CONCLUSION TO PART 3 At present we are inarticulate; we know the riches of the gospel; we wonder at those who have it already at hand and yet are content instead with the weak and beggarly elements. When will God raise up the man of His choice to give His message powerfully to the world? We cannot say. But the truth is not dead, and God has not deserted His church. Behind all the darkness and perplexity of the present time we can discern, on the basis of the promises of God, the dawn of a better day. There may come a time, sooner than we can tell, when again we cry in the church, as every redeemed soul cries even now: `The old things are passed away; behold they are become new.'
J. Gresham Machen (1923)(1)
With these words, Machen ended his sermon, "The Present Issue in the Church." It was delivered on December 30, 1923, while he was serving as stated supply in the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton. It was the fifth in a series that ended the year. It was the sermon that persuaded Henry van Dyke to write his famous press release, thereby catapulting Machen into the national spotlight.
That generation of Americans soon received an answer to Machen's question: "When will God raise up the man of His choice to give His message powerfully to the world?" It did not, however, see the brighter day that he hoped might soon dawn. It saw even greater darkness. But great darkness allows bright lights to shine more powerfully.
Machen recognized his problem in 1923: the growing theological darkness had not received a matching increase in the light that was necessary to dispel it. He knew that one man could not supply it. As a representative, he could lead others, but the Church relies on the division of labor to achieve her God-mandated task (I Cor. 12). Machen in 1923 stood almost alone in the professional world of academic theology, and as time passed, the ranks of those who stood with him thinned.
This was a culture-wide problem for American Protestantism. In his book-long academic Jeremiad, liberal Church historian Winthrop Hudson in 1953 chronicled the loss of vision and dedication of American Protestantism after 1900. He scorned the fundamentalists as backward-looking anachronisms, but he recognized that liberalism had failed. The peak years for American Protestantism, even in the cities, was 1900 to 1920.(2) Yet throughout this period, the churches, and especially Church colleges, were becoming secular, increasingly indistinguishable from the general intellectual milieu around them.(3) There was an intellectual retreat, as well as a loss of Church discipline.(4) In this sense, theological modernism surrendered intellectually to political and humanistic modernism.(5)
This did not apply to Princeton Seminary. It still defended late-eighteenth-century or, at best, early nineteenth-century Scottish common-sense philosophy. It was out of date, both theologically and epistemologically, and proud of it. Had it not been for the presence of Vos on the faculty, the Princeton of Machen's era could proclaim, echoing Charles Hodge, that "a new idea never originated in this Seminary."(6) But the Old Princeton, like the Old School, had not reproduced itself. When this happens, a movement dies. This is what happened to the Old Princeton in 1929. The postmillennialism of Princeton was replaced by amillennialism at Westminster.(7) The Princeton apologetic was never taught at Westminster; it was replaced by Van Til's presuppositionalism and (later) Robert Knudsen's Dooyeweerdianism.(8) These developments were imports from the Christian Reformed Church. Although Machen loved to say that Princeton's tradition lived on at Westminster, this was no longer the case after 1936. Princeton had failed to reproduce. Something had to replace it.
The Old Princeton Throughout the nineteenth century, defenders of Old School Presbyterianism were firmly entrenched at Princeton Seminary and were dominant in the Philadelphia Presbytery. At the beginning, the founders' social vision had been shaped by the older aristocratic, hierarchical worldview, as had the Westminster standards. Nineteenth-century America did not prove to be favorable to such an aristocratic outlook. Democratic theory rapidly replaced the older aristocratic legacy in the Jacksonian era, beginning in the late 1820's.(9) But this shift did not affect the fundamental legacy of the U.S. Constitution, which can fairly be described as right-wing Enlightenment thought: decentralist, voluntarist, and anti-State power--Jackson's ideology. This was the social thought of Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, from which was born Scottish common-sense realism, the philosophy of Princeton Seminary. It was easy--natural, one might say--for Princeton to be associated loosely and unofficially with the social thought of independent capitalism.
The ideal of the independent capitalist had never been absent in the Scotch-Irish communities in the Carolinas. It remained powerful in the Southern Presbyterian Church after the split from the Northern Presbyterians and long after the Civil War. The premier Old School theologian in the South, Robert L. Dabney, ended his academic career teaching political economy at the University of Texas.(10) The South was never enamored with the economic ideal of the urban colossus. It was the Southern Presbyterian Church that nurtured J. Gresham Machen, even though he lived in urban Baltimore. Machen's social outlook was that of nineteenth-century liberalism: the independent capitalist ideal, although modified by a the ideal of the Southern gentleman. That vision had departed from the America of the 1920's. As George Marsden says, "J. Gresham Machen was an anomaly in that era."(11)
An Anomaly Something had happened to undermine that earlier version of Scottish liberalism. Three things, actually: historicism, Darwinism, and industrialism-urbanism. The urban growth in the midwestern United States had been unprecedented. In 1830, Chicago was a village of 50 people. In 1900, it was a city of well over 1.5 million.(12) The Progressive movement after 1890 transformed the older liberalism into a new liberalism: centralist, compulsory, and statist. The State was progressively regarded as the primary implement of social transformation and salvation. When the individualistic social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner was replaced by the corporate social Darwinism of Lester Frank Ward and the Progressives, the older liberalism went into decline.
The failure of Old School Presbyterianism to respond effectively to these challenges points to a serious deficiency: the Old School did not possess a biblically integrated world-and-life view. Their apologetic was a hybrid: Scottish theology of 1646 and Scottish philosophy of 1776. The first tradition was explicitly Calvinist; the second was implicitly Unitarian. When the intellectual world abandoned Scottish common-sense rationalism in the wake of Darwinism and all the other Darwin-based ism's of the twentieth century, this left the Old School with neither a common-ground apologetic method nor a convincing social theory. The new rationalism was not the static rationalism of either idealism or empiricism, where one could appeal either to fixed logic or to objective facts. The new rationalism was the historicism of nationalism, Marxism, Darwinism, and Progressivism, where the laws of society and thought change with the environment, and so do the historically relevant facts. Common-sense rationalism was dismissed as passé--a death sentence in the worldview of the new rationalism.
The New School and the evangelicals did not take the Confession's Calvinism seriously, although they may have been vaguely content with the economics of Adam Smith. They were willing to risk a fight for neither. Presbyterian modernists took neither tradition seriously. They were willing to challenge both--intellectually in the early stages, institutionally after 1933. This left the Old School without steadfast allies within the vast majority of the Presbyterian Church. By 1936, Machen's worldview, like the world that had produced it, was gone with the wind.
Machen was a Calvinist. From at least 1660, Calvinism in the Anglo-American religious universe had been regarded by the intellectual leaders as a threat to common sense. It places God fully in control of everything, yet it insists that man is fully responsible for his own sin. This alone would have made Machen an anomaly.
Western Civilization changed institutionally after the Industrial Revolution. It changed intellectually after Darwin. The second half of the nineteenth century was the turning point of this transformation. The old theological world had begun to crumble: a more comfortable intellectual world that was confident regarding a presumed harmony between the Bible and natural science, the Bible and historical evidence, morality and prosperity,(13) religion and civilization. All of this was being called into question. This loss of faith offered a challenge: the opportunity to offer a systematically biblical alternative to the dying hybrid. The Old School did not respond to this challenge. It stuck with the worldview and methodology of the dying hybrid, and did so in the name of Calvinism. Losing this unique opportunity, it also lost the war for orthodoxy within Northern Presbyterianism.
The Theological Issue: Propositional Truth in History God has spoken in history. What He has said is true for all time and beyond time. This does not negate the fact that He has revealed Himself in history, by word and deed. The problem men face is that they are time-bound creatures of God. They must make sense of the past in terms of permanent truths, yet these truths were revealed to men in history.
This is the problem of orthodox theology: systematic theology (permanent propositional truth) and biblical theology (historically revealed truth).(14) It is the problem of creedal revision in Church history: making something that is mostly true propositionally even more true. It is the problem of personal responsibility: in relation to permanent standards, but also in relation to one's own time. As time goes on, more is given because more has been learned. To whom much is given, much is expected (Luke 12:47-48).
The Old Princeton emphasized systematic theology from the its founding in 1812. Its critics in the early twentieth century pointed out that the faculty paid too little attention to the problems of biblical theology.(15) Biblical theology was regarded by liberals as the child of historical criticism. In an era dominated by the myth of evolution--in nature and in history--this was a telling criticism. The era after Darwin but before World War II worshipped the historical method, even though there was no agreement about what constituted this method. Princeton's emphasis on systematic theology made its task that much more difficult. It needn't have been.
There was one man who might have made a significant difference in the battle against modernism, a man whose contributions were ignored by all sides, although his office was within walking distance from Warfield's and then Machen's: Geerhardus Vos. He joined the faculty of Princeton in 1893 to fill the newly created chair in Old Testament biblical theology-the same year that Briggs was suspended from the ministry because of his inaugural address for Union's chair in biblical theology. A member of the Christian Reformed Church, he was not directly involved in the Presbyterian conflict. He remained at Princeton until his retirement in 1932. He avoided rhetoric in his writings. He surely was not a skilled stylist.(16) Yet it was in his writings that the biblical alternative to modernism appeared: a thoroughly orthodox alternative to the relativistic biblical theology of the higher critics. Vos understood that there need be no contradiction between systematic theology and biblical theology, between definitive truth and history.
His intellectual heir, Cornelius Van Til, demonstrated throughout his career at Westminster Seminary that there is an irreconcilable logical contradiction between humanism's version of systematic theology--static rationalism--and its version of biblical theology: historical process. As Van Til put it, the fixed logic of Parmenides cannot be shown to relate in any way to Heraclitus' historical flux. It is only the fixed revelation of God in history--the Bible--that can reconcile logic and history.
Vos was not assigned to teach apologetics, although his discoveries offered a way out for the Old School's apologists. They did not understand the magnitude of what Vos was getting at. They did not appropriate for their own battles his monumental discoveries regarding the progress of revelation in the Old Testament, or as he called it, "the history of special revelation."(17) He was the most original theologian that Princeton ever had on its faculty, but his colleagues ignored the high-caliber ammunition that he kept turning out, year after year. Here was a man with a Ph.D. in Arabic studies who had taught everything from Greek grammar to systematic theology at Calvin Seminary (1888-1893),(18) yet he remained on the sidelines. His wife, author of the deservedly famous Child's Story Bible, is the only Vos most Old School heirs have ever read.(19) The Old School labored in vain to overcome the most effective intellectual challenge of the then-confident humanists: the irreconcilability of the supposedly evolutionary historical process and the ideal of Calvinist systematic theology--fixed propositional truth.
Without widespread institutional faith in fixed propositional truth, on what judicial basis can anyone be lawfully excluded from the Church? Only on the basis of institutional convenience. It was convenient in 1936 for the deniers of fixed propositional truth to remove Machen from their midst.
Personalism: The Neglected Alternative It is a commonplace observation that most heresies are illegitimate extensions of some biblical truth. A similar observation should be made about the Old School in general and Princeton Seminary in particular. Its great strength was its unswerving commitment to the integrity of the Bible. Its great weakness was its equally unswerving commitment to eighteenth-century rationalism as a means of defending the Bible. Princeton's defense of the faith indulged in a myth: the primacy of the intellect. It imitated the educational bureaucracy created by medieval scholastics. It abandoned the biblical model: apprenticeship.
Apprenticeship vs. Credentialism
Presbyterian Church rules have always required candidates for the ministry to have a college degree and a seminary degree; only special exceptions were allowed (such as in Briggs' case, who never graduated from college or seminary).(20) Had the Old School adopted apprenticeship for the training of its ministerial candidates, the Western frontier of the United States might not have fallen to the Methodists, Baptists, Disciples of Christ, and Cumberland Presbyterians after 1800. Had the Old School used the apprenticeship system, the aura of credentialism might not have engulfed the denomination. The impersonalism of the educational establishment replaced the personalism of the apprenticeship system. Responsibility became impersonal--a system of formal examinations--rather than personal: one on one.
One thing is certain: it would have been far more difficult for the liberals to have executed their strategy of subversion had the Presbyterian Church not operated colleges and seminaries. From the beginning of the university system in the late middle ages, the college has been the equivalent of a gigantic sign on the front of the Church: "Come and get us!" Heretics, apostates, and humanists have taken advantage of this offer very seriously for nine centuries. The commitment to neutral academic methodology inherent in every institution of higher learning makes it easy for subversives to pick it off. Wrap a subversive hidden agenda in the swaddling clothes of common-ground rationalism, and it can pass through every known academic barrier. Wolves in sheepskin invade the flock. The crucial authority granted to such institutions by the Church, the State, and the professions hands over to virtually autonomous bureaucrats the ideological future of the organizations that have substituted an earned degree for on-the-job apprenticeship. To capture the robes of authority--black robes or white smocks--a movement needs only capture the universities.
The problem with this strategy is that the movement will then succumb to the universities. The means of subversion become the end of subversion. A civilization that transfers to scholars dressed in black academic robes the authority to screen its future leaders has handed itself over to the bureaucrats who run every known system of formal education. The academic bureaucrats who control who gets into and out of the classroom will eventually re-create society in their own image. It happens every time: in Pharaonic Egypt, in Mandarin China, and in the modern world. When an organization authorizes written examinations as a substitute for on-the-job training as its preferred method for screening future employees, its bureaucratization becomes as inevitable as anything social theory can postulate.
Sanctions affect performance. If you create a system of rewards and punishments, those participating under these sanctions will shape their behavior to maximize their return, given whatever constraints the system imposes. You get what you pay for. If you tell young men that entry into the ministry is based on passing written exams in institutions of higher education, they will spend most of their time and effort mastering the techniques necessary for passing the exams. The churches must select candidates from a limited supply of survivors. Problem: there is no evidence showing that passing written exams prepares men to pastor churches. There is considerable evidence based on actual Church growth rates that these skills are inversely related: the greater the skill in passing formal exams, the less the skill in pastoring. Additionally, there is a positive correlation between the ability to pass written exams and political liberalism. As Ladd and Ferree concluded in 1982, based on a detailed survey of the opinions of 1,112 members of American seminary faculties, "Those who teach in schools of religion and theology resemble fairly closely a larger community of academic humanists of which they are a part."(21) Of those responding, 50 percent or more described themselves as politically liberal. The Episcopalians were the highest: 78 percent. Then came Methodists (69 percent) and Presbyterians (63 percent). The only faculties below 50 percent were Southern Baptists (32 percent), other Baptists (17 percent), and Pentecostals (7 percent).(22)
Those students who seek access to a seminary education must first prove themselves skilled at passing collegiate exams designed and imposed by politically correct liberals, atheists, feminists, and New Age mystics on the college campus. The issue, as always, is sanctions. The Church's preliminary screening process is placed in the hands of the Church's mortal enemies. This has been going on for eight centuries. You get what you pay for, and hierarchical churches pay ministerial candidates for passing academic exams. The operational rule is: "Those who baptize infants have been academically certified by liberals." So, hierarchical churches get their choice: liberalism or stagnation in the early stage; liberalism with stagnation in the middle stage; liberalism with contraction in the final stage. The Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., is now in its final stage.
The enemies of the Church are clever. They search for weak points and attack them, even as a pack of wolves attacks stragglers in a herd of deer. The targeted animal kicks for a while, but it is doomed. The weak point in churches that baptize infants is their intellectual pride. "Our ministers have more academic degrees from humanist-accredited universities than yours do," they brag. There are two possible responses: (1) "They're a lot more liberal, too." (2) "You don't have very many churches to employ them, and the ones you have are tiny." This is the inevitable result of substituting seminary education for pastoral apprenticeship: a choice between the prevailing climate of academic opinion and growth.
The Question of Positive Sanctions Throughout this book, I have stressed the question of negative sanctions. Without them, it is impossible to police the boundaries of any organization. But negative sanctions are not sufficient. Eternity is more than the lake of fire; it is also the New Heaven and New Earth. The two realms are equally ultimate in terms of duration, but not in terms of influence. Grace is not equally ultimate with sin; it is far greater. This is the message of the Bible, from Genesis 3 to Revelation 22.
Machen and the Old School faced a problem. It is the problem faced by every movement: how to persuade people to accept your ideas and your program rather than someone else's. Although the language of marketing is foreign to ecclesiastical etiquette, marketing is surely a form of persuasion. The Old School had a marketing problem.
As theologians, the Old School approached the problem as if persuasion were primarily intellectual. The assumption of the primacy of the intellect can be found in the writings of Charles Hodge, Warfield, and Machen. It was the bedrock presupposition of the Old Princeton's apologetics. But it is not a biblical presupposition. Grace is comprehensive; it encompasses reason, but it is not confined to it or defined primarily in terms of it. This is why the sacraments are equally ultimate with preaching as a mark of the Church. This is why Calvin said that the sacrament of the Lord's Supper should be taken "very often, and at least once a week."(23) Yearly communion he dismissed "as a veritable invention of the devil, whoever was instrumental in introducing it."(24)
The benefits of salvation are more than intellectual. The blessings of grace are more than doctrinal. Yet the Old School saw progress in history as primarily doctrinal. They chose not to present their case for orthodoxy in terms other than intellectual-doctrinal. The problem is, only a few churches in history have ever been extensively doctrinal in their appeal; Presbyterianism is the most notable. Within Presbyterianism, the Old School was the most self-consciously doctrinal. This led to the creation of a movement that did not offer effective motivational appeals outside of the narrow confines of doctrine.
There is a rule in scientific advertising: "Lead with the benefits; follow with the features." List the features only to prove the benefits. The public is not interested in features that cannot be translated into benefits. This is as true of the Church-going public as any other identifiable market. The tendency is for manufacturers to focus on the features and assume that the potential buyers will see the benefits. This is the engineer's illusion. He thinks that the features are the benefits. The public does not care about features unless these features bring benefits.
There are benefits to good theology, a doctrine of the escape from hell being high on the list. This was a promise that was easier to sell in Machen's day than in ours, and surely easier in Warfield's day. But Baptists can promise this, too. What was the Unique Service Proposition--the USP--of Old School Presbyterianism? What was the one great benefit that was the exclusive monopoly, or close to it, of Old School Presbyterianism? The Old School Presbyterian leaders, being theologians, answered: rigorous Confessional theology. The general public yawned. So did the Presbyterian public. (They still do.)
Machen kept raising the costs. As with anything else, the higher the cost, the less is demanded. Machen priced Old School Presbyterianism out of the market. He did not come up with a benefit other than rigorous theology, for which there is always a narrow market. He was trying to sell a theological-institutional system to two million laymen and 9,500 ordained teaching elders when he could not sell it to the minority faction on the faculty of Princeton Seminary or to anyone on the faculty of Princeton University, the Northern Presbyterian Church's most prestigious institution after 1900.
The liberals promised two major benefits: institutional peace and missionary activity. The evangelical majority in the Church wanted both. Their ability and willingness to grasp the subtleties of theology were limited. The larger the Church, the more limited this ability and willingness. The higher the ecclesiastical stakes, the less interested the majority became. The higher the stakes, the higher the costs. They wanted orthodoxy, but they wanted it cheap. The evangelicals were unwilling to pay the escalating price. When Machen and his colleagues began to speak of hundreds of heretics in Presbyterian pulpits, the specter of never-ending heresy trials loomed before them, with General Assembly having to hear each one on appeal, probably several times. They did not suspect that the Presbyterian system would accommodate wholesale de-frockings. The liberals had insisted that this was not judicially possible in Presbyterianism. The conservatives did not learn differently until 1935, when the liberals began the process. This information came too late for the conservative middle to respond. They learned the price of peace under liberalism: silence regarding theology and regular financial assessments from local congregations, i.e., closed mouths and open wallets.
What are the benefits of theological orthodoxy? What are the benefits that extend beyond the intellectual pleasures of considering in detail the Westminster Confession of Faith? What are the practical benefits? Liberals insisted there are none. Conservatives thought there may be some, but not enough to recommend heresy trials except in exceptional cases--rhetorically exceptional. What Machen lacked--what the Old School lacked--was a theory of covenantal sanctions in history that connects Confessional faithfulness, moral holiness, and cultural triumph in history. Machen hinted at this relationship in his 1913 essay, "Christianity and Culture," but he did not elaborate.(25) He did not show how adherence to ever-more rigorous confessions can lead to Church growth. He did not attempt to argue, let alone prove, that improved Church confessions can and will lead to greater corporate wealth, happiness, and external benefits. He did not discuss Christendom as the cultural manifestation of orthodoxy. As a nineteenth-century Whig liberal, he denied the covenantal relationship between Church creeds and political life. How, then, was he going to persuade two million Presbyterians to pay the costs of an unending stream of heresy trials? He wasn't. He didn't.
Machen's Last Stand Machen had initiated a break with the denomination on doctrinal grounds. His justification was simple: it is immoral to require God-fearing Christians to subsidize ecclesiastical institutions that have been captured by liars or even subtle manipulators who no longer believe even the five minimal points of the 1910 Doctrinal Deliverance, let alone the Westminster Confession. The result of his efforts was the creation of a Church which was in the Old School Confessional tradition, but whose membership was vastly smaller than the old denomination's. Size, of course, meant little to him, so long as its theological content was sound.
This act of separation began a chain of events which continued to break the conservatives into smaller and smaller fragments, with each new denomination frequently more in conflict with its neighbor than with the original denomination. Some of the men originally involved gave up all hope of formal denominational action, and therefore established totally independent local congregations. Ministers and laymen have drifted into such independent bodies in considerable numbers, choosing whichever fine points of Calvinist and dispensational theologies that seemed logical to them.
The conflict between individual belief and group standards has been resolved by the creedal churches only by denying the legitimacy of existing larger denominations, often by totally rejecting all formal structures linking individual denominations. Reformed Christians--or any other group of Christians--have yet to discover an acceptable permanent point midway between a broadly based, but less doctrinally demanding, Church organization, and a doctrinally explicit Protestant local church of few members. The churches, to this extent, are still grappling with the humanists' inescapable dilemma, unity vs. diversity. Rushdoony has observed: "Every philosophy of autonomous man from the Greeks to the present has foundered on the problem of the one and the many, universality and particularity. If the one be affirmed as the ultimate reality, the individuals are swallowed up in the whole. If the many be affirmed, then reality is lost in endless particularity and individuality, and no binding concept has any reality. Thus, the one and the many are in perpetual tension."(26) How, then, can Christians escape this dualism which faces autonomous man?
The doctrinal conflicts within American Presbyterianism, from the inception of the Church until the present, serve as eloquent footnotes to this inescapable dilemma for men who are not governed by the Bible and by God's Spirit. The tradition of denominational division is not merely the heritage of Luther, but of the fundamental dichotomy of Western thought. There has yet to be a resolution of the conflicts between the authority of conscience and the authority of the institutional Church.
Institutional Purity and Peace Machen tried to resolve the conflicts by calling for Christian fellowship with premillennialists, Anglicans, Lutherans, and even Roman Catholics.(27) This did not deal with the issue which was to divide the newly created Orthodox Presbyterian Church: How to resolve such differences institutionally? It was not enough to have fellowship across denominational traditions; the problem facing the Church was the problem of personal subordination to an institution which is governed by a written confession and written rules of discipline. Which confession? Which rules?
What can be said of Machen's role in the developments in modern American Protestantism? Pearl S. Buck pointed to the age-old institutional problems of cooperation, compromise, and conscience in her assessment of his efforts in the concluding remarks of her obituary on his earthly journey: "Of course what he did not realize was that he could never have lived in a church. As soon as it had become an entity he would have had to compromise with this opinion or that, or more impossible still to him, with a majority opinion, and he would have had to break again with them all. One might say that death was merciful to him, except I have an idea he enjoyed his wars."(28)
Murray Forst Thompson, Machen's old colleague, told me in the spring of 1984 that Mrs. Buck's assessment was incorrect. Machen was tired of the squabbling, he had told Thompson in 1936, and was anxious to get the new denomination into operation. But even if he had lived, the squabbles would have continued. There was no escape. He had established a new organization, and problems of cooperation face the members of all organizations. He had never gone into print with any guidelines concerning the biblical way to reconcile the legitimate authority of the human conscience and the legitimate authority of God's monopolistic institution, the Church. The problem is always the sin of autonomy. The divisiveness of the self-professed autonomous conscience is always a problem for institutions. At the same time, the implicit tyranny of the self-professed autonomous institution is always a problem for consciences--at least for ethically unseared consciences.(29)
Principle or Power? It must be admitted, however, that problems of conscience are less visible in organizations that are not founded on ethical, ideological, or philosophical standards--organizations such as the Northern Presbyterian Church after 1936. In such organizations, the overriding issue is power: how to attain it and how to maintain it. Under such circumstances, questions of principle are translated into questions of power. People raise questions of principle only insofar as questions of principle are relevant to the attaining and maintaining of power.
Machen's view had always been straightforward: maintaining fundamental principle is more important than maintaining short-run institutional power, for it is out of adherence to God's principles that God's elect attain eternal power under God. His opponents in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., least of all Mrs. Buck, could never understand his position.
What stands out in the history of the capture of the Northern Presbyterian Church is the unwillingness of the Bible-believing wing of the Church to stand for principle and fight: seminary by seminary, ordination by ordination, heresy trial by heresy trial. They had the votes after 1869, but they seldom used them. They did not understand the requirements of the theological warfare of their day, nor did they understand the costs of a long-term battle. Their opponents did recognize the nature of the battle and the costs involved. They also understood that if they carefully used their opponent's short-sightedness, they could gain time to impose their strategy. What was this tactic for gaining time? Avoiding premature conflicts. They understood their opponents well: the conservatives wanted institutional peace at virtually any price, especially after 1900. By the time that the Bible-believing forces woke up to the danger that faced them, all but one of their seminaries had been captured, as had the New York Presbytery.
The conservatives were content to accept the language of orthodoxy rather than the substance. The liberals have used this blindness on the part of conservatives to their own advantage for well over a century. As long as words sound biblical and Bible-honoring, the fight-avoiding conservatives are willing to keep quiet in the name of toleration.
What can we legitimately conclude? The situation in the large mainline Protestant churches in 1940 is accurately summarized by Church historian Sidney E. Mead. "`Fundamentalism' in America was a movement that tried, among other things, to recall these denominations to theological and confessional self-consciousness. It was defeated in the major denominations, not so much by theological discussion as by effective political manipulation of denominational leaders to sterilize this new `divisive' element."(30) Those who remained behind became institutionally sterile: no spiritual heirs.
Theological liberalism steadily manifested itself in the affairs of the Church. Consider the overwhelming support given by the General Assembly to the creation of something like the United Nations Organization, beginning in May, 1941, four years before the UN was created. (The influence of John Foster Dulles was crucial in this early support; he was a strong internationalist prior to 1948.)(31) In every year but one, 1946 to 1990, the General Assembly annually promoted the work of the UN.(32) In 1947, eleven years after the de-frocking of Machen, two decades before the 1903 Westminster Confession was revised, the General Assembly voted its approval of the following position: "We believe that the ultimate goal for World Organization should be Federal World Government. The success of the United Nations is an important step toward this end."(33) Once in the hands of power religionists, the proclamation of the Northern Presbyterian Church's political commitments preceded the proclamation of its confessional commitment.
After 1936, creed-affirming conservatives went along quietly with the liberals, since the Confession was left formally intact. The substance or content of the Confession had long since been compromised into institutional irrelevance, but those who held the religion of cultural irrelevance (pietism) did not take great offense. "The Confession, the Confession," they proclaimed, imitating the Israelites in Jeremiah's day, who proclaimed, "the temple, the temple" (Jer. 7:4). In 1967 the Confession was changed, yet the remnant of the conservatives still remained silent. Their religion was the escapist religion, and their long-standing alliance with the power religion could not be broken without abandoning escapism--in other words, without either a fight or a public exodus. They did not want either in 1903, 1906, 1926, 1929, 1934, 1936, or 1967. They do not want either today. The Church was not split cleanly in 1936, and it cannot be split cleanly today. You cannot split rotten wood.
Wolves and Sheep
Early in his career, Machen had recognized the tendency toward theological drift within the denomination. In 1915, a year after his ordination, he wrote a letter to his mother describing his fears. I quote from his letter in Chapter 14.(34) Above all, he wrote, he resented the deceptiveness of the liberals, and the fact that the New York Presbytery kept ordaining known unbelievers. "I do not mean to use harsh phrases in a harsh way, and my language must be understood to be Biblical. But men like McGiffert and William Adams Brown at Union Seminary are perfectly clear about the enormous gulf that separates their religion from orthodox Protestantism--just about as clear about it as Dr. Warfield is. Why then do they try to deceive the simple-minded people in the Church? That is the real ground of my quarrel with them."(35)
He recognized where the votes were in the denomination: "The mass of the Church here is still conservative--but conservative in an ignorant, non-polemic, sweetness-and-light kind of way which is just meat for wolves." That is to say, the conservatives were unwilling to defend what they believed by imposing negative sanctions. They would indeed become meat for wolves.
The Religion of Pluralism The 1934 enactment by the General Assembly regarding the flow of funds marked the penultimate judicial act of the liberals' capture of the Presbyterian Church. The final act was the Permanent Judicial Commission's 1936 decision to sustain suspensions of the handful of ministers who had disobeyed the 1934 declaration. They had challenged the theology of the flow of funds.
The supporters of the 1934 declaration insisted that it was not in any way a theologically based decision; it was strictly administrative. This presumes that Church administration can be separated from theology. Administration is strictly a matter of obedience, they insisted, but in this case, obedience supposedly had nothing to do with theology, especially the theology of those running and serving under the Foreign Missions Board. Although they were never quite so crass about it, the liberals meant this: obedience has everything to do with power and money. But they pretended, as all defenders of pluralism must pretend, that covenantal law can be (and should be) separated from theology. This had been the refrain of every pluralist from Roger Williams to John Dewey.
Machen and his supporters knew better with respect to ecclesiastical law, although all of them believed the theology of pluralism with respect to civil law. What undermined Machen philosophically was that the precepts of American civil pluralism, which he defended throughout his career, had seeped into the Church. Vainly did he protest that the Church's status as a voluntary institution separated it from the civil pluralism of American society. He did not recognize that pluralism is as theocratic as all the other theories of covenantal government. It cannot be hedged in by rival theologies of separation. There is no neutrality. The Princeton apologetic affirmed neutrality. Van Til's apologetic denied it, but Machen was not a follower of Van Til; he was merely his employer. Machen was defending the Church against well-organized forces that had adopted a consistent pluralism that proclaimed: "no negative institutional sanctions against rival theological theories." He was using a natural law-based apologetic methodology that had been undermined by Lyell's time frame a generation before the reunion of 1869. He kept appealing to a common ethics. There was no common ethics, for there was no common theology, just as he had said in Christianity and Liberalism. He kept telling the liberals that they should withdraw if they did not believe the Westminster Confession. That is, he kept telling power religionists that they should cease their quest for power. The fact was, there was no common morality. There was no common theology. But there was a common administrative hierarchy. In 1936, a de-frocked Machen withdrew.
Ever since the Briggs trial, the liberals had maintained that the General Assembly had no authority to announce binding theological positions. It had the authority to try cases, but not to announce in advance any theological position. The liberals had attempted to maintain a distinction between a supreme court and a legislative body.(36) This was an imported legal concept based on the U.S. Constitution. Ever since 1910, they had declared that the General Assembly could not enforce the Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910. But, they hastened to add in 1934, the General Assembly had not only the authority but the duty to uphold the administrative authority of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The Church had voted overwhelmingly to restructure its rules in 1934. Now these rules would be enforced--in a non-doctrinal way, of course. Machen and his allies recognized the nature of the sham, but this did them no institutional good. They could not persuade the experientialist majority of the truth of their position, namely, that the 1934 declaration was the liberals' means of sweeping the more vocal theological conservatives from their midst.
The declaration equating the financial support of the Church's national boards with participation in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper was a theological declaration of awesome proportions. It was a break, at the very least, with all of Protestant Church history, and in fact a break with all of Church history. But the fiction of "administration, not theology" was central to the liberals' theology: their long-term denial of the judicial, institutional relevance of all theology, i.e., sanctions--point four of their covenant model. In 1936, they demonstrated their commitment to "theology without negative ecclesiastical sanctions" by imposing negative ecclesiastical sanctions. Somehow, their apologists--sometimes referred to as theologically neutral professional Church historians--have failed to see the irony of all this. The modernists were like the Jewish leaders in Jesus' day, crying out against Jesus' critical public comments against the religious establishment. Similar counter-measures were adopted by both establishments.
The Price of Peace By 1920, Presbyterian modernists concluded that they would henceforth be able to dominate the denomination's bureaucracies as successfully as they dominated all but one of the theological seminaries: Princeton. They would be required to pay no price except the price they had been paying for a generation: patient institutional infiltration, a skill that their theological peers had demonstrated masterfully in several other denominations by the end of World War I.(37)
The conservative, "peace at any reasonable price" leaders of the denominations wanted to pay a low price. They believed all too often that the only price that they would have to pay was institutional: a less rigorous confession, the presence of more leaders within the denomination who really did not believe even this watered-down confession, and the departure of contentious hard-liners who refused to pay the theological price. The price they actually paid, in denomination after denomination, was exceedingly high: the surrender of theological leadership to men who held an explicitly rival faith, modernism.
The Presbyterians were a case in point. The ranks of those pastors who were willing to stand up and fight, even if the cost was their eventual dismissal from the denomination they sought to defend, were steadily thinned out as the risk of their de-frocking increased. The personal price of peace kept getting higher, until the only way to avoid paying it was to break ranks with Machen and join the "loyal opposition" within the denomination. A majority of these once-vociferous conservatives could not bring themselves to become disloyal to those who had captured the denomination's machinery. They kept proclaiming their loyalty to the "true Church," defined as the "Church of the Westminster Confession," when in fact hardly anyone in the denomination still believed in that Confession, and nobody was ready to enforce it judicially in the Church's courts.
The comforting presence of the Westminster Confession and its two catechisms as polished antiques in the denomination's local prayer closets served as salve for many conservative consciences. The liberals were content to allow traditionalists to go quietly into those little local museums and worship there in peace and obscurity, just so long as they remained quiet upon their return to the denomination's institutional seats of power. After all, God's Church is supposed to be a place of peace and quiet, almost everyone agreed. Assuming that they were not accompanied by judicial sanctions, these Confessional antiques meant little or nothing to the liberals. Yet even stripped of all institutional sanctions, they meant everything to the conservatives who remained. After 1936, the liberals were giving up nothing very valuable in their eyes in order to keep the conservatives quiet and their funds flowing upward, and the conservatives were willing to give up everything else, including the future even of the Confessional museum itself, just so long as the liberals allowed it to remain open until that generation died off.
In 1967, the 1903 Westminster Confession was officially supplemented in order to make it conform to the tenets of American political liberalism as of 1965.(38) First, there is the family of man: "God has created the peoples of the earth to be one universal family."(39) ("Cain, your mother and I think you and Abel should set up a neighborhood home church. You can both be ministers.") It attacked "enslaving poverty in a world of abundance," and then announced: "The church cannot condone poverty. . . ." (A grammar book would have helped here. Of course the Church can condone poverty; the question is: Should it?) Poverty is caused, among other factors, by "the rapid expansion of populations."(40) The revision called for "peace, justice, and freedom among nations. . . ." It invoked the language of near-pacifism and internationalism in the "search for cooperation and peace. . . . This search requires that the nations pursue fresh and responsible relations across every line of conflict, even at risk to national security, to reduce areas of strife and to broaden international understanding." All nations are equal before God: "Although nations may serve God's purposes in history, the church which identifies the sovereignty of any one nation or any way of life with the cause of God denies the Lordship of Christ and betrays its calling."(41) ("December 8, 1941. Dear Mr. Churchill: the Presbyterian Church wishes to express its deep concern regarding the intemperance of your recent remarks before the House of Commons regarding the motivation of Germany and Chancellor Hitler. Your rhetorical contrast between Christian civilization and barbarism was especially objectionable. A copy of our specific objections is enclosed.") As for foreign mission (never called missions in liberal circles), "The Christian finds parallels between other religions and his own and must approach all religions with openness and respect."(42) (I wonder what the parallel might be between Christianity and Hinduism's practice of pressuring widows to be burned alive on their husbands' funeral pyres. The practice is called "suttee," and is derived from the Sanskrit word for "faithful wife." But I digress.) Then there is the traditional bugaboo of modern intellectuals, alienation, in this case regarding sex. There is great confusion about sex today because of, among other things, "the pressures of urbanization. . . ." In the midst of this confusion, the Church comes under the judgment of God whenever "it withholds the compassion of Christ from those caught in the moral confusion of our time."(43) ("Of course we believe in the Seventh Commandment, but. . . .") What is needed is a greater commitment to "responsible freedom" in marital affairs. (Questions: Freedom to do what? Responsible to whom? For how long? For how much per month until she remarries?) The revision of 1967 reveals the working out of one of the most powerful motivations of modern theological liberalism, the desire to be up to date: "trendier than thou." Had the Confession been revised a decade later, it might have included a section calling on God's people to eat more natural whole grain foods and less red meat.(44)
Simultaneously, the most judgmental antique in the Presbyterian prayer closet, the Larger Catechism, was thrown out as junk. "Get rid of this clutter; people keep tripping over it!" By 1967, there were few mourners remaining to bewail the loss.(45) There was no mass exodus of those who had long claimed that their continuing presence within the denomination was justified by the continuing presence of the historic Presbyterian creeds and confessions.(46)
In 1936, Samuel G. Craig and others who had originally stood with Machen decided to abandon ship when public support for Machen's Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions rather than the denomination's missions board became grounds for excommunication. Later that year, when Machen and his associates were at last booted out of the Church, the bulk of their former supporters remained on board the theologically sinking ship, almost as secret well-wishers may have remained on board H.M.S. Bounty, watching Captain Bligh and his loyal supporters sail away in their little open boat.(47) Bligh's shipboard well-wishers chose to forget who was now captain of the Bounty and what its mission would soon become. The difference is, those who mutinied against the Confession's Calvinist theology took control of the whole fleet, while those who had resisted them wound up stranded in the cultural equivalent of Pitcairn Island.
Machen's Legacy Machen's faith was a nineteenth-century faith which had run its course both epistemologically(48) and institutionally. Most of his supporters, Calvinists and fundamentalists, held a twentieth-century evangelical faith which only recently has visibly begun to run its course intellectually and institutionally.(49) What was required was a total theological, ecclesiastical, and cultural reconstruction. This was Warfield's implicit point to Machen in 1921 when he called the denomination rotten wood. The preliminary theological and philosophical foundations of such a reconstruction were laid at Machen's own Westminster Seminary by the man he hired to teach apologetics, Cornelius Van Til, who dynamited the foundations of the Princeton apologetic.(50)
Machen left behind something of very great long-term significance: the philosophical foundations of a new Calvinism, Van Til's, which Machen may not have fully understood.(51) One thing is clear: he did recognize that Van Til's system was different. Van Til criticized the Old Princeton apologetic as a compromise with paganism. At the end of his first year at Westminster, he submitted his resignation. Machen refused it.(52) Van Til years later related the story of a train trip with Machen to Grand Rapids. Van Til had offered then to resign, but Machen replied: "You mustn't. At this stage, I couldn't afford to lose even a janitor."(53)
Machen's spiritual heirs need the memory of his valiant fight as both an inspiration and a warning: an inspiration because of his courage, and a warning because of the seeming futility of his decision to fight a battle that he could not win, theologically or institutionally, with the resources at his disposal. Machen's was a lost cause institutionally, but it was not a lost cause theologically and historically. He believed this with all his heart until the day he died. So should all those who call themselves his spiritual heirs.
We should not forget what has happened to the winners. After 1965, the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., and the Presbyterian Church, U.S. (Southern Presbyterians), began a long decline in membership. In 1965, the two denominations had a total of 4.25 million members. In 1990, the now-unified denomination had 2.85 million. If the same rate of decline continues, the denomination will not exist in the middle of the twenty-first century.(54)
Machen on the Good Fight Machen delivered a chapel sermon to the students of Princeton Seminary on March 10, 1929, a few months before he led a small exodus of faculty members and students to the newly created Westminster Seminary. It was titled, "The Good Fight of Faith." He called the students into battle. Of Paul, he said: "Fortunately, he was a great fighter; and by God's grace he not only fought, but he won." We know he won because his doctrine of grace was adopted by Augustine and the Protestant Reformers.(55) This was how Old School Presbyterians had always seen the battle: as theological. They defined victory in terms of the progress of doctrine in history.
Machen saw his enemies as theological enemies. They proclaim, he summarized: ". . . let us hold to a Person and not to a dogma; let us sink small doctrinal differences and seek the unity of the church of Christ; let us drop doctrinal accretions and interpret Christ for ourselves; let us look for our knowledge of Christ, not to ancient books, but to the living Christ in our hearts; let us not impose Western creeds on the Eastern mind; let us be tolerant of opposing views."(56) This view is in harmony with the naive fundamentalist slogan, which few fundamentalists really believe: "No creed but Christ, no law but love." But Machen's enemies were not fundamentalists; they were modernists. Their creed was the denial of the legitimacy of creeds. Their law was situation ethics: the evolving law of Darwin's universe. By 1991, the spiritual heirs of Machen's enemies proposed this for consideration by the 203rd General Assembly: "Young people, regardless of their sexual orientation, need to understand the institutional power of heterosexism and the injustice that it perpetuates. As the church is called to speak a truthful word about sexuality, it does so in the name of God's call to justice--a call that invites gay and lesbian adolescents to explore the goodness of their sexuality within the community of God's people."(57) It was little more than half a century's journey from theological perversion to sexual perversion. Machen had seen it coming: "God save us from the deadly guilt of consenting to the presence as our representatives in the church of those who lead Christ's little ones astray. . . ."(58)
Machen fought a theological battle. He lost that battle, for it was more than theological. It was institutional. Words without institutional sanctions could not win it. They never can. His opponents had control over the machinery of sanctions, not just negative sanctions but also positive. Machen by 1929 was well aware of this. To follow him was to abandon many of the Presbyterian Church's positive sanctions.
. . . you will have the opposition, not only of the world, but increasingly, I fear, of the church. I cannot tell you that your sacrifice will be light. No doubt it would be noble to care nothing whatever about the judgment of our fellowmen. But to such nobility I confess that I for my part have not quite attained, and I cannot expect you to have attained it. I confess that academic preferments, easy access to great libraries, the society of cultured people, and in general the thousand advantages that come from being regarded as respectable people in a respectable world--I confess that these things seem to me to be in themselves good and desirable things. Yet the servant of Jesus Christ, to an increasing extent, is being obliged to give them up.(59)
Through his pen and his preaching, but mostly his pen, Machen gained leadership over a shrinking, confused, besieged, betrayed, and dispirited army. That army had suffered a series of defeats extending back, ultimately, to 1865. Its officers after 1869 were not prepared to fight a protracted conflict. But this was exactly what Machen was calling them to--very late in the battle. This is what God calls His people to throughout history. There are no volunteers, the Calvinist insists. All covenant-keepers are unwilling draftees initially.
Machen's Social Immunity Machen could not be bought off: not with money, prestige, or the promise of career advancement. Machen was an independently wealthy bachelor. This economic independence made him a force to be reckoned with. But his immunity was not merely financial; it was not merely spiritual; it was also social. He had lived among the super-rich all of his life, and their world held no fascination for him. His followers had no first-hand awareness of this world. His biographers know of its geographical existence, but they show no understanding of its social implications, both for Machen and the elite that opposed him, most notably Henry van Dyke.
His family was rich enough to own property inside the archetypal enclave of America's financial elite, Mount Desert Island in Maine. They bought it before this became economically prohibitive. As William Hutchison has described it, "On Mount Desert, year after year, Browns and Peabodys of the religious establishment vacationed with Eliots, Rockefellers, and Peppers--that is, with education, business, and political leadership."(60) Years later, Union Seminary professor and ecumenist William Adams Brown reminisced about the time he spent there.(61) George Marsden hints at its existence and importance: "The major university founders, such as White [Cornell], Gilman [California, Johns Hopkins], Angell [Michigan], and Eliot [Harvard], kept in close touch and sometimes vacationed in the same vicinity in Maine."(62) The man known in the 1950's as the Chairman of the American Establishment, John J. McCloy, spent his middle-class youth on the island prior to World War I, where his mother was the favored hairdresser of the elite.(63) From that crucial geographical entry point,(64) he made the personal contacts that led to his becoming the most influential private citizen in the United States, and presumably the world, from 1949 to at least 1970, and possibly into the early 1980's.(65) Geography has consequences. (We could use detailed studies of the well-connected residents of the three Island enclaves of the American Establishment: prior to World War II, Mount Desert and Jekyl [Georgia];(66) beginning in the early 1930's and accelerating after 1945, Jupiter, located in Florida's Hobe Sound.(67))
Locking Out the Riff-Raff
Because nobody else is going to tell you about this, please allow me a few extra paragraphs, even though the material is extraneous to the Presbyterian conflict; it is not extraneous to the mind-set of the senior members of the Establishment. It was this mind-set that Machen, as a nineteenth-century Whig liberal and democrat, rejected completely. He had seen it first-hand.
Mount Desert Island was the prototype Establishment enclave. In 1910, the year that he served as foreman of the grand jury in New York, Rockefeller bought a 104-room granite mansion there, importing tiles from the Great Wall of China.(68) He used Mount Desert Island as his first great experiment in permanently sequestering property away from the free market, which develops properties aimed for sale to middle-class buyers. He and his elite neighbors were concerned about "overdevelopment."(69) This is an elitist code word for "real estate sales to the upper middle class." They created an association and donated 5,000 acres to it; then they gave it to the Federal government. President Wilson used executive authority in 1916 to create a special monument; in 1919, Congress passed a law making it Lafayette National Park. Junior bought more land and donated it to the government; this is now Acadia National Park.(70)
He and his heirs have repeated this lock-out, using tax-deductible money, to remove prime real estate from the market in wilderness areas surrounding elite enclaves. This raises the value of the remaining properties, and it secures an insulated social world for them. The area around Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is one of the prime areas where the Rockefellers own large tracts. This area has long been the focus of a Rockefeller-inspired lock-out, beginning in 1919.(71) Land values there reflect this: astronomical. But the original model was Mount Desert Island. The Rockefeller family biographers say of Junior's role: "Very shortly, he became a towering figure, the greatest ally the National Park Service ever had."(72) The assistance was mutual. The National Park Service provides the authority to keep the rest of us out of these areas on a permanent basis.
This program to seal off wilderness areas from development had its origins in the special role of wilderness in the coming of age for the sons of the rich. It is one of the three ordeals of youth and early manhood: the wilderness summer (wealthy scion Teddy Roosevelt is the most famous exemplar); the academy (Exeter, Groton, etc.), and military service in wartime (again, Roosevelt the "Rough Rider" is most famous).(73) Mount Desert Island has been a big part of this.(74) Nelson Aldrich, as part of the Old Money Establishment, is quite forthright about its political implications: "The social religion of Nature, which began with rich kids going outdoors for their health, ends in political action against the market--the condo developers, the shopping-mall impresarios, the army of entrepreneurs whom Old Money (and not Old Money alone imagines despoiling Arcadia."(75) This program of removing land from exposure to market forces is now a worldwide religious-political effort, in the name of conservation, and elitist money is behind it in a pump-priming fashion.(76) Government money accounts for far more, however: forfeited revenues that the sale of government-owned land could produce, as well as land-management expenses borne by the government. What is being conserved is the lifestyle of the rich and famous.
The economics of the environmental movement points to an interest group that is more permanent and far better organized politically than part-time nature-lovers who backpack along the John Muir Trail during one memorable summer vacation at age 19. Economist Thomas Sowell, who grew up in rural North Carolina and urban Harlem during the Great Depression and war years,(77) has put his insightful finger on the problem: the non-rich have too much money in the aggregate for the minority rich to compete against successfully. The non-rich are foreclosing on the rich because they have more money. "There are infinitely more of them, and real estate dealers and developers would rather get $10 million from 10,000 people than get $1 million from one millionaire."(78)
In the natural course of economic events, the non-rich would end up taking more and more land and shore away from the rich. Spectacular homes with spectacular views would be replaced by mundane apartment buildings with only moderately pleasant vistas. A doctor or movie mogul who can now walk the beach in front of his house in splendid isolation would be replaced by whole families of ordinary grubby mortals seeking a respite from the asphalt and an occasional view of the sunset.
The climax of the story is when the affluent heroes are rescued by the government. In the old days, this used to be the cavalry, but nowadays it is more likely to be the zoning board or the coastal commission. They decree that the land cannot be used in ways that would make it accessible to the many, but only in ways accessible to the few. Legal phrasing is of course more elaborate and indirect than this, but that is what it all boils down to. This is called "preserving the environment" (applause) from those who would "misuse" it (boos).(79)
Machen did not participate in the Establishment, even though he owned property in its midst. The Establishment offered no allure to him. He had no desire to pursue membership in any inner ring.(80) The Establishment could offer him no meaningful positive sanctions. Negative sanctions also did not terrify him. The economic threat of forfeiting an academic chair, pulpit, or pension was no threat to him. But, as he learned after 1929, in the midst of the Great Depression, such an economic threat held considerable terror for most pastors, especially men with families and the promise of a pension.
Conclusion The problem Machen faced was this: how to devise a successful strategy that would reverse the stalemate psychology that had engulfed Old School Presbyterianism even before the 1869 reunion. He failed in this task. He and his dwindling band of followers did not win the battle to reform the Presbyterian Church. It is my contention that the institutional war had surely been lost by 1906 at the latest, and probably as early as 1869. The Old School surrendered in three stages: first to the New School (1869), then to the Arminians from the Cumberland Presbyterian Church (1906), and only late in the struggle to the modernists (1920's). The modernists inherited the Church in 1936 because of a series of prior theological and institutional surrenders. These surrenders paralleled a series of political surrenders by old Whig liberalism during the same era: the rise of Progressivism.
In 1925, Machen wrote a long, highly critical review essay on Fosdick's book, The Modern Use of the Bible (1924). He ended the essay with this postmillennial vision: "But this is not the first period of decadence through which the world has passed, as it is not the first period of desperate conflict in the Church. God still rules, and in the midst of the darkness there will come in His good time the shining of a clearer light. There will come a great revival of the Christian religion; and with it will come, we believe, a revival of true learning: the new Reformation for which we long and pray may well be accompanied by a new Renaissance."(81)
A renaissance is a re-birth. Machen wanted a re-birth of Christian scholarship undergirded by a civilization-wide spiritual re-birth. His vision was not shared by many of his allies in 1925: pastors or laymen, Calvinists or fundamentalists. He understood that the war for Christ is the war to re-establish Christendom, but he focused his energies on narrower defensive tasks throughout his career: defending the Bible from modernist scholars in The Origin of Paul's Religion and The Virgin Birth of Christ, defending the common believer's faith from popular modernism, defending Princeton Seminary from the inclusivists, and defending the Presbyterian Church from wolves in sheep's clothing. He lost every battle.
He fought with the rusty and discarded weapons of Old School Presbyterianism: a seventeenth-century Confession of Faith that was no longer believed; a pair of catechisms that no one had ever appealed to in the General Assembly's court; seventeenth-century Protestant scholastic theological categories--Turretin's six loci--whose latest update was Charles Hodge's 1873 Systematic Theology;(82) an apologetic methodology based on Scottish common-sense realism, which twentieth-century, post-Kantian philosophy had long since abandoned as naive; a version of creationism based on the acceptance of Lyell's geological time scale in opposition to the Confession; a critique of biblical higher criticism based on the common-ground methodology of lower criticism; a recovery of the teaching ministry based on a non-existent plan to reform seminary education rather that a revival of pastoral apprenticeship; a version of postmillennialism devoid of biblical law and its appropriate sanctions; and the ideal of Christendom which proclaimed the legitimacy of nineteenth-century Whig political economy, i.e., common-ground political humanism. He was an academic man trying to stop a juggernaut based on deception and subversion. He was trying to overcome the combined efforts of modern philosophy, modern science, and modern politics. He was battling the American Establishment, which was heavily funded by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.(83)
Machen's defense of Presbyterian orthodoxy was hampered by his intellectual defense of the faith: a nineteenth-century version of rational Calvinism, Scottish common-sense realism, i.e., empiricism. His allies were less rigorous methodologically than he was. Had he won, his victory would have resulted in a major setback for Christianity. Machen's apologetic approach was defective. His loss of that skirmish was essential for the overall progress and ultimate victory of God's people, in time and on earth, before Christ's Second Coming.
When Machen left the Presbyterian Church, not one established Presbyterian leader or spokesman joined the exodus. The only name anyone might have recognized was Dulles. It belonged to Joseph Welsh Dulles, who was not a famous Dulles. Machen left behind a denomination of two million members, 9,500 ministers, and enormous wealth. Six months later, he was dead.
What did Machen leave behind to his successors? A model of the stalwart defender who stands and fights against seemingly impossible odds. A commitment to scholarship at the highest level, yet also a commitment to the techniques of popular mobilization: lectures, rallies, pamphlets, simple books, magazine essays, radio addresses--high-tech for his day--and even testimony before the U.S. Congress on major issues. But above all else, his willingness to hire Cornelius Van Til and keep him on the faculty of Westminster Seminary despite the fact that Van Til was working hard to destroy his students' faith in the compromised apologetic tradition of Old Princeton. Van Til substituted the absolute Creator/creature distinction(84) and the doctrine of the Trinity--the one and the many, equally ultimate--for common-ground rationalism and the humanist myth of neutrality as the basis of Christian apologetics(85) and systematic theology.(86) This constituted the laying of the necessary foundation for the new Reformation and new renaissance Machen so strongly believed are coming. God's positive sanctions will eventually come to the Church that remains faithful to Jesus Christ, he believed. For Machen's postmillennial eschatology, the crucial issue for the Church was sanctions--positive sanctions, not negative.
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Footnotes:
1. Machen, "The Issue in the Church" (1923); reprinted in Machen, God Transcendent, edited by Ned Bernard Stonehouse (Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Banner of Truth Trust, [1949] 1982), p. 51.
2. Winthrop Hudson, The Great Tradition of the American Churches (New York: Harper & Bros., 1953), p. 195.
3. Ibid., pp. 197-98.
4. Ibid., p. 217.
5. Ibid., p. 218.
6. Cited in A. A. Hodge, The Life of Charles Hodge, Professor in the Theological Seminary Princeton N. J. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1880), p. 521.
7. The premillennialism of Carl McIntire's Faith Seminary was a New School heritage. The postmillennialism of John Murray was not evident until his lectures on Romans 11 in 1964 and the publication of the second volume of his Commentary on Romans in 1965. His classroom notes on eschatology in the senior systematics course appeared to be amillennial. I audited both courses at the same time and was struck by the incongruity.
8. Knudsen did not write much, and his influence on campus was quite limited. Herman Dooyeweerd was a Dutch legal theorist and philosopher. See Dooyeweerd, In the Twilight of Western Thought (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1960); A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1953-58).
9. Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815-1830 (New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1991), pp. 929-42.
10. His favorite economics text was J. B. Say's. Thomas Cary Johnson, The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney (Richmond, Virginia: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1903), p. 445. Say, the modern mythology goes, was refuted by John Maynard Keynes. He wasn't.
11. George M. Marsden, "J. Gresham Machen, History, and Truth," Westminster Theological Journal, 42 (Fall 1979), p. 157.
12. Jack Lessinger, Regions of Opportunity (New York: Times Books, 1986), p. 36.
13. In 1889, the faculty of the University of Texas asked Dabney to deliver the commencement discourse. Dabney selected this subject: "Religion and Morality, the Indispensable Supports for Political Prosperity." Johnson, Dabney, p. 448. The address is reprinted in Dabney, Discussions, vol. 3, Philosophical, edited by C. R. Vaughan (Harrisonburg, Virginia: Sprinkle, [1892]), pp. 536-50. It appears just before the chapter on "The Standard of Ordination." This is a long-dead world, at the University of Texas, surely, but also in the Southern Presbyterian Church.
14. Richard Gaffin, "Systematic Theology and Biblical Theology," in The New Testament Student and Theology, edited by John H. Skilton (n.p.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1976), ch. 3.
15. Gerald Birney Smith, Shirley Jackson Case, and D. D. Luckinbill, "Theological Scholarship at Princeton," American Journal of Theology, 17 (1913), pp. 95, 100; cited in D. G. Hart, "Doctor Fundamentalis": An Intellectual Biography of J. Gresham Machen, 1881-1937 (Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1988), p. 101.
16. Transitional sentences were rarely used by Vos, nor were headings, subheadings, and other aids to readers.
17. Richard B. Gaffin, "Introduction," Redemptive History and Interpretation: The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos, edited by Gaffin (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1980), p. xiv.
18. Ibid., p. x.
19. Melvin Vos, Geerhardus' grandson, told me in 1963 that the family received virtually all of its book royalty income from his grandmother's book, almost nothing from his grandfather's books.
20. Another example was the conservative leader, Mark A. Matthews. Robert K. Churchill, Lest We Forget: A Personal Reflection on the Formation of The Orthodox Presbyterian Church (Philadelphia: Committee of the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, [1986]), p. 24.
21. Everett Carll Ladd and G. Donald Ferree, Jr., "The Politics of American Theology Faculty," This World, 2 (Summer 1982), p. 84.
22. "Theology Faculty: How They Compare," ibid., p. 72.
23. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), IV:XVII:43. Ford Lewis Battles translation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), p. 1421.
24. Ibid., IV:XVII:46.
25. Machen, "Christianity and Culture," Princeton Theological Review, 11 (Jan. 1913).
26. Rousas J. Rushdoony, Intellectual Schizophrenia: Culture, Crisis, and Education (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1961), p. 10.
27. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1923), pp. 48ff.
28. Pearl S. Buck, "A Tribute to Dr. Machen," New Republic (January 20, 1937), p. 355.
29. "Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their conscience seared with a hot iron" (I Tim. 4:1-2).
30. Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 114.
31. Mark G. Toulouse, "Working Toward Meaningful Peace: John Foster Dulles and the Federal Council of Churches, 1937-1945," Journal of Presbyterian History, 61 (Winter 1983).
32. Robert F. Smylie, "The Presbyterian Church and the United Nations: An Overview," American Presbyterians, 68 (Summer 1990), p. 73.
33. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1947, p. 209. Cited in ibid., p. 78.
34. Section: "Dry Rot Had Set in Early."
35. Cited by Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Philadelphia: Westminster Theological Seminary, [1954] 1977), p. 221.
36. This convenient judicial fiction began breaking in American civil law as soon as John Marshall became Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The power to declare the law retroactively is in fact the power to declare the law in advance. Only a certain embarrassed silence on this matter, coupled with the traditional Constitutional distinction between the legislative and judicial branches, has maintained the legal fiction in American civil law. The Constitution's Framers did not understand what the doctrine of judicial review could do to their hoped-for tripartite separation. Marshall was later to teach Jefferson and Madison a long series of lessons in Constitutional theory.
37. C. Gregg Singer, The Unholy Alliance (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1975), chaps. 1-3.
38. On the revision of the Confession, see Edward A. Downey, Jr., A Commentary on the Confession of 1967 and An Introduction to "The Book of Confessions" (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968). For a critique of Downey's book, see Edmund P. Clowney, "The Broken Bands," in Scripture and Confession: A Book About Confessions Old and New, edited by John H. Skilton (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterial & Reformed, 1973), ch. 7.
39. "The Confession of 1967," 9:44; in The Constitution of the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, Part I: Book of Confessions, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Office of the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, 1970).
40. Ibid., 9:46.
41. Ibid., 9:45.
42. Ibid., 9:42.
43. Ibid., 9:47.
44. If you think I am exaggerating, read Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (Downers Grove, Illinois: Inter-Varsity Press, 1977), pp. 42-45. He discusses the benefits of abstaining from beef in order to free up more grain to feed poor people in the Third World.
45. It was restored at the time of the reunion with the Southern Presbyterians in 1983.
46. The behind-the-scenes figure in this resistance movement was Presbyterian layman and Sun Oil Company billionaire, J. Howard Pew, who died in 1973. The main public personality was Henrieta C. Mears, who guided an evangelical group headquarted unofficially at Hollywood's First Presbyterian Church from the late 1920's through the early 1960's. Richard C. Halverson, Chaplain of the U.S. Senate, 1981 to 1994, was one of her disciples. Karen M. Feaver, "The Soul of the Senate," Christianity Today (Jan. 9, 1995), p. 27. So was Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ.
47. Bligh has had a bad press for two centuries. The sexually debauched mutineers have been made heroes. A revisionist account is Richard Hough, Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian: The Men and the Mutiny (New York: Dutton, 1973).
48. "Epistemology" asks the question: "What can we know, and how can we know it?"
49. James Davison Hunter, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
50. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), ch. 3.
51. William White, Jr., Van Til: Defender of the Faith, An Authorized Biography (Nashville, Tennessee: Nelson, 1979), p. 99. Greg L. Bahnsen disagrees, but if he is correct, then Van Til was not the revolutionary thinker that Van Til's followers have generally imagined. Bahnsen has emphasized continuity over discontinuity in the transition from the Old Princeton to the New Westminster. I believe that there was far more discontinuity than his essay conveys. Greg L. Bahnsen, "Machen, Van Til, and the Apologetical Tradition of the OPC," in Pressing the Mark: Essays Commemorating Fifty Years of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, edited by Charles G. Dennison and Richard C. Gamble (Philadelphia: Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1986), ch. 17. See Darryl G. Hart, "The Princeton Tradition in the Modern World and the Common Sense of J. Gresham Machen," Westminster Theological Journal, 46 (1984), pp. 1-25.
52. Robert L. Atwell, "The Heritage of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church," New Horizons (May-June 1981), p. 4. Rev. Atwell attended the first General Assembly of the Church in 1936, and later served as a member of Westminster Seminary's Board of Trustees.
53. Related to me by George Hutchinson, to whom Van Til told the story.
54. "Presbyterians and the Mainline Decline," Christianity Today (Sept. 13, 1993), p. 39. This was a review of the seven-volume study, The Presbyterian Presence: The Twentieth-Century Experience, edited by Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis M. Weeks (Westminster/John Knox Press).
55. Machen, "The Good Fight of Faith," The Presbyterian (March 28, 1929), p. 6.
56. Ibid., p. 7.
57. Keeping Body and Soul Together: Sexuality, Spirituality, and Social Justice, A Document Prepared for the 203rd General Assembly (1991) by the General Assembly Special Committee on Human Sexuality, p. 89, lines 3500-3501.
58. Machen, "Good Fight," p. 7.
59. Ibid.
60. William R. Hutchison, "Protestantism as Establishment," in Hutchison, ed., Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 10. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), p. 147.
61. William Adams Brown, A Teacher and His Times (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940), pp. 144-55.
62. George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 196.
63. Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 30, 54-55.
64. And from Harvard Law School.
65. Alan Brinkley, "Minister Without Portfolio," Harper's (Feb. 1983).
66. This was where the secret meeting--first names only--was held in 1910 to plan the Federal Reserve System. This important meeting is rarely mentioned in history textbooks. See Thomas W. Lamont, Henry P. Davidson (New York: Harper & Bros., 1933), pp. 96-101; Nathaniel Wright Stephenson, Nelson W. Aldrich: A Leader in American Politics (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat, [1930] 1971), ch. 24: "Jekyl Island"; Thibaut de Saint Phalle, The Federal Reserve: An Intentional Mystery (New York: Praeger, 1985), p. 49. See the oblique reference to this conference by one of the participants, Paul Warburg, in his authoritative history, The Federal Reserve System: Its Origin and Growth, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Macmillan, 1930), II:58.
67. "Millionaires Find Resort Is Too Rich For Their Blue Blood," Wall Street Journal (Feb. 1, 1995).
68. Collier and Horowitz, Rockefellers, p. 97.
69. John Ensor Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Century (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988), p. 199.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid., pp. 201-211.
72. Ibid., p. 198.
73. Nelson Aldrich, Jr., Old Money: The Mythology of America's Upper Class (New York: Knopf, 1988), ch. 5: "Tree Ordeals."
74. Ibid., pp. 164, 166.
75. Ibid., p. 169.
76. A detailed study of this is found in Larry Abraham and Franklin Saunders, The Greening (Atlanta, Georgia: Soundview, 1993).
77. Sowell, Black Education: Myths and Tragedies (New York: David McKay, 1972).
78. Sowell, Pink and Brown People and Other Controversial Essays (Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press, 1981), p. 104.
79. Ibid.
80. C. S. Lewis, "The Inner Ring" (1944), in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 93-105.
81. Machen, "The Modern Use of the Bible," Princeton Theological Review, 23 (1925), p. 81.
82. This still is the case in 1995: there has been no Presbyterian Calvinist systematic theology to replace Hodge's Systematic Theology unless we consider Louis Berkhof's 1939 Systematic Theology, a dry-as-dust catalogue of doctrinal opinions of obscure Continental theologians. Berkhof substitutes quotations in Dutch for Hodge's quotations in Latin.
83. For references to half a dozen letters between Machen and Junior, see D. G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 190, note 2. These letters related to Machen's participation in worship services and projects of the Mount Desert Parish Church. He even preached occasionally at the church. Ibid., p. 85. The Establishment knew exactly who he was.
84. This is not to say that the Princetonians had ignored this. Machen was strong in his affirmation of the distinction in Christianity and Liberalism, pp. 62-63. But they had not made it the starting-place in their apologetics.
85. Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 3rd ed. (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1967).
86. Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology, vol. 5 of In Defense of the Faith (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, [1961] 1978).