Stories
the narratives it tells itself
A presbytery writes its own will and dies.
On 28 June 1804 Stone and five colleagues dissolved the Springfield Presbytery they had just formed, in a document written as a last will and testament, bequeathing their power back to the churches. It is a strange and funny piece of writing and it is the movement's founding gesture.
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Command, example, necessary inference.
The hermeneutic that does the work: a practice is authorised by an explicit command, by an apostolic example, or by an inference the text forces. It is a legal method applied to a library of letters, and the movement's divisions are almost all disputes about how binding an example is.
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