Presbyterians

Presbyterians are Protestants whose congregations are governed by elders (“presbyters”) elected by their membership. These elders govern collectively, as a session, with some of them chosen as representatives to the local presbytery, the regional synod, and the national general assembly. Presbyterians trace their origins to 16th-century Geneva, where John Calvin instituted a rudimentary form of Presbyterianism. Their theological distinctions are summarized in the Westminster Confession (1647) and Shorter (1647) and Larger (1648) Catechisms. English Puritans were too divided to impose these tenets on the Church of England, but they were adopted by the Church of Scotland and later by breakaway denominations in Scotland as well as by daughter churches in America.

The first Presbyterian church in what became the United States was established in Hempstead, New York, in 1644, with others soon following in Newark (1667), Philadelphia (1692), and elsewhere along the midAtlantic coast. Francis Makemie, a Scots-Irish missionary recognized as the father of American Presbyterianism, arrived in 1683. In 1706 he led in organizing the Presbytery of Philadelphia, serving as its first moderator; in 1716 this was reorganized as the Synod of Philadelphia. Most of its growth stemmed from the influx of Scots-Irish immigrants and the southward surge of New England Puritans. While the Scots-Irish generally stressed the centrality of doctrinal orthodoxy as defined by fidelity to the Westminster Confession, New Englanders generally urged the secondary status of all standards other than the Bible and emphasized the centrality of “experimental” (experiential) religion. Tensions between the two were temporarily eased by the Adopting Act of 1729, in which the synod embraced Westminster as its doctrinal standard while making room for those with scruples about nonessential aspects of Westminster’s teaching.

These wings endured a painful separation during the Great Awakening. Experience-oriented Presbyterians, dubbed New Lights, welcomed the revival as God’s work, while doctrine-oriented Presbyterians, dubbed Old Lights, saw New Light excesses as reason enough to reject it outright. At the synod’s 1741 meeting the Old Lights revoked the Adopting Act and ousted most New Light ministers. Prorevival Presbyterianism now entered a period of accelerated growth; in 1745 New Lights organized the Synod of New York, and a year later they founded the College of New Jersey, Princeton University’s predecessor, primarily to provide their congregations with well-educated pastors. Meanwhile, antirevival Presbyterianism experienced stagnation and numerical decline that eventually forced the Old Lights’ reconciliation with the New Lights on the latter’s terms. In 1758 their synods merged to form the Synod of New York and Philadelphia.

Recent scholarship has argued that New Lights, including Presbyterians, were more likely to challenge secular as well as religious authority. Many of them consequently engaged in political resistance during the decade preceding the American Revolution.

Further reading: Randall Balmer and John R. Fitzmier, The Presbyterians (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993); Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Leonard J. Trinterud, The Forming of an American Tradition: A Reexamination of Colonial Presbyterianism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1949).

—George W. Harper and Billy G. Smith

Priber, Christian Gottlieb (1697-1744?) missionary, reformer

Christian Gottlieb Priber was a utopian philosopher who advocated a radically different society while living among the Cherokee Indians. Despite contemporary and subsequent suspicions that he was a French agent or a French Jesuit, Christian Priber was, in fact, born in Zittau, Saxony, the son of Friedrich Priber, publican and linen merchant, and Anna Dorothea Bergmann. His early career saw him gain a doctorate in jurisprudence at Erfurt University, after which he returned to Zittau to practice law and to marry Christiane Dorothea Hoffman, with whom he had had five children by 1732. By 1735 Priber, who claimed to have fled persecution for his beliefs, was at Charleston. A 500-mile journey over the Appalachians took him to Great Tellico, a principal town of the Cherokee. It was here, after learning the local language, altering his physical appearance to conform with local custom, and gaining the trust and affection of the local Cherokee, that he began (filled with fashionable contemporary notions about the “noble savage”) to build what was described as his “Kingdom of Paradise.” In this utopian state there was to be equality of the sexes, communal care of children, communal possession of all property (which was to be distributed strictly according to need), and a radically limited legal code. Priber’s suggestion that the Cherokee begin to trade on equal terms with both the English and the French and his teaching the Cherokee the use of weights and measures to protect themselves from dishonest merchants annoyed the local English authorities. After several failed attempts to capture him, Priber was finally seized by a group of Creek in 1743, taken to Fort Frederica, and interrogated by James Oglethorpe. It was at Frederica that, in all likelihood, he died.

Further reading: Knox Mellon, Jr., “Christian Priber’s Cherokee Kingdom of Paradise,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, 57 (1973): 319-333.

—Jonathan Wright