Conservatives v. Confession

The battle over the United Presbyterians' much debated, social activist "Confession of 1967" (TIME, June 3) is not over. Last week a group of conservative church members, calling themselves the Presbyterian Lay Committee, Inc., took ads in more than 100 U.S. newspapers urging their fellow believers to reject the present phrasing of the doctrinal statement as contrary to the church's faith and as a repudiation of the Westminster Confession of 1647.

Organized two years ago, the com mittee has 3,000 financial contributors, including such well-known industrialists as J. Howard Pew, board chairman of Sun Oil, and President Roger Hull of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York. Although it acknowledges the right of individual ministers to take stands on political-moral issues, the committee strongly objects to the tendency of Presbyterian leaders to issue pronouncements that purport to speak for the church as a whole.

In its ads the committee complained that the new confession downgrades the authority of Scripture since it involves the words of men, conditioned by the "places and times in which they were written." It also rejects the idea, implicit in the new confession, that the church has an imperative obligation to take firm stands on such temporal is sues as civil rights and poverty.

Presbyterian leaders answer that the confession adopted has been approved in principle by the church's last two General Assemblies. They also point out that the committee's chances of defeating the confession are rather dim. Be fore adoption by the General Assembly next May, the confession must be ratified by two-thirds of the 188 presbyteries. So far, 25 of them have taken votes; only two have turned it down.

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