The Auburn Affirmation is a major part of Presbyterian history and exerts a significant influence to the present day. The Auburn statement was referred to at the 2004 General Assembly in Richmond as providing guidance for the evaluation of ministerial candidates. Many, in the more moderate and liberal wing of the church, regard it positively as a statement of Christian freedom and a way of maintaining a proper balance between confessional faithfulness and personal conscience. Others, from a more conservative or evangelical perspective, have viewed it with suspicion. So, what’s the real story?
The Auburn Affirmation was drafted in Auburn, New York in 1924 as a response to actions taken by the 1923 General Assembly of the then northern Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. By the time it had circulated throughout the denomination it had been signed by over 1200 leaders in the Presbyterian Church. This was at the height of the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy and many to this day believe it set the stage for the resolution of that conflict and indeed has been a de facto guide ever since. Its citation at the 2004 General Assembly, exactly eighty years after its drafting, testifies to its continuing influence.
The 1923 General Assembly had endorsed a set of “five fundamentals” as essential beliefs for the church. These were hardly unique to the Presbyterian Church since much of Protestantism was embroiled in controversy over them at that time. The five fundamentals included the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, the substitutionary atonement of Jesus’ death, his bodily resurrection and the claim that Jesus performed genuine miracles during his earthly life. These five points had gained ascendancy in theological and denominational circles during the early years of the twentieth century because these were the doctrines which conservatives perceived to be most under attack.
The five fundamentals had been supported by the 1916 General Assembly and were reaffirmed again in 1923. The truth is that, apart from the precise definition of “inerrancy” with regard to Scripture, the other four had been uncontested affirmations of Christian orthodoxy for centuries. Christ’s virgin birth, sacrificial death and resurrection are mentioned explicitly in the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds. The Westminster Confession of Faith, following earlier Reformed confessions, calls the Scriptures “infallible.” The doctrine of inerrancy as systematically defined in the 1880’s by Princeton Theologians B. B. Warfield and A. A. Hodge was more precise in its understanding of infallibility by extending this to matters of science, history and geography (however they did so in such a nuanced way that other conservatives accused them of selling out to the emerging liberal theology of the period). Finally, no orthodox Christian church had ever questioned the miraculous element of Jesus’ ministry or, for that matter, the miracles attributed to the apostles.
The controversy that had sparked the furor in the Presbyterian Church in the early 1920’s arose from two challenges posed by New York Presbytery. The first came from Harry Emerson Fosdick who, while not an ordained Presbyterian, had nonetheless been licensed to preach at the First Presbyterian Church in New York City. Fosdick denied all the points of the “five fundamentals” and had made his position very public in a famous sermon preached in 1922 entitled, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” The second came from the fact that New York Presbytery had licensed two candidates for the ministry who denied the virgin birth of Christ. The response of the 1923 General Assembly was clearly motivated by these events as was Princeton Professor J. Gresham Machen’s book, Christianity and Liberalism, in which he argued that orthodox Christianity and liberalism represented not different theologies but indeed two different religions.
It was in this context that the Auburn Affirmation was drafted the following year, in 1924. The Affirmation sought to position itself in an historical tradition of Christian freedom which it maintained was authentic Presbyterianism. The Affirmation references the famous quote of the Westminster Confession, “God alone is lord of the conscience and hath left it free from the commandments and doctrines of men, which are in anything contrary to his Word, or beside it, in matters of faith and worship….”
The Affirmation then goes on to address the response of the 1923 GA to the situation in New York Presbytery. Given Fosdick’s virtual denial of the deity of Jesus Christ, the Assembly, following its constitutional responsibility “to bear testimony against error in doctrine,” had gone on to declare that “doctrines contrary to the standards of the Presbyterian Church” had been preached by Fosdick at First Presbyterian Church. This could hardly be denied. It was probably Fosdick, more than any other Liberal spokesperson that H. Richard Niebuhr had in mind when he made his famous statement that Liberal Christianity proclaimed a version of the gospel in which “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross” (The Kingdom of God in America, p. 185).
In the wake of the controversies following the 1923 Assembly the Auburn Affirmation was drafted to state an evangelical “middle way” for the church to follow. By the 1929 Assembly it had essentially become the unofficial position of the Presbyterian Church. Since then it has continually been lifted up as a model for the present church. It has again been invoked with reference to the current Task Force Report on Peace, Unity and Purity.
The fact however is that the Auburn Affirmation, instead of offering any middle ground, actually offers no ground. The hindsight of history has to be that it did not strengthen the church in its era nor can it do so now.
Scripture is not a reliable source of God’s Word
There are three essential failings of the Auburn Affirmation which rob it of its claim to be either a mediating position or a statement in conformity to “the teachings of evangelical Christianity.” The first and most serious failing has to do with its view of Scripture. In a telling phrase the Affirmation refers to receiving all truth “which from time to time” God causes to break forth from the Scriptures. Here is perhaps the first clear intimation of the distinction of Scripture from the Word of God as in the phrase, “Scripture contains the Word of God” or, liturgically, “Listen for the Word of God.” Since it is only “from time to time” that God brings forth his truth from the Bible, Scripture cannot then be a reliable source of God’s Word on a consistent basis.
The Affirmation then goes on to state, disingenuously, that the Scriptures never claim to be free from error thereby rejecting the 1923 Assembly’s claim that the writers of Scripture were kept “from error.” They claim that the Westminster Confession never makes this statement either. This claim can only be made on the flimsy ground that the exact wording “without error” does not appear in Scripture or the Westminster Confession. First of all, Westminster does refer to “the infallible truth” of Scripture (Book of Confessions 6.005). Certainly its authors did not know of the later subtle distinction between “infallibility” (matters of faith and belief) and “inerrancy” (all subjects including history, cosmology, science). For the Westminster authors, as their sermons and writings make clear, any thought of Scripture containing error was completely alien.
Scripture itself refers time and again to writing down the exact words of God. These texts are therefore the truth of God. God himself writes the words in some cases (Ex. 34:1). Other times the issue of divine inspiration (“God breathed”) is spelled out explicitly (Ex. 34:27; Jer. 30:1-2; Habakkuk 2:2). Scripture, the written word, cannot be separated from Christ the living Word (John 5:39; Luke 24:44-45). Jesus himself says literally that not one jot or tittle will pass from the law until all is fulfilled (Matt. 5:18). Second Peter can speak of the epistles of Paul as “scripture” (II Peter 3:16). Revelation warns against adding or taking away “the words of the prophecy of this book” (Rev. 22:18-19). If all (or every) Scripture is “God breathed” (II Tim. 316) then the Scriptures are the Word of God and “the sum of your word is truth” (Ps. 119:160).
GA authority to bear witness against error undermined
The second major failing is their criticism of the 1923 Assembly’s declaration that “doctrines contrary to the standard of the Presbyterian Church” had been preached by Fosdick in First Presbyterian Church, New York. Auburn objects to this on very confusing grounds. After admitting that the Assembly has the responsibility to “bear witness against error in doctrine,” they proceed to take the opposite position by saying, that in so doing, the Assembly has virtually pronounced a judgment against First Presbyterian Church without going through the disciplinary process outlined in the Book of Discipline. More seriously, Auburn maintains that an Assembly’s attempt to “bear testimony against error” is “without binding authority.” They then seem to make the rather astounding claim that the Assembly cannot declare what the Presbyterian Church states in its confessions without a concurrent action of the presbyteries. They thereby raise the question as to the point of having either a confession of faith or a constitution.
The 1923 Assembly wasn’t defining or revising church doctrine. They were simply calling attention to what the Westminster Confession states and saying that Fosdick’s preaching was contrary to it. Considering that Fosdick denied most of the so-called “five fundamentals” this was hardly a case of the Assembly overstepping itself. Auburn creates a needless controversy by essentially identifying the idea of bearing testimony to the Confession with that of establishing or creating doctrine. The 1923 Assembly was in no way trying to present or state a new confession or doctrinal statement. They were applying an existing standard to a present situation, the basic thing they were (and still are) required to do (Book of Order G-13.0103 p). Auburn ultimately undermines the authority of a General Assembly to make any statement regarding doctrine or belief. If Fosdick’s preaching in the 1920’s could not be called doctrinal error then nothing could. The legacy of Auburn is to paralyze the General Assembly from speaking out in terms of its own confessional standards.
Doctrine redefined as “theory”
The third, and most serious, error of Auburn is its very radical redefinition of doctrinal statements as “theories.” They essentially say that the “great facts and doctrines” of the faith may be explained by whatever theory we want to use to interpret them. This is saying more than that there is room for interpretation in stating church doctrine. For Auburn the 1923 Assembly did not affirm basic doctrines, e.g. the virgin birth of Christ, the atonement, the bodily resurrection, etc. Rather they set forth “particular theories” of these “great facts and doctrines.” Is the virgin birth of Christ a doctrine or a theory? The distinction is far from clear. Auburn seems to be saying that as long as we affirm the virgin birth, for example, as one of “the great facts and doctrines,” we can use whatever theory we want to explain it. In other words, the virgin birth, or for that matter, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, can be interpreted as an historical event, a symbolic description, a parable, a myth or whatever. The net result of this leaves “the teachings of evangelical Christianity” without any meaningful definition, the very thing that centuries of confessional affirmation on the part of the church had sought to accomplish.
The writers of the Westminster Confession (or any other confession) hardly saw themselves as setting forth a list of theories about doctrine. They believed that they were stating biblical truth for the church. There are of course parameters of interpretation in any confession. However to say, for example, that the doctrine of the incarnation could be interpreted as a theory that Jesus had a “God-consciousness” and not that he was genuinely God in the flesh makes a mockery of the precision of all confessions from Nicea to the present day.
The Auburn Affirmation wants to be faithful to the doctrines of the church reiterated in the Westminster Confession and then, at the same time, define liberty of conscience so broadly that doctrine becomes reduced to theory. It can’t have it both ways. The Auburn Affirmation stands neither for fidelity to Reformed doctrine nor true Christian freedom. Its legacy to the church continues to be ambiguity and confusion.
This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 11, No. 5 (Nov/Dec 2005).
