Auburn Affirmation
The Auburn Affirmation was a document dated May 1924, with the title ""AN AFFIRMATION designed to safeguard the unity and liberty of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America"", authored by an eleven-member "Conference Committee" and signed by 1274 ministers of the PCUSA. The "Affirmation" challenged the right of the highest body of the church, the General Assembly, to impose the "Five fundamentals" as a test of orthodoxy without the concurrence of a vote from the regional bodies, the presbyteries. History. In 1910, 1916, and again in 1923, the General Assembly declared that every candidate  seeking to be ordained in the Presbyterian Church ought to be able to affirm The Auburn Theological Seminary history professor, Robert Hastings Nichols, proposed to challenge this procedure of repeatedly affirming additional standards of orthodoxy, besides the Bible and the Westminster Confession of Faith - which were the only standards of orthodoxy officially recognized by the church. The "Affirmation" denounces that procedure of affirming the "Fundamentals" in the General Assembly as a contradiction of the history and polity of the Presbyterian Church. It was drafted and signed by a writing group, primarily Nichols and Henry Sloane Coffin, with the original intention  of presenting it to the General Assembly of 1923. After events of the Assembly that year appeared to indicate that their thesis would be favorably received by moderates, Coffin suggested that the "Affirmation" should be signed by ministers before being formally made public; and in accord with that advice it was circulated for signature in preparation for the General Assembly of 1924. The Affirmation. Although the "Affirmation" did not officially come from Auburn Theological Seminary (at that time located in Auburn, New York), the name "Auburn Affirmation" has been attached to the document from the beginning, because of Nichols' influence  as the originator of the idea. The "Auburn Affirmation" was the culmination of the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy, which by 1924 had been a conflict of more than thirty years within the Presbyterian Church (USA). It is generally regarded as signalling a turning point in the history of American Presbyterianism, because it garnered the support of both theological traditionalists and liberals. Besides the 1274 signatories, the document as submitted claimed the support of "hundreds of ministers who agree with and approve of the Affirmation, though they have refrained from signing it." Content. The "Affirmation" has six sections that can be summarized  as: Referring to the "Five Fundamentals" as "particular theories", the "Affirmation's" argument is succinctly summarized in two sentences: Partly due to the acceptance of the Auburn Affirmation, Presbyterian traditionalists who found themselves displaced because of it went on to found the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. This church maintains the older standards, such belief in the five essential doctrines (listed above) and the inerrancy of the bible; these are the minimum requirements for membership in an OPC congregation and ordination for its ministers. Discussion of the Affirmation continued into the 1940s when the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (aka, Southern Presbyterian  Church) began to consider union with the northern Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., with conservatives charging that the Affirmation was indicative of the theological posture of the northern denomination.