10

PRINCETON, PENSIONS, AND PEACE

Instead of making our theological seminaries merely centres of religious emotion, we shall make them battle-grounds of the faith, where, helped a little by the experience of Christian teachers, men are taught to fight their own battle, where they come to appreciate the real strength of the adversary and in the hard school of intellectual struggle learn to substitute for the unthinking faith of childhood the profound convictions of full-grown men.

J. Gresham Machen (1913)⁽¹⁾

Machen issued this stirring call to intellectual battle in a lecture to the incoming Princeton students in 1912. But he should have added, "if they survive the ordeal." Machen's faith almost did not survive the academic ordeal of Germany in 1905-6. D. G. Hart blames Machen's spiritual crisis on Johns Hopkins University rather than Germany.⁽²⁾ This argument has the marks of a younger historian's attempt to overcome one of the more easily documented theses of his most distinguished predecessor--in this case, Ned B. Stonehouse, whom he dismisses anonymously with the comment, "some have interpreted. . . ."⁽³⁾ He thereby dismisses the obvious as peripheral: Machen's crisis came in the middle of his academic year in Germany, not at Johns Hopkins. This crisis was precipitated in Germany, whether or not it had simmered at Princeton Seminary for three years and, even earlier, at Johns Hopkins.

In Germany, Machen had come under the influence of the eloquent liberal theologian, Wilhelm Herrmann. Stonehouse called this section of his biography "Captivation by Herrmann."⁽⁴⁾ Early in 1906, Machen wrote home: "For me to speak of the Christian ministry in one breath with myself is hypocrisy."⁽⁵⁾ Stonehouse concluded that "one cannot doubt that the impact made by Liberalism especially in the person of Herrmann had precipitated it."⁽⁶⁾ Stonehouse, a master scholar in Machen's own field of New Testament studies, recognized clearly what Hart fails to mention: that the chief battlefield of the war between Christianity and liberalism is New Testament studies, for it is here that the authenticity of God's revelation is most under attack. As Machen wrote to his older brother in early 1906, "In the field of the N.T., there is no place for the weakling. Decisiveness, moral and intellectual, is absolutely required. Any other kind of work is not merely useless (it might even be humbly useful in other fields), but is even perhaps harmful."⁽⁷⁾ He did not write anything like this while he was at Johns Hopkins.

Presbyterian seminaries in that era indulged in a form of academic initiation, a suicidal practice that led irrevocably to the capture of all of them by the liberals: they sent their young candidates for their faculties to Germany to swim in the cesspool of theological liberalism for a year or two. About all the guidance the young men received before departing was a warning: "When you inhale, be sure to keep your mouth above water." Can you imagine Martin Luther insisting that every Lutheran scholar spend a year studying theology at the Vatican? But even this does not do justice to the degree of absurdity. Can you imagine Luther recommending that they study in Istanbul?⁽⁸⁾

Machen was a victim of this unofficial requirement. He refused ordination until 1914. This led him and Princeton into their game of "reinterpreting the founding document": a faculty position without ministerial ordination. Princeton accepted Machen's baptism by fire (or whatever) as valid; the faculty and Board conveniently ignored the fact that he had not yet sworn formal covenantal allegiance to the Westminster Confession, as required by the Seminary's rules. Only ordained Presbyterians took such an oath. "A mere technicality," Princeton had implicitly announced, adopting the liberals' view of founding documents. "We had our fingers crossed," they implicitly announced, a practice the liberals surely approved of. When Machen delivered his 1912 lecture to incoming students, he was still not ordained. Other young men did not survive the spiritual ordeal in Germany; Briggs is the premier example. Those who survived with their faith intact were hired by Princeton; those who did not survive were hired by Union.

The Academic Vulnerability of Presbyterianism

Because of the strong emphasis that Presbyterians have always placed on a highly educated ministry, to the point of distinguishing "teaching elders" (seminary graduates) from "ruling elders" (laymen elected to office), the denomination was inherently vulnerable to long-term infiltration by those who were academically certified, especially by German universities, but not in agreement with the Westminster standards. Ruling elders were not full-time employees of a local congregation. They had little time to develop long-term strategies. Teaching elders, who might have been expected to uphold the doctrinal standards, were graduates of seminaries, and seminaries were being undermined.

The denomination recognized higher academic degrees as the main criteria for permanent positions, and the humanist world that granted such degrees was hostile to the orthodox faith. Thus, the lure of Harvard, Princeton (University), Yale, and the German theological swamps was too great, just as it has been too great for Christian colleges in the twentieth century. Academic prestige had been the golden calf for Presbyterians for three centuries, but the worship of this idol became an all-consuming lust after the secularization of higher education in America. So ingrained was this mind-set that even the Church established by Machen in 1936 incorporated the PCUSA's certification standards into its Form of Government:

Because it is highly reproachful to religion and dangerous to the church to trust the holy ministry to weak and ignorant men, the presbytery shall admit a candidate to licensure only if he has received a bachelor of arts degree, or its academic equivalent, from an accredited college or university. He must also have completed at least two years of study in a theological seminary.⁽⁹⁾

This, despite the fact that it was Rockefeller's General Education Board that pioneered the accreditation system of American colleges--a modern priestly function if there ever was one--by establishing the operating model with the accreditation of American medical schools prior to 1920.⁽¹⁰⁾ It is through academic accreditation that the humanists have enforced the secularization of America's privately funded colleges, despite the fact that private colleges are participants in an inherently decentralized system.⁽¹¹⁾ The regional accrediting agencies are private, yet they possess monopoly influence that dwarfs anything ever prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice. Through them, the humanists have screened candidates for the Presbyterian ministry from Machen's era until today.

The old-boy network among the teaching elders of the PCUSA eroded the willingness of their fellow graduates to boot them out. Old friends from seminary, after all, were recognized as fellow "runners of the academic gauntlet." Besides, their own professors had graduated them. This was not quite the same as having baptized their theological views, but over time, this is what graduation from seminary came to mean. The seminary degree was, after 1893 (and probably from 1812 onward), very nearly the equivalent of licensure. 

Warfield's Belated Warning

Warfield was the acknowledged intellectual leader of Old School Presbyterianism after 1890. He recognized the threat posed by seminary education, but he discussed this threat publicly only late in his career. He saw the seminary as a support institution, one with distinct limitations. "It is not the function of the seminary to give young men their entire training for the ministry. That is the concern of the presbytery; and no other organization can supersede the presbytery in this business. The seminary is only an instrument which the presbytery uses in training young men for the ministry. An instrument, not the instrument. The presbytery uses other instruments also in this work."⁽¹²⁾ But no matter how hard he and other Calvinistic Presbyterians might proclaim the legitimate sovereignty of the presbytery, their rationalism and their respect for the institutions of higher (humanist) learning eventually undercut their own warnings. Over the decade prior to the time that he wrote this, Warfield had fought the move on the part of the pastoral faction at Princeton to modify the curriculum ever so slightly in the direction of practical theology. He had great faith in the "tradition once delivered": the Protestant scholasticism of Turretin by way of Charles Hodge.

Credentials and Certification

The liberals had a difficult time in their capture of the Northern Presbyterians because of the rigorous orthodoxy of the Westminster standards. It took them six decades: 1875 to 1936. But Princeton Seminary could not withstand indefinitely the pressure of humanist education. It was not merely a question of the lack of numbers of Old School advocates. It was a much deeper problem than Church politics. Old School Presbyterianism was itself rationalistic in its apologetic methodology--its philosophical defense of the faith. Its apologetic was based on the belief in the existence of shared first principles of logic between the saved and the lost. This was essentially a form of epistemological "inclusivism." Warfield wrote: "All minds are of the same essential structure. . . ."⁽¹³⁾ Because their minds have the same structure, unbelievers are subject to arguments for Christianity that appeal to a common human reason. It was this aspect of the apologetics of Princeton Seminary that Westminster Seminary philosopher-theologian Cornelius Van Til criticized for half a century as Princeton's weak link theologically.⁽¹⁴⁾ 

Warfield was a postmillennialist. He believed that the gospel of Christ will triumph on earth before Christ physically returns again at the final judgment. But what marked Warfield's eschatology was his reliance on human reason--the Old Princeton rationalist apologetic method--as the basis of this great revival. It is difficult for us to believe that anyone in the post-Darwin, or even post-Kant world could have believed in reason as the means of evangelism, but Warfield did.

The part that Apologetics has to play in the Christianizing of the world is rather a primary part, and it is a conquering part. It is the distinction of Christianity that it has come into the world clothed with the mission to reason its way to its dominion. Other religions may appeal to the sword, or seek some other way to propagate themselves. Christianity makes its appeal to right reason, and stands out among all religions, therefore, as distinctively "the Apologetic religion." It is solely by reasoning that it has come thus far on its way to its kingship. And it is solely by reasoning that it will put all its enemies under its feet.⁽¹⁵⁾

The credentials of Christianity, said Warfield, are its logic. "It stands calmly over against the world with its credentials in its hands, and fears no contentions of men."⁽¹⁶⁾ But these credentials collapsed in the 1920's in the face of Darwinism, post-Heisenberg science (1927-the present), and the triumph of secular humanism. The common-ground logic that Warfield proclaimed became an intellectual drawbridge over which humanists crossed Christianity's defensive moat and began to batter down its gates. Christianity's supposed credentials turned out to be humanism's credentials, both in principle (common-ground logic) and institutionally (seminary and university degrees).

Nineteenth-century Presbyterian Calvinists believed that their religion, once its basic premises were accepted, would lead inescapably to certain definite conclusions about God's relationship to man and the universe. They believed, as Warfield did, that logic is the foundation of systematic religion. Machen was an intellectual heir of this tradition. He wrote: "There is sometimes a salutary lack of logic which prevents the whole of a man's faith being destroyed when he has given up a part. But the true way in which to examine a spiritual movement is in its logical relations; logic is the great dynamic, and the logical implications of any way of thinking are sooner or later certain to be worked out."⁽¹⁷⁾ It was his perception of this nineteenth-century Calvinism that led the skeptic Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., to write his poem, "The Wonderful One Hoss Shay," a mirror of nineteenth-century Calvinism. The shay was a marvel of craftsmanship, but when one part of it broke, the whole thing collapsed.

Old Princeton's Apologetics

This rationalistic weakness of Princeton's apologetic methodology had been present from the beginning. In an informative introduction to the writings of several of the great Princeton theologians, Mark Noll offers a fine summary of the presuppositions--common-ground reasoning--of what has come to be called the Scottish common-sense philosophy. It was this which Van Til, using a consistently "presuppositionalist" apologetics in the tradition of Abraham Kuyper and especially Herman Bavinck, challenged from the earliest stages of his career. Noll writes:

This approach laid great stress on the "common sense" of humankind. It argued that normal people, using responsibly the information provided by their senses, actually grasped thereby the real world. Furthermore, an exercise of the "moral sense," a faculty analogous in all important ways to physical senses, gave humans immediate knowledge about the nature of their own minds. And because all humans, humanity in common, were able to grasp the truth of the world in this way--in fact, could not live unless they took for granted that truth was available in this way--this common sense could provide the basis for a full-scale philosophy as well. . . . The Scottish philosophers regarded truth as a static entity, open equally to all people wherever they lived, in the present or past. They placed a high premium on scientific investigation. They were deeply committed to an empirical method that made much of gathering relevant facts into logical wholes. They abhorred "speculation" and "metaphysics" as unconscionable flights from the basic realities of the physical world and the human mind. And at least some of them assumed that this approach could be used to convince all rational souls of the truth of Christianity, the necessity of traditional social order, and the capacity of scientific methods to reveal whatever may be learned about the world.⁽¹⁸⁾

It should not be surprising to find that Machen spoke of the need of defending a "scientific theology."⁽¹⁹⁾ His debt to the Old Princeton, including its partial commitment to experientialism, was great.⁽²⁰⁾ He saw himself as one of Warfield's heirs.

Two "nations" within the Church were unquestionably divided theologically: humanism vs. Christianity. They were not equally divided philosophically. Common-ground apologetics softened the radical intellectual distinction between the saved and the lost because rationalist apologetics failed to see that the incompatible ethical presuppositions created inescapable differences in men's interpretation of the facts and their use of logic. 

An overestimation of the role of the intellect in challenging men to believe in Christ led to an overestimation of the skills imparted by higher education. This served in effect as a bridge across the great divide over which theological liberals could pass. The passport that got the humanists across the bridge was the seminary degree. It could be argued that it was a similar overestimation of the benefits of classical education which helped to undermine the Puritans in the seventeenth century.⁽²¹⁾ Scottish Enlightenment rationalism also led Calvinistic Harvard down the path toward Unitarianism in the late eighteenth century.⁽²²⁾

"Other Sanctions Have We"

From the invention of the university until the present, the Church has consented to a second, unofficial means of bringing judicial sanctions: the academic examination. Candidates for the highest Church offices in hierarchical churches have long been required by Church rules to run an academic gauntlet before they are eligible for ordination. This decision transferred Church authority--covenantal authority--to an institution that is not normally under the direct judicial authority of the Church. Even where the educational institution's charter places the Church in control, several layers of bureaucracy, in the Church and in the school, protect the instructors from direct judicial sanctions imposed by the Church. The legitimacy of such sanctions-thwarting procedures is defended by the doctrine of academic freedom.

A Shift in Legitimacy

In Presbyterianism, a series of seminary examinations has taken increased precedence over the single presbyterial examination as the means of screening access to the position of teaching elder, i.e., the gospel ministry. This shift in authority had taken place a century before Machen's day. The seminary had been invented to strengthen the faith of ministerial candidates after American colleges had capitulated to anti-Christian ideologies: Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, and secularism, i.e., the religion of humanity.⁽²³⁾ The seminary was to be a supplement to the university, which in turn had been a substitute for an apprentice system for training ministers. At each step, bureaucratic formalism and impersonalism replaced the personalism of apprenticeship. This has been a culture-wide phenomenon in the West since the early decades of the nineteenth century. It has accelerated rapidly with the spread of tax-funded education. But the Church established the pattern, beginning in the late eleventh century: the university.

The very existence of Princeton Seminary testified to the nature of the institutional compromise after 1812. In this sense, Machen's cause had been lost long before the 1920's. When the formal academic examination became the most important screening device for entrance into the ministry, the struggle for control over who would administer the examinations shifted from the presbyteries to the seminaries. Princeton was the last Northern Presbyterian seminary to depart from the Westminster Confession. It was the last bastion. But the battle had been lost in principle the day a seminary supplemented presbyterial examinations with academic examinations. Seminaries from the beginning have been vulnerable to the shifting climates of academic opinion. A national seminary gained a degree of legitimacy that no single presbytery possessed. Yet this legitimacy was informal. Few rules governed it, and fewer sanctions.

The liberals understood the nature of this shift in legitimacy and screening from 1869 onward. The conservatives did not. Not even Machen fully recognized its full implications for ecclesiastical government. He was blinded, as were the Old Princeton traditionalists in general, by the myth of the primacy of the intellect. They did not recognize one of the dominant realities of modern times: the primacy of the intellect is manifested institutionally as the primacy of the academic degree. Their opponents took advantage of this blindness.

The 1923 Report on Seminary Education

I have found no statement of this blindness that surpasses the 1923 report of the Special Committee to Visit Theological Seminaries, which had been created by the 1922 General Assembly. This report was introduced at what was supposedly a conservative-dominated General Assembly. It called for a reconstruction of seminary education through the removal of all presbyterial authority in setting entrance requirements for students. It announced: "The most unfortunate feature of the entire system is that Presbyteries practically control the entrance requirements. In the earlier days a presbyterial examination may have served the purpose; it is no longer an acceptable or efficient method. That entire question might better be left to the Seminaries."⁽²⁴⁾ The report also called for a total restructuring, not just of seminary curricula, but of ministerial ordination itself. Ordination henceforth should require examinations in Christian education, psychology, philosophy, Christian sociology, and missions.⁽²⁵⁾ The move away from traditional theology was obvious, yet the report was accepted by the General Assembly.

There was also a recommendation regarding the control of seminaries by dual bodies, Trustees and Boards. The problem, said the report, was that the seminaries had too many board members. This is not efficient--not in accord with modern standards of corporate control. "The corporation management of the present day is usually through a small body of men carefully selected for the purpose."⁽²⁶⁾ What was needed was centralization of control on a more permanent basis. The report called for a restructuring of seminary control: ". . . to reorganize by a combination of the functions of Trustees and Directors in one body elected for a definite term of ten years."⁽²⁷⁾ This was a dagger aimed at the heart of Princeton Seminary, which had a dual board system, yet as far as I have been able to determine, no one at Princeton commented on it publicly at the time. Within five years, the Princetonians understood. Too late.

This report created no sensation, no visible opposition. It seemed only to reinforce the long-term desire of seminaries to become autonomous from all Church authority. Here was one more move in the direction of theological liberalism, given the liberal make-up by 1923 of every Presbyterian seminary faculty except Princeton's. As the faculty of Princeton learned, 1926-29, this call for the judicial independence of seminaries had one major exception: Princeton.

Confession and Sanctions

Machen, faithful to Princeton's Scottish apologetics, saw the battle for the faith as primarily intellectual. "False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel."⁽²⁸⁾ He focused on the Old School's revision of the third point of the biblical covenant model: propositional truth (not ethics). This had been the apologetic strategy of the Princetonians from the

beginning in 1812. This was what lured them into accepting Charles Briggs' strategically brilliant offer in 1880 to co-publish The Presbyterian Review. They believed that the battle for Christianity could be won on the battlefield of ideas. Then they invited their mortal enemies onto the battlefield, forgetting that this was an explicitly Christian battlefield supposedly open only to Christian participants. This decision baptized higher criticism in the Presbyterian Church. From that time on, no Princetonian could ever publicly argue that higher criticism is methodologically heretical.

The Princetonians were strategically in error. This undermined their tactics. The "soft underbelly" of Presbyterian ecclesiology had always been sanctions, not stipulations. The problem was not a lack of propositional truth. The Presbyterian Church imposed on its ministers at the time of ordination a requirement to affirm faith in the most detailed and rigorous theological confession in Christendom. The problem was, once a man made this profession of faith, the Presbyterian Church had no predictable answer to the question: "Now what?"

The Confessionally rigorous Calvinists voluntarily surrendered to the Confessionally less rigorous Calvinists in 1758 and 1869. The public debate in these two instances was over stipulations, but since both sides professed allegiance to the same stipulations, the unspoken issue centered on sanctions. "How hard will the Old School push the New School to put their sanctions where their mouths are?" The answer in 1869: "Not very hard." By remaining in the Church after 1903, the Old School surrendered to the New School regarding a loosening of the Confession. The debate was subsequently about stipulations; Old School sanctions were a lost cause. Then both Old School and New School surrendered to the invading Cumberland Presbyterians in 1906. Old School, New School, and Cumberland Arminians surrendered to the modernists in 1936. The official issue still was sanctions, but in reality it was both stipulations and sanctions. The takeover was complete. The surrender on stipulations in 1967 was a mere formality: public ratification of a 31-year-old treaty of surrender.

There is a lesson here: theology apart from sanctions is not theology; it is, as the Auburn Affirmation insisted, merely a theory. Institutions do not persevere by theories alone. They also require sanctions to enforce their foundational theories. There can be no chain of command apart from sanctions. There can be no voice of authority institutionally without sanctions. Otherwise, no one would pay attention to that voice.

Legalism at Princeton

I define "legalism" as the self-conscious decision to break the intention of a rule in the name of the rule. It involves violating the spirit of a law by means of the letter of the law. It is one thing to ignore the letter of the law. That is antinomianism. It is quite another to use it against the obvious intent of the law-giver.

The Presbyterian Church's leaders in the first decade of the nineteenth century grew concerned over the fate of theological education at the College of New Jersey. The college was not producing enough ministerial candidates. It was also legally independent of Church control.⁽²⁹⁾ Princeton Seminary opened in 1812. Its founders were determined to keep the new seminary under Church control, rejecting the suggestion that the seminary be placed under the authority of the College,⁽³⁰⁾ despite the fact that 21 of the 23 members of the College's Board of Trustees were Presbyterians.⁽³¹⁾ (Harvard in 1819 and Yale in 1822 established divinity schools as separate departments under the control of the respective college boards.)⁽³²⁾ When the General Assembly in 1811 designated Princeton Seminary as the Church's only seminary, it specified that every professor must be an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church. Each had to swear that he would not teach anything opposed to the Church's Confession.⁽³³⁾ This meant that the seminary was under the authority of the General Assembly, and each faculty member was under the authority of the presbytery in which the seminary was located. The founders understood that he who teaches the next generation of ministers possesses the strongest judicial position in the denomination because of his control over the classroom and its powerful sanctions: grading and therefore graduation. Every Princeton Seminary professor by charter had to be under Church control. This was the clear intent of the founders.

Machen's Appointment

The extent of Princeton Seminary's later commitment to technical scholarship above the authority of the Church is best seen in Machen's appointment to a teaching position: instructor. He received the appointment in the fall of 1906. He was not ordained to the teaching eldership until June 23, 1914.⁽³⁴⁾ He was elevated to assistant professor in May, 1914, to begin in the fall of that year. The faculty was self-conscious about this, as Stonehouse's language indicates: "Acting on the background of Machen's licensure, the Faculty of the Seminary was not slow to recommend his election as Assistant Professor of New Testament in its report to the Board of Directors at its meeting during the first week of May, 1914."⁽³⁵⁾

Notice the change in title: "instructor" to "assistant professor." The key was the word "professor." Only ordained men could be professors at Princeton Seminary. So, Machen had not been a professor, 1906-14; he had been merely an instructor. He had graded students, delivered lectures, and participated in faculty meetings. But he had never been a professor. He had possessed the authority to impose professorial sanctions on students, but without the professorial title. He had possessed the substance of judicial authority but not the form.

The faculty and Board of Directors had played a game with the language of charter. The founders had used the word "professor" to define a faculty member. The word "instructor," like the words "assistant professor," were additions many decades later. Such professional academic distinctions did not occur to the General Assembly of 1811. This is how the Old School professors got their way with the seminary's charter. Fifteen years after Machen's 1914 appointment, the modernists and their allies would also get their way with the charter.

Why had Machen waited so long to be ordained? Because he had doubts about the faith. Early in 1906, he had written a letter to his brother concerning his doubts concerning his faith. He also had doubts about his worthiness to become a minister.⁽³⁶⁾ Nevertheless, Princeton wanted him, and wanted him badly. William Armstrong, his former mentor at Princeton, wrote to him on March 11. He knew of Machen's hesitancy to enter the ministry. He assured Machen that "you need have no hesitancy for fear of binding yourself for more than one year and for this there would be no necessity of ordination."⁽³⁷⁾

The state of Machen's mind may be seen from his letter to his father on March 30: "How I envy the humble clerk, who at least has some employment in which he can engage with enthusiasm and without doubts and qualms of conscience!"⁽³⁸⁾ He said that he wished he could start a career in business, but it was too late for that. When he returned to the United States he visited his family's summer estate in Seal Harbor, Maine.⁽³⁹⁾ After he left Seal Harbor, he and his mother began an exchange of letters, unprecedented for their emotional intensity, arguing over his decision to return to Germany to study for several more years.⁽⁴⁰⁾ That summer, he finally decided to join the Princeton faculty. But, as his biographer writes, "It was not until the fall of 1913 that he attained such assurance and calm that he could undertake the first step looking toward ordination, that of being taken under care of presbytery, and could confidently and joyfully look toward ordination."⁽⁴¹⁾

Princeton set a precedent with Machen. It placed a man onto its faculty who was not only not ordained, but whose refusal to become ordained, at least in the early years,⁽⁴²⁾ was based on his own sense of religious doubt. There was no question about his academic credentials. He was a skilled linguist in Greek--one of the best students ever trained by that master of the classics, Johns Hopkins University's Basil S. Gildersleeve. He had spent a year in two German universities, even though he had not received a degree. That was sufficient, and always had been at Princeton. He had survived Princeton's soul-threatening but informal faculty eligibility initiation rite of the German academic gauntlet.⁽⁴³⁾ Therefore, the formal requirement of ministerial ordination was regarded by the Princeton faculty as optional. With this decision, the Old Princeton publicly announced its new operational ecclesiology: judicial expediency for the sake of academic criteria.

 

Princeton: The Old School's Last Bastion

The issues that divided Presbyterians regarding the fate of Princeton Seminary were the same ones that divided them in the other ecclesiastical battles. Princeton was committed legally to the Westminster Confession. From 1811 onward, its Plan committed the organization and its professors to the terms of the Westminster Confession and the Church's catechisms. Each professor also subscribed to this oath:

I do solemnly promise and engage not to inculcate, teach, or insinuate anything which shall appear to me to contradict or contravene, either directly or impliedly, anything taught in the said Confession of Faith or Catechisms, nor to oppose any of the fundamental principles of Presbyterian Church government, while I remain a professor in this seminary.⁽⁴⁴⁾

In 1870, the year following the reunion, the General Assembly adopted changes in the Plan of the seminary which greatly strengthened the power of the Board of Directors to fill its own vacancies and fix the salaries of the professors. The General Assembly had the power to veto the first of these powers, however.⁽⁴⁵⁾ More to the point, what the General Assembly of 1870 gave, a subsequent General Assembly could take away. Princeton, unlike Union, from its origin had been under the authority of the General Assembly.⁽⁴⁶⁾ And because Union was still allowed to place men in the voting ministry of the Church, Union and its theological allies had thereby gained a potential stranglehold over Princeton which the Princetonians could not conceivably gain over Union.

 

J. Ross Stevenson

Stevenson was a graduate of McCormick Seminary, originally a Calvinist institution founded by Cyrus McCormick, the wealthy Old School Calvinist. He also had served as pastor of New York's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. He was an inclusivist, deeply committed to Church union. He had been present at the World's Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 (as had Erdman),⁽⁴⁷⁾ "which inaugurated the modern ecumenical movement," according to John Mackay, Stevenson's liberal successor at Princeton.⁽⁴⁸⁾ There could be no doubt in 1914: he was an ecumenist--religiously committed, not just vaguely interested.

Lefferts Loetscher was the son of one of Princeton Seminary's faculty members--one of three praised by Henry van Dyke,⁽⁴⁹⁾ the other two being Erdman and Stevenson.⁽⁵⁰⁾ Loetscher summarizes the view of this power shift that was held by liberals in the Church, and for this reason it deserves reprinting:

There was a feeling in some quarters that Princeton's place in the Church and in the religious world was not what it once had been. By the year 1913 the gradual divergence between the "historic Princeton position" and the emerging attitudes in the Church were threatening the seminary with partial isolation. Finally, after much deliberation, the Board of Directors elected to the presidency Dr. J. Ross Stevenson, distinguished pastor and active churchman with membership on numerous General Assembly and interdenominational boards and committees. The determining factor in his election was the desire that the seminary might, under his leadership, be brought into closer relationship with the Church as a whole.⁽⁵¹⁾

In 1938, Stevenson had been, in the words of John Mackay, "the chief representative of American Christianity in the city of Utrecht" at the founding of the organization that became, in 1948, the World Council of Churches.⁽⁵²⁾ Nevertheless, Loetscher describes Stevenson as follows: "His utterances, with lifelong consistency, attested his earnest evangelicalism and basic conservatism."⁽⁵³⁾ Loetscher's assessment of men such as Robert Speer, Erdman, and Stevenson always accentuated their supposedly innate conservatism and evangelicalism, but these men proved to be bureaucratic wedges for the liberals.

Stevenson was inaugurated in 1914 and immediately began taking a leading role in the Seminary's affairs. Previously, the president had been little more than a presiding officer at faculty meetings.⁽⁵⁴⁾ Stevenson was far more of an activist president than Patton had ever been. Like Woodrow Wilson, another activist who had succeeded Patton, Stevenson was determined to re-shape Princeton. He achieved his goal in 1929.

The League of Evangelical Students

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, a significant controversy between Stevenson and the faculty took place in 1924-25, the year after Stevenson had supported Erdman as Moderator of the General Assembly, while the faculty had supported Clarence Macartney. 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. The students of six campuses then created a new organization, the League of Evangelical Students. Most of the other Presbyterian seminaries in the Church refused to join the League. Even worse, in Stevenson's view, was the fact that the League allowed Bible College students to join. Stevenson raised the specter of "know-nothingism." He warned that "religion without sound learning must ultimately prove injurious to the Church." Here it was: the appeal to the educated ministry, meaning a certified ministry. That he could use such an argument pointed to the vulnerability of Machen's position and the position of conservative "scientific theologians" everywhere. The liberals used a kind of jiu-jitsu on the conservatives: they elevated certification over doctrine. It proved impossible after 1923 for the conservatives to counter this argument effectively, for they and their predecessors had already succumbed to it institutionally.

Second, Stevenson asked rhetorically, "shall this institution now be permitted to swing off to the extreme right wing so as to become an interdenominational Seminary for Bible School-premillennial-secession fundamentalism?"⁽⁵⁵⁾ Here again, a liberal could appeal rhetorically to what seemed to be a traditional theological heritage. Machen was outspokenly allied to premillennialists inside the Church,⁽⁵⁶⁾ although he was a postmillennialist,⁽⁵⁷⁾ and he was unquestionably becoming the intellectual spokesman of American fundamentalism, which by 1924 was overwhelmingly dispensational and separatist. Stevenson could make it appear as though the students, and therefore Machen and the Princeton Calvinists, were deviating from established Presbyterian traditions and adopting extreme right-wing traditions, which were the only right-wing traditions there were, liberal rhetoric indicated.

Tactics and the Confession

Machen's dilemma was a dilemma which is still being sorted out in today's creedal churches. On the one hand, he stood for the Westminster Confession. On the other hand, he needed allies within the Church whose leaders no longer believed in the Confession's Calvinistic provisions. So, Machen invoked the Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910 to rally the troops. This creedal formulation was acceptable to anti-modernists outside the Presbyterian tradition. He argued that it was necessary to cooperate with premillennialists within the Church,⁽⁵⁸⁾ yet on the next page, he also argued that it was and is necessary to separate ecclesiastically from Lutherans on the basis of differing views of the Lord's Supper, and also from Anglicans and Arminians. He was the spokesman for a conservative alliance, though not ecumenical union. An alliance is not an oath-bound covenant with judicial sanctions.

Consider his words concerning Roman Catholicism: 

Far more serious still is the division between the Church of Rome and evangelical Protestantism in all its forms. Yet how great is the common heritage which unites the Roman Catholic Church, with its maintenance of the authority of Holy Scripture and with its acceptance of the great early creeds, to devout Protestants to-day! We would not indeed obscure the difference which divides us from Rome. The gulf is indeed profound. But profound as it is, it seems almost trifling compared to the abyss which stands between us and many ministers in our own Church. The Church of Rome may represent a perversion of the Christian religion; but naturalistic liberalism is not Christianity at all.⁽⁵⁹⁾

Machen faced a real problem. The original version of the Westminster Confession read: "There is no other head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ. Nor can the Pope of Rome, in any sense, be head thereof: but is that Antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth himself, in the Church, against Christ and all that is called God" (XXV:6). The Presbyterian Church had modified this section in 1903 to soften it. The new Church which he and his supporters founded in 1936 adopted a modified version of the modified version: "There is no other head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ. Nor can the Pope of Rome, in any sense, be head thereof."⁽⁶⁰⁾ They accepted the revised Confession--a change that above all other changes would have been rejected by virtually all Protestants in the Reformation. The doctrine that the Pope is the Antichrist was probably the only doctrine that was accepted by every Protestant group in the sixteenth century.

It is clear in retrospect that the Westminster Confession no longer functioned in Machen's day to bind the Church together, nor could it be used to purge the Church of heresy. Each side appealed to the Confession when it seemed appropriate or tactically useful. Neither side appealed to it when it wasn't. Thus, an odd situation developed: those who believed virtually all of the Confession joined with those who believed part of the Confession to do battle against those who believed virtually none of the Confession, but who proclaimed allegiance to the Confession, and who protested any clarifying additions to the Confession that might have made their subterfuge more difficult.

The Battle Over the Boards

In May of 1926, Machen was elected by the Board of Directors and confirmed by the Board of Trustees as professor of apologetics and ethics. A minority of Directors and Trustees immediately appealed the decision to the General Assembly, which was meeting that month.⁽⁶¹⁾ That they would do so indicates that they perceived a major shift in the theological conditions within the Church since 1925. At the General Assembly, Machen's nomination was tabled in committee. Nothing like this had happened since the Briggs case. But this time, theology would not be mentioned. Never again would theology be mentioned by the sanctions-bringers as the basis of their actions. The theologians of "theology without sanctions" were now in control. (In 1934, they would metamorphose into "sanctions without theology" theologians.)

A five-man committee was set up at the 1926 General Assembly by the Standing Committee on Theological Seminaries to investigate the "welfare of Princeton Seminary" and to attempt to "harmonize differences." Machen's appointment to the chair of apologetics was delayed until this committee reported back to the General Assembly. The committee visited Princeton during the interval between Assemblies, interviewing faculty members, students, and members of the Boards of Trustees and Directors. (The Church's senior bureaucrat after 1920, Stated Clerk Lewis Mudge, had been a member of the Board of Trustees from 1910.)⁽⁶²⁾ The report of the committee, adopted at the 1927 Assembly, invoked the language of van Dyke's 1893 modernist document, A Plea for Peace and Work. Describing Stevenson's faction as the minority, the report declared: "The minority believe in peace and work, the majority believe in controversy in defense of the truth, and work."⁽⁶³⁾ The real problem was not theological; it was administrative, the report concluded: "The root and source of the serious difficulties at Princeton, and the greatest obstacle to the removal of these difficulties, seem to be in the plan of government by two boards."⁽⁶⁴⁾

From the point of view of the moderate and liberal wings, the conservative Board of Directors had to be thwarted, since the Board was in charge of all appointments to the faculty, the school's curriculum, and all other matters except financial, which was the responsibility of the Trustees. Therefore, any attempt to put Princeton under one Board of Control was a direct thrust at the conservative orthodoxy of Princeton Seminary.

The legal implication of the committee's report was that the Board of Trustees was really an organization equal in responsibility to the Board of Directors in the management of Princeton's affairs, a view which Machen would later challenge. But the legal implication was only one aspect of the report. The other was far more revealing. The committee stated that the root of the problem was the division of control into two boards. In other words, the problem was institutional and governmental, not theological. This had been the standard argument of the liberals from the beginning: divisions were never admitted to be theological, but only institutional and personal ("unloving attitudes," "extremism"). The liberals had by this time gained an enormous advantage of their opponents. They had framed the terms of the debate.

Framing the Public Debate

Consider Erdman's response two years earlier to a hostile editorial in The Presbyterian (Jan. 15, 1925). The editorial had pointed out that Henry van Dyke had returned to Princeton's First Presbyterian Church now that Erdman was preaching there. Erdman replied in The Presbyterian Advance (Jan. 22, 1925). He presented the now-standard response whenever a conservative was pressured by even more conservative men to act more consistently according to his stated faith. He called his opponents unkind, unloving, and/or un-Christian. "Allow me to reply, that I repudiate your insinuations as unfounded, unwarranted, unkind and unchristian." Then he reiterated the now-familiar theme: "You intimate that a division exists in the seminary faculty. No such division exists on points of doctrine. Every member of the faculty is absolutely loyal to the standards of our church. The only division I have observed is as to spirit, methods or policies. This division would be of no consequence were it not for the unkindness, suspicion, bitterness and intolerance of those members of the faculty who are also editors of The Presbyterian." But Machen was the only faculty member who was a member of the editorial staff of The Presbyterian.⁽⁶⁵⁾

Erdman was the Moderator of the 1925 General Assembly. Because of this, he had also been present at the meeting of the Standing Committee on Theological Seminaries. Machen replied in a printed pamphlet late in 1926. "According to the Chairman of the committee, it had been asserted that I am spiritually unqualified to hold the post in question and teach good will to the students, that I am temperamentally defective, bitter and harsh in my judgments of others and implacable to brethren who do not agree with me."⁽⁶⁶⁾ Machen then pointed to the division within the faculty as the real reason for the committee's decision. He said that the division became clear in 1920 with the Plan of Organic Union, which Erdman and Stevenson had supported.⁽⁶⁷⁾ He denied that he had done anything "to introduce such unpleasant personalities into our relationships at Princeton."⁽⁶⁸⁾ Machen had also opposed Erdman's candidacy for Moderator at the 1924 General Assembly, supporting Macartney. Was this a crime, he asked rhetorically? If so, he stands convicted.⁽⁶⁹⁾ "Ever since 1920 Dr. Erdman had consistently favored an ecclesiastical policy to which the majority of his colleagues conscientiously opposed."⁽⁷⁰⁾ He quoted the Philadelphia Public Ledger of a speech by Erdman, who had said: "I want the constructive work of the Presbyterian Church to go on without interruption on account of any doctrinal controversy. . . ." This, concluded Machen, proves his "doctrinal indifferentism."⁽⁷¹⁾ This position neglects the work of doctrine in salvation, since "only by persuading men to accept the blessed `doctrine' or gospel can it save human souls."⁽⁷²⁾

Then Machen got to Erdman's Presbyterian Advance article. He cited Erdman's phrase: ". . . the unkindness, suspicion, bitterness and intolerance of those members of the faculty who are also editors of The Presbyterian." That, Machen said, narrowed the field down to one man: Machen. He denied that he had in any way been responsible for anything written in The Presbyterian except for articles signed by him.⁽⁷³⁾ The newspapers had picked up the story that Machen had attacked van Dyke. He cited The New York Herald Tribune (Feb. 1, 1925) and The Daily Princetonian (Feb. 2, 1925).⁽⁷⁴⁾ Then Machen reiterated what he said throughout the period, and which his opponents, for rhetorical effect in order to subvert the denomination, always ignored: theology. "The difference of principle involves convictions which I cherish more than anything else in all the world and the consistent application of which I cannot relinquish for any personal consideration whatsoever. Dr. Erdman's letter placed the difference between us on the plane of personalities; my replies endeavored to place it again upon the plane which I always placed it--upon the plane of a conflict of principles."⁽⁷⁵⁾

In any era, those who hold rigorously to a set of ideas or principles stand out as extremists. The bell-shaped curve always places true believers and true disbelievers at the extremities of the curve. "Extremist" was a word repeatedly used by Machen's critics to describe Machen's wing of the Church. A bell-shaped curve has two ends. Those at the other end--modernists--were never described as extremists. This indicates the extent to which the modernists and their allies in the press had already framed the terms of the debate. Once this is done by one's opponents, escape is very difficult.

When the stakes are not considered high, few people enjoy a fight. Few approve of a fighter. Machen was a fighter. What doomed him was his era. The theology of religious pluralism had been adopted by mainline American Protestantism by 1925. The Unitarianism of the public schools had been imparted to generations of students, who had learned their lessons well. Bryan's humiliation in Tennessee had hastened the process. Nevertheless, Machen called Princeton students to volunteer for a fight in a 1929 sermon.

Paul was a great fighter because he was at peace. He who said, "Fight the good fight of faith," spoke also of "the peace of God which passeth all understanding"; and in that peace the sinews of his war were found. He fought against the enemies that were without because he was at peace within; there was an inner sanctuary in his life that no enemy could disturb. There, my friends, is the great central truth.⁽⁷⁶⁾

By then, his was visibly a lost cause at Princeton. There are few volunteers for lost causes.

Machen was not a great hater; he was a great fighter. He was a gentleman who would slice an enemy from throat to groin theologically, but who seemed to bear no personal animosity toward his decimated target. He was like a prosecuting attorney who does not hate the defendant, but dearly wants to see him convicted for crimes committed. Understandably, the ecclesiastical kidnappers who had been caught in the act were not going to oblige him by giving him added jurisdiction: a full professorship in apologetics. He was dangerous enough in the Department of New Testament.

Machen was correct: "At no time in this controversy have I indulged in any personally abusive language such as is found in the attack on me in The Presbyterian Advance."⁽⁷⁷⁾ What Machen faced was the power of prior rhetoric: his opponents charged the conservatives with telling lies, distorting facts, and generally committing breaches of rhetorical etiquette, when in fact it was they who were the prime perpetrators. They got away with it because they had successfully painted themselves as a besieged minority of peacemakers and seekers after tolerance. Machen was the victim of this rhetorical strategy, and he knew it: ". . . Dr. Erdman has done me the worst kind of injury that can be done to one man by another; he has impaired my good name in the community and throughout the Church at large."⁽⁷⁸⁾ This mythology has persevered. In 1974, a doctoral dissertation in speech was still promoting Erdman's line, asserting that Machen had a weak character. (Unlike Erdman, who would have had to respond publicly to Machen's withering logic without appearing to be a blithering idiot, the dissertation's author added that Machen's thought was also weak.)⁽⁷⁹⁾

Machen got to the political point late in the Statement: the publicity that had pictured Erdman as the victim of the faculty. This had appeared in the public press prior to his election as Moderator in 1925. The press picked up the twin stories: Erdman's access to the pulpit vacated by Machen--part of the normal rotation of this assignment, a fact not mentioned by the press--and the story of his removal as faculty advisor after he opposed the League of Evangelical Students.⁽⁸⁰⁾ In response, conservatives in the Presbytery of New Brunswick had started a committee to mail out press releases to counter what they regarded as false or misleading information.⁽⁸¹⁾ As Machen said, "We represent an unpopular cause, for which it is difficult to get a hearing."⁽⁸²⁾ This existence of such a group indicates that the conservatives were becoming a little better organized.

"I am not a controversialist," Erdman had announced. "On the contrary," Machen replied, "he has shown himself, during his last few years, to be a controversialist of a very decided kind." Erdman had not directed his complaint about controversy to the signers of the Auburn Affirmation or doctrinal indifferentism. "But it is directed against men who defend the Christian faith."⁽⁸³⁾

Machen printed Additional Statement--"Printed, Not Published," it said on the cover--on December 18, 1926. He pointed out that Erdman's attack on the unnamed Presbyterian editors who were on the faculty of Princeton had to mean him. "In reply Dr. Erdman entered into certain explanations, the purport of which apparently was that he intended his attack in The Presbyterian Advance to be directed not against me but against some other member of the faculty."⁽⁸⁴⁾ But this information appeared in print in The Presbyterian Advance on Feb. 12, 1926. That, Machen did not have to say, was 13 months later. He reminded his readers that Erdman had fired the first shot, not only in The Presbyterian Advance but in two other newspapers. Also, he reminded them, "I have not engaged either first or last in any personal abuse of Dr. Erdman. . . ."⁽⁸⁵⁾

The liberals who organized the campaign against the conservatives could not accept this explanation. An attack on a man's theology constituted, in their repeatedly stated public view, a personal attack. In contrast, Erdman's deeply personal attack on the unnamed Princeton faculty member's moral reputation was regarded by them as merely an accurate summary of the situation--fair play beyond question. They could not allow the issue to hinge on theology, for that would have meant allowing Machen and the conservatives to gain the high moral ground, not to mention legal leverage in Church courts. It would have allowed Machen to set the agenda, to frame the debate. They had to prevent this at all costs. To thwart him, they had to invoke personalities--converting an ecclesiastically legitimate judicial attack by the conservatives into an immoral personal attack.

Machen never fell into the trap of initiating personal attacks, as his predecessor Francis Patton had in his attack in 1874 on Swing. But despite Machen's clean hands, his opponents kept telling the press that there was a lot of suspicious dirt under his fingernails.

The 1927 General Assembly

At the 1927 General Assembly, Robert E. Speer was elected Moderator by acclamation. No Moderator had ever before been elected by acclamation.⁽⁸⁶⁾ He had only a token opponent.⁽⁸⁷⁾ A laymen, a bureaucrat, and a peace-keeping evangelical, Speer achieved what no other Presbyterian layman ever had: Moderator. It was a portent of things to come, not just in 1927 but for the next nine years. During the 1930's, his Rockefeller connection would lead him into the final stage of the Presbyterian conflict. He would become the last performer to play that indispensable role which had been played so effectively by a series of liberals since 1893: wounded lamb.

The question of the supplementary ordination clauses of 1910, 1916, and 1923 was reintroduced at the 1927 Assembly. A Special Commission appointed in 1925 reported back in 1927. Speer was a member.⁽⁸⁸⁾ This time, a final decision was reached. The authority of the five points was dismissed as not binding because every deliverance must be in "the exact language of the article as it appears in the Confession of Faith."⁽⁸⁹⁾ Furthermore, no subsequent Assembly is bound to uphold the decisions of a previous Assembly.⁽⁹⁰⁾ This report was adopted without debate.⁽⁹¹⁾ Loetscher thought that this was a turning point in the Church's history since 1869: "It meant that moderate theological liberalism would have what it had unsuccessfully sought almost since the reunion, and acknowledged place in the Church's life and thought."⁽⁹²⁾ He was incorrect; 1920 had been the turning point. The 1927 General Assembly was merely the public acknowledgment of a liberal takeover of the Church's hierarchy that had taken place seven years earlier.

No More Heresy Trials

But there was more to this report than what Loetscher indicated. It was the modernists' magna carta. It relieved them of their greatest fear: de-frocking by the General Assembly. The key passage was the section titled, "Authority of the General Assembly and the Function of Presbyteries in Regard to Licensure and Ordination." It asserted that the powers of the General Assembly are delegated by the presbyteries. These powers are specific and limited. "It follows that the powers of the General Assembly are numerated and defined; but the powers of Presbytery, being reserved powers, are not necessarily fully enumerated, nor strictly defined."⁽⁹³⁾ So far, so good. Next, "Licensure of probationers and ordination to the gospel ministry are the exclusive functions of the Presbytery. Whatever powers in this connection have been delegated to the General Assembly, the Assembly itself cannot do indirectly what it has no authority to do indirectly."⁽⁹⁴⁾ So far, still so good: the Assembly cannot ordain ministers. But there was more. The Assembly is the highest court, and has authority to interpret general deliverances "and apply the Constitution to specific judicial cases."⁽⁹⁵⁾ To use the analogy of baseball pitching, this was the long, slow curve. Then, seven pages later, came the fast break: the prohibition of post-ordination heresy trials by the General Assembly. I quote the passage verbatim because a summary would seem unbelievable. The General Assembly may not lawfully revoke any man's ordination for any reason. It can go as far as severing all connection with the offending presbytery (mass de-frocking?) that ordained him, but once ordained, always ordained as far as the General Assembly can legally say.

When, however, complaint has been lodged against a Presbytery because it has, through its ministerial members, ordained a candidate alleged to be not qualified, and execution of the decision complained of has not been stayed by one-third of the members recorded as present when the decision was made, joining in complaint against the ordination, the complaint may be answered by the superior court, even by the General Assembly, unfavorably to the Presbytery's action, but this would not invalidate the ordination nor affect the official status of the newly endowed minister, nor annul the sacred rites already performed by him. The Presbytery may be disciplined for erroneous action, and there appears to be no limit to the authority of the General Assembly in dealing with a Presbytery that has proved to be contumacious, but the individual whom the Presbytery has ordained constitutionally can not be reached by this process. If there has been no stay, and he has been invested with the office, the issue, so far as he is affected, is between the General Assembly and the Presbytery and is founded upon a complaint against the Presbytery, to which he is not even a party. The one proper method of proceeding against the newly ordained minister would be to prefer charges against him personally and the substantive charges should be based upon facts coming to the knowledge of the Presbytery subsequent to his ordination. For these he might, if convicted, be suspended or deposed, but the disposition of this case would not affect, technically, the complaint against the Presbytery called to account for ordaining him.⁽⁹⁶⁾

The report continued: "It would not seem logical to infer that the General Assembly has been clothed with authority to revoke an ordination when the Presbytery itself does not possess this authority, or that the General Assembly can direct a Presbytery to do something by means which the Presbytery is forbidden to employ originally."⁽⁹⁷⁾ The commission made its position crystal clear: "Once a minister, always a minister. . . ."⁽⁹⁸⁾

By unanimous vote, the General Assembly abandoned its authority to call into question any man's ordination for any reason. Even the presbytery was said to be limited--unlike the statement to the contrary seven pages earlier. Only upon the introduction of new material not available to the presbytery at the time of the person's ordination can a presbytery revoke this ordination. If one-third of the members of presbytery did not complain at the time of the ordination, which would annul it until a later date, an ordination is irrevocable. All authority to revoke it is lodged with the presbytery. Thus, once cleared by his presbytery regarding any accusation against him, the man cannot be tried by any higher court. This had been the modernists' number-one judicial goal since the 1870's: the prohibition of double jeopardy.

Notice this phrase: "The Presbytery may be disciplined for erroneous action, and there appears to be no limit to the authority of the General Assembly in dealing with a Presbytery that has proved to be contumacious. . . ." How, pray tell, can a presbytery be disciplined if its ordained ministers cannot be deposed from office? How can an entire presbytery be de-frocked by the General Assembly if none of its members can be de-frocked by the General Assembly?

Unless a subsequent General Assembly reversed this decision, the Presbyterian conflict had finally been settled judicially. But no one said publicly what this meant in terms of Church polity. The report had revoked Presbyterianism's system of appeals courts, with the General Assembly as the supreme court. The report announced a new ordination polity: regional autonomy. It created a truncated system of local courts. The initiating executive agency of ordination would henceforth also become the supreme court with respect to its ordinations. A presbytery would sit in final judgment of itself. This report mandated judicial paralysis: the end of negative sanctions above the presbytery level. It announced the end of hierarchy. Legally, the Church would now become a Presbyterian-Congregational hybrid, almost as the 1801 Plan of Union had prescribed. Yet this new polity had not been voted on by the presbyteries. It could not survive, given the Form of Government.

As it turned out, this new judicial order was merely temporary: a holding action to secure immunity from prosecution for the liberals, so that they would enjoy peace and toleration, giving them time to restructure Presbyterian law. That restructuring began in 1931 and took effect in 1934.

In 1936, the Presbytery of New Brunswick revoked Machen's ordination, and the General Assembly upheld this act. This was power religion in action. Things evolve, especially judicial standards.

Bait and Hook: the Pension Program

We come now to a topic that has never been mentioned in any published discussion of the Presbyterian conflict. This was the strategic role of the pension fund in the consolidation of bureaucratic power within the denomination. There are reasons for this previous silence. To discuss money as a primary motivation of godly men alienates the theologically faithful who prefer to view the Presbyterian conflict strictly in terms of theological controversy. Similarly, to discuss the strategic use of money and promises of money as part of a conspiratorial program of infiltration alienates the intellectual and spiritual heirs of the victors who successfully employed the strategy. Neither side wants to follow the money. It is time to do so, especially in the context of the 1927 General Assembly.

In 1908, the Church voted to create an Executive Commission to represent the General Assembly in between Assemblies. This was a major move in the direction of denominational centralization. The Executive Commission immediately began making plans to consolidate the boards, a strategy which was not completed until the 1924 General Assembly. In 1912, the Executive Commission had proposed the consolidation of the two boards that administered ministerial relief. The new board would be called the Ministerial Sustenation Fund. As part of this plan, the Executive Commission proposed the creation of a ministers' retirement fund "of not less than $10,000,000."⁽⁹⁹⁾ This was an enormous sum in 1912's pre-war purchasing power--in the range of $200 million in 1995 dollars. Motivated by this generous promise, the General Assembly voted to consolidate the two boards. The $10 million never materialized. The Church had established a $7 million fund by 1918, but with the post-war purchasing power of the dollar reduced considerably. Then the mini-depression of 1920-21 reduced the market value of this inadequate portfolio. Meanwhile, more ministers than ever before were approaching retirement age.⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ It was clear that a crisis was approaching: ". . . the deficit was becoming unmanageable."⁽¹⁰¹⁾ A new round of promises became necessary.

Investing and Divesting

In 1924, the newly consolidated Board of Pensions introduced a plan for a replacement pension fund. The plan promised to raise $15 million in capital. This plan was voted for by the General Assembly. But the plan lacked a specific clause: the right of a minister to demit the ministry or leave for any other reason and take his pension money with him. That is, there was zero vesting. The Pension Board had designed a system in which each participant's funds would be totally locked into the denomination until he retired on schedule. This omission became part of a 1928 overture by the Presbytery of Marion, which insisted that a minister should be allowed to collect his funds, plus 4 percent interest, "but shall sacrifice all benefits and payments that have been made on his behalf by salary paying organizations."⁽¹⁰²⁾ This was incorporated into the final plan in 1928. This was only partial vesting: a minimal 25 percent.

The Board of Pensions had announced to the 1927 General Assembly that as of April 1, 1927, the denomination's new pension program, the Service Pension Plan, had been in effect. A minister had until March 31, 1928, to sign up to obtain credit for his prior years of service. He had to pay in ten percent of his salary (15 percent if he had a manse) for that year in order to become eligible. This means that for ten percent of one year's income he would receive a retroactive retirement credit for his entire career. This was a very large piece of bait. This year would be a minister's "window of opportunity." The 1928 Foreword to the Service Pension Plan reminded readers of this past deadline.⁽¹⁰³⁾ But the Board in fact kept the window open beyond the deadline.⁽¹⁰⁴⁾

To fund this extraordinary offer--unprecedented in the history of private pension funds--the Board of Pensions had to raise a huge amount of money. Preliminary work on this had begun in 1923, when the Assembly appointed a committee that included millionaires Frederick Weyerhauser and Richard Mellon. It also included publicist Will Hays, the former Postmaster General of the United States and then "motion picture czar" who ran the Hays Office.⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ The real work began in 1927. At that time, over $15 million in pledges were on record.⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ But pledges are easier to obtain than money. As of April 1, 1929, six months before the stock market crash, only $8.2 million had been collected.⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ That was the high point of pledge-collecting.

Those who had already retired by April 1, 1927, were not included in the new program. Almost 2,000 of these people were on the Presbyterian relief roles in May, 1928.⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ The Board regretfully announced that at some unstated future time (perhaps seven years), the Board would no longer fund these pre-1927 pensioners even partially, and annual support from the Board should be expected to drop until that time.⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ The Board implored the Church at large to do its duty and support these unfortunates.⁽¹¹⁰⁾ As for the hoped-for $15 million, all of it "belongs absolutely to the men and women who were in active service of the Presbyterian Church on April 1, 1927."⁽¹¹¹⁾ The political implication: those who no longer could impose ministerial judicial sanctions were not eligible for the bait.

From 1928 on, a participating minister contributed 2.5 percent and his congregation contributed 7.5 percent. For this, the retired pensioner at age 65 would receive 1.25 percent of his average salary during his covered years.⁽¹¹²⁾ At a salary of $1,200 a year (the minimum specified by many synods), times 35 years, the figure for lifetime income was $42,000. Multiplying this by .0125 gives $525 a year. The minimum guaranteed income was $600 a year.⁽¹¹³⁾ A widow received half: a minimum of $300 a year, which would cease upon remarriage.⁽¹¹⁴⁾ An orphan would receive $100 a year until maturity; then nothing.⁽¹¹⁵⁾ The maximum income paid to a retired minister was $2,000 a year.⁽¹¹⁶⁾

The minister's pension was minimally vested. Any minister who withdrew from the denomination had been warned in advance: he would receive his contributions of 2.5 percent, plus 4 percent interest on his money.⁽¹¹⁷⁾ Whatever his local church had contributed, plus all the build-up of interest, stayed with the Pension Board. This was the denomination's hook. Rather than taking a salary increase of 7.5 percent and investing it, along with his 2.5 percent, a participating minister took his salary in a different form: a three-to-one "matching" grant. Financially, it made no difference to the congregation which way he chose to be compensated. It did make a difference in terms of control, however. He would not be so likely to leave the denomination if it would cost him three-quarters of his pension's equity. This turned out to be doubly true nine years later, in the middle of the depression.

The pension scheme was pure bait and hook. It worked. By the time of the 1928 General Assembly, over 7,000 ministers and Church workers were enrolled. This made participation in the plan the rule rather than the exception that it had been previously.⁽¹¹⁸⁾ In 1926, only 2,500 ministers had been enrolled when it paid only $350 a year after 35 years of service.⁽¹¹⁹⁾

The 1936 General Assembly elected as its Moderator Rev. Henry B. Master, a Princeton Seminary graduate, who had served as the executive secretary of the Board of Pensions since 1919.⁽¹²⁰⁾ His presence at the podium was a visible reminder to the assembled ministers of just how much was at stake in a decision to walk out of the denomination alongside Machen.

Bait and Switch

The plan had been sold to the ministers with this guarantee: no minister would be forced to retire at age 65. Master had assured everyone in writing: "Our retirement plan provides a pension at the age of sixty-five IN ORDER TO PREVENT RETIREMENT."⁽¹²¹⁾ Most ministers knew what the Board also knew, that after age 49, a man's opportunities dropped sharply. Larger congregations hired young ministers, so older men had to content themselves with demand from smaller churches offering reduced salaries. A decade later, the Board changed the rules: mandatory retirement at age 65. This engulfed the denomination in controversy.⁽¹²²⁾

The monograph on the history of Presbyterian pension programs does not offer an explanation for this change. There are two obvious reasons: one economic, one theological. First, economics: if a man stopped paying into the fund at age 65 but received income from it, his portion of the fund would suffer a net outflow. The benefit to the older man was double income: pension plus salary. On the other hand, if the recipient was forced to retire, a younger man would replace him, and he would probably become a participant in the program. His contributions would flow in.

Second, theology: forcible retirement was a way to push older conservatives out of their pulpits. In 1937, Machen and the hard-line Calvinists were gone, but there were many older men in the denomination's pulpits who held very conservative theological views. These men would now have to resign from their pulpits at age 65 if they wanted to receive their pension income. In 1936, they had been forced to remain in the Church if they wanted to keep their pensions. The longer they had been in the Church, the more valuable their pensions were. So, older men who stayed behind, hoping to keep their jobs and their pensions, unlike Machen and his followers, who gave up both, now faced another decision: pension income or job, but not both at once. They had forgotten the rule of contracts: "The large print giveth, and the fine print taketh away." They had been warned in the Minutes that almost nobody ever read: "The right to alter and amend the above described Plan, as may be found to be to the general advantage of the Church, is reserved to the Board of Pensions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., such alterations and amendments to be effective only after approval of the General Assembly."⁽¹²³⁾ Legally, no commercial insurance company could have written in a clause like this one. The Presbyterian Church could. This was power religion in action. Things evolve, especially pension guarantees.

In 1939, the Board of Pensions admitted to the denomination that the Board's assets had dropped by $12 million. These were "paper" losses, the Church was assured: a merely temporary fall in market value. The Board had invested 70 percent of its portfolio in railroad bonds and mortgages at something over 4 percent. Millions of dollars worth of these bonds and mortgages had gone into default. The Board then wound up owning a lot of depreciated real estate. The fund's managers then began switching more of the portfolio into stocks. Then came the 1937-38 stock market crash.⁽¹²⁴⁾

The 1939 General Assembly was assured by a Pension Board official that the fund's reserves were actuarially sound. The attendees were also informed that in order to begin collecting their pensions, ministers would have to retire at age 65.⁽¹²⁵⁾ This was obviously doubletalk; if the fund's reserves were sound, why the change in retirement policy? The problem was admitted publicly at the 1940 General Assembly. The justification for the change in policy in 1939 was that the pension fund would not otherwise meet actuarial standards.⁽¹²⁶⁾ By 1940, the Board's reputation was very low.⁽¹²⁷⁾ At the 1941 General Assembly, ministers were told that, beginning in October of 1942, pension benefits would be reduced by ten percent.⁽¹²⁸⁾

What saved the revised pension program was the inflation of World War II. This so reduced the pre-1940 value of the pension fund's legal obligations that the program survived on paper, i.e., on paper money. The hook had caught many fish; the bait now melted away.

Princeton Seminary

The 1926 committee to investigate Princeton presented its report, filling pages 87 to 134 of the Minutes. The committee also turned over to the General Assembly a transcript of the hearings that was 800 pages long. The committee's conclusion was classically Presbyterian: another committee was recommended. Coming to that conclusion, however, did not require 47 pages plus 800 pages of hearings. The committee had to lay some ground work, also called poisoning the well. For example, in dealing with the conflict between Erdman and Machen, in which Erdman had in print falsely implied that Machen was behind an editorial in The Presbyterian that was hostile to Erdman, the committee cited Machen's willingness to let the matter drop. "I do not believe that any desire on my part for personal vindication should be allowed to jeopardize the high interests with which this institution is entrusted. I do not, of course, mean that I shall necessarily agree with Dr. Erdman's ecclesiastical policies, with regard to which I must, of course, follow the dictates of my conscience. But I am ready and willing, with appreciation of the good offices of the Committee, to resume full personal friendly relations with Dr. Erdman."⁽¹²⁹⁾

This statement presented a major problem for the committee. The modernists, from van Dyke's 1923 press release onward, had spent a great deal of space in the press painting Machen as a bitter, unyielding, un-Christian controversialist. This conciliatory statement by Machen undercut this image of his personality. This, in turn, would tend to remove the stigma of "malignant spirit" from the man, thereby removing from him the added judicial burden imposed by Presbyterian law on such people.⁽¹³⁰⁾ The committee could not allow this to go unchallenged, so, without citing any specific infraction on Machen's part, the report hastened to add:

But the ensuing discussion left with the Committee the impression that the statement had been academic and defensive, rather than an overture toward reconciliation. Dr. Machen confesses no fault. He accepts no forgiveness and offers none. The net effect of these personal conferences with the Faculty upon the minds of the Committee was an impression that no essential change had taken place in the mind of Dr. Machen. He still believes that there are serious differences in the doctrinal attitudes of the Faculty, and he is unwilling to trust the doctrinal loyalties of his colleagues. This obviously leaves much to be desired as a basis of brotherly relations.⁽¹³¹⁾

There is an implicit formula here: doctrinal differences = unbrotherly relations. This formula was promoted by the modernists, accepted hesitatingly by the conservative middle, and applied to the orthodox party.

The committee criticized the divided authority of the trustees and the directors, calling it "unwise and always likely to be a source of friction."⁽¹³²⁾ Since 1922, the charter designated only a Board of Trustees.⁽¹³³⁾ But the Board of Directors had existed since the original Plan of 1811, before the charter of incorporation, as the Assembly's agency of control.⁽¹³⁴⁾

A report of the General Assembly in 1893, the year of Briggs' de-frocking, had specified that the property of the Seminary was governed by stipulations. The Seminary had come under the jurisdiction of the reunited Church in 1870 on the basis of a continuation of the Confession of Faith and Catechisms, "as these doctrines were understood and explained by the Old School General Assembly," and these "shall continue to be taught in the Seminary."⁽¹³⁵⁾ The donors had specified this provision. These gifts were made under stipulations that were a matter of civil law.⁽¹³⁶⁾ But the Trustees legally controlled these funds. The 1926 committee assured everyone that the Trustees would carry out this trust.⁽¹³⁷⁾ The committee met with the Trustees and advised that the secure legal counsel on the matter of single-board control with respect to New Jersey law.⁽¹³⁸⁾

The committee recommended that all the seminaries be placed under the jurisdiction of the General Assembly.⁽¹³⁹⁾ This, of course, did not include Union, which had pulled out a generation earlier, or Auburn, which had also pulled out. It assured the Assembly that "sacred trusts" existed between donors and seminaries, and that the wishes of donors would be upheld.⁽¹⁴⁰⁾

Seven years later, a Barthian was on the faculty at Princeton as a visiting lecturer, and Emil Brunner himself was on the faculty in 1939. This was power religion in action. Things evolve, especially sacred trusts.

The committee recommended deferring all appointments to any faculty position until the next General Assembly.⁽¹⁴¹⁾ This meant Machen and O. T. Allis, who was Machen's alter ego in the Old Testament department.

The committee referred back to the 1923 decision of the General Assembly to consolidate control over seminaries in one board per seminary. The Princeton boards had ignored it.⁽¹⁴²⁾

The committee concluded that "The root and source of the serious difficulties at Princeton, and the greatest obstacle to the removal of these difficulties, seem to be in the plan of government by two boards."⁽¹⁴³⁾ Irreconcilable theological conflict is thus transformed into an administrative matter, and so it can be reconciled. (Thus might men of good and advanced management training heal the breach between heaven and hell.)

Recommendations: (1) appoint another committee; (2) delay the appointments of Machen and Allis, who had been appointed to the chair in Old Testament.⁽¹⁴⁴⁾

The Assembly's vote to accept the report (503 to 323) revealed that there was no longer any institutionally significant opposition to the power religion. The commissioners rose and cheered.⁽¹⁴⁵⁾

On the Defensive

It was clear that Machen and his supporters were now completely on the defensive. There was little that they could accomplish to halt the onrushing events. During the year between the 1927 and 1928 Assemblies, a petition was circulated asking the new Assembly to refrain from tampering with Princeton's system of government, and it eventually collected the signatures of some 11,000 ruling elders and 2,500 ministers.⁽¹⁴⁶⁾ It was presented to the 1928 Assembly, but judging from the events that followed, it had no effect.

Machen felt the sting of the rejection. He referred to it as "an indignity almost without precedent in the entire history of our Church."⁽¹⁴⁷⁾ There had been one such precedent: the rejection of Briggs' appointment in 1891 by the General Assembly. Briggs retained his appointment because Union pulled out from under the General Assembly's control. Princeton did not. Briggs was de-frocked in 1893 for heresy; Machen was de-frocked in 1936 for failure to obey.

Machen never received his appointment. For the first time in the history of Princeton, the Board's appointment was vetoed. The Board then decided to appoint a less controversial man, one with no reputation nationally, and with no teaching experience, either. He had earned a Princeton University Ph.D. in philosophy in 1927. He was a disciple of Geerhardus Vos, the least understood of the orthodox members of the faculty. In 1928, he was serving as a pastor in rural Indiana. All in all, it looked like a safe bureaucratic appointment, one that would not rock the boat. They appointed a man who, they believed, would shun public controversy: Cornelius Van Til. This call brought Van Til back into academia from a rural Indiana congregation of 70 families.⁽¹⁴⁸⁾ In 1928, he had wanted only to be a pastor in the Christian Reformed Church.

 

Machen's Plea for Pluralism

In a pamphlet issued in December, 1927, Machen returned to a familiar theme. He pointed out that one member of the committee which the Board of Trustees had created to work out the reorganization was a signer of the Auburn Affirmation.⁽¹⁴⁹⁾ The presence of Affirmationists on any board, committee, or commission became a touchstone for Machen and his allies: proof of the theological unreliability of the group.

He began his defense with a summary of what the Seminary stood for: the accuracy of the Bible, the doctrinal authority of the Westminster Confession, and a rigorous intellectual defense of Christianity.⁽¹⁵⁰⁾ Its students are subjected to a rigorous academic program: ". . . we try to divest our students of the notion that there is any royal road to sacred learning. . . ."⁽¹⁵¹⁾ They are required to study many viewpoints; the curriculum is not "unduly negative."⁽¹⁵²⁾

In Chapter 2, he offered a brief history of the attack on Princeton. He blamed its president: ". . . the first important step was the coming of J. Ross Stevenson as president of the Seminary."⁽¹⁵³⁾ By naming Stevenson, Machen launched a last-ditch suicide mission, since no academic organization tolerates published attacks on its president from inside the system unless it is totally on the defensive. But Stevenson's associates had almost won by late 1927.

Machen insisted that Stevenson was opposed to Old School tradition at Princeton. Machen's tactical problem was that Stevenson had been president since 1914. Why, at this late date, was Machen complaining? This is always the problem of the critic who tries to work within the system: he then finds it tactically difficult ever to appeal beyond the system. He argued that Stevenson could have resigned; instead, Stevenson had appealed to the General Assembly to consolidate the Trustees and the Board.⁽¹⁵⁴⁾ This pointed to the conservatives' problem since 1893: their opponents had no intention of resigning.

The Assembly should reverse this consolidation, Machen argued. There are other seminaries. They are liberal. Why should Princeton's message be muted? The conservatives "must be allowed to have at least one seminary that clearly and unequivocally represents their view."⁽¹⁵⁵⁾

This was a theologically doomed argument that reflected an ecclesiastically doomed movement. He was arguing utter nonsense, given his theological commitment. He had argued that liberalism is a rival religion. But if he was correct, then on what basis should liberals be allowed to teach in seminaries inside the Church? Religious pluralism has no place in the Church; this had been Machen's argument from the beginning. His 1927 argument made as much sense as a principled defender of monogamy complaining that a married man ought to allow his wife to have her own home, keeping his concubines in another dwelling. The only monogamist who would invoke such an argument is a frantic wife whose husband was openly planning to put his concubines down the hall.

He predicted that if the reoarganization went through, Princeton would soon go modernist.⁽¹⁵⁶⁾ In one way, he was correct; in another, he was not. Princeton by 1933 had moved publicly toward neo-orthodoxy: Adolph Keller's Stone Foundation lectures.⁽¹⁵⁷⁾ In 1939, Emil Brunner was a guest faculty member. Princeton adopted what Van Til in 1947 would call the new modernism.

The liberals in 1929 were at last ready to reveal the fact that their commitment to pluralism had always been tactical, not principled. They did not believe in pluralism; they believed in power. They did not believe in equal time for orthodoxy in the councils of the Church; they believed in no time for orthodoxy. They wanted to confine orthodoxy to prayer closets. What they had said in print regarding the free expression of ideas, 1891 to 1926, was rhetoric for popular consumption. They had no intention of acting in terms of their rhetoric. Why should they?

The modernists were Progressives. Indeed, as Hofstadter says, "Progressivism can be considered from this standpoint as a phase in the history of the Protestant conscience, a latter-day Protestant revival. Liberal politics as well as liberal theology were both inherent in the response of religion to the secularization of society."⁽¹⁵⁸⁾ As Progressives, modernists believed in the use of force to change men and society. Most of all, they believed in using other people's money to achieve their goals. But they were wise. They understood that they could not be open about this use of force. So they adopted another strategy, very long term: the institutional suppression of rival views. Lester Frank Ward, who provided the Progressives with their sociological worldview,⁽¹⁵⁹⁾ had presented this strategy of institutional infiltration through ideological filtering as early as 1883. "Instill progressive principles, no matter how, into the mind, and progressive actions will result." But there is a problem: the reaction against coercion. "The attempt to change opinions by direct efforts has been frequently made. No one will deny that coercion applied to this end has been a signal failure." Then how should progressive people change unprogressive minds who hold unprogressive views? By a systematic program of exclusion and censorship. "The forcible suppression of the utterance or publication in any form of unwelcome opinions is equivalent to withholding from all undetermined minds the evidence upon which such views rest; . . ."⁽¹⁶⁰⁾ Conclusion: "It is simply that true views may as easily be created by this method of exclusion as false ones, which latter is the point of view from which this fact is regarded. The more or less arbitrary exclusion of error, i.e., of false data, is to a great degree justifiable. . . . This, however, is the essence of what is here meant by education, which may be regarded as a systematic process for the manufacture of correct opinions."⁽¹⁶¹⁾ No Whig pluralist illusions here!

The Presbyterian modernists were ready to put the final squeeze on the main source of what they regarded as the most dangerous theological ideas in the United States: Princeton Seminary. They fully understood that this was the point of entry of the most self-conscious, consistent, academically sophisticated alternative to theological modernism. They had to silence it, but without providing evidence of the coercive nature of this carefully planned, decades-old pincer movement. Machen knew they understood exactly what they were doing: "But the truth is that Princeton is being attacked not in spite of its success but because of it."⁽¹⁶²⁾

His plea for fair play--allowing at least one Old School seminary out of a dozen⁽¹⁶³⁾--was a cry of desperation. His commitment to Whig politics had at this point overcome his commitment to a pure Church. He had always previously insisted that Whig pluralism be confined to civil government. He had always understood that there could be no "equal time" for historic Calvinism in a Church that was dominated by anti-creedal modernists and both liberals and evangelicals who agreed with Speer's minimal-creed persuasion. Now he had proof. Even one-twelfth time was too much for the likes of Erdman and Stevenson. There had to be a victory for one side or the other. By 1927, it was clear which side this would be. Machen must have known this, for he wrote: "The ecclesiastical machinery rolls smoothly on, and the Church proceeds to destroy that wherein its real safety rests."⁽¹⁶⁴⁾

Machen's Judicial Protest

Just before the 1928 General Assembly convened at Tulsa, Oklahoma, Machen published a 35-page pamphlet stating legal objections to the proposed reorganization. This booklet, bearing the lengthy title of Legal Opinion on Questions Involved in Proposed Reorganization of Princeton Theological Seminary, was an attempt by Machen, Allis, and several attorneys to show that the reorganization, as proposed, was not constitutional according to Presbyterian Church law, and might well be counter to New Jersey state law. Several questions were considered, but the three main points concerned the powers of the Trustees, the right of the General Assembly to postpone the appointments of Machen and Allis, and the legal restrictions on the reorganization itself.

We need to examine the logic of his position, not because it convinced the Church's authorities, but because it didn't. Machen was following the tradition of judicial theology. He wanted to abide by the laws of the Church and the laws of the State of New Jersey. He wanted to abide by the Seminary's charter. He wanted to remain faithful to both the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. In short, he wanted to save Princeton Seminary from those whose goal was to subvert it. But his appeal to law fell on deaf ears. His liberal opponents wanted to capture something that did not belong to them--an oath-bound institution that still affirmed the terms of the oath. Those who affirmed it but did not believe it asked only one thing: "Who holds the hammer?" After 1925, they did. It was time to use it.

The liberals' governing principle was the capture of power. To achieve this at Princeton Seminary, they had to ignore the letter of the law and the intentions of those who had built the institution. They now moved from their earlier position of legalism--undermining the intent of the law by the letter of the law--to the exercise of raw power. This did not bother them in the slightest. After all, their spiritual cousins had already captured Princeton University under Woodrow Wilson and his successor, Rev. John Grier Hibben.⁽¹⁶⁵⁾

But Machen did not have clean hands in this matter. He had served as an instructor from 1906 to 1914, in obvious defiance of the intent of the founders of Princeton Seminary, who wanted only ordained men as teachers on the faculty. Old Princeton, in desperately short supply of competent teachers, had bent the rules. Like a branch pulled back and then released, this infraction snapped back and struck down its previous beneficiary.

The Fine Details of the Law

Machen's pamphlet surveyed three issues: the power of the Trustees, the approval of the nomination of professors, and the legality of the proposed reorganization. On the first issue, the power of the Trustees, the authors stated that the Assembly assumes a two-board control of the Seminary. This, they assert, is not the case: "The Trustees have no voice in the management of the Seminary at all . . . except so far as additional powers may be vested in them by the Plan; and such additional powers, if any, are at most a veto for financial reasons on certain expenditures on funds."⁽¹⁶⁶⁾ If the logic of the General Assembly concludes that this makes the Trustees a second board of control, then it must also take into account that a small part of the funds are held by the Assembly's Trustees, and therefore, "by the same token the Trustees of the General Assembly are a third board of control."⁽¹⁶⁷⁾ This technicality proved unimpressive to the General Assembly.

On the second question, the approval of the nomination of professors, the authors argued that the veto, logically, should be used during the same General Assembly meeting as the nomination to any chair is made, "otherwise the Seminary may be kept in a state of turmoil and uncertainty indefinitely by postponing from year to year action on elections of professors."⁽¹⁶⁸⁾

This had been Francis Patton's argument a generation earlier during the Briggs dispute. In the interest of academic freedom, he had said, let us limit the Assembly's right to veto any appointment to the next Assembly after the nomination.⁽¹⁶⁹⁾

The pamphlet called attention to the hesitation of Auburn Seminary to enter the Presbyterian seminary system in 1871, precisely because of the vagueness of the Plan of Princeton Seminary concerning the veto power of the Assembly. In order to alleviate these fears, the Assembly had passed an amendment to Article III, Section I of the Plan, "apparently unanimously," that the veto would have to be applied at the General Assembly following the appointment.

Stevenson held another view, according to the pamphlet: a postponement is not a "failure to act." The authors took exception, however, claiming that a "`failure to act' plainly means `failure to take final action.'"⁽¹⁷⁰⁾ Therefore, the actions of the 1926 and 1927 Assemblies were void, and both men were entitled to their chairs and pay, to be enforced by the Church courts.

It might appear as though Machen and Allis were motivated purely by personal interest to publish this attack, an action aimed merely at getting their back pay and offices. In light of their subsequent decisions to leave Princeton on doctrinal grounds, breaking contact with Princeton completely, it would seem more reasonable to assume that they were really trying to show that the whole matter of Princeton was being mishandled by the liberal faction in control of the General Assemblies' machinery. Machen, with financial support available to him outside of his capacity as a teacher--money that permitted him to publish the pamphlet--was hardly worried personally about the differences in pay scales between an assistant professor and full professor, except as a point of legal contention. In any case, as recently as 1926, he had been approached by Columbia Seminary, the Southern Presbyterian institution, to accept the chair in New Testament.⁽¹⁷¹⁾ He would have been a plum on that far less distinguished faculty. He was not facing forced retirement.

The third and final issue, the legality of the proposed reorganization, affords additional insight into the hopelessness of the orthodox position. Appealing to Article I, Section 3 of the Plan of the Seminary, the authors asserted that to be legal, any alteration in the Plan must be approved by a unanimous vote if the proposed change is introduced at that Assembly. Otherwise, the specific recommendation cannot be voted upon until the next General Assembly, at which time a majority decision can alter the Plan. At the 1927 meeting, W. O. Thompson introduced notice that "at the next meeting of the General Assembly to be convened in May, 1928, a resolution will be proposed for adoption abrogating the Plan of Princeton Theological Seminary." This was not a true proposal, in the authors' view, since it was not specific in regard to the changes to be made, and therefore to be legal, a unanimous vote had to be registered at the General Assembly of 1928.⁽¹⁷²⁾ All of these fine points of law were ignored.

A Holding Action

These men were clearly fighting a holding action. At most, assuming the unreasonable hope that their thesis would be upheld in the hostile Assembly, the decision to reorganize Princeton could only be postponed for one year, since the opposition obviously had the votes, even if not a unanimous voice. Perhaps the defenders hoped for a change of heart on the part of the Assembly of 1928, since the constituency of the presbyteries might conceivably change, or the new delegates might be more conservative. But this was an unrealistic hope, and, as it turned out, a useless one; the conservative camp became smaller at each succeeding Assembly.

Nevertheless, Machen had done everything he could judicially. He had repeated his familiar arguments about the need for a strong voice for historic Presbyterianism. This did no good on the floor of the Assembly. The 1928 Assembly voted to postpone the reorganization for one more year, asking the Board of Directors to try to compose the differences on the faculty in the intervening period.

The Defections Begin

The Seminary's Directors, probably seeing the inevitability of the 1929 General Assembly's action, reversed their traditionally impregnable orthodox stand, and voted, 17 to ten, to approve the report of the Committee of Eleven. Perhaps there was some thought that a useless fight against the Assembly, whose power in the matter was unquestioned, would do no good, and in fact might alienate the new board completely. Whatever the reason, the capitulation of the Directors made the final decision of the 1929 Assembly anti-climactic. At that Assembly, the debate over Princeton was allocated a total of 25 minutes of discussion time. Machen was allowed to speak for five minutes.⁽¹⁷³⁾ So much for three decades of pleas from the liberals for "fair play" and "toleration." The liberals now had the votes, and from that time on, they wasted no more time. There would now be negative sanctions.

The newly created board was composed of one-third of the members of the Directors, one-third on the old Board of Trustees, and one-third from the Church at large. Both Mudge and Speer were members.⁽¹⁷⁴⁾ The president's powers were also enlarged. This last decision emphasized a new trend; formerly, when out of power, liberals and moderates had pushed for decentralization of power. Now they began a process of centralization, with the conservatives making a new plea for tolerance and Christian freedom. The roles and arguments had reversed.

Once in power, the liberals were never to turn loose. Their creed was power, and they would defend it with far greater enthusiasm and commitment than the conservatives had defended the Westminster Confession. The conservatives' pleas for tolerance had no visible effect. The new doctrine of the liberal faction was straightforward from this point on: "In the name of institutional stability and peace--not doctrinal conformity--you must submit." The Times dutifully dismissed the critics as members of the "extreme conservative group."⁽¹⁷⁵⁾ Liberal rhetoric never changes. I am unaware of any case during the Presbyterian conflict when a liberal or mass media news outlet referred to the "extreme liberal group."

This has gone on ever since. Typical are the comments of Church historian Winthrop Hudson, in his supposedly neutral academic textbook: "Nowhere was the Fundamentalist case stated with more clarity and cogency than in Machen's writings, but his ill-tempered dogmatism in personal relationships and his determination to dominate the life of the seminary drove even staunchly conservative colleagues to make common cause with the Auburn `Affirmationists.'"⁽¹⁷⁶⁾ He follows this remark with a description of the Baptist Bible Union, a fundamentalist organization of the same era. "Here too the bitter-spirited intransigence of the extremists caused some of the priminent early leaders of the movement to defect and work out a policy of coexistence with the liberals."⁽¹⁷⁷⁾ Extremists were everywhere in the 1920's, but only on the Right.

The first step in consolidating power at Princeton was to issue a lie to the press, which announced that the Board would "do nothing whatever to alter the distinctive doctrinal position which the seminary has maintained throughout its entire history."⁽¹⁷⁸⁾ Machen correctly dismissed this announcement as "meaningless." In this era, he said, the same words are given different meanings. Machen was correct. Four years later, the Seminary invited the Barthian socialist Adolph Keller to deliver the Stone lectures; a decade later, Emil Brunner was on the faculty.

Machen's Response: The Issue Is Doctrine

The new board assumed control of the Seminary in mid-June of 1929. Within days, Machen had challenged it as a deception. But he hastened to remove all traces of personal responsibility, another example of his rhetorically mild-mannered ways--ways guaranteed to lose the battle. "I do not mean to impugn the good faith of these gentlemen."⁽¹⁷⁹⁾ The Times quoted Machen as saying that the new board was not legally installed, but "If the new board of directors were legally in control of Princeton Seminary, I should resign my professorship at once."⁽¹⁸⁰⁾ Then he opened the challenge: "In any case I am convinced that the time has come for bold and definite action on the part of the evangelicals in the Presbyterian Church. It is evident that they can look for no tolerance or fairness from those who at present are in control of the ecclesiastical machinery. . . . The evangelicals must at once take steps to found a new seminary that shall continue the old Princeton tradition. . . ."⁽¹⁸¹⁾

He also hoped that the civil courts would clear up the illegalities at Princeton, since they were the last hope. But, "the evangelicals must not depend on the possibility of that." Machen had, by this time, given up hope in a successful civil suit. Stonehouse reports that Machen blamed himself for not having introduced a motion into the 1930 General Assembly to put the Seminary back under the old Plan, "and this on the understanding that the action taken in 1929 would inevitably result in legal chaos."⁽¹⁸²⁾ But this, too, would have been nothing more than an obstructionist tactic, which would have had no chance of doing more than temporarily deflecting the Assembly from the new path it was following.

Professionally Naive Conservatives

The new Board of Directors immediately issued a ringing declaration which was designed to pacify those who wanted above all to be pacified.

In the one hundred and seventeen years of its history, Princeton Seminary has stood with firm steadfastness for the propagation at home and abroad, and for the scholarly defense of evangelical Christianity as formulated in the Standards of the Presbyterian Church. In taking up the duties assigned to it by the General Assembly, the temporary Board of Directors feels that it has a sacred mandate from the Assembly to continue unchanged the historic policy of the Seminary and do nothing whatever to alter the distinctive traditional position which the Seminary has maintained throughout its entire history.⁽¹⁸³⁾

The new Board of Directors now included two signers of the Auburn Affirmation.⁽¹⁸⁴⁾ Here was a strange way to affirm devotion to the Princeton tradition!

The battle over Princeton began a separation of sheep from goats, and also between the "about to be sheared" sheep and the "let's avoid the catastrophe" sheep. The Presbyterian, long the conservative outlet for Machen's wing, now switched editorial policy. Rev. Samuel G. Craig had resigned in 1929 in protest at interference with his editorials opposing the change at Princeton. Machen helped him by funding the creation of the Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing Co., which began publishing Christianity Today⁽¹⁸⁵⁾ in May of 1930. The investors at The Presbyterian hired William Courtland Robinson as editor. Robinson had been a director of Princeton and an opponent of the reorganization, but he would not admit the reality of what had happened. Robinson announced in the May 15 issue: "That which many predicted and which some of us feared has not taken place. . . . We cannot find a single happening during this year now closing to which a conservative could take serious exception."

The modernists had bided their time since 1900. They were not foolish. They could bide their time for another year or two. But the direction in which Princeton was headed was clear. Machen had predicted it, and the three professors who followed him to Westminster knew. So did Geerhardus Vos, C. W. Hodge, and Machen's old friend, "Army" Armstrong, who remained behind.⁽¹⁸⁶⁾

Westminster Seminary

Four men on the faculty resigned: Machen; Robert Dick Wilson, the foremost orthodox Old Testament scholar in the English-speaking world; Old Testament scholar O. T. Allis, who had edited Princeton Theological Review for years; and Cornelius Van Til, the man who took Machen's place as Calvinism's leading orthodox apologist upon Machen's death. This group of four seceding professors became the nucleus around which a new seminary was built. Ironically, Princeton had just elected Allis to the Helena chair of Oriental and Old Testament Literature, and Van Til to the Stuart Professorship of Apologetics and Christian Ethics.⁽¹⁸⁷⁾

Less than a month later, on July 18, 1929, a meeting was held in Philadelphia at which steps were taken to begin the new school, Westminster Theological Seminary, to be located in Philadelphia. This was a wise location, since the Philadelphia Presbytery had long been the leading conservative force in the Assemblies, and there was far more chance of having Westminster graduates being ordained there than in some other, less orthodox, presbytery. Westminster was opened in the fall of 1929, a month before the stock market crashed.

Van Til had resisted the call. He did not want to return to teaching. That summer, he took a pastorate in Spring Lake, Michigan. Allis went to Spring Lake to plead with him to join the faculty. He refused. Then, in August, came Machen and Ned B. Stonehouse. He refused. "We aren't called stubborn Dutchmen without cause," he later remarked.⁽¹⁸⁸⁾ But a month later, he showed up. He retired in 1972 and remained close to the Seminary until his death in 1987: over 50 years of academic service from a man who wanted to be a rural pastor.

In his speech at the Seminary's opening exercises (Sept. 25, 1929), with 50 students enrolled, Machen invoked the memory of the Old Princeton: "No, my friends, though Princeton Seminary is dead, the noble tradition of Princeton Seminary is alive. Westminster Seminary will endeavor by God's grace to continue that tradition unimpaired; it will endeavor, not on a foundation of equivocation and compromise, but on an honest foundation of devotion to God's Word, to maintain the same principles that the old Princeton maintained."⁽¹⁸⁹⁾ Yet this was not really the case. Old Princeton had been Old School in its alignment. Westminster was less consistently Old School.

There would soon be a major change: the arrival of amillennial Dutch theologians in the tradition of Geerhardus Vos. Soon, R. B. Kuiper and Ned B. Stonehouse would be added to Westminster's faculty. The Old School Presbyterians remained at Princeton or retired after 1930. At Westminster, the tradition of Scottish common-sense apologetics was replaced by Van Til's presuppositionalism; Warfield's postmillennialism by Dutch amillennialism.

The New Princeton

Calvinists were no longer in control of Princeton's administration, and the outstanding orthodox voices had left the faculty. The last stronghold of orthodox Calvinism in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., had been broken up. Moderator John McDowell, in answering Machen's statements in the New York Times, had tried to soothe the conservatives of the Church when he wrote that "the board of trustees are on record to the effect that they desire no change in the historical theological position of Princeton Seminary relative to the standards of the Church."⁽¹⁹⁰⁾

These last seven words, "relative to the standards of the Church," were qualifications that altered the surface implication of the statement, that no theological change was going to take place. Almost immediately, there was a decided shift over to the neo-orthodoxy of Barth and Brunner and a rejection of the Calvinist system by many of the new men on the faculty. While the departure of the four Calvinist professors hastened the shift, still it could not have been prevented for long, if only because new appointments to the chairs of theology would have been filled with those who held the new theology. The General Assembly was lost by the conservatives, and it was only a matter of time before the inclusive Church would become a reality throughout the whole of the organization.

In 1932, Geerhardus Vos retired. In 1933, the prestigious Stone Foundation Lectures of Princeton Seminary featured a German theologian, Adolph Keller, who introduced the theology of Karl Barth to the students. In 1898, Abraham Kuyper, the soon-to-be Prime Minister of the Netherlands, had delivered his remarkable Lectures on Calvinism as his Stone Lectures.⁽¹⁹¹⁾ Now, the students were told: "To Barth, as a Christian socialist, it seemed that the Church was lacking in the social courage to seek new manifestations of God's Spirit."⁽¹⁹²⁾ Why has the Spirit waited so long to manifest Himself? Does He change over time? The answer seems to be yes. God evolves, or at least His Spirit as manifested to man can reconstruct one age's firm morality to make a whole new moral world: process theology.

. . . he [Barth] was confronted with a Christian conservatism which understood the facts of revelation as given historical data, that is to say, as so much divine capital consisting of transcendent facts and ethical commandments which had become the property of men and which they could treat in the same way as the facts and laws of a scientific system. This kind of Christianity felt itself to be in complete possession of salvation. In its false fundamentalistic assurance it had forgotten the dynamic character of God's revelation, which lifts the Gospel beyond the possibility of being permanently posited by human experience and Christian knowledge and connotes a process of continual development.⁽¹⁹³⁾

From this point of view, Karl Barth is strongly opposed to any canonized interpretation of the Bible, which defines once for all the meaning of the Word of God and prevents the Holy Spirit from using the written Word as a manifestation of God's will. When the Church tries to define once and forever what the authoritative interpretation of the Bible should be, it assumes an authority which it does not possess and identifies itself with the dynamic action of the Spirit. Karl Barth demands a free exegesis of the Bible, trusting in the spiritual power of the Word of God to explain itself and to remain eternally a critical, corrective power over against any man's purely individualistic interpretation of it. To any man in a truly listening and obedient attitude, the Bible explains itself.⁽¹⁹⁴⁾

It should be clear what the faculty at Princeton was doing. Keller was challenging the orthodox party's view of the Confession as a fixed, binding standard of faith and action. He was substituting evolution for creedalism. This confirmed Machen's warnings. But Machen and his supporters still had a problem: to explain the proper use of the Confession, both theologically and institutionally, as a document which has relevance in every era. If Machen was unable to gather support for a purge of liberals in this, the most creedal of churches, because his supporters did not really accept the whole creed, then the effectiveness of a fixed creed as a tool of institutional administration and screening had been fatally compromised in the Presbyterian Church.

Princeton Seminary soon proved to be a lost cause.⁽¹⁹⁵⁾ Machen understood this in 1929. It was a lost cause because it no longer held to the Confession. But if confessions need revision from time to time, by what standard, or by what procedure, could the revisors legitimately change the Confession without abandoning it? How can structure and change, law and application, be fused together in a creedal organization? How can changing historical circumstances not affect the application of biblical and creedal principles? But if circumstances change, then how is the overarching fixed truth of the creed going to be preserved in a new historical setting?

Machen knew that the problem still existed. He was still struggling to call his Church to reconfirm the creeds. But the 1647 document no longer motivated many men. The Confession needed revision, but how could it be revised without undermining it? Barthianism is a doctrine of evolution. How can creeds honor the fact of historical change without becoming Barthian-evolutionistic? More to the point, how could Calvinists who had accepted Lyell's chronology in defiance of the Confession's explicit chronology defend themselves from evolutionism, whether biological or Barthian?⁽¹⁹⁶⁾

Conclusion

The Presbyterian conflict seemed to be resolved. First, Princeton was now to become more representative of the Church as a whole, more responsive to new trends in theology. "Relative to the standards of the Church," as McDowell had said, there would be no change in theology, because there were no longer any fixed theological standards in the Church. As the Church's theology drifted, Princeton's would follow closely; so, in relation to each other, there would be no change! It was all relative, so long as there is no fixed standard by which to measure change. Second, the orthodox party now had their own training center, Westminster Seminary, and while it was not a part of the Church, its professors were still Presbyterian ministers, and its graduates, if they so chose, might become Presbyterian ministers.

The Old School had always affirmed that theological seminaries should be under the authority of the Church.⁽¹⁹⁷⁾ Princeton Professor John de Witt in 1893 declared: "The Board of Directors of Princeton Seminary is as much the creature of the General Assembly as it has ever been. It is simply the agent of the Assembly to execute the Assembly's own `plan.'"⁽¹⁹⁸⁾ The irony of Westminster Seminary would be that, as the last remaining seminary to defend the Old School's theology, it could do so only by defying and rejecting the Old School's tradition of Church control over seminary education.

In 1927, the General Assembly revoked its own authority to revoke the ordination of heretics. This decentralized power. The General Assembly also established a pension plan that would penalize any minister covered by this plan who then left the denomination. This centralized power. The 1927 General Assembly sent out mixed signals. It was traveling in opposite directions simultaneously. This could not continue indefinitely.

In 1931, the liberals, who were in complete control of the bureaucracy, recommended to the General Assembly a revision of the Form of Government. If passed by the presbyteries, this revision would radically restructure the Church. This proposed revision was debated for three years, but it received very little attention from the conservatives. Beginning in late 1932, another issue riveted the attention of the Church: foreign missions. The revision was approved by the presbyteries in 1934. It created a comprehensive system of negative sanctions. The crucial issue was sanctions.

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1. Machen, "Christianity and Culture," Princeton Theological Review, 11 (Jan. 1913), p. 13.

2. 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. 22.

3. Ibid.

4. Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Philadelphia: Westminster Theological Seminary, [1954] 1978), p. 105.

5. Ibid., p. 115.

6. Ibid., p. 116.

7. Ibid., p. 122.

8. It is now nine decades since Machen went to Germany. Today, no one teaches at Westminster Seminary who does not have an advanced academic degree from a state-accredited university or humanist seminary. This means that every prospective faculty member is still required to "go to Germany." But it is far worse today. In 1905, they were not asked to earn a degree; they just had to attend.

9. The Form of Government (1941), in The Standards of Government Discipline and Worship of The Orthodox Presbyterian Church (Philadelphia: Committee on Christian Education, The Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1965), p. 19.

10. John Ensor Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Century (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988), pp. 79-81.

11. George Marsden's Soul of the American University needed a chapter on this topic. The book is silent about it. The book does include a chapter on academic freedom and the American Association of University Professors, a watch-dog organization formed in 1913 in reaction to the firing of a humanist professor--a Princeton Seminary graduate--by Ethelbert Warfield, B. B. Warfield's brother, who served as the president of the Board of Trustees of Princeton Seminary in 1904. Warfield was president of Lafayette College at the time. George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 302-306.

12. Warfield, "The Purpose of the Seminary," The Presbyterian (Nov. 22, 1917); reprinted in Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield--I, edited by John E. Meeter (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1970), p. 374.

13. Warfield, "Introduction to Francis R. Beattie's Apologetics" (1903); reprinted Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield--II edited by John E. Meeter (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1973), p. 103.

14. His criticisms of Charles Hodge's Systematic Theology appears under the heading "Less Consistent Calvinism," in his classroom syllabus, Apologetics (Westminster Theological Seminary, 1959), pp. 47ff. His criticisms of Warfield are found in his book, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1969), pp. 229-30.

15. Warfield, "Introduction to Beattie's Apologetics," op. cit., pp. 99-100.

16. Ibid., p. 100.

17. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1923), pp. 172-73.

18. Mark Noll, "Introduction," in Noll, ed., The Princeton Theology, 1812-1921 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, 1983), p. 31.

19. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p. 17.

20. On the Old Princeton and its theology of experience, see W. Andrew Hoffecker, Piety and the Princeton Theologians (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1981).

21. John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning, and Education, 1560-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1986).

22. Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861 (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, [1970] 1988), ch. 1.

23. R. J. Rushdoony, The Nature of the American System (Fairfax, Virginia: Thoburn Press, [1965] 1978), ch. 6.

24. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1923, p. 231.

25. Ibid., p. 235.

26. Ibid., p. 227.

27. Ibid.

28. Machen, "Christianity and Culture," p. 7.

29. Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 1768-1822 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 263.

30. Lefferts A. Loetscher, Facing the Enlightenment and Pietism: Archibald Alexander and the Founding of Princeton Theological Seminary (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1983), p. 128.

31. Noll, Princeton, p. 262.

32. Loetscher, Facing The Enlightenment, pp. 158-59.

33. George P. Hutchinson, The History Behind the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod (Cherry Hill, New Jersey: Mack, 1974), p. 128.

34. Stonehouse, Machen, p. 197.

35. Ibid., p. 202.

36. Ibid., p. 113.

37. Armstrong to Machen (11 March 1906), ibid., p. 121.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., p. 135.

40. Ibid., pp. 135-44.

41. Ibid., p. 145.

42. Hart believes that he became more secure after 1910. Hart, Defending the Faith, p. 30.

43. Stonehouse, Machen, p. 42.

44. Cited in Edwin H. Rian, The Presbyterian Conflict (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1940), p. 62.

45. Ibid.

46. Lefferts A. Loetscher, The Broadening Church: a study of theological issues in the presbyterian church since 1869 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), p. 69.

47. Stonehouse, Machen, p. 215.

48. Ibid., p. 213.

49. Ibid., p. 73.

50. Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 139.

51. Ibid., p. 138.

52. Cited in Stonehouse, Machen, p. 213.

53. Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 139.

54. Rian, Presbyterian Conflict, p. 66. Cf. Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 138.

55. Cited in Rian, Presbyterian Conflict, p. 70.

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

57. "Human institutions are really to be molded, not by Christian principles accepted by the unsaved, but by Christian men; the true transformation of society will come by the influence of those who have themselves been redeemed. . . . [I]t is not true that the Christian evangelist is interested in the salvation of individuals without being interested in the salvation of the race." Ibid., pp. 158-59.

58. Ibid., pp. 48-49.

59. Ibid., p. 52.

60. They were willing to adopt the "original, modified" version of the PCUSA, but they feared complications stemming from possible copyright infringement of the wording. As Prof. John Murray later said, "The Hebrews would not cooperate with the Samaritans."

61. Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 141.

62. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1945, p. 99.

63. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1927, p. 97.

64. Ibid., p. 131.

65. Rian, Presbyterian Conflict, pp. 73-74.

66. Machen, Statement (Nov. 23, 1926), p. 5.

67. Ibid., pp. 6-7.

68. Ibid., p. 7.

69. Ibid., p. 8.

70. Ibid., p. 12.

71. Ibid., p. 13.

72. Ibid., p. 14.

73. Ibid., p. 19.

74. Ibid., p. 20.

75. Ibid., p. 21.

76. Machen, "The Good Fight of Faith," Sermon delivered in the Princeton Seminary chapel, March 10, 1929; printed in The Presbyterian (March 28, 1929), p. 8.

77. Machen, Statement, p. 21.

78. Ibid., p. 22.

79. "Machen's intensity and complexity, and the weakness of his character and thought, make misreading him likely, if not inevitable." 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. 88. I am torn between describing this sentence as supercilious or merely condescending.

80. Machen, Statement, p. 27.

81. Ibid., p. 29.

82. Ibid., p. 30.

83. Ibid., p. 37.

84. Machen, Additional Statement, p. 1.

85. Ibid., p. 7.

86. William Joseph Watson, The Emergence of the Idea of Pluralism Within the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., 1890-1940 (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1988), p. 89.

87. W. Reginald Wheeler, A Man Sent from God: A Biography of Robert E. Speer (n.p.: Revell, 1956), p. 205.

88. Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 133.

89. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1927, p. 81.

90. Ibid., p. 80.

91. Ibid., p. 58.

92. Ibid., p. 135.

93. Ibid., p. 62.

94. Ibid.

95. Ibid.

96. Ibid., p. 69.

97. Ibid., p. 70.

98. Ibid., p. 68.

99. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1912, p. 233.

100. R. Douglas Brackenridge and Lois A. Boyd, Presbyterians and Pensions, 1717-1988 (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988), pp. 68-69.

101. Ibid., p. 69.

102. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1928, p. 26.

103. Ibid., p. 250.

104. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1929, Part 2, Reports of the Boards, Board of Pensions, p. v.

105. Brackenridge & Boyd, Pensions, p. 72.

106. Ibid., p. 75.

107. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1929, II, Board of Pensions Report, p. 8.

108. Ibid., II, Pensions, p. 3.

109. Ibid., II, Pensions, p. 4.

110. Ibid., II, Pensions, pp. 4-5.

111. Ibid., II, Pensions, p. 5.

112. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1928, p. 251.

113. Ibid., p. 252.

114. Ibid., p. 256.

115. Ibid., p. 257.

116. Ibid., p. 252.

117. Ibid., pp. 257-58.

118. Brackenridge and Boyd, Pensions, p. 76.

119. Ibid., p. 70.

120. New York Times (May 29, 1936), p. 3.

121. Brackenridge and Boyd, Pensions, p. 74.

122. Ibid.

123. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1928, p. 257.

124. Ibid., pp. 122-23.

125. New York Times (May 28, 1939), p. 19.

126. Ibid. (May 26, 1940), p. 21.

127. Brackenridge and Boyd, Pensions, p. 124.

128. New York Times (May 24, 1941), p. 34.

129. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1927, p. 98.

130. The Book of Discipline, II:13. The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath School Work, 1904), p. 395. See Chapter 8, above: subsection on "Van Dyke Strikes Again."

131. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1927, pp. 98-99.

132. Ibid., p. 102.

133. Ibid., pp. 102-103.

134. Ibid., p. 104.

135. Ibid., p. 107.

136. Ibid.

137. Ibid., pp. 108-109.

138. Ibid., p. 109.

139. Ibid., p. 112.

140. Ibid., p. 113.

141. Ibid., p. 119.

142. Ibid., p. 124.

143. Ibid., p. 131.

144. Ibid., p. 133.

145. Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 145.

146. D. G. Hart, "Doctor Fundamentalis": An Intellectual Biography of J. Gresham Machen, 1881-1937 (Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1988), p. 294.

147. Machen, Statement, p. 1.

148. William White, Van Til: Defender of the Faith (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Sons, 1979), p. 71.

149. Machen, The Attack Upon Princeton Seminary: A Plea for Fair Play (Dec. 1927), p. 5.

150. Ibid., pp. 6-11.

151. Ibid., p. 12.

152. Ibid., p. 13.

153. Ibid., p. 16.

154. Ibid., pp. 16-17.

155. Ibid.

156. Ibid., p. 36.

157. See below: section on "The New Princeton."

158. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage, 1955), p. 152.

159. Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880's (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1950), ch. 12.

160. Lester Frank Ward, Dynamic Sociology; or Applied Social Science, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, [1883] 1907), II:547.

161. Ibid., II:548.

162. Machen, Attack, p. 37.

163. Not counting Union and Auburn, which were outside the Church.

164. Ibid.

165. Hibben was typical of the era. He was another supposed conservative who had been voted for by the trustees in 1912, two years after Wilson's departure, in order to reverse or at least modify Wilson's reforms, but who then consolidated these reforms. Henry Wilkinson Bragdon, Woodrow Wilson: The Academic Years (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1967), pp. 405-407.

166. Machen, Allis, and Armstrong, Legal Opinion on Questions Involved in Proposed Reorganization of Princeton Theological Seminary (Baltimore, Maryland: Author's Printing, 1928), p. 6.

167. Ibid., p. 7.

168. Ibid.

169. Patton spoke before the General Assembly of 1891, the GA which followed Briggs' 1891 Inaugural Address. He said: "I am a professor. I have the prejudices of my class, and I tell you that, in the name of that class, I will protest against the right of an Assembly to hold the threat of veto over me a dozen years in succession. They have their chance once, and if they don't veto my appointment then, they ought not to have the chance four or five years hence. . . . I tell you it is in the interest of freedom. . . ." Cited in G. L. Prentiss, The Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York: Its Design and Another Decade of its History (Asbury Park, New Jersey: Pennypacker, 1899), pp. 123-24.

170. Legal Opinion, p. 14.

171. Stonehouse, Machen, p. 424.

172. Legal Opinion, pp. 22-24.

173. Stonehouse, Machen, p. 439.

174. "New Board Pledges Seminary to Faith," New York Times (June 15, 1929), p. 15.

175. Ibid.

176. Winthrop S. Hudson, Religion in America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965), p. 270.

177. Ibid.

178. Ibid.

179. "Charges Deception in Seminary Change," ibid. (June 17, 1929), p. 9.

180. "Machen Proposes a New Seminary," ibid. (June 18, 1929), p. 22.

181. Ibid.

182. Stonehouse, Machen, p. 441.

183. Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 147.

184. Stonehouse, Machen, p. 441.

185. Hart, "Doctor Fundamentalis," p. 295n.

186. Stonehouse, Machen, p. 450.

187. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1930, p. 40.

188. White, Van Til, p. 89.

189. Machen, "Westminster Theological Seminary: Its Purpose and Plan" (1929), in Studying the New Testament Today: New Testament Student, edited by John H. Skilton (Philipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1974), p. 169.

190. "Machen Proposes a New Seminary," New York Times (June 18, 1929), p. 22.

191. Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1931).

192. Adolph Keller, Religion and Revolution: Problems of Contemporary Christianity on the European Scene (New York: Revell, 1934), p. 62.

193. Ibid., pp. 61-62.

194. Ibid., p. 66.

195. In his unpublished--and deservedly so--Ph.D. dissertation, W. J. Watson announces confidently: "Yet Princeton Seminary no more became a liberal institution after Machen left it than it had been a fundamentalist institution before." Watson, Idea of Pluralism, p. 159. First, Princeton had never been a fundamentalist institution; it had been Calvinist. Second, Barthianism is not conservative in relation to the Westminster Confession of Faith. Watson's theological assessment is clouded by his humanistic worldview, which led him to refer to Charles Briggs' opponents as "extreme reactionaries" (ibid., p. 38). Such language is within the bounds of political correctness at Yale University.

196. Van Til answered Barth in a comprehensive fashion in the late 1940's--an answer based explicitly on the Creator-creature distinction. Prior to this, the followers of the Old Princeton tradition were ill-equipped to handle the practical and theoretical problems associated with creedal revision. Van Til's apologetics relied on God's decree and man's analogical reasoning as a creature: approaching a fixed, unchanging truth. Creedal revision is valid because covenant-keeping men improve their knowledge of God and His creation over time. God does not change, but covenant-keeping man's understanding of Him does.

197. Benjamin B. Warfield, "The One Hundred and Fourth General Assembly," Presbyterian and Reformed Review, 3 (1892), p. 531.

198. John de Witt, "Dr. Roberts' Article on Seminary Control," ibid., 4 (1893), p. 125.

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