SHOULD a Christian be a member of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.? Was the formation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church justified? Is the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. officially apostate?
These questions and others like them are often raised. In an editorial in a recent issue of the Southern Presbyterian Journal Dr. William Childs Robinson discusses briefly the question of whether the Northern Presbyterian denomination is apostate. He comes to the conclusion which is formulated in the title of his editorial —"Not Apostate: Sometimes Wrong.” This brief editorial serves as a point of departure for our commenting again on the question of apostasy.
Spiritual Decline
In the first place, it should be noted and emphasized that when a sincere and earnest Christian scholar—which Dr. Robinson certainly is—takes time to give serious consideration to the question whether the Northern Presbyterian Church is apostate, that Church must indeed have departed far from the ordinary concepts of the historic faith. A church may indeed have faults but when that church is earnestly seeking to be true to historic Christianity, when she tolerates no unbelief in her midst, when she does not compromise for an instant with Barthianism or other forms of Modernism—concerning such a church there would be no point in raising the question of whether she is apostate. So that for a serious minded scholar such as Dr. Robinson to discuss whether the Northern Church is apostate is in itself an evidence that there is serious question concerning that Church.
The Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. has in fact so far departed from the faith that in the year 1936 a number of her ministers and elders, together with many others, left or were put out of her fellowship, on the basis of certain decisions of her highest courts. It was here that the Orthodox Presbyterian Church had its beginnings. The reasons have often been stated. Because of their relevancy for our present discussion, certain facts must be stressed again. In 1934 the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. approved a statement of its General Council which included the following assertion: “A church member or an individual church that will not give to promote the officially authorized missionary program of the Presbyterian Church is in exactly the same position with reference to the Constitution of the Church as a church member or an individual church that would refuse to take part in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper…” This assertion was related to the fact that members of the Church, having proved by indisputable evidence that the Foreign Mission Board was supporting programs of modernism and unbelief on the foreign field, had set up another foreign missions agency that would be truly Biblical and truly Presbyterian in its work. On the basis of the General Council's assertion, the members of this new foreign missions agency were ordered to discontinue their activities, and when they refused they were put out of the service of the Church. Thus Dr. J. Gresham Machen, a mighty and unflinching supporter of the historic Christian and Presbyterian faith, was suspended from the ministry.
The reader should examine the statement quoted above very carefully. The thing which stands out so prominently and which makes the declaration so heinous, is that it puts the words and commands of men on a par with the commands of Christ. The Lord's supper is an ordinance instituted by Christ himself. It was the Lord who said, "This do in remembrance of me." But the boards and agencies of the Presbyterian Church or of any other Church, and their program, are humanly devised ordinances erected to carry out the work of the Church. They are to be judged in the light of Scripture. When they are worthy of support certainly they should be supported by members of the Church. But when they represent or involve departures from the faith, they should not be supported. To place support of these human ordinances on a par with partaking of the Lord's supper, a divine ordinance, is simply to elevate man's word to an equality with God's Word.
The General Council statement has never been repudiated, so far as we can discover. Nor has the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. ever expressed regret that such a declaration could have been made. To the best of the present writer's knowledge no attempt has ever been made to bring about an official repudiation of that statement nor to invite back into the Church those who at that time were put out or left because of that statement and its consequences.
Is the Church then apostate? It all depends on what we mean by the term. If we merely mean by the term that the Church has abandoned or departed from the faith, then there is no question but that the Church has done this and is apostate. If, on the other hand, we mean by the term that the Church in official declaration has deliberately renounced the faith, then the Church is not apostate.
The question of whether the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. is apostate may thus be a quibbling about terms. But more important is the question whether, by being a member of that Church, a Christian is sinning.
A Local Church Apostate?
Dr. Robinson in his brief editorial suggests that if the Gospel is preached in the local church than that local church is not apostate. The matter, however, is not that simple. If we were dealing, for example, with a Baptist or a Congregational Church the situation would be quite different. Among Baptists and Congregationalists each local church is considered a law unto itself. One local Baptist church may thus be apostate, another not.
Very different, however, is the situation in the Presbyterian Church. In that denomination each local church is an integral part of the whole. If therefore the whole is guilty of deep sin, each local congregation partakes of that sin and shares in the guilt of the whole.
It is sometimes said that a man may preach the Gospel in his own congregation and have nothing to do with the organization as a whole. There are two things to be said to this suggestion. In the first place it cannot be done. No man is preaching the Gospel faithfully unless he sets it over against its opposite. He must be able to say, "This is the Gospel, and that is not the Gospel." If a man preaches the truth in his own pulpit, while in other pulpits of his denomination error rather than the true Gospel is being preached, then that man, if he keeps quiet about the situation, is not preaching the Gospel faithfully. More than that, by his silence he is giving tacit approval to the denials of the Gospel round about him.
Secondly, the viewpoint that a man may preach the Gospel irrespective of what the denomination to which he belongs does is a viewpoint that leads men to commit terrible sin. Every minister of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. takes a solemn vow to the effect that among other things he will be "zealous and faithful in maintaining the truths of the gospel and the purity and peace of the church, whatever persecution or opposition may arise" to him on that account.
If a man takes this vow and then pays no attention to it, no matter how orthodox his sermons may sound, he is sinning. No man has a right to take such a vow unless in humble dependence upon the mercy of God he intends to keep it. And just so long as a man deceives himself with the idea that he can preach the Gospel in his own congregation and ignore what his denomination may do, that man is guilty of the great sin of being faithless to his ordination vows. And just so long as an individual Christian thinks that he can support a local congregation "where the Gospel is preached," and do nothing about the denomination itself when that denomination denies the gospel, that individual Christian is guilty of aiding his minister in being faithless to his ordination vows.
A Serious Condition
If then, the situation is so serious, what should be done? Dr. Robinson suggests that if wrong has been done in the church, “… we can leave the wrong to the Son of God to judge and deal with as He alone is able to do in wisdom, understanding, love, righteousness, grace — speaking to the wrongdoers in judgment and in forgiving grace. We do not have to take judgment into our hands, nor put ourselves on Roman Catholic ground and decry the denomination as apostate."
In justice to Dr. Robinson it should be made clear that by these words he does not mean that a Christian should not use the due legal processes of the Church, nor that a minister should not take his ordination vows seriously. What he means is that if these proper legal steps have been taken and the highest court in the Church has done wrong, we should then suffer the wrong and receive it in Christ's name. Certainly this is good advice for many occasions. We need not leave a Church everytime it does something wrong. That would be schismatic. But there are times when a Church does something that is so wrong that to remain in that Church afterwards is sin. If Dr. Robinson's words applied to all situations, there never should have been a Reformation, and we should all go back to the Romanist church.
There are times when one must either leave a church, or by remaining in the church be guilty of sinning. How long does any Christian think he would last in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. if he made a serious effort to bring that Church back to the Westminster Confession of Faith? We could understand a man belonging to that Church if he would make a genuine effort to live up to his ordination vows and to correct conditions in the Church. But we cannot admire or respect those who claim to preach the Gospel yet refuse to do anything about the clear departures from the faith in the denomination to which they belong.
The Orthodox Presbyterian Church
The formation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church was not an attempt to retaliate or to "hurt" the Northern Presbyterian denomination for its sinful action in deposing Dr. Machen from the ministry. No, on the contrary, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church was formed under God by men who were convinced that if they were to be true to their Lord, and to ordination vows they had taken, they must separate themselves from their former connections. They wanted to be true, to their ordination vows. They wanted to be true to the Bible and the Presbyterian Faith. But the denomination in which they were required that they should support non-Biblical, non-Presbyterian programs to remain in good standing. This they would not do. It is a sad thing to see a great denomination turn from its proclamation of the historic Reformation faith and depose from its ministry a man who had been one of its greatest ornaments. It is a sad thing to see a great denomination turn with vengeance upon those whose one desire above all else is to see the saving Gospel preached in all the world.
What has troubled the present writer more and more as the years have passed is that apparently no one in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. has shown any concern over the spiritual welfare of those who have left its ranks. Are there no Christians left with enough concern for the Gospel to try to do something to right the terrible wrong that was committed in 1936? We do not say that there is no hope for such a Church. We do not know. It may be that God in His own good wisdom will raise up humble ministers who will call the Church back from its sin, who will point out the errors of modern "theology," and who will plead for a return to the historic, incarnate Son of God and His infallible Word. If such should be the case, none would rejoice more than those who for the sake of that blessed Christ and His holy Word found themselves compelled to leave the Church in order that, without ecclesiastical hindrance, they might preach in all its purity and beauty the Gospel of the unsearchable riches of Christ.