Thank you Daniel. I appreciate your answer. Let me say that I perfectly agree with you.
Your good pastor's wonderful sermon series on the unity of the church was such an eye-opener and a blessing to me a couple of years ago, and since then, unity and all that it must entail- repentance, reformation, and revival- has been a great matter for prayer! I am so grateful for his and others' love and wisdom demonstrated. His theme throughout that sermon series is Isaiah 52:8: "Thy watchmen shall lift up the voice; with the voice together shall they sing: for they shall see eye to eye, when the Lord shall bring again Zion." Oh may the Lord bring it to pass! (He will!)
I don't follow your reasoning. Your confession of faith alone does not, of course, equal your constitution. Both the Confession and The Directory for the Publick Worship of God are part of your constitution, and both positively require the exclusive singing of psalms in corporate worship, but in doing so, neither identifies which translation of the psalter to use (again, these constituting standards were adopted by the Scottish Church prior to its adoption of the 1650 Metrical Psalter).
) so I will probably not reply fully until tomorrow, DV. Just as a point of clarification, neither myself nor William Cunningham, if I understand him correctly, is arguing for a Critical Text position as such. I am actually Byzantine Priority, but not TR only.
I am just back from a long car journey (well, long by Northern Ireland standards before @Logan mocks me
I mentioned the Confession of Faith because of its particular status in the Free Church constitution, and because it is sufficient to prove both TR and EP positions.
Can we have Scripture without having identified the "pure Hebrew and Greek sources"?
Are you speaking of Cunningham here? If you are, I would reply that : 1) he didn't vote to adopt these documents 2) if your reasoning is correct so the Free Church is not constitutionally EP.
If the TR position is confesionnal, then it is constitutional.
I'm not sure I follow - are you saying that within the constituted documents there are some that are subordinate in status to other parts?
Until you can refute Logan's position in #70 above, I can't agree with the former (that the Confession is sufficient to prove the TR position)
Fair enough.
Yes. I believe one could argue that WCF 1.7 allows for the fact that parts of the Church may, at times, be using less than pure sources when it states that "All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all" while also maintaining that "those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them." That is, they might not be "plain" or "clear" because part of the pure text is obscured from the view of God's people in a certain time or place. While WCF 1.8 states that the words immediately inspired by God were by His singular care and providence kept pure in all ages that does not mean (a) they were immediately written down in Hebrew or Greek nor (b) that they were/are always known equally to all of the Church. The latter is, of course, the common objection to the "TR = The Only Pure Text" position - where was the pure text prior to the TR?
No, I was referring to Rutherford, et al, as sampled in Logan's post #70.
Of course. But I'm not acknowledging that the TR position, as I understand it, is confessional. Please understand this is coming from someone who still uses the TR-based Geneva in private and family worship (and reads it silently in public worship while listening to the minister read from the ESV). The Geneva was the first translation authorized by the Church in Scotland and the first Bible printed in Scotland - the Edinburgh ‘Bassandyne Bible’ of 1579 was a straight reprint of the first (1561) folio Geneva Bible and was ordered to be in each parish kirk by King James' Privy Council after a petition to that effect from the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.* I see in this action a particular Church petitioning the civil magistrate to "take order, that unity and peace be preserved in the Church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire" (WCF 23.3). My understanding of WCF Chapter 31 is that it allows the civil magistrate to call upon the Church to make a judgment on the text and/or translation of Scripture (31.2 - see also the end of 31.5), but precludes magistrates from making such a judgment themselves (31.3). I believe this is what occurred with the Geneva in Scotland and later the KJV-AV in the United Kingdom, but nothing in either case mentions whether it was adopted because of the underlying TR. I prefer the Geneva because I like the notes but, if not available, I use the KJV-AV - no other English translations that I know of were adopted consistent with the Confession as these were, but that does not mean that the adoption of these 2 translations proves that the TR was at the same time being confessionally adopted and acknowledged as the text "kept pure in all ages" (it also doesn't prove that it can't be adopted as such - it just proves that it wasn't).
Yes, there is some hierarchy among the constitutional documents. These documents have also different functions. A Directory is not a Confession, and a Catechism is not an Act of the Assembly.
I have gone briefly through the article and the quotes provided by Logan. Both quotes are found in Milne's book and put in context. But to be frank, even without context I cannot see in what they oppose the TR position.
I cannot agree with your interpretation of WCF. But maybe the fundamental question would be now: did the Westminster Divines think to have identified the pure Hebrew and Greek sources and to possess them?
Thank you for clarifying. As we say in France: "I understand quickly, but I need a long explanation."
At this point of our conversation, I think we are left in front of two options :
The FCC has been negotiating with the RPCS for several years now.
But what of the judicial testimony of a particular Church? If I understand them correctly, I believe that might be what some folk are looking for by way of "evidence" in this discussion - for example:
Rutherford (even more so than Durham, for me) convinced me of my error in departing from the RPCNA for a R&P micro denomination some years ago. I heartily agree that there were many cases where our spiritual forefathers
I don't either - but I believe "one could argue" it.
Do you mean the Westminster Divines as a body, or in their individual writings outside of that body? I'm not sure we can know the former without the latter, but you seem to reject that:
I think B.B. Warfield did a worthy job of showing how the Assembly arrived at the wording of WCF 1, and his work showing the influence of Usher and the 1615 Irish Articles sheds light on whether or not the Westminster Divines thought they possessed pure Hebrew and Greek sources - they definitely "identified the pure Hebrew and Greek sources" in 1.8 as "The Old Testament in Hebrew... and the New Testament in Greek... being immediately inspired by God," but they never claimed to have pure copies at hand. This does not mean they did not believe they could not, as Usher put it, discern "the true reading" and that the "this diversity or difficulty [of having "diversities of readings noted in the Greek text of the New Testament] can make no difference or uncertainty in the sum and substance of the Christian religion." See The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield, Book VI. The Westminster Assembly and its Work. 2003 Baker Books edition. pp.176-177 with pp.187-188 (I couldn't find a free digital copy online).
My objection was directed to the principle enunciated earlier, i.e that which didn't divide the Chruch cannot be an obstacle to union. Discipline is not a division.
Please, note that the Free Church just claimed to be the Church of Scotland, with her Confession and constitution, free from the tyranny of the State. There is no Adopting Acts on the part of the Free Church. She just continued with the old Adopting Acts of the Church of Scotland, containing the real, and constitutionaly in force, animus imponentis.
I agree in many respect with what you wrote. But to support errors within a Church is not the same thing as looking for union with other Churches we think to be in errors.
Thank you for the reply, Daniel.
The OPC is a continuing church of the old PCUSA, and the PCA is a continuing church of the old PCUS. That's why Sean Michael Lucas named his book on the origins of the PCA For a Continuing Church.
That I understand, but it’s the whole “our church is truly legitimate and here’s how. Others are not, or less so at besy.”
I don't know. I think there are probably folks who view those on the other side of schisms in American Presbyterianism as schismatics because they aren't part of the PCA or OPC. I'd be interested to know how the discussion would go if someone suggested, for instance, that the PCA or OPC should join Hanover or Vanguard. I think similar discussions of history, schisms, etc. would come up.
There is a lingering sense in all the Scottish denominations of the awfulness of the sin of schism. That is one reason why each new denomination is determined to be able to claim a valid constitutional reason for its split, so that the other party, not them, can be argued to be the schismatics. Whether some of the reasonings are valid is a separate question. But with varying degrees of explicitness and vehemence each of the home-grown denominations feels the need to have a sound constitutional basis.
This probably isn't directed to me but it's something I've wondered about too. I think perhaps, important as the establishment principle is, the question of the church-state relationship is perhaps less crucial than the church-internal disputes. Whether or not the state recognises any denomination, there must be an ecclesiastical imperative to be able to justify your separate position. If there was a future miraculous intervention, there would (pretty sure, but not an expert) be legal implications flowing from 1690, 1843, 1900, etc, but surely that's a secondary consideration - this or that denomination's claim to be The Rightful Heir should in principle be demonstrable on primarily ecclesiastical more than than external/legal grounds.
Iain I wonder if this issue goes right back to the Scottish Covenanters. It seems to me that the Covenanter contribution (especially that of Alexander Henderson) to the 1560 National Covenant, then later the Solemn League and Covenant would only be consistent with the British Edition of the WCF.
