Debating Scripture

For better or for worse, I am a Presbyterian, and I suppose I was predestined to be one. It is easy to believe, as a Presbyterian, that what happens to us is of very great importance, and that it may be of great importance to all Protestants—indeed, all Christians. Whether this is so or not, I still think that the debates over the new confession of the Presbyterian Church are important to all Christendom, if only because they pointed up trends, and may well affect decisions in all denominations.

I am further convinced, as I have been for many years, that there are two crucial areas of theological debate, Protestant or Catholic. One is the nature and authority of Scripture, and the other is the place of the Church qua Church in social action. The Presbyterian Confession of 1967 is highly relevant to both these debates.

These things being so, a new book by Jack Bartlett Rogers is very important, because in it this brilliant young theologian of Westminster College (New Wilmington, Pennsylvania) has given us a serious, scholarly, and at the same time intensely interesting study of one of these crucial questions, namely, the doctrine of Scripture. The title of the book is Scripture in the Westminster Confession: A Problem of Historical Interpretation for American Presbyterianism (Eerdmans, 1967).

In my own reading, two books have helped me more than anything else to understand the moving of the Presbyterian Church. The first one is by Lefferts Loetscher: The Broadening Church: A Study of Theological Issues in the Presbyterian Church Since 1869 (1954). The second is this new book by Professor Rogers. Reading these two books will, in my opinion, give anyone an excellent framework for understanding Protestant theology in our time.

Rogers’s book is really a remarkable piece of work. To call a Th.D. dissertation “interesting” strikes most of us as a contradiction in terms, but somehow Rogers has brought this off, and with none of the devices an author is often tempted to try. The interest is not supported by humor or illustration, and he never demeans language in order to get effect. Yet the reader is carried along through page after page of the most careful and erudite writing. Even the footnotes are interesting! In one of them he refers to Baillie’s comment on the Westminster Confession: “It’s generally taken here for a very gracious and brave peece of worke.” I am grateful to Rogers for a “very gracious and brave peece of worke.”

Dr. John Gerstner has written a brief critical article on the book in Pittsburgh Perspective, the journal of Pittsburgh Seminary. Expressing enthusiasm for Dr. Rogers’s total work, he gives critical attention to his analysis of relationships in the interpretation of Scripture in Calvin, the Westminster Confession, Hodge and Warfield, and the Confession of 1967 (by way of Hendry and Dowey).

My problem in discussing the book here is not so much one of space; it is more a question of my own critical judgment. My education included three years of church history, a doctoral dissertation centered on Calvin, and a considerable amount of reading in church history since then, and so I don’t think I quite represent that mystery man, “the average intelligent layman.” But I am not, on the other hand, a career historian. Right here is the strength of this book. It is instructive and delightful for a man in my condition. It opens doors to new personalities, clarifies movements above and below ground, and creates new vistas for reading and thinking. I think it ought to be read by churchmen everywhere.

Certain thoughts suggest themselves. Is Rogers at the end of Barth, reading a Barthian viewpoint of the Word into the thinking of the Westminster divines? Many writers are tempted in the same direction when working on Calvin and Luther. Does a man conditioned by Karl Barth unconsciously use this conditioning to work through the ambiguities that show up in Calvin, Luther, and Westminster?

Vocabulary and definition—words like “inerrancy,” “plenary,” and “verbal”—give the most serious scholars great difficulty. In conservative circles, and—especially in the seminaries of such persuasion—the whole question of “verbal inerrancy” is very much to the fore in serious discussion. Much of the discussion has very little publicity, but the decisions are serious, nevertheless. Roggers’s book makes a scholarly contribution in this whole area and will lead to its own discussions because of what he sees and what he supports. And he holds that the new confession, in bypassing Hodge and Warfield and the so-called Princeton theology, rediscovers the proper tone of Westminster and points fairly to Calvin himself. The reader himself will have to discover how well Rogers’s thesis maintains itself.

One cannot help being pleased with how Professor Rogers really wades in. He evades no issues, writes intelligently on each subject as it forces its way into his attention, and marshalls great support for what he has to say. In my opinion this book will be a necessary point of reference for future debates on the theologies of Protestantism. Perhaps it might even give rise to some more interesting doctoral dissertations!

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