The Visible Church & the Outer Darkness:
The Church in Extraordinary Times.
Chapter
1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
6
Presbyterian Government in Extraordinary Times bases its justification for separation on the view that the church presently finds herself in “extraordinary times.” One might suppose that since the entire argument rests on this single foundation, the author would carefully define what constitutes extraordinary times and how it is possible to know when the church must avail herself of extraordinary measures. However, if someone supposed that, he would be greatly disappointed.
We are assured that the church was in extraordinary times when Knox went to Saint Andrews in 1546. Futhermore, Mr. Reed maintains that he finds the church in a worse state today than at the dawning of the Reformation.[E.T., p. 15.] Imagine! The religious state of the nation is worse than when the established church required attendance at mass upon pain of excommunication and martyrdom. Christendom is at a lower ebb than when Antichrist sat in God's place in the temple. Churches are less holy than when its “ministers” sold both indulgences and ecclesiastical office.
Actually, it is necessary to overstate his case in order to justify separation. The men of both the Reformation and the Second Reformation established a principle so foundational that it is now unassailable: it is rarely, if ever, lawful to separate from a true church. Therefore that paper must claim that there are no true churches in America. That kind of hardening is ill calculated to work either peace or purity in Christ's church. As M`Crie says, “Parties at variance are inclined to move to a distance from each other. They are apt to magnify the real point in dispute, but also to create or discover new ones, with the view of vindicating their separation, and enlarging charges which they bring against their opponents.”[M`Crie, op. cit., p. 43.]
The essay maintains that “gross ignorance of biblical truth abounds at every hand” as evidence that the church is in extraordinary times.[E.T., p. 15.] It is true that there is much ignorance, even in Presbyterian churches of today. Further, Presbyterian standards require that sessions keep back the “grossly ignorant” from the Lord's table. “Such as are found to be ignorant or scandalous, notwithstanding their profession of the faith . . . , may and ought to be kept from that sacrament, by the power which Christ hath left in his church, until they receive instruction, and manifest their reformation.”[Westminster Larger Catechism (Larger) number 173.]
But it is neither the duty nor the right of private Christians to make determinations of who is ignorant or scandalous. Christ has left this authority in His church – in the hands of church officers. “To these [church-] officers the keys of the kingdom of heaven are committed . . . . The officers of the church are to proceed by admonition, suspension from the sacrament of the Lord's Supper for a season, and by excommunication from the church, according to the nature of the crime, and demerit of the person.”[Confession XXX:2,4.]
The paper further attempts to equate the power of the keys with the ability of Christ's sheep to discern their Master's voice. But Reed far oversteps the meaning of both Christ and the Reformers if he holds,[E.T., pp. 16 & 20-26.] with Congregationalists, that this places church authority in the hands of private Christians. This is the principle of Congregational apologist R. W. Dale, when he states, “This august power of representing and carrying into effect the authority of Christ is not entrusted to church officers, but to the church as a whole.”[R. W. Dale, Manual of Congregational Principles. (London: Congregational Union of England and Wales, 1882) p. 57.]
In a classic on Presbyterian understanding of church polity, Jus Divinum or The Divine Right of Church Government, a group of “sundry ministers of the city of London” take the Separatists of the 1640's to task for the very same statements and assertions made in “Extraordinary Times.” William Hetherington, in A History of the Westminster Assembly, describes the times. “As King Charles plundered the countryside, many sectaries of various beliefs were forced into London (1643-44). The Sectarians knew that no rule of ordination had yet been made. They procured ordination from other sectaries and applied for the ministerial relief. When refused they began to draw parties after them. The Assembly complained to Parliament about the liberties being taken. [Philip] Nye objected. Independents began to align themselves with the sectaries.”[William Hetherington, A History of the Westminster Assembly. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), pp. 144-45.] It was this anarchy and confusion to which the ministers addressed their Jus Divinum.
The London ministers make no pretence of lording it over God's people as bishops had done. They maintain,
the people are indeed allowed certain liberties or privileges; as, To try the spirits, &c., 1 Jn. 4:1. To prove all doctrines by the word, 1 Thess. 5:21. To nominate and elect their own church officers, as their deacons, which they did, Acts 6:3,5,6; but this is not a proper power of the keys. But the proper, public, official, authoritative power, is quite denied to the body of the people, furnished with an eldership or destitute thereof.[Divine Right of Church Government. (New York: R. Martin & Co., 1844, repr. of 1799 ed., edited by “T.H.”), p. 93.]
The sectaries of that day may have responded that it does not belong exclusively to church courts to evaluate the claims of ministers and churches. “Extraordinary Times” claims that it is faulty logic to infer such from Confession XXXI:3.[E.T., p. 26.] In making such a statement the author neglects or refuses to differentiate between natural and positive law. Church office, and hence authority in the church, is positive not natural. The London ministers, in Jus Divinum, anticipated just such an assertion as “Extraordinary Times” makes, which they answered: “The power of Church government in this or that subject is not natural, but positive; and cast upon man, not by natural, but by positive law, positive grant: . . . therefore all such power claimed or exercised, without such positive grant, is merely without any due title, imaginary, usurped, unwarrantable, in very fact null and void.”[Divine Right, p. 94.]
The ministers can make such a statement against the assertion in “Extraordinary Times” of “the office of the sheep”[E.T., p. 26.] because “church government is a power or authority spiritual, revealed in the holy Scriptures, derived from Jesus Christ our Mediator, only to his own officers, and by them exercised in dispensing of the word, seals, censures, and all other ordinances of Christ, for the edifying of the Church of Christ.”[Divine Right, p. 45.] This is the proper understanding of Confession XXXI:3, for it is in this context that the Westminster Confession was written. It is not faulty logic, but a proper historical understanding of our own creeds that requires us to maintain that the keys of church government pertain exclusively to church officers.[E.T., p. 26.]
We must make a distinction here between ordination, which is a function of the Presbytery in the case of teaching elders, and the formation of a pastoral relation. The people have the right of consent and dissent in the latter, but no hand at all in the former, nor in deposition from any church office. It is only in the latter sense of consenting or dissenting to a pastoral relation that the sheep have anything like a voice in selecting a shepherd: the sheep have no authority to create shepherds of their own choosing.
William Cunningham, in Discussions on Church Principles, discusses the topic of church authority at length. The church does not have authority except in certain carefully delimited areas, and that authority is always executed by office bearers.
. . . it is part of the constitution which Christ has prescribed to His church, that it should have certain office-bearers, qualified and appointed according to His directions; and that these office-bearers, when so qualified and appointed, have authority from Him, and not merely from those who elected and ordained them, to execute certain functions, and to do so in accordance with His word, without regard to any other rule or standard . . . . Upon Scriptural and Presbyterian principles, ecclesiastical office-bearers are neither priests on the one hand, nor mere representatives of the people on the other.[William Cunningham, Discussions on Church Principles. (Edmonton, AB Canada: Still Waters Revival Books, 1991 repr. of 1863 first edition), p. 277.]
The plea that Separatists make, whether on the basis of the priesthood of the believer or the sheep hearing the voice of the shepherd, is ultimately an appeal to private conscience as the last and highest court of the church. As George Gillespie stated in 1647, “[if] any in the church do so swell in pride, that he refuse to be under this discipline, and would have himself to be free and exempt from all trial and ecclesiastical judgment, this man's disposition is more like the haughtiness of the Roman Pope, than the meekness and submissiveness of Christ's sheep.”[George Gillespie, “One Hundred and Eleven Propositions Concerning the Ministry and Government of the Church,” Prop. 8. in Works: A Presbyterian's Armoury. (Edinburgh: Robert Ogle and Oliver and Boyd, 1844 repr. of 1647).] Separatists and Independents invariably elevate the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer to a sort of papacy of the believer.
John Calvin himself had a similar view of those in the church who are ever running from one controversy to another. It is one thing for a member of a church to bring offenses to the attention of a church officer or church court. The case is altogether different when a member habitually magnifies lesser faults so out of proportion that the process of reform cannot take place for lack of an agenda. This was nowhere more true than in the French Church at Frankfort. Calvin wrote to them in June 1556:
But so it is when our hearts are embittered with animosity, suspicion must needs get the upper hand, and dispose us to put an unfavorable construction on everything that is done by those we dislike, to such a pitch that from ill-will to individuals we will call white black. If things go on in this train, new evils will never cease to break out among you, and at last the mischief will acquire such intensity as to destroy every thing. Wherefore we have need to bridle our affections more carefully, in order to tame and moderate them.[John Calvin, “Letter to the French Church of Frankfort, June 24, 1556,” in Calvin's Selected Works: Tracts and Letters, edited and translated by Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1983 repr. of 1844), vi, p. 276.]
It is wicked if men intrude themselves upon the Lord's table without warrant. It is dereliction of duty and “desertion in the face of the enemy” if church officers do not properly exercise the key of discipline in dealing with the wayward members of a church. But the wickedness of one man does not excuse the wickedness of another. We are not free to add the sin of unlawful separation to the (supposed) sin of laxity of discipline. As Reverend John Ball of London stated, “The wicked usurp in that they intrude unto the Lord's table: and the faithfull usurp, if without authoritie they take upon them to expell the wicked, or depart themselves.”[John Ball, A Friendly Triall of the Grounds Tending to Separation (Ball). (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1640), p. 202.]
Robert Baylie, a Scottish commissioner to the Westminster Assembly, warned that such a high opinion of one's own ideas must almost inevitably lead to doctrinal errors, for these men lack contact with and respect for the position and authority of the larger church.
A few persons having locked themselves up within the narrow walls of one Congregation, with an Independent power, having made themselves uncontroulable by any or all upon earth; they open a wide doore to any erroneous spirit, to mislead them towards whatever fancie can enter into any cracked brain, without all possibility of any effectual remedy; . . . [Robert Baylie, A Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time. (London: Samuel Gillibrand, 1646), p. 112. Various documents have this commissioner's name spelled differently, but this is the spelling contained in this particular work.]
James Wood, professor of theology at St. Andrews, wrote a similar warning against Independency or any other sort of separatism that neglected the scriptural distinction between officers and private members. “Our alledgeance is that the Independent way of church-Government is such in the nature of it as giveth occasion to men to run freely without controlement into errours, and is a kinde of shelter, for such as holds and maintains errours, to run to, as experience proveth; and this, sure, if it be not an intrinsick Argument yet it is a strong presumption against a Tenet, that it is not of God.”[James Wood, A Little Stone Pretended to be Out of the Mountain. (Edinburgh: Andro Anderson, 1659), p. 114.]
James Bannerman, in his two volume work The Church of Christ, spoke directly to the problem of tension that may arise between the authority of church courts and discipline on the one hand and the liberty of private conscience on the other. He concluded: “Church power, in all its various departments, whether exercised about doctrine, ordinances, government, or discipline, is always administered in the New Testament church by parties in office, and never by the members generally.”[James Bannerman, The Church of Christ. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1974 repr. of 1869), ii, p. 308.]
The Reverend John Ball was an English minister in very unsettled times. His influence[Compare Ball's statement, “For out of a true visible church ordinarily there is no salvation” with WCF XXV:2 regarding the visible church, “out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation.”] upon the Westminster Assembly was very great, even though he was not personally a delegate, due to his death in 1640. The Bishops War had left England without an established church government. If ever the Church of England found herself in extraordinary times, it was on the eve of the call of the Westminster divines. It was in this ecclesiastical environment of “extraordinary times” that Ball took issue with the English Separatists of 1640, maintaining that even in such unsettled times as those, and in a church in which the Prayer Book played a large part in its worship, separation was unlawful.
The General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland also seemed to understand the state of the Church in England to be unsettled. The Westminster Assembly was not an ecclesiastically called synod, but a magisterially called synod. Yet we find in the Act of the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland approving the Confession of Faith (August 27, 1647) the following statement:
It is further declared, That the Assembly understandeth some parts of the second article of the thirty-one chapter only of kirks not settled, or constituted in point of government: And that although, in such kirks, a synod of Ministers, and other fit persons, may be called by the Magistrate's authority and nomination, without any other call, . . . [The Confession of Faith, (Glasgow: Free Presbyterian Publications, 1983), p. 15.]
Yet the Church of Scotland, in 1643, commissioned a delegation to the Westminster Assembly. No such act was passed by the Church of England. The Westminster Assembly met, not upon authority of the Church of England, but upon authority of the Long Parliament. The General Assembly's reasoning seems to run thus: The magistrate may call a synod of ministers only in extraordinary times. Yet the magistrate's call of a synod in 1643 was lawful. Therefore, they must have concluded, the Church of England was in extraordinary times.
In still another place, the Scottish church historian Thomas M`Crie, maintained regarding the Westminster Assembly, “[it] was plainly abnormal, and it could only be justified by the extraordinary circumstances of the country. Strictly speaking, it ought to have been summoned by royal proclamation; but the king was now in the field, with his council, in opposition to the parliament. It ought to have been a general convocation of the bishops and clergy; but prelacy had already been condemned by parliament, and the great body of the clergy may be said to have been yet on their trial.”[Thomas M`Crie, the younger, Annals of English Presbytery (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1872), p. 139. [emphasis added]]
In this extraordinary setting, Ball pointed out first, that the visible church consists of all those who profess the true religion together with their children. God requires the church to maintain her holiness against open and provable scandal. Yet when the church does that imperfectly, she does not lose her identity as the church of Christ.
As the common-wealth of Israel consisting of men uncircumcised in heart, perverse, rebellious, obstinate, as well as faithfull and obedient, was separated into covenant, and so one body in externall communion, and might lawfully have fellowship together in the ordinances; so the faithfull and scandalous received into covenant, and living in society, do partake in the same ordinances without tincture or infection to the better part.[Ball, p. 193.]
Further, John Ball spoke directly to the claim that Separatists were fond of making that the wickedness of those within the church prevented them from remaining, in that the church had supposedly given up its right to be called a true church. For he stated, “. . . it perteineth not to every man to debarre the impenitent from the Lord's table, but it must be done by them, and in such a manner as the Lord hath appointed. For private Christians may not usurp the authority of the church, nor the church execute her authority in undue manner.”[Ibid., p. 190.]
With this statement, Mr. Ball opposed two errors. The first error was that of private Christians who were so zealous of “reform” that they separated from a true church because the reform was not yet complete. The righteous must hate the company of the wicked “with a perfect hatred,” yet they do not therefore have the option of separation from the church.
But it is one thing to avoid the private society of wicked men; another for the hatred of the wicked [to cause one to] renounce the publick communion of the church, and so of Christ, who is present with his people. The duties which I ow [sic] to a brother in this course I must perform; but privately excommunicate him, or separate my self from the congregation for his sake I must not, because I have no charge from God [and] no pattern from the godly so to do.[Ibid., pp. 198-99.]
The second error against which Ball warned was that of a zealous session casting out seeming offenders without due process. For, as he said, it must be done in such a manner as the Lord has appointed. If we do not proceed with the reformation of Christ's church lawfully, then we become like those of whom Christ said, “He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber” (John 10:1). Good intentions do not suffice and if there is not sufficient evidence to discipline a member after due process, then neither is there evidence that the church is no true church because it does not or cannot rid itself of everyone suspected to be ignorant or scandalous. If we should be placed in a position of having no further lawful recourse, then “our communion with the wicked in the ordinances is unwilling on our part, suffered not affected [desired], if we knew how to hinder it lawfully.”[Ibid., p. 201.]
Even a minister of Christ, as the one who ministers the sacraments, is not free based on his own singular judgment to exclude any person from the Lord's Supper. George Gillespie, a contemporary of Ball, agreed with him on this point in his “Assertion.” For there Gillespie stated, “We boldly maintain that there is no part of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the power of one man, but of many met together in the name of Christ.”[George Gillespie, “An Assertion of the Government of the Church of Scotland,” p. 12, in Works: The Presbyterian's Armoury (Edinburgh: Robert Ogle and Oliver and Boyd, 1844 ed. of 1641 text).] And so Ball, writing during the same extraordinary times in which Gillespie wrote, made the same point: “If a minister know a man to be unworthy, he must yet receive him, because he cannot manifest it to the church: And for the same reason, if his unworthinesse be notorious, if it be not so judged by them that have authority, he must administer the sacramentall signes unto him, not as unto one worthy or unworthy, but as unto one as yet undivided from them.”[Ball, p. 205.]
The controversy, then, does not hinge on whether the church finds herself in extraordinary times. The times were as extraordinary when Ball and Gillespie wrote as they are today. According to Ball himself, the whole controversy turns on:
whether one or two or some few private Christians have power to cast out and excommunicate whole societies and churches for some remisseness or abuse in bearing with or admitting scandalous offenders in the societies. So long as the doctrine of grace is purely taught, the sacraments rightly administered for substance, Christ is pleased to tolerate and bear with their manners, continueth the visible signes of his presence among them, and is present by speciall grace to blesse his ordinances to the worthy receiver.[Ibid., p. 211.]
The Puritan John Ball refused to grant any of the arguments of the Separatists even in his extraordinary time. What, then, did Ball believe the godly should do if they may not lawfully separate from corrupt, but true churches?
What remaineth then, but that with merciful affection they dislike, reprove, and correct as much as in them lieth what they find to be amisse; what they cannot amend, that they should patiently endure and suffer, and in loving sort bewail and lament, till God do either correct and amend it, or make way for their enlargement, as they may see the Lord go before them.[Ibid., p. 223.]
John Ball lived in extraordinary times indeed. The national church in the preceding hundred years or so had gone from Popish to Henrician to Reformed, back to Popish and finally through the Elizabethan Settlements and the Stuarts' bishops to a completely unsettled state in 1640. Within a couple years, the Church of England would come within a hair's breadth of becoming Presbyterian, had it not been for the Separatists in the Westminster Assembly. Ball was aware of six settlements in about a hundred years. And through each of them, except the Popish, he could say,
wheresoever we see the Word of God truly taught and professed in points fundamentall, and the sacraments for substance rightly administered, there is the true church of Christ, though the health and soundnesse of it may be crazed by many errours in doctrine, corruptions in the worship of God, and evils in the life and manners of men.[Ibid., p. 306.]
James Durham ministered in the Kirk of Scotland in very irregular times and yet insisted that separations due to irregularities and even scandals are virtually always unlawful.[James Durham, A Treatise Concerning Scandal (Dallas: Naphtali Press, 1990).] Cromwell had invaded the country and the church was divided between Protestors and Resolutioners. Even those men who had been at the Westminster Assembly found themselves divided over the issues involved. The Resolutioners had seemingly abandoned certain of the testimonies of the church in order to appease the “malignants” in the Scottish army. The Protestors were so strongly opposed to allowing “malignants” – those who had not signed the covenants – into the army, that a division arose within the church. In the midst of this strife, confusion and division, Durham attempted to bring the voice of calm reason and biblical reconciliation.
Thomas M`Crie (the younger) spoke of those irregular and extraordinary times in his The Story of the Scottish Church:
It is hard to say whether our worthy fathers were more alarmed at the secular weapons of
Cromwell's soldiers, or at the monstrous heresies which they imported. They beheld with
dismay an army of sectaries impregnated with all the errors of the times, and quite as
ready to combat the pastor in the pulpit, as to meet his people in the battlefield . . . .
In various places throughout the country Cromwell's soldiers behaved very rudely. They
would come into the churches during the time of service, take up their seat, by way of
contempt, on the stool of repentance, and after sermon publically challenge the minister
to dispute with them on the doctrine which he had been preaching . . .
Cromwell spoke for nearly an hour to a meeting of ministers in Edinburgh, and at length
John Semple remarked, “Moderator, I hardly know what the gentleman would be at in
this long discourse; but one thing I am sure of, he was perverting the Scripture.”
For this speech the honest minister was punished by six months' imprisonment.[Thomas
M`Crie, The Story of the Scottish Church (Glasgow: Free Presbyterian Publications,
1988), pp. 239-41.]
So much for Independent “toleration!”
The Independents were not the result of the extraordinary times. Then, as now, they were part of the cause of the extraordinary times. In late 1647 King Charles I concluded an agreement with Scotland that would have established Presbytery in England for three years. Within a few months of the agreement, Cromwell and the Independents killed him. J. H. Merle D'Aubigne defended Cromwell's actions based on the existence of “extraordinary and irregular times.” All parties but the Independents protested against the trial and “execution” of King Charles: Episcopalians, English Presbyterians and the Church of Scotland.[J. H. Merle D'Aubigne, Cromwell the Protector (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 1983 repr.), pp. 74, 84, & 90.] It is truly amazing what can be defended based on an appeal to “extraordinary times!”
In an attempt to defeat Cromwell's army of sectaries, Scotland had allowed men into their army who had not signed the National Covenant. This resulted in a division within the Kirk of Scotland between “Resolutioners” and “Protesters.” “The 1650's saw rival Assemblies, presbyteries and even rival ministers in the same parish. Indeed, the church in Scotland has not been one since.”[David Lachman's “Introduction” to Durham's op. cit., pp. viii-ix.] The period was one of anarchy in both church and state; extraordinary times indeed. Yet even in such an extraordinary time as that, as Professor Dr. John Moffatt of the Union Theological Seminary of New York stated in 1928, “Durham is thoroughly representative of Presbyterianism when he repudiates schism and division as being worse evils than the evils they profess to avoid.”[John Moffatt, The Presbyterian Churches. (London: Methuen and Company, 1928), p. 101.]
Durham conceded in his Treatise that there may be times when it becomes necessary to leave a church that has degenerated into a Synagogue of Satan. Still, he maintains that a hasty withdrawing from a church, i.e. while the means of reformation are still at hand, retards rather than procures reformation.[Durham, op. cit., p. 120.] Even if it should become necessary to leave a church because remaining would require us to sin,
If in this respect rivers of tears were running down our cheeks, because of the abounding of offenses, there might be much more solid peace (we are persuaded) in keeping communion with others, than without that to separate with much, at least seeming pride and uncharitable cruelty in giving offense to them, and thereby confirming them in their profanity.[Ibid., p. 116.]
What, then, may private Christians or even single church officers do when they see corruption in the churches of which they are members or officers? According to Durham, and Presbyterian authors generally, they must bring the charges and the proof before a court of Christ's church following Matthew 18:15-20. For separation is rash and scandalous, “when either means have not been used to remove that ground if it is just, or when men so heighten some lesser defect in a church by aggreging it with such circumstances as may make it appear to themselves or others, a ground sufficient to bear and warrant separation.”[Ibid., p. 229.]
It must be admitted, however, that there will be times when either sufficient evidence cannot be brought to convince a church court, or even times when the church court is itself corrupt. It is in times and circumstances such as those that a conscientious Christian is the most likely to become impatient and run to separation as the only “alternative.” It is also at such times that he is most susceptible to the arguments of Separatists. Yet it is at precisely such times that the conscientious Christian must be most diligent in the use of the God-ordained means of grace. It has often been the case that those Christians who are most insistent that discipline is a mark of a true church have been the least willing to make the effort of using it.
Again, James Durham anticipated such a state of affairs as possibly existing within the church and gave advice to the private Christian.
Either a private person must acquiesce, as being exonered when he has followed the action before the church, or he shall have no ground of peace anywhere, till he is out of the world, or out of all visible churches. And so also there can be no other way of keeping public order and ordinances, and of eviting scandal and confusion.[Ibid., p. 119.]
It is one thing for a person to be dismissed from a less reformed church to a more reformed church. It is another for him to assume a stance of censoriousness and maintain that the means God has ordained to reform His church are less effective than the unlawful means the Separatist would choose. Again, Durham spoke to such an attitude:
And we suppose few will be so uncharitable, as to think there is no congregation whereto they can join, or yet so addicted to outward respects, as to choose separation with offense to others, disturbance to the church, and, it may be, with little quietness to themselves, when they have a remedy so inoffensive allowed to them.[Ibid., p. 124.]
Even in a case in which a court refuses to hear about the scandal of church officers, or refuses to take appropriate action, yet “upon supposition that the defect is true, yet private professors are to continue in the discharge of the duties of their stations, and not to separate from the communion of the church, but to count themselves exonered in holding fast their own integrity.”[Ibid., p. 106.]
When private church members refuse to make use of the means of discipline that God has placed in the church; when they refuse to hear any counsel that does not confirm their predisposition to separate; when they refuse to work with church officers who are making use of all lawful means of reform, then they have ceased being Presbyterians. They may claim zeal for purity, but the best that can be said is they have a zeal without knowledge. As Dr. Moffatt complains,
There may be, as there has often been, in those who break away, a spirit of levity and perversity, self-will disguised as zeal, an exaggerated sense of what is due to scruples, an infatuation with prejudices which have been baptized as principles, or some petulant, local temper which loves to dwell on differences rather than on affinities. Censoriousness and spiritual pride have too often worked in the minorities who seceded.[Moffatt, op. cit., pp. 104-105.]
The principles being set forth by “Extraordinary Times” are not new and they are simply not Presbyterian. It seems that honesty alone would dictate that a person acknowledge that his arguments and actions are identical to Independency, rather than attempt to maintain, as that author does, that they are Presbyterian arguments for use in destitute times. As Malcolm MacKay said in his pamphlet Presbyterian Involvement in Independency,
. . . as for the Independents, they believe as they please and do as they please because they `despise government,' and have cast off the divine restraints of church discipline. With Presbyterians, this ought not so to be because we do have a divine and glorious remedy to keep us in line. But through our unwillingness to submit to the blessed yoke of God, this remedy has become a dead letter.[Malcolm MacKay, Presbyterian Involvement in Independency. (Picton, NS, Can.: self published, 1977), p. 23.]
The church is beset by troubles today as she always has been. Such an acknowledgement does not open the door for individuals to do as they please. Instead, it underscores the need to make proper and diligent use of the scriptural means God has given for reforming His church.
God has given scriptural church government for reformation. When individuals attempt to be wiser than God by resorting to their own devices they become a part of the problem. It really does not matter whether such individuals attempt to justify their actions based upon a conviction that independency is normal or whether they boldly and unwarrantably declare the church to be in “extraordinary times.” In either case they work against the divine right of King Jesus to determine His own church government.
The very documents that independents attempt to undermine were written in extraordinary times. It is our duty, if we would claim to be the heirs of such men as the Westminster divines, to stand on their shoulders and make use of the work they have done. The claim that we now live in extraordinary times in which such documents no longer apply is a virtual denial of both the work those men did and of the providence of God in placing a government in His church. God has prepared the church for such times as these by establishing the unity of the church and placing in her government the means for guarding that unity. We dare not deny the unity of the church nor the means of preserving it.
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