CONCLUSION TO PART 4 And the lord commended the unjust steward, because he had done wisely: for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light (Luke 16:8).
They soon forgat his works; they waited not for his counsel: But lusted exceedingly in the wilderness, and tempted God in the desert. And he gave them their request; but sent leanness into their soul (Psalm 106:13-15).
Modernists inside the Presbyterian Church successfully captured the robes of authority and the reigns of power within two generations of Rev. David Swing's departure from the denomination in 1874. They had a systematic world-and-life view and both a strategy and tactics to match. They were self-conscious about who they were and who their enemies were. They took a long-run perspective, especially after the de-frocking of Charles Briggs in 1893. They were willing to work quietly and systematically in the protective shadows of the Church's bureaucracies for three decades, until Harry Emerson Fosdick in 1922 challenged Bryan in the New York Times and Bryan's allies in his sermon, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?"
Their final victory in 1936 was part of a series of ecclesiastical victories, beginning with the capture of Congregationalism in the mid-nineteenth century. The Presbyterian conflict was the latest of several such conflicts--Congregational, Episcopalian, Methodist, Disciples of Christ, and Northern Baptists--all of which ended by 1940 with the triumph of the liberals. A generation later, a similar victory took place in the Southern Presbyterian Church. The Presbyterian reunion of 1983, North and South, was the liberals' version of the reunion of 1869. It was the capstone of a century of Presbyterian ecumenical efforts. But it did not reverse the post-1965 contraction of liberal Presbyterianism.
To make their strategy work, the liberals had to establish beachheads within the Presbyterian Church, safety zones in which they could build legitimacy for their movement and a develop a program for capturing the institutional inheritance of the Calvinists. They found havens in the colleges, the seminaries, and the permanent boards and bureaucracies of the Church. They also achieved dominance early in the New York Presbytery. They took advantage of the Presbyterian system's weaknesses. They used a plea for peace and work in place of formal theology to take advantage of Presbyterianism's system of semi-autonomous Church boards. From 1876 to 1929, they used the secular dogma of academic freedom to take advantage of Presbyterianism's commitment to a formally educated ministry. They used the protection of the New York Presbytery to articulate their theology and their reform programs to take advantage of Presbyterianism's system of operational immunity for local presbyteries. They sought protection and salaries in the semi-automomous havens from heresy-hunting that had been created by New School Presbyterians after the reunion of 1869.
After 1920, they reversed their strategy. They had achieved dominance in the largest and most prestigious boards by 1920. They consolidated the boards into four large ones in 1924, which had been their goal since 1906. This delivered all of the boards into their hands. They suppressed Princeton Seminary's academic freedom in 1929. In 1931, they re-wrote the Form of Government to centralize the General Council's power over the presbyteries; this was ratified by the presbyteries in 1934. In short, they adopted the Old School's institutional structure of 1838, but they replaced the Old School's Calvinism with an open-ended theological confession, liberalism's version of the shema Israel: "Hear, O Israel. There is, at the most, one God."
The Owl of Minerva With the death of Machen on New Year's Day, 1937, American fundamentalism and American Calvinism lost their only nationally known academic spokesman. This seemed to seal the liberals' triumph. For the next decade, no nationally known intellectual articulated conservative Protestantism. Billy Graham's appearance on the scene in 1949 offered a challenge to the Protestant Establishment, but Graham was then an outsider. He did not seem to be much of a threat. When John D. Rockefeller, Jr., died in 1960, the Protestant Establishment seemed all but immovable, seated securely as the functional Levites in the gates of public authority. But the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, and when it does, those below should cover their heads.
Protestant ecumenism stalled in the 1950's. It did not come close to achieving its long-heralded goal. The ecumenical ideal became increasingly utopian as the mainline denominations began to scramble for new members and more money after 1960. The goal of putting together a New Ecclesiastical Order was placed on the back burner at a low setting; preserving each denomination's existing flow of funds went to the front burner. The practical positive sanction of the flow of funds proved more powerful as a guiding light than the ecumenical vision. The bright promise of 475 Riverside Avenue began to fade, along with the whole neighborhood, and today it is barely visible. Colorado Springs is where the Protestant action is today, not New York City.
The ecclesiastical decline that began to set in as early as 1925 came on the heels of modernism's greatest public relations victory: the humiliation of William Jennings Bryan in Dayton, Tennessee. Handy's 1960 essay, "The American Religious Depression, 1925-1935,"(1) was a scholarly lament from the point of view of mainline Protestantism. But this era of decline launched a period of Church growth and parachurch growth that continues until today.(2) The ecclesiastical Seven Sisters never consolidated their monopoly; meanwhile, new, independent, and "theologically incorrect" competitors appeared on the scene. This is the fate of every rent-seeking cartel: it always breaks down in the face of new competition. Putting this in the language of modern business, the Seven Sisters have lost market share. In the area of foreign missions--the Presbyterian battleground in 1935--liberalism barely registers in the "others" category.
The quest for monopoly returns is a dead end. Those who indulge in it are doomed to disappointment. The ecumenical impulse is just one more discarded dream of monopoly rent-seekers, another example of "buy high, sell low."
Conclusion The liberals adopted a strategy: a strategy of subversion. It was remarkably successful in the mainline Protestant denominations, 1875 to 1940. In one century, from 1875 to 1975, liberals pushed fundamentalists out of the major denominations and into the fringes of cultural irrelevance, where the fundamentalists actually preferred to dwell, just like John the Baptist: beyond the Jordan.(3) But by accomplishing this in the name of Progressive principles, the liberals also pushed the mainline Protestant churches into irrelevance at the other end of the wilderness.(4) The mainline churches are perceived by the public as just one more rent-seeking cartel among many, just one more voice favoring high-tax political reform. Increasingly, the secular authorities have begun to perceive that these Levites can no longer deliver the political sacraments: votes. So, the civil authorities have ceased inviting representatives of the Seven Sisters into the gates of the city. They invite them onto the parade review stand only on special ceremonial occasions, and only if Billy Graham is not available.
"Bread of deceit is sweet to a man; but afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel" (Prov. 20:17). Gravel has become their reward, their sanction. The crucial issue is sanctions.
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Footnotes:
1. Church History, 29 (1960), pp. 3-16.
2. Joel A. Carpenter, "Fundamentalist Institutions and the Rise of Evangelical Protestantism, 1929-1942," ibid, 49 (1980), p. 65.
3. Then came another Jordan, Hamilton, who invited fundamentalists to vote for Jimmy Carter in 1976. They came, a lot of them voted for him, and then they voted for Ronald Reagan and against Carter in 1980 after Carter proved no different from all the others. "Trust me," he had said in 1976. "Not this time," they replied in 1980.
4. Winthrop Hudson, The Great Tradition of the American Churches (New York: Harper & Bros., 1953).