The symbol of Methodism ; being an inquiry into the history, authority, inclusions, and uses of the twenty-five articles

Front matter

The Symbol of Methodism.

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THE SYMBOL

Preface

The present treatise is not meant to be controversial ; but the author is only frank in admitting that recent discussions and official actions which have seemed to call in question, and to some extent actually have called in question, the adequacy of the Confessional Articles of Methodism have been the occasion of its writing. * The matters herein set forth, and the manner of their treatment, appear to me to be such as will contribute to a correct understanding of the present doctrinal situation in Methodism. Some seven and twenty to thirty years ago, in connection with the study of the "Conference Course" for young ministers and the Methodist "Standards," I read Bishop Burnet's "History of the English Reformation." It was then that there came to me a vision of the transcendent historical importance of Methodism as the successor and heir of the great intellectual and doctrinal movements of English and German Protestantism. From that day to this Methodism has seemed to me to be the sublimation of those spiritual and intellectual forces which began with the double revival of letters and religion. The initial effort as represented in the Lutheran movement was to recover the simple theology of apostolic times. Through several stages this b vi THE SYMBOL OF METHODISM.

movement has advanced — chiefly through the articles written by Luther and Melancthon, and later adapted by Cranmer, and then by Archbishop Parker, and still later reduced and clarified by Wesley — until at last it holds the pledge of completion in Methodism. This pledge is being met by Methodism, not only in the maintenance of its own marvelous spiritual life and teaching, but also in its modification of the doctrinal system of almost every other Church of Christendom, especially those of the Calvinistic school. Methodism is therefore to be reckoned a child of Providence not alone in the matter of its spiritual ministry to all conditions of men, but also in the fact of its having been made the depository of that chastened formulary in which history and faith collaborated in a time when each sought to be free.

It is this belief in the historical fitness, confessional sufficiency, and prophetic destiny of the Twenty-Five Articles that has emboldened me to undertake a task which my own sense of lack, as well as of loyalty to the cause itself, has made me wish might have fallen to other hands. * Nevertheless, the work has been prosecuted with diligence and painstaking to know the truth, and in the conviction that the arguments are so abundant and self-assertive that even indifferent skill could not fail of putting them into effective setting.

As to how thoroughly I have met the possibilities

PREFACE. vii

of this situation, I leave to the judgment of general Methodism, to which the cause of the Wesleyan Articles has been appealed.

I trust that the hope is not too ardent that, in addition to the use indicated above, this volume may be found to possess at least a modest permanent value as an interpretation of the teachings of the Articles. Outside of some works too bulky for ordinary handling, I know of no treatise of a like purpose now in print. I believe I correctly expound my motive when I say that the latter office, rather than the former, has been more constantly in my thought during the prosecution of this work.

H. M. Du Bose.

Nashville, Tenn., April 23, 1907.

Introduction

Books are so plentiful nowadays that whoever writes a new one ought to be required to come into court and show cause. If that policy were pursued in the case of the volume at hand, it is altogether sure that the author could successfully meet the demand. The matters with which he deals are of prime importance; and the time is auspicious for dealing with them. When the assertion is boldly made that the doctrinal formularies of Methodism, under which it has achieved all its victories and made all its history, are antiquated and inadequate, and should be thoroughly rewritten in the current speech of to-day, the season has surely arrived for calm and honest discussion. Such discussion cannot fail to be profitable. If any man has light to give to the Church, let him come forward and display it.

) Dr. Du Bose has not written hastily, nor without wide and careful reading. Indeed, I much doubt whether there is another man in the Church who has taken so much pains to inform himself in regard to every phase of the subject. The fullness of his knowledge is matched also by the clearness and vigor of his English. He knows how to use his mother tongue so xii THE SYMBOL OF METHODISM.

as to convey the exact thought in his mind. Above all, he has the temper and spirit of a Christian. One may look through these pages to find a single trace of the odium theologicum. It is a real pleasure to commend the work of my well-beloved fellow-laborer, who never forgets, under any stress of circumstances, that he is a disciple of the Great Teacher.

E. E. HOSS.

Nashville, Tenn., May 3, 1907.

The "Articles of Religion," together with the "established standards" of doctrine, make a system as complete as it is orthodox. — Bishop Holland N. McTyeire.

Mr. Wesley did one great thing for theology, which has never been fully appreciated, either in Europe or America. We allude to the Twenty-Four Articles of Religion which he provided for the use of his followers in this country. We have studied these Articles for more than forty years, not only in the works which have been written upon them, but also in the light of the holy Scriptures, and in the silent hours of our private meditations ; and we are now firmly and confidently persuaded that they constitute the most perpect Confession of faith under the sun. — Albert Taylor Bledsoe, LL.D.

Chapter I. Creed Or Confession I'

Theological controversy has tended to establish an important distinction between the creed of a Church and its confession. In harmony with this distinction, the creed max be defined as that which gives to the Church its catholic character, while the confession is that which, in one part or another, distinguishes it from the other Christian bodies. This definition finds full warrant in the earliest confessions of Protestantism, which are a logical, though unstudied, illustration of its principle.1

The divergence of the confession from the norm of the creed has increased at almost every stage of modern theological development. Some modern Churches, especially of the Calvinistic school, have seen their elaborate scholastic confessions honeycombed by the inroads of catholic and evangelical interpretations originating within their own bodies. The general drift, indeed, is away from the discursive statements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centurv

1Here a necessary distinction is to be remembered between articles of faith and articles of doctrine : the one arc held necessary to salvation, the other are only believed to be true — that is, revealed in the Scriptures, which is a sufficient ground for esteeming them to be true. — Bishop Bur art, on the Thirty-Nine Articles.

type toward the credal simplicity of the earliest Christian ages. Bishop Burnet, writing in the seventeenth century of the great Protestant formularies of the preceding century, anticipated the sanest sentiment of the present day when he said: "It had been an invaluable blessing if the Christian religion had been kept in its original simplicity " In his work on the Thirty- Nine Articles he felt obliged to apologize for their theological range ; and vet these Articles, with these cf the Augsburg Confession, are the least diffuse of all the historical statements of Protestantism. The great Churchman's apology is in these words: "It may seem somewhat strange to see such a collection of tenets made the standard of the doctrines of a Church that is deservedly valued by reason of her moderation : this seems to be a departing from the simplicity cf the first ages, which yet we pretend to set up for a pattern." Continuing, he says: "Since the Church of Rome owns all that is positive in our doctrines, there could be no discrimination made but by condemning the most important of those additions that they have brought into the Christian religion, in express words." This is the imperative in the confession as history has seen it develop. It is the answer to untruth.

The principle of which I have spoken as having been especially illustrated in the formularies of Protestantism had its roots in the primal record of the confession contained in the evangel. For physical background that record had the "coasts of Cesarea Philippi ," but for historical antecedents, the ages of prophecy and Jewish controversy For possible range the confession had the formularies and expanded sys-

CRFF.D OR CONFESSION? 5

terns of all the ancient and then extant rabhinical schools. But it ignored what to an adherent of the schools had been an opportunity, and fulfilled only tin* demands of personal faith. "Whom do men say thai 1 the Son of man am? And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some. Elias , and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets. He saith unto them, Rut whom sav ye that I am"J And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Sun of the living God." Here, indeed, is the norm of all true Churchly confessions, as also an indication of their rationale and inclusions. The situation plainly suggests the historical incentive as the warrant for the authoritative confession. The law governing the growing distinction between creeds and confessions is of great value to present-day faith. Its use is to light the way through present beclouding controversies and others lowering on the horizon of the age. The doctrinal statement that aspires to become effective and historic must answer to this law Place for thought and faith-changing formularies is not made by the votes and resolutions of assemblies, but through the abundant and seasonable provisions of the time spirit. The when of an authoritative statement of doctrine is no more the simple choice of men, or schools of men, than is the substance of the doctrines to be stated. However unwilling and imperfect their submission, men must at last stand by and see history write itself.

If theology is a science, it is a correlate of history and partakes of its necessities and spirit. "I speak," says Professor James Orr, "of a parallel between the theological system and the historical development of dogma, and of a logical law underlying both. The law is in both cases the same." There is, then, a theological system, as there has been, and still is, a historical development of dogma, to be considered. In a true sense these have been parallel, and, without doubt, one law underlies both — the law of cause and effect. Growth or change in the theological system brings nearer the day of the new dogmatic statement, so long as one shall be needed ; but he is but an indifferent student of theological development who does not see that the dogmatic statement can come, and properly should come, only when theological thought and discussion have completed their cycle and culminated in dynamical manifestations. The recognition of this limiting principle of necessity is the only way to keep the confession from becoming a diffuse and overflowing manual of theological opinions.

A creed has in it the element of fixedness. It emanates from the inner life of the Church, but not wholly without influence from external occasions, as has sometimes been claimed. It consists of the verified and immutable elements of the confession that have suffered the final test and fulfilled their day of protest. It is a writing (though as for that, much of the Church's creed is often unwritten) whose terms have been chastened to the last limit of compression and adaptability, and into which have gone the souls of the confessors. It is a formula suited to use inside the Church, as in the instruction of catechumens, in baptismal dedication, and in obligating Church members. It serves also as a ready answer to inquiring

CREED OR COXFESSIOXf 7

interest. The confession is. on the other hand, the Church's answer to heretical departures and innovations which have become overt in the body of Christianity. "The natural heresies in Christianity." says Schleiermacher, "are the Docclic, the Xazaraic, the Manichsean, and the Pelagian." These were the occasions of those historic polemical writings in the early Church which go under the names of symbols and apologies. They produced the necessity for declaratory statements, to which other controversies added, and to which others sufficiently momentous and crucial may yet contribute. This was the necessity which forced a Confession from the first defenders of the faith of Protestantism. It is the only proper provocative of such a writing.

The plain logic of what we have thus discovered is that, while the creed of the Church — "a brief compendium of the objects of our Christian faith"2 — is an enduring formula, the confession is a writing whose use is confined to an age or a cycle of thought. When any one protest or contention of the confession ceases to have force or pertinency, by reason of the disappearance of the abuse or false doctrine covered by it, it is eliminated, or else ceases to be regarded, and the question goes back to the realm of things privately interpreted. This rightly fixes upon every confession and dogmatic statement the limitations which naturally belong to human thinking. The confessions of Christendom are thus to become expressive of true theological progress through a process of elimination

2"An Exposition of the Creed," Pearson.

rather than by wholesale additions to their, tenets, or the picking up of supposed theological drop-stitches.

The Church has already had wholesome illustrations of the possibility of statement-making by elimination. Three entire articles of the Edwardine Confession were omitted by Archbishop Parker and his associates in making up the draft of the Elizabethan or Thirty-Nine Articles. The historian assures us that these tenets having been directed against extravagances of the Anabaptists which had disappeared in the meantime, their presence in the Confession was no longer pertinent.3 The Thirty-Nine Articles were in their turn shorn of their history-worn elements by American Methodists, Mr. Wesley being the mover of their vote. This recension was the appropriate sign not only of the rising of a new ecclesiastical jurisdiction, but of the empowerment of a new spirit in theology The chastened and abridged Anglican Confession exactly expounded that spirit by so much as Methodism is the historical successor of Anglicanism. The Reformed Episcopal Church followed, in a similar recension, the example of its elder American sister. The Protestant Episcopal Church was near doing the same thing at its beginning, in 1785. Bishop Williams, the American editor of Bishop Browne's work on the Thirty-Nine Articles, recites in a footnote appended to that volume the details of this interesting history The Convocation called to organize the Church was about adopting a series of twenty articles, which it is understood were in effect an abridgment of the Thirty-Nine

'See Schaff on these Articles.

Articles. Bishop Seabury "doubted of the need of articles at all." Others appear to have thought with him, and there was much delay An effort was then made to write a statement out of hand to supplement, or supply, the supposed lacks of the old. The plan was abandoned only after "the impossibility of agreement in a new form was shown," and after "the inherent folly of the proposition was exhibited."

Current history, in the matter of the "Articles of Religion" prepared by the Joint Commission for the Methodist Church in Japan, which is to be organized in May. 1907, illustrates our point of contention. The historical preamble to the Articles says : "The Nippon Methodist Kyokwai shall be permanently founded on the fundamental doctrines of Holy Scripture, as unfolded by Christ and his apostles, formally stated in the 'Articles of Religion'4 embodied in this plan of organization," etc. These "Articles of Religion" are eighteen in number, and are a recension of the Twenty- Five Articles, adding no new doctrinal statement and eliminating no matter of importance. In fact, the Confession is the Twenty-Five Articles abridged. Very many of the Articles are, with the slightest verbal changes, the same. Elsewhere there are substitutions of terms and phrases. One Article only is entirely eliminated — the one on the use of "an unknown tongue" in the services of the Church. Several others are combined, in one case three Articles combining to make a single one. The reference to original sin, or guilt, is omitted from Articles II. and VII., but the

*See Appendix, II.

in THE SYMBOL OF METHODISM.

title of original sin5 is retained for the Japanese Article, also numbered VII. This tenet says that "Christ died for the sins of the whole world/' In the Article on the Church the spirit of the ritual for the reception of members is added in these words, "And whose mission is to evangelize the world in obedience to our Lord's command," which is well, particularly in the Confession of a Church newly organized in a heathen land ; but it is a truth that was never in dispute, and is written in large letters on every page of modern Christian literature.

The organization of the Methodist Church of Japan is an event of tremendous moment; and had there been felt a need for it, the movement might have been signalized by the promulgation of new formulas, or at least by the addition of a number of new titles showing doctrines not catalogued in the "mother symbol." But not a new dogma is proposed; not even a new title is added, but on the contrary a half dozen disappear The teaching of the Nipponese Confession is that of the Twenty-Five Articles. It is not a new formulary, nor a restatement, but a technical recension.

As religious thought broadens, the necessity for the historical confession grows measurably less. It is an expedient of Christianity in the days of its distress, and should be rigidly confined to those exceptional matters of difference which history plainly indicates as being the proper elements of such a formulary. "The Christian religion is greater than any possible

5See Chapter IX., page 156.

CREED OR CONFESSION? n

interpretation of it," says Dr. Charles Cuthbert Hall. "The whole conception of orthodoxy, as meaning conformity to a standard drawn up by authority and officially adopted as the touchstone of belief, no longer satisfies the most spiritual minds, who desire only to know and utter the truth as that truth is revealed in Holy Scripture and certified inwardly to the believer through the witness of Christian experience."6 The polemical confession must finally disappear and the apostolic theology be fully recovered. There will then remain but the simple historic creed, the catechism, the homily — which is to-day the normal medium of statement, as the epistle was at the beginning — and the ripened heritage of private interpretation. We need no mentor to instruct us that these observations reach into the realm of the speculative and ideal. Theology is still in its practical stages, and all its surroundings are real. The historic confession has an age and an empire yet before it, but this empire is to embody historical sequences and not yield to empirical exploitations and speculations.

It may be asked: "How. when ascertained, is theological truth to be established, if not in authoritative statements that register the discovery or settlement of each of its contents?" How have the sciences made effective their discoveries and verifications? Not through conventions, nor through the authoritative statements of academies and schools, but through the general conclusions of mankind. Some things in science we know to be settled. These constitute a creed

''"Recovery of the Apostolic Theology." (Cole Lectures.)

i 2

'Villi SYMBOL OF M/iTHODISM.

upon which there is no division. Other things in science are being settled daily, but there is no arrangement, as there is no need, to have the facts reduced to authoritative statements by commissions and academies. Human intuitions and faith receive and verify whatever can make an effective claim. Belief is stronger than an)' form of authority It is in a convinced public judgment and a justified public faith that science goes to record with its claims and discoveries. By so much as theology is a science, and much more than a science, it can trust to a record in human faith, and learn at the earliest possible moment to dispense with the terms of a dogmatic statement.

When there existed but one type of Christianity, as was practically the case during the first four centuries, the symbols of faith took the form of short and simple declarations. But these were themselves, as we have seen, protests against the active forms of paganism, or else against the teachings of heretics and innovators here and there. There would no doubt have been creed forms in the Church had there been no controversies ; but no forms can be conceived of that had not been the result of intellectual crises, or other extraordinary causes. Inquiry into such an hypothetical situation would be profitless. We deal with historic facts. The statements made during the earlier centuries became, by reason of their inclusions and exclusions, precedents for the confessions of later ages. In defining such a doctrinal statement as is allowable under the historic precedent Dr. Philip Schaff says: "It is alwavs the result of dogmatic con-

CREED OR COXFESSION? 13

trovers\r, and more or less directly polemical against opposing error Each symbol bears the impress of its age and the historical situation out of which it arose." Dr. Thomas O. Summers, to whom the distinction had no controversial value, describes the Confession as *'a formulary more extended and developed than the creed." He also adds that efforts have been made to "improve the Confession by both omissions and additions, but the experiments are not encouraging.7 The Confession is for the use of ministers and teachers as a standard of public doctrine where public test has become necessary This principle is of supreme value in determining what is to go into a confession or statement, as well as of the need of such writing at all. By this principle we propose t<> try the Articles of Methodism, and by it they must be tried in the arena of practical theology. These Articles have coexisted, unchallenged, with organized Methodism since the beginning. They are destined to stand in their present relation until the cycle to which they belong is completed.

Methodism is an interpretation of the life of Protestantism, while the Twenty-Five Articles, as being the historical disenthrallment of the Anglican and the Augsburg Confessions, are the final symbol of Protestantism. Successors to these Articles, if such there are to be, will mark the practical consummation of the Reformation, and the extinction, or else permanent decline, of those intransigeant errors and false theologies, principally papalistic, that provoked their writ-

See Summers's "Systematic Theology."

ing. Other Churchly statements have contributed to the completion of Protestant ideals, but the two historic formularies from which our Articles are descended are the chief pillars of the recovered doctrines and prophecies of the gospel. There was meant to be a subtle doctrinal distinction between the term "Reformed" as appropriated by the Calvinistic Churches of the Continent and that of "Protestant" as left to the Lutheran and Anglican bodies. The distinction is far more than doctrinal : it is historic, prophetic. The two great Protestant Confessions with a court-like writ put the spirit of Rome in the stocks until "the thousand years" of its intransigeance should be past ; but the expanded scholastic statements of Calvinism, made under the policing protection of German and English Protestantism, abound with the subtleties of a theology which history has been shut up to the necessity of describing as "Reformed." Though the Calvinistic doctors espoused the cause, they missed, in their zeal for doctrinal abstractions, the first great point of Protestantism. That point subsists permanently with the anti-papal sections of our Twenty-Five Articles. It is worthy of note, and becomes a pertinent record in this connection, that with all the excisions and recensions practiced upon the English Articles since the first draft made of them, in the time of Edward VI., to the abridgment made less than forty years ago by the Reformed Episcopal Church, not a single one of the important anti-Romish tenets has disappeared,8 nor has

8By consulting the draft of the Articles prepared for the Japanese Methodist Church this observation will be found to one of them lost its historical force. They cannot pass until the measure of their demands be realized. That demand is the perfect enthronement of the doctrines of the priesthood of believers, justification by faith alone, access of the individual to the person of Christ, the all-sufficiency of the Scriptures as a rule of faith, and the Church as "a congregation of faithful men." Protestantism did not take its rise in a mere criticism of doctrines, though that was the occasion of its first sign of struggle. It sprang out of the soul of the Erfurt monk who, in hunger of heart, continually cried to himself: "O when wilt thou become holy and fit to obtain the grace of God?" This passion quickly upon its utterance became the passion of a nation, to the satisfying of which the hierarchy of Rome was found to be the one obstacle. Hence the deathless words of protest.

In its more modern use the term confession is of Protestant origin. The German and Anglican Articles— the preeminent types — follow the ancient axiom of inclusions. They are thus found built up as historical protests against heresies and abuses that had gained ascendency in the Christian body. The logical inclusions of future confessions are to be determined by these precedents. The elements to be excluded are those which have not entered into dispute, or, if ever so entering, have passed out of it, or else have so spent their force as to be no longer of historical or polemical moment ; as, for instance, the anti-Anabaptis-

apply to them also, No important anti-papal protest has been omitted, tic Articles of the Edwardine Confession, of which more is to be said later.

The distinguished Creed critic quoted above" notes a tendency among modern Churches to diminish rather than multiply the number of their Articles, and in any new statement to imitate the simplicity of the Vpostles' Creed. The opposite tendency is a sign of reaction, the persistence of theological empiricism, or else the result of an immature conception of what a confession is, both as to its fundamentals and uses. This critic, although himself a Calvinist and a dogmatist, indicts many of the Reformed Confessions for having transgressed the historic rule, and by their unwarranted inclusions having far exceeded the allowable limit. "It was," he remarks, "a sad mistake and a source of incalculable mischief to incorporate the results of every doctrinal controversy with the Confession of Faith, and to bind lengthy discussions with all their metaphysical distinctions and subtleties upon the conscience of every minister and teacher. There is a fast difference between theological opinions and articles of faith."

Statements of doctrines that have been written in exceptional times, as a very necessity of the life of religious faith and liberty, are strong in naked and elemental truth, while those that have emerged out of hand in the dull days of theological empiricism have overflowed with "metaphysical distinctions and subtletics." In this, history admonishes.

It is not to be denied that in the great typical Prot-

•Dr. Schaff.

estant statements certain unnecessitated doctrinal elements have entered; but they are supplemental, and were introduced as being necessary to the proper setting of those for which the Confession was undertaken. Brief formularies of the uncontested catholic Creeds also uniformly enter ; but these are used as a standing ground, or first principle of justification, for protest. Melancthon made this plain in the initial member, or preamble, of those Articles submitted to Charles V and his Diet at Augsburg. The presence in the Confession of the catholic formulary and of a complementing statement here and there is not to become a precedent for multiplying doctrinal tenets, or even attempting to make them into a systematic theology. Whatever else the historical confession may be interpreted to be, it is not an ordo salutis, it is not a systematic theology. It is what the ruder militant side of theology makes it, and not what the meditative, scholastic inwardness of theology might wish to see it. The catholic Articles of the Augsburg Confession constitute the permanent element in every Protestant formulary. They belong to the creed, written or unwritten, which the centuries of history have differentiated from the confession. They constitute the hope and pledge of Christian unity, a unity which is to come not as the result of sentimental fondness but as a militant conquest.

Methodism is settled in the apostolic theology. The Apostles' Creed — the Symbolum Apostolorum — is its Creed. This gives it the succession, for although the claim that this formulary was derived directly from the apostles is unsupported, it is the survival of apos- 2 tolic forms of expression and confession. The "articles of the Christian faith," which in the office of infant baptism are enjoined to be taught the child by parents or sponsors, are no other than this Apostles' Creed. This is made plain by referring to the office for the baptism of adults, where the text of the Apostles' Creed is categorically enjoined as the condition of adult baptism. Acceptance of this Creed is the one condition of belief required of those who seek membership in the Methodist Church. The vow of membership but ratifies and confirms "the promise and vow of repentance, faith, and obedience contained in the baptismal covenant." Of ministers, in both the offices of elder and deacon, unfeigned faith in the canonical Scriptures only is required as the credal condition of ordination. From this it is plain that the "canonical Scriptures of the Old and the New Testament" (of which the Apostles' Creed is accepted as a brief summary) are the final and binding creed of Methodism for all its orders, lay and clerical. This is the acme of theological and evangelical freedom.