9

THE AUBURN AFFIRMATION AND ITS AFTERMATH

Another attack has been made by the modernist "Affirmation" of one hundred and fifty ministers, for which by an active propaganda many more signatures have now been secured. The Affirmation does indeed employ Christian terminology; and, deceived by this terminology, there are no doubt Christian men among the signers. But the document itself is radically hostile to the Christian faith. It is directed (1) against the creedal character of the Presbyterian Church and (2) against the entire factual basis of Christianity.

J. Gresham Machen (1924)⁽¹⁾

Machen's rhetoric against the majority signers of this document was indirect. By admitting that some of the signers were Christians, though deceived by propaganda, he was saying implicitly that the designers were not Christians and were deceivers. The document was "radically hostile to the Christian faith." This would be Machen's argument for the rest of his life. The Affirmation became the most important single piece of evidence in the conservatives' case that liberalism had infiltrated the Church.

This document, released to the public on December 26, 1923, was officially entitled An Affirmation designed to safeguard the unity and liberty of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, but it became popularly known as the Auburn Affirmation, since it had been published by a temporary group located in Auburn, New York.⁽²⁾ It was 1,800 words long. Originally, it bore the names of 149 ministers; by the time of the General Assembly in 1924, this had reached a total of 1,274 ministers.⁽³⁾ This was about 14 percent of the ministers in the denomination.⁽⁴⁾ That was a large percentage, for few men in any organization are normally willing to take sides publicly in an ideological confrontation.

In its judicial aspect, the Affirmation challenged the authority of the General Assembly to make judicially binding decrees. It asserted that according to the Adopting Act of 1729, by which the American Presbyterian Church was created, no candidate for the Presbyterian ministry could be held to confess more than that the Westminster Confession contains "the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scripture." To single out any particular sections of the Confession as "essentials" of the faith would not be legal without the confirmation of at least two-thirds of the Presbyteries. In short, a man could swear allegiance to all of the Confession, yet not be responsible for believing even one of the specifics. The Affirmation was a defense of crossed fingers. Its conclusion: the action of the 1923 Assembly which required every candidate for the ministry to answer in the affirmative to the five points was unconstitutional, and not in the spirit of Christian freedom (Article III). This argument, if upheld by the Church's courts, would have the effect of vindicating the New York Presbytery's decision in 1923 to ordain two candidates for the ministry, Henry P. Van Dusen⁽⁵⁾ and Cedric Lehman. But the Affirmation was intended to be far more than a judicial document, and so it became.

The Affirmation would become the touchstone for the Presbyterian modernists and the conservatives from 1924 to 1936. It became the representative statement of theological toleration: rejected by Machen and his followers; honored by the modernists. Machen and his allies repeatedly used the list of ministers who signed the Affirmation to judge the character of the Church's boards and commissions. But they never brought a formal accusation against anyone who had signed it. This proved fatal to their cause. In his challenge to the presbytery's court that put Machen on trial in 1935, Machen's lawyer made a series of futile attempts to introduce the Affirmation as evidence of bias on the part of several of his accusers. The court announced that the statute of limitations had run out on the Affirmation's signers, and there could be no further complaints against this document or those who had signed it. Then the court found Machen guilty. So, once again, it was a question of sanctions. Who would impose those sanctions? Would it be the signers or the critics?

Preparation for Battle

The year 1923 was the year of preparation. The two sides recognized that the years of comparative peace and quiet, 1901-1921, were over. The rhetoric on both sides in 1922 had challenged men of good will and good judgment in the peace-seeking middle to choose sides. Now representatives of both sides began the task of mobilizing their troops.

The Conservatives

Clarence E. Macartney was the most prominent of the conservatives. He organized three large meetings late in the year. The first was held on October 30 in Broadway Presbyterian Church in New York City. The pastor was Walter Buchanan. Only conservatives were invited to attend. Macartney and Machen spoke. Macartney called the attendees to a fight. "They who love the gospel dare not sin by silence. . . . The eyes of the whole world are fixed on the Presbyterian Church."⁽⁶⁾ This was indeed the case, at least in the United States. The media recognized that something of historic importance was going on inside the denomination.

Two more meetings were held in December. The first was held on December 10 in Macartney's Arch Street Church in Philadelphia. All 15 living ex-Moderators in the Church were invited. Of those who replied, one was conservative but hostile to exclusivism. Two were conservative but not enthusiastic about the meeting, one was addressing the meeting (Maitland Alexander), one was cautiously favorable, and three replied without favoring exclusivism. Four did not reply. This was not an auspicious beginning. Henry van Dyke (1902) was understandably not enthusiastic. His letter was rhetorically clever, however, praising the meeting if it would not (as he knew it would) "be divisive and exclusive, a beginning of theological word-battles and heresy-trials. . . ."⁽⁷⁾ He released his letter to the press, just as he would release another letter at the end of the month that was critical of Machen's occupancy of the pulpit in First Presbyterian Church in Princeton. About 1,000 people attended the meeting.⁽⁸⁾

Rev. Buchanan called Presbyterians to "rally to our Standards." He immediately widened the call: "But the attack is broader than our own beloved church. It is an attack on all those who stand for the infallibility of the Holy Scriptures. It is an onslaught by modernism, skepticism, all essentially rationalist. . . . It is a time when all Trinitarians should rally to a common standard, not only Presbyterians, but Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, Disciples of Christ. . . ."⁽⁹⁾ This was an acknowledgment of the existence of conservative theological ecumenism, though without a call for covenantal union. The conflict that had broken out within Presbyterianism was representative of a larger conflict.

Buchanan then asked the 31-year-old question that by 1923 had become purely rhetorical--a means of pointing out the dishonesty of the enemy: "How, I ask, can honest men stay in the ministry of the Presbyterian Church when they no longer believe her doctrines? Why do they not get out?"⁽¹⁰⁾ There were three possible answers: (1) they were not honest; (2) they had a different standard of honesty; (3) nobody with any authority had forced them to leave. The third answer, institutionally speaking, was the only one that mattered. It was a question of sanctions. Like claim-jumpers in the Old West, liberals were not about to abandon the mother lode until the sheriff forced them to leave.

Maitland Alexander's speech was perhaps the most revealing of all the speeches ever given by a conservative throughout the entire conflict, both for what it said and what it avoided. He pointed out that in academic institutions, teachers are expected to defend the principles of the schools. Unpatriotic men are dismissed. The implication was clear though unstated: Why not in the Presbyterian Church? He returned to the familiar theme: Why don't they leave? "Social radicals can join the Rand School, and Germans can go to Germany. Why cannot those who are out of sympathy with the doctrines of the Reformed faith go where they will be welcomed?" But then he did what almost no other critic ever did: he said why not. He raised the crucial issue: the acceptance by the modernists of the positive benefits of the Presbyterian ministry. These men were illegal intruders bent on mischief, comparable to guests in a home who criticize the owner and refuse to leave.

No one would think of objecting to any criticism of our homes, if it is made from without. . . . But when a man enters our home, becomes a member of our family, eats our food, is furnished with clothing, receives money from our family funds, holds his social position by reason of residence there, bears our name, and then attacks our principles, criticises our food, but eats it, instills disloyalty into our children, uses his residence with us to obtain grounds for attacking us, ridiculing our most precious family traditions, what do we do? We ask him to quickly and peacefully withdraw.

No one ever put it better: logically and rhetorically. But he failed to answer the obvious next question: What if the invader refuses to withdraw? The head of a family would then have to impose negative sanctions. First, he would command that the invader leave. Second, he would call the police and have him ejected. But ever since McGiffert's departure in 1900, the critics had not been forcibly ejected. Here was the overwhelming problem facing the conservatives: they did not have the votes. They also did not have the will. So, the critics continued to sit at the table. Unless they were finally ejected, they would share in the inheritance. More than this: they would disinherit the lawful heirs.

Alexander then made a prediction that was unsupported bluster: "People are talking about a split in the Presbyterian Church. There will be no split. They are talking about the exodus of orthodox Presbyterians. There will be no exodus of orthodox Presbyterians. Our offensive and defensive programme is just beginning, and when the laity of the church is sufficiently aroused, and takes pains to ascertain the theological position of those who are called to our churches, there may be an exodus of those who, finding that they cannot lead the church into [the] modernistic position, will quietly withdraw with good wishes and thanks of those whom they leave behind."⁽¹¹⁾

But there would a split in 1936. The orthodox Presbyterians did join a small exodus when their representative was de-frocked. They would call their tiny denomination the Presbyterian Church of America⁽¹²⁾ until the PCUSA took them into civil court, and the court forced them to change the name on the basis of its closeness to the mother Church's name--a kind of trademark infringement. Then they changed the name to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church--exactly what Alexander had said would never happen. Nykamp is correct regarding Alexander's speech: "The plan was reasonable only in an exclusivist dream world but not in the world that they were struggling with."⁽¹³⁾

There was no "offensive programme." There was only a defensive program covered with offensive rhetoric (in both senses). The modernists were offended. The evangelical peace-seekers were offended. But there was no offense. An offense had to employ the negative sanction of heresy trials, just as Henry van Dyke had said in 1913. The conservatives did not have the votes to conduct heresy trials. In a defensive operation, rhetoric is not an effective substitute for sanctions.

Alexander forthrightly appealed to the laity. In Presbyterianism, the laity in local congregations had so little power and so little self-confidence that they were in no position to veto the decisions of the Church's highest courts. The combined authority of the seminary degree and presbyterial ordination was far too great. Presbyterian laymen were the ecclesiastical equivalent of the Italian Army.

Alexander knew the conservatives were losing: ". . . we are every year increasing the number of those who will vote to do away with our Presbyterian doctrines when we ordain young men from our seminaries as ministers who cannot honestly take their ordination vow. . . . We tolerate among the faculties of our theological seminaries men who have abandoned the Reformed doctrines of the confession. We give money to support this kind of teaching."⁽¹⁴⁾ Here it was at long last: an admission that the conservative middle was financing the modernists. The issue was sanctions: positive (money) and negative (those who vote against Presbyterian doctrines).

Then he came to the heart of the matter: the sanction of the vote. "Orthodoxy is indicted not so much by a verbal profession of it as by a vote for it."⁽¹⁵⁾ At long last, somebody had raised the crucial issue: sanctions. This indictment became conservatism's grave marker because the conservatives could not get the votes. Nevertheless, whenever a man in the conservative camp defected--and virtually all of the leaders of the 1920's eventually did, including Macartney--he valiantly proclaimed his continuing adherence to his verbal proclamation of a rigorously written Confession: a Confession that no longer had any negative sanctions attached to it by the courts. Not one of them would admit the truth: no sanctions--no oath.

Alexander saw the other problem: the success of the modernists in infiltrating the boards and commissions of the denomination. "The pressure of the constituency of orthodox Presbyterianism should be exerted to make the machinery of the church in its personnel conform absolutely to our confessional requirements. The mere re-nomination of members of the boards by themselves to succeed themselves, should not be a guarantee of re-election."⁽¹⁶⁾ Should and should not: by 1923, these were the suggestions of a minority without available sanctions. The words had become rhetorical rather than judicial. These boards had always been self-sustaining, i.e., self-sanctioning, and outside the normal hierarchy of Church sanctions.

Alexander went on, pointing out that the modernists used verbal duplicity, affirming the words of the Confession but not believing them. "Our most difficult task is to strip this system of `new definitions' of its orthodox disguise. . . ."⁽¹⁷⁾ In modern American Constitutional theory, this is called "original intent"--the search for the original intent of the Constitution's Framers. Liberals pay no attention to this theory in politics, either.⁽¹⁸⁾

This was not a program. It offered no plan to get from the reality of Church politics to the ideal of Old School ecclesiology. Nykamp is correct: "Moreover, not once did he identify the Church's constitutional judicial means that were designed to handle allegations of doctrinal deficiencies. . . . The flaw was fatal to Presbyterian exclusivism."⁽¹⁹⁾ The issue was sanctions.

Another meeting was held on December 14 in New York. Ten thousand people were invited; 1,200 attended. Alexander delivered the same speech. There is no question that in a denomination of two million members, the conservatives could rally about a thousand of them to attend a rally in a large city. What they did not do was organize a campaign to do anything judicial. Their efforts would be limited to vote-getting at the annual General Assemblies. That tactic worked only once: in 1924.

The Modernists

Beginning in the summer of 1923, the modernists began to organize. They held no rallies. They issued no pamphlets until December. They avoided rhetoric in public.

Two weeks after the close of the 1923 General Assembly, Rev. Murray Shipley Howland of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church of Buffalo, New York, sent out a circular letter. He was a Union Seminary graduate in the fateful year of 1900--the year McGiffert left the Church but not the Seminary.⁽²⁰⁾ In the debate at the 1923 General Assembly over Bryan's proposal to cut funding of Presbyterian colleges that taught evolution, Howland was the first man to challenge him in debate.⁽²¹⁾ Five upstate New York ministers signed the letter. They protested the Philadelphia Presbytery's overture against Fosdick. They opposed the five-point Declaration. This Declaration, they said, would keep well-educated young men out of the Presbyterian ministry. They invited 68 ministers to attend a meeting in Syracuse, New York. Thirty-three ministers came to the June 19 meeting. So did elder Nolan Best, editor of The Continent, a liberal outlet. In good Presbyterian fashion, the group established four study committees: law and history, doctrinal statement, propaganda, and finance. They reported back the next day. The meeting decided to raise $7,500--a considerable war chest in 1923--to fund additional meetings ($2,500) and the publication of a final pamphlet ($5,000). They established a permanent conference committee to continue the work.⁽²²⁾

Nine men worked on this committee: five Auburn Seminary graduates and four Union Seminary graduates.⁽²³⁾ Eight were pastors, and they served large congregations averaging 1,100 members. The main figure in the committee was Robert Hastings Nichols.⁽²⁴⁾ Most of these congregations made large donations to the boards of the Church.⁽²⁵⁾ The goal of $7,500 was never met; the committee raised $3,557. Of this, most came from ministers, and $2,500 from ministers in the New York Presbytery.⁽²⁶⁾

The conference committee worked quietly for six months gathering materials to write the Affirmation. Nichols did much of the work, although two decades later he wrote that Henry Sloane Coffin was the main contributor.⁽²⁷⁾ A 1945 letter from one of his colleagues reminded Nichols that Nichols had done as much as Coffin, which Nichols admitted in his letter of reply.⁽²⁸⁾ The word "Affirmation" was suggested by George Black Stewart, president of Auburn Seminary. Coffin, Nichols later claimed, had suggested the remainder of the title.⁽²⁹⁾

Strategies

The Presbyterian conservatives were led this time by Old School ministers and Machen. Better put, they were represented by Old School spokesmen. The term "led" implies the presence of a plan governing a group, with coordination of that group. There was no plan. There was barely a group, if by "group" we mean an organized body. Will Rogers' famous quip in the 1930's is far more applicable to Presbyterian conservatives than it was to its designated target: "I belong to no organized political party. I am a Democrat." The conservative spokesmen had great visibility, for the Old School had always relied on the printed word to deliver the message. But the Old School had never learned the intricacies and disciplines of mobilization. Their leaders had always been scholars first and pastors second--a very distant second. Warfield was the archetype: he rarely attended a General Assembly and, after the advent of J. Ross Stevenson as president of Princeton Seminary, never attended a faculty meeting.⁽³⁰⁾ This was not just because his wife was an invalid in need of care; it was a mind-set.

The modernists, in contrast, were skilled masters of the Church's bureaucratic machinery. They had their spokesmen: van Dyke, Coffin, and now Fosdick, but they were not dependent on them in the way that conservatives were dependent on their spokesmen. The modernists clearly understood institutional sanctions; the conservatives may have vaguely understood, but by 1923 were barely able to organize to administer them. All that the modernists had to do to win was to delay the application of the negative sanction of de-frocking. With only one Old School seminary remaining, the modernists had time on their side, as Alexander had implied: "We are every year increasing the number of those who will vote to do away with our Presbyterian doctrines when we ordain young men from our seminaries as ministers who cannot honestly take their ordination vow." The modernists did not need an offense in 1923. They needed only a successful defense. But they needed a theological statement to counter the escalating rhetoric of the Old School. The Affirmation provided it.

 

The Five Points of Modernism

The Affirmation was a modernist document. This was the assertion of Machen and the conservative exclusivists from the beginning, a theme to which Machen returned again and again. Nevertheless, the document was signed by some conservatives and was promoted as a representative Church document. The wording of this document was carefully structured to achieve the goal of bringing conservatives under the authority of the modernists, but the theology of the Affirmation matched the five points of modernism.

1. A Non-Sovereign God

The Affirmation could not openly reject the doctrine of the sovereignty of God, which is stated clearly in the Confession. The Affirmation was presented as a judicial document. Had it openly denied God's sovereignty, the organizers could not have persuaded conservative ministers to sign it. But it could undermine this Calvinist doctrine indirectly by challenging the doctrine of the virgin birth, just as Fosdick had done in "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" How could this be accomplished? By lumping the five points of the Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910 and 1923, which included the virgin birth, under the rubric, "theories."

Some of us regard the particular theories contained in the deliverance of the General Assembly of 1923 as satisfactory explanations of these facts and doctrines. But we are united in believing that these are not the only theories allowed by the Scriptures and our standards as explanations of these facts and doctrines of our religion, and that all who hold to these facts and doctrines, whatever theories they may employ to explain them, are worthy of all confidence and fellowship. 

2. A Non-Authoritative Bible

The Affirmation also declared that "There is no assertion in the Scriptures that their writers were kept `from error.' The Confession of Faith does not make this assertion. . . ."

With respect to the interpretation of the Scriptures the position of our church has been that common to Protestants. "The Supreme Judge," says the Confession of Faith, "by whom all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture" (Conf. I. x). Accordingly our church has held that the supreme guide in the interpretation of the Scriptures is not, as it is with Roman Catholics, ecclesiastical authority, but the Spirit of God, speaking to the Christian believer. Thus our church lays it upon its ministers and others to read and teach the Scriptures as the Spirit of God through His manifold ministries instructs them, and to receive all truth which from time to time He causes to break forth from the Scriptures.

So, the Bible has no "ecclesiastical authority." Only "the Spirit of God, speaking to the Christian believer" has authority. This removes propositional truth from the status of binding authority. It therefore removes the Bible from a system of Church sanctions, which must be based on adjudicable standards. What does the Confession say about the infallibility of the Bible? Nothing.

There is no assertion in the Scriptures that their writers were kept "from error." The Confession of Faith does not make this assertion; and it is significant that this assertion is not to be found in the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed or in any of the great Reformation confessions. The doctrine of inerrancy, intended to enhance the authority of the Scriptures, in fact impairs their Supreme authority for faith and life, and weakens the testimony of the church to the power of God unto salvation through Jesus Christ. We hold that the General Assembly of 1923, in asserting that "the Holy Spirit did so inspire, guide and move the writers of Holy Scripture as to keep them from error," spoke without warrant of the Scriptures or of the Confession of Faith. We hold rather to the words of the Confession of Faith, that the Scriptures "are given by inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life" (Conf. I, ii).

3. Impermanent Standards

If the Doctrinal Deliverance was simply a presentation of a particular group of "theories," then there are no binding theological standards in the Church. The Affirmation went beyond a critique of the General Assembly's authority. It denied the legitimacy of any attempt to elevate any summary doctrinal standards to binding judicial status in ordination--and if not in ordination, then surely in heresy trials, although this was not stated explicitly.

The General Assembly of 1923 expressed the opinion concerning five doctrinal statements that each one "is an essential doctrine of the Word of God and our standards." On the constitutional grounds which we have before described, we are opposed to any attempt to elevate these five doctrinal statements, or any of them, to the position of tests for ordination or for good standing in our church.

4. No Negative Sanctions

The Affirmation rejected the General Assembly's right to bring sanctions against individuals: no binding authority, i.e., no oath-bound judicial sanctions.

While it is constitutional for any General Assembly "to hear testimony against error in doctrine," (Form of Govt. XII, v), yet such testimony is without binding authority, since the constitution of our church provides that its doctrine shall be declared only by concurrent action of the General Assembly and the presbyteries. Thus the church guards the statement of its doctrine against hasty or ill-considered action by either General Assemblies or presbyteries. From this provision of our constitution, it is evident that neither in one General Assembly nor in many, without concurrent action of the presbyteries, is there authority to declare what the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America believes and teaches; and that the assumption that any General Assembly has authoritatively declared what the church believes and teaches is groundless. A declaration by a General Assembly that any doctrine is "an essential doctrine" attempts to amend the constitution of the church in an unconstitutional manner.

5. Ecumenism

The issue within the Church, the liberals insisted, was ecumenism: an open door to pastors of many persuasions, Fosdick in particular. But this open-door policy implied that all denominations should have open doors. This points to a day when all interdenominational walls will be knocked down, since the universal fellowship of Christians will breach all restraining walls. The Affirmation called for a "united testimony" and "fellowship with all."

Finally, we deplore the evidences of division in our beloved church, in the face of a world so desperately in need of a united testimony to the gospel of Christ. We earnestly desire fellowship with all who like us are disciples of Jesus Christ. We hope that those to whom this Affirmation comes will believe that it is not the declaration of a theological party, but rather a sincere appeal, based on the Scriptures and our standards, for the preservation of the unity and freedom of our church, for which most earnestly we plead and pray.

The Affirmation's position had at least three implications. First, a candidate for the eldership can affirm his belief in any of the five points, but lawfully hold so many mental reservations and "explanations" to himself as to make his affirmation virtually meaningless. Second, it indirectly supported Fosdick's position, since his qualifications concerning the virgin birth and Scriptural inerrancy would, under the Affirmation's new dispensation, be tolerated. Finally, it implied that a more inclusive Church was possible, to such an extent that almost anyone who was willing to use orthodox language while maintaining unlimited personal reservations could be ordained.

Theological or Judicial?

The ire of the conservatives was guaranteed when such points of faith as the virgin birth and Christ's working of miracles were somehow only theories, for which other theories could just as easily be substituted. But the Affirmation, in good Presbyterian fashion, was presented in terms of Presbyterian law. This creates a problem for the historian: explaining the importance of the document. As Quirk noted in his dissertation, the constitutional issue was deemed relatively unimportant, although it takes up most of the space. Its theological statements drew the most fire from the critics.⁽³¹⁾ The historians have trouble understanding this only because they are liberals. They are blind to the presence of theology whenever it is dressed in the swaddling clothes of liberalism. They perceive this theology as "common sense"--what I like to call common-sense New York rationalism, in contrast to Princeton's common-sense Scottish rationalism. The Auburn Affirmation, like Fosdick's famous sermon, was an intensely theological document. Its theology was modernism: all five points.

The Key Covenantal Issue: Authority

If the Affirmation had merely challenged the 1923 decision on the grounds of strict legality, the document would never have attained the fame and importance that it ultimately received. The conservatives never would have spent so much energy in attacking the Affirmation and the philosophy that lay behind it. From the point of view of the liberals, on the other hand, it would not have been nearly so effective a piece of propaganda if it had been phrased in strictly legal terms. The legal points would buy them time; if they gained time, the theological points would buy them victory.

Machen realized the danger to the orthodox position that the Affirmation's denial of scriptural infallibility presented, and he did not let the Affirmation pass unnoticed. In a letter cited on page 4 of the New York Times on January 10, 1924, he restated his "two religions in one Church" thesis, applying it to the "Affirmationists," calling the document "a deplorable attempt to obscure the issue. The plain fact is that two mutually exclusive religions are being preached from the pulpits of the Presbyterian Church." But on this point--his central theme--Machen was the equivalent of a general without visible troops. When the 1924 General Assembly met the following May, no action was taken on the issue of the theology of the Affirmation, and no minority voice was heard, although Bryan himself was a member of the Committee on Bills and Overtures that reviewed the document.⁽³²⁾

The Judicial Issue

The judicial issue raised by the Affirmation was specific: a denial of the authority of the General Assembly to establish judicially binding pronouncements. There is no question judicially: for amendments to the Confession of Faith to be valid, two-thirds of the presbyteries had to vote for them, followed by a majority vote in the next General Assembly.⁽³³⁾ This was never attempted with the Doctrinal Deliverances of 1910, 1916, and 1923. The Digest, the compendium of Presbyterian law, declared in 1923 that "it does not appear that the Constitution ever designed that the General Assembly should take up abstract cases and decide on them, especially when the object appears to bring these decisions to bear on particular individuals not judicially before the Assembly."⁽³⁴⁾ Edwin Rian, in his book-long apology for the orthodox wing, was forced to admit in 1940 that the "weight of the law seems to be on the side of the `Auburn Affirmation.' . . . It is altogether likely that the General Assembly does not have the power to bind the Presbyteries to `any essential and necessary doctrines' unless the Presbyteries have so voted."⁽³⁵⁾ Machen, he pointed out, did not support the constitutionality of the five points just because the General Assembly voted to accept them, but because they were taught in the Bible itself.⁽³⁶⁾ This, of course, was the heart of Machen's dilemma: the courts were empowered to enforce the Bible, but the Bible had to be interpreted through the details of the Confession. Meanwhile, conservative members on the Church's courts in Machen's day had long since moved away from the Calvinism of the Confession to, at best, the five points of the 1910 Deliverance.

One reason why the judicial issue may have been ignored in 1924 is that the General Assembly, in its capacity as the supreme court, had not heard a heresy case since 1894: the de-frocking of Henry Preserved Smith. While the General Assembly had repeatedly affirmed the five-point Deliverance of 1910, no presbytery had conducted a heresy trial in terms of its five points. Judicially, the five points seemed moot. They had served more as a rallying cry than binding terms of judicial action. They had always been rhetoric.

The conservatives did not challenge the Affirmation's legal assertion, namely, that the General Assembly could not unilaterally require presbyteries to enforce the five points. The conservatives challenged only its theory regarding "theories." It was the Affirmation vs. the Deliverance: a battle over symbols in the technical theological sense--creeds--that were in fact not judicially enforceable by 1924. The real battle had shifted to "symbols" in the conventional definition: representative statements of philosophy, not binding creeds. The dilemma Machen faced was this: no sanctions--no oath; no oath--no covenant. Then what was the Presbyterian covenant? This would not be answered definitively until it became clear who would impose negative sanctions on whom.

The 1924 General Assembly: Fosdick, Part II

The battle for the Moderator's office was even more heated in 1924 than it had been in the previous year. Clarence E. Macartney ran against Charles Erdman. Erdman was a professor at Princeton Seminary. He had been one of the authors of The Fundamentals. He had signed the 1915 statement, "Back to Fundamentals."⁽³⁷⁾ He could not be challenged as a modernist. Because Erdman's attitude was favorable to the more inclusive Church, Machen decided not to support him, and the majority of the faculty agreed with Machen. In a private letter sent in March, Machen wrote of Erdman: "If he is a candidate, I sincerely hope that he may be defeated; for he is more dangerous because of his good, little commentaries which betoken his belief in the New Testament. Ecclesiastically I fear that he will simply be a catspaw for the Modernists, as he was in 1920 or thereabouts, when he favored the agnostic scheme of organic union."⁽³⁸⁾ J. Ross Stevenson, president of Princeton since 1914, was also a supporter of a more broadly based Church, and he favored Erdman as a consequence. Thus, he alienated himself from the major segment of the faculty which served beneath him. Macartney won, 464 to 446, a slim edge of 18 votes.⁽³⁹⁾ Beginning a year later, Erdman would get his revenge.

Once again, Fosdick's case was the center of attention. Fosdick was not actually present; he was in England delivering a lecture.⁽⁴⁰⁾ His defense attorney in the trial was a relatively young New York lawyer, John Foster Dulles. Because of the two phases of his public career--liberal internationalist and seemingly conservative nationalist--it is necessary to survey Dulles' life briefly.

John Foster Dulles

He was the son of Allen Macy Dulles, a professor at Auburn Seminary. He was a Princeton University graduate. His grandfather, John Foster, had served briefly as Secretary of State under Presbyterian Benjamin Harrison.⁽⁴¹⁾ Foster's influence remained great after his term as Secretary. His biographer reveals that he was referred to by one highly placed State Department employee after 1893 as the "handy man."⁽⁴²⁾ He subsequently held positions with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the American Red Cross. "In every administration from Benjamin Harrison's through Woodrow Wilson's, Foster never strayed far from the vortex of foreign policy decision making. . . . Foster moved easily through the halls of the State Department, corporate board rooms, and the offices of foreign legations in Washington. At times it proved difficult to distinguish his public service from his private practice, a matter that did not cause Foster any noticeable concerns."⁽⁴³⁾ He was able to arrange a diplomatic office for his grandson at age 19: secretary of the Chinese delegation to the 1907 Hague Conference.⁽⁴⁴⁾ Dulles' uncle by marriage, Robert Lansing, had also been greatly influenced by his father-in-law Foster, and greatly assisted by him when Foster asked his friend Elihu Root⁽⁴⁵⁾ to get Lansing a job as Counsellor in the State Department in 1914.⁽⁴⁶⁾ A year later, Lansing became Secretary of State, replacing Bryan, who had resigned in protest against Wilson's barely concealed pro-England foreign policy. Under President Eisenhower in the 1950's, Foster's grandson would also serve as Secretary of State; meanwhile, his brother Allen ran the Central Intelligence Agency, and his sister Eleanor ran the Berlin desk of the State Department.⁽⁴⁷⁾ The Dulles family was a highly influential part of the American Establishment in 1924, and would remain so for another generation.

As Secretary of State, Dulles gained his reputation as a political conservative and nationalist, the inventor of the "brinkmanship" tactic against the Soviet Union. In fact, he had been a staunch liberal theologically all of his life and an outspoken internationalist until the late 1940's.⁽⁴⁸⁾ He served on the Board of Union Seminary in the 1940's, as well as a trustee for the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation (chairman).⁽⁴⁹⁾ He had been a representative of the U.S. government at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919.⁽⁵⁰⁾ He had been one of the founders of the Council of Foreign Relations in 1921. His grandfather had arranged for him to get a job with the prestigious Wall Street law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, before the young man had earned his law degree.⁽⁵¹⁾ He rose to senior partner in the 1930's, earning a salary of $300,000 a year.⁽⁵²⁾ This was the equivalent in today's money of about $5 million a year. He attended the ecumenical World Conference on Church, Community, and State at Oxford in 1937. There he called for the eradication of war. He also called for greater freedom of trade with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Japan, but especially Germany.⁽⁵³⁾ This is understandable; he was involved in arranging numerous financial deals with the Nazi government prior to the outbreak of the War.⁽⁵⁴⁾ This policy of cooperating with the Nazis led to a revolt of the Sullivan & Cromwell staff in 1934, including his brother Allen; he backed down and closed the German branch offices.⁽⁵⁵⁾ But he continued to sell advice to his German clients.

In a 1942 speech, he called for the creation of a world federation, a first step in the creation of world government. He recommended a three-step program: the establishment of a common monetary system to succeed the Bank for International Settlements; an Executive Organ to charter commercial companies worldwide, and taxable by the Executive Organ; and a reduction of tariffs to zero for these chartered commercial companies.⁽⁵⁶⁾ "By these three initial steps we will have begun that dilution of sovereignty which all enlightened thinkers agree to be indispensable."⁽⁵⁷⁾ In 1948, he was a speaker at the founding meeting of the World Council of Churches.⁽⁵⁸⁾ Just before he became Eisenhower's Secretary of State, he was president of the Rockefeller Foundation (1950-51). When he took over as Secretary of State, he invited Democrat Paul Nitze into his office and told him that he was actually in agreement with the policies of President Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson; he just thought he could handle Congress better than Acheson had.⁽⁵⁹⁾ He was correct; he did. He fired Nitze for partisan political reasons, as he told him, but then asked him to find his own replacement.⁽⁶⁰⁾

His father was a theological liberal, a defender of ecumenism.⁽⁶¹⁾ As part of the modernist strategy--accepted at face value by one of his son's biographers⁽⁶²⁾--Alan Macy Dulles always professed attachment to the moderate or inclusivist wing rather than to modernism. Bear in mind, however, that he had been the one public critic of Charles Briggs who said that Briggs had not gone far enough in his 1891 Inaugural Address. It was he who advised his son to get involved on the side of the modernists in the General Assembly of 1924.⁽⁶³⁾ He suggested that his son's main objective should be to secure time, for "time is on the side of the Liberals."⁽⁶⁴⁾ He wanted to de-fang the conservative wing, which was the most important plank in the defensive side of the modernists' strategy. "Let those who want testify to Fundamentals, and let the truth prevail; but why use force and excommunication and anathema in this day and generation? Cannot Fundamentalists win through the truth, without persecution and prosecution?"⁽⁶⁵⁾ In short, no further negative sanctions.

Presbyterian law mandated that a person offering formal judicial counsel in a Church court had to be an elder.⁽⁶⁶⁾ In the 1920's, Dulles was an elder in the Brick Church, pastored by his old Princeton classmate, Tertius van Dyke, whose father had been pastor there two decades earlier.⁽⁶⁷⁾ It was an important church, located on New York's Upper East Side, and has remained important. (In 1989, the funeral of Episcopalian John J. McCloy, a man known simply as "the Chairman"--of the American Establishment--was held there.)⁽⁶⁸⁾ Dulles had already become a very important layman. At the invitation of Speer in 1921, he served on the Federal Council of Churches' Commission on International Justice and Goodwill. He had provided legal advice regarding the Federal Council's incorporation. In 1923, the General Assembly of the Church named him to membership in the American section of the Universal Christian Conference on Life and Work. Throughout the 1920's, he worked on the denomination's Church Extension Committee.⁽⁶⁹⁾ In 1931, Rockefeller invited him to become part of the Laymen's Inquiry's work in Asia, which he refused because he could not afford to give up the time.⁽⁷⁰⁾ It is clear in retrospect that Dulles was uninterested in theology throughout his career. He was a moralist, a believer in doing good.⁽⁷¹⁾

He based his legal defense of Fosdick on the argument of the Auburn Affirmation that the General Assembly did not possess the authority to impose new tests of orthodoxy.⁽⁷²⁾ But he won the case on a technicality, one which rested on a train schedule for success. A few days after his victory in the Fosdick case, Dulles described in a letter to his father how he won:

We succeeded in wresting control . . . away from the Fundamentalists (Bills and Overtures Committee) and I was almost daily in controversy with Bryan. . . . The Fundamentalists had a very well and closely organized machine and had the votes on us throughout the proceeding. The only way we were able to secure a victory was through getting the Judicial Commission to assume jurisdiction in the case of Fosdick and of the Philadelphia Overture, which I do not think they really had, and then when it came to a question of accepting or reviewing the decision of the Judicial Commission, the Fundamentalists were, for the first time, unable to hold their votes in line. The Judicial Commission's report came out Wednesday afternoon about five o'clock. A special train left that evening and all of the delegates had their tickets and mileage books in their pockets. A review would have meant a delay of several days, and that was the only thing in the world which prevented a review of the Judicial Committee's decision in the Fosdick and Philadelphia Overtures.⁽⁷³⁾

What is significant is that Dulles thought he would lose if the Committee on Bills and Overtures would take up the case. A year earlier, however, this committee had voted 21 to one against the Philadelphia Presbytery's complaint against Fosdick.⁽⁷⁴⁾ Opinion in the General Assembly had changed dramatically since 1923. It would soon shift back again.

Fosdick's Convenient Retreat

In 1923, the General Assembly had directed the Presbytery of New York to investigate the complaint against Fosdick.⁽⁷⁵⁾ The New York Presbytery had complied with this request. It issued a statement clearing Fosdick of any suspicion. The General Assembly's Judicial Commission then issued this statement: "If he can accept the doctrinal standards of our Church, as contained in the Confession of Faith, there should be no difficulty in receiving him. If he cannot, he ought not to continue to occupy a Presbyterian pulpit."⁽⁷⁶⁾ The Commission instructed the Presbytery of New York to have Fosdick take the oath of ordination of the Presbyterian Church if he wished to remain in a Presbyterian pulpit. The Assembly adopted this report overwhelmingly. All Fosdick had to do was declare loyalty to an oath the tried and true way: with his fingers crossed.

As it turned out, Fosdick refused to join the Presbyterian Church; he resigned from his pulpit in 1924, the same year he moved into his new summer home on his own island off the coast of Maine.⁽⁷⁷⁾ This was a tactical victory for the conservatives. Fosdick had been warned that the moment he came under the jurisdiction of the Church, his every utterance would be monitored by conservatives, who would immediately prosecute if he said anything liberal.⁽⁷⁸⁾ Given the fact that he had just delivered the 1924 Lyman Beecher lectures at Yale, published as The Modern Use of the Bible (1924), there was little doubt that he would be formally tried. He knew this, and so declined the invitation to another round of trials. Nevertheless, there had been no official criticism of any of the theological issues involved in the Fosdick case. The conservatives had not been able to get the 1910, 1916, and 1923 Deliverances ratified in a court, even though the General Assembly had served as the Church's supreme court from the beginning. The five points had not, so far, been judicially enforced by any lower court, serving only as a general statement of the policy of the particular Assemblies that had supported them. The assertion of the Auburn Affirmation, that these five points were not legal requirements for ordination, was as yet unchallenged in any lower court. Meanwhile, the highest court had again refused to try anyone. The Judicial Commission officially sided with the Auburn Affirmation, denying that the General Assembly possessed the authority to tell the presbyteries what to enforce other than the Confession.⁽⁷⁹⁾ At the close of the Assembly, Coffin wrote to his congregation: "The General Assembly not only did not condemn Dr. Fosdick for any of his teaching but with a full account of his work before it, graciously invited him to enter the Presbyterian ministry. I do not see how a more happy and orderly decision could have been reached."⁽⁸⁰⁾

Ironically, Fosdick later remarked in his autobiography, "all this fuss was about a statement in which, if I erred at all, I erred on the side of conservatism."⁽⁸¹⁾ Yet once begun, there could be no turning back, at least not so far as the orthodox elements of the Church were concerned. Fosdick had become a symbol of a larger problem, the problem of apostasy within the Church. The Assembly had not suspended Fosdick. The president of Princeton University, Rev. John Grier Hibben, had actually called Fosdick "a great teacher and prophet of righteousness."⁽⁸²⁾ Fosdick had been invited into the denomination. Conservatives were unwilling to do the only thing that could have reversed the deterioration: launch a series of heresy trials. As Nykamp comments, "Many exclusivists were willing to exert boundless effort for almost anything except for a heresy trial."⁽⁸³⁾

A year after his withdrawal, Fosdick pieced together a book from previous magazine articles, Adventurous Religion. It was a comprehensive, popularly written defense of modernism. Its chapter titles clearly reveal its theology. These included: "I Believe in Man," "On Being a Real Skeptic," "Evolution and Religion," "Tolerance," and "What Christian Liberals Are Driving At." He assured his readers, in the familiar rhetorical reversal of the liberals, that the true men of faith are the liberals. The liberal, he said, "is a liberal because he is more religious, not because he is less."⁽⁸⁴⁾ From Briggs to Fosdick, the liberals' constant refrain was this: "We're better Christians than the fundamentalists are." They were allowed to get away with this by the press. But when the conservatives invoked the same argument against the liberals in the name of the historic Christian creeds, the liberals and their allies in the secular press pilloried them as narrow-minded Neanderthals. It was "heads, we win; tails, you lose." The rhetorical game was rigged.

One reason why this strategy worked was because the conservatives held back in their own polemical writings. They were afraid of becoming trapped in the tar baby of heresy trials. Machen set the pattern: he never attacked specific Presbyterian liberals by name or by citing chapter and verse from their published works. Neither did other conservative Presbyterians. They never produced a book or position paper titled, The Case Against Fosdick, any more than earlier Princetonians had produced The Case Against Briggs. Instead, they inveighed against no one in particular for holding opinions in general. The issue, however, was sanctions. By 1926, it was clear to everyone that the conservatives' refrain had become, "Sanctions have we none."

Rockefeller to the Rescue!

John D. Rockefeller, Jr., immediately intervened and offered to set Fosdick up as pastor of Park Avenue Baptist Church, where Rockefeller attended. This would be only an interim appointment. He proposed to Fosdick the opportunity to serve as pastor of what would become the most prominent liberal pulpit of that generation, the interdenominational Riverside Church, for which Junior subsequently donated $26 million--in today's money, around $400 million. Fosdick accepted the offer. The Riverside Church opened in 1930, and 6,000 people gathered at the "unveiling." As the Rockefeller biographers describe the event, "To symbolize the interdenominational spirit and its further reconciliation of religion and science, the tympanum arching the main portal contained the figures of non-Christian religious leaders and outstanding heroes of secular history, Confucius and Moses, Hegel and Dante, Mohammed and even the dread Darwin." Here is a description of the Riverside Church's neighborhood.

The building itself was located a block away from the northern boundary of New York's leading university, Columbia (an institution that had been the recipient of numerous large gifts from the Rockefeller Foundation, the General Education Board, and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund) and adjacent to Barnard College (to which Senior had given money half a century earlier, and in recognition of which Cettie [John D. Senior's wife] had been put on the first board of trustees). Across Claremont Avenue, which bounded Riverside Church on the east, was Union Theological Seminary, whose site Junior had helped to choose and whose 1922 endowment drive he had launched with a $1,083,333 gift, amounting to a quarter of its goal. Already one of the foremost divinity schools in the land, whose faculty would boast such formidable voices of modern Protestantism as Reinhold Niebuhr, Henry Pitney Van Dusen, and John C. Bennett, the Seminary's influence was to be greatly enhanced by its proximity to Riverside Drive and the other institutions the Rockefellers had helped to locate there.

By the time of his death, Junior had contributed nearly $75 million to these developments, including $23 million to the Sealantic⁽⁸⁵⁾ Fund (the foundation he had established for his religious charities) "to strengthen and develop Protestant theological education" for a little more mortar in the edifice of the Protestant establishment he, more than any other individual, had made possible.⁽⁸⁶⁾

These institutions included the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches, at 475 Riverside Drive, for which Rockefeller provided the initial capital. "Soon the fifteen-story Interchurch Center would rise on this plot as the headquarters of the principal Protestant denominations in America, their Home and Foreign Missions, and their National Council."⁽⁸⁷⁾ In the spring of 1954, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded $525,000 to Union for a program in advanced religious studies. A few months later, John D. Rockefeller, III, donated $250,000 to Union to endow a Harry Emerson Fosdick visiting professorship.⁽⁸⁸⁾ In short, Rockefeller took care of his wounded.

Preparation for the 1925 General Assembly

The General Assembly of 1924 had not been able to identify Fosdick as someone outside the bounds of Presbyterian orthodoxy. There was a good reason for this. By 1924, there was no judicially enforceable Presbyterian orthodoxy.

In July, 1924, following the 1924 General Assembly, the Auburn committee dissolved. It transferred its funds to a new group, called the Correspondence Committee. The name was reminiscent of the inter-colonial Committees of Correspondence created by Sam Adams in the 1770's. Thirty inclusivist pastors from across the United States joined to educate the Church regarding the issue of freedom. The group published three pamphlets in 1925, including one by Coffin, Freedom in the Presbyterian Church and one by Nichols, Fundamentalism and the Presbyterian Church.⁽⁸⁹⁾

An editorial by David Kennedy, the editor of The Presbyterian (Sept. 4, 1924), charged that the Affirmationists had denied the authority of the Church's standards. One signer, Charles Candee, responded. He was a Princeton Seminary graduate. He challenged Kennedy to bring heresy charges against him. Kennedy refused.⁽⁹⁰⁾ Here it was again: a replay of van Dyke's 1913 challenge. For eleven years, no one had responded. Then, for one brief moment, someone accepted the challenge.

Several weeks later, four men in the Madison, Wisconsin, Presbytery charged Affirmationist George Hunt with having violated his ordination oath. The presbytery's Moderator refused to preside; instead, he resigned. Two former Moderators also refused to preside. The presbytery then voted 21 to four to clear Hunt. The prosecution appealed to the Synod of Wisconsin, but the Synod's Judicial Commission declared that the evidence was insufficient.⁽⁹¹⁾ This meant that in that synod, the Affirmation did not constitute heresy.

Early in 1925, Henry van Dyke once again offered himself as a candidate for a heresy trial, just as he had in 1913. "My liberal views are well known; my record is open. I cordially invite you to try me for heresy before a court of the church, if you dare."⁽⁹²⁾ Kennedy did not accept this challenge, either. Thus, it was clear that the conservatives did not have the ability to enforce their will. Their bluster was a bluff. The modernists called their bluff at the 1926 General Assembly. The decade-long rout of the conservatives would now begin.

Politics (Gasp!)

In January, 1925, Machen and seven other men formed what came to be called the Committee of Eight. They sent out a circular to over 1,000 men.⁽⁹³⁾ It called for more large meetings. It warned about modernism. It called for the selection at the presbytery level of loyal men to attend the 1925 General Assembly.

This circular brought great resistance throughout the denomination.⁽⁹⁴⁾ The Affirmationists replied with a document, For Peace and Liberty. It was signed by all 31 members of the Correspondence Committee.⁽⁹⁵⁾ Both sides were politicking by any standard: lining up supporters, publishing position papers, criticizing opponents. But what led to rhetorical outrage against the Committee of Eight was that its circular called for presbyteries to send exclusivists to the 1925 General Assembly. This, it turned out, violated some unstated etiquette in the Church not to get involved visibly in ecclesiastical politics. Worse; the document had failed to state exactly how this kind of presbytery-level organizing and screening should be done. This was the classic mark of men untrained in Church politics trying to rally their troops. There was no careful planning along the lines of the Affirmationists. There was no plan at all. Writes Nykamp: "The contrast between this dramatic action and the long-planned, carefully prepared action of the inclusivists was to exclusivism's disadvantage."⁽⁹⁶⁾

The modernists had a field day. Two liberal journals adopted the rhetoric of shocked horror by printing C. M. Hunter's "Shall We Politicize the Presbyteries?" He censured the Committee of Eight for its "lower motives." (The thought of the liberals' shock at politics is amusing; power through politics was their religion.) But the article got to the judicial heart of the matter: the failure of the exclusivists to press for trials. "Without giving any clue to the locality of these unknown apostates, they have made serious charges. They owe it to the church to publish the names of those ministers who are undermining the faith of thousands. We wish to know who they are and in what presbyteries. If they can tell us, we will publish their names. But if they are not produced, our readers will understand which of the Ten Commandments has been violated. . . ."⁽⁹⁷⁾

Here was the bedrock problem: Machen and his allies thought that political organizing to impose control from the top could result in victory, but the official locus of Church authority was in the presbyteries. The real locus of authority, however, was in the seminaries: the source of future ministers. The General Assembly legally could serve only as a final court for heresy cases appealed to its jurisdiction. But the 87 inclusivists had stated clearly in 1893 that they did not intend to abide by any precedent set there.⁽⁹⁸⁾ Each case was a one-time event in their eyes. If they stuck to this, the General Assembly would have to try hundreds of cases, but the Briggs case had taken three Assemblies to settle. The Fosdick case had taken two, and had he subscribed to the Confession, who knows how many years the case would have absorbed? The costs of prosecution would have to be borne at the presbyterial level.

The denomination would grind to a halt if the modernists were willing to continue their resistance. Eventually, a peace-seeking majority will capitulate to one side or the other, usually the one that claims that all it wants is peace. In the case of the Presbyterian modernists, this meant peace to subvert, peace to steal the other side's inheritance, and peace to screen ministerial candidates early: at the seminary level.

The experience in the Madison Presbytery indicated how far the exclusivists would get at the local level: nowhere. But the substitution of a national election campaign for local trials was also futile. The fact that Machen and the others went public with a call for national Church politics indicated the extent of the lostness of their cause: they were going up against men whose religion was politics, men who had spent two decades mastering the techniques of vote-getting and evasion.

1925-26: The Visible Turning Point

The 1925 General Assembly sent out confusing signals. Although the participants did not know it at the time, the General Assembly was at another turning point. The outcome was probably decided by William Jennings Bryan, who once again contributed his efforts to a losing effort. A conservative, Lapsley McAfee, ran against moderate William O. Thompson, the retiring president of Ohio State University. Bryan unaccountably supported Thompson. This split the conservative vote. Then Thompson withdrew.⁽⁹⁹⁾ Erdman replaced Thompson as the moderates' candidate and won. Since it is possible, and indeed probable, for two-thirds or even three-quarters of the members of a given Assembly to be new representatives, at the time it was not certain whether this new body marked a change in the outlook of the Church as a whole, or whether it was an abnormality, one which would be changed in 1926 and future Assemblies.

This session reviewed the case of the two New York licensees who had been approved by the presbytery, Van Dusen and Lehman, in 1923. A complaint had been lodged against the pair by a minority group within the New York Presbytery, and the complaint was based on doctrinal grounds. The two had refused to affirm their belief in the virgin birth; under the provisions of the new requirements for ordination advanced by the 1923 General Assembly, were these two eligible to serve in the Presbyterian ministry? This time the question could not be avoided. Both sides were ready to engage the battle. Once again, John Foster Dulles served as legal counsel for the liberals. He emphasized the authority of the local presbytery to decide who is and is not orthodox.⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ The decision of the Judicial Commission sustained the complaint; the Presbytery was at long last instructed to take appropriate action. The 1910 Deliverance was legally sustained. Understandably, the liberal faction was horrified. It would never be horrified again, however. It was time now for the conservatives to be horrified.

The Committee of Fifteen

Henry Sloane Coffin rose to inform the General Assembly that if this ruling was upheld, the liberals would leave the denomination. This was the equivalent of Arius standing in front of the Nicean Assembly and threatening to leave. Fat chance. If ever in Church history a man's obvious bluff should have been called, it was then. Coffin was holding only a pair of deuces, if that. The whole point of the modernist strategy for over three decades had been to stay in the Church until forced out, one by one. They had said so repeatedly. Coffin had said so. Yet Hart says the Assembly took the bluff seriously: "The threat of losing New York's considerable resources and the risk of depleting Presbyterian influence in the region forced leaders to reconsider their decision."⁽¹⁰¹⁾ If he is correct, which I sincerely doubt, then the Northern Presbyterian Church that day sold its soul for an unsecured promise of 30 pieces of silver. Bryan should have given a "Cross of Silver" speech.

The decision of the Judicial Committee put the New York Presbytery on trial. The New York Times reported that the liberals were fighting with their backs to the wall.⁽¹⁰²⁾ A formal protest was introduced by Rev. Joel Hayden of Chicago. For the Judicial Commission to insist that Presbyterian ministers believe in the virgin birth of Christ was nothing less than Roman Catholic tyranny. "By requiring such absolute conformity it restores those Roman Catholic theories of ecclesiastical authority, which it was the very purpose of Presbyterian Protestantism to overthrow."⁽¹⁰³⁾

The protestors once again pointed to the fact that the 1923 Deliverance had not been approved by two-thirds of the presbyteries.⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ The focus of the Judicial Commission, like Presbyterian conservatives in general, had been on the 1923 Doctrinal Deliverance. No one on any side of the debate mentioned the obvious, namely, that the Westminster Confession mandated belief in the virgin birth: ". . . being conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost, in the womb of the virgin Mary, of her substance" (VIII:2). The conservatives had rested their case, not on the Westminster Confession, but on an unratified fundamentalist document of dubious authority. This tactic had only one year to go.

The Times referred repeatedly to "extreme conservatives." The phrase "extreme liberals" had not occurred in the secular press in half a century. Macartney was the leader of the "fighting Fundamentalists." The reporter continued: "It is pointed out that in order to maintain their victory the extreme Fundamentalists must now institute heresy trials or move to exscind rebellious presbyteries."⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ Macartney was specifically calling for this, should the New York Presbytery not conform to the Judicial Commission.⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ But the New York Presbytery was ready to go into the civil courts to defend its property, a dispute that could last two decades.⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ What broke the evangelicals' will to resist was not Coffin's threat that the New York Presbytery would pull out; it was his threat that they would not leave even if thrown out. The price of their departure would be decades of conflict.

They would not have to leave. The liberals and their allies had a plan, and Erdman was the key. He left the Moderator's chair and introduced a motion to appoint a Commission of Fifteen to study the spiritual condition of the Church and the causes for unrest. The Times reported that Erdman would do the appointing after the close of the General Assembly.⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ The motion carried easily. This would defer the day of institutional judgment for the liberals for another year. As things turned out, it deferred it permanently. The Committee of Fifteen was composed mainly of moderates. Mark Matthews, a fundamentalist from Seattle, was a member. Speer was a member.⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ No Auburn Affirmation signer was. Erdman's selection of moderates, however, assured a report favorable to the liberal wing, for all that the liberals were asking for--in 1925--was peace. Their battle cry had always been: "No further negative sanctions." The peace-seeking moderates believed them. The question was: On whose terms? At what price? That would not be absolutely clear until 1936.

Reporting on the Assembly's decision the following day, May 28, the New York Times reported: "Extreme fundamentalists and Liberals admitted that a definite break in the Church had been put off for a year pending the work of the special committee of fifteen. . . . If the committee of fifteen recommends that the next General Assembly reverse yesterday's action and this is adopted, the threatened schism will have been averted."⁽¹¹⁰⁾ This is exactly what the Special Commission did.

To understand the nature of the crucial change that took place in the denomination over the next twelve months, we need to leap ahead to a few days prior to the 1926 General Assembly.

Controversies over Machen

When Erdman replaced Machen as the stated supply preacher at the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton in early 1925, van Dyke reappeared, as he had promised on the last day of 1923. This led to a hostile editorial in The Presbyterian, followed by a printed reply that was printed in two liberal journals, a reply written by Erdman that was a thinly veiled attack on Machen. This increased the antagonism between the Erdman and Machen.⁽¹¹¹⁾

Events at Princeton Seminary overshadowed everything else during the year that the Committee of Fifteen was gathering its data. In May, 1926, shortly before the 1926 General Assembly met, the Seminary's Board of Directors voted to fill the empty Chair of Apologetics and Christian Ethics with the most controversial member of its faculty, Machen. He would replace William Brenton Greene. As might be expected, his continued opposition to liberal theology and his efforts to defeat Erdman's election in 1924 had alienated the inclusivists, whether pietists or modernists. Neither Erdman nor President Stevenson desired to see him in the apologetics department, since this involves the formal defense of the faith, but they were powerless to reverse the Directors' decision until the General Assembly met. They had a problem with precedent: not once in the history of the Seminary had a recommendation by the Board of Directors been overturned.

Another question had been raised at the April meeting of the New Brunswick Presbytery, the one to which the Seminary's members belonged. Very late in the meeting, when all but eight of the members had gone home, someone introduced a motion defending the Volstead Act (Prohibition). Machen voted against it. The moderator then did something highly irregular: he asked if Machen wanted his vote recorded. Machen told him he did not. His biographer, Ned Stonehouse, reprints a letter to Macartney in which he explained himself. Machen said he did not believe that "the Church in a corporate capacity, as distinguished from the activity of its members," should go "on record to such political questions."⁽¹¹²⁾ He did not invoke nineteenth-century Whig liberalism, i.e., the denial of the Federal government's legitimate authority in this area. The Presbyterian Church at the General Assembly had repeatedly come out against the consumption of alcohol. The Progressives and the fundamentalists had been joined together in the Great Crusade against liquor for over a decade by 1926. General Assemblies had repeatedly taken a public stand on this issue. To take a public stand against Prohibition would have separated Machen from many of the fundamentalists who made up the bulk of his lay followers. Fundamentalist laymen worried a lot more about demon rum than demon higher criticism. Carry Nation had never swung her legendary axe in the Union Seminary library. This is probably why the Moderator had singled out Machen, forcing him into a corner: to undermine Machen's moral leadership.⁽¹¹³⁾

His vote was easily exploited as a sign of his personal intemperance, even though he was a non-drinker, since not everyone was aware of his personal habits. Such whispered slander was made even more plausible by the fact that his brother Arthur led an anti-Prohibition society.⁽¹¹⁴⁾ This position was consistent with Machen's philosophy of nonintervention of the State into a citizen's personal affairs, something he had made quite explicit in the introduction to Christianity and Liberalism. This philosophy was not made clear by opponents who wished to discredit his actions.

D. G. Hart believes that this vote cost him the chair of apologetics at Princeton.⁽¹¹⁵⁾ So did Macartney, who said so at the time.⁽¹¹⁶⁾ A month later at the 1926 General Assembly, Machen's nomination by the seminary was tabled. The Assembly then went on to adopt a resolution opposing any modification of the Volstead Act.

To this controversy was added a flap over the newly created League of Evangelical Students.⁽¹¹⁷⁾ First, a Princeton delegation to the Students' Association of Middle-Atlantic Theological Seminaries in the fall of 1924 led to the students' decision to pull out. The Association had recommended that a Unitarian be admitted.⁽¹¹⁸⁾ President Stevenson and student advisor Erdman agreed with this decision to pull out. Second, in 1925, six student bodies met to form a new group: The League of Evangelical Students. Its doctrinal statement was evangelical: affirmation of the virgin birth, the Trinity, Christ's substitionary atonement, and the resurrection.⁽¹¹⁹⁾ The vote on the Princeton Seminary campus was exactly the two-thirds needed to bring the campus into the League. But Stevenson described the whole matter as having "stirred up antagonisms," and was "threatening the order and discipline of the Seminary. . . ."⁽¹²⁰⁾

Erdman had been hesitant about the new group, so the students voted him out as faculty advisor in the spring of 1925, a position he had held since 1907. They replaced him with Old Testament scholar Robert Dick Wilson.⁽¹²¹⁾ The New York Times (April 6) invoked the pejorative rhetoric of the liberal wing, speaking of the "bitter attacks by the extreme Fundamentalists in the Presbyterian Church. . . "⁽¹²²⁾ Machen was blamed at the time and subsequently.⁽¹²³⁾ In fact, a student, Joseph Schofield, later claimed responsibility for opposing Erdman.⁽¹²⁴⁾ The secretary of the Student Association later confirmed in writing to Erdman that Machen had nothing to do with the decision.⁽¹²⁵⁾ The newspapers, however, blamed Machen and his fundamentalist allies.⁽¹²⁶⁾ Note: these campus issues were considered media-worthy in 1926. The Presbyterian conflict was not some peripheral issue.

The Dividing Line: The Scopes Trial

The 1925 General Assembly had not been unified behind either faction of the Church, but this was not true of the 1926 Assembly. It was at this gathering that the inclusivist elements gained supremacy, never to relinquish their control of Church affairs.

What had taken place since 1925? Perhaps most important for the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. in particular, and for the fundamentalist cause in general, was the humiliating defeat suffered by William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes "monkey trial" the previous July. No one has described it better than George Marsden in his book, Fundamentalism and American Culture (pp. 184-86). His account is an example of historical writing at its best. But because of copyright problems, I have decided not to cite it verbatim here, as I did in my original manuscript.

The trial in Dayton, Tennessee, was a symbolic event that captured in one week the drama of the preceding 50-year battle between fundamentalism and modernism. Dayton provided the culture-deciding moment of truth for both sides. Both sides suspected in advance that it might. Both sides were confident that the jury would convict Scopes; Tennessee's anti-evolution law was easy to interpret. The question was one of legitimacy, not law. Was the Tennessee law morally just? Was it even sane?

The trial was also the climax of what would turn out to be Bryan's final crusade, which he had entered into only four years before. Prior to 1921, he had tolerated evolutionary theory.⁽¹²⁷⁾ Bryan, the Great Commoner and Great Loser in American political history, had already described the battle over evolution as the greatest reform effort of his career.⁽¹²⁸⁾ At Dayton, he lost it.

As the incarnation of rural Populism, he fit perfectly into the liberals' stereotype of the fundamentalist: a rural or small town resident laboring to preserve the outmoded way of life of a day gone by. In the minds of sophisticated urban humanists, Bryan was a living relic of an antediluvian age. "Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken in collaboration could hardly have scripted it better. . . . The central theme was, inescapably, the clash of two worlds, the rural and the urban."⁽¹²⁹⁾ On at least one point, the modernists were in full agreement with Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, thereby conforming to Marxism's theory of the bourgeoisie: "the idiocy of rural life."⁽¹³⁰⁾

Theological modernists were allied with humanists in their joint stand against rural fundamentalism and its organizational arms in the north. Most theological modernists in 1925 did not yet perceive that it was not humanism's hostility to fundamentalism as such that made this alliance possible, but rather humanism's commitment to urban life's erosion of all religions other than the secular religion of humanism. Fundamentalism fell first; then it was theological modernism's turn. The second stage of the erosion process became visible to a few theologically liberal observers within a decade. It became much clearer after 1960. But in 1925, a joint effort helped send fundamentalism into the wilderness for the next 50 years.

Mencken, who was present at the trial (and who generally respected Machen, as his obituary of 1937 indicates),⁽¹³¹⁾ described Bryan as a buffoon who hated the city, and who had at last been beaten by his urban foes. He had "lived too long, and descended too deeply into the mud, to be taken seriously hereafter by fully literate men, even of the kind who write school-books."⁽¹³²⁾ Mencken's assessment of Bryan soon was transferred to conservative Protestantism in general. Marsden writes:

It would be an oversimplification to attribute the decline and the disarray of fundamentalism after 1925 to any one factor. It does appear, however, that the movement began in reality to conform to its popular image. The more ridiculous it was made to appear, the more genuinely ridiculous it was likely to become. The reason was simple. [Walter] Lippmann was correct that the assumptions of even the best of the fundamentalist arguments were not acceptable to the best educated minds of the twentieth century. Before 1925 the movement had commanded much respect, though not outstanding support, but after the summer of 1925 the voices of ridicule were raised so loudly that many moderate Protestant conservatives quietly dropped support of the cause rather than be embarrassed by association.

The most solid evidence of the dramatic decline in fundamentalist influence is found in the two denominations where the controversies had been fiercest. From 1922 to 1925 fundamentalists were close to gaining control of the Northern Presbyterian and Northern Baptist groups. Suddenly in 1926 they were much weakened minorities. Perhaps members were simply tired of the acrimony of debate, and the national fundamentalist fad had played itself out. There is no sure explanation of the decline. The simplest explanation lies in the sordid and reactionary cultural image it had acquired.⁽¹³³⁾

With the death of Bryan five days after the trial, the stage was set for the 1926 General Assembly. The most prominent fundamentalist--as distinguished from orthodox or Calvinistic--member of the Presbyterian Church would no longer be a participant. (What is rarely remembered is that while Darrow won the case in the court of public opinion, he lost the legal battle. The anti-evolution statute remained on the books in Tennessee and was still being enforced in the early 1960's.)⁽¹³⁴⁾

I do not agree with Marsden that the conservatives were close to a victory, 1922-25. They could not convict Fosdick for heresy in 1924. The boards were in the hands of their enemies. So were the Executive Commission and its 1924 replacement, the General Council. But with respect to voting strength on issues that could not be successfully adjudicated--i.e., not brought to a conclusion--the conservatives did have the votes. This was a brief, institutionally irrelevant triumph of conservative symbols over modernist symbols. Problem: the crucial issue was sanctions.

The 1926 General Assembly

Three judicial decisions were made at this Assembly. First, the report of the special Committee of Fifteen was read and adopted. Second, Machen's appointment was not confirmed by the Assembly, but instead was postponed. Finally, a special committee was appointed to investigate Princeton Seminary.

The report of the Committee was significant. It condemned the view--Machen's thesis--that two exclusive religions existed within the Presbyterian Church. It also offered the opinion that the General Assembly, while permitted to make theological deliverances, cannot bind any future Assembly to abide by them unless they are formally ratified by two-thirds of the Presbyteries. This was the position of the Affirmation. The report was adopted by a heavy majority.⁽¹³⁵⁾

Machen, again, was one of the few who realized what this could ultimately mean to his cause, that it was in complete disagreement with his conception of the Church. His thesis concerning the schizophrenic condition of American Protestantism and particularly of his denomination had been formally repudiated. It was too late to halt the march of events; the tide was rolling against the orthodoxy of John Calvin and its adherents, yet even Rian, writing as late as 1940, could not seem to grasp the fact, for he wrote that "It is a matter of great sorrow that no attempt whatsoever was made at the time to bring individual signers of the `Auburn Affirmation' to trial."⁽¹³⁶⁾ If such an attempt had been made, unquestionably it would have been buried in a deluge of protests. The Assembly of 1926 was not the Assembly of 1893. Neither were the presbyteries.

In refusing to act upon the appointment of Machen, the Assembly took a step unprecedented in the history of Princeton Seminary. It was evident from the beginning that he was not going to have an easy time of it. He was not present at the Assembly, and he became distressed as he read reports that were being sent to him. Stonehouse has written: "When he became aware that the opposition to his person might be made the occasion for an investigation of the Seminary," he was willing to resign from the post, except for the fact that at the time, a resignation would make it appear as if the conservatives feared an investigation. This, of course, was the case; they did fear such an investigation, but Machen concluded that if the opposition were aware of this fear, there could be no way to stop one.⁽¹³⁷⁾

Machen's fears were justified by the subsequent action. A five-man committee was selected to study the causes of dissention at Princeton, and approval of Machen's appointment was to be withheld until the committee could report on its findings.

 Erdman offered the New York Times one reason for the inaction on Machen's case, a story the Times began on page 1: "I have no personal feeling, and this is not a theological question. What is questioned is whether Dr. Machen's temper and methods are such as to qualify him for a chair in which his whole time will be devoted to defending the faith. . . . "⁽¹³⁸⁾ It would never be a theological question in the eyes of the bureaucrats. Stevenson agreed with Erdman's analysis when he said, "There is not a doctrinal difference in our faculty, and there are no contentions about theological disagreements." But, he said, there are some "who believe that the time has come to make the differences clear. Their plea is that now is the time to draw lines in our Church. This election, I say, is involved in that situation."⁽¹³⁹⁾ Finally, Stevenson crystallized his position: "We are the agency of the combined old school and new school, and my ambition as President of the Seminary is to have it represent the whole Presbyterian Church and not any particular faction of it."⁽¹⁴⁰⁾ The ability of the Old School to reproduce even a shadow of its former self through seminary training--the key to survival in Presbyterianism--was coming to an end.

The dozen other Presbyterian seminaries were hostile to the Old School. Now the only seminary that still presented a somewhat united Old School front was going to become a reflection of the entire denomination. This meant the death of the Old School in Northern Presbyterianism. The Old School was being asked to show toleration. Meanwhile, the other seminaries could hire anyone they pleased, including modernists. This was the essence of the liberals' cry for toleration. It can easily be summarized: "You play ball with us, and we'll smash you in the face with the bat."

The arguments of Erdman and Stevenson, if taken together, are clearly self-contradictory. If the issue was neither personal nor theological, then what was the basis for the division of the factions? The solution to the confusion lies in the conception of theological agreement that Stevenson and Erdman held. If a man subscribes to the Westminster Confession as a system of doctrine, as every Presbyterian minister had to, then there was, in their eyes, undisputed theological agreement, at least as far as the administrative organs of the Church were concerned. Machen, on the other hand, insisted that if a man professed a belief in the Church standards, yet did not support them in his preaching, then his faith was not accounted to him as faith. Between these two conceptions of orthodoxy, no compromise was possible.

 

The Problem of Creeds

From an institutional standpoint, the Church must govern in terms of some set of standards, some statement of faith. It has always been the Protestant position that the Bible alone is the inspired and authoritative word of God. No human document is on a plane equal to the Bible. A creed, therefore, cannot be infallible. If a creed is not infallible, then it is open to alteration over time. Machen admitted this, but he was of the opinion that certain eras in Church history are not appropriate for making modifications in the historic creeds, and he believed that his era was such a period.

His theological opponents also chose not to modify the creeds in his day, probably because they realized that they had not yet completed the capture of the institutional hierarchies, denomination by denomination. They understood that they did not yet have the votes to make substantive changes in the Westminster Confession in Northern Presbyterian in the 1920's. Prior to the revision of 1967, it was their tactic to claim that as long as a minister affirmed his faith in the words of the Confession, it was irrelevant that he maintained mental reservations, or that he preferred to define certain words or phrases in ways that were in outright opposition to the original meaning of the Confession. It was this tactic which outraged Machen and his allies.

The modernists placed little value on creeds and confessions. As historicists and ethical relativists, they believed that each age makes its own truth. Marsden writes: "It was part of the liberals' contention that the issues separating them from the fundamentalists were determined by social forces. As Shailer Mathews put it in The Faith of Modernism, `the differences between the two types of Christians are not so much religious as due to different degrees of sympathy with the social and cultural forces of the day.' While the fundamentalists argued that the acceptance or rejection of unchanging truth was at issue, the modernists insisted that the perception of truth was inevitably shaped by cultural circumstances. By modernist definition fundamentalists were those who for sociological reasons held on to the past in stubborn and irrational resistance to the inevitable changes in culture."⁽¹⁴¹⁾ Thus, it did not bother them that anyone would voice his support of a 1647 document but not actually believe all of it. Machen could see where this would lead: to the capture of the Presbyterian Church by a minority theological faction who were defenders of a rival religion.

Denying the Theological Conflict

What mattered most to the modernist faction was power. They wanted to consolidate their power over the various institutions of the Church. Both Erdman and Stevenson proclaimed that their debate with Machen was not theological but organizational. They wanted no controversy. Controversy upsets people. It leads to reduced financial support for mediating institutions. Most of all, controversy forces each side to declare its first principles and its intentions. This forces underlying disputants out into the open prematurely. It was basic to the tactics of the modernists to rely on the argument of "institutional stability and peace," and later on, after they had more votes, the argument of "this is an administrative matter involving only failure to obey a lawful decision of an organization." In short, it was their deliberate tactic to hide the inescapable theological conflict and to emphasize the issues of institutional peace. After 1933, they emphasized obedience to the decisions of the institutional hierarchy. They converted questions of theology into questions of power. This is understandable, for twentieth-century liberalism is a worldview based on the capture and exercise of power. It is a theology of salvation by law: planning by formally educated elites.

Machen's opponents devoted their efforts to capturing the seats of power within the Church, while he and his supporters had divided interests. The great mass in the middle, the evangelicals, wanted to avoid conflict within the church. This placed them on the side of the modernists, who also wanted to avoid conflict, but for a different reason: they had not yet consolidated their power.

Stonehouse has recorded that "the appointment of this committee in the historical situation virtually guaranteed the reorganization of the institution. Machen foresaw this as the likely result."⁽¹⁴²⁾ The accuracy of Machen's judgment was confirmed in developments within the Seminary and the Church itself. These developments were to influence the course of American Protestantism from that time forward.

Conclusion

The year 1926 marks the year in which the inclusivists, acting to defend the modernists, took control of the General Assembly. The modernists had controlled the executive since at least 1920. The reaction against the bad publicity of the Scopes trial transformed the Northern Presbyterian Church in 1926 as surely as it transformed the Northern Baptists.

What is important to recognize is that 1926 also marked the rise of the independent evangelical movement and the long decline of the mainline Protestant denominations in the North. Robert T. Handy, Church historian at Union Seminary, delivered a 1959 presidential address to the American Association of Church History. He called it, "The American Religious Depression, 1925-1935."⁽¹⁴³⁾ He was speaking as a spiritual heir of the denominational victors. The mid-1920's saw a decline in giving to foreign missions; complaints about this surfaced in 1926.⁽¹⁴⁴⁾ Membership in the PCUSA declined by 5 percent, 1926 to 1936; membership declined by 6.7 percent in the Protestant Episcopal Church in the same period.⁽¹⁴⁵⁾ What Handy failed to note was that after 1925, evangelicals departed or stayed away from mainline churches in droves. This era began a period of Church growth and parachurch growth that continues until today.⁽¹⁴⁶⁾ But inside the Presbyterian Church in 1926, these larger trends were not yet visible. What was visible was the defeat of the conservatives.

In the skirmishes between the orthodox party and the liberals within the Presbyterian Church, there were very few dedicated, self-conscious members in either camp. As is the case in any large organization, the goals and hopes of most members are more mundane than ideology or theology. They want peace and fellowship. The ministers want a retirement program, opportunities to advance their careers, and institutional growth. The ministers take the attitude that since what they are doing is morally correct, they might as well enjoy growth. But then their vision becomes clouded. They confuse means and ends. They begin to conduct their lives on the assumption that whatever produces growth is morally correct, or at least preferable to the alternatives. Form--numerical growth--replaces substance: the declaration of a supernatural Gospel.

What the vast majority of Church leaders wanted after 1924 was peace. The liberals promised this to them, if only they could prevail on their orthodox colleagues to stop all the fighting. The liberals promised peace without negative sanctions. But there can never be peace without negative sanctions. At best, there can only be peace for those who control the sanctions. There will always be sanctions, whether or not there is peace.

Year by year, the conservative experientialists pressured the orthodox men to stop squabbling and get on with God's kingdom work, meaning Church growth and missions. Tract-passing or its Presbyterian equivalents (sermons, Sunday School materials, reprints of radio broadcasts) became more important to most members than the content of theological treatises or the opinions of seminary professors. After all, how much theology can go into a tract? They concluded that the level of theological discussion in the Church should not be raised above the theology of the tract, if such discussion might bring discord.

In 1924, Fosdick had been slapped on the wrist for his rhetorical attack on the conservatives. The message sent by the General Assembly was clear: the conservatives could not impose effective negative sanctions. The conservatives wanted peace at the price of Confessional purity. They wanted to avoid the necessity of imposing sanctions. The crucial issue was sanctions.

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Footnotes:

1. Machen, "The Parting of the Ways--Part II," The Presbyterian (April 24, 1924), p. 7.

2. Charles E. Quirk, "Origins of the Auburn Affirmation," Journal of Presbyterian History, 53 (Summer 1975). This was based on his comprehensive 550-page Ph.D. dissertation, whose title rivals its length: The "Auburn" Affirmation: A Critical Narrative of the Document Designed to Safeguard the Unity and Liberty of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America in 1924 (University of Iowa, 1967).

3. Quirk, "Auburn" Affirmation, p. iii.

4. Herman C. Weber, Presbyterian Statistics Through One Hundred Years, 1826-1926 (n.p.: The General Council, Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., 1927), p. 89.

5. The name of Henry Van Dusen was to surface again and again in the years after the Presbyterian conflict, especially after 1945, when he became the president of Union Seminary. He became one of the prominent proponents of a creedless universal Christianity. His book, World Christianity (1947), presents an attack on the early creeds and councils of the Christian Church as schism-creating. "Lastly and most important, all the councils were singularly ineffective in their primary aim--to further Christian concord. Far from proving successful devices even for preserving such Christian unity as then existed, each of the so-called Seven Great Ecumenical Councils of the early centuries except one actually resulted in one or more major schisms." Henry P. Van Dusen, World Christianity: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (New York: Friendship Press, 1947), p. 76. Contrary to Van Dusen, the primary purpose of the councils and creeds was not to create concord in general; it was to create concord by exclusion of error. They sought unity through the authority to screen prospective Church members and to excommunicate. 

6. "The Flag Goes Up in New York Presbytery," The Presbyterian (Nov. 8, 1923); 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. 193.

7. Ibid., p. 195.

8. Ibid., p. 197.

9. "An Address Delivered at the Mass Meeting in the Interest of Historic Presbyterianism and Evangelism," The Presbyterian (Jan. 13, 1924), p. 7; ibid., pp. 198-99.

10. Ibid., p. 199.

11. Ibid., p. 204.

12. The seceding Presbyterians in the South in 1973 adopted the name Presbyterian Church in America (not of).

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., p. 205.

15. Ibid., p. 206.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., p. 207.

18. The main defender of this theory, Robert Bork, did not receive confirmation by the U.S. Senate when President Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court. Bork later wrote a Foreword to the 1990 reprint of Herbert Schlossberg's 1983 book, Idols for Destruction.

19. Nykamp, Presbyterian Power Struggle, pp. 208-209.

20. He had been the first person to speak against Bryan's suggested legislation at the 1923 General Assembly to withhold funding from Presbyterian colleges that taught evolution. New York Times (May 23, 1923), p. 1.

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

22. Quirk, Auburn Affirmation, pp. 87-90.

23. Ibid., p. 91.

24. Cf. Nichols, Fundamentalism in the Presbyterian Church (Auburn, New York: Jacobs Press, 1925).

25. Quirk, Auburn Affirmation, p. 92.

26. Ibid., p. 94.

27. Nichols, "Leader of American Presbyterianism," in This Ministry, edited by Reinhold Niebuhr (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1945), p. 49; cited in ibid., p. 101.

28. Ibid., pp. 101-102.

29. Ibid., p. 105.

30. Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Philadelphia: Westminster Theological Seminary, [1954] 1977), p. 219.

31. Quirk, Auburn Affirmation, p. v.

32. Lefferts A. Loetscher, The Broadening Church: a study of theological issues in the presbyterian church since 1869 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), p. 120.

33. The Form of Government, XXIV:II. The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath School Work, 1904), pp. 389-90.

34. Digest of the Acts and Deliverances of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church In the United States of America, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Office of the General Assembly, 1923), I:271.

35. Edwin H. Rian, The Presbyterian Conflict (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1940), p. 43.

36. Ibid., p. 42.

37. Ibid., p. 121.

38. Machen to Mrs. A. L. Barry (March 21, 1924), cited in Ronald Thomas Clutter, The Reorientation of Princeton Theological Seminary, 1900-1929 (Th.D. dissertation, Dallas Theological Seminary, 1982), p. 118.

39. Ibid.

40. Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Living of These Days--An Autobiography (New York: Harper and Bros., 1956), p. 169.

41. He replaced James G. Blaine, who resigned in 1892. Michael J. Divine, John W. Foster: Politics and Diplomacy in the Imperial Era, 1873-1917 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1981), p. 49.

42. Ibid., p. 86.

43. Ibid., pp. 86-87.

44. Ibid., p. 95.

45. The first man to hold the unofficial position of Chairman of the American Establishment.

46. Ibid., p. 97.

47. Leonard Mosley, Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen, and John Foster Dulles and Their Family Network (New York: Dial, 1978), ch. 18.

48. A well-documented and highly critical book on this is Alan Stang, The Actor: The True Story of John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, 1953-1959 (Boston: Western Islands, 1968).

49. Mosley, Dulles, p. 190.

50. Ibid., pp. 55-62.

51. Devine, Foster, p. 96.

52. Nancy Lisagor and Frank Lipsius, A Law Unto Itself: The Untold Story of the Law Firm of Sullivan and Cromwell (New York: Morrow, 1988), p. 6.

53. John Foster Dulles, "The Problem of Peace in a Dynamic World," The Universal Church and the World of Nations (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), pp. 162, 165-66.

54. Charles Higham, Trading With the Enemy: An Exposé of The Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949 (New York: Delacorte, 1983), pp. 22, 118, 139.

55. John Robinson Beal, John Foster Dulles: A Biography (New York: Harper & Bros., 1957), p. 84.

56. John Foster Dulles, "Toward World Order," A Basis for the Peace to Come (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1942), pp. 52-53.

57. Ibid., p. 56.

58. Mark G. Toulouse, The Transformation of John Foster Dulles: From Prophet of Realism to Priest of Nationalism (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1985), p. 196.

59. Mosley, Dulles, pp. 307-308.

60. Ibid., p. 309. On Nitze's influence in American foreign policy, see David Callahan, Dangerous Capabilities: Paul Nitze and the Cold War (New York: Burlingame, 1990). His Rockefeller connection can be seen in the photo that appears in The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report, 1957: a meeting of the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research.

61. Alan Macy Dulles, The True Church: A Historical and Scriptural Study (New York: Revell, 1907), p. 58.

62. Michael A. Guhin, John Foster Dulles: A Statesman and His Times (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 14-15.

63. Ibid.

64. Letter to J. F. Dulles, April 29, 1924; cited in ibid., p. 15.

65. Letter to J. F. Dulles (April 29, 1924). Ibid., p. 14.

66. The Book of Discipline, IV:26. Constitution of the Presbyterian Church, p. 399.

67. Toulouse, Transformation, p. 15.

68. Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 15. This unofficial but very real Chairmanship has been held by four people, each of whom has nurtured the career of his successor: Elihu Root, Henry L. Stimson, McCloy, and David Rockefeller, who replaced McCloy as Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. This was in 1970. Ibid., p. 619. As early as the 1957, when McCloy was Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and Rockefeller worked under him, Bird writes: "It was plain for all to see that Rockefeller was a McCloy protégé." Ibid., p. 457.

69. Toulouse, Transformation, p. 16.

70. Ibid., pp. 16-17.

71. Testimony of his sister, Eleanor: ibid., p. 8.

72. Ibid., p. 19.

73. Letter from John Foster Dulles to Alan Macy Dulles (May 2, 1924), Dulles Papers, Box 6; cited in ibid., p. 20. Cf. Guhin, Dulles, pp. 15-16.

74. D. G. Hart, "Doctor Fundamentalis": An Intellectual Biography of J. Gresham Machen, 1881-1937 (Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1988), p. 145.

75. Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 121.

76. Ibid., p. 122.

77. Mouse Island. Fosdick, Living of These Days, p. 114.

78. Ibid., p. 171.

79. Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 123.

80. Cited in Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 126.

81. Fosdick, Autobiography, p. 152.

82. Cited in "Presbyterianism Assailed from Within," The Presbyterian (Sept. 20, 1923), p. 11; cited in Nykamp, Presbyterian Power Struggle, p. 151.

83. Ibid., p. 185.

84. Harry Emerson Fosdick, Adventurous Religion and Other Essays (New York: Association Press, 1926), p. 233.

85. The name was a combination of Seal (for Seal Harbor, on Mount Desert Island, where the Rockefellers had their summer estate) and Atlantic, the ocean surrounding the harbor. It was established in 1938 and shut down in 1973. He made a huge donation of $20 million in 1954: Washington Star (Jan. 25, 1954).

86. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), pp. 154-55.

87. Ibid., p. 155n.

88. Washington Star (Jan. 23, 1954).

89. Quirk, Auburn Affirmation, p. 260.

90. Ibid., pp. 261-62.

91. Ibid., pp. 262-64.

92. Letter to The Presbyterian (Feb. 12, 1925); cited in Nykamp, Presbyterian Power Struggle, p. 348.

93. New York Times (Jan. 5, 1925), p. 11; cited in Quirk, Auburn Affirmation, p. 265.

94. Ibid., pp. 265-66.

95. Ibid., p. 267.

96. Nykamp, Presbyterian Power Struggle, p. 334.

97. C. M. Hunter, Presbyterian Banner (Jan. 15, 1925); quoted in The Presbyterian Advance (Jan. 22, 1925), p. 18; cited in Nykamp, p. 339.

98. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1893, pp. 167-68.

99. Willard H. Smith, The Social and Religious Thought of William Jennings Bryan (Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado, 1975), p. 213.

100. Toulouse, Transformation, p. 23.

101. 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. 117.

102. "Modernists See Presbyterian Split," New York Times (May 28, 1925), p. 1.

103. Ibid., p. 8.

104. Ibid.

105. Ibid., p. 8.

106. Ibid., p. 1.

107. Ibid., p. 8.

108. Ibid., p. 1.

109. Longfield, Presbyterian Controversy, pp. 156-57.

110. New York Times (May 28), p. 1.

111. Stonehouse, Machen, pp. 374-77.

112. Stonehouse, Machen, p. 384. 

113. This divisive issue was one cause of the 1937 split between the 1936 seceders. In June of 1937, after the departure of the premillennial, fundamentalist, faction which became the Bible Presbyterian Church in 1938, the seceders began criticizing the fledgling Presbyterian Church of America as a "wet" church. Rev. J. Oliver Buswell, president of Wheaton College, sent such a letter to several local newspapers in Philadelphia. George P. Hutchinson, The History Behind the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod (Cherry Hill, New Jersey: Mack, 1974), p. 236. The Bible Presbyterians in 1945 came out against gambling, movie attendance, social dancing, alcohol, and tobacco. Ibid., p. 259n. These were the classic five points of American fundamentalism's social theory prior to the 1970's.

114. Clarence E. Macartney, The Making of a Minister (Great Neck, New York: Channel Press, 1961), p. 187.

115. D. G. Hart, "J. Gresham Machen: The Politically Incorrect Fundamentalist," Tabletalk (March 1992), pp. 13-14.

116. New York Times (June 3, 1926), p. 4.

117. Stonehouse, Machen, pp. 377-80.

118. Ibid., p. 377.

119. Clutter, Reorientation of Princeton, pp. 136-37.

120. Ibid.

121. Stonehouse, Machen, p. 378.

122. Ibid., p. 379.

123. Ibid., pp. 378-79. See also Stewart G. Cole's History of Fundamentalism (1931), pp. 126-27, and Norman F. Furniss, The Fundamentalist Controversy (1954), p. 139; cited in Clutter, p. 138.

124. Clutter, Reorientation, p. 139.

125. A. H. Wessels to Erdman (Nov. 8, 1926): ibid., p. 140.

126. Ibid., pp. 141-42. Clutter cites the New York Times (April 6, 1925), Philadelphia Public Ledger (April 6, 1925), New York Herald Tribune (April 6, 1925).

127. Lawrence W. Levine, Defender of the Faith: William Jennings Bryan: The Last Decade, 1915-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 264.

128. Cited in Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., "Introduction," in Gatewood, ed., Controversy in the Twenties: Fundamentalism, Modernism, and Evolution (Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969), p. 21.

129. George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 185.

130. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), in Marx and Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976), vol. 6, p. 488.

131. See Appendix A, below.

132. Cited in Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, p. 187.

133. Ibid., p. 191.

134. Levine, Defender of the Faith, p. 352n.

135. Loetscher, Broadening Church, pp. 130-32.

136. Rian, Presbyterian Conflict, p. 57.

137. Stonehouse, Machen, p. 388.

138. "Presbytery Votes Princeton Inquiry," New York Times (June 3, 1926), p. 4.

139. Ibid.

140. Ibid.

141. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, p. 185.

142. Stonehouse, Machen, p. 394.

143. Church History, 29 (1960), pp. 3-16.

144. Ibid., p. 4.

145. Joel A. Carpenter, "Fundamentalist Institutions and the Rise of Evangelical Protestantism, 1929-1942," ibid, 49 (1980), p. 65.

146. Ibid.

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