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John Henry Livingston and the Liberty of the Conscience

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John Henry Livingston and the Liberty of the Conscience John Henry Livingston and the Liberty of the Conscience John Coakley Although John Henry Livingston ( 17 46-1825), "father of the Reformed Church," is well known for his achievements as an ecclesiastical statesman, he has not had much fame as a theologian. 1 To be sure, he respectably held the office of Professor of Theology for forty-one years, but not even his contemporary admirers considered him a creative thinker. Thus John De Witt, Livingston's junior colleague at the seminary at New Brunswick, remarked in his funeral oration that there was nothing very original in the system of theology that Livingston taught. 2 And Livingston's biographer and sometime confidant Alexander Gunn, while declaring that he "had a sound, acute, discriminating, comprehensive intellect," and that "in professional learning, he was unquestionably preeminent, and had scarce a compeer in the country, " prefaced those observations by acknowledging that "he was not distinguished, indeed, for fertility of imagination, or for originality and sublimity of thought. "3 Yet his ideas, original or not, have a historical importance, if only because of the undisputed importance of his career as a whole; for ideas underlie actions. In this essay I shall therefore consider Livingston as a man of ideas, and the importance for him of one idea in particular: the liberty of the conscience. This idea played a consistent and fundamental role in his thinking from the time of his first published work, through the early decades of his career when he was making his now famous contributions to the formation of the Reformed Church. For background purposes, let us recall those contributions. First, it was Livingston who organized and chaired the convention in 1771 which ratified the Plan of Union to heal the schism between the Coetus and Conferentie factions, effectively to remove the church from subordination to the Classis of Amsterdam, and thus make it finally a self-determining entity. 4 Second, as Professor of Theology from 1784 until his death, he figured prominently in the long, complex, but finally successful struggle to give the professorate a permanent home--ultimately in New Brunswick, where he settled in 1810--and to fund it adequately. 5 Third, he apparently did much of the preparation of the church's first hymnal, Psalms and Hymns , which was published in 1789, and in 181 2- 13 produced more or less single-handedly a considerably different second edition of this work. 6 Fourth, in 1790 it was he who, as the chairman of a committee to translate the Church Order of Dordt into English, pointed out to 119 the General Synod the need for "inserting or adding some further rules" to that document; and he principally drafted the resulting "Explanatory Articles" which the synod ratified in 1792 and published (along with the translation of the Order of Dordt and the Standards -and Liturgy) as the Constitution of the church in 1793. 7 He seems to have had a hand in all the major business of the church in its early, post-colonial years, and moreover to have had a certain genius for accomplishing things. No other single figure of his time in the Reformed Church contributed to its development in so many prominent ways . 8 So much for his tangible accomplishments. What of his thoughts? What leading ideas did he bring to his work? Here we are fortunate to have an early work from his pen which antedates all of his major accomplishments, and reveals his mind at a moment when he was poised, as it were, at the edge of his illustrious career, so that we get a glimpse of his mind at the beginning. This is the treatise De foederis Sinaitici natura (On the nature of the Sinaitic covenant), the discourse he defended to receive his doctorate in theology at the University of Utrecht in 1770. 9 In what follows I shall first examine the ideas of this treatise and then point out some of their echoes in Livingston's writings in the active years that followed. In all of this, as suggested earlier, the notion of liberty of conscience will turn out to have a peculiar importance. De Foederis Sinaitici Natura Livingston wrote the doctoral discourse at the end of his four-year stay at the University of Utrecht, after he had received a call to the Collegiate Church of New York and was about to head home to begin his illustrious career. He had come to the Netherlands in the first place (arriving 20 June 1766) with the encouragement of Archibald Laidlie, the first English-language minister of the Collegiate Church, and of some of the congregation who hoped to have him back as Laidlie's colleague. Once settled in Utrecht, he continued to correspond with them. 10 The New York consistory issued a call in March, 1769. By the time he received it he had completed his basic theological studies and had been licensed to preach by the Classis of Amsterdam. 11 Nonetheless he postponed a response, and instead commenced work toward a doctorate. It is probably germane that an American professorate in the Reformed Church was clearly going to be established in the near future and would likely come the way of someone conspicuously qualified. 12 At any rate, he worked quickly, sustained his first set of examinations for the degree, and wrote his discourse in the winter of 1769-70, and only then, on 1 April 1770, accepted the call and received ordination. 13 He successfully defended the discourse on 6 May, sailing for America soon afterward. 14 The New York consistory received him on 6 September. 15 For Livingston therefore, the discourse was a last academic exercise before the beginning of his active ministry. We can view it therefore 120 as an index of his intellectual formation for that ministry, an indicator of the ideas he brought along to it. We can discern two sets of ideas in De foederis Sinaitici. First, and most obvious, are certain notions rooted in the "covenant theology" that had occupied a prominent place in much of Reformed dogmatics for a hundred years and more. 16 Second, less immediately apparent yet arguably more fundamental for Livingston, are some concepts of human freedom which he derived, not from Reformed dogmatics per se, but probably (as I shall argue) from the work of the British philosopher John Locke. To begin with covenant theology: De foederis Sinaitici natura ostensibly shows Livingston asking what sort of covenant God made with the Israelites in giving them the law at Mount Sinai. This was a question to which, Livingston notes, theologians had given various answers. 17 The treatise argues the position that although this covenant displayed characteristics of both the covenant of works (i .e., God's covenant with Adam, whereby salvation was conditional on Adam's obedience) and the covenant of grace (i.e., the unconditional agreement between God and the elect, whereby God graciously grants salvation because of Christ's mediation), fundamentally it was neither. Rather it was a "national" covenant, the direct aim of which was not to grant adherents salvation, but rather to set them clearly apart as a nation. Since the Sinaitic covenant essentially continues the covenant made with Abraham, as is suggested both by the frequent linked references to the two in Scripture and by the fact that the Israelites are called the "people of God" both before and after Sinai, to speak of one covenant is to speak of the other; and it is actually from the covenant with Abraham that Livingston adduces the main traits that he sees as characterizing the Sinaitic covenant. 18 Specifically, what the covenant with Abraham in Genesis 17: 1-14 accomplished was to establish the "media" through which the promises were fulfilled that had been implied in Genesis 12:2-3, namely that Abraham would be "father of all the faithful" and "progenitor of the future Messiah. "19 These "media" are the strict separation of Israel from other peoples, the establishment of a "theocracy" whereby God was to be king and civil head of the family, and in consequence of this, the forging of a "perfect union between church and state fpolitia] . "20 And since the Abrahamic and Sinaitic covenants are essentially the same, the latter's main thrust was likewise the proclamation of a theocracy for the purpose of setting Israel aside for its task of producing the Messiah. Now the view that the Sinaitic covenant was primarily an instance of neither the covenant of works nor the covenant of grace had also been held by the Dutch theologian Herman Witsius ( 1636-1708), whom Livingston acknowledges; and a comparison is instructive. 2 1 In maintaining this position, Witsius seems at heart to have been concerned to maintain proper definitions of the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, respectively. Thus he argues that the Sinaitic 121 covenant could not have been an instance of the covenant of works because after Adam's fall that covenant could not be "renewed," because the Sinaitic covenant demanded only "sincere obedience" whereas the covenant of works demanded "perfect obedience," and because the Sinaitic covenant did not exclude the possibility of pardon for lapses as did the covenant of works .22 Furthermore it could not be an instance of the covenant of grace, since it lacks the promise of the "strength to obey" that is part and parcel of the covenant of grace. 23 In concluding then that the Sinaitic covenant was "a national covenant between God and Israel," Witsius was chiefly concerned to have demonstrated what it was not. 24 Livingston, for his part, makes some, though not all, of the same observations as Witsius in distinguishing the Sinaitic covenant from the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, pointing out in effect that the Sinaitic covenant did not enjoin perfect obedience, and that it did not itself justify.
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