11

CONFLICT OVER FOREIGN MISSIONS

The missionary movement is the great religious movement of our day.

J. Gresham Machen (1913)⁽¹⁾

In the three years following the reorganization at Princeton, there was relative calm within the Presbyterian Church, but trouble was brewing. It had been brewing for a long time. Church historian Sidney E. Mead discusses this trouble: missions.

But during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth, real belief in the all-sufficiency of this kind of [world-converting] missions declined, at least among those of the top leadership in most of the large denominations. During this period enlightened theological professors hand in hand with "Princes of the Pulpit," responding to the impact of scientific thinking in the garb of evolution and to the deplorable economic and social conditions in the burgeoning industrial society, shaped the "new theology" and the "social gospel." Inevitably as their views came to prevail the conception of the work of the church underwent changes, and missions were metamorphosed from the simple task of winning converts to which, it was assumed, all else would be added, to the complex task of participating actively in social betterment and reconstruction. Foreign missions, from being simple outposts of Christian evangelization, became outposts of the latest technological, medical, agricultural, and educational knowledge and practice being developed in the United States.⁽²⁾

Mead then asks a rhetorical question: "Why would the devoted medical missionary in Africa, China, or India be closely examined regarding his views on the Trinity of [sic: or] the Virgin Birth, or any other `merely' theological views for that matter?" The missions agencies agreed. In 1921, W. H. Griffith Thomas had created a brief sensation with his public accusations regarding modernism on the mission field. In 1932, the long-smoldering crisis over missions would break out again.

Conservatives Are Squeezed Out

Meanwhile, the final consolidation of the boards and commissions of the Church took place in the three years after Princeton's reorganization: before the battle over foreign missions. Change was accelerating. For example, the 1929 General Assembly sent down an overture to the presbyteries that women be allowed to be ordained as elders: ruling and teaching. The overture failed: 170 to 108, with 7 not acting.⁽³⁾ A parallel overture, allowing women to serve as ruling elders and deacons, passed: 158 to 118.⁽⁴⁾ For the first time in Presbyterian history, women could lawfully speak in God's name in a Church court. Machen and the Old School had remained remarkably silent on this issue. They apparently did not see it as fundamental. They did not organize a protest.

At the 1930 General Assembly, Rev. Samuel G. Craig, editor of the newly formed conservative journal, Christianity Today, introduced a motion to take the question of Princeton's reorganization to the civil courts in New Jersey. He felt that because some private legal opinion deemed the Trustee's alteration of the Charter illegal, the final test should come in legal action. This motion was soundly defeated. No further action was taken by the orthodox wing to challenge the reorganization.

That same year saw the trial of dispensational fundamentalist pastor Donald Grey Barnhouse. He was a minister in Philadelphia's Tenth Presbyterian Church. Barnhouse had announced from the pulpit that he would rather die than have a liberal preach in his pulpit. Pressured by the presbytery, he apologized, and his presbytery accepted his apology. The liberals in the presbytery did not; they appealed to the Synod of Pennsylvania, who ordered the presbytery to try him for breach of the ninth commandment and violation of his ordination vows. He was convicted.⁽⁵⁾ The liberals had begun to employ negative sanctions with a vengeance. Barnhouse was only admonished mildly, but the conviction set an example, as convictions are supposed to. It seemed to persuade Barnhouse of the futility of protest. (In 1935, he went on a tour of Presbyterian foreign missions. When he returned, he published a generally favorable report in The Presbyterian. "I have every reason to believe that most of our missionaries hold to the historic truths of the Christian faith as expressed in the creedal statement of our denomination."⁽⁶⁾) The trial convinced Machen that conservative dissenters would be convicted if they spoke the truth about liberalism.⁽⁷⁾

In a long article in Christianity Today (May 1930), Machen continued to warn that modernism and Christianity are rival religions, and that they cannot be maintained for long in the same Church. He surveyed the history of the decline of orthodoxy within the Church: the 1906 union with the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, the widespread support for the Plan of Church Union in 1920, the Auburn Affirmation in 1923, the restructuring of Princeton Seminary in 1929. "The doctrinal drift is also practically in complete control of the agencies of public discussion," by which he meant denominational magazines. What to do about it? Face the facts; avoid paring down our ecclesiastical program; support Christianity Today; support Westminster Seminary; keep our banner flying in the Church's councils; avoid despair.⁽⁸⁾ This is a program suited to a remnant on the distant fringes of authority, not a movement strong enough to threaten the imposition of negative institutional sanctions. (By 1935, he was openly calling his supporters a remnant.)⁽⁹⁾

Machen vs. Speer

Five months later, Machen again sounded the alarm in a long review of Robert E. Speer's book, Some Living Issues. Machen and Speer had exchanged long letters in 1929 regarding the Foreign Missions Board.⁽¹⁰⁾ The problem was not just modernism; the problem more and more was the compromise with modernism by peace-seekers in the Church. Machen understood that there were three forces in the Church. In Christianity and Liberalism he had discussed two. But a this was insufficient. In any confessional or ideological organization, the larger, less committed middle will decide which way the organization goes. It will choose which shepherd to follow. Machen warned his followers of the institutional drift of the Church's center towards modernism. The mobilizing issue for Machen, as always, was the Auburn Affirmation. There were three possible responses to it, he said: oppose it, support it, or delay making a judgment. Speer was taking the third option. This third position, Machen said, was the most dangerous to the life of the Church, for it allows men to believe that they are not very far down the road to unbelief when they are very far down that road.

With regard to that issue, three positions are possible and are actually being taken today. In the first place, one may stand unreservedly for the old Faith and unreservedly against the indifferentist tendency in the modern Church; in the second place, one may stand unreservedly for Modernism and against the old Faith; and in the third place, one may ignore the seriousness of the issue and seek, without bringing it to a head, to preserve the undisturbed control of the present organization in the Church. It is this last attitude that is represented by the book now under review. Dr. Robert E. Speer certainly presents himself not as a Modernist but as an adherent of the historic Christian Faith; yet he takes no clear stand in the great issue of the day, but rather adopts an attitude of reassurance and palliation, according high praise and apparently far-reaching agreement to men of very destructive views. . . .

It is this palliative or reassuring attitude which, we are almost inclined to think, constitutes the most serious menace to the life of the Church today; it is in some ways doing more harm than clear-sighted Modernism can do. The representatives of it are often much farther from the Faith than they themselves know; and they are leading others much farther away than they have been led themselves. Obviously such a tendency in the Church deserves very careful attention from thoughtful men. . . .

But when it is considered, fairness demands that it should be considered not in its poorest, but in its best, representatives. That is our justification for occupying so much space with the present review. Dr. Robert E. Speer is perhaps the most distinguished and eloquent popular representative of what is commonly called the "middle-of-the-road" or pacifist position with regard to the great religious issue of the day.⁽¹¹⁾

This was an undisguised frontal assault against the most popular man in the denomination . . . and the most influential. Their confrontation would escalate in 1932, for Speer was still the head of the Board of Foreign Missions, where the maelstrom would appear. Machen would learn, 1932 to 1936, what Briggs learned in 1893: success or failure institutionally in the Presbyterian Church would be based on the middle group's assessment of the combatants' rhetoric. Speer avoided all confrontational rhetoric; Machen, as a defender of a shrinking minority position, could not do the same. A man in any public organization whose colleagues control the bureaucratic machinery as well as the legislature's votes can afford to be non-confrontational. A man with neither had better be ready for a long institutional battle if he chooses to be equally non-confrontational. This is what the liberals had decided when van Dyke had proposed the strategy in 1893. The fruits of their patience had already begun to bloom. Speer could afford to remain bureaucratically bland in public. He had control.

Centralization Continues Quietly

In January, 1931, Machen began a series in Christianity Today titled, "Notes on Biblical Exposition." It continued for two years until the issue of foreign missions caught his attention. This series was a popular study of Paul's ministry. Rare was any reference in it to contemporary topics. It was as if Machen decided to pull back from the fray in order to write articles that could have been written a century earlier by any competent conservative theologian. Timelessness is surely a secondary goal for anyone who finds himself in the midst of a life-and-death struggle. The series seems to reflect a conscious decision on Machen's part to shift the precious resource of time--his and his readers'--away from the Presbyterian conflict and toward traditional Presbyterian academic affairs. Very few other articles by Machen appeared in the interim, yet Christianity Today had become the only outlet for the exclusivists. The major exception was his three-part article on "The Truth About the Presbyterian Church," which attacked the newly created Permanent Judicial Commission,⁽¹²⁾ the secrecy of the Church's councils and courts,⁽¹³⁾ and the proposed plan of union with the United Presbyterians.⁽¹⁴⁾ That Machen, as the intellectual leader of the Old School forces, not to mention the intellectual leader of American fundamentalism, would go into what amounted to near-seclusion journalistically for almost two years seems odd in retrospect. His book, The Virgin birth of Christ,⁽¹⁵⁾ appeared in 1930, so it was not that he was too busy with a more important writing project.

The Calm Before the Storm

The 1931 General Assembly was, on the surface, an uneventful meeting. It offered testimony of a truce. In a feature article that appeared in the June 17, 1931, issue of Christian Century, John Ray Ewers observed: "The evangelical group, or the solid middle-of-the-road crowd, predominates. There seems to be no lunatic fringe. . . . It is essential to obtain this picture of this strong, dependable, middle-of-the-road crowd in order to understand the happenings in this assembly."⁽¹⁶⁾

The inclusivists' candidate for Moderator, Lewis S. Mudge, who was also the stated Clerk of the Church, was elected narrowly. Commenting editorially on this fact, Christianity Today concluded that this near defeat was probably not due to any disfavor of Mudge personally, but to "the feeling that he had been put forward by the same group that has been virtually dictating the election of moderators as well as important appointments for a number of years." The editorial continued: "It seems to us, therefore, that the vote for moderator indicates that there are more in the Church than many had supposed who disapprove of those tendencies that have been in evidence in the Presbyterian Church in recent years."⁽¹⁷⁾ The future seemed unsure, but not necessarily foreboding. The summary view of the conservative journal on the 142nd General Assembly was fairly neutral: "As a whole it, perhaps, offers more warrant for encouragement on the part of conservatives than did the assemblies immediately preceding. This, however, is not saying a great deal."⁽¹⁸⁾

This was all an illusion. The General Council had introduced to the General Assembly a proposed revision of the Book of Discipline, the first major revision since 1884.⁽¹⁹⁾ Discussions of the proposed revision would continue through 1933, when the presbyteries overwhelmingly voted for it: 190 to 13, with 11 abstentions.⁽²⁰⁾ In September of 1933, seven months before the change became law, Mudge initiated the first step in the purge of Machen and his allies. The institutional issue was the financial support of Church boards, particularly Foreign Missions. The judicial issue would be ecclesiastical submission. The theological issue would be liberalism: the Auburn Affirmation vs. the Westminster Confession of Faith.

At the 1931 Assembly a resolution supporting the Church's continuing participation in the Federal Council of Churches was passed, which included this ringing declaration: "A Central Agency like the Federal Council of Churches standing on the rock of Evangelical faith and the Deity of Christ and directly responsible to the Evangelical Churches of the United States is indispensable."⁽²¹⁾ A year later, the General Council announced in the name of the General Assembly: "That we record our gratitude to God for the growing consciousness of Christian unity which has found expression through the Federal Council. We are conscious of the necessity of finding the mind of Christ in the field of moral and social issues which press upon all our churches."⁽²²⁾

Centralization

The move toward greater centralization continued unabated. The liberals continued to extend their control over the Church's administrative machinery. The newly created Permanent Judicial Commission, which by 1931 had become the highest court of appeal, had eight ministers and seven elders. Half of the ministers, Machen noted, had signed the Auburn Affirmation. Signers of the Affirmation also held high positions in the Board of Foreign Missions and the Board of Christian Education.⁽²³⁾ Yet only 14 percent of the ministers had signed it. Their representation at the highest levels of Church authority was not a random distribution.

The centralization of judicial procedure within the Church was almost complete. Machen called the Permanent Judicial Commission "now practically the supreme doctrinal as well as disciplinary authority in the Church."⁽²⁴⁾ He did not yet recognize the magnitude of the shift: after 1931, there was no further need for a supreme doctrinal authority. The issue of doctrine never again became an official issue in the Northern Presbyterian Church's supreme court.

The 1932 Assembly, held in Denver, likewise saw the relative absence of doctrinal discussion. The much smaller United Presbyterian Church had submitted a plan of union to the 1930 General Assembly, and both denominations began to discuss this at their respective 1932 General Assemblies. The General Assembly did vote to merge in 1934, but the United Presbyterians voted against it. They were afraid of being swallowed by the larger Church.⁽²⁵⁾

The move toward further centralization could not be stopped. An overture to dissolve the General Council (Presbytery of Steubenville) and another to reorganize it and strip it of its authority to "originate or put into operation any matter that has not been referred to it by the General Assembly" (Philadelphia North and 18 other presbyteries)⁽²⁶⁾ were answered in the negative by the Committee on Bills and Overtures.⁽²⁷⁾ In the New York Times, shortly after the Assembly ended, several ministers who had attended were quoted as saying that the Assembly had been a machine. These critics were not all disgruntled conservatives, and their criticisms were not along doctrinal lines. This time, the dissention was purely an administrative matter. One minister, Daniel Russell, who described himself as a conservative, attacked the Assembly outspokenly: "Of course, there is no longer any democracy in the General Assembly. That day has gone by. Democracy certainly has failed there." Rev. Nelson Chester could not agree that the whole Church was undemocratic, but he did agree that the Assembly had been a machine.⁽²⁸⁾

Disputes: Doctrinal or Administrative?

The confusion between doctrinal disputes and administrative measures had been a paramount feature of Church government for ten years. By the end of 1932, this distinction was clearer. The new doctrinal orientation of the Church was in complete opposition to theological conservatism. A new controversy appeared which proved impossible to reconcile, and it eventually resulted in the secession of the conservatives.

The renewal of open warfare within the Church centered, as it had a decade earlier, around a prominent liberal member and a liberal document, with Machen leading the orthodox opposition against both. In the early 1920's, the issue had been, primarily, that of ordination, and the attention of the Church had focused on the case of Fosdick and the Auburn Affirmation. In the latter part of the decade, the controversy had centered around education, specifically Princeton. Now the battlefield shifted to the third element that made up the Church's program, missions. In 1921, W. H. Griffith Thomas had unleashed an attack on the missionary enterprise in China, charging Presbyterian missionaries with cooperation with modernist, and even atheistic, institutions. He had gained little support. Eleven years later, such a charge, introduced into a temporarily calm but supercharged atmosphere within the Church, provided a spark which rocked Presbyterianism to the core.

Rumors of Theological War

For two decades, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had employed denominationalist Speer and ecumenist John R. Mott.⁽²⁹⁾ Mott had headed numerous Rockefeller-funded religious organizations: the International Missionary Council, the International Missionary Agricultural Council, the Panama Conference on Christian Work in Latin America, the Committee on Cooperation in Latin America (along with Speer), the Committee on Benevolence, and the Committee on Social and Religious Surveys.⁽³⁰⁾ This final organization later became the Institute for Social and Religious Research (ISRR). As one historian has put it, "Standard Oil was Mott's organizational model. He incorporated the culture and methods of corporations into the missionary movement. Over the years, millions of Rockefeller dollars poured into Mott's pursuit of streamlined, efficient evangelism."⁽³¹⁾ As early as 1910, Rockefeller sent Mott to China to help establish Peking Union Medical College.⁽³²⁾

In the pre-World War I era, writes Schenkel, "Every Protestant leader--Speer included--was in a hurry, and the taint of Rockefeller money was not sufficient cause for qualms."⁽³³⁾ Speer became, in Schenkel's words, a "trusted associate" of Rockefeller's.⁽³⁴⁾ In 1920, Speer was elected president of the Federal Council of Churches, an organization that Rockefeller's money helped start in 1908. Rockefeller was impressed with his work there: Speer seemed cautious.⁽³⁵⁾ Rockefeller was wise; in 1923, the Southern Presbyterian Church almost pulled out of the FCC, but Speer's plea before the General Assembly prevented it.⁽³⁶⁾

The ISRR

In 1920, Rockefeller had joined and then bailed out of the Interchurch World Movement, with a combination of cash and loans forgiven. He had put $1.5 million of his own money into this venture, which then collapsed.⁽³⁷⁾ Two years after the collapse of the IWM, Rockefeller established the Institute for Social and Religious Research (ISRR). It inherited the research files of the IWM. Speer had advised him in 1920 about the kind of organization it should be: a research program to help the denominations carry out activities.⁽³⁸⁾ Raymond Fosdick had other ideas. He wanted the money used for social research. He wanted it to parallel the work of the Social Science Research Council, which was set up with Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund money in 1923. The ISSR funded the famous Middletown research (Muncie, Indiana) conducted by Progressivist Robert Lynd, a former Union Seminary student, and his wife, Helen.⁽³⁹⁾ This study has been used ever since by liberals to flay the class divisions of American life. The ISRR Board disapproved of its class-division emphasis, and Rockefeller did not fund its publication; the book nevertheless became a best-seller.⁽⁴⁰⁾ From 1923 to 1928, Rockefeller donated $1.35 million to the ISRR.⁽⁴¹⁾ From its inception in 1921 until 1934, Mott was its president.⁽⁴²⁾

Beginning in 1930, the ISRR funded the Laymen's Foreign Mission Inquiry, which represented the major denominations of American Christianity. Mott was a major influence in the Laymen's Inquiry. As chairman of the International Missionary Council, Mott had produced a world missions report in 1928-29 that had caught Rockefeller's attention.⁽⁴³⁾ Rockefeller had consulted fellow-Baptist Harry Emerson Fosdick regarding the study project, who had expressed doubts about Christian proselyting done by Baptist missionaries.⁽⁴⁴⁾ He also consulted Speer, who objected to an independent agency's conducting the investigation.⁽⁴⁵⁾ He did not take Speer's advice. An independent group conducted the study. The members of the Laymen's Committee were not official spokesmen of their respective denominations. Rockefeller gave $363,000⁽⁴⁶⁾--a large sum in the depression years.

The treasurer was James Miliken Speers, the vice-president of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions.⁽⁴⁷⁾ He was a prominent merchant. He had also served in the IWM, first as its treasurer,⁽⁴⁸⁾ later as chairman of the Executive Committee when Mott resigned. Rockefeller and Fosdick then shut it down.⁽⁴⁹⁾ After it had shut down, an auditor complained to Rockefeller of the "criminal carelessness" of those handling the IWM's affairs.⁽⁵⁰⁾ In 1937, Speers served on the committee that produced the anti-capitalist economic report of the Oxford Conference on Church, Community, and State.⁽⁵¹⁾ Mott was chairman of that committee.⁽⁵²⁾ This conference was the pre-War prototype of what became the World Council of Churches in 1948. The name was proposed at the 1937 conference by liberal Presbyterian Samuel McCrea Cavert, the General Secretary of the Federal Council.⁽⁵³⁾ Cavert, Mott, and Robert E. Speer had served together on the General War-Time Commission in 1917.⁽⁵⁴⁾ My point is simple: the two leading lay figures on the Board of Foreign Missions, Speer and Speers, worked closely with the same group of dedicated modernists who created the World Council of Churches a decade and a half later. They were all closely associated with Rockefeller, who was the top donor to the World Council for two decades, 1939 to 1959.⁽⁵⁵⁾

Toward the end of 1932, reports began to circulate that the conclusions reached by the group were highly biased against the traditional conception of missions, and conservatives in all denominations began to take alarm. On November 18, an official but incomplete report was published by the Appraisal Commission of the Laymen's Foreign Mission Inquiry. The next day, November 19, Mott delivered a speech at the Roosevelt Hotel. Mott referred to the "widespread discussion in progress due to reading of the inadequate press releases."⁽⁵⁶⁾ But he tried to put a good face on this. Discussion is healthy. He pointed to the report's "downright frankness and courage."⁽⁵⁷⁾ He thanked Rockefeller, "that splendid layman"--his full-time employer for over a decade--for his "vision, courageous initiative, generous co-operation, and wise counsel. . . ."⁽⁵⁸⁾ All of this was designed to produce "the liberation of greater lay forces and relating them to the plans of the expanding Kingdom of Christ."⁽⁵⁹⁾ Here was the lifetime theme of layman John R. Mott: to extend God's kingdom through laymen. The report was ignored by most laymen, but it briefly aroused the fury of conservative pastors.

The Gauntlet Is Thrown Down

In the November 30 edition of Christian Century, an editorial appeared, "Is Modernism Ready?" The editorial praised the report of the Appraisal Commission, calling it "the most formidable critique" that had appeared in the hundred-year history of American missions. It warned prophetically: "A major battle looms on the horizon of Protestant Christianity. It is no academic battle of ideas, this time, though it will bring into play the whole ideology of both traditional and modern thought. But the basic functioning of organized Christianity is involved. When you touch the missionary enterprise you touch everything that goes by the name Christian. Is modernism ready to take over so fundamental a function as the long cherished enterprise of Christian missions?"

This time, the editorial stated, the liberal elements of the Christian churches were taking the initiative, putting the conservatives on the defensive. To date, said Christian Century, liberals had been a minority, and so had contented themselves with the status quo, not willing to challenge established institutions and programs of their denominations so long as conservatives left them in peace. "But that period of silent and uncritical acquiescence in the status quo has passed, and the Laymen's report is the signal that it has passed."

The editorial pointed to the decreasing number of qualified missionaries available to Protestant churches, blaming much of the drop on "the obsolescence of dogmatic orthodoxy." This had been a familiar theme of the liberals for a generation: orthodoxy is turning away bright young candidates for the ministry. The editorial then appealed to liberal churchmen to join in an attack on the conservative bastion of missions, since liberals were no longer minority participants. "Modernists are not now a minority in Protestant leadership. They are no longer merely tolerated in the churches. They represent the most effective influence in all the progressive communions. They cannot escape the responsibility that goes with numerical strength and accepted leadership. . . . Are modernists ready for the discharge of the responsibility which the commission, in making this report, has assumed on their behalf? Are they willing to take the consequences of the principles which the commission has laid down?"

As it turned out, modernists did not bother to concern themselves about such threatening consequences. They did not need to.

 

Pearl S. Buck Intervenes

The impact of this editorial would have been even greater had it not been dwarfed by a review of the Laymen's report in the preceding issue by the best-known American missionary, Pearl S. Buck. Her novel, The Good Earth (1931), had just won the Pulitzer Prize. Mrs. Buck had been sent to China with her husband under the auspices of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church. Conservatives were aghast that someone representing their Church in the mission field could have written an article as unorthodox as this one. For six months, the controversy over missions within the Presbyterian Church would center around her. Then it shifted to Machen.

Mrs. Buck was enamored with the report, which was published in book form one month later under the name Re-Thinking Missions. "I have not read merely a report. I have read a unique book, a great book. . . . The first three chapters are the finest exposition of religion I have ever read."⁽⁶⁰⁾ Then she went on to offer her own critique of the missionary enterprise, insisting that missionaries in China had been far too concerned with preaching the message of salvation through Christ, rather than meeting the material needs of the people. Missionaries had, in her opinion, been isolating themselves from the Chinese community by laying such stress on the Christian gospel. "I am weary to death with this incessant preaching," she concluded. "It deadens all thought, it confuses all issues, it is producing in our Chinese church a horde of hypocrites. . . ."

This was too much for the conservatives. To call the traditional gospel of Christ into question, to put it on a level below that of material aid, was a challenge which could not go by without comment or action. Now the flood gates were opened, and three decades of pent-up feelings of bitterness, of disgust with the new theology, or frustration at being thwarted by the Church's administration, were released, not just in the Presbyterian Church, and Mrs. Buck found herself at the center of this protest.

Pearl Buck was known in Presbyterian circles as the wife of J. Lossing Buck, a Presbyterian missionary to China. She is described by Stonehouse as "Mrs. J. Lossing (Pearl) Buck."⁽⁶¹⁾

I have not seen any of the books and articles on the Presbyterian conflict that discuss who Mrs. Buck really was during this period. She was a world-famous novelist, of course, but she would soon become much more. Yet her autobiography, My Several Worlds (1954), she does not mention her role in the Presbyterian conflict. Regarding this aspect of her several worlds, her readers were not informed about who she had been, just as readers of books and dissertations about the Presbyterian conflict have not been informed about the world she entered into in 1932.

She returned from China in August, 1932, with her husband, who was on a missionary's sabbatical, and who enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Columbia University. In the month that she wrote her initial review of the Laymen's Report, November, 1932, she had begun an emotional relationship--though not adulterous--with her publisher at The John Day Company, Richard Walsh.⁽⁶²⁾ He asked her to marry him in early 1933.⁽⁶³⁾ Later that year, when she and her husband--his Ph.D. already completed!--returned to China, she announced to him that she intended to separate from him for a year.⁽⁶⁴⁾ (On their way back to China, they had visited Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the founders of the Fabian Society, at their English estate.)⁽⁶⁵⁾ She returned to the U.S. in 1934, divorced her husband in absentia in 1935 in the quick-divorce city of Reno, Nevada, and immediately married Walsh. Three decades later, she told her biographer, "I wasn't convinced--I never have been convinced--about marriage."⁽⁶⁶⁾ So much for her commitment to marriage and the mission field.

If this were the story of just another broken marriage covenant, it would not be worth mentioning. If Mrs. Buck-Walsh had been just another liberal, it would also not matter--Machen argued with a lot of them. But because of who Richard Walsh was, it does matter. He was not just an editor. He was the president of the company.⁽⁶⁷⁾ He was more than just the president of a book publishing firm. He has been described as one of three "family agents" of the Straight family.⁽⁶⁸⁾ That made all the difference.

I now must make a brief detour. The following material relates only peripherally to the Presbyterian conflict. It relates heavily to the American Establishment, modernist in its cultural commitment, for which Machen's theology was anathema. It was Progressive in its politics, for which Machen's Whig liberalism was anathema. Machen was up against an entrenched, well-funded machine, not just inside the Church but outside it. Pearl S. Buck went from the Presbyterian missions field in China straight into the Establishment. Through that Establishment, she gained access to the New Republic, for which she wrote Machen's obituary in 1937. The influence she wielded after 1932 was the result of her connection to the system of influence that directed elite public opinion in the United States in that era. To present a picture of what Machen was up against, I must spend a few pages describing the subsequent connections of Pearl S. Buck.

Straight into the Establishment

Willard and Dorothy Straight founded The New Republic in 1914 and retained ownership of it. It enjoyed Dorothy's financial support until 1953. This journal launched the foreign policy career of Walter Lippmann, who became the most influential columnist in America for the next half century.⁽⁶⁹⁾ Willard in 1914 was employed by J. P. Morgan & Co.⁽⁷⁰⁾ His big break in life had come while he was working in Korea as a reporter in his twenties in 1904. He had been recruited by E. H. Harriman, the multi-millionaire stockbroker and owner, since 1898, of the Union Pacific Railroad. Harriman was a close associate of William Rockefeller, John D. Sr.'s brother, who owned National City Bank (later called Citibank).

Harriman in 1904 was trying to create an around-the-world transportation system. He met Straight in Korea and hired him as his agent in the region. In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt invited Straight to the White House for a personal chat and then appointed him to be the U.S. Consul in Mukden in Manchuria--the only State Department representative north of the Great Wall.⁽⁷¹⁾ Chernow describes Straight as "the most dashing, adventurous agent in Morgan history. . . ."⁽⁷²⁾ In 1910, when he came to Morgan headquarters, he was, in Chernow's words, "appalled at the way the House of Morgan bossed around the State Department." As Straight said, "It was not difficult to see where the real power lies in this country."⁽⁷³⁾

Paralleling the Straight family's career, the Harriman family became one of the dominant influences in American life. Harriman's daughter in 1910 would begin funding the eugenics movement in America. His son Averell became one of the six "Wise Men" who dominated American foreign policy after World War I until the Vietnam War.⁽⁷⁴⁾ Averell's infusion of funds into the English private banking firm of Brown Brothers in 1930 and again in 1933 saved the prestigious but hard-pressed firm from bankruptcy and made him a partner in a re-named Brown Brothers, Harriman.⁽⁷⁵⁾ (Harriman's younger partner, Prescott Bush,⁽⁷⁶⁾ did well with the firm and also as a U.S. Senator; Prescott's son George had a decent career, too, though not with the bank.) Averell's much younger widow Pamela, formerly the daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill, was regarded as the most powerful woman in the Democratic Party until Hillary Clinton's husband was elected President in 1992. She raised $12 million for the Party in the 1980's, and had known and liked Clinton since 1980.⁽⁷⁷⁾ Beginning in early 1992, she had worked to win him the Party's nomination.⁽⁷⁸⁾ He succeeded. He appointed her U.S. Ambassador to France in 1993. So, from E. H. Harriman to his daughter-in-law, we see over nine decades of power-brokering in Washington.⁽⁷⁹⁾

In 1911, Straight decided to marry America's richest heiress, orphan Dorothy Payne Whitney, worth $7 million at the time--in today's money, around $150 million. To persuade the Whitneys to allow her to marry below her station, he asked Roosevelt to intercede, which he did.⁽⁸⁰⁾ Straight died at the Paris Peace Conference in December of 1918, while assisting Wilson's agent, "Colonel" E. M. House. In 1919, Dorothy would help found the New School for Social Research, a liberal and sometimes radical university.⁽⁸¹⁾

The New Republic was one of the two most influential journals of opinion in the United States in the 1930's, the other being the Nation. Both had circulations of 30,000 to 40,000. In regard to the influence of the New Republic, it is useful to cite radical journalist I. F. Stone, who published a review in the Nation (Oct. 21, 1939) of Felix Frankfurter's book, Law and Politics (1939). Frankfurter had been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court the previous January. Frankfurter was a liberal: a member of House's "Inquiry" staff, which did the planning for the Paris peace conference in 1919,⁽⁸²⁾ a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920, and a Harvard Law School professor. After the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, he became one of Roosevelt's most trusted scouts for recruiting talent to serve in the New Deal.⁽⁸³⁾ More to the point, he had been a New Republic staffer from its beginning in 1914. Ronald Steel writes: "He soon spread himself over the entire magazine, writing articles, furnishing legal advice, and joining in editorial conferences."⁽⁸⁴⁾ In his book review, Stone made this observation: "If I may be forgiven for speaking of The Nation's weekly comrade-in-arms, the young men who started the New Republic were concerned not so much with influencing the masses as with influencing important men."⁽⁸⁵⁾ In this, they surely achieved.

The world of the American Establishment was (and remains) a world in which very rich people have moved in very liberal circles, funding the activities of those who, on first glance--before you follow the money--are their mortal enemies. This world is a secure and pleasant one for those inside its protective boundaries. The funding that provides this security is part of the control exercised by the rich over the would-be weathermakers of the climate of public opinion. For example, when Mrs. Buck first aroused some mild displeasure from the missions board, Rockefeller wrote to one of his subordinates recommending that she be hired by the Riverside Church as a missionary should she be fired by the Presbyterians.⁽⁸⁶⁾ This did not become necessary. In 1937, when she published an obituary of Machen in The New Republic, she was part of the Straight publishing empire. That empire was soon to be extended by the Straight family's heir, Michael, who at age 22 returned to the United States in 1938.⁽⁸⁷⁾ He was legally in control of New Republic, Asia, and Theatre Arts; he participated in the overseeing of the Museum of Modern Art. Richard Walsh and his wife ran Asia for him. Walsh was also president of the holding company of New Republic.⁽⁸⁸⁾

To understand how the American Establishment has operated in the twentieth century, consider Georgetown University historian Carroll Quigley's discussion of the family connections of Dorothy Payne-Whitney-Straight-Elmhirst.

She was the daughter of William C. Whitney, New York utility millionaire and the sister and co-heiress of Oliver Payne, of the Standard Oil trust." One of her brothers married Gertrude Vanderbilt, while the other, Payne Whitney, married the daughter of Secretary of State John Hay, who enunciated the American policy of the "Open Door" in China. In the next generation, three first cousins, John Hay ("Jock") Whitney, Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney, and Michael Whitney ("Mike") Straight, were allied in numerous public policy enterprises of a propagandist nature, and all three served in varied roles in the late New Deal and Truman administrations. In these they were closely allied with other "Wall Street liberals," such as Nelson Rockefeller.⁽⁸⁹⁾

It is worth noting that Quigley taught history to Bill Clinton, who referred to him favorably in his July 16, 1992, Presidential nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.

To an extent not sufficiently emphasized by Machen's biographers and others who have written about the Presbyterian conflict, Machen was challenging the American Establishment. Through his family's connections, Machen had spent his life close enough to the Establishment to know exactly what he was facing. He knew he was not involved in some cultural side-show peripheral to American civilization. But this was not the impression which readers obtained from Rian's Presbyterian Conflict (1940) and Loetscher's Broadening Church (1954), which until the 1980's constituted the little-known secondary sources of the Presbyterian conflict, itself nearly forgotten for five decades.

 

The Five Points of Modernism in Missions

Re-Thinking Missions was the full report of the Appraisal Commission, the summary volume, written by Harvard's W. E. Hocking, of a seven-volume set. In the first chapter, it replaced Christianity's exclusive claims with a vague reference to an undefined "supreme good": "Whatever its present conception of the future life, there is little disposition to believe that sincere and aspiring seekers after God in other religions are to be damned: it has become less concerned in any land to save man from eternal punishment than from the danger of losing the supreme good."⁽⁹⁰⁾ It began, in other words, with the fundamental presupposition of humanism: there is no hell.

The book re-stated the theology of modernism and applied it to missions. The book was an attempt to replace traditional missiology with a new theology. The report was a plea for understanding among religions in the face of the common enemy: "materialism, secularism, naturalism." "[T]he former opponents have become to this extent allied by the common task. It is not surprising if our missions make this realignment difficult, perhaps embarrassing; it compels a thorough re-analysis of the purpose of missions in reference to other faiths."⁽⁹¹⁾ Common faiths, common task: here was modernism's call to mission. If accepted, it would mean the end of missions.

1. The Non-Sovereignty of God

The original Christian missionary impulse was based on an attitude: the uniqueness of Christianity's God. The authors understood that "the friendly recognition of other faiths means to many Christians in the mission fields and at home an essential disloyalty, a compromise with error, and a surrender of the uniqueness of Christianity." This view of the world is dominionist: ". . . the conquest of the world by Christianity. . . ." In this older view, "There was one way of salvation and one only, one name, one atonement: this plan with its particular historical center in the career of Jesus must become the point of regard for every human soul."⁽⁹²⁾ Therefore, "those in the mission field who now face toward tolerance and association have their own qualms."⁽⁹³⁾ Missionaries ask this question: "If we fraternize or accept the fellowship of the alien faith, what becomes of the original hope that Christianity will bring the world under its undivided sway? If that objective is surrendered, has not the nerve of the mission motive itself been cut?"⁽⁹⁴⁾

The authors clearly recognized the postmillennial impulse of Christian missions. This perspective had long been dominant, especially in Anglo-American missions.⁽⁹⁵⁾ In a very real sense, the world-conquering vision of Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Milner, and the Anglo-American alliance--which launched the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921--was a secular imitation of this older millennial outlook.⁽⁹⁶⁾ Rockefeller and the American Establishment had adopted this secularized postmillennial vision.

Christianity "is disposed to run out into action. It expects to be applied."⁽⁹⁷⁾ The authors viewed this viewpoint as one-sided. Christianity cannot afford "to leave to Buddhism or to Hinduism the arts of meditation."⁽⁹⁸⁾ "We would commend to the Christian Church a serious inquiry into the religious value of meditation. . . ."⁽⁹⁹⁾ The lure of Eastern mysticism for modernists was the promise of a non-cognitive encounter with an undefined, non-judgmental transcendence. It was an ancient lure.

"But perhaps the chief hope for an important deepening of self-knowledge on the part of Christendom is by way of a more thoroughgoing sharing of its life with the life of the Orient. Sharing may mean spreading abroad what one has"--notice the word may--"but sharing becomes real only as it becomes mutual, running in both directions, each teaching, each learning, each with the other meeting the unsolved problems of both."⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ There was no may associated with mutualism. Mutual sharing was the only way.

Then what is unique about Christianity? Only its particular group of doctrines. But its basic teachings are common in all religions. The Christian doctrine of a sovereign God is, for modernism, a non-sovereign doctrine.

2. The Non-Authority of the Bible

Re-Thinking Missions did not deal explicitly with the authority of the Bible except in relation to doctrines. This silence stands as a testimony to the irrelevance of the Bible to the missionary enterprise. Chapter 6, a two-section chapter, dealt with "Education: Primary and Secondary." Chapter 7, "Education: Higher," continued the theme. In none of these chapters is the Bible mentioned. The same is nearly true in the chapter on "Christian Literature."⁽¹⁰¹⁾ It mentions Bible societies in a seven-line paragraph. "As the work of these Societies is outside the sphere of our Inquiry, we have made no investigation of them."⁽¹⁰²⁾

Without the authority of the Bible to guide hierarchies as the sole source of fundamental law, there must be another source. In an evolutionary world, laws change. But what about hierarchies? We need a new set of hierarchies.

The problem with higher education in foreign missions is "the lack of unity of administration."⁽¹⁰³⁾ "We are convinced that the only remedy for this condition is the establishment of centralized authority. . . . This proposal is identical in principle with that which this Commission is making in Chapter XIV for the reorganization of the administration of missions."⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ The Church ceases to speak authoritatively. It must be replaced by administrative agencies that operate efficiently. The gospel of efficiency replaces the gospel of Jesus Christ; Frederick W. Taylor replaces the Apostle Paul.⁽¹⁰⁵⁾

3. Evolution: Doctrinal and Ethical

Missionaries need new doctrines and new ethical viewpoints. Christian doctrine must not be considered valid if it is static. To be relevant, doctrine must evolve with the times. The older missionary enterprise did not appreciate this. It was doctrine-centered. Times have changed. Doctrine must become subordinate, as it was with Jesus, to "the realization and fulfillment of life."

For years in most of these mission fields the message has been doctrine-centered, sometimes almost centered upon the use of phrases. The preaching, the Bible teaching and the Sunday school work with children has been to a very large extent built around theological conceptions. However effective this method may have been in the past, for the period now before us and for awakened minds, it is psychologically the wrong approach to begin with complicated abstract doctrines, dogmatically asserted. It runs counter to the well-tested methods in education now in vogue throughout the world. The Christianity which is to convince and bring spiritual content to thoughtful and serious-minded persons in any part of the world today must put the emphasis where the founder of Christianity himself put it from the first, namely, upon the realization and fulfillment of life and upon those methods and processes and energies by which life can be brought to its divine possibilities. This does not mean in any sense that the interpretation of Christianity in ways that fit the intellectual needs of man's life is unimportant. It only means that stereotyped patterns of doctrine and static phrases which have gone dead should give place to a thoroughly vital message, expressed in the living forms of thought which convince and persuade the mind today.⁽¹⁰⁶⁾

This is process theology. It sees "processes and energies" as the means by which life attains its "divine possibilities." The absolute Creator-creature distinction of Christian theology, including its assertion of the unique divinity of Jesus Christ -- as distinct from His perfect humanity -- is denied by these words. There is nothing divine in man, according to orthodox Christianity; divinity is an exclusive attribute of God.

The book made a frontal attack on orthodox Christianity when it stated that in the mission field, "Conformity is by no means desirable. Differences of thought and emphasis should be welcomed. They become tragic only when each one of those who disagree claims to be infallibly right. . . ."⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ Doctrinal rigidity hampers missionary activity. This had been Speer's message from the beginning of his career; it was also the message of modernism.

What is true of doctrine is also true of ethics. The early missionaries made a mistake in this regard, too, the Inquiry concluded. They believed that converts should pull out of their pagan culture and begin rebuilding their lives exclusively in terms of Christianity's laws and ethics. Our missionaries were "repelled by the external strangeness, the plural gods, the idols, the devious elements of superstition, fear, baseness, priestly corruption." They told the new converts to abandon their pagan institutions. "This clean-breach method, experience has now amply shown mistaken." It required too heroic a break from local tradition.⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ It ignored the fact that there are many ways to God; we are all brothers in a common quest.

But the central lesson they were slower to read, though they might have been led to it by their own faith that God has not anywhere left himself without a witness. It was hard for the missions to mix with their absorbing interest in rebirth a practical recognition that the surrounding religions were religions, and as such were ways to God. Their very compassion led them to hold these "false" religions responsible for the defects of oriental society and custom, the counterpart of an equally hasty social theory which made Christianity responsible for all the advantages they felt in western life. . . .

But further, the mission is impelled by the requirements of simple truth. For after all, "we are brothers in a common quest, and the first step is to recognize it, and disarm ourselves of our prejudices."⁽¹⁰⁹⁾

The proposed process of moral unification presented in Re-Thinking Missions was not based on progressive sanctification in terms of God's authoritatively revealed law and God's electing grace. It was based on the hope that moral platitudes that are already acceptable to all peoples can be used to reconstruct all societies. In this sense, the liberals appealed to a universal "right morality" in the same way that Warfield had appealed to a universal "right reason."⁽¹¹⁰⁾ But like Warfield, who could never discover those universal principles of right reason that do, in fact, logically compel faith in the gospel, so the liberals have never found those universal moral principles that can serve as the foundation of a new world order. (Conclusion: power will have to suffice; the blue helmets of the United Nations will have to replace the golden rule.)

Noticeable also is the explicit attempt to distinguish Christian values from Western civilization. The liberals recognized that there was a very close relationship between the geographical origins of Christianity in the West and the coming of Western civilization. Max Weber had argued eloquently for the connection between the ethics of Protestantism and the origin of the institutions of Western rationalism, including capitalism.⁽¹¹¹⁾ They had to counter this argument, for to link Christianity and Western civilization would have made foreign missions seem like cultural wedges for a specific sort of religion with specific sorts of institutional consequences. This would not have been sufficiently liberal--sufficiently multi-cultural--in its vision. The idea that Christian ethics produces specific sorts of institutional products--the civilization of middle-class values--has been abhorrent to most evangelical liberal moralists. Their visions of order are anti-Western, as the rhetoric of the liberation theology (RIP) used to indicate.⁽¹¹²⁾ Theological modernists are anti-Western and anti-middle class precisely because the middle-class West is the product of historic Christianity, and they are at war with historic Christianity.

4. No Negative Sanctions

The Inquiry recognized as crucial in Western missions the impulse for world dominion: the extension of Christendom. But fundamentalist missions, like fundamentalist evangelism, have had as their central motivation the salvation of souls from eternal negative sanctions. This has also been an important motivation in all Christian missionary enterprises. What, then, of the doctrine of hell in modern missions? Re-Thinking Missions was even more silent here than it was on the authority of the Bible.

The authors presented a brief history of missions to the orient. In the early days of missions to the orient, Protestants hoped to reap a harvest of souls: ". . . millions of souls, believed to be in danger of eternal death, might be given the opportunity of life; there was but one way, the way of Christ. There was need for haste."⁽¹¹³⁾ The authors prudently did not challenge this vision of salvation from sin and eternal death. But they immediately substituted another vision, a vision of a new world order:

Mingled with this concern for individuals, there was the appealing vision of the world-wide Church. It was well to have many centers from which local extensions might begin. Around this picture of the universal Christian community gathered obscurely all that we now think of as preparation for world unity in civilization. We know that to effect an understanding in religious matters is to pave the way for an understanding in other matters. The world must eventually become a moral unity: to this end, it was necessary that the apparent localism of Christianity should be broken down. It must not be thought of as solely the religion of the West. It was because Christianity is not western, but universally human, that it must be brought back to the Orient and made at home there.⁽¹¹⁴⁾

In short, the report moved from a discussion of hell to a discussion of social theory. This does not mean that the report had no concept of sanctions. Social theory is impossible without the concept of sanctions, both positive and negative. Missionaries are to bring positive sanctions only: in education,⁽¹¹⁵⁾ literature,⁽¹¹⁶⁾ medical missions,⁽¹¹⁷⁾ agricultural missions,⁽¹¹⁸⁾ industrial missions,⁽¹¹⁹⁾ and women's interests and activities.⁽¹²⁰⁾ These positive sanctions must not be conceived as one-way activities: Western Civilization's suppression of Eastern Civilization. There must be interaction: mutual sharing.

5. Ecumenism

The quest today, the Inquiry announced, is for "world unity in civilization."⁽¹²¹⁾ This, I hasten to add, was also the quest of Christ's Apostles. The difference between the two kingdoms, Christ's and Satan's, is the differing attitudes toward the sovereignty of God, the distinction between God and His creation, the relationship between God's law and dominion, and the nature of the new birth. Satan wants a one-world State; Christ proclaims a one-world, decentralized order.⁽¹²²⁾ Satan offers dominion through the exercise and pursuit of power; Christ offers dominion through ethical conformity to God and service to man.⁽¹²³⁾ But both religions are kingdom religions, and both proclaim the world-wide locus of the ethical struggle.

The authors of Re-Thinking Missions brought together in one place virtually all of the tenets of theological liberalism of that generation. Theirs was a secular postmillennial faith. They set forth the possibility of world-wide reconstruction. They claimed that they were calling for Christian reconstruction, but it was in fact a call for the absorption of existing Christian institutions by the forces of humanism. Nevertheless, this vision of conquest by the preaching of the gospel--the gospel of world unity--motivated the liberals of that generation. They saw the possibility of creating a new world order based on shared moral reference points.

Here is the familiar refrain of first-stage liberalism--before the excommunications by second-stage liberalism begin: all roads lead to the same God. We are all sons of our universal Father. Not sons the way Cain was a son--ready to kill his biological brother--but sons in the way that liberal preaching imagines men to be: men without permanent ethical differences to divide them institutionally. But revelational ethics divides men. Thus, the liberal is adamant: we must abandon all forms of God-revealed ("exclusivist") ethics.

The final call of the Commissioners, predictably, was for ecumenical consolidation:

The need of unity on a comprehensive scale. The time has come for a plan of administrative unity on a comprehensive scale. In the homely but striking metaphor of a missionary leader in the Orient, the old model, which was once regarded as a marvel, will no longer sell. Possibly by making a few superficial improvements and introducing one or two new features it may be made to last a little longer. But certainly the wiser course is to undertake at once, in the light of experience and with a long look ahead, the construction of a new model designed to meet the needs of a new world.

A careful study of the problem in its varied aspects has convinced the Commission that the efforts heretofore made in the direction of unity and coordination have produced few significant results, but we recognize great difficulties of effecting union on a large scale. Denominational loyalties are deeply embedded in emotional religious life, and have dominated missionary effort for more than a century. There are many other intricate and perplexing questions to be solved. We believe, nevertheless, that thoughtful Protestants will not [no?] longer insist upon imposing a particular theology and polity upon the Christians of Asia; that they will desire rather to encourage the followers of Christ in the Orient to develop their religious life and their religious organizations in harmony with their own conceptions and their own genius; and that to this end they will be willing to support a far wider and bolder policy of missionary cooperation and union than has heretofore been attempted.⁽¹²⁴⁾

This was a call for "mission," but a wholly new form of mission. It was a mission from the East to the West. It was a call for world unity apart from God's revelation. It was a mission from Babylon to Jerusalem. It was another call for the top-down centralization of institutional life, another architect's vision of a new Tower of Babel.

You can guess what administrative change the Commission suggested, but just for the record I will allow the Commissioners to spell it out: "The Commission proposes, therefore, a single administrative unit for the foreign Christian enterprise in place of the complex, costly and duplicative machinery the existence of which is encumbering the great work that Christian good will is trying to do."⁽¹²⁵⁾ In short, what is needed is ecumenical unity and administrative consolidation and centralization. These goals were predictable. To make sure that nobody missed their point, the Commission offered a six-point summary of the "advantages":

(1) A new view of the functions and responsibilities of the Christian Church: a call to wider allegiances, and a rebuke to un-Christian divisiveness.

(2) An administrative basis, simple, adaptable, and economical.

(3) Centralized disbursement, accounting, and audit of funds.

(4) A body of creative leaders raised above the level of denominationalism.

(5) Experimentation under expert guidance.

(6) A united and coordinated front on the foreign field.⁽¹²⁶⁾

After reading the Report, Rockefeller wrote ecstatically to the commissioners in August:

The deep sympathy, broad grasp, keen penetration; the unquestioned faith in the fundamental, underlying, world-embracing significance of the spiritual values of true religion which these chapters reveal, coupled with the generous appreciation of all that is excellent and the courageous of defect and weaknesses, give assurance that this report if finished as it has begun is destined to have an influence not only on the religious life of the world but on civilization itself far beyond anything that has ever been dreamed or hoped.⁽¹²⁷⁾

Within three years, the Report had sunk without a trace in most denominations.⁽¹²⁸⁾ The foreign missions field had already begun to go through a series of radical changes, especially in Asia with Japan's invasion of Manchuria. Then came World War II, the post-war rise of nationalism, the national independence movements, the dissolution of the British and Dutch Empires (the last empire to fall was Portugal's--the least empire-like), the banning of foreign missionaries as agents of Western colonialism, and the rise of Communism. Re-Thinking Missions became a forgotten relic of the inter-war era of American theological modernism. But in 1932 and 1933, it created a minor sensation, revealing the wide theological diversity within American Protestantism.⁽¹²⁹⁾ It went through ten printings in six months.⁽¹³⁰⁾ It also led to the consummation of the Presbyterian conflict.

Official Reactions: Mild

The reactions of the official boards of missions of the various denominations were, to say the least, cautious. Methodists were the most wholeheartedly in support of the book. The General Council of the Presbyterian Church, while not rejecting the "constructive comments" on the machinery for selecting and training the candidates, rejected the doctrinal aspects of the report: "We cannot accept the interpretation placed by the Report upon the Christian message and the missionary objective. What is proposed is virtually a denial of evangelical Christianity. The Gospel cannot surrender its unique supremacy."⁽¹³¹⁾

The Board of Missions itself was not so clear-cut in its appraisal of the report. Quite naturally, it defended the validity of the mission work it was sponsoring, claiming that it may not have been perfect, but certainly worthy of support. Board members never took a direct stand against the doctrinal issues that the report had raised, as the General Council had done, but instead limited themselves to a carefully worded statement that reaffirmed the Board's "abiding loyalty to the Evangelical basis of the missionary enterprise."⁽¹³²⁾ Its whole tone was neutral to an extreme. Only months later, after the furor had engulfed the Board, did it at last express disagreement with the book, a point noted by Machen the following June.⁽¹³³⁾

A comment in Christianity Today summarized the positions of the various boards of the denominations, although directed specifically to the Presbyterian Church: "All officialdom seemed to be mobilizing its power to satisfy conservatives, on the one hand, by repeated evangelically-toned statements, and to satisfy modernists on the other hand, by doing nothing to disturb their presence on the mission field or in the boards at home."⁽¹³⁴⁾ The conservatives were given rhetoric; the liberals were given jobs.

The official responses of the bureaucrats in power could not hide the magnitude of the negative response, at least in the Presbyterian Church. Macartney spoke for the conservatives: "But in these 129,000 words, I can note just one mention of the word `sin.' The omission is significant. Nor do I recall seeing a single mention of the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. . . ."⁽¹³⁵⁾ In the same issue of Christianity Today, the editor wrote: "It is safe to say that nothing has happened in recent years more fitted to divide the churches than the Laymen's missionary report." It would literally divide the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., over the next three and a half years.

Mrs. Buck Strikes Again

The controversy had barely begun when Mrs. Buck added more fuel to the blaze by publishing a second article in the January, 1933, issue of Harper's Magazine. This time, she expressed her own theological convictions, offering at the same time her personal critique of the mission system. If the first article had upset orthodox churchmen, this one was calculated to give them apoplexy.

It began with an attack on the mediocrity which she felt she saw in the missionaries in China, "ignorant . . . arrogant . . . superstitious" men in far too many cases, "who have taught superstitious creeds and theories and have made the lives of hungry-hearted people more wretched and more sad."⁽¹³⁶⁾ She made it clear, however, that she did not blame these men too much because, as she said, "I do not believe in original sin."⁽¹³⁷⁾

Her statement of personal belief was so unorthodox that even the moderates in the Church would have to take exception: "Some believe in Christ as our father did. To some he is still the divine son of God, born of the virgin Mary, conceived by the Holy Spirit. But to many of us he has ceased to be that. Some of us do not know what he is, some of us care less. In this world of our life it does not matter perhaps what he is. . . . He was perhaps the best man who ever lived. But that is all he is."⁽¹³⁸⁾ As to the uniqueness of Christianity, she made herself unmistakably clear: "I do not believe that any religion is comprehensive enough to exclude all others."⁽¹³⁹⁾

Speer Responds

Almost immediately after the publication of Re-Thinking Missions, Speer replied in The Missionary Review of the World (Jan. 1933). Later in the year, this long article became a short book, "Re-Thinking Missions" Examined. His published response is important, both for what it said and for what it did not say. It was also important for the way in which he said it.

By the mid-1930's, Speer was the chief representative of American Protestant denominational missions. With 1,305 Presbyterian missionaries in the field,⁽¹⁴⁰⁾ this should not be surprising. Only Mott had equal or greater name-recognition,⁽¹⁴¹⁾ but Mott was an interdenominationalist. Speer was, too, but he tried to keep alive some sort of federalism until the unification could be consummated. He did not want to get too far ahead of those in the pews who wrote the checks. Speer's response to Re-Thinking Missions would reveal the degree of hostility or commitment of the American Protestant missions establishment to the ecumenism and secularism of Rockefeller's vision of missions.

Speer was a mild-mannered liberal who covered his theology with conservative phrases. Had his critics, including Machen, read Speer's 1910 Duff Lectures, Christianity and the Nations, they would have seen what their problem was: a liberal was running the Foreign Missions Board. There was one Christian doctrine, above all others, that he sought to de-emphasize or avoid altogether: hell. Speer avoided the topic like the plague. This was the common mark of a liberal. Had he not been a liberal, this would have been a very peculiar omission in the writings of the chief representative of Presbyterian foreign missions.

In his 1902 book, The Principles of Jesus, he included a brief chapter on "Jesus and Hell," which self-consciously befuddled the issue. "`The everlasting fire' is one of Jesus' own expressions. Does He mean `everlasting' and does He mean `fire'? He certainly does not mean material fire. Men long ago perceived that, but He does mean something of which our word `fire' is the best metaphor, something utterly destructive of evil and impurity."⁽¹⁴²⁾ This narrows the question to what Jesus said, but there is more about hell in the Bible than what Jesus said. The Book of Revelation is quite clear: hell means material fire, or better put, the contents of hell, which includes the perfect, eternal, resurrected bodies of covenant-breakers, are dumped into a literal, physical fire at the final judgment. Bodily eternal fire matches bodily resurrection. "And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire" (Rev. 20:14-15). As for eternity, Speer wrote, we just do not know what this means. "What those terms signify in the life that is beyond this, we shall not understand until we get there."⁽¹⁴³⁾ He pleaded ignorance. Nobody ever was de-frocked for pleading ignorance, and besides, Speer had never been ordained. He was immune to judicial action. Speer was a consummate producer of cotton candy prose: all sweetness and air. Nothing he ever wrote left visible traces a year later. He wrote dozens of volumes, yet rarely said anything of theological substance. For over four decades, he gave his readers long shrift.

There was an exception, however. In 1910, the year of the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, he delivered the Duff Lectures on foreign missions. Here, for the first and last time, he came close to saying what he really believed about hell. "The idea that the supreme missionary motive has been the desire to save the souls of the heathen from hell rests upon a very partial knowledge of missionary literature. . . The epistles of Paul know nothing of it. He never once uses the word hell."⁽¹⁴⁴⁾ He adopted a version of Pelagianism, i.e., the denial of the consequences of original sin: ". . . we know that men are not to be judged as though all had seen the same light. No man is lost for not accepting a Savior of whom he has never heard."⁽¹⁴⁵⁾ He refused to discuss the obvious implication of this theology: it is the Christian missionary who necessarily sends heathens to hell, whatever it is, for he brings the message of redemption through faith in Jesus Christ alone, and thereby inflicts heathen souls with the deadly curse: no more excuses.

He also made his ecumenical vision clear: "I belong to the Presbyterian Church, but I have not the slightest zeal in seeking to have the Presbyterian Church extended over the non-Christian world."⁽¹⁴⁶⁾ He wanted ecumenical foreign missions. The West must not export denominationalism abroad: ". . . the Occidental character of our divisions makes it both unnecessary and inexpedient to export them to the mission field."⁽¹⁴⁷⁾ This implies ecumenism: "But the ideal of foreign missions is not realised by a federation of separate agencies. It contemplates a united Church, not a compact of separate units, but one corporate and manifested life."⁽¹⁴⁸⁾ This was happening abroad, he said. "It is showing the Church at home the possibility of union, not only of co-operation in work or of federation of separate Christian bodies, but of actual union."⁽¹⁴⁹⁾ "The missionary movement is teaching us also the duty of union."⁽¹⁵⁰⁾ What was wrong with non-Christian religions? Their lack of unity. "And yet once more, the non-Christian religions are inadequate to the social needs of men because every one of them denies the unity of mankind. . . . To be sure, `The fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man,' is a common phrase throughout the world, but both of these great conceptions are the contribution of the Christian revelation."⁽¹⁵¹⁾ Little wonder that with these ideas, he went on the Rockefeller payroll and stayed there for two decades prior to Re-thinking Missions. What is astounding is that he could remain on the Presbyterian Church's payroll without at least a protest from conservatives.

Speer in late 1932 was trapped between the Rockefeller establishment, which he did not trust despite his participation on its fringes, and the Machen-Macartney wing of his own Church. He had to say something publicly. He rued what he called the "fresh ammunition" given by the Report to both fundamentalists and modernists. He was correct in one thing: the Report did not arouse much interest in missionary activity. It aroused interest only in the Report and discussions about the Report.⁽¹⁵²⁾ He had a bureaucrat's assessment of the Report: "Certainly this report has made our whole problem vastly more difficult for us. It has played directly into the hands of extremists of both wings. I think we have seldom had a document which has had so good a purpose to promote unity and which has had so dire a result in making unity difficult."⁽¹⁵³⁾ Unity is indeed a good purpose; the question is: By what standard? It was this question that Speer had avoided answering throughout his career. This is what had long made him the modernist's wedge, second in importance only to W. H. Roberts during Roberts' lifetime; second to none after 1920.

Speer began his little book with some polite genuflecting to the Rockefeller machine, though without naming it: "Our first desire ought to be and is to express hearty appreciation of the purpose and spirit of this Inquiry and Report and of the unselfish devotion of time and effort which it represents."⁽¹⁵⁴⁾ The Inquiry was undertaken out of the "highest motives," the reader was assured.⁽¹⁵⁵⁾ Furthermore, "Let it be said at once that there ought to be no sensitiveness at all on the part of Missions and Boards with regard to their being passed under the severest criticism."⁽¹⁵⁶⁾ (This openness applied to criticism from those funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, not from Machen and his allies.) Speer alluded to the funding: "As a matter of fact, the financial response from the laymen was negligible and the Inquiry was carried through, not as a great and widespread movement of laymen, but by a very small and devoted group." How small? Fewer than half a dozen people.⁽¹⁵⁷⁾

In Defense of Protocol

Speer referred to the "enormous publicity campaign" that had begun the previous September. This had violated the promised confidentiality of the Report, which the Boards of the various denominational missions organizations were pledged to honor until they received copies of the Report on November 18. They honored the pledge; the unnamed promoters did not. The Boards had to sit quietly "when their constituents were demanding why they made no explanation of their position under the flood of criticism. . . ."⁽¹⁵⁸⁾ Bureaucratic protocol had been violated--normally, a cardinal sin--in this case by Rockefeller interests, so Speer's criticism was muted. The main criticism is that the negative publicity from critics has "made it difficult to secure a fair consideration of the good elements in the Report."⁽¹⁵⁹⁾

There was another problem. The various denominational missions boards had been told that they would appoint the commission that would make the Inquiry. But then the investigation was conducted "in complete independence of the Boards. . . ."⁽¹⁶⁰⁾ Another breach of protocol! This criticism appears under the subhead: "Who Was Responsible?" But Speer did not answer his own question, nor even refer to it again. That, too, showed great deference to the man who was behind it. Schenkel, in his study of Rockefeller's religious commitment, comments on the highly secretive aspect of the Inquiry's funding. "The commission officially completed its task with a public unveiling of its report at the Roosevelt Hotel on January 13, 1933. As usual, Rockefeller's name appeared nowhere on the program. The extent of Rockefeller's role in the enterprise was not generally known, and he declined invitations, like that of Good Housekeeping magazine to comment on it."⁽¹⁶¹⁾

Reading the Report, Speer recognized "the high-mindedness of it, the beautiful literary statement. . . ."⁽¹⁶²⁾ (Perhaps if you have spent your adult life reading committee reports--and Presbyterian committee reports at that--the bureaucratic report known as Re-Thinking Missions might seem a literary delight.)

Then Speer got down to business. First, "The report suffers from a lack of adequate depth of background."⁽¹⁶³⁾ It left out a chapter on the history of missions for lack of space. It barely mentioned St. Paul. It ignored the uplifting social ideas of early missionaries.⁽¹⁶⁴⁾ Second, the report was "exclusive and partisan."⁽¹⁶⁵⁾ Third, the Report "makes the grave error, which we must all seek to correct, of requiring that all shall be taken or none. This is unwise tactics. . . ."⁽¹⁶⁶⁾ It proposes to change the theological basis of missions.⁽¹⁶⁷⁾ It calls for a common, inter-religious quest for truth.⁽¹⁶⁸⁾

Here Speer began to target the real problem: the Report's rejection of the Church's claims regarding the uniqueness of Christ and His claims. Machen would have agreed. But Machen would have called attention to the Bible's doctrine of Christ and redemption. Speer said: "For us, Christ is still the Way, not a way. . . ."⁽¹⁶⁹⁾ What, judicially and ethically speaking, is this Way? What about the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement? Speer did not mention this. What about the doctrine of hell? He did not mention this, either. Instead, he asked other rhetorical questions: "Are we really apprehending Him and His power? Are we willing to let God in Christ work supernaturally in us today?"⁽¹⁷⁰⁾ Power and supernatural personal encounter: here we find language that would appeal to two of the three factions inside the Presbyterian Church: liberals and experientialists.

The Unruffled Flow of Funds and Power

Then he got to the heart of the matter, bureaucratically speaking. The Report called for the centralization of funding and administration. But donors, Speer knew from experience, would not continue to give to such a centralized agency. He wrote what would become a prophetic statement: "One of the Commissioners on November 19 declared that donors had no right to act thus, that they should give their money and let the overhead body, which knows better than they do, spend it. There is truth in this, but only within limits."⁽¹⁷¹⁾ Over the next three years, the Presbyterian Church would define these limits: inside the Presbyterian Church. Speer in 1933 was not about to assent to the transfer of what would, in 1934, become the declared and judicially enforceable sovereignty of Presbyterian boards over Presbyterian congregations' funds, to some interdenominational Board that would skip the middlemen, namely, denominational boards. "It is a mistake to think that in Christian missions or anywhere else centralized monopoly is a good thing."⁽¹⁷²⁾ Machen would be de-frocked in 1936 for saying the same thing, and then acting on it.

The Report, Speer said, was too critical of many missionaries, yet few were interviewed. It was wrong to criticize Asian missionaries for having tried to separate the Asians from traditional religion. It disparaged doctrinal evangelism.⁽¹⁷³⁾ But we are back to the same question: What is Christianity--doctrinally, judicially, and ethically? Speer did not say. For the next ten pages, his little book reported on "Some Excellent Recommendations" in the Report: social reform and--here one can detect the interest of Mr. Rockefeller--"For Better Commercial Representatives."⁽¹⁷⁴⁾

Then came the big one--the number-one evil of the Report: "Of all these, the central and gravest issue must be faced. It is the dreadful peril of divisiveness with which this Report is charged."⁽¹⁷⁵⁾ Spoken like a true bureaucrat, a true seeker after interdenominational unity and peace. "It has sown discontent among the denominations which were not involved in the Inquiry, but all of whose work falls under the judgments of the Report."⁽¹⁷⁶⁾ The Report calls for a "new agency." "What a tragedy it would be if a movement which earnestly and fervently seeks for larger unity among the Churches should issue in a new and rival organization either within or outside of the Churches!"⁽¹⁷⁷⁾

Speer was an ecumenist, though more of a federal ecumenist. He wanted to retain denominational distinctives, though not theological distinctives or polity, which did not concern him, and hadn't since his Student Volunteer Movement days.⁽¹⁷⁸⁾ But if doctrine and polity are not legitimate reasons for separateness, then what is? He never said, but money and tradition come to mind: tradition generates money.

Disturbing the Peace

Church historian William Hutchison, generally sympathetic to Speer, is persuaded by the evidence to admit: "In expanding on these points Speer frequently seemed quintessentially the politician--beholden to too many constituencies, too quickly falling back upon practical considerations in serious matters of principle."⁽¹⁷⁹⁾ This was not Machen's weakness. The problem was, Machen was facing a shrinking constituency.

Speer's defender, James Patterson, who wrote his Princeton Seminary Ph.D. on Speer, using the resources of Princeton's Speer Library, refers to "Speer's vigorous criticisms of Re-Thinking Missions. . . ."⁽¹⁸⁰⁾ The rhetoric of a bureaucrat who seeks to avoid upsetting either source of his funding--Rockefeller on the left and devoted laymen on the right--is described as vigorous. Predictably, Patterson regards Machen's attacks on Speer as having the "appearance of a personal vendetta" for Speer's having participated directly in the reorganization of Princeton Seminary.⁽¹⁸¹⁾

The historiography written by the spiritual heirs of the winners reflects their inability to understand that for a Calvinist, theology is a life-and-death matter. They do not believe that without propositional truth based on a permanent standard over history and revealed in history, the drift down academic relativism's calm tributary leads to the waterfall of cultural nihilism. It leads to this: "Young people, regardless of their sexual orientation, need to understand the institutional power of heterosexism and the injustice that it perpetuates. As the church is called to speak a truthful word about sexuality, it does so in the name of God's call to justice--a call that invites gay and lesbian adolescents to explore the goodness of their sexuality within the community of God's people."⁽¹⁸²⁾

Machen Responds

The reaction in conservative circles was immediate. Any semblance of unity within the Church was banished by the end of January. Orthodox men were up in arms--small-caliber, as always--and Machen soon led the attack, again in terms of the now rejected five-point Doctrinal Deliverance. In a proposed overture to the General Assembly, submitted to the New Brunswick Presbytery for ratification on January 24, 1933, he called for a policy of electing to the Board of Foreign Missions only those who subscribed to the five points.⁽¹⁸³⁾ This overture was made the order of the day for April 11.

Just before the presbytery meeting in April, Machen again went to the printing press, this time with a 110-page brief exposing what he believed were modernist tendencies in the Board of Foreign Missions. It criticized the Board on several accounts, but main ones included: an attack on the Laymen's Mission report which, Machen felt, had not been adequately repudiated by the Board; a criticism of Mrs. Buck's theological position; a criticism of "Modernist propaganda" from the Candidate Secretary's office; and, finally, a reference to the fact that there were two signers of the Auburn Affirmation on the Board.⁽¹⁸⁴⁾

The Silence of the Board

The argument he had with the Board in regard to Re-Thinking Missions was its refusal to rebut unhesitatingly "this broadside of modernist unbelief," this "public attack against the very heart of the Christian religion."⁽¹⁸⁵⁾ Two Board members were actually a part of the original Laymen's Inquiry which appointed the Appraisal Commission: James Speers and Mrs. J. H. Findley. The Board's reply, too vague to be meaningful, seemed entirely unsatisfactory, and Machen described it in military terms: "Did ever a trumpet in time of battle, in a time when the very citadel of the Faith had been attacked, give forth a feebler sound?"⁽¹⁸⁶⁾ After reviewing Mrs. Buck's essay, he quipped, "One thing is certainly to be said for Mrs. Buck. She is absolutely clear. Her utterances are as plain as the utterances of our board are muddled."⁽¹⁸⁷⁾ What bothered Machen most was liberalism camouflaged by the terminology of Christianity. He resented the deception.

The principal question regarding Mrs. Buck, for Machen, was this: Why didn't the Board dismiss her? He said that the Board had two possible plans of action available to it: to eliminate her quietly, "without intensifying yet further the charge of intolerance which already rests upon the Christian Church," a course of action morally reprehensible but financially more profitable; or to dismiss her for cause, on the basis of doctrine.⁽¹⁸⁸⁾ He was wrong. There was a third possibility: do nothing. Be patient. Sit tight. Pray that the woman will resign and go away.

In the third section of the booklet, he referred to the Auburn Affirmation. He asked the fundamental question from the orthodox point of view: Are the signers of the Affirmation "fit persons to be employed by the great Boards of the Church for the responsible duty of saying to the world what the essential meaning of the Church is?"⁽¹⁸⁹⁾ The Affirmation, he went on, was a "typical Modernist document . . . typical in the deceptive way it uses general terms which many interpret in a Christian sense, but which many interpret in a non-Christian sense."⁽¹⁹⁰⁾ Finally, he crystallized his position, a position which was later to lead to a division within Westminster Seminary's own Board of Trustees, and ultimately to a division within the Presbyterian Church: "A mighty conflict is on in the Presbyterian Church at the present time. On one side of the conflict are to be put believers in, and defenders of, the Word of God; on the other side are to be put not only the signers of the Auburn Affirmation themselves, but also those who are ready to make common cause, without protest, with the signers of the Affirmation in mission boards, in governing boards of theological seminaries, and in the courts and councils of the Church."⁽¹⁹¹⁾

He ended the booklet with many pages of documentation showing conclusively that the Church missionaries in China were in many cases cooperating with extremely liberal, and even pro-Communist, elements within that country.

Machen Debates Speer

On the day of the presentation of Machen's overture regarding the Foreign Missions Board, a public debate took place between Machen and Speer. Speer was normally an eloquent speaker.⁽¹⁹²⁾ The New Brunswick Presbytery invited Speer to speak, which he did, saying he did not wish to get involved in controversy. He refused to answer any of Machen's specific charges against the Board. He called for unity, for trust in the Board. "What we need today is not conflict and division among us who hold this common faith but a unified front against all that is opposed to Christ and His gospel."⁽¹⁹³⁾ This had been his theme since the day he addressed the 1901 General Assembly. He added: "If there is one missionary of our Board who is not faithful to the central message of our church the Board does not know of it."⁽¹⁹⁴⁾

The obvious question, then, was what of Mrs. Buck? Speer had to admit that she was not sound in the faith. "We recognize that these are impossible views to be held by any missionary in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A."⁽¹⁹⁵⁾ He did not elaborate, since he could not explain how she could remain on the Church mission field; he simply intimated that "there were factors in the case that could not be referred to publicly." This is a standard bureaucratic ploy: plead the need for secrecy. But the Board had to do something about her, and it chose the easiest path.

Passing the Buck

Mrs. Buck would not affirm her commitment to anything resembling orthodox Christianity. Ironically, some of the Board's members in their private correspondence began to sound like the Confessionalists: they hoped she would voluntarily resign. This was the position of Charles Erdman, who was president of the Board that year.⁽¹⁹⁶⁾ The Board in this case imitated the conservatives: it refused to bring negative sanctions against her. Meanwhile, Machen wrote to her assuring her that his opposition to her was strictly theological, not personal.⁽¹⁹⁷⁾

Late in April of 1933, Mrs. Buck provided the Board with its hoped-for solution when she resigned from the mission enterprise of the Presbyterian Church. Her resignation was accepted on May 1 "with deep regret." Machen called this conciliatory action on the part of the Board "fundamentally dishonest policy."⁽¹⁹⁸⁾ In her obituary on Machen in 1937, she wrote, "we had much the same fate. I was kicked out of the back door of the church and he was kicked out of the front one."⁽¹⁹⁹⁾ But she had not been kicked out. She had decided to divorce her missionary husband, get out of China, and join her new husband and the American Establishment in New York City. She had resigned before a trial was even suggested; Machen had not.

The Fate of Machen's Overture

The New Brunswick Presbytery rejected Machen's overture regarding the Board, but on May 1, the same day that Mrs. Buck turned in her resignation, the Philadelphia Presbytery accepted the overture, and on May 5, the Aberdeen Presbytery followed suit. In retrospect, it seems remarkable that the proponents of such a reform could have thought that this overture might gain the acceptance of the whole Church in 1933.

The overtures had been referred to the Standing Committee on Foreign Missions. The Committee asked the Philadelphia Presbytery to send a commissioner to defend the overture. None appeared. Machen then requested to speak. It was well known that he had written the overture. The Committee at first refused, since Machen was not a commissioner, but then relented. Members of the Board replied. The Committee then voted 45 to 2 against the overture. The majority report affirmed its confidence in the Board, and the General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to accept it.⁽²⁰⁰⁾ Speer's biographer concludes: "Machen's decisive defeat at the General Assembly of 1933 marked a critical juncture in the course of fundamentalist dissent."⁽²⁰¹⁾

Perhaps the most telling evidence of the nature of the response by the Board of Foreign Missions and the General Assembly which approved its report was the fact that in a 15-part report to the General Assembly, the discussion of the overtures' criticisms appeared in section 14. Section 1 is representative of the mind-set of the Board: correct procedure has been followed!

After a thorough examination of the Minutes of the Board for the last year, (1) We would record our satisfaction in the excellence with which the minutes are recorded and indexed, finding them to be truly a work of artistic quality perfect in their mechanics. (2) We express our conviction that if the church at large could know the conscientiousness and thoroughness and prayerfulness with which every matter was considered, as indicated by the Minutes, full confidence in the Board's ability and integrity would be established.⁽²⁰²⁾

First things first, after all. The minutes are complete! So, if anyone fails to find something objectionable in the records which the Board provides, this has to be because nothing is remiss.

And what was second in importance? Need anyone ask? The Treasurer's report.⁽²⁰³⁾

But what of the many theological objections? They were groundless, the Board announced. The General Assembly concurred. The acceptable proof was not judicial theology; rather, it was perceived character. "We know that Dr. Robert E. Speer stands absolutely true to the historic doctrinal position of the Presbyterian Church, and we would be remiss if we did not testify to our recognition that his entire life bears testimony to the supreme effort to extend the gospel to humanity across the world."⁽²⁰⁴⁾ The battle was reduced to a question of representation, as major covenantal battles always must be. Men must choose sides; each side has a leader. In the battle between orthodoxy and modernism in Northern Presbyterianism, it boiled down to this choice: Machen or Speer. The respective leader's cloak would cover the actions of his subordinates. It was clear by 1933 whose cloak was the broadest. "The Assembly also expresses its thorough confidence in the members of the Board of Foreign Missions. . . ."⁽²⁰⁵⁾

Privately, Machen summarized his problem in getting the Board to take a stand. Van Til related to his biographer this recollection of Machen's account: "I write to the Board asking what it proposes to do about Pearl Buck. The Board writes back and says, `Dr. Speer is a very fine man.' I answer, `I realize Dr. Speer is a very fine man but what I would like to know is what you plan to do about Pearl Buck's public pronouncements.' The Board writes me again and says, `Machen, why are you so bitter?'"⁽²⁰⁶⁾

A Softening of Orthodox Resistance

In the mid-June edition of Christianity Today an editorial appeared which gave an indication of the battle to come within the orthodox camp itself. At the May General Assembly, the conservatives had announced the creation of an independent missions board. This might lead to negative Church sanctions. Samuel Craig, editor of the magazine, and also a member of the Board of Control at Westminster, began to move toward the fire escape: the Confession. "But, be the present majority [in the General Assembly] an actual majority or not, as long as the standards of the church remain as they are there is no reason why the present minority should not remain in the Church and continue its struggle in behalf of the grace of God. . . . The situation would be quite different if the standards of the Church were altered so as to be made to conform to the policies of the modernist-indifferentist party. In that case this minority would be bound to separate themselves from the organization known as the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A. . . ." The implication here, of course, was that the Westminster Confession still had meaning within the Church, although in terms of application to specific judicial cases it was a dead letter.

The Problem of Creedalism

This returns us to the persistent problem of the function of creeds. The conservatives who chose to remain in the Church until they died continually reaffirmed that the reason why they could stay in the Church in good conscience is because it was still a creedal Church. But the Church of England also has a creed--the same creed it has had since the sixteenth century. Yet virtually no one would have been so naive in 1933 as to argue that either the Church of England or the Protestant Episcopal Church was in any way bound by that creed, or that even a strong minority of its clergy still held to it.

The Northern Presbyterian Church did not get around to altering its Confession until 1967. The Barthians, liberals, and followers of either of the Niebuhrs had long been content to play the same "mental reservations" game that had outraged Machen in 1923.⁽²⁰⁷⁾ The old slogan applied well to Presbyterians after the 1930's: "Presbyterians can believe anything at all, and generally do." Eventually, they rewrote the Westminster Confession, but that was three decades after Machen's little band had been removed from the Church. Yet Craig and many others justified their continued subordination to the Church--and thereby appeared to justify the same decision by hundreds of thousands of Bible-believing laymen--on the basis of its commitment to the Confession.

Could Machen argue against them effectively? If it was wrong for the liberals to lie about their attachment to the Westminster Confession, why was it wrong for the conservatives who no longer believed in tenets such as predestination to make similar mental reservations? Was the Church a Confessional Church as far back as 1923? Machen had said yes, even though he probably knew that the Westminster Confession was unenforceable in the Church's courts--that there was no way that liberals could be convicted in a heresy trial. By 1924 there was no doubt, with the ordination of Henry P. Van Dusen by the New York Presbytery. Yet in 1923, Machen had written: "If the liberal party, therefore, really obtains control of the Church, evangelical Christians must be prepared to withdraw no matter what it costs. Our Lord has died for us, and surely we must not deny Him for the favor of men. But up to the present time such a situation has not yet appeared; the creedal basis still stands firm in the constitutions of evangelical churches."⁽²⁰⁸⁾

The creedal basis of the Presbyterian Church was not only not standing firm after 1924, it was unenforceable in the Church's courts. That was the significant test, at least for anyone who held the traditional view of Presbyterianism, namely, that the Church's hierarchy is essentially an appeals court system. But Machen had failed to lead God's people out of Egypt in the 1920's. By delaying his exodus, he was thereby affirming a view of creedalism which was not significantly different from Craig's and other of the "remainers" of 1936. The question of when the Church really departed from its creeds became a matter of personal conviction, and a lot of those men--indeed, the majority--who refused to come out in 1936 died as members in good standing in the Church. They just never seemed to get conviction. The "firm creedal foundation" that Machen praised in 1923 somehow looked just as firm to them in, say, 1950.

The Church Supports Missions

At the 1933 General Assembly, two reports came from the Standing Committee on Foreign Missions. The majority report asserted that the Board of Foreign Missions deserved "the wholehearted, unequivocal, and affectionate commendation of the church at large." The minority view stated that the criticisms that Machen had leveled at the Board were grounded in fact, and it recommended that the Assembly go on record as supporting the traditional gospel of Christ by electing a list of conservative candidates to the Board. The minority report was not permitted to circulate in written form; the majority position was. The majority report was also included in the memorial roll of those ministers who had died on the mission field during the year, so that a vote against the majority report was a vote against the memorial as well. While it had been customary to include the roll in the Committee's report, conservatives were incensed that the tradition had not been set aside to make way for a minority report. The full effect of the tactic is impossible to measure. The majority view undoubtedly had the votes to assume adoption by the Assembly, but conservatives felt that they had been insulted and thwarted.⁽²⁰⁹⁾

The Independent Board

Following approval of the report and before the Assembly adjourned, Rev. H. McAllister Griffiths announced the formation of a new missionary board, the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. It was not to interfere with missionaries already in the field, but it was to provide an outlet for those orthodox members of the Church who felt that their gifts to the regular Board were being misused. The first meeting of a tentative Independent Board was held on June 27, 1933, in Philadelphia. Officially organized on October 17, Machen was elected as its president.

That fall, Machen issued a protest against recent actions of the New Brunswick Presbytery in inserting into its rules for ordination a totally new requirement. All candidates for the ministry and all ministers already ordained who were transferring into the New Brunswick Presbytery had to be examined "as to their willingness to support the regularly authorized Boards and Agencies of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., particularly the Board of Foreign Missions." Machen opposed this on constitutional grounds, for such a requirement had neither been sanctioned by the General Assembly nor approved by a majority of the presbyteries, according to the rules of the Church. He also argued that men cannot be bound to statements concerning their future actions unless the constitution specifies these actions. Finally, he argued that the new requirement would transform a freewill offering into a tax, something clearly outside the bounds of the Church's authority to demand. In support of this assertion, Machen quoted from the report (approved) of the Joint Committee on Foreign Missions of 1870: "Especially free and responsible directly to Christ are all Christian people, in deciding through what agencies they will do their share of the work for missions." The Church, accordingly, could not demand funds from its membership, but would have to rely upon voluntary contributions of the laity, made in accordance with their own consciences. The decision as to where specific monies are to be allocated is in the hands of the laymen of the Church, not in the hands of the Church hierarchy.⁽²¹⁰⁾

On October 24, 1933, Christian Reformed Church pastor R. B. Kuiper was installed as Professor of Practical Theology at Westminster Seminary. In his short inaugural speech, the text of which appeared in Christianity Today, Kuiper stated the principle which was to guide for the next three years those orthodox churchmen who allied themselves with Machen and his cause, that of Christian freedom: ". . . Christ's will as expressed in His Word is law for the Church, and His will alone. No man or group of men, no church council, has the right to subtract from the law of Christ or add to it. Rules and regulations made by the Church itself and are not based directly upon the law of Christ may or may not be conducive to good order, but never may they bind the conscience. This is the great principle of Christian Liberty. . . ." That Machen had to go outside the denomination to recruit such a spokesman did not bode well for his cause.

The Appeal to Conscience

This challenge to the authority of the Church councils was to have an increasingly important role as the inclusivists cemented their control of the administrative machinery. In essence, the orthodox minority appealed to the Church's constitution, and ultimately to Christ's will. It is to Christ that the individual conscience is responsible, the Christ revealed in the pages of the New Testament by the Holy Spirit. Machen spoke for the minority a year later when he wrote a defense against formal charges brought against him by the presbytery: "I cannot, no matter what any human authority bids me to do, support a propaganda that is contrary to the gospel of Christ; I cannot substitute a human authority for the authority of the Word of God. . . ."⁽²¹¹⁾ In short, the position of the orthodox wing could now be described in these terms: "`The Supreme Judge,' says the Confession of Faith, `by whom all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other than the Holy Spirit speaking in Scripture' (Conf. I,x)."

These words, however, were not from Machen's pen, nor from the councils of the Philadelphia Presbytery, but from section I of the Auburn Affirmation. The Affirmation had been directed at the ecclesiastical determination of doctrine, while Machen and Kuiper were attacking administrative decisions that were out of accord with the traditional Presbyterian view of Scripture and Church law, or at least Old School traditions. The appeal in both cases was to Christian liberty. Even the wording was similar. Consider, for example, part IV of the Affirmation: "We do not desire liberty to go beyond the teachings of evangelical Christianity. But we maintain that it is our constitutional right and our Christian duty within these limits to exercise liberty of thought and teaching that we may more effectively preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the World." Liberty of thought, constitutional right, Christian duty: these were the essentials of the Machen's position in 1933. Clearly, the positions of the two ideological factions were in the process of reversing themselves, each appropriating the other's arguments of a decade earlier--and a century earlier. It was the Old School that had booted out the New School in 1837 for its support of ecclesiastically independent foreign missions boards.

Machen insisted that the General Assembly did not possess the authority to hand down administrative fiats in advance. This had always been the liberals' position. The General Assembly is a lawful court, but each case had to be decided on its own merits.⁽²¹²⁾ The General Assembly may make general pronouncements, of course, "But these pronouncements have purely moral or persuasive force. Legally they have no more force than pronouncements of the humblest member of the Church."⁽²¹³⁾ What, then, of the Doctrinal Deliverances of 1910, 1916, and 1923? Machen still battled the theology of the Affirmation, but he now adopted its judicial foundation. The General Assembly in 1927 had expressly adopted the judicial view of the Affirmation--presbytery autonomy in ordination--but the judicial agents of the General Assembly had now returned to the theory of Deliverances, and then some. The General Assembly, if it supported these representatives, would threaten sanctions against everyone who disobeyed, ministers and members alike.

A Question of Authority

Machen announced in his 1934 Statement, "I CANNOT OBEY THE ORDER."⁽²¹⁴⁾ He appealed to the Constitution of the Church. "THOUGH DISOBEYING AN ORDER OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY, I HAVE A FULL RIGHT TO REMAIN IN THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH IN THE U.S.A. BECAUSE I AM IN ACCORD WITH THE CONSTITUTION OF THAT CHURCH AND CAN APPEAL FROM THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY TO THE CONSTITUTION."⁽²¹⁵⁾

He could indeed appeal to the Church's Constitution, but all constitutions are interpreted by designated interpreters. His appeal was ultimately to a future General Assembly, for the General Assembly, acting in its capacity as the highest court, would authoritatively interpret the Constitution. Machen's days as a minister in the denomination were numbered.

Rev. John McDowell, the Moderator of the 1933 General Assembly, stood on the floor of a meeting of the conservative Chester Presbytery on September 26, 1933, and proclaimed that if a citizen of this country were to take an attitude against the Constitution of the United States, he would be expelled; similarly, if a minister in the Presbyterian Church could not support the constitution of the Church, he should get out.⁽²¹⁶⁾ This was the argument of the Portland Deliverance of 1892. Conservatives in 1933 saw themselves as the true constitutionalists, for they formally supported its written form: the Westminster Confession of Faith and the two catechisms. Each side claimed that the other was subverting the constitution. Nevertheless, McDowell's language was strikingly similar to that used by the Machen in 1923. If a man cannot agree with the Church, then he should voluntarily remove himself from the Church: such was the basis of both arguments. Because the theological orientation of the Church had changed, the positions of the two factions were reversed. Yet the arguments remained intact, and the written constitution was no different, but not for long. The Book of Discipline had been totally revised in 1931. In 1933 and 1934, the presbyteries voted to accept it. That final centralization of power would bring the Presbyterian conflict to a close.

Machen immediately wrote a formal protest. He surveyed the post-1869 history of Presbyterian foreign missions that showed that the General Assembly had always denied that assessments for foreign missions were mandatory.⁽²¹⁷⁾ He was correct; after 1936, his analysis was also correct. From 1933 to 1936, however, the hierarchy pretended that he was not correct and imposed an oath-bound commitment to the support of Presbyterian foreign missions as a convenient means of expelling its critics.

Machen observed in 1934 that the General Assembly had made a profession of obedience to the boards of the Church a condition of ordination. Support for the boards is voluntary, the directive said; nevertheless, local churches must not support unapproved agencies--the position of Old School Presbyterians in 1837. Machen ridiculed this argument: the General Assembly says the Church is voluntary, but if you do not obey, you must leave.

"You may enter the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. or not as you please," says the General Assembly in effect; "but if you do you must leave your liberty behind. If you once enter you are our slaves. Henceforth support of whatever missionary program successive General Assemblies may set up is obligatory upon you, whether you think the program is right or wrong. If you think that the missionary program of any General Assembly is so wrong that you cannot conscientiously support it, then the only thing for you to do is to leave the Church."⁽²¹⁸⁾

Yet this is exactly what Machen and his predecessors had been arguing since the Portland Deliverance of 1892, and before them, in 1838: conform or leave. "The essence of all religious liberty and ecclesiastical order," the 1838 Pastoral Letter declared, "is evidently involved in the principle, that when two parties in the same community cannot agree, the majority must govern; but if the minority cannot in conscience submit either to the measures, or the doctrines of the majority, it is their right and duty to separate, and form a different denomination."⁽²¹⁹⁾ But the shoe was now on the other foot. Machen invoked the same argument that liberals had been invoking since the 1893 General Assembly: "It is both the right and the duty of an individual in the Church to `censure' and to disobey any actions of the General Assembly or of any other judicatory that are contrary to the Constitution of the Church."⁽²²⁰⁾ The problem, however, is that majorities declare what the constitution is and says, in 1838 as well as in 1936.

Old School vs. Old School

Machen in 1935 wrote: "I disobeyed this purely arbitrary administrative order of the General Assembly on the ground that it was contrary to the Constitution of the Church, and that therefore my ordination pledge not only permitted but required me to disobey it. The only way to test the constitutionality of an action of the General Assembly is in the courts of the Church--beginning with the lowest court, the Presbytery."⁽²²¹⁾ Machen labeled the actions of the General Assembly in 1934 as the exercise of illegitimate authority. Yet a very similar exercise of authority was what the Old School had imposed through the General Assembly in 1837. The Circular Letter had announced:

The General Assembly is vested by the constitution of our church with plenary power "to decide in all controversies respecting doctrine and discipline; to reprove, warn, or bear testimony against error in doctrine or immorality in practice, in any church, Presbytery, or Synod; to superintend the concerns of the whole church; to suppress schismatical contentions and disputations; and, in general, to recommend and attempt reformation of manners, and the promotion of charity, truth, and holiness, through all the churches under their care."⁽²²²⁾

What was the institutional issue that had called forth this 1837 assertion of authority? The General Assembly's obligation to defend the Church's boards. "To suffer Boards constituted by ourselves, pledged to adhere to our own standards, and responsible to our own judicatories, to languish while we sustain and strengthen societies over which we have no control, and which are gradually undermining at once our purity, and, of course, our real strength, while professing to add to our numbers, would manifestly be as unwise as it would be criminal in those who profess to love the Presbyterian Church, and to consider her as conformed, in her doctrine and order, to the apostolic model."⁽²²³⁾

There would be a difference, however. In 1837, the General Assembly threw out all of their opponents without a trial. They cleansed the denomination of a few representative theological troublemakers by removing tens of thousands of members: the people the troublemakers represented. They eliminated the shepherds they regarded as unreliable by sending them away, along with their sheep. In 1935 and 1936, there would be trials, almost all with foregone conclusions. At the conclusion of those trials, those shepherds declared guilty voluntarily departed and invited their sheep to accompany them. There were very few sheep who decided to follow. The excluded sheep and shepherds of 1837 had become the dominant force after the reunion of 1869. The victorious shepherds of 1837 became comparatively meek sheep after the reunion. The 1869 peace treaty between the two flocks delivered the ranch into the hands of the wolves in 1936. The spiritual heirs of both flocks were then publicly sheared.

A Question of Sanctions

Attacks on the Independent Board grew in intensity. Charges of unconstitutional behavior were leveled at the organizers and supporters of the body by the Church bureaucracy. In late 1933, Murray Forst Thompson, a member of both the Independent Board and the Pennsylvania Bar, published an answer to the critics within the Church. In a four-part argument, he put forth the following theses: (1) there is nothing in Church law forbidding the establishment of such a Board; (2) Church judicatories have no power to pass laws "binding the conscience" and penalizing supporters of the body; (3) nothing requires that a man support financially any Church body; (4) money can legally be given to organizations outside the Church. Since the Independent Board was outside the Church, and therefore not within its jurisdiction in the courts, Thompson concluded that nothing could be done to silence it. Then he, too, appealed to the doctrine of Christian Liberty: "The Confession of Faith declares that `God alone is Lord of the conscience and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in anything contrary to His Work, or beside it, in matters of faith and worship' (XX:2). If the Constitution contained such restrictions, it would be contrary to the principles of Christian liberty and freedom of conscience set forth in the Holy Scriptures."⁽²²⁴⁾

There were two major flaws in his argument. First, unlike the Board itself, those inside the Church who were associated with the Independent Board could be silenced within the Church. Second, the Church may not have had the authority to bind the conscience, but it surely had the power to censure those who resisted its power. And so it did. The most independent agency of all, Union Seminary, gained its revenge.⁽²²⁵⁾

The magnitude of the Church's negative response does not seem to match the threat. The Independent Board had put only eleven missionaries in the field by 1936.⁽²²⁶⁾ To say, as Roark does, that the Independent Board constituted an economic threat to the Board of Foreign Missions during a time of economic depression misses the point.⁽²²⁷⁾ Something far more important than the statistical reality of the competition in 1936 for missionary candidates and missionary funds was at stake. What was at stake was a theological principle: the flow of funds. There was no more sacred principle for the liberals, as the final stage of the Presbyterian conflict revealed. And, in Machen's opinion, there was no clearer evidence of ecclesiastical tyranny than the judicial enforcement of this principle.

Conclusion

In the years following the reorganization of Princeton Seminary, the character of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., had continued on its path toward inclusivism. Doctrinal clarity became less and less an issue for Church leaders, leaving administrative authority rather than theological agreement the real basis of Church unity. Any challenge to this authority was taken by officialdom to be as dangerous to the Church.

The appeal to the Scriptures remained the fundamental plea of the orthodox camp, but it now included an appeal to the strict construction of the General Assembly's authority. The liberals had previously been the advocates of this same strict constructionism. Now, however, the liberal wing, along with those conservatives who favored a broader Church, were in control of the judicial machinery of the Church. They were no longer disposed to conform with the letter of the law and constitutional limitations. Denominational unity became an end in itself, far more important than strict adherence to Presbyterian law or tradition. Unity was point five of modernist covenant theology: ecumenism.

When orthodox Presbyterians began to disturb the external facade of Church unity, they placed themselves in a precarious position. The Church as a whole was tired of controversy, and sought peace and unity at all costs. The orthodox were also numerically weaker as a faction than their opponents had been in 1923, since the inclusivist conservatives were not acting as a buffer for the orthodox wing as they had done for the liberals. There was no sympathetic sentiment to shield them from the new majority. The extent of their weakness became unmistakably clear in 1934. They lost the vote for Moderator by 818 to 87. It had been 691 to 120 the year before.

Throughout 1934 and 1935, the Board of Foreign Missions kept issuing pamphlets defending its position against critics.⁽²²⁸⁾ The Missions bureaucracy was feeling the heat of negative publicity. Negative publicity had been for two decades the only negative sanctions available to the conservatives, with the one exception of the resignation of Fosdick, a Baptist. But the Church's courts now began to apply negative sanctions against the critics. In 1936, the verbal critics would depart. There would not be many of them.

As for Rockefeller, there was one positive effect of Re-Thinking Missions. After 1932, he never again gave money to any denomination.⁽²²⁹⁾ That went far to sever the Rockefeller connection from the churches. It is also worth noting that by 1975, missionaries sent out by denominations in the National Council of Churches supplied fewer than eight percent of American Protestant foreign missions.⁽²³⁰⁾ In 1980, evangelical missions boards supplied 90 percent of the 35,000 career foreign missionaries sent from North America.⁽²³¹⁾ The criticisms made by Griffith Thomas in 1921 and Machen in 1933 were no longer relevant. Foreign missions (conservative), which require money, personal dedication, and a lifetime of hard work, had replaced foreign mission (liberal). Missions had indeed been re-thought by the liberals, and they decided to stay home. The positive sanctions of liberalism's mission were insufficient to motivate modernists to go onto the mission field. Meanwhile, the positive sanctions of gospel missions were sufficient to motivate evangelicals to go. The crucial issue is sanctions.

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1. Machen, "Christianity and Culture," Princeton Theological Journal, 11 (Jan. 1913), p. 6.

2. Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 119.

3. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1930, pp. 49-50. Women became eligible for the pastorate in the Church in 1956. John D. Krugler and David Weinberg-Kinsey, "Equality of Leadership: The Ordination of Sarah E. Dickson and Margaret E. Towner in the Presbyterian Church of the USA," American Presbyterians, 68 (Winter 1990), p. 244.

4. Ibid., pp. 50-53.

5. D. G. Hart, "Doctor Fundamentalis": An Intellectual Biography of J. Gresham Machen, 1881-1937 (Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1988), pp. 291-93. Hart cites C. Allyn Russell, "Donald Grey Barnhouse: Fundamentalist Who Changed," Church History, 59 (1981), pp. 33-57.

6. The Presbyterian (Oct. 31, 1935), p. 5. Cited in James Alan Patterson, Robert E. Speer and the Crisis of the American Protestant Missionary Movement, 1920-1937 (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton theological Seminary, 1980), p. 163.

7. D. G. Hart and John Muether, Fighting the Good Fight: A Brief History of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (Philadelphia: Committee on Christian Education and the Committee of the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1995), p. 33.

8. Machen, "The Present Situation in the Presbyterian Church," Christianity Today (May 1930), p. 6.

9. He wrote: "The Christian remnant, at least so far as it is clearly aware of the great issue, is only a minority in the Church." Machen, "What May Be Learned from the 1935 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.," Independent Board Bulletin (June 1935), p. 5.

10. Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 181-83.

11. "Dr. Machen Surveys Dr. Speer's New Book," Christianity Today (Oct. 1930), p. 9.

12. Nov. 1931.

13. Dec. 1931.

14. Jan. 1932.

15. New York: Harper & Row.

16. John Ray Ewers, "Presbyterians in a Conservative Mood," Christian Century (June 17, 1931), p. 817.

17. Christianity Today (June, 1931), p. 3.

18. Ibid., p. 12.

19. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1933, p. 60.

20. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1934, pp. 184-85.

21. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1931, p. 105.

22. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1932, p. 275.

23. Machen, "The Truth About the Presbyterian Church: I. Modernism in the Judicial Commission," Christianity Today (Nov. 1931), pp. 5-6; "The Truth About the Presbyterian Church: II. Secrecy in Councils and Courts," ibid. (Dec. 1931), p. 7.

24. Machen, "Modernism in the Judicial Commission," ibid., p. 5.

25. On J. Ross Stevenson's support of union and Machen's opposition, see Ki-Hong Kim, Presbyterian Conflict in the Early Twentieth Century: Ecclesiology in the Princeton Tradition and the Emergence of Presbyterian Fundamentalism (Ph.D. dissertation, Drew University, 1983), pp. 183-88. Union with the United Presbyterian Church did not come until 1958. Union with the PCUS (Southern Presbyterians) came in 1983, a decade after the departure of the conservatives from the PCUS into the Presbyterian Church of America.

26. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1932, p. 30.

27. Ibid., p. 107.

28. "Church Assembly Called a Machine," New York Times (June 14, 1932), p. 23.

29. Albert Frederick Schenkel, The Rich Man and the Kingdom: John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Protestant Establishment, 1900-1960 (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1990), pp. 129-30.

30. Gerard Colby with Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1995), chart, p. 45.

31. Ibid., p. 33.

32. Ibid.

33. Schenkel, Rich Man and Kingdom, pp. 131-32.

34. Ibid., p. 100.

35. Ibid., p. 151.

36. C. Gregg Singer, The Unholy Alliance (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1975), p. 59.

37. See Chapter 6, above: section on "The Interchurch World Movement, 1919-1921."

38. Schenkel, Rich Man and Kingdom, p. 153.

39. Ibid., p. 156.

40. Ibid., p. 158. Cf. Charles E. Harvey, "Robert S. Lynd, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Middletown," Indiana Magazine of History, 79 (Dec. 1983), p. 352. Lynd nevertheless subsequently served for years as the executive secretary to the Social Science Research Council, created by Beardsley Ruml, who had been on the Rockefeller payroll since the early 1920's. Harvey, "John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Social Sciences: An Introduction," Journal of the History of Sociology, IV (Fall 1982), p. 10.

41. Ibid.

42. Addresses and Papers of John R. Mott, 6 vols. (New York: Association Press, 1947), V:742.

43. C. Howard Hopkins, John R. Mott: 1865-1955 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1979), p. 681.

44. Schenkel, Rich Man and Kingdom, p. 160.

45. Ibid., p. 161.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid., p. 162.

48. Ibid., p. 141.

49. Charles E. Harvey, "Religion and Industrial Relations: John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Interchurch Movement, 1920-1921," Research in Political Economy, 4 (1981), p. 213.

50. Schenkel, Rich Man and Kingdom, p. 144.

51. Peter H. Hobbie, "`Bringing Oxford Home': American Presbyterian Perceptions of the Oxford Conference on Church, Community, and State," American Presbyterians, 66 (Spring 1988), p. 29.

52. Hopkins, Mott, p. 687.

53. Samuel McCrea Cavert, On the Road to Christian Unity: An Appraisal of the Ecumenical Movement (New York: Harper & Bros., 1961), p. 24.

54. Hopkins, Mott, p. 525.

55. Schenkel, Rich Man and Kingdom, p. 197.

56. Mott, "Significance of the Appraisal of the Laymen's Foreign Mission Inquiry," Addresses and Papers, VI:323.

57. Ibid., VI:325.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid., VI:326.

60. Pearl S. Buck, "The Laymen's Mission Report," Christian Century (November 23, 1932), p. 1434.

61. Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Philadelphia: Westminster Theological Seminary, [1954] 1978), p. 476.

62. Buck to Walsh, Nov. 4, 1932; cited in Theodore F. Harris (in consultation with Pearl S. Buck), Pearl S. Buck: A Biography (New York: John Day, 1969), p. 152.

63. Ibid., p. 153.

64. Ibid., p. 154.

65. Pearl S. Buck, My Several Worlds: A Personal Record (New York: John Day, 1954), pp. 283-85. She does not mention her husband's presence.

66. Harris, Pearl S. Buck, p. 167.

67. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 936.

68. Ibid., p. 940.

69. Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and American Foreign Policy (New York: Vintage, [1980] 1981), ch. 8.

70. Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), p. 138.

71. Ibid., p. 134.

72. Ibid., p. 133.

73. Ibid., p. 135.

74. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986).

75. Rudy Abramson, Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, 1891-1986 (New York: Morrow, 1992), pp. 198, 208.

76. Ibid., p. 197.

77. Christopher Ogden, Life of the Party: The Biography of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), p. 448.

78. Ibid., p. 438.

79. In 1994, it was revealed that the Harriman family fortune had dwindled to $3 million. "Harriman Suit: Misconduct or Just Bad Luck Investing?" New York Times (Sept. 25, 1994).

80. Chernow, House of Morgan, p. 135.

81. Ibid., p. 201.

82. Steel, Lippmann, p. 129.

83. Ibid., p. 301.

84. Ibid., p. 61.

85. Cited in James J. Martin, American Liberalism and World Politics, 1931-1941, 2 vols. (New York: Devin-Adair, 1964), I:2.

86. Schenkel, Rich Man and Kingdom, pp. 168-69.

87. Straight was a communist at this time, and he passed what he says was unclassified information to a Soviet agent while serving as a speech writer for Roosevelt in 1939. He had been part of a Cambridge University secret society, the Apostles, which in his years was the recruiting ground for two of the Soviet Union's most highly placed spies, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. He was part of that cell. Straight described all this and much more in his autobiography, After Long Silence (New York: Norton, 1983).

88. Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, p. 941.

89. Ibid., pp. 938-39.

90. Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen's Inquiry After 100 Years (New York: Harper & Bros., 1932), p. 19.

91. Ibid., p. 29.

92. Ibid., p. 35.

93. Ibid., p. 36.

94. Ibid.

95. J. A. De Jong, As the Waters Cover the Sea: Millennial expectations in the rise of Anglo-American missions, 1640-1810 (Kampen, Netherlands: Kok, 1970).

96. John Marlowe, Milner: Apostle of Empire (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976); Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment (New York: Books in Focus, 1981).

97. Re-Thinking Missions, p. 45.

98. Ibid.

99. Ibid.

100. Ibid., p. 46.

101. Ibid., ch. 8.

102. Ibid., p. 190.

103. Ibid., p. 178.

104. Ibid., p. 179.

105. Daniel Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980). Cf. Richard W. Reifsnyder, "Managing the Mission: Church Restructuring in the Twentieth Century," in The Organizational Revolution: Presbyterians and American Denominationalism, edited by Milton J Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), p. 57.

106. Re-Thinking Missions, pp. 94-95.

107. Ibid., p. 93.

108. Ibid., p. 30.

109. Ibid., p. 31.

110. B. B. Warfield, "Introduction to Francis R. Beattie's Apologetics" (1903); reprinted in Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield--II, edited by John Meeter (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1973), p. 100.

111. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958). This book first appeared in German the form of a series of essays in a scholarly journal in 1904-5, and first appeared in English in 1930.

112. Liberation theology fell out of favor when Gorbachev did. It became passé overnight. There is no negative sanction greater than this one in the theology of modernism.

113. Re-Thinking Missions, p. 8.

114. Ibid.

115. Chapters 6-7.

116. Chapter 8.

117. Chapter 9.

118. Chapter 10.

119. Chapter 11.

120. Chapter 12.

121. Ibid., p. 8.

122. Gary North, Healer of the Nations: Biblical Blueprints for International Relations (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).

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

124. Re-Thinking Missions, p. 318.

125. Ibid., p. 319.

126. Ibid., p. 322.

127. Cited in Schenkel, Rich Man and Kingdom, p. 165.

128. Patterson, Speer, p. 119.

129. Archibald G. Baker, "Reactions to the Laymen's Report," Journal of Religion, 13 (1933), pp. 379-98.

130. Colby and Dennett, Thy Will Be Done, p. 40.

131. Reprinted in Christianity Today (Dec. 1932), p. 19.

132. Ibid., p. 20.

133. Machen, "The Observations About the Assembly," Christianity Today (June 1931), p. 5.

134. Ibid., p. 21.

135. Clarence E. Macartney, "`Renouncing Missions' or `Modernism Unmasked,'" Christianity Today (Jan. 1933), p. 6.

136. Pearl S. Buck, "Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?" Harper's (Jan. 1933), p. 145.

137. Ibid., p. 148.

138. Ibid., p. 150.

139. Ibid., p. 152.

140. John R. Fitzmier and Randall Balmer, "A Poultice for the Bite of the Cobra: The Hocking Report and Presbyterian Missions in the Middle Decades of the Twentieth Century," in The Diversity of Discipleship: The Presbyterians and Twentieth-Crentury Christian Witness, edited by Milton J Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), p. 124.

141. Longfield, Presbyterian Controversy, p. 186.

142. Robert E. Speer, The Principles of Jesus Applied to Some Questions of To-day (New York: Revell, 1902), p. 175.

143. Ibid.

144. Robert E. Speer, Christianity and the Nations (New York: Revell, 1910), pp. 32-33.

145. Ibid., p. 33.

146. Ibid., p. 332.

147. Ibid., p. 336.

148. Ibid., p. 349.

149. Ibid., p. 352.

150. Ibid., p. 353.

151. Ibid., p. 282.

152. Speer to William Miller, April 1, 1933; cited in Patterson, Speer, p. 99.

153. Speer to Frank Mason North, Jan. 17, 1933; cited in ibid.

154. Robert E. Speer, "Re-Thinking Missions" Examined (New York: Revell, 1933), p. 7.

155. Ibid.

156. Ibid., p. 8.

157. Ibid., p. 10.

158. Ibid., p. 12.

159. Ibid.

160. Ibid., p. 13.

161. Schenkel, Rich Man and Kingdom, p. 167.

162. Speer, "Re-Thinking Missions" Examined, p. 14.

163. Ibid., p. 16.

164. Ibid., pp. 17-23.

165. Ibid., p. 23.

166. Ibid., p. 25.

167. Ibid., pp. 26-29.

168. Ibid., pp. 28-31.

169. Ibid., p. 31.

170. Ibid., p. 36.

171. Ibid., p. 37.

172. Ibid.

173. Ibid., pp. 38-47.

174. Ibid., p. 57.

175. Ibid., p. 59.

176. Ibid.

177. Ibid.

178. He said in 1894, "We Presbyterians and Methodists have no business being apart on questions of doctrine and polity." Cited in Longfield, Presbyterian Controversy, p. 187.

179. William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 170.

180. James A. Patterson, "Robert E. Speer, J. Gresham Machen and the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions," American Presbyterians, 64 (Spring 1986), p. 63.

181. Ibid., p. 62.

182. Keeping Body and Soul Together: Sexuality, Spirituality, and Social Justice, A Document Prepared for the 203rd General Assembly (1991) by the General Assembly Special Committee on Human Sexuality, p. 89, lines 3500-3501.

183. Stonehouse, Machen, pp. 475-76.

184. Machen, Modernism and the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Author, 1933). Reprinted in Modernism and Foreign Missions: Two Fundamentalist Protests, edited by Joel A. Carpenter (New York: Garland, 1988).

185. Ibid., p. 6.

186. Ibid., p. 8.

187. Ibid., p. 15.

188. Ibid., p. 16.

189. Ibid., p. 22.

190. Ibid., p. 23.

191. Ibid., p. 24.

192. Machen's estimation: Machen, "Dr. Robert E. Speer and His Latest Book," Christianity Today (May 1933), pp. 15, 23.

193. Cited in Patterson, Speer, p. 151.

194. Quoted in Christianity Today (April 1933), p. 22. This article is a lengthy summary of the debate by an anonymous correspondent.

195. Ibid.

196. Letter of Charles Erdman to Speer (March 25, 1933); Patterson, Speer, p. 153.

197. Pearl S. Buck, "A Tribute to Dr. Machen," New Republic (January 20, 1937), p. 355.

198. Machen, "Dr. Robert E. Speer and His Latest Book," Christianity Today (May 1933), p. 15.

199. Buck, "Tribute," p. 355.

200. A summary of these events appeared in the next year's Minutes: Minutes of the General Assembly, 1934, p. 72. Normally, such important details as these never appear in the Minutes.

201. Patterson, Speer, p. 158.

202. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1933, p. 154.

203. Ibid.

204. Ibid., p. 159.

205. Ibid.

206. William White, Jr., Van Til: Defender of the Faith (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 1979), p. 106.

207. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1923), pp. 162-65.

208. Ibid., p. 166.

209. Reported in Christianity Today (April 1933), p. 22.

210. Machen, "Freedom in the Presbyterian Church," Christianity Today (Oct. 1933), p. 5.

211. Machen, Statement to the Special Committee of the Presbytery of New Brunswick in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Which Was Appointed by the Presbytery at its Meeting on Tuesday, September 25, 1934. . . (Author, 1935), p. 14.

212. Ibid., p. 34.

213. Ibid., p. 33.

214. Ibid., p. 14.

215. Ibid., p. 15.

216. Reprinted in Christianity Today (Oct. 1933), p. 16.

217. Machen, "Freedom in the Presbyterian Church," Christianity Today (Oct. 1933), pp. 5, 8.

218. Machen, Statement to the Special Committee, p. 24.

219. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1838, p. 48.

220. Machen, Statement to the Special Committee, p. 38.

221. Christianity Today (May 1935), p. 294.

222. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1837, p. 506.

223. Ibid., p. 507.

224. Murray Forst Thompson, "Have the Organizers of the Independent Board for Foreign Presbyterian Missions Violated the Law of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.?" Christianity Today (Dec. 1933), p. 10.

225. In our day, the deteriorating, high-crime neighborhood in which Union is still located has gained its revenge. As Forrest Gump might say, "Liberalism is as liberalism does."

226. 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. 157.

227. Dallas Roark, J. Gresham Machen and His Desire to Maintain a Doctrinally True Presbyterian Church (Ph.D. Dissertation, Iowa State University, 1963), p. 218.

228. Patterson, Speer, p. 161.

229. Schenkel, Rich Man and Kingdom, p. 178.

230. Patterson, Speer, p. 194.

231. Carpenter, "Introduction," Modernism and Foreign Missions, p. [14].

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