Presbyterianism's Departure From The Reformation After the Council of Dort
Presbyterianism and the Reformed Church
by Timothy Adam
We hear the phrase “Presbyterian and Reformed” often enough that we may assume that most people realize, as is implicit in this style of coupling, that the two words stand for two distinct things. To those from outside of the world of British Protestantism the situation might seem rather different than it does to those of us who are Protestant Episcopalians, they seem to take for granted that the chair reserved for the British Church at the table of Reformed Protestantism belongs to Presbyterians. The chair in question, however, is really not theirs to give, and the mistake they have yet to realize, and the reason they don’t see us still sitting at the head of the table, is because they themselves are now sitting at the wrong one.
History testifies to the truth that the Presbyterian tradition is not an independent Reformed tradition, but rather represents a non-conforming tradition within the Protestant Episcopalianism from which it sprung. At the close of the initial 16th century reformation the whole of the British Isles was Episcopalian, there being bishops in the Churches of England, Scotland, and Ireland. It was not until the beginning of what historians call “The Long Eighteenth Century”, a period well beyond the Protestant Reformation, that the episcopate was finally disestablished in one of the three Kingdoms.
Presbyterianism arising as it does by a partial departure of the earlier Protestantism established within Great Britain and Ireland during the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, in some respects it represents an apostasy from the Confessionally Reformed faith, while in other respects it represents a continuation of it.
At the Ecumenical Council of the Reformed Churches held in the city of Dort from 1618-1619, which provides a sure definition to the Reformed Christian Religion in that it represented a unified profession of the Protestant faith against the errors of Romanism and Anabaptism, the British Church was represented by Episcopalians. No British dissenters or non-conformists of any type were invited to Dort, and the place of the first signature of a foreign delegate on the Judgment, a position of honor, was reserved for the Rt. Rev. George Carleton, sitting in the oldest episcopal see in the British Isles, who was styled in the honor after the ancient manner, “George, Bishop of Llandaff”. The Ecumenical Council openly pleaded the authority of the Protestant Reformed faith as then legally established within the Church of England, and the English Confession, in the settlement of their Judgment. The official publication of the Judgment of the Synod reads:
“Wherefore this Synod, holden at Dort, requesteth, and in the name of the Lord adjureth, all, whosever in godly zeal call upon the name of our Saviour Jesus Christ, that they would be pleased to judge of the doctrines of the Reformed Churches, not out of calumnies raked up here and there, no nor out of the private tenets of some, whether old or new, doctrines, and those oftentimes sinisterly cited, or corrupted, or strained to a sense never intended by the authors, but out of the published Confessions of the Churches themselves, and (for these points) out of this Declaration of orthodox doctrine agreed upon, and enacted by the joint consent of all and every the members of this whole Synod.”
And further:
“We, being desirous, that the Churches of these countries may fully enjoy the fruit of this great, and holy work, (being such as the Reformed Churches never saw before) and holding nothing more dear, nor more pertinent to our charge, than the glory of God’s most sacred name, the maintaining and spreading of the true Reformed Religion (which the foundation of our prosperity, and the bond of combination among the confederate Provinces) than the concord, peace, and tranquility of our Churches; as also the preserving of correspondence, and communion between the Churches within these countries, and all other foreign Reformed Churches, from which we neither may nor can dissever ourselves, having viewed, recognized, the aforesaid Judgment and Sentence of the Synod, have fully in all points approved, confirmed, and ratified, and by these presents do approve, confirm, and ratify the same.”
It should be pointed out the confession of the Church of England, finalized in 1571, stands today exactly as it did in the year 1619, the liturgy and polity of the Church being likewise little altered from that time (and in terms of how they have changed, few, even of their detractors, would claim they have become less Reformed in their alterations). This was the state of things at the culmination of the 16th century Magisterial Reformation, the great Ecumenical Council of Dort, the high-water mark of unified Reformed Christian faith: Protestant Episcopalianism was the acknowledged standard and ideal of the Reformed Churches. It is necessary to look forward to events which would occur within British society during the middle of the 17th century to understand how the status quo at the end of the Protestant Reformation be set aside, and what has been called the “Peace of Dort” breached.
In the Middle of the 17th century, during the reign of the son of James I, King Charles I, a collective of dissenting religious and political forces would rebel against Church and State, and through a vicious military campaign gain control of both. They would murder the King and Archbishop, and put a republic headed by a dictator in their place. Likewise, while in power they would outlaw the Prayer Book, depose the Bishops, and set up in the place of the historic English Confession of the Reformation (the 39 Articles of Religion), new standards produced by a group of non-conforming clergy. These new standards, written between 1643-1648 at Westminster Abbey, are known as the “Westminster Confession of Faith”, the “Westminster Larger Catechism”, and “Westminster Shorter Catechism”. These 17th century documents were specifically designed as a reaction to those already established in the Church of England, and were defined in many respects by their opposition to the Protestant Religion as then received. These three formularies, produced during the rebellion, would become a central part of the long-standing tradition that has come to be known as Presbyterianism.
Though ultimately both the King and Bishops were restored to England by the aid of anti-Episcopal parties who had supported the revolt, but had enough of even more extreme dissenters than themselves, the rebellion itself was nevertheless justified by the claim that it was in response to a general conspiracy of the King and Bishops to abandon the Reformed Protestant religion. Central to the argument was the claim that England was adopting the five points of the Dutch Remonstrants, or Arminianism, that had been universally condemned by the Reformed Churches at Dort in 1618-1619. Proofs of the supposed Arminianism of the Church of England under Charles I which were offered were the Royal Declaration of 1628, which says little more than that the Articles of Religion are to be read in their “literal and grammatical” sense, and provides no direct commentary on the doctrine of Predestination, and the so-called “Arminian Church Canons” of 1640, of which an examination will likewise reveal nothing whatsoever pertaining to the five points of the Dutch Remonstrants at all. Undoubtedly attention was drawn to the seventeen additional canons passed in the year 1640 because outside of these nothing whatsoever was changed in the formal religion of the Church of England, the Confession and Liturgy being just what they had been during the reign of King James I when he sent our British representatives to the assembly at Dort. Whatever nuanced opinions and practices were developing among the individual bishops and priests within the Church of England in the mid-17th century, setting aside the propaganda, the real impetus for the revolt was not to be found in the claims that the Church of England was moving to undo the Reformation. The problem was that a non-conforming religious system was growing within the British Isles, the advocates of which wished to overthrow the Protestant Reformed religion as established by the Reformers themselves in the 16thcentury. That this was their true motivation, and not their pretended fears of a reversion to Romanism, is demonstrated by what they put in the place of the received Reformed Religion when they managed to bring themselves into power.
The doctrine which had first begun to grow among dissenters in the latter half of the 16thcentury, and was known but had been universally rejected among the established Churches which met in 1618-1619, was called Presbyterianism, and during the 17th century it became permanently conjoined with the three formularies produced by non-conformists at Westminster. In its most basic form, Presbyterianism as a system of polity, or church government, is one in which the Church is governed by priests, that is presbyters, rather than a hierarchy of clerics, including bishops and archbishops, however, as specifically advocated by its proponents it entailed a democratic model of church. In this model, the church was run from the bottom up, that is individual congregants vote for “elders”, and priests, called “ministers”, and the whole church is governed by the collection of these. This was distinct from the ancient Episcopal system largely retained during the 16th century Reformation where magistrates selected bishops, and bishops selected priests, and the church was run by the collection of these with the individual congregation playing a passive role in its governance. There was an inherent incompatibility between Presbyterianism and the existing system of government in the British Church, the former literally turned the latter upside down, taking power away from the King in the governance of the Church, and placing it in the hands of the people, or more practically speaking those who they chose to be over them. To Protestant Episcopalians, this effort to restore the clergy to a position where they were not accountable to a higher lay power in the person of the Magistrate, seemed like a return to the Roman system but without the bishops. For this reason they would call Presbyterianism a continuation of the heresy, that of “Hildebrandianism”, where the laity were placed in full subjugation to the ordained, this regardless of whether they had chosen these as their masters.
The problem, however, became greatly compounded when certain advocates of Presbyterianism began to posit it not as a potential form of church government, but, and this relating to their additional adoption of a doctrine called the “regulative principle”, that it was the only legitimate form of church government. The “regulative principle” in its must fundamental sense required that everything within the church be regulated on the basis of an express example in scripture. These Presbyterians would claim that God commanded their system within the pages of the Bible, and that it thus existed by “Divine Right”. This position, known as Jure Divino Presbyterianism, would become a considerable and lasting force within the Presbyterian tradition; it was also to become the justification for the violence to overthrow the Reformed Church as it was settled at the close of the Magisterial Reformation. It is important to understand, however, that operating under the system of authority maintained by the Jure Divino Presbyterians, the whole of the Ecumenical Council of Dort from 1618-1619 lacks validity, as well as the three formularies ratified there, the Judgment or Canons, the Belgic Confession, and the Heidelberg Catechism, as these were not authorized by a national Church under the Presbyterian system of representation by congregationally chosen elders and priests. In this sense, Jure Divino Presbyterianism rejects the authority upon which the Ecumenical Council of Dort was conducted just as it does that upon which the English Confession (the Thirty-nine Articles) was ratified, and is only logically compatible with the definition of “Reformed” by the standards produced at Westminster from 1643-1648, as its adherents regard these standards to be in their essence a product of their own movement with an independent claim to a “Divine Right”.
However, a close examination of even the three documents produced at Westminster reveals that they makes no statement for or against the position of Bishops within the Reformed Church. Presbyterianism as a system of polity was only one part, and a rather controversial one, of a large collective of diverse dissenting religious opinions, and the set of Westminster standards which have become attached to Presbyterianism contain an inconsistent mix-mash of these, while also retaining certain elements of conforming Protestant Episcopal opinion as well. Along with the new system of polity, there was the matter of the application of the “regulative principle” contained within the three new formularies, the details of which had not been spelled out within them. The “regulative principle” was in contradiction to that within the standards of the English Reformation, and as it was developed and applied by British dissenters it became a call to remove all extra-Biblical tradition from the life of the church. In following this, Presbyterianism as a religious system would provide for itself justification for the total removal of liturgy and Holy Days, and the replacement of them with the extemporaneous prayers of the ministers in worship services, and the reduction of the daily celebrations of the Church to a single weekly “Sabbath” holiday.
In contrast, the Continental Reformed tradition as exemplified by the Netherlands which hosted the Ecumenical Council of Dort, maintained continuously a fixed liturgy, with its own forms of Morning and Evening Prayer, and the continued celebration of Holy Days. They likewise had a three-fold hierarchy of ordained ministry, which as in the Church of England, was under the direction of the Magistrate rather than the congregation, though it lacked a separate tactile succession for the office it acknowledged as that of a “bishop”. The Church Order established for the Church of the Netherlands at Dort in 1619 was nonetheless a continuation of the non-democratic system of church government, in which the chain of authority flowed from the top down, as it had always been before the Protestant Reformation. All this being so, we might stand in wonderment and confusion that contemporary heirs of Reformed Churches on the Continent see all of these departures from the common tradition of the Protestant Reformation among the Presbyterians as acceptable, and in some instances even as an improvement. What are we to make of the many so-called adherents to the “Dutch Reformed” faith that from the early 20th century openly threw off their own heritage in order to adopt a Presbyterian-like form of polity in its place?
It seems that much of the justification for the view that Presbyterianism belongs in the place of Episcopalism within the Reformed world rests on the misguided claim that the former represents the “Scottish” Reformed tradition, and the latter an alternative English form. While it is true that “Presbyterianism” did originate in Scotland, far from representing the Scottish Reformation, it represents a later development which would be in competition with it. The indigenous tradition of the Scottish Reformation has been almost entirely lost having been submerged under an English product with which it is largely incompatible. Much of the confusion seems to arise from the disestablishment of the episcopate in Scotland which occurred in 1690, during the period which marked the beginning of the “Long Eighteenth Century”.
As regrettable as the disestablishment of the episcopate within the Church of Scotland was, it was in a certain respect a victory for Protestant Episcopalianism over the Jure Divino Presbyterians who had sworn at the beginning of the century to abolish Episcopalianism within the whole of the British Church. Episcopalianism maintained that although episcopacy was beneficial to the Church, it was not of its essence, that is not by Divine Right. This position was consistent with the Protestant Episcopal counterpart to the “regulative principle”, that being the “normative principle”, which maintains that outside of the direct commands and prohibitions of Scripture, its example set a pattern for what should be “normative” in the Church, and allows room for the Church, as is necessary, to adopt forms of polity consistent with Scripture but not contained within it. A compromise was made with the anti-Episcopal faction in Scotland, they would support Episcopalianism in England and Ireland, and could govern the Church of Scotland without bishops. The Church of Scotland was also allowed to at this time adopt the Westminster formularies, which retained a certain position of headship for the King within the Church, and the ancient system of “investiture”, or Magistrates appointing clergy, would continue on. Likewise, the Church would not be independent from the State, but non-Scottish Bishops would continue to exercise a certain degree of direct influence in its affairs through the House of Lords long after the abolition of the Scottish episcopate itself. 1690 may be remembered both as the year that the Church of Scotland lost her bishops, and as the year she repented from “Solemn League and Covenant”, the hard-line Presbyterian position.
This compromise did not however leave intact the legacy of the 16th century Reformation in Scotland. It is a known fact that the great national reformer of the Church of Scotland, John Knox, was a great champion of the liturgy (leaving Scotland a Prayer Book that would stand for generations), and proponent of an Episcopal system (leaving it a church order retaining a national diocesan system each with a “superintendent”). And it should be noted, like that written at Westminster (which may properly be regarded as an English confession), none of the other three confessions which have been used in the Church of Scotland since the Reformation mention anything of the system of polity known as “Presbyterianism”. Scotland had subscribed to the Judgment of Dort in the person of the Rev. Walter Balcanquhall in 1619, doing so on behalf of the Church and King of Scotland, and like the various other national churches which attended it had its own national confession to which it subscribed, the Scottish Articles of Religion of 1616. Further, although the Palatinate, or Heidelberg Catechism, had been formally used in the English Universities, it was a fully authorized catechism of the Church of Scotland having been printed in English by the royal authority of James I in the year 1591. The Heidelberg Catechism, that great touchstone of Reformed Protestantism, was actually displaced by none other than the Westminster Shorter and Larger Catechisms. Of all of these things, the old Scottish Prayer Book, Knox’s Book of Discipline, the indigenous Scottish Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Canons of Dort, what might be called the Reformation formularies of the Church of Scotland, there is little trace at all in the Church to which they rightly belong. They were all wiped away by Presbyterianism, almost as though they had never been, within the tradition that claims to be the “Scottish” branch of the Reformation, but which offers a handful of documents produced in England from 1643-1648 as its proof.
Allowing the facts of history to strip away the ignorant notion possessed by some that the Presbyterian tradition represents the Scottish wing of the 16th century Reformation, we may rightly ask, what is the basis for the claim that Presbyterianism is “Reformed” beyond its roots in an earlier Episcopalianism? Where is anything remotely resembling the system of national church polity termed Presbyterianism in the 17th century to be found in the identifiable writings of the reformers, or any of their confessions? It won’t be found in Tyndale, Cranmer, Knox, Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, Zwingli, Lasco, Ursinus: it just isn’t there at all.
This is the great problem of Presbyterianism: in some ways it has faithfully continued and grown the Protestant Reformed religion, while in other ways it has departed from it.Jure Divino Presbyterianism cannot be reconciled with the Reformed Christian Religion as defined at the Ecumenical Council of Dort. Yet, what we must ask of Presbyterians is not that they abandon their own tradition, but that they embrace their heritage more fully, delving deeper into it, not stopping at those great truths which we still possess in common, but reaching further and recovering those which they once received but have long since departed from – that they rediscover their own Episcopalian roots. The Reformed Church may claim the Presbyterian as a prodigal son; if he will only amend his errors there may be a joyous reunion, and both he and we will be the better for it.
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