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Witherspoon of Paisley and Princeton
By John A. Mackay

AMONG the memorable utterances of that eminent Scotsman of the nineteenth century, Thomas Carlyle, there is one in which he refers to his native country and its debt to John Knox. "The history of Scotland," says Carlyle, "shows nothing of world interest at all, but the Reformation by Knox." Then "the people began to live," he adds. "They needed first of all to do that." Four hundred years ago a small northern territory became the scene of revolutionary change which had world significance.

The Scottish Reformation, however, as an event in history, would not have attained the place which it occupies in the annals of time, were it not for a very special circumstance. That circumstance is the fact that, in the intervening centuries, tens of thousands of Caledonia's sons and daughters carried the treasures of their national inheritance of faith and life to all the continents of the world. With the single exception of Palestine, Scotland has influenced non-European lands more than any country of similar size in history's annals. This she has done chiefly through the great company of her children who left Scottish soil to toil and witness in other lands.

It was not mere wanderlust that carried those men and women to the foreign strands to which they went. Nothing could be more unkind than the sly gibe of the English poet, Alexander Pope, in one of his couplets. Says this Sassenach rhymester:

"If Cain were Scot, God would have changed his doom,

Not bade him wander, but remain at home."

How much fairer it would be, and truer to history, to think of the great company of Scottish pioneers in many lands and many spheres, not as aimless globe trotters who bore the mark of Cain, but as children of Abraham, who like their spiritual sire, had embarked on a great Abrahamic adventure!

Voluntary exiles of this kind were the members of that great mis-

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sionary phalanx which includes the illustrious names of Robert Morrison and Alexander Duff, of John Paton and Thomas Kalley, of Robert Moffatt, David Livingstone, and the beloved Donald Fraser. The day is coming when scores of new countries in Asia, Africa and Australasia, and in South, Central, and North America, will proclaim the debt they owe, social, political, cultural, but very especially, religious, to the land of John Knox and to the transforming light of Christ's Gospel which broke into Scotland's darkness four centuries ago.

I

I want especially, in these pages, to revive the memory and interpret the significance of one of those sons of Scotland who left his native land inspired by a sense of mission. The person I have in mind was a minister of the Church of Scotland in. the eighteenth century who became a pivotal and creative figure in the life of the former British colony which today bears the name of the United States of America. His name was John Witherspoon.

Witherspoon is a household figure in the national history of the United States. In a public square in the city of Washington a monument stands to his memory. The headquarters of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., Presbyterianism's largest denomination, is located in the Witherspoon Building, Philadelphia. A man called Witherspoon was the only clergyman who signed the Declaration of American Independence. The same man was the chief architect of the Presbyterian Church in America, and the first Moderator of its General Assembly. During the most decisive period in American history, the Reverend John Witherspoon was President of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, to which he was called from his parish in Paisley in the year 1768.

But here we are met by one of the strangest ironies in history. This Scotsman, born in the manse of Yester, in the East Lothian village of Gifford, not far from the birth place of John Knox, a graduate of Edinburgh University who achieved national reputation by a book which he wrote, a man who at the age of forty-one received the Doctor of Divinity degree from the University of St. Andrews, is today a virtually unknown and forgotten figure in the land of his fathers. Yet no Scotsman who ever left these shores was more fully imbued with the spirit of John Knox, or gave more creative expres-

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sion to the genius of the Scottish Reformation, than did John Witherspoon of Paisley and Princeton.

II

America's unspeakable debt to Scotland and to what happened in the religious life of this country four centuries ago, can in no way be better interpreted than by resuscitating and presenting the majestic figure of John Witherspoon, the most outstanding Scotsman ever to settle in the Western world. When I have done that, I will try to interpret, very briefly, the witness of American Presbyterianism in the world of today.

Witherspoon, it may be said, was a precursor of, and closely resembled, Thomas Chalmers, the father of that great spiritual movement which in 1843 brought into being the Free Church of Scotland. Carlyle has rightly designated Chalmers the "greatest Scotsman since John Knox." Both Witherspoon and Chalmers were "Evangelicals," persons of warm piety and of deep devotion to the Gospel. Both were concerned about applying religion to life. Both were students of the new science of economics. Both lived day and night with the problems of relating the great principles of the Reformed faith to the affairs of Church and state. Both opposed the right of landed proprietors to place men of their choice in the pulpits of Scottish parishes. Both proclaimed and acted upon the central truth of the Scottish Reformation, the sole Kingship of Jesus Christ over Church and nation.

Two things happened which changed the course of Witherspoon's life.

The first was the atmosphere created by a book which he wrote anonymously while parish minister in Paisley. This volume. which was entitled Ecclesiastical Characteristics, created an immense sensation. Its author, the moment his identity was known, became a national figure.

Witherspoon's book was a brilliant satirical indictment of a widespread defection on the part of the Scottish clergy from the spirit and truths of the Reformation. The "moderates," as the representatives of the prevailing trend were called, were disdainfully uninterested in evangelical theology. "Let sleeping dogmas lie," was their slogan. The prevailing culture was not examined in the light of the Word of God. The "moderate" clergy aspired rather to con-

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vince the cultured elite that ministers of the Word were good fellows, sensitive to cultural values and current trends, and so merited admission into the best circles. To quote the caustic words of their critic, they were men "moderate in ability, showing a moderate amount of zeal. and doing a very moderate amount of work." The "moderates" strove to remove the stigma from ordination. Their supreme concern was to give the Church social respectability and its ministers a reputation for good citizenship.

The second thing that happened in Witherspoon's life in this period was a pressing invitation from the Presbyterian College of New Jersey to become its President. After prolonged soul searching, he accepted. In 1768, at the age of forty-five, this son of John Knox and precursor of Thomas Chalmers left his native Scotland for the Western World. In the words of a distinguished Scottish historian, Dr. Andrew Drummond of Alva, to whose research this presentation owes much, "In Hanoverian Scotland, independence and enterprise were not the qualities encouraged by Church and state," The national situation did not offer this son of East Lothian the environment which his dynamic spirit demanded if he were to fulfil his destiny, Here was a parish minister in his mid-forties, a man of evangelical faith, theological insight, social concern, and militant zeal, whom God had prepared in a fallow period of Scottish religious history in order that he might represent the Scottish Reformation and the revolutionary implications of the Gospel on a new frontier.

Momentous things began to happen.

With his deep sense of God's sovereign purpose embracing this whole terrestrial globe and everything within it, believing with Calvin that "the world is the theatre of God's glory," it was not difficult for John Witherspoon to identify himself closely with the land of his adoption. He was no narrow Scottish nationalist or racialist. With the vision of Calvin and in the spirit of Knox, he became one with the American colonists. He shared their aspirations and their burdens. His eyes scanned their horizons. He dedicated himself to prepare men of thought and action for new frontiers.

As head of an institution which was the fruit of the Evangelical Awakening under Whitefield and which came into being in 1746 soon after Yale College had expelled David Brainerd, John Witherspoon made the College of New Jersey the first intercolonial and inter-confessional college in the Western Hemisphere. True to his

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Calvinistic heritage, and with a vision of the country's needs, lie set himself to train not only ministers of the Word but servants of society. For this Scot believed with Calvin that the office of public servant is one of the noblest of human vocations. He believed also that the state, in Calvin's words, is "God's viceregent to achieve order and justice," and for that reason it must ever strive to "maintain humanity among men."

Soon after his arrival, Witherspoon, along with a New York Presbyterian minister, John Rogers, organized a group called "Tile Sons of Liberty." He thus became a leader in the revolt against the autocratic government of a Hanoverian monarch whose policies were deplored by British statesmen like Edmund Burke. In his turn, that same Monarch, King George the Third, called the American Revolution "that Presbyterian parson's war." Some American historians have actually called it "A Presbyterian Rebellion." The truth is that Presbyterians of Scottish and Scotch-Irish stock constituted the back bone of the revolutionary army of that great Anglican layman, George Washington. The Presbyterian Church, moreover, was the principal Christian denomination in the America of that time, both during the Revolutionary War and in the years that immediately followed.

A recent study of the academic background of the men who drafted the Constitution of the United States has revealed this amazing fact. In the membership of the Drafting Committee, there were as many graduates of Witherspoon's Presbyterian College at Princeton as there were graduates of the combined Colleges of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Pennsylvania. One of the authors of the Constitution, James Madison, who with the passing of the years became President of the United States, was one of Witherspoon's favorite students.

III

John Witherspoon's greatest day was when he was elected Moderator of the First General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America which was constituted in the City of Philadelphia in 1788. The Church's Constitution, of which Witherspoon was the chief architect, was adopted in 1789. Thus Presbyterianism, whose pioneer in North America was an Ulster Scot, Francis Makemie, a graduate of the University of Glasgow, and which received its first

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organized expression when, under Makemie's leadership, the Presbytery of Philadelphia was formed in 1716, was now launched upon its way in a new dimension and With a fresh vision.

Today, the Church of Witherspoon, with some ten thousand ministers and more than three million members, moves steadily forward. Its ecclesiastical life, like that of many a sister communion, has been marked by opposites of glory and of shame, by missionary achievement which carried the Gospel of Christ across the nation and the world, and by bitter controversies which rifted the Body of Christ and brought dishonor to the name of Christ. In its public witness it has been unashamedly Reformed and, in the spirit of John Calvin, enthusiastically ecumenical. It has given its support to evangelistic crusades for Christ, to social action in the spirit of Christ, to Pronouncements that challenged the Church and, secular society in the name of Christ, to endeavors to heal divisions in the world-wide community of Christ. Afore united today than at any time in its history, and more intelligently informed regarding its Reformation heritage, the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. is eager to play a part worthy of that heritage in the new Reformation which is called for in our time.

IV

Before I conclude, let me ask and briefly answer a question. The question is this: What may be regarded as some of the most authentic echoes of the Scottish Reformation and of the Reformed faith in general that have sounded, or are sounding today, in the witness of American Presbyterianism?

In what I am going to say, I do not speak exclusively for the denomination to which I belong. I speak also, I believe, for beloved sister denominations in America, the Southern Presbyterian Church, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, and the Reformed Presbyterian Church, which are members with us in the World Presbyterian Alliance. In our common loyalty to the great principles of the Reformed faith, certain significant notes have been sounded which have deep significance.

The first note in this orchestral harmony is the clarion utterance contained in the original Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in America when it was adopted in 1789, and re-affirmed by the two Churches that united in 1958. Its author is none other than John

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Witherspoon himself. The statement, which expresses the soul of Calvinism, reads in part: "Truth is in order to goodness, and the great touchstone of truth, its tendency to promote holiness, according to our Saviour's rule 'By their fruits ye shall know them.' ... There is an inseparable connection between faith and practice, truth and duty."

Truth is In order to goodness. God must be loved with the mind as well as with the heart. Carefully formulated doctrine founded upon Holy Scripture, which is "the only infallible rule of faith and practice," and oriented towards the issues in the historical situation, is of first rate importance for a luminous faith and a robust testimony. Intelligent loyalty to fundamental doctrine on the part of a Church's officers is crucial for the Church's stability and witness. But what a man believes, though he may claim it to be flawless orthodoxy, can never be a substitute in the sight of God, and should not be a substitute in the sight of fellow churchmen, for Christian holiness. that is, for a godly life and a Christianlike character.

Sometimes, alas, dogmas are cherished for their own sake, without relation to the life which Christ died to make possible and lives to make real. When that happens, they become idols. Their devotees meantime develop a smug complacency or a violent fanaticism, which are traits common to idol worshippers in all ages. Loyalty to doctrines about God, however true these doctrines may be, can never be a substitute for personal devotion to the living God himself.

On the other hand, let this never be forgotten. The cultivation of the inner life and impeccable moral behavior do not by themselves meet the demands of Christian "goodness." "Goodness," in Witherspoon's meaning of the term, requires something beyond both piety and morality in the ordinary meaning of these terms. It requires loyal active obedience to the will of God in the situation in which a Christian's lot is cast, as well as responsiveness to Christ's call to service.

Christ's "friends" are not just good Church people in the conventional sense; they are those who do what the Risen Lord commands them by his Word and Spirit. They are persons who take seriously that great symbol, a flaming heart in an outstretched hand, known in art as "Calvin's Crest." They alone are true to the Reformation heritage when they say with the great Genevan and his Scottish dis-

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ciples, Knox and Witherspoon, "My heart I give Thee, Lord, eagerly and sincerely."

Some years ago "Calvin's Crest" was made the symbol of a great forward endeavor in American Presbyterianism, called the "New Life Movement." More recently our Presbyterian Churches have become impressed with the centrality of the servant image in the Bible and in the Reformed faith. It is becoming clear to an increasing number of clergymen and laymen that Christian Churches are in danger of becoming ends in themselves, institutions in society just like other institutions. What is more, Churches sometimes suffer from a delirium of grandeur. Happily Calvin's view of the Church as "an instrument of God's glory," a medium, a servant, whereby the Almighty unveils the splendor of his sovereign grace, and carries out his purposes in the world, is beginning to grip the mind and inflame the heart of Presbyterians across the Western Ocean.

V

With the passage of time, the Presbyterian children of the Scottish Reformation beyond the Atlantic have become increasingly aware of another fact. No one can be truly Presbyterian, a legitimate heir of Calvin and of Knox, or take seriously the Westminster Confession of Faith, who does not put Christ's Church Universal above every narrow ecclesiastical loyalty, recognizing the while, as did the Westminster divines, that no Church is perfectly pure.

But if the Church was designed by God to be his servant, the "instrument of His glory," to declare his salvation to all mankind, the unity of the Church must be for the mission of the Church. Only a missionary Church can be truly the Church. Only those who participate in the work of the Apostles are in the true apostolic succession.

When three years ago the successors of Francis Makemie and John Witherspoon joined with American-born sons of Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine and of the Scottish Covenanters, the Uniting General Assembly sent down a message to all the congregations of the newly United Church. That message -was entitled, "In Unity-for Mission." As a member of the small committee that drafted this message I can breathe my inmost soul and deepest conviction into the words with which it concludes:

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"God summons us to pilgrimmage, to life on the missionary road.

"We must journey not only along desert paths and jungle trails, but in the teeming alleys of our cities. God commands us to be missionaries not only in the community where we live, not alone in the national environment of our home Church, but to the ends of the earth. The Church's place is the frontier. But for the Church, in the discharge of its God-given mission, the frontier is more than a location. It is wherever any sector of thought or life has to be occupied in the name of Jesus Christ.

"Only as Church members become Christ's missionaries in their several vocations, in government and diplomacy, in industry and commerce, in the home and in the classroom, in the clinic and on the farm, will men perceive that Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life."