INTRODUCTION TO PART 3 It is required of all officers in the Presbyterian Church, including the ministers, that at their ordination they make answer "plainly" to a series of questions which begins with the two following: "Do you believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice?" "Do you sincerely receive and adopt the Confession of Faith of this Church, as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures?"
If these "constitutional principles" do not fix clearly the creedal basis of the Presbyterian Church, it is difficult to see how any human language could possibly do so. Yet immediately after making such a solemn declaration, immediately after declaring that the Westminster Confession contains the system of doctrine taught in infallible Scriptures, many ministers of the Presbyterian Church will proceed to decry that same Confession and the doctrine of the infallibility of Scripture to which they have just solemnly subscribed!
J. Gresham Machen (1923)(1)
Machen, as with previous Old School members, could not overcome the "crossed fingers" problem: ministers who publicly swore their commitment to the Confession, but who then defied its stipulations in teaching or preaching. These ordained men were not held judicially accountable to the terms--theologically precise terms--of their oaths. The Presbyterian court system had abandoned any defense of the Confession. The system of government declared by the Form of Government and the Book of Discipline no longer was being enforced.
Parallel Governments No later than 1910, there was a well-organized shadow government inside Northern Presbyterianism. This shadow government had its own rules, its own confession, and its own system of sanctions. Unless temporarily convenient to it, or unless forced upon it, this government would not abide by the written Confession and constitution of the Church.
This shadow government was shielded by the New School's tradition of resisting heresy trials. The New School in 1870 was not ready to enforce the Westminster Confession on a systematic basis, any more than it had been in 1837. Prior to the reunion, only Charles Hodge understood that the Old School would have to consent to a two-government system: official and unofficial, formal and substantive. New School ministers were confessing to a Confession that they had no intention of systematically enforcing in Church courts. This made possible an operating alliance between the modernists' shadow government and the New School.
Another aspect of this hidden government was the seminary system. As I have said earlier, from 1812 to 1871, Princeton had officially required that its incoming students be able read Latin well enough to read Turretin. But by the time of the reunion, this requirement had become a sham. Many students in 1870 could not read Turretin; instead, they read Hodge's lecture notes on Turretin, which were heavily, though not exclusively, based on Turretin. So, Hodge decided to put his notes in print: Systematic Theology (1871-73). Yet for another generation, the Church officially continued to pretend that every ordained man could read Latin fluently. Only in 1911 did the Church's presbyteries vote to substitute a bachelor's degree or master's degree in place of Latin.(2)
Presbyterianism officially placed the authority of ordination in the hands of the presbytery. But before he could be ordained, the candidate had to read Latin fluently (a sham by 1870) or earn an advanced academic degree (1911-), be a graduate of a seminary, and have a knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, all of which required formal education that the presbytery did not offer. Functionally, Presbyterianism after 1812 transferred the bulk of the ordination process to college professors (four years) and seminary professors (three years). Yet Presbyterians pretended that the presbytery was still in control: a one-hour (or less) exam. In short, a dual government system--separate sanctions--was in operation for ordination after 1812. It would be possible to argue that this tradition had begun through the transformation of New Side leader William Tennent's informal seminary of the late 1720's, which became the Log College in 1735,(3) which in turn became the College of New Jersey (1746). The college degree became mandatory for ordination.
Secular Education in America
The Calvinist theological seminary was the first institutionally separate graduate school in the United States: Andover (1808) and Princeton (1812). Beginning in 1876, Johns Hopkins University pioneered the secular graduate school in America. It was, in Marsden's words, "the virtual cradle of modern academic thought in America. . . ."(4) It was under the direction of Daniel Coit Gilman, who had arrived after completing his work in consolidating the University of California. He had been its second president, the man who shaped it. Gilman's first major public act was to bring Thomas Huxley, known as "Darwin's bulldog" and a champion of the recently invented term "agnosticism," to address the school in the fall of 1876, seven months after its official opening.(5) Johns Hopkins was committed to technical excellence, using the German educational model. Johns Hopkins, in turn, became the model for America's graduate schools. As Marsden summarizes this development: "Technical specialization almost inevitably meant that there would be vast realms separated from direct religious influences. . . . That meant that the universities themselves, as well as the vast majority of their disciplines, were defined according to the new professional scientific basis for which religion was considered irrelevant."(6) There was no protest from the Christian public, which had already accepted what Marsden calls "The larger tendency of modernity," i.e., "methodological secularization."(7) Seminaries did not escape this outlook. In 1876, Briggs delivered his first inaugural address promoting higher criticism; a decade later, Warfield was promoting lower criticism. Both forms of criticism rested on common-ground, religiously "neutral" principles of investigation.
The center of interest at Johns Hopkins in the 1880's was the weekly seminar conducted by Herbert Adams. This meeting was not called a seminar; it was called a Historical Seminary. In attendance at this Seminary were some of the major Progressive intellectuals, including Richard T. Ely (economics), J. Franklin Jameson (history), and Woodrow Wilson, who as a student was its scribe.(8) This Seminary was secular to the core.
Two Constitutions
In 1883-84, Wilson, still a graduate student, wrote a book, Constitutional Government. It was published in 1885. He submitted it as his Ph.D. dissertation at Johns Hopkins. It was accepted. In it, he identified the crucial distinction between the "constitution of the books" and the "constitution in operation."(9) That distinction would soon become fundamental in both the U.S. government and Presbyterian government. In 1887, the first U.S. regulatory commission was established, the Interstate Commerce Commission. A new bureaucratic structure was imposed on the Constitutional order. This structure would allow a new hierarchy based on economic self-interest to gain control over the consumers' flow of funds through government regulation of the market.(10) Under Wilson, 1913-1921, this regulatory system would be extended as never before. The hidden Constitution would replace the written one.(11)
Paralleling this development, a similar transformation took place in the Presbyterian Church. The Foreign Missions Board became both the model and the wedge. It raised funds outside of normal Church channels. This semi-independent structure of recruiting and funding was soon augmented by Dwight L. Moody's Northfield missions conferences, which in the late 1880's began attracting hundreds of young men who dedicated themselves to the foreign mission field. This Collegiate Great Awakening re-shaped foreign missions in the denominations.(12)
The modernists, who were political Progressives, established a shadow Presbyterian government by strengthening and extending the Church's system of permanent boards. When the Church added new layers of bureaucracy after 1908, modernists steadily sought and received employment in them. These agencies resembled the U.S. government's regulatory commissions in their independence from the legislative authority, i.e., the General Assembly. Progressives used the same system of infiltration and capture in both civil and ecclesiastical government. In both cases, they benefited from executive alternatives to legislative authority. This is the judicial process known as administrative law. It is undermining the Western legal tradition.(13)
In 1908, the Church established a new administrative bureaucracy: the Executive Commission, which would run the Church in between General Assemblies. This was the Church's major step in the creation of a shadow government. The shadow government had achieved invisible supremacy by 1920.(14)
Dead Letters and Hidden Agendas Ministerial oaths are the judicial basis of ordination. A covenant oath for which no institutional sanctions can be invoked is judicially a dead letter, whether in Church, State, or family. The oath-taker may, for sentimental or other personal reasons, adhere to the terms of the oath, but it no longer has the force of law behind it. If Presbyterian ministerial oaths were in fact dead letters institutionally after 1900, then historic Presbyterianism was equally a dead letter. The defining characteristics of Presbyterianism then became ecclesiastical rather than theological: tradition over confession, form over content. Yet this was not really the case, either, for there is always confession; there is always content. What had changed was the judicial character of the oath's content. The Confession's words remained, but new interpretations were now in effect. A hidden Confession had replaced the written Confession. The new Confession governed the boards and permanent bureaucracies of the Church, where decisions regarding the Church's operations were increasingly being made.
A Larger Problem
The problem of modernist ministers who taught doctrines opposed to the Westminster Confession was part of a more general problem: conservative ministers who paid no attention to the Confession. The modernists defied the Confession; a majority of the conservatives by 1910 simply ignored it. They had publicly sworn an oath to uphold the Confession and the two catechisms, but they were interested in other things. To hamper the modernists, let alone see them de-frocked, Machen had to gain the votes of Confessional indifferentists. This was Machen's dilemma because it had been the Old School's dilemma since the reunion.
Machen knew that the Church's operational confession had changed. He understood that this had undermined historic Presbyterianism. But he could not prove his case theologically to the satisfaction of the vast middle that held the sanction of the vote. Very late in the Presbyterian conflict, he was trying to reclaim the denomination from its long-term theological deterioration, but without any institutional means to enforce the formal terms of ministerial oaths. Machen and his supporters were judicially offense-less. After the Scopes trial in 1925, they became increasingly defenseless.
So, Machen made the best of it. He incorporated this institutional defenselessness into his overall strategy, especially after Princeton Seminary was restructured in 1929. He adopted a method of proof which was more than academic and rhetorical; it was institutional. He decided to force his opponents to throw him out for pressing the case for Confessional orthodoxy. This would, he believed, publicly demonstrate his theological case against them. He would force them to demonstrate that they had abandoned the Confession.
They always refused to admit that this was the case. (Their defenders still do.) They denied that he was being thrown out for theological reasons. They argued that the issue was exclusively administrative: a matter of institutional authority and mandatory obedience irrespective of the details of formal theology. But this was nonetheless a theological statement: an affirmation of the power religion. In 1935 and 1936, men who had long denied the legitimacy of imposing sanctions to defend the Westminster Confession's stipulations applied sanctions against those who did affirm its authority. There is no escape from sanctions. The question in 1936 was this: By which confession--the official one or the unofficial one? This was the battle over point three of the covenant, stipulations. There was another battle, however: over point two.
Rival Theologies: Representation Representation is point two of the biblical covenant. The covenantal questions are these: Who speaks for God in any organization? Who has the authority under God to enforce God's law in a particular organization? In short, to whom do subordinates report?
Ecclesiastical ordination is based on judicial representation. The question arises: Who is being represented? The Old School Presbyterians answered: God primarily, the Church's members secondarily. This ordination process is itself representative; it must be screened through men who are themselves ordained, and who are bound by the terms of the Church covenant. This view of Church officers is fundamental to Presbyterianism. The New School did not officially disagree, although the New School's emphasis was on personal experience and minimal confession rather than the detailed terms of the Confession of Faith and the Book of Discipline's sanctions.
Power and the General Will
The modernists did disagree with Presbyterianism's judicial basis of representation, but they could not do so publicly. Their view of God was radically different. Their god was the evolving god of spiritual process. This god reveals himself continually through mankind, which is continually evolving. There is no definitive revelation of a sovereign God to men in history, the modernists insisted. The people are sovereign, for they speak for the modernists' god; they manifest this god. There is no radical Creator/creature distinction in modernism, for there is no doctrine of definitive personal creation. Modernism is process theology, not creationist theology. Briggs did his best to equate his process theology with the traditional Calvinist doctrine of progressive sanctification,(15) but this was a tactic, not a serious theological position. Briggs' theology had no doctrine of the definitive imputation of Christ's perfect humanity as the judicial basis of personal salvation.
The people do incarnate god, modernism teaches, but they are an inchoate mass. They do not speak with a unified voice. Borrowing from Rousseau's political terminology, we could say that the people are the source of the General Will, but they do not express it. They themselves need representation. The sovereign people must be represented in a democracy, including the Church, but by whom? This was the institutional problem for the modernists.
The Church's answer was formal: representation by those who have been ordained. But the crucial figure in American Presbyterianism after 1926 was Speer, and he had never been ordained. The substantive answer as to who should represent the people's Church was ethical. The spokesman whose word must be obeyed is he who represents the interests of that sub-group which most faithfully voices the General Will, i.e., the spirit of the age, the climate of public opinion--the "best" opinions, of course. The spirit of the age in the 1920's was clearly not Calvinist. Thus, Presbyterian representation, while formally Calvinistic ("four-point Calvinism" after 1903), would have to be based on some other factor. For the modernists, this other factor was the ability to gain and maintain power, which in Rousseau's political theology is the meaningful manifestation of the General Will. Nisbet is correct: "It is political religion which Rousseau extols. . . ."(16) This religion has become the dominant religion of the modern world's intellectual and spiritual leaders.
Atonement vs. Moral Example
There was no way to reconcile Presbyterianism's judicial concept of representation with modernism's. Evolution and Christianity do not mix. The Confession's doctrine of progressive sanctification was undergirded by a theology of definitive judicial representation: Jesus Christ, in His judicial office of perfect humanity (the second Adam) died in place of His elect, i.e., died representatively. His perfect humanity is imputed judicially in history by God to the elect. ". . . God in justification imputeth the righteousness of Christ. . ." (Larger Catechism, Answer 77). This means that man's progressive sanctification is judged continually by God in terms of the fully complete, final sanctification achieved by Jesus Christ at His resurrection in history. Jesus Christ's achievement was in no way evolutionary; it was the very antithesis of evolution or process. By overcoming death in history, He definitively proved that the ultimate evolutionary process--life inevitably leading to death(17)--is not binding on man or the cosmos, both of which can be redeemed by God's grace.
The broad evangelical wing of the Church accepted the doctrine of judicial imputation, though not in its full Calvinist rigor, e.g., Jacob's pre-birth election but not Esau's. The modernists did not accept any of it. Thus, two irreconcilable doctrines of representation were operating inside the Presbyterian Church. Each view was an extension of a particular theology. The evangelicals proclaimed the God who declares all of His people "Not guilty!" in history on the judicial basis of the ethically completed work of Christ in history. The redeemed will escape God's final judgment at the end of time. In contrast, the modernists proclaimed a process divinity indistinguishable from the cosmos, one who does not bring final judgment in eternity, or if he does, few if any people are condemned (Briggs' view). Jesus supposedly did not act as man's representative judicial agent; rather, He acted as a moral example. All men can become what Jesus was. In the outline of his final sermon, which he preached at age 80 in 1931, Henry van Dyke wrote: "Man is sinful but not damned. Needs to be saved and can be saved. . . . Jesus is messenger of this forgiving love. . . . Truth as Jesus sees it is not static. Dynamic, unfolding, advancing."(18)
Sanctions
The crucial issue was sanctions. The Calvinists proclaimed the biblical God who will bring final judgment. The modernists refused to proclaim such a God; they did not believe in a literal hell. But if there is no hell, then the institutional Church does not possess the authority to declare someone outside the realm of special grace. This means that there can be no lawful excommunication based on a person's legal condition of being visibly lost and in danger of hell. The Church cannot lawfully declare in history what cannot become a reality in eternity.
Then on what judicial basis can a minister be removed from his pulpit? The modernists answered technically: "Only if his presbytery says he must, and the deciding issue must not be his theology." But this answer was a smoke screen, one which still blinds the eyes of Church historians. Theology is an inescapable concept. It is never a question of theology vs. no theology. It is always a question of which theology.
Rival Strategies: Representation Because their theologies of representation were different, the two main camps operated in terms of rival views of Church court authority. The modernists did not publicly operate in terms of their view until after 1930; their strategy prior to 1930 was a strategy of subversion. Their goal was to subvert the Church's system of authority and sanctions, negating it until they could capture it.
The Debate Over Judicial Precedent
What was the role of judicial precedent? When a court handed down negative sanctions, to what degree would future courts be bound by this decision? In other words, to what degree was a prior decision representative judicially for future decisions?
Two views of law were at war in the Church. The modernists viewed Church law much as they viewed Mosaic law: as a series of isolated declarations cobbled together by an unprovable theory of providential judicial unity. Such judicial unity does not exist in the biblical texts, they insisted. Such unity is mythical. Belief in such unity is the product of pre-scientific mind-set. Those who would enforce such a view of law are clearly not to be trusted. The moral law was not revealed by an unchanging, sovereign God. Law evolves; ancient law has no moral authority. Law is based on present power, not past precedent.
For as long as the conservatives controlled the Church's courts, the modernists refused to acknowledge the courts' authority to make anything except retroactive decisions in specific trials. They denied that one General Assembly's decision could lawfully bind any future General Assembly. They were formally correct. The Church's rules limited the General Assembly's authority. Only with two-thirds of all the presbyteries voting to change the Church's theological standards, or a majority to change the Form of Government, could new standards be adopted or applied.(19) But this rule only applied to the General Assembly acting as a legislative body. As a supreme court, its rulings served as precedents, which is why the Church periodically published updated compilations of its rulings, the Digest of the Acts and Deliverances of the General Assembly.
The conservatives' theory of law rested on a non-evolutionary view of history. They viewed New Testament law and the Ten Commandments as part of an unchanging moral order created by God. They believed in judicial precedents by the Church's courts. The Church's goal is to establish a judicial order that is in conformity to the Bible's moral and judicial requirements. Precedents should be honored. As with the Confession of Faith, judicial precedents should not be abandoned without major cause.
They concluded that if a man preaches what another man has been de-frocked for, he should also be de-frocked by the courts. Thus, the Church officially de-frocked Smith in 1894 because of Smith's declaration that he believed in the opinions voiced by Briggs. The conservatives believed in declaratory representation by individuals and courts.
If the supreme court's declaration of judgment does not bind future lower courts, and if it does not influence future supreme court decisions, then the rule of law collapses. Without legal predictability, every institution's survival is threatened. If one court decision sets no binding pattern on future decisions, every case will be appealed. The organization will be drained by the costs of endless adjudication. This undermines the rule of law. While the supreme court can change its mind under extraordinary circumstances--the Old School's 1864 reversal on slavery was a case in point--the preponderance of authority must rest with precedent.
Furthermore, without binding legal precedents, those disputants going before a judge cannot be sure what he will decide. Disputes are unlikely to be settled before they go into court, since each side has an equal opportunity to win, i.e., random. A court unbound by precedent can become arbitrary and even tyrannical. Given the fact of original sin, it will become arbitrary and tyrannical if more power is transferred to it or arrogated by it. To reduce the arbitrary power of the courts, conservatives defended judicial precedent. The Whig political tradition still prevailed in conservative circles.
The Modernists' Judicial Strategy
The rule of law can be undermined by the courts in two ways: (1) courts can ignore precedents, or reinterpret them into oblivion, thereby producing either legal chaos or judicial tyranny; (2) courts can refuse to try or convict, thereby producing either institutional chaos or tyranny by informal, extra-judicial institutional arrangements. In the first case, the courts' activity is the source of the problem; in the second case, the courts' inactivity is the source of the problem. The liberals on occasion promoted each of these possibilities.
The modernists understood Presbyterian law and tradition. They understood what they would have to do to deflect attacks against them. They understood what was necessary to take control of the Church's institutional structure. After 1900, they adopted a two-step judicial strategy at the national level: defensive and offensive. First, the defensive judicial strategy: reduce or eliminate the ability of the General Assembly, as a gathered annual body, to initiate anything judicially enforceable. Their strategy was to deny the legitimacy of all binding legislative declarations by the General Assembly. They became defenders of the initiating authority of the presbyteries. Second, the offensive judicial strategy: gain control over the supreme court, i.e., the General Assembly, through a new system of bureaucratic representation for the Assembly. Once accomplished, they could then reassert the power of the General Assembly. In short, "Power taketh away, and power giveth back; blessed be the name of power."
The General Assembly represented the Church once a year for one week in May. The supreme strategic goal of the modernists was to create a system of representation for the General Assembly in between the annual meetings, and then staff it with their representatives. They could not do this through a system of bishops. They had to do it by adding new layers of bureaucracy. This is the traditional Presbyterian way.
If this could be accomplished, their representatives could act in the name of the General Assembly in between the annual meetings, re-write the Form of Government, persuade the General Assembly to vote favorably on the alteration at an annual meeting, submit it to the presbyteries, persuade the presbyteries to vote for it, and then re-introduce judicial precedent with a vengeance, conducting a coordinated series of trials. I know of no secret planning committee that sat down in 1901 to create this plan of infiltration, but the nature of Presbyterian law and Presbyterian tradition, as well as Progressive politics, mandated that the modernists use bureaucracy rather than personal rule (episcopacy) in their capture of the denomination. The structure of the Form of Government made it clear what they had to do: (1) avoid heresy trials at the presbytery level and (2) gain full-time administrative control in the name of a national representative assembly that met only once a year.
If they could avoid heresy trials, they would not need to fear Church sanctions. They could believe whatever they wanted, and even preach it, assuming they did so in a judicious, mild-mannered way. They did not feel morally bound by previous precedents, for they did not believe in God's final judgment, the doctrine of judicial imputation, or the lawful authority of the Church to make such judicial declarations in the name of an absolutely sovereign God. They did not believe that such a God has granted to men a uniquely holy book which speaks authoritatively in His name. They did not believe in binding universal unchanging law. If they could avoid negative sanctions, in any way, at any cost, they could remain in the Church as faithful representatives of the god of process. They felt no moral obligation to leave. They felt a moral obligation to stay.(20)
The Conservatives' Judicial Strategy
Conservatives could thwart the modernists by an offensive use of the courts to screen out new heretics and remove previously ordained ones. This initiatory authority existed only at the presbytery level. The General Assembly could not initiate heresy trials. So, the General Assembly would have to content itself by instructing presbyteries. But this instruction could not be judicial except in the sense of guaranteeing the outcomes of future trials initiated by the presbyteries and appealed to the General Assembly.
The conservatives got the opportunity to use the General Assembly as an appeals court only once: in the Fosdick case, 1923-24. They issued a series of declarations through the General Assembly (1910, 1916, 1923) about what lower courts should do, but the presbyteries ignored these recommendations in every case but one. The conservatives acted as though the General Assembly were the supreme legislative body rather than the supreme judicial body. As a judicial body, just like the U.S. Supreme Court, it was also an unofficial but inevitable legislative body, but only in its capacity to declare judicial precedents that govern lower courts and all legislative assemblies. First, the General Assembly could initiate offensive actions by voting on overtures that would then be sent to the presbyteries for ratification. Second, the General Assembly could encourage offensive presbyterial action by issuing predictable final judgments in heresy trials. Both approaches required the cooperation of the presbyteries: to ratify changes in the Form of Government and to initiate heresy trials.
The second strategy was the easiest. It took only one elder to initiate a heresy trial, and he could appeal the results if the suspect was then declared innocent. But after 1900, only the Fosdick case produced a final decision by the General Assembly, and the decision was theologically indecisive.
The conservatives refused to pay the price of defending the Church from its enemies. They contented themselves with rhetorical gestures, the main one being their repeated calls for over four decades for the liberals to leave the Church. The liberals replied, schoolboy-like: "Make us!" The issue was negative sanctions. The conservatives refused to apply them.
The liberals were seeking power in the name of evolutionary ethics. Their strategy of subversion was based on process theology, which included ethics. Because the conservatives never really understood this application of modernism's process theology, they regarded the modernists as unethical men. By the standards of the Westminster Confession and the Bible, modernists were unprincipled men: wolves in sheep's clothing. But in terms of situation ethics, they were wiser than the children of light. The conservatives did not recognize this fundamental ethical separation. There is no common ethical system joining Christians and modernists. There is only temporary common procedure. Progressives became the masters of procedure in every field and in almost every influential national institution after 1900. They captured the robes of authority: representation.
This lack of common ethical ground is why the conservatives' insistence that the modernists leave the Presbyterian Church fell on judicially deaf ears. This demand merely amused the liberals. Why should they leave? The modernists were Progressives. They believed in democracy as a process. They also believed in bureaucracy as a structure promoting reform. They believed in reform, but they believed that reform comes only because a dedicated elite operates self-consciously within the democratic process to guide it.
The modernists saw themselves as representatives of an open-ended future that faces no final judgment other than what is common to all existence: the impersonal heat death of the universe. Conservatives saw themselves as representatives of a sovereign God who will bring final judgment. There was no common theological ground between them. There was only a common system of courts: civil and ecclesiastical. The modernists understood this far better than the conservatives did. They acted accordingly.
An Open-Ended Process Modern democracy is open-ended. It is not based on a judicial concept of a covenantal oath taken by citizens before a God who threatens negative corporate sanctions against them if they corporately violate the legal terms of the covenant (Ex. 19). In this sense, modern democracy is based on the theology of modernism: "no representative sanctions in history imposed by a God who threatens final sanctions in eternity."
The Old School had always accepted this view of political democracy. They were Whigs, as theologically conservative American Presbyterians had always been. Machen said over and over that the judicial standard of political democracy does not apply in a voluntary institution. He argued again and again that the democratic standards of civil government must not be imported into the Church. He pointed to the oaths of Presbyterian ministers as evidence of the difference between secular democratic civil government, which he accepted, and Church government. If his opponents ever understood this argument, they must have silently thought to themselves, "Says you." His view of the limits of political democracy--the boundary wall of separation between Church and State--meant nothing to his opponents. They were Progressives. They recognized no limits to democracy as a methodology. Theirs was the religion of democracy. They imported their religion into the Church. They would not be bound by theological precedents. They saw themselves as representing the future, not the past. In modernism's theology, the future is not bound by past legal or theological precedents. There was therefore no moral reason for any modernist to leave except through formal expulsion.
Machen was in a bind. He believed in Church court precedents. He also believed that the Church's highest court, the General Assembly, did speak authoritatively in history. It spoke either for God or for covenant-breaking man. This became increasingly clear to him as he was squeezed by the modernists and their judicially silent evangelical allies. By 1936, he would decide whether the Church was apostate in terms of the General Assembly's decision against him. He concluded this because he at long last recognized the institutional significance of point two and the biblical covenant--representation--and point four: sanctions. He understood that the General Assembly's decision would be a representative decision. It would speak to the whole world in terms of a covenant. The question was: Whose covenant?
The Effects of Crossed Fingers Only fanatics and highly principled people are willing to remain on what is clearly the losing side institutionally. This reality of human nature pointed to a time in which the average local church member, elder, and minister would knowingly adopt the tactic that the modernists adopted regarding the Confession: crossed fingers. They had been doing this since 1869 on what they regarded as minor issues. They would eventually have to do this with respect to major issues. If the long retreat from Confessional orthodoxy could not be reversed and turned into a successful offensive campaign, then the bulk of the conservative troops would eventually profess covenantal allegiance to a Church that opposed the fundamentals of their faith. They would eventually argue, as Machen heard them argue, that "the Presbyterian Church is fundamentally sound." Everyone would keep his fingers safely crossed, no matter how far from the Westminster Confession of Faith the might Church stray.
The modernists also adopted the tactic of crossed fingers. But there was a fundamental difference between the modernists and their opponents with respect to crossed fingers. The modernists were crossing their fingers as an offensive tactic which was part of a larger strategy, namely, to steal the inheritance left to their heirs by Confessionalists who had built the American Presbyterian Church for two centuries. They adopted crossed fingers to help advance their strategic plan to become the winning side. They did not adopt the tactic of crossed fingers as a way to remain forever on the institutional sidelines in a lost cause. For a modernist, crossed fingers are a way of life: situational ethics. Crossed fingers are part of a systematic strategy: inheritance. For a Calvinist Presbyterian, crossing his fingers represents personal moral compromise and institutional retreat. Crossing his fingers will eventually debilitate his will to resist. To preserve his self-esteem, he will have to re-define both his personal confession and his cause.
Most Calvinists in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., became progressively debilitated, 1901-1936. Therefore, they went through the painful process of re-defining their confession and their cause.
Darwinism, Progressivism, and Democracy The 1890's saw the rise of the Progressive Movement in the United States. It was Darwinist to the core. There had been a shift in the application of Darwinism in the 1880's, most powerfully presented by Lester Frank Ward in his two-volume Dynamic Sociology (1883) and reinforced a decade later by Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution (1894).(21) The individualistic Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and Yale's William Graham Sumner had become passé in Progressive intellectual circles. Spencer's famous phrase, "the survival of the fittest," no longer was understood by Progressives as the survival of the most competitive individuals within a species. It now meant the survival of the more powerful species. Species man, through the impersonal forces of unplanned and unplanning nature, has made an evolutionary leap of being: the human brain.
The reform social Darwinists believed that some men possess a unique knowledge of the laws of evolution. These men--meaning an elite group of scientists--can now direct the environment, including race, and also including social forces, along progressive paths. Apart from such planning, society (like nature) is too wasteful. The State should therefore adopt the recommendations of the planners.(22) This reversed the anti-State, pro-free market worldview of the previous generation of social Darwinists.(23) Arthur S. Link, who dedicated his career to a study of Woodrow Wilson, has summarized the new outlook: "By 1900 the ideal of an individualistic society had given way, at least in the minds of many intellectuals and political leaders, to the concept of a society organized for collective action in the public interest."(24)
The Progressive Movement was dedicated to reform: of education, State, and society, which included the institutional Church. What was not emphasized by historians until late in the twentieth century was the influence of Calvinism in the early lives of several of the founders of Progressivism. In his aptly titled book, Ministers of Reform, Robert M. Crunden writes of these founders: "They routinely noted [in their autobiographies] the pervasiveness of Calvinist influences in their homes and made few objections to their import. They frequently rebelled as soon as they were old enough to succeed, yet they remained devoted to their parents and tolerant of discipline as an inevitable part of their emotional worlds."(25) Crunden does not make it clear that the roots of this Calvinist heritage were in New School Presbyterianism and New Light Congregationalism. He understands, however, that "The political heritage that informed this religious heritage was usually abolitionist."(26) The archetypical representative of the Progressive Movement--its very incarnation--was Woodrow Wilson. Unlike most children who grew up in the South, Crunden observes, he became a Progressive.(27) What Crunden does not explain that Calvinist Presbyterianism in the South had been dominated by Old School theologians until long after the Civil War. Wilson joined the Northern Church.
The relationship between political/social Progressivism and theological modernism was not a one-way affair. Each of these reform movements shared common roots in New School/New Light Calvinism. Modernism was a rival theological system to both Old School and New School Calvinism. Progressivism was a rival political system to Whig political Calvinism, of which Machen was the last nationally prominent representative.
Darwin Replaces Newton
The Newtonian worldview was essentially mechanical. In Newtonianism, mathematics rules the cosmos. To the extent that physics became the ideal model for men's social theories, the quest for social order became the quest for fixed laws. Natural law was seen as above historical processes, bringing order to these processes. This worldview collapsed under the weight of Progressivism's version of social Darwinism. No better statement of the transformation can be found than Woodrow Wilson's 1908 book, Constitutional Government of the United States.
In 1906, Woodrow Wilson wanted to run for President in 1908 as the Democratic Party's nominee. He had an ideological problem. He had been a Hamiltonian throughout his classroom career: a believer in a strong central government.(28) The Hamiltonian vision was associated with the Republican Party generally, and after 1909, with Theodore Roosevelt's Progressives specifically.(29) This was not the tradition of the Democratic Party in 1906. The Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition was laissez-faire. Bryan's radical Populism had abandoned this tradition, but Populism was totally hostile to any elitist oligarchy--the essence of Hamiltonianism and, in Bryan's eyes, the Republican Party. The Democratic Party had nominated conservative lawyer Alton B. Parker in 1904, a defender of the gold standard, who lost so badly to Roosevelt that some of the Party's leaders were ready to abandon the old Andrew Jackson-Grover Cleveland-Whig liberalism tradition. Bryan despised this tradition; he called it "Clevelandism."(30) Bryan was correct when he wrote in a letter, immediately after Parker's defeat, "The defeat was so overwhelming that we are not likely to hear much more--for some years at least--of the reorganizers. The Democratic Party will now have a chance to become a real reform party."(31) Regionally, the Democratic Party was moving toward Progressivism throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, even in the South,(32) but the national party did not clearly position itself as Progressive until after Taft's defeat of Bryan in 1908.(33)
So, to win the 1908 nomination, Wilson publicly had to switch. He switched four times in four years: from Hamiltonianism to Jeffersonianism (1906); from Jeffersonianism to Progressivism (1907); back to limited Jeffersonian government (the New Jersey governor's campaign of 1910); and back to Progressivism (the day after he won the governorship). In 1906, speaking at a Jefferson Day dinner of the National Democratic Club, he extolled Jeffersonian ideals of the little man's rights.(34) His speech defended laissez-faire economics. This speech was well received by an audience of "Old Democrat," Grover Cleveland types who, like Wilson, were opposed to Bryan's Populism. But Wilson had been opposed to Bryan in the name of Hamilton; the conservative Democrats had been opposed to Bryan in the name of Jefferson.
Bryan won the party's nomination for a third time in 1908, so Wilson's subtle moves to win the nomination had failed. Wilson had to wait another four years. In 1907, Wilson openly moved from laissez-faire Jeffersonianism to Progressivism. He wrote Constitutional Government, a thinly disguised fat campaign tract, published the next year. It praised the Presidency as the central political office: head of the party. This was a self-conscious break from the Constitution's view of the office. The Constitution does not mention political parties, and the Framers had hated political factions in 1787. Wilson, having switched to Progressivism, had to undermine this older political faith. He turned to Darwin as the solution. The Framers had been Whigs because they had been Newtonians, he correctly argued. This Newtonian Whig worldview is incorrect, he insisted, and so is the Constitutional order that assumes it. "The government of the United States was constructed upon the Whig theory of political dynamics, which was a sort of unconscious copy of the Newtonian theory of the universe. In our own day, whenever we discuss the structure or development of anything, whether in nature or in society, we consciously or unconsciously follow Mr. Darwin; but before Mr. Darwin, they followed Newton. Some single law, like the law of gravitation, swung each system of thought and gave it its principle of unity."(35)
The checks and balances built into the Federal government by the Constitution are now a hindrance to effective political action, he said. This language of balances reflects mechanism. We need to overcome this mechanical way of thinking, Wilson said:
The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick cooperation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day of specialization, but with a common task and purpose. Their cooperation is indispensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no successful government without leadership or without the intimate, almost instinctive, coordination of the organs of life and action. This is not theory, but fact, and displays its force as fact, whatever theories may be thrown across its track. Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice.(36)
This was the Progressives' worldview: the State as a centralized agency of reform in which sufficient political power is concentrated to overcome the economic power of large corporations. The State becomes society's coordinator, like the central nervous system-brain connection: organic.
State Planning
Liberalism in America after 1900 meant State planning, especially through bureaucratic centralization and Federal regulation. This worldview was shared by theological modernists. It was the basis of the social gospel of the Federal Council of Churches. Political reform was to be achieved through the establishment of bureaucracies that would control business. This would be financed by money collected from taxpayers.
This view of political centralization was mirrored after 1900 in the hierarchies of the churches, including the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. The denomination consented to a centralization of power in agencies run by boards that were nearly independent, not merely from lay control but even from the General Assembly. Only if a scandal arose within a bureaucracy and gained public attention was the authority of a board likely to be challenged, which happened only once, in 1932-33, with the Board of Foreign Missions. These agencies were staffed by nearly permanent employees. Their jobs were not quite so secure as jobs were in the U.S. government. Government employees had Civil Service protection. Employees of the Church's bureaucracies were more vulnerable. The Presbyterian liberals' primary protective strategies were secrecy and the avoidance of confrontational rhetoric. Few documents are less rhetorical than bureaucratic reports.(37)
The worldview of Progressivism was based on the possibility of social healing through the centralization of political power, funded by other people's money.(38) This worldview became the operating standard for theological modernists, who were committed to the goals and means of the Progressive Movement.
Machen rejected this worldview, both as an Old School Calvinist and a nineteenth-century Whig political liberal. He was a political liberal of the New South. There was more of the post-1815 John C. Calhoun in his politics than of Daniel Webster or Henry Clay. He did not trust the State.
The Progressives viewed democracy as an open-ended process, just as they viewed natural forces. Evolution reveals itself progressively, but its revelations are always bounded by time. There is no ultimate truth higher than evolution. This outlook was applied to democracy. The masses will always lag behind the insights of the scientific elite. Ward had announced in 1883: "The knowledge which enables a very few to introduce all the progressive agencies into civilization tends not in the least to render the mass of mankind, though possessing equal average capacity for such service, capable of contributing any thing to that result. On the contrary--and this is a fact of capital significance--this inequality in the distribution of knowledge actually tends in no small degree to render a considerable amount of the knowledge prejudicial to the true interests of society."(39) The fundamental issue then becomes: Who in society is best able to discern these "true interests"? The scientific elite. As with Rousseau's General Will, which is revealed clearly to all men only in the hypothetical absence of society's many non-political institutions, and which can be perceived in the real world only by political rulers,(40) so are the true interests of society in Progressive thought. Social science became the Progressives' proposed key to understanding--a social science informed by historical understanding, i.e., historical process and the forces of social and cultural evolution.(41)
Democracy and Bureaucracy
Max Weber wrote his studies of bureaucracy and power during the Progressive era. He understood that bureaucracy accompanies mass democracy.(42) He also understood the new principle of representation: someone must speak and act in the name of the masses, modern society's sovereign. "The demos itself, in the sense of a shapeless mass, never `governs' larger associations, but rather is governed. What changes is only the way in which executive leaders are selected and the measure of influence which the demos, or better, which social circles from its midst are able to exert upon the content and the direction of administrative activities by means of `public opinion.'"(43) This observation applied to the Presbyterian Church.
Political democracy rejects the rule of old elites, such as nobles who hold their power by birth. By substituting self-certifying bureaucracy for rule by nobles, the democratic order creates another rival to democracy. The bureaucrats resist public opinion whenever that opinion is opposed to the expansion of bureaucratic power. "Thereby democracy inevitably comes into conflict with the bureaucratic tendencies which have been produced by its fight against the notables."(44) Couple this tendency to resist public opinion with a view of social evolution which elevates the scientific planner to the position of representative of the progressive future--the vanguard of the next evolutionary leap of being--and there is built into bureaucracy an anti-democratic theology of administrative process.
The Primacy of the Examination System
Modernism's god is the god of evolutionary process. This god speaks only through evolving mankind, and really only through the uniquely ordained representatives of evolving mankind. This ordination is not based on a covenant oath; it is based on the successful completion of an examination system. But this is what the Old School had also concluded: the functional sovereignty of the seminary examination system. Thus, functionally and judicially, the Old School was not in a strong position to stop the flood of theologically lax candidates for the ministry that was coming out of the seminaries. In 1914, Princeton Seminary graduated 29 students. This constituted 14 percent of the 200-plus graduates of the thirteen Northern Presbyterian seminaries, not counting Union.(45) The Old School was being swamped. Contrary to a 1992 study of the catalogues of Presbyterian seminaries,(46) Old School theology survived in the 1920's only at Princeton. The other formally Old School seminaries did not move overnight from Hodge, Strong, and Shedd to Barth, Brunner, and the two Niebuhrs in the 1930's. In between there was the Progressives' version of modernism. The transformation took three decades.(47) That the catalogues did not announce this theological shift until the 1920's is evidence that the modernists' strategy was in effect: no public confrontation.
The seminaries surrendered piecemeal. First, they hired men in the Old Testament department who taught higher criticism. Second, they quietly began to hire modernists in other departments, since the modernists' historicist methodology had already been accepted by the Old Testament department. This process was well underway by 1900. Union was the model, not Princeton. Third, the seminaries welcomed neo-orthodoxy in the 1930's and 1940's. The supreme irony here is that by the time the modernists captured the Northern Presbyterian Church in 1936, modernism was itself becoming passé; the existentialism of neo-orthodoxy and the political realism of Reinhold Niebuhr were rapidly replacing it.
Throughout the period surveyed in this book, a stream of ministers was coming into the Presbyterian Church from other, less theologically rigorous denominations. From 1870 to 1926, over 5,100 of the 11,500 ordained ministers were received from other denominations. The percentage rose steadily after 1900: from almost one-third during the entire period to almost 39 percent, 1922-26.(48) The liberals had only to be patient. Time and seminary education were on their side.
Other People's Money
American Progressives had a strategy, which culminated in 1913 with the Sixteenth Amendment (the Federal income tax), the Seventeenth Amendment (the direct election of U.S. Senators), and the establishment of the Federal Reserve System, a quasi-public central bank relatively free from interference by Congress or the President that would possess a monopoly over the nation's monetary policy. Their strategy was to impose their agenda through the use of other people's money. The British Fabians achieved the income tax in 1911. Their forebears in 1694 had set up the Bank of England, the model for all successive privately owned, publicly sanctioned central banks.(49) Now it was America's turn.
The Progressives understood that the average citizen did not agree with their view of scientific management by an educated elite through government coercion. William Jennings Bryan's opposition to the Eastern Establishment, from his 1896 Democratic presidential nomination until his death in 1925, reminded them that an anti-elitist Populist political movement opposed them. The Populists also wanted extensive government controls, but not if the wealthy elite would benefit. The Progressives understood that individuals would not voluntarily finance all of the social programs that were dear to the hearts of most Progressives. The Progressives' strategy was to finance their projects through money collected by law from people who would not volunteer these funds. Like the Populists, Progressives needed to reach directly into the wallets of the citizenry in order to fund their reform schemes. The Sixteenth Amendment achieved this goal even though, technically speaking, it was never properly ratified by voters(50)--a judicial "oversight" that academic historians have never bothered to explore.
The Presbyterian Debate Over Economics Presbyterian liberals were Progressives. The pronouncements of the Federal Council of Churches, founded in 1908, reflected the Progressives' political agenda: the social gospel of the Council's 1908 Social Creed of the Churches. (John D. Rockefeller, Jr., personally contributed five percent of the first year's budget.)(51) A modified version of these pronouncements was presented to the 1910 General Assembly as a report of the Special Committee on Social Problems, appointed by the 1909 General Assembly. This report was presented in the same year as the theologically conservative five-point Doctrinal Deliverance. The report did not explicitly call for the State to enforce child labor laws, shortened hours for women, and sabbath laws, but the State's action was implied.(52) It did not name the Federal government as the proper agency of enforcement. So, the report was ambivalent: a statement of social and economic goals without any mention of how this should be accomplished. The Assembly voted to approve it. From 1912 to the mid-1920's, conservatives resisted or de-fanged such pronouncements except for those associated with Prohibition and sabbath laws.(53) But they did not have the votes to stop these pronouncements completely.
Presbyterian liberals wanted to achieve in ecclesiastical affairs what the Federal government achieved through the income tax: administrative centralization without loss of funding through the defection of those paying the bills. They had a model: the Episcopal Church. They saw what Episcopalian liberals had achieved through administrative centralization. This process had accelerated after the withdrawal of the Calvinists from the denomination in 1873 to establish the Reformed Episcopal Church, which, like the Presbyterian Church, was headquartered in Philadelphia. When Briggs needed a place of refuge, he was ordained by the Episcopalian Church. After that, he could write Church Unity without fear of retaliation.
The Conservatives' Response
The most vocal Presbyterian opponent of Progressivism's economic ideas in these years was Princeton Seminary's William Brenton Greene, Jr., professor of apologetics (1893-1926), who wrote a hundred-plus book reviews opposing the social gospel.(54) But short book reviews by one man in an in-house academic journal did not constitute a successful defense. Greene and his associates did not offer an alternative economic framework in the name of the Bible. In fact, they denied that such an alternative existed. There was no systematically biblical, exegetical, conservative Protestant alternative to the baptized left-wing humanism of the Federal Council and its theological equivalents. There was only baptized right-wing humanism: Scottish Enlightenment sociology, i.e., some variant of nineteenth-century political liberalism. Greene presented this view; so did Machen in the 1920's.
In 1914, Greene issued a challenge to the social gospel in the name of New Testament ethics, but it was merely the familiar defense of nineteenth-century Whig individualism combined with Christian pietism. He complained: "Sociology is a more popular study than theology and the reason is that it puts its stress not in individual regeneration but on social reformation."(55) He began with the assumption that all the Mosaic laws governing society are judicially annulled today. Then he said that their underlying "sociological principles" are still sound.(56) He suggested no way to get from these sound principles to actual civil legislation. (Neither had any of his ideological predecessors.) Furthermore, "Our Lord was anything rather than a social reformer or a teacher of sociology."(57) So far, he had offered no alternative to the modernists' Progressivism.
Greene openly rejected the Federal Council's 1908 Social Creed of the Churches.(58) The Bible does not pass judgments on such topics, he insisted, so the Church should not. "The authority of the Bible does not cover every sociological question."(59) Yet his silence with regard to what questions it does cover implied that it covers no sociological question. The minister's great work, he concluded, "is not to agitate even for the social principles laid down in the Bible." Rather, he is to preach the gospel. Greene ended his essay with this announcement: "This is the supreme and the most comprehensive lesson of the Bible regarded as the text-book in Sociology."(60) In short, the Bible is judicially silent on social issues, so the minister ought to be silent, too.
What Greene really was saying was that the Bible is not a textbook in sociology. Sociology is judicially independent of the Bible. The great issues of sociology, meaning social theory, are not really so great; they are adiaphora: things indifferent to the faith. Greene was arguing against the Federal Council's manifestos in the same way that Hodge and other Old School theologians had argued against abolitionism: by steadfastly avoiding an appeal to the texts of the Bible in search of an alternative worldview. This theological defense failed miserably with respect to abolitionism and therefore also with respect to the Old School's authority in the nation after 1865 and in the Northern Presbyterian Church after 1869. It failed equally miserably with respect to modernism's Progressivism. It was not Greene's Calvinist Whig theology that prevailed over the old modernism; rather, what prevailed was the new existential modernism of Barth and Brunner and the left-wing political realism of Reinhold Niebuhr.(61)
The Presbyterian conservatives tried to defeat something with nothing. This defensive effort was doomed. The spirit of the age was contrary to the older non-interventionist political liberalism: the politics of Grover Cleveland. It was contrary to the older free market social Darwinism. Increasingly, so was the spirit of the Presbyterian colleges, whose younger faculty members had earned advanced academic degrees from secular universities. The liberals had only to bide their time in order to win. Eventually, a younger generation of university-trained seminary professors would replace the dwindling and aging Old Guard, which held forth only at Princeton by 1914. Only one younger faculty member at Princeton publicly articulated Greene's views: Machen, who became an assistant professor of New Testament in 1914. Few Presbyterians outside of the Princeton campus had heard of him until the first week of 1924. It was Henry van Dyke's resignation from the First Church of Princeton and his press release on December 31 that catapulted Machen into the limelight.
Follow the Money Events are not the product of vast impersonal forces. Ours is not a cosmically impersonal universe. Mobs usually have leaders;(62) movements always do. Movements also have financial supporters. Theological modernism from 1910 to 1936 and beyond did, too. Most of these supporters were simple people who put their weekly offerings into collection plates, not recognizing that their money was being used to undermine the confessionally Christian worldview they had grown up with.
But there was another source of the funding, one who understood early what Franklin Roosevelt would later call pump-priming: spending money strategically in order to get far more money flowing. That man was John D. Rockefeller, Jr. He and his two employees--Frederick Gates, who had advised his father,(63) and, beginning in 1920, Raymond Fosdick--spent enormous sums of money, 1910 to 1960, to redirect American religious, intellectual, and industrial life, and foreign policy. They were remarkably successful, yet they have received very little credit or blame. This was also part of their plan. I can do no better than to quote my colleague from our graduate school teaching assistantship days, Charles Harvey, who wrote a series of articles in 1982--insufficiently appreciated--on the Rockefeller connection: "The obscurity of Rockefeller's role is partly due to his artful circumspection as heir to the world's largest industrial fortune and the controversies surrounding its formation. The oversight is also due, one suspects, to the aversion of historians to what might seem a vulgar economic determinism or even a conspiracy thesis. Yet, as with a number of other major developments in the first half of the twentieth century, to ignore Rockefeller is to miss much of the inside story."(64)
This is why I do my best to follow at least some of the Rockefeller money in the following chapters.
Conclusion After 1900, the modernists adopted a new strategy. It was based on the infiltration and strengthening of the bureaucracies and boards of the Church. They understood the threat of de-frocking; they respected power. Power is what they respected above all. They decided that discretion was the better part of valor. They were willing to bide their time, publicly testing the climate of ecclesiastical opinion occasionally but not continually. They did not depart from the Church even though Briggs and Smith had been de-frocked and two had resigned before their trials in the General Assembly: Swing in 1874 and McGiffert in 1900. They did not regard the Church's courts as representing a sovereign God in history. They believed in a god who reveals himself progressively only through the processes of history. If they could remain in the Church and gain control over its judicial agencies, they could someday impose sanctions in terms of their values. They would thereby reveal themselves as this evolving god's representatives in history.
The modernists had a theology. This theology was attractive and powerful. Even Machen, the most astute of their opponents, did not fully understand the extent of this theology's comprehensive claims. We know that he did not understand it because he kept repeating the naive, sanctionless request of the 1892 General Assembly: modernists should avoid violating their consciences and leave the Church. But they were not violating their consciences. They were Progressives. Such an act of voluntary withdrawal was regarded by the modernists as worse than cowardice: it was foolishness. They saw Church government as an open-ended evolutionary process. Their goal was the capture of America's greatest ecclesiastical treasure: colleges, seminaries, church buildings, a stream of income from donors, a prestigious denomination's reputation, and perhaps even political influence. Resign? Were their opponents fools?
Machen knew that modernism had a radically different view of God, propositional truth, and the Church, but he did not understand that it also had a radically different view of representation and sanctions. He fought his war on points one, three, and five of the five covenantal battlefields: theology proper (the doctrine of God); propositional truth (creedalism); and succession, meaning Church growth as an aspect of the expansion of God's kingdom in history. He understood very well that modernism had a rival view of the earthly future: the kingdom of God vs. the ecumenical kingdom of man. The battle over succession in Machen's day was the two-front battle over ecumenism: home missions (ecclesiastical ecumenism vs. personal evangelism) and foreign missions (universalism-ecumenism vs. personal evangelism). But he did not pay close attention to the modernists' theology in points two and four: representation and sanctions. Here was where the modernists chose to concentrate their efforts, 1901-1936, for in these two areas of the covenant the issues of power are settled in history. As power religionists, the modernists paid very close attention to points two and four. It was here that the battle would be won or lost, especially point four: sanctions. The crucial issue was sanctions.
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Footnotes:
1. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1923), p. 163.
2. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1911, pp. 197-98.
3. Cited in Leonard Trinterud, The Forming of an American Tradition: A Re-examination of COLONIAL PRESBYTERIANISM (Salem, New Hampshire: Ayer, [1949] 1978), p. 63.
4. George Marsden, "J. Gresham Machen, History, and Truth," Westminster Theological Journal, 42 (fall 1979). p. 159.
5. George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 151-52.
6. Ibid., p. 156.
7. Ibid.
8. Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1927), Youth, 1856-1890, pp. 178-79.
9. Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, [1956] 1973), p. 30.
10. Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (New York: Free Press, [1963] 1977).
11. Arthur S. Miller, The Secret Constitution and the Need for Constitutional Change (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1987), ch. 1. Miller discusses the reality of the elite Establishment's control over this secret Constitution. The Rockefeller Foundation briefly funded Professor Miller, which he said helped him develop his thesis.
12. See Chapter 14, below: section on "Foreign Missions and Ecumenism."
13. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 33-41.
14. See Chapter 6, below: Section on "The Interchurch World Movement, 1919-1921."
15. Briggs, Whither? A Theological Question for the Times, 3rd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, [1889] 1890), p. 147.
16. Robert A. Nisbet, "Rousseau and the Political Community," in Nisbet, Tradition and Revolt: Historical and Sociological Essays (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 25.
17. Ultimately, the heat death of the universe: the triumph of entropy. Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988), ch. 2.
18. Tertius van Dyke, Henry van Dyke: A Biography (New York: Harper & Bros., 1935), p. 412. He preached it four places: (1) Seal Harbor, Maine; (2) Bar Harbor, Maine--both located on Mount Desert Island, the enclave of America's Establishment; (3) the Brick Church in New York City, where he had been the pastor; and (4) First Church, Princeton, where he had walked out in 1923 because of Machen's preaching, notifying the press of his decision.
19. The Form of Government, XXIV:I, II, The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath School Work, 1904), pp. 389-90.
20. Cf. Henry van Dyke, The Bible As It Is (New York: Session, 1893), p. 29. See Chapter 5, above: section on "Briggs' Second Defense in Presbytery," subsection, "Van Dyke's Test."
21. Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., Progressivism in America (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974), ch. 2.
22. For a detailed discussion of this shift in Darwinism, see Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis, 2nd ed. (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), Appendix A.
23. Herbert Spencer, The Man versus the State (Indianapolis, Indiana: LibertyClassics, [1884] 1982); William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes to Owe Each Other (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, [1883] 1961). Reprinted, Yale University Press, 1925, 1934.
24. Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910-1917 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1954), p. 1.
25. Robert M. Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization, 1889-1920 (New York: Basic Books, 1982), p. 3.
26. Ibid., p. 3.
27. Ibid., p. 9.
28. This was the assessment of his student, Raymond Fosdick: Chronicle of a Generation: An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Bros., 1958), p. 50.
29. Link, Wilson, p. 19.
30. Cited in Paolo E. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan, 2 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), I, Political Evangelist, p. 319.
31. Ibid., I:352.
32. Dewey Grantham, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983).
33. David Sarasohn, The Party of Reform: Democrats in the Progressive Era (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989).
34. Henry Wilkinson Bragdon, Woodrow Wilson: The Academic Years (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1967), pp. 339-41.
35. Woodrow Wilson, The Constitutional Government of the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, [1908] 1961), pp. 54-55.
36. Ibid., pp. 56-57.
37. Anyone who doubts this should spend a day reading sample passages from the thousand-plus pages of board reports published annually after 1906 in Volume 2 of the Minutes of the General Assembly.
38. Ekirch, Progressivism in America, Parts 3, 4.
39. Lester Frank Ward, Dynamic Sociology; or Applied Social Science, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, [1883] 1907), II:535.
40. Nisbet, "Rousseau and the Political Community," Tradition and Revolt, ch. 1.
41. Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).
42. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by Guenther Roth and Claude Wittich (New York: Bedminster, 1968), p. 983.
43. Ibid., p. 985.
44. Ibid.
45. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1914, pp. 328-68.
46. John M. Mulder and Lee A. Wyatt, "The Predicament of Pluralism: The Study of Theology in Presbyterian Seminaries Since the 1920s," in The Pluralistic Vision: Presbyterians and Mainstream Protestant Education and Leadership, edited by Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks (Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox Press, 1992), ch. 1.
47. Lefferts A. Loetscher, The Broadening Church: a study of theological issues in the presbyterian church since 1869 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), pp. 77-82.
48. Herman C. Weber, Presbyterian Statistics Through One Hundred Years, 1826-1926 (n.p.: The General Council, Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., 1927), p. 103.
49. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688-1783 (New York: Knopf, 1989).
50. This thesis, accompanied by photographic reproductions of the primary source documentation, is presented by Bill Benson and M. J. Beckman, The Law That Never Was (South Holland, Illinois: Constitutional Research Assn., 1985); cf. XVI: The Constitution's Income Tax Not Ratified (Washington, D.C.: American Liberty Information Society, 1985).
51. Albert Frederick Schenkel, The Rich Man and His Kingdom: John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Protestant Establishment, 1900-1960 (Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1990), p. 187.
52. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1910, pp. 230-32.
53. Gary Scott Smith, "Conservative Presbyterians: The Gospel, Social Reform, and the Church in the Progressive Era," American Presbyterians, 70 (Summer 1992), pp. 93-96.
54. Earl William Kennedy, "William Brenton Greene's Treatment of Social Issues," Journal of Presbyterian History, 40 (1962), pp. 92-112.
55. William Brenton Greene, Jr., "The Bible as the Text-Book in Sociology," Princeton Theological Review, 12 (Jan. 1914), p. 7.
56. Ibid., pp. 13-14.
57. Ibid., p. 19.
58. Ibid., p. 21.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid., p. 22.
61. Donald B. Meyer, The Protestant Search for Political Realism, 1919-1941 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, [1960] 1973).
62. There are few groups more dangerous than a mob without a leader. A law-enforcement officer must then somehow create one in order to deal with the mob. This, at least, was Wyatt Earp's opinion, to whom I defer in such matters.
63. Gates had been the educational secretary of the Northern Baptists. Charles E. Harvey, "John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Herbert Hoover, and President Wilson's Industrial Conferences, 1919-1920," in Voluntarism, Planning and the State: The American Planning Experience, 1914-1946, edited by Jerold E. Brown and Patrick D. Reagan (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1988), p. 28.
64. Ibid., p. 25.