Cornerstone Presbyterian Church
Presbyterian Church in America (PCA)
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“Calvinism is just religion in its purity. We have only, therefore, to conceive of religion in its purity, and that is Calvinism.”
-- B. B. Warfield of Princeton, 1906.
“The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches is the same as what the [scientist] adopts to ascertain what nature teaches.”
-- Charles Hodge of Princeton in his Systematic Theology, 1871-73.
Reformed Theology in America; A History of Its Modern Development, David Wells, Editor, Eerdmans, 1985.
This
collection of essays has relevance to Cornerstone Church and its
denomination through two connections.
The first connection is to the “Northern Presbyterian Church.” Chapter I of the book is on The Princeton Theology, covering the conservative ways of thinking about God and man present in that Church through the influence of Princeton Seminary in New Jersey. But in 1929 the liberal wing of the church finally succeeded in wresting Princeton from the control of the conservatives, and, as its champions say, “Old Princeton” died. As a result, the new and orthodox Westminster Seminary was founded in Philadelphia to replace it. By 1938 a new conservative denomination was started by a group withdrawing from the “Northern Presbyterian Church”. Westminster Seminary survives today, much as it was envisioned when founded. The new denomination had its divisions, and progress, and out of it, along with an older Presbyterian group, came the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, (RPCES), the denomination of our church before 1982.
The other connection between Cornerstone and this book is to the “Southern Presbyterian Church”. This denomination, which had its own heroes and heroic seminaries, was dominated by its conservative wing till about 1939. After that it too began to shift toward liberal views. In 1964 Reformed Theological Seminary of Jackson, Mississippi was founded, and its founders regarded it as something of a daughter seminary to Westminster. In 1973 another new denomination was born, made up of conservatives who were convinced that withdrawing from the “Southern Presbyterian Church” was by now necessary. This new denomination became the Presbyterian Church in America, the PCA.
The two denominations, one mostly northern, the other mostly southern, both conservative, joined in 1982 to become the PCA we know today.
This book has an introduction by the Christian historian George Marsden and a conclusion by the late James Boice. In between are five sections, each with three chapters. The three chapters are, in each case, an overview of the movement being treated in the section, and articles about two of its important people.
People of Cornerstone will probably be most interested in the overviews of Section 1, The Princeton Theology, by the historian Mark Noll (though in places it is rather technical), and the somewhat easier to read Section 4, The Southern Tradition, with overview by PCA leader Morton Smith. The heroes of Princeton presented are Charles Hodge and Benjamin Warfield; the heroes of the south are Robert Dabney and James Thornwell. These are informative articles about important people, and when the wading gets too deep, you can jump out of the water for a bit. The Thornwell article gives interesting insight into some issues of Presbyterian church government, the Old School-New School division, and relationships between ruling elders (laymen) and teaching elders (pastors). In addition to these two most relevant sections, there is material on The Westminster School, the Dutch Schools, both of which are close to us, and a more controversial topic, Neoorthodoxy. The conclusion, The Future of Reformed Theology, by James Boice, is excellent.
I got my copy of this book the year after it came out. It is still useful and can help us to understand where we are as a group, and where we came from.
— Dean Brown
“The Princeton theologians constantly stressed the importance of religious experience and the need for the work of the Holy Spirit.
"The Sunday afternoon 'conferences' with seminary students … , their occasional sermons, and especially the commentaries and selected polemical essays of Charles Hodge, testify to consistent efforts at giving the supernatural work of the Spirit its proper place in the life of the individual believer and of the church as a whole.”
— Mark Noll, in the book’s overview of The Princeton Theology.
471 Mathews Rd, Boardman, OH 44512 Phone/Fax 330-758-5628
email: info@cornerstonepch.org