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Broad
Churchism
By: Robert Lewis Dabney
It has been hitherto both the characteristic and the boast of our branch of
the Reformed Church that it was a strict advocate of doctrinal correctness.
Our Confession is one of the longest and most detailed, as it is the most
orthodox and judicious, among the symbols of Protestantism. It has been the
fixed principle of Presbyterianism in all its better days, that its
teachers must subscribe its honored standards in the strict sense of the
system of doctrine which they embody. . . . No herald of Christ does his
duty who keeps back any known divine truth. Its suppression may ruin some
soul, and must mar, to some degree, the sanctification of all whom he
guides.
A church, whose teachers are not heartily agreed in doctrine, can only have
peace within itself at the cost of a Sadducean indifference to truth. . . .
Indeed, the ends designed by this so-called comprehension can only be
gained by indifferentism. The theory has an obvious tendency to disparage
the importance of truth. . . . So benumbing is the spirit of indifferency
begotten by this comprehension, that its tendency is to extinguish all true
life in the church which practices it. . . . Peace is preserved at the
expense of life, and the motley body dies in the stupor of its own
indifference. The latter seems to have been the issue of the alliance of
1691, between the Presbyterians of England and a part of the Independents.
In that "plan of union," it was covenanted that the diversities
in the testimonies of the two should be suppressed for the sake of outward
unity. The bargain was kept; and the result was, that, despite the presence
of a
In such a communion the orthodox Protestant is borne down by a practical
consciousness that he cannot assail his own brethren and equals. They would
raise against him the cry that he is disturbing the peace of the church.
The temptation is thus powerful to suppress all reference to disputed
dogmas and usages, and the testimony of the whole body becomes merely
negative. . . . As no fortress is stronger than its weakest bastion, so the
doctrinal weight of a denomination never goes for more with the outside
world than that of the lowest doctrine which that communion teaches. A
church may have a decided Calvinistic creed and many Calvinistic ministers;
but I appeal to the sense of every intelligent hearer, if she tolerates
Arminianism, does she ever, as a body, make a Calvinistic impression upon
Christendom?
The most ominous feature of that church is a general one; the fearful
neutralizing and solvent power which its ecclesiastical radicalism has over
the conservative men in it. They go in seemingly orthodox, Old School, staunch:
they proclaim as they enter, that they are going in to combat for
orthodoxy. But somehow, after a little, their orthodoxy is practically
silenced, and their influence for truth somehow neutralized.
Should it be that our little
Excerpted from "Broad Churchism" (1871) and "Fraternal
Relations," (1877) in Robert L. Dabney's Discussions: Evangelical
and Theological, volume two.
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