TheAuburn Affirmation is 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-memberConference Committee and signed by 1274 ministers of thePCUSA. TheAffirmation challenged the right of the highest body of the church, theGeneral Assembly, to impose theFive Fundamentals as a test of orthodoxy without the concurrence of a vote from the regional bodies, thepresbyteries.
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
TheAuburn Theological Seminary history professor,Robert Hastings Nichols, proposed to challenge this procedure of repeatedly affirming additional standards of orthodoxy, besides theBible and theWestminster Confession of Faith – which were the only standards of orthodoxy officially recognized by the church. TheAffirmation denounces that procedure of affirming theFundamentals 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 andHenry 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 theAffirmation 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.
Although theAffirmation did not officially come from Auburn Theological Seminary (at that time located inAuburn, 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.
TheAuburn Affirmation was the culmination of theFundamentalist–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."
TheAffirmation has six sections that can be summarized as:
Referring to theFive Fundamentals as "particular theories", theAffirmation'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 theOrthodox Presbyterian Church. This church maintains the older standards, such as belief in the five essential doctrines (listed above).
Discussion of the Affirmation continued into the 1940s when thePresbyterian Church in the U.S. (aka, Southern Presbyterian Church) began to consider union with thenorthern Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., with conservatives charging that the Affirmation was indicative of the theological posture of the northern denomination.
