PREFACE Historians begin with basic intentions, as do all persons who plan to reach an objective. Self-consciously or otherwise, they approach their work with some notion of what they expect to do with a topic. It is often difficult to ascertain the subtler aspects of purpose because at the outset the authors frequently do not realize what they intended to accomplish.
Henry Warner Bowden (1985)(1)
Let it never be said of me that (1) I do not realize what I intend to accomplish when I write a book or (2) there is anything subtle about my purposes. I am about as subtle as a high voltage cattle prod.
On the surface, this is a book about Church history: not one of the hot topics in any recent American generation's curriculum, even in theological seminaries. Within the field of Church history, the least interesting subdivision for most academic historians is denominational history. This book at first glance is a denominational history--a denomination that has yet to see its first full-scale scholarly history, almost three centuries after its founding in America. Worse; it is a large book that focuses on a relatively brief period in that denomination's history: 1869 to 1936. There is already another seemingly definitive book in the field, Lefferts Loetscher's The Broadening Church (1954), one of the most influential books in American Presbyterian Church history, not just as a secondary source but as a primary source.(2) It has become the standard account for non-Presbyterian Church historians. This brings me to one of my not-too-subtle purposes: to provide an antidote to that book.(3) Warning: like Ipecac, Crossed Fingers will upset many tummies prior to emptying them.
It is not just that I do not agree with the "spin" that Loetscher put on the events and debates he surveyed. It is that he, like so many Church historians, refused to look outside the Church at the broader sweep of political and intellectual affairs in which the Presbyterian Church was operating. It was as if these ecclesiastical events were taking place in an intellectual and cultural vacuum. It was as if the battle to control the Northern Presbyterian Church had not been the representative moral conflict of the era: where modernism challenged traditionalism in a struggle for the hearts, minds, and wallets of men.
Exclusion is the problem with all specialized histories. The historian asks: "Which events should be left out of my version of the story?" The problem of exclusion becomes acute whenever a central institution is perceived by the historian as a peripheral one. The specialist concentrates his attention on internal organizational affairs when external affairs were just as important. When this happens, the historian becomes an antiquarian wielding footnotes.
This surely is what happened to Edwin Rian, who wrote the Calvinists' version of The Broadening Church. He wrote The Presbyterian Conflict (1940) as an apologetic for a tiny minority group's secession in 1936, not as a discussion of the importance to American life of the pre-secession conflict. His book says: "See all the trouble we were compelled on principle to make!" (Seven years later, he changed his mind.)
Much the same can be said of Loetscher. He wrote his book as an apologetic to show why all the unpleasant theological conflict ended after the secession. His book says: "See all the unnecessary trouble those people made!" I do not think Loetscher came close to understanding how central to American thought, culture, and national politics the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. was, 1869 to 1936.(4) If he did understand it, his book does not reflect this understanding.
Hart Attack This book is also an attack on one aspect of D. G. Hart's 1994 biography of J. Gresham Machen. Dr. Hart's award-winning book is admirable with respect to chronicling the details of Machen's life--almost as good as his 1988 Ph.D. dissertation on the same subject. But it suffers from a fatal defect: it rejects Machen's analysis of the spiritual crisis of the Christian Church in his era.
Machen argued that there were two rival religions warring for control in the Protestant churches: Christianity and liberalism. These were not two sides of the same religion; they were two rival religions. Only one of them could win. In Christianity and Liberalism (1923), Machen identified theological liberalism as what we today would call the religion of humanism. The liberals, Machen implied (and said in private letters), were wolves in sheep's clothing. They were apostates. By 1936, almost no one believed Machen regarding the irreconcilable nature of the two religions except for the most self-conscious liberals and the nationally known skeptic, H. L. Mencken. Dr. Hart does not believe him, either. In this respect, he has not been alone. Approximately two million members of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., also refused to believe, 1923-1936.
Dr. Hart tries to persuade the reader that there was a distinction between cultural modernists (bad guys) and Presbyterian theological modernists (basically, well-meaning guys).
. . . the use of a common adjective to describe both "modernist" Protestants and "modernist" intellectuals creates confusion. Except for the most radical fringe of Protestant "modernists," mainstream and liberal Protestants only sought adjustments to traditional Christianity. They wanted to preserve historic Protestant certainties and the privileged position of Protestantism in American culture. They thought they could reach this goal with tactical adaptations of the historic faith. Cultural modernism, by contrast, according to David Hollinger, was "resoundingly post-Biblical" and rejected inherited religious authority. Liberal Protestantism's confidence in a benevolent God and its optimism about finding a lasting solution to the problems of modern society were "distant" from the intents of modernist writers and intellectuals.(5)
For this string of implausible assertions he offers no evidence. Crossed Fingers offers hundreds of pages of evidence that Machen was correct in his assessment of theological modernism, and Dr. Hart is wrong in his. In his own subtle academic way, Dr. Hart, the librarian at Machen's legacy, Westminster Seminary, is telling the hard-pressed heirs of those who lost the Presbyterian conflict that Machen had it wrong. In doing so, he is also telling the victors that their ecclesiastical predecessors had been correct. He is implying that Machen's inclusivist, peace-seeking critics were justified in asking Machen to be more reasonable, more charitable, and to sit down and shut up. He is implying that the liberals who attacked Machen's theology and drove him out of the Church were really not all that bad, and probably were provoked by Machen's exaggerated assessment of their theology and their intentions. After all, to quote Dr. Hart, they were only seeking "adjustments to traditional Christianity." They were only seeking ways "to preserve historic Protestant certainties."
If you believe this, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Or a seminary in Philadelphia.
Presbyterian modernist leaders were not only as morally corrupt as Machen said they were, they were a lot more corrupt than Machen ever said in public. They were thieves, charlatans, and liars who were not only in an alliance with cultural modernists; they were a major part of cultural modernism. They were, in fact, cultural modernism's Levites, ranking just below the Aaronic priests who officiated in the secular temples of higher education. Deception was fundamental to their strategy. Machen identified them as morally corrupt apostates inside the camp of the faithful. This is why he became their most feared and hated enemy after William Jennings Bryan died in 1925. They had to silence him, just as they had to silence Bryan. And they did.
Modernism Was a Unified Faith
Politically, American theological modernists were Progressives. Progressivism was itself deeply religious. Richard Hofstadter writes that "Progressivism can be considered . . . as a phase in the history of the Protestant conscience, a latter-day Protestant revival. Liberal politics as well as liberal theology were both inherent in the response of religion to the secularization of society."(6) The reason why the term "modernist" has been applied by historians to religious figures as well as to contemporary political activists and cultural innovators is that theological modernists shared Progressivism's faith. What was this faith? It was faith in Darwinian evolution, historical relativism, progress through science, the benevolent State, and the benefits of getting one's hands on other people's money--through political force, deception, or both. Sharing this faith, modernists inside and outside the Church repeatedly worked together to silence those Christians who challenged their claims of legitimacy, whether ecclesiastical or civil.
I cannot say what most of the liberal Presbyterian pastors believed or what they preached in their pulpits. No historian can. There are insufficient records. What I can do, and have done in this book, is to examine in detail the writings and careers of several representative theological modernists who exercised enormous influence inside and outside of the Presbyterian Church. The main ones were Charles A. Briggs, Henry van Dyke, and Harry Emerson Fosdick. Others who served in secondary roles were Henry Preserved Smith, Philip Schaff, Arthur C. McGiffert, Henry Sloane Coffin, William Adams Brown, and Henry P. Van Dusen. All but van Dyke served as members of Union Theological Seminary's faculty. If these men were not cultural modernists--political Progressives in clerical robes--then modernism was a vapor, a subject fit only for doctoral dissertations in third-rank universities. There was also one other key figure: Presbyterian ruling elder Woodrow Wilson. If he was not a cultural modernist, then modernism was not only a vapor, it has been a figment of the imagination of professors in the best universities.
The United States prior to World War I was Protestant. To capture the country, modernists had to capture the mainline Protestant churches in the North. This they accomplished no later than 1940. They did it with a strategy of subversion. Modernists outside the Church had agents inside the Church who mouthed pious platitudes and invoked traditional pious phrases to keep the sheep calm and their shepherds confused.
Modernism was self-consciously manufactured to sound theologically orthodox. Let me suggest an analogy given to me over three decades ago by the man who brought me to saving faith in Jesus Christ: "When you're a counterfeiter, you don't use triangular orange sheets of paper and then put a picture of Bob Hope in the center." Dr. Hart, like so many other trusting victims, got stuck with a large pile of counterfeit academic bills. I am not saying that he is now deliberately trying to stick his readers with these counterfeits. What I am saying is that he is passing them into circulation with abandon, and he has received lots of applause for his efforts from the spiritual heirs of the original counterfeiters.
From 1876 to 1936, one institution, more than any other, was the primary distribution center for counterfeit bills: Union Theological Seminary of New York. But, as we shall see, the center that actually designed American academic modernism's original phony plates was Johns Hopkins University, which awarded degrees to Wilson (Ph.D.), Machen (B.A.), and Hart (Ph.D.), and which also published Hart's book.
Winners and Losers If there is one rule above all other rules governing the writing of history, it is this: the winning side writes the popular history books. Lefferts Loetscher wrote his book as a winner for the winners. Unlike other book-length scholarly studies of the Presbyterian conflict except Edwin Rian's Presbyterian Conflict (which he implicitly repudiated in 1947 when he returned to the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.), my book is written from the point of view of the losers: the Calvinists who defended the Old School Presbyterian position. It is written from a position sympathetic to what became the largest lost cause in American Protestant Church history.
How large a lost cause? At the time of the Presbyterian reunion in 1869, the Old School had 2,381 ministers, 2,740 congregations, and 259,000 members.(7) The New School had 1,848 ministers, 1,631 congregations, and 173,000 members.(8) Each side had five seminaries.(9) In 1936, leaving behind thirteen liberal seminaries, approximately 100 ministers out of some 9,500, and some 4,200 members out of some two million, departed from the denomination to protest the de-frocking of their spokesman, J. Gresham Machen, who died soon thereafter: January 1, 1937. Fewer than ten ministers had their names erased from presbytery rolls or were suspended in 1936, but Machen was the most visible representative. At the end of the first General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church(10) in 1936, the denomination had 44 ministers and 22 elders. A year after the original exodus, 14 ministers and three ruling elders left to begin forming a premillennial denomination, the Bible Presbyterian Church.(11) Of those theologians who remained in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, none maintained the postmillennial eschatology of the Old Princeton. The new Church's leading philosopher, Cornelius Van Til, had never accepted the Old School's apologetic method, i.e., Scottish common-sense realism. By 1937, there was no identifiable institutional trace of Old School Presbyterianism in the North. This, in my judgment, constitutes a lost cause.
The reader should know in advance that I do not come as an agent of Old School Presbyterianism. Why not? Because of my commitment to (1) six-day creationism,(12) (2) Calvin's defense of weekly communion,(13) (3) an affirmation of at least the Apostles' Creed or Nicene Creed for communicant membership, and the entire Confession plus proof of tithing as conditions of voting Church membership,(14) (4) a sacramental view of the ministry(15) as taught in the long-neglected Larger Catechism but not in Presbyterian tradition,(16) and (5) Van Til's presuppositional apologetics.(17) I regard Old School Presbyterianism as far too lax theologically and institutionally. In 1869, Old School Presbyterianism had been the entrenched right flank of American Protestantism. In 1937, it was gone.
A Question of Sanctions The events collectively known as the Presbyterian conflict centered around five theological questions: (1) What is the nature of God and His relation to His Church? (2) What is the (representative) voice of God's authority in history? (3) What is the nature of law, e.g., the ecclesiastical judicial function of creeds and confessions? (4) On what legal basis, and in which jurisdiction, should Church discipline be brought against ordained ministers who are regarded as theologically deviant? (5) Which faction will become the dominant one in the Church's future? I have summarized these issues in five words: legitimacy, authority, legality, sanctions, and inheritance.
I argue in this book that point four--Church sanctions--was the key institutional factor in the Presbyterian conflict. The other four points were important, but the outcome of the conflict was determined by point four: the imposition of negative sanctions.
Because the theological terminology of the Presbyterian conflict has seemed foreign to religiously pluralistic and secular historians, and even to Christians who have been educated by such historians, I begin with an analogy that will be very understandable to them, as well as to conservatives. I begin with that most hated of all groups in the post-1940 era, the Nazis. Here, not even the most dedicated ethical relativist has any doubts: we are dealing with evil, and we must discover institutional ways to deal with it, i.e., effective negative sanctions. (The best way for a college student to destroy in full public view any liberal college professor who defends ethical relativism is with this question: "Are you saying that there was no objective ethical difference between Adolph Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt?" If he says no, he loses the argument; if he says yes, he loses his job.)
Your Church, Their Target
What if a well-organized, dedicated group of Nazis has found an entry point to become ordained as ministers in your denomination? A prominent theological seminary that supplies candidates for the ministry has been quietly taken over by Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. What if other seminaries also have hired Nazi professors who hold advanced theological degrees? Should everyone else in the denomination consent quietly? Should you remain silent?
When challenged by critics, the Nazis take the following approach. First, they cry out for theological toleration. Isn't the modern Church broad enough to include men of many opinions? Second, they insist that they believe in the tenets of the Church, but in their own way. When they speak of the Holy Spirit, for example, they really mean the spirit of the Volk as it speaks to every man, but especially as it has spoken through great teachers. "It has spoken most eloquently in our era through one enlightened, illuminated man, Adolph Hitler. Two thousand years ago, the same Spirit spoke through Jesus Christ." Third, when anyone challenges their right to interpret the biblical doctrine of the Holy Spirit in this way, the Nazis reply that the Bible is not an infallible book. "It contains mistakes, although it was a meaningful revelation of God in the eras in which its parts were written. But its contradictory ideas should not be used as judicial standards for today." Fourth, if a critic then argues that the Church's Confession does not teach any such view of the Holy Spirit, the Nazis reply that the Confession is not to be applied in such a narrow fashion. "After all, it does not say that the Holy Spirit is not the spirit of the Volk, nor does it deny that Adolph Hitler was the Spirit's supreme mouthpiece in the twentieth century." (It was written over three centuries ago.) Fifth, if a pastor tries to take a Nazi minister into any Church court except the one that ordained him in the first place, the Nazi replies that the critic has no lawful jurisdiction over him; after all, his local presbytery ordained him. But, the critic replies, that presbytery is filled with Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. "You had better be able to prove that in a trial in my presbytery," replies the Nazi, smirking.
If a majority of ministers in the denomination also take a similar view of the Bible, toleration, progressive revelation in history, the Church's Confession, and its jurisdictions, even though they are not themselves Nazis, how could you remove that Nazi and his colleagues? What would you do to alert your fellow churchmen to the dangers of Nazi infiltration?
In short, if there are no negative institutional sanctions that can lawfully be imposed in terms of fundamental law, Constitutional law, and organizational by-laws, how can the Church (or any organization) protect itself from a takeover by its mortal enemies? This was the organizational question that confronted Old School Presbyterians from 1874 to 1936.
Strategy: Offensive or Defensive? What I contend in this book is this: the best defense is a good offense. The conservative defenders of the Presbyterian Church from 1900 until 1922 had no institutional offense. They gave offense, but they had none. Calvinists and conservatives had chosen not to fight to the death the ordination of modernists from 1900 until 1922, so by 1922 they had no secure institutional power base when the modernists launched the next stage of their long-term offensive operations. Because the conservatives sought victory through publication and public rallies, they appeared to be the aggressors. A crucial tactic in the modernists' strategy of conquest was to appear as victims of the conservatives. The fact is, the conservatives were last-ditch defenders, the victims of a successful conspiracy. The invaders easily crossed that ditch.
This was not just a Presbyterian problem. Conservative leaders in American Protestantism had only a defensive strategy. The institutional and theological battles of the twentieth century were lost because the vast majority of those who called themselves Bible-believing Christians from 1900 to the mid-1970's were conducting holding actions. They had, at best, a stalemate mentality.(18) They did not believe that they could win the long-term earthly battle against Satan and his forces. In this respect, Machen was an exception, but his mild postmillennialism was not shared by his colleagues even at his own Westminster Seminary. Without a vision of victory, they lost the skirmishes that lasted three generations, 1901-1975. When it came to a battle for institutional control, conservative Christians were up against professionals, men who believed in power above all else. The conservatives could not win by taking a defensive stand, but they did not have an aggressive theology, nor did they know how to organize institutionally. This was not true of the modernists.
Very late in the Presbyterian conflict, a year after the Church-mandated reorganization of Princeton Seminary, Machen wrote an essay, "The Present Situation in the Presbyterian Church." It appeared in Christianity Today (May 1930).(19) He made this cryptic one-sentence summary of the crucial years, 1906 to 1920: "After the Cumberland union, the destructive forces labored for a time in the dark." Then he skipped to the Plan of Organic Union in 1920. Presbyterian Church historians also labor in the dark regarding this period.(20) What is needed is a detailed, multi-volume study of the archives of the boards and commissions of every mainline American Protestant denomination to see how the capture of power took place. We need a generation of doctoral dissertations on this topic. We will not get them soon.
I want to see many other books written about this diabolically brilliant and temporarily successful strategy, with each book dedicated to a detailed study of how the humanists captured a particular institution, but with every book governed by an integrating presupposition: a conspiracy was operating in terms of a strategy of subversion. We need book cases filled with such books. We need to understand that Christian historiography is necessarily conspiracy history, for all history is covenantal history. History is the manifestation of a war between two covenants. Only one covenant is sovereign: God's. Covenant-breakers conspire against it.
A Conspiracy View of History Most historians dismiss disdainfully the conspiracy view of history. Most historians of any temporarily successful conspiracy have accepted one task above all others: to deny the legitimacy of any conspiracy view of history, humanistic or biblical.(21) They have devoted their careers to this assignment.
History is the unfolding of a conflict between the covenantal representatives of God and Satan. This conflict is intensely personal. History is not the product of impersonal forces. It is also not the product of great men, great ideas, or great armies. Most of all, it is not the product of random events. There is nothing either random or impersonal about history, which is the unfolding of God's sovereign decree in time. History incorporates ideas, social forces, great men, and not-so-great men. It involves a series of conspiratorial attempts by Satan's followers to overturn God's decree. What conventional historians deny, either implicitly or explicitly, is Psalm 2:
Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure. Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion. I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him.
On the surface, and for a time, some of these conspiracies appear successful. Herbert Schlossberg is correct: "The Bible can be interpreted as a string of God's triumphs disguised as disasters."(22) The cross of Jesus Christ is the obvious example. But conspiracies cannot remain successful. They are overturned in history. God overturns them by mobilizing His people.(23)
The Need for Institutional Historiography In a 1976 article on William H. Roberts, who served as Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church from 1884 until 1920, Bruce David Forbes made this observation: "To the author's knowledge, there exists no detailed, critical examination of the great changes in structure and function of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. during this turn of the century period."(24) Yet institutional history is neglected by the historian at the peril of historical truth. As in modern warfare, battles for ecclesiastical control are fought and won mainly in the trenches of Church boards and committees, not overhead in the skies. The infantry captures and holds territory, not the air force. This is especially true in Presbyterianism, where national boards and committees count for more than they do in independent churches.
Institutional histories rarely focus on great moral or ideological confrontations, great battles fought, or great anything except boredom. Reading the minutes of ancient meetings, reports of forgotten conferences, and fading personal letters in poorly catalogued manuscript collections in major libraries is not most people's idea of a life well spent. Yet it is in such forgotten and long-neglected records that the historian finds the means of putting the flesh of institutional life back onto the bones of ideology and rhetoric. Pamphlets alone do not a revolution make. The quip of President Nixon's Attorney General John Mitchell is worth repeating: "Watch what we do, not what we say."(25) The higher the institutional stakes, the more important it is for someone to do the watching, at the time especially, but also in retrospect. This detailed archival research has not been done by those who have written about the Presbyterian conflict, including me. The best I can do here is to sketch a few areas of interest that may prove fruitful for future researchers.
We need multiple institutional histories of the Presbyterian Church written to throw light on the great conflict that beset it. But this is rarely the way institutional histories are written. They are usually written by the winners and their spiritual heirs, who have an incentive not to emphasize the existence of conflict, especially if the winners employed nefarious tactics. They are written to be boring, and they usually succeed. "Nothing crucial was going on here! I'll prove it." The losers do not get access to the files, and the losers' heirs are rarely interested. If the losers have failed to multiply and build up their own organization, the division of labor works against them: too few well-trained historians and too few potential book buyers.
The capture of the Presbyterian Church--and, I suspect, all of the others--was made far easier for the liberals because nobody in the conservative camp was carefully monitoring the activities of the boards of the Church. I am not exaggerating: nobody. There were no published warnings until after World War I--two decades after the takeover had begun--and even then only with regard to foreign missions. No historian has made a detailed study of even one of the Presbyterian boards, 1890 to 1930, and I am aware of no representative example from any of the other Protestant denominations.
A series of detailed studies of the Presbyterian boards, especially the Board of Foreign Missions, should be written by a dozen enterprising Ph.D. candidates. This would require years in the archives and private collections of letters, as well as the annual reports of the boards (included in the second volume of the Minutes of the General Assembly). We need such projects done in the seven main Protestant denominations. Some of the questions that need answers are these: (1) Where did the boards recruit most of their ministers and workers? (2) What screening process was used to sort through the candidates? (3) How many of those who got hired were ever fired, and for what reasons? (4) What percentage of the money sent to the boards got to the people in the field? (5) What was the theological perspective of the boards and committees, where such records exist? (6) What was the theological content of official pronouncements by the boards and commissions? (7) How closely did board members work with board members of comparable boards in other denominations? But life is short, funds are limited, and interest is nil. These dissertations will not be written. So, we must content ourselves with incomplete outlines of partial records that only hint at what went on behind closed doors.
Then there is the issue of personal financial considerations. No historian I have read has ever asked this question, let alone attempted to answer it: "What effects, if any, did the 1927 revision of the Church's retirement system have on the institutional loyalty of ministers, 1928-1936?" I decided that it was time for at least one historian to consider the relevance of the question. I found it very relevant.
There was more to this Presbyterian conflict than the traditional Presbyterian practice of writing pamphlets. But historians find it easier to summarize pamphlets and books than to follow the money. For most Church historians, including me, pamphlets and books are easier to read than yellowing accounting reports. Church histories reflect this preference. Were I a full-time historian, I would have done more digging around in dusty filing cabinets in Philadelphia's Witherspoon Building. But I have at least sniffed around some long-ignored areas.
The Minutes of the General Assembly The annual General Assemblies were open forums. You might think that it would be possible to trace in the Minutes of the General Assembly the history of the great battle for control over the Presbyterian Church: great speeches, crucial votes, parliamentary maneuvering. This is not the case, however. Delwyn Nykamp's 1974 doctoral dissertation, which remains by far the most detailed study of the 1922-26 phase of the struggle, has warned the prospective researcher: "To the despair of the critic, however, official records contain little actual discourse and few clues to permit reconstruction of the events."(26) The Minutes of the General Assembly after 1900 reveal mainly what the various boards, committees, and commissions wanted revealed. The Minutes are sufficient only to indicate the general direction of the process of administrative centralization.
In one paragraph, let us briefly survey the growth of bureaucracy in the Church through the lens of a surrogate indicator: the growth of the Minutes. In 1789, the Minutes filled 16 pages, nine pages of which were actual minutes. A full decade of Minutes of the Old School denomination, 1848 to 1858, filled 586 pages. Statistical columns and boxes averaged six pages per year. All of 1865 to 1869 filled 535 pages. From 1870 to 1871, after the reunion, they filled 946 pages. In 1900, they filled 817 pages, but much of this material was statistical. In 1906, it was a 916-page volume. In 1907, the year after the arrival of 1,100 Cumberland Presbyterian congregations, the Minutes, including committee reports (Sections II-V, pp. 261-439) and statistics (Section VI, pp. 450-937), filled 1,077 pages, and the reports of the Boards filled a second volume: 1,432 pages. From that time on, the Minutes were a two-volume affair. Volume 1 contained reports from the Assembly's commissions and standing committees, which filled most of the 250 to 300 pages devoted to actual decisions. Information on debates in the General Assembly disappeared except as brief, fragmentary entries related to actions in response to committee reports. The rest of the first volume was filled with 500 or more pages of boxes of small-print statistical data from presbyteries, synods, and other Church entities. This section is a lasting testimony to W. H. Roberts, the Stated Clerk (senior permanent bureaucrat), who had been trained as a government statistician: highly detailed, no typographical errors, and utterly useless. We never find so much as a footnote in The Journal of Presbyterian History or American Presbyterians that refers to the statistical sections of the Minutes.(27)
From Christendom to Humanist Civilization The Presbyterian conflict was part of a much larger process, which I call covenantal: a conflict between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. The Presbyterian conflict was an important American manifestation of a two-stage shift in the judicial worldview of the West. The first stage was the shift from covenant to contract (1690 to 1890). The second stage was the shift from contract to coercion (1890 to the present).
Calvinistic covenantalism had emphasized the presence of God as a sanctioning agent in the four supreme contracts in life: God and man; man and the Church; man and wife; and man as a citizen. The most profound defender of covenantal political theory was Johannes Althusius (c. 1600), today an almost forgotten figure.(28) He was the great intellectual rival of Hugo Grotius, the Arminian natural law theorist, who receives at least a cursory discussion in most European history textbooks. The English Puritans and the Scottish Presbyterians sought a covenantal political theory, but the demise in 1559 of Cromwell's premature revolution ended this quest. The Presbyterians were then marginalized in Anglo-American culture for two generations, and by the time they emerged as a powerful cultural influence in North America after 1740, they had adopted the legitimacy of contractualism, humanism's alternative to covenantalism.
Contractualism removed God and biblically revealed law from the civil realm. There were two main versions of contractualism: Whiggism, represented by Locke's Second Treatise on Government (1690) and its economic legacy, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776); and Continental contractualism, beginning with Rousseau's Social Contract (1762). By 1790, civil contractualism was judicially operational at the national level in the United States, France, and England.
The second stage of the shift was from Whiggism to Social Democracy--in the United States, Progressivism. In political theory, this was marked by the replacement of philosophical individualism with some version of class theory, usually accompanied by an economic interpretation of history. In economic theory, this was marked by the supplementation or even replacement of voluntary contracts by state regulation. This shift in outlook took place within a single generation among the West's educated elite: from about 1880 to 1920. By 1936, the culmination year of the Presbyterian conflict, this political worldview was accepted by almost everyone. Evidence from that year includes fascism in Italy, national socialism in Germany, the first Presidential ratification year of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal (a landslide), and the publication of John Maynard Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money--especially the German edition, with its introduction complimenting the total planning state.(29) Those who disagreed were relegated to the fringes of acceptable political discourse,(30) or in Germany and Italy, eliminated.
The transition from Christendom to humanist civilization can be understood in many ways, among which are these:
From cosmic personalism to cosmic impersonalism
From cosmic impersonalism to humanistic sovereignty
From biblical revelation to epistemological neutrality
From eternal sanctions to historical sanctions
From covenant theology (1560 to 1659) to contractualism (1660 to 1880)
From Newtonian political theory (1690 to 1776) to historicism (Rousseau to the present)
From mechanism to organicism
From predictability to process
From absolutes to relativism
From the discovery of truth to the search for truth
From substantive justice to procedural justice
From law to methodology
From creationism to Darwinism
From free market social Darwinism to reform social Darwinism
From status to contract (nineteenth century)(31)
From contract to status (twentieth century)(32)
From decentralization to centralization
From business partnership to corporation
From Whig political economy to Progressivism
From excise taxes to income taxes
From the gold standard to the Federal Reserve
From open entry to government regulation
From price competition to professional licensing
From apprenticeship to certification by exams
From academic scholasticism to specialization (seminary to seminar; M.A. to Ph.D.)
From political spoils to Civil Service
From voluntarism to conscription
From morality to efficiency
This civilization-wide transformation can be represented by one phrase that encapsulates the incomparable mundanity of the move from the kingdom of God in history to the contemporary kingdom of man:
From the Ten Commandments to Robert's Rules of Order
Conclusion Machen's role in the battle, 1922-1936, was representative of numerous struggles between humanists and Christians for the control of the mainline denominations. The same slogans and tactics occurred again and again in different denominations and ecclesiastical groups. My hope is that this book will provide a case study of national and even international trends--theological, ecclesiastical, and educational. Let us learn from Machen's loss: we cannot win with a defensive strategy. Also, we can't beat something with nothing.
Please keep this slogan in the back of your mind as you read this book: toleration during wartime = surrender to the enemy. Keep this in mind, too: There is no substitute for victory. If you find it difficult to apply these slogans to the institutional Church, apply them to World War II. Does they seem reasonable in that context? Then ask yourself: If German Protestant churches had not ordained theological liberals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, would there have been a Hitler? Would there have been World War II? Germany lost World War II in its universities and churches long before Adolph Hitler arrived on the scene. A nation that still believed in the God of Martin Luther would not have surrendered to a master of confrontational rhetoric who required this verbal confession: "Heil [salvation] Hitler!"(33) Theological ideas have consequences.
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Footnotes:
1. Bowden, "Ends and Means in Church History," Church History, 54 (March 1985), p. 75.
2. Cynthia M. Campbell, "The Broadening Church," American Presbyterians, 66 (Winter 1988), pp. 309-13.
3. Other purposes include: (1) to identify the central tenets of liberal Protestant theology prior to 1930; (2) to identify the liberals' strategy of subversion, 1875 to 1936; (3) to identify the weaknesses of the conservatives who opposed them; (4) to identify scoundrels and saints; (5) to follow the money.
4. It was re-named the United Presbyterian Church in 1958. Since 1983, it has been called PCUSA again.
5. D. G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 7.
6. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage, 1955), p. 152.
7. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1869, p. 498. Cf. Presbyterian Re-union Memorial Volume, 1837-1871 (New York: DeWitt C. Lent & Co., 1870), p. 494.
8. Presbyterian Re-union, p. 503.
9. Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, edited by John M'Clintock and James Strong, 12 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1894), VIII:535.
10. Called the Presbyterian Church of America until 1939.
11. Letter to the author from Charles Dennison, historian of the OPC: Jan. 12, 1994. The BPC came into existence in 1938. On the BPC's New School links, see George M. Marsden, "Perspective on the Division of 1937," Pressing Toward the Mark: Essays Commemorating Fifty Years of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, edited by Charles G. Dennison and Richard C. Gamble (Philadelphia: Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1986), ch. 18. This essay appeared originally as a four-part series in The Presbyterian Guardian (Jan.-April 1964). See also Marsden, "The New School Heritage and Presbyterian Fundamentalism," Pressing, p. 179.
12. Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988).
13. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV:XVII:43.
14. Gary North, Tithing and the Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 3.
15. Ibid., chaps. 3, 6.
16. See Introduction, below: section on "Sacrament and Word."
17. Gary North, ed., Foundations of Christian Scholarship: Essays in the Van Til Perspective (Vallecito, California: Ross House Books, 1976). This apologetic approach argues that all men must argue from religiously held presuppositions, and that these presuppositions cannot be reconciled through so-called neutral reason. Men presuppose the source of truth.
18. Gary North, Backward, Christian Soldiers? 2nd ed. (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988), ch. 11.
19. This was not related to the post-1955 magazine with the same name.
20. See Chapter 6, below.
21. Gary North, Conspiracy: A Biblical View (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1986), ch. 6.
22. Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, [1983] 1993), p. 304.
23. The most obvious example in the twentieth century is the collapse of Communism in Europe, 1989-1991. From apparently total power to the pathetic coup of August 19-21, 1991, Communism collapsed in a drunken stupor. Today, Communism survives only in culturally bleak outposts: North Korea, Cuba, and the English departments of major American universities.
24. Bruce David Forbes, "William H. Roberts: Resistance and Bureaucratic Adaptation," Journal of Presbyterian History, 54 (Winter 1976), p. 413.
25. He was only partially correct. The Watergate Committee listened to what they all said on the secret White House tapes, and Mitchell went to jail for what he did.
26. Delwyn G. Nykamp, A Presbyterian Power Struggle: A Critical History of Communication Strategies in the Struggle for Control of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., 1922-1926 (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1974), pp. 12-13.
27. Here is my suggestion to scholars who use the Minutes of the General Assembly. The Committee on Bills and Overtures was usually the most important committee at each General Assembly. Begin with the section on the overtures from the presbyteries. The early overtures reveal which issues were likely to be the most important at that year's GA. Then turn to the index to see to which committee an overture was assigned by the Committee on Bills and Overtures. Turn to the pages listed in the index to find out what the particular committee did in response to any overture. This is a bureaucrat's approach to historical research, but bureaucrats structured the Minutes to achieve their goals, not yours. One of their goals--in my view, the supreme goal--was concealment. In this sense, the Minutes of the General Assembly are like the Congressional Record.
28. Johannus Althusius, Politica, trans. Frederick S. Carney (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, [1964] 1995). This is an abridged version of his Politica methodice digesta (1614). The translator also wrote a Ph.D. dissertation, The Associational Theory of Johannes Althusius: A Study in Calvinist Constitutionalism (University of Chicago, 1960).
29. Keynes wrote: "The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under the conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire. This is one of the reasons that justifies the fact that I call my book a general theory." A side-by-side translation of the Preface in the original German edition is found in James J. Martin, Revisionist Viewpoints (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles Press, 1971), pp. 203, 205. A modified version of the citation appears in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (New York: St. Martin's, 1973), VII, p. xxvi. It does not include his final sentence.
30. Justin Raimondo, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (Burlingame, California: Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993), chaps 1-6.
31. Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law (New York: Dorset, [1861] 1986), p. 141.
32. The reversal of the process described by Sir Henry Maine. The difference is that family connection undergirded ancient status; today, formal certification does. The West has moved from familism to the free market to bureaucracy.
33. Thomas Schirrmacher, "National Socialism and the Future of Germany," Symbiotica, 1 (Spring 1991), pp. 23-29. This is the journal of the Institute for Christian Economics--Europe.