PRESBYTERIANISM

One of the earliest, most influential, and enduring forms of Protestantism, essentially a system of ecclesiastical polity, namely, the government of the church by presbyters. In a larger sense, however, it connotes the theology, liturgy, and discipline that stem from John calvin and as such constitutes the general tradition in Protestantism called "Reformed." This entry surveys the origins, history and significant developments in the evolution of Presbyterianism in Europe.

The specific designation "presbyterian" derives from the Greek presbuteros, the "elder." The presbyter's function in the New Testament church provided a model for the Calvinist ideal of a reformed church that would be neither tyrannical nor anarchical. Calvin sought, by divine warrant, to avoid the two extremes of episcopal authoritarianism and congregational egalitarianism. The entire subsequent history of Presbyterianism can almost be summarized as the struggle to maintain and extend this scripturally based balance in church order.

By definition pre-Calvinist, Presbyterianism traces its origins to the OT, where the tradition of elders in Israel provided an obvious working pattern for the first Christian communities of the NT. The occasional references to elders (presbuteroi ) and especially the apparent equivalence of that term with "overseers" (episcopoi ) established a sufficient scriptural basis for the later Calvinist elaboration of an integral presbyterian polity. Nevertheless, the fact that neither Calvin nor the earliest Reformed churches stemming from him ever really insisted on the claims of presbyterianism to be the only polity with a scriptural sanction lessens the problem of the continuity of the presbyterian system through the centuries that extended from the apostolic age to the Reformation. Practically, then, Presbyterian history begins with Calvin.

Calvinist Origins. The Reformation in the Swiss cantons was already well under way when Calvin arrived in Geneva in 1536. Yet the intellectual eminence of his theology as evidenced in his institutes and the practical acumen of his organizational directives as seen in his Ecclesiastical Ordinances secured for him an ascendancy not only in Geneva but in Protestantism. Under his leadership Geneva became the "Protestant Rome," the model and training center of Reformed religion. Skillfully adapting biblical prescriptions to the circumstances of an autonomous, republican city-state, Calvin devised a system of church government that incorporated four basic features: (1) the autonomy of the church—independence from the state and competence to administer its own internal discipline; (2) the unity of the church—interdependence of the individual local congregations in a graded series of disciplinary courts, or judicatories; (3) the parity of ministers—corporate uniformity of clerical power substantiating the presbytery and its varied functions; and (4) the representation of the people—ratification by the laity of the clerical power and functions. All four features were thus mutually integrated and geared toward the ultimate realization of a church wholly incorporated in Christ.

The implementation of this Calvinist scheme was never complete, even in Geneva. Calvin had to accede to the demand of the secular magistrates that they share formally in the appointment of the elders—the lay members who were to complement the dual commission of the clerical ministers to preach the Word and administer the sacraments by their own dual commission to rule (i.e., legislate and enforce discipline) and care for the sick (and other temporalities). Moreover, a certain Genevan character remained impressed on all subsequent presbyterian polities: an aristocratic, homogeneous body, with a curious proclivity toward erastianism or sectarianism, or both. Not surprisingly, perhaps, an authentic Calvinist presbyterianism never succeeded in displacing the earlier and looser Zwinglianism as the dominant Protestant form in Switzerland.

Growth of Presbyterianism. In the other German-speaking lands Calvinism was likewise a late arrival; but within the lifetime of the founder it became a considerable force, particularly in the Palatinate. In 1563 the Heidelberg Catechism appeared and in 1566 the Second Helvetic Confession, two of the most influential documents in the Reformed tradition. A well-knit presbyterian system posed as much of a threat to the Lutheran territorial churches as to the Catholic Church, and this complicated the situation that eventually led to the thirty years' war. In spite of the toleration finally secured for it at the Peace of westphalia—perhaps because of it—German Calvinism lapsed into a quiescence in which, after some 200 years, it was practically absorbed into the prevailing Lutheranism. Meanwhile in Eastern Europe the originally fast-growing Calvinism was effectively countered by a revitalized Catholicism under Hapsburg auspices. Of these German and eastern Reformed churches, the one that best survived the Catholic dominance of the 17th century, the "enlightened" laxity of the 18th, and the interconfessional confusion of the 19th has been that of Hungary, where a presbyterian Calvinism is still a vigorous minority.

Although Calvin's initial success lay in German-speaking Strassburg, while his initial plea to Francis I was a failure, his interest in his native France never flagged. Both Catholic and Protestant appreciated the centrality of this greatest kingdom in Christendom; and if the Catholics succeeded in maintaining possession of the crown and the majority of the nation, the Protestants, spearheaded from Geneva, proceeded with skill and momentum to build a powerfully based minority. The first Reformed, or Huguenot, congregation was established in 1555; by 1559 there were enough to justify the adoption of a Gallican Confession and the establishment of a national synod. This first presbyterian church on a nationwide scale was likewise the first to be organized according to a Calvin-inspired series of pyramided judicatories: the local congregations, or consistories (more commonly called sessions), forming regional colloquies (or presbyteries), which in turn were grouped into provincial synods (or simply synods), which finally reached a national unity in the National Synod (or General Assembly). The long politico-religious war that almost inevitably resulted from this organized rupture in French society ended (Edict of nantes, 1598) practically where it began: a Catholic majority and a Protestant minority facing each other in an uneasy truce. Political absolutism (revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 1685) and cultural secularism (the Enlightenment) successively reduced the extent of that Protestant minority; but largely because of their tough presbyterian polity, the Huguenots retain a permanent position in France.

Already strongly affected by Lutheran and Anabaptist influences from Germany, the Netherlands quickly responded to the later and more organized impulses of Calvinism coming from France and the Palatinate. In 1566 a synod in Antwerp adopted the Belgic Confession, composed some years earlier by Guy de Brès, and published in Dutch in the Heidelberg Catechism. In the following years, while Spain pursued a policy of stern repression, refugees in Wesel and Emden organized the Dutch Reformed Church along the same lines as the Reformed Church of France. The declaration of independence of the United Provinces of the North introduced the ambiguous Church-State relationship that would remain a permanent feature of the new Dutch nation. Under the stress of the Spanish war the Calvinist religion assumed an increasingly "established" character, while the Estates-General assumed an increasingly ecclesiastical competence. This ambiguity was compounded by the Arminian controversy, which broke out in 1609 after the Spanish truce, and was finally resolved—in favor of rigid "orthodox" Calvinism—in 1619 by state intervention at the Synod of Dort. In spite of their numerical majority and political dominance, the Dutch Presbyterians under-went much the same vicissitudes in the subsequent centuries as did their coreligionists elsewhere on the Continent (see confessions of faith, protestant; reformed churches).

English, Scottish, and Irish Presbyterianism.

While the militant ecclesiasticism called the Reformed religion was taking over the vanguard of Continental Protestantism, another wing of the movement was finding its greatest opportunity yet—and its greatest ultimate success—in the British Isles. England appeared precluded from direct Calvinist inroads by its formidably state-dominated and instinctively conservative Established Church. Scotland, on the other hand, presented a vacuum. Remote, feudal, and beset by a succession of royal minorities, the country was disunited and pressured by the alien, competing interests of England and France. In 1560, under the driving leadership of John knox, the Reformed Church of Scotland was officially inaugurated by the parliamentary approval of the First Scottish Confession and by the convocation of the first General Assembly of the Kirk, in which a Book of Discipline was adopted. The revised Genevan liturgy of the Book of Common Order completed the formulation of the Scottish Reformation in 1564, by which time the efforts of mary stu art, the young widowed queen, to restore Catholicism had manifestly failed. Although Knox's Kirk was disposed to tolerate bishops as possibly useful superintendents, a rigid presbyterian reaction, claiming an exclusive scriptural sanction, was launched by Andrew melville in 1574 and codified in a Second Book of Discipline in 1581. Episcopacy thus became the classic point at issue between the churches of Scotland and England in the politico-religious crisis that became immediate in 1603 when both countries recognized the sovereignty of a common crown.

Despite the original harrying of radical Protestants under Henry VIII, both the momentum and the ambiguity of his schism indirectly favored the introduction of an integral Protestantism. The dominantly Lutheran and Zwinglian influence gradually yielded to the Calvinist in the course of Edward VI's reign, and this trend was confirmed by the sojourn of the Marian exiles principally in Frankfurt and Geneva. If on Mary's death it was clear that a schismatic Anglicanism would be politically reestablished, it was equally clear that this establishment would be strongly bent theologically toward Calvinism. This fact of a common theology, however, only intensified the quarrel over polity that the anonymous Admonition to Parliament brought to a head in 1572. Demanding a full-scale renovation of the liturgical and organizational fabric of the national church, and encouraged by the antiroyalist example of the Huguenots and the Scots, the "Precisians," or "puritans," as they were called, were repressed by Elizabeth I and her bishops as dangerous subversives. On their part the Puritans were not unanimously agreed regarding the right order in Church and State. The majority, led by Thomas cartwright, advocated a formal presbyterian polity on a nationwide scale; only a minority as yet tended toward the Separatism (or Congregationalism) that would disestablish the church and dissolve it into independent local congregations.

The accession of the Stuarts signaled an ecclesiastical crisis in both kingdoms. In 1603 James I refused the millenary petition for certain Puritan reforms; in 1610 he reintroduced bishops into the Kirk. Against this alliance of high church Anglicanism and divine-right monarchy there coalesced an alliance of Puritans and parliament men, and under Charles I the inevitable crisis came. In 1638 the Scottish General Assembly abolished episcopacy and solemnly adopted the National League and Covenant. In 1641 the English Long Parliament began discussing a reformation of "root and branch." In 1643 an Assembly of Divines of the dominant presbyterian party met in Westminster to formulate the new religious settlement for all three British kingdoms. The result of their four years of labor was the remarkable collection of documents that have been the standards of all English-speaking Presbyterians ever since: the westminster confession, the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, the Directory of Public Worship, and the Form of Church Government. Ironically, the Westminster Standards were at the time successfully adopted only in Scotland, where they supplanted the earlier formularies of Knox. In England the brief Presbyterian triumph succumbed to the congregational Puritans, then called Independents, who abolished the monarchy and the state church. This revolutionary force could not survive Oliver cromwell, and the immediate reaction in 1660 meant not only the restoration of king and bishops but also the "Great Ejectment" of the presbyterian clergy. Thereafter, in spite of toleration secured by the Revolution of 1688 and the partial revival of Calvinist principles by the eventual Evangelical Movement, Presbyterianism as such retained but a small minority in England.

Outside England, in Wales and Scotland, where the latitudinarianism of the 18th century was less marked, the residual Calvinism of the early Reformation kept its vigor. In Wales this took the form of a revival, under the leadership of Howell harris (1735), that anticipated and subsequently fused with John wesley's movement. Like Wesley, Harris had at first no intention of leaving the established Anglican Church. Only when his "societies" were proscribed did he ordain his own ministers and, in 1811, organize a regular presbyterian church. The Calvinist Methodist Church of Wales was structured like the Scottish, with which otherwise it has no connection: local societies (sessions) formed monthly meetings (presbyteries) and quarterly associations (synods) and finally a general assembly. In Scotland, meanwhile, the Kirk had been reestablished (1690); but the Patronage Act of 1712 introduced an Erastian irritant that provoked a series of secessions and partial reunions. The divisions, however, were jurisdictional, not doctrinal; and the basic presbyterian polity was never substantially modified in any of them.

Of almost equal significance with Scotland in the history of Presbyterianism was Ireland. From the first years of the 17th century a royal policy of promoting plantations in the conquered island gave rise to an immigration of Scottish presbyterians to Ulster. When the native Irish revolted in 1641, the Ulstermen, or "Scotch-Irish," replied by forming a church of their own, a militant Presbyterianism modeled on the Kirk, and equally opposed to the Catholicism of the national majority and to the Anglicanism of the government. Although the victory of William of Orange over James II at the Boyne was a triumph for Ulster, nevertheless the Scotch-Irish felt neglected and discriminated against by the government at Whitehall. One reaction was the decidedly conservative trend of the two synods that later united in 1840 to form the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Ireland; another was the emigration of many Ulstermen to America. Beginning even before 1688, they were laying the foundations of Presbyterianism in the future United States.

Seeing their church as a mean between the authoritarian and the anarchical, Presbyterians view it also as both an individual, autonomous entity and a constituent part of a larger whole. The first large-scale and lasting ecumenical achievement within Protestantism, the Alliance of the Reformed Churches throughout the World Holding the Presbyterian Order, established in 1875, represents 90 churches and nearly 50 million members. Through and beyond this world alliance, as well as participation in the World Council of Churches, Presbyterian Churches have committed themselves to the eventual realization of a Christian universality.

Bibliography: j. dall, m. w. armstrong et al., eds., The Presbyterian Enterprise (Philadelphia 1956). c. m. drury, Presbyterian Panorama (Philadelphia 1952). united presbyterian church in the u.s.a., Constitution … 1961–1962 (Philadelphia 1963). g. s. hendry, The Westminster Confession for Today (Richmond, Va. 1960). h. t. kerr, A God-Centered Faith (New York 1935). l. a. loetscher, A Brief History of the Presbyterians (Philadelphia 1958); The Broadening Church (Philadelphia 1957). g. macgregor, Corpus Christi (London 1958). j. a. mackay, The Presbyterian Way of Life (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1960). j. t. mcneill, The History and Character of Calvinism (New York 1954). h. h. meeter, Calvinism: An Interpretation of Its Basic Ideas (Grand Rapids, Mich. 1939). n. sykes, Old Priest and New Presbyter (Cambridge, Eng. 1956); The English Religious Tradition (London 1953). a. h. drysdale, History of the Presbyterians in England (London 1889). j. viÉnot, Histoire de la réforme française, 2 v. (Paris 1926–34). e. o. james, A History of Christianity in England (New York 1949). a. c. zenos, Presbyterianism in America (New York 1937).

[r. i. bradley/eds.]