INTRODUCTION I take a grave view of the present state of the Church; I think that those who cry, "`Peace, peace,' when there is no peace," constitute the greatest menace to the people of God. I am in little agreement with those who say, for example, that the Presbyterian Church, to which I belong, is "fundamentally sound." For my part, I have two convictions regarding the Presbyterian Church. I hold (1) that it is not fundamentally sound but fundamentally unsound; and I hold (2) that the Holy Spirit is able to make it sound. And I think we ought, very humbly, to ask Him to do that. Nothing kills true prayer like a shallow optimism. Those who form the consistently Christian remnant in the Presbyterian Church and in other churches, instead of taking refuge in a cowardly anti-intellectualism, instead of decrying controversy, ought to be on their knees asking God to bring the visible Church back from her wanderings to her true Lord.
J. Gresham Machen (1932)(1)
J. Gresham Machen was involved in a great theological and institutional struggle, 1922-1936, as surely as Patrick Henry was about to become involved in a life-and-death military struggle in 1775 when he uttered these same words, "Peace, peace, when there is no peace," taken from Jeremiah 6:4. In neither conflict could there be any near-term peace. It both cases, it was a struggle for the conscience of the nation. In Machen's day, the United States was still perceived as Protestant, although this was being challenged by humanism in almost every area. In the 1920's and 1930's, the Presbyterian conflict frequently became front-page news, even in the normally sedate New York Times. Each May, when the General Assembly met, the press was there to cover the story, for a decade and a half. After Machen's ejection in 1936, however, what the General Assembly did was regarded as front-page news only once over the next decade, on June 1, 1937: "Nazis Denounced by Presbyterians." The media ceased to care what Presbyterians did.(2)
The Presbyterian Conflict The Presbyterian conflict is generally dated from 1922 to 1936, but I do not follow this tradition. The timeline on the inside front and back covers presents my chronological account of the Presbyterian conflict. As the bold facing indicates, I think there is an underlying pattern to this chronology: five phases. These correspond to five clusters of covenantal disputes that divided Presbyterianism from almost from its beginning until 1936. Nevertheless, the book's chronological narrative is divided into two main sections, with 1900 as the dividing year: 1869 to 1900 and 1901 to 1936. In 1900, liberal theologian A. C. McGiffert left the denomination to escape a heresy trial. This was a major turning point in the history of the Presbyterian conflict.
The Church prior to the reunion of 1869 went through the first phase of the conflict: the battle over legitimacy. The reunion launched phase two: the battle over authority. This was the first phase of the liberals' conflict; it was phase two of the Presbyterian conflict. The year 1900 marks the end of phase one of the liberals' battle. It took two successive generations for the liberals to replace the conservatives: 1869 to 1900; 1901 to 1936.
The conservatives in the first period were comprised of two groups: Old School and New School Calvinists. The New School was increasingly dominant from 1869 to 1900. The transition from conservatism--increasingly an alliance between the Old School and evangelicalism-fundamentalism--to liberal dominance took until 1936. To grasp this transformation, a two-part division is necessary but not sufficient. There were three factions, not two--something that Machen emphasized before 1915 and in the final weeks of his life, but not in between. To delineate the silent majority's shift from support for conservatism to support for liberalism, 1901 to 1936, I have overlaid the two-part general division with four of the five subdivisions.
The Presbyterian conflict had five phases. The last two phases are those that generally are designated by historians as "the Presbyterian conflict." To narrow the definition in this way is to miss most of the story of that conflict: about three-fifths of it.
The Presbyterian conflict lasted from 1721 (the beginning of the two-century debate over strict vs. loose subscription to the Confession)(3) to November, 1936 (Machen's removal from the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions). It began with the split between what soon became "Old" Presbyterians--Old Side and Old School--vs. "New" Presbyterians. The Old Presbyterians were creedalists; the New Presbyterians were experientialists. The split began in 1721 with the decision of the newly formed Presbyterian synod of three presbyteries to punish a minister's admitted fornication with a mere four-week suspension from the pulpit.(4) It ended with the deciding vote against Machen as president of the Independent Board being cast by an heir to the New School, his former friend and former presbyterial defense attorney, who had recently been caught in a sexual scandal and not disciplined for it.(5) That act ended both the Old School and New School as identifiable movements.
The debate over subscription had begun in Scotland in the 1690's and was still going on in the 1720's.(6) In the new American Church, "loose subscriptionists" opposed any tightening of synodical authority, especially over the creedal requirements for ordination.(7) The strict subscriptionist party was led by the fornicator, John Cross, whose scruples regarding subscription were much more rigorous than they were in that other crucial area of applied theology. This party became the anti-revivalist "Old Side" in the 1730's.(8) The same debate over subscription is still going on in the Presbyterian Church of America. If there is one irreconcilable conflict in Presbyterianism--and not just in Presbyterianism--it is this one. "What is the judicial function of a confession of faith?" is still a burning ecclesiastical question.
The Five Phases
The conflict's initial stage, 1721 to 1868, had to do with legitimacy, which in turn was a debate over earthly institutional sovereignty. The debate was over these two crucial issues: (1) What are the marks of saving faith? (2) How does the Church extend the kingdom of God in history? These questions can be summarized by one question: What are the marks of ecclesiastical sovereignty? It was a debate over legitimacy, and the Presbyterian Church split twice over this question, in 1741 and 1837. Each side claimed: "I'm OK; you're not equally OK."
The second phase of the conflict, 1869 to 1900, was a debate over Church hierarchy and lawful authority. Institutionally, it was a debate over the limits of Church courts' authority over ministers. Ultimately, however, it was a debate over the earthly source of authority: the Bible. Is the Bible the infallible and authoritative word of God? If it is not, then the constitutional documents of Presbyterianism--the Westminster Confession of Faith and its two catechisms--must be revised, for they identify the Bible as God's absolutely authoritative word. The debate over Confessional revision began in 1889 during a debate over biblical authority. The same man initiated both debates: Charles A. Briggs. He began the debate over the Bible in 1876; he began the debate over the authority of the Confession in 1885.
The third phase of the conflict, 1901 to 1921, was over judicial standards. It was this question: What constitutes the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church? It involved these questions: Should the Confession of Faith be revised? How extensive should this revision be? How broadly should its categories be interpreted? Finally, what kind of judicial structure should enforce these laws? This was the era of governmental consolidation in the Presbyterian Church.
The fourth phase of the conflict, 1922 to 1933, was over sanctions. It began in January of 1922. It began outside the Presbyterian Church: in the Kentucky legislature and the pages of the New York Times. It spread into the Church within three months. The question in this phase of the conflict was this: Who has the votes to impose which sanctions? What was initially a debate over State sanctions spread to the Church. It was in the middle of this struggle that the liberals visibly captured the General Assembly: 1926. The General Assembly re-defined Church sanctions in 1927, turning the denomination into functional Congregationalism.
The fifth and final phase of the conflict, 1934 to 1936, was a debate over inheritance: Which organized group would retain control over the assets of the Presbyterian Church? The battle had broken out over the question of liberalism in the foreign mission field, where it had also broken out in 1921. The moderates and liberals contained the outbreak in 1921 by a minor restructuring of the Church's appeals court system for foreign missionaries. In the final phase, they contained it by a major restructuring of Church law from Congregationalism to a hybrid system: centralized administrative Presbyterianism. This restructuring had been proposed in 1931, the year before the outbreak over foreign missions. Even before this restructuring was judicially sanctioned by the presbyteries in 1934, the liberals began the final imposition of negative sanctions. They claimed the inheritance. They collected.
A conflict always involves all five issues: legitimacy, authority-hierarchy, standards, sanctions, and inheritance-disinheritance. There will be winners and losers. A conflict becomes visible when each side seeks to impose sanctions on the other. While the focus of the battle shifts from one phase to the next, the battle is enjoined when the sides seek to impose sanctions. The conflict continues until one minority faction or the other persuades the less committed majority to accept the removal of the rival faction's public representatives. The removal of these representatives silences the majority. The majority prefers to remain silent prior to the visible outcome of the rival systems of sanctions: ". . . and the people answered him [Elijah] not a word" (I Kings 18:21b). Only in the final phase of a conflict does the majority speak out and impose corporate sanctions (I Kings 18:40). This is why I argue throughout this book that the crucial issue in the Presbyterian conflict was sanctions. The presence of the sanctions is what made it a conflict.
A National Spokesman One of the ironies of the final two phases of the Presbyterian conflict was Machen's position as an ecumenical leader. He was not only the academic spokesman for Calvinistic Presbyterianism; he was also the unofficial intellectual spokesman for American fundamentalism in general, a position that he knew was confusing to many. He was not a fundamentalist, as he said repeatedly,(9) but rather an Old School Calvinist. He did not believe in man's free will, nor did he believe in premillennialism, two common marks of Protestant fundamentalism. But by default, he won the fundamentalists' mantle of authority. The fundamentalists had no figure of comparable influence nationally who could match wits and rhetoric with the representatives of theological and political liberalism. William Jennings Bryan was a Presbyterian ruling elder, but he was no theologian. Billy Sunday, the ex-baseball player and flamboyant revivalist, was a Presbyterian minister (teaching elder), but he was not regarded as a theological spokesman. In any case, Sunday's influence faded after 1917; he died in 1935. Bryan died in 1925.
For as long as fundamentalists were willing to fight modernism publicly, they relied on Machen to defend a common position. Machen understood his unique role. In 1926, he acknowledged his position as an ecumenical spokesman: "But in the presence of a great common foe, I have little time to be attacking my brethren who stand with me in defense of the Word of God."(10) His leadership ended only with his death on New Year's Day in 1937.
When Machen's voice was silenced--institutionally in June of 1936, and physically by his death seven months later--the conscience of both Northern Presbyterianism and fundamentalism was silenced. Carl Henry in 1947 wrote The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. The title was evidence of a malaise. No one took Machen's place as a representative national figure who personally transcended the warring factions of conservative Protestantism until the final days of Billy Graham's three-week tent crusade in Los Angeles in 1949. At that point, William Randolph Hearst, the anti-Communist newspaper magnate and world-famous adulterer,(11) sent a memo to his reporters: "Puff Graham."(12) They did, and Graham became a celebrity overnight. He later became the best-known representative of a new ecumenism: neo-evangelicalism.(13) But unlike the fundamentalist ecumenism of Machen's day, Graham's was more broadly based. Unlike Machen, Graham's cooperation with the National Council of Churches, beginning with his New York City crusade in 1958, brought forth harsh criticism from fundamentalists.(14) Had fundamentalists known in 1958 that John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had donated $75,000 to help fund that New York crusade,(15) more of them might have protested earlier.
The only politically conservative Protestant with a national audience after Machen's death was George S. Benson, who took over as president of tiny Harding College in Arkansas, a Church of Christ institution, in 1936. Also in 1936, he began what became a weekly column that ran in over 2,000 newspapers. His weekly radio broadcast was on 100 stations. His newsletter eventually reached 90,000 people.(16) He stressed Americanism, not theology. He is no longer remembered today, even by specialists in American Church history or American political history. He did not have the national stature and influence that Machen had enjoyed. Conservative Protestantism floundered after 1936. A subculture without a visible spokesman is a ghetto phenomenon.
Strict vs. Loose Subscription This book is the story of a victory and a defeat. The victory went to men whose theological opinions were at odds with the creedal position set forth by the Westminster Confession of Faith and its Larger and Shorter Catechisms: the Presbyterian Church's official statements of faith.(17) These documents had been hammered out by English Puritans and Scottish Presbyterians in the midst of a national revolution. The Confession's public defeat in 1936 came to those few people in mainline Northern Presbyterianism who still believed in that historic Confessional position.
Yet this summary is too simplistic. The battle was not merely a dispute over personal belief; it was also a matter of verbal profession of faith. It was ultimately a matter of judicial sanctions. In 1901, the leaders on all three sides of the Presbyterian conflict had verbally and publicly professed faith in that historic Confessional position, despite the fact that none of them fully believed it. Having sworn a public oath to defend a standard they did not fully believe, the officers of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., had little incentive to use the denomination's courts to impose the oath's mandatory negative sanctions. But without negative sanctions there can be no organization. So, negative sanctions would eventually be imposed. These sanctions would be imposed in terms of a standard other than the Westminster Confession of Faith and its two catechisms. The institutional question became: By what other standard? The quest for this rival standard was the fundamental theme of the final three phases of the Presbyterian conflict, 1901-1936.
The problem of negative sanctions had been festering in Presbyterianism ever since the Westminster Assembly (1643-48). The Assembly had not produced the definitive ecclesiastical document that Parliament had expected and had asked for. The House of Commons in 1643 was divided between ecclesiastical independents and self-identified Presbyterians who had never been inside a Presbyterian Church. In addition, probably a majority of members of the House of Commons wanted Parliament to replace the King as head of the English Church or share his ecclesiastical sovereignty: the Erastians. Initially, the Assembly reflected these Parliamentary divisions, and by the time the Assembly's vocal malcontents left in 1645, their spiritual associates in Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army had become a growing political force in England.
From the beginning, the Assembly found that it had to compromise drastically on ecclesiology if it was to get Parliament to accept its recommendations, a political goal which it never did achieve. In that fruitless ecclesiastical compromise, the Assembly bequeathed a legacy of confusion to Anglo-Scottish-American Presbyterianism that is still not resolved in those secessionist Presbyterian Churches that take seriously at least some of the Assembly's documents.(18) The matter was resolved judicially in the Northern Presbyterian Church in 1936 when the theological heirs of the Westminster Assembly were driven out by theological liberals who had individually sworn formal allegiance to the Westminster Confession of Faith, but who had mentally crossed their fingers when they made their confession.
Protecting the Vulnerable
The age-old debate between a strict interpretation of a standard and a loose interpretation was a big part of the Presbyterian conflict. To understand what was involved, consider a speed limit sign. It says "35" (either miles per hour or kilometers per hour). What if a man drives 36? Will he be ticketed by a policeman? Probably not. The policeman has limited amounts of time to pursue speeders. He has to chase the speeder, ticket him, and perhaps appear in court to defend his actions. In a world of limited resources, a person who speeds by driving 36 in a 35 zone is probably going to get away with it. If there are lots of serious speeders on the road, he should get away with it; the safety of the public is dependent on stopping the activities of those other, life-threatening speeders. Only if the community is willing to hire many, many policemen and judges can it afford to ticket speeders who drive 36.
Now consider someone who drives 55 in a "25" speed zone for young school-age children. Will a policeman pursue him? Without question. The speeder is putting children at risk. That speeder is a serious lawbreaker. To refuse to pursue him, a policeman would be abandoning the very essence of law enforcement. His own job would probably be at risk for malfeasance. A city that will not bring employment sanctions against a traffic policeman who steadfastly refuses to pursue such speeders is saying, in effect: "Our posted signs mean nothing. Drive as fast as you want, day or night." In other words, "Young children had better look out for themselves; we will not do it for them."
Strict subscription, like speed limits, is designed to protect the vulnerable person who is under the protection of the law. As surely as a seven-year-old child walking to school is protected by a speed limit sign and a court system prepared to enforce it, so is a resident in a country protected by the strict interpretation of a written civil constitution and a court system prepared to enforce it, and so is a Church member protected by strict subscription to a confession of faith and a court system prepared to enforce it.
Two conclusions follow: (1) law without sanctions protects no one; (2) law interpreted by loose construction protects no one predictably. This is as true in ecclesiastical matters as it is in highway safety matters.
The child is under the protection of the law, the posted limit, the police, and the court, even though he did not publicly swear an oath of allegiance to obey the law. The speed limit sign is for his protection: the person at greatest risk from speeders. When he becomes a driver, he will be expected to obey the law.
In the Bible, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger are identified as the most vulnerable people in the community. The civil law is supposed to protect them. The minor or resident alien today is protected by the national constitution, even though he did not publicly swear an oath of allegiance to it, as the person most at risk of government tyranny.
The visitor or the non-voting Church member is protected by the confession of faith, even though he did not publicly swear allegiance to it. It protects his soul from wolves in sheep's clothing: false shepherds. He will be expected to take a public oath to uphold the confession if he ever becomes a Church officer.
Then what about becoming a voting member? Here, Protestant Christianity refuses to follow the logic of strict subscription and affirmation. Very few churches require a voting member to do anything more than swear allegiance to a minimal statement of faith, perhaps a short historic creed. Presbyterianism, which requires its officers to affirm their acceptance of the most detailed theological confession in what used to be called Christendom, has almost no denomination-wide confessional requirement for a voting member. To receive baptism, he is constitutionally required to affirm only that he believes in Christ and will obey Him. There is zero theological content in this oath. Even this minimal promise is found only in the Larger Catechism (A. 166), which has never been used to prosecute anyone in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. This arrangement crippled the conservative forces during the Presbyterian conflict, as we shall see. Voting members could impose local Church sanctions on Church officers ("You're fired!"), yet they had never taken a public oath, nor did Church law or tradition suggest that they had taken an implicit oath. Instead, a system of defensive Presbyterian Church sanctions and oaths was established in the seventeenth century in order to remove any judicial influence above the congregational level of non-oath-bound voting members. But conservative leaders, 1922 to 1925, relied heavily on support by conservative laymen during the Presbyterian conflict. This reliance doomed the conservative cause.
Freedom or Arbitrariness?
Loose subscriptionists are comparable to elected or appointed public officials who come before the voters in the name of greater freedom: loose constructionists of the Constitution. As law enforcers, they resent the tight controls placed on them by the law, especially constitutional law. Loose constructionists are not greatly concerned with the needs of those who are being protected by the strict enforcement of predictable, written law.
Let us return to the analogy of the speed limit. The loose constructionist announces his faith in the good judgment of the police and the courts. "The important thing is true safety, not adherence to arbitrary speed limits." He denies the legitimacy of posted speed limits. In the early stages, he may come as a representative of "oppressed" drivers who want to drive a lot faster.
Once the speed limit signs are removed, however, a policeman can arrest any driver he wants. He can make up the rules as he goes along. "Your honor, I say that this driver was not driving safely." Without a fixed speed limit to appeal to, who can successfully challenge this professional? The driver cannot say, "Your honor, I was driving 34 in a 35 zone."
Add to the dilemma a government that seeks to fund itself by collecting fines from speeders. The police have an incentive to impose arbitrary standards for the sake of the flow of funds. So, in later stages of the debate over posted limits, the loose constructionist may not be on the side of "oppressed" drivers; he may be ready to ticket anyone whenever the government's coffers are depleted of funds.
Question: Are posted speed limits a hindrance on our freedom as pedestrians and drivers, or are they the basis of freedom? The strict constructionist in civil law sees the posted signs and the court's enforcement of those signs as crucial elements of a free society. The same is true of strict subscription in ecclesiastical law. Strict subscription places strict limits on the decision-making ability of law enforcers, thereby increasing the freedom of those under this authority. Strict subscription increases the predictability of law enforcement. It reduces arbitrary power.
This argument appears to be all about stipulations: the proper interpretation of the law. Such a narrow interpretation of the subscription issue is incorrect. The argument is inevitably also about sanctions: the degree of arbitrary power allowed by the constitution to those who lawfully possess the institutional authority to impose sanctions. The debate is really over the law enforcement system's protection of vulnerable innocents. Jesus told Peter to feed His sheep, not eat them. Yet ecclesiastical shepherds, as with all shepherds, are economically dependent on the productivity of their sheep. How can the Church protect Jesus' sheep, who must fund the necessary shepherding system? This is what the strict subscription debate is all about. It is also what the flow of funds debate is all about.
The Subscription Battle in Church and State
Theological liberals were loose subscriptionists. Old School Presbyterians were strict subscriptionists. The evangelical New School majority was somewhere in between. The Presbyterian conflict was a battle over the degree of subscription and the system of sanctions appropriate to defend subscription.
This ecclesiastical battle paralleled an analogous and simultaneous battle in politics: the war between those who held to a strict interpretation of the United States Constitution vs. those who barely believed in the Constitution. These parallel institutional battles--covenantal battles--began at the same time and in the same place: in May of 1787, in the city of Philadelphia, where the Presbyterian Synod and the Constitutional Convention met separately to draw up a pair of anti-theocratic constitutions.(19) In the Church, the debate was over Confessional subscription; in politics, it was over Constitutional construction. Jeffersonians were strict constructionists; Hamiltonians were loose constructionists. The country was more with Jefferson than Hamilton in 1787. To get the Constitution ratified, the pro-Constitution politicians had to promise a Bill of Rights.
These parallel battles increased in intensity during the decades prior to the Civil War (1861-1865): in Presbyterianism, Old School (strict subscription) vs. New School (loose subscription); in politics, Democrats (strict construction) vs. Whigs(20) and then Republicans (loose construction). There was a civil war in the Church, which resulted in a split in 1837.
After the Civil War, there were two reunions, both consummated on terms laid down by the loose interpretationists: ecclesiastical (New School after the 1869 reunion)(21) and political (Republican Party after the 1865 reunion).(22) In politics, this resulted in the extension of Federal power, though checked after 1877 by the settlement over Reconstruction in the South.(23) In the Church, this was marked by the rise of the social gospel, though checked by the rise of premillennial pietism in the 1870's.(24)
Both of these subscriptionist battles went into high gear from the 1890's to the 1920's. Loose construction in politics is seen in the Progressive movement and, in rural areas, the Populist movement. Loose subscription in the Church is seen in modernism. The Populist influence was incarnated in the career of a Presbyterian ruling elder, a member of the Democratic Party, William Jennings Bryan (d. 1925); the Progressive influence was incarnated in the career of a former Presbyterian ruling elder, a member of the Democratic Party, Woodrow Wilson (d. 1924).(25) Their careers destroyed the politics of strict construction. After 1912, the Democratic Party leap-frogged the Republican Party in its quest to remove the restraints of the Constitution.(26) Meanwhile, strict-subscription Presbyterian Confessionalists also retreated: the revision of the Westminster Confession in 1903. The twin battles culminated in the mid-1930's: the demise of the Old Republican order with the rise of Franklin Roosevelt's first New Deal (1933-36);(27) and the demise of the Old School in the Presbyterian conflict (1934-36).
Left, Right, and Center As was the case in the great political-Constitutional battle, three main ecclesiastical viewpoints were involved: left, right, and center. (It is significant that in all major languages except Chinese, "left" is associated with opposition to traditional social and religious customs.(28) As historian James Billington writes concerning the French Revolution, "The subsequent equation of the left with virtue dramatized revolutionary defiance of Christian tradition, which had always represented those on the right hand of God as saved and those on the left as damned."(29))
Undergirding the left end of the spectrum was the power religion, represented by theological liberalism (modernism).(30) The liberals in the early stages demanded theological toleration: the annulment of strict subscription. This camouflaged their commitment to power, which became clear only in the mid-1930's. Modernism justified its rejection of the judicially binding character of creeds and confessions on the basis of three arguments: an appeal to secular evolutionary science and reason (Darwinism), an appeal to historical change (historicism), and an appeal to individual experience (experientialism), by which modernists meant Christian man's autonomous judgment in defiance of explicit biblical revelation and the historic creeds.
Dominating the middle and also influencing the right were representatives of one variety of experiential religion, sometimes called pietism. Pietism's concern was with personal salvation, not theological precision. It placed heavy emphasis on personal evangelism, missions, and Church growth. With respect both to experientialism and Church growth, pietism was close to modernism. The capture of the Northern Presbyterian Church by the liberals was consented to by the evangelical experientialists, who had a numerical majority after 1906 and had been dominant psychologically since 1869. They, like the modernists, regarded themselves as inclusivists, although their inclusivism did not automatically mean the passive acceptance of modernist ministers until 1926. What they wanted was peace.
Leading the right intellectually, though rarely organizationally, were defenders of judicial religion: the judicial theology of Calvinism. These were the exclusivists, whose intellectual leader in the 1920's and 1930's was Machen. They were exclusivists in the sense that they wanted to exclude from the ministry men who were modernists. But they did not actually do anything to exclude them judicially, once modernists were ordained, after 1900.
Machen used a similar three-fold classification scheme in 1913: anti-supernatural, anti-cultural, and biblical cultural transformation. The first is liberalism; the second is fundamentalism (pietism); and the third is biblical Christianity. Machen denied the existence of a supposedly necessary dualism between Christianity and culture.(31) But he dropped this classification scheme in 1915 in his inaugural lecture at Princeton Seminary, "History and Faith." Covenantally, the two-fold classification is correct: saved and lost. Strategically, the three-fold classification is more useful.
"Peace, Peace!" Machen's three categories in 1913 were far more accurate, but far less rhetorically compelling, than his two categories in his 1923 book, Christianity and Liberalism. His later description of the division between Christianity and liberalism was accurate as far as it went, but it did not go far enough, as he was to learn after the liberals captured Princeton Seminary in 1929. What his analysis in 1923 did not acknowledge was that the middle ground, where about 80 percent of those in any organization normally reside, did not fit comfortably into his two categories. But by 1923, he was strategically dependent on a significant portion of that 80 percent, who were best described as pietists. Pietism limits the realm of meaningful faith to the realm of the heart, thereby truncating the commitment of those who hold it. Pietism is similar to Greek neoplatonism: escapist, world-renouncing, and mystical.(32) Pietism, like neoplatonism, has flourished during eras marked by a loss of optimism.(33)
By the time Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism, several mainline Protestant denominations had been rent by controversy, with the liberals (modernists) challenging conservative believers for control over the ecclesiastical machinery. The Episcopal Church had gone liberal a generation earlier. The drift within his own denomination had concerned him at the time of his ordination in 1914.(34) He had for a time considered ordination in the Southern Presbyterian Church (PCUS). He had decided to go into the Northern Church because he was persuaded that there was still hope. By the time he realized that such hope was misplaced, he was publicly committed to a defense of the denomination. He refused to transfer to the PCUS, even when offered a seminary job in 1926, the year of victory for the anti-confessionalists in the General Assembly. He defended his ministerial oath by refusing to remain silent. He knew at least by 1935 that he would eventually be silenced. He may have known in 1929, with the takeover of Princeton Seminary. If he believed Warfield's deathbed warning, he knew in 1921.
The experientialists were willing to defend institutionally only the stripped-down fundamentals of America's Protestant evangelical faith: the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, Christ's substitutionary atonement, Christ's bodily resurrection, and the historic reality of Christ's miracles.(35) What Machen did not recognize soon enough was that most experientialists shared a common commitment that was even more precious to them than these theological fundamentals: the goal of institutional peace. By the early 1930's at least, Machen knew.(36) By this time, it was too late for conservatives to re-capture the denomination. The advocates--both conservative and liberal--of pietism's religion of inner peace demanded that new men be given control of the denomination, which would then reflect this peaceful ideal. These new men came in the name of theological peace and institutional order. The pietists-experientialists were willing to pay a theological price to attain this goal, but as in the case of every economic transaction, they preferred to pay the lowest possible price. And like so many people who seek a below-market price, they wound up paying far more than they bargained for.
Crossed Fingers The development of every organization is determined by the private confessions of those who gain control over the formal procedures and sanctions that are used to defend the institution's official confession of faith. The historian's problem escalates when formal adherence to the confession is publicly made by all the participants. Some of them are lying or are self-deluded, but who?
In the year before his death on February 10, 1985, I spoke on the phone with Rev. Milo F. Jamison, who in 1933 became the first pastor to be thrown out of the denomination because of orthodoxy.(37) (I had first interviewed him about this in late 1962.) He told me the story of a fellow graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary who had just been ordained in the mid-1920's. Jamison knew that the man did not believe in the Westminster Confession of Faith. Jamison asked him: "How could you tell the examining committee that you believe in the Westminster Confession when you really don't?" The man answered: "I kept my fingers crossed." Jamison repeated the man's statement again, as if to affirm it categorically with a double witness.
But Jamison himself did not believe this historic Confession of Presbyterianism, nor had he believed it when their exchange took place. He was a premillennial dispensationalist.(38) When, in 1937, he was defeated for Moderator at the second General Assembly of the year-old Presbyterian Church of America, he immediately departed with Carl McIntire's secessionist group. He joined McIntire's Bible Presbyterian Church, founded in 1938, which revised the Westminster Confession's section on eschatology in order to make it conform to premillennialism,(39) although the denomination was not formally dispensational. Jamison left the Bible Presbyterian Church in 1968,(40) but in fact he spent his post-1933 career as the pastor of an independent Bible church that taught the Scofield Reference Bible. He did not discuss the Westminster Confession in the pulpit.(41) He was not a Calvinist.(42) He had crossed his fingers early.
This was Machen's dilemma: everyone on all sides of the Presbyterian conflict had his fingers crossed. The strategically relevant question was: On which issues?
Sacrament and Word This book is my attempt to answer many questions regarding Presbyterian history. First and foremost, there are two judicial questions: (1) What does American Presbyterianism teach are the marks of a true Church? (2) What role have the Westminster Confession and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms played in American Presbyterianism? Until these questions are answered in terms of the historical record, the details of the rival camps' strategies will remain unintelligible.
Sacrament and Ministry
The Westminster Confession and the two catechisms do not define the following offices in terms of a judicial oath and its stipulations: minister, ruling elder, and deacon. The words "elder" and "deacon" do not even appear. The phrase "minister of the gospel" (WCF XXVIII:2) is used to describe what is today called the teaching elder in conservative Presbyterian circles and Minister of the Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. The words "teaching elder" do not appear in the Confession. The term "elder," meaning any officer not a "teacher," "doctor," or "deacon," does appear in the 1645 Form of Church-Government, under Other Church-Governors, but this document has had no binding legal authority in Presbyterianism.(43)
According to the Confession, only a minister can lawfully administer the sacraments (WCF XXVII:4; XXVIII:2). The word "minister" does not appear in the Confession in any ecclesiastical context other than the sacraments. Judicially speaking, the Westminster Confession has a solely sacramental view of the ministry. The Larger Catechism adds preaching (Q&A 158). Even here, far more space is devoted to the sacraments (Q&A 162-177) than to preaching (Q&A 158-160). American Presbyterianism's Constitutional documents establish a predominantly sacramental basis for the ministry. But I am aware of no Calvinist Presbyterian theologian or spokesman who has ever defended the sacraments as the primary judicial basis of the ministry.
A Church member is defined in these documents as someone who professes faith in Christ and promises to obey Him. This is the only Church oath mentioned in the Constitutional documents of Presbyterianism. This lone reference to a Church oath appears in the context of baptism (Larger Catechism, A. 166). The only official Presbyterian Church oath is the oath of the lowly Church member. This has been a major weakness of Presbyterianism. Presbyterians built a structure of Church government on something other than binding covenantal oaths, their stipulations, and precise negative sanctions. This has made it far easier for the enemies of the Confession to capture the Church in the name of the Confession: "No oath-bound stipulations; therefore, no negative sanctions."
Sacrament and Preaching
In the Presbyterian conflict from 1869 to 1934, the sacraments were rarely if ever mentioned in relation to the ecclesiastical battle underway. I do not remember reading anything in the writings of the Old School regarding the defense of the Church or the ministry as a defense of the sacraments. Modernists did mention the sacraments, 1934 to 1936, but only in relation to money: refusing to send money to an official ministry of the Presbyterian Church was said by the Church's hierarchy to be the equivalent of not taking the Lord's Supper. This was fully consistent with modernism's view of the true sacrament: power leading to control over Church assets. Yet even in this extreme case, the Old School did not respond by presenting a carefully constructed theological case to refute this obviously anti-Presbyterian, anti-Protestant theory of Church order.
The failure of the Old School to build its case against modernism in terms of the sacraments weakened its case--I believe fatally. The Old School called the ministry the teaching eldership, which the Confession does not mention. The Confession defines the ministry as the agency authorized to administer and therefore defend the sacraments. The Larger Catechism adds preaching. The judicial emphasis of the two documents is sacrament first, preaching second. Yet in terms of Presbyterian tradition, preaching has always come first, which has led to the establishment of higher education for ministers as the number-one priority and the main distinguishing mark of the minister. (The secondary mark is his membership in his presbytery rather than his congregation.) This allowed the worldwide capture of Presbyterianism by liberals through their capture of higher education: first in the colleges, then in the seminaries. (European Presbyterianism also did not escape; it fell earlier.)
The Old School defined the ministry in terms of preaching and the minister's extra-Confessional 1729 oath to uphold the Confession. This weakened its case again: ruling elders took the same oath, yet they were not permitted to preach in a vacant pulpit.(44) The vote of a ruling elder was equal to vote of a minister, yet the Old School was only peripherally concerned with the institutional defense of the ruling eldership. Nevertheless, the Old School had more supporters in the ruling eldership than in the teaching eldership, since ruling elders did not have to attend seminary. They avoided the gauntlet of theological liberalism after 1890. Eventually, ruling elders sided with the middle majority--peace-seeking, controversy-avoiding, evangelical ministers--and the modernist ministers who in fact controlled the Church. This defection of the ruling elders ended mainline Presbyterian Calvinism.
Prior to 1900, the Old School based its case entirely on the defense of the integrity of preaching, meaning the integrity of doctrine, meaning the defense of the Westminster Confession (unofficially modified by James Hutton's and Charles Lyell's uniformitarian geological time scale). After 1903, it had to base its defense on the 1903 revision of the Confession: watered-down Calvinism. After 1909, it had to base its case on the even more diluted five points of fundamentalism known as the Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910. Each time, the Old School retreated judicially from the Westminster Confession. It did not have to retreat from the two catechisms, since no one on any side ever appealed to their specifics as binding elements of Presbyterian creedalism. They were ignored by everyone throughout the entire period. This also weakened the case for Calvinism in American Presbyterianism.
Sacrament and Apostasy
The primacy of the sacraments in Presbyterian Confessional and judicial standards is rarely discussed by Calvinist Presbyterians. This has been a major weakness of Presbyterianism. Ultimately, the sacraments are the most important judicial issue ecclesiastically, and they have been understood as such ever since the Donatist controversy in the fourth century.(45) No Church that baptizes infants can escape this question: What about the re-baptism of adults? Specifically, must a person who was baptized as a child or as an adult in a heretical Church be re-baptized when he transfers his membership? Non-Anabaptist churches have answered no ever since the days of Donatism. In fact, answering yes has long been considered heretical by such churches. Then what about an apostate Church's baptism? If the person's baptism was administered under the authority of a Trinitarian creed, non-Anabaptist churches have always said that no re-baptism is authorized. What about baptism by a cult? Here the churches have re-baptized, since they regard the cult's baptism as invalid. The baptizing church's creed is what makes the difference.
So, an apostate Church is still a Church sacramentally if it maintains a Trinitarian creed. Its baptisms are valid. Then what, judicially speaking, constitutes apostasy? From a practical standpoint, how serious judicially is continuing membership in an apostate Church? Sacramentally speaking, it is less serious than being in a cult and no more serious than being in a heretical Church. But what about creedally? The apostate Church's official creed is not enforced. A Trinitarian Church will normally accept as a new member a person who has been excommunicated by a heretical or apostate Church because of his orthodoxy or his contumacy relating to orthodoxy. So, the creed is judicially valid with respect to legitimizing the sanction of baptism, yet operationally invalid with respect to the sanction of excommunication.
The implicit oath of every Presbyterian baptism is not enforced by an apostate Church's government. I say implicit oath, for the Westminster Assembly's 1645 Directory for the Publick Worship of God does not require the parents of a child about to be baptized to promise to rear the child in a Christian manner; the minister merely exhorts the parents regarding their obligations in this regard. The only time a parent speaks is to tell the minister the name of the child.(46) On the question of adult baptism, the Directory is silent. The familiar American Presbyterian practice of asking the parents or adults to confess publicly their faith and promise to be obedient is not mandated by the traditional documents of Presbyterianism.
Defining apostasy in terms of the sacraments, creeds, and ecclesiastical sanctions remains a very large unresolved theological problem for modern confessional churches. This is one reason why Machen's decision in 1936 to designate the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., as apostate did not impress the two million members who remained behind.
The Authority of the Confession American Presbyterianism has deferred any public discussion of the problem of the Confession's lack of ministerial oaths because it has invoked the authority of such secondary documents as the Westminster Assembly's Directory for the Publick Worship of God or The Form of Presbyterial Church-Government and of Ordination of Ministers. But the Confession did not identify these supplemental documents as judicially binding. The extraordinary and rarely discussed fact is, the Westminster Confession does not mention its own judicial authority, a fact to which liberals appealed again and again during the Presbyterian conflict. The Confession does not say how its stipulations are to be enforced. How could it? It does not mandate oath-bound stipulations for any Church office. It does not establish any system for bringing formal sanctions against those who serve as ministers, let alone the two offices it does not mention, ruling elders and deacons. All offices are governed by the Church's supplemental by-laws. No one wants to admit it publicly, but the fact of the matter is this: Henry Martyn Robert did more to shape modern American Presbyterianism than any Presbyterian minister ever did. It has been more important institutionally to have gained a mastery of Robert's Rules of Order (1876)--originally, an obscure self-published book--than either the Bible or the Westminster Confession.
The Westminster Confession and the two catechisms therefore cannot serve as stand-alone judicial documents, yet they alone have been regarded as the Constitutional documents of Presbyterianism. This anomaly led to a long series of Presbyterian conflicts over the supplemental by-laws, beginning with English Presbyterianism after 1660. In each case, Unitarians (or worse) keep inheriting the largest Presbyterian denominations.
The Unholy Alliance It is not simply the liberal power religionists who oppose the imposition of more rigorous confessional formulations. Conservative, pietistic, experiential religion also generally adopts an officially non-confessional covering. It proclaims: "All people who affirm the name of Jesus are working for the same God and for the same goals." This belief is naive; almost anyone in the West can "name the name of Jesus" and mean anything by it: Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, even New Age mystics. This does not make him a Trinitarian. The naive view of the experientialists is remarkably close to the familiar anti-Christian creed of the universal salvationists: "We're all traveling different roads to the same God." Anyone who denies the tenets of this inclusivist faith is regarded as a nuisance, and if he continues to disrupt the institution, he so completely alienates the "peace-keepers" that they remove him from their presence.
Machen opposed the experientialism of modernism, but eventually the majority evangelical experientialists took offense at his incessant criticisms of modernism's anti-Confessionalism. Criticizing Harry Emerson Fosdick, the most famous theological modernist of his day, Machen wrote: "Doctrine . . . is not an explanation of human experience, but it is a system revealed in the Holy Scriptures by God. It is not the product of experience, but a setting forth of those facts upon which Christian experience is based."(47) In this, he was following Warfield, who had insisted that "if theology is the science of God, it deals not with a mass of subjective experiences . . . but with a body of objective facts. . . ."(48) In 1924, conservative experientialists perceived Fosdick as the chief disturber of the peace; in 1936, they perceived Machen as the chief disturber of the peace. They imposed negative sanctions on both men: mild in the first case, rigorous in the second.
Negative Sanctions
There must be negative sanctions. Excommunication and removal from ordained office are essential to the maintenance of any ecclesiastical creed or confession, and ultimately every organization has a process of excommunication, for they all have implicit creeds. The experientialists are not exceptions to this rule. They want peace so much, they are willing to fight for it. They want unity so much, they are willing to excommunicate creedalists in order to attain it. But note well: the removal of their enemies from their presence is rarely done in terms of the content of a formal statement of faith. It is done in the name of institutional peace. Why? Because in the view of the experiential religion, formal confessions are only rarely worth enforcing, once members have made a formal profession of faith in the confession, no matter what they profess subsequently. Once inside the organization, no one is supposed to suffer involuntary removal based on the judicial content of his original confession of faith. It is not the theological and judicial content of the confession that is determinative for the experiential religion; it is rather the formal act of public verbal confession and the inner experience of personal healing that supposedly follows.(49) A critic who seeks publicly to impose Church sanctions on mild-mannered confessors who no longer believe the formal terms of their own public confessions of faith is regarded by experientialists as a disturber of the peace.
The power religionists understand this, so they initially confine themselves to a subversive undermining of men's faith in the theological content of the original confession. They maintain the traditional forms of worship while denying the judicial content thereof. They infuse old terminology with new meanings. The judicialists see both the hypocrisy and the institutional threat in this strategy. They mount a defense based on the judicial and theological content of the original confession. The power religionists then enlist the support of the experientialists in the name of the original act of verbal confession and the supposed lifetime immunities thereof: "Once confessed, always confessed!" In the most radical forms of the experiential religion, the original confessional act confers judicial immunity to every theological revision that follows. The power religionists use this to their advantage. In 1927, the General Assembly actually concluded that no Church court had the authority to de-frock a minister for any theological reason. It declared: "Once a minister, always a minister. . . ."(50)
The judicialists cannot in good conscience take such a view of Church sanctions. This is why they are rarely successful institutionally, once the experiential religion has been widely accepted in a Church. To remove the power religionists, the judicialists must deny the legitimacy of the institutional mandate of the experiential religion: "Never hold anyone accountable for the content of his original confession."
Seeking an Alliance
Judicial religion is at war with both the power religion and the experiential religion. Similarly, the power religion is at war with judicial religion and experiential religion. The problem is, to conduct this two-front war, both sides must seek an alliance with the experientialists, since they have been in the majority in American Protestant churches. The history of the institutional Church in the twentieth century can be seen in terms of the shifting alliances of these factions. The experientialists may ally themselves with the judicial religionists against the power religionists, or they may ally themselves with the power religionists against the judicialists. They reserve the option of changing sides. The experientialists want institutional peace.
When power religionists do not possess a majority, they adopt the language of "peace, peace," in order to gain time to consolidate their institutional position. They can afford to cooperate with the experientialists, for the experientialists are no significant threat to their ultimate goal: the capture and maintenance of power.(51)
The experientialists are willing to cooperate with the power religionists in order to remove from their presence all those who proclaim the judicial theology of the dominion covenant.(52) Experientialists are embarrassed and shocked by the controversies that such judicial theology creates, and they are also horrified at the burden of additional responsibility that the dominion covenant places on them.(53) They want to get judicial religionists and their message out of their midst, but being peaceful and non-controversial, experientialists hesitate to take the lead in purging the dominionist leaven from their presence. At this point, the power religionists offer their services, seemingly free of charge. It is an offer that the experientialists never seem to be able to refuse.
Machen's Strategy: Defending Confessionalism Machen's burden--a burden he had inherited from the Presbyterian reunion of 1869--was to develop an institutional strategy that could be fought successfully in terms of the traditional or familiar confessions of his denomination. He believed that the war between modernism and orthodoxy is ultimately a dispute over the truth of the theological system presented in the Westminster Confession of Faith, the most theologically rigorous confessional statement in the history of Christianity. But he also knew that he could get very few of his denomination's leaders to admit this, let alone fight in terms of it. The Westminster Confession was judicially a dead issue by Machen's day, and he knew it. Another, weaker creed had replaced the older, rigorous Confession. This was Machen's fundamental dilemma, or better put, his fundamentalist dilemma.
What Machen learned to his dismay was that people who denied the importance of a distinctly Presbyterian Confession as the basis of institutional authority within Presbyterianism were the ones who held the balance of power in the Northern Presbyterian Church after World War I. Their "loving" wrath would be directed against whichever of the two principled factions--right or left, judicial religion or power religion--disturbed their cultural slumber. The power-seekers had recognized this trend as early as 1900, and they adopted a tactic of proclaiming "peaceful coexistence" until they had the power to exercise their will.
Conclusion It is one of the oddities of history that those who proclaim the judicial religion almost never seem to recognize the nature of the war they are in until the final stages. For example, the Sanhedrin--the power religionists of Jesus' day--understood that He had promised to rise from the dead in three days. They supposed that His disciples also understood this prophecy, so they wanted Pilate to seal up the tomb so that the disciples could not break in and steal the body, and then proclaim that Jesus' prophecy had been fulfilled (Matt. 27:62-64). But the disciples had not understood Jesus, and they had scattered. No seal on the tomb was needed to keep out the disciples. Nevertheless, no seal was powerful enough to restrain Christ's resurrected body, and when the disciples finally recognized what Christ had accomplished, no seal could keep the gospel bottled up. They learned slowly, but they did learn.
Machen was a Westminster Confessionalist. He understood that a formal theological confession is like a stepping stone up the ramp of history toward the pinnacle of victory, either for covenant-breakers or covenant-keepers. Just as the Roman legions built a ramp up a mountain to the summit of Masada, so must the Church build its confessional ramp. If a Church stands firmly on any confessional stepping stone, it cannot ascend the ramp. Each step is crucial in the Church's ascent, but standing motionless on one step is not a legitimate substitute for making the ascent.
Machen knew that confessions must be revised periodically, but he did not know how this could be done faithfully in his era. By 1921, the Westminster Confession was a dead letter judicially. Only the five-point Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910 could rally the conservatives. So, he wound up having to step down several confessional steps: to a watered-down, five-point fundamentalist confession. The conservatives did not believe in the Westminster Confession, and they were willing to march forward only by retreating to a lower step. That is to say, they were not willing to march forward at all. They wanted to retreat, form a circle with the wagons, and be left in peace. But history is a covenantal battle which leaves no one in peace for long.
Machen tried to cooperate with the experientialists who were selling out his cause, but as the confrontation grew more intense, they dropped away from him, one by one. By trying to understand the battle in terms of a limited two-fold distinction--Christianity vs. liberalism--Machen never overcame the hatred that his proclamation of a Confessional religion had created in the ranks of the supposedly faithful.
Almost alone, Machen recognized that either Christ's creed or liberalism's creed would have to direct the Presbyterian Church. It would be a battle to the end to see one or the other triumphant. He announced his opinions openly, unlike his modernist opponents: "Mere concessiveness, therefore, will never succeed in avoiding the intellectual conflict. In the intellectual battle of the present day there can be no `peace without victory'; one side or the other must win."(54) But his temporary theological allies--defenders of a watered-down creed and a religion of institutional unity at almost any price--understood better than he did who their long-term allies really were. The long-term institutional allies of the limited-creed faction were the modernists. The experientialists knew the modernists would leave them alone to be culturally irrelevant in peace, precisely because of this cultural irrelevance.
The experiential religion is a religion of principled irrelevance in history. The modernists understood this and used this knowledge to gain the votes to expel those who preached the relevance of the Bible and the historic creeds and confessions, however limited in scope their concept of relevance may have been. The liberals needed only votes--one of the two sacraments they recognize, the other being a legal claim on other people's money. Year by year after 1925, the pietists sold the modernists their votes for the promise of peace. After 1936, they kept their pulpits and then collected their pensions.
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Footnotes:
1. Machen, "Christianity in Conflict," in Contemporary American Theology, edited by Vergilius Ferm (New York: Round Table Press, 1932), I:272-73.
2. In June, 1994, the press was once again in attendance. A controversy had arisen over the November, 1993, "RE-imagining 1993" conference, sponsored by the World Council of Churches. At that conference, ecumenical feminist ministers (including a few witches) and laywomen called upon a female divinity, Sophia, during a pagan communion meal. This was media-worthy. See "Feminist Crusade Sparks Holy War," Insight (July 25, 1994). The Presbyterian News Service released a summary of the meeting (Presbynet, Dec. 23, 1993). The denomination paid $66,000 to help fund this $390,000 conference. Over 400 women from the PCUSA attended, including 22 leaders. Of the almost 2,200 in attendance (83 were men), Presbyterians constituted the largest group from any denomination.
Presbyterian laymen briefly awakened from their traditional slumber to protest at the 1994 General Assembly. But the protest fizzled: the vote was 516 to 4 in favor of reconciliation. After the vote, delegates cheered, hugged, and wept. In protest, many congregations had withheld funds totalling $2.4 million; these funds were expected to be released. The Church's official statement upheld the Church's Reformed tradition, but it also affirmed the right to explore theological options. It supported those who had attended the conference. National & International Religion Report (June 27, 1994), p. 1.
3. Jomathan Dickenson, A Sermon Preached at the Opening of the Synod at Philadelphia (1722); extracts in The Presbyterian Enterprise: Sources of American Presbyterian History, edited by Maurice W. Armstrong, Lefferts A. Loetscher, and Charles A. Anderson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956), pp. 26-27.
4. Leonard Trinterud, The Forming of an American Tradition: A Re-examination of COLONIAL PRESBYTERIANISM (Salem, New Hampshire: Ayer, [1949] 1978), p. 38.
5. Charles G. Dennison, "Tragedy, Hope and Ambivalence: The History of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1936-1962, Part 1," Mid-America Journal of Theology, 8 (Fall 1992), pp. 155-56.
6. Trinterud, American Tradition, pp. 39-42.
7. Ibid., p. 43.
8. Ibid., p. 63.
9. Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Philadelphia: Westminster Theological Seminary, [1954] 1977), pp. 337-38.
10. Ibid., p. 338.
11. His consort was actress Marion Davies. This affair was made famous by Orson Welles' 1941 film, Citizen Kane. See W. A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1961).
12. Marshall Frady, Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 201.
13. Historian George Marsden writes of neo-evangelicalism: "Close connections with Billy Graham gave this new leadership national impact and attention. For the two decades after 1950, the most prominent parts of this more narrowly self-conscious evangelicalism focused around Graham." Marsden, "The Evangelical Denomination," in Marsden, ed., Evangelicalism and Modern America (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1984), p. xiii.
14. William E. Ashbrook, Evangelicalism: The New Neutralism, 9th ed. (Mentor, Ohio: Author, [1958] n.d.), pp. 10-17. Billy Graham: Performer? Politician? Preacher? Prophet? A Chronological Record Compiled from Public Sources (Wheaton, Illinois: Church League of America, 1982).
15. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), p. 150n.
16. John C. Stevens, Before Any Were Willing: The Story of George S. Benson (n.p., 1991), pp. 146-47.
17. A creed is one of the ancient statements of the Christian faith: Apostles', Nicene, Chalcedonian, etc. A confession is a later, more detailed summary of the Christian faith.
18. See Appendix C: "The Strange Legacy of the Westminster Assembly."
19. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), pp. 543-50. On the Presbyterian influence at the Constitutional Convention, see James H. Smylie, "We, the Presbyterian People: On Celebrating the Constitution of the U.S.A.," American Presbyterians, 65 (Winter 1987).
20. English Whigs were ideological allies of American Democrats. American Whigs and Republicans were ideological allies of Wellington- or Disraeli-type English Tories.
21. See Chapter 2, below.
22. Harold M. Hyman, A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (New York: Knopf, 1973); George Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Harper, 1958), chaps. 5-7.
23. C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction, rev. ed. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956).
24. Timothy P. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
25. A third Presbyterian, Benjamin Harrison, was a Republican. He defeated Grover Cleveland for the Presidency in 1888, and lost to him in 1892. Cleveland, son of a Presbyterian minister and husband of a Presbyterian wife, never joined the Church.
26. Philip M. Crane, The Democrat's Dilemma (Chicago: Regnery, 1964).
27. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957-60), vol. 2, The Coming of the New Deal.
28. J. A. Laponce, "Spatial Archetypes and Political Perceptions," American Political Science Review, 59 (March 1975), p. 17.
29. James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980), p. 22.
30. On the three viewpoints, see Chapter 1.
31. Machen, "Christianity and Culture," Princeton Theological Review, 11 (1913), pp. 1-15; reprinted in What Is Christianity?, edited by Ned Bernard Stonehouse (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1951), pp. 156-69. Elsewhere, I have used a parallel three-fold division: power religion, escape religion, and dominion religion. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), pp. 2-5.
32. R. J. Rushdoony, The Flight from Humanity: A Study of the Effect of Neoplatonism on Christianity (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1973).
33. The loss of optimism by liberal theologians in the post-1918 era in Europe and in the United States in the 1930's was accompanied by the rise of neo-orthodoxy, which emphasizes an existentialist encounter with God at the expense of propositional truth.
34. Stonehouse, Machen, p. 221.
35. These were the criteria of the General Assembly's Doctrinal Deliverances of 1910, 1916, and 1923, reprinted in Presbyterian Enterprise, p. 281.
36. See his statement that begins this Introduction.
37. He was the leader of a popular Bible study class held on or near the campus at UCLA in West Los Angeles. When other denominations that had campus ministries formed an interdenominational campus organization, Jamison refused to participate. Its creed was "cooperation without compromise." He was ordered by the Los Angeles Presbytery to bring his group in, but he still refused. Without a trial, the presbytery then erased his name from presbytery's rolls. This took place on January 24, 1933: "Jamison, Milo Fisher," The Orthodox Presbyterian Church 1936-1986, edited by Charles G. Dennison (Philadelphia: Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1986), p. 339.
38. The notes in The Scofield Reference Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1909) provide the most popular introduction to dispensational theology. For a critical study of dispensational theology, see Oswald T. Allis, Prophecy and the Church (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1945). For a defense, see Charles C. Ryrie, Dispensationalism Today (Chicago: Moody Press, [1965] 1988); Ryrie, Basic Theology (Wheaton, Illinois: Victor, 1986).
39. George P. Hutchinson, The History Behind the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod (Cherry Hill, New Jersey: Mack, 1974), p. 249. See The Constitution of the Bible Presbyterian Church (Collingswood, New Jersey: Independent Board for Presbyterian Home Missions, 1959), ch. XXXIII, p. 41.
40. "Jamison, Milo Fisher," op. cit.
41. My parents were members of his church in the 1960's.
42. As he told me in late summer, 1963, when I was about to leave California to attend Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, "Don't let them sell you on covenant theology." They did, however.
43. The Form of Church-Government, in Confession of Faith, p. 402. See Appendix C, below: section on "A Transformed Scottish Legacy."
44. A congregation with a vacant pulpit was to gather together for praying, singing, reading the Bible, and reading "the works of such approved divines, as the presbytery within whose bounds they are, may recommend, and they may be able to procure; and that the elders or deacons be the persons who shall preside, and select the portions of Scripture, and of other books to be read; . . ." The Form of Government, XXI; The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath School Work, 1904), pp. 387-88.
45. Augustine, On Baptism, Against the Donatists, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, edited by Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1979 reprint), vol. 4.
46. The Directory for the Publick Worship of God (1645), in The Confession of Faith (Publications Committee of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, 1970), p. 383.
47. Machen, "The Parting of the Ways--Part II," The Presbyterian (April 24, 1924), p. 6.
48. Warfield, "Apologetics," The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, 12 vols. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, [1907] 1951), I:234.
49. In fundamentalist circles, this outlook is codified by the slogan, "once saved, always saved." The act of "walking the aisle" after an "altar call" is regarded as definitive.
50. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1927, p. 68.
51. The main exception in recent history is the Southern Baptist Convention. There, a tiny group of dedicated confessionalists worked for over a decade to mobilize the conservative majority, 1977-1990. They conservatives steadily re-captured the Convention's leadership and its boards. This took a systematic plan and detailed knowledge of the organization's rules.
52. In the Dutch Calvinist tradition, the dominion covenant is called the cultural mandate.
53. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis, 2nd ed. (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987).
54. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1923), p. 6.