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June 3: 1812 The Old Tennent Presbyterian Church

3 June, 2016 in June 2016 by davidtmyers | No comments

It is Simply Known as Old Tennent
by Rev. David T. Myers

Would you join a church congregation if the original members of the church were branded on their faces with a “T” for traitor?  Or had their ears “cropped” and disfigured as a permanent sign of their rebellion? I dare say most modern Christians might hesitate for a moment, wondering about the background of these members. But what if you discovered through investigation that these members had resisted the government’s attempting to overturn their Presbyterian convictions with those of the official state church?  I dare say that we who are true and faithful to the Word of God—the Bible—would quickly stand by their side and declare ourselves to be faithful adherents in such a church.

Such were the original members of what is simply known as Old Tennent Church, a  hardy group of Covenanters who came to these American shores in the late seventeenth century. More specifically, they came to Monmouth County, New Jersey, in 1685, where they had been sent by the Crown as indentured servants.  As they worked off their “punishment,” they established in 1692 on a small acre of ground, a tiny log church, about the size of a cabin, as their worship center.  They called it “Free Hill.”

Fast forward to when the small group of believers, under the spiritual oversight of Ruling Elder Walter Ker, aligned themselves with the newly begun Philadelphia Presbytery, of which we have written before in these posts. In fact, there is some discussion as to whether that Presbytery actually met at Old Tennent rather than in the Philadelphia area.  Elder Walter Ker, who was known as “the Father of Old Tennent”, believes it did meet at Old Tennent.

It was on this day, June 3, that the steadily growing church was organized as a particular church in the Philadelphia Presbytery. Its first pastor was the first Presbyterian pastor ordained in the colonies, namely, John Boyd. Later, two of the Tennent brothers, John and William Tennant filled the pulpit, with the latter occupying that pulpit for several decades.  Under the leadership of William Tennent the church was a central part of the Great Awakening, that wide-spread revival then filling the land. As a result, men like George Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, and Jonathan Edwards were also there on occasion to fill the pulpit at Old Tennent. In one instance, the Presbyterian missionary David Brainerd administered the Sacrament to a number of Indian converts in its sanctuary.

The original structure has been restored at various times, but its sanctuary continues to be active with members, friends, and visitors, being a member congregation of the Presbyterian Church, USA.

Words to Live By:
Whether Old Tennent Church was the location where the Presbytery of Philadelphia began or not, we still can rejoice in this church’s founding and subsequent early history for the faith once delivered unto the saints. This author wishes he could state that this church is now part of the Presbyterian Church in America, but that is not the case. Let us however not simply rejoice in the early history of Presbyterian churches, but every day and with all our heart and mind, continue the Reformed faith—the clear proclamation of the Gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ our Lord—in our families, to our fellow members in evangelical and Reformed churches with which we are affiliated, and in the communities in which we live. Point them to Christ as our only Hope and our sure Salvation.

June 2: Miracles in the Life of Ebenezer Erskine

2 June, 2016 in June 2016 by davidtmyers | 2 comments

There are two miracles associated with our Scottish subject today, Ebenezer Erskine [1680-1754].  One of the miracles was in the physical realm and the second was spiritual.

erskine_ebenezerFirst, for the physical miracle, Ebenezer Erskine was born after his mother died.  It may take a few minutes for that fact to sink in, but it is nevertheless true.  Let me explain.  Ebenezer’s father,  Henry, was a Presbyterian minister in Scotland.  He was married to Margaret.  One day, his wife died.  She had a very beautiful and expensive gold ring on her finger.  The family tried to get it off, but her finger was so swollen that it was impossible.  So she was laid in a coffin and taken to the graveyard near the church.  The sexton, who was officiating at the funeral, also saw the gold ring on her finger.  After the funeral, around midnight, he dug up the casket, opened it, and tried to remove the ring with a sharp knife.  Blood spurted out, and the “corpse” sat up.  Margaret climbed out of the casket and walked to the manse near the cemetery.  (We are not told in the true story what happened to the sexton!)  She knocked at the door. It was opened, and everyone was astonished, including her mourning husband.  Ebenezar, to say nothing of his younger brother, Ralph, was literally born of one who was raised from the dead.

The second miracles was spiritual in nature.  Ebenezer, who was born in 1680, went to the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1703.  Ordained by the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, he began his ministry as the pastor of a church in Portmoak, Scotland, preaching a mixture of law and gospel, with an emphasis on good works.  His wife, Alison Turpie Erskine, being a solid believer, wept for her husband’s hard heart.  But God’s Spirit was going to move in that heart in a marvelous way.

In God’s providence, Ebenezer overheard his wife and her brother talking about the gospel.  What they said about it troubled his heart.  Then his wife became very ill, and in her delirium, spoke of the things of God to her caring husband.  Ebenezer continued to be troubled.  She became well, and both of them began to converse about the gospel and its message.  He in his own words, “got his head out of time and into eternity.”  His heart was converted.  He covenanted with God the following: “I offer myself up, soul and body, unto God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. I flee for shelter to the blood of Jesus.  I will live to Him.  I will die to Him. I take heaven and earth to witness that all I am and all I have is His.”

From henceforth, his messages were all of grace.  He knew how, one said, to introduce Jesus Christ to a sinner.  People so flocked to his worship services that the building could not contain them.  He spent 28 years in his first pastorate before moving to Stirling, Scotland, where he stayed the rest of his life and ministry until 1754.

The first succession from the Church of Scotland came in 1740 under  his leadership.  It was over the old issue of patronage, discussed elsewhere in Today.  It also involved a doctrinal issue centered around the doctrine found in a book entitled “The Marrow of Modern Divinity.”  The church he began was first called the Associate Presbytery.  He died on June 2, 1754.

His name is immortalized today in the educational institutions of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, namely, Erskine College and Erskine Theological Seminary.

Words to Live By:
Reader, look back into your own life, spiritual and otherwise, for extraordinary evidences of God’s working in the past and present.  Then render thanksgiving for each one and share them with others, for either their conviction, if an unbeliever, or for their encouragement, if a fellow believer.

May 27: Death of John Calvin

27 May, 2016 in May 2016 by davidtmyers | No comments

Today we are pleased to have as our guest author the Rev. Dr. David W. Hall, pastor of the Midway Presbyterian Church (PCA) of Powder Springs, GA. It was Dr. Hall who so competently headed up the Calvin 500 celebration just a few years back, a celebration which included the publication of almost a shelf of new works on the life and ministry of John Calvin, with several of those works written by Dr. Hall himself. He has also been our guest author on most Saturdays this year, with a series on Election Day Sermons.

Calvin’s Death

calvinJohn02On April 25, 1564, sensing the nearness of death, Calvin filed his final will. In it he pled his unworthiness (“Woe is me; my ardor and zeal have been so careless and languid, that I confess I have failed innumerable times”1) and thanked God for mercy. He appointed his brother, Anthony (whose reputation for divorcing an earlier wife due to adultery had been maliciously used to malign Calvin himself), to be his heir, and in his will he bequeathed equal amounts to the Boys’ School, the poor refugees, and his stepdaughters. He also left part of his meager estate to his nephews and their children. To vindicate Calvin against charges of greed, Beza reiterated what Calvin had stated earlier: “If some will not be persuaded while I am alive, my death, at all events will show that I have not been a money-making man.”2 When his will was notarized and brought to the attention of the Senate,3 members of that council visited the declining Calvin to hear his final farewell personally.

Calvin’s importance and relationship to the city leaders may be gleaned from his Farewell Address to the Members of the Little Council.4 The members of this council had gone to his home to hear his advice and to express their appreciation for the “services he has performed for the Seigneurie and for that of which he has faithfully acquitted himself in his duty.” A contemporary recorded his sentiments from April 27, 1564. In that chronicle, the dying Calvin first thanked these leaders for their support, cooperation, and friendship. Although they had engaged in numerous struggles, still their relationship was cordial. Even though he wished to accomplish more, Calvin humbly suggested that God might have “used him in the little he did.” He urged the senators to honor God and to keep “hidden under the wings of God in whom all our confidence must be. And as much as we are hanging by a thread, nevertheless he will continue, as in the past, to keep us as we have already experienced that he saved us in several ways.”

He concluded by encouraging each one to “walk according to his station and use faithfully that which God gave him in order to uphold this Republic. Regarding civil or criminal trials, one should reject all favor, hate, errors, commendations.” He also advised leaders not to aspire to privilege as if rank was a benefit for governors. “And if one is tempted to deviate from this,” Calvin added, “one should resist and be constant, considering the One who established us, asking him to conduct us by his Holy Spirit, and he will not desert us.”

Calvin’s farewell to these political leaders was followed by his Farewell Address to the Ministers on April 28, 1564. From his chamber, Calvin reminded them poignantly: “When I first came to this Church there was almost nothing. We preached and that was all. We searched out idols and burned them, but there was no reformation. Everything was in tumult. . . . I lived here through marvelous battles. I was welcomed with mockery one evening in front of my door by 50 or 60 rifle shots. Do you think that that could disturb a poor, timid student as I am, and as I have always been, I confess?” The farewell address continued to review his Strasbourg exile, the tensions he faced upon return, and some of his experiences with various councils. Calvin concluded by predicting that the battles would not lessen in the days ahead, warning, “You will be busy after God takes me, even though I am nothing, still I know I prevented three thousand uproars that there might have been in Geneva. But take courage and strengthen yourselves, for God will use this Church and will maintain her, and be sure that God will keep her.”

Calvin humbly confessed: “I say again that all that I did has no value, and that I am a miserable creature. But if I could say what I truly wanted to, that my vices always displeased me, and that the root of the fear of God was in my heart, and you can say that what I was subjected to was good, and I pray that you would forgive me of the bad, but if there is anything good, that you conform yourselves to it and follow it.”

He denied that he had written hateful things about others, and he confirmed that the pastors had elected Beza to be his successor. “Watch that you help him [Beza],” exhorted the dying Calvin, “for the duty is large and troublesome, of such a sort that he may be overwhelmed under the burden. . . . As for him, I know that he has a good will and will do what he can.” Further, he requested that senators not change anything in Geneva’s structures and urged them “not to innovate—we often ask for novelties—not that I desire for myself by ambition what mine remains, and that we retain it without wanting better, but because all change is hazardous, and sometimes harmful.” The advice from this leader is filled with layer upon layer of wisdom.

Always sensitive to the calling to lead in many sectors of public life, he concluded with a plea for his fellow ministers to recall how they would affect matters outside the walls of the church, too: “Let each one consider the obligation he has, not only to this Church, but to the city, which has promised to serve in adversity as well as in prosperity, and likewise each one should continue in his vocation and not try to leave it or not practice it. For when one hides to escape the duty, he will say that he has neither thought about it nor sought this or that. But one should consider the obligation he has here before God.”

calvin_deathbedWhen Calvin passed away almost a month after making these comments on May 27, 1564, “the whole State regretted” the death of “its wisest citizen . . . a common parent.” He was interred in a common cemetery at Plein Palais, finally finding the anonymity he craved. That, one historian wrote, was characteristic of Calvin in life as in death.5 The widespread notice and sadness at his death should serve to correct any faulty view that his contemporaries either despised him or underestimated his importance. He was mourned, and his large number of friends would keep his memory alive far more than some contemporaries would have predicted.

 

Source: David W. Hall, The Genevan Reformation and the American Founding(Lexington Books, 2003).

1 Theodore Beza, Life of John Calvin (contained in John Calvin, Tracts and Treatises on the Reformation of the Church [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1958], vol. 1), cxxv.

2 Theodore Beza, Life of John Calvin, cxxxviii.

3 Beza refers to this Little Council as the “senate.” See Theodore Beza, Life of John Calvin, cxxii.

4 This translation is from an unpublished translation of Calvin’s “Farewell Address,” trans. Kim McMahan of Oak Ridge, TN; originally published in 1999 at: http://capo.org/premise/99/jan/p990110.html.

5 Emile Doumergue, The Character of Calvin (Neuilly, La Cause, 1931), 173.

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May 20: Old School/New School Reunion (1869)

20 May, 2016 in May 2016 by davidtmyers | 2 comments

Does Doctrine Divide While Mission Unites?

This was the sentiment when the schism of 1837 between the Old School and New School Presbyterians was  healed in the days following May 20, 1869.  Doctrine had divided the Presbyterian church but it was not insignificant doctrines.  It is what made the Presbyterian Church what it was, namely, a biblical, Reformed church according to its subordinate standards, the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms.  The Old School, led by Princeton Theological Seminary men, held to it, while the New School Presbyterians, led by men like Albert Barnes and Charles Finney, wanted to weaken it.  (We will see all of the issues in an upcoming devotional on the schism on June 5)  But for this day, we look at the first day of the General Assembly in 1869 when there was talk of and actions of reunion.  Why did this change take place?

The pivotal reason was that a terrible Civil War had taken place in the land which consumed their attention and placed concerns for doctrine to shift to secondary place.  Ministers and churches of both Old School and New School Presbyterians were now united in political issues as it had to do with the support of the Federal government.  Slavery concerns were now a dead issue in that the war had brought  freedom for blacks.  Reconstruction was now the matter on the front burner, and both Old School and New School pretty much agreed on that.

It can also be said that the New School had become more conservative in their theology.  They had departed from the Plan of Union with the Congregationalist churches.  The New England theology which denied of certain fundamental doctrines was, for the most part, no longer an issue in their ranks.  In other words, if there was any problem with the Confessional Standards, it wasn’t an open one.  Many of the men and churches who had fought the earlier issues had passed to their heavenly reward, so they were not in the church any longer. Other men were filling their pulpits and positions.

With the opening of this Assembly, the presbyters voted to send the reunion plans down to the Presbyteries.  In the intervening months, 113 Old School presbyteries approved it, with 126 out of 129 New School presbyteries approving the reunion plans as well.  Only fifty–two ministers of the Old School Presbyterians protested, led again by Princeton Seminary men, like Charles Hodge.

At the next General Assembly in Pittsburgh in 1870, after the required number of presbyteries had passed it,  there was a symbolic march of delegates from each assembly to a certain street in that city, where joining forces, arm in arm, they marched in tandem to Third Presbyterian Church for a mass meeting.  A broadening church had begun in the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.  Mission and how to serve the masses via ecumenical means, became the watchword for the church.  It would be only a question of time when Reformed conservatives would begin to not recognize the church of their spiritual fathers.

Words to Live By: Many of us are in everyday life led into dozens of compromise situations which are necessary to simply get along with others.  But when that compromise involves fundamental doctrines which weaken our Christian faith, then there is a call to stand up and be counted and hold firm to the faith once delivered unto the saints.  Are you boldly standing for the historic Christian faith?

May 3: Chaplain Abner Crump Hopkins

3 May, 2016 in May 2016 by davidtmyers | 4 comments

A Chaplain of the Stonewall Brigade

It was said that no danger deferred him; no sacrifices were too great for him to make.

The year was 1862. For those living in that section of Virginia now bordered as present day West Virginia, the great civil war was an imminent and daily reality of danger and disruption. It was a time of separation from family, soldiers on long distance marches, and life-threatening casualties from battle. And Stonewall Jackson always had his fair share of them.  Into this scene, Abner Crump Hopkins entered.

Born in 1835 in Powhatan County, Virginia, young Abner was educated at Hampden-Sydney College, graduating in 1855 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Whatever was used of the Holy Spirit to call him into a relationship with Jesus Christ, we do not know. But we do know that he was born again after his collegiate years.  With a call to be a minister, Abner entered Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia during the years of 1857-1860. Licensed and ordained by East Hanover and Winchester Presbyteries, he took the congregation of the Presbyterian Church of Martinsburg, Virginia. It was evidently a happy ministry until Federal troops invaded the town.  Leaving behind family and friends, Abner Hopkins was commissioned as a Confederate chaplain by the Second Virginia Infantry Regiment on May 3, 1862.

Right at the very beginning, Chaplain Hopkins made it his determination to share the suffering, marches, and perils of the men in the regiment.  Indeed he was so successful in this determination to be faithful always in his post of duty that the officers and  men of his regiment, and other units, sought him out for spiritual comfort. Opportunities to proclaim the gospel of grace came frequently from nightly prayer meetings at headquarters as well as on the Sabbath, which brought many souls into the kingdom.

On two occasions during the war, the hardships of this life and ministry produced emotional and physical breakdowns which set him apart from his military “congregation.”  But after times of rest and recovery, he always returned to the military  to further minister God’s Word. He was a part of the great “revival” which took place in the Southern army, especially during the latter part of the War.

After the close of the war, he returned to the civilian world as a pastor. His longest pastorate was in the Charleston area of West Virginia, where he was faithful in one congregation for forty-five years.  He was known all over the South, in that he served one year as the moderator of the 1903 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States. He died in 1911.

Further study :
The grave site of the Rev. Abner Crump Hopkins.
His diary is preserved at the Virginia Historical Society Library. The diary contains entries describing participation of the Second Virginia Infantry Regiment in the battles of the Seven Days’, Cedar Mountain, Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Bristoe Station, and 1862 Shenandoah Valley Campaigns.

Also on this day :
May 3, 1895 marks the birthday of Cornelius Van Til, born this day in 1895 in the Netherlands. For more on Dr. Van Til, including a photographic retrospective, click here.

Words to Live By:   How important it is to pray now for future difficult situations in your family or work or congregation, so that you will be faithful to the Word of the Lord and His will when the time of those difficult situations arrive.

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