FOREWORD Almost every contemporary proposal to bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the world. For freeing the church now does not mean freeing it in all directions. It means freeing that peculiar set of dogmas called scientific, dogmas of monism, of pantheism, or of Arianism, or of necessity. And every one of these . . . can be shown to be the natural ally of oppression.
G. K. Chesterton (1924)(1)
In 1924, Chesterton converted to Roman Catholicism and wrote Orthodoxy, which was his testimony against modernism. He understood that the most dangerous of modernism's heresies are to a great extent merely extensions of heretical theologies that were rejected long ago by the early Church. Chesterton's insight here was that theology has implications for society. Heretical theology leads to political tyranny. Bad theology produces political oppression. The twentieth century stands as evidence of his contention.
Modernism is another gospel. This was Chesterton's contention; it was also the contention of his Protestant contemporary, John Gresham(2) Machen.(3) Both of them did their best to challenge modernism. Both of them wrote popular books for Christians in the pews. They died within a few months of each other. Chesterton did not live long enough to see the Roman Church engulfed by modernism; Vatican II began a quarter century after his death. Machen, however, did see modernism triumphant in his denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. Seven months before he died, modernists persuaded the broad evangelical majority of that denomination that Machen had become disobedient to Church authority, and that for the sake of the peace, he should be removed from office.
'Twas a Famous Victory Modernism has achieved a comprehensive cultural victory in our day. This has been a barren victory. Modernism has pushed the West to its moral and epistemological limits, especially the former. The crucial divisive issues in a civilization are ethical: right vs. wrong. Man's primary problems are moral, not intellectual. While it is no doubt true that the modern world is in a flight from truth,(4) this is because it is in a flight from God, His permanent law, and, above all, His permanent negative sanctions: hell and the lake of fire.
Modernism seeks solutions to man's ethical problems apart from an appeal to an authoritative God who has revealed Himself in the Bible in such a way that this revelation can be authoritatively assembled by men in terms of propositional truths. Without a permanent God to provide permanent standards, whirl becomes king. Modernism faithfully serves this king, though usually in the name of evolving linear progress. But in seeking historical progress autonomously, modern man has achieved its inversion, alienation.(5)
Because modernism has invaded every area of life, including the churches, whirl's dry rot of relativism has undermined those institutions that might otherwise act to prevent the looming crisis. This book is the story of how modernism invaded and then captured one denomination: the Northern Presbyterian Church.
An Old Problem What Christians should recognize is that this has happened before, though in slow motion: the breakdown of classical civilization. The heresies that plagued the early Church were extensions of ancient Greek philosophy.(6) As faith in Greek moral philosophy steadily broke down, so did the civilization that had been constructed in terms of its categories.(7) The Roman world was viewed by its intellectuals as the product of either godless impersonal fate or godless impersonal chance, i.e., fatalism or anarchy.(8) The only way out of this philosophical dilemma seemed to be the assertion of an eternal tension between them: part fate, part chance, no final resolution. This tension we call dualism or dialecticism. It undermined Greek philosophy as thoroughly as it has now undermined modernism. The pantheistic monism of Greek continuity--the great chain of being(9)--was offset philosophically by the futile Greek dialecticism of form (idea) vs. matter. Similarly, modernism's materialistic monism--the world as mere matter in motion--is offset philosophically by the equally futile dialecticism of Kant's phenomenal/noumenal (science/freedom) dialecticism.(10) Matter vs. mind, fate vs. chance, law vs. change, necessity vs. freedom, science vs. personality, determinism vs. responsibility: modern man's updated versions of ancient Greek antinomies plague him every bit as much as they plagued the ancients. The relativist historian Carl Becker raised the issue in a rhetorical statement that was really not all that rhetorical: "What is man that the electron should be mindful of him!"(11) When men seek freedom and meaning in anything but the self-revelation of God in the Bible, they hit philosophical brick walls. And every once in a while, the crash takes down a whole civilization. Ours may be one of them. We are now facing a potential breakdown of monumental proportions.(12)
The answer to Greek rationalism is also the answer to modern rationalism: the biblical doctrines of the Trinity, the Creator/creature distinction, the bodily resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ in history, and God's declaration of "Not guilty!" to His people on the judicial basis of this death and resurrection. This is the Bible's theme of creation-fall-redemption. Here is the answer presented in the creeds and councils of the early Church. God is in control, not man. God has sent a redeemer in history. This redeemer is not the State.
What Happened to Presbyterianism? In 1924, the year Orthodoxy appeared, the conservatives' candidate won the Moderatorship of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church for the first and last time during what has come to be called the Presbyterian conflict. That conflict ended in June of 1936 with the defeat of the conservatives. On June 15, for the last time, an article on the Presbyterian conflict appeared on the front page of the New York Times. The headline announced: "Barring of 3 Philadelphia Pastors Brings Walkout by Presbyterians." The same page announced: "G. K. Chesterton, Noted Author, Dies." Somehow, these parallels seem fitting.
Move ahead two decades. In 1955, a book was published with the title, What Presbyterians Believe. I can think of no book with a more misleading title, given its date of its publication. It was a study of the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647). It was written by a Calvinist minister, theologian, and philosopher, Gordon H. Clark. Clark was a member of the United Presbyterian Church of North America, which three years later would merge with the far larger mainline denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA), at which time Clark left the denomination. The United Presbyterian Church in 1955 was drifting into liberalism. It had been dabbling with liberalism for a quarter of a century. It had initiated discussions on a possible merger with the larger denomination in 1930, but then had voted not to follow through after the PCUSA voted for the plan in 1934. It was obvious in 1930 that the PCUSA's liberals had brought the conservatives under control. Nevertheless, from 1948 to 1958, Clark subordinated himself to the jurisdiction of men who did not believe in Calvinism, and who proved it in 1958 when they voted to join the PCUSA. Had Clark been more honest in selecting a title for his book, he would have called it What a Handful of Presbyterians Believe, or What Presbyterian Officers Swear They Believe, But Rarely Do, or even What Presbyterians Believe in the Small Denomination I Abandoned as Hopeless in 1948 When I Joined This One.(13) But he didn't. Instead, he pretended in public that he was not a minority voice, that he was not under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Presbyterians who did not believe. In this, he was not alone.
Today, there are millions of confessionally faithful but ecclesiastically compromised Church members and thousands of compromised pastors who are in a condition similar to Clark's in 1955. If anything, they are in a much worse condition: the mainline Protestant churches have become much more liberal since 1955. So has the Roman Catholic Church. Only the Southern Baptist Convention has reversed course: the most remarkable ecclesiastical reversal of the past three centuries.(14)
Church Government and Theology
America in the twentieth century has offered a three-fold ecclesiastical development.
1. Theologically conservative, creedal, hierarchical denominations grow more liberal as they grow larger and wealthier, thereby attracting the services of pastors who have been educated in state-funded and state-accredited colleges and universities.
2. Theologically liberal hierarchical denominations grow smaller as their members discover what their well-educated pastors actually believe.
3. Theologically conservative, non-creedal, non-hierarchical churches enjoy most of the growth. Their lack of formal academic requirements for the ministry inoculates them against the worst features of liberalism. Their freedom from hierarchical control allows the members to fund the theology they prefer, which is rarely liberal.
This has created an institutional dilemma for the leaders of theologically conservative, creedal, hierarchical churches. To grow, they apparently have only three choices: to go soft creedally, to go independent, or both. They must position themselves creedally somewhere in between Cotton Mather and The Christian Century. In no denomination has this dilemma been revealed more clearly than in American Presbyterianism, but it has happened in all of the large Protestant denominations.
Are you a well-catechized Presbyterian? If so, you are the member of a tiny minority group. People such as you have been in one of the following situations since 1960: (1) members of a large, wealthy, but shrinking denomination that has been taken over by liberals; (2) members of a medium-sized, officially Calvinistic, and growing denomination that has been taken over at the top by people who are more concerned with Church growth than theology, and who do not make it sufficiently difficult to penetrate by Arminians, neo-evangelicals, Scofieldians, and Baptists who happen to sprinkle babies and who want in on the deal;(15) (3) members of a tiny, hard-pressed Calvinist denomination that Arminians and liberals do not regard as worth the effort to take over. Putting it graphically, you're governed by ministers who believe the editorials in (1) The Christian Century, (2) Christianity Today, or (3) a denominational magazine printed on non-slick paper with no color pictures inside. It boils down to this: you've been sold out to liberals; you're being sold out to neo-evangelicals who will later sell you out to liberals; or you're not yet worth buying.
What you need is membership in a large and rapidly growing Presbyterian Church that is so costly to penetrate by neo-evangelicals that the liberals might as well concentrate on taking over the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church.(16) Sorry; this ecclesiastical product is not only not available at the present time, it is not even in the early prototype stage.
What should a Presbyterian prototype look like? You cannot begin to answer this until you know what it had better not look like: the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., in 1920.(17)
Rotten Wood This book is about a conflict between two mighty religions, Christianity and humanism. It is also about a third religious tradition that was caught in the middle, whose adherents were forced by circumstances to decide which side to support: experientialism-pietism. Some of them were Christians; others were humanists. This book is about a number of confusions, both theological and institutional, and their subsequent clarification. It discusses heroes and villains, and it acknowledges that the vast majority of the participants were somewhere in between. This is true of every turning point in history except the rebellion of Adam and Eve, in which there were no innocent bystanders. It is the story of a turning point in the history of the United States.
This is a history of the liberals' strategy of infiltration and conquest of the Northern Presbyterian Church. A similar strategy was carried out in the public schools, the judiciary, the colleges, and the media, but this ecclesiastical battle was the most important battle of the war. It had to be won. Why? Because the fundamental covenantal issues of life are always at bottom theological, not political, educational, or economic. The public testimony of the Presbyterian Church was by far the most theologically rigorous testimony in the country--indeed, in the world. Humanists had to silence this denomination, for it was too influential. The capture of the most theologically articulate large conservative Protestant denomination in the United States was modernism's best-publicized success story of the era. The strategy the modernists used to take over the Presbyterians was used, with modifications, to capture the other large denominations.
This book is more than a history; it is a study in sociological patterns: how institutions and groups adjust in order to survive through history. This is why I focus on a few representative figures. I agree with C. Wright Mills: "No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey."(18)
This book is also a study in what could be called ecclesiastical entomology: bugs. Specifically, it is a study of ecclesiastical termites: liberals. By 1921, these voracious termites had eaten away so much of the Presbyterian Church that Princeton Seminary's greatest living theologian, Warfield, on his deathbed called the entire denomination rotten wood.(19)
Beyond Presbyterianism I wrote this book to be more than a monograph on one denomination's history. It is a representative case study of a much wider phenomenon. It provides an introduction to the whole question of theological liberalism in the churches, and how this came about. Church historian William Hutchison has described well the subject matter of this book: the presence and then the triumph of theological liberals in a denomination in which a large majority of the members did not regard themselves as liberals. Hutchison writes:
The Protestant establishment can in fact be understood as a "broad church" that held together, and exercised whatever cultural authority it did enjoy, precisely because it retained the adherence, at all levels, of many besides liberals. While it is probably true that few who called themselves fundamentalists were able to remain comfortably in these churches after about 1930, all the evidence indicates that "liberal" was rarely a preferred term outside the theological seminaries and the more sophisticated periodicals. (During the time of neo-orthodox reaction against conventional liberalism--that is, between 1930 and 1960--such terminology was a bit suspect in those precincts as well.) Most establishment leaders and people, if forced to use limiting terms, were likely to designate their own positions as evangelical, confessional, progressive, or--calling on that all-time favorite among weasel words--moderate.(20)
I write for those Christians who fully recognize that in this, the final decade of the second millennium after the birth of Jesus Christ, His Church is in a full-scale war against an implacable enemy: humanism. There can be no permanent cease-fire. This book is written for those Christians who understand this and who are ready to act accordingly. Any other reader is entitled to come along for the ride, but he is not my target. Ethically self-conscious Christians are my targeted audience. Their needs and, more to the point, their vulnerability are my concern. There are still conservative Protestant denominations, and similar liberal strategies are still in effect. The problem is, the conservatives, then as now, have had no strategy.
This book is a strategy manual. It is a manual tracing how an earlier institutional battle was lost. It is not written in the spirit of detached academic inquiry. It is written in the spirit of institutional conquest: to recapture lost ground from the spiritual heirs of the invaders. When the invaders surrender cultural territory, we will regain it--not inside the four walls of liberal churches but in the culture at large. As for liberal churches today, let the dead bury the dead. Large brick churches in declining sections of town are not worth re-capturing. The heating and cooling bills alone would strap us.
Had it not been for the defection of earlier generations of Christians, we would not be in the place we are today: looking in from the outside on institutions that once belonged to God and His people rather than to the covenant-breakers who now occupy positions of institutional authority. But their authority is now fading. The flow of funds--a primary mark of authority--has begun to flow elsewhere.
So has political power. From the foundation of the Federal (later National) Council of Churches in 1908, theological liberals exhorted theological conservatives to get involved in social action and politics. Now that conservatives have begun to do this, great is the anguish inside the hallowed halls of liberalism. God has granted the liberals their request, and like the Israelites after the quail feast in the wilderness (Num. 11), the liberals are now paying dearly for it. They do not have the votes. The Christian Right has the votes. The action today is in places like Colorado Springs and Orlando, not 475 Riverside Drive, New York City.
Liberals committed their strategic resources to capturing mainline Protestant churches at the peak of these churches' influence, 1920 to 1940. They have seen this influence wither away since 1960. They bought close to the top of the market and are now hanging on for eternal life to their portfolio, hoping against hope for a recovery. It has been a primary bear market for a generation, and today looks weaker than ever. The Protestant Establishment peaked with Dwight Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles (d. 1959). It has been all downhill since then.
Liberals still seek to recoup their losses however they can. If your church has assets, it is a potential target. If it also has the same judicial and educational structure that the Presbyterian Church had in 1869, it is surely a target. Your denomination has a large neon sign flashing brightly: "Come and get us!" Somebody will. In all likelihood, the subversion is already in progress.
I know, I know: "It can't happen to us." That's what they all say.
What Reading This Book Can Do for You Do you want to recognize well in advance the tell-tale signs that your Church is moving away from orthodoxy toward theological liberalism? This book provides you with guide markers.
Do you want to find out what the most vulnerable and undefended parts of your Church are? This book identifies them.
Do you want to know how to patch up these undefended parts? This book shows you both how and how not to do this.
Do you want to spot the catch phrases of those who are actively infiltrating your Church or selling it out? This book provides them.
Do you want to understand the strategy of subversion that proved successful in the most spectacular Protestant takeover in modern American history? This book explains it in detail.
Do you want to know how those accomplices outside the Presbyterian Church cooperated with infiltrators inside to undermine and then capture the Church? This book reveals this mystery.
Do you want to identify the bait which the subversives used to hook the Presbyterian Church? This book shows you what to look for in your own denomination.
Do you want to know which deeply rooted Presbyterian ideals led to the institutional defeat of those who held them? This book identifies them.
Do you want to know what never works in any program to reform a Church's hierarchy? This book shows you how to avoid volunteering for a suicide mission.
Do you want to know what terrifies the infiltrators in the early stages of their invasion? This book shows you.
Do you want to know what terrifies them after they have completed the take-over at the top? Learn the secret in this book.
Do you want to know why the liberals' strategy of subversion always backfires on them in the next generation, or even sooner? This book shows you.
Do you want to learn the details of the strategy used by the conservatives who recaptured the Southern Baptist Convention, 1977-1990? (For that, you're going to have to pay more. There are limits on my generosity.)(21)
Do you know why liberals and their queasy conservative allies will give this book bad reviews or no reviews at all? (You do unless you have an IQ lower than Forrest Gump's.)
Who, What, Why, When, and Where? My strategy for this book has forced me to answer a series of specific historical questions--a "package inquiry" which historians of the Presbyterian conflict have scrupulously avoided making in the past. They have not previously been dealt with in a single study.
What was the institutional and theological legacy of the Presbyterian reunion of 1869?
Why did the Northern Presbyterian Church cease all heresy trials after 1900?
What was the theological strategy of the liberals after 1900?
What was the institutional strategy of the liberals after 1900?
What is the proper role of historic creeds and confessions in the life of the Church?
Why did the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., abandon its Confession as the means of screening its leadership?
What was the importance of seminary education in the liberals' capture of the Presbyterian Church?
What was the theological legacy of Princeton Seminary?
What was the theological legacy of Union Seminary?
What compromises in strategy was Machen forced to make, and why?
Why did people who initially "talked conservative" wind up going along with liberal Church leaders?
Why did others who "talked Calvinistic" wind up going along with liberal Church leaders?
Did Machen's tactics destroy the Old School Presbyterian tradition?
How was a Baptist, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., involved in the Presbyterian conflict?
What You Have Not Been Told I am not paid to write my theological books. I receive no book royalties. If a topic does not interest me, I do not pursue it. I pick my books' topics mainly out of personal curiosity: to find out how things work or how things happened.(22) I piece things together on my computer screen. I argue with myself on-screen. I do a lot of electronic erasing, despite how long some of my books are. Then, when I think I have the answers, I publish.
With respect to the origins, issues, and outcome of the Presbyterian conflict, I think I now have the broad outline of the answer. It took a long time for me to put the pieces together. As you read my answer, please keep in mind my original question: "What strategy did the liberals adopt in their successful attempt to capture the Northern Presbyterian Church?" Their strategy, I argue, was developed as part of a much larger process. Most scholars would call that process cultural. I call it covenantal.
My book is long, but it had to be. As I researched this topic, on and off, for over three decades, I kept uncovering things that I had never been told--not as a student at Westminster Seminary, not as a graduate student in American history, and not in any textbook on American Church history. The more I discovered, the more I wondered, "Why didn't someone tell me about this earlier?" Then I figured out why: nobody had known. A kind of collective amnesia set in after 1936, and even prior to 1936. The victims never did fully understand what had happened to them, and the perpetrators were not about to tell them or anyone else. The spiritual heirs of those on all sides of the Presbyterian conflict have not been told what happened.
Since 1963, graduate students have examined some of the more accessible records. Bits and pieces of the story have dribbled out in doctoral dissertations. In very recent years, academic books have appeared on the topic. But young men in graduate school and assistant professors seeking tenure are not supposed to tell a story in the way that a man my age, with no academic reputation to lose and access to enough foundation money to have his book published without an outside editor to tell him to "tone this down," is able to tell it.(23) So, I have told the story--as Cromwell is said to have told his portrait painter, "warts and all." I assure you, you have never read anything like it. But if you are a member of any hierarchical Protestant denomination with more than 50,000 members, some of it will, I predict, seem suspiciously familiar.(24)
Even if you are a pastor in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, founded in 1936 when Machen and his tiny band of 4,200 people departed from the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA), you have never been told anything like the whole story of why and how your denomination came into existence. You may have read Edwin H. Rian's book, The Presbyterian Conflict (1940), which the OPC reprinted after I tipped off Rev. Charles Dennison that William B. Eerdmans Co. had failed to renew the book's copyright. Rian's book is incomplete, to say the least. You may even have read Lefferts Loetscher's book, The Broadening Church (1954). That book is also incomplete, though less incomplete than Rian's. Neither of them asked this crucial question: Was the Presbyterian conflict part of a much wider series of events that transformed American society? In short, was the Presbyterian conflict a microcosm--no, the microcosm--of the triumph of modernism in America, 1870 to 1940?
Why This Book Is So Long In order to earn my living, I have had to master the techniques of direct-mail advertising. In this field, there are many rules to obey. Two rules are crucial. The ad writer must write the ad so as to cut off two negative reactions by the reader. One is a rhetorical question; one is a challenge. These two statements are legitimate, and if not dealt with in the text of the ad, the ad will fail. The two statements are:
So What? Says you! The historian also must pay close attention to these two statements. He must write every word to cut them off in advance. It is not sufficient for the historian to offer a narrative. For example, Will and Ariel Durant offered a gigantic narrative in their multi-volume Story of Civilization. But when the reader has finished the set--a highly unlikely prospect--he thinks to himself: "So what?" What were the lessons learned? No one can remember--not even the Durants.(25) Stories are not sufficient. They are necessary, but not sufficient. In this book, I tell a story. But on every page, I do my best to tell why this part of the story was significant. This makes the book longer than it would have been, had I just told the story.
I offer many direct citations from the record. This also has made the book longer. The more controversial the interpretation, the more necessary the documentation. When an author is presenting the case for losers in history, those educated by the winners are far more ready to say, "Says you!" To which I reply: "Says the record, if you pay close attention."
I would like to see a generation of institutional historians pay even closer attention to the record, and not just of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., but of all Seven Sisters: the mainline Protestant denominations that comprise the Protestant Establishment in America.(26)
A Brief History of This Book What little I know about sociology I learned mainly from Robert Nisbet's lectures and graduate seminars. He made an important point a few years after I began writing this book: "History, it has been well said, yields her secrets only to those who begin with the present. The present is, in Alfred North Whitehead's phrase, holy ground."(27) The problem is, such ground does not stay holy for very long. The experience of writing this book over a period of three decades has driven home to me just how fleeting such holy ground is.
I began writing this book in the fall of 1962. I was a senior at the University of California, Riverside. In those days, UCR was the University of California's one exclusively undergraduate school. (There has been none since 1963.) It had about 2,000 students in 1962. All seniors were required to write a bachelor's thesis. I completed mine about the time Dallas Roark completed his Iowa State University Ph.D. dissertation on Machen. (It would have looked suspicious if mine had been turned in a year later, had anyone known of Roark's dissertation. I did not learn of it until three decades later.) My thesis advisors were Dennis Strong(28) and Jeffrey Burton Russell, who later did his best to teach me medieval history when I returned to UCR to begin my graduate studies in 1965. In between, I attended Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, from which I did not graduate.(29)
My original 1963 thesis was a conventional exercise in historiography. This book is not. It is neither a conventional work in Church history nor a conventional study in applied sociology. It is a hybrid: a mixture of history, sociology, theology, and economics. I did not work on it from 1963 until I moved to Tyler, Texas, in 1980. My understanding of U.S. history had been expanded by earning a Ph.D. and doing a great deal of reading. I revised the manuscript in 1980; it more than tripled in size. Then I stopped working on it.
I began again in 1985 when Ray Sutton came up with his variation of Meredith G. Kline's suggested Old Covenant model.(30) His breakthrough alerted me to a possibility. Machen's thesis in Christianity and Liberalism (1923) was that there were two rival religions battling for control in America's mainline Protestant churches. Was this thesis true? If so, the theology of theological modernism-liberalism may have been a mirror-image replacement for the five-point structure of biblical covenant theology. I began looking at the documents to see if my suspicion could be verified. I discovered that there were numerous defenders of a five-point covenant theology of modernism. Then I stopped again. I returned to the project in 1992. I expanded the manuscript. But once again, I quit writing. I returned for the last time in December of 1993. I worked steadily for the next 18 months to complete it, also finishing Leviticus: An Economic Commentary. The manuscript grew larger.
Missing Pieces in 1963
Beginning in 1985, I revised my manuscript in terms of a theological premise:
A covenant is a legally binding relationship between God and man that is established by taking an oath to which are attached sanctions, positive and negative.
The centrality of the covenantal oath and its sanctions was fundamental to the continuing Presbyterian conflict from the days of the First Great Awakening. I did not understand this when I began to research this book's first draft in 1962. This is why I did not fully understand what the Presbyterian conflict was all about when I completed the initial draft in May of 1963, although I did understand that Machen and his followers were defending theological orthodoxy against its enemies. I did not fully comprehend why Machen lost. It was not that there were more self-conscious enemies of orthodoxy than supporters in the Presbyterian Church in 1936, for the evangelicals outnumbered the liberals. It was rather that the enemies of orthodoxy had captured the instruments of ecclesiastical power by means of a strategy--a strategy that extended back for three centuries: an attack on the authority of the Bible in the name of the Bible.
In 1963, Henning Graf Reventlow had not written The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (1980), which traces the origins of the higher criticism of the Bible back to the reaction against English Puritanism, beginning in the 1630's. The Puritans had emphasized the Old Testament as a source of legitimate judicial standards.(31) Anti-Puritans developed an alternative approach. R. B. Mullin correctly identifies as Unitarian this literary-textual approach to the Bible.(32) This was the legacy claimed by liberals in the United States and greatly extended by them after 1875.
Also in the spring of 1963, I was unaware of Edmund Morgan's path-breaking insights that same year into the origins of the New England Puritans' doctrine of halfway covenant, another tradition stretching back to the 1630's: the elevation of religious experience to equality with creedal confession and personal ethics as the identifying mark of conversion.(33) This was the legacy adopted by minimal-creed Presbyterian conservatives. I was therefore unaware of the existence of three centuries of institutional precedents against Machen and his followers: a two-fold ancient heritage--higher criticism on the left and experientialism on the right--that Machen's opponents could invoke against him.
Conclusion Unread diet books on the shelf will not help a person to lose weight. Neither will a diet book that he reads while munching Fritos with bean dip. So, before you proceed any further, let me warn you:
No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God (Luke 9:62).
For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Lest haply [it happen], after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish (Luke 14:28-30).
But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass [mirror]: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was (James 1:22-24).
Now, get out your yellow highlighter, your pen, and some note cards. It is time to begin stage one: reconnaissance. It will take you about 50 hours to complete this initial mission. That is a lot of time, and time is money. Not many people will make this large an investment. The problem is, whenever good people refuse to prepare themselves for the ecclesiastical battles that lie ahead, righteousness loses by default. This book offers a lot of evidence to prove this statement.
When you have finished, start thinking about what a revamped ecclesiastical prototype should look like. That will take you a lot more than 50 hours. Should some faithful Presbyterian tell you that no revamped prototype is necessary, ask him to sketch his plan for retrofitting one of the three existing Presbyterian models: liberal, neo-evangelical, or culturally invisible.
If this book helps you gain a new understanding of the Bible, please consider sending a small donation to the Institute for Christian Economics, P.O. Box 8000, Tyler, TX 75711. You may also want to buy a printed version of this book, if it is still in print. Contact ICE to find out. icetylertx@aol.com
Footnotes:
1. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, New York: Image, [1924] 1959), p. 125.
2. Pronounced GRESSum. I was told this by his contemporary, Murray Forst Thompson. Most of his followers today are unaware of this; they refer to him as GRESHam.
3. Pronounced MAYchen.
4. Jean-Francois Revel, The Flight from Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information (New York: Random House, 1991).
5. Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 6; ch. 7.
6. Cornelius Van Til, Christianity in Conflict (Philadelphia: Westminster Seminary, 1962).
7. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (New York: Oxford University Press, [1944] 1957).
8. Ibid., p. 159.
9. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (New York: Harper Torchbooks, [1936] 1965), ch. 2.
10. Richard Kroner, Kant's Weltanschauung (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1914] 1956).
11. Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, [1932] 1951), p. 15.
12. Pitirim A. Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age: The Social and Cultural Outlook (New York: Dutton, [1941] 1957).
13. He had been ordained by the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1944. See "Clark, Gordon Haddon," in The Orthodox Presbyterian Church 1936-1986, edited by Charles G. Dennison (Philadelphia: Committee of the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1986), p. 330.
14. Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson deserve far more than this footnote for what they engineered, 1977 to 1990.
15. The outstanding twentieth-century example is William Jennings Bryan. Billy Sunday comes in second.
16. If you're in the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, you are in condition two, just barely. Had the denomination not cleaned house on Concordia Seminary in the mid-1970's, you would be in condition one.
17. See Chapter 6, below.
18. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 6.
19. Reported by J. Gresham Machen in a letter to his mother in 1921. Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Philadelphia: Westminster Theological Seminary, [1954] 1977), p. 310.
20. 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. 14.
21. For a copy of my audiotape interview with the man who co-designed the strategy and then very quietly directed the conservatives' mobilization, send $10 to ICE, P. O. Box 8000, Tyler, TX 75711. Ask for the Southern Baptist Strategy Tape.
22. Exceptions: those books that are replies to critics.
23. I must say, however, that Albert Frederick Schenkel's 1990 Harvard dissertation on how John D. Rockefeller, Jr., bought a controlling interest in America's Protestant Establishment, ventured courageously into a crucially important area that had been off-limits academically from the day that the proxy purchases began.
24. As any successful coach will tell you, if you find a play that works again and again, run with it until it quits working.
25. See their slim, belated, and ignored book, The Lessons of History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968). They begin with this Darwinist presupposition: "History is a fragment of biology. . . Therefore the laws of biology are the fundamental lessons of history" (p. 18). Try to find anyone who has read even one of their fat volumes who learned that lesson from it.
26. The phrase, "Seven Sisters," is William Hutchison's: "Protestantism as Establishment," in Hutchison, ed., Between the Times, p. 6. The Seven Sisters represent half of the members of the Federal and National Council of Churches: Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Disciples of Christ, and Lutherans. Ibid., p. 4.
27. Nisbet, Sociological Tradition, p. 5.
28. Strong complained that I had not attempted to explain the broader cultural relevance of the Presbyterian conflict. This book is my response, 32 years later.
29. I could see the handwriting on the wall. It went from right to left.
30. The ICE published Sutton's book, That You May Prosper, in 1987.
31. Reventlow begins his discussion of anti-Puritan higher criticism with a discussion of William Chillingsworth and the Anglican Great Tew circle of the late 1630's: literary critics who moved from considering the Old Testament's literary themes to questioning its judicial authority. Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (London: SCM Press, [1980] 1984), pp. 147-52.
32. Robert Bruce Mullin, "Biblical Critics and the Battle Over Slavery," Journal of Presbyterian History, 61 (Summer 1983), p. 211.
33. Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1963), pp. 99-105.