“…The Briggs trial prompted the defeat of a plan for confessional revision in 1893. Briggs himself eventually left for the Episcopalian Church, but the push for revision continued. Thirty-four presbyteries sent overtures for revision to the 1900 Assembly, and that Assembly appointed a study committee of fifteen, which included a former U.S. President (Benjamin Harrison) and a sitting Supreme Court justice (John Harlan). One who was invited, but declined to serve, was Princeton's Benjamin B. Warfield. "It is an inexpressible grief," he wrote, to see the church "spending its energies in a vain attempt to lower its testimony to suit the ever changing sentiment of the world around it." Warfield's lament would persuade few. In an era when change was a sign of health, his dissent sounded, in the words of an opponent, as a call for the "harmony of standing still." Briggs may have left the church, but clearly his spirit lived on.
Despite some support for a major overhaul, a compromise prevailed that effected minor revisions to the Confession. In 1903 the church added two chapters on "The Holy Spirit" and "The Love of God and Missions." Both were crafted with language that was vaguely biblical and not distinctively Reformed. In addition, the church revised chapter 16, article 7, which described the works of the unregenerate. Where these works were formerly described as "sinful and cannot please God," the revised language described them as "praiseworthy." Perhaps of greatest significance was the inclusion of a "Declaratory Statement" that sought to explain the Confession's doctrine of election. In words that many accused of being deliberately ambiguous, the statement offered an "avowal ... of certain inferences" about predestination, softening the doctrine for those who found it offensive and contradictory to the doctrine of human freedom.
Presbyterians for the most part reacted enthusiastically to these changes. It was a preservation of "generic Calvinism" in the judgment of many. Henry Van Dyke carefully framed the results within the mainstream of Calvinist orthodoxy: "These two truths," he wrote, "God's
sovereignty in the bestowal of his grace, and his
infinite love for all men, are the hinges and turning points of all Christian theology. The
anti-Calvinist decries the first. The
hyper-Calvinist or Supralapsarian decries the second, holding that God creates some men on purpose to damn them, for his glory. The true Calvinist believes both and insists that they are consistent." The
Philadelphia Public Ledger echoed Van Dyke's sentiments. The revisions to the Confession left its basic Calvinism intact while managing "to render it instantly so much more congenial to the modern mind."
Years later, Princeton historian Lefferts Loetscher was more candid when he described alterations as a "change to Arminianism." By these revisions, he wrote, "the Remonstrants of the Synod of Dort ... finally won recognition" in American Presbyterianism. Evidence for Loetscher's interpretation can be found in the reunion that took place on the heels of revision, when the Arminian prodigals of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church reunited with the Northern Presbyterians in 1906. Two years later, Presbyterians were leaders in the formation of the Federal Council of Churches, the institution that would emerge as the voice for mainline or (as evangelicals called it) "liberal" Protestantism.” OPC.ORG
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