Not my alma mater. The Confession. Theo Geek ponders the same enigmatic curiosity that has circulated around the web since the premature suspension of Dr. Peter Enns from Westminster Theological Seminary a few weeks ago.
It intrigues me because I just can't fathom the sanity of adhering to a creedal statement written in 1642. In 1642 they barely understood Koine Greek, biblical scholarship was only in its infancy, they had next to no understanding of the customs, practices and thinking of ancient world, and they had very few of the writings of the early church Fathers that we now have.
To be sure, the language from the institution we know thus far has not clearly indicated that it was due to confessional adherence that Enns was suspended. But this raises the other question that is more general. Why the Westminster Confession?
According to the About page on the Seminary Website:
The very name of the institution signals clearly that our systematic theology has been and remains an outworking of the theological documents known as the Westminster Standards. In addition to the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms, the Seminary treasures the rich and harmonious diversity of creeds and confessions within the historic Reformed tradition. In particular, it recognizes that the system of doctrine contained in Scripture is also confessed in the Three Forms of Unity (the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort).
Perhaps the most intriguing statement that points to exactly Theo Geek's question. This is in their statement of faith. Understand that faith statements from many institutions require faculty consent in the very signing of faculty contracts. We cannot know for certain if there was a breach of these standards for Dr. Enns – at least the institution has not reported this in so much language.
Scripture, as "the very Word of God written," is absolutely authoritative and without error.
Reformed orthodoxy, as informed by the system of doctrine contained in the Westminster Standards, represents faithfully and accurately what Scripture teaches.
Biblical theology (in the tradition of Geerhardus Vos) and presuppositional apologetics (in the tradition of Cornelius Van Til) are among the crucial methods to be used in interpreting and applying the teachings of Scripture and in developing a biblical world view.
And further:
The Westminster Standards are the climactic statement of Reformed Theology. In a very real sense, their publication in 1647 brought the creedal development of the Protestant Reformation to its historical conclusion.
Both the tasks of biblical and theological education have been set with clearly stated and tightly wound conditions. The fallout from the Remonstrance and the response from the Synod of Dort in 1618-19 form a backdrop for the very Reformed tradition of Dutch Calvinism to which Westminster hearkens back. The drafting of the Westminster standards was not without clear political motivation. During the first civil war in England between parlimentarians and royalists the English sought out the assistance of Scotland. To make a long story short, one of the documents that was drafted in order that this Solemn League and Covenenant occur was the Westminster Ceonfession which defined both the unity of forces against the King and the reform of the Church of England as a condition for the participation of Scotland in the fray.
In 1789 the document was revised to reflect values specific to post-Revolution America. To this end references that specifically chided the pope and the king were removed as well as language of duties of the state relative to the church to reflect the independent polities of the church and the civil government.
It is well known that the effect of evolution and scientific method largely transformed higher education in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Charles Eliot, president of Harvard at the end of the nineteenth century, is considered to be the most symbolic of education reformers who moved higher education from a system of education that focused on training ministers and civic servants via the classics, to a system that contained multiple disciplines and areas of study including pragmatic curricula geared towards the specific practical needs of society. These reformers were consistently concerned about the dogmatic penchant of higher education to constrain any open inquiry that would explore the very foundations of knowledge.
During this time biblical criticism and theology both underwent transformations that would move biblical studies into an academic discipline in its own right and where it would be rooted in basic principles of scientific methodology. This means that based on available evidence, hypotheses are then tested through principles of deduction. Hence the birth of what we know now to be the historical Jesus as distinct from the Jesus of faith. Before this, there was no distinction between the two sets of evidence regarding the work and person of Christ.
It was in the midst of these rather rapid and far reaching progressive changes in theology and biblical criticism that we find the separation of Westminster Seminary from Princeton Seminary. Part of this transformation was, perhaps, an over-enthusiastic acceptance of evolutionary principles as a scientific marker of the inevitability of progress. Also, the reaction against dogmatism as a symbol of higher education's constriction of open inquiry resulted in the eventual "marginalization of morality" as Julie Reuben argues. As the brief history of Westminster notes, again from the website:
(E)ventually a movement surfaced to end Princeton's adherence to scriptural theology, and in 1929 Princeton Theological Seminary was reorganized under modernist influences.
Among the Princeton faculty who loved the Reformed faith were Robert Dick Wilson, J. Gresham Machen, Oswald T. Allis, and Cornelius Van Til. Almost immediately after Princeton's reorganization, these four men founded Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, and, with others who were invited to join the teaching staff, continued the exposition and defense of the Reformed faith.
Over the years, Westminster has prospered as we have maintained the infallible Scriptures as our foundation.
It is clear that the backdrop for the formation of Westminster Seminary has to do with the confluence of two things against which higher education was reacting: classical dogmatic assertions about the relativization of scientific progress to confessional statements of faith and the development of biblical criticism that began to call then traditional theological assumptions into question. There is thus a congruency here between a Baconian understanding of science where the objective world can be directly apprehended and ideas need to conform to the objects of experience versus the movement to a new scientific method which makes deductions based on experience that are then proven with evidence. The move from inductive to deductive scientific reasoning was also the same set of controversies between the Biblical infalliblism of Gresham Machen and B.B. Warfield versus the use of scientific methodology in biblical criticism. Historian D.G. Hart
"contends that Machen's conservative scholarship was a response not simply to the rise of historical criticism and the secularization of American culture but also to the dominant Protestant ethos in America. He proposes that Machen's differences with more liberal biblical critics were shaped not only by his ahistorical outlook but also by the contemporary social agenda of more progressive scholars, and that debates over evolution manifested not so much the variant epistemologies of liberals and conservatives as their differing conceptions of the nature of Christianity."#
It is clear that the development of the dogmatic commitments of Westminster have been culturally conditioned within the trappings of the development of higher education between the publishing of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 through the 1920's where the intellectual development of biblical studies and theology largely partook of this more scientific premise and developed accordingly. The Society for Biblical Literature formed in 1880. The American Academy of Religion began to form in 1909 and then through various permutations became the organization it is today in 1964.
It is hard to understand why dogmatic assertions in theological traditions such as the origins of Westminster Theological Seminary are viewed in such absolute terms. It is abundantly clear that we know more about Jesus than Machen or Warfield ever did, we have had to bring theology to bear on countless historical circumstances that have changed our understanding of God in conversation with that Biblical witness, and that much of this progress has not by necessity been heretical, apostatic, or heterodox. It seems that in the clear language of the seminary it is assumed that when the intellectual development of seminary and higher education absorbed scientific reasoning in the post-Baconian age, its scientific metholodology was associated with what is heterodox. The Westminster Confession became the symbol of an unwavering and complete orthodoxy in contradistinction to these events.
Perhaps it made sense then as a reaction to certain tendencies in higher education that were literally replacing not only theology, but religion, and ethical reasoning with scientific investigation. At the time there was a definite sense that the faith in science to cure all of the world's problems and to order a just society would expelled religious and theological reasoning, and therefore God, from education in general. But in our post-positivist age, it is clear that the development of a value-free science was not only an empirical impossibility, but a clear philosophical fallacy. Science recognizes value in the research process more than it did at the time Westminster was founded. The value of the observer is now also an object of critical appraisal.
The question is if science has progressed, if theology has progressed, and if biblical studies have ballooned as a result of resource availability from a paucity of materials to a veritable glut of ancient resources now available to scholars both professional and lay, it no longer makes sense for Westminster to continue to assert that:
The Westminster Standards are the climactic statement of Reformed Theology. In a very real sense, their publication in 1647 brought the creedal development of the Protestant Reformation to its historical conclusion.
The Presbyterian Church (USA) has a wonderful statement in the Book of Order that places these confessions, including Westminster, in their proper place:
Yet the church, in obedience to Jesus Christ, is open to the reform of its standards of doctrine as well as of governance. The church affirms “Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda,” that is, “The church reformed, always reforming,” according to the Word of God and the call of the Spirit.
Thus the Confessions are not the end of any reformation because the Spirit of God is continually reforming the church and it is the duty of the church to be responsive to that challenge in conjunction with the witness of Scripture. Such absolute reliance on a set of documents drafted in the midst of political as well as theological concerns from a bygone era, and as a continual response to another bygone era should trouble any discerning mind sensitive to the scholarship that such an institution produces and its effect on the development of the church in our current era.
With the suspension of Peter Enns, it is apparent that Westminster Theological Seminary has got this relationship in reverse. Ironically a book about Scripture is the lightning rod not for an open dialogue about the Word of God to which the confessions are subordinate. It is a test and example for what happens when those historical confessions and the mission of the institution hold the Scriptures subordinate to the whims of the board and its marriage to the confessions as "the historical conclusion" of the Reformation.
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