The Auburn Declaration:

[The Auburn Declaration, so called from the place of its adoption, belongs to the history of American Presbyterianism, and although it never aspired to the dignity of an authoritative Confession of Faith, it may claim a place here for its intrinsic value and importance before and after the disruption. It originated during the conflict which preceded the division of the Presbyterian Church into Old and New School, A.D.1837, and was prepared by the Rev. Baxter Dickinson, D.D. (d.1876). It had been charged, on one side, that sixteen errors, involving considerable departures from true Calvinism and the Westminster standards, had become current in that Church. (They are printed in the Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton Review for 1876, pp.7, 8.) In answer to this charge, the New School party were led to embody their belief on these points in a corresponding series of ‘True Doctrines,’ which were incorporated in their Protest, as presented to the General Assembly of 1837. These doctrinal statements were subsequently considered and adopted by an important representative convention at Auburn, New York, Aug., 1837, as expressing their matured views, and those of the churches and ministry represented by them, on the several topics involved. The Declaration thus adopted became, not indeed a creed, but an authoritative explanation of the interpretation given to the Westminster Symbols by the leading minds in the New School Church, as organized in 1838. It was in 1868 indorsed by the General Assembly (O. S.) as containing ‘all the fundamentals of the Calvinistic Creed,’ and this indorsement was one among the most effectual steps in bringing about the reunion of the two Churches in 1870. The document is rather a disavowal of imputed error than an exposition of revealed truth, and must be understood from the anthropological and soteriological controversies of that period of division now happily gone by.

Both the Errors and the True Doctrines may be found in the Minutes of the Assembly for 1837; also, in the New Digest, pp.227-230. See also Art. on The Auburn Declaration by Prof. E. D. Morris, D.D., of Lane Seminary, in the Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton Review, Jan.1876, pp.5-40.

The original document is deposited in the library of Lane Theol. Sem., Cincinnati, O. The text here given is an accurate copy from it, and was kindly furnished for this work by the Rev. E. D. Morris, D.D. The headings in brackets have been supplied by the editor.]

[Permission of Sin.]

1. God permitted the introduction of sin, not because he was unable to prevent it consistently with the moral freedom of his creatures, but for wise and benevolent reasons which he has not revealed.

[Election.]

2. Election to eternal life is not founded on a foresight of faith and obedience, but is a sovereign act of God’s mercy, whereby, according to the counsel of his own will, he has chosen some to salvation: ‘yet so as thereby neither is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established;’ nor does this gracious purpose ever take effect independently of faith and a holy life.

[Fall of Adam.]

3. By a divine constitution Adam was so the head and representative of the race that, as a consequence of his transgression, all mankind became morally corrupt, and liable to death, temporal and eternal.

[Hereditary Sin.]

4. Adam was created in the image of God, ‘endued with knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness.’ Infants come into the world not only destitute of these, but with a nature inclined to evil, and only evil.

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Richards:

LECTURE XXII.
ABILITY AND INABILITY.

JOHN vi. 44. “No man can come to me, except the Father, which hath sent me, draw him.”

IT is good for us to be humbled and God has declared it to be a leading design of the Gospel, to stain the pride of all human glory. Every part of this wonderful scheme, in its origin, in its progress, in its consummation, tends to exalt God and to lay man in the dust ! We cannot turn to a page of the Gospel record, without finding something of this character. Do we glory in the dignity or strength of our natural powers, in our acquisitions, or in our enjoyments? The Gospel teaches us that we have nothing but what we have received, and that it is God alone who causes us to differ. Do we think favorably of our moral dispositions, or secretly flatter ourselves with our virtues? The Gospel declares that we are, by nature, children of wrath and disobedience, having no power to please God; because, with all our good qualities, we possess nothing in our unrenewed state which he dignifies with the name of virtue. Do we think ourselves safe because the Word of life is preached to us–or because we hear the voice of our Redeemer calling to us to come unto him and be saved? Our Lord confounds this self-deluding imagination, with all the vain hopes attached to it, by declaring, as in the words before us: ‘ ‘ No man can come to me, except the Father, which hath sent me, draw him.”

But will not many object to this declaration? Will they not say, “If we cannot come to Christ, how are we to blame for not coming? And if we can come, what need of being drawn by the Father? Are not these things strange and contradictory?” Strange and contradictory as they may seem, the Divine Teacher will not take back his words, nor soften their import. He lays down his doctrine with great clearness and strength: He speaks with the authority of one who came forth from God, and who is God himself. Whatever may be our opinions or our feelings, his Word will stand in broad and legible characters when the fire, which consumes all things, shall have dissolved this earth and these heavens. It is in vain to contend against what is written; the reck will not be removed out of its place for us. But though we may not contend, we may lawfully inquire; and sure I am, the more diligent and humble our inquiry, the more cheerfully shall we subscribe to what God has revealed.

In attending to the words before us, I propose, in the First place, briefly to consider what it is to come to Christ.

Second. To notice our Lord’s assertion, that no man can come to him unless drawn by the Father.

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C. Hodge (by way of A.A. Hodge):

Dr. Hodge says himself in his “Retrospect of the History of the Princeton Review,” 1871,

In all the controversies culminating in the division of the church in 1837-8, the conductors of this Review were in entire sympathy with the Old School party. They sided with them as to the right and under existing circumstances the duty, of the church to conduct the work of education and foreign and domestic missions by ecclesiastical boards instead of voluntary independent societies. They agreed with that party on all doctrinal questions in dispute; and as to the obligation to enforce conformity to our Confession of Faith on the part of ministers and teachers of theology under our jurisdiction. They were so unfortunate, however, as to differ from many, and apparently from a majority of their Old School brethren, as to the wisdom of the measures adopted for securing a common object. In our number for January, 1837, it is said: ‘Our position we feel to be difficult and delicate. On the one hand, we respect and love the great mass of our Old School brethren; we believe them to constitute the bone and sinew of the Presbyterian church; we agree with them in doctrine; we sympathize with them in their disapprobation and distrust of the spirit and conduct of the leaders of the opposite party; and we harmonize with them in all the great leading principles of ecclesiastical policy, though we differ from a portion of them, how large or how small that portion may be we cannot tell, as to the wisdom and propriety of some particular measures. They have the right to cherish and express their opinions, and to endeavor to enforce them on others by argument and persuasion, and so have we. They, we verily believe, have no selfish end in view. We are knowingly operating, under stress of conscience, against all our own interests, so far as they are not involved in the interests of the Church of God.’

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Mc’Crie:

It was in Scotland, however, that the federal scheme of revealed truth was carried furthest and presented in the most developed form. In 1650 there was printed at Edinburgh an edition of the Confession and Catechisms in which there appeared for the first time a treatise having for title, The Sum of saving knowledge: or, a brief sum of Christian Doctrine, together with the practical Use thereof.¹ This compendium never received the formal sanction of the Church of Scotland, but it became a well-nigh constant accompaniment of the Westminster documents in Scottish editions. Wodrow, the historian, declares it to have been the joint-composition of David Dickson, minister at Irvine, and thereafter Professor at Glasgow University, and of James Durham, minister of the Inner Kirk, Glasgow, and author of The Dying Mans Testament, or, a Treatise Concerning Scandal.² A work which the saintly M Cheyne regarded as the means of bringing about in him a saving change may well be read with interest, and ought to be handled with respect.³ At the same time, it will readily be admitted that federalism, as developed in the Sum, is objectionable in form and application. Detailed descriptions of redemption as a bargain entered into between the First and Second persons of the Trinity, in which conditions were laid down, promises held out, and pledges given; the reducing of salvation to a mercantile arrangement between God and the sinner, in which the latter signifies contentment to enter into covenant and the former intimates agreement to entertain a relation of grace, so that ever after the contented, contracting party can say, ‘Lord, let it be a bargain,’–such presentations have obviously a tendency to reduce the gospel of the grace of God to the level of a legal compact entered into between two independent and, so far as right or status is concerned, two equal parties. This blessedness of the mercy seat is in danger of being lost sight of in the bargaining of the market-place; the simple story of salvation is thrown into the crucible of the logic of schools and it emerges in the form of a syllogism.

C.G. Mc’Crie, The Confessions of the Church of Scotland, Their Evolution in History (Edinburgh: McNiven & Wallace, 1907), 72-73. [Footnote values modernized, footnote content original; and underlining mine.]

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¹The Confession of Faith, and the Larger and Shorter Catechisme, First agreed upon by the Assembly of Divines at Westminster. And now approved by the Generall Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, to be a part of Uniformity in Religion between the Kirks of Christ in the three Kingdomes. Edinburgh, Printed by Gideon Lithgow, Printer to the University of Edinburgh, 1650. The Confession and Catechisms are provided with distinct titles, but are paged continuously. At the end, occupying sixty-six unnumbered pages, comes what has for title page:–‘A Brief Sum of Christian Doctrine, and the Practical Use thereof, contained in Holy Scripture, and holden forth in the Confession of Faith and Catechisms. Agreed upon by the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, and received by the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland.’ The error in the punctuation of the above, which makes the Sum to be a product of the Westminster Assembly, was repeated in subsequent editions till 1744, when the period after Catechisms was changed into a comma. Subsequent to 1650 nearly all Scottish editions of the Confession include the Sum, which does not appear to have ever been issued as a separate publication. Carruthers’s Facsimile Shorter Catechism, pp. 41-42.

Prof. Warfield s Pointing of the Westminster Confession. Presbyterian and Reformed Review, Oct. 1901, pp. 626-27.

Dr D. Hay Fleming in D. x. 318-24.

²He [Mr David Dickson] and Mr James Durham dreu up The Summ of Saving Knouledge, in some afternoons when they went out to the Craigs of Glasgou to take the air, because they thought the Catechisme too large and dark ; (and if 1 be not forgot, my informer, Mr P. S. [Patrick Simson] was their amanuensis,) and the application was the substance of some sermons Mr Dickson preached at Inneraray, written out at the desire of my Lady Argyle. Analecta, vol. i. p. 166.

³Diary in Memoir, March 11, 1834.