The Revision of 1903

What it was. It is the most extensive revision of all, and the only one which does not confine itself to deleting. It was made in 1903 by the northern Presbyterian church of the United States, after years of debate: the movement in favour of revising the Confession had begun about 1889, and a first proposal was defeated in 1893. Besides the two deletions already seen (the oath, in chapter XXII, and the Antichrist, in chapter XXV), it changed a paragraph on good works, added two whole chapters, and approved a Declaratory Statement. Three years later, in 1906, the greater part of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, Arminian in doctrine, united with it.

1. The works of unregenerate men. In the text of 1903, where the original said that those works are "of good use both to themselves and others", one reads that they are "in themselves praiseworthy and useful"; and where it said that they "are therefore sinful, and cannot please God", one reads that "they come short of what God requires, and do not make any man meet to receive the grace of God". The word "sinful" disappears.

2. Two new chapters. There were added at the end a chapter XXXIV, "Of the Holy Spirit", and a chapter XXXV, "Of the Gospel of the Love of God and Missions". The latter affirms that God has provided in Christ a way of salvation "sufficient for and adapted to the whole lost race of man", that he freely offers it to all, and that in the gospel he declares "his love for the world and his desire that all men should be saved". Neither of the two chapters mentions election.

3. The Declaratory Statement. It answers, in its own words, to the desire "for a disavowal by the Church of certain inferences" drawn from the Confession. It declares two things. On chapter III (God's eternal decree): that that doctrine is held "in harmony with the doctrine of his love to all mankind" and of the gift of his Son "to be the propitiation for the sins of the whole world"; that his decree "hinders no man from accepting" the offer of the gospel, and that no man is condemned except on the ground of his sin. And on chapter X, paragraph III (which speaks of "elect infants, dying in infancy"): that it is not to be regarded as teaching that any who die in infancy are lost, because "all dying in infancy are included in the election of grace".

Why. Here the reasons are indeed documented. Many Presbyterians of the late nineteenth century already regarded the rigour of the Confession as antiquated, above all in predestination, and asked that it be adjusted, as was said at the time, to "the higher knowledge of our times". To this was added the purpose of uniting with the Cumberland Presbyterians, whose church had been founded in 1810 by ministers who rejected election and reprobation as the Confession teaches them: the additions of 1903 smoothed the way.

What this change shows. Here it is no longer a question of the century's ideas about the State or the conscience, but of theological liberalism properly so called, and it is well to observe its method, because it denies nothing. Almost everything the Declaratory Statement affirms is true, and may be found in the Confession itself: that salvation is freely offered to sinners (chapter VII) and that the reprobate are condemned "for their sin" (chapter III). What is new is not what it says, but to what end it says it: to reassure those who no longer believed chapter III, by declaring it "in harmony" with something else until it ceases to say what it said. The added chapters do the same by omission: they speak of the Spirit and of the gospel in a biblical language in which a Calvinist and an Arminian can equally find room. And in the case of infants, the Declaratory Statement decides what the Assembly, quite deliberately, had left undecided.
The conservative Presbyterians understood it so. Gresham Machen called these additions "compromising amendments" and a calamity; the Orthodox Presbyterian Church rejected them on its constitution in 1936, and the Presbyterian Church in America did the same in 1973. It is the only point in this whole course of events at which anyone undid a change already made.