The Golden Age:

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The Golden Age

• Presbyterian Stories
• Presbyterians in the 19th century

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(No Transcript)
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Presbyterians and Congregationalists Together

• The Plan of Union of 1801
• Each denomination promised to promote mutual
  forbearance, and a spirit of accommodation
  toward each other, particularly in each local
  congregation that may be constituted from
  Presbyterian and Congregational elements.
• The plan provided means for adjudicating disputes
  between Congregational churches that desired to
  settle Presbyterian ministers, and vice versa,
  either by referring the matter to the appropriate
  association or presbytery where the ministers
  ordination credentials were held, or by creating
  a joint committee made up of Congregationalists
  and Presbyterians to run on the matter.

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Presbyterians and Congregationalists Together

• The plan also provided an avenue for churches
  with mixed sympathies to join as an united
  congregation and exercise church discipline of
  church members, by creating a session of ruling
  elders with the possibility of appeal either to
  presbytery or the congregation.
• Finally, the plan potentially gave
  Congregationalists the same right to sit and act
  in the Presbytery as a ruling elder of the
  Presbyterian church.

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Presbyterians and Congregationalists Together

• Problems caused by the Plan of Union
• First, by creating union churches, these local
  congregations would not have a fixed identity.
• Were they Presbyterian or Congregational? To whom
  were the churches ultimately responsible in terms
  of discipline or financial giving? Where would
  they secure ministersfrom Congregationalist
  sources or Presbyterian ones?
• Also, the Plan of Union appeared to minimize
  polity as an essential element of Gospel order,
  suggesting that the differences between the
  polities were not large or important.
• Finally, the Plan of Union appeared to assume
  that there was doctrinal similarity between the
  two groups and that agreement would continue.

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The Division of 1837

• Four key issues that led to the growing divide in
  the church, as represented by men like Charles
  Finney
• new measures revivalism
• Interdenominational v. denominational
  consciousness
• Social Reform (the Evangelical United Front)
• Doctrinal issues (the New Divinity)
• Human depravity (imputation)
• Freedom of the will
• Regeneration
• Holiness

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The Division of 1837

• Those who sided with Finney came to be called
  the New School within the church esp. Lyman
  Beecher and Albert Barnes. Many of these leaders
  were associated with churches planted under the
  Plan of Union.
• Those who opposed the plan were the Old School
  (Philadelphia conservatives and southerners, with
  Princeton)
• Between 1832-35, several prominent heresy trials
  all the New School men were acquitted.

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The Division of 1837

• By 1837, the Old School was able to secure
  resolution
• Held GA in the heart of their strength,
  Philadelphia
• Elected their moderator
• Able to pass a resolution that came to be called
  the Abrogating Act, which did away with the
  Plan of Union
• Passed a second resolution that came to be called
  the Excising Act, making the first action
  retroactive. This unchurched 4 entire synods
  (Western Reserve in OH Utica, Geneva, and
  Genesee in NY)
• The following year, the Old School was able to
  deny seats to New School commissioners, leading
  to two separate general assemblies.

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The New and Old Schools

• The New School
• Mainly a northern church small southern presence
• Doctrinal In 1837, defended themselves with the
  Auburn Declaration in 16 points, the New
  School sought to establish their interpretation
  of the Westminster Standards as allowable within
  the bounds of orthodoxy
• Polity Began to withdraw from alliances with
  Congregationalists and establish denominational
  concerns
• Social reform did not take an official position
  on slavery until 1857
• Most important institution Union Theological
  Seminary in New York City
• Most important theologian Henry Boynton Smith

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The New and Old Schools

• The Old School
• Was a national church with strength from
  Philadelphia to South Carolina and west to
  Missouri.
• Key theologians
• Charles Hodge (1797-1878)
• Theologian Educator Churchman (moderator of GA,
  1846)
• James Henley Thornwell (1812-62)
• Pastor and professor at South Carolina College
  and Columbia Seminary Churchman (moderator of
  GA, 1847)
• Hodge-Thornwell debates Church boards Ruling
  elders Revised Book of Discipline

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A Nation and a Church Divided and Reunited

• Divisions, North and South
• The New School divided in 1857
• In 1856, at their General Assembly in New York,
  that body issued a report on the constitutional
  power of the General Assembly over the subject of
  slaveholding in our churches.
• The report implied that slaveholders were not in
  good standing in the church because the General
  Assembly deemed slaveholding to be a sin worthy
  of discipline.
• By the time the 1857 General Assembly met, it was
  clear that the church was ready to say that
  slaveholders were not only in a sinful economic
  and social relation, but that they ought to be
  barred from church membership.
• Southerners left and formed their own United
  Synod of the South.

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A Nation and a Church Divided and Reunited

• The Old School divided in 1861
• In May 1861, the Old School General Assembly met
  in Philadelphia minus a large number of southern
  commissioners.
• Gardiner Spring, minister at the Brick
  Presbyterian Church in New York City, proposed a
  resolution that committed the church to do all
  in their power to strengthen, uphold, and
  encourage the federal government.
• Southerners met at First Presbyterian Church,
  Augusta, GA on December 4, 1861 to form the
  PCCSA B. M. Palmer was the first moderator
• Was the division about politics or slavery? Yes.

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A Nation and a Church Divided and Reunited

• Reunions, North and South
• The southern branches reunited first in 1864
• This reunion was promoted and effected by Robert
  Lewis Dabney over the objections of B. M. Palmer.
  
• Dabney desired the reunion both to further his
  personal goal of creating one single southern
  Presbyterian church that would serve as a
  bulwark of morals and doctrine in the South.
• Though Dabney chaired a conference of committees
  that prepared a statement on disputed doctrinal
  points between the New and Old Schools, in the
  end the reunion was consummated on the basis of
  subscription to the Westminster Standards pure
  and simple.

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A Nation and a Church Divided and Reunited

• The northern branches reunited in 1869
• Many of the issues that had divided them seemed
  less important by 1869
• the New School had become more Presbyterian in
  their identity many of the innovative revival
  practices were now widely utilized in Old School
  churches and the war had convinced Old School
  Presbyterians about the propriety of social
  reforms, such as abolitionism.
• The only substantive issue dividing the two
  bodies was doctrinal and it was summed up in the
  question of confessional subscription.
• The theological leader of the New School, Henry
  Boynton Smith, promised that his side would be
  willing to subscribe to the Standards in their
  commonly understood form without note or
  comment.

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A Nation and a Church Divided and Reunited

• Some Old School leaders, such as Hodge, worried
  that the two branches had substantively different
  understandings of what subscription meant
• the Old School holding to a type of strict
  subscription in which all the truths of the
  Standards were affirmed, while the New School
  affirming system subscription in which
  ministers subscribed to the fundamental system of
  doctrine contained in the Standards.
• However, the church was still basking in the glow
  of patriotism and the power of union to
  overcome all obstacles and over Hodges
  objections, the church reunited.