most important being the Westminster Confession of Faith. As part of their ordination vows, ministers and other church officers were required to "sincerely receive and adopt the Confession of Faith of this Church, as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures". In addition to the Confession of Faith, the Westminster Shorter Catechism and Larger Catechism were also used. Throughout the denomination's existence, a "relatively uniform" view of biblical authority and interpretation based on Reformed scholasticism dominated Presbyterian thought until the 1930s. In reaction to the Scientific Revolution, the doctrine of biblical infallibility as found in the Confession of Faith was transformed into biblical inerrancy, the idea that the Bible is without error in matters of science and history. This approach to biblical interpretation was accompanied by Scottish common sense realism, which dominated Princeton, Harvard, and other American colleges in the 18th and 19th centuries. When applied to biblical interpretation, Common Sense philosophy encouraged theologians to assume that people in all times and cultures thought in similar ways. Therefore, it was believed that a modern interpreter could know the mind of biblical writers regardless of differences in culture and context. This form of biblical literalism was standard teaching in Presbyterian colleges and seminaries. The rise of higher criticism in the late 1800s posed a challenge to this dominant view by arguing that "the Bible was composed of strands of material written by ancient, Near-Eastern people whose world view and manner of thought was formulated in language structures and cultural contexts very different from those of nineteenth century Americans." A division emerged between a majority who held that inerrancy was an essential doctrine and a growing minority that believed it actually undermined scriptural authority for "faith and life". Beginning in 1892, the General Assembly sought to combat liberal theology by specifying beliefs that every minister should affirm. From 1910 to 1927, the Confession of Faith was officially interpreted with reference to five fundamental beliefs: biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth, substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection, and the miracles of Christ. Faced with possible schism, the General Assembly opted for "theological decentralization" after 1927. It was determined that the General Assembly could not define essential beliefs without first amending the church's constitution, which allowed a greater degree of toleration for alternative interpretations of the Confession. The outcome of the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy was that the church ultimately accepted "moderate liberalism" in order