Henry Sloane Coffin and the Auburn Affirmation

Abstract

Abstract Liberal theology had been gaining strength within American Protestantism in general and the Presbyterian Church in particular since the late nineteenth century. Though the Presbyterian Church had unequal vocally rejected the tenets of modernism in the Portland Deliverance of 1892 and in the doctrinal declarations of 1910 and 1916, some presbyteries, most notably that of New York City, had continued to ordain men who accepted the higher critical method and the assumptions of liberalism. That eighty-five commissioners would publicly protest the assembly’s endorsement of the five fundamentals was a mark of how adamant many were in defending the rights of modernists within the church.