The Presbyterian Church of Australia (PCA) holds to the Westminster Confession “read in the light” of a Declaratory Statement (DS) adopted when the Church was formed in 1901. There is a range of views about the intent and effect of the DS. Is it a conservative reaffirmation of the Confession or is it more liberalising?

It might seem quite esoteric, but anyone concerned about the PCA has to think about this important part of its Basis of Union.

A new book has just been published on the DS — P. Cooper, D. Burke eds, Read in the Light (Stanhope Gardens: Eider Books, 2019). It’s a great volume (if I can say that about a book in which I have a chapter). It offers thoughtful accounts of historical background and insightful theological assessment and will be required reading for everyone who is taking ordination vows, especially as a minister; and for anyone interested in the PCA and its history and theology.

I’ve been working on a review of the whole volume, but one section sparked some detailed thought for me. Hence, this post looks especially at how the 1882 Presbyterian Church of Victoria Declaratory Act (PCV DA) was used in the PCA DS, and what light that might cast on the intent of the DS.

The DS is mainly a pastiche of older documents, as outlined here.

1) The UPC Declaratory Act

The UPC DA is generally recognised to have been a liberalising document. Paul Cooper notes the preamble to the Act which affirms problems in the Standards since they are human compositions and “necessarily imperfect”, and states that the Church has already taken exception to them in the matter of the civil magistrates and the establishment of religion. It goes on to say that “there are other subjects in regard to which it has been found desirable to set forth more fully and clearly the view which the Synod takes of the teaching of Holy Scripture”. Cooper’s comment is that it had “an air of concession about its preamble which was ready to yield doctrinal ground”.¹

2) The PCV Declaratory Act

When the UPC material was adopted by the PCV for its own DA, just a few years later, the intent was quite different. The trigger, as is well known, was the case of Charles Strong (1844–1942) the minister of Scots Church (1875-1883) who offered a radically revisionist theology and was, with his supporters, an open critic of the Confession.

Most of the PCV DA was drawn from the UPC, but the final section was devised by the PCV, and the last part of it consists of the anti-Strong material. Because the use of this material in successive documents is key to their assessment, it is worth quoting Section 4 in its entirety.

“That the Church does not regard subscription to the Formula as binding the person subscribing to anything more in respect of doctrine than the Formula requires expressly and in terms, viz. : To own and believe the whole doctrine contained in the Standards of this Church as an exhibition of the sense in which he understands the Scriptures, and to acknowledge it as a confession of his faith, meaning, by the ‘ whole doctrine contained in the Standards,’ the system of doctrine in its unity, formulated in the Confession of Faith, catechetically exhibited in the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, implied in the statements of the Directory for Public Worship, the Form of Presbyterian Church Government, and the Second Book of Discipline, and historically known as the Calvinistic or Reformed System of Doctrine ; but that the Church has always regarded, and continues to regard, those whom it admits to the office of the ministry as pledged to profess, defend, and teach this system in its integrity, and, while giving due prominence in their teaching to all the doctrines which it includes, to give a chief place to the central and most vital doctrines thereof, with those objective supernatural facts on which they rest, especially the Incarnation, the Perfect Obedience and Expiatory Death, and the Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord, avoiding such forms of teaching as might be fitted to weaken or destroy the faith of the people in the same.”

There are several features which indicate that the PCV DA was adopted with a more conservative concern to assert and defend the Westminster Standards. Much of the following is based on ²

• The DA followed requests from several Presbyteries for the PCV to vindicate its doctrine against criticisms.
• Murdoch Macdonald (1832-1906) who drafted the DA spoke in Assembly and explained that the DA was to “authoritatively declare” that the church did not hold the doctrines which Strong’s supports claimed as they caricatured Calvinism.
• The PCV preamble refers to misunderstandings of the Confession rather than its faults.
• The PCV omitted section 1. of the UPC DA which asserted that God’s universal love, a universal atonement and the free offer of the gospel on the ground of this atonement “have been and continue to be regarded by this Church as vital in the system of gospel truth”. Neither of these three assertions are found in the Confession. To make them “vital” for gospel truth set the UPC DA in some tension with the WCF, affirming a hypothetical universal atonement which is not the WCF.
• The PCV section 1 is based on UPC DA Section 2 affirming that the doctrines of decrees and election are held in harmony with several other truths — “that God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance, that He has provided a salvation sufficient for all, adapted to all, and offered to all in the gospel, and that every hearer of the gospel is responsible for his dealing with the free and unrestricted offer of eternal life”. The PCV version inserts statements from WCF 3.1 itself, which reject certain false implications which could be drawn from the doctrine of God’s decrees. This increases the extent to which the PCV position is integrated with the WCF, in comparison to the UPC.
• Section 3 sets out the liberty of opinion allowed in the PCV. The UPC DA allowed liberty of opinion “on such points in the Standards, not entering into the substance of faith”. The PCV used stricter wording, allowing liberty “on such points in the Standards as are not essential to the system of doctrine therein taught”.
• Section 4 clarifies the responsibility of ministers and elders to “own and believe the whole doctrine contained in the Standards of this Church”. This, in effect, provided a definition of the “system of doctrine” referred to in Section 3. It explained that “the whole doctrine”, is “the system of doctrine in its unity” expressed in the Confession and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, and implied other documents of the Church of Scotland (the Directory for Public Worship, the Form of Presbyterian Church Government, and the Second Book of Discipline). This system is “historically known as the Calvinistic or Reformed System of Doctrine”. The section reaffirms that officers are pledged “to profess, defend, and teach this system in its integrity”.
• Section 4. not only lists the “objective supernatural facts”, it states that “central and most vital doctrines” of the Confession rest on these facts, and requires ministers to “give a chief place” to these doctrines and the facts.

All of these points help to underscore the fact that the PCV DS was conservative, rather than concessive.

3) The PCA Declaratory Statement

What about the PCA Declaratory Statement then? Is it concessive, like the UPC; or conservative, like the PCV?

It seems to me that it swings back toward the UPC position, if not conceding quite as much.

a) The 1884 proposal

The DS first appeared in the 1884 Conference of the Presbyterian Churches of Australia and Tasmania, less than a year after Charles Strong had left the PCV. The Conference approved a version of the DS without a preamble. It had the liberty of opinion clause as the first section, allowing liberty in “points in the confession not necessary to integrity of the system of doctrine”.

This version of the DS also included a section 2. which used UPC Section 1 (omitted by the PCV). It included with this the anti-Strong material (somewhat revised) in section 2, stating that the universal doctrines, along with the person and work of Christ and “the mission and work of the Holy Spirit” are “vital elements in the system of Gospel truth to which special prominence ought ever to be given”. This lacked the theological specificity of the PCV anti-strong material and lost the explicit connection with the theology of the Confession.

Instead of the PCV definition of the system of doctrine, the Conference adopted an explanatory note outlining the “leading positions of the ‘system of doctrine’” in the WCF. The note lists most of the first twenty chapters of the Confession and offers a potted summary, usually in a sentence or so. It names the “The Inspiration and Divine Authority of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments” but offers no expansion. WCF Chapter 2 is summarised as the doctrine of the Trinity with no fuller doctrine of God. There is no reference to WCF Chapter 3 or the doctrine of the decrees, though the summary of Effectual Calling or Regeneration states “that those and those only who have been Divinely ordained unto life are effectually called”. The doctrine of Providence is summarised as “that God effectually governs all his creatures and all their actions so that however His infinitely wise, holy, and benevolent purposes may be opposed or contravened, they cannot be subverted or frustrated”. This does not summarise the basic position of the Confession that “God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeable ordain whatsoever comes to pass” (3.1). WCF Chapter 6 on the Fall, Sin, and Punishment is omitted, though one effect of the Fall is noted under the doctrine of free will. The notes gives a full summary of the person and work of Christ (Chapter VIII) distinguishing it into two doctrines “the doctrine concerning Christ our Mediator” and “the doctrine that the Eternal Son of God”. The doctrine of Good Works, includes the unusual claim that “in the case of adults [good works are] the uniform products of the indwelling of the Spirit in their heart”. (Does this imply some state of innocence for children?). All in all, the note provides a rough approximation of the theology of the WCF but hardly a thorough and careful exposition.

Even with the 1884 version of the DS, there are reasons to think that it was not as robust as the PCV DS.

When the proposed DS was circulated to the colonies, the NSW Assembly rejected it. The Presbytery of Melbourne expressed concern that there was only reference to the Confession and none of the other Standards and that the Note had no mention of the Church, the Sacraments or Eschatology. ³ The proposed DS was removed from the federation documents in 1885 and any mention of a such a declaration seems to have disappeared from the discussions for almost a decade.

b) The 1901 Declaratory Statement

In 1894 the Federal Assembly received a report from the Committee on Union including the recommendation that “the Subordinate Standards of the United Church shall be the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Shorter Catechism, read in the light of a Declaratory Statement such as that in use in the Church of Victoria”. The Assembly made no particular resolution about this aspect of the proposal, but set the Committee to redraft the scheme, submit it to the Assemblies of the colonial churches for comment. At the next in 1895 Assembly the committee offered there a detailed proposal with a DS.

As was the case in 1884, the proposed DS lacked the robust Preamble of the PCV Act.

The proposed DA in 1895 omitted reference to standards of Church government and worship in its summary of “the whole doctrine”, though it continued to affirm that this was the unity of doctrine in the Confession and Catechisms “historically known as the Calvinistic or Reformed System of Doctrine”. The PCV objected to the omission, and the solution was to remove the whole section (1895, Section 5) and to include affirmations of purity of worship and church government in the ordination Formula instead.

The Victorians were apparently satisfied with this change, which might suggest that the result was consistent with PCV DA. ⁴ However, it has to be admitted that the resulting statements do not retain the robust definition of the PCV DA. There is no reference in the DA or the Formula to “unity of Doctrine” or “the Calvinistic or Reformed System of Doctrine”. Both the 1895 Section 5 and the Formula lack the statement of an expectation of ministers to “to profess, defend, and teach this system in its integrity”, though something similar is in the ordination vows.

With the deletion of the 1895 Section 5, the anti-Strong material was moved to a new Section 1 and combined with material from Section 1 of the UPC DA. This resulted in a section which was quite similar Section 2 of the DS proposed in 1884. So, again, the anti-Strong material was associated with the universal statements of the UPC and dissociated from the “Calvinistic or Reformed System of Doctrine” of the Confession.

The anti-Strong material was also reworded. In the PCV DA the “objective supernatural facts” were said to be the ground of “the central and most vital doctrines” of the Confession. In the DS, the list has been changed slightly (with some improvement) to “the incarnation, the atoning life and death, and the resurrection and ascension of our Lord, and His bestowment of His Holy Spirit”. The Statement says that ministers are “pledged to give a chief place in their teaching to these cardinal facts”. In explaining the significance of these facts, it makes three statements, none of which relate the facts to the doctrine of the Confession in the manner of the PCV Act. The three statements are “the Christian faith rests upon” these facts, “the Christian consciousness takes hold of” them and that they imply and manifest “the message of redemption and reconciliation” which ministers are also to proclaim. There is nothing objectionable in this wording, but it does not secure the relationship between the Confession and the person and work of Christ in the way the PCV Statement did.

The liberty of opinion section (Section 5) was varied in the negotiations from 1895. Initially is allowed liberty in “points in the Standards not essential to the system of doctrine therein taught”. In 1899 this was varied to refer to “points in the subordinate Standard not essential to the doctrine therein taught”, losing the reference to “system of doctrine”. Creation in six days was included as an example of such a point. In 1900 it reached its final form granting liberty in “matters in the subordinate standard not essential to the doctrine therein taught”. Whether the shift from points to matters indicates a substantial change is not clear. The removal of ‘system of doctrine’, along with any definition of a system does have the effect of making the provision of liberty more generous and less well defined.⁵

Conclusion

All in all, the development of the DS from the PCV DA, constitutes a shift toward the 1879 UPC Statement with its more concessive approach to the Confession. This is not to say that the DS has no value for the PCA (see my chapter in Read in the Light). It does help to underline that in it the PCA had an ambiguous theological heritage. We have an ongoing task to make the best use of this heritage and, I hope, to work out how to hold the Confession in a genuine and healthy way. That is a discussion for another post (or posts). This post is simply to help trace the difference between the conservative PCV DA and the more concessive PCA DS.

1. Paul Cooper, “Background to the Declaratory Statement of 1901”, Read in the Light, 34-35.
2. Much of the following is based on Cooper, “Background”, 34-43.
3. C.D. Balzer, “Australian Presbyterians and the Westminster Confession of Faith, 1823-1901”. (ACT MTh thesis, 1989), 129.
4. See Cooper, 48.
5. J. Hood, “Give Me Liberty: Liberty of Opinion in the Presbyterian Church of Australia.” RTR  78.1 (April 2019): 51–81 suggests that ‘matters’ are the equivalent of ‘points’, and denotes “smaller propositions or the minutiae within the paragraphs”. He argues that these are constitutive elements of the paragraphs (which may or may turn out to be essential); and items which would not usually be considered ‘essential’ — scriptural allusions, technical terminology, implications drawn from the doctrines and tangential assertions.