Phase 3: Whose Legality?

6

SHADOW GOVERNMENT, ADMINISTRATIVE LAW

For five or six years, through overtures, committees of investigation, public addresses, newspaper articles, and private conversations, the Presbyterian Church has been voicing its desire for simplification, unification, and centralization, and also for cooperation, solidarity, and mutuality.

Minutes (1911)⁽¹⁾

The leading inquiry in the examination of any system of government must, of course, concern primarily the real depositaries and the essential machinery of power. There is always a centre of power: where in this system is that centre? in whose hands is self-sufficient authority lodged and through what agencies does that authority speak and act?

Woodrow Wilson (1885)⁽²⁾

When he wrote this, Wilson was a 29-year-old graduate student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he was frequently a guest in the Machen household.⁽³⁾ This was his first published book, Congressional Government. He submitted it in 1886 as his Ph.D. dissertation. It was accepted. A decade later, he would become a ruling elder in Second Presbyterian Church in Princeton, an office he would hold in the Presbytery of New Brunswick during most of the period in which Machen refused ordination by that same presbytery because of his theological doubts. Woodrow Wilson had no doubts about theology or anything else.⁽⁴⁾

From 1900 to 1920, there was no clear-cut answer in the Northern Presbyterian Church to Wilson's question: "In whose hands is self-sufficient authority lodged and through what agencies does that authority speak and act?" By 1920 the answer was clear to anyone who cared to look: in the bureaucracies of the Church, including the Executive Commission, which spoke for the General Assembly at least 51 weeks every year. This 1908 creation was the crucial institution for the modernists. If they could take control over it, they would capture the Church. By 1920, they had. They proved in full public view, 1922 to 1926, that the conservatives could not re-gain the control which they had forfeited to the Executive Commission. Warfield on his deathbed in 1921 knew that the battle was lost, but Machen refused to quit. His time of trial had not yet come. Beginning on December 31, 1923, it would.⁽⁵⁾

In acknowledgment of the dawning of a new liberal era, the social gospel liberals who edited the Disciples' magazine, The Christian Oracle, in 1908 changed its name to The Christian Century. The century soon proved to be anything but Christian. As accurate forecasting goes, the original magazine was not much of an oracle.⁽⁶⁾ But from 1908 to 1920, it did seem as though Protestant liberalism in America was destined for an era of ever-greater victories. In just two decades, 1901 to 1920, Presbyterian liberals were able to reverse what had appeared to be an overwhelming victory by the conservatives in 1900.

The question here is that of representation. What did Briggs and Smith represent in 1900? Victory or defeat? The two sides had differing assessments. The conservatives were ready to "put all that behind us; we won." The liberals were ready to do the same thing; they had lost. The conservatives believed they had proved their point. Meanwhile, by remaining inside the Church, the liberals believed they could eventually prove their point. But both sides agreed: the trials of the 1890's should be put behind. And because of this readiness to "put all that behind us," the Presbyterian Church was publicly captured in 1936 by the spiritual heirs of the losers of the 1890's. The leaven of modernism steadily replaced the leaven of orthodoxy.

Theology as a Trifle

In 1901, Robert E. Speer, secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions, spoke eloquently, as he usually spoke, to the General Assembly. He defended the priority of foreign missions and the non-priority of doctrinal "trifles." He implored his audience: "Oh, my friends, our Church needs a supreme world purpose, such as this of which I have been speaking, that will forbid our trifling away the time of God, playing with details while men die."⁽⁷⁾ Thirty-five years later, one year before Speer retired, Machen was publicly de-frocked because of his effort to bring minimal-creed orthodoxy to Speer's Board and, through it, to the Church. In the aftermath of that experience, Machen wrote: "But I am bound to say that I think such doctrinal advance to be just now extremely unlikely. We are living in a time of widespread intellectual as well as moral decadence, and the visible church has unfortunately not kept free from this decadence. . . . Intellectual and moral indolence like ours does not constitute the soil out of which great Christian creeds may be expected to grow."⁽⁸⁾

Machen's words reflected not only his own defeat, but the defeat of Old School Presbyterianism, 1901 to 1903, while he was a student at Princeton Seminary. Machen understood what that defeat meant and how it was manifested: by the Confessional revision of 1903 and its aftermath. Yet even he and his followers retained two of these changes in 1936: the elimination of the Confession's statement that to refuse to take an oath to a lawful agency is a sin (XXII:3), which was the last trace of theocratic language in the 1788 American revision, and the identification of the Pope as the Antichrist (XXV:6),⁽⁹⁾ which was the most widely shared Protestant doctrine of the Reformation. Even in eras in which confessions supposedly should not be revised, confessions can be properly revised. This was a major theological problem for Machen and the Old School: they, too, had crossed their fingers.⁽¹⁰⁾

Speer as the Model Bureaucrat

The opening years of the twentieth century were marked by a shift of theological opinion within the Presbyterian Church: the devaluing of the Westminster standards and all other judicially enforceable creeds. This period was also marked by the beginning of the restructuring of the Presbyterian Church's administrative machinery. The model for this restructuring was the Board of Foreign Missions. Speer, secretary of that Board from 1891 to 1937, was the embodiment of the institutional development, while Henry van Dyke incarnated the theological transformation. Because of Speer's commitment to minimal-creed missions work and ecumenical missions work, he became a spokesman for the minimal-creed umbrella under which van Dyke and his fellow liberals operated safely.

Speer was present at the creation of the Federal Council of Churches in 1908.⁽¹¹⁾ Its organizers had been working at the national level since the 1901 conference held in Philadelphia: the National Federation of Churches. There had been a series of local and regional conferences throughout the 1890's. The Inter-Church Conference of 1905 was the penultimate step.⁽¹²⁾ Historian Sidney Fine writes of the Federal Council that it "was not only a product of the social-gospel movement but became, in effect, the institutional embodiment of the social gospel point of view in American Protestantism. Significantly, the social creed that it adopted in 1908 and amended in 1912 was in perfect accord with the legislative objectives of Progressivism."⁽¹³⁾ In 1920, Speer was elected president of the Council for a four-year term. His fervent plea to the General Assembly in 1923 saved the Federal Council from a cut-off in funding by the Southern Presbyterian Church; the General Assembly had almost voted to secede. A year later, the PCUSA voted for the first time to fund the FCC: $25,000.⁽¹⁴⁾

Speer's language was always pietistic and conciliatory, but his four decades of pleas echoed Henry van Dyke's 1893 manifesto, A Plea for Peace and Work. Speer faithfully hewed the modernists' wood and carried their water. When theological liberals sought an evangelical whose presence would legitimize their undermining of orthodox Christianity, they repeatedly turned to Speer.⁽¹⁵⁾ For over four decades, he helped raise their money, gave them employment, and protected their interests. He did all this as a favor--no strings attached.

Speer walked down the center of the highway between liberalism and orthodoxy, but he always walked in the direction of liberalism. No truck travelling toward orthodoxy ever flattened him, and the liberals granted him the right-of-way. In the name of evangelicalism, Speer baptized Progressivism. But he did not do this alone. He had help from the most important teaching elder in phases three and four of the Presbyterian conflict, a man who began his career as an Old School man.

 

Roberts' Rule of Order

The Church's slow but sure administrative centralization after 1880 made the Stated Clerk of the denomination an increasingly influential figure. This position was filled from 1884 until his death in 1920 by William H. Roberts, a theological conservative.⁽¹⁶⁾ There is no doubt regarding his conservatism. He was fired by Lane Seminary for his stand against higher criticism. The Trustees in 1893 simply abolished the Chair of Practical Theology that he occupied.⁽¹⁷⁾ Yet he did more to further the cause of liberalism than Lane's Henry Preserved Smith ever did.

In 1894, the year of Smith's conviction, the office of Stated Clerk became a full-time position.⁽¹⁸⁾ Roberts became the chief legal officer and chief financial officer of the denomination.⁽¹⁹⁾ He became the Church's statistician, a task for which he was well trained, having worked as a statistician for the U.S. government early in his career.⁽²⁰⁾ He was appointed automatically to the most important committees. He also became the Church's representative in the various Reformed ecumenical organizations.⁽²¹⁾ Perhaps most important from the point of view of the historian, the Stated Clerk edited the Minutes of the General Assembly.⁽²²⁾ He was succeeded in the office of Stated Clerk in 1920 by Lewis Mudge, Speer's classmate from Princeton University. Under Mudge, the centralization process was completed in 1936.⁽²³⁾

In 1905, Roberts became the permanent chairman of the Inter-Church Conference, which organized the Federal Council of Churches.⁽²⁴⁾ In 1908, he became the acting president of the Council,⁽²⁵⁾ and in 1911 became the first secretary of the Council's newly created Commission on Evangelism.⁽²⁶⁾ His 1908 welcome speech before the Federal Council invoked the postmillennial vision of Princeton's theology in front of an assembly of social gospel advocates who were ready to immanentize the kingdom in the name of Progressivism. We must, he said, "hasten the day when the true King of Men shall everywhere be crowned as Lord of all. The Council stands for the hope of organized work for speedy Christian advance toward world conquest. . . . It is marvelous how the presence of the common enemy in heathen lands has brought Christian men to realize their need of unity in thought and work."⁽²⁷⁾ This was the ecumenical vision of Presbyterianism's most entrenched bureaucrat.

Forbes has put it well: the bureaucratization and centralization of the Presbyterian Church paralleled the bureaucratization and centralization of American society generally. "Some historians' preoccupation with the activist and the social gospel applications of American ecumenism, especially that of the Federal Council of Churches, has led to neglect of important institutional implications. The example of William Henry Roberts suggests that the organizing, consolidating impulse of ecumenism may have been more closely related to the bureaucratic, regularizing trends within the nation as a whole then [than] we have previously recognized."⁽²⁸⁾ Roberts served both as the midwife and nursemaid of this administrative process, making life far easier for the liberals whose theology was formally anathema to his, but whom he never bothered to challenge once he had accepted his job as chief bureaucrat. By 1920, when death removed him from the job, the takeover of the administrative machinery by the liberals was complete.

The Pressure to Revise

There had been a brief movement favoring the revision of the Confession, 1889-93. This effort had failed. The Briggs affair erupted in 1891, followed by Smith's conviction in 1894 and then the resignation of McGiffert in 1900, a year that became a turning point for the denomination, although no one recognized it at the time.

The removal of these three modernists, two by court action, was accomplished because of their offense against the Bible and biblical truth, not because of a concerted effort by the courts to defend Calvinistic sections of the Confession. Confrontational rhetoric had sunk Briggs, not ministerial concern over a defense of the Confession. The trials had revealed that the Confession was institutionally vulnerable. The modernists wasted no time in calling this vulnerability to the attention of the Church. They had the cooperation of the New School.

When a Church decides not to impose sanctions to enforce a creed, it will either revise its creed or ignore it forever. But Presbyterianism in 1900 could not abandon the Confession, so it would have to be revised. In 1900, the next wave of pressure to revise the Confession began. The General Assembly was petitioned by over three dozen presbyteries to begin consideration of revision. The Old School recognized this for what it was: an attempt to depart from the rigor of the Confession. Once again, the Old School was on the defensive. The liberal agenda regarding Confessional revision had returned to center stage: exactly where it had been in 1889, as if nothing had happened in between.

The Old School's defense would depend on their ability to persuade ruling elders that they should defend the Confession with the same enthusiasm that they defended the Bible. With respect to the reliability of the Bible, the ruling elders were generally in agreement with the Old School. But the Old School had a problem: confessions are man-made documents. Members of the Old School could not defend the Confession with the same confidence that they could defend the Bible. As for the two catechisms, relatively few Presbyterians were familiar with them. The last major commentary on the Shorter Catechism was Congregationalist Samuel Willard's Complete Body of Divinity (1726). The Larger Catechism has had only one major commentator.⁽²⁹⁾ The two catechisms were museum pieces, especially the Larger Catechism. People paid public respect to them; they did not pursue heretics by means of them. The Old School might have screened ministerial candidates with the Larger Catechism's answers 60 and 86b on final judgment, but the day of pursuing previously ordained and rhetorically discreet heretics never arrived.

Revision and Re-definition

In 1901, a 25-man committee under the chairmanship of Henry van Dyke was assigned the task of making recommended revisions in the Confession. That the New School majority would trust van Dyke with this responsibility indicates that the transition away from Calvinism was well advanced. He was widely regarded as the leader of Briggs' forces in 1893.⁽³⁰⁾ He was the pastor of New York City's Brick Church. He was a liberal who, more than any other liberal, was active in the middle three phases of the Presbyterian conflict, from his support for creedal revision in 1889 to his work in revising the Presbyterian hymnal in 1933, the year of his death. Beginning in 1889, during the first move to re-write the Confession, he had affirmed the salvation of all dying infants, the love of God for the whole world, and Christ's atonement for all mankind.⁽³¹⁾ He announced the Pelagian doctrine that "no man is lost save for his own sins," a denial of the doctrine of original sin. "Is this Calvinism? I do not know. I do not care. It is Christianity."⁽³²⁾ He was, of course, lying through his teeth for rhetorical purposes. He was a careful scholar of Calvin. He knew that he was no Calvinist. Not long afterward, he offered a prize of $100--worth over $2,000 in today's money--to anyone who could show that Calvin ever affirmed that all children dying in infancy are elect.⁽³³⁾ No one challenged him; he was correct regarding Calvin's silence. Van Dyke denied the Confession's doctrine that Christ died to save only the elect (III:6). He prepared a non-binding statement on the Church's faith. Neither biblical inerrancy nor reprobation was mentioned.

His Committee's report sailed through the 1902 General Assembly in two hours of debate.⁽³⁴⁾ There were only two dissenting votes.⁽³⁵⁾ In that same year, he was elected Moderator of the General Assembly.⁽³⁶⁾ He also served as the primary editor of the revised The Book of Common Worship, which the 1906 General Assembly accepted, though not without heated debate. (When asked in the early 1930's what rule the committee should follow at a meeting at which he was unable to attend, he replied: "Eliminate all hymns that mention hell; Hell is nothing to sing about."⁽³⁷⁾)

In 1903, the committee's proposed revisions were ratified by the presbyteries. There were four changes. First, a missions-related affirmation that God loves humanity in general and seeks the salvation of all mankind--a denial, in other words, of God's "double predestination" of fallen mankind to either heaven or hell (III). The Old School correctly saw this as a move toward the Arminian doctrine of general redemption. It was a move against the L in TULIP: limited atonement, meaning particular redemption. Second, there was an affirmation that all infants who die are elect (X:3). This the Old School had accepted long before. It was a denial of Paul's express teaching regarding God's hatred of at least one unborn infant, Esau (Rom. 9:10-13). Third, a denial that the Pope is the Antichrist (XXV:6). Fourth, dropping the statement that it is sinful to refuse a legal oath (XX:3). All in all, this constituted a weakening of the 1788 faith, but these changes were not of the same theological magnitude as the universal "crossed fingers" strategy regarding the six-day creation. The Old School had capitulated to geological science on the six-day creation; quibbling over the L in TULIP was hardly worth the effort. The Old School could live with these changes, but it could not prosper.

The proposed revisions received very little opposition from the Old School. Princeton Seminary ran a single article in its new journal, The Princeton Theological Review, two and a half pages long, written by a very minor Hodge, Edward B., who opposed all the changes, although "We have no particular zeal about the proposed change in the action relating to the Pope."⁽³⁸⁾ His rhetoric was appropriate for a scholarly journal: formal, subdued, clinical. It was not appropriate, however, for a last-ditch defense of historic Presbyterianism by the Old School.⁽³⁹⁾

The Old School was now boxed in by the "love of God" revision: an obvious denial of Calvinism's doctrine of particular redemption. The Church in 1903 adopted what is commonly known as four-point Calvinism. It was possible for most New School Calvinists to accept such a doctrine, and had been since at least 1837, but not the Old School. Old School fingers would now have to be crossed.⁽⁴⁰⁾ (One of the first acts of Machen's newly formed Presbyterian Church of America was to rescind this clause of the 1903 revision, which led to a rhetorically mischievous headline in the November 25, 1936, issue of The Christian Century: "Dr. Machen's Church Drops the Love of God.")

Word Games

While the new position on universally elect infants allowed the Old School to uncross its collective fingers, the "love of God" plank forced a re-crossing, and on what appeared to be a much more fundamental issue. But it really was the same issue. If God universally loves infants, and every person begins as an infant, it takes no advanced training in logic to conclude that God does extend His love to mankind in general. Only as infants grow older--how old, no four-point Calvinist theologian wants to say--do they come under God's condemnation.

From 1903 forward, the Old School found itself in a condition similar to the modernists in the denomination. To remain in the denomination, the Old School would now have to find a way to re-define God's universal love, making its interpretation different in theological substance from the New School's, but identical in verbal profession. Even Warfield was reduced to playing this verbal game in 1904: "It would not be true to say that either the Declaratory Statement or the whole mass of the revision accomplished in 1903 in any way or to any degree modifies our doctrinal system: though it may possibly be true that some elements of truth not always recognized as provided in our doctrinal system are emphasized in it."⁽⁴¹⁾

The Old School wanted to remain inside the denomination, but to do so, its members had to consent to a verbal modification of a fundamental implication of Calvinism's doctrine of particular redemption: God's unique love for His people and His hatred of everyone else.⁽⁴²⁾ They could remain in the denomination in the hope of capturing it; the modernists also remained in order to capture it. Unlike the Old School, however, the modernists had a strategy to achieve their goal.

There was a conscience problem here. The modernists' self-justification since Briggs' Whither? had been to stress that the Old School's fudging on the Confession was judicially the equivalent of disbelieving whole portions of it. With respect to the Westminster Assembly of 1643-47, the Old School's fudging was hardly minor, but compared to Briggs' fudging, it was minor. Crossing one's fingers was a mere tactic for the modernists, not a moral issue. But the Old School had always presented its moral case against the modernists because of this modernist tactic. "State your objections publicly or get out," the Old School had insisted. The Old School would now be at a psychological disadvantage in any confrontation with the modernists. They had stated their theological objections; the New School had outvoted them; yet the Old School's members stayed right where they were.

All three factions in the denomination were playing the same game of "let's pretend" regarding the 1788 standards, let alone the 1647 standards. The modernists thought this was clever; the New School was too interested in Church growth and institutional peace to care; but the Old School found itself with its moral confidence missing. Unlike the members of the Christian Reformed Church who would depart on principle to form the Protestant Reformed Church in 1924 after the CRC added the plank on God's favor toward mankind in general in 1923, the Old School decided in 1903 to remain in the denomination by continuing to play the game. But how could the Old School speak judicially as self-conscious Calvinists in future denominational assemblies? Its members couldn't. This is why 1903 marks the institutional end of the Old School's resistance in the name of Confessional Calvinism. In 1910, they would invoke a new, watered-down confession.

Four-Point Calvinism with Arminian Sanctions

Prior to 1903, it was not yet clear that the Westminster Confession could no longer be enforced in the denomination through the imposition of negative Church sanctions. After 1903, this became more clear. In 1903, the Presbyterian Church became a four-point Calvinist denomination.

The revised Confession only hinted at what was a much deeper change. It established a new low for the lowest common denominator. Practically, the Confession could no longer be enforced, although no one was sure of this until 1936. The issue was Church court sanctions, not the precise terminology of the revised Confession. The 1903 Westminster Confession remained the denomination's official standard until 1967, but it would be naive and utterly misleading to say that the denomination was Calvinist in, say, 1962, just because the 1903 version of the Westminster Confession was still on the books. Thus, Longfield's comment is misleading: "Though doctrinal interpretation can always be a matter of debate, it seems clear that the confessional revision of 1903 hardly made the Presbyterian Church an Arminian body."⁽⁴³⁾ Longfield mistakes form for content. The primary judicial issue after 1869 was not the Calvinist content of the Westminster Confession; the primary issue was sanctions: the judicial penalties undergirding the ordination oath and readily enforceable by Church courts. After 1869, no one was ever publicly challenged in a Presbyterian court for having denied any uniquely Calvinist doctrine in the Confession. The judicial rule is unbreakable: no sanctions--no oath. The Calvinism of the Confession had been a dead letter since the reunion.

Secession or Dilution?

Why didn't the Calvinists secede in 1903? There were two legal precedents for a split: 1741 and 1837-38. The historian can only speculate. Whatever the reason, it must have had something to do with their psychological acceptance of this downgrading of theology and an upgrading of their expected benefits for remaining inside. They were not being openly forced out, unlike the tiny band that would depart in 1936. They were only being asked (implicitly) to continue to cross their fingers, just as everyone had been doing for a generation. In 1903, the Arminian majority publicly shoved the crossed-fingers tactic down the collective throat of the Old School, to see if the Old School would gag. No one gagged. The game of "let's pretend" continued: "Let's pretend that this denomination is still defined judicially by the Westminster Confession of Faith. Let's pretend that its courts will occasionally bring negative sanctions against ministers who preach against the Confession's clauses." The price of remaining inside the Church seemed small. It proved to be huge: the eventual capture of the denomination's assets by the modernists. This inheritance went to those who rejected the Confession.

A person with theologically crossed fingers cannot make a fist. To fight with crossed fingers, you must be prepared to poke out your opponent's eyes. The modernists were prepared to do just this, since they had survived inside Presbyterianism only by throwing sand in their opponents' eyes. The Old School refused to poke out anyone's eyes, but they could not make a collective fist. The Old School ceased to fight for its theology after the 1903 Confessional revisions. At most, its members would support the majority evangelicals who did not define their theology in terms of the Confession. This permanent back-up position indicates that the overwhelming numerical majority which the Old School had enjoyed in 1870 had evaporated by 1903. Refusing to enforce its unique tenets when it had the votes, 1870 to 1900, the Old School had lost both its sense of responsibility for the life of the Church and its ability to recruit large numbers of men dedicated to its tenets.

Dilution: The Cumberland Petition

In 1903, the Old School may have entertained some hope for the recapture of the denomination, or hope at least that things would not get any worse. If so, they were deluded; things got worse almost immediately. At the 1903 General Assembly, several presbyteries of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church made an overture to reunite with the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.⁽⁴⁴⁾ This would heal a split that had begun in 1810 and had become official in 1813. That split had been forthrightly doctrinal; the Cumberland Presbyterians had regarded the Presbyterian Church as too Calvinistic. The Cumberland Presbyterian Church had not changed its opinion of Calvinism. What had changed was the public confession of the Presbyterian Church. Warfield saw what was coming: another series of excruciating--for Old School members--redefinitions of words. "It is distressingly easy for signatories of differing traditions to attach differing interpretations to documents they sign in common."⁽⁴⁵⁾

Warfield had speculated in 1904 that perhaps the union would come about because the Cumberland Presbyterians had at long last abandoned their Arminianism.⁽⁴⁶⁾ Ho, ho, ho; and, we might add, ha, ha, ha. As surely as the Old School had capitulated to the New School in 1869 and again in 1903, so did the Presbyterian Church capitulate to the Cumberland Presbyterians in 1906. The lowest common theological denominator was lowered again. After 1906, any successful institutional defense against modernism could be made only in terms of Arminianism's theology. Again, the issue was sanctions: a Church is defined by the oath-bound confession that it is willing to defend through the imposition of judicial sanctions.

The documents were signed in 1906. Over 1,100 Cumberland Presbyterian ministers joined the Church,⁽⁴⁷⁾ increasing the number of ministers from 7,848 to 9,031.⁽⁴⁸⁾ Something in the range of 90,000 Cumberland Presbyterians entered the Church; 54,000 remained behind.⁽⁴⁹⁾ Yet the actual number of Presbyterian churches began a long decline, from over 11,000 in 1907 to just under 10,000 in 1908, and from there to 9,565 in 1926.⁽⁵⁰⁾ This was due to consolidation, since the number of total members continued rising. The number of ministers with churches remained in the range of 6,000.⁽⁵¹⁾ Some 23 percent of ordained Presbyterian ministers were not employed as ministers after 1910; others were employed as chaplains, missionaries, and teachers.⁽⁵²⁾ Only about 45 percent of ordained ministers were employed as pastors after 1910.⁽⁵³⁾ This means that an amazing number of churches could not afford a full-time pastor. Even as late as 1926, there were almost 2,000 vacant pulpits.⁽⁵⁴⁾

The Sovereignty of the General Assembly

One Old School member, Rev. John Fox, filed a protest against the 1904 General Assembly during the meeting. Patton supported this protest. Fox claimed that the proposed reunion was based on the General Assembly's claim earlier in the meeting that it possessed the authority to interpret the Confession. The General Assembly had stated that the 1903 revision had created a new state of judicial affairs with respect to the Cumberland Church: ". . . such agreement now exists between the systems of doctrine contained in the Confessions of Faith of the two Churches as to warrant this Union--a Union honoring alike to both." Such authority, Fox insisted, did not exist at the General Assembly level. The General Assembly replied by saying it did possess such authority.⁽⁵⁵⁾ But did it? The future of the denomination would hinge on just this claim.

Prior to 1934, the modernists denied that the Assembly possessed such initiatory legislative authority. It could not "lay down the law." Technically, this interpretation was correct. In reality, the Assembly-as-Supreme-Court could indeed lay down the law merely by predictably enforcing the Confession and by standing ready to try on appeal an endless stream of lower court cases. This the Calvinists proved unwilling to do even before 1900: a defense of Calvinism. When it became clear in 1936 that the modernists were willing to do exactly this, they captured the denomination. They did not have to prosecute streams of cases, because their opponents knew they were quite willing to do this if necessary. Like a man who does not have to fight because he is ready to fight, so were the Presbyterian liberals after 1936.

Alliances vs. the Broadening Church

The doctrines which the Old School shared with Arminians were far more rigorous judicially than modernism's evolutionary creed. After 1906, Calvinists and Arminians shared a common enemy within the camp. Meanwhile, modernists were working within the denomination quietly but steadily. There would be no replay of Briggs' confrontational rhetoric until 1922.

Despite the conservatism of the Presbyterian Church and its reputation as being reactionary in social questions, it was the first American Protestant denomination to pursue an active social gospel program through the efforts of a paid secretary in one of its national boards. In 1903, the year of the revision, Rev. Charles Stelzle was appointed to head up the newly created Workingmen's Department (later changed to the Presbyterian Department of Church and Labor), a part of the Church's Board of Home Missions. He was an active proponent of Christian socialism at the turn of the century.⁽⁵⁶⁾ He advocated that the Church recognize the good points of socialism, and that "the working classes should be informed that the church does not endorse the present social system." He wrote this in Christianity's Storm Center, published in 1907, the year after the Cumberland reunion.⁽⁵⁷⁾ He resigned in 1912 due to budget cuts.⁽⁵⁸⁾ By then, the General Assembly had formally affirmed its commitment to the social platform of the Federal Council of Churches.⁽⁵⁹⁾ Stelzle was then hired by the Council.⁽⁶⁰⁾ There had been one brief attempt by his presbytery to examine his socialistic views, but the committee assigned to investigate him recommended that the matter be dropped, which it was. Stelzle reminded the denomination of this in 1915.⁽⁶¹⁾

A Question of Boundaries

One Princetonian did articulate his opposition to a denomination broad enough to encompass modernism. In an article presumably written before the Cumberland reunion became official and published in The Princeton Theological Review (July 1906), William Brenton Greene identified the broad Church movement as ecumenist, anti-creedal, and sinful. He had commented a decade earlier to the connection between Briggs and the movement toward a broader Church.⁽⁶²⁾ He contrasted what he called broad churchism with a federation: the first is anti-creedal; the second is pro-creedal. He pulled no rhetorical punches. He asserted his belief that "Broad Churchism is one of the great foes of Christian living; . . . The Broad Church attitude of mind is essentially sinful. . . . First, it tends toward mental suicide." It cannot make distinctions, he said.⁽⁶³⁾ "The other and the more significant aspect of the sinfulness of the Broad Church attitude is that it expresses indifference to God and thus is a direct insult to Him Himself."⁽⁶⁴⁾ It is "rooted in indifference to truth in general and to religious truth in particular."⁽⁶⁵⁾ This was a foretaste of what Machen would preach and write in the final phase of the Presbyterian conflict, but it was not typical of Old School rhetoric in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Greene and his colleagues would soon face a problem: in order to resist successfully the broad Church vision of men such as Stelzle, a new alliance--Greene called it a federation--would be required. The arrival of the Cumberland Presbyterians had already broadened the denomination. The question then became: How broad was the new Confessional boundary? To keep an effective restraining force against another extension of this boundary, the Old School would have to form an alliance with those who did not share its commitment to the Westminster Confession. It was no longer a question of a conservative ecumenical alliance, which Greene supported; it was now a question of saving the denomination from the acids of modernism.

To consummate this alliance, the Old School had to pay a price: the abandonment of any lingering hope of using the Westminster Confession as a test of orthodoxy. This judicial situation had in fact been the institutional reality since 1869, but only a few modernists would say this in public. The Old School after 1906 could not admit publicly that it had agreed in principle to this intra-Church alliance. It was the old problem of the lowest common denominator. The Old School had already joined a theologically less rigorous group, the New School; it therefore had to sacrifice a commitment to the enforcement of the old standards. But its members never had admitted this. To have admitted this would have meant committing theological suicide in public. It would have been an admission that Charles Hodge had been correct about the New School and the reunion of 1869. It was too late for that in 1906. So, members of the Old School would once again have to cross their fingers in silence. They preferred this slow strangulation of Calvinism to jumping out of the ecclesiastical window. In 1936, their spiritual heirs--vastly reduced in number and strength by this legacy of compromise--were publicly pushed out of the window.

The Great Restructuring: 1908

The Cumberland reunion was an institutional turning point for Northern Presbyterianism: the most important institutional turning point since 1869. The arrival of so many Cumberland Presbyterians offered an opportunity for the liberals to extend their control. The reunion justified a major alteration of Presbyterian government. The call for this alteration began in 1906, the year of the reunion. Each denomination had its own boards. Shouldn't they be consolidated?

Before the 1906 General Assembly convened, six overtures endorsed by 114 presbyteries,⁽⁶⁶⁾ known collectively as the Cleveland Overture, had been circulated. This overture called for consolidation of the benevolent agencies of the Church as well as "additional improvements in the administrative agencies of the Church. . . ."⁽⁶⁷⁾ The twin issues were money and the consolidation of the boards. The issue of consolidation would not be settled until the 1924 General Assembly, when the boards were finally restructured. The issue of the allocation of money never did get settled.⁽⁶⁸⁾ In 1906, the General Assembly created a Special Committee on Administrative Agencies. It reported back in 1907.

One problem, the committee said, was this: "The Boards are not provided for in our Form of Government, but have been born of sheer necessity."⁽⁶⁹⁾ This had long been the most important institutional problem facing American Presbyterianism, the one which had split the Church in 1837: the debate over parachurch missions. The boards, like Presbyterian seminaries and colleges, had no official position in the original Presbyterian system of hierarchical authority. These institutions had grown up outside of the formal authority structure of the Church. From the day that the College of New Jersey had opened its doors in 1746, this structural indeterminacy had allowed the acids of academic humanism to invade the Church, just as they had been doing since the invention of the university in the twelfth century.⁽⁷⁰⁾ President John Witherspoon had announced in 1776: "Every question about forms of church government is so entirely excluded that . . . if they [the students] know nothing more of religious controversy than what they have learned here, they have that Science wholly to begin."⁽⁷¹⁾ The College's ecumenical spirit was unmistakable.

The committee's statement raised a two-fold question of hierarchy and sanctions: the enforcement of covenantal oaths. The boards had an added degree of immunity from sanctions, either formally or operationally. Legally, they were chartered as separate organizations with their own boards of trustees, and often with their own sources of funding outside the General Assembly. So, judicial sovereignty was completely outside the presbyteries, and economic sovereignty was clouded. Yet Presbyterian law lodges primary sovereignty in the presbytery, to which ministers belong. Two crucial institutional questions are these: "Who's in charge here?" (sovereignty) and "To whom do I report?" (authority). The Presbyterian structure of government did not provide clear answers in the case of the boards. The Church lost its ability to answer the third institutional question: "What are the rules?" It also lost the ability to deal with the fourth institutional question: "What do I get if I obey or disobey?" (sanctions).

Representation

Another problem, the committee said, was that there was no agency to speak for the Church. The Moderator has no executive functions. The Committee complained: "How different this phase of our organization is, when compared with the political government of our country and with the organization of other Churches. . . ."⁽⁷²⁾ This problem was an aspect of point two of the covenant: representation in between assemblies and meetings. "In episcopally organized churches there is not a day in the year in which executive officers are not charged with the responsibility of oversight of the Church at large and in each subdivision of it, and they are ready to improve opportunities for advancing the interests of the Church as these opportunities arise. In our Church, on the other hand, it is only the individual church that is thus completely organized."⁽⁷³⁾ Being Presbyterians, they could not call for bishops. Being Presbyterians, they called for more bureaucracy.

This is the recurring dilemma of Presbyterian government: the question of representation. There is an anomaly above the local congregation, where the pastor speaks for the local church. There is no comparable representative above the congregational level. There is no spokesman. But in a large organization, there must be spokesmen, each with authority to speak representatively. Even during the annual General Assembly, most questions cannot be answered by a formal vote. So, the crucial institutional question is this: "How should each bureaucratic unit within the Presbyterian Church sanction a spokesman who is himself under sanctions of that unit?" That was what the 1907 General Assembly tried to answer. Its answer--the committee's recommended answer--restructured the Presbyterian Church.

The 1907 General Assembly sent down a proposal to the presbyteries authorizing the creation of Executive Commissions at the presbytery, synod, and General Assembly levels. This was passed by the presbyteries in 1907-8 by a vote of 156 out of 279,⁽⁷⁴⁾ a close but irreversible majority, as subsequent events proved. The Form of Government was amended. But no rules governing the actual structure of these Executive Commissions had been included in the original proposal. The General Assembly would decide how the system would look at the General Assembly level. If this was not binding legislative authority by the General Assembly, then nothing is.

The Committee on Administrative Agencies proposed in 1908 that the GA's new Executive Commission be composed of eight ministers and seven ruling elders, each with a term of three years, with the terms overlapping. The Stated Clerk would be the Secretary of the Executive Commission. He would be the primary source of organizational continuity. This is why two men, Roberts and his successor Lewis Mudge, would become crucial figures in the Presbyterian conflict. No paid agents of the boards or commissions could serve, nor could any General Assembly permanent officer be a member.⁽⁷⁵⁾

The Flow of Funds

The suggested list of the Executive Commission's duties was as follows: (1) receive financial reports; (2) prepare a tentative annual denominational budget; (3) consult with boards and permanent agencies on how to collect the funds.⁽⁷⁶⁾ Notice the primary frame of reference: budgeting and collecting. Then an open-ended clause was added: "To discharge such other executive or administrative duties as the General Assembly may from time to time require; and from time to time to recommend to the General Assembly such action concerning the needs or work of the Church as the Commission may deem wise."⁽⁷⁷⁾

With this seemingly innocuous clause, the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., was definitively transformed the moment the General Assembly voted to accept the committee's report: May 28, 1908. The General Assembly's one-week-per-year body now had a permanent head: the Executive Commission. Initiative immediately shifted to the top. It never shifted back. The Form of Government now allowed a comprehensive series of Executive Commissions at the synod and presbytery level.⁽⁷⁸⁾ These became shadow bureaucracies that were easier for the central Executive Commission to coordinate. The committee's report recommended that the General Assembly instruct the presbyteries to appoint their own Commissions, and also instruct them "to cooperate with the Executive Commission of the General Assembly, in any way within their power, to secure from all the churches their fair share of contributions needed for the work of all our Boards."⁽⁷⁹⁾ Thus arrived the politics of the fair share,⁽⁸⁰⁾ announced two years before England adopted an income tax and five years before the United States did. (The Church sets the pattern for the State.) The next year, this rule was added: "It is made the duty of the Executive Commission to recommend to the General Assembly annually the amount of money that should be appropriated to each Board and other Permanent Agency for a given year; . . ."⁽⁸¹⁾

Control over the budget is one of the crucial marks of sovereignty in any organization. The ability to collect the revenues mandated in the budget is even more crucial in non-market institutions.⁽⁸²⁾ The Executive Commission possessed the first mark of sovereignty: budgeting; it did not possess the second. Laymen still held the purse strings. The Presbyterian conflict was fought by conservatives in the name of theology, and by liberals in the name of institutional peace (pre-1934) and institutional authority (post-1933); but the chief spoils of victory were the hierarchy's moral access to laymen's purses, followed by a flow of funds.

No Resistance, 1908-1925

There is no indication that the conservatives strongly opposed this restructuring, organized against it, or even recognized what it might mean for the Church. There was no public resistance to it until 1926, when the Presbytery of Chester, perhaps the most conservative presbytery in the denomination, submitted an overture calling for a return to "the same condition that existed before the Executive Commission was created in 1908."⁽⁸³⁾ Too late; 1926 was the year that the liberals took complete control of the General Assembly.

Conservatives chose to fight over the issue of theology; the crucial institutional issue, however, was sanctions--in this case, economic sanctions: positive and negative. The issue after 1908 was control over the flow of funds.

Showdown in 1910

In 1909, the New York Presbytery again became the center of theological conflict when three men were ordained over the objections of a determined minority. The minority appealed to the General Assembly in 1910. The response to that appeal would lay the judicial foundations of Machen's struggle in the mid-1920's.

The three men had refused to assent to the doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ. They responded to their critics by saying that they did not actually deny the doctrine; they just were "not prepared to affirm it with the same positiveness as for some other doctrine."⁽⁸⁴⁾ (I wonder what that other doctrine might have been.) The General Assembly dismissed the complaint against them--no further negative sanctions--but instructed the Committee on Bills and Overtures to prepare a statement for governing future licensures by the presbyteries.

Here is the problem: the General Assembly was not authorized to accept or dismiss a complaint. It was authorized only to demit the complaint back to the presbytery. It could also instruct the Presbytery of New York to conduct a heresy trial. By doing this, the General Assembly would have created a way to render judgment in the case if someone in the New York Presbytery appealed to the Synod of New York, and from there to the General Assembly. That is, the only way the General Assembly could act authoritatively in such a matter was to launch the process of heresy trials by commanding the New York Presbytery to hold a trial. The General Assembly refused to do this. Instead, it pretended that it had initiatory legislative authority.

The Assembly had taken this position in 1904 when it asserted its authority to interpret the Confession, a claim unsuccessfully challenged by Old School minister John Fox. But the General Assembly had no legal authority to instruct the presbyteries to do anything other than hold trials. A majority vote of the presbyteries could initiate a change in procedural requirements; a two-thirds majority was required for any doctrinal change. The General Assembly could try cases; it could not officially serve as a legislative body. Only by a determined willingness to try cases and hand down consistent, predictable judgments could it become, functionally, a legislative body. But it refused to try the three cases. It pretended that it was a legislative body. In the 1920's, this tactic would explode in the faces of the conservatives with the Auburn Affirmation. Had the three been de-frocked in 1910, the conservatives might have been given an extra generation of control. As it turned out, they had only a decade remaining to them.

The Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910

The General Assembly adopted a five-point doctrinal statement that came to be called the Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910. These five points were announced as "necessary and essential" doctrines--the same language as found in the 1729 Adopting Act that had created the Church. The five points were: the inspiration of the Bible by the Holy Spirit, error-free; the virgin birth of Jesus; the atonement; the bodily resurrection of Christ; and the historical reality of Christ's miracles.⁽⁸⁵⁾ There was nothing distinctively Calvinistic about any of them. They were reaffirmed by the General Assembly in 1916 and 1923.

This Deliverance was evidence of fundamental changes that were going on within the denomination. First, it was a statement that "fundamentalists"--this term first appeared a decade later--and theologically moderate evangelicals could accept. It was in no sense visibly Calvinistic. Second, it indicates that some presbyteries were still having trouble with ordained men, or candidates for ordination, who were verbally accepting the Westminster Confession, but only with mental qualifications that enabled them to hold heretical views of the fundamentals of the faith. This was a strategy of concealment condemned as "Jesuitical" by over three centuries of Protestants. The presbyteries supposedly needed a supplemental creed to assist them in their screening task. The obvious question was this: If the most rigorous and detailed Confession in Church history could not serve as a screening device, what difference would five common-ground fundamentalist paragraphs do to improve things?

Crossed fingers had undermined the presbyteries; they were no longer strongly committed to the original Westminster standards. The New School men were uncomfortable with using them as screening devices. So were the Cumberland Presbyterians. As far as there is any public record, no Northern Presbyterian spokesman after 1859 believed the Confession in the area of creationism. The ecclesiastical unions of 1869 and 1906 had brought men into the denomination who were opposed to the 1788 standards of the Westminster Confession, or at least its more rigorously predestinarianism elements. The orthodoxy of the Old School had been diluted in 1869 and then swamped after 1906. A "broadening Church" was in fact what they had worried about in 1869, and had finally capitulated to in the name of Christian unity. Thus, in order to provide the presbyteries with theological ammunition that they would be both willing and able to use--"short and sweet," as the saying goes, or "down and dirty," from the modernists' perspective--the General Assembly announced the Doctrinal Deliverance.

The problem faced by the conservatives after 1906 was how to call a halt to a further extension of this broadening process. A denomination that had been broadened sufficiently to include both the New School and the Cumberland Presbyterians could not easily be limited, as a matter of principle, to exclude others whose views were even farther away from historic Presbyterianism. The bulk of the conservatives were now unwilling to declare as judicially binding the more predestinarian and "exclusivist" aspects of the Westminster standards--for example, the eternal hatred by God of all unbelievers. Without a willingness to be bound by these "exclusivist" restrictions, they could not bind others, should these others be equally willing to affirm their faith in the Confession as a whole while not believing in numerous propositions of the Confession. They could vote on an ad hoc basis to keep this or that candidate out of a particular presbytery, but any invocation by evangelicals and outright modernists of "Church unity above creedal details" could hardly be rejected by Presbyterians who were themselves unwilling to affirm the more exclusivist aspects of historic Calvinism. They had made the Confession more inclusive in 1903, and this in the long run made the denomination inclusivist. Ideas do have consequences for the operation and development of institutions.

The Social Deliverance of 1910

There was a second Deliverance at the 1910 General Assembly. It has been neglected in most histories of the period. It has not been capitalized by the historians, indicating its supposed secondary importance. But it deserves to be capitalized, for it served as a window into the Church's future. Attendees voted to accept a 14-point Deliverance submitted by the Special Committee on Social Problems, which had been set up in 1909.⁽⁸⁶⁾ This Deliverance was a re-written version of the Federal Council of Church's 1908 program for social reconstruction. The Presbyterian version called for, among other things, "a more equitable distribution of wealth" and "the abatement of poverty."⁽⁸⁷⁾ Then the General Assembly directed the Board of Publication and Sabbath-school Work to print and distribute 10,000 copies of this Deliverance.⁽⁸⁸⁾ So, the liberals' social agenda was ratified by the same General Assembly that established the five-point evangelical Deliverance. This platform was reaffirmed in 1913⁽⁸⁹⁾ and 1914.⁽⁹⁰⁾

Also in 1910, the General Assembly approved a report that announced: "All these new questions can not be solved by one Church alone, nor one denomination alone. There must be a combination of the Churches--a united, persistent effort to lift society, in both Church and State, or the Republic is doomed. Realizing this, the Church bodies formed the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, popularly called the Inter-Church Federation. The work of the Inter-Church Federation is the rousing in all our churches and citizens to the solving of the great religious and social problems of our day."⁽⁹¹⁾

I argue that 1910 was a significant theological turning point in Northern Presbyterian history--the result of the 1906 institutional turning point: the arrival of Cumberland Presbyterians. (The next major turning point was again institutional rather than theological; it took place in 1920, as we shall see.) The five-point Deliverance marked the judicial advent of what would become known as fundamentalism, as distinguished from New School Calvinism. So far, mine is a conventional interpretation. But 1910 was a turning point for the nation, not just for the Presbyterian Church. I need to explain why in greater detail than is customary in a Church history. The events of Church history do not take place in a vacuum.

Beginning sometime around 1910, Protestant Church expansion began a slow decline. More congregations were dissolved or merged, 1910 to 1940, than were organized.⁽⁹²⁾ After 1910, the evangelicalism of the Sunday School movement also began to fade; it was replaced by social entertainment activities.⁽⁹³⁾ This transformation had begun in the YMCA a decade earlier.⁽⁹⁴⁾

There were two other important events in 1910 that would leave their mark on the Presbyterian Church.

Henry Sloane Coffin Makes His International Debut

The month following the General Assembly meeting, a World Missionary Conference brought 1,200 missionaries together in Edinburgh. This was the first of the great international ecumenical meetings that were to lead, almost five decades later, to the formation of the World Council of Churches. It is generally regarded a milestone in the modern ecumenical movement. "Here was born the kind of international and interdenominational Christian co-operation that has increasingly characterized the twentieth century," wrote W. R. Hogg in 1952.⁽⁹⁵⁾ It was a conference attended by missions agency bureaucrats, not missionaries--a point made in a contemporary account by one of the attendees.⁽⁹⁶⁾ Its predecessor was the 1900 missions conference in New York City. Church historian R. H. Nichols says that New York Presbyterians were conspicuous in both conferences.⁽⁹⁷⁾ The Edinburgh conference's main organizer was J. H. Oldham,⁽⁹⁸⁾ but its co-organizer was also its chairman, John R. Mott, who, along with Speer, his friend and associate of the late 1880's, became the leading voice of Protestant world missions through the 1930's. It is significant that throughout this period, Mott was John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s paid ecumenical agent.

At the Edinburgh conference, Presbyterian liberal Henry Sloane Coffin spoke on "The Finality of the Christian Ethic."⁽⁹⁹⁾ This was representative of the Presbyterian Church's future, for Coffin was a defender of Darwinian evolution--a theological denial of ethical finality. The next year, Coffin's book appeared, Social Aspects of the Cross, a clear statement of the social gospel. It was published six years prior to Walter Rauschenbusch's A Theology for the Social Gospel.⁽¹⁰⁰⁾

In 1910, a new hymn book appeared, edited by Coffin and Ambrose White Vernon, minister of a Congregational Church. The hymnbook was titled, Hymns of the Kingdom of God. They announced in the Editor's Note that their strategy had been "to include only hymns which are poetically beautiful, which express normal and healthy spiritual experience, contain no divisive theology, and are specifically Christian in religion."⁽¹⁰¹⁾ Here was the rallying cry of the inclusivists and the liberals from 1910 to 1926: experience and unity. Men must express themselves liturgically. The older hymns were too constraining theologically and judicially for the liberals. While this 1910 hymnal never became popular, Coffin's biographer insists that it had "a profound influence upon other hymnals introduced to American churches. . . ."⁽¹⁰²⁾

Establishment Credentials

Who was Henry Sloane Coffin? He was an heir to a famous fortune, the furniture firm of W. and J. Sloane & Co. His brother William, at the time of his death in 1933, was president of New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art,⁽¹⁰³⁾ an extremely influential position in American culture. This Museum is an institution secured by and dominated by America's "old money."⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ Henry in 1910 was the pastor of New York's Madison Avenue Church. He was to become the patriarch of a long line of liberal ministers. He was a graduate of Yale University (1897). In his student years he met evangelist Dwight L. Moody, who devoted considerable attention on the young man at Moody's famous Northfield Conferences in Massachusetts.⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ But something changed in Coffin's thinking before he was ordained in 1900. He would no longer be congenial to Moody's theology.

In 1896, he was one of the 15 junior-year students "tapped" to join Skull & Bones (also called The Order). His father had been a member.⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ His biographer does no more than mention this "tapping." Founded in 1832, this highly influential Yale secret society remained invisible to all but its members and Yale students until a 1977 article appeared in Esquire magazine. It remained invisible to most Americans until George Bush, a member, was elected President of the United States in 1988.⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ Bush was not the first Bonesman to be elected President, however; William Howard Taft was the first. He later served as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court--the only person ever to hold both offices. Taft's father had been a co-founder of the Order and served as President Grant's Secretary of War and his Attorney General, as well as Minister to Austria and Ambassador to Russia under President Arthur.⁽¹⁰⁸⁾

The Bones connection has been an important launching pad for many stratospheric careers in American history.⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ Its initiatory rites and meetings are held in the organization's exclusive on-campus building, shaped as a tomb.⁽¹¹⁰⁾ (Scroll & Key and Wolf's Head are Yale's two other senior secret societies.) Its initiation rites involve sitting overnight in a coffin, and at least three Coffins have done so: Henry's father, Henry, and William Sloane Coffin, his nephew ('49). Those who are initiated into Skull & Bones move rapidly into what can be called the American Establishment, but Coffin's family connections placed him in the Establishment before he was initiated.⁽¹¹¹⁾

In 1916, Coffin was asked to assume the job of president of Union Seminary. He declined.⁽¹¹²⁾ Arthur C. McGiffert, unharmed by his near-conviction of heresy in 1900, took over.⁽¹¹³⁾ Coffin accepted a similar offer in 1926, and he retained this post until 1945.

In 1917, Coffin served as Chairman of the Committee of the Board of Home Missions.⁽¹¹⁴⁾ This indicates that the liberals' takeover was very nearly complete.

Rockefeller's "Baptism" in 1910

The third event in 1910 may seem minor; it was in fact one of the most important events of the twentieth century. In 1909, the pre-election year propaganda of the Republican Party in New York City had charged Tammany Hall Democrats with having allowed organized prostitution to flourish in the city. (That anything this obvious could have become part of a political campaign in 1909 indicates the unpredictability of politics.) A judge of the Court of Sessions, Thomas O'Sullivan, a Tammany man, called a grand jury together. The grand jury then elected John D. Rockefeller, Jr., as its foreman, which he immediately protested to the judge, who let the election stand. Rockefeller reluctantly accepted. He then threw himself into the project with fervor. The jury was supposed to sit for a month; it sat for six months. The judge, frightened of the outcome, refused to take the jury's formal presentment in public. Eventually, it was accepted; it returned 54 indictments. Rockefeller was widely praised in newspapers around the nation for his work. This experience persuaded Rockefeller of the importance of his presence in the field of moral reform. In 1910, at age 36, John D., Jr., severed his tie with the family business and began a life of philanthropy and the subsidizing of science.⁽¹¹⁵⁾

The report called for a commission to study the whole subject of prostitution. Rockefeller decided to form this commission independent of politics. He established the Bureau of Social Hygiene in 1911, the first of the charitable-social organizations founded by the heir of the Standard Oil fortune. (This was the year that the Federal government broke up the Standard Oil Trust.) In searching for men to serve on the Bureau, he located a recent graduate of Princeton University, a young lawyer named Raymond Fosdick, the younger brother of liberal Baptist preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick.⁽¹¹⁶⁾ At that time, Raymond Fosdick was a minor New York City official. Rochefeller hired him in 1913 at $10,000 a year⁽¹¹⁷⁾--in the range of $200,000 a year today, in an era in which income taxes were miniscule. Fosdick would become, in historian Charles Harvey's words, "the chancellor of the Rockefeller philanthropic empire."⁽¹¹⁸⁾ Nothing would ever be the same in the United States--in religion, education, state and local government, medicine, foreign policy,⁽¹¹⁹⁾ and even nuclear physics.

Firm Foundations

For example, the Rockefeller Foundation funded Niels Bohr's laboratory in Copenhagen.⁽¹²⁰⁾ One result of this was the atomic bomb. Another example: the hiring of Beardsley Ruml to run the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund in 1922. He had previously been employed as an assistant to the president of the Carnegie Corporation. He was 26 years old.⁽¹²¹⁾ From 1923 on, he ran the Rockefeller-funded Social Science Research Council, along with his academic colleague, University of Chicago political scientist Charles E. Merriam. Through this organization after 1928, Ruml funded large segments of the American social science community to promote the ideology of the government-regulated economy. As Donald Fisher writes: "A bargain was struck between social scientists, Rockefeller philanthropy, and the State that has since become an accepted part of the way we organize social life."⁽¹²²⁾ In 1954, the Reece Committee investigations on tax-exempt foundations concluded: "The Social Science Research Council is now probably the greatest power in the social science research field."⁽¹²³⁾ Ruml later became the first dean of the social science department at the University of Chicago. He drafted part of the Social Security Act in 1935, and he was the driving force in 1942 behind the introduction of Federal income tax withholding, which began in 1943.⁽¹²⁴⁾ He was on the board of the New York Federal Reserve Bank from 1937 to 1947; he served as chairman during the final six years. This was the dominant Federal Reserve Bank. As Chairman, he announced to the American Bar Association in 1945 that with the creation of a central bank (1913) and the suspension of gold payments (1933), the United States no longer needs to levy taxes for revenue purposes. Taxes have become means of redistributing wealth among groups and to express public policy "in subsidizing or in penalyzing various industries and groups."⁽¹²⁵⁾ He then dutifully called for the abolition of the corporate tax and the imposition in its place of any alternative.⁽¹²⁶⁾

By a quiet, respectful, professional, and bureaucratic distribution of enormous amounts of money, Raymond Fosdick bought off the nation's potential critics of Rockefeller's interests: pastors, intellectuals, politicians, and publicists. Had he remained a minor New York City employee doing the same kind of work, he would have been called a bag man.

Rev. Frederick Gates served John D., Sr., in a similar capacity, helping him to give away close to $500 million by 1915,⁽¹²⁷⁾ the equivalent of about $10 billion today. Gates was a theological liberal and strongly anti-Calvinist. He shepherded John D., Jr., from 1901 to 1917 in the creation of the Rockefeller foundations.⁽¹²⁸⁾ He retired in 1923, to be replaced by Raymond Fosdick. Gates had served as the Executive Secretary of the American Baptist Education Society in the late 1880's and the 1890's.⁽¹²⁹⁾ The liberals' infiltration strategy was not confined to the Presbyterian Church.

The ability of private philanthropic agencies to absorb and then productively distribute such gigantic sums is highly limited. Those people who gain initial control over the funds have an opportunity to become influential, even powerful. There is a strong compulsion--indeed, a fiduciary responsibility--of the administrators to conserve the assets, which means conserving jobs, influence, and power. The division of labor being what it is, only certain types of people are psychologically suited to submerge themselves in such an organization: those who prefer anonymity to visible power and ideological crusades, i.e., organization men. What has happened to every major tax-exempt foundation established by an extremely rich patron, from Andrew Carnegie to billionaire Presbyterian Calvinist J. Howard Pew (d. 1973), has been consistent to the point of monotony: bureaucrats have inherited control, meaning people trained in America's prestige academic institutions and others brought in through personal connections to those who gained initial control. To the extent that they have espoused any theology, they have been liberals and modernists. Writes W. A. Nielson in an academic study of foundations: "Big foundation boards are a microcosm of what has been variously called the Establishment, the power elite, or the American ruling class."⁽¹³⁰⁾ Board members sit on multiple boards.⁽¹³¹⁾ As for the staffs, at least in recent years, "The field has a particular attraction for the well-educated, the idealistic, and perhaps the insecure."⁽¹³²⁾ Prior to the 1960's, the major foundations were all to the left politically.⁽¹³³⁾ (Today, a few are conservative.)

What the large foundations are, the permanent boards of the Northern Presbyterian Church and the other major denominations became even earlier, beginning early in the twentieth century.

Rockefeller's initial contact with Fosdick in 1910 was to have enormous impact in the 1920's on the Presbyterian Church and American fundamentalism generally. But before this, Rockefeller had discovered and promoted John R. Mott and ecumenism.⁽¹³⁴⁾ It was Mott, as head of the YMCA, who chaired a national interfaith fund-raising drive, the United War Work Campaign, inaugurated by President Wilson, to send money to Europe to keep U.S. servicemen from falling into immoral behavior.⁽¹³⁵⁾ This drive raised a staggering $175 million.⁽¹³⁶⁾

1913: Testing the Conservatives' Will to Resist

In 1913, President Wilson appointed his old Princeton colleague Henry van Dyke as the U.S. Ambassador to The Hague (Netherlands and Luxembourg). As historian Henry F. May described this appointment, van Dyke was one of three U.S. Ambassadors who were "the perfect representatives of progressive culture."⁽¹³⁷⁾ He was also a perfect representative of theological modernism. A vignette indicates van Dyke's theological commitment. In 1917, when America entered World War I, van Dyke was 65 years old. He called Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels. In his diary (December 15, 1917), Daniels recorded the following "playful" exchange:

Dr. Van Dyke wished to know if there was not some service he could render. Yes. Chaplain in Reserve Corps. Send for Frazier [a Navy Chaplain--ed.] Are you less than 40? F "Looks like 38." "I was 38 once." Must examine you in theology. F & I both Methodists. Do you believe in Calvinism? I do not. "You have passed."⁽¹³⁸⁾

In his son's version of this exchange, Daniels asked him if he believed in Calvinism, and van Dyke answered: "No, and I never did."⁽¹³⁹⁾

Like Coffin, Henry van Dyke was part of the American Establishment, but he was far better known to the general public than Coffin because of his literary efforts. By 1927, his Story of the Other Wise Man (1902), had sold 800,000 copies in English and had been translated into the major European and Far Eastern languages.⁽¹⁴⁰⁾ He could even boast, had he chosen to, that he bought his Seal Harbor home on the Establishment's enclave, Mount Desert Island, even before John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Edsel Ford bought theirs.⁽¹⁴¹⁾

Van Dyke's Challenge

In 1913, the year Wilson appointed Henry van Dyke, Tertius van Dyke, his son, was ordained to the ministry by the New York Presbytery. So were three others. All were graduates of Union.⁽¹⁴²⁾ These men held liberal views regarding the authorship of the Bible, and they had said so publicly. A minority of New York presbyters protested the presbytery's authorization of these ordinations.

Henry van Dyke preached at his son's ordination. He publicly identified himself as someone holding the same views on the Bible that his son and the other three men held. He then challenged anyone to bring him to trial for heresy. "Heresy-trials are the delight of the ungodly and the despair of religion. . . . Do not try it on eager-hearted seminary boys. Try it on a grown man who stands with them in the liberty wherewith Christ made us free."⁽¹⁴³⁾

No one accepted the challenge of a man who was a nationally respected literary figure, whose numerous books and stories had a ready market, many of which are still in print, six decades after his death. Van Dyke's challenge and the Church's failure to respond judicially established the new terms of the debate under the 1910 Doctrinal Deliverance. Because the conservatives remained silent, van Dyke's challenge publicly transferred the initiative into the camp of the modernists. They would subsequently set the pace, not the conservatives. This had been true since the 1880's. This was the first time, however, that any major figure had taunted the conservatives in public by calling for his own trial. It was a rhetorical master stroke. It would not be his last.

This brings us back to my original point. The ecclesiastical issue cannot be limited to the judicial content of publicly professed theology. The issue is always theology enforced by judicial sanctions. If the courts of the Presbyterian Church were not prepared to de-frock, let alone excommunicate, even one representative member of the faction that refused to abide by the Confession's standards, then the Church was no longer covenantally Calvinistic. Everyone knew this by 1903, although none of the Calvinists would admit it. They should have known it in 1869. The Church did have Calvinists in it, but it was no longer covenantally Calvinist. Similarly, if the Church's courts were unwilling to enforce the watered-down creedal standards of the 1910 Doctrinal Deliverance, then the Church was no longer covenantally conservative and evangelical. An oath without sanctions is not a covenantal oath. There can be no covenant without an enforceable oath. The crucial covenantal question after 1913 was this: Whose oath would the Church enforce? The Church might have conservative evangelicals in it--even a majority of them--but it was no longer covenantally evangelical.

This had obviously become the case by 1913. The public challenge by van Dyke proved it. He had successfully tested the conservatives' will to resist. They had none. They were unwilling to bring formal charges against him. Like the alcoholic who claims that he can stop drinking at any time, so were the conservatives who claimed to be in control of the Presbyterian Church. They had the votes outside of the New York Presbytery, but they refused to use them. They were not yet the equivalent of the alcoholic who can no longer maintain his sobriety for a full day, but they were the equivalent of hard drinkers who choose not to stop while they still can. It was clear where they were headed, but like hard drinkers, they refused to face what they had already become and were fast becoming. Their opponents knew, and they took full advantage of the conservatives' blindness and lack of will.

The Covenant Lawsuit

The fact of covenantal faithfulness is not established solely by preaching the ethical and judicial terms of God's covenant. Covenant faithfulness is demonstrated institutionally through the imposition of covenant sanctions. The prophets did not come before Israel with a message of God's holy love alone or God's holy law alone. They came with a warning: obey God's law and receive positive covenant sanctions (Deut. 28:1-14); disobey His law, and He will bring negative covenant sanctions (Deut. 28:14-68). The threat of negative sanctions within 40 days was Jonah's message to Nineveh. This is why the fundamental issue of the gospel of Christ's salvation cannot be separated from the issue of covenant sanctions in both history and eternity. This is what the covenant theologians at Princeton should have affirmed more clearly than anyone, but from 1880 on, they never mentioned this in relation to the heretics within the denomination. They missed a fundamental aspect of Christ's ministry: Christ, as the ultimate Prophet, brought a covenant lawsuit against Old Covenant Israel.⁽¹⁴⁴⁾ Paul then brought this same covenant lawsuit against the gentiles. The message was the same: repent or be damned. This is the New Testament's gospel.

It is never enough to bring this lawsuit against those outside the institutional Church. If Machen's thesis is correct--Christianity and liberalism are rival religions--then it was mandatory that covenant-keepers within the Church bring lawsuits against ordained covenant-breakers within the Church. This, a majority of the conservatives would not do from 1900 to 1923. By failing to do so, they were institutionally denying the truth of Machen's thesis.

The humanists at the New York Times understood the crucial nature of these events. The Times published reports on the 1913 ordination controversy.⁽¹⁴⁵⁾ When some conservatives challenged Union Seminary at the 1913 General Assembly, but failed to get the votes, the Times reported this.⁽¹⁴⁶⁾ Minority protests within the New York Presbytery took place after subsequent ordinations in 1914 and 1915, all dutifully reported by the Times.⁽¹⁴⁷⁾ John Fox called for the General Assembly to investigate the New York Presbytery.⁽¹⁴⁸⁾ Nothing came of his protest.

When news hit the press in 1916 that the New York Presbytery had licensed three more candidates for the ministry who would not affirm the virgin birth, protests against Union Seminary came from a dozen other presbyteries.⁽¹⁴⁹⁾ The 1916 General Assembly did not prosecute. An anti-Union Seminary candidate for Moderator of the General Assembly was defeated by a moderate.⁽¹⁵⁰⁾ But there was one presbytery that clearly understood the principle of sanctions: Cincinnati. It understood that the main problem was not Union Seminary; it was the presbytery that kept ordaining Union's heretical graduates. It submitted an overture accusing the New York Presbytery of "being guilty of long-continued disloyalty, and being persistently disobedient to the General Assembly. . . ." It called for removing the New York Presbytery from the Church "if no other methods will prevail."⁽¹⁵¹⁾ This suggestion was not taken seriously by the Committee on Bills and Overtures, which dismissed this overture and the others by taking the New York Presbytery's side. It was all a mistake made "on the basis of exaggerated and misleading newspaper reports."⁽¹⁵²⁾ (When caught red-handed, blame the media.)

Princeton's Seminary's New President

In 1913, Francis Patton resigned as president of Princeton Seminary. Warfield served as the interim president. J. Ross Stevenson was elected to replace him the following year. Stevenson had been on the Board of Directors since 1902. Machen opposed Stevenson's candidacy from the beginning. He thought Stevenson would be worse than Charles Erdman, a faculty member, and he had opposed Erdman.⁽¹⁵³⁾ Both Erdman and Stevenson later served as delegates to the Federal Council of Churches in 1916.⁽¹⁵⁴⁾ Stevenson was an ecumenist, an associate of Mott and Speer, who had spoken at the 25th anniversary of the Student Volunteer Movement in 1911.⁽¹⁵⁵⁾ Stevenson had been a pastor, and he was perceived by the Board--favorably--as having pastoral concerns rather than theological ones. The Old School professors agreed with this assessment; they opposed him for this reason. There had been pressure from students for over a decade to shift the curriculum from the rigorous theological training favored by Warfield to pastoral training.⁽¹⁵⁶⁾

This had always been a major problem for the Old School: Princeton's rigorous curriculum kept it from graduating many ministers. By 1914, it was the last of the Old School seminaries that actually taught Old School doctrines. With 9,500 ministers in the denomination, and with 256 ordinations in 1914,⁽¹⁵⁷⁾ Princeton's influence had to fade. Only 29 seniors graduated from the seminary in 1914; total enrollment was 154 students.⁽¹⁵⁸⁾

The Board of Directors in 1914 set up a committee to consider curriculum changes. The committee was divided. One group wanted to cut back on the number of theology courses.⁽¹⁵⁹⁾ This had been the opinion of the Board's Supervising Committee in 1909. Warfield had opposed this, and he opposed the new suggestion. He then counter-offered: add an extra year of Greek for the woefully trained new students, but don't give them any academic credit.⁽¹⁶⁰⁾ The Committee discussed the possibility that some elective courses be allowed for graduation. There were none in 1914. Warfield opposed this suggestion.⁽¹⁶¹⁾ His commitment to academic training, like the entire Old School's commitment to a formally educated ministry, was leading to the triumph of the rival schools, whose young ministers were the products of an increasingly secularized system of college education. Warfield preferred "extinction by swamping" to curriculum revision. His Old School colleagues at Princeton generally agreed, although they did agree to allow some electives for seniors. Thus, the defeat of the Old School at Princeton was only a matter of time--as it turned out, 15 years.

 

An Unenforceable Faith

Beginning in 1910, the year after the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible, and continuing to 1915, Lyman Stewart and his brother Milton, two wealthy businessmen in southern California, published a series of twelve pamphlets called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth.⁽¹⁶²⁾ The series grew to 90 essays, written by 64 authors. Lyman Stewart was a California Presbyterian layman and millionaire oil man (Union Oil Co.), as well as a dispensationalist.⁽¹⁶³⁾ The Fundamentals defended theological conservatism. It was from the title of this series that Curtis Lee Laws, a Northern Baptist editor, coined the term fundamentalists in 1920.⁽¹⁶⁴⁾ These booklets were enormously popular in conservative circles; over three million copies were sold or distributed.⁽¹⁶⁵⁾ They were conservative in theology. Several were written by Calvinists, some of whom were Presbyterians, and even Presbyterian moderates, e.g., Charles Erdman and Speer. The former battled Machen in the 1920's: the latter in the 1930's.

A conservative manifesto, "Back to Fundamentals," had begun circulating within the denomination in the spring of 1915. The conservative magazine, The Presbyterian, ran a copy of it.⁽¹⁶⁶⁾ Liberal journals opposed it: The Presbyterian Advance and The Continent. But the major challenge came from James Snowden, editor of The Presbyterian Banner. He told the manifesto's signers to put up or shut up: either make their complaints official in the Church's courts or drop the whole thing.⁽¹⁶⁷⁾ This was an echo of van Dyke's challenge in 1913.

The reaction in The Presbyterian was typical of the conservative responses to every challenge after 1900. The editor refused to present evidence of specific heretical opinions expressed by specific individuals.⁽¹⁶⁸⁾ Quirk has summarized this strategy: "Throughout the lengthy controversy discussed in the remainder of the study, leading militant Presbyterians tended to stress the efficacy of formal testimonials to the Christian faith, and to shun heresy proceedings."⁽¹⁶⁹⁾ In short, no further negative sanctions.

Sanctions Must Come Early

At the 1916 General Assembly, the Committee on Bills and Overtures handed down two judicially significant recommendations. First, the report advised against making harsh judgments against ministers in good standing. Second, it advised presbyteries against licensing candidates who would not support the Church's doctrinal standards.⁽¹⁷⁰⁾ Putting these two recommendations together, an alert conservative would have concluded the following: once inside the "club," a minister was going to be protected by the club.

The only hope of the conservatives was to screen out the liberals at the presbytery level. This had been the unofficial reality ever since the reunion of 1869. The screening had to come at the ordination examination. The Presbytery of New York had long made a mockery of this restriction. What was rarely discussed at the time was the fact that once ordained, a minister could easily transfer without restriction. The receiving presbyteries rarely protested. This was a major failing of the Presbyterian system. Once certified by a seminary, a presbytery's teaching elders found it difficult to oppose a man's ordination. Once ordained, the man was nearly immune from rejection should he ever transfer to another presbytery. The Presbyterian Church refused to quarantine its diseased presbyteries. No one could accuse any presbytery of being diseased without facing possible court action in his own presbytery, for the accused presbytery (a high authority) could protest formally to the critic's presbytery (a high authority) to bring sanctions against the critic.

The 1916 report affirmed this: criticisms against ministers should not be accompanied by harsh judgments. "This man is heretical" surely is a harsh judgment. So, the 1916 General Assembly made it official: there would probably be no successful restriction of heresy and outright apostasy within the Church. From Union Seminary to ordination by the New York Presbytery and into the whole denomination: the modernists' organizational transmission belt had been baptized and offered the Lord's Supper.

The report repeated the fundamentalistic five-point Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910. The assembly accepted this report unanimously. While this appeared to be a partial victory for the conservatives, it was in fact their unofficial decision to surrender. Without sanctions against ministers, and without sanctions against any presbytery for its continuing ordination of liberal candidates for the ministry, the 1916 Deliverance was as dead a letter as the 1910 Deliverance.

From 1913 on, the long-term future of the Church would be determined by the faction that could avoid negative sanctions while preparing to bring sanctions against its rivals. It was not sufficient to avoid sanctions; it was necessary also to prepare to bring sanctions: no sanctions--no covenant. Those who held van Dyke's views did not yet have the votes to de-frock those who opposed their views, but they were free to remain inside the Church, free to work to achieve such judicial domination. If this remained the case, and if they could eventually bring sanctions against their rivals, they would inherit the Church.

Parachurches and Ecumenism

Two distinct theological movements came to the forefront in the second decade of the twentieth century. One was the movement toward Church unity, in part stimulated by the First World War, and in part by the desire to increase the effectiveness of joint social programs. The other movement was the independent evangelical Christian associations, represented by Bible conferences, Bible colleges, and evangelical meetings that were held throughout the nation. The Student Volunteer Movement, co-founded by John R. Mott in 1888, was an early representative of this type of organization. So was the YMCA. These were independent agencies that were organized, for the most part, by men who were unwilling to work within established denominations, although they were not hostile to working with others who belonged to established churches, so long as there was some agreement doctrinally between the individual men involved.

The first movement, Church union, affected even the Presbyterians. This was another ecumenical dead end in which John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was involved, beginning in the planning stages in 1919.⁽¹⁷¹⁾ Schenkel, whose Harvard dissertation is devoted to Rockefeller's religious views and financial contributions, concluded: "There was Rockefeller money behind virtually every interdenominational movement in the first half of the twentieth century."⁽¹⁷²⁾

World War I

World War I had a decided effect upon American churches. They united temporarily in a display of patriotism, although each denomination maintained its sovereignty and formal independence. This development was well within the tradition of American revivalism, for from the beginning, as Rushdoony has put it, "Revivalism was undenominational and very often anti-denominational. It was not greatly concerned with reviving the church, in many instances, but rather with reviving America. Its cry was, `Save America.' Hence its interdenominationalism and intense patriotism."⁽¹⁷³⁾ This new unity was analogous to the unity of the North during the Civil War. As had been the case in the 1860's, this new sense of Christian unity came at the expense of doctrinal clarity. Disputes within and among churches were at a minimum, but when the trials and tribulations of the war were over, the seeds of unrest still existed. The liberal elements in the denominations were ready to reassert themselves more forcefully than ever. They had gained time to infiltrate the boards and bureaucracies. They would now be far more difficult to dislodge.

Typical of the wartime effort to create religious unity was the General War-Time Commission, which sought to coordinate the work of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish programs related to the war. It was formed on September 20, 1917. Its Chairman was Robert E. Speer; its General Secretary was William Adams Brown, a prominent self-proclaimed liberal Presbyterian professor at Union Seminary. In his autobiography, Brown correctly subtitles one section: "The General War Time Commission as an Experiment in Interchurch Cooperation."⁽¹⁷⁴⁾ Indeed, it was. The Commission was the creation of the Federal Council of Churches; it worked closely with the War Department. The Council also created a parallel organization, the National Committee on the Churches and Moral Aims of the War, which held meetings in three hundred cities and towns, drawing a million attendees. One of its themes was the need for the creation of a post-war international assembly of nations.⁽¹⁷⁵⁾

The Interchurch World Movement, 1919-21

The turning point for the Presbyterian Church came in 1920. The liberals inside the Church's bureaucratic hierarchy acted after 1920 as though they knew that they were in control, which in fact they were. While the publicly visible turning point for the General Assembly came in 1926, the fate of the denomination had been sealed administratively six years earlier. It was sealed by the liberals' victory over the issue of funding the Interchurch World Movement, an organization which today only a handful of specialized Church historians have ever heard of. But it was to shape the terms of the Presbyterian conflict in the 1930's.

On November 11, 1918, the Executive Committee of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church issued a call for a meeting of Protestant leaders which would plan for a united effort to fund world evangelism.⁽¹⁷⁶⁾ On December 17--a suspiciously brief time for any meeting this large to have been spontaneously assembled--135 representatives of various Protestant missions agencies met in New York City at the Foreign Missions Conference of North America. Speer opened the exercises.⁽¹⁷⁷⁾ At that meeting, they set up an Executive Committee of 15, including John R. Mott (chairman), which announced the formation of the Interchurch World Movement on February 6, 1919. Presbyterian William Foulkes was Vice-Chairman of the Executive Committee.⁽¹⁷⁸⁾ He soon became General Secretary of the Presbyterian Church's newly created New Era Movement, which would launch a huge fund-raising effort, 1919-24, which freed the Church's boards from direct financial control by the congregations.

The Interchurch World Movement was an experiment in ecumenism--the last major one, as it turned out. Brown described it in retrospect two years later, after the project had gone bankrupt: "But they had seen a vision--the vision of a united church uniting a divided world, and under the spell of what they saw all things seemed possible. Difficulties were waved aside, doubters were silenced."⁽¹⁷⁹⁾

In January, 1920, the Prohibition amendment went into effect. This seemed to prove that the churches had the power to change society through coordinated action.⁽¹⁸⁰⁾ Political power is a heady thing, especially for those who have been kept out of the political dialogue for a generation or more. The Progressives had allowed fundamentalists inside the corridors of power, briefly, for the sake of the numbers they could bring into the voting booths on this, the main post-war issue on which Progressivism and fundamentalism shared an agenda. Power intoxicates some people even as alcohol intoxicates others. The Progressives were well into their addiction. So, this seemed to be an auspicious time for fund-raising. The post-War enthusiasm for reform had not yet cooled. The economic recession of 1920-21 had not yet hit. The Progressives' hangover had not yet arrived. The speakeasy had not yet replaced the vote-easy.

In January, 1920, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., formally joined the organization when 1,700 religious leaders gathered at Atlantic City for the World Survey Conference. At least 140 boards representing 34 Protestant denominations sent representatives. So did 20 parachurch organizations. Rockefeller addressed the group, claiming that it would "become the greatest force for righteousness in the whole world."⁽¹⁸¹⁾ The IWM's proposed religious survey would bring efficiency, economy, and scientific grounding to the church, he prophesied. Cooperation is the key, he said. This would require centralized ecumenical leadership.⁽¹⁸²⁾ In trying to raise a $50 million to $100 million endowment from his father--who turned down the request--he waxed eloquent regarding the potential of the IWM: "As I see it, it is capable of having a much more far-reaching influence than the League of Nations in bringing about peace, contentment, goodwill and prosperity among the peoples of the earth."⁽¹⁸³⁾ That was a great deal to expect from an organization whose main job would be to conduct religious surveys.

He expected a repetition of the enormous fund-raising effort of the United War Work Campaign, conducted immediately after the armistice, which had raised $175 million.⁽¹⁸⁴⁾ Political reaction and recession would soon dash these hopes, taking with them over a million dollars of his money, plus a million from his father.⁽¹⁸⁵⁾

The stated goal of the Interchurch campaign was to raise money from the general public and from within the denominations. The first effort failed. The second effort was successful, but most of these funds stayed inside the denominations. The IWM ran a massive operational deficit as a result. A majority of the IWM's money came from the denominations in the form of loans, for which they had borrowed from the banks.⁽¹⁸⁶⁾ The churches funded the IWM, the central organization, expecting it to become self-sufficient through public donations. What they received for their investment was a national fund-raising drive, which is what they had asked for. This campaign may have helped them with their own intra-denominational fund-raising--it helped the Presbyterians--but the financial benefits of the IWM campaign were at best indirect.

At the end of the week-long fund drive in April, 1920, it was clear that the effort was a failure. As a member of the IWM's Executive Committee, Rockefeller had promised to underwrite the effort to the tune of a million dollars. But because of the pivotal role of his underwriting pledge, which encouraged an all-out effort, this pledge now appeared to be a potential open-ended liability of huge proportions. By May, the IWM employed over 2,600 people in an office building in New York City.⁽¹⁸⁷⁾ While the total IWM effort gained pledges of $176 million, half of the originally announced goal,⁽¹⁸⁸⁾ almost all of the money actually raised--there was never any formal accounting--remained inside the denominations that had raised it. On June 28, 1920, the IWM suspended operations, taking with it almost three million dollars of Rockefeller money--Junior, Senior, and assorted Rockefeller foundations.⁽¹⁸⁹⁾

In April, 1920, Raymond Fosdick resigned from his job as the American Under Secretary General of the League of Nations and returned to the United States. Fosdick in 1919 and 1920 was travelling in high circles, which as a result of the international contacts generated by the Paris Peace Conference were becoming much higher for all concerned. His career had obviously soared since that fateful meeting with Junior in 1910. At the League of Nations, he had worked closely with 31-year-old Jean Monnet. As Fosdick put it at the time, he and Monnet were working in 1919 to lay the foundations of "the framework of international government. . . ."⁽¹⁹⁰⁾ This was no idle boast. Over the next six decades, Monnet became the driving force behind the creation of the European Common Market and the New European order. His connections to the American Establishment had made this possible.⁽¹⁹¹⁾ He died in 1979.

Upon his return to the United States in 1920, Fosdick and two partners set up a new law firm in New York City. This was not what you would call a high-risk career move for Fosdick. He immediately signed up his first (and only) client: Junior.⁽¹⁹²⁾ Fosdick's primary initial task was to unsort the mess at the IWM. He did the necessary legal work to transform retroactively Junior's potentially open-ended guarantee into a one-time gift.⁽¹⁹³⁾ One result of this gift was that Rockefeller wound up the owner of the IWM's field survey materials on social needs and opportunities. From that time forward, Fosdick steered Junior toward projects in the social sciences.⁽¹⁹⁴⁾ The value of these assets was estimated by Fosdick to be over $2 million.⁽¹⁹⁵⁾ This collection was the origin of Rockefeller's Institute of Social and Religious Research (ISRR).⁽¹⁹⁶⁾ In 1932, one of its publications led to the final battle in the Presbyterian conflict: Re-Thinking Missions. The IWM became in retrospect a major factor in the rise of the Rockefeller empire in the social sciences.⁽¹⁹⁷⁾

Consolidating the Presbyterian Bureaucracy

Presbyterians Speer, Foulkes, and James M. Speers had been high officials in the IWM. So had Presbyterian ruling elder Robert Lansing,⁽¹⁹⁸⁾ who had served as Secretary of State under Wilson from Bryan's resignation in 1915 until early 1920. Other prominent supporters included Thomas Marshall, the Vice President of the United States; Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo, Wilson's son-in-law; Mrs. Wilson; Senator (and soon to be President) Warren G. Harding; and General Pershing.⁽¹⁹⁹⁾ It would have been difficult for Presbyterian laymen or ministers to criticize the mission of the IWM, given the presence of these high-level connections. Only when the enormous bills came due in 1920 did Presbyterian critics briefly appear. Their failure marked the transfer of power in the denomination to the liberals.

At the 1919 General Assembly, the Executive Commission presented a report on the Interchurch World Movement. The Commission assured attendees that the IWM was not an ecclesiastical movement or effort at church union.⁽²⁰⁰⁾ The Commission also proposed that the General Assembly create a new denominational fund-raising agency, New Era Movement, whose director would be Foulkes.⁽²⁰¹⁾ Funds raised in the Church would go through the New Era Movement to the Church's boards. These assurances were offered:

4. That the cooperation shall be upon the condition that funds raised by the Presbyterian Churches and Agencies shall be paid to and distributed through the regular channels of the Presbyterian Church.

5. That no financial obligations for the administrative expenses of the Interchurch Movement shall be incurred by any of our Boards or Agencies without the authorization of the General Assembly or its Executive Commission.⁽²⁰²⁾

The key word in Point 5 was or. Debts would have to be approved by the General Assembly or the Executive Commission, meaning the permanent administrative unit created by the 1908 restructuring of the Church. This gave the Executive Commission a blank check. It soon wrote the check.

This was not the first discussion of the New Era idea. In 1918, the New Era Extension Program had been announced to the General Assembly in a classic statement of the social gospel: "WHEREAS, This supreme crisis in the spiritual history of mankind presents itself largely in the forms and terms of physical needs, of combat with social vices, or readjustment of social relations and economical conditions, and, in our country especially, of the necessity of achieving a higher moral and spiritual, as well as political unity of the diverse elements of our population."⁽²⁰³⁾ The fulfillment came in 1919, when the 27-member New Era Movement was voted into existence by the General Assembly. Nine members would be from the Executive Commission; nine from the boards; nine from the Church at large.⁽²⁰⁴⁾ This structuring was crucial and also representative of the liberals' consolidation of power: representatives of the permanent agencies of the Church were in control at all times by a vote of 18 to 9.

Financially, the New Era Movement proved to be a bonanza. Funds raised for home missions rose from the $2 million level of 1916-19 to over $3 million in 1920, $3.7 million in 1921, $3.8 million in 1922, and over $4 million in 1923. Funds raised for foreign missions paralleled home missions almost exactly: from $2 million a year in 1917-19 to $3.5 million in 1920, $4.2 million in 1921, around $3.8 million in 1922 and 1923, and $4.6 million in 1924.⁽²⁰⁵⁾

Administratively, the New Era Movement also proved to be a bonanza. It was as a result of the New Era Movement's five-year campaign that financial independence for the major Church boards was achieved. Funds were increasingly funneled from a central collection agency into the boards. The boards became less and less dependent on the direct giving of individual members and congregations. This inevitably reduced the economic authority of donors over the boards, for the New Era Movement was operated as a central committee of bureaucrats. "He who pays the piper calls the tune." In this sense, the joint timing of the creation of the New Era Movement and the IWM was significant. The hoped-for fund-raising effort by the IWM had augmented the work of the New Era Movement, as well as similar agencies within the other participating denominations. The IWM failed; the New Era Movement did not, at least from the point of view of the Church's increasingly independent boards.

The Executive Commission in 1919 did note the existence of "a state of doubt among the members with regard to the wisdom of our Church entering the proposed Interchurch World Movement at the present time. . . ."⁽²⁰⁶⁾ It sought to overcome these doubts. It voted "to call together representatives of the Boards and Agencies in joint conference. . . ."⁽²⁰⁷⁾ It promised to report back at the 1920 General Assembly. It then added this ominous warning regarding the IWM:

We are also informed that the present organization has already incurred a debt, in an amount of which we have no information. This may of course be provided for without any contribution from us. We cannot tell without investigation. It is also reported to us that the said organization is now operating under heavy expense. As to this also we have no definite knowledge.

. . . [B]ut we suggest that there can be no intelligent action without either the submission to us of definite and acceptable plans, or sufficient time to inquire whether they exist; and we suggest that on a project so important, the facts even when known, must be carefully weighed and considered.⁽²⁰⁸⁾

The bills came due a year later. The Executive Commission announced that it had incurred an obligation for its share of the IWM's budget. It had extended credit to the IWM.⁽²⁰⁹⁾ The IWM had taken loans from banks, and these had been co-signed by the denominations.⁽²¹⁰⁾ The total debt of the IWM was $6.5 million.⁽²¹¹⁾ The Northern Baptists were in debt $1.5 million. They agreed to pay.⁽²¹²⁾ The General Assembly's debt to the IWM's bankers was a million dollars. To this was added an additional $650,000 debt to the New Era Movement.⁽²¹³⁾ On top of this was interest owed to the boards, whose treasuries had been raided to advance the money. This announcement at the 1920 General Assembly came at the beginning of a major recession. At 6%, this debt was still building a year later.⁽²¹⁴⁾ In 1922, the General Assembly still owed $371,000 on its IWM debt.⁽²¹⁵⁾

The IWM had coordinated a campaign that had raised a lot of money within the denominations, but this campaign had been, in Ernst's words, a moment of truth. Its public failure, he believes, marked end of Protestantism as a religious force in America.⁽²¹⁶⁾ I would say, rather, that the events of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, marked this end--the impotence of fundamentalism--but the IWM's failure was a harbinger: the impotence of theological modernism. Without the use of coercive force by the civil magistrate, theological modernism could fund its vision for America only by relying on donations from inside each denomination, for use only in that denomination. The Protestant ecumenical impulse among the laity was visibly dead in 1920. It never revived. But the ecumenical bureaucracies within the Presbyterian Church kept pushing their agenda. For a bureaucracy, nothing succeeds like failure.

Deflecting the Protests

There were dozens of protests from presbyteries in 1920, presented in the traditional form of overtures. Overtures 1 to 12 were collectively a call to reverse the action of the Executive Commission in indebting the Church for the IWM.⁽²¹⁷⁾ Overtures 13 to 55 were more moderate in tone but still critical.⁽²¹⁸⁾ The Executive Commission appeared to be in trouble. If it really was in trouble, a decade of centralization by the administrative machinery was at risk.

But the overtures led to no action. The Executive Commission proposed, and the General Assembly ratified, the payment of the million dollars to the IWM. No further payments would be made, the Executive Commission promised.⁽²¹⁹⁾ This was an easy concession to make, since the IWM was in the process of being shut down by May of 1920. Yet even here there was a loophole: if the IWM was reorganized, the Executive Commission was authorized to contribute $100,000 for the 1920-21 year.⁽²²⁰⁾

In February, 1920, the Pittsburgh Presbytery had sent a letter to the Executive Commission complaining about the IWM plus the New Era Movement's budget of $2.8 million. Was this $3.8 million total obligation constitutional? "May not such authorization of the use of benevolent funds, given through the ordinary denominational channels, be beyond the power of the Assembly? May it not, indeed, be considered a diversion of funds, that have been sacredly confided to the Assembly, for other uses?"⁽²²¹⁾ This was indeed the question--one of the two key institutional questions in the battle for the Presbyterian Church: the flow of funds. (The other was the question of judicial sanctions.)

The senior bureaucrat of the Church, Stated Clerk William H. Roberts, responded with a classic bureaucratic runaround in a letter dated February 18. Pittsburgh had asked: Did the Executive Commission act constitutionally in obligating the Church with such debt? Roberts answered: the Executive Commission has no authority to make such pronouncements on the Church's constitution. So, if the presbytery wants to gain such information, "the proper course for it to pursue would be to take the matter to the proper higher judicatory under the regulations of the Constitution of the Church."⁽²²²⁾ In short, gentlemen, you can jump into Presbyterianism's legendary judicial morass! But this leap was exactly what the conservatives had been self-consciously avoiding since 1900.

This was one of Roberts' last pronouncements as Stated Clerk. He was too sick to attend the General Assembly, and he died before the end of the year. He had held this crucial post since 1884. Under Roberts, an Old School man originally, liberals gained control. Roberts, more than any other figure, had been the visible incarnation of the Presbyterian system, and the liberals steadily captured it under the protection of his formal adherence to the rules. The two Roberts became the liberals' crucial allies: William H. and Robert's Rules of Order.

The Committee on Bills and Overtures smugly dismissed mild-mannered overtures 13 to 55: ". . . it recommends that the Assembly and the Church be requested to acquaint themselves with the constitution of the Executive Commission."⁽²²³⁾ In short, "Buzz off, critics; we bureaucrats are in control!" And they were.

Capitulation: The Green Light

The 1920 General Assembly then voted to authorize the Executive Commission's proposed budget of $45 million, with $22 million specifically "certified to the Executive Committee of the Interchurch World Movement as that part of the budget of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. to be secured through the united simultaneous campaign."⁽²²⁴⁾ Of course, this money would remain inside the denomination, but the underlying issue was legitimacy: gaining legitimacy from the IWM and granting legitimacy to it. Would the Church's Executive Commission receive its 1920 budget authorization from the General Assembly under the broader umbrella of the IWM ("legitimacy from")? Also, had its decision to give the IWM a million dollars in the interim been a legitimate expenditure ("legitimacy to")? The Executive Commission proposed this justification of $22 million in expenditures, knowing full well that the IWM was in the process of going into receivership to Rockefeller. In short, they insisted that the Presbyterian Church should raise this money for its own uses under the umbrella of the IWM, thereby retroactively legitimizing an ecumenical, Rockefeller-backed project that was virtually bankrupt at the time. The General Assembly did what the Executive Commission proposed.

The critical overtures had completely failed. Resistance had failed. From this point on, the Church's senior bureaucrats never looked back. Their access to a percentage of the flow of funds was henceforth assured. This was the critical institutional and political turning point in the victory of the liberals in the Presbyterian Church. It took place two years before the advent of what has been called the Presbyterian conflict. The Church in 1920 helped to bail out Rockefeller's IWM; four years later, he reciprocated by bailing out the liberals' lone casualty in the next phase of the Presbyterian conflict: Harry Emerson Fosdick.

The organizational goal of goals was control over the flow funds.⁽²²⁵⁾ The New Era Movement paid lip service to individual responsibility by insisting that "scrupulous care shall be taken to carry out the intent of the original donors of funds." But then these words were added: "That individuals, churches, Presbyteries and Synods be urged to follow the percentages approved by the Executive Commission."⁽²²⁶⁾ If the Executive Commission's recommendations were accepted, the pooling of funds would more and more reflect the allocational decisions of the Executive Commission. The Executive Commission, not the laity that dutifully paid the bills, would be in control. The goal, in short, was bureaucratic control over other people's money.

Church Union

The movement toward national unity and institutional centralization that occurred after the Civil War pushed the Old School and New School back into each other's arms. Similar pressures recurred in the years following World War I. The price of interdenominational union was the same: a lowering of doctrinal standards.

The 1919 General Assembly sent a Committee on Church Cooperation and Union to a national ecumenical convention that was proposing church union.⁽²²⁷⁾ The 1920 General Assembly adopted the Committee's plan for organic union. The Presbyterian Church was to unite judicially with 17 other denominations, all designated as "Evangelical," a category broad enough to include the Protestant Episcopan Church, the Society of Friends (Quakers), and the Five Years' Meeting of the Friends in America.⁽²²⁸⁾ The plan called for the creation of the "United Churches of Christ in America." The president of the Ad Interim Committee of the organization was the Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church, William H. Roberts.⁽²²⁹⁾ This new organization was to be a federal union, with denominations retaining their legal autonomy, i.e., "their autonomy in purely denominational affairs."⁽²³⁰⁾ This plan had to be approved by two-thirds of the Church's presbyteries.

The proposed form of administration, however, resembled the administrative outline of the Presbyterian Church after the reorganization of 1908. The Preamble to the Plan of Union announced: "The United Churches of Christ in America shall act through a Council and through such Executive and Judicial Commissions, or Administrative Boards, working ad interim, as such Council may from time to time appoint and ordain."⁽²³¹⁾ For example, the Council would consolidate all missionary activities. But how? The Preamble did not say for sure, but it suggested the possibility of uniting the missionary boards.⁽²³²⁾ The Committee on Church Cooperation and Union "heartily" recommended the adoption of the Plan of Union.⁽²³³⁾

What was called organic union was in fact covenantal union. Problem: every lawful covenant is established by taking an sanctions-bound oath to uphold a particular set of stipulations. There are no lawful covenants without judicial terms. Machen understood what this proposed union would mean: a watering down of the judicial terms of the faith. He wrote to his mother: "The Preamble of the Plan of Union sets forth the things in which all the constituent churches are to be agreed. Everything else is regarded as of secondary importance. The Preamble is studiously vague: a man could subscribe to the creed contained in it without believing in the essentials of the Christian faith."⁽²³⁴⁾ The majority report of the Committee on Church Cooperation and Union was signed by the president of Princeton Seminary, J. Ross Stevenson.⁽²³⁵⁾

Machen Appears on the Scene

This was the prelude to a battle that erupted over the control of Princeton after the 1926 General Assembly, but Machen could not foresee this in 1920. Machen went public with an attack on the Plan of Union in The Presbyterian (June 10, 1920). He focused on the creedal issue.⁽²³⁶⁾ Over the following year, The Presbyterian published articles critical of the union by Princetonians Warfield, W. B. Greene, C. W. Hodge, and O. T. Allis.⁽²³⁷⁾

Machen's opposition was two-fold. First, the judicial basis of the union was vague. This was a judicial criticism. Second, the author of the Preamble was a liberal, indicating that churches and ministers with similarly liberal views would not be threatened by the union. This was a question of the least common theological denominator. Machen's opposition was therefore both theological and judicial. He was not opposing cooperation with other churches; he was opposing an oath-bound covenantal union in which the oath was not expressly Bible-based and specific in its commitment to fundamental doctrine.

I stress this because numerous critics of Machen, in his day and ever since, have argued that his opposition to this union was inconsistent with his later cooperation with fundamentalists and other conservative evangelical organizations. This criticism is misleading. The issue in 1920 was not the legitimacy of alliances, which are permitted by the Bible (Gen. 14:13); the issue was the theological basis of Church covenants. Alliances are not covenants. Alliances are not created by means of a self-maledictory (negative sanctions-invoking) oath before God.⁽²³⁸⁾ Machen never spelled out this distinction by means of covenantal language, for he rarely used covenantal language, but his hostility to Church union was based on his understanding that the fundamental issue was covenant law, not cooperation as such.

The Division at Princeton Begins

The presbyteries had to approve the union. They voted it down prior to the 1921 General Assembly, 150 to 100,⁽²³⁹⁾ but not before Princeton's Charles Erdman came out in favor of it in front of the student body.⁽²⁴⁰⁾ Machen a week later spoke against it before the student body.⁽²⁴¹⁾ It was clear that the conservatives were facing a growing opposition when a hundred presbyteries favored joining an organization whose preamble had been composed primarily by a liberal in another denomination.⁽²⁴²⁾ It was also clear that the Old School's only remaining seminary was facing a revolt within its own faculty--a revolt led by its president, Stevenson.

Six years later, Erdman testified to a committee that was investigating the disputes at Princeton Seminary. He said, "The 1920 discussions on the Plan of Union was the dividing point in this seminary." He hastened to add that his position, which was also Stevenson's, was "misinterpreted, and has become the ground of endless suspicions."⁽²⁴³⁾ From 1926 to 1936, these suspicions were proven to have been well grounded.

Did the presbyteries' vote in 1920-21 call a halt to the Church union movement? Hardly. The Committee on Church Cooperation in 1921 declared that the negative vote by the presbyteries had all been a big mistake, that the actual overture had merely been "a referendum," not "a final act." (Why a referendum voted by the presbyteries would not have been final, the Committee did not say.) This clarification had been made by the General Assembly of 1920, the Committee insisted; unfortunately, both copies of this clarification somehow disappeared, so it was not recorded in the 1920 Minutes. This clarifying information had not been sent to the presbyteries.⁽²⁴⁴⁾ The presbyteries had misinterpreted this vote as "a hastily and ill-conceived scheme for super-government subversive of the sanctity and property rights of our Church. . . ."⁽²⁴⁵⁾ The Committee therefore ignored the negative vote. It kept working. Stevenson was still serving as chairman of the Special Committee on Church Cooperation and Union in 1922.⁽²⁴⁶⁾ It received a renewal of its 1918 authorization in 1923, becoming a permanent department known as the Council on Organic Union.⁽²⁴⁷⁾ This was two decades after the establishment of the original Committee on Church Cooperation.⁽²⁴⁸⁾ Obviously, 1903 had been a busy year, not just for creedal revision. The new reality was clear by 1920: once established, it proved impossible to de-fund a Church agency.

The Liberal Takeover in 1920

From the restructuring of 1908 until 1920, the liberals consolidated their control in the Church's administrative agencies. By 1918, they felt sufficiently secure to propose the New Era Movement, which passed in 1919. That year, the General Assembly also authorized a committee to study the possibility of the ordination of women, which reported back in 1920 with a recommendation to the General Assembly to submit to the presbyteries a plan to ordain women.⁽²⁴⁹⁾ The General Assembly voted to submit this overture to the presbyteries, which was defeated, 129 to 125.⁽²⁵⁰⁾ The fact that the General Assembly had authorized this vote is indicative of how far things had moved away from historic Presbyterianism. (Women were authorized to become ruling elders in 1930.) Also in 1920, the flare-up over the Interchurch World Movement was easily contained. The liberals' main setback in 1920 took place outside the General Assembly at the presbytery level: the failure of the Assembly's proposed Plan of Union.

The 1920 General Assembly also voted its moral support of the work of something called the World Alliance for International Friendship, which in turn had supported the work of the National Committee on the Churches and the Moral Aims of the War. This committee had sent out a postcard survey to the ministers of America, asking them their opinion of the following resolution: support for the League of Nations, calling on the U.S. Senate to ratify the treaty exactly as President Wilson was demanding, "without amendments or such reservations as would require resubmission of the Treaty to the Peace Conference and Germany." Of 16,125 ministers responding, all but 805 supposedly had responded favorably.⁽²⁵¹⁾ The World Alliance had called for "that spirit of goodwill which we desire to foster until it ripens into the general recognition of the brotherhood of nations."⁽²⁵²⁾ The General Assembly added its vote of approval to this humanist manifesto, which was laying the foundations of world government. At the heart of the General Assembly's motivation was politics: "Presbyterian Churches were repeatedly urged to write letters to their Senators urging them to take a stand in ratification of the League Covenant. . . ."⁽²⁵³⁾ The denomination's connection with the World Alliance became permanent.⁽²⁵⁴⁾ By 1920, liberals had gained uncontested control over the Church's administrative machinery. This was exactly two decades after Arthur C. McGiffert had left the Church in the face of a heresy trial.

The presbyteries overcame the 1920 General Assembly on two issues: the ordination of women and the Plan of Union. From that point on, the General Assemblies were able to get most of their overtures passed by the presbyteries. Unless some outside issue intruded, the General Assemblies were henceforth under the control of the Stated Clerk, the Executive Commission, and representatives of the boards, whose incarnation was Speer. When the 1920 Executive Commission escaped censure for its million-dollar funding of Rockefeller's Interchurch World Movement, its members knew that their day had dawned. They wasted no time.

There would soon be another challenge to this consolidation, however. It did not come from inside the Church. An outsider arrived to stir the pot. When it did not overflow, the liberals knew for sure that they had won control over the Church's executive system. As with the United States government after the defeat of Herbert Hoover in 1932, control over the executive agencies meant the ability to set most of the legislative agenda, to the extent that the General Assembly could have a de facto legislative agenda. Then all they would have to do was control the General Assembly's judicial function. That was not secured defensively until 1926, and not secured offensively until 1934.

But first, they had to get by the next challenge.

The Warning About Missions

Twice in the Presbyterian conflict, the dividing issue was liberalism in foreign missions: 1921 and 1932-36. The first battle began in 1921, when fundamentalist oilman Milton Stewart funded a tour by fundamentalist leaders of foreign missions in China.⁽²⁵⁵⁾ The Stewarts were old rivals of the Rockefellers in Pennsylvania and later in California.⁽²⁵⁶⁾ In 1921, Milton Stewart also anonymously donated $1.7 million to the Northern Baptist Convention, which then pledged that its missionaries would adhere to fundamentalist theology. This enraged John D., Sr., who had Junior inform every denomination and missionary society that had been receiving Rockefeller funds that there would be no further gifts if their missionaries were forced to espouse fundamentalism. This action, Senior told Junior, was designed "to forestall, if possible, the ill effect that their still treacherous action may have on the final carrying out of our ideas."⁽²⁵⁷⁾

That same year, an orthodox Anglican scholar-lecturer, W. H. Griffith Thomas, unleashed an attack on modernism within China's various missions agencies, including the Presbyterian missionary enterprise in China.⁽²⁵⁸⁾ His account of his experiences shows that the mission field in China was already divided between defenders of higher criticism and conservatives. He raised a crucially important point in what I regard as the most insightful one-sentence evaluation in the post-1869 phases of the Presbyterian conflict, or, for that matter, in the history of the entire fundamentalist-modernist conflict:

I also urged the importance of taking care lest Liberalism should be intolerant, because as long as conservatives are silent there is an outward appearance of unity, but when they begin to speak out on behalf of their own position, they are said to be causing division, though, in reality, the cause of division is the introduction of the new views.⁽²⁵⁹⁾

In one sentence, he identified the most important rhetorical tactic of the liberals from 1874 on: their accusation that the conservatives were the intolerant faction, disrupting the unity of the Church. Typical of this misrepresentation was Shailer Mathews' evaluation in his 1936 autobiography, that the fundamentalists' "language was often intemperate and their actions were repeatedly open to ethical criticism."⁽²⁶⁰⁾ He did admit, however, that "they made no recourse to force. . . ."⁽²⁶¹⁾ (That was why they lost.) The liberals' spiritual heirs, who have written all of the textbooks and most of the monographs, have repeated this argument ever since, to great effect. They have persuaded at least two generations of observers that rhetorical aggression and theological intolerance have been the morally incriminating monopolies of the conservatives. (This reiterated accusation has psychologically disarmed the conservatives, especially seminary professors, who have adopted a polemical style more suitable to after-dinner discussions regarding the careers of retired editors of scholarly journals.)

He also referred to a newly formed organization in China made up of missionaries: the Bible Union of China, which was interdenominational. It had begun after his departure from China. Its Bulletin spoke of "destructive critical views of the Bible, which teaching has been gradually introduced into some mission centres in China."⁽²⁶²⁾ By the time he wrote his essay, the Union had over 600 members and was growing rapidly.⁽²⁶³⁾ He complained that The Continent, a liberal Presbyterian magazine, had blamed him for the creation of the Union, which it described rhetorically as "another bit of mischief."⁽²⁶⁴⁾ He said that he had received opposition from several YMCA workers, who said his lectures were dividing the missionaries.⁽²⁶⁵⁾ This was further confirmation of the 30-year problem with the YMCA missionary efforts under Mott: they tended toward liberalism.

What is clear from Griffith Thomas' extensive quoting from publications in China is that the China mission field had been sharply divided for years, and the participants on both sides recognized this. In his essay, he named specific Chinese teachers and visiting American lecturers who opposed the creeds or taught higher criticism. He identified liberal textbooks in use on the field. More of his essay is devoted to reprinted materials than to his own comments. But he was circumspect in his refusal to name a single liberal missionary.

His was not the first warning on foreign missions. In 1918, a book by Northern Baptist theologian A. H. Strong, A Tour of the Missions, had warned about the growing modernism of Baptists on the foreign missions field. Strong had been the president of Rochester Theological Seminary for four decades, retiring in 1912. He had accepted higher criticism. He believed in the creeds, but he also believed that the Church should not bother to enforce them.⁽²⁶⁶⁾ He had pressured John D. Rockefeller, Sr., into creating the University of Chicago.⁽²⁶⁷⁾ His Systematic Theology went through eight editions, and the eighth edition in 1980 was in its 30th printing.⁽²⁶⁸⁾ He had appointed Walter Rauschenbusch and other modernists to the faculty, although he had also hired conservatives.⁽²⁶⁹⁾ He had been attacked as an incipient Unitarian during the 1890's. He announced in 1899 that "Christ is the principle of evolution."⁽²⁷⁰⁾ Yet he also believed in timeless truth.⁽²⁷¹⁾ He was, in short, theologically schizophrenic, and his life's work has long puzzled American Church historians.⁽²⁷²⁾ But this schizophrenia made him a successful college president: balancing rival worldviews in his mind, he could balance rival worldviews in his departments. He had defended his faculty's academic freedom, and he had raised so much money for the school's endowment that the school became immune to economic reprisals. He served as a mediator between "robber barron" donors who, as usual, were happy to subsidize their mortal enemies,⁽²⁷³⁾ and social gospel socialists on his faculty. But by the time of his retirement, he had begun to have serious misgivings about what was going on in the Church. His trip to the missions field in 1916 and 1917 convinced him that his suspicions had been correct.⁽²⁷⁴⁾ He proposed a three-part strategy in 1921, the last year of his life: purge the schools, rectify missions work, and adopt a confession of faith.⁽²⁷⁵⁾ He was too late by three decades.

Challenge and Response

Griffith Thomas spoke in a series of lectures throughout the United States. He claimed that Presbyterian missionaries were giving aid to distinctly liberal activities of social reform and de-emphasizing the traditional Church message, but his accusations against the Board of Foreign Missions went unheeded, even by most of the conservatives. As was true in his Princeton Theological Review article, he refused to name specific missionaries when challenged to do so by one of the Foreign Mission Board's officers.⁽²⁷⁶⁾ As an outsider, he was wise enough to recognize the nature of Presbyterian government: a judicial quagmire from which it took years to extricate yourself, assuming that you named only one name. He refused to rush in where Old School Presbyterians feared to tread.

Predictably, he was attacked publicly for having made his general accusation. This had been the liberals' strategy ever since Henry van Dyke's challenge in 1913: "Put up or shut up; prosecute or hold thy peace." Anyone who criticized any aspect of the Church's operations for its liberalism had to be ready to inaugurate a full-fledged heresy trial to the bitter end. No one was.

Without a concerted judicial attack by the conservatives, nothing would be done by the bureaucrats who ran the Foreign Missions Board, since to admit that there were theological heretics under their jurisdiction would be to call attention to screening problems within the Board. The General Assembly of 1921 asserted that there was "nothing to disturb the confidence of the General Assembly in the Board of Foreign Missions and in the great body of its Christian missionaries." It did instruct the Board of Foreign Missions to conduct an examination of these reports.⁽²⁷⁷⁾ To no one's surprise, the Board that had sent them onto the mission field found nothing seriously amiss with anyone. The Presbyterian, the publishing arm of the conservatives, did state that the investigation should have been conducted by a mixed group and not the Board, but that is as far as the criticism went.⁽²⁷⁸⁾

Erdman, a long-time member of the Board, defended the Board vigorously. Speer, secretary of the Board, was even more vociferous it its defense. He rejected the recent formation of the Bible Union of China, an independent missionary organization dedicated to conservative theology.

If differences of interpretation of opinion do come, my friends, I do not believe that the principle of exclusion and separation and division is the right principle by which to deal with them. Much less, to set up organizations that divide the Body of Christ, that establish extra-Scriptural tests using in those tests words that are not in the New Testament. By what right do we erect barriers with words that the New Testament, itself, never uses?⁽²⁷⁹⁾

This is a familiar inclusivist argument against invoking theology as a screening device. If taken literally, it would have to exclude use of the word "Trinity." By adopting this argument, he implicitly rejected the 1910 Doctrinal Deliverance and its reaffirmation by the 1916 General Assembly. He used a line of argument that would appear in late 1923 in the Auburn Affirmation.⁽²⁸⁰⁾

"Peace in Our Time"

By 1927, when he was elected Moderator of the General Assembly by acclamation, and perhaps a decade earlier, Speer had become the most widely respected lay leader in the Presbyterian Church. As secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions since 1891, he was also the best known representative for Protestant denominational missions in the United States.⁽²⁸¹⁾ He was a brilliant debater. He had graduated valedictorian from the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1889, just ahead of his lifetime friend and fellow Church bureaucrat, Lewis Mudge,⁽²⁸²⁾ who became the Church's Stated Clerk in 1921 and held this crucial position until 1938. Speer was an early disciple of evangelist Dwight L. Moody. Immediately after graduation in 1889, he became a highly successful recruiter for the newly created Student Volunteer Movement, visiting 110 campuses and bringing in 1,100 students in one academic year, 1889-90.⁽²⁸³⁾ Then he quit. In 1891, he became secretary for the Board of Foreign Missions, a position he held for the next 47 years; he retired in 1937 on his 70th birthday. He was never ordained to the ministry.⁽²⁸⁴⁾ If there is a model of the modern Protestant ecclesiastical bureaucrat, Speer was the original.

He was a premillennialist, but he was also an ecumenist. Longfield writes: "At times it almost seemed as if Speer equated the gospel with the message of the oneness of humanity."⁽²⁸⁵⁾ He was present at the first meeting of the Federal Council of Churches in 1908, where he delivered an address, "Christian Unity on the Foreign Missions Field."⁽²⁸⁶⁾ He was elected president of the organization for a four-year term in 1920.⁽²⁸⁷⁾ In his study of the Federal Council of Churches, historian C. Gregg Singer comments: "Widespread criticism of the Federal Council from conservatives within the denominations was infrequent until after 1920, when the Council became involved in radical movements of various kinds on a wider scale than it had been during the years from 1908 to 1917."⁽²⁸⁸⁾

Unlike Machen, Speer was a strong advocate of the Volstead Act, i.e., Prohibition. He had joined several anti-alcohol organizations while in college.⁽²⁸⁹⁾ Also unlike Machen, he was a supporter of American intervention into World War I. He called it "a just and necessary war."⁽²⁹⁰⁾ He took quite seriously the National Security League's messianic claim that the United States was fighting for "FREEDOM FOR ALL FOREVER."⁽²⁹¹⁾ He referred to this as one of "the clear moral aims of the war." The Church must get behind "the great ideal ends which the President has stated. . . ."⁽²⁹²⁾ The war offered a tremendous opportunity: the creation of an international government. "We have our opportunity through the war to effect an organization of the nations which should bring them under such a just and mutually helpful order as binds in closer bonds the widely varied interests of our American Union."⁽²⁹³⁾ The problem here was "the resistance of nationalistic individualism to the spirit of world brotherhood and to the common interest of humanity."⁽²⁹⁴⁾ To overcome this, we need two things: "One is a new spirit of universalism. . . . The other necessity is some instrumentality of international association by which the gains of a world peace in righteousness may be won and held without sacrifice of national personality."⁽²⁹⁵⁾ This is true Christianity, for "Jesus Christ was and is a principle of unity."⁽²⁹⁶⁾

A year later, Speer continued this theme of a new moral order through a new world order. He argued in a post-War chapter titled, "The War Aims and Foreign Missions": ". . . the great ideas and principles of the missionary enterprise were taken over and declared by the nation as its moral aims in the war."⁽²⁹⁷⁾ He waxed eloquent in 1919 about a coming new world order: "And above all as time went on men realized that they were in this struggle for the sake of what lies ahead of us, for the hope of a new human order--an order of righteousness and of justice and of brotherhood."⁽²⁹⁸⁾ Men must now commit themselves to furthering a new international order, "the ideals of human brotherhood, of international justice and service, of peace and good will."⁽²⁹⁹⁾ In 1919, this was rhetoric unmistakably promoting President Wilson's crusade for the League of Nations. That same year, he wrote in the Federal Council Bulletin: "What we speak of today as the League of Nations is an indispensable and unavoidable implicate of all our Christian faith and endeavor in the world." This, in an essay appropriately titled, "From World War to World Brotherhood."⁽³⁰⁰⁾

Speer worked with John D. Rockefeller, Jr., from at least 1913⁽³⁰¹⁾ until the end of his career. This, despite the fact that he eventually lost confidence in the bureaucrats at the Rockefeller Foundation. He wrote to his daughter in 1926: "I think the professional Rockefeller Foundation people are not especially interested in religious enterprises and I know they do not care for missionary enterprises. . . ." Then he added: "Don't whisper this to anybody else, however."⁽³⁰²⁾ Rockefeller had great confidence in Speer as a spokesman for ecumenism. He wrote to Speer in 1920, after Speer's election as president of the Federal Council: "Surely there must be many people throughout the country who have believed firmly in the principle of federation but who have not had the fullest confidence in some of the personnel, and therefore have withheld their support and cooperation. As I may have perhaps said to you, this has been our own position. Your coming into the leadership of the movement will go far toward removing that obstacle and will inspire general confidence and bring about increased support of the enterprise throughout the country."⁽³⁰³⁾

Room for All

Speer was opposed to debates over theology. Longfield says that he was a disciple of Horace Bushnell, the mid-century Congregational pastor-theologian who sought to reconcile Calvinism and Arminianism by returning to the Apostles' Creed.⁽³⁰⁴⁾ In 1901, he addressed the General Assembly on the matter. "For the Church to spend her whole strength on that battlefield is to war with phantoms. . . ."⁽³⁰⁵⁾ His biographer comments: "Recognizing a threat to the stability and efficiency of the large missionary program he had carefully nurtured for many years, he naturally sought to protect the interests of his Board in the face of precisionist sniping."⁽³⁰⁶⁾ This was the problem of the denomination generally; the national boards were havens from orthodoxy. Modernists could hide there knowing that the institutional response of the boards would be to shield those inside from theological critics outside.

Church historian Lefferts Loetscher, whose liberal sympathies pervade his book on the history of the era, has given us a description of Speer that needs to be considered very carefully. This thumbnail biographical sketch offers us the very essence of the inclusivist--the seemingly well-meaning defender of a "warm Christian faith" whose actions, step by step, turned the denomination over to its covenantal enemies. No one could successfully question such a man's orthodoxy. He seems just as orthodox as anyone, and what a marvelous fellow, too! This figure is and has been absolutely indispensable to the modernists in the capture of formerly conservative churches. Loetscher regards Speer as the key figure in the Church after 1920.

Dr. Speer, who was at this juncture thrust into the controversy, was, in the coming decade and a half, to do more in forming the theological policy of the Presbyterian Church than perhaps any other individual. After a career as football hero and near head of his class at the College of New Jersey, he had been snatched from his course at Princeton Seminary to be secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. Almost immediately he had become one of the three or four principal leaders of a great forward thrust made by American Protestant foreign missions. In recruiting missionary volunteers, in formulating and directing missionary strategy, in moving popular audiences, he was unsurpassed. He had contributed to The Fundamentals and many of his deepest religious beliefs were very conservative, but as one who had been a broad reader and a leader in large practical affairs since early manhood, he could not accept any view of Christian "essentials" which would commit the Church to a detached and irrelevant existence. His theory, like his life, was intensely dynamic. "I wish," he told a correspondent in China at this time, "we could get up such a glow and fervor and onrush of evangelical and evangelistic conviction and action that we would be swept clear past issues like the present ones so that men who want to dispute over these things could stay behind and do so while the rest of us could march ahead, more than making up by new conquests for all the defections and losses of those who stay behind."⁽³⁰⁷⁾

In short, if we can just stop arguing about theology, and start marching forward, everything will go well for evangelism. But those who want to debate theology are retarding factors in this march into the future. This is what Loetscher means by a "dynamic faith." It is also the faith of the evolutionist and the situation ethics advocate. It is the faith of the humanist. Without a strong commitment to some form of creedalism, the conservative is helpless to challenge such a position successfully, whether in politics in ecclesiastical affairs. Understandably, Speer was opposed to creedalism and systematic theology generally. In 1894, at a Student Volunteer Movement convention, he had warned them: "Don't preach a system of truth. What good is a system of truth anyhow? Don't preach salvation; don't preach redemption. Preach a Saviour. Preach a Redeemer. What is wanted is not more truth; it is a Divine Person. What is wanted is not a larger doctrine; it is the advent of Divine Life."⁽³⁰⁸⁾

Speer was a consummate bureaucrat who would become the master of the denomination, the "first among equals." He saw the problem facing those who, like himself, wished to de-emphasize theology. The General Assembly was in charge of the boards of the denomination. This included the Foreign Missions Board. The General Assembly at this time was conservative--more conservative than some of the presbyteries that had ordained the missionaries sent out by the Board. So, there was a distinct threat of negative sanctions against liberals on the mission field. But Speer would soon plug this threat. He exercised what Loetscher calls "truer statesmanship. . . . Dr. Speer therefore cast his powerful influence on the side of decentralization and pluralism--in constitutional terms, on the side of leaving full theological jurisdiction over the missionary in the hands of his presbytery."⁽³⁰⁹⁾ This remained the tactic of the liberals until 1931: decentralizing power away from the General Assembly.

What he did was to announce the policy of having the Board of Foreign Missions receive complaints against a missionary, and then pass along the complaint to the missionary's home presbytery. This was certainly Presbyterianism in action: the locus of authority remained with the ordained man's presbytery back in the United States. The problem was, the presbytery was at least 10,000 miles away from the mission field in China. Loetscher was correct: the Presbyterian Church's administrative machinery "had never been completely integrated into the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pattern of government by four ascending judicatories."⁽³¹⁰⁾ Where did the missionary fit into the four courts: congregation, presbytery, synod, and General Assembly? No one knew. This gave Speer the opportunity to define a new chain of command.

Speer had spotted an institutional escape hatch for liberal missionaries who were under fire from conservatives, either at home and abroad. The foreign missionary was in a kind of judicial "no man's land" in between his foreign congregation and his American presbytery. He was not a member of the foreign congregation; teaching elders were members of presbyteries. From the days of the Second Great Awakening, the problem of missionaries had plagued the Presbyterian Church. The debate over who had lawful authority over missions had split the Church in 1837. This split did not resolve the secondary debate over which court had lawful jurisdiction over the foreign missionary. It was not resolved in the 1860 General Assembly debate between Charles Hodge and James H. Thornwell (see below, pages 927-29). It was ultimately the question of the locus of authority in enforcing the ministerial oath. The Presbyterian court of final jurisdiction was the court of original jurisdiction; it was located far from the witnesses. Speer made effective use of this unresolved jurisdictional problem. It remained unresolved until 1936.

Lengthening the Chain of Command

Speer's deft move was perfect from the point of view of the modernists. Not only would the inherent bureaucratic resistance by each presbytery protect liberals in these presbyteries, it would then move these heretics to the four corners of the earth, where it would be virtually impossible for anyone to monitor their preaching other than other missionaries in the same area, which might mean hundreds of miles away. These other missionaries would not be part of a regional presbytery in that country. Thus, to bring negative sanctions against another missionary, the complaining missionary would have to complain through his own presbytery back in the United States. From there the complaint would go to the defendant's presbytery, then up to the chain of appeals--synod, General Assembly--then back to the defendant's presbytery. The trial will be conducted 10,000 miles away from the mission field.

It would be obvious to any conservative on the mission field that the government was too distant for the any reasonable expectation of success. Because the denomination never established a permanent system to create geography-based presbyteries on the various mission fields, and because it assented to Speer's recommendation to avoid placing the authority over missionaries in the common agency of government--the Foreign Missions Board itself--the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., effectively removed all threat of negative sanctions from anyone on the mission field. The result in 1932-33 would be the Pearl S. Buck affair.⁽³¹¹⁾ There were many more missionaries on the field who shared her liberal theological views. The only reason why she became a target of conservatives is because she went into print: the public rhetoric factor.

As Machen and his supporters learned, beginning a decade later, Speer's commitment to decentralization was a temporary tactic, not a permanent principle. It was an ad hoc move to insulate liberal missionaries from conservative critics, both at home and on the field. It was a decision to isolate the influence of orthodox theology: at the presbytery level. This could be done only if the General Assembly could be stripped of all authority to impose negative sanctions on anyone who was not under its immediate authority. The boards had become institutional shields for liberals.

This policy of strengthening the presbyteries at the expense of the General Assembly was later abandoned by the inclusivists, after they took control of Princeton Seminary in 1929. The seminary was legally under the General Assembly's authority--an Old School policy. Once that test of power proved to be a total success, the tactic of decentralization was abandoned by the inclusivists, and a policy of comprehensive centralization of power over the presbyteries replaced it. Speer was part of this reversal. Well did Loetscher put it: from 1921 to 1936, Speer did more "in forming the theological policy of the Presbyterian Church than perhaps any other individual."⁽³¹²⁾

In 1924, Princeton's Old Testament scholar Robert Dick Wilson visited the Far East. He returned and issued a basically favorable report on what he had seen. "It is my belief that the ordained missionaries of our church are as true to the teachings of the Confession and as loyal to the Word of God as the ministers at home are."⁽³¹³⁾ This report ended public criticism of the Foreign Missions Board for almost nine years. Wilson could not be written off as a compromiser. He was so dedicated to Old School Presbyterianism that in 1929 he left Princeton at the end of his career and joined the faculty at Westminster. (A very similar report appeared in The Presbyterian in 1935, written by fundamentalist pastor Donald Gray Barnhouse. It had a very similar effect under similar circumstances.)

Final Administrative Consolidation

In 1922, the General Assembly approved a plan to consolidate its 16 Church boards into four. Such a consolidation had been discussed publicly since 1906, the year of the first discussions regarding the 1908 restructuring. The report of the Special Committee on Reorganization and Consolidation of Assembly Agencies was presented. This Committee had been appointed at the turning-point General Assembly of 1920. The very title of the Committee is revealing: Assembly Agencies. The report, accepted unanimously (bold face in the original) by the Committee, filled the 1922 Minutes from page 149 to 181.

The report proposed the creation of a new organization, the General Council, which would coordinate missionary and benevolent operations.⁽³¹⁴⁾ But that was only the beginning. "The General Council shall discharge such other duties as the General Assembly shall from time to time require and authorize."⁽³¹⁵⁾ Other duties: here was an open-ended authorization, and it would soon be exercised.

The Council's Chairman would be chosen for five years by the Council, "subject to the approval of the General Assembly."⁽³¹⁶⁾ The General Assembly would henceforth no longer initiate anything of significance regarding the central agency that would represent it. Attendees could merely exercise the veto. The Stated Clerk would also be a permanent member. If passed by the presbyteries, this overture would consolidate the denomination's bureaucracy. It passed overwhelmingly in 1923-24: 222 to 26, with 6 taking no action.⁽³¹⁷⁾ The presbyteries that voted for it included the conservative strongholds: Chester, Philadelphia, and New Brunswick (Machen's). At the 1924 General Assembly, the General Council recommended a seemingly minor alteration: a name change in the Form of Government from "Executive Commission(s)" to "General Council(s)." This was to be substituted at every level: General Assembly, synod, and presbytery.⁽³¹⁸⁾ The General Assembly approved of the alteration. This overture was also passed overwhelmingly by the presbyteries, 1924-25, and the same three conservative presbyteries voted for it.⁽³¹⁹⁾ So much for concern over the administration of benevolences as the justification for the General Council. The consolidation of the hierarchy was now complete. Here is the significant fact: these changes were initiated by the only two post-war General Assemblies in which the conservatives were supposedly dominant, 1923 and 1924.

In 1926, Chester Presbytery submitted Overture 7, "On Dissolving the General Council," which called for a return to the pre-1908 General Assembly.⁽³²⁰⁾ More than any other action in the entire history of the Presbyterian conflict, this overture reveals naiveté on an unprecedented scale. It justifies the application of an old phrase, "They never saw it coming." From the creedal revision of 1903 until the liberals' administrative juggernaut blind-sided them at the 1926 General Assembly, the conservatives never saw it coming.

Conclusion

The Old School's problem after 1869 was simultaneously theological and judicial. The judicial battles were lost, step by step: 1869 (reunion), 1903 (creedal revision), and 1906 (the Cumberland churches' invasion). The 1908 restructuring of the Church's administrative machinery had almost been defeated by the presbyteries. The 1910 General Assembly passed the fundamentalists' five-point Doctrinal Deliverance, but it also passed the Social Deliverance modeled after the Federal Council of Churches' 1908 statement. The five-point Deliverance, which had zero authority judicially, was the last major defeat for the liberals until 1920, when Church Union and the ordination of women elders were voted down. With each judicial defeat came a theological setback for the conservatives. Five-point Calvinism became judicially unenforceable in the courts in 1903. In 1910, what little remained of four-point Calvinism after the 1906 arrival of 1,100 Cumberland Presbyterian congregations was formally replaced creedally by something not distinguishable from common-ground fundamentalism: the five-point Doctrinal Deliverance.

Meanwhile, the modernists had learned their lesson from Briggs. From 1900 until 1922, they guarded their pens and tongues while they systematically infiltrated the agencies and boards. By 1920, their work was administratively secured from reversal. As Quirk writes of the Old School, "Exclusivists were not particularly prominent in the structure of boards and agencies, and they expressed concern about the growth of Church machinery, of professional programs, and the soundness of the missionary enterprises of the Church."⁽³²¹⁾ This is the familiar progression in every denomination: those who want to preach a conservative gospel enter the pulpits and stay there. Those who want jobs more than they want theological commitment enter the bureaucracy. The larger the bureaucracy, the weaker its theology. It takes a systematic and permanent effort for conservatives to retard this development.⁽³²²⁾

The modernists hid in the shadow of the New School's experiential-based, minimal-sanctions theology. They found that this shadow grew much broader in 1906 when Cumberland Presbyterians came in. This step-by-step downgrading of theology was exactly suited to their plans. If they could avoid giving rhetorical offense, they could continue their work unimpeded judicially. For example, Rev. Stelzle's version of the social gospel was controversial, but he was neither a theologian nor a seminary professor. He was a social activist who worked with the poor--an unrepresentative figure who resigned his position in 1912.⁽³²³⁾ (He was representative in one sense, however: he was subsequently hired by the Federal Council. The liberals took care of their fallen wounded.) Meanwhile, the General Assembly ratified the social program of the Federal Council in 1910, 1913, and 1914. The modernists bided their time. They could afford to be patient.

In 1920, the liberals visibly captured the Church's bureaucracy. They gained the General Assembly's support for establishing a committee to lay the foundation for the next administrative reorganization of the Church: the consolidation of the boards. The key figure behind this was Speer, whose letter to the committee recommended the establishment of a central council.⁽³²⁴⁾ This restructuring took place in 1923, a year in which the conservatives supposedly were powerful in the General Assembly. The liberals had the votes; the conservatives had only rhetoric.

The conservatives' rhetoric was mild because they did not want to provoke a fight. They called for the modernists in general (never by name) to leave the denomination, but that was the extent of it. This attitude of forbearance played into the hands of the modernists. Like a dim-witted mother who refuses to use a scrub brush on her muddy child because of her fear that this scrubbing might hurt the little tyke too much, so was the typical Presbyterian conservative in regard to the condition of the Church. Most of them preferred to slumber in peace. Anyone in their camp who betrayed this happy-face theology by adopting confrontational rhetoric risked being treated in the same way that Briggs was treated. It had not been his theology that had doomed him; it had been his rhetoric. Hostile rhetoric--or even the unproven accusation of hostile rhetoric--would bring forth negative sanctions. The crucial issue was sanctions.

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Footnotes:

1. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1911, p. 151.

2. Wilson, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, [1956] 1973), p. 30.

3. Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Philadelphia: Westminster Theological Seminary, [1954] 1977), p. 72.

4. He died in 1924, a broken, beaten man, absolutely confident that the U.S. Senate had been wrong about the League of Nations, and that he had been completely correct.

5. Henry van Dyke's press release. See Chapter 8, below, section on "Van Dyke Strikes Again."

6. In 1962, the magazine did it again. At the peak of the American Protestant Establishment's control over the religious scene--a drastically shrunken scene since 1908--its editor wrote: "Today, as a new era dawns, God is using the power of ecumenical faith and experience to add a new dimension to churchmanship in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as in Europe and America." Harold E. Fey, "Preface," in Fey and Margaret Frakes, eds., The Christian Century Reader (New York: Association Press, 1962), p. 7.

7. Speech to the General Assembly, "The Speedy Bringing of the World to Christ," cited in James A. Patterson, "Robert E. Speer, J. Gresham Machen and the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions," American Presbyterians, 64 (Spring 1986), p. 59.

8. Machen, "The Creeds and Doctrinal Advance" (1936), in Scripture and Confession: A Book About Confessions Old and New, edited by John H. Skilton (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1973), p. 156.

9. Report of the Committee of the Constitution, Minutes of the Second General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America (Nov. 12-14, 1936), pp. 13-14.

10. This problem is not confined to ecclesiology; it is fundamental to every tradition and every constitution. History moves forward. New traditions appear. Constitutions are revised. New precedents are set. But God retains the final veto in terms of permanent standards.

11. In that same year, the Northern Baptist Convention was formed, with Henry Pratt Judson, president of the University of Chicago, as its first president. Judson conferred with Rev. Frederick Gates, Rockefeller's money-distributor, on numerous matters. Albert Frederick Schenkel, The Rich Man and the Kingdom: John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Protestant Establishment, 1900-1960 (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1990), pp. 33-35.

12. C. Gregg Singer, The Unholy Alliance (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1975), p. 19.

13. 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), p. 381. The 1908 social creed itself was the product earlier in the year of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church: "The Social Ideals of the Churches." See Samuel McCrea Cavert, On the Road to Christian Unity: An Appraisal of the Ecumenical Movement (New York: Harper & Bros., 1961), p. 31.

14. Singer, Unholy Alliance, p. 59.

15. See, for example, the symposium edited by Ralph H. Gabriel, Christianity and Modern Thought (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1924). Speer wrote Chapter 9: "Christianity and International Relations." The editor wrote in his Foreword regarding fundamentalism's "demagogic appeals" (p. viii). He announced triumphantly: "It seems fairly clear that liberal Protestantism is shaking off this inherent tendency ["to conserve the traditions of antiquity and to retard advance"] and is putting itself in the way to assume a new leadership in a new world" (p. xi). Furthermore, "the result seems destined to be Protestant unity." He spoke of "the passing of the Fundamentalists," and proclaimed "a new faith out of which will have been refined those encumbering superstitions and doctrinal antagonisms which are the inheritance of ignorance" (p. xii).

16. On Roberts' long career, see Bruce David Forbes, "William Henry Roberts: Resistance and Bureaucratic Adaptation," Journal of Presbyterian History, 54 (Winter 1976). The Stated Clerk of the Southern Presbyterian Church, 1865-1898, was also a conservative, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, the father of Woodrow and the brother-in-law of James Woodrow. Roberts was a friend of the Wilson family.

17. Ibid., p. 412.

18. Ibid., pp. 414-15.

19. Ibid., pp. 415-16.

20. Ibid., p. 417.

21. Richard W. Reifsnyder, "Presbyterian Reunion, Reorganization and Expansion in the Late Nineteenth Century," American Presbyterians, 64 (1986), p. 33.

22. James H. Smylie, "Stated Clerks and Social Policy: American Presbyterians and Transforming American Culture," ibid., 67 (Fall 1989), p. 193.

23. Smylie says not a word about Mudge, who served from 1921 to 1938. He served as Stated Clerk Emeritus until his death in 1945, and he served as Acting General Secretary of the Board of Education, 1938-40. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1945, p. 99.

24. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1906, p. 134.

25. Smylie, "Stated Clerks," p. 194.

26. Singer, Unholy Alliance, p. 79.

27. Cited in Robert T. Handy, A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 148-49. Handy lists the social gospel leaders involved in the work of the Council (p. 149).

28. Forbes, "Roberts," p. 417.

29. Thomas Ridgeley, A Body of Divinity, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Bros., [1731-33] 1855). Reprinted by Still Waters Revival Books, 1993.

30. Tertius van Dyke, Henry van Dyke: A Biography (New York: Harper & Bros., 1935), p. 132.

31. Ibid., p. 124. This was from a January 27, 1890 sermon.

32. Cited in ibid., p. 125.

33. Ibid., p. 126.

34. Robert Hastings Nichols, Presbyterianism in New York State: A History of the Synod and Its Predecessors (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963), p. 196.

35. Van Dyke, Van Dyke, p. 269.

36. Ibid., p. 223.

37. Hugh T. Kerr, "Henry van Dyke," American Presbyterians, 66 (Winter 1988), p. 295.

38. Edward B. Hodge, "The Proposed Amendments and Additions to the text of the Confessions," Princeton Theological Review, 1 (1903), p. 283.

39. This journal and its cousin, edited by Warfield, The Presbyterian and Reformed Review, were mild-mannered academic affairs. They published articles on New Testament and Old Testament studies, Church history (mainly biographies), studies of the Confession, and similar topics. Typical is Frederick W. Loetscher's article, "Schwenckfeld's Participation in the Eucharistic Controversy of the Sixteenth Century," Princeton Theological Review, 4 (July 1906). George Hopkins' essay in the January, 1901, issue of The Presbyterian and Reformed Review may not be typical, but it reflects a kind of self-conscious otherworldliness: "Whether Angels Can Love." One rare exception was an article by Princeton Seminary's William Brenton Greene, Jr., "Broad Churchism and the Christian Life," Princeton Theological Review, 4 (July 1906). I discuss his article below.

40. In 1923, the Christian Reformed Church accepted a similar creedal revision that spoke of "the favorable attitude of God toward mankind in general." Westminster Seminary's Cornelius Van Til would later write a book defending this revision: Common Grace (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1947). But this revision led to a split in the denomination. The Protestant Reformed Church understood the threat to Calvinist orthodoxy posed by the revision; its 1924 Synod rejected it.

41. B. B. Warfield, "The Proposed Union With the Cumberland Presbyterians," Princeton Theological Review, 2 (April 1904), p. 298.

42. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987).

43. Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 24.

44. Warfield, "Proposed Union," PTR (1904), p. 295.

45. Ibid., p. 302.

46. Ibid., pp. 315-16.

47. Herman C. Weber, Presbyterian Statistics Through One Hundred Years, 1826-1926 (n.p.: The General Council, Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., 1927), p. 88.

48. Ibid., p. 30.

49. John T. Ames, "Cumberland Liberals and the Union of 1906," Journal of Presbyterian History, 52 (Spring 1974), p. 18.

50. Weber, Presbyterian Statistics, p. 31.

51. Ibid., p. 89.

52. Ibid., p. 109.

53. Ibid., p. 108.

54. Ibid., p. 94.

55. Charles E. Quirk, The "Auburn" Affirmation (Ph.D. dissertation, Iowa University, 1967), pp. 21-22.

56. Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York: Harper Torchbooks, [1949] 1967), p. 207.

57. Charles H. Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865-1915 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1940), pp. 234-35.

58. "Stelzle, Charles," Dictionary of American Religious Biography, edited by Henry Warden Bowden (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1977), p. 429.

59. See below: "Showdown in 1910."

60. Willard H. Smith, "William Jennings Bryan and the Social Gospel," Journal of American History, 53 (June 1966), p. 47.

61. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1915, pp. 168-69.

62. Greene, "Broad Churchism and the Briggs Case," Presbyterian Journal (May 18, 1893).

63. Greene, "Broad Churchism and the Christian Life," PTR (1906), p. 309.

64. Ibid., p. 310.

65. Ibid.

66. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1906, p. 82.

67. Ibid., p. 83.

68. David G. Dawson, "Mission Philanthropy, Selected Giving and Presbyterianism," American Presbyterians, 68 (Summer 1990).

69. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1907, p. 80.

70. Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World: Europe, 1100-1350 (New York: World, 1961), chaps. 9, 10.

71. Cited in Leonard Trinterud, The Forming of an American Tradition: A Re-examination of COLONIAL PRESBYTERIANISM (Salem, New Hampshire: Ayer, [1949] 1978), p. 256.

72. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1907, p. 81.

73. Ibid.

74. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1908, p. 206.

75. Ibid., p. 156.

76. Ibid.

77. Ibid., p. 157.

78. Ibid.

79. Ibid.

80. Gary North, "The Politics of the `Fair Share,'" The Freeman, 43 (Nov. 1993).

81. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1909, p. 91.

82. In market institutions, consumers are sovereign: they supply the funds. Gary North, The Sinai Strategy: Economics and the Ten Commandments (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1986), pp. 163-65.

83. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1926, p. 25.

84. Cited in Lefferts A. Loetscher, The Broadening Church: a study of theological issues in the presbyterian church since 1869 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), p. 97.

85. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1910, pp. 273-74. 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. 281.

86. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1909, p. 47.

87. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1910, p. 231.

88. Ibid., p. 233.

89. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1913, p. 69.

90. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1914, p. 28.

91. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1910, p. 285.

92. Winthrop S. Hudson, The Great Tradition of the American Churches (New York: Harper & Bros., 1953), p. 209.

93. Ibid., p. 210.

94. Ibid., p. 207.

95. William Richey Hogg, Ecumenical Foundations (New York: Harper & Bros., 1952), p. 130.

96. Charles Clayton Morrison, "The World Missionary Conference," Christian Century (July 7, 1910); reprinted in The Christian Century Reader (New York: Association Press, 1962), p. 140. He called them "missionary specialists." Speakers included England's Arthur Balfour and America's William Jennings Bryan. Ibid., pp. 141, 142.

97. Nichols, Presbyterianism in New York State, p. 182.

98. This, at least, according to Samuel McCrea Cavert, who worked with Oldham and Mott. Cavert, On the Road to Christian Unity, p. 23n.

99. Morgan Phelps Noyes, Henry Sloane Coffin: The Man and His Ministry (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964), p. 106.

100. Ibid., p. 146.

101. Cited in ibid., p. 107.

102. Ibid., p. 108.

103. Ibid., p. 202.

104. In his study of America's elite, a member of this elite, Nelson Aldrich, Jr., writes: "Trusteeships are also famously hereditary, at least as hereditary as family business. Even in a city like New York, a place famously hazardous to old fortunes, as late as 1979 the board of the Metropolitan Museum reserved seats for the Morgan family, the Astor family, the Whitney family, the Rockefeller family, and (the so-called media seat) the Sulzberger family. Morgan's seat was in its fourth generation in the line of descent." Aldrich, Old Money: The Mythology of America's Upper Class (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 220.

105. Noyes, Coffin, p. 25.

106. Ibid., pp. 26-27.

107. Newspaper cartoonist Gary Trudeau featured Bush's Skull & Bones connection in several of his Doonesbury cartoon strips in 1988. Trudeau is a Bones member. Duncan Maxwell Anderson, "The Club," Success! (May 1987), p. 57.

108. See Antony C. Sutton, America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to The Order of Skull & Bones (Billings, Montana: Liberty House, 1986), p. 8.

109. A brief list of influential members: Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, author of the enormously influential anti-Christian book, A History of the Warfare of Science with Technology in Christendom (1896), and the first president of the American Historical Association; Daniel Coit Gilman, the second president of the University of California (1872-75), the first president of Johns Hopkins University (long tenure: 1875-1901), and the first president of the Carnegie Institution (1902-1905); William Graham Sumner, the right-wing Social Darwinist and sociology professor at Yale; Henry R. Luce, founder of Time-Life Corp.; Averell Harriman, one of the six "wise men" who superintended U.S. foreign policy after 1933, and partner of Brown Brothers, Harriman, a major investment banking firm; Prescott Bush, later a U.S. Senator, George Bush's father, who was a member of the Harriman organization; Henry L. Stimson, another of the wise men, who served as Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of War, Herbert Hoover's Secretary of State, and Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of War, continuing to serve under Harry Truman; Robert Lovett, whose family had been in the Order through several generations, a member of the Harriman organization, another of the wise men, Secretary of Defense under Truman; Robert A. Taft, the conservative U.S. Senator in the 1940's and 1950's; William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of National Review; Winston Lord, the sixth in his family to be initiated, the former Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and the U.S. Ambassador to Mainland China; the Bundy brothers, McGeorge (president of the Ford Foundation) and William; J. Richardson Dilworth, who in the 1970's managed a large share of the Rockefeller fortune. See Sutton's America's Secret Establishment for details. Brown Brothers, Harriman pays Skull and Bones' tax bill. Ron Rosenbaum, "Last Secrets of Skull & Bones," Esquire (Sept. 1977), p. 85.

110. A 1970 made-for-TV movie, The Brotherhood of the Bell, seems to have been modeled on Bones. One scene takes place in a bedroom with a Yale pennant on the wall--the only reference in the movie to a non-fictional university.

111. The starting point for any serious study of the American Establishment is Philip H. Burch, Jr., Elites in American History, 3 vols. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980).

112. Noyes, Coffin, p. 180.

113. In 1931, the McGiffert Hall dormitory for married students was completed at Union. It had been financed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Ibid., p. 200.

114. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1917, p. 179.

115. John Ensor Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Century (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988), p. 87.

116. On the grand jury episode, see Raymond B. Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller Jr.: A Portrait (New York: Harper & Bros., 1956), pp. 137-39.

117. Daryl L. Revoldt, Raymond B. Fosdick: Reform, Internationalism, and the Rockefeller Foundation (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Akron, 1982), p. 75.

118. Charles E. Harvey, "John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Social Sciences: An Introduction," Journal of the History of Sociology, IV (Fall 1982), p. 13.

119. Edward H. Berman, The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations in American Foreign Policy: Ideology and Philanthropy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984).

120. Harr and Johnson, Rockefellers, p. 169.

121. Don Fisher: Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences: Rockefeller Philanthropy and the United States Social Science Research Council (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 32.

122. Ibid., Preface.

123. Tax-Exempt Foundations, Report, House of Representatives, 83rd Congress, 2nd session, Report 2681, Dec. 16, 1954 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954), p. 47. Cf. pages 47-51.

124. Patrick D. Reagan, "The Withholding Tax, Beardsley Ruml, and Modern American Public Policy," Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives, 24 (Spring 1992), p. 23.

125. Beardsley Ruml, "Taxes for Revenue Are Obsolete," American Affairs, 8 (Jan. 1946), p. 36.

126. Ibid., pp. 37-39.

127. Rounding figures to the nearest million, here are the expenditures. Rockefeller Foundation: $183 million; General Education Board: $129 million; Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund (named after John D., Sr.'s wife): $74 million; Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research: $61 million; University of Chicago: $40 million. Total: $487 million. Ferdinand Lundberg, The Rockefeller Syndrome (Secaucus, New Jersey: Lyle Stewart, 1975), p. 150.

128. Schenkel, Rich Man and Kingdom, pp. 38-39.

129. Ibid., p. 36.

130. Waldemar A. Nielson, The Big Foundations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), p. 316.

131. Ibid., pp. 317-18.

132. Ibid., p. 325.

133. See the series issued by the Capital Research Center, Washington, D.C.: Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy (1987, 1988, 1990).

134. Charles E. Harvey, "Speer Versus Rockefeller and Mott, 1910-1935," Journal of Presbyterian History, 60 (Winter 1982). Speer was less of an ecumenist than Mott, but he never formally broke with Rockefeller.

135. Harvey, "Social Sciences," p. 5.

136. Schenkel, Rich Man and Kingdom, p. 135.

137. Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence: A study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912-1917 (Chicago: Quadrangle, [1959] 1964), p. 356. The other two were Brand Whitlock, Progressive novelist and reformer (Brussels) and Walter Hines Page (London).

138. The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus Daniels, 1913-1921, edited by E. David Cronin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), pp. 250-51.

139. Van Dyke, Van Dyke, p. 350.

140. Ibid., p. 390.

141. William Adams Brown, A Teacher and His Times: A Story of Two Worlds (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940), p. 149.

142. Quirk, Auburn Affirmation, p. 31.

143. Van Dyke, Van Dyke, p. 279.

144. David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).

145. April 15, 1913, p. 5; April 18, 1913, p. 6. Cited in Quirk, Auburn Affirmation, p. 31n.

146. May 20, 1913, p. 5. Cited in ibid., p. 32n.

147. April 14, 1914, p. 3; June 9, 1914, p. 6; April 13, 1914, p. 7. Cited in ibid., p. 33n.

148. Fox, Does the Presbytery of New York Need Visitation? (New York: n.p., 1915); New York Times (May 1, 1915), p. 13. Cited in ibid., p. 33.

149. New York Times (April 18, 1916), p. 13; (May 9, 1916), p. 9; (May 16, 1916), p. 4; (May 20, 1916), p. 8. Ibid., p. 36.

150. New York Times (May 19, 1916), p. 22. Ibid., p. 37.

151. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1916, p. 58. The Presbytery of Chester presented a similar overture in 1925, with the same result. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1925, p. 20.

152. Ibid., p. 130.

153. Stonehouse, Machen, p. 216. This book has been reprinted by Presbyterian & Reformed.

154. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1916, p. 35.

155. J. Ross Stevenson, "Contribution of the S.V.M. to the Home Church," Student Volunteer Movement after Twenty-Five Years (n.p., n.d. [1911]).

156. Ronald Thomas Clutter, The Reorientation of Princeton Theological Seminary, 1900-1929 (Th.D. dissertation, Dallas Theological Seminary, 1982), ch. 4.

157. Weber, Presbyterian Statistics, p. 30.

158. William O. Harris, Librarian for Archives and Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary, to the author: Sept. 10, 1992.

159. Clutter, Reorientation, p. 95.

160. Ibid., p. 98.

161. Ibid.

162. The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, edited by R. A. Torrey, A. C. Dixon, et al., 4 vols. (Bible Institute of Los Angeles, 1917). This set has been reprinted by Baker Book House in Grand Rapids.

163. Stewart was also the founder of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, the institutional predecessor of Biola College. He also contributed $1,000 to help publish the Scofield Reference Bible (1909). Ernest R. Sandeen, "Toward a Historical Interpretation of the Origins of Fundamentalism," Church History, 36 (1967), p. 78.

164. Curtis Lee Laws, Watchman-Examiner (July 1, 1920); cited in LeRoy Moore, Jr., "Another Look at Fundamentalism: A Response to Ernest R. Sandeen," Church History, 37 (June 1968), p. 196. See Gabriel Hebert, Fundamentalism and the Church (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1957), pp. 17-27.

165. George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 119.

166. The Presbyterian (April 22, 1916), pp. 18-19. Cited in Quirk, Auburn Affirmation, p. 39.

167. The Presbyterian Banner (April 29, 1916), p. 6. Cited in ibid., p. 40.

168. The Presbyterian (April 29, 1915), p. 5; (May 6, 1915), p. 4. Cited in ibid., pp. 40-41.

169. Ibid., p. 41.

170. Ibid., p. 37.

171. Schenkel, Rich Man and Kingdom, p. 188.

172. Ibid., p. 186.

173. Rousas John Rushdoony, This Independent Republic: Studies in the Nature and Meaning of American History (Fairfax, Virginia: Thoburn Press, [1964] 1978), p. 107.

174. Brown, Teacher and His Times, p. 237.

175. Singer, Unholy Alliance, p. 45.

176. Handy, Christian America, p. 161.

177. Eldon G. Ernst, Moment of Truth for Protestant America: Interchurch Campaigns Following World War I (Missoula, Montana: American Academy of Religion & Scholars' Press, 1972), p. 51.

178. Ibid., p. 62.

179. W. A. Brown, The Church in America: A Study of the Present Condition and Future Prospects of American Protestantism (1922), p. 119; cited in Handy, Christian America, p. 162.

180. Handy, ibid., p. 164.

181. Cited in Schenkel, Rich Man and Kingdom, p. 134.

182. Ibid.

183. J. D. Rockefeller, Jr., to Rockefeller, Sr., 21 April 1920. Cited in Charles E. Harvey, "John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Herbert Hoover, and President Wilson's Industrial Conferences of 1919-1920," in Voluntarism, Planning, and the State: The American Planning Experience, 1914-1946, edited by Jerold D. Brown and Patrick D. Reagan (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1988), p. 36.

184. Schenkel, Rich Man and Kingdom, p. 135.

185. Ibid., p. 144.

186. Ernst, Moment of Truth, p. 79.

187. Ibid., p. 91.

188. Charles E. Harvey, "John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Interchurch World Movement of 1919-1920: A Different Angle on the Ecumenical Movement," Church History, 51 (June 1982), p. 205n.

189. Ernst, Moment of Truth, pp. 144-45.

190. Fosdick to his wife: July 31, 1919; in Fosdick, ed., Letters on the League of Nations (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 18.

191. Francois Duchene, Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence (New York: Norton, 1994), p. 63; Richard J. Barnet, The Alliance: America-Europe-Japan, Makers of the Postwar World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), ch. 3.

192. Raymond B. Fosdick, Chronicle of a Generation: An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Bros., 1958), p. 215.

193. Harvey, "Different Angle," p. 206.

194. Harvey, "John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Social Sciences," op. cit., p. 9.

195. Harvey, "Different Angle," p. 207.

196. This was different from the SSRC: Social Science Research Council. The ISRR was formed in 1923: Harvey, "Social Sciences," p. 10. So was the SSRC: Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by Edwin R. A. Seligman, 15 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1933), IX:299.

197. Ibid., pp. 1-31.

198. Eldon G. Ernst, "Presbyterians and the Interchurch World Movement--A Chapter in the Development of Protestant Unity in Twentieth-Century America," Journal of Presbyterian History, 48 (Winter 1970), p. 242. Lansing was John Foster Dulles' uncle.

199. Ibid., pp. 242-43.

200. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1919, p. 224.

201. He resigned in October, 1924. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1924, pp. 103-104. This was the year that the Church's consolidation went into effect; the New Era Movement had ceased to exist as the consolidating agency of benevolences.

202. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1919, p. 224.

203. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1918, p. 67.

204. Ibid., p. 55.

205. Weber, Presbyterian Statistics, pp. 117-19.

206. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1919, pp. 224-25.

207. Ibid., p. 225.

208. Ibid., pp. 227-28.

209. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1920, p. 145.

210. Ernst, Moment of Truth, p. 79.

211. Ibid., p. 146.

212. Ibid., p. 149.

213. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1920, p. 218.

214. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1921, pp. 172-73.

215. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1922, p. 31.

216. Ernst, Moment of Truth, p. 171.

217. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1920, p. 26.

218. Ibid., p. 27.

219. Ibid., p. 175.

220. Ibid., p. 176.

221. Ibid., p. 219.

222. Ibid., p. 220.

223. Ibid., p. 202.

224. Ibid., p. 244.

225. See Chapter 14, below.

226. Ibid., p. 143.

227. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1919, p. 154.

228. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1920, p. 118.

229. Ibid., p. 122.

230. "Preamble," ibid., p. 119.

231. Ibid.

232. Ibid., p. 120.

233. Ibid., p. 121.

234. Cited in Stonehouse, Machen, p. 305. The Preamble is reprinted by Stonehouse: pp. 305-306.

235. He later claimed to have opposed it in presbytery.

236. Ibid., pp. 306-307. Machen wrote other articles on this issue for The Presbyterian: January 20, 1921, and March 17, 1921.

237. Ibid., p. 307.

238. Gary North, Healer of the Nations: Biblical Blueprints for International Relations (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987), ch. 9: "Alliances Are Not Covenants."

239. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1921, p. 42.

240. Stonehouse, Machen, pp. 311.

241. Ibid., p. 312.

242. The author was George W. Richards, a defender of Schleiermacher and Ritschl. Machen pointed this out in The Presbyterian (Jan. 20, 1921). Ibid., pp. 308, 312.

243. Cited in Delwyn G. Nykamp, A Presbyterian Power Struggle: A Critical History of Communication Strategies in the Struggle for Control of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., 1922-1926 (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1974), p. 453.

244. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1921, p. 83.

245. Ibid., p. 84.

246. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1922, pp. 78ff.

247. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1923, pp. 296-99.

248. Ibid., p. 296.

249. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1920, pp. 127-31.

250. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1921, p. 44.

251. Ibid., p. 45.

252. Ibid., p. 46.

253. Ibid., p. 44.

254. Cf. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1923, pp. 47-50.

255. Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1995), p. 24.

256. Ibid.

257. Cited in ibid., p. 25.

258. W. H. Griffith Thomas, "Modernism in China," Princeton Theological Review, 19 (Oct. 1921), pp. 630-71; reprinted with its original pagination in Modernism and Foreign Missions: Two Fundamentalist Protests, edited by Joel A. Carpenter (New York: Garland, 1988).

259. Ibid., p. 632.

260. Shailer Mathews, New Faith for Old: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1936), p. 278.

261. Ibid.

262. Cited in Griffith Thomas, "Modernism in China," pp. 634-35.

263. Ibid., p. 636.

264. Ibid., p. 637.

265. Ibid., p. 638.

266. Grant Wacker, "The Dilemmas of Historical Consciousness: The Case of Augustus H. Strong," in In the Great Tradition: In honor of Winthrop S. Hudson, Essays on Pluralism, Voluntarism, and Revivalism, edited by Paul R. Dekar and Joseph D. Ban (Valley Forge, Pennsylvania: Judson, 1982), pp. 223, 227.

267. Ibid., p. 225.

268. Ibid.

269. Ibid.

270. Augustus H. Strong, Christ in Creation and Ethical Monism (Philadelphia: Griffith & Rowland, 1899), p. 10. Cited in ibid., p. 227.

271. Ibid., p. 229.

272. Ibid., p. 226.

273. Wrote Joseph Schumpeter in 1942: "Perhaps the most striking feature of the picture is the extent to which the bourgeoisie, besides educating its own enemies, allows itself in turn to be educated by them. It absorbs the slogans of current radicalism and seems quite willing to undergo a process of conversion to a creed hostile to its very existence. Haltingly and grudgingly it concedes in part the implications of that creed. This would be most astonishing and indeed very hard to explain were it not for the fact that the typical bourgeois is rapidly losing faith in his own creed." Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, [1942] 1962), p. 161.

274. Moore, "Another Look at Fundamentalism," op. cit., p. 198.

275. Ibid., p. 200.

276. Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 104.

277. Ibid., p. 107.

278. Ibid.

279. Speer, "Are the Missionaries in China Trustworthy?" Address to the Presbyterian Social Union, March 28, 1921; cited in James Alan Patterson, Robert E. Speer and the Crisis of the American Protestant Missionary Movement, 1920-1937 (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton theological Seminary, 1980), p. 131.

280. See Chapter 9, below.

281. Mott was less known as a promoter of denominational missions than as an ecumenist and a defender of interdenominational missions.

282. Patterson, Speer, p. 5.

283. Ibid., p. 16.

284. Ibid., p. 22.

285. Longfield, Presbyterian Controversy, p. 196.

286. Patterson, Speer, p. 25.

287. Ibid., p. 26.

288. Singer, Unholy Alliance, p. 28.

289. Patterson, Speer, p. 29.

290. Robert E. Speer, The Christian Man, the Church and the War (New York: Macmillan, 1918), p. 7.

291. Ibid., p. 51.

292. Ibid.

293. Ibid., p. 78.

294. Ibid., p. 89.

295. Ibid., p. 91.

296. Ibid., p. 95.

297. Speer, The New Opportunity of the Church (New York: Macmillan, 1919), p. 89.

298. Ibid., p. 93.

299. Ibid., p. 109.

300. Speer, in Federal Council Bulletin, 2 (June 1919), p. 103; cited in Handy, Christian America, p. 161.

301. Charles E. Harvey, "Speer Versus Rockefeller and Mott, 1910-1935," Journal of Presbyterian History, 60 (Winter, 1982), p. 285.

302. Cited in Patterson, Speer, pp. 81-82.

303. Rockefeller to Speer, Dec. 4, 1920; cited in Schenkel, Rich Man and Kingdom, p. 189.

304. Longfield, Presbyterian Controversy, pp. 189-95.

305. Cited in Patterson, Speer, p. 127.

306. Ibid.

307. Loetscher, Broadening Church, pp. 105-106.

308. Cited in Longfield, Presbyterian Controversy, p. 187.

309. Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 106.

310. Ibid.

311. See Chapter 11, below.

312. Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 105.

313. Wilson, "Friendly Advice to the Foreign Board," The Presbyterian (Oct. 25, 1923), p. 9; cited in Patterson, Speer, p. 135.

314. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1922, p. 178.

315. Ibid.

316. Ibid.

317. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1924, p. 137.

318. Ibid., p. 105.

319. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1925, p. 61.

320. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1926, p. 25.

321. Quirk, Auburn Affirmation, p. 56.

322. Only once has it been reversed in the twentieth century: in the Southern Baptist Convention, 1977-1990. The Missouri Synod Lutherans slowed the drift into liberalism in 1975 and may have reversed it in 1992. The Convention voted 580 to 568 to replace the more liberal president with a conservative. Christian News (July 20, 1992), p. 23. But the fight continues.

323. George H. Nash, "Charles Stezle: Social Gospel Pioneer," Journal of Presbyterian History, 50 (1972), pp. 206-28.

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