The Line Subscription Draws

Subscription to a confession is also one of the clearest lines separating whole families of Protestant churches from one another, and it has produced real controversy inside the confessional churches themselves over how strictly it should be required. Colonial American Presbyterianism split over exactly this question in the 1720s: Scotch Irish ministers favored requiring unqualified subscription to the Westminster Confession, while New England Presbyterians, wary that binding a minister's conscience to a human document violated the principle that scripture alone should rule, wanted something looser. The Adopting Act of 1729 settled the dispute with a compromise, requiring subscription only to the confession's essential and necessary articles, leaving individual presbyteries to judge what counted as essential. A parallel controversy divided English Dissenters at Salters' Hall in London in 1719, where ministers meeting to advise a congregation worried about its pastors' orthodoxy split over whether requiring subscription to any human formula, even on a point as central as the Trinity, was itself a betrayal of scripture's sole authority. That same argument is what separates the confessional churches from the Baptist and Restorationist traditions today, which hold that a confession may describe what a congregation happens to believe but can never rightly bind a minister's conscience.