The denomination in the United States that goes by the name of Presbyterianism is a legacy of the Reformed tradition. By the end of the sixteenth century, versions of Reformed-style ecclesiology and doctrine were flourishing in the Netherlands, Lowland Scotland, the Rhineland and certain city states in Switzerland. More embattled versions emerged in France and the England of Elizabeth i. Migrations from Scotland and Ireland that began in the seventeenth century brought Scottish-style Presbyterianism to the middle and southern colonies in British North America. Never accorded official status of the kind it enjoyed in Scotland, the Church became politically important in places such as Pennsylvania and, because of its insistence on a learned ministry, instrumental in the founding of academies and colleges, most notably the College of New Jersey (1746), which numbered Jonathan Edwards and John Witherspoon among its early leaders. As happened elsewhere, the college eventually delegated the training of ministers and theological/biblical topics to Princeton Seminary (founded in 1812), which subsequently became independent of the university.
Outnumbered at the middle of the nineteenth century by Baptists and Methodists, although still ranking third in size among Protestant denominations, Presbyterians of several kinds constituted about 3 per cent of the country's population. Today, when the collective versions may number a little more than two million adherents, that percentage has fallen below 1 per cent. Presbyterians began to divide in the early decades of the new republic and, like amoeba, have continued to do so, a process punctuated from time to time by moments of reunion or reconciliation. For readers unfamiliar with this story, an appended seven-page ‘Genealogical table of American Presbyterians’ provides an overview of the abundance of fragments. What explains this fragmentation? The answer depends on when and where a schism occurred. Before the Civil War, Presbyterians who insisted that the Bible upheld slavery broke off from Presbyterians who questioned the slave system, although only a few were ‘strident’ advocates of ‘immediatism’. Other tensions arose around revivalism and its disruptive effects on church order. But for the authors of this book, schism and sectarianism were principally a response to a ‘liberalism’ they associate with Charles Darwin, a point of view that weakened the authority of the Bible and, more generally, the authority of an ‘orthodoxy’ enshrined in the Westminster Confession. Unhappily, some Presbyterians began to argue that the denomination could permit its ministers to endorse a selective version of Westminster and/or understand the Bible as historically inflected. For others, however, it was imperative that the Bible be regarded as inerrant. Ruptures that persist to this day arose in the wake of either assertion.
The four authors of this book never decry this process. Indeed, each is aligned with a different version of Presbyterianism. Even so, they seem to share a sense of alarm about the liberalism they attribute to The origin of species. The near-total absence of intellectual and doctrinal history from this book means that readers will not learn of the ‘common sense realism’ approach to truth that became normative among Presbyterian clergy in the mid-nineteenth century and blinded generations of Presbyterians (and others) to the methods of experimental science; perhaps more tellingly, no references occur to German philosophy and theology as mediated through figures such as Coleridge. The first of these aspects of Presbyterianism is narrated in E. Brooks Holifield's masterful The gentlemen theologians: American theology in southern culture, 1795-1860 (Eugene, Or 1978), the second in James Hasting Nichols's Romanticism in American theology: Nevin and Schaff at Mercersburg (Chicago, Il 1961), books not noticed by this book's authors, who sometimes fall back on outdated scholarship.
In keeping with the unspoken rule that a denominational history must extol a contribution of some kind to the well-being of American Protestantism, the four authors emphasise the Presbyterian commitment to ‘Evangelicalism’. Hence their warm words for the post-World War II resurgence of mainstream Protestantism and, especially, for Billy Graham, a Presbyterian who never preached only (or mainly) to denominational audiences. That the postwar boom began to collapse in the late 1960s is not mentioned. Nor do the authors linger on Presbyterian assumptions about Church and State that played such a powerful role in Scotland and Ireland and surfaced again from time to time in early America and, in curious ways, have resurfaced with the rise of the religious right. That several branches of the Church became aligned with Falwell-style politics is minimised, perhaps because this would compromise the authors’ insistence that their denomination was in the forefront of social and moral progress in the nineteenth century – a half-truth, at best. Indeed, the Presbyterians most associated with moral and social reform – for example, Charles Finney – moved outside the denomination.
Other silences are perplexing. No one would learn much about worship from this book or grasp why right worship mattered to several generations of Presbyterians. No one would learn that the Westminster Assembly regarded Presbyterianism as biblically mandated, an assumption that seems to have evaporated. Nor would anyone learn that John Williamson Nevin rebuked his fellow Presbyterians for ignoring John Calvin's understanding of the sacraments of baptism and holy communion; as Nevin discerned after beginning to read Calvin, the mid-nineteenth century Princeton theologians were closer to Baptists than to the Reformers they claimed to revere. For that matter, Calvin is a ghostly figure in these pages, as is the Westminster Confession: regarded as authoritative by certain branches but never unpacked. Do contemporary Presbyterians continue to reiterate the truisms of the ‘federal’ or covenant theology and the clumsy scholasticisms of that text? Do they lament the disappearance of the Sunday Sabbath which, in my childhood Presbyterian household, was rigidly observed? And how interesting it would have been had the authors of this book acknowledged the darker meanings of their master word ‘Evangelical’ in present-day America.
