The 1837 Schism Divides Old School and New School Presbyterians

Forty eight years after the first General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church convened in Philadelphia in 1789, already recorded here, and twenty two years before Ashbel Green Simonton brought Presbyterianism to Brazil beginning in 1859, also recorded here, American Presbyterianism split over revivalism and doctrine. At the 1837 General Assembly, the theologically conservative Old School party, led by Princeton Theological Seminary's Charles Hodge, won a majority and voted on 5 June to abrogate the 1801 Plan of Union with the Congregationalists, then declared four largely New School synods no longer part of the church, expelling twenty eight presbyteries, five hundred nine ministers and sixty thousand members over their tolerance of revivalist theology the Old School read as departing from Westminster orthodoxy. The Presbyterian Church in America's own historical center's account of the division traces the expulsion and the twenty two years the New School Presbyterian Church stood as a separate denomination before the 1869 reunion. George Marsden's academic case study of New School thought and theology, published by Yale University Press, reads the schism as American Presbyterianism's sharpest nineteenth century confrontation between confessional Calvinism and the revivalist evangelicalism reshaping American Protestantism.