Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield

“ No less an one than Calvin teaches us how impossible it is to avoid confessing the doctrine of sovereign reprobation if we confess the doctrine of election, of which it is not the logical inference, but the other half—writing with some sharpness: "Many, as if they wished to avert odium from God, so confess election as to deny that any one is reprobated. But this is puerile and absurd, because election itself could not exist without being opposed to reprobation. ”

“ Continuity and harmony of teaching is only attainable within the limits of the doctrinal standards. With respect to all that is beyond or outside them, successive teachers may and do differ; the people are confused, and grow first doubtful, then agnostic, and then oppositive. If we would have the people pass beyond the first principles of the faith, we must pass just in that proportion beyond them in our Creed—which is not only our official testimony to the truth, and our official text-book of doctrine, but our standard of teaching to all our pastors. ”

“ We have but to open our eyes to see that the living Church of God is already one in the unity of the Spirit, or awaits, for its full realization, only the spirit of oneness in our hearts. If it were, indeed, true that "our Church" constitutes the whole true Church of God, then we should beware of excluding from our pulpits any whom God has called to preach His Word. But if we all who, under many names, hold fast to the one head, are, by common communion with Him, united into one spiritual body, it by no means follows that each member is not required to do its own work in its own appointed way. ”

“ And although it is the duty of every church, as of every individual, to see to it that she does not profess a faith she does not believe, yet her convictions are not the measure of the truth. Its norm and standard are elsewhere; and a church's convictions are rather the measure of herself than of the truth. It is the duty of every church to believe and profess faith in all that the Bible teaches. And when we speak of revising a creed, the real question is not (as has been often supposed) whether the church still believes the creed, but whether the Bible still teaches it ”

“ In a word, a creed, in the sense of a doctrinal standard, as distinguished from a liturgical form, must be extensive enough not only to witness to the essential Christianity of a people, but to enable them, on the one hand, to testify through it to the truth of God as they have attained knowledge of it—for testimony to truth against heresy and error from within is only second in importance to testimony to truth against heathenism and error from without—and to protect them, on the other hand, in their Christian rights in the administration of the Gospel. ”

“ God's electing love is the highest manifestation of His love for man, not (as some seem to think) a limitation of it: it does not make His general love without effect—it gives it effect. That the Confession lays most stress on it, is to preserve the right proportion of faith and to glorify God's general love, not to derogate from it. Doing so it makes everything of love, bases its whole fabric on it, and all the more glorifies it that it does not forget God's justice. After the Bible, it is the most perfect charter of the divine love current among men. ”

“ Thus, while the theology of the Reformed churches was being matured, and the course of controversy was bringing it about that the deepest and broadest lines of thought, which run through all the Christian ages, were engrossing the minds of men, a body of pious and devoted preachers of the word was being prepared, who could not state the precious truths of the Gospel without suffusing their statement with the breath of true godliness. ”

“ Perhaps, at bottom, we are face to face here, in more or less developed form, with one application of the modern doctrine of the "Christian consciousness." But at all events it has little fitness among us. Presbyterians do not look upon their creed as the expression of what their people believe: but rather as the expression of what they ought to believe. Like the perfect moral standard of life—the divine perfection; this creed strives to represent the perfect intellectual standard of faith—the divine truth. ”

“ The more the Westminster Confession of Faith is studied, and the better it is understood, the less likely is it to be either abandoned, explained away, or patched up with scraps of cruder new thinking. ”

“ The Confession already provides firm ground for all who believe that all those that die in infancy are elect, and it does this without dogmatism and without sacrificing its moderation and calm guardedness of statement. Why sacrifice this? No one can doubt that what the Confession asserts is exactly true: that "elect infants dying in infancy are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit, who worketh when and where and how He pleaseth." ”

“ Preterition, or negative reprobation, is an eternal decree of God, purposing within Himself to deny unto the non-elect that peculiar love of His wherewith election is accompanied, as, also, that special grace which infallibly bringeth to glory. ”

“ Presbyterians are no relic-worshippers; they claim the right, and have exercised it, of adapting their Creed to their living faith. But when nothing is to be gained and perhaps much lost they will not fail to consider it a certain vandalism to throw away, merely in the license of change, a flag under which so many battles have been fought and so many glorious victories won, and perhaps even more glorious defeats suffered. They will not keep the old, merely because it is old ”

“ Overstrictness of formula is not, however, the cause of all the restlessness, as over against the Westminster Standards, which is, at present, exhibiting itself in the churches, nor even of all that arises apart from doctrinal disharmony with the Westminster Confession. It has grown quite common to hear objections directed wholly against its form; it is alleged that it is too long, too full, too detailed, too analytical, too scholastic, too logical, or too polemic to serve properly as a creed for the profession of a Church's faith. ”

“ It may easily be inferred from what I have just said that I do not think our present formula a lax one. It is a liberal one; as liberal as it ought to be; as liberal as it is safe to be; as liberal as is consistent with the Church's witness to and guardianship over the truth of God. But it is in no sense a lax formula. It is, on the contrary, a binding formula—a strict formula—in the use of which no man can honestly accept our Confession of Faith and not be a sound Calvinist. ”

“ Enough has been already quoted to point out that the Westminster divines had in mind, as, indeed, they could not fail to have, the very obvious and necessary distinction between God's sovereign decree of preterition—"negative reprobation," as Arrowsmith calls it—which must be as free and sovereign as election itself, of which it is, indeed, but the negative statement; and his dealing with those thus passed by, which depends on their deserts. The fact that men are sinners does not affect the sovereignty of preterition; it only affects the treatment they are left to by preterition. ”

“ As they are the most complete, so are they the most carefully framed, and the most inclusive, and the most acceptable, of all the standards of the Reformation. It can scarcely be necessary to stop to point out in detail the characteristic excellences of the Confession: its clear analysis, its lucid definitions, its atmosphere of devout piety, its completeness, its logical exactness, the richness of its phraseology. It will perhaps be more useful to occupy ourselves with some remarks upon a few of the chief objections that are most commonly brought against it. ”

“ If we, however, range the world over and gather together indiscriminately all the objections that have been made to the Westminster Confession during these last years, we are in danger of confusing even such opposite points of view as these. In the midst of such an agitation for change as has arisen in the American Church during the last months, therefore, it seems necessary for us to take a general glance over the Presbyterian world with a view to tracing the causes which are working in one place or another, to the production of this restlessness. ”

“ Church with the Church of God, and seeks the fusion of all denominations into one external body on account of difficulty in conceiving of the Church as one amid a multiplicity of forms of organization, creed, and life. The last few years have given birth to many schemes to secure Church unity by some external means, or in some external sense—by inclusion in a common organization, as if unity were attainable "by building a great house around a divided family," or by enforced uniformity in forms of worship, or the like—none of them the product of a truly liberal spirit. ”

“ Now certainly it is worth while saying to these brethren that they have no grievance, that they have not accepted the Confession for more than the system of doctrine, and that seeing that they are not asked to assert that its forms of statement are absolutely perfect and incapable of improvement, they ought to think twice, or even thrice, before they enter into the unsettling path of revision, without prospect, or indeed possibility, of at all bettering their relation to it. ”

“ It is so perfectly gratuitous as almost to reach the level of the sublime. And when Dr. Van Dyke adduces "the ambiguous phrase 'elect infants dying in infancy,'" as sanctioning "the popular impression that we hold the abhorrent doctrine of the damnation of infants," and as, therefore, one of the three cases in which the necessity for revision is obvious, he renders it easy for us to reply that the phrase is not, properly speaking, "ambiguous," and that the Confession is certainly in no need of revision to guard it from a wholly unreasonable interpretation. ”

“ And, on the other hand, the men of tenderness of conscience and pure heart toward God and men, have leaned not only to the Confession of the permanently central truths, but to the eager and solemn Confession of whatever truth the time and its trial called for—to its Confession not only individually, but by the unanimous and accordant voice of the witnessing Church of Christ. ”

“ In a word, a public confession, by virtue of the very fact that it is public, cannot be, and ought not to be pretended to be, just the expression of his faith which each one who accepts it as representing his faith would have framed had he only himself to consider. ”

“ Consequently, sin is not the cause of preterition; election is the cause of preterition; i. e., the choosing of some is the cause that "the rest" are left. Sin is the cause, however, of how the preterited ones are treated. And to guard this, the Westminster men were accustomed to use a phrase they borrowed from Wollevius, which affirmed that sin is not the causa reprobationis, but the causa reprobabilitatis; that is, sin is not the cause of reprobation (otherwise the elect, who also are sinners, would be reprobates) , but it is the cause of men being in a reprobatible state. ”

“ The attempt to pare down our testimony to truth to the narrowest limits is similar to the attempt to enter heaven on the minimum of morality. And how could a minimum creed serve as a text-book of doctrine, or protect the people in the exercise of their rights as against the misbelief of a pastor? The necessary contents of a doctrinal standard are determined by a threefold test: (1) . It must contain our confession of essential Christianity—all the holy truths that lie at the basis of our Christian religion must find their places in it. ”

“ The experience of the Calvinists during the Laudian oppression had compacted them into a single body, enabled them to look upon their differences as relatively unimportant, and inclined them to seek to frame a Confession which should be inclusive of all soundly Calvinistic thought, and which should exclude only those errors which cut to the roots of the system which all Calvinists unite in believing to be the truth of God. ”

“ No one who looks back upon the history of early Protestantism can fail to perceive that the times were ripening toward the middle of the seventeenth century, and especially in England, for just such an enterprise. During the century or more that had elapsed since the Reformation, the Reformed Theology had developed into a mature and maturely tested system of truth, tried everywhere by the Scriptures and in the fires of controversy. ”

“ In the history of Scotland, and in the Reformed Churches generally, it does not appear that the men who sought for the minimum of truth to confess, were the men who had the most of the Divine spirit of truth. ”

“ As discussion goes on, it can scarcely fail to become increasingly plain to all, not only that the Presbyterian Church is satisfied with her Standards, but that she loves them and finds in them the best statement—most moderate and most inclusive as well as most logical and most complete—of the truth of God as she apprehends it, that has ever been framed. ”

“ To adopt every proposition contained in the Westminster Confession and Catechisms is more than the vast majority of our ministers either do or can do. To make them profess to do it is a great sin. It hurts their consciences. ”

“ Instead of being disturbed or infected by the restlessness of these Churches, bound to a confession with a strictness that must wound every tender conscience which finds any phraseology in the document to which it can raise any exception, we should pity them as brethren still in durance, and point out to them the safe pathway through which we escaped more than a century and a half ago. ”

“ But Church courts can afford, and do venture, to hold men strictly to the terms of a liberal formula, when they could not to an illiberal one. Overstrictness demands and begets laxity in performance; while a truly liberal but conservative formula binds all essentially sound men together against laxity. In pleading for a liberal formula, therefore, we wish it distinctly understood that we do not plead either for a lax formula, or much less for a lax administration of any formula—within which an essential dishonesty seems to lurk. ”