Covenant Essays. T. Hoogsteen
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the Thirty-Nine: “The doctrine of the Church of England is grounded in the holy Scriptures, and in such teachings of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church as are agreeable to the said Scriptures. In particular such doctrine is found in the thirty-nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal.”89 If not in North America, at least in 1973 England, the Thirty-Nine carried a measure of weight, even if this broad consensus faced huge opposition. “Peculiar to the Church of England is a former bugbear, subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, a set of doctrinal formulae drawn up in an attempt to define the dogmatic position of the Church of England in relation to the controversies of the sixteenth century . . .. In 1975 the General Synod more or less laid the Articles to rest, deciding that in future the clergy need only ‘affirm and declare their belief in the faith which is revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds and to which the historic formularies of the Church of England bear witness.”90 So much then, for the original Anglican confessional foundation; in its place came embarrassing messes of private opinion.
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In North America too, covetousness pushes aside and away the Articles of Religion, a process continuing since Anglican life started in the Thirteen Colonies.
THE DESCENT OF THE WESTMINSTER
In North America, the Standards went down two routes—Congregationalism by adopting the 1648 Cambridge Platform and Presbyterianism by living out the Westminster Standards.
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In early America: Transitory Congregationalism in cities and villages struggled with loss of supervision over westwards-moving, frontier-settling members; these lapsing church members in a cultural drift preferred the lure of idolatrous wealth-gathering to creedal wholeness. Leadership, then, to deflect further pangs of desertion, concocted the 1662 Half-Way Covenant;91 they sought unity at truth’s expense throughout New England by including lapsed members and unbelievers in ecclesiastical membership—baptizing children to win hearts and thereby regain colonial supervision.
This Half-Way measure to hold unbelievers with their children failed, unable to bar murky behaviors of faithlessness. “The movement was from the sovereignty of God to the emphasis on man’s helplessness, to a decline of efforts to arouse sinners, to a paralysis within the churches, to an interest in externals and the arrival of the ‘Half-Way Covenant.’”92 This failure in New England endangered Congregationalist existence until the ministry of Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening.
In the shrinking Congregationalist creedal commitment, two movements clashed: A deterministic/fatalistic Calvinism based on unconditional election against increasingly combative Arminianism, democratic/egalitarian/humanistic. Arminians improvised a religiosity that overworked human ability in salvation and traded on the hope to counteract massing irreligion. “In the year 1729, when Jonathan Edwards became full pastor of the church at Northampton, Mass., New England religion had already a long process of decline. The theocratic ideal of the first settlers was disappearing, Calvinistic theology had become largely a matter of formality, and worldliness had been growing among the people. Calvinistic Christianity was being buried under a heavy coating of political and economic facts which had little relevance to its theology.”93 This “spirit of worldliness” and ‘formalism”94 consequently, at least until the Great Awakening, eviscerated Congregationalism, taking down whatever of Cambridge Platform Presbyterianism that remained of this movement. And left the churches to Arminian-hearted Bible interpretations.
In early Canada: Congregationalists given to the New Side/New School/Newlight95 persuasion sought evasion of confessional patterns of integrity with active discrimination on the basis of scientific discoveries.
Early eighteenth-century Congregationalists spreading northwards and westwards from New England carried the Westminster Standards also into the Maritime Provinces. And shifted into a worldly mode with the arrival of railways, telegraph connections, newspapers, stock exchanges, steam-powered factories, agricultural improvements, etc., that is, industrialization and urbanization. Heart-strong beginnings faded. “The shift was evident in the character of many of the supporters of the Church, in the growing interest in secular affairs, and in the weakening of attitudes of devoutness and piety.”96 As on the Eastern Seaboard, concentrations of Congregationalists everywhere became entangled in New Side/New School/Newlight movements, taking the Standards down into the Arminianism unleashed by Jonathan Edwards.
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