This, and the preceding two posts are from an essay written by R.L. Dabney for the periodical The Southern Presbyterian Review,
for the April 1883 edition. It was written in response to an October
1882 & January 1883 article, entitled "An Inquiry into the
Aggressiveness of Presbyterianism."
We have been told that by this way we
should get a cheaper ministry for our new fields. Men thus trained,
not having spent so much in their training, would work on smaller
salaries. Now, the only experience we have does not support this
hope. Most of the Methodist evangelists were trained thus; but they
really receive better salaries than the Presbyterian. When the
various allowances are added up, theirs is found a better paid
ministry than ours.
The urgent comparisons made between our
method and that of Methodists and Baptists cannot but suggest another
thought:—that we, if we make the proposed change, shall be in
danger of “putting on their old shoes just when they are
throwing them away.” If these denominations are good exemplars
for us, then it is to be presumed that they understand their own
interests; their fine results indicate wise management. Now, it is
significant that both these denominations are now expending great
effort in making certain changes in their methods of rearing
ministers, and that these changes are in the direction of the way we
are now advised to forsake. They have tried, and are trying, two
different ways. They are in a transition state. Before we make their
way our guide, it will be well to wait and see which of their two
ways they are going to approve finally for themselves. If we are
correctly informed by those who are in closest intelligence with
their influential men, these are yearly less and less satisfied with
their old species of training, and more and more desirous to have all
their ministry improve the advantages of the excellent seminaries of
theology which they have founded. Hear, for instance, the testimony
of Mr Price in the Southern Presbyterian:—“And, in proof of
this view, it is a remarkable fact, that those very causes to which
this writer ascribes their more rapid growth, are becoming more
unpopular every day with those denominations.” While he and
others in our church are advocating a lower standard of ministerial
qualification, that we may keep pace with the Baptists and
Methodists, these denominations are directing the most intelligent
energies of their respective churches to raising their grade of
scholarship; their uneducated men are losing caste and influence; the
ministers coming forth from their theological schools are
establishing a public sentiment and a more rigid rule of systematic
theology, and of clear and accurate statement in doctrine, before
which the loose and extravagant discourses of a class of preachers
that once exercised. a powerful influence fall under sharp censure,
and are even occasionally exposed to ridicule.
“There are unlearned men in
these churches, and such may be licensed and ordained in ours, under
our provisions for extraordinary cases, whom the most intelligent are
bound to respect as called of God, and whose usefulness none can
deny; but when our Baptist and Methodist brethren are casting off
certain methods, which they have weighed in the balance and found
wanting, it becomes us to consider well before we take up that which
they throw away, especially when they are free to confess that our
example, and the evident fruits of our more thorough training, have
powerfully impelled them towards change.
“The writer in the Review
has heard of the Cumberland Presbyterians. If he has been correctly
informed, he will find that no branch of the Presbyterian Church has,
in proportion to its numbers and resources, more colleges,
universities, and theological schools. If he attends their General
Assembly, he will be impressed by the distinct and painful line of
demarcation between their learned and their unlearned men. And when
he sees and hears some of the latter, though he may find much to
admire in the vigour of their speech and the vigour of their labours,
he will not wonder that, as a people, our Cumberland brethren are
making, perhaps, more vigorous effort”, than
any other Presbyterian body to educate their ministry, and thus
obliterate one of the distinctive features upon which they went out
from us. When the Revelation Dr Lyon brought into our General
Assembly, some years ago, a report against certain proposals of union
with the Cumberland Presbyterians, he did not hesitate to present, as
one of the arguments of the committee that he represented, that, by
such a union, our church will be brought under the control of an
overwhelming majority of uneducated men. If some of the theories now
in vogue among us are put into practice, we may reach this
alternative without uniting with the Cumberlands; and they, in turn,
by raising their standard, as they now seem determined to do, may be
in a position, by and by, to raise the same objection to a union with
us.
“We are reminded that our
system now requires a longer and more expensive preparation than the
other liberal professions. And why should it not, when our
professional tasks are infinitely more responsible? But facts here
argue on our side again, in that society is steadily demanding a
raised standard of preparation from lawyers and physicians. Is this
the time to lower ours? The well-furnished young physician, for
instance, gets, in his youth, a pretty fair classical education; then
he reads medicine a year with some doctor; then, if he graduates in
one year (most have to spend two) in a good school of theoretic
medicine, like that in the University of Virginia, he does remarkably
well; then he goes into a New York or Baltimore hospital one or two
years, to get the clinic instruction. And even the plainer country
neighbourhoods are now requiring so much of training of their
doctors! The other professions are advancing largely; it is no time
for ours to go back.”
It has been often and justly remarked
that it requires more mature training and ability to teach
unenlightened minds accurately than cultivated ones. It was
considered by discerning persons the crowning manifestation of Dr
John H, Rice's trained capacity, that he could not only preach to the
edification of General Assemblies in Philadelphia, but could go then
to the Bethel Seamen's chapel and preach with equal effect to the
rough sailors. If we are to bring poor and rude communities into our
denomination, then they will need the best trained, not the inferior,
minds, to inculcate on them our logical and profound system. And as
regards the frontier communities, there is no greater mistake than
that of concluding that, because their exteriors are rough, the
ill-furnished minister will suffice to instruct them. The testimony
of Dr N. L. Rice, for instance, in the Assembly of 1857, was wholly
the opposite; and he spoke of his own knowledge. Said he:—“The
garb of the frontiersmen may be rough; their dwellings may be cabins;
but they include the most independent, active, inquiring minds
anywhere to be found in America. It is the fact that their minds and
temperaments are such which has made them emigrants; the plodding,
the slow, the minds that like to lean on precedent and prescription,
and are content to be led—these stay in the old neighbourhoods. It
is the adventurous minds who seek new fortunes. A very large portion
of them are men of thorough education. The educated emigrant is most
often a 'free-thinker,' so-called; for one main impulse which pushes
the man of culture to brave the roughnessess of the frontier is, that
he has broken all intellectual trammels, if not all sound restraints
of orthodox thinking. Hence we find these frontier societies seething
with most eager speculation, questioning all old foundations. To
suppose that the good man of slim intellectual resources can control
these minds is the most fatal mistake. The man who is to command them
needs to have the most mature resources of learning at the readiest
possible command. He needs to be a walking library, of the most
advanced learning, not only in divinity, but in all connected
studies.” This witness is also true of our Southern frontiers.
You shall see the “cow-boy” of Western Texas, sometimes
reclining on his greasy blanket to read a pocket edition of Horace or
Moliere. In their “shanties,” alongside of the
whiskey-jug, will be found the writings of Huxley, Bradlaugh, and
Büchner, with the Westminster Review, and the works of Renan. Our
evangelists confirm Dr Rice's testimony, and tell us to send none but
thoroughly furnished men to the frontiers.
It has been supposed that great
gain-would result from the alternative of an “English course”
in our seminaries for such candidates for the ministry as could not
find time or means for mastering the original languages of Scripture.
A manual of church history might be taught, it is supposed, without
involving Latin or Greek; and the exegetical and doctrinal studies
would be founded on the English version alone. Were the teachers in
these seminaries entitled to any consideration in this discussion,
their friends might perhaps raise an embarrassing question on their
behalf. Their time seems to be already fully occupied in the teaching
of the fuller course to their classical students and the exposition
of the Greek and Hebrew Scriptures, which alone are the ipsissima
verba of God. Shall they cease to give this course, in order to do
justice to the other class of their students? Or shall they give the
latter class a light, perfunctory. Sabbath-school course, such as
they will have time for? Would such a little sketch be a worthy
training for a Presbyterian minister?
It will behove the advocates of this
system to consider three consequences which are very distinctly
involved in it.
One is, that it will admit the
imperfect education of a great many more men than should be entitled,
according to the new plan itself, to enter the ministry upon it.
Men's over-haste, or indolence, or ill-considered seal, or
self-confidence, will prompt many of the candidates to plead that
they also are poor enough, or old enough, or gifted enough, or
married enough, to claim to enter through the English door, of whom
the judgment of our innovators themselves “would be, that they
had no grounds for claiming that easier way.” The pressure of
churches and Presbyteries for more labourers to be speedily gotten
will assuredly second their pleas. The result will be the general
breaking down of our standard. The majority of our ministry will be
the uneducated, the minority the educated, as it was in the other
denominations in those old ways from which they are striving so hard
to escape.
The second will be, that the students
of the English course will be much at the mercy of the professor for
their doctrinal and exegetical opinions. When the teacher gives his
construction of the text, if the English pupils attempt to say that
the English version, or the commentaries thereon, seem to sustain
another meaning, he has only to reply:—“I assure you, young
gentlemen, that the original supports only my construction; and if
you understood that language, you would see it to be so.” That
is, to those students, an end of debate. Or else they must learn to
hold their teacher in suspicion and disesteem, as a man capable of
imposing on their ignorance. There will be one caste of minds which
will resent this mental domination, the self-sufficient and
crotchety. The consequence will be, that to this class their teacher
will be no guide; but this is the class to whom influential guidance
will be most necessary. Now, we surmise that this sweeping power in
the professors of our seminaries will not be very agreeable to that
large class of our presbyters who cherish along with us a
well-grounded jealousy of seminary dictation, and all other forms of
centralisation. It may be said, our present professors may all be
trusted. But they cannot remain always. Unhappily, such things have
been known in seminaries as heretical professors, and yet oftener as
crotchety professors, fond of riding exegetical hobbies. Shall we arm
these with this dangerous power of leading off the English students
after their error?
The third consideration is, that if the
new plan of training is to be carried on to any successful extent, we
must reconcile our minds to become a “broad church.” We
must lose our doctrinal unity. Again, we advance the experimental
evidence as the most solid. All the denominations which practice the
methods of training ministers proposed become broad churches. The
Immersionists are a broad church; we have ourselves heard Calvinism
and Arminianism preached in it from the same pulpit. The Cumberland
Presbyterian is a broad church. The Methodist is a broad church. As
we remarked, the Wesleyan theology receives from Methodist ministers
various interpretations, from moderate Calvinism down to Pelagianism.
There are ministers and presiding elders who hold the perseverance of
the saints, just as we do. The church of Alexander Campbell is a
broad church; he himself declared that in it “all sorts of
doctrine were preached by all sorts of men.” In this we are not
reproaching these denominations. We use the phrase “broad
church” in no sense offensive to them, but as a ready and
familiar phrase to describe a condition of things among them on which
they congratulate themselves, namely, a tolerance in the ministry of
the same body of different schools of theological opinion, “within
the scope of the fundamental doctrines of salvation.” But we
only point to the fact that it has been the conscientious fixed
policy of us Presbyterians not to have these doctrinal diversities
and contrarieties among our official teachers. We receive all shades
of opinion, compatible with true repentance, to our communion; but we
require the voice of our official body to give one sound as to
revealed theology.
Now, the experience cited above proves
that if we are willing to lose this doctrinal harmony and unity, the
chief glory of a church of Christ, we have only to imitate these
other denominations in their method of training ministers. The
explanation of the result is easy. Human minds are imperfect
instruments of thought, and their opinions naturally tend to variety
and diversity. Again, the religious world teems with competing
clashing doctrines, each striving for recognition and pressing itself
on others with its utmost ingenuity of argument. The proposed method
of training, by reason of its comparative brevity and imperfection,
must leave its pupils more pervious to the injurious religious errors
which obtrusively meet them. These different “grades” of
preachers will not have the unifying bond with each other of a
complete esprit de corps. The result will be doctrinal divergence;
and our church must either submit to become a “broad” one,
or be again rent by schism. We are aware that there is no patent
infallible process, in fallible men's hands, for transmitting a
doctrinal homogeneity from age to age. But the means which comes
nearest, the only means of any tolerable efficiency is, under the
grace and light of God's Spirit, the thorough education of ministers
in an orthodox theology, and that by similar methods for all. Thus
not only is the competent knowledge of the divine science acquired by
all, and the practical skill in moral reasoning and exposition, which
detect error and sophism in false doctrines, but all imbibe, so to
speak, the Presbyterian and orthodox idiosyncrasy of mind The
doctrinal affinity in the correct creed is propagated through the
whole body. Now, he who really doubts whether the Presbyterian
theology is right, may also doubt whether it is proper to employ
these influences for unifying and stereotyping men's belief in it.
But those who, with us, are sure that our theology is right, will
also feel that it is not only allowable, but our duty to wield those
influences for making our theology permanent in our ministers' minds.
It is the only human way to avoid the tendencies to “broad
Churchism.”
In conclusion, we most emphatically
affirm all the regrets expressed at our lack of a holy
aggressiveness, and every ardent aspiration for a remedy. But this
remedy is not to be found by innovation upon our system, but in the
reformation of the persons who work the system. What we need is not a
class of imperfectly educated ministers, but repentance, holy
yearning for souls, prayer, and more abounding labour by educated
ministers; more family religion and true Christian training in
households, which is, after all, the Presbyterian's main lever; more
self-consecration in our laymen; and especially our employment of the
“dead capital” now lying unused in our eldership. The
elder need not be a “local preacher,” after the pattern of
the Methodist “local,” but the intelligent elder ought to
be something much better; active in spheres of work which the church
needs much more than sermonising or formal “preachments,”
vis., catechetical instruction, teaching the gospel from house to
house, oversight, social meetings, exhortations. Sabbath-schools. Do
we feel a “crying need” in our out-lying destitutions for
such work as this, and for labourers to do it more cheaply than the
educated evangelist? This is precisely the work which intelligent
ruling elders ought to do. All the elders in Scripture, ruling and
teaching, were required to be “apt to teach.” Our
conception of the New Testament organisation of the congregation
would not pull down a part of the ministers to an uneducated level,
but lift up all the elders, including the ruling elders, to the level
of official teachers. Each congregation was governed and taught, not
by a one-man power, a sort of local prelate, but by a board, a
plurality of elders, all of whom were teachers, though not all of
equal teaching authority, learning, or gifts. But, to ensure full
intelligence and permanent orthodoxy, we should require the presiding
elder in this board to have the full equipment of well attested
theological learning. One such man, thoroughly furnished, presiding
over the board, and regulating and harmonising their joint
instructions, would give a sufficient guarantee of soundness in the
faith. The others under him, in their less authoritative teaching
sphere, would safely fill in the details of the work. The ruling
elder would not act as catechist as though he were an independent
integer, but as a member of the board, under its direction, and
especially under the direction of the president, who is fully trained
and tried; even as he, in his public work as authoritative herald of
salvation, does not act independently, but under the control of his
Presbyterial Board, the Presbytery. Thus the didactic work of each
congregation would assume a largeness, occupying several men's hands;
while the thorough theological furniture of the one man at the head
would guarantee doctrinal safety in the whole. Such was evidently the
apostle's conception in the pastoral epistles.
