Without Touching the Text: The Declaratory Acts

The other method. In Scotland not a word of the Confession of 1647 has ever been changed. What has been changed is what it means to subscribe it. The instrument has been the declaratory act: a resolution of the synod or of the assembly declaring in what sense the church receives the Confession, or which parts of it she ceases to require.

What was done, and when.
1879. The United Presbyterian Church of Scotland is the first to relax subscription. Its act declares that the subordinate Standards, "being of human composition, are necessarily imperfect", and recognises diversity of opinion on such points in the Confession as do not enter into "the substance of the Reformed Faith", the church reserving to herself the right to determine which these are.
1889. The Church of Scotland in its turn relaxes the formula of subscription.
1892. The Free Church of Scotland, which was seeking union with the United Presbyterian Church, passes a similar act. It declares that the church disclaims "intolerant or persecuting principles", and that she does not consider her office-bearers, in subscribing the Confession, committed to any principles inconsistent with "liberty of conscience and the right of private judgment"; and it repeats the clause on "the substance of the Reformed Faith". A minority separated the following year on this account and formed the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The union was consummated in 1900.
1986. The Church of Scotland expressly dissociates itself from four passages of the Confession: that on monastical vows (chapter XXII), that on marriage with Roman Catholics (XXIV), that on the Pope as Antichrist (XXV), and that on the mass (XXIX).
Outside Scotland the same has been done. The Presbyterian Church of Australia receives the Confession read in the light of an annexed declaratory statement. And the American Declaratory Statement of 1903 itself, with which the preceding article deals, belongs to this kind.

Why. The Scottish acts of the nineteenth century have a declared motive: to make possible the union of churches which no longer believed the same things concerning the Confession, without obliging any of them to say so. And a vocabulary which leaves no room for doubt as to its origin: "liberty of conscience" and "the right of private judgment" are, word for word, the watchwords of the liberalism of their century.

What this method shows. Not every declaratory act is an evasion. The Church of Scotland approved the Confession in 1647 with one, which specifies in what sense she understood a paragraph on synods: to declare how a text is understood is legitimate. What the acts of 1879 and 1892 do is another thing: they do not explain the text, but authorise men not to believe it, and without saying in what. "The substance of the Reformed Faith" is nowhere defined; each is left free to decide what enters into it, and the Confession ceases to be a standard and becomes a historical document.
In favour of this method it is argued that it is more honest to acknowledge scruples openly than to sign with mental reservations, and that no confession is infallible. Both things are true. But honesty then requires one to say which points are not believed, and on the ground of what text of Scripture, which is what the Americans did in 1729 and in 1788, for better or for worse. A general clause is not an exception: it is a blank cheque.
The result, compared with the American road, is instructive. He who changes the text leaves in plain view what he has changed, and others can go back, as happened in 1936. He who keeps the text and changes the subscription keeps the prestige of the Confession and loses its content, with no trace remaining of the moment at which he lost it.