CONCLUSION Liberty first. And why? Because without liberty there is no true orthodoxy. A man cannot be taught to believe and think right without liberty. Orthodoxy must flourish in an air of freedom. . . . That is the position of a conservative.
Henry van Dyke (1891)(1)
In the second place, a true Christian Church will be radically intolerant. . . . Now, a church is a voluntary association. No one is compelled to be a member of it; and no one is compelled to be one of its accredited representatives. It is, therefore, no interference with liberty to insist that those who do choose to be its accredited representatives shall not use the vantage ground of such a position to attack that for which the church exists.
J. Gresham Machen (1933)(2)
How much theological diversity could be tolerated by the Northern Presbyterian Church and still remain Presbyterian? Van Dyke answered: "more." Forty-two years later, a few months before van Dyke died, Machen answered: "less." The Presbyterian Church sided with van Dyke in 1936. It decided that the important issue was not theology; it was the flow of funds. Nevertheless, that view reflected an implicit theology: Progressivism. Theological modernism was the same as political modernism with respect to their central confession: a self-certified, self-appointed, self-perpetuating administrative elite's legitimate control over other people's money--other people being the majority, which affirms a rival confession.
The conservatives who remained behind, for whatever reasons, acted as though they believed that Machen had been incorrect. They acted as though there were not two rival religions battling for control over the assets of the Presbyterian Church. Modernists had always known better, but they could not have gained control over the flow of funds had they admitted publicly what they knew to be true. They wisely affirmed the opposite until they had gained control over the administrative and judicial arms of the Church. Then the purge began.
Those Unitarians who had kept going into print to prod Presbyterian modernists to "come clean" and pull out of a Church that mandated a ministerial oath to a Calvinist Confession of Faith were as naive as the conservatives who stayed behind after 1936. These Unitarian critics had misunderstood the central tenet of the shared ideal of theological modernism and political modernism. The issue was not confession; the issue was power. The issue was not the theological content of the ministerial oath; the issue was sanctions.
Covenantalism The fundamental ecclesiastical issue in the Presbyterian conflict was covenantalism. This is true of every Church conflict, but historic Presbyterianism's claim to be the defender of covenant theology placed covenantal issues somewhat more visibly at the center of the battle. Nevertheless, covenant theology had yet to be precisely defined in Machen's day, contrary to the mythology of covenant theologians. There was no formal Confessional definition of the details of the Church covenant. There was (and is) no covenant theology of the baptism oath in official Presbyterianism.
This put the Calvinists in the denomination at a distinct disadvantage, not just theologically but also strategically. They did think covenantally with respect to formal sovereignty (God's), formal authority (infallible Bible), and law (Confession and catechisms), but not with respect to sanctions (law without sanctions as mere opinion) and succession (academic training). They did not understand after 1892 that full-time monitoring and policing of what was taught in all of the seminaries was crucial to the future of the Church. They did not acknowledge the implications of the screening process for ordination: the sanctions began in college, continued through seminary, and only at the very end of the process became a matter of presbyterial authority. This screening process had unofficially transferred authority to those outside presbyterial authority: academic faculties. The Calvinists' confusion with regard to this unofficial operational authority (point two) to impose academic sanctions (point four) to authorize succession (point five) doomed their cause. The modernists did understand: after Union Seminary withdrew from Church authority in 1892, its graduates retained equal access to ordination (positive sanctions) and therefore to succession.
Three Covenant Theologies
Covenant theology is not simply theological doctrine--point three, stipulations--as the Old School preferred to define it. Rather, it is all five points of the covenant: sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and succession. The Presbyterian conflict was a long battle over the sovereignty of God (how comprehensive?), the authority of the Bible (how reliable?), the stipulations of the Westminster Confession of Faith (how binding?), Church sanctions (locus of?), and Church growth (ecumenism?). But the crucial institutional issue was point four: sanctions. If sanctions could not be imposed by the Calvinists, they would be imposed by a rival faction operating in terms of a rival system of covenant theology. Sanctions are an inescapable concept. It is never a question of "sanctions vs. no sanctions." It is always a question of which sanctions. As Lenin asked: "Who, whom?"
There were three rival groups in Northern Presbyterianism, 1869-1936: Old School Calvinism, New School Calvinism-evangelicalism (fundamentalism after 1910), and liberalism disguised as New School Calvinism until about 1913, after which the disguise was abandoned. This means that three rival religions battled for control: judicial religion, experiential religion, and power religion. Each group had its own version of the covenant. Only one version could win institutionally. Had the Old School Calvinists understood this, they would not have joined with the New School in 1869, but only Charles Hodge and eight others at the General Assembly understood this at the time. After 1869, they could do little about it institutionally, despite their numerical majority in the first decade. They had lost their will to resist. After 1869, the Old School Calvinists, denying the very concept of chance, never had one.
The judicialists had a concept of ecclesiastical law: a comprehensive Confession of faith invoked by ministerial oath, but not invoked by members. What they did not have was a means of enforcing this view on the Church at large. Members were not bound by the Confession, for they took no oath. After 1875, judicialists never again initiated heresy trials. Strong on theology, they were weak on negative sanctions.
The conservative evangelicals understood almost nothing about the implications of the covenant. They did not think in a self-consciously covenantal fashion. They knew only that they did not want the Presbyterian Church to enforce the expressly Calvinistic stipulations of the Westminster Confession, and the Church never did. The heresy trials of the 1890's were conducted in terms of common-ground doctrines that were shared with fundamentalism in general. After 1900, the conservatives did not enforce the modified Confession (1903) or the new lowest-common-denominator Confession (the 1910 Doctrinal Deliverance). They did not believe that all of the terms of the oath should be enforced, and they had the votes to enforce their view by vetoing attempts by the judicialists to bring formal heresy trials. The majority evangelicals substituted another concept of law: peace unless rhetorically provoked. This view prevailed from 1879 (after the 1878 McCune trial) until 1934. Weak on theology, they were weak on negative sanctions.
The liberals understood the implications of their covenant theology. They knew that only one party could win, but they had to pretend they didn't. Instead, they called publicly for the imported political doctrine of pluralism, i.e., religious toleration--Whig political liberalism in ecclesiastical robes--until they had sufficient votes to enforce their view of the covenant. Their view of the covenant substituted process theology for inerrancy in all five points prior to their victory: sovereignty (evolving god, evolving mankind), authority (historicism's Bible), law (situation ethics), sanctions (open debate), and succession (open-ended). But, like all Progressive evolutionists, they abandoned their open-ended process theology once they came into power. They substituted a new form of inerrency: sovereignty (majority rule), authority (unquestioned submission), law (executive-administrative), sanctions (the flow of funds), and succession (winners take all). The only confession they bothered to enforce after 1933 was ministerial confession of faith in point two: hierarchy. In 1934, they officially elevated the collection of money to the judicial equivalent of a sacrament: the flow of funds. They consolidated the Church's machinery in terms of this view from 1931 to 1934. From 1934 to 1936, they imposed it, with the assent of the inclusivist evangelicals.
The decline of Presbyterianism's flow of funds after 1965 testifies to the truth of Machen's original contention: the Church is a voluntary institution. The boards of the Presbyterian Church can enforce their claims on the laity's flow of funds, if at all, only within the boundaries of the denomination. In 1910, modernists insisted that if the Presbyterian Church did not change its theology, bright young men would not join. The Church did change its theology--several times: to modernism, realism, Barthianism, and. . . ? (Evolution at work!) But the bright, secularized young men and women have continued to depart.(3) The modernists' social theology of 1910 grew feeble and had retired by 1940. Such is the age-old problem of conforming to the spirit of the age. All such spirits are mortal. They grow feeble; then they need catheters; then they die. Point five of the covenant cannot be evaded: succession. Those confessing a modified confession, either openly or with crossed fingers, will inherit. Confessions cannot remain simultaneously relevant and static. Only the Bible possesses this unique status.
Defending the Church The traditional marks of the institutional Church are preaching, the sacraments, and discipline. Each of the three major groups within Presbyterianism had its own emphasis in the defense of the marks of the Church.
Calvinism
Old School Calvinists placed most of their emphasis on preaching. The problem was, they had to establish a means of securing the orthodoxy of preaching. With the establishment in 1812 of Princeton Theological Seminary, the Old School unofficially transferred initial authority over the content of theology from the local presbytery to a national seminary. The sanctions became primarily academic. Prior to the publication of Hodge's Systematic Theology, the ability to read Latin was more important than any other academic skill for entrance into the Presbyterian ministry, since Princeton used Turretin's Latin textbook as its text. Given the fact of most Americans' minimal ability with foreign languages, this policy drastically narrowed the base from which to recruit pastors. This negative sanction over Presbyterian ordination served as a positive sanction for Baptist and Methodist ordination. They took full advantage of it, on a scale never before seen in home missions.
The Old School did formally proclaim the presbytery as the court of initial access to the teaching ministry, but this did little good after 1900. The presbyteries were operationally free to ordain whomever they pleased without a serious threat of hierarchical negative sanctions. The New York Presbytery ordained a series of creed-denying (not just Confession-denying) candidates. From the General Assembly of 1892 until 1936, the Old School appealed to confessional morality: if a man does not believe the Confession, he should leave. But after the Confessional revision of 1903, no Calvinists left the denomination. That judicially sealed their cause's doom. When, in late 1936, the de-frocked Machen at last announced in an editorial that the 1903 revisions had been "compromising amendments," "highly objectionable," a "calamity," and "a very serious lowering of the flag,"(4) he implicitly admitted to having crossed his own fingers at his ordination in 1914. He had labored under too great a burden for conducting a successful ecclesiastical campaign. He had never admired the standards--the "flag"--to which he had rallied his troops. Five weeks after he made this belated assessment, he was dead.
The sacraments were not explicitly discussed by Old School Presbyterians as being tied to propositional truth, so they did not become a focus of debate. None of the three groups regarded the sacraments as invoking God's sanctions in history. None saw the Lord's Supper as a covenant renewal celebration. None saw the Church's role in guarding this public invocation of God's sacramental sanctions as judicially relevant. Thus, the Old School did not proclaim the covenantal link between propositional truth in the pulpit and the judicial ramifications of the oath-bound sacraments. The only systematic defense of the Lord's Supper in Presbyterianism was offered by the local congregation and the local presbytery: closed communion, i.e., baptized Church members only. Nevertheless, the Larger Catechism did relate the sacrament of baptism to obedience. A Presbyterian Church member was understood as having professed faith in Christ and having promised to obey, i.e., a confession honoring hierarchy. "Baptism is not to be administered to any that are out of the visible church, and so strangers from the covenant of promise, till they profess their faith in Christ, and obedience to him. . . ." (A. 166). The modernists understood this covenantal principle of hierarchy, which is why, at the General Assembly of 1934, they formally equated local congregations' donations to the Church's official boards with the Lord's Supper. For liberals, the flow of funds up the hierarchy was the equivalent of the blood of Christ. They demanded sacramental obedience, so defined. Machen refused to give it, and this led to his de-frocking.
Ultimately, the Presbyterian structure of government passes local judicial sovereignty into the hands of communing members, who can hire and fire pastors, and who can decide to donate money or not. Yet the members' confession of faith was always formally devoid of theological content. Membership standards were imposed by the local church's session. No denomination-wide membership standards existed. In New York City, these standards were minimal. A modernist layman would have no problem in confessing a theologically empty oath; modernist ministers confessed such judicial language continually. At the level of the local congregation, the lowest common denominator increasingly prevailed. When the catechizing of children was not strongly recommended by a local congregation's session, the lowest common denominator fell very low indeed, though never so low as the theological confession of Henry van Dyke or Henry Sloane Coffin.
The Old School Calvinists delivered their votes by proxy to the New School Calvinists after 1869. They had returned to the smaller fold on their opponents' terms. Legitimacy would henceforth flow downward from New School abolitionism to fill the void of Old School adiaphorism. Presbyterial sanctions were operationally in the hands of New School Calvinists in all but a handful of presbyteries, from 1869 onward. This meant that Old School Calvinists had to gain the support of non-Calvinists in order to enforce denominational discipline. The one exception was Patton's pursuit of Swing in 1874. The defense of the Presbyterian Church would not be made by an appeal the Westminster Confession. Charles Hodge had recognized this in 1869. His was a voice crying in the wilderness.
Patton was a major participant throughout both periods of the Presbyterian conflict, the alter-ego of Henry van Dyke, who survived Patton by four months. He was the hard-liner after the reunion, the one Old School theologian who brought formal negative sanctions against a liberal in a Church court. Yet he began a quiet retreat after he became president of Princeton University in 1888. He refused to purge the university of its liberal faculty members; so, in 1902, they purged him. (Negative sanctions are inescapable concepts.) They paid him a small fortune to leave quietly, and he did. He chose as his successor the man he had hired, who had said nothing good about him, and who had engineered the purge: Woodrow Wilson. Finally, in 1926, the year of the liberals' takeover of the General Assembly, he openly repudiated the Old School tradition on inerrancy. In Fundamental Christianity, he announced: "Concerning now the inspiration of the Scripture, you cannot on that account assume that it is errorless. . . . Nor have we any right to substitute the word `inerrancy' for `inspiration' in our discussion of the Bible unless we are prepared to show from the teaching of the Bible that inspiration means inerrancy--and that, I think, would be difficult to do."(5) His career, more than anyone else's, incarnates the demise of Old School Calvinism, just as van Dyke's incarnates the triumph of modernism.
Conservative Evangelicalism
The evangelicals may have been formally committed to Calvinism, but, as in the cases of William Jennings Bryan and Billy Sunday, this commitment never affected anything they wrote or said in public. They became increasingly dominant numerically after the arrival of the Cumberland Presbyterians in 1906. Their view of the content of preaching was significantly less rigorous that the Calvinists' view. Their official view of the sacraments was the same as the Old School's: rarely mentioned. Their view of discipline after McCune was de-frocked in 1878 was that only rhetorical confrontation of the most severe kind was worth the price of a long, drawn-out judicial proceeding. The war would therefore be won by that faction which could successfully present itself as the injured party, the victim of un-Christian rhetoric.
Liberalism-Modernism
Modernism was hostile to any screening of the Church in terms of the Westminster Confession. Modernists announced another standard: peace, toleration, and work. This meant peace and toleration for them while they worked to subvert the enforcement mechanism undergirding the Westminster standards. Preaching was never regarded by modernists as an operational mark of the Church. This left only the sacraments and Church discipline as the operational marks.
The sacraments created no problem for the modernists. The sacraments were seen as traditional rituals, not covenantal. Operationally, this was equally true of all the Presbyterian factions. The sacraments were never invoked by anyone until 1934, when the modernists invoked them in the name of the flow of funds. Modernists also downplayed all discipline above the presbyterial level until 1934; then they announced the authority of the General Assembly over presbyteries--the very thing they had denied since the days of Charles Briggs. In 1934, they were defending the Church's right to collect funds, not the theological content of preaching. They defended what they believed to be most important.
What the modernists accomplished judicially and institutionally was the substitution of the lowest common confession of the non-ordained Church member for the theological content of the ministerial oath. To be baptized, i.e., to become a member, a person (or his adult representative) only had to vow "faith in Christ, and obedience to him. . ." (Larger Catechism, A. 166). Even this minimal proclamation was not formally required by any Presbyterian judicial document to take place in a public ceremony. No statement of theological faith was required of members by any Presbyterian judicial document.
The member's implicit oath at the time of his baptism or his reception by letter of transfer had neither judicial content nor theological content. What did it mean to obey Christ? The Confession did not say. The member's vow was always the absolute minimal vow in the Church. This vow, in the hands of the modernists after 1933, became the modernists' mandated vow for all ministers and all laymen: the promise to obey Christ's representatives (point two). Thus, the Presbyterian conflict ended when the modernists succeeded in substituting a new ministerial oath for the Confessional vow: the common member's oath of allegiance. The lowest-common-denominator oath in Presbyterianism triumphed at its highest judicial level: the General Assembly. It was not that the content of the 1729 ministerial vow was abandoned publicly; that did not take place until 1967. But in terms of Church sanctions, the original ministerial vow ended in 1936.
A Matter of Strategy There is no way that any organization can sustain a series of inconclusive, unresolved battles at its highest level, year after year. This is why the honoring of judicial precedents is mandatory for institutional survival. There has to be an agreed-upon settling of specific divisive issues. Any group within an organization that refuses to be bound by past court decisions has made a decision: (1) to paralyze the leadership's ability to impose sanctions by endless appeals and trials, (2) to capture the institution because of their opponents' lack of will to impose escalating sanctions, or (3) to destroy it by means of continuing paralysis if it cannot be captured. Gandhi's techniques of non-violent but active resistance against British rule are the classic modern examples of this strategy. They were successfully adopted by Martin Luther King and Chicago radical Saul Alinsky.(6)
These techniques rest on a fundamental assumption: the action is the reaction. If there is no reaction from the leadership, the initiators of institutional change escalate the confrontation. When at last there is a reaction, as there must be if the organization is to survive the challenge and the paralysis it brings, the strategy of the challengers is to make the leaders pay a very heavy price: in the press, among the organization's constituency, and in the organization's bank account.
The Moral High Ground
The success of this strategy rests on a crucial assumption: the resisters must be perceived as operating from the moral high ground. As the master strategist Saul Alinsky wrote, "All effective actions require the passport of morality."(7) Therefore, it is imperative for the targets of the strategy of non-violent non-cooperation to respond with a counter-appeal based on a superior morality. If the resisters can be identified successfully by the representative leadership of the organization as willful subversives of a legitimate moral order, the resisters' strategy of non-cooperation will fail. The resisters will be seen as destroyers, not men with a valid moral cause. Their institutional support will dry up. Then they can be surgically removed.
Most members understand that any organization has the right and obligation to remove destroyers from its midst. Its leaders can and must act on behalf of the membership to remove a cancer from the organization. But to complete this operation, there must be a will to resist on the part of the leaders, as well as a strategy of persuasion to mobilize the membership. Above all, there must be an agreed-upon moral standard to appeal to as the basis of the imposition of sanctions. Only then can the defensive sanctions successfully be applied.
By the 1920's, the conservatives had been crossing their fingers for over two generations on the issue of the six-day creation. They refused to admit this publicly, but they in fact regarded the Confession's statement--and therefore Genesis 1--as "just another theory" of origins. This opened the door to Lyell's chronology, and from there to Darwin's process theology. They opened the door to Progressivism. Also, ever since 1876, they had not successfully shown that higher criticism of the Bible as a methodology of moral evolutionism was the ideological foundation of an attack on the Church and Christendom. They refused to conduct heresy trials except for flagrant heresy expressed flagrantly. They were not willing to resist, thereby revealing a lack of moral fervor and commitment: moral mid-ground. By the 1920, the conservatives no longer occupied the moral high ground. They were vulnerable.
Meanwhile, the liberals had worked diligently since 1893 to define a new moral high ground: peace, toleration, and work. Briggs' rhetoric of confrontation had belied his commitment to peace, and for this he had been de-frocked in 1893. A few months before the 1893 General Assembly, Henry van Dyke was able to replace Briggs as the leader of the Presbyterian modernists when he and his 234 colleagues issued A Plea for Peace and Work. A successful realignment of what defined the moral high ground was crucial for the success of the modernists' strategy. Once accomplished--and by 1913, it was accomplished--the modernists pursued a three-part propaganda campaign: (1) the identification of the imposition of Church sanctions as the moral low ground (a counter-affirmation of presbyterial autonomy); (2) the identification of the Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910 as a mere theory (a counter-affirmation of theological relativism); (3) the identification of the General Assembly as a court whose decisions are strictly past-oriented, not establishing precedents (a counter-affirmation of non-cooperation).
The modernists adopted low-profile tactics that matched their strategy after 1900. Nykamp is correct regarding the 1922 to 1926 period, i.e., the Bryan phase and its aftermath: "Although inclusivists held many major Church offices, initial victories went to exclusivists." But these victories were not institutional; they were rhetorical: form without substance. "Inclusivists then used sophisticated, carefully engineered campaigns that employed public and private communications media to acquire support from a majority of the Church populace. Exclusivists thundered judgments about their opponents in mass rallies. The more subtle, quieter strategy of inclusivism won; exclusivism was excluded from the Presbyterian Church."(8) And every other mainline Church as well.
The Demise of Whiggery The spirit of the age ("climate of opinion") was against the conservatives after 1900. Darwinism's process theology had eroded the judicial foundations of the older Protestant worldview, not just in the Presbyterian Church but throughout American society.(9) So had early Unitarianism's program of creedless public education.(10) For that matter, the very creedlessness of the U.S. Constitution (Article VI, Section III: no religious test oaths) seemed to justify the legitimacy of social cooperation under a common-ground, non-creedal, non-sectarian, even non-Christian civil covenant. The Presbyterian conservatives, as nineteenth-century political Whigs, accepted this conclusion, since the philosophical origins of both the U.S. Constitution and the Princeton apologetic were the same: Scottish common-sense realism (John Witherspoon by way of his former student, James Madison).(11)
As a Whig liberal, Machen argued for a judicial distinction between Church and State based on the traditional Whig distinction between voluntarism vs. involuntarism. The Church is voluntary, he said, and therefore bound by its own laws to enforce ministerial oaths. But the liberals could rely on the spirit of the age to undermine men's confidence in Machen's argument. They could rely on the visible success of creedless peace and work in civil affairs and modern education. It would take a monumental program of re-education for the conservatives to persuade Church members that heresy trials, systematic searching for Confessional deviation, and literally decades of conflict were the necessary price of theological purity. Who on earth was that committed to theological purity during the Progressive era? Nobody, including the Old School, none of whom called for heresy trials after Patton pressured Swing out of the denomination. Christian theology seemingly had been shown to be irrelevant to civil affairs and modern education. Not one President of the United States had ever been a conservative evangelical.(12) "Why all the fuss over the details of theology?" the liberals asked rhetorically. Meanwhile, the crossed fingers of the conservatives, even including Machen--his refusal to support the six-day creation,(13) as well as his secret rejection of some of the 1903 revisions--had undermined their will to resist. With crossed fingers, it is difficult to cast the first stone.
Lying for a Good Cause
Difficult, but not impossible. One man who mastered the art of stone-casting with crossed fingers was Lefferts Loetscher, whose history of the Presbyterian conflict still shapes the debate. Historians make mistakes, but there are times when an historian with an agenda will deliberately mislead his readers. The more skilled the historian, the more likely that a major error of interpretation is a form of subtle deception. Loetscher, a power religionist and a defender of power religionists, was a skilled deceiver for the sake of his cause. In his assessment of Machen's ecclesiology, he cited Machen's insistence that the Church is a voluntary institution. Then he commented: "In constitution, though of course not in purpose, he likened the Church to a political club. This was good Anabaptist doctrine and might even pass for Congregationalism, but it certainly was not Presbyterianism. The Presbyterian conception of the Church is organic. Presbyterian doctrine is that normally people are born into the Church."(14)
He assumed that his readers had little or no understanding of theology or history--generally, a safe assumption. He figured that he could fool them, which he did. So, he lied. Let us examine his lie more carefully. He said, "Presbyterian doctrine is that normally people are born into the Church." This statement implies that Presbyterians believe in Church membership through procreation and baptism, not through evangelism and baptism. Operationally, it may seem this way: Presbyterian evangelism is generally regarded as one step ahead of Episcopalian evangelism, which is one step ahead of Eastern Orthodox evangelism.(15) But theologically, such a summary is not only nonsense; in the context of Machen's battle, it is preposterous. The final battle in the Presbyterian conflict (1933-36) was officially a battle over foreign missions. (Unofficially, it was a battle over sanctions.) The foreign missions field is where most Church members are brought into the Church through conversion and voluntary confession, not by birth. The fact is, Presbyterianism rests, and has always rested, on the doctrine of a Church covenant sealed judicially by baptism, which is seen as a voluntary covenant: invoked either by an adult on his own behalf or on behalf of his infant. As the premier Presbyterian historian of his day, Loetscher knew this. He simply ignored it for the sake of discrediting Machen.
Second, Loetscher deliberately ignored the context of Machen's point in the passages he cited: the judicial distinction between subservience to civil government, which is involuntary, and to Church government, where membership is confessional and voluntary.(16) If there is any single principle of government that has united American Protestants in their confession of faith in political pluralism, it is this one. There was nothing especially Congregational about Machen's distinction, let alone Anabaptist (the Presbyterians' dreaded A-word!); it is as Presbyterian a distinction as might be imagined, though not uniquely so. More than this; this same judicial distinction has been the foundation of the entire tradition of Whig political liberalism, as well as the humanism of the American Civil Liberties Union: the separation of Church and State.
Loetscher was dishonest. He was also one of the most respected American Church historians in the guild. He got away with this subterfuge at Machen's expense. Four decades ago reviewers should have pointed out his deception. They refused. Winners not only write the histories and screenplays; they also write the book reviews.
Confession and Confrontation The strategy of the modernists in the Northern Presbyterian Church--avoiding a frontal assault after 1893--was only temporary. They reversed it in 1922; or, more to the point, Harry Emerson Fosdick reversed it. They reversed their call for judicial toleration in 1931 when they initiated a revision of the Form of Government. They could not maintain their creedal silence forever; they would eventually confess the power religion and enforce its claims. They expected to win in the end. The "end" was defined as the day that they could make a public confession of their true faith, confident that they could control the courts and impose negative sanctions on those who might protest. When modernism's fat lady finally sang, she would have her foot on her opponent's neck. Until she did, there would be no song.
Eventually, men confess their true faith, even men who do not expect to win. This is an important point. Men's ability to remain confessionally lukewarm is drastically limited. They cannot always remain silent. Rushdoony has called this the phenomenon of necessary confession. "Confession is a necessary aspect of man's psychology and nature. Man was created by God to be a confessing creature, to confess God in all his activities, research, study, and science. In every area, man makes a religious confession in all that he does and is. Man's life is a confession before the world of the faith and purpose which govern his heart. Man's life is also a continual confession before God and to God. Every thought and motive is naked and open before God. . . . For the unregenerate, the God of Scripture is a prying God who must be barred from the mind of man. His resentment against such sovereign power is intense. His thoughts are his totally private property, and he will not allow to God title over a single thought."(17)
Covenant-breaking man's problem is guilt. "The sinner refuses to confess his sins to God and to acknowledge his guilt, and he refuses to confess Christ in his daily life and motives, but he does not thereby escape the need for confession. Where men refuse to make a godly confession, they will make an ungodly one. They will confess with their lives, thought, and deed, their rebellion against God, and they will confess with their mouth their sins with a bravado or in spite of themselves."(18)
One by one, from Briggs to Speer to Macartney, they "came clean." They finally admitted where their hearts were, meaning where their dreams were. Their hearts were not with the Westminster Confession and a system of Church courts that would enforce it. Machen was more forthright than his opponents and even his colleagues, and because of this verbal forthrightness, he progressively alienated the majority of his fellow Presbyterians. He believed in consistent confession, continual confession, a life based on confession. His confession? The 1788 Whig revision of the Westminster Confession. Most of it, anyway.(19)
The Institutional Costs of Policing Confessions
The problem for Machen and his initial supporters was that most Presbyterian conservatives did not want institutional trouble. They knew about the effects of modernism in theory, but they did not want to admit that their Church had been infiltrated and captured at the top by 1920. They did not want to go through the agonies associated with a series of long, drawn-out heresy trials. They would have had to begin with a majority of the members of the New York Presbytery, one by one. Representatives from other presbyteries would have had to attend the ordination meetings of the New York Presbytery, and any suspected modernist would then have been challenged by means of complaints from other presbyteries to the General Assembly. Wholesale excommunications of existing New York Presbytery members would have been necessary. But such trials require proof, and proof is expensive, embarrassing, and difficult for outsiders to collect. Prudent modernists recognized by 1893 what was required for a successful capture of a major denomination--their avoidance of confrontational rhetoric--and they were willing to wait to "go public" with even a mild version of their underlying religious faith.
It is said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. This is dead wrong. The price of liberty is eternal sanctions. There can be no long-term liberty for any society that denies the doctrine of hell. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, including political and economic wisdom. Men should fear God, if not for liberty's sake, then for their eternal state.
God created heaven and hell to serve as preliminary "holding areas" for the eternal state: the new heavens and new earth, and the lake of fire (Rev. 20:14-15). His people are to enforce His law with positive and negative sanctions in history, especially negative sanctions: the price of purity. Few bureaucracies are ever willing to pay this price, and those that do generally do so out of fear: a challenge from another bureaucracy. Because of their understanding of the paralysis of bureaucracies, the modernists eventually took over the mainline denominations, one by one. The modernists' strategy in the Northern Presbyterian Church was clear: say nothing outrageous in public, write nothing outrageous, build up an institutional power base, preach toleration when challenged, and plan a takeover which will forever remove toleration for those Presbyterians who might seek to apply the orthodox creeds by means of judicial sanctions.
There were time limits, however. Men cannot keep silent forever. The question was: When to speak out? Which side would speak out first? Which side would persevere in a systematic campaign of confession--confession unto confrontation, confession unto institutional victory: the modernists or the conservatives?
Confessional Progress, Sanctions, and Adiaphora The rhetorical offensive began outside the Church: in the pages of the New York Times, beginning in January, 1922. Bryan's political threat was too great: returning the content of taxpayer-funded education to the taxpayers. The Times launched a multi-pronged attack on Bryan.
This led to Fosdick's March 12 attack in the Times, then to his May 22 sermon, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" This in turn produced an institutional reaction: Macartney's 1923 overture from the Philadelphia Presbytery. It also led to Machen's published protest, Christianity and Liberalism (1923). The initiative had come from modernists outside the Presbyterian Church. Then it shifted to a modernist inside the Church.
In the most important sermon of his career--the one he preached on December 30, 1923, which led to Henry van Dyke's departure from the congregation and his December 31 press release--Machen offered a rhetorical speculation that no Protestant theologian has ever answered clearly, yet which must be answered by someone, sometime. It is a mark of the breakdown of both theology and ecclesiology in the twentieth century that the question has never been dealt with by those who have lost almost every ecclesiastical battle. It is the question of confessional revision. Machen said: "Formerly, when men had brought to their attention perfectly plain documents like the Apostle's Creed or the Westminster Confession or the New Testament, they either accepted them or else denied them. Now they no longer deny, but merely `interpret.' Every generation, it is said, must interpret the Bible or the Creed in its own way. But I sometimes wonder just how far this business of interpretation will go."(20)
Machen was an honest man, as his critics freely admitted, so this passage reveals self-delusion on a major scale. He did not recognize how far Princeton Seminary had gone in the convenient-interpretation game. The Westminster Confession, not to mention Genesis 1, leaves no doubt about the doctrine of creation: God created the world out of nothing "in the space of six days" (IV:1). This, to use Machen's words, is "perfectly plain." A man can either accept this plain teaching or deny it. But men--most notably, the two greatest systematic theologians on the Princeton faculty, Charles Hodge and Warfield--chose to deny it by interpreting it to mean something radically different from what the plain teaching explicitly says. Six days does not mean six days, they insisted; it means an indeterminate time period. How long a time period? Answer (unstated): "Whatever amount of time is needed to legitimize our latest refusal to confront modern uniformitarian geology." They bowed to the chronology of James Hutton by way Charles Lyell, and then hoped and prayed that no one would wind up as Lyell did late in his career: a disciple of Charles Darwin. Machen himself remained profoundly mute on the creation-evolution debate. Yet it was this great public debate in Dayton, Tennessee, that sealed the fate of the orthodox wings in the Northern Presbyterian and Northern Baptist churches after 1925.(21) Machen did not overcome the problem of his own crossed fingers.
The 1903 Revision in 1936
Machen announced in 1923: "Every generation, it is said, must interpret the Bible or the Creed in its own way." His Westminster colleague John Murray also affirmed this; Murray taught systematic theology at Westminster Seminary for over 35 years. He wrote: "Unless we maintain that the tradition established in the church from the early fourth century until the seventeenth was a mistake, there can be no gainsaying of the demand that creedal confession must keep pace with the challenge of heresy."(22) Machen argued late in 1936 that confessions can be revised, but that his era was not a safe era for revision.(23) Nevertheless, his new denomination accepted two of the revisions of 1903: rejecting the Confession's assertion that the Pope is the antichrist (XXV:6) and rejecting the last trace of the Puritans' theocratic worldview, i.e., which identified as a sin a man's refusal to swear a lawful oath to a lawful authority (XXII:3).(24) To this extent, they acknowledged that Henry van Dyke and his colleagues had been correct and the Westminster Divines had been incorrect. They acknowledged that they had needed modernists to make it institutionally possible for Calvinists to get closer to the truth.
The Puritans and most other Protestants, as well as the Catholic Church, had assumed that the State is an oath-bound covenantal institution under God. Thus, both Church and State can lawfully compel from anyone under their authority the presentation of sworn testimony in their courts. Certain Anabaptist groups have denied that an oath to the State is valid; rather, they say, it is a sin to take such an oath. Calvin had opposed this position, arguing that such an oath can be valid.(25) The Puritans had taken this one step farther, saying that it is a sin not to swear. They had in mind courtroom testimony as a witness who calls upon God as a witness. So did Calvin, who wrote that "swearing means to call upon God as a witness. . . ."(26) The Puritans included loyalty oaths made to the prince; so did Calvin.(27)
Why, then, the 1936 revision? Machen's Church did not say, any more than the parent Church had said in 1903. But it is obvious why: to strip the last traces of theocracy out of the Confession in an attempt to make the Confession conform to modern political pluralism. Along with 1646's Confessional statements went 1647's supporting Bible verses, but no Presbyterian assembly has substituted new ones, nor has anyone thought it necessary to do so. The political Anabaptism of Roger Williams had at long last triumphed in Presbyterianism in 1903, which became, symbolically, the Calvinist's mid-winter flight from Boston into the wilderness of Rhode Island. From this Confessional wilderness Presbyterianism has not yet emerged.
Even in 1936 (and today), no Presbyterian Calvinist minister has had the courage to demand a revision of the Confession with respect to the six-day creation, despite the fact that no Calvinist Presbyterian seminary professor is willing to defend the Confession in print on this point. Crossed fingers continue.
We have yet to see a conservative defender of theological orthodoxy write a treatise on confessional progress and revision. As Machen put it in his sermon, "I sometimes wonder just how far this business of interpretation will go." Interpreting away personally inconvenient portions of a confession is a convenient option for men who have ceased to believe those portions. If the Church allows such crossed-fingers revisions, then how secure--how authoritative--is the original confession? If a section of the Westminster Confession of Faith is not worth defending through the imposition of ecclesiastical sanctions, how binding is the ministerial oath on anyone's conscience? If it is binding on the conscience, how can it possibly be revised by those who have sworn belief in it? But if it is not binding on the conscience, what is wrong with interpreting it into oblivion?
This is the great unanswered dilemma of creedal progress: the one area of progress that Protestants of all eschatological persuasions are forced by their history to admit there is in history; otherwise, the Protestant Reformation was an illegitimate schism. If a man states that he does not believe a passage in a confession, and if he is nevertheless ordained to office, those who ordained him are inevitably saying that with respect to the confession--the ministerial covenantal oath--the passage is either part of the adiaphora of the Christian faith (things indifferent) or else something not yet sorted out ecclesiastically ("But we're working on it!").(28)
All sides argued that, with reference to the their oath-bound affirmations of the Westminster Confession, conscience was at stake. All sides prevaricated. All sides crossed their fingers. Conscience was a very small tributary of a far larger river. Consciences were quieted by means of the Jesuitical game of reinterpretation and re-definition. ("Are you a priest?" asked the English inquisitor to a Jesuit. "I am not a priest," he replied, while thinking to himself, "of Apollo.") What was at stake was inheritance: jobs, real estate, libraries, and the denomination's reputation. And, we should also add, full pension vesting after 35 years of service in the pulpit.
The Question of Strict Subscription From 1729 until today, American Presbyterianism has never required absolutely strict subscription to the Confession. It could not, for that would elevate the Confession to equality with the Bible, the only unchanging source of truth. Presbyterians have always acknowledged that the Confession is flawed in relation to the Bible. The Bible is sovereign over the Confession. Thus, strict subscription has always meant stricter subscription, not absolute subscription.
Stricter than what? There is the rub. Byron Snapp, a strict confessionalist, in reviewing Longfield's Presbyterian Controversy, writes of exceptions to the Confession: "If Scripture supports these doctrinal exceptions, then our standards must change to conform to God's word."(29) Standards do not change on their own initiative. People must work to change them. But if everyone with the authority to change the standards is required to express his complete agreement with the standards, in the name of the unchanging Bible, then the standards can no more be legally changed by "truly confessional" (TC) men than the Bible can. To announce the need to alter the standards is to invite de-frocking--the problem faced by Briggs and the liberals. This is why they demanded immunity from negative sanctions for their writings.
This is the unsolved dilemma of strict subscription. The result of this dilemma is crossed fingers. Snapp writes that without strict subscription, "presbyteries may begin to receive men who believe that women ought to be ordained to the office of elder." Quite true. As evidence, I offer the fact that Machen and his allies remained virtually silent in print on this issue in 1929 and 1930 when the proposal to ordain women as ruling elders and deacons was sent down to the presbyteries by the General Assembly. The decision to ordain women was then passed by a vote of 158 to 118. This did not require a two-thirds vote, because the Confession did not explicitly limit the office of elder to men. The conservatives did not believe this issue was worth fighting about, either before or after the vote. Yet many of these men were strict subscriptionists. Since the Confession did not speak directly to the issue of women elders--in mid-seventeenth-century England, this ecclesiastical problem did not exist--they were faced with defending the non-ordination of women by an appeal to the Bible. But by 1929, nothing could be successfully defended by the conservatives by an appeal to the Bible, even if the Confession spoke clearly to the issue. Thus, the Confession operationally took precedence over the Bible in the Church's courts, at least when its silence helped the liberal cause.
Here is the perpetual dilemma of strict subscription: whenever the Confession cannot in practice be changed, it operationally takes precedence over the Bible in judicial affairs. It has to. Anything that is elevated as equal to the Bible will inevitably take precedence over the Bible. The question then becomes one of power: Which group, all members of which crossed their fingers at the time ordination and/or subsequently, can gain control of the judicial machinery, i.e., the voice of ecclesiastical authority?
We can see this principle of substitution at work in the post-Old Covenant era. The New Testament has superior interpretive authority over the Old Testament in Christianity. The Talmud's authority over the Old Testament in Judaism is equally true.(30) Only the Kairites, a tiny Jewish sect hated by Orthodox Jews, rejects the Talmud for the Torah, and their rejection of the Talmud is total.
On the other hand, if the Confession can legally be changed, then absolute subscription becomes an impossible position to defend. Men are allowed to change their minds and still remain in the pastorate. The institutional question remains the same, however: How to capture the judicial machinery that establishes the operational limits of how tight or loose a subscription is enforceable?
Here is the institutional dilemma of a confession: the larger the denomination, the lower the common confessional denominator. Charles Hodge referred to this confessional problem in 1858. "We could not hold together a week, if we made the adoption of all its propositions a condition of ministerial communion. . . . [I]t is not only difficult but impossible to frame a creed as extended as the Westminster Confession, which can be adopted in all its details by the ministry of any large body of Christians. . . ."(31) The greater the growth, the lower the confessional minimum. The traditional mark of success--growth--apparently leads to confessional surrender. This is the dilemma of Presbyterianism and every other known ecclesiastical system. No denomination has solved it yet. We see growing churches whose leaders have abandoned the original confession through crossed fingers. We see shrinking or stagnant churches that have lost touch with reality whenever a social problem has appeared--abortion comes to mind--that the confession does not mention. Finally, we see local church splits, which in the American South are known as Baptist home missions programs.
Hodge was adamant against absolute subscription. "Are we living in a false show? Are we pretending to adopt a principle of subscription, which in fact we neither act on for ourselves, nor dream of enforcing on others?"(32) With respect to the Confession's defense of the enforcement of the Church's theology by the civil magistrate, the American Presbyterian Church officially rejected this, despite the words of the Confession, from 1729 until the revision of the Confession in 1788, when the offending passages were officially removed. "It cannot be denied, therefore, that the church understood the adoption of the Westminster Confession as not involving the adoption of every position in that book."(33) "The principle that the adoption of the Confession of Faith implies the adoption of all the propositions therein contained, is not only contrary to the plain, historical meaning of the words which the candidate is required to use, and the mind of the church in imposing a profession of faith, but the principle is impracticable. It cannot be carried out without working the certain and immediate ruin of the church."(34)
So, there are stricter subscriptionists and looser subscriptionists, but there are no absolute subscriptionists in Presbyterianism or anywhere else. This is why an appeal to the Confession resolves nothing permanently. There is no permanent Confession that is beyond revision; there are therefore no permanently resolved Confessional questions. The Church is always moving forward. Progressive sanctification is always at work. So is heresy. The parallel wars go on: (1) old errors vs. new truths; (2) new errors vs. old truths. In the case of the Presbyterian Church after 1900, those who held old errors gave their votes by proxy to those who held new errors in order to suppress those who held old truths. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend"--until the day we have eliminated our common enemy.
Meanwhile, charismatic churches are growing everywhere.(35)
There can be no question about this: the Westminster Confession is incomplete. The Confession is silent regarding the authority and judicial uses of the Confession. For example, it contains no section describing the proper procedure for making amendments to it. The fact that the Westminster Assembly never addressed the obvious question of the judicial authority of the Confession and catechisms is indicative of the ecclesiastical problem. This has left Presbyterianism open-ended confessionally. No appeal to the 1647 or subsequent versions of the Confession can resolve this question: Exactly how open-ended? This is what has led to the problem of crossed fingers in Presbyterianism, generation after generation.
A Retreat from History The Presbyterian conflict was a conflict over history and the Church's role in it. When the General Assembly allowed George Bourne's de-frocking on a technicality in 1818, the Old School began a long retreat from relevance in history. The Old School was joined in this retreat by New School experientialists in 1869. The pietism of the New School steadily undermined what little remained of the Old School's original theological commitment to cultural transformation. By Machen's day, not much remained.
The Old School had a theology: (1) sovereign God, (2) authoritative Bible, (3) law of God, (4) doctrine of final judgment, and (5) postmillennial eschatology. It never officially surrendered this theology. The OId School disappeared with Machen's death, but it had clung to that theology in public.
Prior to the reunion of 1869, the Old School had an ecclesiastical system that mirrored this theology prior to the reunion: (1) legitimate Church, (2) hierarchical court system, (3) Westminster Confession of Faith, (4) binding ministerial oaths, and (5) a seminary system. But their faith wavered on point one after 1864: legitimate Church. Their neutrality on chattel slavery had undermined their confidence in the legitimacy of their forced expulsion of the New School in 1837. So, they surrendered to the New School in 1869. By 1910, they had consented to a new ecclesiastical system: (1) legitimate Church (New School's), (2) a toothless hierarchy, (3) the five-point fundamentalist Doctrinal Deliverance, (4) crossed fingers (the 1903 revision), and (5) one seminary out of a dozen, not counting Union.
The Old School surrendered in 1869. They continued to surrender after the Swing case in 1874. Initiative passed to the New School because legitimacy (sovereignty) had passed to the New School. After 1900, initiative passed to the modernists. Why? First, because equal legitimacy had passed to the modernists. Despite the expulsion of Briggs and Smith, and the near-expulsion of McGiffert, the modernists gained legitimacy equal to the other two schools. The Church's conservative leadership refused to conduct a continuing series of heresy trials against all those who voiced the Briggs' opinions, though without his rhetoric. Union continued to train candidates for the Presbyterian ministry. The issue was not theology; the issue was sanctions. Because the conservatives refused to impose negative sanctions on the modernists, the modernists were allowed to seek positive sanctions wherever they could. They sought and found such sanctions in the boards and bureaucracies of the Church.
Sources of Additional Legitimacy Judicially, the modernists gained legitimacy by default: the refusal of conservatives to impose negative sanctions. This does not explain the comprehensive nature of the modernists' victory. You can't beat something with nothing. What was the "something" that the modernists had that the conservatives did not?
What they had was support from the outside. Sometimes this was financial, as the Rockefeller connection indicates. But more money flowed to Rockefeller in 1919 than ever flowed from Rockefeller. He hired Speer on part-time basis. The support they received from the outside was not primarily or even secondarily financial; it was cultural.
What the modernists enjoyed was the intellectual climate of opinion. Not the opinion prevailing in places like Dayton, Tennessee; rather, places like New York City; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and New Haven, Connecticut. There was a drastic split between the older Protestant culture and the new humanism. The new humanism did not have the numbers, but it had the self-confidence. It had, in short, a compelling sense of five things: its own legitimacy, authority, law, sanctions, and destiny. In its own eyes, it was the wave of the future. And so compelling was that vision that its enemies became persuaded, at least with respect to American culture. Fundamentalism's premillennialism added to this sense of inevitable replacement: the eschatological substitution of new heirs.
There was a victory. There was a surrender. The modernists had a vision of victory. The conservatives, with few exceptions, had a vision of surrender. This made all the difference.
The Modernists' Goal The modernists had a long-term goal: to replace the heirs. They used deception when necessary, confrontational rhetoric when necessary, and infiltration continually. They relied on their knowledge of their opponents' weaknesses to sustain them. The Old School was all theology and no sanctions after 1874. They did not want a confrontation in the courts. The New School had even less theology. They also did not want a confrontation. When provoked by Briggs, they acted to remove him from their presence ecclesiastically. Then they allowed him and his equally modernist colleagues to teach candidates for the ministry. It was as if the Pope had sent students to study theology at Wittenberg after 1525.
In the United States, a new priesthood was substituted for the minister after the Civil War: the professor. But what did the professor profess? Darwinism. He professed a new evolutionistic cosmology, a new evolutionistic philosophy, and a new evolutionistic ethics. He was a new voice of authority.
For a Christian historian to speak of theological modernism, 1885 to 1935, as if it had not been part of the warp and woof of political and cultural modernism is to ratify the legitimacy of pietism's retreat from relevance in history. It is another attempt to segregate the institutional Church from the world around it. It is to attribute to the opponents of orthodoxy the pietists' view of the institutional Church: a cultural ghetto with little or no impact on the society around it. It is to attribute to the modernists' voice of authority--Darwinism--the same cultural and political irrelevance that pietists attribute to the Bible. It is, in short, to break with Machen.
This is not to say that this theory of the distinction between two different modernisms--cultural and theological--does not have a long tradition. It was Machen's own forthrightness in calling attention to the status of theological modernism as a separate religion that challenged the thesis of the two modernisms. If theological modernism was a rival religion--a religion in conformity to the climate of humanist opinion--then what else could it have been except cultural modernism? Machen knew of the intimate connections of the two branches of modernism, both philosophically and personally. He had studied at Johns Hopkins. He lived among the elite of the American Establishment every summer: Mount Desert Island. He had testified to Congress. He knew. But there are those among the ranks of his spiritual heirs who still sing the old song: theological modernism had only the loosest connections to cultural modernism. "Church is Church, and society is society, and rarely do the two meet."
In pietistic churches, this is true. So, the pietist-humanist alliance continues: humanists establish the destination and drive the bus; pietists' taxes pay for the bus and most of the gas, but nonetheless, they sit dutifully in the back. "No back seat drivers here! That's not our responsibility. We must render unto Caesar the things that are Caeser's." More to the point, they render unto Seizer. They supply Seizer's flow of funds.
J. Gresham Machen had the right enemies. The liberals hated him. They had good cause. He publicly called into question their well-orchestrated subterfuge by which they were stealing the ecclesiastical inheritance built up by generations of of faithful Chrtistians. The successors of the winners have written the textbooks. They continue the mythology established by their spiritual predecessors. Norman Furniss in 1954 labeled Machen "chronically dusputative."(36) Ernest Sandeen in 1970 referred to his "perverse obstinacy."(37) Both authors' remarks were published by prestige academic publishers. To the victors belong the spoils.
Answers to My Original Questions I listed numerous questions in the Foreword. It is time to summarize my answers.
What are the tell-tale signs that your Church is moving away from orthodoxy toward theological liberalism? First, an emphasis on Church growth over the Church's confession. If the program of Church growth does not include explicit institutional means of implementing the confession along with the growth, then the sell-out is underway.
Second, an emphasis on academic respectability over the Church's confession. Evidence: the denominational college and the seminary where most of the ministerial candidates attend no longer teach the Church's historic confession in a required course for graduation for students who are members of the Church and for all students receiving scholarship aid of any kind from the institution. This means that there must be full-cost tuition from everyone else. There is no good reason for the absence of such a required course in any denominational organization that provides certified training; hence, there has to be a bad reason from the point of view of orthodoxy. The school is headed for "broad Churchism," which is the first step toward liberalism. If either the college or the seminary teaches any form of higher criticism, the battle is as good as lost. The same is true of any aspect of Darwinism, the reigning theology of our age. If the seminary does not teach explicitly against higher criticism and Darwinism in required classes, and if the college does not teach against both of these ideas in the religion major and the philosophy major, and against Darwin in the biology and geology departments, the intellectual and cultural battles will continue to be lost by Christianity.
What are the most vulnerable and undefended parts of your Church? Its oaths and their enforcement through sanctions. First, if communicant members are not required to affirm belief in the Apostles' Creed or one of the more complex early Church creeds, the lowest common denominator principle will ultimately undermine the entire denomination. A corporate verbal re-affirmation of this oath should be built into the denomination's required liturgy, and always required prior to the application of a sacrament. Second, if ministers are not required to affirm a far more detailed confession of faith, the Church will drift toward the lowest common denominator confession.
Now I will get very specific. First, every member of the faculty of the denominational college or seminary must re-affirm the Church's detailed confession of faith at the end of every school term, or else his next year's contract is null and void. Any personal objections to any aspect of the confession must also be made in writing each year. These exceptions must be made available to the public. The employment contract must specify this. Tenure is out of the question. The mere existence of academic tenure is prima facie evidence of a sell-out. Second, every member of every permanent commission and board, as well as every bureaucratic employee with executive authority, must annually re-affirm belief in the full ministerial confession. This must be in writing. Any personal exceptions to the confession must also be put in writing. Copies of these exceptions must be available on request to any voting Church member in the denomination.
What are the catch phrases of those who are actively infiltrating your Church or selling it out? "If we require such detailed confessions of members and ministers, we will never have Church growth." "Heresy trials never do any good." "Christianity has always made room for a wide range of opinions." "We must not be so narrow that we exclude good people from joining." "The Church is here to help people, not drive them away." "We will lose our young people if we emphasize this doctrine." "The Bible is not a textbook of [ ]." "The Bible is a book of spiritual principles, not a book of science." "Science has proven this to be incorrect." "Truth is unified: the Bible is not in opposition to science. [We must therefore reinterpret the Bible]." "We cannot hire the best faculty with confessional requirements this narrow." "Academic freedom." "God is a God of love, not of judgment." "Personal religious experience is more important than creeds are." "Heart religion is more important than head religion." And, at the final stage of the takeover: "Jesus was a great teacher." All of this is abetted by those inside the Church who proclaim some variant of this one: "No creed but the Bible, no law but love."
What was the strategy of subversion that proved successful in the most spectacular Protestant takeover in modern American history? Their public strategy was to use conservative biblical phrases as a cover for importing alien religious categories into the Church. When challenged, the modernists said that their ideas were the true Christianity; orthodoxy was the pretender. They pleaded for tolerance. Their private strategy was silence: infiltrate the boards and bureaucracies quietly. They evaded negative sanctions until they were in control of the courts; then they imposed them with a vengeance. Their definition of tolerance proved to be highly selective: tolerance for those who quietly accept our Church boards' moral claim on their money.
How did the modernists' accomplices outside the Church cooperate with infiltrators inside to undermine and then capture the Church? The media identified the modernists' critics as narrow-minded, intolerant, confrontational, and bitter. At the same time, the media portrayed the "true meaning" of Christianity as in being accord with whatever the liberals were teaching. Whenever a modernist was caught red-handed and booted out, he was immediately employed by modernists outside. The liberals took care of their wounded. This reduced the personal risk of becoming a subversive, lowering its cost, thereby increasing the supply of subversion.
What was the bait that the subversives used to hook to the Presbyterian Church? Bait: for candidates for the ministry, there was the promise of employment. Hook: earn college and seminary degrees. Bait: for those seeking employment by the colleges and seminaries, there was the promise of near tenure for life. Hook: earn an advanced academic degree in a secular institution. Bait: for ministers, there was a heavily subsidized retroactive pension. Hook: the loss of three-quarters of the pension fund's assets upon resigning prematurely. Bait: for the laymen, there was the promise of participation in a growing Church with a large missions outreach. Hook: toleration of heresy.
Which deeply rooted Presbyterian ideals led to the institutional defeat of those who held them? First and by far the most important covenantally, the absence of any theological content in the member's confession of faith: the lowest common denominator. Second, the absence in the Confession of Faith of any statement regarding its own authority: how to use it, enforce it, and amend it to preserve the purity of the Church. Third, an educated ministry, meaning men in possession of advanced academic degrees. Colleges and universities have been deeply influenced by secularism in all known cases, from the University of Paris to the present: Greek rationalism/irrationalism, Newtonian rationalism/reductionism, Adamic (Ferguson and Smith) common-sense rationalism, Kantian rationalism/irrationalism. The seminaries have also been easily infiltrated: the requirement that all faculty members first attend "German" institutions of higher learning. Fourth, the ideal of near-autonomy for presbyteries, which led to the New York Presbytery situation: a safe-haven entry-point for liberals.
What never works in any program to reform a Church's hierarchy? A call from outside the hierarchy for the hierarchy to change its policies unless this call is accompanied by a budget cut or the threat of a budget cut if these policies are not changed. It is far more effective to cut the budget now and promise to restore it later than to threaten a budget cut in the future. This gets the bureaucrats' attention faster.
What terrifies the infiltrators in the early stages of their invasion? A requirement for employment that they must publicly affirm their unqualified belief in the doctrine of hell (Luke 16:19-31), which will be followed by the lake of fire (Rev. 20:14-15). The price of liberty is eternal sanctions.
What terrifies them after they have completed the takeover at the top? Budget cuts or (even better) the abolition of the national boards and bureaucracies that employ them. Decentralization terrifies them. Having to raise their own funds terrifies them. The heart of liberalism's goal, both secular and theistic, is this confession: elitist-directed evolutionary change financed by other people's money.
Why does the liberals' strategy of subversion always backfire on them in the next generation, or even sooner? People will not commit themselves strongly to a voluntary organization whose creed and goals cannot easily be readily distinguished from other institutions.(38) The more that the humanists inside the Church re-position the Church to reflect respectable humanist opinion outside the Church, the more that outsiders see no compelling reason to join the Church, and the more that its youth see no compelling reason to return after college or marriage. The Church, structurally, was designed by God to be on the offensive: a light to the world. When it loses this light because it is no brighter than the world, it no longer has a unique service proposition to offer. Attrition then takes over. Salt without savor is fit only for grinding underfoot.
What was the institutional and theological legacy of the Presbyterian reunion of 1869? The Old School moved from rigorous Confessionalism to less rigorous Confessionalism. It moved from a willingness to conduct heresy trials to a greatly reduced willingness. It moved from intolerance regarding Arminian theology to toleration.
Why did the Northern Presbyterian Church cease all heresy trials after 1900? The New School was unwilling even to threaten such trials except when provoked by confrontational rhetoric. The modernists ceased employing such rhetoric until 1922, by which time it proved impossible to prosecute heresy trials successfully.(39) This eliminated the pressure on liberals that had created the conservative backlash in the 1890's. After 1903, the Confession had been watered down to such an extent that the Old School had been repudiated. They had to compromise with the 1903 revisions in order to remain in the Church. They refused to leave, just as the modernists refused to leave. They had to play the game of crossed fingers, just as the liberals did. This undermined their confidence in the appropriateness of Church sanctions. It strengthened the liberals, whose strategy of subversion was obviously working.
What was the theological strategy of the liberals after 1900? They switched from a public emphasis on the benefits of biblical higher criticism--Briggs' strategy--to an emphasis on peace, work, and toleration: van Dyke's strategy. They argued that the Presbyterian tradition allows freedom of thought. They emphasized the practical benefits of liberalism: making this a better world (with other people's money). They repositioned liberty of thought as the moral high ground, to replace confessional orthodoxy.
What was the institutional strategy of the liberals after 1900? They steadily infiltrated the Church's boards and commissions. They continued to infiltrate the seminaries. Men such as Henry Sloane Coffin mastered the intricacies of parliamentary procedure. They defied the conservatives sporadically after 1913, but only in the name of a higher good, i.e., freedom of thought and tolerance.
What is the proper role of historic creeds and confessions in the life of the Presbyterian Church? The creeds--shorter than the confessions--should establish a church's institutional boundaries. Communicant membership should be by confession of faith in the creed. This should not be voting membership, however, lest the lowest common denominator principle be subsidized. Voting membership should require more: affirmation of the full Confession. Those given the right to impose ecclesiastical sanctions in terms of a confession must be under those sanctions and confession. Detailed confessions serve as Constitutional law documents of the respective denominations. This law is always subject to the fundamental law of the Bible. Confessions establish boundaries for Church officers, and should also establish boundaries for voting communicant members. Those who lawfully impose Presbyterian Church sanctions--voting in a local election is such a sanction--should be governed by an oath to the Westminster Confession and both catechisms. To argue otherwise is to relegate the standards for voting membership to adiaphora.
Because there are no formal creedal standards for Presbyterian laymen, this led to a constant lowering of the lowest common denominator. The low common denominator of the layman's creed at first triumphed over the ministerial Confession: from Calvinism to Arminianism. But after 1925, the judicially unenforceable five-point Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910 left the laymen confessionally more rigorous than most graduates of the seminaries, which were increasingly modernist: old modernism (Progressivism) or new modernism (neo-orthodoxy). Rhetoric and infiltration by 1926 had decided which confessional standard would triumph, either: (1) the laymen's presumed but unspecified Arminian-experiential creed; (2) the officers' institutionally unenforceable judicial Calvinist Confession; or (3) modernism. The modernists in 1934 controlled the judicial machinery. They imposed negative sanctions in terms of their supposedly creedless five-point creed.
Why did the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., abandon its Confession as the means of screening its leadership? New School members and fundamentalists were most interested in Church growth and evangelism. They did not see the great value of the Confession, let alone the two judicially ignored catechisms, in screening ministerial candidates. New School members did not regard the benefits of screening by means of the details of the Confession--the Old School's tradition--as offsetting the costs of full-time screening: acrimonious trials, long presbytery examinations, and the difficulty of mastering the Confession. Conservatives were unwilling to affirm the Confession in the important areas of origins (no six-day creationism), canon (lower criticism), and eternal sanctions (no non-elect infants). This also undermined their confidence in the use of the Confession as a screening device.
What was the importance of seminary education in the liberals' capture of the Presbyterian Church? The seminary replaced informal apprenticeship after 1812. It was added onto the requirement of college, i.e., mastery of Latin. Prior to the 1870's, seminaries screened the number of ministerial candidates by requiring fluency in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and systematic theology, thereby making additional screening far more perfunctory at the final level. Presbyteries moved from reliance on the content of theology--what ministerial candidates actually professed--to formal academic certification: where they received their training. Presbyteries deferred unofficial responsibility for evaluating theological competency to academic theologians. These theologians themselves were expected to experience the gauntlet of higher education, especially German higher education. Not that they had to graduate from a German university; they merely had to attend for a year or two. This was usually sufficient to undermine their faith in the Confession's view of Scripture. The liberals succumbed to the rationalist methodologies of the Germans; the conservatives had long since succumbed to the rationalist methodology of the Scots. The professors molded students in their own images over a three-year training period. After one year in office, each faculty member became immune to removal from that office by the General Assembly. It was far easier to capture the seminaries than the General Assembly. It was also more profitable. Infiltrators were paid by the seminaries.
What was the theological legacy of Princeton Seminary? Princeton was stricter-Confessional, rigorously academic, rationalist in the Scottish empiricist (facts-based) tradition, postmillennial in eschatology, and confident in traditional systematic theology (Turretin's seventeenth-century loci). The Princetonians believed in public theological debate, especially in academic journals. This led them into the disastrous trap of co-publishing with Union Seminary The Presbyterian Review, which allowed higher criticism to enter the Church as merely one more legitimate, intellectually neutral methodology among others. The Princetonians assumed the primacy of the intellect--at the very least, rational thought as first among equals. But this meant, in the final analysis, the primacy of the formal academic degree. Princeton was the last Northern Presbyterian seminary to succumb to modernism, but it had succumbed in principle to the methodology of modernism by 1881, at the Presbyterian Review proves.
What was the theological legacy of Union Seminary? Union was New School until the 1890's, when it publicly went modernist. It was always committed to open inquiry. It stressed practical theology: evangelicalism before 1890, Progressive political activism after 1900. It became the most important Presbyterian seminary in the United States, and probably the most important seminary anywhere. Its faculty after 1900 represented the American Protestant Establishment. It was committed to the toleration of everything except orthodoxy.(40)
What compromises in strategy was Machen forced to make, and why? He had to accept the Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910 as the best means of testing a minister's theological orthodoxy. The Church's conservatives had long since abandoned the Westminster Confession as a test of orthodoxy. They had abandoned too much of it by 1900 and most of it after 1906. Machen kept referring to the authority of the Westminster Confession, but he had no hope of ever seeing it enforced judicially. This forced him into a common-ground alliance with Arminians in the Church and outside.
Why did people who initially "talked conservative" wind up going along with liberal Church leaders? The cost of remaining with Machen grew too high. At each stage, Machen forced a confrontation with entrenched modernists and their majority experientialist allies, and each time he lost. This narrowed the range of his supporters, and it steadily guaranteed his ultimate institutional defeat. Most people will not commit to a movement which they regard as institutionally doomed. The positive sanctions offered by the Church for silence were great: jobs, peace, a building, and a retroactive pension plan. The negative sanctions were great, especially after 1934: unemployment during the Great Depression.
Why did others who "talked Calvinistic" wind up going along with liberal Church leaders? For the same reasons as the conservatives, but with this added element: Machen's demands on them pressed them ever-more tightly. They formally confessed adherence to the same Confession. There is always the temptation to dismiss as too radical, and therefore dangerous to a successful extension of the common faith, that person who is closest to you ideologically, but who is taking the implications that you hold in common to ever-more costly conclusions. "Stand up and stand firm," Machen implored, but they much preferred to stand pat.
Did Machen's tactics destroy the Old School Presbyterian tradition? Yes. The Dutch-American Calvinist tradition replaced it in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church after 1936 because of the problem of hiring academically qualified candidates for Westminster Seminary's faculty. John Murray alone defended something resembling the Old School system, but he did not clearly articulate its postmillennialism.(41) The New School tradition was also either dead or severely paralyzed by 1936. Fundamentalism had replaced the New School tradition after 1910. The Bible Presbyterian Church in 1938 was more fundamentalist than New School, tolerating anti-covenantal dispensationalism in the name of tolerating historic premillennialism. It launched no reforming crusades comparable to the New School's attack on slavery.
How was a Baptist, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., involved in the Presbyterian conflict? He understood the power of money in a world that was moving into moral relativism. He saw the long-term potential for funding ministers' educations.(42) He believed in modernism, which meant point five: ecumenism. His money financed ecumenism from 1910 onward, when the ecumenists were slowly gaining control over the Presbyterian Church's trust funds, properties, agencies, and tithes. He provided funding for liberals in the Presbyterian Church, most notably the liberal Baptist who resigned from it under fire in 1924: Harry Emerson Fosdick. He funded the mailing of Fosdick's famous sermon. He was equally ready to take care of Mrs. Buck after 1932, but her book royalties and movie royalties rolled in, and she re-married very well, so she did not need his assistance. He also funded Robert E. Speer throughout the period, though not on a full-time basis. Rockefeller armed the infiltrators and took care of the wounded when necessary. Finally, he funded criticism of biblical orthodoxy from outside the Presbyterian camp: a crucial aspect of the liberals' capture of the Church.
What Was to Be Done? What went wrong? Why were the liberals able to capture the Northern Presbyterian Church in 1936? It goes back to 1646.
Problems
The Westminster Assembly failed to explain judicially what the ecclesiastical authority of its own documents should be. The Assembly failed to address this fundamental covenantal question: What is the judicial basis of both ordination and local church membership? That is, what oath is mandatory for officers? What oath is mandatory of members? Because Presbyterianism did not deal with the issue of the oath-bound confession of faith in its foundational documents, the problem of stricter subscription vs. looser subscription was never resolved. This problem plagued American Presbyterianism from 1729 on: New Side (New York Synod) vs. Old Side (Philadelphia Synod); later, Old School vs. New School; finally, conservatives vs. modernists.
Second, the pre-1869 Old School sank on the shoals of adiaphora--specifically, the issue of chattel slavery. Refusing to deal with this social, economic, and political issue exegetically, circumstances after 1861 forced the Old School to deal with it defensively in terms of politics, both civil and ecclesiastical. In a weakened psychological condition, 1864-1869, it succumbed to the lure of one more reconciliation with its twice-divorced ex-spouse. The Old School Presbyterian tradition never did come up with a detailed exegetical solution to the question of chattel slavery. Westminster Seminary's Scot John Murray, as late as 1957, was still unwilling to condemn it biblically.(43)
Third, the Church never did establish the judicial and institutional basis of its control over the content of education, either in its colleges or its seminaries. The chain of command was more informal than formal. Presbyterian higher education was tied judicially more to the Prussian doctrine of academic freedom than to Confessional authority. The educational boards were almost completely independent of the General Assembly. They became self-appointing entities. This self-appointing, self-perpetuating feature became the model for the other Church boards.
Fourth, the boards of the Church were never integrated judicially into the Church's structure of presbyterial authority. A recognition of the problem of integrating the boards into Presbyterian government went back to the days of the division of 1838. Citing Presbyterianism's regulative principle of formal Church worship, James Thornwell had rejected the degree of independence given to the boards by the General Assembly, an authority not authorized by the Bible. He wanted smaller boards that were directly responsible to the General Assembly, not large legally independent boards with near-permanent executive committees that barely answered to the General Assembly. These boards are "virtually self-appointed."(44) They employed full-time fund-raisers who spoke at local congregations. Robert Breckenridge agreed, and went even further. He said that pastors should raise the funds as part of ordinary worship.(45) This would have transferred the power of the purse back to local congregations. Thornwell's next suggestion would have made it far more difficult for liberals ever to have captured the Presbyterian Church. He recommended placing authority for home missions and foreign missions with the presbyteries. This way, he said, the boards would not send out Pelagians and Arminians.(46) Little did he suspect that by 1900, semi-Pelagians would have been orthodox compared to those missionaries that were actually being sent out. He had spotted the weak link: the inability of the boards to screen out heretics. But the key question still remained: Why would the presbyteries initially fail to screen out any heretics who would then be sent out by the boards?
Charles Hodge disagreed. In 1860, in a debate with Thornwell in front of the General Assembly, Hodge defended the existing system of boards, rejecting Thornwell's application of the regulative principle to the details of Church government, as distinguished from formal worship.(47) Calvin had been speaking of baptism when he wrote: "First, whatever is not commanded, we are not free to choose."(48) So, Hodge concluded, Thornwell's view of the regulative principle was too narrow; unless the Bible says not to create a new office, the Church is allowed to create it. Thornwell was teaching "hyper-hyper-hyper High Church Presbyterianism." To which Thornwell replied that Hodge was teaching "no, no, NO Presbyterianism, no no, NO Churchism."(49) Their rhetoric had descended to the level of rival schoolboys on a playground. Hodge's view prevailed, and it ultimately led the Church into liberalism. When the majority should not have listened to him, it did; when it should have listened to him (the 1869 reunion), it didn't. Once again, the much-praised and rarely specified Presbyterian regulative principle had failed in practice to regulate anything. There was no agreement by two of Presbyterianism's greatest theologians on what it actually meant. In this respect, little has changed since 1860. (Without an afterthought, American Presbyterians use organs in their churches today, but from the Westminster Assembly to Thornwell, there were those who denied their use in the name of the regulative principle.(50) Dabney allowed musical instruments in worship, but he opposed the organ as being uniquely papist. Adopt and organ, he said, and you are headed into popery.(51) Any Presbyterian minister who holds such a view today is regarded by his peers as a harmless eccentric, unless he presses the issue in his presbytery, in which case he is regarded as a troublemaking crank. One thing is certain: he has a very small congregation if he has any congregation at all.)
In an article published in January, 1861, as the South was seceding from the Union, Thornwell got the last, judicially accurate word against Hodge: "The Board, therefore, seems to us to be an organization within the Church, occupying the place and exercising the powers which belong to her own judicatories."(52) But this did not go far enough analytically. Why should a supreme court, i.e., the General Assembly, establish and supervise executive administrative agencies? This confusion of supreme executive authority and supreme judicial authority in one organization has been the organizational Achilles' heel of Presbyterianism from the beginning. It concentrates both final judicial authority and supreme executive authority at the top of an impersonal bureaucratic system. Power concentrated means power exercised, and eventually it becomes power captured by power religionists.
The General Assembly did not appoint new trustees for Church boards on a regular basis. The boards in effect could grant a board member a kind of tenure for good behavior: tenure as far as the General Assembly was concerned. This tenure extended to all those hired by, or sent out by, these boards. (The advent of Civil Service protection for employees of the Federal government, which began in the 1880's, paralleled the development of the Presbyterian Church boards in the same era.) This near immunity to dismissal enabled modernists to infiltrate the boards, which were almost as autonomous functionally as the seminaries. The two biggest boards, Foreign Missions and Home Missions, sent out ordained men, yet the boards did not police the confessions of these men. The boards were not empowered to do so, which made employment by the boards a safe haven, Confessionally speaking, for liberals. Presbyterian foreign missions were closely associated with the post-1886 collegiate parachurch missions movement that was led by Mott and Speer. Liberals became the dominant force in this collegiate movement: YMCA, SVM, etc.
Fifth, there was the Presbyterian problem of the voice of authority in between General Assembly meetings. Silence for 51 weeks each year became less acceptable as the Church grew ever-larger, more complex, and wealthier. After 1906, the liberals worked for three decades to create permanent agencies that spoke in the name of the GA, and which would gain enormous influence over each GA, whose attendees were mostly first-timers. The elected officials who served as GA attendees faced what all politicians face: the expertise of the permanent bureaucracy. They surrendered.
Sixth, the Presbyterian Church never found a way to deal with the heresy of the New York Presbytery. Those outside the New York Presbytery found it almost impossible to control heretics under its jurisdiction before 1900, and completely impossible after 1900. The defensive mentality of presbyteries resists all criticisms from outsiders, and this puts pressure on minority critics inside, who can solve their problems only by going "over the head" of the presbytery to "outsiders." This meant that a heretic had to go into print in order for those outside his presbytery to bring effective negative sanctions against him.
Seventh, the General Assembly had become a legislative assembly that sat in judgment of itself. This is the essence of administrative law: legislator, judge, and jury. The structure of the General Assembly played into the hands of the modernists, who transformed Presbyterian law in the same way that they transformed civil law: through top-down administrative law courts.
Solutions
First, the solution to the Westminster Confession was the addition of another chapter on ecclesiastical oaths: for ordination and for membership. There also needed to be a section on the locus of authority in policing these oaths: local to national. This required that Confessional affirmation had to be dealt with: stricter vs. looser. Synods should have automatically reviewed the ordination of every elder who offered an exception to the Confession. This requirement, of course, would either have paralyzed the court system or led to automatic approval unless the Confession had been modified occasionally to meet shifting theological opinion. But there was no other way: either the Confession is revised or the courts jam up or elders play the game of crossed fingers. In any case, the Church's true confession will change over time.
Second, the solution to the problem of adiaphora always is exegesis: searching the whole of the Scriptures for the judicial foundations of social theory and policy.
Third, control over higher education had to be returned to the presbyteries by way of agencies controlled by them, not by the General Assembly. Any denomination that does not have a permanent committee of laymen and ministers who monitor the textbooks and lecture notes of the denominational college and seminary has surrendered to liberalism in advance. This committee on educational standards must not be appointed; it must be elected every two or three years: one minister and one layman (not necessarily a ruling elder) per synod or presbytery (depending on the size of the denomination), but not elected by the General Assembly, which is too easily controlled by the boards. The Presbyterian Church did not have such a committee.
This committee had to have the authority, subject to a veto only by the General Assembly, to cut the denomination's financial support of the suspect institution by up to 5% per year, a cut not to be restored until the committee's academic recommendation is implemented. The rule is: no sanctions, no oath; no oath, no covenant. Committee members should have been encouraged to consult with outside specialists in the various academic fields, whether or not they were members of the denomination.
Fourth, all national Presbyterian boards should have been turned over by the General Assembly to the presbyteries. These boards were executive agencies operating under the jurisdiction of a supreme court. This created a hybrid system of bureaucratic authority, judicial and executive, that always leads directly into the tyranny of administrative law--the judicial revolution that is undermining the West. The boards should have been appointed, funded, and policed by the presbyteries, which do lawfully initiate because they ordain men to local office. The General Assembly should have remained a supreme court. Each board member on every board would have been appointed by his presbytery, with rotating synodical representation to keep boards no larger than a dozen members per board. A board member would have been limited to a three-year term. The boards' membership should have been replaced annually: one-third of the board's officers every year. No board should have been allowed to recommend successor members. No synod would have been allowed to appoint a new member if any other synod had not sent a member during the same term. The Stated Clerk should have been removed from his ex officio position on every board. No board should have been under the administrative control of the General Assembly. Power must be decentralized to preserve freedom. The General Assembly should have relinquished all control over the boards.
Public choice economic theory informs us of one reality of original sin: whenever a bureaucracy gets access to a nearly guaranteed stream of income, its members seek their individual goals first and the bureaucracy's autonomous goals second. The goals of those supplying the funds are, at best, a distant third. This is why the flow of funds is so important to bureaucrats. They change their behavior only in response to a reduction in the flow of funds: negative sanctions. The only way to control the spread of bureaucracy is to de-fund it. There is no other way for dilettantes (us) to control experts (them). There is no other potential solution to the steady transfer of power from the laity to the central bureaucracy. Conclusion: missions should be local or presbyterial, the latter on a matching-fund basis. The local church sends out missionaries, and the presbytery matches funds using some fixed formula.
Fifth, who speaks for the General Assembly in between meetings? There was no clear answer. Scottish Presbyterianism had a preliminary answer: the superintendent. This pastoral office that prevailed in Scottish Presbyterianism during the "Second Episcopacy" of 1662-1690.(53) What if, alongside presbyteries, synods, and General Assemblies, there had been a hierarchical system of superintendents, one for each presbytery and synod, each one subject to the veto of his presbytery or synod? All would have been ultimately responsible to the General Assembly, itself made up of ruling elders and teaching elders. What if each superintendent had possessed the authority to investigate the rumors of heresy within his own jurisdiction? What if he had been able to sit down with another superintendent and discuss with him, as a man possessing equal authority, the goings-on inside the other man's jurisdiction? What if a superintendent had possessed the authority to examine the classroom instruction of any seminary professor within his jurisdiction? Then it would not have required the lonely stand of some courageous individual in another presbytery--a man not possessing the authority of an entire presbytery--to have called public attention to the theologically unsound condition of the New York Presbytery. Machen performed this service to the denomination in the 1920's, but by then it was too late. He stood increasingly alone, an anomaly: a Presbyterian who believed that the Westminster Confession should be honored verbally, though not enforced through heresy trials.
There was no such judicial representative above the congregational level. But there must be operational continuity in any organization; the larger the organization, the more imperative this continuity. People understand this with respect to civil authority, but they are less willing to admit that ecclesiastical authority is equally in need of personal continuity. Functional authority in Presbyterianism unceremoniously moved from the infrequent gatherings of corporate judicial assemblies to the permanent corporations of the Church. This silent transfer of functional authority accelerated after the centralization of 1908. The judicial continuity of the Presbyterian Church was increasingly provided by its permanent commissions and boards, which were represented by men who were first among equals. The most influential Presbyterian representative of all after 1926 was Robert E. Speer. His advent to the robes of power came at the General Assembly of 1927.
The office of superintendent was abandoned early by the Scottish Church, never reaching American shores. Not to have a spokesman is to adopt a mode of independency, e.g., the Southern Baptist Convention. To have a spokesman is to adopt either prelacy or episcopacy. Spokesmen there are in Presbyterianism. Machen was one. Macartney was one. So were van Dyke, Coffin, and Speer. But they are informal spokesmen and therefore not subject to a formal veto, since their words carry no official authority.
Sixth, how to enable critics in one presbytery to overcome the defensive mind-set of another presbytery? The defensive mentality of presbyteries led them to protect deviants in their midst from criticisms by those outside the presbytery. This was another example of Presbyterianism's absence of personalism above the congregational level. I have no idea how this problem can be solved within the framework of Presbyterian government without a superintendent. It never was.
Seventh, General Assembly meetings should have been divided into two completely separate sessions: first as a court of appeals; second as a policy-initiating body. The judicial session should have come first; if it ran out of time, there would have been no legislative session that year. Everything done in either session should have been subject to a veto by the presbyteries.(54) The presbyteries should have put the General Assembly's legislative authority on a very short chain. No matter not approved by two-thirds of the number of authorized delegates at a General Assembly (not just at a particular session) would have been considered valid. A majority vote by all the attendees (not just those in attendance at a poorly attended session), but not a two-thirds majority, should have automatically triggered an overture to be sent down to the presbyteries for a final vote. Until approved by the over half of the presbyteries, the proposed legislation should have been put on hold. No five-point Doctrinal Deliverances, no 14-point Social Deliverances, no authorizations of money for the Federal Council of Churches, no calls for a League of Nations, unless approved by two-thirds of the delegates or by over half of the presbyteries. In short, no national voice of authority on issues not authorized by those represented. The presbyteries had delegated vast authority to the seminaries and the General Assembly, which was an open invitation to liberals: "Come and get us!" They did.
Finally, there was one other solution: keep the denomination so small that screening by an intimate network of pastors keeps out liberals. This has been the only workable long-term Presbyterian solution so far. Baptists and charismatics think it is just the right solution for solving Presbyterian conflicts. For that matter, so do the liberals in mainline Presbyterianism. It reduces competition.
Conclusion The Presbyterian conflict began with the First Great Awakening, which split the denomination in 1741. In this initial phase of the conflict, the debate was over the role of "experience vs. confession" as the true mark of saving faith. This crucial theological debate was never resolved. The Church reunited in 1758. The debate re-surfaced again in the 1820's as a result of the Second Great Awakening. To this was added another dividing issue: slavery. The Church split again in 1837, and each of the splitting factions subsequently divided over slavery and the Civil War.
The second phase of the conflict began with the reuniting of the Northern Church in 1869. From this point on, the division was a three-way split. The third phase, beginning in 1901, was a time of visible peace; it was during this phase that the Westminster Confession was revised and the liberals captured the administrative machinery of the Church. It was a conflict over legitimate standards and the rule of law. The fourth phase was the debate over legitimate sanctions, 1922 to 1933. The fifth phase was the final one: the decision regarding who would inherit the assets of the Presbyterian Church. It ended inside the Church in 1936. It ended outside the Church when the civil courts decided in 1938 that the separating Presbyterian Church of America could not retain its name, which was the property of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. What had begun in 1722 as a debate over strict subscription ended in 1939 in a battle over trademark rights.
Presbyterianism has two enormous chinks in its judicial armor. First, at the bottom: the absence of any denomination-wide creed for communicant members, who are also voting members. (Prior to the Civil War, donors who were not members had the vote when calling a pastor(55)--a true judicial nightmare.) This system of judicial representation places authority into the hands of those who are not formally covenanted to the Church in terms of judicially explicit and enforceable theological stipulations. There is no Presbyterian personal confession beyond faith in Christ and a willingness to obey Him; there has been none since 1647. Those who are not under an oath with theological content can lawfully hire and fire the Church's voices of judicial authority: elders. Second, at the top: the fusion of legislative, executive, and final judicial authority in the same organization, the General Assembly. The institution which establishes policy and executes policy sits as its own judge over policy. This is the essence of administrative law. It is also the essence of tyranny.
This dualism of initiating authority cannot persist indefinitely. One or the other must become supreme: the oath-less member or the supreme bureaucracy. From 1934 to 1936, the issue was finally resolved when the supreme administrative law court was announced its formal initiating authority over all presbyteries, which in turn announced their newly acquired executive authority over all members. The lowest-common-denominator confession proved to be the confession of the liberals who had captured control over the General Assembly's unified executive and judicial machinery. Nevertheless, what took place in this brief, consummating period had always been implied by the General Assembly's triple authority: executive, legislative, and judicial. What changed judicially in 1934 was that the communicant members were at last brought under the General Assembly's authority despite the absence of any oath on their part. This destroyed the intermediary courts' layers of judicial authority that had been built into Presbyterianism in order to insulate the authority of teaching elders from the decisions of communicant members. In order to get at the communicant members' wallets--the flow of funds--the new judicial order commandeered the initiating authority of the presbyteries. We could also say that in order to commandeer the initiating authority of the presbyteries, the new legal order extended its authority over communicant members. Presbytery's rights went the way of state's rights in 1865: gone with the wind. So did member's rights.(56)
The Presbyterian conflict had implications far beyond the four walls of the institutional Church. It was more than a conflict over theology narrowly defined. It was a battle for the soul of what was a Protestant nation when the conflict began in 1721, though not when it ended in 1936. To understand how high the stakes were, consider the words of George Santayana in 1913: "The present age is a critical one and interesting to live in. The civilization characteristic of Christendom has not yet disappeared, yet another civilization has begun to take its place."(57) One year later, World War I broke out, and by its end in 1918, the ideal of Christendom was gone. For the first time since the days of King Saul, the kings had departed,(58) and so had the long-fading ideal of Christendom. The triumph of Renaissance-Enlightenment civilization was complete. Humanistic civil covenants would now be administered and enforced in the West. The fourth stage of the Presbyterian conflict began in 1922, after this culture-wide succession had taken place. The power religionists' strategy of subversion had worked well inside the Church, just as it had worked well outside the Church, as Machen and his allies would soon learn.
In 1908, the year of the administrative restructuring of the Presbyterian Church, Woodrow Wilson wrote this regarding legitimate government: "Each part of the government loses force and prestige in proportion as it ceases to give, and give publicly, conclusive reasons for what it is doing and for what it is declining to do."(59) That assessment, perhaps more than any other, stands as the tombstone which was waiting in reserve for the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. The modernists' strategy of subversion has always rested on bureaucratic secrecy--the creation of a shadow government and a shadow confession. Decade by decade, the Presbyterian Church's hierarchy has offered its bureaucratic explanations for each successive outrage, from its financial support of Rockefeller's Interchurch World Movement in 1919 to its support of Communist Angela Davis in 1971 to its financial support of the RE-imagining Conference in 1993. The denomination is aging(60) and shrinking. The bureaucracy's post-scandal explanations fall on fewer and fewer ears.
The Angela Davis case is representative. In 1971, the denomination's Council on Church and Race donated $10,000 to her legal defense fund. In 1970, the gifts from the churches to the General Assembly's General Mission fund totaled $24.6 million. In 1972, gifts had dropped to $22.6 million. In 1973, they had dropped to $20.3 million. Meanwhile, giving to the congregations rose from $368.8 million (1971) to $373.2 million (1972) to $410.5 million (1973). The members applied negative sanctions to the bureaucracy, not to their local congregations. Membership dropped by 100,000 each year, from 3 million in 1971 to 2.8 million in 1973.(61) It has continued to drop. Presbyterians continue vote with their wallets and their feet. Such is the fate of administrative law. It creates apoplexy at the center and anemia at the extremities. (And what became of Miss Davis? She was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1979. She ran as Vice President of the United States on the Communist Party ticket in 1980 and 1984. She was expelled by the Party in 1992. In 1995, she was named to what is probably the most prestigious academic position at the University of California, Santa Cruz: the tenured Presidential Chair. She never earned a Ph.D. Lesson: the Left takes care of its own.)(62)
A Final Word
In the spring of 1963, about the time I completed my B.A. thesis on the Presbyterian conflict, Dallas Roark completed his Ph.D. dissertation on Machen. In the Conclusion, he offered this assessment: "The judgment of time has validated the conclusion that Machen exaggerated the extent of liberalism within the Presbyterian Church."(63) This was not time's judgment; it was Roark's. Nothing in his dissertation had prepared the reader for his assessment, and I can think of nothing of denomination-wide significance that has happened since 1936 that would validate it. The revised Confession of 1967 surely did not. Neither did the "RE-imagining 1993" conference. But those of us who write conclusions to monographs are frequently tempted sorely to make judgments more sweeping than our circumscribed theses warrant, if only to justify the enormous commitment of our time and effort. I, too, will now succumb to this temptation.
The question facing Christians today is this: Will there be a resurrection of Christendom? Few of Machen's heirs believe in the possibility of such a resurrection; few believed in 1937. Some of them believe not only that it will not be resurrected; it should not be resurrected.(64) I believe that Christendom can, will, and should be resurrected, though next time without kings, and also without a U.S. Department of Education. This is my confession. It was also Machen's.
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Footnotes:
1. Cited in Tertius van Dyke, Henry van Dyke: A Biography (New York: Harper & Bros., 1935), p. 129.
2. Machen, "The Responsibility of the Church in Our New Age," Annals of the American Academy of Political Science, 165 (Jan. 1933), p. 8.
3. Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), Epilogue.
4. Machen, Presbyterian Guardian (Nov. 28, 1936), pp. 69-70.
5. Francis L. Patton, Fundamental Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1926), pp. 162-63.
6. Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1972); Reveille for Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1969).
7. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, p. 44. Emphasis in the original.
8. Delwyn G. Nykamp, A Presbyterian Power Struggle: A Critical History of Communication Strategies in the Struggle for Control of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., 1922-1926 (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1974), p. 2.
9. Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York: Harper Torchbooks, [1949] 1967), ch. 5.
10. Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Vintage, 1964), Part 1.
11. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), Part 3.
12. Garfield was a Disciple of Christ, i.e., a Cambellite. He had prepared to become a minister in his youth, but had gone into politics instead. By 1881, a few months before his assassination, he had become a theological liberal. W. W. Wasson, James A. Garfield: His Religion and Education (Nashville: Tennessee Book Co., 1952), pp. 120-21.
13. 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), pp. 96-99.
14. Lefferts A. Loetscher, The Broadening Church: a study of theological issues in the presbyterian church since 1869 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), p. 117.
15. Presbyterian D. James Kennedy's Evangelism Explosion is the common-ground version; the publishers would not accept his original Calvinistic version, as he told me several years ago.
16. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1923), pp. 168-69, 171.
17. R. J. Rushdoony, Revolt Against Maturity: A Biblical Psychology of Man (Fairfax, Virginia: Thoburn Press, 1977), p. 274.
18. Ibid., pp. 274-75.
19. Not the Pope as the antichrist, and not lawful oaths as ethically mandatory.
20. Machen, "The Issue in the Church" (1923), in God Transcendent, edited by Ned B. Stonehouse (Carlysle, Pennsylvania: Banner of Truth Trust, [1949] 1982), p. 45.
21. As mentioned in Chapter 7, Bryan was an age-day creationist.
22. John Murray, "The Theology of the Westminster Confession of Faith," in Scripture and Confession: A Book About Confessions Old and New, edited by John H. Skilton (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1973), p. 126.
23. Machen, "The Creeds and Doctrinal Advance," ibid., p. 156.
24. Minutes of the Second General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America (Nov. 12-14, 1936), p. 13.
25. John Calvin, Brief Instruction for Arming All the Good Faithful Against the Errors of the Common Sect of the Anabaptists (1544), in Treatises Against the Anabaptists and Against the Libertines, Benjamin Wirt Farley, editor (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, 1982), ch. 4.
26. Ibid., p. 94.
27. Ibid., p. 104.
28. Eschatology is such a thing in modern Calvinism: historic premillennialism, amillennialism, postmillennialism, and dispensational premillennialism cannot possibly be reconciled. Yet American Presbyterianism, unlike conservative Lutheranism, has relegated these differences to the realm of theological speculation beyond the reach of ecclesiastical sanctions: things indifferent.
29. Byron Snapp, Presbyterian Witness, 8 (Summer 1994), p. 10.
30. Jacob Neusner, Judaism and Scripture: The Evidence of Leviticus Rabbah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. xi.
31. "The General Assembly," Princeton Review (July 1858), p. 561.
32. Charles Hodge, "Adoption of the Confession of Faith," ibid., (Oct. 1858), p. 670.
33. Ibid., p. 682.
34. Ibid., p. 685.
35. If this represents the early stages of another Great Awakening, high Churchmen will probably miss out again, just as they did after 1797. The demand for high Church liturgy and mid-Church confessionalism is low. The demand for entertainment is high. The trinitarian confession basic to ecclesiastical success today is drums, guitar, and electronic keyboard.
36. Norman L. Furniss, The Fundamentalist Controversy, 1918-1931 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 35.
37. Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 257.
38. Winthrop Hudson, The Great Tradition of the American Churches (New York: Harper & Bros., 1953).
39. Fosdick was removed on a technicality: he had never been ordained as a Presbyterian minister. He was offered the opportunity to remain in his pulpit if he submitted to ordination. He refused.
40. Union's Harry F. Ward was the most politically radical seminary professor in America--and probably in the world. On Ward, see C. Gregg Singer, The Unholy Alliance (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1975), pp. 357-59.
41. His comments on Romans 11 indicate that he was postmillennial, but his lectures on eschatology in his senior systematics course sounded amillennial to me. I was taking his course on Romans 11 at the same time in the spring of 1964.
42. The Sealantic Fund.
43. John Murray, Principles of Conduct: Aspects of Biblical Ethics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1957), pp. 100-102.
44. Ernest Trice Thompson, Presbyterians in the South, 3 vols. (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1973), I:511.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid, I:512.
47. Charles Hodge, Discussions in Church Polity (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1878), p. 133.
48. John Calvin, "Form of Administering the Sacraments," in Selected Works of John Calvin: Tracts and Letters, Henry Beveridge, translator (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, [1849] 1983), vol. 2, Tracts, p. 118.
49. Ibid., I:515.
50. Ibid., II:429.
51. Ibid., I:430.
52. Thornwell, Collected Writings, IV:240; cited in ibid., I:515.
53. Geddes MacGregor, Corpus Christi: The Nature of the Church According to the Reformed Tradition (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1958), pp. 80n-81n.
54. On the judicial session, see Appendix B, below, section on "A Technical Solution to Confessional Revision."
55. Thompson, Presbyterians in the South, I:518-19.
56. Paralleling these developments were analogous developments in American civil law.
57. Cited in Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence: A study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912-1917 (Chicago: Quadrangle, [1959] 1964), two pages prior to the Introduction.
58. In the classic aphorism of Egypt's King Farouk, a British puppet who was deposed in the early 1950's, "There are but five kings left in the world: the King of England, and the kings of jacks, hearts, diamonds, and spades."
59. Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, [1908] 1961), p. 110.
60. Some 13% of PCUSA members are in the 18-34 age group, compared with 36% nationally. A third are age 65 or older, almost double the percentage of older Americans. National & International Religion Report (July 10, 1995), p. 5.
61. John R. Fry, The Triviliazation of the United Presbyterian Church (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 50.
62. Jeffrey Hart, "Angela Davis: Academic Fraud," Conservative Chronicle (April 26, 1995). p. 25.
63. Dallas Roark, J. Gresham Machen and His Desire to Maintain a Doctrinally True Presbyterian Church (Ph.D. Dissertation, Iowa State University, 1963), p. 215.
64. Gary North, Westminster's Confession: The Abandonment of Van Til's Legacy (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991).