Each Generation's Task

It strikes many Presbyterians with surprise that the General Assembly and our leading periodicals in this year 1860, one hundred and fifty years after the beginning of our church in America, should be largely occupied in discussing the question, "What is Presbyterianism?" They ask with displeasure, "Are fundamentals never to be settled among us? Is the church never to be relieved of these debates, which thus agitate the settled foundations of our theory?" We may answer to these indignant questions with an emphatic No. The good brethren who thus deplore these renewed discussions of first principles misconceive the nature of the human mind and of free institutions. While man remains the creature he is, such discussions are to be expected and desired. Each generation must do its own thinking, and learn for itself its own lessons in first truths and general principles. If we insist that this generation of Presbyterians shall hold our fathers' principles on trust, and by mere prescription, the result will be that they will not hold them sincerely at all. For by the very reason that general principles do not lie on the surface, but are to be detected by analysis and induction, they are always in every science, other than first appearances and first impressions would lead men to suppose. Hence, in every science, the true general principles are unpopular and paradoxical, in the first, unthinking view. Prior to this active investigation, it is, in astronomy for instance, the earth which seems to stand still and the heavenly bodies to move; in hydrostatics, it is the empty tube which seems to suck up the water; in theology, it is the Pelagian view which commends itself to the natural mind, instead of the Calvinistic. So in church government, the actual first truths of the New Testament are not those which our unreflecting impressions would lead us to suppose. Hence each generation must correct those first impressions for itself, and be led down to the true principles by the laborious collision of debate and investigation.

Beside this, the human mind loves the concrete; and the labor of abstraction and correct generalization is most irksome to it. Yet it is certain that all general truths, that are properly such, are abstractions. Hence, most minds never trouble themselves to attain independently to an intelligent view of such truths, but adopt the practical results of them with a sort of imperfect comprehension and conviction; and of many who make such first truths the regulative sources of their practical opinions, the general views are more or less vague, and their agreement with each other in them is only approximative. Now we cheerfully grant that both these classes may be practically very hood and honest Presbyterians, and that their detailed opinions and conduct may be much better than the general principles of their theory. But it is none the less true that the general principles sooner or later work out their logical details in the public mind; and that it is the men who hold the abstractions--a Plato, an Augustine, a Calvin, a Des Carts, a Jefferson, a Calhoun--correctly or incorrectly, who in the issue determine the practical opinions of their fellow-men for good or for evil. The practical opinions can only be kept correct by a perpetual recurrence to first truths. Hence we must expect the perpetual agitation of those first truths. It indicates, not, indeed, the perfect health of the body ecclesiastical, a condition not to be expected while Christians are imperfect, but its sanative tendencies.

from R. L. Dabney, "Theories of the Eldership"