and viability of church symbols do not know what to do with these confessions, except adapt to the inevitability of anti-confessionalism, slowly. Or make new ones, which become occasional pieces to stave off a danger or elucidate a concern, without ecclesiastical normativity and without rootage in the ecclesiastical soul and soil on the one and only foundation.

THE EROSION OF FUNDAMENTAL CREEDS

At the risk of stimulating anti-confessional winds and impoverishing further anti-confessional soils, a more comprehensive overview of this religious malignity, or tyranny of human willfulness, exemplifies the powers of overweening religiosity.

Over centuries now, ecclesiastical symbols met name-calling opposition inspired by evangelical impatience and liberal conceit, each mean-spirited movement eager to misinterpret Scriptures as well as misunderstand the purpose and significance of confessions of faith. “Sectarian distinctives.” “Quibbling over the finer points of doctrine.” “Traditional faith.” “Dead orthodoxy.” “Major assumptions.” “Inherited formation of the faith.” “Inherited theological formulations.” “Denominational peculiarities.” “Rigid theological straitjackets.” “Ecclesiastical heirlooms.” “Sectarianism.” “Antiquated knowledge.” “Theological hairsplitting.” These and other skewed epithets convey darkness of heart: Negativity, deep and abiding, emanating as smear campaigns against the controverted symbols. Smug with heterodoxy, church people believing contrary to the Word what they themselves want feed into blinding influences of selfishness manifested as anti-confessionalism.

Shallow soil and Rocky Ground

Anglicans/Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Reformed immigrants in successive waves carried onto North American shores incisive confessional strengths born in the century of the Reformation. Each church body hoped to speed on the reforming of the Church here, at least hold onto gains made. Even early Baptists drew largely from the Westminster Standards, confessing God’s sovereign will radiating outwards from respective fellowships; they too brought initial waves of reformative high hopes.60 To all intents and purposes, each of the confessional traditions counted on an unlimited future of ecclesiastical aspirations in North America, unifying symbols held high. However, symbolic expectations after each immigrant generation dropped from high to low; second and third generations generally failed, succumbing to prevailing anti-confessionalism.

At consecutive confessional plantings in shallow soil and on rocky ground, however, winds of revolution gathered momentum, first the Arminian, a troubling variant of the Reformation,61 with its subtle temptations for human sovereignty in salvation. This Arminianism, Protestant sister to Roman Catholic Semi-Pelagianism, in tandem with the continent’s pagan soul started opposition to the symbols’ predestinarian doctrine, desiring works righteousness. Therefore, one reason for this heretical wind, first formally identified and opposed at the Synod of Dort, 1618–19, consisted of its fear of divine sovereignty relative to salvation. Arminians, even as Semi-Pelagians, demanded final control in predestination. Hence, its opposition to the regnant symbols attempted to prove these wrong, at variance with the Scriptures. Arminianism had to disparage its principled opponents in order to gain undisputed dominion in Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions.

Decline of the Euro-centric confessions surfaced already prior to the American Civil War, 1860–65. Before that bloody, internecine conflict, Arminianism split into Methodist, Evangelical, revivalist, and Free-Will Baptist patterns, searing winds scorching the creedal plants, “. . . that Calvinism of the other denominations was becoming so diluted as to be unrecognizable. Taking their lead from Nathanial W. Taylor, the revivalists had placed such stress upon the ability of the sinner to acquire conversion as in effect to transform Calvinism into an operational Arminianism.”62 Revivalism, free-flowing Arminian winds at the time, hammered reformative hopes to dust, sucking away precious saps of life. By 1842, “. . . revivals had become ‘a constituent part of the religious system’ to such an extent that ‘he who should oppose himself to revivals, as such, would be regarded by most of our evangelical Christians as, ipso facto, an enemy of spiritual religion itself.’”63 In running-up to the American Civil War, revivalists/Methodists/Evangelicals/Free-Will Baptists swept North American populations up along the Atlantic Seaboard, deep into Canada too, to absorb by popular agitation many in its religiosity. As fast as settlers, adventurers, pioneers, and itinerant preachers moved inland, so fast anti-confessionalism took hold, fearfully reducing confessional hopes.

Astonishing, high hopes for the symbols succumbed to egregious anti-creedalism storming hither and yon across the continent.

Searing Winds and Hostile Storms

At the lowest levels of anti-confessionalism, the conglomeration of revivalist Evangelicals/Methodists/Free-Will Baptists held out high hopes for their religiosity. Within this broadening movement, pietistic winds added to the anti-confessional attacks. Pietists, in reaction to stiff, dry Lutheran and Reformed orthodoxies in Europe, crossed the Atlantic, hungering for more religious experience, devotional living, and practical effects of Christianity. On the whole, these Pietists were probably nice people. “The Pietists were not hostile to the churches and they were far from heterodox, but they found theological discussion distasteful and regarded it as a source of division and strife among Christians. Christianity was a life, they insisted, not a creed. Thus the Pietists tended to sit rather loosely to their confessional traditions, to emphasize the common experience of Christ which bound all Christians together, and to be characterized by a strong missionary fervor.”64 This sort of ecumenism of the heart, a source of division in itself, made them prey for all sorts of deceitful philosophies and human traditions. The point, however, is: Increasingly they shunned the symbols of the Church as inconsistent with and opposed to what they considered the fire of religion. Therefore, Pietists minimized, consciously cast aside the monumental standards, Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Reformed.

Another revolutionary wind bolstered these storming desperations of revivalism: Wesleyan perfectionism. Comparative wealth, mechanical inventions, and westwards expansion generated expectancy, enthusiasm, social ferment—nothing seemed impossible, not even perfection of human nature. Strangely, amidst material buoyancy, perfectionists hoped for a heavenly existence on earth. Hence: “Perfectionist tendencies, of course, always threatened to get out of hand. The revivals had multiplied conversions so rapidly that it became increasingly easy to overlook the great obstacles which man’s sinful nature placed in the path to perfection and to believe that it was only an individual’s willful perversity which caused him to temporize with sin. Thus many were moving into a perfectionist phase, which emphasized the abolition of sin almost to the exclusion of any preoccupations with creed . . .”65 Perfectionist enthusiasm impatient with the Church sought the perfectibility of believers, if not the race. The Social Gospel movement of the late nineteenth century with plans for the Kingdom of Heaven on earth typified the intense excitement and total envelopment of perfectionism at a later stage.

Perfectionism, too, ridiculed creedal integrity, until the bloody horrors of World War One. Thereafter, only the biblically illiterate and historically unaware pursued perfectionist hopes.

At the same time as anti-creedal Pietism and perfectionism stormed westwards and northwards, other winds picked up and mixed in—socialization, acculturation, and indigenization, further damaging and disintegrating confessional growth. “Religion became increasingly a social activity rather than a spiritual experience. William Dean Howells . . . noted the ravages of secularization, even in Puritan New England. ‘Religion there . . . has largely ceased to be a fact of spiritual experience, and the visible church flourished on condition of providing for the social needs of the community. It was practically held that salvation of one’s soul must not be made too depressing, or the young people would have nothing to do with it. Professors of the sternest creeds temporized with the sinners, and did what might be done to win them to heaven by helping them to have a good time here. The church embraced and included the world.”66 Even strict Calvinists, whether Anglican, Presbyterian, or Reformed, conceded little by little to the socialization and secularization of the Church in order, allegedly, to maintain a united front with which and from which to counteract hostile movements, for instance, in the eighteenth century Unitarianism and Universalism. In this socialization, “. . . churches in a democratic society must stand for something definite and specific if they are to avoid surrendering to the dominant cultural tendencies of the time.”67 And this “standing for something” became the difficulty.

Along with socialization and acculturation once revivalism had done its damages, other winds picked up. Individualism blew stronger as post-World War II governments adopted human rights platforms, and believers fell before this onslaught of humanism. As one wrote, “. . . I came to consider that the creeds are a form of speaking in tongues.”68 That is, individualism descended into glossolalia. With no one to interpret, each succumbs to what is right in his/her own eyes.

An ecumenical storm also swept over the continent, seeking to bring churches to a lowest-common denominator confessional basis, thereby to accommodate disparate traditions and spirits; each faction to ecumenical agreement did so on the basis of a minimal creedal statement to eliminate points of division and incorporate only issues of agreement, sometimes no more than “Jesus is Lord.” Not faithfulness to the Scriptures, but mollycoddling human inventiveness carried the day in ecumenical circling about only “grand essentials.”69 Such the formation of the Canadian Council of Church, for one, manifested in 1944. “In searching for a theological bond of unity that would escape a too narrow creedal limitation, the Council accepted the Affirmation of the Edinburgh Conference of 1937. It declares a fellowship of churches which ‘accepted our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour.’”70

Then, too, neo-orthodoxy, a denial of any absolute expression of truth also in confessions and, hence, an affirmation of relativism, troubled mainstream churches. “Barth held this view and was able to say the Bible was fallible because every word fell short. But the spiritual message and its function (God’s revelation for you!) was thought to be untouchable by historical criticism . . .. Thus the Bible was split and the word ‘revelation’ took on a new meaning.”71 This sort of religiosity-coated individualism required continuing support through more of such revelation. “Neo-orthodoxy’s emphasis on continuing revelation and the revelatory event is very compatible to the charismatic emphasis, but the similarities between the charismatic movement and neo-orthodox does not stop here. Both movements were reactionary movements to dead orthodoxy and the old liberalism. They both desired to recapture the subjective and experiential aspect of the Christian life and devalued the doctrine of the written Word and the objective promises of God.”72 This neo-orthodoxy, congenial to North America’s pagan soul, leveled off and further eliminated confessional interest as incompatible with individualism and experiential religion.

And not to forget, raging secularism, ubiquitous, further asphyxiated confessional concentration, “. . . an attitude begotten of modern science and philosophy and a demand for satisfying ‘creature wants’; modern advertising is the messenger of an ever-enlarging set of selfish desires.”73 Secularist storms struck away at confessional growth, demanding a flat earth.

Thus, from the lowest anti-confessionalism, leaders in the Church searched for new highs in religiosity, and found failed expectations.

CONCLUSIONS

Frontal assaults of anti-confessional winds and tempests arrested creedal life, drawing out its sap and withering its wood. The symbols—Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Reformed—planted in poor and rocky North American soil struggled for existence. In a lengthy process of neglect, despised, confessional traditions became stunted and misshaped entities, experiencing at best nominal adherence, perhaps “perfunctory orthodoxy.”74

Strangely, in times of anti-confessionalism and perfunctory orthodoxy, more symbols sprang up, especially among those of Reformed persuasion.75 Somehow, Christ-implanted and Spirit-driven necessity to confess the Faith comes out, however meager and pitiable compared to sixteenth-century confessions. For instance. The 1973 Declaration of Evangelical Concerns. The Christian Reformed Church’s 1984 Our World Belongs to God. The Reformed Church’s Our Song of Hope. The Presbyterian’s Living Faith. The Lutheran’s Evangelical Catechism. The 1975 The Hartford Appeal for Theological Affirmation. As much as these and more from birth struggled for breath and life, they became historical curiosities, occasional declarations, passing phases of interest suddenly smitten by anti-confessional storms.

In short, confessional plants in poor and on rocky soil withered under blatant anti-creedalism. For ecclesiastical symbols, North America proved to be an infertile continent.

2005/2015

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baird, Robert. Religion in America: A Critical Abridgment. New York: Harper & Row, 1856/1970.

Bayne, Stephen Fielding, Jr. “United States.” William E. Leidt, ed. Anglican Mosaic. Toronto: The Anglican Book Centre, 1962.

Bratt, James D. Dutch Calvinism in Modern America: A History of a Conservative Subculture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984.

Busch, Eberhard. “The Closeness of the Distant: Reformed Confessions After 1945.” David Willis and Michael Welker, eds. Toward the Future of Reformed Theology: Tasks, Topics, Traditions. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999.

Freitag, Walter. “Lutheran Tradition in Canada.” 94–101. John Webster Grant, ed. The Churches And the Canadian Experience. Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1963.

Grant, John Webster, ed. “Blending Traditions: The United Church in Canada.” 133–144. The Churches And the Canadian Experience. Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1963.

Henderson, Ron L.H. “Canada.” William E. Leidt, ed. Anglican Mosaic. Toronto: The Anglican Book Centre, 1962.

Hudson, Winthrop S. The Great Tradition of the American Churches. New York: Harper/Torch, 1953/63.

———. Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965.

Ivison, Stuart. “Is There A Canadian Baptist Tradition?” 53–68. John Webster Grant, ed. The Churches And the Canadian Experience. Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1963.

Norris, Kathleen. Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. New York: Riverhead, 1998.

Stanford, Craig S. The Death of the Lutheran Reformation: A Practical Look at Modern Theology And Its Effects In the Church and in the Lives of Its People. Fort Wayne: Stanford, 1988.

Wilson, Douglas J. The Church Grows in Canada. New York: Committee on Missionary Education/Canadian Council of Churches, 1966.

SECOND STUDY:POST-CONFESSING ACROSS NORTH AMERICA

Covetousness mutilates and scars North America’s landscape. Sooner or later, all who sought confessional integrity on these shores slid or collapsed into the continental pit, consumed by greed. Avarice is difficult, if not impossible, to resist; everyone breathes in its ruinous seductions. Hence, the breakdown of the four main European confessional imports—Anglican/Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Reformed—by subtle contortions of mammonism descending into grace-less infernos.

Even new-created symbols—as the 1950 Reformed Foundations and Perspectives of Confession, the 1954 Reformed The Doctrine Concerning Holy Scripture, the 1954 Presbyterian Declaration of Faith Concerning Church and Nations, the Presbyterian Confession of 1967, the 1972 Presbyterian A Declaration of Faith, the 1984 Presbyterian Living Faith, the 1974 Reformed Our Song of Hope, and the 1984 Christian Reformed Our World Belongs to God—totter on precarious edges of the continental black hole. However, not even this post-World War Two spurt of confessional eagerness gives the lie to the restless North American-wide human folly catering to covetousness—the mangling economic covetousness of naked self-interest—preventing these intellectual exercises from taking hold of heart and soul.

Covetousness, put broadly, appears through materialist yearnings, even though forbidden by the Tenth Commandment. Take the Tenth’s interpretation through Ps 119:37,

Turn my eyes from looking at vanity;

And give me life in thy ways.

However, the more financially comfortable members of the four creedal traditions became, the less passion they displayed for transformative statements of faith; in fact, each symbol hampered avaricious hopes. This insatiable worm of covetousness, which consumes foundations of faith in order to establish infernal bases for life, occurred often imperceptibly. Within these materialist yearnings grew an intermeshed religiosity, for covetousness flourished where destabilizing people of the various churches broke first the Second Commandment; only by perverting the worship and life to which the Lord Jesus called could any slip away into the continent’s bottomless delusions of cupidity.

THE DESCENT OF THE THIRTY-NINE

From the early seventeenth century the Anglicans/Episcopalians, starting in Virginia, and the Puritans,76 starting in New England, constituted the twin confessors of the Thirty-Nine Articles,77 the Articles of Religion, in the New World. However, those “articles of religion”78—slowly—entered into deviant confessional erosion, one motivated and dominated by creeping materialism.

1–2

Within a hundred years after British colonization in North America began, the restless search to tap into the enormous riches of the continent perverted the determining glue of neighboring Anglican/Episcopal and Puritan jurisdictions. The intense and protracted search for wealth that compelled Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus to reach across the Atlantic for the fabled Orient gained control of North American immigrants too; only, they sought these riches at first along the Eastern Seaboard from Newfoundland to Florida, then far inland, always westwards. This unrelenting covetousness consumed both Anglicans and Puritans.

The slide of the Anglicans/Episcopalians into covetousness occurred through efforts to establish a viable plantation system.

One Down

This contaminating movement of the heart constricted the Episcopalian spirit with age-old evil. Upon discovery of a tobacco cultivation industry, the introduction of English common law with due process, and the institution of private property laid in Virginia the groundwork for capitalistic enterprise. With little or no regard for the unifying power of the Thirty-Nine, nor its forward Kingdom perspective, Anglicans/Episcopalians spread out along river banks to make money by cultivating tobacco.79 Procuring enormous continental wealth, in accommodation to Matt 6:24’s mammonism, overrode establishing a flourishing Anglican/Episcopalian community in the New World.

Two Down

The slide of the Puritans into covetousness has been documented much more prodigiously. “New England was becoming involved in the ways of the Old World, striving for commercial success, competing for profits, tasting power and assuming rights, ready to defend them legally or otherwise. The spirit of European nationalism, capitalism and rationalism, with its apparatus of political and legal theory, was already growing strong.”80 Rather than the professed biblical, all-consuming, glory to God, material covetousness disengaged the Puritan spirit from the Bible.

Slowly, the Puritan cultural power sank away from high ideals. “In America the character of the people underwent a change; they moved further (sic) into the frontier, they became more absorbed in business and profits than in religion and salvation . . ..”81 In effect, inland frontier areas served as escape routes from alleged religious domination along coastal areas.

Succumbing to “love of money,” 1 Tim 6:10, multiple Puritan explorers for riches bade defiance to the letter and the spirit of the Thirty-Nine; out of this waywardness an unforeseen complication arose. “The energetic, executive, alert, practical shrewd American, in a word the Yankee, begins to emerge out of the Puritan saint.”82 To stress this Yankeeism: “He becomes in time less and less preoccupied with the war on Satan, more and more with the practical problems of making a life for himself and his people, saints and sinners alike, in the new environment.”83 Procurement of the enormous continental wealth overrode initial intents of the Puritans; the establishment of the New Jerusalem vision faded into a patchwork of sordid Old World preoccupations.

At first, then, Puritanism as manifested along the Eastern Seaboard, focused on the primary, encompassing significance of the Bible as confessed in the Thirty-Nine, living inclined to and suffused by the glory of God. Intentionally, patterns of deference to the Articles of Religion held the colonists’ loyalty. Then, gradually, in passages of time, disarming changes took hold and confessional insensitivity crept in. “Leadership by the learned and dutiful subordination of the unlearned—as long as the original religious creed retained its hold upon the people these exhortations were heeded; in the eighteenth century, as it ceased to arouse their loyalties, they went seeking after gods that were utterly strange to Puritanism. They demanded fervent rather than learned ministers and asserted the equality of all men.”84 Numbing combinations of Arminianism swept more and more away. Contrary, then, to the Thirty-Nine patterns for tomorrow and in search for egalitarianism, they violated and downgraded scriptural givens as Eph 4:11–14, the commissioning of Christ Jesus’s office bearers from and in the Church, which many ill-trained ministers among the Puritans abused with high-profile elitism, another sinister air of covetousness.

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Over time, erosion of faithfulness settled in and commandeered an appeasing influence. Easier unobservable pangs of reprobation than bolder steps of growing community on the foundation of the Scriptures as confessed in the Articles of Religion. Thus these British colonists, Anglican/Episcopalian and Puritan alike, generally emulated diverse Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and Dutch explorers, dreaming of wealth as they peopled as well as mapped first all of Virginia and New England. Love-of-money soon betrayed confessional integrity.

2–2

In 1648, upon the Westminster Assembly, many Puritans adopted the Cambridge Platform, thereby essentially turning into the way of Presbyterianism, or Congregationalism.

With Puritan adoption of the Westminster Standards, in North America the Anglicans/Episcopalians alone carried responsibility for the Thirty-Nine. This North American manifestation of the Church of England, Episcopalianism, suffered constant decline, eventually soft-pedaling the Articles of Religion, the more as congregations succumbed to middle-class slackness in wealthier sorts of cultures.

The Canadian Descent

In Canada, during the twentieth to twenty-first centuries, valuation of the Thirty-Nine underwent constant deterioration, compromising the original impact of this confession of faith. Specifically, as interpreted in the late twentieth century, “During the reign of Edward VI, a number of Articles were published to define the position of the Church of England on a number of issues, to attempt to define a middle way between the old Catholic ways and the new Calvinist reforms. In all 42 Articles were proposed in 1552. These were not accepted but, in 1559, during the reign of Elizabeth, the Thirty-Nine Articles were adopted as a balanced statement of the Anglican positions on certain disputed topics . . .. They are not a formal and full statement of doctrine but rather attempt to deal with certain controversies of the 16th century. The articles try to avoid a narrow definition and leave room for a variety of interpretation . . . an important principle of Anglican theology.”85 This pushing into the twenty-first century revaluation of the Thirty-Nine for a now characteristic middle-of-the-road Anglican movement, even an agnostic spirit, tells of the current worth the Articles possess, at best a token presence. Even though the Thirty-Nine portray a rounded confessional statement, they were for the road ahead revised in quality and diverted into historical mists. Now, “The Anglican Church is not a ‘confessional’ church, a church which subscribes to a particular set of beliefs written down in a confessional statement.”86 Rather than a written-out list of beliefs, Canadian Anglicans tend to take pride in theological pluralism with its contempt of Scriptures.

The American Descent

In America, prevailing wind currents of unbelief urging to change direction dramatically further demolished Episcopalian confessional integrity. “So believers . . . are forced to face the fact that today all Bibles, creeds, doctrines, prayers, and hymns are nothing but religious artifacts created to allow us to speak of our God experience at an earlier point in our history. But history has moved us to a place where the literal content of these artifacts is all but meaningless, the traditional definitions inoperative, and the symbols no longer competent points to reality.”87 This revolutionary contempt gutting all creeds, inclusive the Thirty-Nine, opened up Episcopalians for anti-biblical, man-centered days after tomorrow. “So being a disciple of Jesus does not require me to make literal creedal affirmations in propositional form about the reality of this theistic God who supposedly invaded our world and who lived among us for a time in the person of Jesus.”88 South, then, of the 49th Parallel and the Great Lakes, Episcopalians arrived at confessional devaluation as the right thing to do—less than even the Apostles Creed.

Across North America, however religious Anglicanism/Episcopalianism may be, neglect, if not rejection, of its original creedal affirmation sacks faithfulness through unwillingness to say: on the basis of the Word, here we come.

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From the heartland of Anglicanism this yet, the Church of England’s 1973 official definition with respect to the Thirty-Nine: “The doctrine of the Church of England is grounded in the holy Scriptures, and in such teachings of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church as are agreeable to the said Scriptures. In particular such doctrine is found in the thirty-nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal.”89 If not in North America, at least in 1973 England, the Thirty-Nine carried a measure of weight, even if this broad consensus faced huge opposition. “Peculiar to the Church of England is a former bugbear, subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, a set of doctrinal formulae drawn up in an attempt to define the dogmatic position of the Church of England in relation to the controversies of the sixteenth century . . .. In 1975 the General Synod more or less laid the Articles to rest, deciding that in future the clergy need only ‘affirm and declare their belief in the faith which is revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds and to which the historic formularies of the Church of England bear witness.”90 So much then, for the original Anglican confessional foundation; in its place came embarrassing messes of private opinion.

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In North America too, covetousness pushes aside and away the Articles of Religion, a process continuing since Anglican life started in the Thirteen Colonies.

THE DESCENT OF THE WESTMINSTER

In North America, the Standards went down two routes—Congregationalism by adopting the 1648 Cambridge Platform and Presbyterianism by living out the Westminster Standards.

1–5

In early America: Transitory Congregationalism in cities and villages struggled with loss of supervision over westwards-moving, frontier-settling members; these lapsing church members in a cultural drift preferred the lure of idolatrous wealth-gathering to creedal wholeness. Leadership, then, to deflect further pangs of desertion, concocted the 1662 Half-Way Covenant;91 they sought unity at truth’s expense throughout New England by including lapsed members and unbelievers in ecclesiastical membership—baptizing children to win hearts and thereby regain colonial supervision.

This Half-Way measure to hold unbelievers with their children failed, unable to bar murky behaviors of faithlessness. “The movement was from the sovereignty of God to the emphasis on man’s helplessness, to a decline of efforts to arouse sinners, to a paralysis within the churches, to an interest in externals and the arrival of the ‘Half-Way Covenant.’”92 This failure in New England endangered Congregationalist existence until the ministry of Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening.

In the shrinking Congregationalist creedal commitment, two movements clashed: A deterministic/fatalistic Calvinism based on unconditional election against increasingly combative Arminianism, democratic/egalitarian/humanistic. Arminians improvised a religiosity that overworked human ability in salvation and traded on the hope to counteract massing irreligion. “In the year 1729, when Jonathan Edwards became full pastor of the church at Northampton, Mass., New England religion had already a long process of decline. The theocratic ideal of the first settlers was disappearing, Calvinistic theology had become largely a matter of formality, and worldliness had been growing among the people. Calvinistic Christianity was being buried under a heavy coating of political and economic facts which had little relevance to its theology.”93 This “spirit of worldliness” and ‘formalism”94 consequently, at least until the Great Awakening, eviscerated Congregationalism, taking down whatever of Cambridge Platform Presbyterianism that remained of this movement. And left the churches to Arminian-hearted Bible interpretations.

In early Canada: Congregationalists given to the New Side/New School/Newlight95 persuasion sought evasion of confessional patterns of integrity with active discrimination on the basis of scientific discoveries.

Early eighteenth-century Congregationalists spreading northwards and westwards from New England carried the Westminster Standards also into the Maritime Provinces. And shifted into a worldly mode with the arrival of railways, telegraph connections, newspapers, stock exchanges, steam-powered factories, agricultural improvements, etc., that is, industrialization and urbanization. Heart-strong beginnings faded. “The shift was evident in the character of many of the supporters of the Church, in the growing interest in secular affairs, and in the weakening of attitudes of devoutness and piety.”96 As on the Eastern Seaboard, concentrations of Congregationalists everywhere became entangled in New Side/New School/Newlight movements, taking the Standards down into the Arminianism unleashed by Jonathan Edwards.