Old School/New School Reunion In The South: The Theological Compromise Of 1864 -- By: S. Donald Fortson III

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 66:1 (Spring 2004)
Article: Old School/New School Reunion In The South: The Theological Compromise Of 1864
Author: S. Donald Fortson III


Old School/New School Reunion In The South:
The Theological Compromise Of 1864

S. Donald Fortson III

[Donald Fortson is Assistant Professor of Church History and Practical Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte, N.C.]

Any retelling of the story of nineteenth-century Southern Presbyterianism1 must highlight the long controversy over domestic slavery and the journey to emancipation. The African question seemed to lie just below the surface of every major crisis Presbyterians in the South faced before, during, and after the War Between the States. Even after the Old School/New School schism of 1837–38, neither party could fully escape the consuming question. The New School would become stridently anti-slavery, while the Old School attempted to avoid the controversy. For both branches of the Presbyterian Church it was a festering sore that would eventually poison the unity of the church. The second half of the nineteenth century would witness American Presbyterians divided North and South rather than Old School and New School.

I. The New School South

Having endured a relentless “abolition spirit” in the New School body for many years, the southern New School men finally abandoned the New School Assembly to form their own denomination. Southern delegates to the 1857 New School General Assembly at Cleveland called for a new Assembly to be formed in the “Address of Protest” against the New School body. The address protested the “political agitation” and “ultra abolitionist sentiments” in the New School that were advocating discipline for slaveholding. The southern New School men countered that “there is not the most remote allusion to slave-holding in our standards.” Therefore, this was a “palpable violation of the spirit and letter of the Constitution of the Church.” If the church disciplined slave-holders, this would be “an ecclesiastical despotism as tyrannical as that which has distinguished the Church of Rome.. .. we consider that the Assembly has so far departed from the Constitution of the Church as to render our adherence to it undesirable and impossible.”2

The stated goal of these protesters was to form a new ecclesiastical body “in which the agitation of the Slavery question will be unknown.” An invitation was issued to “all Constitutional Presbyterians” throughout the land to unite with them in a new organization. The unifying principles of this new denomination would be commitment to “a common basis as to doctrine and government—and an understanding that, however we may differ in our views respecting S...

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