1 THEOLOGIES IN CONFLICT But we cannot understand at all what the New Testament says about heaven, unless we attend also to what the New Testament says about hell; in the New Testament heaven and hell appear in contrast. . . . There can be no greater mistake than to suppose that Jesus ever separated theology from ethics, or that if you remove His theology--His beliefs about God and judgment, about future woe for the wicked and future blessedness for the good--you can have His ethical teaching intact.
J. Gresham Machen (1925)(1)
The doctrine of hell is the starting point for any orthodox Christian theology of negative sanctions. Jesus warned: "And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matt. 10:28). Jesus assured His followers that God really does send to hell the souls of all covenant-breakers, Adam's disinherited sons (Luke 16:22-28). Only through personal faith in the substitutionary atonement of God's Son, Jesus Christ, the lawful heir of the kingdom, can anyone escape hell. "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him" (John 3:36).
The New Testament teaches that after the general resurrection and the final judgment, God will send covenant-breakers, angelic and human (the contents of hell), into the lake of fire (Rev. 20:14-15). He will then torture them forever. Some soft-hearted Christians may think "torture" is too strong a word. The New Testament Greek word is translated "torment" (Luke 16:28). The meaning, however, is torture: God's deliberate imposition of pain and misery on covenant-breakers forever, not to cure souls or restore men to righteousness, but purely for the sake of vengeance. "Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord" (Rom. 12:19). The God of the Bible is no buttercup.
To put this as mildly as I can, consigning men and women to screaming agony forever has to be regarded as an intolerant act on God's part. The issue of sanctions in history is the issue of the judicial toleration of one's enemies: how much toleration, for how long, for which people, and in what institutional arrangements. After the day of judgment, toleration ends forever. God announces for all men and angels to hear eternally: "No more common grace."(2)
The most important dividing issue in the Presbyterian conflict between conservatives and modernists was the doctrine of eternal sanctions: heaven vs. hell, followed by the New Heaven and New Earth vs. the lake of fire. There was not a lot of argument over heaven, however; the fundamental theological and judicial issue that divided liberals from conservatives, then as now, was the doctrine of hell. The dividing question became: Which group will exercise the positive ecclesiastical sanction of ordination and the negative ecclesiastical sanction of ministerial suspension in terms of which opinion regarding hell?
Presbyterianism's Official Doctrine of Hell All ordained officers in the Presbyterian Church took an oath affirming the Westminster Confession. This Confession announced: "By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life; and others are foreordained to everlasting death" (III:3). The Confession made it plain: only some men are elect. "The rest of mankind God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of His own will, whereby He extendeth or withholdeth mercy, as He pleaseth, for the glory of His sovereign power over creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to dishonour and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious justice" (III:7). There were many ministers within the Presbyterian Church after 1900 who did not believe this. Nevertheless, they took the oath. They lied. They looked their future associates in the eye and lied. Not one of them was ever de-frocked for this particular lie.
The issue here is the judicial limits of ecclesiastical toleration. If God refuses to tolerate covenant-breakers in eternity, should the Church's government tolerate those inside the Church who side with the covenant-breakers? If those who swore allegiance to the Confession in order to gain positions of authority inside the Church are in fact in agreement with those outside the Church on this, the crucial doctrine of eternal sanctions, shouldn't the Church's courts bring the negative sanction of de-frocking against those who falsely subordinated themselves by ministerial oath to the Church's authority? The crucial issue is sanctions.
Guarding the Sacraments The priests and Levites of the Old Covenant had three primary tasks: to preach and teach God's word (Deut. 31:9-13; Neh. 8:13), to administer the sacrifices (Num. 3:6-9), and to defend the temple area from unauthorized trespassers who might cross the boundaries of the area of sacrifice (Num. 3:10). Each of these was a judicial task. These three judicial tasks have not changed in the New Covenant. The required sacrifices and sanctions have changed, but not the tasks.
In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin argued that the institutional Church has two identifying marks: the lawful preaching of the word and the lawful administration of the sacraments: baptism and the Lord's Supper. Implicit in his definition is a third mark: institutional discipline. Preachers who do not faithfully preach God's word are to be removed from office. Church members who do not confess the Christian faith and walk uprightly are to be kept away from the table of the Lord. The Church is therefore marked by of three things: word, sacrament, and the judicial protection of both.(3)
The sacraments are the formal means of implementing God's ecclesiastical sanctions: positive and negative. Baptism is the New Testament's equivalent of circumcision. Baptism places a person under the dual sanctions of God: blessing and cursing. Kline calls baptism the oath-sign of the New Covenant.(4) The Lord's Supper (Holy Communion) also brings positive and negative sanctions. Paul warned the church at Corinth about God's negative sanctions against those who participate unworthily in the Lord's Supper: sickness and death (I Cor. 11:29-30). Thus, the Lord's Supper is the source of sanctions, just as the altar was under the Old Covenant. I am not implying that the New Covenant altar is a place of sacrifice; I am speaking of it as the place of judicial confrontation between God and man. Following Kline's lead, I call the Lord's Supper the oath-renewal sign of the New Covenant, just as Passover was in the Mosaic Covenant.
Who has the right to renew his oath? Only those who still are willing to confess--or whose legal representatives are still willing to confess on his behalf--their agreement with the terms of the oath. There is no lawful covenantal oath without terms (stipulations), just as their is no lawful covenantal oath without specified covenantal sanctions. Historically, the Church of Jesus Christ has specified the following terms for all adult (communing) members: the Apostles' Creed or one of the more detailed creeds, the Lord's prayer, and the Ten Commandments. These judicial standards have been basic to Church liturgy from very early days. The Church has not tolerated members who deny these confessional terms. The Church has, until quite recently, denied lawful access to the Lord's Supper those who have denied these standards. This is an aspect of the priestly guarding function.
Excommunication by the Church is the ultimate negative sanction in history, for God honors the excommunication in eternity (Matt. 16:19).(5) Execution by the State is a mild rebuke compared to this. He who is lawfully excommunicated by a Trinitarian Church is in worse condition than the heathen who never heard the gospel. From him to whom much has been given, much is expected (Luke 12:47-48).
A Strategic Blunder The Presbyterian conflict was a conflict over two of Calvinism's marks of the Church: faithful preaching and faithful Church discipline. To my knowledge, no major participant in the conflict ever wrote so much as an article on the defense of the sacraments. This issue did not become a significant part of the public debate. It is also never mentioned by the many authors who have studied the Presbyterian conflict. The Confessionalists and the minimal-creed conservatives always argued that the most judicially significant issue is the theological content of preaching. In contrast, their modernist opponents always said that the fundamental judicial issue is lawful Church government: toleration (to 1933) and obedience (1934-36). But no one ever argued that the fundamental judicial issue is the defense of the sacraments. Like the dog that never barked in the Sherlock Holmes story, so is the missing issue of the sacraments in the Presbyterian conflict.
The conservatives--initially Old School Presbyterians, and later Old School and New School Presbyterians--always presented their case against their opponents in terms of the requirements (stipulations) of the preaching ministry. This was a fatal strategic blunder. The issue was not merely unfaithful preaching by ordained ministers; it was also the question of who possesses lawful access to the sacraments and who does not.
The Plan of Salvation Christianity affirms the existence of a supernatural Creator who calls ethically rebellious people to Himself (Matt. 20:16), regenerates them through His grace (Eph. 2:8-9), and makes them adopted sons (John 1:12). They become members of God's household. Christianity affirms that there is no other way to salvation except through faith in the substitutionary death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who was both God and an ethically perfect man in one person. Christianity is a religion that preaches redemption by the grace of the God of the Bible and no other. It is an "all-or-nothing" religion. It acknowledges no middle position. It is at war--spiritual, doctrinal, and historical--with all other religions. It proclaims the existence of God's "non-negotiable demands,"(6) His call for "unconditional surrender."(7)
Machen recognized this from the beginning. He knew that Christ's Church is in a fight, not merely to the death, but to the day of judgment. This fight is a fight to the second death for Satan and his followers (Rev. 20:14), and a fight to life eternal for Christians. Christians are supposed to understand that this fight is still in progress, as Machen warned his generation: "The type of religion which rejoices in the pious sound of traditional phrases, regardless of their meanings, or shrinks from `controversial' matters, will never stand amid the shocks of life. In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight."(8)
But Machen's distinction between Christianity and liberalism was not enough, for the Christians were not united in his era in an organized defense of the fundamentals of the faith. We need additional categories to make sense out of the Presbyterian conflict. I have selected two tripartite classification schemes: (1) power religion, (2) experiential religion, and (3) judicial religion; and the division of (1) Conservatism: Calvinist, (2) Conservatism: Arminian, and (3) Liberalism-Modernism. There were additional subdivisions, although I am limiting my discussion of these more subtle distinctions in order to help readers in their understanding of the split. What must be understood are the three religious worldviews.
1. Power Religion This religious viewpoint affirms that the most important goal for a man, group, or species, is the capture and maintenance of power. Power is seen as the chief attribute of God, or, if the religion is officially atheistic, then the chief attribute of man or nature. This perspective is a perversion of God's command to man to exercise dominion over all the creation (Gen. 1:26-28).(9) It is man's attempt to exercise dominion in history apart from his covenantal subordination to the true Creator God. It invokes a transfer of sovereignty from the Creator to the creation.
Power religion denies the presupposition that God the Creator is absolutely sovereign over His creation. Because God is not absolutely sovereign, partially sovereign man must seek ways to bring order into his life and to the creation. Man then seeks order through power. The basic perspective of power religion is that knowledge is power. Salvation is by knowledge. This was the worldview of Greek philosophy and all occultism (with Pythagoras and even Socrates, who claimed that a daimon spoke to him,(10) as intermediaries). The less that God has to do with the creation, the more sovereignty falls to man if man can exercise it through power. Mankind gains such sovereignty through representatives. In the reform social Darwinism of the Progressive era in the United States (1890-1920), this was understood as implying that a scientific elite would advise politicians in the techniques of scientific planning and management.(11)
What distinguishes the Bible's judicial religion from humanism's power religion is ethics. Is the person who seeks power doing so for the glory of God primarily, for himself secondarily, and only to the extent that he is God's lawful and covenantally faithful representative? If so, he will act in terms of God's ethical standards, which includes partaking in the Lord's Supper, and in terms of a Trinitarian profession of faith in God. The Church has long recognized this, establishing a dual requirement for membership: profession of faith and a godly life, which includes taking the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. This was Calvin's definition of the basis of Church membership.(12)
In contrast, power religion is a religion of man's autonomy. It affirms that "My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth" (Deut. 8:17). It seeks power or wealth in order to make credible this claim. In the cosmic hierarchy of authority, there can be no meaningful, efficacious judicial appeal beyond mankind in history.
Some final authority always undergirds power. This authority comes from man and his institutions, the power religionist asserts. If there is any god above man, this god acts primarily through certain men, who are in turn agents of mankind. In short, the god of the power religion possesses no voice of authority independent of man. Harry Emerson Fosdick, Machen's opponent in the 1920's, stated this position clearly: "To be sure, God cannot be an individual to whom we cry. . . . What we are manifestly dealing with is a vital universe surcharged with Creative Power. . . . That power has issued in spiritual life and in terms of spiritual life must be interpreted."(13) The spiritual life of man incarnates the impersonal power of the universe. "May the Force be with you (and especially with me)!"
Wealth and power are aspects of both power religion and dominion religion. Advocates of both of these rival religions regard wealth and power as valid visible manifestations of historical progress. This is why God warns His people not to believe that their autonomous actions have gained them their blessings: "But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day" (Deut. 8:18). Christians need to recognize that God's opponents also want visible confirmation of the validity of their covenant: a covenant with death. God warns all men that "the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just" (Prov. 13:22b). The entry of the Israelites into Canaan was supposed to remind them of this fact: the Canaanites had built homes and vineyards to no avail; their conquerors inherited the land (Josh. 24:13).
Those who believe in power religion have refused to see that long-term wealth in any society is the product of ethical conformity to God's law. They believe in historical sanctions--blessing and cursing--but not the law of God. They have sought the blessings promised by God's covenant while denying the validity and eternally binding ethical standards of that covenant. In short, they have confused the fruits of Christianity with the roots. They have attempted to chop away the roots but preserve the fruits.
The strategy of the power religionists: "Bide your time until you've got the votes. Meanwhile, plead for peace, harmony, and the blessings of diversity." Their battle cry (until the final phase): "Toleration must be tolerated!"
2. Experiential Religion Seeing that the exercise of autonomous power is a snare and a delusion, the proponents of experiential religion have sought to insulate themselves from the general culture--a culture maintained by power. They have fled the responsibilities of worldwide dominion, or even regional dominion, in the hope that God will excuse them from the general dominion covenant. They have abandoned the ideal of Christendom.
The basic idea lying behind experiential religion is the denial of the dominion covenant. The experientialist believes that the techniques of self-discipline, whether under God or apart from God (e.g., Buddhism), offer power over only limited areas of life. Experientialists attempt to conserve their limited power by focusing their ethical concern on progressively (regressively) narrower areas of personal responsibility. The experientialist believes that he will gain more control over himself and his narrow environment by restricting his self-imposed zones of responsibility. An example of this outlook is gnosticism. The ancient gnostic's concern was self, from start to finish; his attempt to escape from responsibilities beyond the narrow confines of self was a program for gaining power over self. It was a religion of works, of self-salvation. A man "humbled" himself--admitted that there were limits to his power, and therefore limits to the range of his responsibilities--only to elevate self to a position of hypothetically God-like spirituality.
Experiential religion proclaims institutional peace: "peace at any price." Ezekiel responded to such an assertion in the name of God: ". . . they have seduced my people, saying, Peace; and there was no peace" (Ezek. 13:10a). Experientialism elevates the goal of peace because experientialism has little interest in the systematic efforts that are always required to purify institutions as a prelude to social reconstruction. It does not cry, "Give me liberty or give me death." It rests on another choice: "Give me peace or give me death." God gives defeat to those who choose peace at this price.
Experiential religion calls for a flight from the world. Experiential religion's advocates may hide their real concern--the systematic abandonment of a world supposedly so corrupt that nothing can be done to overcome widespread cultural evil--by appealing to their moral responsibility of "sharing Christ to the world" or "building up the Church" rather than rebuilding civilization, but their ultimate concern is personal flight from responsibility.
Experiential religion shares a theological affirmation with power religion: religion without binding propositional truth. The power religionist often speaks of religion as grounded in man's experience. He may mean collective man. With neo-orthodoxy, this may mean individual experience, but neo-orthodoxy is inherently pietistic, even though its advocates are usually power religionists.(14) Modernist experientialism moves all religions into the realm of comparative religion, comparative culture, and therefore cultural relativism. This supposedly allows the power religionist personal freedom from the responsibility of having to conform to the specifics of any religion, especially if he regards himself as the vanguard of the next evolutionary phase of religion. This form of experientialism denies the uniqueness of any one doctrine or rite for all time and places. "There have been many saviors, many gospels." In contrast, the pietistic experientialist grounds his faith in his unique personal experience. He may or may not claim that this experience is universal. The Zen Buddhist does not; a Christian mystic may. If he claims that this experience is available to anyone, as the Christian fundamentalist does, he nonetheless has to admit that this experience cannot be put into words. It must be felt in order to be appreciated; it is nonpropositional.
A New Gnosticism(15)
Experiential religion is creedal, but in a gnostic sense: relegating matter and time to the realm of second-best or even to the realm of evil. Through experientialism, gnosticism seeps back into the Church. Gnosticism's goal is inner peace through an escape from time and from judicial confrontations in time. Gnosticism is Christianity's ancient rival. It keeps returning in new garb. Rushdoony has pointed out that gnosticism has generally been hostile to creeds. "Creeds too obviously revealed its departure from and hostility to the faith. It was much more effective to affirm the Apostles' Creed and to re-interpret in terms of Gnosticism. This, from Gnosticism on through neo-orthodoxy, has been a favored method of heresy."(16) This was precisely the strategy adopted by the liberal humanists in the Northern Presbyterian Church after 1900: proclaiming that they were faithful to the words of the Westminster Confession, they silently re-interpreted the meaning of its words.
Gnosticism is a rival religion, the religion of humanism. "Gnosticism was in essence humanism, the glorification of man. In humanism, man makes himself ultimate by undercutting the ultimacy of God. The vaguer the doctrines of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the more clearly man emerged as the sovereign, and man's order as the ultimate order."(17) This description characterizes the theology of the liberal humanists who captured the Presbyterian Church. The minimal-creed experientialists found it difficult to impose Church sanctions against this form of gnosticism; they shared too many presuppositions with it.
There are two institutional forms that are appropriate to individualistic experiential religion: separatism and inclusivism. Separatism is the way of the ecclesiastical independents. Inclusivism is the way of the denominationalists. The strategy of the separatists: "Make a stink and then leave." The battle cry of the separatists: "Come out from among them!"(18) The strategy of the inclusivists: "I'll think about it tomorrow." The battle cry of the inclusivists: "There must be no battle cries!"
3. Judicial Religion Both forms of experientialism--mysticism and pietism--are opposed to judicial religion, for judicial religion announces both the universality of its claims and the uniqueness of its message. It announces: one way. Biblical Christianity proclaims the sovereignty of God, the reliability of the historic creeds and confessions, the necessity of standing firm for principle, and the requirement that faithful men take risks for God's sake. It proclaims that the one-time sacrifice of Jesus Christ on Calvary was a judicial act. His righteousness is imputed judicially to fallen men by the grace of God. Imputation is God's judicial declaration: "Guilty as charged!" to the sons of Adam; "Not guilty!" to the adopted sons of Jesus Christ. The theological doctrine of justification by grace through faith is a judicial doctrine.
Because covenant-keeping man's salvation is grounded in God's judicial declaration, he is responsible before God to keep God's ethical commands (I John 2:3-4). The Church must be kept pure by preaching which is faithful to the Bible, by the faithful administration of the sacraments, and by the defense of both doctrine and sacrament through discipline: the removal from ordained office of false preachers and the excommunication of covenant-breaking members. In short, judicial religion mandates judicial sanctions: in Church, State, and family. The battle for judicial religion begins in the Church, for the Church is the place where the whole counsel of God is to be preached. Judgment must begin at the house of God (I Pet. 4:17).
We can see the difference between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Orthodoxy in the term for the rites of baptism and the Lord's Supper. In the Western Church, baptism and the Lord's Supper are called sacraments, from the Latin word sacramentum: the enlistment oath taken by a Roman soldier.(19) (Calvin, however, rejected the theological relevance of the grammatical origin of the word,(20) thereby separating the Reformed sacramental tradition from oath-taking. This has led to an operational emphasis in Reformed churches on the liturgical importance of preaching over the Lord's Supper.) In the Eastern Church, these rites are called mysteries. Neither term is used in the New Testament to describe these rites. Usage stems from the differing emphases of the two traditions. The Eastern Church is primarily mystical; the Western Church is primarily judicial.
Both the power religion and the experiential religion have become mystical and antinomian as they have abandoned the creeds and confessions. Protestant and Catholic power religionists have proclaimed Barthian "Christ encounters," while Protestant experiential religion has moved into mysticism and tongues-speaking. Both forms of experientialism dismiss creedalism as rationalistic and legalistic. Both proclaim: "No creed but Christ, no law but love."
Covenantal religion is always openly, forthrightly creedal; it has a public theology. The very existence of the creed testifies to the fact that God has dealt with men through revelation that can be summarized accurately in terms of propositional truth. Experiential religion emphasizes creeds only to the extent that they can promote a traditional sense of subordination to God that stimulates a religious experience. Power religion is officially anti-creedal. "All creeds are relative," it proclaims, but it keeps this mental reservation: "except the legitimacy of power and power that legitimizes." Every worldview has a creed, even if its permanent creed states that "there is no permanent creed." Creeds are inescapable concepts. It is never a question of "creed vs. no creed"; it is a question of which creed.(21)
The strategy of the judicialists: "Make a fight until we win or they kick us out." The battle cry of the judicialists: "All or nothing!"
The Content of Theological Systems I have adopted the Bible's five-point covenant model as a grid to understand the rival theological positions in the Presbyterian conflict. Other models are no doubt possible and useful, but this one enables us to be sure that we have not missed anything really crucial. The five points of the biblical covenant are: (1) the transcendence of God, which also involves His universal presence; (2) hierarchy in the creation, with the word of God governing man, and with man as God's representative agent over the creation; (3) ethics based on God's two-fold revelation of His standards to man: special revelation (the Bible) and general ("natural") revelation; (4) the covenantal oath as the judicial basis of legitimacy in Church, State, and family, in which God's eternal and historical sanctions are invoked: positive and negative; (5) succession in history based on covenantal inheritance and disinheritance.(22) The acronym for this system is THEOS, the Greek word for God: transcendence, hierarchy, ethics, oath, succession.
1. The Five Points of Calvinism(23) The familiar five points of Calvinism were not arranged this way by John Calvin. They came in response to a theological challenge by the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius, whose name perseveres as Arminianism. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, he offered a rival theology to Calvinism.(24) He died in 1609. The Synod of Dort (1616-19) was held by Calvinists to refute him and his followers, known as the Remonstrants. The Calvinists adopted a five-point alternative. They affirmed the total depravity of man, the unconditional election of the saints by God's predestinating sovereignty, Jesus Christ's particular redemption of the elect (unfortunately popularized as "limited atonement"), God's irresistible grace in each redeemed person's election, and the perseverance of the saints' salvation until their bodily death. In English, the acronym for this theology is TULIP.
The five points of Dort summarize Calvin's soteriology (doctrine of salvation). Calvin taught that God is absolutely sovereign. There is nothing that happens in history outside the decree of God. This is Calvin's doctrine of predestination. Some men are saved; others are lost; God is absolutely sovereign over both. This is taught most clearly in the Bible in the ninth chapter of Romans, in Paul's discussion of the love of God for Jacob and His hatred for Esau before either of them had been born or had done good or evil. Paul wrote: "And not only this; but when Rebecca also had conceived by one, even by our father Isaac; (For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth;) It was said unto her, The elder shall serve the younger. As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated" (Rom. 9:11-13). It was Calvinism's interpretation of this passage that Arminius objected to.(25) The elect, Calvin taught, are elected by God's grace before the foundation of the world; they do not have the option of resisting this saving grace. They remain the saints of God throughout eternity. An elect person cannot "backslide"--modern Arminianism's term--into damnation.
The five points of Calvinism match the five points of the biblical covenant model.
1. Total depravity/Ethics (man's)
2. Unconditional election/Oath (God's)
3. Limited atonement/Hierarchy (representation)
4. Irresistible grace/Transcendence (sovereignty)
5. Perseverance of the saints/Succession(26)
Calvinism is far more than these five points. Calvin's writings constitute a comprehensive, rigorous theological system that deals with society in general, the Church, and the State. His Bible commentaries cover those topics that the Bible covers. The five points are a stripped-down summary of Calvinism that is limited to soteriology. This summary reveals little of Calvin's theology in general, nor does it explain Calvinism's enormous impact on Western society. When these five points are presented as the essence of Calvinism, the resultant Calvinism takes on the character of Arminian pietism: souls-only salvation rather than the comprehensive redemption of society as part of the Great Commission. Such a view ignores Book IV of the Institutes, the largest section of the Institutes, which is devoted to the institutional Church.
2. The Five Points of the Westminster Confession The five points of the biblical covenant can be found in many of the Confession's sections, but I concentrate here on those points that became sources of controversy during the Presbyterian conflict.
1. The Absolute Sovereignty of God
Chapter III, Of God's Eternal Decree, announces: "God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass. . ." (sec. 1). This decree was not based on His mere foresight of the future (Sec. 2).
God is identified as the sovereign Creator. God created the world "of nothing" in six days: Chapter IV, Of Creation (Sec. 1). In Chapter VIII, Of Providence, the Confession extends the implications of creationism: "God the great Creator of all things doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, by His most wise and holy providence. . ." (Sec. 1). This providence extended even to the rebellion of angels and men, "and that not by a bare permission. . ." (Sec. 4).
2. The Word of God
God was represented visibly in history by Jesus Christ: Of Christ the Mediator, Chapter VIII. Jesus Christ is both God and man (Sec. 2). He was conceived by the Holy Ghost and was born of a virgin, "of her substance" (Sec. 2). Christ reveals to His elect, "in and by the Word, the mysteries of salvation. . ." (Sec. 8).
What is this word? The Bible. Chapter I, Of the Holy Scripture, insists on biblical authority. Section 2 lists the books of the Bible. Section 3 rejects the Apocrypha. Section 4 insists: "The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or Church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof: and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God."
The Bible is the sole fixed authority over man in history: "The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by the good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit or traditions of men" (Sec. 6). This law is unchanging. It does not evolve.
The Hebrew and Greek texts, "being immediately inspired by God, and, by His singular care and providence, kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical; so as, in all controversies of religion, the Church is finally to appeal unto them" (Sec. 8).
The Bible is the voice of authority in history: "The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself. . ." (Sec. 9).
3. Ethics/Law
Chapter XIX deals with law, Of the Law of God. It begins with Adam's covenant of works: "God gave Adam a law, as a covenant of works, by which He bound him and all his posterity, to personal, exact, and perpetual obedience. . ." (Sec. 1). This law has continued as "a perfect rule of righteousness; and, as such, was delivered by God upon Mount Sinai, in ten commandments, and written in two tables. . ." (Sec. 2). The laws of God given to Israel were moral, ceremonial, and civil. The ceremonial laws are abrogated (Sec. 3), as are many of the civil laws of Israel (Sec. 4). "The moral law doth for ever bind all, as well justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof. . ." (Sec. 5). This law, "as a rule of life informing them of the will of God, and their duty, it directs and binds them to walk accordingly" (Sec. 6).
This law is directed to the consciences of men: Of Christian Liberty, and Liberty of Conscience, Chapter XX. Under the New Testament, "the liberty of Christians is further enlarged, in their freedom from the yoke of the ceremonial law. . ." (Sec. 1).
Men's consciences are free to obey God's revealed will: "God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are, in any thing, contrary to His Word; or beside it, in matters of worship." The conscience is therefore bound under God's word, His Bible. This adherence to the written word is the ethical basis of men's freedom of conscience. The Bible is finally authoritative in history, not men's pronouncements. What is prohibited is "an absolute and blind obedience" to men's pronouncements (Sec. 2). But men are not to resist lawful powers "upon pretence of Christian liberty" and thereby "resist the ordinances of God" (Sec. 4). Churches have lawful authority to call such men to account; so does the civil magistrate (Sec. 4; see also Chapter XXX, Of Church Censures).
4. Oath/Sanctions
The Confession deals with oaths in relation to lawful authority: Of lawful Oaths and Vows, Chapter XXII. It discusses oaths as formal acts of swearing: testifying to the truth of some event (Sec. 1). The Confession does not discuss oaths in relation to the establishment of a covenantal bond in family, State, or Church. There is no formal affirmation of the biblical doctrine of sanctions imposed by God on the basis of an oath taken by man. It does not discuss the sacraments as oath-signs.
Election is an aspect of oaths, since God swore an oath to Abraham to seal His covenant with him (Gen. 15). "By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life; and others foreordained to everlasting death" (Sec. 3). The numbers in each group cannot be increased or decreased (Sec. 4).
With respect to election, "those predestinated unto life, and those only" are called by God to salvation. This is the teaching of Section 1 of Chapter X, Of Effectual Calling. This election includes infants. There is no automatic salvation for all infants. "Elect infants, dying in infancy, are regenerated, and saved by Christ, through the Spirit. . ." (Sec. 3). The Confession is silent regarding non-elect infants, but the language is precise: elect infants are saved.(27)
With respect to sanctions, Chapter XXXII deals with the intermediate state in between a man's death and the last judgment: Of the State of Man after Death, and of the Resurrection of the Dead. Souls of the righteous, "which neither die nor sleep, having an immortal substance, immediately return to God who gave them. . . . All the souls of the wicked are cast into hell, where they remain in torments and utter darkness, reserved to the judgment of the great day" (Sec. 1).
Chapter XXXIII, Of the Last Judgment, says that the righteous will go into everlasting life, but the wicked "shall be cast into eternal torments. . ." (Sec. 2). Men should be "always watchful, because they know not at what hour the Lord will come. . ." (Sec. 3).
5. Succession/Inheritance/Kingdom
Chapter XVII, Of the Perseverance of the Saints, denies that saved people can ever "finally fall away from the state of grace, but shall certainly persevere therein to the end, and be eternally saved" (Sec. 1). This perseverance does not depend on "their own free will, but upon the immutability of the decree of election. . ." (Sec. 2).
The saints are members of Christ's Church: Chapter XXV, Of the Church. The Confession says that the visible Church, "catholic and universal under the Gospel . . . is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation" (Sec. 2). This equation of the Church with the kingdom of Christ evades the issue of Christendom: the wider influence of the gospel in history.
The Confession is generally silent regarding eschatology, except as it applies to death and the last judgment. Only in the Larger Catechism does a broader ideal of the kingdom appear, in the discussion of the Lord's Prayer:
Q. 191. What do we pray for in the second petition?
A. In the second petition, (which is, Thy kingdom come,) acknowledging ourselves and all mankind to be by nature under the dominion of sin and Satan, we pray, that the kingdom of sin and Satan may be destroyed, the gospel propagated throughout the world, the Jews called, the fulness of the Gentiles brought in; the church furnished with all gospel-officers and ordinances, purged from corruption, countenanced and maintained by the civil magistrate; that the ordinances of Christ may be purely dispensed, and made effectual to the converting of those yet in their sins, and the confirming, comforting, and building up of those that are already converted: that Christ would rule in our hearts here, and hasten the time of his second coming, and our reigning with him for ever: and that he would be pleased so to exercise the kingdom of power in all the world, as may best conduce to these ends.
This application of the Lord's Prayer instructs Christians to call on God to extend His kingdom in history. In this sense, the prayer is postmillennial in intent. It is also theocratic, calling on the civil magistrate to defend the Church. The Larger Catechism does not say that God will answer this prayer in history, but it does require that all Presbyterians pray it.
3. The Five Points of Princeton's Theology The Calvinism of Princeton Seminary from 1812 to 1929 was Old School Calvinism. This was more consistently Confessional than New School Calvinism. But it deviated from the Westminster Confession in key areas.
1. The Absolute Sovereignty of God
With respect to the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, Princeton was orthodox. But there was an important defection from the Confession: the six-day creation. Charles Hodge, who attacked Darwinism as atheism in 1874,(28) never accepted the six-day creation. In his early years, he had defended the "gap theory": a long but indeterminate period between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. By 1871, he had switched; he defended an age-day theory.(29) In volume 1 of his Systematic Theology (1871), he self-consciously abandoned hermeneutical literalism in the name of scientific facts. "It is of course admitted that, taking this account by itself, it would be most natural to understand the word [day] in its ordinary sense; but if that sense brings the Mosaic account unto conflict with facts, and another sense avoids such conflict, then it is obligatory on us to adopt that other. Now it is urged that if the word `day' be taken in the sense of `an indefinite period of time,' a sense which it undoubtedly has in other parts of Scripture, there is not only no discrepancy between the Mosaic account of the creation and the assumed facts of geology, but there is a most marvellous coincidence between them."(30) In short, the authentic facts are scientific; we must interpret the Bible to fit these facts. He ended his discussion of the creation with this surrender to process philosophy: "And so if it should be proved that the creation was a process continued through countless ages, and that the Bible alone of all books of antiquity recognized this fact, then, as Professor Dana(31) says, the idea of its being of human origin would become `utterly incomprehensible.'"(32) After Charles Hodge died, Princeton Seminary's faculty became far worse on the question of the evolutionary time scale.(33)
How an age-day theory that places the creation of the earth on day one and the creation of the stars on day four will help Christians become more scientifically acceptable, Hodge never explained. The longer the ages separating the so-called days, the more scientifically ludicrous the theory becomes.
The Creator/creature distinction is fundamental to Calvinism. By compromising on this distinction by abandoning both the Bible and the Westminster Confession on the six-day creation, the Princetonians surrendered to Charles Lyell's vast uniformitarian time scale.(34) This was a weak reed to rest on. Lyell in the early 1860's had returned to the evangelical faith of his youth.(35) He had resisted Darwin's use of his theory, despite the fact that he had encouraged Darwin to publish in 1858. He had become a theistic evolutionist: God uses evolution for his purposes.(36) But in the 1867 edition of his Principles of Geology, Lyell could no longer maintain his resistance to Darwinism. He publicly surrendered to the evidence favoring natural selection, which he said established "a strong presumption in favour of the doctrine."(37) This progression of intellectual seduction has marked evangelical Christianity's continual flirtation with uniformitarianism.
2. The Word of God
The Princetonians defended the full authority of the Bible, but in a unique way: by denying the Westminster Confession's plain teaching on this subject and then proclaiming their allegiance to the true meaning of the Confession. This same argument was employed by the modernists on many occasions: denial in the name of a truer conformity.
B. B. Warfield adopted the lower criticism of the Bible: the supposedly neutral methodology of assembling the texts of the Bible. He argued that the preservation of Scripture affirmed by the Confession was achieved through scientific collation of extant texts.(38) In contrast, the Confession says that the manuscript copies were kept pure by God (I:8). If the Confession is incorrect, then what is needed is an explicitly biblical theory of the imperfect copies and their proper reconstruction, not a theory of neutral linguistic methodology. Warfield defended lower criticism as God's way of preserving the pure text.(39)
The Princetonians developed a theory of the original manuscripts of the Bible. These manuscripts no longer exist. They were inerrant. There have been errors added in subsequent copies, but we have a sufficiently reliable Bible to make authoritative judgments based on its authority. This theory was contrary to the language of the Confession (I:8).
3. Ethics/Law
The Princetonians did not break with the Confession on this point. The Confession affirms the permanence of the moral law. They were not evolutionists, nor were they ethical relativists. They defended systematic theology as a science of permanent propositional truth.
4. Oath/Sanctions
The Princetonians were defenders of the Confession's doctrine of the final judgment. They viewed the gospel as God's only means of bringing salvation from eternal torment to otherwise doomed sinners.
There was one strategic surrender, however, which left the Princetonians helpless against the accusation that they had quietly abandoned the Confession. With respect to the question of God's absolute sovereignty in election, the Old School no longer defended the idea, presumed though not explicitly stated in the Confession, that there can be non-elect infants.
The doctrine of final sanctions raises the legal issue of formal Church sanctions. The Princetonians, like the Old School generally, believed that modernist pastors should be de-frocked. They believed in heresy trials. But after 1874, they never actually recommended specific trials of named heretics. They upheld the legitimacy of negative Church sanctions; they just never invoked them.
5. Succession/Inheritance/Kingdom
The Princetonians were postmillennialists. This probably includes Geerhardus Vos, who was somewhat obtuse on the subject (as he was on many others).(40) They believed that Christendom would be extended across the face of the earth in history. Warfield asked: "Are They Few That Be Saved?"(41) He answered in the negative. They were strongly opposed to premillennialism's doctrine of the bodily return of Christ to set up a kingdom prior to the final judgment.
The Princetonians were not ecumenists. They did not view the near-term future as a period of legitimate unity among evangelical churches. There can be unity among Christians, they taught, especially in the battle against modernism, but they resisted any alteration of the Confession, which meant that they could not accept Church unity in their day. The other churches would have to adopt the Confession in order for the Princetonians to accept ecclesiastical ecumenism: Church union as distinguished from temporary alliances.
4. The Five Points of Evangelicalism/Fundamentalism The conservative evangelicals who comprised a majority of the Church after 1900 were heirs of the New School. They were not rigorously Calvinistic, although ministers did have to proclaim allegiance to the Confession. After 1910, they became indistinguishable from fundamentalists in the denomination.(42)
1. The Sovereignty of God
The revision of the Confession in 1903 watered down the Confession's absolute predestination. The revision announced the love of God for all mankind, a revision of Chapter III, which affirms the foreordination of cursed men and angels to everlasting death (Sec. 3). Historically, this position has been known as four-point Calvinism: a denial of particular redemption. The revision also stated that "no man is condemned except on the ground of his sin." This evaded the question of original sin and origin of the total depravity of man, which the Confession says did not take place by God's "bare permission" (IV:4). It therefore tampered with the Confession's doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of God.
2. The Word of God
The Bible is the revealed word of God in history. Its testimony is sure. On this point, the evangelicals agreed with the Princetonians. The Princetonians were regarded by evangelicals and fundamentalists as the premier defenders of the Bible. But the Princetonians had abandoned the Confession's statement on the purity of the existent manuscripts, especially those used to produce the King James Version. Some fundamentalists may have regarded this as a sell-out, but they did not go into print about it.
3. Ethics/Law
The conservatives were not defenders of situation ethics. The practical question facing them was this: Did the boundaries of theology and the Confession necessarily exclude modernists from the Church? Over this question and the question of Church sanctions the four later phases of the Presbyterian conflict was fought. Some experientialists sided with Machen in the 1920's; others didn't. Most of them refused to join him in 1936.
4. Oath/Sanctions
Evangelicals believed in the Confession's doctrine of hell. They saw evangelism in terms of the offer of escape from hell and the gaining of eternal life. This was a major point of theological contact between Princeton and the broader Church.
The 1903 revision announced the universal salvation of infants. This compromised the Confession's teaching on elect infants. It was intended to; the whole denomination had abandoned the Confession's implication that there are non-elect infants.
The question of God's eternal sanctions leads to the doctrine of Church sanctions. Should those pastors who refuse to affirm the doctrine of hell or other key doctrines be de-frocked? Prior to 1900, the New School did believe this in principle, but they had to be strongly provoked by a modernist spokesman to persuade them to take steps to remove him. After 1900, the Presbyterian conflict was fought in terms of this question: What institutional price is reasonable and legitimate to pay in order to achieve the de-frocking of modernists? Answer: a price lower than the "market" called for.
5. Succession/Inheritance/Kingdom
Some conservative leaders after 1915 were defenders of ecumenism.(43) Most were not. But the arrival in 1906 of 1,100 congregations from the Cumberland Presbyterian Church did water down the hard-core resistance to further union. General Assembly standing committees on Church union continued throughout the 1906-1936 period.
Many Presbyterian conservatives after 1910 were premillennialists, and so had no hope in an earthly kingdom prior to Christ's visible return to earth in power. Others--probably very few--were amillennialists, who also had no faith in an earthly visible kingdom prior to the final judgment. Conservatives were united on the question of the bodily return of Jesus.
Theological Modernism: Darwinism for Vague Theists What was theological modernism? It was secular modernism with the addition of a god who does not interfere with Darwinian evolution. There is no need to identify every theological nuance of modernism, every outworking of its creed. It is only necessary to identify those features without which modernism would not have been modernism. There were five such features, corresponding to the five points of the biblical covenant model. These are: the rejection of the doctrine of God as the absolutely sovereign Creator, the acceptance of higher criticism of the Bible, the acceptance of Darwinism, the rejection of the doctrine of final judgment, and the acceptance of ecclesiastical ecumenism.
The modernist denied the existence of the God of the Bible, but in the initial stages of the confrontation, he was wise enough not to announce this openly. He covered his theology with the language of orthodoxy. He needed to conceal his institutional strategy: the capture of a particular denomination or ecclesiastical association without losing the ownership of the buildings or the financial support of existing members. Nevertheless, there were key theological doctrines that he either had to reject or modify beyond the point of recognition. He began his attack where the Bible also begins: with the story of the creation.
The heart of modernism was its historicism, which included Darwinism. Had Darwinism not swept the intellectual world after 1859, theological modernism would not have taken the form that it did. There were two forms of Darwinism in the social sciences in the late nineteenth century. From the 1860's until the early 1890's, the dominant interpretation in the United States was that of "society as nature." These Darwinists, usually called the social Darwinists, promoted the laissez-faire economy in the name of scientific Darwinism. The two most important figures in this movement were England's Herbert Spencer and Yale University's William Graham Sumner. They applied Darwin's principle of nature's unrestricted and unplanned competition to society. The model was the free market. Nature is not planned by a guiding agent; therefore, society should not be planned by a guiding agent. In the words of Scottish social evolutionist Adam Ferguson a century earlier, society is the product of human action, not human design.(44) This form of social Darwinism was rejected by political Progressivism and by theological modernism.
Ward's Progressivism
Free market social Darwinism was challenged in the early 1880's, most notably by the self-educated American scholar and dedicated atheist, Lester Frank Ward.(45) He argued that man's presence in nature has at long last introduced an element of teleology: a planning agent. Unplanned nature has produced planning man. Mankind represents an evolutionary leap of being. Man's mind is capable of planning. Therefore, scientists who understand the laws of evolution can direct the process, including social evolution. Society needs such planned progress in order for mankind to compete successfully against other species. Ward published his theory in 1883 in a two-volume work, Dynamic Sociology. The specified targets of Ward's invective were Christianity and traditional social Darwinism. His was a reform social Darwinism: the Darwinism of scientific planning by an elite. This vision is central to twentieth-century liberalism. The decentralized social evolutionism of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment and nineteenth-century free market social Darwinism was transformed by the American Progressives, as well as by Communists, Italian fascists, and German National Socialists in Europe. The vision of the French Revolution and its Napoleonic fulfillment--top-down, State-planned social rationalism(46)--came to fruition through reform social Darwinism.
Dynamic Sociology attracted little attention initially,(47) but by 1900 Ward's views had become the dominant outlook within the Progressive movement.(48) Ward has been called the father of the American concept of the planned society.(49) This assessment is accurate. This Darwinian vision of social planning undergirded the modernists' confidence in the doctrine of progress. While confidence in the creativity of objective, rational thought began to wane visibly after World War I, especially among European intellectuals,(50) it was still strong enough in the United States to overcome traditionalists in politics and theology, especially after the Great Depression began in 1929. This confidence is evident in the words of University of Chicago political scientist Charles E. Merriam, who became a crucial figure in American social science after 1923 through his connection with the Rockefeller-funded Social Science Research Council.(51) In 1925, he called on other scholars "to contribute to the new politics which is to emerge in the new world: that of the conscious control of human evolution toward which intelligence steadily moves in every domain of human life."(52)
Salvation as Moral Reform
The impact of Darwinism on late nineteenth-century religious thought can be seen in an essay written by Rev. James Maurice Wilson, Canon of Worcester, in a 1925 essay, "The Religious Effect of the Idea of Evolution." Wilson was a modernist, one who fully understood the theological implications of Darwinism and Darwin's impact on Wilson's theological peers. Darwin had delivered them from Trinitarian orthodoxy by providing a scientific basis for believing in the religion of man. Man must become the focal point of religion, Wilson said, for "it is only in the study of man's nature that we can hope to find a clue to God's Purpose in Creation. Herein lies, as I think, the great service that the idea of evolution is rendering to theology."(53) Darwin had freed man from the biblical God. "The evolution of man from lower forms of life was in itself a new and startling fact, and one that broke up the old theology. I and my contemporaries, however, accepted it as fact. The first and obvious result of this acceptance was that we were compelled to regard the Biblical story of the Fall as not historic, as it had long been believed to be. We were compelled to regard that story as a primitive attempt to account for the presence of sin and evil in the world. . . . But now, in the light of the fact of evolution, the Fall, as a historic event, already questioned on other grounds, was excluded and denied by science."(54)
Understandably, the rejection of the doctrine of the ethical rebellion of man against God at a particular point in human history necessarily transformed that generation's interpretation of Christianity. "The abandonment of the belief in a historic `Fall' of a primeval pair of human beings has removed one of the great obstacles to the acceptance by our generation of the Christian Faith which had required that belief. Yet taken by itself it certainly tends to create, as well as to remove, a difficulty. For if there was no historic Fall, what becomes of the Redemption, the Salvation through Christ, which the universal experience of Christendom proves incontestably to be fact? How does Jesus save His people from their sins? He makes men better."(55) Man now becomes a co-worker with a vague, undefinable god who does not judge. "It is the sins of the world and our sins that He who died on the Cross is taking away, by making us better. Salvation is not then thought of as an escape from hell; but as a lifting us all out from living lives unworthy of us. Religion so conceived is not the art of winning heaven, but the effort to become better and to work with God."(56) Here we have it: "Religion so conceived is not the art of winning heaven." More to the point, religion so conceived is not the art of avoiding hell. This, in my view, is the heart of modernism in all of its forms: the denial of hell. For modernism, the crucial issue was eternal sanctions.
5. The Five Points of Modernism I have selected Shailer Mathews (1863-1941) as the representative modernist. He was a Baptist. He served as president of the Northern Baptist Convention in 1915, while he was also serving a four-year term as president of the Federal Council of Churches (1912-16). He was a defender of the social gospel. He ended his academic career as Dean of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. To the extent that Presbyterian theologians and leaders expressed views similar to those expressed by Mathews, they were modernists.
1. The Non-Sovereignty of God
The theology of modernism is process theology in a generic sense. The modernist must first challenge the doctrine of an absolutely sovereign God in order to make his position theologically plausible. Once any aspect of God's sovereign control over His creation is denied, no matter how minor this aspect may initially appear, the retreat from biblical orthodoxy has begun. What modernism denies is the Bible's absolute Creator/creature distinction. This is no minor aspect of God's sovereignty.
The Bible presents God as the Creator: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Gen. 1:1). The doctrine of God's creation of the universe out of nothing is the doctrine that must be rejected. The suggestion that God created the universe in six literal 24-hour days is anathema for the modernist. The Bible's creation account removes every trace of process (evolution) and substitutes God's spoken word: "And God said, Let there be. . . ." God literally spoke the universe into existence, day by literal day. First there was nothing; then there was something. The discontinuity between nothing and something was absolute. It is this radical discontinuity that the modernist had to deny. In place of the radical discontinuity of Genesis 1 he put continuity: process.
At issue is the question of ultimate sovereignty: God vs. process. Rushdoony is correct when he writes that "creation is described by all of Scripture as a creative act of God, in six days, and thus it must be understood as act not process. Every attempt to read process into the creation account, to turn the days into ages and make room for `scientific' interpretations, is a surrender to process philosophies and an abandonment of a sovereign God. . . . The creative acts are not only perfect and final: they are totally supernatural. This is their offense."(57)
Mathews announced, "The modern age is primarily scientific and controlled by the conception of process."(58) Darwin's Origin of Species established "a new intellectual age."(59) Process philosophy has affected the doctrine of God: ". . . God as immanent in this process rather than an extra-mundane monarch."(60) Process governs the cosmos; there are no God-miracles in the sense of imposed breaks in the "causal, genetic process."(61)
The messianic religion of Jesus was based on the sovereignty of God, he admitted. "Sovereignty was an analogy, but it was the most inclusive analogy under which the ancient world which shaped our ecumenical orthodoxy undertook to set forth the conception of God."(62) This concept no longer is acceptable to man. "We do not look to Him to find any likeness to the oriental monarch, but regarding Him as immanent Life . . . the source and guide of all progress."(63)
2. The Non-Word of God
"To the orthodox, Christianity was based upon the Bible as authority."(64) It was this viewpoint that modernism challenged. "The Fundamentalist movement was orthodoxy struggling to preserve not merely its doctrines but the inerrant authority of the Bible. To succeed it had to oppose science and other elements of a developing culture."(65) Science means evolutionary process.
From process, the modernist moves to historicism, i.e., the historical method: the scientific study of the biblical texts. "This historical method is of first importance throughout the entire field of investigation, but in the region of religion it is all but revolutionary."(66) Higher criticism is the result.
Higher criticism is now triumphant: ". . . there is no serious attempt to refute its conclusions by its own methods."(67) (This should come as no surprise; its method presumes its conclusions: an historically relative, textually fragmented Bible that must be judged by the canons of secular literary analysis.) "The Modernist believes in studying the Bible according to accredited historical and literary methods."(68) (The accreditation system was and still is controlled by modernists.) Methodology, he said, has supplanted authority. "The substitution of scientific method for reliance upon authority is characteristic of our modern religious thought. . . [T]he methods of science are more conclusive than is authority, for authority itself is in question."(69) Anyone who has not been instructed by these methods cannot correctly understand Christianity. "The inability of the uninstructed to understand Christianity has always been asserted by dogmatic authority. What the Modernist is doing is, therefore, nothing new."(70) Therefore, the true orthodox Christian is the modernist--a familiar refrain of the liberals. "The Modernist rather than the champion of verbal inerrancy is a true successor of such fathers of orthodoxy"(71) as Clement of Alexandria, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and others.(72)
The modernist challenges the Bible's unchanging authority in history, i.e., the only source of fundamental law. Higher criticism invokes the processes of history to challenge the absolute sovereignty of God's revelation of Himself in history. Higher criticism appeals to the human aspect of God's revelation of Himself, i.e., individuals in history. These individuals made mistakes with respect to this revelation, we are told--mistakes that the Bible's internal evidence does not always identify and correct. The Bible's account of what prophets said and did is flawed, we are told, just as any human document of comparable detail must be flawed. Therefore, the uniquely divine character of the Bible is denied. This leads to a necessary conclusion: a denial of the permanently binding judicial authority of the laws revealed in the Bible. The techniques of higher criticism produce a specific kind of ethical system: evolutionary.(73)
If God has not revealed Himself authoritatively in history, how can anyone speak authoritatively in His name? Who, then, speaks for God? By what authority? This is point two of the covenant: authority or representation. Furthermore, the modernist asks, by what standard does this person speak? This is point three: law. What sanctions are permanently appropriate to a law-order that is a product of history? This is point four: sanctions. Finally, how or why can subsequent revisions of the judicial boundaries--the enforcer's laws and sanctions--be themselves bounded by the judicial boundaries of the original revelation? This is point five: succession.
Higher criticism is inherently evolutionary, not in the biblical sense of the working out of fundamental principles--i.e., progressive sanctification (Phil. 2:12)--but rather morally open-ended. This is why modernism has no doctrine of definitive sanctification in history (II Cor. 5:17-18) to provide judicially binding moral boundaries to progressive sanctification. It has no doctrine of final sanctification: God's final judgment (I Cor. 3:12-15).
Once Darwinism has undermined men's faith in the absolute decree of God over creation, it is a simple step to undermine the morally binding character of the Bible. This is why higher criticism works in tandem with evolution. Higher criticism undermines the judicial authority of the Bible by an appeal to the historical origin of the texts: the autonomy, and therefore the sovereignty, of historical process. After the Bible's judicially binding authority as fundamental law is undermined by an appeal to historical process, the creeds and confessions lose their binding constitutional authority within the Church.
When the transcendent fixed anchor of authority of the Bible in history is removed, authority begins to drift. It is not that authority disappears. Rather, a new voice of authority is substituted for the old one. For the modernists, the voice of authority was science. Mathews wrote an essay titled, "Science Justifies the Religious Life."(74) Higher criticism was presented by modernists as a scientific approach to the Bible.
Science has created a new priesthood. Modernists sought to cloak themselves in the robes of scientific authority, which is why they heralded scientific methodology as the road to truth. They infused their writings with the terminology of science. But in doing so, they abandoned permanence, for science as a vocation is always changing. As Max Weber wrote in 1918, "In science, each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years. . . . Every scientific `fulfillment' raises new `questions'; it asks to be `surpassed' and outdated. Whoever wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this fact."(75) Nothing proves this better than the fate of modernism, which had begun to fade in 1936, the year Mathews wrote his autobiography and the year Machen was de-frocked.
3. Ethics/Law
In modernism, the supernatural Creator God of the Bible is pulled down from high heaven. He is dragged by nature and nature's theologians into the natural processes of history. His absolute sovereignty over nature is denied by the modernist.
If God lacks full control over the affairs of His creation, then process governs history. If process governs history, then men are not bound by fixed theological, moral, and judicial standards in history. Creeds lose their binding nature in Church history. Situation ethics becomes process theology's ethical standard. This has been a major goal of modernism: to escape permanent ethical standards in history. Modernists believe that a denial of God's fixed ethical standards will enable them to escape permanent negative sanctions in eternity. Thus, they adopt some version of evolution. The most common variety of evolutionary speculation in the West is Darwinism.
The immutable modernist doctrine of the evolution of the message found in the anonymously edited biblical texts leads to the equally immutable doctrine of ethical relativism. If the word of God itself has evolved, then the standards announced by that authority also must have evolved. When we ask, "By what authority?" we are necessarily also asking, "By what standard?" The modernist answers: By an evolving authority and an evolving standard. As Mathews put it, "Christians have never had a static system of philosophy or a finished theology."(76) "A theological pattern of unchanging content has never existed. . . . When a pattern no longer expresses a religious value or serves as the symbol of a group attitude, it should be and has been abandoned."(77)
Theologies reflect the Church. They change when the Church's historical conditions change. "We must look beneath and through the Creeds and Confessions to the attitudes and convictions, the needs, temptations and trials, the prayer and rites, in a word, the actual religious life of the ongoing and developing Christian group."(78) Historical study allows us to recognize that "the permanent element of our evolving religion resides in attitudes and convictions rather than in doctrines."(79) Therefore, "The first duty of the student of Christianity is to seize firmly the historical fact that it is the concrete religious life of a continuous, ongoing group rather than various doctrines in which that life found expression."(80) Mathews' outlook moves theology from heaven to earth, from God to the Church, from individual confession--"I believe"--to group living. "Our new world cannot be made Christian by reliance upon inherited patterns, but upon Christian attitudes and convictions embodied and expressed in the Christian group's life."(81) "Any study of Christianity must take into account the development of the social process which gave rise to the situations in which doctrines were developed. . . . Strictly speaking, there is no history of doctrine; there is only the history of the people who made doctrines."(82) Historical process replaces God's law as well as permanent propositional truth--except, of course, the permanent propositional truth of this proposition.
4. The Denial of Eternal Negative Sanctions: Hell
Mathews and the other modernists were relativists, both ethically and creedally. They denied the permanent binding nature of law. But if the covenant's stipulations change, then there can be no binding oath to God. If there is no binding oath to God, then there are no permanent sanctions for having broken it.
As I have written elsewhere, the doctrine of evolution must be seen primarily as a justification for denying the final judgment.(83) The language of hell, unlike almost every other biblical doctrine, cannot be evaded by prevarication, qualification, and obfuscation. The New Testament's language of eternal torment is clear. The modernist wants to scrap the doctrine of hell above all other doctrines. Thus, the doctrine of hell becomes a convenient touchstone of orthodoxy--perhaps the most useful of all biblical doctrines to identify and then remove self-professed Trinitarians who are in fact heretics or apostates. Hell is taught in the New Testament; hell is mentioned in the creeds; hell is discussed in the Westminster Confession, but hell is not found in the theology known as liberalism or modernism. The doctrine of hell is as useful a judicial screening doctrine today as it would have been a century ago and will be a century from now. No one has put the modernists' rejection of hell any better that Will and Ariel Durant did in their brief volume, The Lessons of History:
In one way Christianity lent a hand against itself by developing in many Christians a moral sense that could no longer stomach the vengeful God of traditional theology. The idea of hell disappeared from educated thought, even from pulpit homilies. Presbyterians became ashamed of the Westminster Confession, which had pledged them to a belief in a God who had created billions of men and women despite foreknowledge that, regardless of their virtues and crimes, they were predestined to everlasting hell.(84)
The denial of final judgment is the identifying mark of theological liberalism. Every other doctrine, every other tradition, and every other institutional alteration must be sacrificed on the altar of this new confession: God does not announce a permanent declaration of "guilty as charged" beyond the grave. He does not resurrect any person and give him a perfect body only to cast that body into the eternal torture chamber of lake of fire (Rev. 20:14-15). This, above all other creeds, traditions, strategies, and tactics, must be affirmed by the modernist. If there is a hell, then the modernist knows what lies ahead. This must not be, so therefore it cannot be, he concludes. Those who preach otherwise must be removed from the presence of the modernist. There will be no final judgment, no eternal separation of the sheep from the goats, and anyone who preaches otherwise must be temporally separated from the presence of modernists. Separation is an inescapable concept. It is never a question of separation vs. no separation (e.g., ecumenism). It is always a question of who gets separated by whom?
The broad conservative majority believed in hell. To deny the existence of a literal hell was to deny the evangelical faith. This created a problem for modernists. They could not publicly deny hell and stay inside the Church. Mathews, like so many modernists, was guarded in his language rejecting hell. In his autobiography, he announced: "From the scientific point of view immortality ceases to be an element of religious faith and takes its place among those hypotheses whose tenability depends upon available evidence. Heaven and hell have been repeatedly re-defined but among intelligent persons they no longer bulk as the basis for morality."(85) So, anyone who believes in hell has thereby identified himself as an unintelligent person. Mathews offered the tenuously held opinion that survival apart from the body after death "seems more probable than that life is purely mechanistic."(86) The idea that hell is a place where people are burned eternally is a valid figure of speech, but today we reject such "medieval pictures of punishment. . . ."(87)
Mathews was self-conscious in his rejection of the doctrine of hell. Hell, he said, disappears when the doctrine of God's absolute sovereignty disappears, i.e., point one of modernism's covenant theology. "The abandonment of divine sovereignty means the abandonment of the entire political pattern. Human guilt is the correlate of divine sovereignty and cannot survive its disappearance. And with the disappearance of sovereignty as a literal attribute of God and of guilt on the part of man, the need of satisfying the divine honor or punitive justice also disappears and the death of Christ no longer gets significance as expiation, satisfaction, or vicarious suffering."(88)
If there is no Creator God who creates and sustains the universe in terms of His sovereign decree, and if there is no final judgment by this God, then all there can be is historical process.(89) If there is neither definitive nor final sanctification, then all there can be is change: history without a sovereign, permanent decree. The only temporal boundaries for reality are the impersonal Big Bang at the beginning of time and entropy's impersonal heat death of the universe at the end. Neither has anything to do with ethical standards or eternal judgment. Life is then just a question of entropy: the irrevocable loss of heat--cosmically meaningless heat.(90) Better this, the liberal says, then eternally meaningful heat (Rev. 20:14-15).
If God's final judgment beyond history does not provide meaning to life, then what is the meaning of life? The modernist wrote rambling pages to deal with this problem, but he always came to a dead end. He kept affirming progress in this world as the meaning of life. But a moving standard is not a standard. Weber understood the implication of such a view: the death of meaning. "And because death is meaningless, civilized life as such is meaningless; by its very `progressiveness' it gives death the imprint of meaninglessness."(91)
5. Succession/Inheritance/Kingdom
The kingdom of God is re-defined by modernists to be the kingdom of man, meaning collective man. It was not random that Mathews was also a socialist and a defender of the social gospel.(92) The social gospel was the product of social Darwinism: specifically, the collectivist or Progressive branch, which had been pioneered by Lester Frank Ward.
Mathews did not write much about ecclesiastical union, which is not surprising: he was a Baptist. His interest was in the effects of union: political and social rather than ecclesiastical. He took the standard line of the modernists in the early phase of their conflict with fundamentalism: a plea for tolerance. There should be a place for both the fundamentalists and the modernists. What will unite the two wings? A "common campaign of evangelicalism."(93) He saw the missionary movement as the model: cooperation between churches and parachurch ministries. "In some particulars, notably in the matter of Church coöperation, it is even breaking the road to Christians of all lands."(94) That the debate over foreign missions was the issue that finally split the Presbyterian Church is not surprising. It was here that liberals and ecumenists had infiltrated the churches. The call to evangelize the world had attracted many missionaries--perhaps thousands--whose theologies were closer to Mathews' than Moody's.
Thus ended Mathews' lesson. On ecumenism, he was not a representative modernist--too little said in print. We must consider the implication of his call for evangelism. A call for ecclesiastical unity based on evangelism can go only so far before the question arises: Is there unity of belief? If there is none, then what becomes of the call for ecclesiastical unity? If there is no final judgment by God, then there is no legitimacy for institutional barriers that permanently exclude from the churches those who confess the modernist's unification faith. But the fundamentalists rejected this faith. As time went on, and the modernists gained majorities in the denominations, the only institutional barriers that were regarded as legitimate by modernists were those that separated the hell-preachers from the unification-preachers. The hell-preachers had to be isolated, cast out into the outer darkness of fundamentalist independency or sectarian denominations, leaving their fixed capital behind for others to inherit.
Once this surgical removal has taken place within the ever-expanding boundaries of the increasingly institutionalized Church, there must be no suggestion of permanent boundaries on theological expression. There may be temporary restrictions on self-expression for the sake of propriety, i.e., for the sake of the ultimate institutional integration--the omega point of ecumenical unification--but these are merely tactical considerations, not strategic goals. No one is to be removed from the presence of those who preach the ultimate integration of heaven and hell except those who refuse to preach this integration. A few premature enthusiasts of "ecumenism now" may have to be institutionally isolated from time to time--for the sake of selling the ecumenical program to the theologically unenlightened laymen in the pews who must finance it--but not removed by Church law or institutional sanctions.
Creedal religion that excludes is to be replaced by creedal religion that includes. As time goes on, the modernist believes, the many expressions of man's belief in God will be and must be absorbed into a single organization that will make room for even more bizarre expressions of this common faith. Every responsible person will find a place in the universal democratic Church. All views will be accepted, as long as each confession allows for all views to be accepted. All practices that are the outcome of such views are must be accepted: "faith in action." Nothing human is foreign to modernism! Except orthodoxy.
Factions and Functionaries The liberals were liberals; they sought power in terms of modernism's five-point creed. They were Progressives. They were also promoters of a religion deeply opposed to Christianity. Their goal was simple: to capture an institution that belonged to their enemies. It is not difficult to understand their motives. They were men who coveted the ecclesiastical robes of authority, but who did not have the capital to construct their own ecclesiastical empire. Their goal was to steal the institutional Church without suffering a revolt by the donors. They wanted the robes of ecclesiastical authority, just as they wanted the robes of academic authority (tenured professorships) and the robes of judicial authority. They wanted access to other people's money--people who did not believe what they believed. This has been the goal of twentieth-century liberalism, political and theological: build a new world order with old world money. The implementation of this plan was pioneered by Presbyterian Woodrow Wilson, who did it first with Presbyterianism's Princeton University, then with the U.S. government, and suffered a stroke while he was campaigning to do it with the world.
Making sense of the modernists' Presbyterian opponents is more difficult. By 1936, a majority of the evangelicals wanted peace at the price of orthodoxy. Prior to 1926, when they believed that they might be able to win the fight, more of them had stood up to challenge the liberals. Conservatives remained in the Church, they claimed, in order to "fight from within," but there is no trace of any significant battle after 1936, i.e., after Machen and the hard-liners had departed.(95) How, then, are we to understand the varying motivations of the conservatives, 1922-36? I think it helps to single out key figures of the battle in advance, in order to identify the ecclesiastical forces that they represented. (This is the accepted methodology of "federal" theology or "covenant" theology: the quest for the representative head.)
Henry van Dyke was the most prominent modernist in the Presbyterian Church. In 1893, before Briggs was convicted of heresy, van Dyke set forth the modernists' new strategy of verbal conciliation; he chaired the Confession revision committee that prepared the revision of 1903; he defied the conservatives, taunting them to put him on trial in 1913 (they refused); he walked out on Machen in 1923 in a masterful display of press agentry; and he helped revise the Presbyterian hymnal in the early 1930's. He died in 1933. He served as a large-church pastor, as an English professor at Princeton University, as the U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands in World War I, and was one of the most popular literary figures in the world. He understood the Presbyterian governmental system, and the only battle he ever lost was his support for creedal revision in 1889, which he won in 1903.
In sharp contrast was William Jennings Bryan, the consummate loser in American history. Defeated three times in his attempt to win the Presidency as the Democrat nominee, defeated in his attempt as Secretary of State to keep Wilson neutral prior to America's entry into World War I, defeated in his quest for Moderator of the Church in 1923, and defeated in 1925 in the most celebrated trial of his era, Bryan never won a battle he entered into. He was a fundamentalist, a Populist political radical, and an "old time religionist."(96) He was in no sense a Calvinist, but he was a vociferous opponent of theological liberalism. As a ruling elder, he exercised indirect influence over other ruling elders, but like the vast bulk of the denomination's elders, he was not involved in the Church's day-to-day operations. He was no match theologically or institutionally for his opponents. When he died, publicly humiliated, in July of 1925, having been pilloried by the world press because of his defense of the State of Tennessee in the famous Scopes "monkey trial," his followers were scattered--indeed, the whole fundamentalist world was scattered.(97)
Clarence E. Macartney was the most prominent Calvinist preacher in the United States, the conservatives' representative large-church pastor. In the early years of the battle, he stood firm with Machen, but when push came to shove in 1936, he revealed himself as a representative of the peace-seekers, the defenders of the religion of non-confrontation. He did what every large-church Presbyterian pastor did: he surrendered. He had been an "exclusivist" in the 1920's, and had led the fight in 1923 and 1924 against the modernists, but when the modernists and inclusivists gained total power in the Church, he recognized that a continued defense of exclusivism would mean that he would be excluded by them, rather than they by him. He capitulated. He retained his pastorate but lost most of his influence outside his congregation.
Machen articulated the theological case for the hard-pressed remnant that attempted to defend traditional Calvinism. From the outset, he was in the minority, theologically speaking. He recognized early in the battle that he could win at that late date only if he downplayed the rigorous theological distinctions of his Church's Confession, since so few of his conservative colleagues still believed in it. Theologically, he was an "exclusivist" who was forced to fight his institutional battle as a "semi-exclusivist."
Robert E. Speer, a layman in name only, served as secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions, 1891 to 1937: from the end of phase two through phase five of the Presbyterian conflict. He became the most respected person in the denomination. He was a representative of the great bland evangelical majority, the archetypal "warm Christian" with "warm feelings" for all "men of good will" who preach any sort of gospel whatsoever, just as long as the name of Jesus (but not necessarily His theology) is mentioned occasionally. He was the representative inclusivist. Today, he would be referred to as a neo-evangelical. His chosen role was to serve initially as a mediator between the warring factions, and his presence calmed the majority of conservatives who believed that peace was preferable to the Westminster Confession. It was not surprising that they chose peace, for very few of them in the 1920's still believed in the Westminster Confession. Their lack of belief made them implicit allies of the modernists. Also like the modern neo-evangelical, once his work of mediation was over, and the creedal religionists were driven out, he sided openly with the liberals, whose agent theologically and institutionally he had been from the beginning. This two-fold role--mediator and theological agent for the liberal wing--was crucial to the takeover by the liberals.
Finally, there was Lewis Mudge, Speer's college classmate, who became the denomination's Stated Clerk in 1920 and supervised the expulsion of the conservatives, 1933-36. He was the archetype of the Church functionary who owes his position to the Church's institutional structure rather than to a specific congregation. He was the beneficiary of the power religion, a faceless bureaucrat who became the liberals' senior hatchet man.
What Is a Covenant? A covenant is a judicial bond under God established by a self-maledictory oath that calls down God's negative sanctions on the party who violates the terms of the oath.(98) There are only four biblical covenants: individual (salvation), familial, ecclesiastical, and civil.(99) None of them rests on experience. All of them rest on a legally binding oath before God which calls down God's blessings for obedience and God's curses for disobedience.
We begin with the personal covenant between God and a new convert. The Christian must believe in Christ's work on the cross as his legal substitute, and then obey Him. The Westminster Confession puts it this way: "Christ hath purchased redemption, . . . effectually persuading them [His people] by His Spirit to believe and obey, . ." (IX:8). The old hymn, "Trust and Obey," has it right. Experience is optional. Conversion may be marked by a special experience, but this experience is not what establishes personal salvation (definitive), sustains it (progressive), and completes it (final). God's grace is the sole source of salvation, not men's feelings. God's grace is judicial: His declaration throughout time and eternity, that on the basis of the death and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ, an elect individual is formally declared "not guilty." This is Calvinism's highly judicial view of Christ's substitutionary atonement.
Christ died for man as a perfect sacrifice, a propitiation to God for man's sin. This is the official declaration of both Catholicism (certainly from Anselm's day in the twelfth century, this has been the case) and Protestantism. Christian theology in the West is judicial. Because the implications of this fact are not well understood with respect to the institutional Church, perhaps they will become clearer with respect to the family.
Judicial Bond, Not Feeling
A Christian marriage does not rest legally on the fact of two people having fallen in love. Divorce is not biblically justified because they subsequently "fall out of love." So, if the grounds for marriage are not a shared experience (love), and the grounds for divorce are not a shared experience (hate), then the grounds of marriage are not experiential. The grounds of marriage are judicial: a binding oath of mutual loyalty. God declares that there is only one legal way out of a marriage: the death of one of the partners, either physically or covenantally.(100) The marriage vow (oath) in most Church traditions makes this clear: "Till death do us part."
A judicial bond is equally the basis of civil citizenship. I was born inside the geographical boundaries of the United States. This makes me a U.S. citizen until one of three things takes place: (1) my death, (2) my renunciation of my citizenship and its transfer to another jurisdiction,(101) or (3) the revocation of my citizenship by a civil court based on a the decision of a jury to convict me of having committed a crime. Until then, I have the right to vote in U.S. elections. I am entitled to certain legal rights pertaining to U.S. citizenship. I may or may not get all tingly because I am a U.S. citizen; I am nevertheless a U.S. citizen. Prior to the Vietnam War, there were still patriotic parades and speeches every Fourth of July in the United States. Such events are rare today, and far less grand. This does not mean that Americans' citizenship is any less legal. The experience of citizenship is not the basis of citizenship. A civil covenant, as with all other covenants, is judicially grounded, not experientially grounded.
Christians understand these aspects of the civil covenant, but they do not apply this knowledge to the personal and ecclesiastical covenants. They do not recognize that God has established only three ways out of a local church covenant: death, letter of transfer, or excommunication. As for the basis of marriage, the debate goes on within the churches. The widespread prevalence of divorce among Church members in good standing indicates that experientialism has moved from the personal covenant to the marriage covenant. Marriage is no longer viewed as grounded in a covenant with sanctions.
In the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647),(102) there is not a word on the necessity of an experience for salvation or Church membership--not in the chapter on the covenant (VII), or effectual calling (X), or justification (XI), or saving faith (XIV), or repentance unto life (XV), or the Church (XXV), or the communion of saints (XXVI). In the chapter on effectual calling, we are warned that "Others, not elected, although they may be called by the ministry of the Word, and may have some common operations of the Spirit, yet they never truly come unto Christ, and therefore cannot be saved; . ." (X:4). But like the New England Puritans in 1636, New Side (eighteenth century) and New School (nineteenth century) Presbyterians added experience as one criterion of Church membership, if not making it an explicit requirement, then at least an unofficial requirement. This led to the capture of the denomination by its enemies in 1936: three centuries after the New England Puritans stepped onto the slippery slope of experientialism.
De-emphasizing the Covenant
The Church from time to time has de-emphasized the judicial foundation of its covenant. It has emphasized experience over confession. As I explain in the Introduction to Part 2, the century-long confusion introduced by the New England Puritans' insistence on personal testimony of a conversion experience as a condition for local church membership led to the doctrine of halfway covenant, then to Solomon Stoddard's open communion practices, and finally to the First Great Awakening, which destroyed the Puritan holy commonwealth ideal. The Puritan emphasis on experience eventually undermined Puritanism's covenant theology.
The problem with a religious experience is that it cannot be defined in propositional terms. At best, its physiological symptoms can be described in retrospect. A religious experience surely cannot be defined judicially. But all four biblical covenants are defined judicially, and only judicially. More important, the subsequent policing of all covenants must be in terms of known judicial standards. For example, the fact that a husband has had "a profound and spiritual moving" sexual encounter with someone other than his wife in no way restores their broken marriage covenant. Only his wife's acceptance of him can restore it. But in an age filled with adulterers, this judicial concept of the marital covenant repulses many people, including some Christians. It is much the same for Church covenants, and has been for centuries. The fact is, there was no way to distinguish judicially between a personal conversion experience in Boston in 1636, or during the First Great Awakening in 1736, or during the Second Great Awakening in 1836, or after reading a chapter in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics on the "Christ encounter" during seminary in 1936.(103) But because the Presbyterian Church after 1869 refused to specify in its Form of Government that membership in the Presbyterian Church was exclusively legal--profession of faith and outward righteousness--and in no way based on experience, those who had read Church Dogmatics (or at least classroom lecture notes based on it) and who had believed what they read eventually captured the Presbyterian Church. The evidence of this is the 1967 revision of the Westminster Confession of Faith.
Defining Terms In examining the doctrinal controversies that took place in Northern Presbyterianism, I have had to employ a number of terms that, without careful definition, could easily lead to confusion. The meanings of "conservative," and at the other end of the theological spectrum, "liberal" or "modernist," have fairly precise connotations, but what is the difference between a "fundamentalist" and an "orthodox" churchman? Is it proper to designate both of them as "conservatives"? Without some attempt to define these words on my part, or at least to show how I have used them, they would lose their ability to make meaningful differentiations, and would thus become superfluous at best, misleading at worst.
From 1869 until approximately the second quarter of the twentieth century, a theologically orthodox Calvinist Presbyterian and a theological conservative seemed similar. But there were differences, and these differences ultimately led to the defeat of the conservative wing.
The central doctrine of Calvinism is the doctrine of the Trinity, which implies the sovereignty of God. Equal in importance is the doctrine of creation: the Creator/creature distinction.(104) Yet these are not exclusively Calvinist doctrines. So, the distinguishing doctrines of Calvinist theology are not its central doctrines. This is true of every Christian denomination or group. It is what distinguishes sects from cults.
An Old School Presbyterian, being a Calvinist, put emphasis on the authority and sovereignty of God rather than on the will of man in the process of salvation: definitive (declarative), progressive, and final. A New School Presbyterian who was more in the tradition of Arminianism emphasized man's free will in accepting God's free grace. Both should be classified as conservatives. The Calvinist holds as the central feature of the doctrine of salvation the miraculous work that Christ performed at the cross, a literal historical event that serves as the sole basis of personal regeneration. The Arminian, however, is willing to discuss saving faith as a voluntary good work of man in response to God's free offer of the gospel--a work that can be forfeited by a subsequent "bad work" of disbelief. Both these streams of traditional Christian thought held to a miraculous, supernatural faith, and in this unity they were opposed to the theological liberalism that denied the supernatural nature of Christianity.
1. Conservatism: Calvinist
There were two schools of Presbyterian Calvinism: Old School (judicialists) and New School (experientialists). Both schools formally professed their commitment to the Westminster Confession. They were therefore formally as conservative as the 1788 version of the Westminster Confession was. The Confession was six-day creationist, denied man's free will, established a comprehensive theological system, and proclaimed a predestinated number of saved and lost at God's final judgment.
The problem for the Northern Presbyterian Calvinist after World War I was that his Church no longer really held to the Confession that he proclaimed. How could he engage in a successful battle to purge the Church of the modernists without the support of the vast majority of members and elders who were not willing to make a stand in terms of the Confession? There was only one way: to adopt a watered-down creedal position that the Arminians would accept but which could not easily be accepted by the modernists. But if Calvinists adopted this strategy, they could preserve at best a conservative Church. By 1910, there was no reasonable expectation that they could preserve a Calvinist Church. That Church was gone. The Calvinists could at best reclaim it in the name of a broad, ecumenical fundamentalism. To achieve more than this, they would be forced to adopt the infiltration tactics of the modernists. But their public profession of the Westminster Confession made this strategy morally unacceptable and practically useless. Everyone knew where the Calvinists stood. This stand was no longer acceptable to a majority of Northern Presbyterians.
2. Conservatism: Arminian
Any conservative Protestant in 1910 would have believed in the virgin birth of Christ, His divinity, the infallibility of the Bible, and the existence of a personal God. He would also have held the position that through faith in Christ, and in Him alone, can an individual gain his personal salvation, and thereby escape the horrors of an eternal, literal hell. But the theological battle for the Northern Presbyterian Church in this era was not over what the typical conservative churchman believed in. It was what he privately and silently refused to believe in: Calvinism. With the entry into the Church in 1906 of 1,100 Cumberland Presbyterian congregations--decidedly not Calvinistic--the Church quietly abandoned its judicially enforceable commitment to five-point Calvinism.
What the Arminian conservative did not believe in was the Westminster Confession of Faith, with its doctrine of predestination-election. Yet the denomination officially was committed to this Confession. What the Arminian conservative had to deal with was the problem of denying ordination to liberals who personally did not believe in any of the Confession's distinctive theological premises, but who said they believed that it does represent what the Bible teaches. These well-trained, self-conscious hypocrites did not believe even remotely in what the Bible teaches. The essence of the conservative Arminian's problem was that he did not believe in many parts of the Confession, but he, too, had publicly affirmed that he believed in it as an accurate representation of the Bible's teaching. The liberal-modernist churchman was a bigger liar than the conservative Arminian, but it was always a question of comparative degrees of lying. And as modernist theologian Charles Briggs had pointed out in 1889, even the staunchest of the Princeton Calvinists had abandoned some of the Confession's doctrines, most notably the possibility of infant damnation.(105)
How could the conservative Arminians purge out the liberals without condemning themselves, unless the denomination adopted a non-Calvinist creedal formulation that would be specific in those areas of theology that the liberals could not easily affirm? And if conservative Arminians attempted a Confession-based purge, wouldn't their efforts be compromised by guilt and indecision because of their own hypocrisy? To ask these questions is to answer them. This book records how they answered these questions, and when.
3. Liberalism-Modernism
The theological liberal is a much more difficult person to describe. From 1874 to 1936, liberal Protestant belief could range from an acceptance of many of the tenets of traditional Christianity to thoroughgoing Darwinism. A liberal theologian desired to make his theology conform with accepted scientific truth and human reason, i.e., he was willing to sacrifice the former for the sake of the latter.
Most of those who could be classified as liberals insisted that they were not concerned with overthrowing the established churches, but only with modifying the faith so that it would be more applicable, in their eyes, to the scientific world in which they found themselves. Criticizing the society around them, one by one they arrived at a rejection of the old ecclesiastical order: an institution that resisted the material and social changes that they believed their society needed to preserve the dignity of its citizens. They were ready to demand "equal time" for a broader, more humane theology. This broad theology would eventually prove to be very broad indeed.
Their leaders knew better. They had no intention of allowing equal time for the Westminster Confession of Faith in the life of the denomination, for they well understood that this Confession does not allow a concept of equal time. The Confession is exclusivist--Protestantism's greatest masterpiece of theological intolerance. Liberals like van Dyke intended to allow no time for it whatsoever. They also knew that their own exclusivist goal--a purge of the Confessionalists--would take decades to achieve. Their commitment to such a time frame gave them what proved to be an overwhelming competitive advantage against their opponents.
Drawing Some Lines, Erasing Others Anyone in 1869 who accepted any of the findings of higher criticism, e.g., the non-Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, was, in the eyes of conservative theologians, theologically suspect. The authority of the Great Commission of the Church (Matt. 28:18-20) was based on the Holy Scriptures; any challenge to the latter was a challenge to the former. This was always a fundamental point of contention. A social reformer such as Bryan who held to the traditional doctrines of Christianity, and who accepted at least the testimony of the New Testament on the teachings and crucifixion of Christ, if not the whole Bible, was considered a theological conservative. Conversely, a political conservative who was willing to accept the Church as a fine institution, but devoid of any messianic mission--a proclaimer of Jesus of Nazareth, but not of Jesus the Christ--would have been placed in the modernist camp by theological conservatives.
In the late nineteenth century--or in the case of the Presbyterians, in the early twentieth century--these two streams of theological opinion began to merge within denominations, and even within individual believers. Thus, a man or a denomination might reject the infallibility of the Bible, yet accept Christ as Savior. Another might voice the traditional dogmas of Christendom, yet reinterpret them to mean something far different from what had been intended when they were categorized and written down. The distinction between conservative and liberal, at least in the middle ground between the extremists in each faction, became increasingly fuzzy, since so many on each side could be found who were in partial agreement with the other.
The vocal modernists were distinguished by their refusal to be bound by traditional theological dogmas. Far more dedicated to Progressivism's social ethics than to theological formulas, they were the active proponents of social reform within any congregation. Few after 1900 saw Christ as a uniquely divine figure; He was merely a great teacher, a man who had best exhibited that divine spark which flickers in every man's soul. Men, in this view, should be most concerned about this earthly life, and not about their eternal destinies, and therefore should devote the major portion of their lives to the earthly, material salvation of themselves and their fellow humans. Modernists were, and still are, best represented by the ecumenical Unitarian theology that is proclaimed at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.(106)
Conclusion Each of the three groups in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., sought institutional peace, 1869-1936. The modernists sought peace through institutional power: anyone who could get himself ordained could and should remain a minister in good standing--without qualification prior to 1934, but after 1933 only so long as he conformed to the dictates of the hierarchy, which was now modernist-dominated. The experientialist majority sought peace through avoiding confrontational rhetoric: with the liberals in charge, with the orthodox in charge, or with the fundamentalists in charge, just so long as they were allowed to build up their congregations. They did not want to stir up trouble. They did not want to take sides. In the 1870-1925 period, the experientialists would sometimes join with the Calvinists against the modernists. After 1925, they steadily joined with the modernists against the Calvinists. Why? Because the Calvinists wanted peace through separation: the voluntary departure of the modernists from the Church. The Calvinists recognized that Christianity was at war with the theological liberalism of their day. They saw that the liberals would eventually capture the Church if they remained in the Church. They understood that there cannot be a neutral ecclesiastical-confessional position that gives free reign to both Christianity and liberalism. They were outvoted after 1925, but they did achieve their goal of peace through separation: they were expelled in 1936.
The judicial aspect of this conflict began in 1729, when the New York Synod and the Philadelphia Synod joined together to form a single Presbyterian denomination. That decision was abandoned twice, in 1741 and again in 1838, and ratified twice, in 1758 and 1869. But the breach was never healed to the satisfaction of both sides. The theological war between New York and Philadelphia did not end until 1936, when representatives of the third theology, foreign to both, gained their victory. They threw out the handful of leaders who opposed them. The crucial issue was sanctions.
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Footnotes:
1. Machen, What Is Faith? (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1925] 1974), pp. 222, 224.
2. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987).
3. A detailed study of Calvin's thought on the sacraments is the exhaustive study by Ronald S. Wallace, Calvin's Doctrine of the Word and Sacrament (Tyler, Texas: Geneva Divinity School Press, [1953] 1982).
4. Meredith G. Kline, By Oath Consigned: A Reinterpretation of the Covenant Signs of Circumcision and Baptism (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1968), ch. 5.
5. Calvin commented on Matthew 16:19: ". . . the latter applies to the discipline of excommunication which is entrusted to the church. But the church binds him whom it excommunicates--not that it casts him into everlasting ruin and despair, but because it condemns his life and morals, and already warns him of his condemnation unless he should repent. . . . Therefore, that no one may stubbornly despise the judgment of the church, or think it immaterial that he has been condemned by the vote of the believers, the Lord testifies that such judgment by believers is nothing but the proclamation of his own sentence, and that whatever they have done on earth is ratified in heaven." Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), IV:XI:2. Ford Lewis Battles translation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), II:1214.
6. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), ch. 10.
7. Ibid., ch. 13; Cf. Gary North, Unconditional Surrender: God's Program for Victory, 3rd ed. (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988).
8. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1923), pp. 1-2. Reprinted by William B. Eerdmans Co.
9. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis, vol. 1 of An Economic Commentary on the Bible, 2nd ed. (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987).
10. In the Apology 31, he said: "You have heard me speak at sundry times and in divers places of an oracle or sign which comes to me, and is the divinity which Meletus ridicules in the indictment. This sign, which is a kind of voice, first began to come to me when I was a child; it always forbids but never commands me to do anything which I am going to do. This is what deters me from being a politician." The Dialogues of Plato, translated by B. Jowett, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, [1892] 1937), I:414.
11. See below, "The Five Points of Modernism," point three: "Ethics/Law." See also North, Dominion Covenant, Appendix A.
12. Calvin wrote: ". . . we recognize as members of the church those who, by confession of faith, by example of life, and by partaking of the sacraments, profess the same God and Christ with us." Calvin, Institutes, IV:I:8. Battles translation, II:1022-23.
13. Cited in Cornelius Van Til, Psychology of Religion, vol. 4 of In Defense of the Faith (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, [1961] 1971), p. 102.
14. Barthians derive their power religion from their liberal politics; theologically speaking, however, neo-orthodoxy insists that God has not spoken in such a way as to derive permanent propositional creeds and theologies. Neo-orthodoxy places faith in Kant's noumenal realm, not his phenomenal realm.
15. Philip J. Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
16. R. J. Rushdoony, Foundations of Social Order: Studies in the Creeds and Councils of the Early Church (Fairfax, Virginia: Thoburn Press, [1969] 1978), p. 11.
17. Ibid.
18. Carl McIntire and his followers were separatists. They voted Machen off of the Board of Trustees of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions in late 1936. The following June, they walked out of General Assembly of the one-year-old Presbyterian Church of America when their candidate, Rev. Jamison, failed to win the Moderator's position.
19. "Sacrament," Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, edited by John M'Clintock and James Strong, 10 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1894), IX:212.
20. Calvin, Institutes, IV:XIV:13; Battles edition, p. 1288.
21. Rushdoony, Foundations of Social Order, pp. 1-2. Cf. Rushdoony, Systematic Theology (Vallecito, California: Ross House, [1978] 1994), ch. 1.
22. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant, 2nd ed. (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992). First edition: 1987.
23. David N. Steele and Curtis C. Thomas, The Five Points of Calvinism: Defined, Defended, Documented (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, [1963] 1979).
24. Carl Bangs, Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon, 1971).
25. Ibid., ch. 14.
26. North, "Publisher's Preface (1992)," That You May Prosper, p. xvi.
27. If all infants were said to be elect, then abortion would be the most effective evangelism program possible. Heaven would fill up through murder. If all infants were automatically damned, the Christian parents of dead infants and miscarried infants would be grief-stricken. Thus, we are not told by God which infants are saved and which are not. There is no concept of the so-called age of accountability in the Confession.
28. Charles Hodge, What Is Darwinism? And Other Writings on Science and Religion, edited by Mark A. Noll and David N. Livingstone (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, 1994), pp. 63-157.
29. Jonathan Wells, "Charles Hodge on the Bible and Science," American Presbyterians, 66 (Fall 1988), pp. 159-61.
30. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1871]), I:570-71.
31. James Dana, author of Manual of Geology, was Stillman Professor of Geology and Natural History at Yale University: ibid., I:571n.
32. Ibid., I:574.
33. Daryl Freeman, The Attitudes of the Princeton Theologians toward Darwinism and Evolution from 1859-1929 (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Iowa, 1969).
34. Uniformitarianism assumes that today's rates of geological and biological change have remained unchanged throughout history.
35. William Irvine, Apes, Angels, and Victorians: The Story of Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), p. 139.
36. Ronald W. Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin: A Biography of a Man and an Idea (New York: Random House, 1984), p. 134.
37. See the extract in Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition, edited by Philip Appleman (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 324.
38. Theodore P. Letis, "B. B. Warfield, Common-Sense Philosophy and Biblical Criticism," American Presbyterians, 69 (Fall 1991).
39. See Chapter 3, below, section on "Lower Criticism and the Westminster Confession."
40. Vos, "Eschatology of the New Testament," International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915), reprinted in Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation: The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos, edited by Richard B. Gaffin (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1980), ch. 2. See especially his comments on the conversion of the Jews, pp. 35, 41.
41. Lutheran Church Review (1915), reprinted in Biblical and Theological Studies (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1952), ch. 12.
42. Historic premillennialism teaches that the Church will go through a future great tribulation before Jesus comes again to set up His earthly kingdom. The broad majority of dispensational fundamentalists believe that the Church will be removed ("raptured") out of this world before the seven-year tribulation period begins. Also, historic premillennialists do not think that a restored political Israel will be the central focus of Christ's thousand-year earthly reign on earth; dispensationalists do.
43. For example, J. Ross Stevenson and Charles Erdman of Princeton Seminary. Both sided with the modernists after 1920.
44. F. A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), ch. 6.
45. Samuel Chugerman, Lester Frank Ward: The American Aristotle (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1939). Chapters 13 and 14 were prophetic of liberal fads to come: "The Feminist," "The Environmentalist."
46. F. A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason (Indianapolis: LibertyPress, [1952] 1979).
47. Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Vintage, 1964), p. 98.
48. North, Dominion Covenant: Genesis, pp. 297-318.
49. Clarence J. Karier, Shaping the American Educational State: 1900 to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1975), p. 139. Cf. Sidney Fine, Laissez-Faire and the General Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1865-1901 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), pp. 253-64.
50. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930 (New York: Vintage, 1958), ch. 10.
51. See Chapter 6, below: section on "Rockefeller's `Baptism' in 1910"; subsection on "Firm Foundations."
52. Charles E. Merriam, New Aspects of Politics, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1925] 1970), pp. 59-60. That this book was reprinted in 1970 by its original publisher indicates that it was regarded as a classic.
53. James Maurice Wilson, "The Religious Effect of the Idea of Evolution," in Evolution in the Light of Modern Knowledge: A Collective Work (London: Blackie & Son, 1925), p. 492.
54. Ibid., pp. 497-98.
55. Ibid., pp. 498-99.
56. Ibid., p. 501.
57. Rousas J. Rushdoony, The Biblical Philosophy of History (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1969), p. 3.
58. Mathews, The Gospel and the Modern Man (New York: Macmillan, 1912), p. 36.
59. Ibid., p. 38.
60. Ibid., p. 43.
61. Ibid., p. 46.
62. Ibid., pp. 81-82.
63. Ibid., p. 82.
64. Mathews, New Faith for Old: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1936), p. 277.
65. Ibid., p. 278.
66. Mathews, Gospel & Modern Man, p. 42.
67. Mathews, The Faith of Modernism (New York: AMS Press, [1924] 1969), pp. 38-39.
68. Ibid., p. 43.
69. Mathews, "Scientific Method and Religion," in Mathews, Contributions of Science to Religion (New York: Appleton, 1924), p. 381.
70. Mathews, Faith of Modernism, p. 46.
71. Ibid., p. 47.
72. Ibid., p. 46.
73. Gary North, The Hoax of Higher Criticism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), ch. 3.
74. Mathews, Contributions of Science to Religion, ch. 17.
75. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation" (1918), in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 138.
76. Mathews, Faith of Modernism, p. 3.
77. Ibid., pp. 72, 73.
78. Ibid., p. 58.
79. Ibid., p. 76.
80. Ibid., p. 61. Emphasis in original.
81. Ibid., p. 83. Emphasis in original.
82. Mathews, The Atonement and the Social Process (New York: Macmillan, 1930), pp. 10-11.
83. Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988), pp. 63-64.
84. Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), pp. 47-48.
85. Mathews, New Faith for Old, p. 234.
86. Ibid., p. 235.
87. Mathews, Faith of Modernism, p. 90.
88. Mathews, Atonement & Social Process, p. 182.
89. The Hindu would say that even this is maya, an illusion. All there is for him ultimately is impersonal timelessness: the divine unity of all life.
90. North, Is the World Running Down?, ch. 2.
91. Weber, "Science as a Vocation," p. 140.
92. Mathews, The Individual and the Social Gospel (New York: Missionary Education Movement, 1914).
93. Mathews, Gospel and Modern Man, pp. 325-26.
94. Mathews, Individual, p. 69.
95. Lefferts A. Loetscher, The Broadening Church: a study of theological issues in the presbyterian church since 1869 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), p. 155. This, in fact, is the thesis that Loetscher's book was written to prove: once Machen was out of their midst, there never was another Church-disrupting theological controversy.
96. Lawrence W. Levine, Defender of the Faith: William Jennings Bryan: The Last Decade, 1915-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965).
97. See Chapter 9, below: subsection on "The Scopes Trial: The Dividing Line."
98. Sutton, That You May Prosper, ch. 4.
99. This four-fold division structured Richard Baxter's monumental Puritan study of ethics, A Christian Directory (1673).
100. Ray R. Sutton, Second Chance: Biblical Blueprints for Divorce and Remarriage (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).
101. In state and local jurisdictions, this is done automatically by moving out of the jurisdiction.
102. It was completed by the Assembly in 1647 with the inclusion of the Bible support texts.
103. Anyone who has tried to read a page or two of Church Dogmatics will find it difficult to believe that this "spiritual discipline" could produce a mystical experience.
104. Machen's colleague at both Princeton and Westminster, Cornelius Van Til, reconstructed Calvinist philosophy in terms of these two doctrines. In this sense, his theology is radically theocentric.
105. Charles Augustus Briggs, Whither?: A Theological Question for the Times, 3rd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, [1889] 1890), pp. 133-37.
106. Southern Presbyterians also had a Union Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. It was conservative in Machen's era.