A Patchwork Confession
Meredith Kline and the American Revisions
In his 1977 essay, “Comments on an Old-New Error,” in which he critiqued “the over-heated typewriter of Greg Bahnsen,” Meredith G. Kline wrote the following about the American revisions to chapter 19 of the Westminster Confession of Faith:
In support of this position, Bahsen makes precedential appeal to the Westminster Confession of Faith ([Theonomy & Christian Ethics] pp. 537 f.) and, as already intimated, there is a degree of validity in that appeal. For though we may hold that on the subject of the civil magistrate the Confession, even in its original form, is non-Erastian, we must still admit that the original Chapter 23 did attribute to the state the function of enforcing the first four laws of the Decalogue. It must also be acknowledged then that in its original intent, WCF 19:4 must also have placed the “four first commandments containing our duty towards God” (19:2) under the jurisdiction of the state, whatever precisely is meant by saying that the judicial laws given to Israel “expired together with the State of that people; not obliging any other now, further than the general equity thereof may require.”
The question that would have to be faced today is whether WCF 19:4 retains its original sense. Did the 1788 revision of the Confession in explicitly modifying 23:3 implicitly modify the meaning of the unchanged wording of 19:4? It is sound hermeneutical policy in interpreting the inspired Word of God to follow the analogy of Scripture. But since neither the original Confession nor its revision was inspired, we cannot simply assume that WCF 19:4 is to be interpreted according to the analogy of the revised 23:3. Is it not possible to argue that the revision was a patchwork job that has left the Confession in a condition of inner tension on the subject of the functions of the state? However that question be answered, Chalcedon can justly claim historical precedence for its position on this matter in the original formulations of the Confession. (emphasis added)
Kline was essentially arguing here that while the original Westminster Confession placed the enforcement of the first table of the moral law in the hands of the state, the revisers of the confession at the founding of the United States did not sufficiently revise them to accomplish their intent (which it seems, in Kline’s view, was to completely remove this enforcement), and thus the confession has been left in something of an incoherent state regarding the role of the civil government.
This is a very odd argument coming from someone who served as an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (as I currently do). As ministers, we vow the following in our second ordination vow:
(2) Do you sincerely receive and adopt the Confession of Faith and Catechisms of this Church, as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures?
How can one in good conscience vow to adopt a confession as containing the biblical system of doctrine while also advocating that it does not, in fact, teach a proper biblical system of doctrine, particularly on matters of the state? I can understand the desire to critique Bahnsen (I think his theonomic project overreached) but the most that could be said is that this was a problem with confessional interpretation, not the confession itself. If Kline believed the confessional standards of the OPC to be a patchwork, he should not have subscribed them. Furthermore, if Kline came to be at variance with the confession on this point, he had a duty to submit the matter to the courts of the church, not publish his differences and agitations in an attempt to teach them to others. Sadly, as is often the case, scholarship and partisanship seem to have trumped churchmanship.