In 2004, in my capacity as Pastor of Adult Education at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Maryland, I was commissioned to write an article on the history of that church as the time approached for the celebration of its 175th anniversary.
I was privileged to be given access to the church’s vault and to work there with a number of priceless historical documents — including the founding charter of the church and the handwritten Session minutes from 1828 and forward.
I’d always been of the conviction that what mattered was not the medium on, in, or through which we receive information, but the information itself. In other words, I’d always figured that reading, say, a collection of Session minutes from the 1820s and 30s transcribed and printed on copy paper would be just as useful and informative for the student as reading the original document would be.
But as I sat there with these documents from so long ago, handling and observing them in their sheer physicality, with their graceful penmanship preserved in real ink scratched with tangible variances of thickness and nuance on the paper, all put on these pages by the hand of an eyewitness to the reported proceedings generations before my grandparents were born — all this generated in me a profound sense of awe.
I discovered right then something of the power of artifacts, of relics. In that moment I could see — more, I could feel — why pilgrims journeyed so far in the Middle Ages to view, and sometimes handle, these things, because of their ability to generate awe, giving an uncanny sense of connection with people and places long past, such that the gulf of centuries seems momentarily bridged, and just for an exhilarating moment, there is an exquisite sense of connection and possibility…
It was right about then, too, that I realized the value of what was in my hands, and I put aside the cup of coffee I’d been so casually slurping, and began to treat the pages with the gentleness that comes with the handling of something utterly precious and irreplaceable.
(I’ve got a chunk of the Berlin Wall in my office which engenders similar feelings in visitors who hold it. At first, it’s just a piece of concrete with colors sort of sprayed randomly on one side; then, suddenly, upon finding that it’s a piece of the wall that held East Germans in their national prison for decades, that the colors are graffiti from the West Berlin side, that this chunk had been part of that very wall, standing there through snow and rain, the symbol of freedom’s denial and now of freedom’s victory… And suddenly the holder isn’t just holding a piece of concrete, but a piece of history, raw, real, and electrifying. Yes, relics are powerful things. And it is precisely in their power to awe us that I believe the Bible warns us to beware of them, to be on guard against their power to sway us, unawares, into the spell of idolatry…)
Anyway, in the course of writing the article, I’d been curious as to the congregation’s stance with regard to the Presbyterian schism of the mid-nineteenth century, when the Presbyterian Church in the United States split into mutually hostile Old School and New School camps, with conflicting and overlapping presbyteries.
What I found interesting from the vantage point of the researcher was that, while there had been a book written back in the 1960′s about the history of Fourth Presbyterian Church, it had focused more or less entirely on the succession of its pastors and buildings and not at all on the theological and denominational issues and controversies faced by the church through the years. Particularly interesting to me was the question of how Fourth Church had navigated the waters of revivalism, reaction, and schism that were cresting at during the early years of the congregation’s existence.
And what became quickly apparent was that it was impossible to understand the history of Fourth Presbyterian Church (just as it is impossible to understand the history of Presbyterianism in nineteenth century America as a whole) without understanding the theological, confessional, and denominational issues that led to the Old School-New School split. And just as surely, it is impossible to understand the Old School-New School conflict of the nineteenth century without a grounding in the Old Side-New Side conflict of the eighteenth. And it was in the course of doing research on Presbyterianism in the eighteenth century that I discovered the Log College.
In the 1700′s, Presbyterians were confronted with a crisis: how to get enough pastors out to the frontier areas to service the burgeoning populations there, given that there was a despereate shortage of properly trained and qualified candidates (properly trained and qualified meaning, at that time, ideally, schooled in Scotland and fully conversant with and wholly subscribing to the Westminster Standards).
Given the critical need of pastors, and the glaring absence of fully trained, qualified ones, could/should standards be relaxed just a bit to allow for locally trained pastors to meet the local need? The New Side favored the tendency toward using locally trained pastors, while the Old Side insisted that such a path, allowing for a looser standard of subscription to the Standards, would lead to doctrinal slippage. (The long and short of it: the New Side won and the Old Side was ultimately proved correct. The good news was that New Siders’ evangelistic zeal led to a multiplication of New Side churches while the number of Old Side congregations actually shrunk (I suppose we should qualify this by noting that it was good news for the gospel, bad news for the Old Siders!). The bad news is that this growth had indeed come at a price of doctrinal slippage, the fruits of which would show up more glaringly in the nineteenth century, during the years of the Second Great Awakening and leading up to the Old School-New School split.
But in the midst of all this came an extraordinarily interesting development. One of the leading New Siders, William Tennent, the pastor of a church in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in a place called Neshaminy, launched a sort of seminary for the training of these young, locally drawn leaders. I say “a sort of seminary” because it was located on his property. There, in the (then) wilds of Bucks County, this pastor tutored and schooled a small number of young men at any one time, teaching them Hebrew, Greek, Latin, theology, and the Bible.
Critics of Tennent’s school derisively called it “the Log College.” But gradutates of “the Log College” were among those who founded Princeton, which would become in turn, somewhat ironically, the bastion of Old School Presbyterianism in America through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
I was inspired by this notion — the Log College. It struck me as the very thing pastors ought to be engaged in, if and to the extent that they’re able to do so: training and guiding young men who feel called to the ministry, shepherding them and encouraging them in the context of service to an actual congregation… (Not so much, I should add, with a vision to replacing seminary, of course, as to provide a template for pre- and post-seminary vocational training and guidance, through a vital internship in the life of a real congregation…)
Enamored of the romantic notion of starting a Princeton University in the woods, I visited “the wilds of” Neshaminy, and was deeply disappointed to find a rather ordinary shopping mall! Rats!
Nevertheless, it was that vision of Presbyterianism’s roots in America, there in Bucks County, in the Log College, that led me, in part, to accept a call to serve a congregation there. I hoped that, someday, I might be able to summon that spirit of what Tennent sought to do, in providing means for young men called to the ministry to learn and test their callings and giftings — in my case, before quitting their day jobs and committing to seminary full-time!
Now, as I prepare to begin my first Greek class for interested members of the congregation, and in particular for two young men who are interested in the ministry, I pray that God will bless this endeavor.
And I hope that this blog will be an extension of that spirit — a virtual “place” whose purpose is to feed, stimulate, challenge, and above all to enourage readers in their walks of faith and in their witness to God’s grace.
Thus, and after an admittedly rambling first post, the name of this blog: the Blog College!
May the words of this blog, from this day forward, bring glory to God, and to the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior.
Amen!
(P.S. — If you’re interested in any of these issues concerning the Old Side-New Side and Old School-New School splits of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively, or for a fuller treatment of the issues of revivalism, reaction, and schism in the history of Presbyterianism in America, here’s the link to read the article: http://www.faithprez.org/holdfast.htm.)
J.D. Grisham
