Word: presbyterianism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Minutes after the shooting, Malcolm's body was lifted from the stage, placed on a rolling bed that had been wheeled over from the nearby Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, and rushed to an emergency operating room. A team of doctors laid open his chest, tried to revive him via open-heart massage. But Malcolm X was dead. Because he had not yet been formally identified, he was at first entered on hospital records as John...
...proposed 5,000-word "Confession of 1967" does not have to deal with predestination, the historic preoccupation of Presbyterians; an amendment to the Westminster Confession way back in 1903 effectively modified the Calvinist doctrine that some men are predestined for salvation while others are damned to hell. It challenges the "inerrancy" of the literal Bible by asserting that while Scripture is the authoritative witness to God's word, it is to be reinterpreted in each age in the light of increasing knowledge. For the first time in Presbyterian church history, the new confession gives the church a specific social...
Schizophrenic Belief. The Westminster Confession, drawn up in England and ratified by Parliament in 1648, has been the Presbyterian creed ever since. Most members of the church have long ago rejected the predestination and the Biblical inerrancy that are the confession's basis. But United Presbyterian pastors must take an ordination oath to "sincerely receive and adopt the Confession of Faith and Catechisms," even though most do so with declared reservations. The result, says Boston Pastor Sidney Menk, is "schizophrenic" for many. In 1958, the United Presbyterian Church appointed the Dowey committee to update the confessional beliefs...
Humanistic Theology? A conservative minority disagrees. The Dowey committee's proposals "will in effect replace every distinguishing doctrine of the Reformed faith with humanistically influenced theology," charges The Rev. G. Aiken Taylor, editor of the Presbyterian Journal. The nondenominational, fortnightly Christianity Today says that the changes will "legitimize contemporary church practices that violate the Westminster Standards, including the hierarchy's mounting involvement in politico-social activity...
Most United Presbyterians are backing the doctrinal updating. "We decided in the 1920s that we would not be a fundamentalist church, but a conservative, Biblically oriented church that was not rigidly literalist," says the church's chief administrative officer, the Rev. Eugene Carson Blake. And predestination? "No, I don't believe in predestination, that gloomy theory that contradicts one of Christianity's chief wellsprings-hope," says Louis Armstrong, United Presbyterian layman and Denver businessman. Dowey eloquently sums up the spirit of the renovation: "The Reformed Church, if the name means anything, must always be willing to reform...