The resolution was carried.
c. Church Commentary on the Bible Dr. Breckinridge offered a minute to provide a Commentary on the Scriptures which shall be in accordance with the Westminster doctrines of this Church, as follows:
Inasmuch as the want of a sound, godly, and thorough commentary on the whole word of God, composed in the sense of the constant faith of the Church of God, as that is briefly set forth in the standard of the Westminster Assembly, held by the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, has long been felt to be a grievous want, whereby a great lack of due service to God and to his truth occurs, and whereby constant danger arises to men of needless ignorance on one side, and of dangerous misguidance on the other, therefore be it.
Resolved, By the General Assembly, that the Board of Publication shall, and it is hereby directed to proceed with all convenient despatch to have such a commentary composed, prepared for the press and published. And in the execution of this great work, the following rules and orders, together with such further as may be adopted from time to time by the General Assembly, shall be carefully observed by the Board of Publication, and by all others in any ways engaged in the execution of any part thereof.
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The commentary shall be prepared exclusively by the members of this Church, and in the preparing of it they shall have all such indulgence as to time as they shall respectively demand. And for their own compensation and their heirs, shall receive, for the legal term of twenty-eight years, a fair per centum on the price of the work sold, which shall be settled in advance by the Board of Publication, and which shall be uniform, and in lieu of all claims and cost of every sort in any way connected with their said work.
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The said commentary shall be fitted for common use by all men, and in the preparation of it free use may be made of all material that may exist; the design being to procure not so much what may be original, as what may be best in the way of enlightening and saving men. It shall not be prolix, but so arranged that the whole may be embraced in five or six royal octavo volumes, of good print, containing, besides commentary, the English text in full, together with the usual accessories thereof, and such other suitable helps to its understanding as plain people need. And the text used in it shall be strictly that of the version prepared by the translators appointed by James the First, King of England.
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In order to secure the fittest men for this great work, the Board of Publication shall make special application to the general synods of our Church at the next stated meetings respectively, and the said synods shall, upon careful consideration, nominate to the said Board of Publication any number of their own members, not to exceed five from any one synod, of such as they shall consider qualified to undertake the work, and the Board of Publication may add not more than four, in addition to the whole number thus nominated to it, and it shall communicate the list of names thus obtained by sifting the Church, to the General Assembly, at its next stated meeting in May of next year, making, at the same time, and from year to year thereafter, report of its doings under and by virtue of this minute.
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The General Assembly of 1859 will take such further order in the premises, especially with regard to selection of persons out of the list communicated to it, to the distribution of the work amongst them, and to all things needful for its effectual prosecution, as shall seem most expedient.
It is evident, from the very nature of this proposal, as well as from the arguments of its advocates, that it contemplates an exposition of the whole Scripture, to which shall be given the sanction of Church authority. If the mere suggestion of such an idea does not strike a man dumb with awe, he must be impervious to all argument. It is a fearful thing to give Church authority even to articles of faith gathered from the general sense of Scripture. How large a part of the Church universal, or even of the Church of England, can conscientiously adopt the Thirty-Nine Articles in their true sense? How do we get along with our more extended Confession? We could not hold together a week, if we made the adoption of all its propositions a condition of ministerial communion. How is it with the marriage question? If it is not only difficult but impossible to frame a creed as extended as the Westminster Confession, which can be adopted in all its details by the ministry of any large body of Christians, what shall we say to giving the sanction of the Church to a given interpretation of every passage of Scripture? This is more than all the popes, who ever lived, merged in one, would dare to propose. It is a thousand fold more than Rome, when most drunk with pride, ever ventured to attempt. Where is there such a thing? who has ever heard of such a thing as a Church Commentary? There must be some mistake about this matter. The proposition cannot mean what it appears to mean, and what some at least, both of its advocates and opponents, understood it to mean. We cannot persuade ourselves that any one, having the least idea of the nature of the work, any apprehension of what it is, to come to a clear conviction, even for oneself, what is the true interpretation of thousands of texts of Scripture, how many questions of philology, of grammar, of logic, of geography, history, antiquities, of the analogy of faith and of Scripture, which such decision involves, could, for a moment, dream of the possibility of a Church exposition of the whole Bible. The proposal on the part of any man, or any body of men, to give an authoritative interpretation of unfulfilled prophecy, of the visions of Ezekiel, Zechariah, Daniel, and John, would be proof that God had given him or them up to strong delusion. No amount of inspiration ever granted to man would justify such an assumption. The prophets themselves did not understand their own predictions. The apostles, though rendered infallible in what they taught, were as ignorant, it may be, as other men of what they did not teach. The Scriptures were as much an unfathomable sea of Divine knowledge to them as they are to us.
It will no doubt be said, that the view above given of the design of the proposed commentary is exaggerated and distorted. It is very probable that the proposition lies in the minds of its advocates in a very different form from that which it presents to others. We are speaking of it as it lies in the record, and as it was exhibited in the speeches of those who urged its adoption. Some may say that there is no great harm in the Board of Publication publishing a commentary on the Bible. Certainly not, and simply because the Board of Publication is not the Church, and therefore no special authority belongs to any of their publications. They may print the commentaries of Henry or Scott, or Dr. Jacobus’s Notes on the Gospel, with impunity, because no one is responsible for the correctness of the expositions given but their authors. Who ever dreams that the Church is responsible for Dr. Scott’s interpretation of Ezekiel’s wheels? Who thinks of attributing Church authority to Dr. Jacobus’s exposition of our Lord’s discourses? These works pass for what they are intrinsically worth, and for no more. But here it is proposed to pursue the same course in making a commentary, as was adopted in making our Catechisms and compiling our Hymn Book. The Church, as such, is responsible for the doctrinal correctness of every hymn in the collection. The people do not know who were the writers or who the compilers. They take the book on the authority of the Church, and the Church is fully committed to its correctness. This must be the case in regard to any commentary written by men selected and appointed by the Church, reporting their work from time to time, as they proceed, and receiving as essential the imprimatur of the Church to what they write. This of necessity commits the Church; and this purpose was clearly avowed. It was said that the Westminster Confession has a sense, and the Church has a clear conviction of what that sense is; and according to these principles the commentary is to be constructed. That is, the Church is to see to it, that the commentary is orthodox and correct; therefore the Church must be responsible. When this commentary is quoted in controversy, it will come not with the authority of Luther, or Calvin, or Scott, or Jacobus, but of the Presbyterian Church. All Presbyterians will go to it, not as to the other publications of the Board, written by private individuals, but as to a book having authority, as being written or compiled by the Church. The plan proposed is much the same as that pursued by our Baptist friends in the preparation of their new version. If that work should be completed, it will be the Baptist version, not Dr. Conant’s or Professor Hackett’s version, but the Baptist version—one to which the Baptists as a denomination stand committed. So the proposed commentary will be the Presbyterian commentary, not the commentary of Mr. A. or of Dr. B., and it must of necessity be clothed with Church authority. This was evidently contemplated by those who urged that the exposition of Scripture should be kept under the vigilant eye of the Church, and who pleaded the promise of the Holy Spirit to the Church as a reason why the work should not be referred to the Board of Publication, but decided upon and carried out by the Church itself, the Board being only her agent, as in the preparation of the Hymn Book. This is a fatal objection to the whole scheme, for the Church will never submit, unless God has withdrawn from her the spirit of wisdom and of a sound mind, to have imposed upon her the interpretations of any man, as of authority in the reading of the Scriptures.
Besides this, the object aimed at is not only inconsistent with the liberty of believing, but it is utterly impracticable. It is said the Bible is to be interpreted according to the Church’s sense of the Westminster Confession. But who is to tell us the Church’s sense of the Confession? It is notorious, that as to that point we are not agreed. In the second place, even as to points in which the sense of the Confession is plain, there is want of entire concurrence in its reception; and what is the main point, there is no such thing as the sense of the Westminster Confession as to the true interpretation of thousands of passages of Scripture. The standard is an imaginary one. What does that Confession teach of the dark sayings of Hosea, of the baptism for the dead, or the sense of Gal. 3:20, concerning which an octavo volume has been written, giving no less than one hundred and fifty distinct interpretations? It is plain that there is not, and that there cannot be a standard for the interpretation of the Scriptures in detail; and therefore the Church must either submit to have the opinions of some one man enacted into the laws to bind the reason and conscience of all other men, or she must give up the idea of having a Church exposition of the Bible.
Admitting, however, that such a work is desirable, and that it is practicable, where are the men to be found to execute the task? It is proposed that each synod should nominate five of its own members for the work, some one hundred and sixty in all. We venture to say, that instead of our Church being able to furnish a hundred men fit for such a work as this, it does not contain, and never has contained, any one such man. It is bad enough for any poor sinner, after all his study, to undertake to present his own private judgment as to the meaning of Scripture, and to state the reasons for his opinion, leaving all other men to judge for themselves, to receive or reject his interpretation as they may see fit. But to assume to act as the mouthpiece of the Church in this matter, to say what the Church believes as to the meaning of each text of Scripture, and what all its members, therefore, are bound to receive as its meaning, is a task which none but an idiot or an angel would dare to undertake.
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