What Is Presbyterianism?

Charles Hodge published What Is Presbyterianism? in 1855 in the Princeton Review, the quarterly he edited at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he taught. It was an address delivered on the occasion of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America's engagement with a question that had become practical rather than academic. Presbyterians in the mid-nineteenth century were being pressed from two directions: by Episcopalians who argued that a ministry without bishops stood outside the historic church, and by Congregationalists and others who thought presbyterian government too hierarchical. Hodge wrote to say, plainly, what his church believed about the church and why.

The essay proceeds by defining Presbyterianism through its principles of government rather than its confessional doctrine alone. Hodge argues that the church is one visible body, not a loose association of independent congregations, and that Christ has given it a form of government in Scripture. The central structural claim is that the ordinary officers of the church are presbyters, or elders, and that the New Testament uses the terms bishop and presbyter for the same office. Authority therefore belongs to elders acting together in courts of graduated jurisdiction, from the local session to the presbytery to the general assembly, rather than to a single bishop or to the individual congregation. Hodge also insists on the place of the people: they choose their own officers, and the elders who represent them govern in their name. He treats the parity of ministers, the right of the laity to a voice in church affairs, and the unity of the church across its parts as consequences of a single principle, that Christ rules his people through officers they recognize and a system they can see.

The essay still matters because it is among the clearest short statements of classical Presbyterian church order by the leading American Reformed theologian of his century, and because its arguments are laid out with unusual economy and without rancor. It remains a standard point of reference in debates over church polity, where the questions Hodge addressed, about who governs the church and by what warrant, have not gone away. It also shows how ecclesiology was argued in a denominational age, from Scripture and from history together.

Who should read this: pastors, elders, and seminarians who want a compact, primary-source account of Presbyterian polity and the reasoning behind it, and anyone weighing presbyterian, episcopal, and congregational models of church government. It is not a devotional work, and readers looking for spiritual direction or a general introduction to Reformed doctrine will find it narrowly focused on questions of church order.