Phase 1: Whose Legitimacy?
2 OLD SCHOOL VS. NEW SCHOOL With the woful departures from sound doctrine, which we have already pointed out, and the grievous declensions in Church order heretofore stated, has advanced step by step, the ruin of all sound discipline in large portions of our Church, until in some places our very name is becoming a public scandal, and the proceedings of persons and Churches connected with some of our Presbyteries, are hardly to be defended from the accusation of being blasphemous.
Testimony and Memorial (1837)(1)
So announced the Old School wing of the Presbyterian Church at a meeting held prior to the 1837 General Assembly at which the Old School majority expelled four New School presbyteries. In the eyes of the Old School's members, this was necessary in order to re-establish the purity of the Presbyterian Church: theologically, judicially, and structurally. Loose subscription to the Westminster Confession would have to go, along with those who defended loose subscription.
The crucial dividing issue was theology--specifically, soteriology: the doctrine of salvation. What is the way of salvation? Rev. Albert Barnes, around whom the controversy had centered, had stated in 1829: "All men have some scheme of salvation."(2) No Presbyterian doubted the truth of this statement, but Old School Presbyterians were concerned with the issue that Barnes implicitly raised: What constitutes valid evidence that a person is regenerate and therefore lawfully a Church member? On this point, Old Side and New Side Presbyterianism had divided in 1741. The Old Side had sided with Calvin: profession of faith and an outwardly holy life. The New Side had added experientialism. The same division marked Old School and New School Presbyterians in the first half of the nineteenth century. But there were additional divisions: some theological (Calvinism vs. Arminianism), some institutional (Church hierarchy vs. parachurch ministries), and one moral (the legitimacy of chattel slavery).
These debates were ultimately a debate over the legitimacy of the institutional Church. The question was: "What constitutes a legitimate Presbyterian Church?" The division of 1741 indicated that there had not been agreement on this point. The division of 1837-38 indicated that this question had not been resolved by the re-unification of 1758.
New School Presbyterianism was closely associated with the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, just as the New Side a century earlier had been associated with the First Great Awakening: phase one, part one of the Presbyterian conflict. In both cases, there was a tendency toward an ecumenism based on shared experience.(3) It was this ecumenism--financial support of parachurch ministries and union with Congregationalism on the Western frontier--that finally drew the fire of the Old School.
The Purity of the Church Old School Presbyterians launched a series of heresy trials in 1831, beginning with the first trial of Albert Barnes of Philadelphia and ending in 1836 with Barnes' second trial.(4) Barnes was acquitted both times.
Barnes' 1829 sermon, "The Way of Salvation," triggered the first of these judicial actions. He said: "No man is compelled, against his will, to be saved. The work of salvation, and the work of damnation, are the two most deliberate and solemn acts of choosing, that mortal man ever performs."(5) The theological question at issue here is the uniquely Calvinistic assertion of God's absolutely sovereign transformation of each person's will prior to any solemn act of man's choosing. The Westminster Confession announced: "Man, by his fall into a state of sin, hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation: so as, a natural man, being altogether averse from that good, and dead in sin, is not able, by his own strength, to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto" (IX:3). God, "by His grace alone, enables him freely to will and to do that which is spiritually good" (IX:4b). Barnes had abandoned the Westminster Confession on this point. He was not alone, which was why he could not be convicted for heresy. He was brought to trial in 1830, cleared by the General Assembly in 1831, tried again in 1835, and again was cleared by the GA in 1836. In between, Lyman Beecher had also been tried and cleared in 1835. This led to the division of the Church in 1837.
Finney left Presbyterianism in 1836, the year after he had assumed the presidency of Oberlin College (a summer assignment).(6) Throughout his ministerial career, beginning in 1824, he repeated the standard defense of the New Side a century before, and what was to become the standard defense of the modernists half a century later: the negative effects of negative Church sanctions. Criticisms of the revivals were being offered, he said, by men who were themselves spiritually unproductive. "Ecclesiastical difficulties are calculated to grieve away the Spirit, and destroy revivals. It has always been the policy of the devil to turn off the attention of ministers from the work of the Lord to disputes and ecclesiastical litigations. . . . When will these ministers and professors of religion who do little or nothing themselves, let others alone, and let them work for God?" He cited Jonathan Edwards' painful ecclesiastical experience with his congregation, just as he cited Edwards on so much else.(7) This "grieved Spirit" approach had been Gilbert Tennent's criticism of Old Side Presbyterianism in 1740, although Finney did not adopt Tennent's vitriol.(8)
The charges against each of the accused revivalists were dismissed on appeal in every case. The Old School then gave up on the Church's existing court system.(9) The Old School at the 1837 General Assembly, which it controlled, annulled the 1801 agreement known as the Plan of Union, which had created joint Congregationalist and Presbyterian missionary activities and joint acceptance of each other's pastors in local congregations in the western territories.(10) The General Assembly then expelled four New School Synods.(11) Over 550 congregations and over 500 ministers in the New School were removed from the rolls.(12) This was the First Great Expulsion. The judicial issue, argued Old School theologian Robert Breckenridge in 1843, had hinged on the absence of ruling elders in the churches formed by the 1801 Union. "They had no ruling elders and therefore were not Presbyterian."(13) The issue, therefore, was "church order," he said. "Upon this ground, more than any other, it was triumphantly carried through the great Assembly, through the church at large, and through the civil tribunals of the country."(14) Not theology but Church order: so also would the modernists declare in the Second Great Expulsion of 1936. The victors in the first case misused Church rules in order to achieve this increase in Church order.(15) The victors in the second case had rewritten the rules in order to make it legal.
New School vs. Negative Sanctions The important point is this: the conservatives in the New School would not vote to convict those ministers who deviated from the Westminster standards. They publicly defended creedal orthodoxy, but they consistently refused to impose negative ecclesiastical sanctions in order to defend this professed orthodoxy. This crucial covenantal fact is what the Old School decided to ignore in 1869. Because of this, the Northern Presbyterian Church abandoned Calvinist orthodoxy within two generations of the reunion. The denomination ignored the fundamental principle of law that had been set forth in Puritan New England two centuries earlier: "The execution of the law is the life of the law."(16) By failing to enforce the Confessional standards, they allowed their theological enemies to bury these standards and inherit the denomination. It was symbolic of what was to come when, in the spring of 1870, the reunited Church's representatives met in Philadelphia in Barnes' church.(17) He died that same year, victorious. He had served faithfully as a Director of Union Seminary in New York.(18) It was through Union, more than any other institution, that the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., was lost to modernism.
In the 1890's, the modernists appealed back to the heresy trials of Barnes and Beecher, a sour memory in the minds of New School members, and a cause of the 1837-38 split. This rhetorical appeal was used to gain support from the spiritual heirs of the New School. Theologically, Barnes had been Arminian; theologically, the modernists were apostate. This difference was immense. But the modernists' rhetorical appeal was a useful tactic in confirming the prejudices of those who did not think that ministerial oaths should invoke the threat of negative institutional sanctions. The modernists would seek protection under the umbrella of the New School's view of the Confession: devoid of negative sanctions. After 1900, this umbrella never again leaked at the General Assembly level.
Independent Agencies Another major division between Old School and New School was their conflict over independent religious organizations. The Old School believed that such efforts as missions and charity should be under the judicial authority of the Church. The New School disagreed. In 1837, Charles Hodge and fellow Old School members strengthened the Board of Home Missions and organized a Board of Foreign Missions.(19) (These attitudes were reversed in the disputes a century later, when Machen and his clerical supporters were suspended for supporting an Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions.)(20)
In 1835, two years before the split, at a pre-General Assembly meeting, 37 minister and 27 ruling elders of the Old School prepared the "Act and Testimony." It had no legal standing in the denomination, and it was opposed by the Princeton Seminary faculty as being unnecessarily divisive and outside normal Church court channels.(21) It rejected the legitimacy of support by Presbyterian Church funds of interdenominational missions. The target was the American Home Mission Society. The "Act and Testimony" complained that congregational funds were being sent to this agency. This money "ought to come into the treasury of the body, to which its possessors belong; . . . The Assembly's own Board of Missions, created by herself, governed by herself, and amenable to herself, finds a great and powerful rival in her own house, with whom she comes into perpetual collision."(22) The issue was judicial: the rival organization "feels no obligation to our courts. . . ."(23) (In 1933, Machen and his allies formed the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, and in 1935, Machen's presbytery convicted him of disobedience for refusing to support the denominational Foreign Missions Board.)
There was also the issue of educating pastors. Money was being sent to the legally independent Presbyterian Education Society in preference to the Assembly's Board of Education. This, too, was perceived as a threat. The Act warned that "no Church can be safe--safe in her doctrinal standards--safe in her ecclesiastical polity--safe in her financial operations--safe in the independence of her ministry, if that ministry are [sic] dependent upon an independent foreign body; and especially, if their houses and lands, their libraries and furniture, are under bonds."(24) (In 1929, Machen and his allies founded Westminster Seminary, a judicially independent institution for educating Presbyterian ministers.)
Something fundamental had changed in the Old School's position, 1869 to 1929. What had changed was a shift in confession. After 1903, the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., was no longer covenantally a Calvinist denomination. It refused to enforce the Westminster Confession in its courts. This refusal destroyed the Old School's case for conformity to the 1835 "Act and Testimony." By 1935, the Old School had become, by 1835 Old School standards, a movement committed to New School organizational practices. Meanwhile, the New School members, in alliance with modernists, had adopted the Old School's position in 1835: "Conform to the Church's missions program." The Old School threw out the New School in 1837. The New School and the modernists threw out the Old School and the separatists in 1936.
The Old School and New School became separate denominations in 1838. This split was not healed institutionally until 1869.(25) The primary reason offered by the Old School to justify the split in 1837 was the New School's lack of conformity to Church discipline and Church order.(26) The shoe would be on the other foot 99 years later. In 1936, however, theological error was not offered as the basis of proper Church discipline; in 1838, it was: "The impossibility of obtaining a plain and sufficient sentence [in Church courts] against gross errors. . . ."(27)
Abolitionism and Biblical Exegesis Revivalism was part of the dispute, and so was theology. So was the question of congregational financial support for independent agencies. So was Church discipline. But the crucial issue was abolitionism. Because of this difference, the Old School felt compelled to crawl back to the New School in 1869, begging for acceptance. The Old School never recovered from this act of filial subordination.
The Bourne Case
If any event sealed the fate of American Presbyterianism, it was the de-frocking of English immigrant George Bourne by his Lexington, Virginia, presbytery in 1815. He had been ordained in 1812. In 1805, he had been the co-publisher of the Baltimore Evening Post; it failed that same year and was sold to Hezekiah Niles, one of the prominent newspaper publishers of the day.(28) He then worked for several years as an author. He began preaching in a start-up congregation near Harrisonburg, Virginia, in 1810. He was ordained in 1812.
In 1815, he presented an overture to the General Assembly raising the question of whether Presbyterians who owned slaves could be Christians. The Assembly refused to act. Upon his return home, his presbytery voted his deposition. In 1816, he published The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable, the most critical American anti-slavery book of its day. The theological importance of the book was that Bourne identified slaveholding as a sin. In his protest in 1815, he cited I Timothy 1:10, which links whoremongers, homosexuals, and man-stealers. The Larger Catechism cites this verse (A. 142) in listing crimes against the Ten Commandments.
The 1816 General Assembly retroactively removed this reference from his protest on procedural grounds.(29) The reason for this was that the Church's Constitution (1806) had added a detailed critique of man-stealing, but this passage had never been voted on by the presbyteries. This meant that it was not legally binding in a Presbyterian court. Part of the passage read: "The word he [Paul] uses in its original import, comprehends all who are concerned in bringing any of the human race into slavery, or in detaining them in it. . . . Stealers of men are all those who bring off slaves or freemen, and keep, sell, or buy them. To steal a freeman, says Grotius, is the highest kind of theft."(30) This note was eliminated in editions of the Constitution published subsequent to 1816.(31) This undercut Bourne's protest, for the Bible's man-stealing passage and the 1806 statement had been the central pillars of his formal protest and his book. What the Scriptures taught and what the Larger Catechism's biblical citation implied, the Church dismissed on a technicality, burying the topic for the next half century.
The Synod of New York had gone on record as early as 1787 as favoring gradual abolition. First, however, slaves had to be educated. Church members who own slaves should educated them with the goal of their emancipation. Masters should also give them property to start out. The Synod used the phrase "abolition of slavery."(32) Overtures to the General Assembly regarding the legitimacy of slave ownership were submitted in 1793 and 1795. These overtures were not voted on by the presbyteries, and so had no force of law. The Church did not vote to label slavery a sin. This retroactive expurgation of the 1806 addendum in 1818 was regarded by the Old School as having expurgated the legal issue. If the formal Constitutional documents of the Presbyterian Church were now silent, or at least the damning 1806 extension, then God is equally silent. The Constitution of the Church was elevated procedurally above the Bible. From this time on, the Bible was regarded by the Old School as judicially irrelevant on this issue, and remained so.
Never did the Old School invoke ecclesiastical sanctions on the basis of the biblical passages on slavery relating to the South's practices: no legal marriages for slaves; the widespread legalized adultery--no negative sanctions--and fornication of white owners with slave girls; the absence of any appeals court above the masters, either Church or State, contrary to Exodus 18 and Matthew 18:15-18; the absence of any State-legislated means for a slave to buy his way out; legalized maiming of slaves, contrary to the Mosaic law;(33) and the annulment of the inter-generational slave law of Leviticus 25:44-46 by Jesus' fulfillment of, and therefore annulment of, the Mosaic law's jubilee year (Luke 4:18-21).(34) The Old School sat as the three pagan monkeys sit: hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil. Evil rejoiced in the South. This silence delivered the North after 1860 into the hands of the Unitarian-abolitionist crusaders. After 1865, it delivered the South into Reconstruction's judicial revolution against the Constitution and Social Darwinism's revolution against Christendom. Evil rejoiced in the North. It is still rejoicing.
On appeal, Bourne's de-frocking was reversed temporarily by the 1817 General Assembly, but in 1818 his presbytery's sentence was allowed to stand. Amazingly, the 1818 Assembly also voted to approve a statement opposing slavery as "a gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature" and "utterly inconsistent with the law of God, which requires us to love our neighbors as ourselves. . . ." But the Assembly equivocated. Having identified slavery as being in opposition to God's law, it did not call on slaveholders to emancipate their slaves immediately.(35) Bourne had. Church officials recommended gradualism, but they threatened no sanctions for a refusal to comply.
Bourne subsequently became a full-time abolitionist, calling for immediate emancipation years before William Lloyd Garrison appeared on the scene.(36) Garrison borrowed heavily from Bourne from 1828 on, but he never acknowledged the degree of his dependence.(37) Neither have the historians, who generally begin their discussions of anti-slavery in America with the Unitarian crusade of the 1930's.(38) Bourne is long forgotten by most Americans, and is rarely mentioned in history textbooks, but if anyone deserves the distinction of being the first American to demand immediate abolition, it is Bourne.
Negative sanctions had been applied to Bourne by the Old School. After 1818, any Presbyterian pastor in the South knew that he would be fired and possibly de-frocked if he spoke out against slavery.(39) Negative sanctions would be applied to abolitionist pastors, not to slave-holders. In 1845, the Old School General Assembly announced that petitions asking the Church to declare slavery a sin "do virtually require this judicatory to dissolve itself, and to abandon the organization under which, by the Divine blessing, it has so long prospered. The tendency is evidently to separate the northern from the southern portion of the Church; a result which every good citizen must deplore, as tending to a dissolution of the Union of our beloved country, of which every enlightened Christian will oppose as bringing about a ruinous and unnecessary schism between brethren who maintain a common faith." The vote was 168 for, 13 against, 4 excused.(40) But the war came anyway, and when it ended, so had the legitimacy of the now-disunited Old School in the North.
The New School General Assembly in 1846 passed an anti-slavery Declaration, but it did not declare slave-owning as a sin. It also condemned excessive pressures in the Church against slavery: ". . . we do at the same time condemn all divisive and schismatic measures, tending to destroy the unity and disturb the peace of our churches, and deprecate the spirit of denunciation. . . ." It then adopted an Old School-like judicial reticence: "As a court of our Lord Jesus Christ, we possess no judiciary authority. We have no right to institute and prescribe tests of Christian character and church membership not recognized and sanctioned in the sacred Scriptures, and our standards by which we have agreed to walk. We must therefore leave this matter with the sessions, presbyteries and synods--the judicatories to whom pertains the right of judgment--to act in administrative discipline as they may judge it to be their duty, constitutionally subject to the General Assembly only in the way of general review and control."(41) In short, with respect to slavery, the New School went officially Congregational. Congregations in New York could continue to bring slave-owners to justice, since there were none; congregations in Virginia could continue to ordain slave owners if the so chose. All very nice, and all very non-Presbyterian. This was state's rights for Presbyterianism. Only after the departure of the Southern New School in 1857 did the Northern New School gain the courage to become abolitionists. But this head start on the Old School gave them the late-blooming moral legitimacy they used to lure back the Old School on New School terms in 1869.
The vaunted neutrality of the Old School was a delusion; in 1861, it also proved to be a snare. There was no neutrality possible on this issue. Old School Presbyterians in the North would surely refuse to veto presbyterial de-frockings of Southern ministers. This transferred authority over the slavery question to the Southerners. The mark of judicial authority is the ability to impose negative sanctions. Southern regionalism prevailed in Old School Presbyterianism's courts until the secession of 1861; it continued to prevail morally until 1864, when the Northern Old School at last identified slavery as a sin.(42) They blamed the South for everything: "Under the influence of the most incomprehensible infatuation with wickedness, those who were the most deeply interested in the perpetuation of slavery have taken away every motive for its further toleration. The spirit of American slavery . . . threatens not only our very existence as a people, but the annihilation of the principles of free Christian government; and thus has rendered the continuance of negro slavery incompatible with the preservation of our own liberty and conscience."(43) Or, as a cynic in the South might have put it: "The Bible is still silent on the morality of slavery, but on July 3 and 4, 1863, Gettysburg and Vicksburg were noisy in their moral clarity." The General Assembly did not quote the Bible, following its long tradition regarding slavery as adiaphora.
In the Southern Old School, slavery survived as judicially valid until the surrender at Appomattox Court House. Then, with the exception of Robert Dabney's 1867 A Defense of Virginia [And Through Her, of the South], which included a defense of slavery,(44) the Old School in the South developed collective amnesia about the peculiar institution and its role in the coming of the war. The entire region became afflicted with the same amnesia. The supreme issue in retrospect became legal, not economic; Constitutional, not moral. It became, in the title of the two-volume work written by Alexander H. Stephens, the former Vice President of the Confederacy, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (1867, 1870).(45) State's rights in general, not state's rights to defend chattel slavery, became the retroactive moral justification of secession. This outlook led to the South's "Jim Crow" racial segregation laws against blacks within a generation. It took another round of coercive Federal intervention, 1955 to 1970, to reverse this system and its mentality. Parts of the Old South, like the Old School, perished in 1865, but it took over a century to remove the parts that remained.
By thumbing its collective nose at the Bible in the name of a legal technicality, the Old School in 1818 set a precedent that would destroy its last remaining traces in 1936, when another Presbyterian majority thumbed its nose at the Bible on the basis a revised Book of Discipline. As it turned out, the Old School perished before Jim Crow did.
Christian Abolitionism
In 1832, England abolished slavery in its colonies. This was the culmination of a lifetime of dedicated political organization and pressure by William Wilberforce and his Clapham group.(46) In the name of Christianity, Wilberforce had challenged the moral authority and legal right of slavery and its continued existence.(47) But it was the Society of Friends (Quakers), not Trinitarians, who first made the abolition of slavery a theological issue, beginning in the late 1750's and escalating in the 1770's.(48)
After 1846, when the political issue of the extension of slavery into newly created states became the most potent political issue of the day, anti-slavery men became far more influential in Northern churches. Churches became sectional institutions.(49) Northern churches resisted the openly pro-slavery position of the Southern churches. Theology, not the tracts of the abolitionists, is what mobilized them.(50) As Howard writes: "Historians have tended to view the concept of free soil too narrowly to mean free labor. Free labor was a part of a concept that also included free religion and free schools unhampered by the institution of slavery."(51) One Democratic newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, adopted the following rhetoric: "Those old blue bellied Presbyterians that hung the witches and banished the Quakers"--actually, Massachusetts Congregationalists had done this--"are determined to convert the people of this region into a race of psalm singers, using the degenerate dregs of the old puritans remaining here to drive the Democracy out."(52)
New School members in the South withdrew in 1857. This freed the New School in the North from any remaining taint of slavery. In 1858, the Southern New School Assembly petitioned the Old School for membership, but the latter did not respond favorably. The Old School, which was heavily represented by Presbyterians in the South, also refused to stand with Wilberforce's tradition. Instead, it stood on the judicial and moral sidelines. The Presbyterian, an Old School magazine, professed "a stubborn neutrality" in 1856.(53) Members of the Old School, most notably the faculty of Princeton Seminary, were convinced that the Church had nothing authoritative to say against "moderate, humanitarian" slavery. Slavery was not seen as being inherently immoral. This had been the universal view of the Church International until the late eighteenth century. This Church tradition seemed quite safe in 1837. So did U.S. Constitution's tradition. They weren't.
The Old School's Position: Adiaphora
The Old School bet its moral legitimacy and its survival on two things: (1) the U.S. Constitution of 1788, which had established a compromise with the slave states on this issue, and (2) a strategy of ignoring Old Testament texts, especially Leviticus 25:44-46, which authorized inter-generational slavery as part of the jubilee law.(54) But the jubilee law was not in force after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Traditional Jewish and Christian expositions of biblical texts had accepted the moral legitimacy of the institution of permanent chattel slavery,(55) yet without the jubilee law, it had no textual support. Refusing to separate from the Southerners over this issue--no one doubted that an abolitionist stand would have split the Old School--the Northerners relegated the institution of chattel slavery to adiaphora: things supposedly judicially indifferent to the faith. Slavery was supposedly a political matter, not ecclesiastical.(56) In effect, the northerners in the Old School said of slavery: "While we've never actually owned slaves, and while we don't personally believe in slavery, we don't think the Church or State should legislate against it. We should not infringe on the slave owner's freedom of choice. The slave owner is sovereign over his own household."(57) Only after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation announced semi-abolitionism in 1863--abolitionism for states currently in rebellion against the United States--did the Old School reverse itself in the North, but without offering any biblical justification for this reversal. For its theological silence, pre-War and post-War, Old School Presbyterianism in the North paid with its life, denominationally speaking, in 1936.
The Old School was not alone. Prior to the War, in 1835, the Congregational Calvinist scholar Moses Stuart of Andover Seminary appealed to Leviticus 25:44-46 as the proof text that refuted the Christian abolitionists' claim that slavery is sinful in itself.(58) Yet Stuart personally regarded slavery as an institution that should and would gradually fade away without legislative pressure. His position was morally ambiguous.(59) During the War, Bibliotheca Sacra, the Andover journal, published three essays by Elijah P. Barrows, whose exegetical strategy was to ignore the Old Testament texts on slavery and then claim that the New Testament's ethic was against it. He moved from the biblical texts to an alleged Gospel spirit.(60) This was close to the Christian abolitionists' pre-Civil War view. Charles Hodge took an even more neutral position than Stuart's prior to the War: slavery as not sinful in itself, but subject to legislative reforms to do away with certain evil aspects of slavery as then practiced.(61) In 1865, he insisted that his views, and the views of the Princeton Review, had not changed on the issue of slavery since 1836, either morally or politically.(62) Psychologically, he could vote against the guilt-induced reunion of 1869; no other theologian did.
Secession in early 1861 and the outbreak of war in April led to the departure of the Southerners from the Old School. The Old School General Assembly in May imposed a loyalty oath to the Union, which Hodge opposed and so did large numbers of the attendees, but it nevertheless passed, 156 to 66. The General Assembly tabled this resolution initially, but the outburst of negative opinion in the secular press and in threatening telegrams the next day persuaded the General Assembly to reconsider.(63) Hodge denied that the General Assembly had the authority to decide a political question.(64)
Representatives of the Southern churches met on December 4 in a local congregation in Augusta, Georgia, to establish a Confederate Presbyterian Church.(65) The pastor of that congregation was Joseph Ruggles Wilson,(66) the father of five-year-old Thomas Woodrow Wilson, who would later become a ruling elder in the PCUSA.(67) In 1864, they joined the New School seceders to create the Presbyterian Church in the United States (Southern Presbyterians). The secession of the Confederacy counted for more in Southern Presbyterianism than the theological issues of the Old School-New School division. Politics and the preservation of a slavery-based social order counted for more than ecclesiology.
That same year, the Northern Old School reversed itself on abolitionism, identifying slavery as a sin, indicating that politics and the preservation of the Union was more important than its previous theology of slavery as adiaphora. This left the Old School in the North high and dry theologically. Its members had felt compelled, as pastors during full-scale wars always do, to support the war effort, and therefore they also had to support the North's stated causes of the war: the illegitimacy of secession (1861) and the illegitimacy of slavery (but only in Confederate states) (1863). Hodge wrote five Princeton Review essays critical of Southern slavery, calling for its abolition, but still he refused to say that the Bible condemns slavery. He appealed to nationalism instead.(68) By 1864, politics, in both the North and the South, had overcome theology. With respect to the irreconcilable respective war aims, Presbyterian theology had become adiaphora. By 1869, so had Northern Old School concerns of 1837-68.
The General Assemblies from 1865 to 1867 announced policies that required the public repentance for any Old School pastors in the South to gain admission to the Church. The General Assembly of 1865 instructed presbyteries to question all prospective pastors regarding their views regarding the "atrocious rebellion." Each applicant must "confess and forsake his sin before he shall be received."(69) The 1866 General Assembly elected as Moderator R. L. Stanton, author of The Church and the Rebellion (1864), which had identified the Old School pastors as "the leading spirits of the rebellion."(70) Once installed, he told the Assembly that the war had been "the offspring of heresy, corruption, and all unrighteousness."(71) These and similar statements drove the border state churches into the Southern Presbyterian Church. Vander Velde, a University of Michigan historian with no ecclesiastical axe to grind, describes these assemblies as reflecting "the spirit of revenge and vindictiveness."(72) They made impossible any reconciliation in that generation with Southern Presbyterianism. He summarizes the shift:
Perhaps most significant of all, by 1866 the Church had come under the domination of what had once been regarded a contemptible group of radicals--men who for years had been agitators against slavery, against control of the Church by the East, and in favor of reunion with the New School Church. With its first two objectives virtually accomplished, this group, firmly in the saddle in 1866, gave the New School brethren an illustration of the completeness of its patriotism by its drastic handling of the case of the Presbytery of Louisville. . . . Sternly anti-slavery, vindictively aggressive in its patriotism, critically watchful of the "loyalty" of its ministers, openly currying favor with the New School brethren, distinctly Northern in its geography and Western in its control, the Old School Church of 1866 was a very different body from that to which the outbreak of the Civil War had brought such a serious crisis.(73)
These radical pronouncements and actions also had the effect of retroactively undermining the legitimacy of the pre-1864 Old School in the North, especially Charles Hodge and the Princetonians, who had led the battle to defer the Church's discussion of slavery as a sin, and who still refused to retract the denomination's pre-1864 position. Princeton's legitimacy was never completely restored. This fact was to shape the next two generations in the Northern Presbyterian Church.
Meanwhile, the New School General Assembly of 1866 issued a platform promoting the Freedman's Bureau and the political Reconstruction of the South.(74) It was time "to set aside all partisan aims and low ambitions . . . to the end that our Christian and Protestant civilization may maintain its legitimate ascendency. . . ."(75) Christendom would be advanced by the program of radical Republicans.(76) This optimistic faith did not survive Reconstruction (1866-1877), and with its demise perished American Presbyterianism's ideal of Christendom, both North and South.
The Abandonment of the Ideal of Christendom This war-induced theological surrender led to the emasculation of Old School Presbyterianism in the North after the reunion. The Bible had not changed, but the Old School's beliefs regarding slavery had changed. Mullin writes of the Unitarians' response to the Calvinists' exegetical ambivalence on slavery: "Bound by their dogmatic presuppositions and their belief that the Bible contained a perfect moral law, they were unable to deal with the biblical ambivalence towards slavery. The obvious solution . . . was to abandon the belief in the infallibility of Scripture, and instead to acknowledge the historical relativity of the biblical record."(77) Escalating after 1875--but not in the South--this ambivalence led to the acceptance of the premises of biblical higher criticism. In the first half of the nineteenth century, a handful of theologians in New England began to accept the claims and methodology of higher criticism.(78) This increasingly Unitarian-dominated region became the academic headquarters of abolitionism. But it was only after 1875 that higher criticism gained a significant hearing in the North.
Southern Protestantism took a different approach: a world-rejecting experiential pietism that separated the Bible from social and political concerns. Politics became adiaphora, or worse.(79) The South, having staked its legitimacy as a distinctly Christian social order on the armed defense of chattel slavery, suffered psychologically from its military defeat. Its commitment to slavery had been smashed on the battlefield; so had its pre-war commitment to the ideal of Christendom. A Christian social order was henceforth defined in terms of what Christians as individuals do not do, not what their civil representatives say or do in the legislature or court house. A different JC became the politically correct god of the New South: Jim Crow replaced Jesus Christ.
The Southern Old School theologian, James Henry Thornwell, had long favored this view of the institutional Church. Benjamin Palmer reaffirmed it in his opening sermon at the first General Assembly in 1861.(80) This outlook dominated the Southern Church for the next two generations. The social gospel was not welcome in the Southern Presbyterian Church in 1900; the Church was committed to a narrow pietism. The mission the Church, said Robert Ferris, editor of the St. Louis Presbyterian, is not to reform men or corrupt societies; it is not to advance civilization. Its only task is to save souls.(81) This anti-cultural relevance resolve collapsed briefly in 1914 with respect to the Prohibition amendment.(82) The only other social issues that drew criticism from the General Assembly were these: (1) sabbath desecration (Sunday newspapers; running trains on Sundays to deliver the mail on Mondays);(83) (2) "worldly amusements" (dancing, card-playing, theater);(84) anti-lottery legislation;(85) and easy divorce (adultery and desertion only).(86) These were traditional fundamentalist social evils, with Scottish sabbatarianism as a substitute for the fundamentalists' anti-tobacco plank. The General Assembly in 1908 did recommend that employers and parents honor existing child labor laws.(87) That was the extent of its official concern on any economic issue. This perspective was moralism rather than social transformation.
In North and South, the West's ideal of Christendom disappeared after 1865. The kingdom of God either became so immersed in history that it became indistinguishable from culture (modernism), or else it became so transcendent that it lost its judicial authority over culture (fundamentalism). This was a battle between two ideals, both announced in the name of Jesus Christ: the worldwide kingdom of man vs. the pietist ghetto. As they became more consistent over the next century, each side in the fundamentalist-modernist conflict developed the implications of its faith. The modernists believed in history but not in God; the fundamentalists believed in God but not in history. From about 1865 until about 1975, this pattern was only intermittently reversed in fundamentalism, the anti-alcohol crusade, 1900 to 1933, and Bryan's campaign against Darwinism in the public schools, 1921 to 1925, being the only major exceptions.(88) The voters' reaction against Prohibition in 1933, following the orchestrated reaction against Bryan by the chattering class, sent American fundamentalism even deeper into its ghetto. The name adopted by one Baptist splinter group describes fundamentalism's cultural mind-set after 1933: Hard Shell.(89)
War and the Spirit of Unity Once the Civil War began, the 1837 division appeared in retrospect to have been a mistake. In 1862, the Old School General Assembly passed a resolution proposing a "stated annual and friendly interchange of commissioners between the two General Assemblies."(90) The New School received this resolution with pleasure at its May, 1863 General Assembly.(91) At the 1864 Old School General Assembly, an unofficial group of ministers began working for reunion. This was the year that the General Assembly declared slavery to be sinful. They understood what would have to be done to achieve reunion: the resurrection of a spirit of unity. New School leader William Adams subsequently wrote: "Reunion cannot be accomplished, nor is it to be desired, without the restoration of a spirit of unity and fraternity. We believe this spirit exists, and is constantly increasing."(92) National unity during wartime was placing great pressure on regional ecclesiastical divisions. The affairs and needs of the respective civil governments had become the affairs and needs for regional churches. Civil government became the model for regional groupings within the denominations: a sure mark of theological crisis in the Church. When the desires of politicians determine the agendas of the churches, society has moved away from the ideal of Christendom and toward the ideal of humanism's Savior State.
Vindication and Exclusion
With the defeat of the South in 1865, the North's New School seemed vindicated politically and judicially. The U.S. Constitution was amended over the next three years to stamp out all traces of the old slave system, and the South was placed under Reconstruction. Slavery became, in retrospect, the lost cause. The regional civilization that had been built on it was gone with the wind.
Prior to 1864, the Old School had maintained that the Church should not get involved in the political cause of abolition. It rejected the claim of the New School that abolition was a legitimate moral cause. With the total victory of abolitionism in 1865, and with the public acceptance by almost everyone, even in the South, that slavery had in fact been immoral and therefore its defense a deservedly lost cause,(93) the Northern Old School found itself outside the mainstream of American Christianity. Its embarrassment was no doubt compounded in 1867 by the publication of Dabney's wartime manuscript, A Defense of Virginia. Dabney had served Confederate General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson as his chaplain, his aide-de-camp, and later as his biographer.(94) He was unreconstructed in 1867, both theologically and socially. He was a Southern Presbyterian and had been a leading Old School theologian. But in 1864, his recommendation of ecclesiastical union with the Southern New School carried the day.(95) His previous theological objections to the New School had been overcome by his commitment to a dying Confederacy: the common cause of both schools in the South.
The presence of Southern representatives in the Old School had kept the denomination from opposing slavery as a comprehensive moral evil. This had also been true of the New School prior to 1858. But this three-year head start by the Northern New School became crucial retroactively. Only with the departure of Southern Old School members in 1861 could the Northern Old School members begin to consider reunion with the New School. The question was: On whose terms?
In the Re-union Memorial Volume, Old School representative Samuel Miller tried to put as good a face as he could on the Old School's earlier position, going so far as to write: "Sometimes it has been intimated, that pro-slavery tendencies on the part of the Old School were among the most influential causes of the division of 1838. No allegation could be more entirely opposed to historical truth."(96) But this self-serving assertion was denied by William Adams, a New School pastor who served as Chairman of the Joint Committee for reunion in 1867, 1868, and 1869.(97) He served for many years as a professor at Union Seminary. He wrote in the same volume that "the existence of slavery had more to do with the division of the Church than has generally been supposed; and that its entire extinction has been among the many causes which have made the Reunion of the two Northern Assemblies more easy and more certain."(98) While the published documents of the 1837 split indicate that slavery had not been a factor officially, it remained an underlying point of contention. This division of opinion increased over the next two decades, especially after the Southern New School seceded from the New School in 1857. The New School in 1869 was quite open about this division; its members recognized their advantage.
What was the Old School to do? Only by joining with the New School could it re-enter the American ecclesiastical mainstream. But if it joined, it would return as the erring brother who had initially opposed the victorious forces of national unity, social reform, and abolition. The Old School was in no position to bargain after 1865. It would have to join on the judicial terms established by the New School.
"Welcome Home, [Prodigal] Brethren!"
Jonathan Stearns was a leader of New School Presbyterianism. He was a member of the Board of Directors of Union Seminary.(99) He could afford to be magnanimous: "And now the long and troubled drama of New and Old School is at length finished. The seal is on the past, and the future, with its responsibilities, opens before us. And now, forgetting the things that are behind, all the grudges, all the alienations and rivalries of the past, and reaching forth to those things which are before, what have we, but to press towards the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus?"(100) This sounded suspiciously like Lincoln's Second Inaugural address, after the electoral rout of the Democrats: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in. . . ."
Stearns wrote a victory essay disguised as a conciliation essay. His view of Church sanctions was that of the New School, namely, that fights over theology are almost always a liability to the denomination. So, he recommended, let us forgive and forget. Since the reunion had been established on the basis of the New School's principles, the Old School would subsequently have no institutional alternative but to forgive; whether or not Old School members would forget was institutionally irrelevant to the New School. The issue was Church sanctions, and the New School had forever removed themselves from this threat as a condition of unity. Or so it seemed in 1869. In 1936, the threat reappeared: the modernists were not bound by the unofficial terms of the Old School's surrender.
A Question of Confession The New School's defenders had always maintained that their members were full subscriptionists.(101) They made the same defense in the years immediately prior to the reunion. But the problem had not been the New School's confession; it had been the New School's unwillingness to bring negative ecclesiastical sanctions against those who were self-consciously Arminians. The reunion of 1869 necessarily came at the expense of the Old School's far stricter construction of the Westminster Confession and its view of Church discipline. This de-emphasis of judicial standards is always the institutional result, at least temporarily, when a more rigorous, more tightly knit organization joins with a less rigorous organization. The less rigorous organization will refuse to unify with the more rigorous organization unless all members of the new organization are promised immunity from subsequent trials based on the standards of the more rigorous faction. The lowest common denominator of the less rigorous faction becomes the highest judicial standard for the courts of the new organization. It will then take great diligence on the part of the stricter faction to keep the standards from drifting even lower. Loetscher is correct: "Once again in 1869, as in 1758, the Presbyterian Church was restoring unity not by resolving its differences but by ignoring and absorbing them."(102)
Men whose theology had been denounced as heretical by Old School members in the 1830's were now honored brethren. "The result was, of course, that the theological base of the Church (especially of the former Old School branch of the Church) was broadened and the meaning of its subscription formula further relaxed. . . . it would be increasingly difficult to protect historic Calvinism against the variations that might undermine its essential character."(103)
Theology without sanctions becomes mere opinion. The reunion of 1869 spelled the institutional death of the ecclesiastical views of Charles Hodge and Princeton Seminary. Those views could be publicly expressed, but they could no longer be defended through Church discipline except in the rarest of cases--after 1900, in none. After 1878 (the McCune case), the New School would not allow such enforcement without extreme rhetorical provocation from a modernist. The price of union had been the triumph of the New School's position; otherwise, they would not have voted to join with the Old School. Their view of Church order became the new institutional standard. The New School won the battle. It did not win the war, however; that victory went to the modernists. This transfer of power took a little over two generations: 1874-1936, i.e., from David Swing's departure to Machen's.
The Presbyterian conflict after 1874 was a war between Calvinist orthodoxy at one end of the theological spectrum and theological modernism at the other. Typically, no more than ten percent of the members of any organization are committed to either end of the spectrum. The war is always for acceptance by the 80 percent in between. Presbyterian orthodoxy of the Old School (1838-1869) is relatively easy to define: Calvinistic, creedal, and hierarchical. But after the reunion of 1869, this commitment to judicially enforceable Calvinism and creedalism faded rapidly in Northern Presbyterianism. This was the theological legacy of the New School. This decline of respect for the Westminster Confession led to the denomination's capture by the modernists in 1936.
The Price of Unity
The story of the decline of Presbyterian orthodoxy is the story of the decline of respect for the Confession and also the courts of the Church, to the extent that they imposed negative sanctions to enforce the Confession. Charles Hodge fought the reunion right down to the final vote.(104) But the tide was running against him. As his son wrote in his 1880 biography of Hodge, this defeat was the result of "the influence of the general spirit of the age, which deprecates the value of doctrinal distinctions, and emphasizes the value of character, and practical energy and work."(105) The Old School's theology was taught at Princeton Seminary, and Hodge vigorously defended this theology. An historian a decade after the union wrote: "One may well doubt whether any other Christian communion of equal size has ever excelled it as to unity in the reception of an evangelical creed of such extent as the Westminster Confession and Catechisms."(106) But the vote was so overwhelming in 1869--unanimous in the New School's assembly; 285 to 9 in the Old School's(107)--that it was futile to continue the fight.
George Marsden, who was trained at Westminster Seminary before earning his Ph.D. in history at Yale, argues that the New School had become more conservative since 1838.(108) Well, yes and no. On abolition, it became conservative through military victory: abolitionism became the status quo after 1865. Its 1838 position on abolition had not identified slavery as a sin, nor had its 1846 declaration, which is why Southern New School churches stayed on board until 1857. But at the 1866 General Assembly, it took a position favoring Reconstruction, including universal suffrage for blacks: the radical Republican position. There was nothing conservative about New School politics. Then what about New School theology? There was no fixed pattern. The New School's theological heirs were sometimes modernists (e.g., the Union Seminary faculty after 1890) and sometimes fundamentalists (e.g., the Bible Presbyterian Church). The issue I am raising here is ecclesiology. The New School may have affirmed the Confession as a tactic for gaining entry into, and control over, the larger Old School Presbyterian communion, but the deciding issue was not verbal affirmation; it was its willingness to conduct heresy trials in the name of the Confession.(109) After 1900, the New School's resolve collapsed. The unwillingness to prosecute ministers in heresy trials was the New School ecclesiastical tradition. It was interrupted significantly for only one decade, 1891-1900, and only because of one man's rhetoric: Charles A. Briggs.
Without the threat of negative sanctions, the Confession and the catechisms steadily became museum pieces. The modernists' strategy was to defend the legitimacy of verbal profession at the time of one's ordination, but deny the moral legitimacy of Church sanctions to defend the integrity of these professions. This was a strategy that the New School had already established as a de facto policy of the denomination in 1869. It was to lead, step by step, decade by decade, to the capture of Northern Presbyterianism by the modernists.
Conclusion What were the distinguishing features of Old School Calvinist theology? First, the doctrine of God's absolute predestination, including the work of salvation: God's sovereign grace as the sole basis of salvation. Second, the doctrine of hierarchical Church authority: the General Assembly's mandate to enforce the Confession. Third, the doctrine of Confessional separatism: Presbyterian supremacy among ecclesiastical traditions. Fourth, judicialism: personal confession over personal experience as the basis of Church membership. Fifth, anti-ecumenism: hostility to parachurch or interdenominational missionary activity. The New School denied or de-emphasized each of these five points. Without these five points, the Old School-New School conflict would not be understandable: "exclusivists" vs. "inclusivists."(110)
After the reunion of 1869, those in favor of an inclusive, less dogmatic Church could appeal to the New School tradition; conversely, those favoring an exclusive, doctrinal Church had the history of the Old School supporting them. Institutionally, it was not so much a question of a new Church structure over an older form, but rather a question of which tradition to select, the Old School's theological exclusivism or the New School's theological inclusivism. The New School's tradition gained full legitimacy after 1869. The question, "Whose legitimacy?" was answered with the reunion. It had taken a century and a half for Presbyterians to decide. Five years later, modernist minister David Swing would re-open the question again.
The Old School lost its judicial case as early as 1869. (It lost its moral case in 1818: the Bourne Case.) The merger with the New School downgraded the denomination's commitment to a systematic enforcement of the Westminster Confession. This was a replay of the Presbyterian union of 1758. From 1869 on, the Old School was fighting a rear-guard action, defensive rather than offensive.
A defensive strategy is inappropriate for those who proclaim a religion of victory. It was the liberals and modernists in the 1901-36 period who believed in victory and who took systematic steps--institutional and propaganda steps--to achieve it. As Shailer Mathews announced in the two-sentence opening paragraph of The Faith of Modernism (1924): "The world is being reconstructed. Can Christians aid?" Modernists were not fighting a rear-guard action. A Confessionally compromised Old School Calvinism and a peace-seeking New School evangelicalism proved to be unsuited for the kind of full-scale, generations-long battle that had to be fought after 1875. The liberals determined the battlefields and the weapons. They controlled the initiative. They set the agenda. The historic results of the Presbyterian conflict prove that law apart from the willingness to impose appropriate sanctions is impotent. The crucial issue was sanctions.
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Footnotes:
1. Reprinted in The Presbyterian Enterprise: Sources of American Presbyterian History, edited by Maurice W. Armstrong, Lefferts A. Loetscher, and Charles A. Anderson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956), p. 155.
2. Barnes, "The Way of Salvation" (1829), in ibid., p. 146.
3. On the First Great Awakening's ecumenical impulse, see Edwin Scott Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (Chicago: Quadrangle, [1957] 1968), ch. 7.
4. Jacob Harris Patton, A Popular History of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (New York: Mighill, 1900), ch. 41.
5. Barnes, "The Way of Salvation," Presbyterian Enterprise, p. 147.
6. Keith J. Hardman, Charles Grandison Finney, 1792-1875: Revivalist and Reformer (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1987), pp. 310-11. Paperback reprint by Baker Book House.
7. Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, 2nd ed. (New York: Revell, [1835] 1868), p. 276.
8. Gilbert Tennent, "The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry" (1740), in The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences, edited by Alan Heimert and Perry Miller (Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), ch. 9.
9. Winthrop S. Hudson, Religion in America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1865), p. 164.
10. Presbyterian Enterprise, pp. 102-104.
11. Robert Hastings Nichols, Presbyterianism in New York State: A History of the Synod and Its Predecessors (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963), p. 131.
12. Sidney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 468.
13. Robert L. Breckenridge, "Presbyterian Government: Not a Hierarchy, but a Commonwealth" (1843), in Paradigms in Polity, edited by David W. Hall and Joseph H. Hall (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 519.
14. Ibid.
15. On Princeton Seminary's division regarding the expulsion of three of the four synods, see A. A. Hodge, The Life of Charles Hodge, Professor in the Theological Seminary Princeton N.J. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1880), pp. 301, 304. A majority opposed this action.
16. "Book of the General Laws and Liberties Governing the Inhabitants of the Massachusetts, 1647," in The Foundations of Colonial America: A Documentary History, edited by W. Keith Kavenaugh, 3 vols. (New York: Chelsea House, 1973), I:297.
17. "Barnes, Albert," Dictionary of American Religious Biography, p. 31. Finney died in 1875.
18. Channing Renwick Jeschke, The Briggs Case: The Focus of a Study in Nineteenth Century Presbyterian History (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1966), p. 127.
19. Ki-Hong Kim, Presbyterian Conflict in the Early Twentieth Century: Ecclesiology in the Princeton Tradition and the Emergence of Presbyterian Fundamentalism (Ph.D. dissertation, Drew University, 1983), p. 85.
20. This reversal is the subject of Kim's dissertation.
21. Hodge, Life of Charles Hodge, pp. 293-94.
22. "The Acts and Testimony Convention" (1835), Presbyterian Enterprise, p. 151.
23. Ibid., p. 152.
24. Ibid.
25. The reunion legally took place when the presbyteries ratified it in November, 1869. The first General Assembly meeting of the reunited denomination took place in May, 1870.
26. "Testimony and Memorial" (1837), ibid., pp. 153-56.
27. "Testimony and Memorial," Point 1, "In Relation to Church Discipline." Ibid., p. 153.
28. John W. Christie and Dwight L. Dumond, George Bourne and The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable (Historical Society of Delaware and the Presbyterian History Society, 1969), pp. 5-6.
29. Andrew E. Murray, "The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable," American Presbyterians, 66 (Winter 1988), p. 230.
30. Christie and Dumond, Bourne, p. 18.
31. Ibid., p. 26.
32. Reprinted in Gaius Jackson Slosser, ed., They Seek a Country: The American Presbyterians (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 217.
33. On the extent of the maiming, Congregationalist Theodore Weld's Slavery As It Is: The Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839) was eloquent.
34. On the evils of the South's slave system, see Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 232-44.
35. It is reproduced in Christie and Dumond, Bourne., pp. 60-63.
36. Forrest G. Wood, The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1990), pp. 296-97. Marsden's account refers to him as James Bourne. George M. Marsden, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience: A Case Study of Thought and Theology in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 91.
37. Christie and Dumond, Bourne, pp. 78-80; ch. 6.
38. Typical is Slavery Attacked: The Abolitionist Crusade, edited by John L. Thomas (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965), a collection of primary source documents. The book begins with an 1830 essay by William Lloyd Garrison. Bourne's name is nowhere mentioned.
39. Wood, Arrogance of Faith, pp. 303-304.
40. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1845, p. 16. A contemporary history and reprinting of these pronouncements, from 1787 on, as well as the pronouncements of numerous other Protestant denominations, is David Christie, Pulpit Politics; or, Ecclesiastical Legislation on Slavery in its Disturbing Influences on the American Union (Cincinnati, Ohio: Faran & McLean, 1863). The passage is also reproduced in Slosser, ed., They Seek a Country, p. 222.
41. Cited in Slosser, ed., They Seek a Country, p. 226.
42. Lewis G. Vander Velde, The Presbyterian Churches and the Federal Union, 1861-1869 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1932), pp. 126-29.
43. Ibid.
44. The book was reprinted in 1969 by the Negro University Press. For a critique, see North, Tools of Dominion, pp. 190n, 234-35.
45. See R. J. Rushdoony, The Nature of the American System (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1965), ch. 2.
46. Ernest Marshall House, Saints in Politics: The Clapham Sect (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974).
47. Garth Lean, God's Politician: William Wilberforce's Struggle (Colorado Springs, Colorado: Helmers & Howard, [1980] 1987).
48. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1966), pp. 329-32.
49. Ibid., p. xiii.
50. Ibid., p. xiv.
51. Ibid.
52. Editorial, Cleveland Plain Dealer (28 Nov. 1856); cited in ibid., p. 148.
53. Cited in ibid.
54. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 31: "Slaves and Freemen."
55. Davis, Problem of Slavery, chaps. 3, 4, 7; Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), ch. 6.
56. The most comprehensive defense of this position was Rev. John Robinson's The Testimony and Practice of the Presbyterian Church in Reference to Slavery (1852).
57. The problem was: Who would speak representatively in court for the slaves?
58. Robert Bruce Mullin, "Biblical Critics and the Battle Over Slavery," Journal of Presbyterian History, 61 (Summer 1983), p. 215. Cf. J. H. Giltner, "Moses Stuart and the Slavery Controversy: A Study in the Failure of Moderation," Journal of Religious Thought, 18 (1961), p. 31.
59. Ibid., pp. 216-17.
60. Ibid., p. 220.
61. Ibid., pp. 218-19.
62. Charles Hodge, "The Princeton Review on the State of the Country and of the Church," Princeton Review, 38 (1865), p. 637; cited in Jack B. Rogers and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 276.
63. A. A. Hodge, The Life of Charles Hodge, Professor in the Theological Seminary Princeton N.J. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1880), p. 22.
64. Ernest Trice Thompson, Presbyterians in the South, 3 vols. (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1973), I:564-65.
65. Ibid., II:14.
66. John M. Mulder, Woodrow Wilson: The Years of Preparation (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 3.
67. His father once bragged to a barber: "My son, Woodrow, has been made Ruling Elder in the Presbyterian Church. I would rather he held that position than be President of the United States." Spoken for many of us! See Josephus Daniels, The Life of Woodrow Wilson, 1856-1924 (Philadelphia: Winston, 1924), p. 359.
68. Mullin, "Biblical Critics," pp. 221-22.
69. Vander Velde, Presbyterian Churches, p. 199.
70. Ibid., p. 221.
71. Ibid., p. 222.
72. Ibid., p. 279.
73. Ibid., p. 333.
74. Ibid., pp. 358-59.
75. Ibid., p. 359.
76. Charles Hodge wrote to his brother in 1866: "With such outrageously wicked men as [Ben] Butler and [Thaddeus] Stevens to be their representatives and mouthpieces, I do not see what the party can expect. My hope is that the Copperhead Democrats and the Radical Republicans may both be consigned to political extinction. . . ." Reprinted in Hodge, Life of Charles Hodge, p. 486. A decade later, his hope came true.
77. Ibid., p. 222.
78. Jerry Wayne Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800-1870: The New England Scholars (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1969).
79. Cambellite David Lipscomb, publisher of the Gospel Advocate and author of Civil Government, is an example. Before the Civil War, he was a follower of Horace Greeley and a believer in the power of democracy. He believed that the United States had been the first nation founded on the principles of Jesus. After the war, he warned Christians not to vote, lest they pollute themselves with this-worldly politics. Robert E. Hooper, Crying in the Wilderness: A Biography of David Lipscomb (Nashville, Tennessee: David Lipscomb College, 1979), pp. 55-59; ch. 8.
80. Thompson, Presbyterians in the South, II:16.
81. He said this in 1888. Ibid., III:261.
82. Ibid., III:262.
83. Ibid., II:225-26.
84. Ibid., II:229-30. These positions the General Assembly officially held to, though without much enthusiasm.
85. Ibid., II:233.
86. Ibid., II:237-38.
87. Ibid., II:243.
88. After 1975, a growing number of fundamentalists in the U.S. began to abandon their world-rejecting pietism. They began to get involved in politics. The origin of the Christian Right can be dated from this period. Factors responsible for this reversal included these: (1) the reaction against the secularization and academic decline of the public schools and the rise of the Christian school and home school movements; (2) a growing awareness that legalized abortion is not adiaphora; (3) the Presidency of Jimmy Carter, who ran as an optimistic Baptist political outsider and turned out to be a national malaise-preaching Trilateral Commission political insider. The shift of charismatic author Bob Slosser is representative: he wrote The Miracle of Jimmy Carter (Logos Books, 1976) and ghost-wrote Pat Robertson's The Secret Kingdom (Thomas Nelson Sons, 1982). The fundamentalist leaders' dispensational theology also began to slip into the shadows. Cf. Gary North, "The Intellectual Schizophrenia of the New Christian Right," Christianity and Civilization, 1 (1983), pp. 1-40.
89. Yet since 1975, Aesop's story of the tortoise and the hare seems to be coming true. The fast-start modernists are spending more and more time napping at the side of the road.
90. William Adams, "The Reunion," Presbyterian Re-union Memorial Volume, 1837-1871 (New York: De Witt C. Lent & Co., 1870), p. 249.
91. Ibid.
92. Ibid., p. 250.
93. The date of this transformation in the South was late 1864, when the Confederacy began considering an offer to the slaves: join the army and receive your freedom after the war. Once this was even contemplated politically, the slave cause was doomed. To make such an offer meant that black slaves were men, and men want and deserve freedom. See Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still, Jr., How the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), ch. 14. After the War, they write, "Few southerners ever admitted a desire to restore slavery, but thousands confessed relief that war had destroyed the peculiar institution." Ibid., p. 361.
94. Thomas Cary Johnson, The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney (Richmond, Virginia: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1905), ch. 13.
95. Ibid., p. 287.
96. Samuel Miller, "Historical Review of the Church (Old School Branch)," Re-union Memorial Volume, p. 23.
97. William Adams, "Reunion," ibid., pp. 260, 285, 296.
98. Ibid., p. 249.
99. G. L. Prentice, The Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York: Its Design and another Decade of its History (Asbury Park, New Jersey: Pennypacker, 1899), pp. 21-22.
100. Stearns, "Historical Review," Re-union Memorial Volume, pp. 101-102.
101. See, for example, the New School defense: A History of the Division of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America by a Committee of the Synod of New York and New Jersey (New York: Dodd, 1852).
102. Lefferts A. Loetscher, The Broadening Church: a study of theological issues in the presbyterian church since 1869 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), p. 8.
103. Ibid. Loetscher, a liberal, approved of this development.
104. Charles Hodge, "The General Assembly," Princeton Review, 39 (July 1867); Hodge, "Presbyterian Reunion," ibid., 40 (Jan. 1868). The second essay was more moderate in tone.
105. Hodge, Life of Charles Hodge, p. 502.
106. "Presbyterian Churches," in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, edited by John M'Clintock and James Strong, 12 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1879), VIII:535.
107. Marsden, Evangelical Mind, p. 225.
108. Ibid., ch. 11.
109. "Watch what we do, not what we say."
110. A representative study is Loetscher's Broadening Church.