From the TeachingtheWord Bible Knowledgebase

Part six of a series. Read part five.

The Auburn liberals used ecclesiastical "lawfare" to make it impossible for false teachers to be ejected from the church.

The fourth false principle propagated in the Auburn Affirmation was that there is no such thing as essential doctrine. Any such statement by a council or assembly is, they insisted, merely an opinion. Thus the Auburn liberals wrote:

While it is constitutional for any General Assembly "to bear testimony against error in doctrine," (Form of Govt. XII, v), yet such testimony is without binding authority, since the constitution of our church provides that its doctrine shall be declared only by concurrent action of the General Assembly and the presbyteries. Thus the church guards the statement of its doctrine against hasty or ill-considered action by either General Assemblies or presbyteries. From this provision of our constitution, it is evident that neither in one General Assembly nor in many, without concurrent action of the presbyteries, is there authority to declare what the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America believes and teaches; and that the assumption that any General Assembly has authoritatively declared what the church believes and teaches is groundless. A declaration by a General Assembly that any doctrine is "an essential doctrine" attempts to amend the constitution of the church in an unconstitutional manner.[1]

The Auburn liberals' argument was specious, and was also a faulty view of Presbyterian government. The issue was not the constitutional authority of statements by human assemblies, but the binding authority of the Word of God, and the authority of the church under the headship of Christ to require conformity to the system of doctrine revealed in Scripture among its ordained men. Furthermore, the only thing they considered to be "doctrinal error" was Bible-believers' refusal to tolerate their apostasy. It was their practice to turn the constitution of the church into nothing more than a collection of legal technicalities to shield themselves against discipline - and the doctrinally indifferent allowed them to get away with it. After the 19th century, as the mindset of the Auburn liberals gained a firm foothold, not a single ordained Presbyterian USA minister or ruling elder has ever been convicted of heresy and evicted from the church.

If the Bible is not inerrant, if it is not subject to fixed, self-derived rules of interpretation, and if there is no such thing as an essential doctrine, one wonders how there can be any place at all for a "testimony against error in doctrine." But such contradictions were possible because the old liberals implicitly rejected systematic theology. Systematic theology is founded on the principle that the Scriptures reveal a God-ordained, ordered, coherent, and unchanging system of doctrine, and that by nature this system has essential or foundational elements.

Systematic theology is a method of studying God's Word that opens up His well-ordered, consistent, and unchanging system of doctrine for believers to see. When systematic theology is rejected, neglected, or done poorly, this leads to wrong attitudes about the Word of God that in turn will lead to unbelief.

Both the old liberalism of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the postmodern theologies of the 21st century, reject genuine systematic theology. This has led to the propagation of many false, dangerous notions about the Bible. For example, many ministers today are trained to believe that God's Word contains contradictions, or that the Bible contains no essential doctrines. This kind of thinking leads to the problems of unbelief that we see in many Evangelical churches today.

Systematic theology, properly practiced, does not impose a human system upon Scripture, but rather seeks to understand and articulate the system of doctrine that the God-breathed Scriptures already contain.

Practicing systematic theology well requires a proper approach to Scripture, one that recognizes several facts that Scripture tells us about itself:

1. God the Holy Spirit is the Author of every word of the Book, and He infallibly employed human writers as His instruments.

2. The Bible, as a divine Book, is therefore inerrant and internally consistent from beginning to end.

3. The Bible, as the only divine Book, is therefore its only infallible interpreter. Traditions and the words of men are not.

4. God's Word is intelligible. God intended to communicate truth to mankind at large, and to instruct His church specifically, through His Word and through the illumination of Scripture by the Holy Spirit.

5. God did not communicate in an analogous or indirect manner. He communicated His own thoughts directly. Man can understand such direct communication of God's thoughts because he is created in God's image.

The approach to Scripture which recognizes these facts requires submission to God, an attitude of servanthood toward His Book. The Auburn liberals insisted on making the Bible their servant to support their falsehoods, rather than bowing the knee to the supreme authority of the Word. Liberals in our own time - many masquerading as "evangelicals" - insist on doing the same.

References:

1. The full text of the Auburn Affirmation appears here.

Next: Never Let Anyone Call Heresy By Its Right Name

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