The Synod of Philadelphia Adopts the Westminster Confession in the Adopting Act

On 19 September 1729, twenty three years after Francis Makemie organized the first American presbytery in 1706, already recorded here, and sixty years before the first General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church convened in Philadelphia in 1789, also recorded here, the Synod of Philadelphia unanimously adopted what became known as the Adopting Act. Likely drafted by Jonathan Dickinson, the act required every minister and candidate for the ministry to declare agreement with the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms as containing, in all the essential and necessary articles, good forms of sound words and systems of Christian doctrine, resolving a dispute between Scotch Irish ministers who favored strict subscription and colonial clergy who preferred scriptural primacy alone. A minister with a scruple over some non essential clause could declare it to his presbytery or synod, which would judge whether the point was in fact essential; the synod itself exempted two specific paragraphs of the Confession's chapters on Christian liberty and the civil magistrate from binding force, rejecting any reading that gave a civil ruler power to control synods or persecute dissenters. The compromise held the young American church together through the controversies of the First Great Awakening and became, in historian Lefferts Loetscher's phrase, a kind of Magna Charta in the church's theological history, the founding act of confessional identity for Presbyterianism in the American colonies.