CONCLUSION TO PART 1 The visible Church should strive to receive, into a communion for prayer and fellowship and labor, as many as possible of those who are united to Christ in saving faith, and it should strive to exclude as many as possible of those who are not so united to Him. If it does not practise exclusion as well as inclusion, it will soon come to stand for nothing at all, but will be merged in the life of the world; it will soon become like salt that has lost its savour, fit only to be cast out and to be trodden under foot of men.
J. Gresham Machen (1925)(1)
Inclusion and exclusion: here are the two sanctions of the Church. Membership and excommunication, ordination and suspension: the Church must have both. The question for Machen was: Which group would announce the Church's standards and impose the Church's sanctions?
There were three major schools of theological opinion in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., after the mid-1870's: Old School Calvinism, New School Calvinism, and modernism. Each theology was covenantal; each had its representative five points. Each group also had its own strategy and tactics.
The Old School's theology was judicial and rested on a commitment to the 1788 Confession of Faith. Its members believed in the two catechisms, but these documents were not enforced by Church sanctions. The Old School was the heir of Puritanism's confessional Calvinism.
The New School's theology was officially Calvinistic, but its primary emphasis was experiential and evangelical. It was an heir of American revivalism. It tended toward cooperation with other ecclesiastical groups and even with what would today be called parachurch groups. New School Calvinism drifted into fundamentalism after 1909.
Modernism was even more ecumenical. Modernists defended their position in terms of the language of New School experientialism and evangelism, but their experientialism and evangelism were not tied to the theological categories of the Westminster Confession.
The Old School had a view of Church sanctions more rigorous than the New School's, which in turn was more rigorous than the modernists until the 1930's. But Old School members refused to press formal charges against modernists after the Swing heresy case of 1874.(2) This left the initiating authority to New School members.
New School members refused to press charges against modernists after 1900. This left the Presbyterian Church devoid of effective Church sanctions in the area of theological confession for a generation, 1901 to 1934. Officially, Church sanctions for theological confession ended in 1901; the trials of the 1930's were officially conducted for reasons other than theology. So, after 1900, the Northern Presbyterian Church seemed to have no ecclesiastical sanctions. But no institution can exist apart from sanctions. So, in order to see what happened to the Presbyterian Church after 1900, we must examine in detail the substitutes for formal ecclesiastical sanctions. First, however, we must examine Church's theological sanctions prior to 1901.
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Footnotes:
1. Machen, What Is Faith? (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1925] 1974), p. 155.
2. See Chapter 3, below, section on "`General' Patton's Battles," subsection on "The Swing Case."