Presbyterian Creed Revision.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 26, 26 June 1902, Page 1

Presbyterian Creed Revision.

The principle of unfettered private judgment— one of the characteristic tenets of Protestantism —is the natural and necessary foe to permanance and stability of belief, and there is a continual and inevitable tendency to drift from their doctrinal moorings amongst the bodies which have adopted it. After a time it becomes notorious that many of the ministers of a particular denomination have ceased to hold — and in some instances violently repudiate — several of the doctrines to which at their ordination they formally subscribed, and which they solemnly undertook to at all times uphold and maintain. It becomes necessary then to either have these ministers ' fired out ' or to have the creed • revised ' and adjusted to their later views and as the ' firing-out ' process, besides being disagreeable! would only lead to the forming ol more sectaries the much simpler and altogether more convenient course of revising their doctrinal beliefs is- alwajs adopted Amonst the Presbyterian body in America the cry for revision of this kind has of late been particularly insistent and for some time past a Presbyterian Revision Committee has been at work overhauling what is known as the Westminster Confession of Faith— which embodies the official creed of Presbytenanism- and discussing the amendments which will be necessary to bring it into line with the piesent views of the dominant party amongst the Presbyterians. The conclusions of the Committee were supposed to be kept secict but in some way or other they appear to have leaked out, and the American correspondent of the Otago Daily Times has bren able to give his readers a brief but manilebtly correct summary of the principal changes proposed.

There is only one of the changes that is of special interest to Catholics, but it is worth while in passing to note the general lines on which the main alterations have been carried out. In some cases while a doctrine has been nominally retained it has been watered down by ' declaratory statements ' or footnote? of explanation which practically intimate that though the original words are to remain part of the creed they are not to be taken as meaning what they say. This is the course which has been adopted in connection with the famous Presbyterian doctrine of predestination and foreordination. This is the doctrine, it will be remembered, of which the: Rev. J. Gibb — who is now by a strange irony of fate the official head of the whole Presbyterian Church of New Zealand — declaied a few years ago that its statement 'as set forth in the standards of his Church was revolting to his very soul,' — a declaration that involved the future Moderator in a very keen and lively heresy hunt. The doctrine is thus stated in the 'Confession of Faith ' in the chapter on God's Eternal Decree : ' By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlasting death. These angels and men, thus predestinated and foreordained, are particularly and unchangeably designed ; and their number is so certain and definite, that it cannot be either increased or diminished.' This is still to remain part of the Presbyterian creed but it is proposed to attach to it a foot-note which, while ' maintaining the integrity of the doctrine of foreordination ' will set forth that the mercy of God is extended to all men, that the Presbyterian Church does not endorse any fatalistic doctrine. In the same way the original doctrine of the Presbyterian Church as to the fate of elect and non-elect infants has been modified by an explanatory statement to the effect that the Church does not hold that nonelect infants dying in infancy are damned. In other cases the wording of the confession is altered — sometimes so as to flatly contradict the original teaching — and in yet a third class of cases whole passages are completely struck out. * In this latter category has been placed, we are glad to say, the absurd and silly statement as to the Pope which at present disfigures the Presbyterian creed. Until some change is made every good Presbyterian is supposed to hold the following as an article of faith : ' Nor can the Pope of Rome be in any sense the head (of the Church) ; but is that Anti-Christ, that man of sin and son of perdition, that exalts himself in the Church againt Christ, and all that is called God.' This, the Revision Committee recommend, should be expunged on the ground that it is now meaningless. It is not so much meaningless as utterly sill), and is a icfltction, not on the saintly occupant of the Papacy, but on the sanity of the people who could be found to endorse it. Such a doctrine is a monument, not of faith or piety, but of narrowness and bigotry, and for the credit of the' PresbUerian body the sooner it is wiped out of existence as part of their official creed the betUr.