8

THE REVIVAL OF RHETORIC

Upon the Christian doctrine of the Cross, modern liberals are never weary of pouring out the vials of their hatred and their scorn. Even at this point, it is true, the hope of avoiding offence is not always abandoned; the words "vicarious atonement" and the like--of course in a sense totally at variance from their Christian meaning--are still sometimes used. But despite such occasional employment of traditional language the liberal preachers reveal only too clearly what is in their minds. They speak with disgust of those who believe "that the blood of our Lord, shed in substitutionary death, placates an alienated Deity and makes possible welcome for the returning sinner." Against the doctrine of the Cross they use every weapon of caricature and vilification. Thus they pour out their scorn upon a thing so holy and so precious that in the presence of it the Christian heart melts in gratitude too deep for words. It never seems to occur to modern liberals that in deriding the Christian doctrine of the Cross, they are trampling on human hearts.

J. Gresham Machen (1923)⁽¹⁾

Machen in 1923 quoted verbatim from a sermon. That sermon was fast becoming the most important sermon preached by any American pastor in the twentieth century. The historical context of that sermon was the battle over Darwinism. It was a follow-up to the preacher's article against Bryan which appeared in the New York Times on March 12, 1922.

The published attacks on Bryan by March 5 had been deemed insufficient by the editors of the Times. They wanted an even bigger gun. The previous attacks had been conducted by well-known secularists. This was not enough. Bryan was a Presbyterian. The Presbyterian Church had two million members and almost ten thousand pastors. First, the editors needed a prominent fellow-Presbyterian to respond. Second, the editors also needed a Baptist, the largest American Protestant association. Finally, they wanted a pastor whose name was known to literate Americans generally and to New York Times readers specifically. They got all three in one man: Harry Emerson Fosdick.

The Senior Pastor of the American Establishment

Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969) was a Baptist minister with a unique distinction: he was the associate pastor of New York's First Presbyterian Church. This congregation had been formed in 1918 as an amalgam of three other Presbyterian Churches. This had been an era of war-inspired Church unity. Fosdick also served Union Seminary as professor of practical theology from 1915 until 1934.⁽²⁾ He became the most famous radio preacher of his era--the original electronic preacher. He began his Sunday morning broadcasts in 1923.⁽³⁾ Later, he preached free of charge for NBC's "National Vespers," 1927-1946,⁽⁴⁾ a radio program sponsored by the Federal Council of Churches.⁽⁵⁾ His book royalties did not suffer as a result of his radio broadcasts. He wrote nearly 50 books and 1,000 printed sermons.⁽⁶⁾ His weekly audience was estimated at well over two million people in 1946.⁽⁷⁾ He received 134,827 letters, October 1944 to May 1945.⁽⁸⁾ In order to preach Sunday afternoons on "National Vespers," he had to forsake the Park Avenue Baptist Church's once-a-month afternoon communion services. Fosdick ceased taking communion from 1927 until 1931, when the newly built Riverside Church re-scheduled its communion services.⁽⁹⁾ His biographer justifiably asserts: "In this century . . . no American Protestant minister has exceeded the prominence of Harry Emerson Fosdick."⁽¹⁰⁾

He was a liberal who, like his biographer, equated biblical orthodoxy with mindlessness: "Fosdick believed that it was possible to be a Christian in the twentieth century without throwing one's mind away. . . ."⁽¹¹⁾ He was a founder of psychological pastoral counselling,⁽¹²⁾ and his best-selling book, On Being a Real Person (1943), was an early representative of "the power of positive thinking" school of theology, made famous a decade later by Rev. Norman Vincent Peale.⁽¹³⁾ But he, unlike Peale, was never subject to a verbal barb such as Adlai Stevenson's quip, "I find Paul appealing and Peale appalling." His prestige among liberals was too great. He was also "up to his hips in the vast mental health movement. . . ."⁽¹⁴⁾ But more to the point, he was up to his hips in the Rockefeller empire, which also financed much of the research cost for Miller's laudatory biography.⁽¹⁵⁾

His adult life, says his biographer, was a revolt against the "Calvinist ethos" of his childhood, i.e., the doctrine of hell.⁽¹⁶⁾ He had become an evolutionist in his freshman year of college. His liberalism steadily increased until his suicide attempt in 1902, half way through his second year at seminary, his first at Union, where he also took philosophy courses at Columbia University.⁽¹⁷⁾ After his recovery, he never looked back. He graduated from Union in 1904 with an A+ average.⁽¹⁸⁾ Like Machen, he did not earn a doctorate; like Machen, he served in the YMCA in World War I;⁽¹⁹⁾ like Machen, he wrote and preached for the average person; and like Machen, he was always known as "Dr."⁽²⁰⁾

A Man With Connections

If any man has ever deserved the title, Senior Pastor of the American Establishment, it was Fosdick. He had been appointed as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1917, the year of its reorganization.⁽²¹⁾ That was the year that John D., Jr., became the chairman of its Board.⁽²²⁾ He rubbed shoulders with Charles Evans Hughes, John D., Jr.'s old Sunday School teacher, who had just barely lost the 1916 Presidential election to Woodrow Wilson, and who became Secretary of State in 1921 and Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1930. Also on the Board was the head of Sears, Roebuck: Julius Rosenwald. Fosdick's younger brother Raymond had served as Wilson's Undersecretary General of the League of Nations in Europe.⁽²³⁾ Raymond had studied under Wilson at Princeton.

In the first two weeks of June, 1922, a few months after his response to Bryan, Fosdick gave commencement addresses at the following institutions: Bryn Mawr College, Crozer Seminary, George Washington University (after spending the morning with Supreme Court Justice Brandeis), Ohio University, and the University of Rochester. Add to this a pair of baccalaureate addresses (Ohio University, Radcliffe College) and the invocation at Smith College, plus a morning sermon at Harvard University and a lecture at Ohio Wesleyan University.⁽²⁴⁾ He spoke at the memorial service for Woodrow Wilson in 1924.⁽²⁵⁾ In 1937, he conducted the funeral of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. He offered the benediction at Rockefeller, Jr.'s funeral in 1960.⁽²⁶⁾ He sponsored David Rockefeller's membership in the exclusive Century Club of New York.⁽²⁷⁾ In the years of the Presbyterian conflict, Fosdick was a regularly appearing author in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and Ladies' Home Journal. Beginning in 1923, he began a long association with Reader's Digest: over 60 articles, making him the number-one contributor in his era.⁽²⁸⁾ It is not too much to say (and several Church historians have said it) that Fosdick was the most influential preacher in America in between the eras of Billy Sunday and Billy Graham.⁽²⁹⁾ Andrew Blackwood, who taught homiletics at Princeton Seminary, once said of Fosdick's abilities: "If any young man wishes to learn what to preach, he may look elsewhere; if he would learn how, let him tarry."⁽³⁰⁾

He earned in this era at least $25,000 a year, placing him in the upper four-tenths of one percent of American income.⁽³¹⁾ The average pastor earned under $1,000 in 1918;⁽³²⁾ fewer than 2,000 of America's 170,000 pastors earned over $3,000.⁽³³⁾ His salary from his congregation was only a small fraction of $25,000: perhaps 20 percent. Lecture fees and book royalties constituted the bulk of his income. He was the most audible American pastor of his day: the voice of the literate American public. His books were translated into 50 languages.⁽³⁴⁾ Meanwhile, the average Presbyterian pastor was generally thought to earn $1,200 a year in the 1920's, before the Great Depression hit, but some lay missionaries earned less.⁽³⁵⁾ Like Machen, who was also independent financially, he could preach what he believed without fear of being fired. But Union was not about to fire Fosdick. Shortly before the 1923 General Assembly, at which phase four the Presbyterian conflict publicly erupted, Fosdick wrote to his brother Raymond to ask Rockefeller to give Union money as part of Union's $4 million fund-raising drive. Rockefeller gave a million dollars, and he gave another three million over the years.⁽³⁶⁾

The president of Union in the period of Fosdick's participation in the Presbyterian conflict was A. C. McGiffert.⁽³⁷⁾ With respect to Fosdick's influence on campus, consider the remarks of John C. Bennett, who entered Union in 1926 and became one of the most prominent modernists of the twentieth century. He later became president of Union. He described Fosdick's course on practical theology. Fosdick, he said, "did more than anyone else to bring the results of critical study of the Bible to that whole generation. . . . It is hard to exaggerate what a source of emancipation it was for thoughtful people of that period to learn that the Bible was not a book of Fundamentalism."⁽³⁸⁾ Fosdick's classes were so popular that tickets had to be issued to allocate seats.⁽³⁹⁾ This explains why the New York Times approached Fosdick to respond to Bryan.⁽⁴⁰⁾

His role in the next phase of the Presbyterian conflict was appropriate for another reason: a year before, in the midst of the brief American flurry of interest over liberal missions in China, Fosdick had been in China addressing missionaries.⁽⁴¹⁾ In 1922, he exposed to full public view the fact that the same theological divisions were undermining Protestantism in America.

Briggs' Rhetorical Strategy Revived

Let us begin with the Times headline: "Attacks W. J. B. Preacher Says Bryan Article Injury to Bible--God Infinitely Grander Than Occasional Wonder-Worker." This was Briggs' old ploy: positioning modernism as the religion that honors the Bible, with conservatism as dishonoring. The headline writer had read the article carefully; he understood what Fosdick was saying.

Fosdick challenged Bryan on three points: his rejection of a generally established scientific principle; his inappropriate use, in Fosdick's view, of the Bible as a measuring rod of scientific truth; and his narrow view of education. "Indeed, the real enemies of the Christian faith, so far as our students are concerned, are not the evolutionary biologists, but folk like Mr. Bryan who insist on setting up artificial adhesions between Christianity and outgrown scientific opinions, and who proclaim that we cannot have one without the other." Folk like Mr. Bryan: a catchy phrase. (Mr. White Liberal, try using this phrase the next time you speak before an audience of blacks: "What is it you folks want?" It doesn't sound appropriate, does it? It sounds condescending, doesn't it? If ever a man was condescending, it was Harry Emerson Fosdick.) He dismissed Bryan's "special form of medievalism" which Bryan wants to "be made authoritative by the state, promulgated as the only teaching allowed by the schools." By this time, the word "medieval" had been attached to Bryan and his campaign by the political modernists; Fosdick was simply following their lead. Almost prophetically, his conclusion warned Bryan of "a long, long road to travel before he plunges the educational system into such incredible folly. . . ."⁽⁴²⁾

This had been the argument of Charles Briggs a generation earlier: blame the defenders of an inerrant Bible as the true threats to Christianity. The true defenders of the faith are therefore those progressives who are ready and willing to fuse Darwinism and higher criticism with the language of orthodoxy. This strategy had cost Briggs his Presbyterian ordination, but primarily because of his excessively confrontational rhetoric. The liberals had avoided such rhetorical confrontations for a generation. Fosdick decided that it was time to launch a challenge to those in the denomination who still defended at least an outline of Confessional orthodoxy. He did this in the name of a stronger, truer Christianity. But he did so only after the rhetorical precedent had been set by political modernists outside the Church.

American Church historian Edwin Scott Gaustad⁽⁴³⁾ writes of higher criticism that "it was still possible in 1922 to hold that such criticism was chiefly constructive, that Christianity ended up both purer and stronger, and that one's faith was firmer than before."⁽⁴⁴⁾ That is to say, it was possible for an ordained minister to make such arguments in public and avoid being de-frocked in most Protestant denominations. The question in 1922 was: Did this generalization include the Northern Presbyterians?

The theological issue of higher criticism was the same as it had been in Briggs' day: the authority of the Bible (point two of the covenant). The institutional issue was also the same: Could a Presbyterian leader escape negative sanctions--point four--if he went into print with such ideas? The lines of battle were again drawn. Briggs had escaped censure for 15 years, 1876-1891. He kept escalating his rhetoric until he was prosecuted. Fosdick also escaped censure: for three months. Nothing happened. So, it was time to escalate the rhetoric once again.

"Shall the Fundamentalists Win?"

On May 21, 1922, Fosdick delivered the most important sermon of his career, or perhaps of any twentieth-century preacher's career: "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?"⁽⁴⁵⁾ It immediately thrust him into the limelight of denominational politics and national prominence. It acted as a catalyst to the latent controversy within the Church. It was this sermon which gave widespread circulation to Curtis Lee Laws' term fundamentalist, despite the fact that the printed version did not include this word in its title, The New Knowledge and the Christian Faith.

Essentially, the sermon was the familiar liberal plea for tolerance within the denomination for those whose faith was less orthodox than the strict Calvinism of the Westminster Confession. He went beyond this, however; he inserted a statement that biblical inerrancy and the virgin birth are not necessary doctrines of the Christian faith. This was a direct challenge to the Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910, not just to the Calvinists in the denomination.

He began with praise for Gamaliel, who cautioned the Pharisees to show tolerance for the Christians (Acts 5:34-39). This was a clever beginning: he equated the fundamentalists with the Pharisees. He hastened to add: "All Fundamentalists are conservatives, but not all conservatives are Fundamentalists. The best conservatives can often give lessons to the liberals in true liberality of spirit, but the Fundamentalist program is essentially illiberal and intolerant."⁽⁴⁶⁾ He understood the division within the conservative ranks: conservatives who were willing to fight for what they believed because they regarded it as fundamental, and conservatives who would not fight because they did not regard their theology as sufficiently distinctive to be worth creating a public disturbance to defend.

The Five Points of Modernism

Fosdick's sermon revealed all five points: the non-sovereignty of God in history, the non-authoritative Bible, the judicial standard of evolution, the denial of legitimate negative sanctions (although he did not mention hell), and ecumenism, although the ecumenical aspect of the sermon was muted--implied but not stated clearly. The sermon was a warning against conservative theology as the basis of the liberals' doctrine of the Church. Its unstated assumption was that liberal theology should be allowed to spread within the denomination. He used the rhetoric of toleration to deny the legality of oath-bound ordination. This was always the public position of theological liberals in the mainline denominations until they gained control over the courts. After they had gained control, a new rhetoric of oath-bound confession--the confession to obey the Church's courts--was substituted for the rhetoric of toleration.

1. God's sovereignty over history and the processes of history. Fosdick said that Jesus may not have been born of a virgin. That is, His conception did not break with the normal historical processes of conception. In short, in terms of Jewish law, Jesus was a bastard: conceived before marriage. Either the Bible's account of Joseph's surprise is false--he was in fact Jesus' biological father--or else he thought he had been betrayed by Mary. But Fosdick was not so unwise as to put his bastard Christology this graphically. He had to proceed with caution.

Fosdick was making a fundamental liberal point: Jesus' sovereignty over history was not uniquely manifested by God's miraculous act of generation which clearly identified Jesus as God incarnate. Fosdick called this issue "the vexed and mooted question of the virgin birth of our Lord." There is one point of view which affirms the virgin birth, he said, but there are many people in evangelical churches who disagree with this view. He insisted that Christianity is not unique in its affirmation of a virgin birth. "Many people suppose that only once in history do we run across a record of supernatural birth. Upon the contrary, stories of miraculous generation are among the commonest traditions of antiquity. Especially is this true about the founders of great religions." He listed Buddha, Zoroaster, and Lao-Tsze.⁽⁴⁷⁾ His examples were weak. The sacred texts of Zoroastrianism make no such claim, and the story of Buddha's virgin birth came centuries after his era and is expressly opposed to his teaching--facts well known to students of comparative religion in Fosdick's day.⁽⁴⁸⁾ The point is, the New Testament teaches Jesus' virgin birth; it is not the product of accretions from later folk religion.

His acceptance of the possibility of a non-virgin birth for Jesus was a direct assault on the Westminster Confession, which announces that Jesus was "conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost, in the womb of the virgin Mary, of her substance" (VIII:2). If Fosdick was correct, is Jesus sovereign over history? Where and what is the evidence? If not the virgin birth, then what is the alternative? If He was not the son of God through incarnation, then He was a Jewish bastard. In what sense is a heretical dead Jewish bastard sovereign over history? The modernists much preferred to conduct worship on behalf of the memory of a dead Jewish bastard than on behalf of a living sovereign God who brings final judgment. The bulk of their parishioners agreed.

2. The inspiration and authority of the Bible. He admitted that some Christians defend the inerrancy of Scripture.⁽⁴⁹⁾ He called this a "static and mechanical theory of inspiration."⁽⁵⁰⁾ Then he asserted that the Bible's view of God as "an Oriental monarch, fatalistic submission to his will as man's chief duty, the use of force on unbelievers, polygamy, slavery--they are all in the Koran. . . . All of these ideas, which we dislike in the Koran, are somewhere in the Bible."⁽⁵¹⁾ But these Old Testament ideas changed in the New Testament. He implied that revelation is progressive, and is still going on: ". . . finality in the Koran is behind; finality in the Bible is ahead. We have not reached it. We cannot compass all of it. God is leading us out toward it."⁽⁵²⁾ This was another assault on the Westminster Confession, which identifies the Bible as "The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined. . ." (I:10).

3. Fixed vs. evolutionary standards. He appealed to science, meaning evolutionary science. "A great mass of new knowledge has come into man's possession: new knowledge about the physical universe, its origin, its forces, its laws; new knowledge about human history and in particular about the ways in which ancient peoples used to think in matters of religion and the methods by which they phrased and explained their spiritual experiences; and new knowledge, also, about other religions and the strangely similar ways in which men's faiths and religious practices have developed everywhere." Of course, some Christians have been unable to integrate this new knowledge into their thinking. "They have been sure that all truth comes from the one God and is his revelation." Unmentioned here was the Westminster Confession's explicit statement: "The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit or traditions of men" (I:4). Fosdick made Christianity and modernity correlative, i.e., dialectical: "We must be able to think our modern life through in Christian terms, and to do that we also must be able to think our Christian life through in modern terms."⁽⁵³⁾ But some men refuse to accept this. They establish fixed boundaries around the truth: ". . . the Fundamentalists are driving in their stakes to mark out the deadline of doctrine around the Church, across which no one is to pass except on terms of agreement."⁽⁵⁴⁾

4. Sanctions. This was the judicial issue for liberals in all the denominations, and still is. It surely was for Fosdick. "Here in the Christian Church today are these two groups, and the question which the Fundamentalists have raised is this, Shall one of them drive the other out? Do we think the cause of Jesus will be furthered by that?"⁽⁵⁵⁾ The fundamental issue was sanctions. This is why he called the sermon: "Shall the fundamentalists win?" Notice: he recognized only two groups, fundamentalists and everyone else. Machen the next year based Christianity and Liberalism on the same two-fold division.

5. Eschatology: Premillennial Kingdom vs. Ecumenical. What about Christ's second coming? That language meant something very different for early Christians, he argued. They did not understand it as evolutionary. "No one in the ancient world had ever thought, as we do, of development, progress, gradual change, as God's way of working out His will in human life and institutions."⁽⁵⁶⁾ In the evangelical churches today there are differing views of the second coming, he noted. He dismissed premillennialism and premillennialists: "They sit still and do nothing and expect the world to grow worse and worse until He comes."⁽⁵⁷⁾ He contrasted this with Progressivism's secularized postmillennialism, which proclaims that "development is God's way of working out His will."⁽⁵⁸⁾ In music, painting, and architecture, we see progress. He did not mention biblical (i.e., Princeton Seminary's) postmillennialism or amillennialism--the traditional views of a majority of those who have defended historic Calvinism.

Rhetoric vs. the Facts

The fundamentalists plan to drive their enemies out of the Church, he insisted. The problem was, there was no evidence of this at the national level, and had not been since 1900 when McGiffert departed.⁽⁵⁹⁾ Bryan had suggested that liberals voluntarily depart. Machen would soon do the same. But Fosdick was using rhetoric, not logic, to mobilize his listeners.

Fundamentalists, he implied, will thwart the ecumenical impulse by their endless theological quibbling. It is a matter of "penitent shame that the Christian Church should be quarreling over little matters when the world is dying of great needs."⁽⁶⁰⁾ Here is the contrast: the quarreling, nit-picking Christian Church (not just the Presbyterian Church) vs. the great needs of the whole world. As a Baptist, he did not use the words "Church union," but the implication was clear: to meet the needs of a big world, the Christian Church should stop debating theology. Rhetorically, he asked: Should the Church "in the face of colossal issues, play with the tiddly-winks and peccadillos of religion?"⁽⁶¹⁾ This was an echo of Speer's 1901 address to the General Assembly, where he warned against "trifling."

He hastened to add, as every minister who wants to keep his job should add, that he was not talking about anyone in his congregation. "Never in this church have I caught one accent on intolerance. God keep us always so and ever increasing areas of the Christian fellowship; intellectually hospitable, open-minded, liberty-loving, fair, tolerant, not with the tolerance of indifference, as though we did not care about the faith, but because our major emphasis is upon the weightier matters of the law."⁽⁶²⁾ Thus ended the lesson.

This was very strong rhetoric. Fosdick's implication was clear: the fundamentalists were not "intellectually hospitable, open-minded, liberty-loving, fair, tolerant." This sermon was reminiscent of Briggs' rhetoric in his 1891 Inaugural Address, both theologically and rhetorically. It, too, would soon provoke a negative reaction. In his case, at least, his prophecy would come true: after 22 years, the conservatives tried to remove a preacher from his pulpit.

Who Was Behind it?

The sermon became famous in theologically liberal circles within a few weeks. It was published in The Christian Century (June 8) and The Christian Work (June 10). But this was just the beginning. A layman in Fosdick's congregation, Ivy Lee, approached him. He asked: Would Fosdick consent to a reprinting of the sermon? Fosdick agreed, and soon thereafter Lee sent 130,000 copies to ministers and laymen throughout the nation.⁽⁶³⁾ The original title had been toned down; it was now called The New Knowledge and the Christian Faith. After it had been mailed, Fosdick announced that all this had been done without his knowledge.⁽⁶⁴⁾ Over 30 years later, however, Fosdick admitted in his autobiography that Lee had come to him and had asked permission to publish it.⁽⁶⁵⁾ That is to say, he had lied in 1922.

Someone had put up the money to print and mail 130,000 copies of this sermon. At the time, it was not clear who had done this. Also, the title had been changed. Why? Fosdick never publicly admitted why: because John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had suggested the change. Rockefeller had written to Lee: "The object in circulating this sermon is to get the views therein expressed widely read and not stir up discord. The title which I suggest is clear and accurately descriptive,--at the same time it does not breathe controversy. . . . This is merely a suggestion; whatever Raymond Fosdick thinks wise, and perhaps he will care to take up with the matter with his brother, will be satisfactory to me."⁽⁶⁶⁾

What interest did Rockefeller have in all this? Considerable: he was putting up the money to mail it.⁽⁶⁷⁾ This expenditure was part of his lifetime strategy to win American Protestantism to ecumenism and theological liberalism, a plan that he supported with over one hundred million dollars.⁽⁶⁸⁾ Much of this was spent during an era in which the dollar was worth at least ten times more than it is today.

Lee and Rockefeller had been close since 1914. Lee handled Rockefeller's public relations activities.⁽⁶⁹⁾ They shared memberships in three exclusive clubs: the Broad Street Club, the University Club, and the Recess Club.⁽⁷⁰⁾ They also shared a commitment to an ecumenical theology.⁽⁷¹⁾

Raymond Fosdick

In his letter to Lee, Rockefeller deferred to Raymond Fosdick. Why? Because Rockefeller was in the process of putting Fosdick in charge of the distribution of his fortune. Also, Raymond was the author's brother. Raymond Fosdick had known Rockefeller since 1910.⁽⁷²⁾ Rockefeller had hired him prior to World War I to study European and American police systems in their control of prostitution.⁽⁷³⁾ Then Newton D. Baker, Wilson's Secretary of War and a former Progressive mayor of Cleveland, sent Fosdick to the Mexican-U.S. border towns during General Pershing's futile 1916 expedition into Mexico to capture the bandit Pancho Villa. Fosdick's task was to study ways to keep American troops morally pure. He spent five weeks on that assignment.⁽⁷⁴⁾

Also in 1916, Fosdick persuaded Rockefeller to establish the Institute for Government Research, which shortly thereafter was re-named the Brookings Institution.⁽⁷⁵⁾ It was re-named for Robert S. Brookings, a businessman. Brookings was a defender of a government-business partnership which would control free market competition.⁽⁷⁶⁾ This was a continuing theme among the industrial magnates and great financiers of the Progressive era.⁽⁷⁷⁾ It was the big business application of Lester Frank Ward's vision of Darwinian scientific planning. Brookings called for "intelligent public supervision designed to protect the public and the trade from grasping and intractable minorities."⁽⁷⁸⁾ That is, established big businesses can continue to prosper if price-competitive newcomers are kept out of the market. "So we know from sad experience that blind or ignorant competition has failed to make its reasonable contribution through earnings to our national economic needs."⁽⁷⁹⁾ At the bottom of the Great Depression, he called for "a new co-operative epoch with social planning and social control. . . ."⁽⁸⁰⁾ (The Brookings Institution remains true to its namesake's outlook. It is still one of the most influential think tanks in Washington. In 1988, it was the recipient of $677 million in donations from the Forbes index of the largest 250 American corporations, placing Brookings ninth in a list of 225 recipient organizations. The Council on Foreign Relations was tenth.)⁽⁸¹⁾

In 1917, Fosdick was appointed by the government to head two commissions, each called the Commission on Training Camp Activities, one run by the Army, the other by the Navy.⁽⁸²⁾ Its slogan was "fit to fight."⁽⁸³⁾ Rockefeller's Bureau of Social Hygiene paid his salary.⁽⁸⁴⁾ It had been doing so since 1913.

In 1919, he was named by Wilson as an Associate Secretary-General of the League of Nations. After he resigned in 1920 to become Rockefeller's advisor, he became a prime mover in the creation of the Foreign Policy Association and an organizer of the Council on Foreign Relations (1921). Write Horowitz and Collier: "It was Fosdick who got Rockefeller involved and interested in the question of the realignment of global power that would begin to take place in the decade after World War I."⁽⁸⁵⁾ Beginning in 1936, Raymond served as president of the Rockefeller Foundation for a dozen years; he also wrote the only authorized biography of John D., Jr.⁽⁸⁶⁾

Raymond Fosdick was a scoffer where his brother professed tolerance. He described his religious upbringing in a pietistic Baptist household: ". . . we were brought up on the crude theology which characterized my grandfather's era. Yet I cannot remember either my father or my mother talking to us about damnation or hell-fire or the rest of the horrendous doctrine which was the bulwark of the church."⁽⁸⁷⁾ Baptism by total immersion was "an archaic and dismal initiatory rite."⁽⁸⁸⁾ "Such a religious environment as surrounded us in our early youth could have led either to morbidity or to a rebellious cynicism."⁽⁸⁹⁾ From his teen years, he attended two Baptist churches each Sunday. His father earned extra money singing in the evening at a rival congregation. One minister was a liberal, the other a conservative. The family would discuss both sermons at the Sunday evening dinner table. This turned him and his siblings into relativists. "Out of this conflict we children began to realize that even in the field of religion, ideas and concepts have no final and conclusive form. All systems of theology `have their day and cease to be'; they are as transient as the cultures they are patterned on."⁽⁹⁰⁾ He used his growing influence with Rockefeller for half a century, 1910-1960, to do whatever he could to direct that liberal Baptist layman's immense fortune into moral reform projects, social science research projects, and other secular pursuits. His faith was in the kingdom of man, which he once referred to as "the kingdom of Social Righteousness."⁽⁹¹⁾ When the time was ripe, he and Ivy Lee unleashed the power of his brother's sermon.

My reason for mentioning Raymond Fosdick's background is two-fold. First, because previous historians, especially Church historians, have ignored it. This was especially true when I began this project in 1962, when only a few Church historians paid any attention to the Presbyterian conflict, and none paid attention to the Rockefeller connection. Second, the reader should understand that the Presbyterian conflict was not some minor affair on the fringes of American life. It was a battle for the heart and soul of the nation. It was the primary battlefield of a larger war over the theological content of Protestantism's confession in what was then a self-consciously Protestant nation. Beginning in 1923, Machen, a little-known assistant professor in New Testament literature and theology, sounded the rallying cry of a frontal assault against a well-entrenched and well-funded enemy: the American Establishment--not just the religious Establishment, which today is a comparatively minor affair in the United States, but the American Establishment in the broadest sense.

Rockefeller was wrong about both reasons for changing the title of Harry Fosdick's sermon. First, the pamphlet stirred up more controversy than any printed sermon in American history. Second, despite the name change, the sermon has always been remembered by its original title: "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?"

The Master of Public Relations

That Ivy Lee initiated the mailing is also significant. Lee was no ordinary layman. He is generally regarded as America's first full-time public relations specialist.⁽⁹²⁾ Even if he wasn't the first, it was his genius at self-promotion that has persuaded historians to regard him as such. He worked independently for the largest industrial corporations in America, including the Rockefeller interests. It has long been asserted that it was Lee who came up with the famous strategy of having the elderly John D., Sr., hand out dimes to children, which the old man actually enjoyed doing--30,000 dimes, according to one account.⁽⁹³⁾ This story of Lee as the developer of this technique is probably not true,⁽⁹⁴⁾ but Lee did encourage the old man to create opportunities for the press to photograph him when he did this.⁽⁹⁵⁾ It was Lee who, in a speech to the American Railway Guild in May of 1914, the month John D. Rockefeller, Jr., hired his services for the first time,⁽⁹⁶⁾ set forth this principle of modern public relations: "The people now rule. We have substituted for the divine right of kings, the divine right of the multitude. The crowd is enthroned. This new sovereign has his courtiers, who flatter and caress precisely as did those who surrounded medieval emperors."⁽⁹⁷⁾ The man who would represent the crowd must flatter it.

Lee was the son of a liberal Methodist minister.⁽⁹⁸⁾ He had attended Princeton University, where he had come under the influence of Wilson, as had Raymond Fosdick.⁽⁹⁹⁾ Lee was the man who engineered the Rockefellers' public relations response to the 1914 Ludlow, Colorado, massacre, in which eleven wives and two children of striking United Mine Workers had been suffocated or burned to death in a fire that had started accidentally when they fled in panic from the state militia, which had begun shooting at them.⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ The miners had been striking against a company in which the Rockefellers were heavily invested.⁽¹⁰¹⁾ Because of this early work for the Rockefellers, he gained the epithet "poison Ivy."⁽¹⁰²⁾ He was one of the original hundred founders in 1921 of the Council on Foreign Relations,⁽¹⁰³⁾ a private, then-secretive association that has exercised strong and continuing influence over the American political agenda.⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ He was an ecumenist. A member of Fosdick's Presbyterian congregation, Lee in 1922 provided his services to Junior, who wanted publicity for the newly formed Park Avenue Baptist Church, where Rockefeller was a member.⁽¹⁰⁵⁾

Lee had experience in direct-mail promotions. He had used the Princeton University alumni list to mail copies of a university lecture series. It produced excellent results (presumably, donations). He suggested to Rockefeller to have an independent laymen's committee serve as a front for the mailing.⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ He assured Rockefeller that mailing the sermon would lead to the "building of a firmer and stronger foundation upon which the work of the church in this country might proceed."⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ Lee remained as a public relations agent for Rev. Fosdick throughout the 1920's. As Fosdick's biographer notes, because of this connection, "virtually everything he said was given a `play.'"⁽¹⁰⁸⁾

Which Side Will Win?

Fosdick's original title for the sermon correctly identified the institutional issue: sanctions. One faction might win; its rivals would therefore lose. There were two rival views of Christianity present within the Presbyterian denomination and Protestant denominations generally, he argued. As a liberal, he argued the position that there could be institutional coherence without a victory by either side. This was nonsense, as the next 14 years would demonstrate: a victory for theological toleration would be a defeat for the fundamentalists and Calvinists.

The sermon was a plea for tolerance. Decades later, Fosdick later admitted that "If ever a sermon failed to achieve its object, mine did."⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ The sermon produced "an explosion of ill-will," he said in retrospect. He offered this explanation for the drastic effects that the sermon caused: "Since the liberals had no idea of driving the fundamentalists out of the church, while the fundamentalists were certainly trying to drive the liberals out, the impact of this appeal fell on the reactionary group."⁽¹¹⁰⁾

Fosdick was being too modest--or too clever. The sermon was a calculated risk. If it created no opposition, the tolerance-seeking modernists would inherit. If it was challenged, he could position himself (with Lee's masterful assistance) as a wounded lamb, an honest man seeking only tolerance. Where was this wave of conservative opposition to theological liberalism in 1922? Where was the strategy of de-frocking? Nowhere. The New York Times essay by Bryan was the first widely circulated piece of anti-liberal rhetoric that the Presbyterian Church had seen from a conservative Presbyterian in over two decades, and he had called upon modernists to resign, not for conservatives to begin heresy trials. In any case, Bryan was a layman. The explosion came only after Fosdick's sermon was sent out.

His sermon proposed the removal of negative sanctions from ecclesiastical affairs. This suggestion appeared to rest on a broad-minded theology of open-endedness. This was an illusion; no theology is open-ended. A theology insists that God is one thing; He therefore cannot be something else. There is also the issue of eternal sanctions. The Christian doctrine of final judgment and eternal, irreversible sanctions is surely the most closed-end theology imaginable. There was no way for liberals to escape a theological confrontation if they publicly denied the Church's doctrine of final judgment. None of the liberals in the Presbyterian Church had been willing to admit this fact publicly from David Swing forward, nor had their peers in the other mainline denominations. The modernists' strategy was to foster the illusion of "tolerance vs. intolerance," when in fact they knew that the conservatives could not acquiesce to liberalism's doctrine of universal salvation. The liberals wanted to move the denominations into Unitarianism-Universalism, but this would take time. And money. Other people's money: Rockefeller's and the laity's.

Fosdick's explanation for the failure of his call to toleration was typical of liberals who resent the creeds of Christendom. For him, tolerance was the fundamental law of the church: creeds without negative sanctions. This belief was an extension of liberalism's most important theological point: eternity without negative sanctions. Fosdick rejected all Church creeds; he detested all Church sanctions. "Fosdick openly boasted of never having repeated the Apostles' Creed in his life," his biographer reports.⁽¹¹¹⁾ Yet he was a pastor in a denomination that required for ordination formal subscription to the most rigorous Christian creed in history, the Westminster Confession of Faith and its two catechisms. As one secular newspaper editor put it, "It is not exactly ethical for a vegetarian to accept employment from a meat packer and urge a diet of spinach upon all who come asking for meat."⁽¹¹²⁾ The capture of the Presbyterian Church by its theological enemies rested from the beginning on this "vegetarian" strategy, and more: a challenge to the moral legitimacy of any "meat packers" who might seek to remove these vegetarians from the payroll.

Fosdick wrote to his father in January, 1923: "I really think we are going in the end to get the two things that we want most to get: namely, a real victory for liberalism, while at the same time we are holding together the Presbyterian church without a split."⁽¹¹³⁾

Lippmann vs. Fosdick

The man who saw this clearly and described the nature of the conflict more concisely than anyone in his generation was not J. Gresham Machen. It was Walter Lippmann, the most influential columnist in America from the era shortly after the First World War until the Vietnam War.⁽¹¹⁴⁾ (A few years after Machen's death in 1937, Lippmann would buy a summer home in the Establishment's enclave, where the Machens had also resided each summer: Seal Harbor, Mount Desert Island, Maine. He lived there in the summers until 1972; he died in 1974. His ashes were scattered off the Maine coast.)⁽¹¹⁵⁾

Lippmann was a Jew by birth and an atheist by confession. In his book, American Inquisitors (1928), he wrote a dialogue on the Christian doctrine of salvation--the escape from God's eternal negative sanctions--a doctrine separating the modernists from the fundamentalists. It was clear to Fosdick that his target was Fosdick:

Modernist: We can at least discuss it like gentlemen, without heat, without rancor.

Fundamentalist: Has it ever occurred to you that this advice is easier for you to follow than for me?

Modernist: How so?

Fundamentalist: Because for me an eternal plan of salvation is at stake. For you there is nothing at stake but a few tentative opinions, none of which means anything to your happiness. Your request that I should be tolerant and amiable is, therefore, that I submit the foundations of my life to the destructive effects of your skepticism, your indifference, and your good nature. You ask me to smile and commit suicide.⁽¹¹⁶⁾

Fosdick got even a year later with a critical New York Post book review of Lippmann's Preface to Morals, chiding Lippmann for his "naive and medieval" view of theism.⁽¹¹⁷⁾ But it was not Lippmann who was naive; it was Fosdick. Humanists such as Lippmann and H. L. Mencken understood what was at stake institutionally.⁽¹¹⁸⁾ They recognized that Machen was correct: Fosdick was preaching a view of God that could not be reconciled with the Bible's doctrine of hell. But the crucial institutional issue was not formal theology as such; the issue was sanctions: the ability of one side or the other to drive its opponents from the denomination in terms of one of two creeds, either the Westminster standards or toleration. The question indeed was: Shall the fundamentalists win? The answer was clear: not if they conducted a strictly defensive campaign. Without negative sanctions, there could be no victory.

The Conflict Escalates

Upon receipt of Fosdick's pamphlet, Clarence E. Macartney wrote "Shall Unbelief Win?" which was published in The Presbyterian (July 13, 1922), the conservative denominational magazine. In October, Macartney attended a Philadelphia Presbytery meeting at the home of John Wanamaker, the wealthy merchant. The issue was Fosdick. He introduced in executive session (closed to non-members of the presbytery) a proposed Address to the New York Presbytery from the Philadelphia Presbytery, asking the other presbytery to see to it that the preaching in the First Church be in conformity to the standards of the denomination. At the next meeting of the Philadelphia Presbytery, this Address was sent to every member of the New York Presbytery. The Philadelphia Presbytery also adopted an overture to the General Assembly requesting the same thing, which was sent to the Clerk of the General Assembly.⁽¹¹⁹⁾ Phase four of the Presbyterian conflict had clearly begun.

Under the leadership of Macartney, the Philadelphia Presbytery was to remain the leading orthodox presbytery. It was joined by 14 other presbyteries in making this request. Since every ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church had to subscribe to the Confession "as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures," Macartney, a strict Calvinist, believed that Fosdick's pronouncements had overstepped the limits of the Confession, and therefore deserved censure. In his mind, and in the minds of many other orthodox Presbyterians, such preaching could not be tolerated, especially from a minister who had never been licensed by the Church.

Macartney was generally regarded as the most gifted preacher in the conservative camp, the only man whose reputation for preaching matched Fosdick's. He later wrote a famous book of sermon illustrations. In his autobiography, he describes what happened after he introduced his Address-Overture:

I had expected, of course, criticism and scoffing, and that the old cry and accusation, "heresy hunter," would go up. But what surprised me was the intemperate and bitter abuse which poured forth. At the meeting of the Presbytery when the overture was adopted, I thought for a moment that one of the Presbyters was going to make a physical assault upon me. The letters of abuse poured in like a flood. I have preserved these letters in my files, and I call them, the "Liturgy of Execration." The so-called Liberals and Modernists certainly did not live up to their vaunted reputation and their claim of "sweetness and light."⁽¹²⁰⁾

Liberals had worked long and hard after 1893 to create an illusion: their mild-mannered, gracious responses to rhetorically outrageous accusations by conservatives. The conservatives positioned themselves as defenders of the faith. This was a powerful appeal. To counter it, the liberals positioned themselves as defenders of the peace. I regard this as the liberals' most successful rhetorical ploy.⁽¹²¹⁾ By repeating it endlessly, they eventually persuaded the majority of confrontation-avoiding pietists that it was the liberal faction that had long been the victim of "un-Christian" verbal abuse by their opponents. In a phrase attributed to Winston Churchill--as so many great phrases are--"If you get the reputation for rising at dawn, you can sleep till noon."

The 1923 General Assembly

The General Assembly met at Indianapolis in May of 1923, exactly one year after Fosdick had delivered his sermon. It was obvious from the beginning that the session would be a hot one, for the conservatives were championing as their candidate for Moderator none other than the Great Commoner himself, Bryan. His opponent, Dr. Charles F. Wishart, president of the College of Wooster, was known as a conservative theologically, but he was far from it, as events would prove. He won the election on the third ballot, just barely, by a margin of 24 votes out of some 800.⁽¹²²⁾

This had been a showdown from the opening gavel of the General Assembly. Wishart had known Bryan for almost three decades, since the time as a young man he had journeyed to Nebraska in 1896 to meet him after Bryan's presidential nomination by the Democratic Party. Bryan had spoken in Wishart's church two decades later. But the two were at odds with each other before the General Assembly began. Bryan had attacked in print one of Wooster's professors and a member of Wishart's church, Horace Mateer, for Mateer's open espousal of evolution. Mateer wrote an anti-creation book in 1923, Evolution versus Special Creation, in response to Bryan, who had spoken in 1921 at a Wooster chapel service for over two hours attacking evolution. This conflict was public knowledge within the Church's leadership. The vote for Moderator served as a kind of referendum.⁽¹²³⁾ Wishart, who had presented his candidacy in the guise of moderation, later wrote to Harry Fosdick: "I am convinced that most of the harm in our denomination has been made possible through one man, Mr. Bryan."⁽¹²⁴⁾ The feeling was mutual; six months after the General Assembly, Bryan was still complaining about Wishart's faculty.⁽¹²⁵⁾

By 1923, the denomination had visibly begun to divide along theological lines. As Bryan said later in the conference, after the defeat of his proposal to ban money from the Educational Fund going to any instruction that taught Darwinism or evolution, "I have had experience enough in politics to know a machine when I see it, and the machinery in control of this Assembly works perfectly. The so-called liberals have everything their own way."⁽¹²⁶⁾ He exaggerated, given the subsequent decision of the Assembly regarding the re-affirmation of the five points of faith of the Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910 and 1916, but after 1925, his words were quite appropriate.

The Fosdick Case

The chief issue of the General Assembly was the Fosdick case. It was first considered by the Committee on Bills and Overtures. All but one member of the 22-man committee recommended that the case be sent back to the New York Presbytery for further study and action. Judicially, this responsibility lay with Fosdick's presbytery. The minority report of one, however, accepting the Philadelphia overture and also calling for a reaffirmation of the Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910, was adopted by the Assembly, 439 to 359.⁽¹²⁷⁾ The New York Presbytery's representatives had voted 12 to three against the majority. The three "yes" votes came from ruling elders. Among the "no" voters was William Foulkes, the New Era's director. The New Yorkers' "no" voters were joined by Moderator Wishart and Vice Moderator Chapman.⁽¹²⁸⁾

The battle against the Committee's report had been led by Bryan and Macartney. Macartney's statement opposing the majority report was rhetorical. "Fathers and brethren, this majority report is a masterpiece of whitewash. The man who wrote it ought to get a job as an interior decorator." But Macartney knew that the stakes were high: "This was only a skirmish--a whispering in the mulberry tree. The storm is coming, and you can't keep it back with pusillanimous compromises."⁽¹²⁹⁾ (He was correct; the storm came, and in 1936, he battened down the hatches, bid Machen a fond farewell, and pulled the covers up over his head.)

This 1910 doctrinal statement, compared to the Westminster Confession, was a pale affirmation of orthodoxy. It said nothing of predestination, creation, human depravity, or the covenant. It affirmed five beliefs: (1) the infallibility of the Bible, (2) the virgin birth, (3) Christ's substitionary atonement, (4) the reality of the resurrection, and (5) the reality of Christ's miracles.⁽¹³⁰⁾ Because this affirmation of faithhad not been approved by two-thirds of the presbyteries, it did not constitute a binding decision in Church courts, as the conservatives were to discover in subsequent General Assemblies.

Even more disturbing for the conservatives was the divided support of the clergy. Lefferts Loetscher points out that the majority vote came from the elders of the Church (ruling elders), not from the clergy (seminary-trained teaching elders), since the latter group divided almost evenly on the issue, but the ruling elders supported it, three votes to two. According to Loetscher, the board members and officers of the Church were almost unanimously opposed to the action taken.⁽¹³¹⁾ In other words, the higher up the bureaucratic chain of command, the stronger was the opposition to any kind of orthodox or conservative affirmation.

The Presbyterian (June 14, 1923) surveyed the results of the Assembly's vote on the provisions of the 1910 Deliverance. What the author found shocked him, but should not have at this late date: "Whenever the name of a man connected with the offices and Boards and organized activities of the church was called, a defiant `No' was the response." Even more amazing to him, "The foreign missionaries, who of all persons might have been expected to cast a ringing vote for an overture which declared the honor of Jesus Christ, voted against it."⁽¹³²⁾ Three decades of Speer's leadership was showing. The conflict over missions would flare up again in late 1932, as it had in 1921. But more significant organizationally was the vote of board members and paid bureaucrats. There, the battle was already over. The modernists had won.

Liberal attendees issued a four-part protest. The first one revealed the heart of the conservatives' problem: the self-justification of the local presbytery. "We protest against the action taken because it was based upon allegations made by one presbytery in regard to conditions in another Presbytery, which are not substantiated by the evidence."⁽¹³³⁾ Not substantiated? Fosdick's sermon had been sent to 130,000 people. If this was insufficient evidence, then Presbyterianism had standards of evidence higher than those applying to angels.

A Brief Digression on Sources

The reader may have noted that I cite secondary sources for many of the events of the General Assembly's actions during this period. This is not because I have not consulted the Minutes of the General Assembly. The problem is that by the time this phase of the Presbyterian conflict broke out, the Minutes had long since ceased to record the details of the debates on the floor of the General Assembly. Two fat volumes for each year were filled with committee reports and statistics, not debates--and sometimes not even the numerical results of voting. This itself is an indication of the shift in power from the General Assembly to the denomination's permanent boards.

As an example, consider Bryan's motion on the floor of the General Assembly to prohibit the funding of any school by the Presbyterian Church if that school taught Darwinism as a fact. The New York Times reported on the front page that he spoke for an hour, and the session went on for three hours. Bryan's opponents succeeded in watering down the proposal, destroying its impact. The headline blared: "Bryan Loses Fight to Ban Darwinism in Church Schools: Presbyterian Assembly Defeats His Anti-Evolution Resolution After a Hot Debate."⁽¹³⁴⁾ The Minutes record the event in this passionless bureaucratic manner: "In the discussion of a resolution presented by the Hon. William Jennings Bryan, a member of the Standing Committee on Education, the following took part. . . ."⁽¹³⁵⁾ There follows a list of nine men's names and their presbytery memberships. No mention of the nature of Bryan's resolution appears. The Minutes then reprint the substitute motion, which carried. The substitute motion presented a vague instruction to synods and presbyteries to "exercise careful oversight" over instruction in institutions receiving money from the Church, and to "withhold official approval"--money was not mentioned--from any school "which seeks to establish a materialistic evolutionary philosophy of life, or which disregards or attempts to discredit the Christian faith."⁽¹³⁶⁾ Since every Presbyterian modernist would deny doing either, this resolution would keep the flow of funds flowing. But the Minutes reveal little of what was at stake, or even what was going on.

The Far More Important Issue

All of the histories of the Presbyterian conflict focus on the 1923 General Assembly meeting because of the fireworks over Bryan, Macartney, and Fosdick. Yet the Minutes, true to their bureaucratic slant, reveal few signs of any contention. It is as if nothing significant were happening on the floor of the General Assembly. And, from the point of view of the liberals, who by now had captured complete control over the boards, nothing significant was happening. What really was significant received no attention from the press, either secular or denominational. In 1923, the Presbyterian Church was set up for a total reorganization by the liberals.

The most recent move to reorganize the Church had begun in 1920, the year of triumph by the liberals. A Special Committee on Reorganization and Consolidation of Assembly Agencies was appointed by the General Assembly. It reported back in 1921 and again in 1922.⁽¹³⁷⁾ The final report was approved by the General Assembly on May 21, 1923--exactly one year to the day after Fosdick preached "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" to his congregation. Typically, the Minutes record nothing about the debate (if any) or the vote tallies.⁽¹³⁸⁾ If approved by a majority of the presbyteries, the eleven boards of the denomination would henceforth be consolidated into four. Church finances would be centralized into one collections agency--in the name of "economy."⁽¹³⁹⁾ The Office of the General Assembly would become the General Council with control over executive commissions.⁽¹⁴⁰⁾ A final layer of bureaucratic representation would be laid down over the operations of the General Assembly.

Having been approved by the General Assembly, the report was then sent down to the presbyteries for ratification. The voting went on throughout the year prior to the 1924 General Assembly. At that Assembly, Clarence E. Macartney was elected Moderator. This is regarded by historians of the Presbyterian conflict as the one clear-cut General Assembly victory by the conservatives. Yet in the year of Fosdick--the great rhetorical confrontation--the presbyteries approved the restructuring of the Church by a vote of 222 to 26, with six taking no action.⁽¹⁴¹⁾ This is evidence that the conservatives, as late as 1924, did not have a clue regarding the process of infiltration and capture that had been going on since 1906. They would not receive another opportunity to learn from their mistakes.

The New York Presbytery

The 1923 General Assembly sent the Fosdick case back to the New York Presbytery. The New York Presbytery took no action, in defiance of the order of the General Assembly, except to adopt a protest against the General Assembly's actions in the first place.⁽¹⁴²⁾ A few weeks later it went so far as to license two men, Henry Van P. Dusen (later to serve as president of Union Seminary)⁽¹⁴³⁾ and Cedric Lehman, neither of whom was willing to affirm the virgin birth of Christ, the second point of the Doctrinal Deliverances of 1910, 1916, and 1923. The stage was set for continued antagonism on the floor of the General Assembly of 1924.

Lehman's statement is important because he said publicly exactly what he was doing. What he was doing was what all of the modernists coming into the ministry had been doing since 1875: crossing their fingers. The Presbyterian (June 21, 1923) reported what took place on the floor of presbytery:

He, on being questioned, asserted that he could not affirm belief in the bodily resurrection of Christ. Asked how he could repeat the Apostles' Creed with his people, Mr. Layman [Lehman] said: "I would repeat the creed, but with an interpretation in my own mind."⁽¹⁴⁴⁾

Without negative sanctions against such hypocrisy--hypocrisy elevated to a strategy of subversion--the conservatives could not save their Church. If they could not keep out Cedric Lehman, they could not keep out anyone willing to play mental games with the most minimal of Christian creeds. Lehman and those like him did not believe the creeds and confessions of the historic Church, Presbyterian or otherwise.

The task for their opponents was two-fold: (1) to identify what the liberals did believe as alien to Christianity; (2) to mobilize those who believed in the Westminster Confession to remove their enemies from their midst. The problem was therefore confession and sanctions. Lehman had thrown down the challenge to the Trinitarians by publicly confessing belief without believing what he was verbally confessing. It was a challenge to the conservatives to do something about it: the same challenge Henry van Dyke had issued after another New York ordination--his son's--in 1913. No one had taken up that challenge a decade earlier. Henry Sloane Coffin, by now a part-time professor of practical theology at Union Seminary, immediately issued another challenge just like van Dyke's:

In the face of the action taken by the majority of the General Assembly, it is impossible for those of us who stand in the pulpits of the Presbyterian Church to remain silent, and I feel that I owe it to my own congregation and the Presbytery to state plainly that if any action is taken which removes Dr. Fosdick from the pulpit of the First Church on account of his interpretation of the Christian Gospel, I cannot honestly be allowed to remain in the pulpit of the Madison Avenue Church, for I share fully his point of view.⁽¹⁴⁵⁾

He said he agreed with Fosdick and rejected all five of the Doctrinal Deliverance's points. As for the error-free Bible, he said: "But its science, history, ethics and theology are no more inerrant than those of other ancient documents." The virgin birth is not essential; he, for one, had no idea how Jesus was conceived. (Let's see: if not by the Holy Spirit, then it might be. . . . I don't know; it's just too confusing.) He was resurrected, but not with a material body. He did not die to "satisfy divine justice." No single interpretation suffices. Jesus opposed the literalism of the Pharisees. As for modernism, he said he did not know what that was. Here is what he did know: "If the latter point of view becomes authoritative in the Presbyterian Church there will be no room for the thinking men and women of our day and tomorrow." (As it has turned out, there is lots and lots of room for thinking men and women in the Presbyterian Church: empty pews by the tens of thousands.)

Coffin announced his unwillingness to withdraw: ". . . I will not voluntarily withdraw from the Presbyterian ministry and leave the Church to those who appear to me to misconstrue its standards and repudiate its Protestant heritage. . . ."⁽¹⁴⁶⁾ In 1913, the year of van Dyke's challenge, Coffin had worked at the General Assembly to defer a direct confrontation, using what he called "parliamentary dodges" to circumvent "the enemy."⁽¹⁴⁷⁾ In 1923, he issued his own judicial challenge. No one would take up Coffin's challenge, any more than anyone had taken up van Dyke's. The risk was too high. Under Presbyterian law, anyone bringing a false charge against another Presbyterian would himself be publicly censured.⁽¹⁴⁸⁾

After a decade of experience, Coffin became a crucial strategist of the liberal forces in the 1923-26 battle.⁽¹⁴⁹⁾ His reward was the presidency of Union (1926-45). His nephew and fellow Bonesman, William Sloane Coffin, later became pastor of the church that Rockefeller had built for Harry Emerson Fosdick, the Riverside Church. As the historians of the Rockefellers write: "It has been liberal not only in theology, but in every other sphere as well. . . ."⁽¹⁵⁰⁾ This was to be expected.

Machen Becomes a National Spokesman

In February, 1923, Macmillan published Machen's Christianity and Liberalism.⁽¹⁵¹⁾ The book was an extension of his 1922 article, "Liberalism or Christianity?"⁽¹⁵²⁾ The publisher did not think it would sell well. Macmillan correctly identified the money-maker: Machen's New Testament Greek for Beginners (1922).⁽¹⁵³⁾ This book has gone through over 50 printings⁽¹⁵⁴⁾--without the cost of a single revision. (Money in book publishing is rarely made with best-sellers; they are too rare. It is made with back-lists: books that have a steady market of a few thousand copies per year.) Christianity and Liberalism sold only 1,000 copies in 1923. In 1924, however, it sold 3,000 copies, largely as a result of the Fosdick controversy and Henry van Dyke's press release.⁽¹⁵⁵⁾

Van Dyke Strikes Again

Beginning in October, 1923, Machen had been called to preach regularly at First Presbyterian Church in Princeton, a practice common in those days: allowing Princeton Seminary professors access to the pulpit. He gave several sermons on the division between liberals and conservatives. On December 30, He preached a sermon against the practice of liberals of reinterpreting the creeds of the faith rather than denying them. He challenged their honesty--a theme that he had presented in Christianity and Liberalism.

The next day, van Dyke, who was a distant relative of Machen's--his "Uncle Henry"--now emeritus professor of English at Princeton University, sent a scathing message to the treasurer of the Session, and released it simultaneously to the press. He was leaving the presence of the congregation until Machen left. It was a masterful piece of rhetoric. If he could get away with this challenge to the authority of the office of teaching elder, the modernists were approaching institutional victory.

Having had another Sabbath spoiled by the bitter, schismatic and unscriptural preaching of the stated supply of the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton (directly contrary to the spirit of the beautiful text) I desire to give up my pew in the church. The few Sabbaths that I am free from evangelical work to spend with my family are too precious to me to be wasted in listening to such a dismal, bilious travesty of the gospel. We want to hear about Christ, the Son of God and the Son of Man, not about Fundamentalists and Modernists, the only subject on which your stated supply seems to have anything to say, and what he says is untrue and malicious. Until he is done, counts me out, and give up my pew in the church. We want to worship Christ, our Savior.⁽¹⁵⁶⁾

What is mind-boggling is that Van Dyke gave a New York Times reporter the following explanation for his action: "I am not seeking for strife; I am seeking for peace."⁽¹⁵⁷⁾ I am aware of no more vitriolic rhetorical attack on any participant on any side during the Presbyterian conflict, 1869 to 1936. No one in the conservative camp could have gotten away with anything like this, surely no one in a leadership position. His own followers would have turned against him. But nothing happened to van Dyke. No charges were filed against him. He did as he promised: he stayed away until Machen's term as stated supply ended in 1925, and Charles Erdman replaced him. Then van Dyke returned with fanfare in the liberal press.⁽¹⁵⁸⁾

Van Dyke was a major figure in the Presbyterian Church. He was a graduate of both the College of New Jersey and Princeton Seminary. He had studied at the University of Berlin in 1878. He had begun his ministerial career as a pastor of the United Congregational Church in Newport, Rhode Island, 1879-1882. He had been pastor of New York City's Brick Church, 1882-1900, to which he was called back on two occasions for a year. He had been Briggs' most visible defender. A generation before Fosdick toured the prestige college campuses giving liberal sermons, van Dyke was preaching baccalaureate sermons at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia.⁽¹⁵⁹⁾ He had been Moderator of the General Assembly in 1902, as his father had been in 1876. He had chaired the committee that wrote the Confessional Revision of 1903. He was world-famous as a best-selling author: poetry, short stories, travelogues, and biography.⁽¹⁶⁰⁾ He had served as Wilson's Ambassador to The Hague during World War I. He was a neighbor of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on Mount Desert Island. He was a clearly member in good standing of the American Establishment. As a former preacher, a professor of English, and a best-selling author, he, more than any Presbyterian liberal, understood the uses of rhetoric in public. As his son wrote in 1935, "All through his days, Henry van Dyke was beset by reporters. He was almost invariably a dramatic figure."⁽¹⁶¹⁾

In 1926 the tide visibly swung against the conservatives, and once again, it had been Henry van Dyke who in late 1923 had issued the challenge, just as he had at his son's ordination in 1913. He had escaped Church sanctions then; he would escape them again. Although Fosdick received most of the attention, then and now, it was van Dyke, above all other participants in the Presbyterian conflict after 1893, who best understood the tactics of the conflict: judicial and rhetorical. He used inflammatory rhetoric in 1923 to test the limits of judicial resistance, just as his friend Briggs had done, 1876-1893. Unlike Briggs, van Dyke never encountered any resistance.⁽¹⁶²⁾

He had said of Machen that "what he says is untrue and malicious." Thus began the rhetorical isolation of Machen and the conservatives. This was not merely a rhetorical tactic; it was also judicial. The Book of Discipline stipulated that contentious men are not to be trusted when they bring charges against their brethren:

Great caution ought to be exercised in receiving accusations from any person who is known to indulge a malignant spirit toward the accused, or who is not of good character, or who is himself under censure or process, or who is personally interested in any respect in the conviction of the accused, or who is known to be litigious, rash, or highly impudent.⁽¹⁶³⁾

It was important judicially for the modernists that their opponents be tarred and feathered well in advance with the rhetorical brush of malignancy, litigiousness, and/or bad character. There was no easy way for such accusations to be refuted. Presbyterian law specified no formal requirement for the accusers to prove their accusations in a Church court before such a reputation became judicially relevant. The accused merely had to be "known to indulge" in such spitefulness. Known by whom? By everyone, as in "everyone knows that." So, for the next decade, the modernists did what they could rhetorically to make their opponents' malignant spirit well known. To raise the issue of modernism was to risk becoming known as a malignant spirit. This would make it difficult for anyone so designated to gain a judgment against a modernist. Hart devotes an entire chapter in his biography of Machen to "A Question of Character," as well he should.⁽¹⁶⁴⁾

Machen's Public Reputation in 1923

On December 30, 1923, Machen was not a major figure. Almost two decades earlier, he had survived a year of higher criticism's gauntlet in Germany: at Marburg and Göttingen. He had joined the Princeton faculty in 1906. He had been ordained in the Northern Church in 1914, a self-imposed delay of eight years. He had published in Princeton Theological Review, an in-house academic journal. He had only one academic book to his credit, The Origin of Paul's Religion (1921), a successful attempt on his part to match the scholarship of the German liberals he was trying to refute. The book was as scholarly--and almost as dry--as anything the Germans had published on the supposed Pauline revisions of Jesus' message. The book was not well known outside of academic theological circles, and, as is the case with most academic books, not very well known even within academic theological circles. As with every other known academic treatise written by an evangelical, it persuaded no liberal scholars to confess saving faith in Christ.⁽¹⁶⁵⁾ Christianity and Liberalism was in print in 1923 but not selling well. None of this had made him a national figure. Henry van Dyke's December 31 press release did. As Machen later commented, soon the newspaper reporters "were as thick as flies."⁽¹⁶⁶⁾

From the day after the secular press picked up the story of van Dyke's departure, the sales of Christianity and Liberalism took off. Van Dyke had catapulted Machen into the position of the premier academic spokesman, not only for conservative Presbyterianism, but for American fundamentalism in general. Prior to this, Machen had deferred to Macartney, who had been the driving force behind the petition against Fosdick in the May General Assembly. From this time forward, Machen's star waxed as Macartney's waned. When the final split came in the denomination in 1936, Macartney remained behind, his influence gone except as a symbol of surrender.

Christianity vs. Liberalism

In Christianity and Liberalism, Machen criticized the growing influence of liberal theology in America and, specifically, in the Presbyterian Church. His view of liberal theology was considerably different from any that had been publicly expressed previously. As he wrote: "The plain fact is that liberalism, whether it be true or false, is no mere `heresy'--no mere divergence at isolated points from Christian teaching. On the contrary it proceeds from a totally different root, and it constitutes, in essentials, a unitary system of its own."⁽¹⁶⁷⁾

The unmistakable implication, given this premise, is that liberal theologians, not being Christians in the creedal sense of the word, and not being Presbyterians in the Confessional sense, should have no part in the ordained ministry of the Presbyterian Church. While there may be a certain latitude in defining a "liberal theologian," if a man cannot accept wholeheartedly the ordination declaration of the Church, he should not hold a high position in it. This assertion was almost identical with Bryan's in 1922, although argued far more persuasively and logically.⁽¹⁶⁸⁾ Machen suggested voluntary departure as the honest action of the person involved. This, too, was Bryan's opinion. Machen's emphasis was on the doctrinal foundations of the faith, far more than the experiential: ". . . it is the very essence of `conservatism' in the Church to regard doctrinal differences as no trifles but as matters of supreme import."⁽¹⁶⁹⁾ Finally, he made his position absolutely clear: ". . . it is highly undesirable that liberalism and Christianity should continue to be propagated within the bounds of the same organization. A separation between the two parties in the Church is the crying need of the hour."⁽¹⁷⁰⁾

Machen was arguing that liberalism is not heresy; it is apostasy. This moved the debate from a matter of belief to a matter of judicial action. There was no way for Machen logically to refrain from calling for a series of heresy trials. Yet he did refrain, and so did his allies. This undermined the logic of his argument, as his critics repeatedly said in public, and as van Dyke had said in 1913. They understood: no sanctions--no heresy, let alone apostasy.

Machen's book made it plain that the issue dividing the churches was the issue of supernaturalism vs. naturalism. Modernism is a rival religion. The time has come, Machen said, to settle the issue within the churches. The time has come to fight: ". . . the really important things are the things about which men will fight."⁽¹⁷¹⁾ For Machen, the issue was truth. If the Christians do not defeat modernism, modernism will defeat the Christians. "In the intellectual battle of the present day there can be no `peace without victory'; one side or the other must win."⁽¹⁷²⁾

His thesis demanded negative sanctions: either the Christians should expel the modernists or the modernists should expel the Christians. The issue was sanctions. But he refused to invoke sanctions. He invoked morality. An honest liberal would withdraw, he insisted.⁽¹⁷³⁾ But liberals are dishonest, he said, for they seek a unity that cannot be sustained.⁽¹⁷⁴⁾ There must be peace in the Church, he said, but a peace born of separation. "Nothing engenders strife so much as a forced unity, within the same organization, of those who disagree fundamentally in aim."⁽¹⁷⁵⁾ But the liberals refused to withdraw.

Then why shouldn't the conservatives withdraw? "Certainly it may come to that. If the liberal party really obtains full control of the councils of the Church, then no evangelical Christian can continue to support the Church's work." He should have said ought to rather than can. Most conservative Presbyterians did continue to support the Church's work long after Machen departed. But he understood that one aspect of the fight was financial: positive sanctions. "If a man believes that salvation from sin comes only through the atoning death of Jesus, then he cannot honestly support by his gifts and by his presence a propaganda which is intended to produce an exactly opposite impression. To do so would mean the most terrible bloodguiltiness which it is possible to conceive. If the liberal party, therefore, really obtains control of the Church, evangelical Christians must be prepared to withdraw no matter what it costs."⁽¹⁷⁶⁾ Conclusion: stop giving; cut off the flow of funds.

He revealed here the tremendous institutional weakness of the conservatives. Liberals had no concept of bloodguilt. If they could lie successfully and not get thrown out, they would inherit "the resources of the evangelical churches," as Machen put it.⁽¹⁷⁷⁾ To do this, all they had to do was use "equivocal language"⁽¹⁷⁸⁾--a horrible thought for creedalist Machen, but a trifle to the liberals. Then, if the conservatives remained in the Church after it went liberal, they would be psychologically impotent: suffering from bloodguilt. The liberals would have nothing to fear from such guilt-ridden opponents.

What would mark bloodguiltiness? Remaining in a liberal Church. How did Machen define a Church's liberal status? Creedally, but not judicially. Here was his Waterloo: ". . . the creedal basis still stands firm in the constitutions of evangelical churches."⁽¹⁷⁹⁾ This was word without deed: a written Confession without judicial sanctions, profession without submission. Machen's definition surrendered his case. He would re-define the Church in 1936 to include sanctions, but by then it was too late: he was under the sanctions.

All that the liberals had to do to remove any threat to themselves and their plans would be to gain control over the courts. They would not have to alter the language of the Confession. They had been working toward the capture of the courts for over two decades. If successful, they could disarm the conservatives. The conservative hard-liners might choose to stay in the Church, but then they would be playing an escalated crossed-fingers game: pretending that the Church was still judicially orthodox just because it was Confessionally unchanged. They would suffer a psychological defeat by playing this game: bloodguiltiness. Meanwhile, the conservative soft-liners would not care. They had not cared very much from 1901 to 1922. The liberals had everything to gain through duplicity except, as Machen put it, "higher ground."⁽¹⁸⁰⁾

Machen's condemnation fell on deaf ears; his opponents were evolutionists and situation ethicists, not Calvinists. Higher ground for them meant bureaucratic survival and ultimate inheritance: the survival of the fittest. But, as Machen was to learn, beginning on December 31, they were able to create the camouflage of moral high ground. That had been true ever since van Dyke's 1893 manifesto, A Plea for Peace and Work. It would continue to be true. They would vilify the conservatives for defending the Church, just as W. H. Griffith Thomas had written regarding Chinese missions in 1921. For a liberal, the conservatives' defense of the Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910 was inherently offensive: a serious breach of etiquette, an affront to the gospel. Such a defense deserved no rhetorical mercy, and received none.

Machen said that the conservatives must not withdraw too soon. "The reason is found in the trust which the churches hold. That trust includes trust funds of the most definite kind. And contrary to what seems to be the prevailing opinion, we venture to regard a trust as a sacred thing."⁽¹⁸¹⁾ Theologically, this use of the language of sacredness was an error. The trust was sacred, but not the trust funds. The sacredness of the trust was derived from the sacraments. The protection of the sacraments, not the protection of trust funds, was the sacred duty of the evangelicals. The liberals wanted those funds. The funds were worth defending, but Machen used rhetorical language that deflected men's attention from the sacred judicial issue: the defense of the sacraments by those Church officers who had been given an oath-bound charge to defend them. This was the sacred aspect of the Presbyterian conflict that none of the leaders on any side ever acknowledged, 1869-1936.

Calvin had defined the true Church in terms of orthodox preaching and the sacraments, with the implication that discipline was a third aspect of the definition, but Presbyterian conservatives had reduced this formula to only one: orthodox preaching, i.e., orthodoxy without sanctions.

The Absence of Negative Sanctions in 1923

There was a glaring practical problem in Machen's analysis: the Presbyterian Church's ecclesiastical unity had not been judicially enforced for over two decades. No one had compelled anyone to leave the Church by means of a heresy trial. The 1923 General Assembly was still months away when Machen's book appeared. When Machen wrote the original essay in 1921, Fosdick's famous sermon was a year away. No Presbyterian conservative had publicly called for the implementation of negative judicial sanctions since 1900. For that matter, neither did Machen. Nowhere in the book did he issue the only challenge that would have mattered covenantally: "Get out now while you still can or we will remove you one by one through a series of heresy trials that will not end until all of you are either gone from the midst of this Church or are publicly silent."

It was not just a matter of calling for the removal of apostate pastors. That would have been necessary but not sufficient to save the Presbyterian Church. The judicial issue was excommunication, not mere removal from office. If liberalism is a rival religion, then it is not enough to identify ordained men who have been unfaithful to their ordination vows to uphold the Westminster Confession and the catechisms. No Church can afford knowingly to have on its membership rolls those who profess a rival religion. This is especially true of a Church in which all communicant members vote, i.e., impose sanctions. Machen could not make a judicially plausible case for liberalism as a rival religion unless he called forthrightly, in principle, for the threat of a heresy trial to be imposed over every member who professed the liberal creed.

Machen steadfastly refused to call for heresy trials for anyone, let alone laymen. Instead, he challenged his opponents to leave. This was not simply naive on his part; it was evidence of his startling ignorance of his opponents' covenantal theology. He was facing believers in a rival religion: the power religion. It was not simply that they had rejected the judicial authority of the Bible and the Confession. It was that they were calling for the establishment of a comprehensive rival covenant. Theological liberalism, like political liberalism (right wing and left wing), calls for a covenantal transfer of sovereignty to autonomous man. This proposed transfer applies to all five areas: sovereignty to autonomous man, authority to autonomous man, law to autonomous man, sanctions to autonomous man, and the Church's inheritance to themselves.

Protecting the Sacraments

In his writings, Machen did not make clear the comprehensive claims of his opponents' religion. He described it as a rival religion, but he did not call for the excommunication of those who held it. He called only for them to resign from ordained office, not from the Church. As was true with all of his Confessional predecessors, Machen never dealt with this fundamental judicial issue: the judicial protection of the sacraments.

He excoriated the modern Church, not just Presbyterians: ". . . the Church of to-day has been unfaithful to her Lord by admitting great companies of non-Christian persons, not only into her membership, but into her teaching positions."⁽¹⁸²⁾ He reminded his readers on the next page that "liberalism is not Christianity."⁽¹⁸³⁾ This meant that non-Christians were participating in the Lord's Supper. What should be done about this? Machen was forthright: nothing. "We are not now speaking of the membership of the Church, but of its ministry, and we are not speaking of the man who is troubled by grave doubts and wonders whether with his doubts he can honestly continue his membership in the Church. For great hosts of such troubled souls the Church offers bountifully its fellowship and its aid; it would be a crime to cast them out."⁽¹⁸⁴⁾

The Church, he said, is a place of fellowship and aid for troubled souls. With this statement, Machen gave away the case for ecclesiastical orthodoxy. The history of lawful worship teaches that it would be a violation of Church standards not to deny such people access to the Lord's Table. Paul was clear: anyone taking the Lord's Supper with such doubts is risking sickness and even death at God's hands (I Cor. 11:29-30). The integrity of the Church is to be preserved by removing false religion from its midst. This includes apostate laymen.

To say that Machen surrendered the case for ecclesiastical orthodoxy is to make a very serious accusation against him. Nevertheless, in terms of what Calvin taught regarding the sacraments and the Church's responsibility to screen access to them, there can be no doubt that Machen had abandoned Calvin on this issue, and not only Calvin; he had abandoned Paul. Revoking lawful access to the sacraments is the judicial issue of formal excommunication, which is the fundamental issue of Church sanctions.

Calvin was adamant on the need to excommunicate people in order to protect the Lord's Table: "And here also we must preserve the order of the Lord's Supper, that it may not be profaned by being administered indiscriminately. For it is very true that he to whom its distribution has been committed, if he knowingly and willingly admits an unworthy person whom he could rightfully turn away, is as guilty of sacrilege as if he had cast the Lord's body to the dogs. On this account, Chrysostom gravely inveighs against priests who, fearing the power of great men, dare exclude no one."⁽¹⁸⁵⁾ The context of his remarks was ethics: openly sinful living rather than false doctrine. The judicial principle is the same in either case: closing communion to those who have denied the faith, in word or deed. Not to do so is to commit sacrilege, Calvin warned.

The non-Christian is at risk when he takes the Lord's Supper, said Calvin, for "it is turned into a deadly poison for all those whose faith it does not nourish and strengthen. . . ."⁽¹⁸⁶⁾ Men "profane and pollute it by so receiving it. . . . Hence, by this unworthy eating they bring condemnation upon themselves."⁽¹⁸⁷⁾ "Therefore, they are their own accusers; they bear witness against themselves and seal their own condemnation."⁽¹⁸⁸⁾ Are those who are known to hold a false religion then to be permitted access to the Lord's Supper knowingly by the officers of the Church? Sadly, Machen said yes, for the thesis of Christianity and Liberalism is that liberalism is not Christian faith, yet liberal laymen are not to be excluded from the Lord's Table.

What Is a Presbyterian Layman?

Machen's problem was the problem of all Presbyterian government: the Church's standards do not specify what a member in good standing must believe. Answer 172 of the Larger Catechism states that a person who has doubts regarding "his being in Christ" still has lawful access to the Lord's Supper "that he may be further strengthened." Only the "ignorant and scandalous" are to be barred (Ans. 173). This specifically places greater weight on intellectual perception ("ignorance") than it does on personal assurance of salvation. Charles Hodge cited these passages in his essay rejecting Coit's claim that New School Presbyterian laymen had been ejected in 1837 because they refused to accept the Confession. Not so, said Hodge; no such obligation exists for laymen. "Nothing, therefore, can be plainer than that our Church requires nothing more than credible evidence of Christian character as the condition of Christian communion. Of that evidence the Church officers are to judge."⁽¹⁸⁹⁾ This is membership by good works. This is humanism. This view of Church membership eventually transferred the Church to humanists.

Communing members are voting members in Presbyterianism. The system depends judicially on the judgment of elders in screening ministerial candidates before laymen are allowed to vote to hire them. Because voting members do not have to affirm faith in the Confession, this places heavy emphasis on the top-down administrative screening of candidates. The bottom-up screening process by Presbyterian laymen has always been understood as being without judicially enforceable theological standards. Elders screen local church members; teaching elders also screen ministerial candidates; presbyteries screen ruling elders retroactively. Only after the presbytery identifies lawful candidates for the ministry can members vote to hire one. In short, because there is no formal judicial content to a Presbyterian member's oath, a system of government was constructed that places almost total official control in the hands of elders, which in fact has meant ministers and the seminary professors who have screened them.

Machen's Dilemma

This structure of authority had a crucial implication for the conservatives' strategy, 1923-25. Any attempt by Machen and his allies to appeal to laymen over the heads of ministers and seminary faculties was doomed in advance. The system of government had been constructed from the beginning to screen laymen out of the sanctioning process above the local congregation because they are under no oath-bound stipulations beyond those administered by their local elders. The Westminster Confession does not directly govern Presbyterian laymen; therefore, Presbyterian law does not allow them to govern above the local congregation. Their only meaningful power above the local congregation is economic: the power of the purse. It was this power that the Church's bureaucrats sought to remove or reduce whenever possible. Meanwhile, Machen and his allies built much of their strategy on an appeal to laymen.

Machen was trapped by Presbyterian law. He could not publicly confront the crucial covenantal issue: written, judicially enforceable confessional standards for voting Church members as well as for elders. He could not suggest a judicial distinction between communicant members and voting members. He could not suggest that voting members be required to profess their oath-bound allegiance to the Constitution of the Church before they are given the vote over elders. He could not suggest that voting members be placed under the stipulations of the Confession for the sake of the purity of the Church. To have suggested this would have meant breaking with Presbyterianism, in which no legal distinction exists between voting and non-voting members. In order to protect the highest offices of the Church from sanctions imposed by people who have taken no oath to uphold the Confession, Presbyterianism established a two-tiered eldership. Only ministers (teaching elders) were entitled to preach the word (WCF XXVIII:2), administer the sacraments (WCF XXVII:4), and ordain new ministers.⁽¹⁹⁰⁾

Machen was correct in his assertion that liberalism was a violation of ministerial confessional standards. It was a rival religion. But he refused to make this obvious and judicially necessary extension of his argument: voting members must also swear an oath to the Confession. That is, those who impose judicial sanctions (i.e., vote as God's ordained agents) through the authority of the Westminster Confession must first formally place themselves under the stipulations of that Confession. If a man is not under God's covenant law, he cannot lawfully rule in terms of God's covenant law.

To have argued that voting members should be under the same stipulations as the officers would have exposed him as someone who had broken with Presbyterian law: an extremist. He was about to become the Church's chief extremist even without making this application of his argument regarding liberalism. So, he toned down his case against the curse of liberalism--not just rhetorically but judicially. He refused to blame laymen for being liberals, i.e., for having adopted anti-Christianity as he defined it. This argument implicitly denied the biblical basis of Church authority: from the layman to the officers--bottom-up responsibility. It denied that God makes His Church covenant by means of the members' oath-bound confessions, who in turn delegate to officers the formal authority to represent them. It made the personal confession of the officers the judicial basis of the Church covenant, as if the Church derived its authority from God by way of the officers. Yet the members could fire any or all of the officers at any time: the sovereignty of the purse. The officers could hardly excommunicate all of the members.

Machen steadfastly refused to invoke a theology that defended the Lord's Table from God's covenantal enemies. He adopted the position of nearly open communion in the name of historic Presbyterianism, for this was in fact historic Presbyterianism. Any local church member, Machen insisted, can gain lawful access to the communion table irrespective of his doubts regarding the truth of Christianity. The member could be a liberal and still take communion. He could deny the Apostles' Creed and still take communion unless his local officers decided otherwise--and in the New York Presbytery, they probably wouldn't. There was no denominational way to prevent this. There was no Presbyterian standard of personal confession for Church membership. Machen was trapped by the original compromises and oversights of the Westminster Assembly. The Puritan Independents still exercised their ecclesiastical rule over him through the Westminster Confession.⁽¹⁹¹⁾ Machen was left without ecclesiastical sanctions at the most fundamental level: the oath that establishes the Church covenant. Machen was forced to reduce the operational definition of the Church to a "fellowship," an "aid" society. With respect to local church membership, Machen accepted the number-one tenet of liberalism's official doctrine of the Church: a fellowship without judicial sanctions.

What Machen described was, judicially speaking, what the liberal Church historian Winthrop S. Hudson described in 1953 in his discussion of the loss of both the authority and the distinctiveness of the Protestant Church under liberalism: "The church could and should be a center of fellowship which would give visible expression to the fundamental unity of mankind. The problem was to get the people into the church so that the oneness of humanity--the brotherhood of man--might be made evident to the community at large. Discipline, of course, could be relaxed. An indiscriminate welcome into the fellowship of the church could be extended to all members of the community. The errant and the wayward need not be excluded from the fold." That meant a relaxation of Church discipline. "But the relaxation of discipline in itself would scarcely draw people into the church's fellowship."⁽¹⁹²⁾ The Church needed something to differentiate its mission from that of the world. When the older evangelical vision departed, something had to replace it.⁽¹⁹³⁾ Nothing did. That was Hudson's lament.

In the Northern Presbyterian Church of Machen's day, there was no longer any reliable guardian of the oath. But there would soon be a guardian of the bureaucracy.

Sanctions and Creed

In 1925, in a series of lectures in Grove City, Pennsylvania, Machen returned to this theme of Church membership as distinguished from ministerial ordination. In his lecture, "Faith and the Gospel," he tightened what had been a very loose definition of Church membership in Christianity and Liberalism. He identified the Church as "the visible representative in the world of the body of Christ; and its members are not merely seekers after God, but those who have already found; . . ."⁽¹⁹⁴⁾ But he reaffirmed his earlier statement that he was not much concerned about admitting to membership "men who are struggling with doubts and difficulties about the gospel," but rather those "who are perfectly satisfied with another gospel; . . ."⁽¹⁹⁵⁾

This did not solve his dilemma. How can a Church member be lawfully removed from membership when he believes in "another gospel"? There must be confessional standards governing each member. Machen acknowledged that there must be "a limit beyond which exclusion must certainly be practiced; . . ."⁽¹⁹⁶⁾ But "such requirements ought clearly to be recognized as provisional; . . . That is one reason why we must refuse to answer, in any definite and formal way, the question as to the minimum doctrinal requirements that are necessary in order that a man may be a Christian."⁽¹⁹⁷⁾

With this statement, Machen publicly affirmed what had always been true of Scottish and English Presbyterianism. He was no revolutionary; he was a conservative. He was just more open about the reality of Presbyterian Church membership. From the Council of Nicea onward, there had been a requirement for membership in most churches: the public affirmation of a creed. But Presbyterianism has never required this as a formal test of membership. Neither does Presbyterianism's mandated liturgy--there is none--involve a corporate affirmation of any creed. Such affirmations are allowed, but they are not required. Except for an implied oath of obedience at baptism, the person seeking membership in a Presbyterian Church has never had to meet any denominational test of his or her orthodoxy. A local congregation's session is in charge of formulating whatever standards it chooses. This means, judicially speaking, that Presbyterian Church membership has always been congregational-independent. The higher courts of the denomination have nothing to say about it. The Confession and the catechisms are silent on the matter of the formal content of the member's confession of faith. For a layman, there is no Presbyterian confession of faith. There is only a Congregationalist confession of faith. The judicial sanctions are exclusively local: top-down. But the economic sanctions are also local: bottom-up. The layman controls the purse strings. He who pays the piper calls the tune, especially if he also has the vote.

The ecclesiastical implications of this fact have rarely been recognized by conservative Presbyterians. The liberals have always understood these implications far better than the conservatives have. Because a candidate for Presbyterian Church membership is under no denominationally enforced formal creedal requirement, the judicial authority over him is the session of the local congregation. The teaching elder and ruling elders make the decision regarding the credibility and acceptability of the candidate's statement of faith. The Confession says nothing regarding minimal requirements of belief for either officers or members. Since 1729, the American Presbyterian Church has used the Confession as a screening device for its officers, but that has always been a separate judicial matter. The Confession does not mandate this. The Confession is silent with respect to its own judicial authority.

Once ordained, a liberal minister can work with the local ruling elders to water down his congregation's required confession for membership. As far as the Church's standards require, all the new member has to do is to promise to obey Christ. Furthermore, this requirement is given in the Larger Catechism, not the Confession. "Baptism is not to be administered to any that are out of the visible church, and so strangers from the covenant of promise, till they profess their faith in Christ, and obedience to him. . . ." (Larger Catechism, Answer 166). Problem: an Arian or a Unitarian can readily profess faith in Christ unless such faith is carefully defined, as the historical creeds have done. There is no theological or judicial content in this mandatory confession. A promise to obey means nothing apart from written laws and institutional sanctions, neither of which are mentioned in the Confession or catechisms. It should also be understood that the Larger Catechism has rarely (I believe never) been appealed to in American Presbyterian judicial cases; it has always been a judicially neglected document in American Presbyterianism. So, from the perspective of local church membership, Presbyterianism is not only congregational-independent; it is also Arian-Unitarian. The lowest common denominator is the highest enforceable standard. Anyone who doubts this should consider what happened to the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A, from 1936 to the revision of the Confession in 1967. (Those who doubt me after doing this should then consider what has happened since 1967.)

Because Machen saw his theological battle as exclusively clerical-Confessional--a war over Confessional standards for the eldership, and really only the teaching eldership--he neglected the issue of the historic membership creeds. But he had little choice; three centuries of Presbyterian law were behind his opponents: creedless membership. Creeds in other ecclesiastical traditions have served as screening devices for their members in the same way that longer confessional statements serve as screening devices for their ordained officers. Creeds and confessions are equally oath-bound statements of faith. The creed-bound oath provides access to the sacraments; the Confession-bound oath provides access to the offices that administer the sacraments. Without a creed to provide judicial content for the self-maledictory oath of Church membership, there can be no judicially binding predictable negative Church sanctions. Without oath-bound negative Church sanctions over the laity, judicial authority passes to the lowest-common denominator confession of the members. When this confession is theologically empty, the lowest confessional limit is the one enunciated by the capitalist villain in Frank Norris' Progressive-era novel, The Octopus: "All the traffic will bear!" Lower, ever lower went the limit.

Representation and Subordination

A promise to obey Christ raises the question of judicial representation: Who speaks in Christ's name? Is it the local session, the presbytery, the synod, or the General Assembly? This raises the issue of centralized authority. In the twentieth century, political centralization has been increasingly acceptable to laymen in their capacity as citizens. In their capacity as local church members, they could hardly resist the same centralization process in the churches.

The Presbyterian layman is oath-bound to obey Christ. But in every hierarchical Church, ordained officers are presumed to speak for Christ unless there is evidence to the contrary. The Presbyterian layman will generally obey his ecclesiastical superiors; very few are theologically equipped to resist, and none can successfully resist on his own authority. Yet Machen and his supporters appealed to conservative laymen as if laymen possessed operational authority in a denomination that allowed theological Unitarians access to both the pulpit and the pew. It was clear that conservative laymen would be outvoted. A Unitarian confession of faith--or worse--would become the creedal membership standard as time went on because the modernists had allies outside the camp: in education, the media, and culture. American public schools after 1830 had been increasingly based on a Unitarian confession. New members would bring these confessions into the Church when they joined. It was up to the local session to prevent these implicit Unitarians from gaining access to the congregational vote until they abandoned this outlook. But would the sessions do this?

Machen understood the common denominator problem. He warned against the quest to find "some greatest common denominator which shall unite men in different Christian bodies; for such a greatest common denominator is often found to be very small indeed."⁽¹⁹⁸⁾ But he offered no solution to this, the central judicial dilemma of the Presbyterian conflict. Voting members in Presbyterian churches in the long run control access to the pulpit and also the flow of funds. Eventually, the confession of the remaining members will govern the confession of the officers. If the members refuse to pull the officers up to their level, then the officers will pull the members' confession down to theirs. In such cases, the steady exodus of the more confessionally orthodox members will continue. But there is no escape from the covenantal structure of sovereignty: institutional sovereignty in history flows from the bottom up, not from the top down, no matter what systems men construct in a futile attempt to reverse this process (Lev. 4).⁽¹⁹⁹⁾ Church officers are dual representatives of God and the members. Their confession of faith cannot permanently deviate significantly in theological and judicial content from the corporate confession of those who elect them.

Humanist political liberals have long understand this principle, which is why they have universally mandated compulsory or near-compulsory government-operated school systems and government-regulated private schools. They seek to shape the opinions of the children of their judicial masters. They offer "free" tuition to gain the cooperation of the now over-taxed parents. They invoke the politics of guilt and pity regarding the needs of poor parents in order to justify the taxation of all parents. The key to understanding the public schools is not the needs of the poor; rather, it is the need of elected representatives and their appointed, self-certified, tenured educational bureaucrats to control the opinions of future voters. This was the heart of the attack on Bryan, 1922-25. These "outside allies" of the theological liberals were (and still are) in control of the public schools. This has made the work of liberals inside the Church much easier.

Reading the Old Testament, Machen should have understood: God did not bring sanctions against Israel because her leaders were corrupt while the people were righteous. God imposed negative corporate sanctions because the corrupt majority had demanded rule by corrupt leaders (Isa. 1). The silent majority in Israel was not in opposition to its sinful rulers; it was in full agreement. So it would prove to be in the Presbyterian Church. This was Machen's primary strategic problem. He never publicly recognized this; he did not warn his followers. He did the opposite, blaming the crossed-fingers confessions of the ministers and dismissing as judicially far less relevant the liberal confessions of voting members. So, every time the liberals raised the stakes in the conflict, more of Machen's previous supporters removed themselves from his leadership. Year by year after 1924, battle by battle, they defected.

The issue was oath-invoked sanctions. Sanctions are inescapable concepts. It is not a question of "sanctions vs. no sanctions." It is a question of which sanctions enforced on which people by which representatives. Access to the sacraments (which are means of God's sanctions) is covenantally dependent on a formal oath, either personally prior to baptism or representatively for infants through a parent who is a Church member. The issue of the sacraments is judicially tied to the unified issue of oaths and sanctions. None of this is visible in Machen's writings because none of this is mandated in Presbyterianism. Machen learned in 1936 who controlled the sanctions. But he suspected the answer in 1923: ". . . the forces opposed to the gospel are now almost in control."⁽²⁰⁰⁾ Nevertheless, he remained a postmillennial optimist: "And another Reformation in God's good time will come."⁽²⁰¹⁾

A Matter of Rhetoric

Machen, true to the Princetonian tradition of attacking bad ideas in public rather than those who hold them, refused to name names in Christianity and Liberalism. On page 128, he did quote one sentence from Fosdick's "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" but that was the extent of his challenge. Had he done more, he might have been faced with bringing an accusation of heresy (actually, apostasy) against his opponents. This the Princetonians had not been willing to do even in Briggs' day. The Princetonians gave indications of being men who feared to be drawn into heresy trials and counter-trials. The Princetonians were thereby forced to wage a defensive war after 1869. In 1929, the Old School's remaining members lost control over the Seminary.⁽²⁰²⁾

Despite Machen's self-restraint, the liberals' reviews of Christianity and Liberalism focused on Machen's supposedly vituperative tone--a fact noted by Hart in his doctoral dissertation but not in his book.⁽²⁰³⁾ Yet Henry van Dyke's press release had been a personal attack on an ordained minister; the liberals did not publicly criticize him. This was to be Machen's fate from this time forward: no matter what slander was made against Machen in public, Machen was always regarded as the initiator, the rhetorical bully.⁽²⁰⁴⁾ While Briggs had been able to identify almost any conservative doctrine as theologically deviant and get away with it, 1876-1890, Machen could say almost nothing theologically orthodox and get away with it after 1923.

It was far too late for a call to offensive judicial action. The conservatives did not have the votes, as they would soon learn. They had not had the votes since 1913, when van Dyke successfully called their bluff by challenging them to launch a heresy trial against him. In 1921, Warfield on his deathbed had already supplied Machen with the Church's autopsy: rotten wood. Machen in 1936 delivered the Church's funeral oration. But he kept Warfield's autopsy to himself from 1921 until his death in 1937. Only his mother had shared in this knowledge.

Machen's mild rhetoric did him no good whatsoever in the rhetoric wars. Nolan R. Best, editor of the liberal Continent from 1910 until late 1924, when he resigned because the Board suppressed one of his editorials on the Fosdick case,⁽²⁰⁵⁾ accused Machen in 1923 of "so totally lacking in the fundamental element of fidelity to facts" that the book was "simply an offense against the ninth commandment."⁽²⁰⁶⁾ That is, he called Machen a liar. Yet it was Machen who gained the reputation of being a loose canon rhetorically. That, too, was part of the modernists' successful rhetorical attack on Machen.⁽²⁰⁷⁾ They dismissed as unacceptable rhetoric what was in fact a theologically precise critique that had hit its targets. It was not his rhetoric that outraged his opponents; it was his theology--the reverse of Briggs' experience, whose rhetoric had ignited the firestorm of protest. Machen wanted to debate the theological issues.⁽²⁰⁸⁾ His opponents wanted institutional peace without debate. As time went on, so did his allies.

Machen's Views on Church and State

It is important to understand that Machen never regarded himself as a fundamentalist, although he became the leading intellectual spokesman for American fundamentalism over the next decade and a half. He was an Old School Calvinist. He was a postmillennialist, although not a vociferous one. He was, however, a vociferous critic of premillennialism⁽²⁰⁹⁾--an old Princeton Seminary tradition prior to 1900.⁽²¹⁰⁾ Most fundamentalists were (and still are) premillennialists. He was a believer in God's absolute predestination; few fundamentalists were (or are).

He was also a nineteenth-century Whig liberal in his political and economic views, something not understood by some of those Calvinist Presbyterians who have claimed him as their spiritual father.⁽²¹¹⁾ Like Robert Dabney, the Southern Presbyterian theologian and social philosopher, Machen was a believer in limited civil government, non-intervention in foreign policy (one view he shared with Bryan), and private charities rather than tax-financed institutions of coercive wealth redistribution. He opposed Prohibition as an unwarranted incursion into people's freedom of action by the civil government.⁽²¹²⁾ He testified before a joint Congressional committee in 1926 against the proposed U.S. Department of Education.⁽²¹³⁾ He opposed the proposed amendment to the Constitution, the child labor amendment of 1935.⁽²¹⁴⁾ He opposed military conscription.⁽²¹⁵⁾ He opposed the New Deal's Social Security legislation and its anti-gold standard monetary policy, which, he said, undermined contracts.⁽²¹⁶⁾ He opposed Bible reading or the teaching of morality in public schools, since he recognized that the teachers were predominantly atheistic, deistic, or liberal in their theological opinions.⁽²¹⁷⁾ Presumably, he would have opposed prayer in public school classrooms. This was a departure from the opinion held by A. A. Hodge in the 1880's.⁽²¹⁸⁾ Hodge could still claim that the United States was a Christian nation, and that its public schools should reflect this fact. By Machen's day, such a claim was less believable. But he did not publicly reject tax-financed public education.⁽²¹⁹⁾ His Scottish common sense rationalism did allow for some degree of common ground in education, which alone might legitimize tax-funded schools.

Machen and Bryan

Compare his views with Bryan's. Bryan was a Populist, a believer in Big Government to help the Little People. At the 1923 General Assembly, he had challenged a modernist critic who had dismissed him as being wrong . . . again. Bryan knew this was an attack on his political career. He responded by an appeal to his political record: "Did you do more than I did to put across women's suffrage? Did you do more than I did to put across the election of Senators by direct vote of the people? Did you do more than I did to levy an income tax so that those who had the wealth would have to pay for it? There has not been a reform for twenty-five years that I did not support and I am now engaged in the biggest reform of my life. I am trying to save the Christian Church from those who are trying to destroy her faith."⁽²²⁰⁾ He had lobbied successfully to get Wilson's Federal Reserve Act passed by Congress.⁽²²¹⁾ He went so far as to call it "the most remarkable currency measure we ever made."⁽²²²⁾ He later concluded that this noble institution "has been captured by Wall Street," but he called only for its restructuring into an agency for the public interest, not for its abolition.⁽²²³⁾ Predictably, he was a strong supporter of Prohibition; many pages of Koenig's biography of Bryan are devoted to this subject. At the 1923 General Assembly, he introduced a resolution to require ministers and church teachers in every Presbyterian school, college, or seminary to subscribe to a total abstinence pledge.⁽²²⁴⁾ It passed. This was his one victory, the New York Times reported on page 1 (May 23). Given the fact that Federal law made the sale and consumption of alcohol illegal, this was not much of a victory.

Fosdick's sermon had broken the peace of the Church, and not just the Presbyterians. The New York Times ran this story on page 4 of the same May 23 issue: "Baptists Face New Fight Over Creed. Want Fosdick Disciplined." A fundamentalist group at the national convention of the Northern Baptists was pressing the assembly to adopt a five-point creed comparable to the 1910 Doctrinal Deliverance, though somewhat more detailed. The previous year, the assembly had resisted, but the Fosdick case had made another attempt look worthwhile. The move failed. As it turned out in 1924, the Presbyterians, with the most rigorous confession in Protestantism, were only marginally better able to discipline Fosdick than the creedless Baptists were: no negative sanctions.

On May 25, the Times ran this story "Heaton Heresy Case Dropped by Bishop." This referred to a Ft. Worth pastor in the Episcopal Church who had publicly opposed the virgin birth as an essential doctrine. His bishop said the man was in the wrong, but he refused to prosecute because higher Church officials agreed with Rev. Heaton: no negative sanctions.

The camp of the Presbyterian conservatives was divided. There were fundamentalists, a few of whom were active social reformers, but most of whom were not, except on the alcohol issue. There were New School Calvinists and heirs of the Cumberland Church. They were no longer an identifiable voting bloc. Their seminaries hired higher critics. There were Old School Calvinists who looked to Princeton Seminary as their representative--academic leadership rather than organizational. What united these people confessionally? The five-point Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910.

The camp of the modernists was not divided on their most fundamental institutional goal, namely, the necessity of capturing and maintaining institutional power. They were united against negative sanctions imposed in the name of any creedal statement. Any attempt by the conservatives to "clean house" on modernists by means of creedal statements of any kind was going to receive well-organized opposition from this camp.

Conclusion

With the publication of Bryan's book, In His Image, followed by the New York Times' series of attacks on Bryan in February and March of 1922, followed by Bryan's response in late February, followed by Fosdick's response to Bryan in the Times and his challenge to the fundamentalists in "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" followed by Macartney's and Machen's responses to Fosdick and the liberals, Presbyterianism's rhetorical floodgates had been opened after 22 years of visible peace and after 29 years of reduced rhetoric: the 1893 departure of Briggs and the new strategy of peace and work announced by van Dyke. The rhetoric of confrontation after 1922 escalated on both sides, inside and outside the denomination.

Bryan and Machen invoked the naive request of the Portland Deliverance of 1892. They asked liberals to admit that they were not orthodox and depart from the Church voluntarily. Liberals insisted that they were even better Christians than the fundamentalists and Calvinists who opposed them, although they never used the word "Calvinist." After all, the liberals insisted, they were tolerant, while the fundamentalists were intolerant. In the Progressive era and its aftermath in the 1920's, the word "intolerant" was a rhetorically pejorative term as powerful as "Fascist" became in the 1940's, and "racist" is today. To use today's terminology, to be tolerant was to be politically correct. The question was: Which side had the willingness and the ability to employ negative ecclesiastical sanctions to enforce its definition of theological correctness?

The liberals had a strategic institutional task to accomplish in 1922. It was the same task that had faced them from 1869 on: to move the politically correct civil concept of religious toleration into the Church, i.e., to make theological toleration ecclesiastically correct. Machen and the exclusivists challenged the legitimacy of this transfer, but only with respect to the ordained ministry of preaching. What had been regarded as sacrosanct in American politics and had served as plank number one of the American civil religion--religious confessional neutrality--became the battering ram of the liberals inside the churches: to break down the Westminster Confession's middle wall of partition between Progressive political liberalism outside the Church and Progressive theological liberalism inside. What every American Protestant except members of the tiny Calvinist denomination known as the Covenanters (the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America) had long ago accepted by 1922--neutral civil government and civil religion--had captured the mainline churches. What had been the rallying cry of liberal Whigs in eighteenth-century politics was now being proclaimed by theological liberals as the new orthodoxy for Church politics.

Machen, as a nineteenth-century political liberal--a classic Presbyterian Whig--rejected this institutional transfer of Whig political principles. The Church is not the State, he insisted, nor is it bound by the same concept of religious toleration. He made this argument the foundation of his judicial distinction between Church and State: "The state is an involuntary institution; a man is forced to be a member of it whether he will or no. It is therefore an interference with liberty for the state to prescribe any one type of opinion or any one type of education for its citizens."⁽²²⁵⁾ In contrast are churches: voluntary associations.⁽²²⁶⁾ The Church is confessional. It must not tolerate those who declare a rival confession to exercise judicial authority.⁽²²⁷⁾ Machen understood his task: to persuade his readers of the judicial and covenantal distinction between the confessional standards that govern the Church (a voluntary organization) and those governing the State (a geographically compulsory organization). The future of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., would be determined by how many votes he could rally in terms of this judicial distinction. The votes constituted sanctions. The crucial issue was sanctions.

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Footnotes:

1. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1923), pp. 119-20.

2. "Fosdick, Harry Emerson," Dictionary of American Religious Biography, edited by Henry Warden Bowden (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1977), p. 163.

3. Robert Moats Miller, Harry Emerson Fosdick: Preacher, Pastor, Prophet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), ch. 20.

4. Ibid., p. 384.

5. Ibid., p. 386.

6. Ibid., p. viii.

7. Ibid., p. 385.

8. Ibid., p. 386.

9. Ibid., p. 383.

10. Ibid., p. vii.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., pp. 252-69.

13. Ibid., pp. 273-80. This phase of his ministry began in 1923 with the publication of Twelve Tests of Character, essays that had appeared in the Ladies' Home Journal. In this book he cited an old Chinese proverb: "You cannot carve rotten wood." Ibid., p. 274. That he would use a phrase so similar to Warfield's "you can't split rotten wood" is ironic.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., p. xiv.

16. Ibid., pp. 7-8.

17. Ibid., p. 44. He received an M.A. in political science from Columbia in 1908, having studied under economists John Bates Clark and E. R. A. Seligman, and sociologist Franklin Giddings. Ibid., p. 64.

18. Ibid., p. 49.

19. Unlike Machen, he had been an avid interventionist prior to the War. Ibid., ch. 5. Machen had opposed U.S. entry into it.

20. Ibid., p. 292.

21. John Ensor Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Century (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988), p. 146.

22. Raymond B. Fosdick, The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation (Long Acre, London: Odhams Press, 1952), p. 37.

23. Raymond Fosdick, Chronicle of a Generation: An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Bros., 1958), p. 190.

24. Miller, Fosdick, pp. 102-103.

25. Ibid., p. 101.

26. Ibid., p. 318.

27. Ibid., p. 317.

28. Ibid., p. 104.

29. Ibid., pp. 336-37.

30. Ibid., p. 339.

31. Ibid., p. 312. Fosdick cited this figure himself in a 1945 letter to Rockefeller (p. 468).

32. This figure from the Interchurch World Movement survey of 1920; reported in Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage, 1955), p. 151n.

33. Supposedly, 1,671: ibid.

34. Miller, Fosdick, p. 69.

35. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1928, p. 252.

36. 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), p. 184.

37. Fosdick served under four Union presidents: Francis Brown, McGiffert, Henry Sloane Coffin, and (for one year) Henry P. Van Dusen. Miller, Fosdick, p. 328.

38. Ibid., p. 321. It is one of those oddities of history that Bennett taught R. J. Rushdoony at the Pacific School of Religion in the early 1940's.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid., p. 115.

41. Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Living of these Days: An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Bros., 1956), pp. 135-36.

42. New York Times (March 12, 1922), VII, p. 13.

43. And my Ph.D. dissertation advisor.

44. Edwin Scott Gaustad, "Did the Fundamentalists Win?" Daedalus (1982); reprinted in Religion in America: Spiritual Life in a Secular Age, edited by Mary Douglas and Steven Tipton (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983), p. 171.

45. Gaustad asks rhetorically: ". . . has any one paid as much attention to any sermon since?" Ibid., p. 169.

46. Harry Emerson Fosdick, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" in American Protestant Thought in the Liberal Era, edited by William R. Hutchison (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1968), p. 172.

47. Ibid., p. 174.

48. "Virgin Birth," Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, edited by James Hastings, 12 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1921), XII:624.

49. Fosdick, op. cit., p. 175.

50. Ibid., p. 176.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid., p. 172.

54. Ibid., p. 173.

55. Ibid., p. 177.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid., p. 178.

58. Ibid.

59. Seminary professor Thomas Day had been asked to resign from the California Synod in 1911, which he did. See Chapter 5, above: Conclusion.

60. Ibid., p. 180.

61. Ibid., pp. 180-81.

62. Ibid., p. 182.

63. Miller, Fosdick, p. 116.

64. Edwin H. Rian, The Presbyterian Conflict (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1940), p. 30.

65. Fosdick, Living of these Days, p. 146.

66. Quoted in Miller, Fosdick, p. 117.

67. Ibid.

68. This is the estimate of Schenkel, Rich Man and Kingdom, p. 2.

69. Ray Eldon Hiebert, Courtier to the Crowd: The Story of Ivy Lee and the Development of Public Relations (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1966), ch. 11.

70. Schenkel, Rich Man and Kingdom, p. 209.

71. Rockefeller's major public statement of faith was a 1918 article, "The Christian Church--What of Its Future?" Saturday Evening Post (Feb. 9, 1918).

72. See Chapter 6, above: under the heading, "Rockefeller's `Baptism' in 1910."

73. R. Fosdick, Chronicle, ch. 7.

74. Ibid., p. 137. Cf. Murray N. Rothbard, "World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals," Journal of Libertarian Studies, 9 (Winter 1989), p. 93; Charles E. Harvey, "John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Herbert Hoover, and President Wilson's Industrial Conferences, 1919-1920," in Voluntarism, Planning and the State: The American Planning Experience, 1914-1946, edited by Jerold E. Brown and Patrick D. Reagan (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1988), p. 29.

75. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), p. 142.

76. Antony Sutton, Wall Street and FDR (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1975), pp. 77-79.

77. Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (New York: Free Press, [1963] 1977).

78. Robert S. Brookings, Industrial Ownership (New York: Macmillan, 1925), p. 56.

79. Brookings, Economic Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 4.

80. Brookings, The Way Forward (New York: Macmillan, 1932), p. 6.

81. Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy (Washington, D.C.: Capital Research Center, 1990), p. 25.

82. Fosdick, Chronicle, ch. 8; Rothbard, p. 92.

83. Ibid., p. 147.

84. Charles E. Harvey, "John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Social Sciences: An Introduction," Journal of the History of Sociology, IV (Fall 1982), pp. 4, 26, note 31.

85. Horowitz and Collier, Rockefellers, p. 142.

86. Raymond Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: A Portrait (New York: Harper & Bros., 1956). Rockefeller wrote in 1951 that Fosdick "had more to do than anyone else with planning and developing the work of the Foundation and its related organizations. . . ." Rockefeller, "Foreword," to Fosdick, Story of the Rockefeller Foundation.

87. Fosdick, Chronicle, p. 15.

88. Ibid., p. 17.

89. Ibid.

90. Ibid., p. 18.

91. Letter to Woodrow Wilson (1912), cited in Daryl L. Revoldt, Raymond B. Fosdick: Reform, Internationalism, and the Rockefeller Foundation (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Akron, 1982), p. 69.

92. The only other figure of comparable early influence in this field was Edward Bernays (1891-1995), the son of Sigmund Freud's sister-in-law Minna. Bernays wrote more on the theory of public relations than Lee did. On the whole subject, see Marvin Olasky, Corporate Public Relations (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1987).

An early student of both Bernays and Lee was Herbert Hoover, who began using public relations techniques as early as 1912. Craig Lloyd, Aggressive Introvert: A Study of Herbert Hoover and Public Relations Management, 1912-1932 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972), p. 70. Hoover in this period was a Rockefeller agent who worked closely with Raymond Fosdick. See Charles E. Harvey, "John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Herbert Hoover, and President Wilson's Industrial Conferences of 1919-1920," in Volunteerism, Planning and the State: The American Planning Experience, 1914-1946, edited by Jerold E. Brown and Patrick D. Reagan (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1988), ch. 2.

93. Collier and Horowitz, Rockefellers, p. 70.

94. Hiebert, Courtier to the Crowd, p. 115.

95. Harr and Johnson, Rockefeller Century, p. 158.

96. Hiebert, Courtier, p. 97.

97. Cited in ibid., page following the title page. On the same page, Hiebert quotes Abraham Lincoln's August 21, 1858, debate with Stephen A. Douglas: "Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions."

98. Harr and Johnson, Rockefeller Century, p. 129. Hiebert describes the father as having taken "a middle position between the evolutionists and the biblicists. . . ." Hiebert, Courtier, p. 226.

99. Collier and Horowitz, Rockefellers, p. 118. On Wilson's influence on Fosdick, see Fosdick, Chronicle, ch. 3.

100. Revoldt, Raymond Fosdick, p. 342.

101. Lee recommended forthrightness with the press and the miners. He told John D., Jr., to set up grievance committees. The whole operation was supervised by W. L. Mackenzie King, a devout Presbyterian and Rockefeller employee who had lost his position as Minister of Labor for Canada. Horowitz and Collier, Rockefellers, pp. 119-22. He left Rockefeller's employment in 1921 to become Prime Minister of Canada. He served three terms: 1921-26, 1926-30, 1935-48. The most detailed account of King's career as a Rockefeller employee was written by King's aide at both the Ministry of Labor and the Rockefeller Foundation, F. A. MacGregor: The Fall and Rise of Mackenzie King (Toronto: Macmillan, 1962). See also Harr and Johnson, Rockefeller Century, pp. 130-44.

102. Hiebert, Courtier, p. 107. Socialist novelist Upton Sinclair used the name in his book on the press, The Brass Check (1919): ibid., p. 298.

103. Harr and Johnson, Rockefeller Century, p. 156.

104. The two key elitist organizations in the 1920's were the Council on Foreign Relations and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The central figure, who served on each board, was Elihu Root, who had served as McKinley's Secretary of War and Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of State. Philip H. Burch, Jr., Elites in American History, 3 vols. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), II:250. The standard biography of Root is Philip C. Jessup, Elihu Root, 2 vols. (n.p.: Archon, [1938] 1964). Root persuaded Herbert Hoover to name Henry Stimson as his Secretary of State: Richard N. Current, Secretary Stimson: A Study in Statecraft (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1954), p. 43. On Root's influence on Stimson, who served in the cabinets of four presidents, see Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 180; and the references to Root in Hodgson, The Colonel.

The CFR's major publication is the quarterly journal, Foreign Affairs. One of the original organizers, Whitney H. Shepardson, in 1960 wrote a brief history of the origins of the CFR. He traced it to Britain's Institute for International Affairs and to the "Inquiry Group," which advised President Woodrow Wilson's advisor E. M. House before and during the 1919 peace conference in Paris. Shepardson, "Early History of the Council on Foreign Relations," reprinted for the Council's 50th Anniversary Dinner (1972); reprinted in Freemen Digest (1980), pp. 136-38.

105. Hiebert, Courtier, p. 225. Lee's price was quite cheap, given his importance to the Rockefellers: a monthly retainer fee of $1,000. Sometimes, John D., Jr., would give him extra money for a project. Ibid., p. 116.

106. Ibid., p. 227.

107. Cited in ibid., p. 228.

108. Miller, Fosdick, p. 252.

109. H. E. Fosdick, Living of These Days, p. 145.

110. Ibid.

111. Miller, Fosdick, p. 118.

112. Unnamed; cited in ibid.

113. Cited in Ibid., p. 120.

114. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 939; Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (New York: Vintage, 1981).

115. Steel, Lippmann, pp. 385, 594-95, 598.

116. Cited in Miller, Fosdick, p. 177.

117. Ibid.

118. See Mencken's obituary of Machen: Appendix A, below.

119. Clarence E. Macartney, The Making of a Minister (Great Neck, New York: Channel Press, 1961), pp. 184-85.

120. Ibid., p. 186.

121. Another was to position themselves as the "true" defenders of the Confession and the Bible, with the orthodox wing as the "less than true" defenders.

122. Rian, Presbyterian Conflict, p. 32.

123. L. Gordon Tait, "Evolution, Wishart, Wooster, and William Jennings Bryan," Journal of Presbyterian History, 62 (Winter 1984), esp. pp. 309-12.

124. Miller, Fosdick, p. 121.

125. The Presbyterian Advance (Nov. 15, 1923); cited in Willard H. Smith, The Social and Religious Thought of William Jennings Bryan (Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado, 1975), p. 185.

126. Louis W. Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Putnam's, 1971), p. 614.

127. ""Presbyterians Ban Views of Fosdick, Bryan Leading," New York Times (May 24, 1923), p. 1.

128. Ibid.

129. Ibid., p. 6.

130. 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.

131. Lefferts A. Loetscher, The Broadening Church: a study of theological issues in the presbyterian church since 1869 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), p. 112.

132. 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. 184.

133. New York Times (May 25, 1923), p. 10.

134. New York Times (May 23, 1923), p. 1.

135. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1923, p. 211.

136. Ibid., p. 212.

137. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1922, pp. 146-81.

138. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1923, p. 58.

139. Ibid., pp. 61-62.

140. Ibid., pp. 62, 97-101.

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

142. Rian, Presbyterian Conflict, p. 37.

143. Decades later, Van Dusen edited a collection of articles and addresses of John Foster Dulles: The Spiritual Legacy of John Foster Dulles, published in 1959 by Westminster Press, the book publishing arm of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. He wrote The Vindication of Liberal Theology (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1963). From Briggs to Van Dusen, Charles Scribner's Sons served as the primary book publisher for modernist Presbyterians.

144. Quoted in Nykamp, Presbyterian Power Struggle, p. 160.

145. "Assail Fosdick Ban as Assembly Ends," New York Times (May 25), p. 10.

146. Quoted in Morgan Phelps Noyes, Henry Sloane Coffin: The Man and His Ministry (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964), p. 165. This book is copyrighted by Union Theological Seminary.

147. Ibid., p. 109.

148. The Book of Discipline, II:14. The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath School Work, 1904), pp. 395-96.

149. Nykamp, Presbyterian Power Struggle, pp. 162-63.

150. Ensor and Johnson, Rockefeller Century, p. 179.

151. D. G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 62.

152. Princeton Theological Review, 20 (Jan. 1922).

153. Hart, Defending the Faith, p. 66.

154. Ibid., p. 142n.

155. Ibid., p. 142.

156. Cited in Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Philadelphia: Westminster Theological Seminary, [1954] 1977), p. 357. The New York Times version varies slightly.

157. "Van Dyke Quits Pew at Anger at Sermon," New York Times (Jan. 4, 1924), p. 1.

158. Stonehouse, Machen, p. 374.

159. Tertius van Dyke, Henry van Dyke: A Biography (New York: Harper & Bros., 1935), p. 184.

160. "Van Dyke, Henry," Dictionary of American Religious Biography, p. 483.

161. Van Dyke, Van Dyke, p. 262.

162. Woodrow Wilson once said of him that he was the only man he had ever known who could strut while sitting down. Macartney, Making of a Minister, p. 123. Van Dyke had helped deliver the only major loss in Wilson's career prior to his League of Nations fight: the 1906 battle over the proposed reorganization of Princeton's system of elitist dining clubs. Wilson had favored banning these clubs for lower-division students. This loss rankled Wilson; it led him to resign from Princeton in 1910 and run for Governor of New Jersey.

163. Book of Discipline, II:13. Constitution, p. 395.

164. Hart, Defending the Faith, ch. 6.

165. Academic reviewers were critical of the book's thesis, though not its technical scholarship. Ibid., pp. 53-54.

166. Cited in Ibid., p. 66.

167. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p. 172.

168. Ibid., p. 164.

169. Ibid., p. 161.

170. Ibid., p. 160.

171. Ibid., p. 2.

172. Ibid., p. 6.

173. Ibid., p. 165.

174. Ibid., p. 162.

175. Ibid., p. 167.

176. Ibid., p. 166.

177. Ibid., p. 165.

178. Ibid.

179. Ibid., p. 166.

180. Ibid., p. 165.

181. Ibid., p. 166.

182. Ibid., p. 159.

183. Ibid., p. 160.

184. Ibid., p. 163.

185. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Library of Christian Classics, vol. XXI (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, [1559] 1960), Bk. IV, Chap. 12, Sec. 5, p. 1232.

186. Ibid., IV:XVII:40, p. 1417.

187. Ibid.

188. Ibid., pp. 1417-18 (Battles translation).

189. Hodge, Princeton Review (1840); reprinted in Hodge, Discussions on Church Polity (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1878), p. 220. The footnote incorrectly cites Question 147.

190. Manual for Church Officers and Members, 4th ed. (n.p.: Office of the General Assembly by the Publication Department of the Board of Christian Education, 1930), p. 256.

191. See Appendix C, below: Section on "The Divines Gather, 1643-48."

192. Winthrop Hudson, The Great Tradition of the American Churches (New York: Harper & Bros., 1953), p. 214.

193. Ibid., p. 215.

194. Machen, What Is Faith? (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1925] 1974), p. 158.

195. Ibid., pp. 158-59.

196. Ibid., p. 159.

197. Ibid.

198. Machen, What Is Faith?, p. 159.

199. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 4.

200. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p. 179.

201. Ibid., p. 178.

202. See Chapter 10, below.

203. Hart, "Doctor Fundamentalis": An Intellectual Biography of J. Gresham Machen, 1881-1937 (Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1988), p. 161. Cf. Hart, Defending the Faith, pp. 79-80.

204. This mythology is continued in Nykamp's dissertation. He sees the conservatives as using what was regarded as unacceptable negative rhetoric in the dispute, 1922-26. As a doctoral dissertation in the Speech Department, it reflects the author's acceptance of the liberal mythology regarding that era. He cites the modernists' continual cries of "foul!" when in fact the liberals' abusive rhetoric at key points in the battle matched or exceeded the conservatives' rhetoric. They and their inclusivist associates called the conservatives names, and the most effective name was "un-Christian." For them, there could not be a non-Christian inside any church, but "un-Christians" abounded.

205. The Christian Work (Dec. 13, 1924), p. 686. In this issue, Best debated Machen on the question: "Is the Teaching of Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick Opposed to the Christian Religion?" Machen took the affirmarive.

206. Best, "Professor Machen's Christianity and Liberalism," The Continent (Dec. 12, 1923), p. 629; cited in Hart, Defending the Faith, pp. 79-80.

207. As someone who has specialized in confrontational rhetoric for an entire career, let me say that Machen was a pussycat. Fosdick was the master of deliberately misleading confrontational rhetoric in the 1920's, not Machen. But Fosdick had a thin skin. He was incensed when Machen nailed him in public for what he had written. See Miller, Fosdick, p. 142. President Harry Truman's famous line is applicable: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen."

208. Machen and Best debated the following issue in Christian Work (Dec. 13, 1924): "Is the Teaching of Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick Opposed to the Christian Religion?"

209. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, pp. 48-49.

210. Paul C. Kemeny, "Princeton and the Premillennialists: The Roots of the mariage de conveniance," American Presbyterians, 71 (Spring 1993).

211. The best example of this historical "blackout" concerning Machen's economic views is the book by Machen's former colleague, Church historian Paul Woolley, The Significance of J. Gresham Machen Today (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1977). Woolley, who taught at Westminster Seminary for decades, died in 1984. He was a political liberal in the New Deal tradition. I reviewed his book unfavorably in the Journal of Christian Reconstruction, 4 (Winter 1977-78).

212. Stonehouse, Machen, p. 387.

213. Proposed Department of Education, Congress of the United States, Senate Committee on Education and Labor, House Committee on Education (Feb. 25, 1926), pp. 95-108; reprinted in Machen, Education, Christianity, and the State, edited by John W. Robbins (Jefferson, Maryland: Trinity Foundation, 1987), ch. 7. Cf. Machen, "Shall We Have a Federal Department of Education?" The Woman Patriot (Feb. 15, 1926); reprinted in Machen, Education, ch. 6.

214. Machen, "A Debate About the Child Labor Amendment," The Banner (Jan. 4, 1935), pp. 15-16.

215. Ibid., p. 15.

216. "Machen to Franklin Delano Roosevelt," New York Herald Tribune (Oct. 2, 1935); cited in Hart, Defending the Faith, p. 143.

217. Machen, "The Necessity of the Christian School" (1933); reprinted in Machen, Education, ch. 5.

218. A. A. Hodge, "Religion in the Public Schools," New Princeton Review, 3 (1887); reprinted in The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, 4 (Summer 1977).

219. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p. 14.

220. Koenig, Bryan, p. 614. See New York Times (May 23, 1923), p. 4.

221. Ibid., pp. 526-27.

222. Ibid., p. 527.

223. Ibid., p. 616.

224. Ibid., p. 613.

225. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p. 168.

226. Ibid.

227. Ibid., pp. 168-69.

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