Witherspoon Issues Analyst Gene TeSelle, having lived for some decades in the neighboring state of Tennessee, will be providing some glimpses ahead for that encounter.

The Cumberland Presbyterian Heritage: Two Highlights

by Gene TeSelle
[9-21-05]

As the PC(USA) holds a General Assembly jointly with the two Cumberland Presbyterian churches, it is appropriate to look at past relationships, highlighting two in particular, one connected with the separation of the churches, another with their partial reunion.

Separation

The Cumberland Presbyterian Church was organized in 1810 in Dickson County, Tennessee, breaking away from the larger Presbyterian Church over two issues: "fatality" (the doctrine of unconditional predestination) and the requirement of a learned ministry.

A much-simplified version of the Westminster Confession was adopted when they formed a synod in 1813 and revised when they formed a General Assembly in 1829. In this confession, the section on God's eternal decrees is shortened, and instead an explanation is attached (see Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, III, 772-73); it makes some suggestions that are interesting and quite original. God did not reprobate or reject anyone from eternity, the statement says; rather, human kind became reprobate (not definitively damned) through sin. Similarly God's grace of salvation is "as extensive as the legal condemnation, or reprobation." All can become elect by receiving this grace; but they are not elect until they do receive it and are justified by faith.

This sounds very much like Karl Barth's view that all are first condemned, then all are offered salvation. Barth got it from Schleiermacher, who was saying this in Berlin about the time the Cumberlands were saying it in Dickson County, Tennessee. They are similar in taking a sequential rather than an either/or view of condemnation and salvation. Schleiermacher even defended his position as a new and improved version of "supralapsarianism," the extreme Calvinist view that God from eternity differentiated the elect from the reprobate — in the process making the one important change that this is sequential rather than leading to "double issue."

Despite the similarities, there is an important difference between the two. Schleiermacher thought that everything that happens is the direct result of God's will. The Cumberlands would have called this "fatality." For them, both condemnation and the offer of grace are contingent upon human response. Still the similarities are striking, and through Karl Barth this view of predestination has become widespread.

Reunion

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a partial reunion of the "Northern church," the PCUSA, with the Cumberland Presbyterian Church (leaving out the "Second" Cumberland Presbyterian Church, as it was called at that time, a segregated church for African Americans). It seemed advantageous both to the Cumberlands, who could reunite with the national church, and to the PCUSA, which could thereby become a truly "nationwide" church, strengthening its presence in the South.

Actually the PCUSA was not simply a "Northern church," for it had presbyteries and synods composed of African Americans, especially in the Carolinas and Virginia, the result of "home missions" activity in the wake of the Civil War. After the reunion the Home Mission Board sent even more workers into the South, especially into Appalachia and into the "Black Belt," setting up schools at all levels and organizing churches.

But this was the early twentieth century, at the height of legalized segregation and discrimination in the Southern states, and African Americans were incidental when whites thought about a nationwide church. In fact, they were an obstacle. Growth of the PCUSA in the South was impossible if congregations were to be a minority in the already existing African American presbyteries.

As a consequence, one of the conditions of reunion with the all-white Cumberland Presbyterian Church was to have racially segregated presbyteries. This was opposed by many northern leaders, and by the African-American presbyteries and synods of the PCUSA in the South, who organized to oppose reunion (eleven presbyteries voted against, and only two in favor). It was also mocked by Southerners in the PCUS, who had been criticized for setting up a racially segregated synod in 1901.

To bridge the doctrinal differences, the PCUSA in 1903 adopted several amendments to the Westminster Confession, added at the end (C-6.183 to 6.193 in our current Book of Confessions). The operative one was the "Declaratory Statement" that God's love extends to all of human kind, so that all are "fully responsible for their treatment of God's gracious offer"; in contrast to the older statement about "elect infants" (C-6.066), this statement rejects infant damnation.

The reunion was voted in both churches, and the first reunited General Assembly was held in 1907. Not all of the Cumberlands were happy about reunion, however, and they filed suit in several state courts; some of these lawsuits were successful, enabling congregations to keep their property in a continuing Cumberland Presbyterian Church.