Phase 5: Whose Inheritance?

12

INHERITANCE AND DISINHERITANCE

God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are, in any thing, contrary to His Word; or beside it, in matters of faith or worship. So that, to believe such doctrines, or to obey such commands, out of conscience, is to betray true liberty of conscience: and the requiring of an implicit faith, and an absolute and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of conscience, and reason also.

Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), XX:2

This section of the Confession had served New School Arminians in the 1830's and modernists after 1910 as the touchstone of liberty in the Church. The modernists had asserted in the Auburn Affirmation that the General Assembly had no authority to bind ordained men's consciences by deliverances. The General Assembly could at most serve as a final court of appeal, not a legislative body, in the area of Church law. Power lodged in the presbyteries. This had been affirmed by the 1927 General Assembly--the "Speer Assembly"--with the liberals completely in control.⁽¹⁾ The conservatives had maintained the opposite in their rejection of the Auburn Affirmation. "The whole history of the Church, as recorded in the Digest, shows that the Assembly alone is the final interpreter of the law," proclaimed the editor of The Presbyterian in 1924.⁽²⁾ This was true, but only with respect to specific lower court cases that had been appealed to it. Now the ecclesiastical positions would reverse.

The issue, as always, was sanctions. The Presbyterian had enunciated this most clearly in 1922, during the Fosdick case. "No nation, no constitutional church, or other body can afford to allow its constitution to be violated. Such violation is deadly. If it is not resisted, the constitutional body must collapse."⁽³⁾ The words of the Constitution--the Westminster Confession--had not changed, but its interpretation after 1927 was open to any man holding any theological view, so long as his presbytery would ordain him. Negative sanctions would no longer be imposed by the General Assembly in terms of the Confession, but rather in terms of the flow of funds. The politics of the Progressivism had at last gained control over the Presbyterian Church. The guiding principle of the politics of Progressivism is easy to state: progressive change funded by other people's money.

The Church's hierarchy argued in September, 1933, that the General Assembly had the authority to enforce ecclesiastical rules. They denied that there had been a shift with respect to matters of theology and belief. But, they insisted, toleration regarding theology is not the same thing as toleration of disobedience with respect to Church bureaucracies, namely, the requirement that congregations support the official boards of the Church. On this matter, there must be obedience.

The conservatives argued that the underlying issue was theological, since their opposition to the boards, especially Foreign Missions, was based on theological modernism within the boards and tolerance of modernism by the boards. This argument was dismissed by the Church and its agencies. The Church in effect adopted a rule: "Ecclesiastical sanctions against ecclesiastical infractions." This meant that the General Assembly's executive agents were announcing in advance that those convicted by their presbyteries of membership in the Independent Board would automatically be convicted by the General Assembly. The General Assembly had thereby reverted to a functional legislative body. It had adopted the Old Princeton ecclesiology⁽⁴⁾--in order to stamp out Princeton's theology. A series of "non-heresy" trials began in 1935 because the 1934 General Assembly's General Council demanded that they begin.

Sanctions and the Transfer of Authority

There are two kinds of sanctions: positive and negative. The Church's positive judicial sanctions are applied in three ways: by the sacraments, which are the covenantal signs and seals of Church membership; by ordination, at which time judicial authority is simultaneously passed down from God and up through the Church's members; and by laymen voting in a local congregation. God and the members are jointly represented by the ordaining officers.⁽⁵⁾ The Church's negative judicial sanctions are applied in three ways: exclusion from the communion table (excommunication); removal from the ministry or ruling eldership (suspension); removal from ruling eldership or getting fired by the congregation. The right hand of fellowship is removed in the first case; the authority imparted by ordination is removed in the second case; local representation or employment is removed in the third case.

Excommunication is under the authority of the local congregation's session; suspension is under the authority of the presbytery. The question for the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., in the post-1900 phases of the Presbyterian conflict was this: Did the authority to impose these two sanctions reside solely in these two local authorities? Was this authority exclusive? Or was there an appeals system that could reverse the decision of a lower jurisdiction? Specifically, was there double jeopardy protection? Could a person cleared by a lower court be subsequently convicted by a higher court? A preliminary answer came at the 1927 General Assembly in the midst of the controversy over Princeton Seminary. The locus of the authority to ordain ministers was declared to be lodged exclusively in the local presbytery. There could be no further appeal to a higher court.⁽⁶⁾

Meanwhile, control over Princeton Seminary was centralized. The General Assembly restructured it in 1929. So, there was a two-fold movement: authority downward to the presbyteries in matters of ordination; authority upward to the General Assembly in terms of control over Princeton's Board. The Old School would no longer be allowed to control the content of instruction in the last remaining Old School Seminary. It ceased to be an Old School seminary. At the same time, no one could rely on a synod or the General Assembly to remove men from office whose confessions were heretical. From 1927 onward, the modernists had gained their announced long-term goal: no further negative sanctions. In 1928-29, they took their first public action--the reorganization of Princeton--in terms of their unannounced long-term goal: negative sanctions against Confessionalists.

So much for formal sanctions. The fact is, they constitute only the maximum judicial limits of Church sanctions. The reality, as is true in any complex organization, is very different in operation. Not many people are ever excommunicated. Not many Church officers are ever removed from office. The effects of these formal sanctions are achieved representatively: as warnings to others of like mind and like will. But this assumes continuity through a system of judicial precedents. If there are no binding judicial precedents, then the imposition of formal sanctions ceases to be representative. The structure of authority in the organization will disintegrate if a determined opposition group knows that the authorities either cannot or will not systematically impose predictable sanctions, and knowing this, systematically defies authority. If the organization also funds its opponents, then the replacement of the existing leadership is assured.

So, the operating sanctions are not primarily formal. This constitutes a challenge for all those within the organization, as well as for historians seeking in retrospect to make sense of its actual operations. While the organization is supposed to do things "by the book"--point three: stipulations--many things are done without official reference to the book. It is here--beyond the book--that the history of any organization normally takes place. Publicly enforcing the book is a rare event except in times of turmoil and transition. The issue is sanctions.

There is a pattern to institutional change. First, if formal negative sanctions cannot be imposed at all, or if they must be imposed continually to maintain order, the organization is ripe for a takeover. Second, if sanctions are continually threatened but never imposed, the organization is in the final stages of a takeover. Third, the transition is publicly announced when there are neither threats nor systematic formal sanctions. Fourth, the takeover takes place when formal sanctions are imposed in terms of a different set of stipulations, either explicit or implicit. Fifth, the takeover is complete when no further formal sanctions must be imposed in order to gain compliance. This completes the transfer of the inheritance.

In the case of the Presbyterian conflict after 1900, we can date these five stages: (1) new stipulations, silence on negative sanctions (1903-1909); (2) threatened formal negative sanctions, but no imposition (1910-1925); (3) cessation of both threats and negative sanctions (1926-1933); (4) new operational stipulations, renewed negative sanctions (1934-36); (5) no further negative sanctions required (1936 to the present).

The Transformation of Presbyterian Law

In 1934, the revision of the Book of Discipline became law. A new phrase was introduced into Presbyterian law: administrative discipline.⁽⁷⁾ The move to administrative law--what Harold Berman has identified as the seventh and most revolutionary legal revolution in Western history⁽⁸⁾--was now complete in the Northern Presbyterian Church. One further step remained: a public exhibition of this new authority.

Meanwhile, something had been removed: any reference to doctrine or the judicial standards of the Church. Under Chapter I, Section 6, "Purpose of Discipline," we read: "The purpose of discipline is to vindicate the authority and honor of Jesus Christ by the maintenance of the truth, the removal of scandal, the censure for offenses, the spiritual good of offenders, and the promotion of the purity and edification of the Church."⁽⁹⁾ But as Pontius Pilate put it, "What is truth?" More to the point, where do we find it?

Part 7, "Subjects of Discipline," announced: "All baptized persons, being covenant members of the Church and under its care, are subject to administrative discipline, and entitled to the benefits thereof." This was a major innovation in Presbyterian law: non-ordained members previously had been under the initiatory discipline only of the local congregation. They were not members of the presbytery or higher courts, which were accessible only by oath (subscription to the Confession) and ordination. They could contest a local church court's judgment against them in the Church's higher courts, but the idea of administrative discipline on non-ordained members--discipline initiated on them from above the local congregation--had been utterly foreign to Presbyterianism. Since non-ordained members had taken no oath to uphold the Confession, they had not previously been under the initiatory authority of higher courts: presbyteries, synods, and the General Assembly. These courts could lawfully enforce the stipulations of the oath only on those who had taken the oath. All this changed judicially in 1934.

This is additional evidence of an unannounced but radical shift away from the Confession. A formal oath-bound affirmation of the Confession was no longer a distinguishing mark of the structure of Northern Presbyterian law. All members were now placed under the same system of administrative discipline, Confessional oath or not. The implicit content of the oath had therefore shifted: from adherence to the terms of the Confession to obedience to higher Church judicatories irrespective of the Confession. Explicitly, the Confession was still invoked as one aspect of the Church's Constitution, along with the two catechisms, The Form of Government, The Book of Discipline, and The Directory for Worship.⁽¹⁰⁾ In fact, to get at the laymen administratively, the General Assembly implicitly had to abandon the Confession as the judicial basis of its administrative decisions. It substituted maintenance of "the truth" as the binding administrative standard. Every Church member was henceforth obligated to obey the General Assembly's determination of the truth, irrespective of the Confession. The Westminster Confession would never again be invoked as the basis of administrative discipline. It would no longer operationally provide the stipulations of the oath. This confirmed what had been true for decades. The Confession had been a dead letter judicially since at least 1901, and functionally since Swing departed in 1874.

The General Council was explicit regarding the new order: every member has "an obligation to the faithful observance of those terms of communion and fellowship which cannot be set aside by any plea whatsoever."⁽¹¹⁾ Terms? What terms? By what oath of allegiance? "All church members and church officers can be held and must be held to the agreements which they have made."⁽¹²⁾ Agreements? What agreements? By what oath of allegiance?

The document specified that Church officers had taken such an oath,⁽¹³⁾ but it remained silent regarding members. All it said was that members had to obey.

The Steamroller Starts Rolling

On May 3, 1934, an informal meeting was held by certain members of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions and representatives of the Administrative Committee of the General Council of the Church, at the latter's request. Machen and the other Independent Board members were handed a typewritten statement which informed them that the General Council "was of the unanimous opinion that the Independent Board for Foreign Presbyterian Missions, in its organization and operation, is contrary to the fundamental principles of the Constitution of the Church." In September of 1933, before the presbyteries had ratified the new Form of Government, the Stated Clerk had notified the presbyteries of the General Council's new policy regarding the Independent Board.⁽¹⁴⁾

The organizers of the Board, in the opinion of the General Council, were "violating" their "ordination or membership vows, or both."⁽¹⁵⁾ The Council, Machen was informed, was about to circulate this report and a printed argument supporting it to all commissioners of the forthcoming General Assembly, to take place in three weeks. When the members of the Council were asked if the Independent Board could have a copy of the brief against it in advance, they replied that this would be inconvenient, since it was already at the printers.⁽¹⁶⁾ Thus, there was no opportunity for Machen and the other Board members to rebut the arguments against them until the General Assembly met. The scent of kangaroo court was in the air. This scent would soon get much stronger.

The targeted victims challenged the right of the General Council to engage in the publication of a document condemning the Independent Board members before they had the opportunity to plead their cases, individually, in the Church court system.⁽¹⁷⁾ Their pleas went unheard, and the Council published its booklet, Studies in the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. During the General Assembly meeting, the Council distributed its specific recommendations for action on the Independent Board and its supporters just before lunch on the day the question was to be debated. There were only a few hours available for Board members to prepare an adequate defense. Their rebuttal presented primarily the same arguments that Thompson had offered in his article on the Independent Board in 1933.⁽¹⁸⁾ The chief one was that the Board was wholly outside the Church's structure, and therefore not subject to its jurisdiction. This soon proved to be irrelevant, since members of the Independent Board were inside the Church's structure and subject to its jurisdiction. That jurisdiction was now comprehensive.

The great purge could now begin.

The Great Purge

Studies in the Constitution filled pages 71 to 116 of the Minutes. It began by establishing the General Council's authority to deal with the issue at hand. In an "Introductory Note," it cited Chapter XXII, Section II of the new Form of Government, which authorized the General Council "to consider between annual meetings of the General Assembly cases of serious embarrassment or emergency concerning the benevolent and missionary work of the Church, and to provide direct methods of relief."⁽¹⁹⁾ Then it identified the embarrassment-emergency: ". . . certain ministers and laymen of the Presbyterian Church in organizing within the denomination an `Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions.'" That the document identified laymen as participants in the Board was judicially significant, not because the General Council necessarily contemplated action against them, but because the new Form of Government had revoked laymen's judicial immunity from prosecution by a presbytery. Laymen were now under the terms of a new implicit oath: obedience to the directives of the General Assembly.

What had been illegal under Presbyterian law for three centuries had now been authorized: an administrative legal order that was initiated by the General Assembly. Under the old system of courts, the General Assembly possessed no formal authority to serve as a legislative agency in the area of theology. In the 1930 edition of The Digest, under control of the liberals, had carefully distinguished between the General Assembly's "legislative and administrative acts" and its authority as a supreme court. "When the General Assembly as a non-judicial body makes deliverances, they are entitled to great respect, but they are subject to modification or repeal at any time by a majority vote in the General Assembly."⁽²⁰⁾ Yet inevitably, supreme courts do legislate. They may choose not to admit this, but they do legislate. Judge-made law is new law. Supreme courts can reverse themselves, as the Digest affirmed in 1930.⁽²¹⁾

The conservatives had implicitly acknowledged this in their Deliverances of 1910, 1916, and 1923: they kept invoking them to prove that the Deliverances were still in effect. But they had never been in effect, judicially speaking: no sanctions. The liberals had protested, affirming adherence to the formal definition of the General Assembly as a court that had no authority to declare law apart from specific judicial cases. After 1934, this objection was no longer valid. It could not be invoked legitimately by Machen and his allies. The revision of 1934 had transformed the Church into an administrative court: a court that declares the law in advance, applies the law in specific cases, and enforces the law through its own bureaucratic agencies. The conservatives had set the judicial precedent in 1910, but had neither the will to prosecute individuals in the presbyteries nor the votes to get the Form of Government changed. In 1934, the liberals had both. They did not hesitate to implement negative sanctions.

The Flow of Funds

The restructured 1934 Form of Government, by extending the General Assembly's administrative authority to laymen, had in principle abandoned the Westminster Confession, which laymen were not required to subscribe to by oath. But if the Confession was no longer operationally the binding standard, what was? The answer soon became manifest: money--specifically, money for the boards. The boards' moral right to a stream of uncontested income had been challenged by the Independent Board. For the power religion, the flow of funds is sacred.

Studies in the Constitution explicitly affirmed the literally sacred nature of the flow of funds. After spending 50 pages on the history of independent missions agencies, which proved only that opinions about their legitimacy had varied, and there had, since 1869, always been congregational support for independent missions agencies, the General Council got to the point: money. Members are under a judicial obligation to support the boards of the Church financially. The sacramental nature of Presbyterian liberalism's power religion at last manifested itself in no uncertain terms:

Missionary offerings are one of the ordinances enjoined in a particular church by the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church. The successive provisions of the Confession of Faith, the Form of Government, and the Directory for Worship, which have already been noted, make these missionary offerings just as really a part of the instituted worship of the Church as are prayer, preaching the Word of God, or the sacraments. A church member or an individual church that will not give to promote the officially authorized missionary program of the Presbyterian Church is in exactly the same position with reference to the Constitution of the Church as a church member or an individual church that would refuse to take part in the celebration of the Lord's Supper or any other of the prescribed ordinances of the denomination as set forth in Article VII of the Form of Government.⁽²²⁾

The Form of Government, from the never-ratified Westminster Assembly version of 1644 until 1934, listed as ordinances the singing of psalms, reading the Bible, preaching, catechising, the sacraments, a collection made for the poor, and dismissing the people with a blessing. These appear under the section, Of the Ordinances in a particular congregation.⁽²³⁾ Three comments are in order. First, this list did not apply to higher levels of Church authority; these ordinances were exclusively congregational in application. Second, what about collections for the poor? The Church never had attempted to impose this as a requirement for ordination or continued membership, although it appears in the same section as the other local church ordinances. This is the only reference in the section to money; there is silence regarding other mandated collections. Third, the Form of Government did not have equal official authority to the Westminster Confession and the two catechisms, which required a two-thirds vote of the presbyteries to revise (not just a majority), and which are silent regarding collections made for the poor. The only explicit reference points for "ordinances" in the Confession are the marks of the Church: preaching and the sacraments (VII:6; cf. XXV:3). The obvious question: When in Presbyterian history had an oath to support financially the Church's boards been taken by Church officers, let alone its members? The answer: never, before or since.

Then the General Council, in the name of the General Assembly, drew a practical conclusion: "In designating missionary offerings as an ordinance, the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church specifically enjoins all church judicatories, all church officers, and all individual churches to guide, direct, and make effectual through the authorized agencies of the Church the missionary offerings of all church members to the same extent as they are enjoined to perform the same office with reference to any other ordinance of the Church."⁽²⁴⁾ This specified what Church courts were to do. But what if they meet resistance? The General Council was quite specific: begin the trials. The General Council issued its final warning to every member: quit the Independent Board or prepare for judicial action.

If this ordinance was mandatory, what about the others? Would the courts require special oaths of obedience regarding, for example, catechising children or psalm singing? What about special collections for the poor? Not one of these traditional Presbyterian issues was raised. What was raised was this:

2. That all ministers and laymen affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, who are officers, trustees or members of "The Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions", be officially notified by this General Assembly through its Stated Clerk, that they must immediately upon the receipt of such notification sever their connection with this Board, and that refusal to do so and a continuance of their relationship to the said Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, exercising ecclesiastical and administrative functions in contravention of the authority of the General Assembly, will be considered a disorderly and disloyal act on their part and subject them to the discipline of the Church.

3. That Presbyteries having in their membership ministers or laymen who are officers, trustees or members of "The Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions", be officially notified and directed by this General Assembly through its Stated Clerk to ascertain from said ministers and laymen within ninety days of the receipt of such notice as to whether they have complied with the above direction of the General Assembly, and in case of refusal, failure to respond or non-compliance on the part of these persons, to institute, or cause to be instituted, promptly such disciplinary action as is set forth in the Book of Discipline.⁽²⁵⁾

Presbyteries were instructed to initiate proceedings. In the Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910 and subsequently, presbyteries were instructed by the General Assembly to inquire as to ministerial candidates regarding their beliefs. That is, for men seeking ordination, the presbyteries were told to do their screening job. Not once did the General Assembly bring sanctions against any presbytery that failed to follow this order. The General Assembly also had not instructed presbyteries to bring sanctions against men already ordained. The presbyteries had no such authority; once ordained, only a trial could remove a man from office. In 1927, even this authority had been denied to the General Assembly by the General Assembly. But under the revised Book of Discipline, the General Assembly authorized presbyteries to impose sanctions on elders, deacons, and laymen alike.

The Assembly adopted the recommendations of the General Council, including the text of Studies in the Constitution. If Church courts were willing to enforce this directive, orthodox Presbyterians would have three choices: they could cease to support the Independent Board in any official capacity; they could continue to support it and risk disciplinary measures;

or they could withdraw from the Church. Everything had changed in Presbyterian Church since the Scopes trial in 1925. What had been the administrative reality since the General Assembly of 1920 was now in full public view: the triumph of modernism.

Macartney registered a protest in The Presbyterian: "The action of the General Assembly was unjust and unconstitutional in that it amounted to a sentence upon ministers within the church without a hearing and without a trial."⁽²⁶⁾ The trials would soon begin. A year later, he decided to submit in silence, which he did until his retirement. Then he received his pension.

Jurisdiction Over Machen

Machen's opponents were masters of the ecclesiastical machinery. They had used this skill to defend themselves when the conservative forces had the votes. Now, knowing that the balance of power had shifted in their favor, they began to use the bureaucratic system to do to the orthodox wing what the conservatives should have done to them, beginning in 1913 at the latest. Unlike the conservatives, they had the bureaucratic skill, the determination, and the votes to get their way. They also had the will.

On January 23, 1934, Machen submitted a request to the New Brunswick Presbytery that he be given permission to transfer to the Philadelphia Presbytery. Why he had waited so long to transfer remains a mystery. He had been teaching at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia since the fall of 1929. His request was granted, and on March 5, 1934, the Philadelphia Presbytery voted 78 to 48 to accept him into the fellowship. Some of the members had wanted to question him concerning his attitude toward the official agencies of the Church, but this was ruled out of order, and Machen entered the jurisdiction of a far more conservative presbytery.⁽²⁷⁾

Shortly after he had entered the Philadelphia Presbytery, 44 Presbytery delegates filed a notice of complaint with the Synod of Pennsylvania, protesting his acceptance into the fellowship. This complaint was taken under consideration by the Committee on Judicial Business of the Synod, and it was recommended that a final decision as to the legality of Machen's presence within the Philadelphia body be postponed until the 1935 Synod meeting. This postponement, made in June, 1934, effectively silenced Machen's voice in both presbyteries, since it placed him in the category of a minister "in transit," and as such, he was not permitted to speak or to vote in the deliberations of any presbytery.

On June 13, Lewis S. Mudge, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly, informed Mr. Elmer Walker, Stated Clerk of the New Brunswick Presbytery, that Machen was still a member of the presbytery.⁽²⁸⁾ Two days earlier, he had informed the Pennsylvania Synod of his opinion. He informed the Synod that he would instruct the New Brunswick Presbytery to "take up the matter" of Machen's connection to the Independent Board.⁽²⁹⁾ On June 19, the Pennsylvania Synod voted to delay for a year any consideration of the protest against Machen.⁽³⁰⁾ This meant that the Synod avoided tangling with either Mudge or Machen. On June 26, the New Brunswick Presbytery passed a motion requiring Machen to state whether he was willing to sever all connections with the Independent Board, as the General Assembly had demanded. Machen sent a letter of protest to the presbytery: "Without prejudicing the question whether I am or am not still under the jurisdiction of the Presbytery of New Brunswick or whether, if I am still under the jurisdiction of that Presbytery, the Presbytery is warranted in addressing to me officially the inquiry contained in your letter, I desire to say, very respectfully, for the information of the Presbytery, that I have not severed my connection with the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, and that I regard the action of the General Assembly enjoining me to do so as being contrary to the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A."⁽³¹⁾

In response to Machen's defiance of the mandate of the Assembly, a special committee was appointed by the Presbytery of New Brunswick to meet with Machen and to discuss with him the question of his membership on the Independent Board, and, should he remain uncooperative, to recommend disciplinary action at the next meeting of the Presbytery.

The question of Machen's membership in the Philadelphia Presbytery became a crucial point; if he was legitimately a part of the Philadelphia Presbytery, there was little chance of his being brought to trial immediately over the issue of the Independent Board, since the Philadelphia body was in the control of the orthodox forces. If, on the other hand, he was still legally under the jurisdiction of the New Brunswick Presbytery, it was likely not only that he would be placed on trial, but that the decision of the New Brunswick court would go against him.

Machen had little choice, under the circumstances, but to cooperate with the special committee until his jurisdictional status could be officially designated by the Synod of Pennsylvania. He did make a request, however, that he be permitted to bring a stenographer to the committee meeting. This request was denied by the committee. As the committee's chairman wrote to him, "We are not a committee of trial and could pass no judgment which would be binding in character." He called the meeting "a friendly and fraternal conference," in which Machen's interests would be "amply protected."⁽³²⁾ Machen subsequently declined to appear in person, and again he resorted to the printing press, sending a 98-page brief to the committee outlining his position concerning the Assembly's mandate.

The Issue of Christian Freedom

In it, Machen again proclaimed the doctrine of Christian freedom. He presented a five-point argument, with the body of the pamphlet devoted to a defense of his basic five points: (1) that obedience to the command would mean supporting a foreign gospel; (2) that it would mean substituting a human authority for Christ's; (3) that it would mean acquiescence to a mandatory Church tax; (4) that all of these things are forbidden by the Bible; and (5) that he had a full right to remain in the Church in spite of his refusal to acquiesce.

The question of mandatory contributions to the official Church agencies was considered at length by Machen, since he believed that such a tax was an extreme infringement on the personal liberty of Church members.

The modernists in power in the Assembly appealed to the Constitution of the Church, in order to support their demands that Machen and his supporters submit to administrative control. Again, the vital question for the hierarchy was not doctrine but administrative force. Their religion was the power religion.

What divided the two wings was in fact theology. The modernists believed in the theology of power and the bureaucratic machinery necessary to capture and enforce power. The conservatives who were willing to fight--and only a small group of them was willing to fight--believed in creedal religion, meaning the supernatural revelation of God to man in His Bible. Both sides had a covenant theology. Both sides appealed to provisions in the Church constitution and body of rules to attack and defend. But the conservatives were defending a written creed; their opponents were defending an implicit, unwritten creed: the doctrine of salvation through power. The conservatives saw the battle in terms of the moral requirements of an officially supernatural creed, while the liberals saw the battle in terms of the very heart of their religion, namely, conformity to the administrative decisions they were in a position to hand down. The liberals did not admit that the dividing issues were theological, meaning supernatural and creedal, for such an admission would have been contrary to the tenets of their religion.

The Issue of Hierarchical Authority

The 1934 General Assembly was caught in a dilemma of its own creation. If it denied completely the voluntary nature of contributions, it was tampering with a generally accepted principle of voluntarism within all Protestantism. If it did not assert this prerogative of the Assembly to direct all contributions, then its case against Machen and the Independent Board was unfounded. Its own pronouncements reflected this confusion: "As the judicatory of jurisdiction in all matters relating to missionary operations, it [the General Assembly] has never presumed to interfere with the rights or preferences of individual members to give their money or efforts to such missionary objects as they may choose. On the contrary, it has always maintained that the right to control the property of the members of the Church, to assess the amount of their contributions, or to prescribe how they shall dispose of their money, is utterly foreign to the spirit of Presbyterianism. Every contribution on the part of an individual member of the Church must be purely voluntary. . . . In maintaining, however, this personal freedom of individual members, in their contributions to the Church, the General Assembly has never recognized any inconsistency in asserting with equal force, that there is a definite and sacred obligation on the part of every member of the Presbyterian Church to contribute to those objects designated by the authorized judicatory of the denomination."⁽³³⁾ But this judicial dialecticism was merely formal. The hierarchy had decided to come down on the side of compulsion.

Perhaps it was true that the Assembly--the 1934 Assembly--could not see any inconsistency in its pronouncements, but Machen saw a glaring one, and he pointed it out for the benefit of the special committee: "What the General Assembly therefore says in effect (if we may use colloquial language) is: `Support of the Boards is voluntary: don't you dare say that it is not voluntary; but, all the same, if you do not come right across with it we shall see that it will be the worse for you.'"⁽³⁴⁾

In what was perhaps the key clause in the Assembly's mandate, it was asserted that "For any lower judicatory to assume the right of censuring the actions of a higher judicatory is a gross abuse of power on its part, and a nullification of the Constitution of the Church."⁽³⁵⁾ This provision was to play an important role in Machen's trial, for according to the clause, no lower Church court could challenge the legality of the mandate. Such a restriction deprived the lower courts of their judicial powers, making them merely administrative bodies implementing the decisions from above. Their functions as courts had been pre-empted. This is the true nature of all administrative law, and why it constitutes a revolution.⁽³⁶⁾

Top-Down or Bottom-Up?

It is important to understand that it is here, in this concept of lawful authority, that we see the political conflict of the ages. From the days of the early Near Eastern dynastic tyrannies, the power religionists envisioned political authority as a top-down system.⁽³⁷⁾ In contrast to this perception, the Hebrew commonwealth was divided into tribes. The localism of such a decentralized structure was inescapable. Central power was limited. The king was limited by the priests. The priests could not permanently buy rural land belonging to tribe members (Lev. 25). Family members inherited leased family land after 50 years (the jubilee), thereby reducing the central power of the tribes (Lev. 25). The entire social system was based on an appeals court (Ex. 18), not a top-down administrative system. Peter knew that he had the moral authority to appeal to God against the administrative decisions of men (Acts 5:29).

The social structure of the biblical holy commonwealth is a bottom-up law-order, with government beginning with self-government under God's law, and with all ultimate power coming from heaven. The battle between the power religionists and the judicial religionists in the Presbyterian Church reflected this fundamental difference in the concept of authority. 

What had stymied the conservatives in their battle against the liberals in the early 1920's was the Presbyterian court system. The local presbyteries had enormous latitude. Without the vote of two-thirds of the presbyteries, no new creedal requirements could be imposed on individual presbyteries. Thus, the local presbyteries had the authority to ordain heretics and apostates, and the New York Presbytery did it continually. This decentralized system worked against the conservatives, given the fact that they refused to press charges or discipline the New York Presbytery. In 1837, they had known better: they threw out four presbyteries in one shot. After 1869, they forgot.

The liberals took advantage of Presbyterian localism, 1910 to 1933. But once in power, they reversed the traditional decentralized administrative system. They knew in 1934 that the General Assemblies could not impose a new, liberal creed on the whole Church. They did not want to get into such a battle yet. There was no reason to place in jeopardy their recent consolidation of power; a battle over the Confession would have played into the hands of the conservatives. They opted instead for administrative decision-making. The overwhelming public support of the 1934 Form of Government showed there would be no significant resistance. They chose to avoid excommunicating men in terms of doctrine. They adopted a policy of excommunicating men for disobedience or disloyalty to the only god they believed was worth worshipping: the process god who reveals himself in administrative power. It was entirely consistent with their religion that they appealed continually to the moral necessity of conformity to the centralized apparatus of the Church's administrative machinery. After all they possessed the liberals' definition of holy eucharist: 50+ percent of the votes.

Machen would have none of it. "The issue in the Church is doctrinal to the core. . . . The gentlemen in control of the administrative machinery of the Church may go on using the old phrases--`no doctrinal issue,' `purely administrative issue,' and the like--but those phrases are no longer convincing to the public. They might just as well be put on a phonograph record. Putting them on a phonograph record would be a good way to save `overhead.'"⁽³⁸⁾ The issue in 1935 was the same as it had been in 1923: Christianity vs. modernism.⁽³⁹⁾

McIntire vs. Speer

On January 15, 1935, Rev. Carl McIntire, then an unknown young minister, presented an Overture against the Board of Foreign Missions to his Presbytery of West Jersey, which voted with only one negative vote to accept it and send it to the General Assembly. On March 5, Robert E. Speer sent a reply. A committee sent by the Board, which included J. Ross Stevenson, spoke to the Presbytery for two hours on April 15. The Presbytery without debate then rescinded its previous vote, 51 to 38. In response, McIntire published a 96-page booklet, Dr. Robert E. Speer, The Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and Modernism (April 11, 1935). This booklet was a detailed refutation of Speer's March 5 reply. It constitutes the most detailed and documented criticism of Speer and the Board ever published by anyone, before or since.

Typical of how the liberals operated, and still operate, was Speer's response to McIntire's original accusation regarding a book by Winifred Kirkland, The Way Of Discovery, prepared as a series of talks at Fosdick's Riverside Church. The Board recommended it. On page 19, Mrs. Kirkland had written: "There has been only one human being brave enough to release within himself the full creative power of believing that God was his Father. But unless Jesus' method of making himself divine can be imitated, his achievement is a mockery rather than a challenge." McIntire had identified this as Unitarianism. It was worse than Unitarianism; it was Arianism-the heresy against which orthodoxy was established at the Council of Nicea. The suggestion that Jesus became divine and that we can do the same was the essence of the Arian heresy. Such a suggestion denies the unique position of Jesus Christ as the co-eternal Son of God, the Creator of the universe (Col. 1:16).

In response, Speer said that the book had never been recommended by the Board. It had merely been named in a flier prepared by the Women's Committees of the Boards of Foreign Missions and Home Missions, named "without comment for supplemental reading." (What if the book had been Mein Kampf, named "without comment for supplemental reading.") Furthermore, "When attention was called to these two sentences the pamphlet was withdrawn by the Board of Foreign Missions."⁽⁴⁰⁾ McIntire then asked: "How can a Board withdraw a publication, recommend that publication jointly with the Board of National Missions, and still not be responsible for its recommendation and use?"⁽⁴¹⁾ This was the proper question, but it convinced no one in power.

A familiar tactic long used by liberals' has been to recommend heresy and, when caught red-handed, withdraw the offensive document, plead ignorance and innocence, and wait for another opportunity. And why not? For a century, there have been no negative sanctions against anything that the conservatives did not spot, and there have been no negative sanctions against anything that they did spot, since the bureaucracy could immediately plead ignorance or the non-official status of the offending item. This is standard operating policy in every conservative-funded, liberal-run organization. When caught, the perpetrators always dismiss the document as "merely discussion documents" or "unofficial." No one gets in any trouble.

Speer then denied that the lady's pamphlet was Unitarianism.⁽⁴²⁾ His statement revealed a theological ignorance that is startling: either Speer's ignorance or the presbytery's, which accepted at face value his response. "To call this `Unitarianism' is sheer irresponsibility."⁽⁴³⁾ Speer then went much further. He actually referred to biblical passages in defense of the idea that Jesus made Himself divine, although Speer refused to quote these passages verbatim. Here is one of the passages: "Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God" (John 5:18). This was what the Jews said, not what the Bible teaches about Jesus. Then he cited John 13:15: "For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you." The context of this statement was foot-washing. Then he cited I John 2:6: "He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also so to walk, even as he walked." The context here was ethics, not ontology. Speer was deliberately misleading his readers. That a presbytery let him get away with such deliberate misrepresentation of Trinitarian theology -- a defense of Arianism -- indicates just how bad things were in 1935.

McIntire politely added this comment: "Surely this wresting of the Scriptures to support unscriptural truth is not the work of Dr. Speer. Yet it is his writing."⁽⁴⁴⁾

Speer used the same back-peddling when trying to escape another hand grenade tossed by Mrs. Kirkland, in Woman and Missions: "What does the agony on Gethsemene reveal except that Jesus saw human existence so beautiful that he could not bear to leave it." McIntire said: "This is Modernism."⁽⁴⁵⁾ Surely, it was. This pamphlet was published, McIntire had said in his original Overture, by the Board of Foreign Missions. Speer responded: Not so, not so! False, false! "It is `Published by the Woman's Committees of the Boards of Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.' . . . [T]he Boards do not write it or censor its contents. . . ."⁽⁴⁶⁾ Yet it had been sent out by the Board of Foreign Missions. McIntire asked: If the Board is not responsible for its subcommittees, then who is? And so it went for another three pages: debate over the meaning of Mrs. Kirkland's statement. Speer supported the legitimacy of the statement, though he admitted that "steps have been taken to have more care exercised in the future."⁽⁴⁷⁾ That care never arrived. Instead, McIntire was excommunicated a year later-the only protesting minister in the Church to have received this ultimate negative sanction in 1936.

Also recommended in 1933 by the Board was James Hall Franklin's book The Never Failing Light. Hall wrote: "Truly the light was shining in dense spiritual darkness when Jesus began teaching men of all races, of all religions and all classes to look up to the Unseen as their Father and to practice love and brotherhood as the sum total of his requirements of his children." This is modernism, said McIntire. To which Speer replied in his usual forthright manner: "This textbook has not been in some respects a satisfactory book. . . ."⁽⁴⁸⁾ Furthermore, the book was not published by the Board.⁽⁴⁹⁾ Recommended, yes, but not published. The same refrain came in response to E. Herman's The Ministry of Silence and Meditation, recommended in 1934: "Whether our ultimate intellectual conclusions be orthodox or heterodox matters comparatively little. . . ."⁽⁵⁰⁾ This was just one more pamphlet published by the Woman's Committees of the Boards of National and Foreign Missions, said Speer.

McIntire had originally included a section on the Board's cooperative work with liberals in Christian colleges and universities in Asia. He had cited numerous liberal textbooks used in those schools. To which Speer replied: ". . . it was not known to the Board that these books were in the course at the time."⁽⁵¹⁾ "The tract is not satisfactory to us but its writer is an ordained minister in the Church of Scotland. . . ."⁽⁵²⁾ "Cooperative work is not free from difficulties and limitations."⁽⁵³⁾ In short, "it's true, but so what?"

Van Til once said that the unbeliever is like a man standing in front of what he regards as a bottomless pit. He challenges the Christian to give him any fact that points to the existence of God. Every time the Christian presents him with such a fact, the unbeliever shovels it over his shoulder into the pit. "I demand more facts if I am to be persuaded." Such was Speer and the Presbyterian Church's leadership in 1935. There were not a sufficient number of facts on earth to persuade them of the presence of liberalism in the Foreign Missions Board. In 1936, they expelled all those who continued to present such facts.

Neither Sticks Nor Stones

In February, 1935, Machen published an article in The Independent Board Bulletin, "Sham Orthodoxy versus Real Orthodoxy." He hastened to add, as he always did, a statement that none of this was personal. "I do not mean that those who engage in such a propaganda are engaging in any conscious misrepresentation. No doubt very many of them really think that they are orthodox." This implies that some of them knew full well they were not orthodox, and these men were indeed engaging in conscious misrepresentation. But to name them meant launching a heresy trial and risking a trial for slander or, in the now-familiar phrase, violating the ninth commandment. Machen was about to go on trial for insubordination. He was in no position to bring specific accusations against specific ministers. No conservative in the denomination had been in such a position since 1926.

Sham orthodoxy says this, Machen said: "We are opposed to any Modernism that may be in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A." Real orthodoxy says this: "We are opposed to the Modernism which is in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and which dominates its ecclesiastical machinery." To which any good inclusivist would have said: "Says you." And then followed this with: "Prove it." That is exactly what Henry van Dyke had said in 1913, when he challenged anyone to bring him to trial.

Sham orthodoxy says: "We hold that the peace of the Church may be restored by bringing together the warring elements now in the Church." Real orthodoxy says: "We hold that the peace of the Church may be restored only by elimination from the Church of that unbelief which now dominates its councils and by a return of the Church to an honest adherence to the Word of God." To which any informed conservative would have asked: "How can we eliminate unbelief from the Church at this late date?" Meanwhile, any reasonably intelligent inclusivist was saying: "There is a third way to restore peace: eliminate Machen and his followers from the Church." The wheels of administrative procedure had already begun to grind.

Machen then threw down the gauntlet to every conservative who would not stand with him, meaning virtually all of his better-known former supporters by mid-1935. He raised the issue of sanctions and orthodoxy: voting. "We hold that whether a man is a Modernist or not is determined by the way he votes in Presbytery and at the General Assembly; he is a Modernist, no matter what kind of sermons he preaches, if he votes with the Auburn Affirmationists and other Modernist[s] in the great issues of the day." This meant, definitionally speaking, that the overwhelming majority of the Presbyterian ministers was modernist. Machen offered a judicial definition of the modernist rather than homiletic, voting rather than preaching, sanctions rather than confession. Judicially, he was correct, as the Church proved after 1936. The Presbyterian Church had become judicially modernist by 1935. But this did not mean that the muddled middle was confessionally modernist in 1935.

Machen at last had arrived at the crucial understanding of ecclesiology and Confessionalism that had eluded the Old School since 1869: the issue is sanctions. By moving from an emphasis on confession to an emphasis on sanctions as the defining mark of both modernism and orthodoxy, Machen had reversed the Old School's official position, which had always identified personal confession and the theological content of preaching as the judicially defining marks of orthodoxy. He had said so himself a decade earlier: "The corporate witness-bearing of the Presbyterian Church is carried on especially through the pulpit."⁽⁵⁴⁾ Machen was now implying that those ministers who voted with modernists deserved to be de-frocked, for they were not truly orthodox. This is what Maitland Alexander had implied in December, 1923, in his speeches to the anti-Affirmation audiences.⁽⁵⁵⁾ It is significant that Machen wrote to Alexander on June 3, 1935, to tell him that "the Gideon-band method is the method to use in this fight. . . ."⁽⁵⁶⁾ But he knew that in this instance, Gideon would not put the Midianites to flight.

By 1935, Machen was standing firm, just as Luther had: "Here I stand; I can do no other." He was calling for a new Reformation. He had been doing this since 1923: "And another Reformation in God's good time will come."⁽⁵⁷⁾ He knew what this meant: expulsion from the Church, not the reform of the Church. Warfield had told him in 1921: "You can't split rotten wood." This meant trouble: "But meanwhile our souls are tried."⁽⁵⁸⁾

If orthodoxy means voting against the modernists, and modernists control the machinery and the Assemblies, then orthodoxy means expulsion. If orthodoxy cannot bring negative ecclesiastical sanctions, then it must experience negative ecclesiastical sanctions in order to maintain itself. If the test of orthodoxy is judicial as well as confessional, then orthodoxy must identify itself by pushing on the system until it loses institutionally. Orthodoxy cannot be neutral. It cannot sit on the sidelines. Orthodox men must imitate Briggs: escalate the rhetoric until either victory comes or expulsion follows.

A month after the 1935 General Assembly, another essay by Machen appeared in The Independent Board Bulletin (June). He continued both his rhetoric and his unwillingness to name names. The issue, he said, was the tolerance of modernism, as it had been since 1922. He equated tolerance with incompetence.

What we hold is that every member of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. has shown his incompetence to be a member of that Board by his tolerance of Modernism in the work of the Board. It is not a question of this missionary or that. It is not a question of this member of the Board or that. It is a question of the Board itself. In the long run, sound missionaries cannot proceed from an unsound Board. Sweet water cannot come from a bitter fountain. Make the Board sound, and in the long run the missionaries will be sound; make the Board unsound, as it is at present, and in the long run the missionaries will be unsound. That is true no matter what good missionaries may be found at present, even under that unsound Board, on the mission field.

Here we see the absolute futility of the Old School's position since 1869. Machen was unwilling to identify specific missionaries as modernists. In Presbyterianism, naming names brings risks of a court trial for the one who names them. Not naming names, however, guarantees that the present administration will continue unless, through pangs of conscience, the malefactor voluntarily resigns. The modernists moved quietly into the Church's bureaucracies, 1900 to 1913, and thought to themselves, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me." From the day in 1913 when Henry van Dyke publicly challenged any conservative to take him into the New York City Presbytery court for his beliefs, the conservatives were reduced to calling names at no one in particular. Without the willingness and the ability to impose negative sanctions on specific ordained ministers, the conservatives had neither sticks nor stones, and if they named names, sticks and stones would be transferred to their opponents for use in counter-trials. All that the conservatives had was rhetoric against modernist ideas in general, Church boards taken as collectives, and trends. The trends were all against them, as Machen well knew, and had known since his 1912 Seminary lecture on "Christianity and Culture."

Machen's Trial

The special committee ignored Machen's reasoned appeal. It brought back to the Presbytery of New Brunswick a list of specific charges against him, including violation of his ordination vows, and it called for Machen's formal trial before the court of the presbytery, with all proceedings closed to the public. When he heard that the trial was not to be open, Machen went to the press to condemn this restriction. This bad publicity put pressure on the presbytery, which reversed itself and opened the hearing to reporters.⁽⁵⁹⁾ The trial began on February 14, 1935.

Some aspects of the trial bordered on the bizarre. The question of jurisdiction was technically at the heart of Machen's defense. Was he a member of the New Brunswick Presbytery? Machen said no. The presbytery said yes. The Synod of Pennsylvania had placed him in judicial limbo. His presbytery membership was now "in transit." But Mudge had told the New Brunswick Presbytery that Machen was under its jurisdiction. The New Brunswick Presbytery had filed charges against him. Machen's counsel, Rev. H. McAllister Griffiths (accompanied by Edwin H. Rian), argued that the presbytery had no jurisdiction. The argument came down to whether the Philadelphia Presbytery's clerk had sent a receipt of acceptance--a stub--to the New Brunswick Presbytery's clerk. The New Brunswick Presbytery's clerk insisted that he had not received the stub.⁽⁶⁰⁾ The trial continued.

Machen said nothing throughout the trial. Machen's defense counsel invoked the Auburn Affirmation. Some members of the court had signed it or were members of churches whose pastors had signed it. These men should not be sitting in judgment of Machen, his defense counsel argued repeatedly. Finally, court member Kuizenga appealed to the Moderator: "I think that this court is competent to decide that this is not a doctrinal controversy nor a doctrinal question, and that no remarks of this sort shall be allowed in this court."⁽⁶¹⁾ He added that any reference to the Auburn Affirmation was out of order, since the time for anyone to issue a challenge had run out under the statute of limitations.⁽⁶²⁾

Legally, Kuizenga war correct: there was a statute of limitations in the Church, and it had expired. There had been no negative sanctions on the Affirmation, 1923 to 1934. It was now time for other negative sanctions. In short, time had run out for the conservatives. The court ruled that Machen could not invoke either the Affirmation or theology as an aspect of his defense. This effectively ended his defense. But the trial continued, and the transcript fills over 400 double-spaced pages.

The unanimous final verdict of "guilty" was handed down on March 29. All charges against him were upheld. Machen "has been guilty of conduct contrary to the government and discipline of the church, unfaithful in maintaining the peace of the church, has been insubordinate to the lawfully constituted authorities of the church, has violated his ordination vows, has shown contempt of and rebellion against his superiors in the church, and has been guilty of a breach of his lawful promises."⁽⁶³⁾ The court took care to repeat the standard line: "Questions of doctrine have not entered into the case except as the Defendant has endeavored to make them an excuse and justification for his wilful disobedience of Church authority, and his disregard for his ordination vows."⁽⁶⁴⁾ Machen was suspended as a minister of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., with execution of the sentence to be deferred until the case could be reviewed by the higher Church courts.

According to pre-1934 Northern Presbyterian law, suspension also involved excommunication. Suspension "is the sentence by which a Church member or officer is restrained from the exercise and enjoyment of all church privileges and rights. Its visible signs are exclusion from the Lord's Table and from the right of suffrage."⁽⁶⁵⁾ This definition was altered in 1934, but then the alteration was revoked on the following page. Suspension of laymen was defined as temporary excommunication, but "with respect to church officers, it is their temporary exclusion from the exercise of their office, and, at the discretion of the judicatory, from sealing ordinances also. . . . Indefinite suspension is the exclusion of an offender from sealing ordinances, or from his office, until he exhibits signs of repentance, or until, by his conduct, the necessity of the highest censure be made manifest."⁽⁶⁶⁾ The highest censure was excommunication.⁽⁶⁷⁾ This summary was immediately contradicted by the formula of suspension, which the judiciary had to announce publicly: ". . . do now declare you suspended from the communion of the Church (and from the exercise of your office)."⁽⁶⁸⁾ So, suspension after 1933 does seem to have invoked excommunication, even though the text of the actual statute said that excommunication was merely an option.

Machen commented on the trial after the decision of guilty had been handed down: "The special judicial commission of the presbytery of New Brunswick has simply condemned me without giving me a hearing. I am condemned for failing to obey a lawful order; but when my counsel offered to prove that the order that I had disobeyed was not lawful but unlawful the court refused to hear a word of argument. I am condemned for making false assertions about the modernism of the official board of foreign missions, but when my counsel offered to prove that those assertions were true the court would not hear a word of the evidence that we were perfectly ready to produce. It is not too much to say that a trial conducted in this fashion is nothing but a farce. . . ."⁽⁶⁹⁾

But it was too much to say. There was a Presbyterian statute of limitations; it had run out. Machen and the conservatives had accused the Foreign Missions Board of harboring heresy in general but no heretics in particular. Machen's accusation in Christianity and Liberalism was that modernism went beyond heresy; it was apostasy. Machen was like a man who keeps accusing an organization of promoting Communism, but then steadfastly refuses to identify anyone who teaches Communism. No organization can tolerate such accusations from members against its formally constituted agencies. Sooner or later, the accuser must identify specific violations. Machen had refused to do this, and nothing that his defense lawyer said during the trial indicated that he would introduce any specifics beyond someone's having signed the Affirmation. But Machen had said that some of the signers of the Auburn Affirmation were innocent through ignorance;⁽⁷⁰⁾ he just never said who was guilty. In the entire battle over foreign missions, no conservative had ever accused one liberal missionary on the field other than Mrs. Buck, who had resigned. Meanwhile, Robert Dick Wilson (1924) and Donald Gray Barnhouse (1935) had delivered first-hand clean bills of health. Machen's case was doomed to the extent that it relied on his statement of conscience regarding the content of the Missions Board. His only hope was to attack the new legal order, an equally doomed defense: that new legal order had been voted on overwhelmingly by the presbyteries.

The decision of the court was upheld by the Synod of New Jersey, and the Synod of Pennsylvania upheld the complaint against Machen's acceptance into the Philadelphia Presbytery at the 1935 meeting, although the action was taken on extremely technical details of administration. The verdict to remove Machen from the Church's ministry was maintained.

An odd sidelight on the trial took place at the 1935 General Assembly, when a case came before the Permanent Judicial Commission involving two men who had been licensed by the Chester Presbytery, although they had refused to confirm their undivided allegiance to the official Church agencies. O. T. Allis was a member of this very conservative presbytery.⁽⁷¹⁾ The Pennsylvania Synod had upheld the complainants, deciding against the two men, but the Permanent Judicial Commission reversed the Synod's ruling, and permitted the men to enter the Church. It affirmed the absolute sovereignty of presbyteries in licensing candidates for the ministry. "The principle of the Constitution is that a Presbytery in conformity to the Constitutional requirements is the sole judge regarding licensure and when a Presbytery is satisfied it may license."⁽⁷²⁾ In short, the mandate of the 1934 Assembly was judicially overturned. The Permanent Judicial Commission had reaffirmed the General Assembly's 1927 mandate.

This would have been a disaster to the modernists. The Commission had not properly interpreted the new revelation: sanctions would now be imposed; the liberals' orthodoxy from 1876 to 1933 had now evolved into its opposite. In between this General Assembly and the 1936 General Assembly, the Permanent Judicial Commission got the message . . . permanently. The steamroller rolled on, despite this reversal, which in retrospect proved to be a fluke.

Machen decided to take his case to the General Assembly. He knew by now that he would surely lose, but he believed he had an obligation to continue the fight. On April 10, 1935, Machen wrote to Rev. J. R. McMahon:

As for your comment, that I have "no chance," I am perfectly well aware of the fact that I have no chance of vindication from the courts of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. I am very much less concerned about these courts than I am about maintaining my testimony to the gospel and being faithful to my ordination pledge when I became a minister in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.⁽⁷³⁾

 

Showdown at Westminster

All those Presbyterians who maintained their connections with the Independent Board were removed from the Church by their various presbyteries. This did not involve many of the Church's orthodox members, even those originally connected with Westminster Seminary. Some of these men were unwilling to give support to the Independent Board when it became clear that to do so would mean being cut out from the fellowship of the Church. Most notable of these was Samuel G. Craig, editor of Christianity Today, which had been the primary outlet for the orthodox wing since 1930. He resigned from the Board of Trustees of Westminster over this issue, since Machen felt it was incompatible for any who could not support the Independent Board and the possibility of creating a new Church upon expulsion to remain with Westminster. The faculty issued an ultimatum to the Trustees: support the Presbyterian Constitutional Covenantal Union--launched the previous June, which had as its fall-back position the formation of a new Church--or else the faculty would resign. Allis, Machen's close friend since their seminary days, and a staunch orthodox advocate, resigned from his Chair at Westminster, and he was followed by 13 of the 28 trustees on January 7, 1936.⁽⁷⁴⁾

The loss of Allis was very serious. He was the acknowledged successor to Robert Dick Wilson. He was 56 years old, but he lived to be 93, and he was productive right up until the end. His magnum opus, The Old Testament: Its Claims and Critics, was published in 1972, when he was 92. In 1936, he had not yet published his major books, Prophecy and the Church (1945), The Five Books of Moses (1949), God Spake By Moses (1951), and The Unity of Isaiah (1952). He was a giant not yet in his prime, and Machen had forced him out with an ultimatum: "them or us," meaning an independent seminary or an independent board of foreign missions.

What Machen had done by forcing Westminster's Board members to support the Independent Board was to force an ecclesiastical issue on what was supposed to be an independent seminary. The seminary had been established in order to remove it from ecclesiastical control by any Church. Machen violated his principle of an independent seminary board by forcing board members to give at least token acceptance to a completely separate organization, the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions.

The great, grim irony of this decision was that in November, 1936, just two months before his death, the theological independents--fundamentalists in Presbyterian robes--voted Machen out of his long-term position as president of the Independent Board.⁽⁷⁵⁾ They became true to the name "Independent." Machen's successors then had to start a new foreign missions board under the auspices of the new denomination. But Allis and the others never returned.

Why had he done it? Consistency. He had shifted his definition of orthodoxy to include sanctions: voting. This included neutrality; not voting against modernism. He rejected all forms of neutrality with respect to the rival missions boards. It was time to be kicked out of the Church for principle. But by forcing Westminster's Board members to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Independent Board, he was forcing them either to get out of the Presbyterian Church or out of the seminary. Men who had stood by him for a long time decided to remove themselves from his direct influence. The fight for the Presbyterian Church had been lost, in his view; it had not been irrevocably lost in theirs. They were incorrect, but being forced by Machen to choose between Westminster Seminary or the Presbyterian Church gave them an excuse to leave the ecclesiastical battlefield.

By May, 1936, the lines were drawn between the most militant of the orthodox Presbyterians, and those who wished to remain in the Church.

Schism or Apostasy?

In his column in his new periodical, The Presbyterian Guardian (May 4, 1936), Machen chose as its title, "An Apostate Church?" He announced: "It is not schism to break away from an apostate church. Indeed it is schism to remain in an apostate church, since to remain in an apostate church is to separate from the true Church of Jesus Christ." The question at hand: Will the Permanent Judicial Commission uphold the Mandate of the 1934 and 1935 General Assemblies, thereby revealing the Church as apostate? He answered: "Yes." He was correct; the Commission did uphold the mandates, and the General Assembly sustained the Commission. His recommendation if this should happen: "We ought to separate at once from an apostate church organization. . . ." He no longer capitalized the word "church" when referring to the Presbyterian Church. He had previously always done so.

On May 8, Macartney phoned Machen to offer his services as a defense attorney at the trial. Machen graciously turned down the offer in a long letter the next day. The issue was representation, he said. Macartney had decided to remain in the Church. Machen called its machinery apostate in his letter. Machen did not criticize Macartney for remaining behind; in fact he thanked him for all his support, but he said that if he (Machen) were to be lightly reprimanded--unlikely, he thought--then the press would ask Macartney to explain Machen's position. The press would confuse the two positions. He said he had to be represented by someone who agreed with him. He wanted a split: "I think that the evil which this Permanent Judicial Commission is doing will result in the great good of a separation of evangelical forces in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. from an apostate ecclesiastical machine. But I cannot acquiesce in that evil for one moment. . . . If that Permanent Judicial Commission should acquit me, I should adopt every means of forcing the issue immediately in some other way. But that is a most unlikely contingency. . . ."⁽⁷⁶⁾

Machen had finally come to the full realization that the covenantal issue in the denomination was sanctions. He decided to press his point by remaining in the Church until it imposed negative sanctions in terms of its apostate unofficial creed. The imposition of such sanctions would testify to the apostasy of the Church, he believed. He was correct; but this had been equally true in every year since 1901. The Old School had been unwilling to test the orthodoxy of the Church after 1900 by pressing for heresy trials. In fact, it had not initiated a trial against Briggs in 1876 (first Inaugural Address), 1881 (articles in Presbyterian Review), or 1889 (Whither?). The Old School had been unwilling to define covenantal orthodoxy in terms of sanctions because of the implicit understanding that undergirded the reunion of 1869: Old School standards of Confessional orthodoxy would not be used to initiate heresy trials. Only New School standards would be employed. After 1906, Cumberland Presbyterian Church standards would be employed, defined by the 1903 revision. After van Dyke's challenge in 1913, only van Dyke's standards would be employed, which meant no Confessional standards at all. After decades of wrangling, it came at last to this: Machen's standards vs. "Uncle Henry's."

Uncle Henry's prevailed.

The Presbyterian Church of America was formed on June 11, 1936. A remnant of 34 ministers and 17 ruling elders attended that original General Assembly meeting.⁽⁷⁷⁾

The last front-page article devoted by the New York Times to the Presbyterian conflict appeared on June 15, 1936. In the extension on page 21, the Times reprinted much of Machen's June 14 sermon. Machen argued that Satan tempted Christ to worship him by offering Christ the opportunity to do great things for the world. This temptation is still offered to the Church. Just dip the battle flag's colors to the enemy, and there will be no further trouble, Christians are assured. He applied this analogy to the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. "It is an army 2,000,000 strong. Only it is an army no more. That dip of the colors made all the difference in the world."

Suspension and Appeal

The Presbyterian Church's Digest was a compendium of the judicial acts of the General Assembly. The first detailed Digest appeared in 1873, known as Moore's Digest. It summarized earlier short compendiums of 1820, 1850, 1856, and 1861. Moore issued two more: in 1886 and 1898. A Supplement for 1898 to 1907 was issued by William H. Roberts. The next edition appeared in 1922 (two volumes). Another appeared in 1930 (two volumes). There was a supplement in 1934 under Lewis S. Mudge. Two more volumes appeared in 1938.

Volume I of the 1938 edition published the appeals of several ministers who had been suspended by lower courts in 1936 because of their connection to the Independent Board. In each case, the Permanent Judicial Commission of the General Assembly upheld the convictions. Judicial Case No. 1 disposed of the appeals by H. McAllister Griffiths, Merrill T. MacPherson, Edwin H. Rian, Paul Woolley, and Charles J. Woodbridge, all of the Philadelphia Presbytery.⁽⁷⁸⁾ The Commission added: "It is to be noted that the charges against these appellants do not in any wise involve questions of faith or doctrine."⁽⁷⁹⁾ Judicial Case No. 2 upheld the suspension of Carl McIntire by the Synod of New Jersey. In addition, it formally excommunicated him--the only suspended minister singled out for this ultimate sanction.⁽⁸⁰⁾ Judicial Case No. 3 was the longest: the suspension of Machen.⁽⁸¹⁾ Judicial Case No. 4 upheld the suspension of Arthur F. Perkins by the Synod of Wisconsin.⁽⁸²⁾ Judicial Case No. 5 upheld the admonition, a lesser offense than suspension, of J. Oliver Buswell, the president of Wheaton College.⁽⁸³⁾

By suspending the opposition's leaders, the Church ended all opposition from laymen on this issue. No Northern Presbyterian layman subsequently took up Machen's cause by joining the Independent Board, or if he did, no trace of his opposition has survived.⁽⁸⁴⁾ Some 4,200 laymen did agree with Machen and departed with him: about one-fifth of one percent of the denomination's membership.

Two ministers who were members of the Independent Board did avoid suspension. Henry W. Coray in the summer of 1934 had requested that his presbytery allow him to proceed to China as a missionary under the Independent Board. This would require the presbytery to leave his charge as pastor of the West Pittson Presbyterian Church in Pennsylvania. He asked to be released in October. The presbytery refused to release him. The presbytery warned him that if he left his charge, his name would be erased from the presbytery as having become an independent. Rather than trying him for insubordination, it merely erased his name.⁽⁸⁵⁾

Wilbur M. Smith escaped suspension because his presbytery, the highly conservative Chester Presbytery, refused to bring him to trial. It adopted the minority report of the presbytery's Special Judicial Committee. In November, 1935, the Synod of Pennsylvania, through its Permanent Judicial Commission, instructed the Chester Presbytery to institute action against Smith. The General Assembly concurred.⁽⁸⁶⁾ He resigned from the Independent Board, with Machen's blessing, before they could bring him to trial.⁽⁸⁷⁾

With the triumph of the liberals, the Digest no longer had a role to play. There was a supplemental booklet in 1939 and again in 1940 revising the Digest, but after that, the series was never again revised.

The End of the Battle

Machen had twice taken stands for institutional independency: Westminster Seminary and the Independent Board. That second stand backfired on him in November when a majority of the Independent Board voted to remove him as president, replacing him with Harold S. Laird. Laird was still the head of the Independent Board when he was unanimously elected Moderator of the 1939 Synod of the Bible Presbyterian Church.⁽⁸⁸⁾ Laird was not a Presbyterian pastor in 1936; he was pastor of an independent church. This was also true of the new vice president of the board, Merrill T. MacPherson.⁽⁸⁹⁾ From that point on, the Independent Board became openly committed to premillennialism, total abstinence from alcohol, and independency from any ecclesiastical control.⁽⁹⁰⁾ It remained so as of 1995; Carl McIntire was still its vice president, almost six decades after the event.⁽⁹¹⁾

Machen died six weeks later on January 1, 1937, in North Dakota. At his funeral, two men officiated, R. B. Kuiper and Edwin Rian.⁽⁹²⁾ Rian had also been one of the two men to defend him at his 1935 trial. Rian was the Secretary of the Committee on Home Missions and Church Extension as well as field secretary of Westminster Seminary. A decade later he returned to the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., repudiating the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and, by implication, his book, The Presbyterian Conflict. The chief defender at Machen's trial was Griffiths, who would join the secession from Machen's church in 1937, becoming the Stated Clerk of the Bible Presbyterian Church in 1938.⁽⁹³⁾ In between, however, he became involved in a sexual scandal and withdrew from local church duties, although he was never charged formally by any Church court.⁽⁹⁴⁾ He retained his position on the Independent Board.

Machen had decided during the summer that a fight with the fundamentalists was coming. He emphatically renounced the term "fundamentalist" in a private letter that September.⁽⁹⁵⁾ The explosion came in the November meeting of the Independent Board. Machen was not re-elected as president. The deciding vote was cast by Griffiths.⁽⁹⁶⁾

A Shattered Dream

At the 1937 General Assembly of the newly formed Presbyterian Church of America, Rev. Charles Woodbridge recounted the last weeks of Machen's life, and then made an assessment: his expulsion from the Independent Board had killed him. "Dr. Machen told some of us that this was the greatest blow he ever had to stand in his life." He continued: "Six weeks later came the journey to Bismarck. . . . The physician who attended Dr. Machen in his last hours attributed his death largely to the fact that some severe shock had left him in a weakened physical condition. Those of us who were closely associated with Dr. Machen during those last six weeks know what that shock was."⁽⁹⁷⁾ A similar story was related by his sister-in-law, Helen Woods Machen, who said that Machen had spoken with her by phone on the night of his dismissal: "They kicked me out as President, it's the hardest blow I've ever had yet, I'm done for now. . . . Now everything is in the hands of men who haven't the slightest notion of the issues at stake . . . everything I've worked for, loved and suffered for has been kicked out too. I feel it's the end for me, this time they've finished me."⁽⁹⁸⁾

The 1937 General Assembly marked the secession of McIntire, Buswell, and their premillennial followers, which included a Westminster Seminary second-year student, Francis Schaeffer, who then transferred to the newly established Faith Seminary. The official history of McIntire's Bible Presbyterian Church does not mention the premillennialists' 1936 takeover of the Independent Board. Prior to the 1937 assembly, Buswell had contacted the press and had identified the new denomination as a "wet" Church. It was obvious that he was laying the ground work for a secession.⁽⁹⁹⁾ When their candidate for Moderator, dispensationalist Milo Jamison (whose story of the crossed fingers gave me the title of this book), was defeated, they walked out. McIntire explained the reasons for his secession in his newspaper, the Christian Beacon (June 10, 1937). He wanted "a freer, more aggressive testimony, with the warmth of personal evangelism in it, as well as a careful teaching of the great system of doctrine set forth in the Scriptures."⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ Marsden is correct: the separatists who created the Bible Presbyterian Church in September of 1938 were heirs of the New School tradition,⁽¹⁰¹⁾ but they were no longer New School Presbyterians; they were fundamentalists. New School Presbyterianism by 1937 no longer existed as an identifiable movement. Neither did Old School Presbyterianism.

McIntire wrote in 1944: "We must beware of extreme separation. We do not want to dry up like the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, or become a little, small group like the Reformed Episcopal Church."⁽¹⁰²⁾ But with the split between McIntire and the original Bible Presbyterian Church in 1956,⁽¹⁰³⁾ the Bible Presbyterian Church began its march into invisibility to the general public. In 1967, he wrote a book in which he claimed that only the Bible Presbyterian Church still maintained Machen's original commitment. He failed to mention Machen's removal from the Independent Board by McIntire's colleagues in 1936. "This is the denomination which has continued to join the issue in the struggle over the Auburn Affirmation, the reorganization of Princeton Seminary, the formation of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, the ecclesiastical trials of 1936. . . ."⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ He dismissed the Orthodox Presbyterian Church as a defender of the Christian Reformed Church's tradition. It was run by the "group that wanted a different kind of church. . . ."⁽¹⁰⁵⁾

The conflict, Woodbridge said, had been "independency versus historic Presbyterianism." And so it had. In self-defense, Machen had publicly adopted the New School's nineteenth-century theory of ecclesiastically independent ministries. That view led, step by step, to the destruction of the Old School in 1936.

Arthur F. Perkins

On the day Machen died, Rev. Arthur F. Perkins' funeral was held in Wisconsin. He died three days before Machen did. A year earlier he had been in good health. He was an even more obvious victim of the Presbyterian power religion. He had operated a summer camp for children in Wisconsin. He was a premillennialist Presbyterian pastor. He was also opposed to the modernists. He had made the mistake of charging young people $3.50 a week instead of the $12 charged by the presbytery's camp. This brought down the wrath of his presbytery, which announced:

Your committee is of the opinion that the plans in process of promotion under the name of CRESCENT LAKE BIBLE FELLOWSHIP are quite unwise, unethical and divisive (as well as positively contrary to our vows as presbyters, looking toward the peace, unity and purity of the church).⁽¹⁰⁶⁾

In vain did he protest that the camp was not a deliberately rival camp, just a place for children to have Bible studies and have fun. It was non-denominational. It was not run through his local church. That, of course, was the liberals' whole point in the summer of 1936. He refused to close it, and he refused to resign from the Independent Board. For this he was suspended.⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ His health declined sharply after this.⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ He died in late December, possibly as the result of a seemingly minor head injury.⁽¹⁰⁹⁾

The deaths of Machen and Perkins--one an Old School Presbyterian intellectual and the other a fundamentalist Presbyterian evangelist--are representative of the fate of conservative Northern Presbyterianism. But there was another representative figure: Clarence E. Macartney.

The Eloquent Preacher Who Shut Up

Macartney remained behind. He also remained silent. On March 8, 1939, an essay by him was published in the modernist periodical, Christian Century. It was titled "Warm Hearts and Steady Faith." The editor's subtitle announced: "Eighth Article in the Series `How My Mind Has Changed in This Decade.'" He insisted that "I have experienced no emotional or intellectual change in the last ten years. Of course, I have had widening experiences, and perhaps here and there the emphasis has altered; but as regards what Coleridge called the `constituent' doctrines of the faith, I am conscious of no change."⁽¹¹⁰⁾ That he would quote Coleridge rather than the Westminster standards is revealing.

He then spent two pages reminiscing about his early years. Of his leadership in the fundamentalist controversy, he said only that there was "no bitterness in his spirit." He referred to many harsh letters he had received from liberals and modernists during the fight. But regarding the theological and ecclesiastical issues he had raised for over a decade and a half, he was silent. He spoke only of his joy in preaching sermons and running his "Tuesday noon meeting for business men." He then cited James McCosh, the president of Princeton, in McCosh's evaluation of his brother-in-law's ministry, who "was not deep and metaphysical." McCosh said, "They go to hear him because they like to have their hearts warmed."⁽¹¹¹⁾ That was New School Presbyterianism in 1869. The problem was, it was now 1939.

He warned against the reduced unity of witness within denominations. He spoke of the "tragic expulsion" of Machen. He pled for the legitimacy of localism: "More and more, I despair of getting a united witness from churches which embrace in their point of view and preaching almost every religious opinion. Therefore I value less the whole ecclesiastical structure, and feel that more and more for the true witness to the gospel and the Kingdom of God we must depend upon the particular local church, the individual minister and the individual Christian."⁽¹¹²⁾ This was the cry of despair of an outvoted old man at the end of a war--a surrender to Congregational polity in the name of localism. He neglected to deal with the obvious issue, succession, point five of the covenant. The question in 1939 was this: What will happen to the faithful local congregation's witness after the death or retirement of today's evangelical pastor? The curricula of the seminaries would determine that in Presbyterianism. That meant neo-orthodoxy. Emil Brunner was serving as a guest professor of systematic theology at Princeton at the time of the publication of Macartney's article.⁽¹¹³⁾

Macartney rejoiced in the swing away from "the extreme modernist position toward what may be described as the conservative position."⁽¹¹⁴⁾ Here was the grand illusion of those who remained behind: that Barth, Brunner, and neo-orthodoxy were positive replacements for modernism, that they were not offering, in Van Til's subsequent phrase, a new modernism.⁽¹¹⁵⁾ This illusion rested on a false assumption: that theological Progressivism's Kantian phenomenal realm of social gospel politics was inherently far more apostate than neo-orthodoxy's Kantian noumenal realm of personal encounter with a Christ who does not speak objective propositional truth in history. Both positions were equally opposed to the Christian doctrine that God has spoken definitively to man in the texts of the Bible in ways that can be categorized into such propositional statements as judicially binding creeds and confessions.

Macartney took a few mild swipes at the ecumenical movement, and then ended his essay with the doctrine of eternity. "In the last ten years I have emphasized more and more the doctrine of immortality and the future life." We have all, irrespective of our theologies, neglected "this great doctrine."⁽¹¹⁶⁾ He never spoke a truer word. Had the conservatives in every denomination from 1869 onward screened every candidate for the eldership with questions regarding the reality of hell, the modernists would have had a heck of a time capturing the American churches. He was equally correct about this: "Certainly in the church today there seems to be a general conspiracy to keep silent about the future life. . . . The failure to sound the note of the future life has made much of our preaching secular and commonplace." But by 1939 his warning was too late by exactly seventy years.

A beaten general, he would never again launch another attack or participate in one. As one biographer says, after 1939, he concentrated on his preaching. He attended presbytery meetings only infrequently, making token appearances at best. "This was ironical, indeed, for the one who had been recognized as the unquestioned leader of the conservative forces within the church and a former moderator of the General Assembly."⁽¹¹⁷⁾ On the contrary, there was nothing ironical about it. He fully understood the terms of surrender. He would collect his pension; for this, he would pay the required price: silence. Those who stayed behind with him also honored the agreement, as surely as Robert E. Lee's defeated troops honored his. Loetscher wrote in 1954: "The termination of the judicial cases in 1936 marked the virtual cessation to date of theological controversy within the Church's judicatories. In spite of important internal diversities, the Church since 1936 has enjoyed the longest period of peace since the reunion of 1869."⁽¹¹⁸⁾

Henry van Dyke once contemptuously dismissed the conservatives: "They are not great theologians, but they have a tremendous sense of the value of real estate."⁽¹¹⁹⁾ As they proved in 1936, his assessment was correct, but it was even more true of the liberals, whose theology was far more earth-bound. Liberals, after all, went to civil court to keep the local church property that the seceders had to leave behind. Nevertheless, one by one, the conservatives abandoned Machen and his ever-shrinking band of confessional die-hards. They kept their pulpits, but they lost the denomination.

In 1937, Robert E. Speer retired on his 70th birthday, the maximum age limit for secretaries of Church boards, as required by the General Assembly.⁽¹²⁰⁾ In 1938, Lewis Mudge, second academically behind Speer at Princeton University in 1889, retired from his position as Stated Clerk.⁽¹²¹⁾ In 1956, Princeton Seminary named its magnificent new library building in honor of Speer.⁽¹²²⁾

Conclusion

The theological issue in Machen's eyes after 1915 had always been simple: Christianity vs. liberalism. This meant confession. He chose to remain in the Church until a split was precipitated by the liberals. This meant sanctions. He knew by 1929 that there was no possibility that the Church would return to conservative evangelicalism, let alone Calvinistic orthodoxy, in his lifetime. He had been warned by Warfield in 1921 that a split, even with the conservatives in the majority, could not save the Presbyterian Church. The rottenness of the wood had progressed too far. Dry rot--Prohibitionism plus modernism--had set in. The historic Calvinist faith of the Church no longer was respected, even in 1921. Warfield understood that history marches forward, that institutions rarely, if ever, can be persuaded to return to the traditional ways from which they have departed.

But it was not just confession and sanctions. It was also point two: hierarchy (representation). The modernists fully understood this principle. Hart writes: "Yet one of the curious features of the Presbyterian controversy is why the denomination devoted so much energy to silencing what was at best a small and peripheral movement."⁽¹²³⁾ There is nothing curious about it. The modernists needed a public sacrifice, one that would represent the death of the opposition. After 1925, Machen was the acknowledged intellectual spokesman of the entire American fundamentalist movement, as well as the Old School, the only intellectual of the historical Protestant tradition that seriously threatened modernist scholarship. The modernists understood what every power-seeking bully knows from grade school days: if you can beat to a pulp your most prominent opponent in full public view, throwing him and his followers off the playground and stealing all of their marbles, you will have no further trouble with the other boys. You can then extort a percentage of their marbles on a regular basis by rigging the rules. Either they play by your rules or they are kept off the playground by your associates. Most boys want access to the playground far more than they want to keep all of their marbles. By 1967, however, Presbyterian conservatives had completely lost their marbles.

The liberals did not have any commitment to be gentle, fair, or considerate of Machen's wing of the Church. There was nothing moderate about them, once they had gained power. Tolerance then meant toleration of this transfer of control. The liberals had played the game of "mental reservation" with the word "toleration," just as they had with the Westminster Confession. In 1934, the first game ended. The second game did not end until the Confessional revision of 1967. In 1936, through the imposition of sanctions, the Presbyterian Church was made safe, in Malcolm Muggeridge's marvelous phrase, for moderate men of all shades of opinion.⁽¹²⁴⁾

What no doubt bothered Machen was that so many of his former spiritual colleagues remained behind in the Church. Confrontation by confrontation, the ranks had thinned: the 1926 General Assembly, Princeton's 1929 reorganization, the 1933 Independent Board. Men refused to acknowledge what he had warned them all in 1923: if the liberals captured the Church, it would be immoral to remain inside. His conservative and orthodox former supporters had not gone into print calling him an extremist in 1923 or thereafter, but they refused to leave with him. They demonstrated by their refusal to depart that they had not really believed him when he wrote that refusal to leave "would mean the most terrible bloodguiltiness which it is possible to conceive."⁽¹²⁵⁾

In 1922, in the aftermath of W. H. Griffith Thomas' accusations that the foreign mission field had been infiltrated by modernists, an Old School member of the Presbyterian Foreign Missions Board, John Fox, wrote a letter to Speer. His goal was to provoke Speer to a stronger public stand against modernism. He made this observation: "What a man will not fight for, what he will not part with his best friend for, when necessary, has usually a slighter and slighter hold on his mind."⁽¹²⁶⁾ No better epitaph than this exists for the evangelical wing of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. Theology had lost its hold on the minds of good men. Yet in Fox's case, his personal epitaph was different. Just before he died, he called Henry Sloane Coffin to his bedside⁽¹²⁷⁾--his old opponent, the president of Union Seminary, the living incarnation of both theological liberalism and successful bureaucratic strategy in the Presbyterian Church. This, too, was representative of what happened to the Old School in Northern Presbyterianism, 1922 to 1936. It died, leaving the liberals in control over succession. The liberals inherited the Old School's institutional legacy, and the New School's as well. They had achieved their long-term goal.

But history moves forward, and succession continues. The heirs of the modernists have seen their inheritance dissipate since 1965: the steady shrinking of mainline Presbyterianism and the other mainline Protestant denominations, and their expulsion from the American Establishment for non-payment of dues. In the power religion of democracy, covenant renewal is by voting. Mainline Protestantism can no longer deliver the votes. The Christian Right can.

Not believing in the infallibility of the Scriptures, the liberals paid no attention to the Psalms, especially this one: "And he gave them their request; but sent leanness into their souls" (Ps. 106:15). They gained the inheritance through deception. "Bread of deceit is sweet to a man; but afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel" (Prov. 20:17). Negative sanctions have come. The crucial issue is sanctions.

 

Addendum

For over three decades, I have been asked a question by members of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church: "What if Machen had lived?" For an OPC member in the 1960's, though far less so today, this question was analogous to the one asked of historians, especially by Southerners, in the generation after the Civil War: "What if Lincoln had lived?" The professionally correct answer is: "Nobody knows." The theologically correct answer is: "His death was predestined before the foundation of the world." We cannot know what Machen would have accomplished or what those around him would have accomplished. But we can be fairly certain regarding what he would not have accomplished: launching the new Reformation that he had long prayed for.

We do know what Machen had accomplished by the time of his death. First, he had served as an academic spokesman for conservative academic Protestantism, which was about to enter a wilderness period that lasted for a generation. Those few fundamentalists who knew about him, 1924 to 1936, respected his stand for the Bible and against modernism, but they knew little or nothing about his Calvinism or his views on apologetics, politics, and economics. They were vaguely in agreement with his theology, but his mind-set was basically opposed to fundamentalist pietism, as his 1913 essay on "Christianity and Culture" had indicated. He was no pietist, no withdrawer from culture.

Second, he had been the creator of a tiny Calvinist denomination. But his leadership role here had not been primarily as a builder but as a defender of a besieged theological tradition. He was a Moses who led a Remnant out of Egypt. Was he prepared to serve as a Joshua? Few men can do both; the number of Martin Luthers in history is limited.

Third, he had been trained to be a scholar, not an administrator. He had founded Westminster Seminary. He would have been forced to work hard to keep Westminster afloat economically. He and John Murray were the last of the Old School theologians in 1937. Murray would have taught systematic theology. Van Til would have taught apologetics. Machen might have taught a few courses in New Testament, but Stonehouse was fully capable, if not more capable. Machen's job would have been clear: to raise the money to supply the next generation of OPC pastors. There would have been little time to write another book as scholarly as The Origin of Paul's Religion or The Virgin Birth of Christ.

Fourth, the denomination would have looked to him for general leadership, but how successful he would have been as a denominational organizer and builder is unknown. He had not been trained to do such a thing. His expulsion from the Independent Board's Board had made it clear that Presbyterian fundamentalists would not tolerate his personal leadership in building a new denomination.

Meanwhile, his opponents were also about to enter into their wilderness journey, though in far greater outward comfort. They were about to become passé. Barth would be answered by Van Til in the late 1940's; it is unlikely that Machen's Old School Scottish rationalism was fit for that task. As for Harry Emerson Fosdick, he had to content himself with being theologian for the Reader's Digest and serving as John the Baptist for Norman Vincent Peale. Lesson: God is not mocked.

If this book helps you gain a new understanding of the Bible, please consider sending a small donation to the Institute for Christian Economics, P.O. Box 8000, Tyler, TX 75711. You may also want to buy a printed version of this book, if it is still in print. Contact ICE to find out. icetylertx@aol.com

Footnotes:

1. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1927, p. 62.

2. D. S. Kennedy, "An Affirmation of One Hundred and Fifty Liberal Ministers," The Presbyterian (Jan. 17, 1924), p. 9; cited in 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), p. 158.

3. "The Presbyterian Church a Constitutional Body," The Presbyterian (Nov. 9, 1922), p. 6; cited in Kim, ibid., p. 151. A month later, he warned that schism might become necessary if the "vice and error" were not removed. "Honorable and Necessary Schisms" (Dec. 7, 1922), p. 4. Cited in ibid., p. 152.

4. Kim, Presbyterian Conflict, pp. 198-205.

5. On the two-way nature of ordination--upward and downward--including civil ordination, see Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 4.

6. See Chapter 10, above: section on "The 1927 General Assembly."

7. The text reads: "3. Administrative Discipline. . . . 4. "Purpose of Administrative Discipline." Book of Discipline, I:2, 3. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1934, p. 145.

8. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 33-41.

9. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1934, p. 145.

10. Ibid., p. 73.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., p. 74.

13. Ibid.

14. 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. 152.

15. Machen, Statement to the Special Committee of the Presbytery of New Brunswick in the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A. Which was Appointed by the Presbytery at Its Meeting on Tuesday, September 25, 1934. . . (Author, December 12, 1934), p. 6

16. Ibid., p. 7.

17. Edwin H. Rian, The Presbyterian Conflict (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1940), pp. 151-52.

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

19. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1934, p. 70.

20. Digest of the Acts and Deliverances of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church In the United States of America, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Office of the General Assembly, 1930), I:288.

21. Ibid., I:288-89.

22. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1934, p. 110.

23. The Form of Presbyterial Church-Government (1645), in The Confession of Faith (Publications Committee of the Free Church of Scotland, 1970), p. 404.

24. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1934, pp. 110-11.

25. Ibid., pp. 115-16.

26. Macartney, "Presbyterians, Awake," The Presbyterian (July 19, 1934), pp. 8-9.

27. Rian, Presbyterian Conflict, p. 171.

28. Letter to Machen from Elmer Walker, dated July 16, 1934. Reprinted in Machen, Statement to the Special Committee, p. 75.

29. A reprint of his letter appears in Christianity Today (Aug. 1934), p. 62.

30. Ibid.

31. Letter to Elmer Walker from Machen, dated July 25, 1934. Machen, Statement to the Special Committee, p. 76.

32. Letter to Machen from D. Wilson Hollinger, dated October 24, 1934. Reprinted in ibid., p. 83.

33. Machen, Statement to the Special Committee, pp. 70-71. Cf. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1934, p. 113.

34. Ibid., p. 24.

35. Ibid., p. 38.

36. Berman, Law and Revolution, pp. 33-41.

37. Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1957).

38. Machen, "What May Be Learned from the 1935 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church on the U.S.A.," Independent Board Bulletin, 1 (June 1935), p. 5.

39. Ibid.

40. Carl McIntire, Dr. Robert E. Speer, The Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and Modernism (1935), pp. 9-10.

41. Ibid., p. 9.

42. Ibid., p. 11.

43. Ibid., p. 12.

44. Ibid., p. 11.

45. Ibid., p. 16.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid., p. 17.

48. Ibid., p. 20.

49. Ibid., p. 21.

50. Ibid., p. 25.

51. Ibid., p. 32.

52. Ibid., p. 34.

53. Ibid., p. 38.

54. Machen, "The Parting of the Ways--Part 1," The Presbyterian (April 17, 1924), p. 8.

55. See Chapter 9, above: section on "Preparation for Battle."

56. Cited in Hart, "Doctor Fundamentalis": An Intellectual Biography of J. Gresham Machen, 1881-1937 (Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1988), p. 319n.

57. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan 1923), p. 178.

58. Ibid.

59. Rian, Presbyterian Conflict, p. 176.

60. Transcript, Machen Trial, p. 158.

61. Ibid., pp. 63-64.

62. Ibid., p. 64.

63. Ibid., pp. 410-11.

64. Ibid., p. 408.

65. Manual for Church Officers and Members, 4th ed. (n.p.: Office of the General Assembly by the Publication Department of the Board of Christian Education, 1930), p. 161.

66. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1934, pp. 162-63.

67. Ibid., p. 163.

68. Ibid., p. 162.

69. Christian Century (April 17, 1935), p. 519.

70. "The Affirmation does indeed employ Christian terminology; and, deceived by this terminology, there are no doubt Christian men among the signers." Machen, "The Parting of the Ways--Part II," The Presbyterian (April 24, 1924), p. 7.

71. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1935, p. 84.

72. Ibid., p. 86.

73. Machen archives, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia.

74. Rian, Presbyterian Conflict, pp. 98-99.

75. Ibid., pp. 241-42.

76. Machen to Macartney, May 9, 1935; reprinted in Presbyterian Guardian (Jan. 1962), p. 5.

77. 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. 37.

78. Digest of the Acts and Deliverances of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church In the United States of America, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Office of the General Assembly, 1938), I:573-80.

79. Ibid., I:575.

80. Ibid., I:878-79.

81. Ibid., I:871-78.

82. Ibid., I:881-84.

83. Ibid., I:755-57.

84. Sun Oil Company's J. Howard Pew, the richest man in the Church, subsequently bankrolled a conservative tabloid, The Presbyterian Layman, for many years. He remained in the Church, part of the loyal opposition.

85. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1936, pp. 35-36.

86. Ibid., pp. 37-40.

87. Wilbur M. Smith, Before I Forget (Chicago: Moody, 1971), pp. 116-17.

88. A Brief History of the Bible Presbyterian Church And Its Agencies (no publisher no date, but probably published in 1968), p. 64.

89. George P. Hutchinson, The History Behind the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod (Cherry Hill, New Jersey: Mack, 1974),, p. 233.

90. Ibid., p. 234.

91. Letterhead, March 6, 1995.

92. Christian Beacon (Jan. 7, 1937), p. 1.

93. Brief History, p. 60.

94. Charles G. Dennison, "Tragedy, Hope and Ambivalence: The History of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1936-1962, Part 1," Mid-America Journal of Theology, 8 (Fall 1992), pp. 155-56.

95. Ibid., p. 157.

96. Ibid., pp. 157-58.

97. New York Times (June 3, 1937); cited in Dallas M. Roark, "J. Gresham Machen: The Doctrinally True Presbyterian Church," Journal of Presbyterian History, 43 (June 1965), p. 138.

98. Cited in Hart, Defending the Faith, pp. 164-65.

99. Hutchinson, History, p. 236.

100. Cited in ibid., p. 237.

101. George M. Marsden, "The New School Heritage and Presbyterian Fundamentalism," Pressing Toward the Mark: Essays Commemorating Fifty Years of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, edited by Charles G. Dennison and Richard C. Gamble (Philadelphia: Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1986), p. 179. Cf. Marsden, "Perspective on the Division of 1937," ibid.

102. Cited in Hutchinson, History, p. 244.

103. It changed its name to the Columbus Synod of the Presbyterian Church, then to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (1961), and then united with the Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America (General Synod) to become the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod (1965).

104. Carl McIntire, The Death of a Church (Collingswood, New Jersey: Christian Beacon Press, 1967), p. 165.

105. Ibid., p. 164.

106. [Carrie Fenton], A Costly Dream at Crescent Lake and Lake Lundgren (Salem, Oregon: Panther, 1979), p. 59.

107. His defense attorney was Rev. Harry Rimmer, who was well-known as a fundamentalist Presbyterian author and speaker. Rimmer was a creationist, though a "gap theorist" in the Scofield Reference Bible tradition (Gen. 1:1-2). See Henry R. Morris, History of Modern Creationism (San Diego, California: Master, 1984), pp. 58, 88-92.

108. A Costly Dream, p. 60.

109. Ibid., p. 95.

110. Clarence Edward Macartney, "Warm Hearts and Steady Faith," Christian Century (March 8, 1939), p. 315.

111. Ibid., p. 317.

112. Ibid.

113. Brief History, p. 22.

114. Macartney, "Warm Hearts," p. 318.

115. Cornelius Van Til, The New Modernism: An Appraisal of the Theology of Barth and Brunner (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1947).

116. Macartney, "Warm Hearts," p. 319.

117. C. Allyn Russell, "Clarence E. Macartney: Prince of the Pulpit," Journal of Presbyterian History, 52 (Spring 1974), p. 56.

118. Lefferts A. Loetscher, The Broadening Church: a study of theological issues in the presbyterian church since 1869 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), p. 155.

119. Cited in Tertius van Dyke, Henry van Dyke: A Biography (New York: Harper & Bros., 1935), p. 375.

120. W. Reginald Wheeler, A Man Sent from God: A Biography of Robert E. Speer (n.p.: Revell, 1956), p. 251.

121. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1938, p. 131.

122. The second library building, to be completed in 1995, will bear the name of Henry R. Luce, founder of Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, and a member of Skull & Bones.

123. Hart, Defending the Faith, p. 157.

124. Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, Chronicle I: The Green Stick (New York: Morrow, 1973), p. 168.

125. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p. 166.

126. Fox to Speer, June 22, 1922; 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. 133.

127. Morgan Phelps Noyes, Henry Sloane Coffin: The Man and His Ministry (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964), p. 85.

TOP

Table of Contents