INTRODUCTION TO PART 4 It is our duty not to withdraw from the Presbyterian Church. Christian honor requires us to remain.
Henry van Dyke (1893)(1)
Like Shakespeare's Brutus, van Dyke was an honorable man. So were they all honorable men. Unlike Brutus and his colleagues, however, they won.
Van Dyke announced a new rhetorical strategy for his liberals in 1893 manifesto, A Plea for Peace and Work. He could see what was going to happen to Briggs. He knew that Briggs' confrontational rhetoric had been the cause of his imminent defeat. He was determined that it should not happen again. Because of Henry Preserved Smith's public commitment to Briggs, he followed Briggs out the door in 1894. McGiffert left under fire in 1900. But by then van Dyke was ready for the next phase, beginning with creedal revision and a new hymnal, which became realities in 1903. For a decade longer, soft words triumphed. Meanwhile, he became the best-known literary figure in Presbyterianism. The outside world gave him great respect. Then, in 1913, van Dyke threw down a verbal gauntlet: he came to the defense of his son, as a good father is expected to. He came with a challenge: "Try me for heresy if you dare." No one dared. A decade later he escalated the rhetoric again by releasing to the press his letter to the treasurer of the session at First Presbyterian Church of Princeton: "I'm leaving until Machen leaves." He left. He got away with it. In 1933, in the year of his death, he led the Church to another revision of the hymnal. It had all been so easy. And every summer, he refreshed himself among the scions of the American Establishment on Mount Desert Island.
In van Dyke's words and van Dyke's life we see the grand strategy of theological liberalism. It began with a willingness to moderate liberalism's image for the sake of public opinion. Liberals, led by van Dyke, sought to create a pair of public images. The images fostered were these: a band of good men doing good works who were being assailed by right-wing extremists who were hampering good works for the sake of antiquated dogmas. This image of liberalism was adopted by the modernists' allies: the humanist, Progressive media, which reinforced the message from what appeared to be independent sources.
The conservatives were caught in a pincer movement between two wings of the same modernist army: inside and outside. Unless the conservatives were willing to adopt Machen's two-religions model, they would never understand that their mortal enemies had launched a systematic, carefully coordinated strategic pincer movement against them. They would not understand that the pagans outside the Church were merely echoing the contrived imagery established by the pagans inside the Church. This is why Christianity and Liberalism was so important as a statement of the conservatives' position. It was an affront to the liberals then; it is an affront to them today. Most of the conservatives failed to take it seriously then, and most of them fail to take it seriously today.(2)
Machen's analysis was the conservatives' equivalent of van Dyke's Plea of Peace and Work. It provided a diagnosis of the problem: two irreconcilable religions in the same Church. It also provided a prognosis: not good. In 1936, both the diagnosis and the prognosis proved accurate.
The liberals had a systematic, comprehensive, consistent strategy. The conservatives did not. The liberals had tactics that were integrated into their strategy. The conservatives did not. The liberals had the advantage of being part of a self-confident Progressive Movement that saw itself as the wave of the future. The conservatives did not. The Progressives' eschatology was a secularized postmillennialism.(3) With the exception of the Princetonians, American conservative Christianity after 1865 had become premillennial or amillennial: without cultural hope in this, the "Church Age."(4)
You can't beat something with nothing. Strategically, the conservatives had next to nothing. The liberals had a great deal. Most of all, they had the climate of respectable intellectual opinion on their side. They were historicists in an era of historicism. They were social reform Darwinists in an era of social reform Darwinism (post-1890). They were dogmatically anti-dogmatic, in an era of dogmatic anti-dogmaticism. They were for ecclesiastical pluralism in an age of political pluralism. Their spiritual accomplices outside the Church controlled the major institutions of higher learning, and the Presbyterian Church required its ministerial candidates to graduate from these institutions. Above all, they were men who had rejected the doctrine of hell in a culture increasingly dominated by an educated elite that had rejected the doctrine of hell. The crucial issue was sanctions.
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Footnotes:
1. Van Dyke, The Bible As It Is (New York: Session, 1893), p. 29.
2. See Preface, above, section on "Hart Attack."
3. Jean B. Quandt, "Religion and Social Thought: The Secularization of Postmillennial Thought," American Quarterly, 25 (Oct. 1973).
4. James H. Moorhead, "The Erosion of Postmillennialism in American Religious Thought, 1865-1925," Church History, 53 (March 1984).