CONCLUSION TO PART 2 We are conscious that in pronouncing the errors in question to be unscriptural, radical, and highly dangerous, we are actuated by no feelings of narrow party zeal; but by a firm and growing persuasion that such errors cannot fail, in their ultimate effect, to subvert the foundations of Christian hope, and destroy the souls of men. As watchmen on the walls of Zion, we should be unfaithful to the trust reposed in us, were we not to cry aloud and proclaim a solemn warning against opinions so corrupt and delusive.
General Assembly of 1837(1)
The acts of 1837 deposed no minister and excommunicated no Church member. They declared no man and no set of men unworthy of Christian communion. It would indeed have been a monstrous iniquity for the Assembly to excommunicate thousands of Christians of whom they knew nothing, and who had been neither accused nor convicted of any offense. The imputation of any such purpose to the General Assembly is a gross calumny against that venerable body.
Charles Hodge (1840)(2)
Well, which was it? It was both. Judicially, Hodge was correct in his assessment: the General Assembly, dominated by Old School Calvinists, excommunicated no one in 1837 or 1838. Deposing just one minister, let alone excommunicating hundreds of them, is a long, drawn-out, and expensive judicial procedure. Extending the right boot of fellowship to four synods at a single General Assembly is far cheaper. Yet theologically, there can be little doubt: the Old School majority in the 1837 General Assembly was motivated by theological concerns. It did throw out four New School synods, and did so on a legal technicality: the supposedly unconstitutional nature of the Plan of Union of 1801, which had allowed presbyteries to bring together in one ecclesiastical body Congregationalists and Presbyterians.
The General Assembly made it plain in 1837 that the ejection of the four New School synods rested on a very definite theological foundation: the heretical nature of certain unnamed individuals who were hiding under the ecclesiastical umbrella of the Plan of Union and who were undermining the Presbyterian Church. The Assembly said just that, as we shall see. It was this publicly known fact that Hodge chose to ignore three years later. He claimed that the Assembly's decision was strictly judicial and in no way theological. A similarly preposterous assertion was echoed a century later in 1936 by a majority in the Church when it suspended a handful of Calvinist ministers--and it was no less a falsehood then.
A Strategy of Verbal Subversion The language of the General Assembly was judicial-constitutional in its 1837 Pastoral Letter to the Churches Under the Care of The General Assembly. But this document was immediately followed in the Minutes by a Circular Letter issued by the General Assembly and signed by the Moderator and Stated Clerk who had signed the Pastoral Letter. The language of the Circular Letter was deliberately inflammatory. It spoke of the interests of the Church--specifically, the missions boards--as having been subjected to "humiliating and degrading perversions" by those who had established parallel boards outside the control of the General Assembly. (This would also become the formal cause of the Calvinists' ejection in 1936.) It spoke of "doctrinal errors" which had gained an "alarming presence in some of our judicatories."(3) These errors were Arminian in theology, which the Circular Letter identified as "another gospel"--the terminology used by Paul to justify his anathema, a judicial condemnation of false doctrine worthy of excommunication (Gal. 1:6-11). The Circular Letter also identified their opponents' strategy: a strategy of subversion based on the misuse of words. This declaration would prove amazingly prophetic after 1875, when the modernists began to employ the same strategy. The Old School in 1837 summarized what would become the crisis of the reunited Church at the end of the century. It was a long document, but it is important, not just for what it said about the past but about the future. The author understood the strategy of ecclesiastical subversion.
The advocates of these errors, on their first appearance, were cautious and reserved, alleging that they differed in words only from the doctrines as stated in our public standards. Very soon, however, they began to contend that their opinions were really new, and were a substantial and important improvement on the old creed of the church; and, at length, that revivals of religion could not be hoped for, and that the souls of men must be destroyed, if the old doctrines continued to be preached. The errors thus promulg[at]ed were by no means of that doubtful or unimportant character, which seems to be assigned to them even by some of the professed friends of orthodoxy. You will see, by our published acts, that some of them affect the very foundation of the system of gospel truth, and that they all bear relations to the gospel plan, of very serious and ominous import. Surely, doctrines which go to the formal or virtual denial of our covenant relation to Adam; the native and total depravity of man; the entire inability of the sinner to recover himself from rebellion and corruption; the nature and source of regeneration; and our justification solely on account of the imputed righteousness of the Redeemer, cannot, upon any just principle, be regarded as "minor errors." They form, in fact, "another gospel;" and it is impossible for those who faithfully adhere to our public standards, to walk with those who adopt such opinions with either comfort or confidence.
It cannot be denied, indeed, that those who adopted and preached these opinions, at the same time declared their readiness to subscribe to our Confession of Faith, and actually professed their assent to it, in the usual form, without apparent scruple. This, in fact, was one of the most revolting and alarming characteristics of their position. They declared, that in doing this, they only adopted the confession "for substance," and by no means intended to receive the whole system which it contained. Upon this principle, we had good evidence that a number of Presbyteries, in the ordination and reception of ministers and other church officers, avowedly and habitually acted. And hence it has not been uncommon for the members of such Presbyteries publicly and formally to repudiate some of the important doctrines of the formulary which they had thus subscribed; and even, in a few extraordinary cases, to hold up the system of truth which it contains as "an abomination;" as a system which it were to be "wished had never had an existence." No wonder that men feeling and acting thus should have been found, in some instances, substituting entirely different Confessions of Faith in place of that which is contained in our constitution. Who can doubt that such a method of subscribing to articles of faith is immoral in principle; that it is adapted to defeat the great purpose of adopting confessions; and that, if persisted in, it could not fail to open the door of our church wider and wider to the introduction of the most radical and pestiferous heresies, which would speedily destroy her character as an evangelical body.(4)
It was not just Arminianism that alienated the Old School. It was also the political implication of this Arminianism, the "ever restless spirit of radicalism, manifest both in the church and in the state," which "has driven its deep agitations through the bosom of our beloved church. . . . It is ever the same levelling revolutionary spirit, and tends to the same ruinous results. It has, in succession, driven to extreme fanaticism the great cause or revivals of religion, of temperance, and of the rights of man."(5) The phrase, "the rights of man," was a code phrase that obviously referred to abolitionism, but its historic origins harkened back to the French Revolution and the atheism of Thomas Paine. "It has aimed to transmute our pure faith into destructive heresy, our scriptural order into confusion and misrule. It has crowded many of our churches with ignorant zealots and unholy members; driven our pastors from their flocks; and with strange fire(6) consumed the heritage of the Lord, filling our churches with confusion, and our judicatories with conflict; . . ." Thus did the Old School dismiss the New School's claim of Calvinist orthodoxy.
Déjà Vu
These New School Arminians had pioneered a strategy of verbal deception which was adopted by modernists after 1875. But unlike the General Assembly of 1837, the post-1869 General Assemblies refused to remove from their ranks in one fell swoop all of the offending parties as well as their allies, whether active or passive, by means of a single surgical operation. The Old School in 1837 chose not to initiate a series of heresy trials, which they would have lost. By refusing to identify specific individuals as heretical and deserving of Church discipline, the Old School accomplished its goal with a minimum commitment of scarce judicial resources.
In the 1920's, their spiritual heirs adopted half of this strategy: a self-conscious refusal to name anyone as heretical or to launch formal trials against anyone. To demand a heresy trial was risky. Presbyterian law mandated that a person bringing a false accusation against a member would in turn become subject to censure for slander.(7) But unlike the General Assembly of 1837, the conservatives of the 1920's did not have the votes to remove from their presence all of the heretics and most of their sympathizers in one comprehensive judicial housecleaning. Geography was against them: the deviants were no longer confined to specific synods. The climate of opinion--the spirit of the times or Zeitgeist--was also opposed to them: pluralism. But most important, the structure of the Church was opposed to them: bureaucracy. The termites had multiplied. The wood was rotten.
A Marriage Apparently Not Made in Heaven Analogies are always dangerous if taken too literally, but they are useful heuristic devices. In 1869, the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., was like a couple who had been married to each other twice, had been divorced twice, and were ready to get married again. A marriage counselor would not be optimistic about the proposed third union, especially since each party was convinced that his or her cause had been correct and the other's wrong.
As in marriage, the two sides came into the union as judicial equals. Each had the power to say no to the other prior to the union. In terms of democratic theory, the Old School should have been dominant politically, being significantly larger, but this proved not to be the case. The functional question in 1869 was this: Which party was entering the union on the other's terms? There was no doubt about this: the Old School. They had bet wrong on the most divisive political issue in American history: chattel slavery. Their public image was linked, if not to slavery, then at least to the forces of ethical and political reaction that had refused to challenge the now-defunct evil institution to mortal combat. They had implicitly announced that this issue was adiaphora, i.e., one not spoken to authoritatively by Scripture. The issue of slavery was none of the Church's business, they had dogmatically maintained. Yet in the United States, 1830-1865, no political issue had been more relevant. Thus, the Old School had in effect announced: "The Bible is irrelevant in this matter, and therefore so are we."(8) Theirs had been a massive failure of leadership, although this failure was not confined to Old School Presbyterians.(9)
Continuity and Discontinuity The Old School needed to put all this behind it: judicially and psychologically. But its members were unwilling to do this through public confession and repentance.
The reunion offered a seemingly painless way to do this: to immerse the Old School's separate identity in a new denomination with the old name. Continuity would be provided by the denomination's name and Confessional standards; discontinuity would be provided by the presence of the New School within the new (old) denomination. But there was a high price tag on this disguised discontinuity: judicial subordination. The Confession was verbally the same; the New School's leaders repeatedly said that they believed it without qualification. It was this affirmation that broke the will to resist on the part of all of the Old School leaders except Charles Hodge, who believed the New School could not be trusted, and who turned out to be correct. The New School's leaders lied about their intentions as representatives of the whole faction. They swore allegiance to the Confession, but they held the reunion's first meeting in the congregation of the man whom they had twice refused to de-frock for Arminianism: Albert Barnes. The reunion was based on crossed fingers.
This meant that the Church's judicial enforcement structure would not be the same as it had been in the Old School. There would be the form of Calvinist orthodoxy but not the substance thereof. The New School's standards would dominate in most Church courts, and the New School had systematically refused to convict Arminians of deviation from the Confession. It should have been clear where this would lead, but only Charles Hodge had the fortitude to make the prediction in part. His colleagues did not believe him. They wanted the reunion more than they wanted to think through its judicial implications.
In 1869, the Old School was willing to return, hat in hand, bare head lowered, as the now publicly humiliated prodigal son. Its members swallowed their pride, but far more important, swallowed their judicial suspicions, in order to make possible what was to be, in retrospect, stage one in a program of Presbyterian ecumenical union. Cumberland Presbyterian churches were next: 1906. The Old School was swallowed by the New School. Old School members surrendered their ecclesiastical inheritance to their long-time opponents. The New School's spiritual heirs surrendered this grand inheritance to the modernists in 1936, when they silently consented to the modernists' public disinheritance of the tattered remnants of the Old School and a few New School premillennialists.
The Old School would not admit in 1869 that they had made a catastrophic error in ethical and political judgment: slavery as adiaphora. In short, the Old School was unwilling to repent in public. (The New School remained politely quiet, as a wise suitor should.) Old School members were either silent about the matter or else they denied it, which was an exercise in self-delusion. Meanwhile, the South's partisans were playing this same psychological game of denial. Alexander Stephens, the former Vice President of the Confederacy, denied in 1870 that slavery had been the primary cause of the War; Constitutional issues had been.(10) This self-induced memory loss in the South was widespread.(11) But there was a high price to pay there, too. The Presbyterians' antebellum moral and cultural leadership in the South was surrendered at Appomattox Court House and never regained. The same was true of Old School's leadership in the reunited Northern Church.
With the reunion of 1869, the New School Presbyterians began a process of absorbing the Old School. The Old School's representatives--Charles Hodge excepted--had not understood how far this absorption process could lead. They learned only after 1900. The New School represented a theological tradition that favored a Confessionally broader-based Church and growth through evangelism. Their evangelism techniques had been established during the two Great Awakenings. They were experientialists more than they were Confessionalists.
New School members were willing to confess allegiance to the Confession, but unless strongly provoked by modernists, they were not willing to enforce its details on any ordained minister who had acknowledged its authority, once, at his ordination. Their Confessional assumption was "once confessed, always confessed." This would become official policy at the General Assembly in 1927. New School members had grown tired of squabbling over the details of Calvinist theology in 1838, and they remained tired. They could be mobilized into action if the rhetoric of the modernists grew flagrant enough, as it became in the 1890's, but after 1900, the modernists avoided rhetorical confrontations for two decades, and the New School retreated once again, calling for Church union with other, more Arminian Presbyterian churches. They could be mobilized against disturbers of the peace in the Church after 1900, but not by appeals to the Westminster Confession. The key issue after 1900 was peace, not the Westminster Confession.
Representative Cases The multi-level heresy trials of Charles Briggs had absorbed enormous quantities of resources. Three General Assemblies, 1891-93, had devoted most of their concern to Briggs and the issues he represented. In 1894, the General Assembly had an open-and-shut case: Henry Preserved Smith formally supported Briggs. The decision was easy. But McGiffert had also publicly supported Briggs in 1893. He was brought to trial in 1898 on another issue. This pointed to trouble in the future. Would the New School's decade of enthusiasm for heresy trials remain?
McGiffert's resignation in 1900 ended Presbyterian trials against heresy. What must be recognized is something that books about the Presbyterian conflict and American Church history rarely or never point out clearly. Only three men were convicted of heresy in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., during the nineteenth century: William McCune in 1878, Briggs in 1893, and Smith in 1894. Still, these were important events--representative cases, just as convictions by a civil court are. Few crimes are ever solved; few criminals are arrested; few cases get to court; few of those that get to court result in convictions. But people who are convicted serve as warnings and deterrents to others who might be willing to break the law. The tree of orthodoxy is watered by periodic heresy trials. After 1900, the mainline Protestant churches ceased watering the tree of orthodoxy, just as European Protestantism ceased watering it in the nineteenth century. The twentieth century's mainline Protestant churches were the desiccated result.
From 1900 on, a majority of the ministers in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., decided that for the sake of peace, and for the spread of the gospel, there should be no further trials of heretics. There would be trials by heretics, 1935-36, but no trials of heretics. These later trials would be conducted in the name of institutional peace and obedience, not theology.
The General Assembly of 1893 did not agree with the modernists' official appeal, namely, that theology--meaning orthodox theology--is a hindrance to the life of the Church. It removed Briggs from the ministry. The following May it did the same with Henry Preserved Smith. But those 235 signers who agreed with Henry van Dyke's Plea for Peace and Work manifesto had only just begun to fight in 1893. They learned how to fight far more effectively after 1900. They learned to fight within the institutional restraints imposed by the majority: peacefully. They learned to work quietly in terms of the official rules, which, as the majority members of the Church boards after 1915, they increasingly wrote. In 1936, they won. They imposed negative sanctions--not an incident, but a precedent. They never had to impose them again.
The Liberals Resolve to Fight
Those who do not understand the power religion may ask, as Nathaniel Weyl asked in the early 1940's:(12) How could the modernists remain in a denomination whose Confession they rejected? This was no a problem theologically for them; their religion was the religion of democracy. Democracy was the reigning religion of the intellectuals during this era, as it is in our own.(13) Thus, what was basic to the modernists' agenda was the capture of institutional power and wealth through democratic means: voting the institutional legacy of orthodoxy into their own inheritance. Voting was their equivalent of the Lord's Supper.(14) The modernists recognized that in order to gain and keep a majority, they had to capture the denomination's seminaries and its permanent bureaucratic boards. They also had to avoid the negative sanction of de-frocking.
Control of the seminaries was the key strategy. First, seminaries established the extreme limits of acceptable theological discourse: from Princeton to Union. By making them ever-more liberal, the modernists could move the denomination's center farther to the left, since Princeton was increasingly isolated after 1869. Second, seminaries trained the next generation of ministers. This would, over time, lead to victory: the sacrament of voting. Third--rarely mentioned by historians--a seminary professor was employable elsewhere, especially in the fields of Hebrew linguistics and Church history. This meant that there was little economic risk to a modernist if he was convicted of heresy. He could move to Union Seminary or to a humanist university. He would not suffer a permanent loss of income or prestige. The modernists had allies in the colleges. The personal cost of this tactic in the strategy of conquest was low.(15)
A Crucial Feature of the Liberals' Strategy Liberals, both political and theological, have long honored a institutionally crucial rule, one which has governed both their ecclesiastical politics and their civil politics for over a century, and perhaps longer: take care of your wounded. This practice has been fundamental to their success. Crawford H. Toy was immediately hired by Harvard. W. Robertson Smith was immediately hired by Cambridge and would have been hired by Harvard. Briggs and McGiffert (in 1898) were already on the faculty at Union, a safe haven. Only Henry Preserved Smith suffered a few years of academic unemployment before he was hired by Amherst and later by Union. Knowing that they would be protected, they could afford to take greater risks. They could, when necessary, adopt confrontational rhetoric. For two decades, they avoided this: 1900-1922. Briggs' rhetoric had established the battle lines; after 1900, the tactic moved from open confrontation to quiet infiltration: van Dyke's announced strategy in 1893.
When it came time to test again the defensive lines of orthodoxy by means of an escalation of rhetoric, an eminently protected point man did so: Harry Emerson Fosdick. A rich liberal Baptist with the resources of an even richer Baptist behind him-John D. Rockefeller, Jr.--he was not seriously threatened by any negative sanctions available to the Presbyterian Church.
The conservatives have never been strongly committed to the liberals' policy of taking care of their wounded. Even if they had been equally committed as the liberals in the 1930's, they were not equally well funded. The threat of theological disinheritance would, in the 1930's, come face to face with the threat of personal economic disinheritance. The exodus was small.
The Old School's Dilemma A dilemma confronted the Old School theologians, 1869-1900. The New School gave an official affirmation to the historic confessions of Presbyterianism. They had sworn loyalty to them as the basis of the reunion of 1869. The Old School had voted overwhelmingly to accept this profession of faith at face value. Once the reunion was sealed, there was nothing that the Old School could do to challenge New School members regarding their commitment except to beg them to enforce the stipulations of the Confession against the most notorious heretics. This the New School would occasionally and sporadically do, but only under pressure--not pressure from the Old School, but rather from the modernists. This pressure had to be rhetorical, not merely theological. The 1870's produced only one conviction, William McCune, and his deviation was interdenominationalism, not modernism as such. If a specific modernist adopted confrontational rhetoric, as Briggs did, the denomination could be rallied temporarily to silence him. But there was no operational precedent set by a successful heresy trial, except this: confrontational rhetoric might, under certain limited circumstances, again provoke the denomination. But there was no meaningful theological precedent. Briggs was condemned because of his rhetorical excesses, not his theological excesses. Heresy was necessary but not sufficient to gain a conviction. This was never admitted in public, but it was the case. If Whither? could not get a seminary professor de-frocked, a mild-mannered modernist pastor had very little to fear, especially if he did not go into print with his views. There would be no further negative sanctions against rhetorically prudent men.
Without the willingness on the part of court members to impose negative sanctions, no one in the denomination could be sure that those who took ministerial oaths believed what they were saying. In fact, everyone could be certain that no one took the judicial content of his oath so rigorously as the seventeenth-century divines had intended when they debated them, 1643-47. Briggs had made this much clear: on certain issues, even the Old School's leaders had departed from the Confession, the "elect infants" clause being his favorite example. So, it was all a matter of degree. Every minister had mentally crossed his fingers on ordination day. This made them unwilling to prosecute others who had done the same thing, except for the most flagrant violations of the Confession--flagrant here defined as rhetorically excessive. This transferred the authority to set the agenda to the modernists. Their rhetoric would set the agenda.
Uncrossed Fingers There are three ways to reduce the amount of finger-crossing. The Old School rejected two of them. First, encourage candidates to state their objections during their cross-examination by the ordination committee, but then tell each of them that his objections are no problem. That is, refuse to impose negative sanctions at the beginning of the judicial process. Let unofficial word get around to all seminary students in any institution that this is the new policy.
This approach would have been unacceptable to every presbytery except the New York Presbytery, which does seem to have adopted something like this after 1900. Certain traditions still had to be honored. However, the New School would have accepted as valid a great many more doubts on the part of candidates than the Old School did. There was no way around this new reality after 1869. The question was: How tightly would any given presbytery screen its candidates for the ministry? It was the Old School's job to say, "just a little bit tighter." They had to press as hard as they could without provoking a reaction from the New School.
Second, revise the creeds so that hardly any Presbyterian could object. The problem here is that there is always a "lowest common denominator" problem. "Lowest common denominator" always means "lowest at this point in time." Lower the common denominator today, and some of those who gain entry tomorrow will work to pull it even lower. The bell-shaped curve will never be eliminated in history. There will always be somebody on the far end of the spectrum who is having doubts. Similarly, the number of "true believers" in any organization is limited. Growth adds to the number of less rigorous creedalists. So, one creedal downgrading tends to lead to another, other things remaining equal.(16) Weaken the theological content of the ministerial oath, and those on the outer edge of the definition will try again to get inside. Candidates will still be tempted to cross their fingers. The Old School feared the slippery slope that seemed to lay ahead of every creedal revision. These fears proved fully justified after 1900.
The third way to reduce finger-crossing is to impose far more rigorous sanctions after ordination than those imposed after 1869. This is what the Old School wanted, but they did not have the votes. One reason why they did not have the votes is the economic reality of heresy trials: they absorb lots of resources, especially time. They go on for years. Also, the person who initiates one must be willing to disrupt "the club." Unlike a bishop, whose job is to impose sanctions on those under his jurisdiction, and who is not perceived as having overstepped his authority by initiating an investigation, men who are perceived as equals (teaching elders), let alone inferiors (ruling elders), are resented by many of their peers when they initiate sanctions against another ordained man. The accusers are saying implicitly that the screening committee had been too lax, unless the defendant comes out publicly and admits that he changed his views after his ordination. This is not likely; his best defense is to claim allegiance to "true" Presbyterianism, just as Briggs did. The accused will not admit that he changed his views, especially when he probably didn't. He came in as a closet heretic, and he must be proved to be a heretic in a court--several courts, in fact, for almost everyone convicted by a Presbyterian court will appeal this negative judgment unless he withdraws from the denomination before a court hands down a final decision.
The operational definition of "heretic" will then be shaped by the amount of resources that the denomination is willing to allocate to prove heresy in a representative number of cases.(17) Nevertheless, not every heretic must be brought to trial and convicted in order to reduce the amount of heresy and the degree of heresy. Convictions are representative; not every heretic can be identified and removed. The institutional question is rather: Is the likelihood of conviction high? If it is, then setting a judicial precedent is sufficient to silence many of them or persuade them to leave quietly. As the economist-legal theorist F. A. Hayek says, the test of a legal system is the number of trials that never go to court because the guilty parties know they are likely to be convicted. The larger the number of these non-trials, the more efficient the legal order.(18)
The Ordination Examination Presbyterian government made it less expensive in time, trouble, and embarrassment to reject ministerial candidates than to conduct successful heresy trials after their ordination. The highest return on the Old School's investment of resources in restricting heresy was here: the candidate's examination. There was only one cost-effective way for the Old School to protect the theological integrity of the ministerial oath after 1869: to insist on the right of the presbyteries' examination committees to use the Confession to cross-examine the candidates. Here is where the Old School needed to test the seriousness of the New School regarding the latter's public affirmation of the Confession. This should have begun in 1870. Had the Old School insisted on this, Briggs would never have been ordained. The Old School had to go on the offensive in 1870 in order to defend the "gate": the point of entry. They had to do this in such a way that the New School would not--could not--object. They had to persuade the New School to impose negative sanctions in terms of the Confession and the catechisms. If the New School refused, then their verbal profession was a either sham or self-delusion.
The New School was not committed to the Confession to the degree that the Old School was. There was little likelihood that the New School would consent to a cross-examination that was based on Old School rigor. The cry of "Yes, yes, we all believe that; let's get this over with!" would have drowned out efforts by Old School members to screen each candidate by the Confession's explicit standards. This was a fact of institutional life. The Old School had to adjust to the new reality. The Old School did adjust. The problem was, it adjusted by remaining on the defensive. It did not develop an effective offensive strategy at the presbytery level.
The Old School needed a single representative doctrine from the Confession which would screen out their enemies. But who was the enemy? Not the New School. Not after 1869. The enemies of both schools were the modernists. The representative screening question had to be acceptable to the New School but an outrage to all modernists. It had to be so specific that no amount of verbal weaseling on the part of the candidate would let him escape. Better yet, it would affront his sense of justice; he would publicly proclaim his opposition.
A Representative Question
The Old School's problem was this: isolating the joint enemy of both schools, modernism. By the time of the reunion, one of the chief tenets of modernism had already spread to the College of New Jersey: evolution. The arrival of James McCosh in 1868 to become the college's president should have alerted them to what was coming.(19)
Darwin's initial presupposition--long time frames--had come from Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology. This idea had already breached the gates at the College and Princeton Seminary. The six-day creation was no longer publicly defended by the Old School's leaders. Charles Hodge waited until 1874 to go into print against Darwin: a decade and a half after the publication of the Origin of Species. A. A. Hodge and Warfield adopted an indeterminate time in the past for the date of the creation. Warfield wrote: "The question of the antiquity of man has itself no theological significance. It is to theology, as such, a matter of entire indifference how long man has existed on earth. . . . The Bible does not assign a brief span to human history; this is done only by a particular mode of interpreting the Biblical data, which is found on examination to rest on no solid basis."(20) Charles Briggs could easily have written such a statement. Because the Old School had given up the Confession's precise language on the six-day creation, the Confession's creation statement was no longer available for screening candidates, despite its obvious use in dealing with modernists. "Six literal days, sir, just as the Confession says. Do you believe this? Yes or no?" Had he answered no, using some version of creative evolution, the presbytery would still have ordained him. This section was useless to the Old School; they were not ready to de-frock both Hodges and Warfield. But in terms of strict Confessionalism, all three deserved de-frocking.
The Old School needed a substitute, one that would screen out modernists as well or better than the doctrine of the six-day creation, yet not backfire on them. That substitute doctrine was available: the doctrine eternal torment. The Larger Catechism was clear, tightly worded, and anathema to every modernist: "Whereas the souls of the wicked are at their death cast into hell, where they remain in torments and utter darkness, and their bodies kept in their graves, as in their prisons, till the resurrection and judgment of the great day" (Answer 86b). The Bible is equally clear (Rev. 20:14-15). Then, pressing the issue, what about those who never hear the gospel? Answer: "They who, having never heard the gospel, know not Jesus Christ, and believe him not, cannot be saved, be they never so diligent to frame their lives according to the light of nature, or the laws of that religion which they profess; neither is their salvation in any other, but in Christ alone, who is the Saviour only of his body the church" (Answer 60). Such detailed specifics as these were why the Presbyterian Church in 1967 officially abandoned the Larger Catechism as a test of orthodoxy.
By screening every candidate for the eldership by means of the doctrine of eternal torment, Old School members could have positioned themselves as dedicated promoters of evangelism and Church growth rather than as last-ditch defenders of a narrow conception of the Confession--narrow compared with New School conceptions. The Old School had surrendered in 1869. That war was over. The Old School's strategic question after 1869 was this: How much of the Confession could be preserved as the outer defense against the systematic and continual assault by modernism? No one foresaw in 1869 that five years later, a higher critic of the Bible would be teaching at Union Seminary: Briggs. The Old School was still looking over its collective shoulder at the latent Arminianism of the New School instead of looking ahead at the forces of apostasy that were virtually at the gates. As is so often the case with generals, the Old School's generals were fighting the last, lost war: 1837-69. They were still on the defensive. They were still in retreat. Eventually, they would lose.
Weak Links In the Presbyterian Re-union Memorial Volume (1870), Rev. John Hall announced this principle of ecclesiology: "The measure of the strength of a machine is the strength of its weakest part. It is prudent for a besieged city to look to its defences where the line is most easily penetrable. And it is wise for a church to make good any position which it is right to hold, preparatory to successful aggressive effort."(21)
It is ironic that this warning was announced by Rev. Hall, for his career, perhaps more than any other conservative minister in his generation, was representative of the Presbyterian Church's unsolved problem of weak links. As a newly arrived immigrant pastor from Northern Ireland in 1867, he was instrumental in bringing theistic evolutionist James McCosh to the College of New Jersey in 1868. As president of the Board of Home Missions, he tried to mediate between two wings of the Church.(22) The problem was, he did not work to suppress the third faction: modernism. When, at the General Assembly of 1895, the GA was ready to move against modernists who were under the authority of the Board of Home Missions, Hall's speech turned back this, the first and last major attempt by the denomination to deal with this functionally autonomous board.(23) A defender of biblical inerrancy, he opposed the proposed revision of the Westminster Confession in 1889. Yet he defended Union Seminary professor Charles A. Briggs' right to preach what Hall knew was opposed to the Confession. He denounced heresy trials as useless.(24) In his capacity as a member of the Board of Trustees of Union Seminary, he devised the legal justification that Union adopted when it pulled out of the Church in 1892. Then he resigned in protest when it did.(25) He served as pastor of New York City's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, retiring in 1898. In the next phase of the Presbyterian conflict, modernist Henry Sloane Coffin occupied that pulpit. Finally, Hall's son, a professor at Union, wrote his father's biography.
Hall was a man caught between two great theological movements, each pulling hard on Presbyterianism's chain: modernism and Calvinism. Hall chose not to acknowledge that modernism was a substantial threat to Christianity in general and the Presbyterian Church in particular. He and other Presbyterian conservatives like him could not keep the chain connected. They themselves were the weak links. The institutional question after 1900 was this: How much of the chain would each side retain after it snapped? The answer came in 1936.
Conclusion In the era prior to the final institutional turning point in 1934--the new Form of Government--Presbyterian modernists, like the other denominations' modernists, invoked the theology of pluralism: broad churchmanship without the institutional threat of negative sanctions. They were theological inclusivists during any period in which they did not control the Church's institutions. The Church's theological boundaries were not to be policed by anyone possessing the authority to impose sanctions, they insisted. Those anti-pluralists who might seek to exclude others from crossing the institutional boundaries and enter the Presbyterian Church without abandoning the humanist idols in their suitcases had to be disarmed. Defenders of the Church's theological perimeters could be allowed shout the traditional, "Halt! Who goes there?", but only for tradition's sake, and only during ordination examinations. They were not actually supposed to enforce the fading "No Trespassing" signs that were posted on the roads leading from the seminaries to the pulpits. Surely there were to be no evictions after the installation ceremony.
On May 2, 1900, the New York Presbytery ordained Henry Sloane Coffin.(26) That was, as it turned out, an auspicious event. He had been McGiffert's pupil and would succeed him as the president of Union in 1926, a position which he then held for two decades. This was the new reality of Northern Presbyterianism.
If the conservatives agreed to these rules, then all that remained necessary for the modernists to capture the Church--or any hierarchical Church--was to capture the seminaries. After 1900, this is exactly what the Presbyterian modernists did, culminating in the capture of Princeton Seminary in 1929.
In the meantime, there would be a series of inclusions and attempted exclusions. What was significant was that these would not be enforced in terms of the Westminster Confession of Faith, as had also been the case with Swing (almost), McCune, Briggs, Smith, and McGiffert (almost). What the Old School had surrendered in 1869 would never be recovered: the institutionally enforceable Confessional boundary markers of 1788.
Foreign Missions
In 1893, Briggs' colleague and public supporter Philip Schaff put in his final public appearance. In his address, "The Reunion of Christendom," he called for a federal union of American Protestantism. This Chicago meeting was the first in a series of conferences attended by representatives of Protestant world missions. It was followed by the first meeting of the Foreign Missions Conference of North America. These missions conferences were to set the tone for the next generation of evangelicals and liberals: the quest for Christian unity in missions.(27) The future of the Presbyterian Church would be determined by the success of two rival impulses: the narrowing impulse of Confessional purity and the broadening impulse of the evangelical alliance.
In 1900, America's most prominent promoter of world missions, John R. Mott, wrote a book, The Evangelization of the World in Our Time. As the chairman of the Student Volunteer Movement and the intercollegiate secretary of the YMCA, Mott exuded Protestant America's confidence in the future in the final year of the nineteenth century. His ecumenical foreign missions vision spread to the Presbyterian Church, in large part because of the efforts of Mott's eloquent partner in the SVM a decade earlier, Robert E. Speer, who served as the secretary of the Presbyterian Foreign Missions Board, 1891-1937. Their cooperation continued in the 1890's, culminating in the Ecumenical Conference on Foreign Missions, held in New York City in 1900.(28) It was at this conference, attended by representatives of 162 worldwide missions boards, that the word ecumenical can be said to have first entered the modern Protestant vocabulary.(29) This was not some small affair. At the conference, former President and Presbyterian elder Benjamin Harrison spoke, as honorary chairman. So did President William McKinley and Vice President Teddy Roosevelt. It seemed to mark a new era. Robert T. Handy writes: "Tensions between liberals and conservatives were somewhat sublimated in the partnership of piety, progress, and civilization which, it was confidently believed, was preparing the way for the kingdom itself."(30)
Mott's book raised two questions for American Protestantism. First, was there really a possibility of evangelizing the whole world in one generation? Second, what should be the theological message brought to the non-Christian world by Protestant missionaries? World War I and its immediate aftermath ended most Americans' confidence in Mott's vision of victory. The final phase of the war in Northern Presbyterianism would be fought over the second question: the theology of missions. And fought it was. Sanctions were imposed in 1936. The crucial issue was sanctions.
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Footnotes:
1. Circular Letter, Minutes of the General Assembly, 1837, p. 504.
2. Hodge, Princeton Review (1840); reprinted in Hodge, Discussions on Church Polity (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1878), p. 222.
3. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1837, p. 503.
4. Ibid., pp. 503-504.
5. Ibid., p. 507.
6. A rhetorical reference to the false sacrifice by Nadab and Abihu (Lev. 10:1-7).
7. The Book of Discipline, II:14. The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath School Work, 1904), p. 395.
8. Anyone who wonders how theologians of the caliber of the Old School could be this out of touch ethically for so long need only search for official statements against abortion issued by conservative Protestant theological seminaries and denominations. Warning: don't spend too much time in your search.
9. C. C. Goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the American Civil War (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1986), ch. 5.
10. Alexander H. Stephens, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: National Publishing Co; Chicago: Ziegler, McCurdy, 1870), I:10.
11. Richard E. Beringer, et al., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), ch. 16.
12. See the section, "Capturing the Robes," in Chapter 13.
13. See, for example, the writings of the prolific modernist author Charles Fergusson, especially The Religion of Democracy: A Memorandum of Modern Principles (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1900); The Affirmative Intellect: An Account of the Origin and Mission of the American Spirit (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1901). Cf. William Rainey Harper, "The University and Democracy," in The Trend in Higher Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1905). Harper was the president of the University of Chicago. He described the modern university as prophet, priest, and sage. Harper was a friend of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and had been installed by him as president. It was Harper who had advised John D. Jr., to attend Brown University in 1893: Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), p. 83.
14. In modern politics, voting really is the judicial equivalent of the Lord's Supper: the public imposition of periodic sanctions, positive and negative, for or against oath-bound legal representatives in a covenantal institution--the civil government. Voting is an act of covenant renewal in the civil covenant.
15. Economics teaches that when the cost of supplying anything drops, more of it will be supplied, other things remaining constant.
16. Social theorists cannot speculate scientifically without ceteris paribus. Unfortunately, ceteris paribus is impossible: "You cannot change just one thing."
17. For a detailed study of how New England Puritans shifted the definitions of deviant behavior in terms of how much they were willing to pay to enforce public sanctions, see Kai T. Erikson, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Wiley, 1966).
18. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 208. Hayek took his degree in law, as did all graduates in economics at the University of Vienna in his day.
19. J. David, Hoeveler, Jr., James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition: From Glasgow to Princeton (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981), ch. 6.
20. Benjamin B. Warfield, "On the Antiquity of the Human Race," Princeton Theological Review, 9 (Jan. 1911); reprinted in Warfield, Biblical and Theological Studies (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1952), pp. 238-39.
21. John Hall, "The Future Church," Presbyterian Re-union Memorial Volume, 1837-1871 (New York: De Witt C. Lent & Co.,1870), p. 462.
22. Thomas C. Hall, John Hall: Pastor and Preacher (New York: Revell, 1901), p. 235.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., pp. 286-89.
25. Ibid., pp. 281-84.
26. Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 85.
27. Eldon G. Ernst, Moment of Truth for Protestant America: Interchurch Campaigns Following World War I (Missoula, Montana: American Academy of Religion, 1972), pp. 17-18.
28. John F. Piper, "Robert E. Speer: His Call and the Missionary Impulse, 1890-1900," American Presbyterians, 65 (Summer 1987), p. 107.
29. William C. Ringberg, "Benjamin Harrison: The Religious Thought and Practice of an American President," ibid., 64 (Fall 1986), p. 186.
30. Robert T. Handy, A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 116.