Start with what's shared: Presbyterians honor the Bible, and so do we. The real differences come in four places. The first is final authority: Presbyterians hold a written confession alongside Scripture, and here at Christians In Honesdale we hold the Bible alone. The second is salvation, where historic Presbyterian teaching follows Calvinism, predestination included. Then come baptism and the way a church is governed. Each one is laid out below as fairly as we can manage, so you can weigh both sides against the text yourself.
Two Things Calvin Would Recognize Here
Before the differences, two surprises.
John Calvin, the father of Presbyterian theology, wanted the Lord's Supper every week. He wrote that "the Lord's Table should have been spread at least once a week for the assembly of Christians" (Institutes 4.17.43). The city council of Geneva wouldn't allow it, and he had to settle for far less. Every Sunday here, we take the Supper, because that's what the first church gathered to do (Acts 20:7).
Calvin also wanted the church to sing without instruments. Commenting on Psalm 33, he wrote that "musical instruments in celebrating the praises of God would be no more suitable than the burning of incense, the lighting up of lamps, and the restoration of the other shadows of the law." For a long time Presbyterians agreed with him. Many Scottish congregations sang the psalms unaccompanied well into the 1800s. We still do, "singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart" (Ephesians 5:19).
We mention this only to say that the gap isn't as wide as people think. A Presbyterian who read Calvin would find a good deal in our worship that looks familiar.
Not All Presbyterians Are Alike
One more thing before we start. Presbyterians in America aren't one body. The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church hold the Westminster Confession closely. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the largest Presbyterian body in the country, keeps a Book of Confessions that includes Westminster alongside about a dozen other creeds and statements, and plenty of its members hold Calvinism loosely or not at all. What follows describes historic Presbyterian teaching. The church down the street may hold it more or less strictly, and the best way to know is to ask its pastor.
The Westminster Confession and the Bible Alone
We'll begin with authority, because the other three differences grow out of it.
Presbyterian churches keep the Westminster Confession of Faith and its catechisms (or, in the PC(USA), the wider Book of Confessions) as their doctrinal standard, placed under Scripture. Their ministers and elders vow at ordination to receive it as a faithful summary of what the Bible teaches. That's how they describe it, and we'll take them at their word.
In fact, Westminster says some things we'd say ourselves. It teaches that everything necessary for salvation, faith and life "is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added" (1.6). It even warns that church councils "may err; and many have erred," and so "are not to be made the rule of faith, or practice" (ch. 31).
We agree with every word of that, and it's the reason we don't use a creed or a confession of any kind. Scripture says it's enough by itself: "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work" (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Complete. Equipped for every good work. Think it through and a confession has only two options. If it says less than the Bible, nobody needs it, and if it says more, it's gone further than God did. And the Westminster Assembly was itself a council of men, the kind its own Confession says can err.
Chosen Before the World Began?
This is where the two of us differ most deeply. Calvinism teaches that before creation God chose particular people to be saved, that Christ died specifically for those chosen people, and that not one of them can ever end up lost. Westminster puts it this way: "some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life; and others foreordained to everlasting death" (3.3). In that system, your salvation was settled before you ever drew breath, by God's choice alone.
We read the Bible differently. As we understand it, God's desire is for every person to be saved, and each of us is free to answer Him. Paul speaks of "God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:3-4). Peter describes the Lord as "not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" (2 Peter 3:9). And the last invitation in the whole Bible is about as wide open as words get: "let the one who desires take the water of life without price" (Revelation 22:17).
A note on the Greek: In 1 Timothy 2:4, God thelei pantas anthrōpous sōthēnai, "wills all people to be saved." Pantas anthrōpous is the same "all people" Paul tells Timothy to pray for two verses earlier, "kings and all who are in high positions" included (2:1-2). It's hard to read the first "all" as everyone and the second as only the elect.
The Old Testament says the same thing. Moses set the choice before Israel: "I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life" (Deuteronomy 30:19). And God told Ezekiel, "I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live" (Ezekiel 33:11).
A note on the Hebrew: "Choose life" is ûbāḥartā baḥayyîm. The verb bāḥar is the same word used when God "chose" Israel (Deuteronomy 7:6). God chooses, and He calls on people to choose back. In Ezekiel 33:11, "I have no pleasure" is ʾim-ʾeḥpōṣ, from ḥāpēṣ, to delight in or desire. God's own oath says He doesn't want anyone lost.
So who are God's elect? Whoever comes to Christ the way He asks, and that invitation leaves nobody out (Acts 10:34-35). Scripture does talk about predestination (Ephesians 1:5). What it describes is a plan God settled ahead of time and a people He'd have in Christ. Paul says God "chose us in him before the foundation of the world" (Ephesians 1:4). The choosing happened in Christ, and a person comes into Christ by faith and baptism (Galatians 3:26-27). It doesn't describe a sealed list of names that nobody can get onto or off of.
Presbyterians often point to Romans 9, where God says, "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated" (Romans 9:13). But Paul is quoting Malachi 1:2-3, written more than a thousand years after both men died, about the nations that came from them, Israel and Edom. And the choice was about which line would carry the promise, not which man would be saved.
A note on the Hebrew: Before the twins were born, God told Rebekah, šənê gōyim bəḇiṭnēḵ, "Two nations are in your womb" (Genesis 25:23). The prophecy that "the older shall serve the younger" is about peoples and their place in God's plan. Esau himself never served Jacob. It was Edom that later served Israel (2 Samuel 8:14).
The last piece of Calvinism, that no one truly saved can ever be lost, runs into Paul's warning to Christians in Galatia: "You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace" (Galatians 5:4). You can't fall from a place you never stood. (We've written more on that in our post on whether a Christian can fall from grace.)
Sprinkled as Infants, Buried as Believers
Presbyterian churches baptize babies, usually by sprinkling or pouring. They understand it as the covenant sign given to the children of believing parents, the way circumcision was given to Israel's sons. Westminster says infants "of one, or both, believing parents, are to be baptized," and that "dipping of the person into the water is not necessary" (28.3-4).
Here, the only people baptized are those able to believe and repent for themselves. We do it only by immersion, and always for the purpose Peter named: "Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins" (Acts 2:38). Paul calls what happens in the water a burial: "We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life" (Romans 6:4).
A note on the Greek: Baptizō means "to dip" or "immerse." Greek writers used it for a ship going under and for anything plunged beneath the water. And "for the forgiveness of your sins" is eis aphesin tōn hamartiōn hymōn, the same phrase Jesus used of His own blood, "poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins" (Matthew 26:28). In both places, eis points to what's received.
The circumcision argument rests mostly on Colossians 2:11-12. But read the passage to the end. Paul says we were "buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God." The baptism Paul has in mind is one where the person being raised has faith. Israel's sons were circumcised at eight days old because they were born into the old covenant. In the new one, Jeremiah said, "they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest" (Jeremiah 31:34; Hebrews 8:11). People enter the new covenant by being born again, not by being born.
Presbyterians also point to the households baptized in Acts, like the Philippian jailer's. But Luke says Paul and Silas "spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house," and afterward the jailer "rejoiced along with his entire household that he had believed in God" (Acts 16:32-34). The household that was baptized was a household that heard and believed.
Two things follow. You can't bury someone with a few drops of water. And repentance takes a believer who's old enough to turn from sin, while a baby has no sin to turn from.
A note on the Hebrew: Ezekiel 18:20 says, bēn lōʾ-yiśśāʾ baʿăwōn hāʾāḇ, "The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father." The verb nāśāʾ means "to carry" or "bear." Guilt isn't passed down like a family debt. Each person carries his own.
That's why we don't baptize infants.
Sessions, Presbyteries, and a Congregation That Stands Alone
Here there's real agreement to start with. Presbyterians take their very name from the elders, or presbyters, who lead each congregation, and they're right that the New Testament puts congregations under elders.
A note on the Greek: Presbyteros means "elder," and episkopos means "overseer." In Acts 20, Paul calls for the presbyterous of the church at Ephesus (20:17), then tells those same men the Holy Spirit made them episkopous, overseers, to "care for the church of God" (20:28). Titus 1:5-7 uses both words for the same office. Presbyterians and we read this the same way: elder and overseer are one role, not two ranks.
The difference is what sits over those elders. A local session answers to a regional presbytery. Presbyteries answer to a general assembly (and, in some Presbyterian bodies, to synods in between), and decisions move through that whole structure.
The New Testament gives nothing above the local congregation. Elders were appointed to oversee their own church (Titus 1:5; Acts 14:23), and Peter kept the job local: "shepherd the flock of God that is among you" (1 Peter 5:2). No congregation answers to another one. Christ alone is head over the church (Ephesians 1:22-23).
We'll be honest about where we stand on that. We're a small congregation of fewer than twenty members, and right now none of our men meet the qualifications Paul lays out (1 Timothy 3:1-7; Titus 1:5-9). So we don't have elders yet, and we won't appoint anyone just to fill the title. That isn't unusual in the New Testament. Paul and Barnabas planted churches and came back later to appoint elders (Acts 14:21-23), and Paul left Titus in Crete to "appoint elders in every town" where congregations were already meeting (Titus 1:5). Until the Lord raises up qualified men among us, we work together as a congregation under Christ and His word.
Calvin, Knox, the 1640s, and Reaching Back Past All of Them
The Presbyterian story starts in the Protestant Reformation. John Calvin shaped its teaching in Geneva in the 1500s, and John Knox carried it home to Scotland, where it took root in 1560. The name points to the way it's governed, by elders, or presbyters, and its Westminster Confession dates to the 1640s. None of that is hidden. Presbyterians tell the story themselves, and we'd tell it the same way.
We aren't trying to reform that story or start a new branch off it. What we want is to reach back past every movement, all the way to the church Jesus said He'd build, "on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (Matthew 16:18), and simply be that, with the New Testament as our only pattern (1 Peter 4:11).
And because we reach back that way, we don't have a denomination of our own. We're one independent congregation, with no headquarters and no assembly speaking over us. That means we can't speak for any other group of Christians, even ones who read these passages the same way we do. We can only tell you what's taught and practiced here in Honesdale.
How to Weigh All Four
Nobody needs to take either church's word for this, ours included. Read Acts and the New Testament letters with these four differences in mind. Check each claim you've read here against the text, the way the Bereans checked Paul (Acts 17:11). For every practice, ask one thing: can I actually read this in the New Testament?
Westminster itself would tell you the same. If councils may err, then the only safe place to stand is the book they were trying to summarize.
Take your time. Let the Bible have the final say.
Open Acts and the Letters With Us
If you grew up Presbyterian, or you're weighing a move, we'd be glad to go through these passages with you, as slowly as you like and on your own questions. Book a free Bible study, learn who we are, or write to us before your first visit.
When to find us:
Look for 416 Main Street, Suite D, Honesdale, PA 18431, then drive around to the rear of the building, where you'll park and come inside.