Presbyterians in the United States had little trouble extricating themselves from compromising entanglements with the civil magistrate. None of the British colonies in North America that were to become the United States had a Presbyterian ecclesiastical establishment. Neither did the Articles of Confederation or the United States Constitution call for church-state relationships that prevented Presbyterians from exercising their convictions regarding the institution and maintenance of a Reformed communion. Some Presbyterians, like the Covenanters, objected to the silence of United States law about the lordship of Christ and so forbade members from voting, serving in the military, or holding public office in a republic that did not acknowledge Christ. But the main branch of American Presbyterians never originally objected to the new political order of the United States. In fact, the Presbyterian Church in the USA on the eve of its first General Assembly in 1789 revised the Westminster Confession’s teaching on the civil magistrate: where the original confession had required civil authorities to protect the true church and punish false religions, the American revision taught that rulers had a duty to protect all religious groups.
The separation of church and state as codified in the United States Constitution and affirmed in the revised Presbyterian Confession of Faith did not mean that Presbyterians in the United States were less inclined than their European counterparts to regard the church as a servant of the nation or the nation as a partner in religious mission. US Presbyterians tended to view the War of Independence not simply as just but also as a conflict between the forces of spiritual light and wicked darkness. They also imbibed the heady mix of political theory and Christian theology sometimes known as Christian republicanism. This melange encouraged many US Protestants to believe that the success of their nation depended upon the spiritual health of its citizens. Such an outlook was partly responsible for the Presbyterian Church USA’s 1801 decision,
codified in the Plan of Union, to cooperate with the Congregationalist churches of New England in planting churches in the Northwest Territory (later added to the political union as the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin). US Presbyterians also participated significantly in the establishment of the so-called Benevolent Empire, a network of religious and humanitarian voluntary associations that the revivals of the Second Great Awakening inspired. This phalanx of pan-Protestant societies was important for securing moral and social order in the new nation through such initiatives as primary education, temperance, and wholesome literature. It was also responsible for giving Presbyterians a stake in the fortunes of the new nation thanks to the mutually reinforcing tasks of religious outreach and moral reform.
By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a significant element in the North American church began to question the material and formal aspects of the Second Great Awakening. These Old School Presbyterians, as they became known, took exception to the theology that characterized many of the revivals’ supporters. The doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s sin was central to these debates, with Old Schoolers arguing that subscription to the Westminster Standards involved adherence to imputation and revivalists contending that such an understanding of human nature would undermine incentives for revival. Old School Presbyterians also began to question cooperation with Congregationalists in the Plan of Union and with other Protestants through the voluntary agencies of the Awakening thanks to a heightened commitment to Presbyterian church government. The defense of federal theology and jure divino Presbyterianism led Old School Presbyterians in 1837 to abrogate the Plan of Union, reject interdenominational cooperation, and exscind twenty-eight presbyteries and over five hundred ministers, most of whom were in areas (New York and Ohio) where the revivals had been strongest.
The Presbyterians whom the Old School banished were known, appropriately, as New School. Forceful figures in their ranks included Lyman Beecher, a Boston Congregationalist who became president of the Presbyterian seminary in Cincinnati (Lane), and Albert Barnes, a popular preacher and Bible expositor in New York and later in Philadelphia. Each of these figures held views on the atonement (an example of God’s displeasure) and the nature of sin (individual acts versus corporate guilt) that drew fire from Presbyterians who adhered to the Westminster Confession of Faith. New School theology did provide a rationale for the revivals of Charles G. Finney, since he too stressed the power of individuals to choose Christ. This outlook also underwrote the social activism of the Second Great Awakening by encouraging Americans to do all in their power to live lives of holiness. New Schoolers hoped and prayed that, if enough people would freely choose to follow Christ and lead moral lives, the
United States could usher in the kingdom of God. For them, the Old School insistence on the truth of historic Reformed teaching or the necessity of Presbyterian procedure was an impediment to the power of Protestants from all denominations to build a righteous society together.
The collision between these two versions of New World Presbyterianism in the 1830s coincided with controversies in the Netherlands and Scotland that also involved efforts by Free Church Presbyterians and the Afscheiding to extricate the spiritual mission of the church from the social programs of the state. Old School theologians, such as James Henley Thornwell in South Carolina, Robert Lewis Dabney in Virginia, Charles Hodge in New Jersey, and Stuart Robinson in Kentucky, injected into American Presbyterianism a strong dose of selfconsciousness. They argued that the church had a unique commission to perform a task that was essentially spiritual in nature. At the same time they contended that to execute this mission the church had specific means through the ordained ministry and oversight of ministers and elders meeting in delegated assemblies.
This Old School sensibility flourished for roughly a generation but became marginal among US Presbyterians after the 1869 reunion of the Old and New School churches. It continued to inform the teaching at different Presbyterian seminaries. When controversies at the beginning of the twentieth century over biblical criticism and evolution drove American Protestants into fundamentalist and modernist camps, the Old School Presbyterian doctrine of the spirituality of the church became a casualty in the polemics that aggravated Presbyterians. But it was a crucial factor in the thought ofJ. Gresham Machen, a professor of the New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, who led conservative Presbyterian opposition to theological modernism. His reliance on and defense of the spirituality of the church and Presbyterian polity provoked another secession among modern Reformed Protestants. It was neither as large as those led by Chalmers or Kuyper, nor did it involve withdrawing from the patronage of the state. It did mean the abandonment of aspirations to be part of an informal ecclesiastical establishment, however, known in the United States as the mainline Protestant churches. Even if Machens secession added only one more name to the handbook of United States denominations, it was similar to those of Chalmers and Kuyper in displaying a willingness to reject cultural prestige for clarity of purpose.
Reunion and Union
At the beginning of the 1860s, as citizens of the United States were dividing along sectional lines in preparation for civil war, Presbyterians themselves were split theologically and regionally. The New School Presbyterians broke apart first, as a
result of an issue that was alienating the northern United States from the southern. In 1857, after repeated efforts by the General Assembly to establish committees to investigate the practice of slavery and its effects on southern Presbyterians, a small minority of the New School resolved to form a separate communion, the United Synod of the Presbyterian Church, for Presbyterians who defended slavery in principle. Four years later, the Old School Presbyterians also divided, and by then the question was whether or not to support the federal government’s efforts to maintain the union of the United States and go to war against southern states that had begun to secede from the nation after the attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. A resolution before the 1861 General Assembly by the New York pastor, Gardiner Spring, called upon the Old School communion to endorse the federal government, a motion that clearly confronted ministers from South Carolina as well as other southern states with the dilemma of ministering in a church whose politics were seditious in the South. To resolve the dilemma, southern Old School Presbyterians withdrew into a distinct communion with 10 synods, 45 presbyteries, 840 ministers and approximately 72,000 communicant members. Consequently, at the beginning of the Civil War, the major branch of Presbyterianism in the United States was divided into four separate communions: Old School and New School, in both the north and the south.
But by the end of the 1860s these divisions were beginning to heal, and the politics of preserving the nation’s union were an important ingredient in ecclesiastical cooperation. Southern Presbyterians led the way in 1867, with the Old School communion absorbing the three synods of the New School that had operated within the bounds of the Confederacy. Some Old Schoolers opposed union because of lingering theological suspicions, but the merger prevailed thanks to hopes that a united southern church would give Old School theology the upper hand and eventually extinguish New School sentiments. The united church became the Presbyterian Church in the US (PCUS). In 1869 northern Presbyterians followed suit and overcame theological objections from a minority of conservatives to unite as the Presbyterian Church in the USA (PCUSA).
In the case of northern Presbyterians, the ideals of political integration clearly contributed to the reasons for ecclesiastical union. The report that recommended union of the northern Old and New Schools recognized the nation’s need for a unified Presbyterian church:
The changes which have occurred in our own country and throughout the world, during the last thirty years - the period of our separation - arrest and compel attention. Within this time the original number of our States has been very nearly doubled.... The population crowding into this immense area is heterogeneous. Six millions of emigrants, representing various religious and
nationalities, have arrived on our shores within the last thirty years; and four millions of slaves, recently enfranchised, demand Christian education. It is no secret that anti-Christian forces - Romanism, Ecclesiasticism, Rationalism, Infidelity, Materialism, and Paganism itself - assuming new vitality, are struggling for the ascendency. Christian forces should be combined and deployed, according to the new movements of their adversaries. It is no time for small and weak detachments, which may easily be defeated in detail.... Before the world we are now engaged, as a nation, in solving the problem of whether it is possible for all the incongruous and antagonistic nationalities thrown upon our shores, exerting their mutual attraction and repulsion, to become fixed in one new American sentiment. If the several branches of the Presbyterian Church in this country, representing to a great degree ancestral differences, should become cordially united, it must have not only a direct effect upon the question of our national unity, but, reacting by the force of a successful example on the Old World, must render aid in that direction, to all who are striving to reconsider and readjust those combinations, which had their origin either in the faults or the necessities of a remote past. 1
The Presbyterians responsible for this report were not guilty of overestimating the effects of their reunion on the rest of the United States, since while the Old School and New School were combing through the fine print of merger plans, other Presbyterians were also involved in establishing closer ties among US Protestants. In 1867 an American branch of the British society, the Evangelical Alliance, attracted Protestants from other Anglo-American denominations to work with it. It had started in London in 1846 - thanks in part to the efforts of the Free Church leader, Thomas Chalmers - to bring greater cooperation among Protestants both within and outside the Church of England. The appeal of and need for the Alliance became apparent to Americans after their Civil War precisely because of the belief that Protestantism was crucial to the preservation of a free and Christian society. The Evangelical Alliance did not sponsor many specific activities beyond supplying American Protestants with information about threats to the character of their nation. The list of perils included materialism, infidelity, and socialism, and extended to specific evils such as the saloon, threats to the home and motherhood, and Sabbath desecration. The subtext for particular vices was Roman Catholicism, and leaders of the Alliance had little trouble in naming Romanism as a threat to Christian civilization as great as atheism. The danger posed by Rome was evident to cooperative Protestants thanks to changing demographics in the United States, where large influxes of immigrants after the Civil War brought waves of Roman Catholics that appeared even more menacing than the arrival of Irish and Germans during the 1840s and
1850s. Beyond the composition of the American population, Rome’s threat loomed large after the First Vatican Council in 1870. Here the doctrine of papal infallibility gained formal acceptance among Roman Catholics; for many American Protestants, cooperation and consolidation were necessary if they were to rival Rome’s reinvigorated unity and authority.
The support for ecumenicity and Christianizing the social order in the United States drowned out scientific and theological challenges that might have sapped Protestant confidence. During the decades that Presbyterians facilitated interdenominational cooperation they also witnessed heated debates over new ideas in the academy, namely, Charles Darwin’s arguments about natural selection and new historical research on the text and reception of the Old and New Testaments (i.e. higher criticism). In the southern church (PCUS), James Woodrow (the uncle of Woodrow Wilson), professor of natural theology at Columbia Seminary in South Carolina, drew fire for efforts to reconcile evolution and Old Testament accounts of creation. Although his presbytery and the synods that controlled the seminary acquitted Woodrow of heresy charges, he lost his faculty post (only to land on his feet at president of the University of South Carolina), even while retaining his credentials as a minister. In response to Woodrow’s views, the southern church at its 1886 General Assembly declared by a vote of 137 to 13 that Adam was not a descendant of animals but the direct creation of God.
In the northern church (PCUSA), Presbyterians debated the reliability of Scripture in the light of modern scholarship. Charles A. Briggs, an Old Testament professor at Union Seminary (an institution formed in 1836, which was clearly in the New School camp), denied the verbal inspiration of the Bible and argued for a greater role for reason in theological reflection. Benjamin B. Warfield, a theologian at Princeton Seminary, opposed Briggs by arguing for the inerrancy of Scripture in a way that tried to account for its divine and human aspects by arguing that its divinity made the Bible authoritative and its humanity gave it intelligibility. In response to Briggs, the northern church affirmed the doctrine of biblical inerrancy in 1892, and a year later dismissed him from the ministry. Briggs retained his position at Union thanks in part to the seminary’s decision to become a school independent of the church.
Some Presbyterian conservatives who also opposed the most alarming features of Darwinism and higher criticism, such as Warfield, objected to their church’s involvements in the wider ecumenical world. Still, leaders of Protestant ecumenism, such as Philip Schaff, a professor of church history at the German Reformed school, Mercersburg Seminary, before joining the faculty at Union Seminary in New York City, helped to create other outlets for cooperation. Many southern Presbyterians who were still resentful over the outcome of the Civil
War resisted cooperation. They also argued that the substance of their doctrinal and ecclesiastical convictions would not allow cooperation with nonPresbyterians. The remedy was the Presbyterian Alliance, founded in 1877 as a Reformed equivalent to the Evangelical Alliance. The Presbyterian Alliance’s rhetoric did not differ substantially from the earlier organization but it did signal a desire among ecumenical leaders for a union of Presbyterian bodies as a means toward a unified Protestant communion. One indication of this goal was the 1906 merger of the Presbyterian Church USA and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. This union took some time to achieve thanks to doctrinal differences between the two communions. The Cumberland church had started in 1810 owing to a rejection of the predestinarian Calvinism and federal theology in the Westminster Confession. In order to overcome this theological chasm, northern Presbyterians spent the better part of the 1880s and 1890s considering a revision of their confession of faith. Once accomplished, with the addition in 1903 of chapters on the Holy Spirit and the Love of God which were designed to soften the hard edges of Calvinism, the merger was possible, thus adding another group of Presbyterians to the widening coalition of united Protestants.
The culmination of postbellum ecumenism in the United States was the formation in 1908 of the Federal Council of Churches. The stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church USA, William H. Roberts, was also the first acting president of the newly formed Council. Another tie to the Presbyterian Church was the use of the Witherspoon Building, a modern high rise in downtown Philadelphia that amounted to the national headquarters for the Presbyterian Church. This structure served as the registration hall for the delegates arriving from roughly thirty different denominations to respond to the need for interdenominational cooperation “for the moral and spiritual welfare of the nation and of the world.” 2 Aside from the services rendered by Presbyterians, the initial meeting of the Council in Philadelphia, the nation’s first capital, was significant. As E. R. Hendrix, Bishop in the Methodist Church, explained after taking over the presiding functions from Roberts:
I count it a very suggestive historical parallel that we meet in this goodly city of Philadelphia, where the Liberty Bell rang out with the inscription upon it, “Proclaim liberty through all the land and to the inhabitants thereof.”... I count it a very interesting historic parallel, my brethren, that in Philadelphia there has been already formed, registered and shaped, in large measure, the Federal Union, not of thirteen separate states, feeble in resources and weak in population, but the Federal Union of thirty-three great Christian Churches, aggregating in number of communicants nearly eighteen millions, - six times
the original number of souls gathered together in our American Union more than a hundred years ago. 3
This was the same city, according to Hendrix, which heard the nation’s first martyred president, Abraham Lincoln, say, “God bless all the churches and blessed be God that in this time of peril giveth us the churches.” These inspiring and patriotic precedents led Roberts to conclude that if the Federal Council were to be of any value or significance, it would need to proclaim “the manliness of Christ, the ‘strong Son of God,’ ” and so make “this great nation mighty in cooperation.”
Thank God, in this assembly to-day the nation through its representative Churches sees eye to eye. No longer any North, no longer any South, but one United Nation, one flag over all. Let it be ours to sustain that flag and to see to it that wherever that flag goes our holy religion goes, in every part of the world. 4
With such political and religious motivations echoing through Philadelphia’s Academy of Music where the Council convened, the delegates turned to the business at hand. Their first act was to create and adopt a new creed. But this was no set of theological or liturgical affirmations; it was in fact a social creed that attempted to show the relevance of a common Protestant faith for the well-being of the United States. The “Social Creed for the Churches” did not descend to the level of policy or legislation. It highlighted, instead, the need for the churches to respond to the social unrest generated by the disputes between big business and organized labor. The new creed was moderate (“gradual and reasonable reduction of the hours of labor to the lowest practicable point, and for that degree of leisure for all which is the condition of the highest human life”), idealistic (“equal rights and complete justice for all men in all stations of life”), and generically religious (“a release from employment one day in seven”). 5
Presbyterians in the United States were no more prone to the excesses of nationalism and civil religion than the other denominations that in 1908 sent delegates to Philadelphia. At the same time, Protestants in the United States were no less tempted to adapt their convictions to the needs of their nation. Indeed, the nationalistic urge among Presbyterians in the United States is all the more remarkable considering that Reformed Churches in Europe modified their teachings and practices in order to retain the support of their governmental patrons and their status as part of the political establishment. Even without the demands from the United States government, the nation’s Protestants, according to one historian, “felt responsible for America: for its moral structure, for the
religious content of national ideals, for the educative and welfare functions that government would not ... carry out.” 6 Questioning the connections between Protestant beliefs and national identity would prove to be almost as difficult as the disentanglements attempted in Scotland and the Netherlands.
The Presbyterian Controversy
J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937) was an unlikely field marshal in the 1920s conflict that would divide American Presbyterians. Since 1906 he had taught New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, first as an instructor, and then after 1914, once he resolved doubts about becoming ordained to the ministry, as an assistant professor. Machen’s misgivings stemmed in part from his cultural background and previous education. The son of a prominent Baltimore attorney and a graduate of Johns Hopkins University with a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Classics, Machen saw the ministerial credentials necessary for teaching at a seminary as an awkward barrier to his intellectual interests and social standing. A degree from Princeton and a year of advanced study with some of Germany’s leading biblical scholars failed to quell these misgivings. But friendships made at Princeton and associations with former professors helped Machen to resolve his vocational dilemma. Even then, in 1918, during World War I, he took an assignment as a secretary with the YMCA in France, leading Bible studies and running a canteen, out of some frustration with the distance between academic work and active life. He returned from Europe, shaken by the horrors of modern warfare, just in time to prepare lectures for students and faculty at Union Seminary in Richmond. His subject was the title of his first book, The Origin of Paul’s Religion (1921), a systematic critique of naturalistic accounts of the apostle Paul’s ministry.
Machen also returned to the United States in time to hear the proposal that was the culmination of Protestant hopes since the Civil War for a united church and a Christian nation. After the war, Protestant leaders believed that their cooperative activities during the war pointed to the possibility of an organic union of the nation’s largest denominations. Unlike a federation, where each denomination retained its own prerogatives, an organic union called for a single Protestant body. Presbyterians again played leading roles and brought the plan to the General Assembly of 1920 where Machen was a first-time commissioner. He was stunned when the president of Princeton Seminary, J. Ross Stevenson, who served on the Committee for Organic Union, presented the plan to the assembly. Although the plan failed (a similar effort among Presbyterians, Anglicans and Methodists in Canada would succeed), the US proposal alarmed conservatives, and the assembly of 1920 planted the seeds of a struggle. The specific issue was
whether Presbyterians, thanks to their theology and polity, retained a mission distinct from other Protestant churches, or whether by virtue of a generic Protestantism they could unite with other communions to Christianize America. This question would absorb the Presbyterian Church’s energies for the better part of two decades.
American Presbyterians also had several other matters to consider during the tumultuous decade of the 1920s. From the left came objections to dogmatism and intolerance. Flarry Emerson Fosdick, a popular Baptist minister who functioned as stated supply at the First Presbyterian Church in New York City, preached a controversial sermon in May of 1922: “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” His contention - that the doctrines of biblical inerrancy and the second coming of Christ were mere “peccadillos” compared to the weighty problems of international peace - attracted numerous and vociferous objections from conservatives. Eventually, the Presbytery of New York was forced to ask Fosdick to step down from his role at The First Presbyterian Church. New York Presbyterians attributed the problem to the anomaly of a Baptist ministering outside the bounds of his denomination. From the right came objections to Darwinism in the schools and alcohol in the wider society. William Jennings Bryan, an elder in the Presbyterian Church USA, and arguably its most famous church member thanks to three unsuccessful runs for the United States presidency and his role as the lead prosecutor in the Scopes Trial (which resulted in the conviction of a Tennessee public school teacher for teaching evolution) peppered his denomination with proposals to insure that Presbyterian ministers and agencies remained free from the taint of evolution and drunkenness.
Machen wrote critically of Fosdick and was reliable enough for Bryan to invite him to testify at the Scopes Trial (an invitation Machen declined), but his major contribution to the Presbyterian and fundamentalist controversies was his book Christianity and Liberalism (1923). Its thesis was as simple as it was provocative: Christianity and liberalism were two entirely different religions, and as such Christians and liberals could not remain together in the same communion. Most of the book was an effort to prove that liberalism departed from historic Christianity by comparing its tenets to those of the church. Machen s outline mirrored the topics of systematic theology: God, man, Scripture, Christ, salvation, and the church. In each case, liberalism departed from any meaningful definition of Christian orthodoxy. But he was no less critical of the utilitarian appropriation of Christianity by Protestant ecumenists for social progress:
religion is discovered after all to be a useful thing. But the trouble is that in
being utilized religion is also being degraded and destroyed. Religion is being
regarded more and more as a mere means to a higher end.... The persons who
speak in this way usually have little interest in religion for its own sake; it has never occurred to them to enter into the secret place of communion with the holy God. But religion is thought to be necessary for a healthy community; and therefore for the sake of the community they are willing to have a church.
Machen’s controversial book generated a wide audience, partly owing to the unintended publicity he gained when Henry van Dyke, professor of literature at Princeton University and former United States ambassador to the Netherlands, in reaction to a Machen sermon gave up his pew at the First Presbyterian Church, Princeton, and held a press conference about his decision to do so. The Princeton Seminary professor became a staple among newspaper editors and conference organizers who were looking for the “fundamentalist” side on a given topic. Machen also received favorable comments from some of the nation’s leading columnists such as H. L. Mencken and Walter Lippmann for clearly identifying the issues dividing the Protestant churches. But although Machen attempted to write a general account of the source of controversy, Christianity and Liberalism spoke directly to the Presbyterian Church USA and the question of whether the church could cooperate or affiliate with other Protestant denominations. The book itself stemmed from a series of talks that Machen gave to conservative Presbyterian audiences while trying to increase opposition to the 1920 plan for organic union. Furthermore, his discussion of the function of creeds in the Protestant churches indicated the chief reason for opposing Protestant ecumenism. The ecumenists (both liberal and fundamentalist) proposed a doctrinal basis for unity that neglected the particular tenets of creedal churches. Whether desirable or not, Machen observed, ordination in the Presbyterian Church required subscribing the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms. This situation put liberal Presbyterians in an admittedly awkward position: “Finding the existing ‘evangelical’ churches to be bound up to a creed which he does not accept, he may either unite himself with some other existing body or else found a new body to suit himself.” 8 At the same time, if the existing creeds exposed the radical character of liberalism, evangelical doctrines also stood as obstacles to interdenominational cooperation.
The publicity surrounding Fosdick’s sermon, Machen’s book, and Bryan’s crusade against Darwinism would not have provoked sustained controversy and institutional deliberation were it not for the Presbytery of New York’s ordination of two candidates who could not affirm the virgin birth of Christ. In 1922, two recent graduates of Union Seminary (New York), Henry P. Van Dusen and Cedric O. Lehman, gained approval from the presbytery for ministry, despite their reservations about certain doctrines. This happened at a time when New York was already under close scrutiny. 9 Compounding the problem for New
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York Presbyterians was the General Assembly’s repeated insistence that the virgin birth was an essential and necessary doctrine within the confession of faith. Going back to debates over higher criticism during the 1890s, the Presbyterian Church had in 1892, 1910, and 1916 affirmed and reaffirmed five doctrines, including the virgin birth, as necessary for holding office. The assembly that met in 1923 was not inclined to change this. In response to the unsettling state of affairs in New York, it again insisted that the virgin birth was non-negotiable. This left one of the most progressive and wealthiest sectors of the denomination, comprised of the Presbytery of New York City and the Synod of New York, on a collision course with the General Assembly, which was by no means controlled by fundamentalists but was quite unprepared for what liberals proposed. “The Auburn Affirmation” (1923), a document written and circulated by ministers and faculty predominantly from the Synod of New York, was indicative of the escalating differences. The Affirmation called for tolerance and charity in the Presbyterian Church by allowing for a variety of interpretations of the confession of faith.
The growing divide between conservatives and liberals came to a head in 1925 at the General Assembly, which saw another Princeton Seminary professor, Charles R. Erdman, selected as moderator. The man who taught practical theology to the students learning the New Testment under Machen was a good barometer for the mind of the Presbyterian Church. He was an evangelical, friendly to the world of revivalism and Bible conferences, but did not follow the church’s theological standards rigorously. More important, he was not inclined to force anyone out of the church, whether on the left or the right. When the 1925 assembly voted to reaffirm the virgin birth as an essential and necessary article of the Christian faith - in response to the situation in New York - the commissioners followed Erdman’s own convictions about the fundamentals of the faith. But like many other evangelicals in the denomination, Erdman did not want to lose liberals. Consequently, when commissioners from the Presbytery of New York City and the Synod of New York threatened to secede from the denomination, Erdman intervened as moderator. He established a committee, the Special Commission of 1925, and gave it the task of assessing the cause of controversy in the Presbyterian Church and recommending a course of action.
The Special Commission worked diligently over the course of the next year. In an effort to be fair and balanced, the committee interviewed prominent figures on both sides of the controversy. On the right were Machen and Clarence Macartney, a pastor from Philadelphia; from the other side came testimony by Henry Sloane Coffin, a pastor in New York City, and William Adams Brown, professor of theology at Union Seminary (New York). The committee’s report followed in two installments, one for the assembly of 1926 and the next at the
subsequent General Assembly. Without naming names, the committee attributed less blame for the controversy to liberals than to conservatives, who were guilty of issuing “misjudgments and unfair and untrue statements which have been made in speech and in printed publications.” For peace and purity to prevail in the church, the committee argued, “all slander and misrepresentation must be brought to an end.” 10 The committee’s recommendations posed a real threat to conservatives. “Public expression of hasty or harsh judgments of the motives of brethren whose hearts are fully known only to God” should be prohibited. Even beyond the matter or manner of judging others was the committee’s desire to rally the resources of the Presbyterian Church for the advance of God’s kingdom around the world. “With resourceful America on one side of the globe,” the committee’s report concluded, “and, on the other, contemplative India and progressive Japan and seething China, there flame before the faces of men the signal fires of a Providential purpose.” 11 The ideals of cooperation and unity for the sake of social wellbeing were still dominant among American Presbyterians.
Also pronounced among American Presbyterians was a strong identification between the health of their nation and the blessings of their faith. One sign of this relationship was the Presbyterian Church’s support for Prohibition. Even without William Jennings Bryan’s constant lobbying - he died in 1925, only days after the conclusion of the Scopes Trial - the Presbyterian Church regularly passed resolutions at both the national and local levels in support of United States law banning the sale and distribution of alcohol. In 1926 the proProhibition outlook had direct consequences for Machen. The Presbytery of New Brunswick (New Jersey) where he was a member passed a motion to support the federal government’s policy. Machen voted “no” but did not protest any further. His understanding of the church was that it could speak only on matters revealed in Scripture, and because neither bans on alcohol nor the authority of the federal government were clear from the Bible, Machen opposed any effort that might turn the church into a political lobby or an agency of the police. But his doctrine of the spirituality of the church was lost on many of his fellow Presbyterians. At the General Assembly of 1926, which as part of its business had to review a recommendation from Princeton Seminary to promote Machen to the vacant chair of apologetics and ethics, commissioners decided to postpone the promotion. The reason was Machen’s vote against Prohibition: some commissioners wondered how a man who failed to recognize the evils of alcohol could teach Christian morality.
The decision to postpone Machen’s appointment was a product of more than simply the pious fears of the saloon; it was also an indication of ecclesiastical political maneuvering at the Presbyterian Church’s oldest seminary. Princeton Seminary had been established in 1812 and was under the direct oversight of the
assembly, unlike other institutions that were the creations of synods. During the 1920s Princeton became a piece of denominational machinery coveted by both sides in the struggle. For conservatives it was the last vestige of the Old School Presbyterian theology taught by the likes of Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, and Benjamin Warfield. For liberals and some evangelicals, Princeton became a roadblock to greater unity and more effective outreach by the Presbyterian Church. President J. Ross Stevenson’s support for the 1920 Plan of Union and Charles Erdman’s establishment of the Special Commission of 1925 indicated that some members of the faculty at Princeton were open to moving the seminary away from its Old School course and onto a moderate road of unity and progress. The decision to delay Machen’s promotion at Princeton was a further indication of efforts to bring the seminary into the denomination’s mainstream. That effort became explicit when the 1926 assembly also approved the appointment of a committee to investigate the differences among members of the faculty at Princeton. This committee was essentially an extension of the Special Commission of 1925. It eventually recommended an administrative overhaul, which increased the president’s power and diluted the authority of the board of directors (a largely conservative body) by merging it with the board of trustees. Legal objections delayed the reorganization for two years but it finally took place in 1929.
By this point, Machen had abandoned Princeton and decided to start an independent Presbyterian seminary in response to the reorganization. He was frustrated by church politics and string-pulling by remote denominational bureaucrats. He also had considerable means to initiate such a venture, despite economic upheaval worldwide, thanks to wealth inherited from both parents. Machen had a following among Presbyterian conservatives and fundamentalist Protestants; during the years after the publication of Christianity and Liberalism enrollments at Princeton spiked (though many new students were not from Presbyterian backgrounds). He rallied ministers and presbyteries in southeastern Pennsylvania, a stronghold of conservative congregations, and launched Westminster Theological Seminary from its center-city campus in Philadelphia. As Machen explained at the new seminary’s convocation, held at the Witherspoon Building, the very place where delegates to the Federal Council of Churches’ first meeting had registered:
Fifty years ago many colleges and universities and theological seminaries were devoted to the truth of God’s Word. But one by one they have drifted away, often with all sorts of professions of orthodoxy on the part of those who were responsible for the change. Until May 1929 one great theological seminary, the Seminary at Princeton, resisted bravely the current of the age. But now that
seminary has been made to conform to the general drift.... [T]hough Princeton Seminary is dead, the noble tradition of Princeton Seminary is alive. Westminster Seminary will endeavor by God’s grace to continue that tradition unimpaired; it will endeavor, not on a foundation of equivocation and compromise but on an honest foundation of devotion to God’s word .. } l
The new seminary was the only institutional base for conservative Presbyterians, but its effectiveness was questionable once Machen embarked on the second phase of ecclesiastical independence. In 1932 the report from an interdenominational project, Re-Thinking Missions: The Laymen's Foreign Missions Inquiry, was published. The largest Protestant denominations co-sponsored the study, while John D. Rockefeller underwrote actual expenses. The report, written by William Ernest Hocking, a professor of philosophy at Harvard University, contained the committee’s recommendations but could not avoid objections from evangelical and conservative Protestants. The purpose of the study was to arrive at a new motive for foreign missions in response to growing indifference and declining contributions. The committee narrowed its scope to missions in Asia. Hocking s report highlighted changes in theology and science over the previous five decades that undercut the old rationale for missions, namely, saving sinners from eternal damnation. It proposed instead some fundamental spiritual and moral ideals that Christianity shared with other world religions and recommended cooperation between Protestant missionaries and indigenous religious institutions. The report also addressed the perennial tension between a western expression of Christianity and the place of indigenous culture after evangelization. Now that missionaries needed to be concerned less with questions of heaven and hell than previous generations, they could devote their energies to those educational, economic, and medical enterprises that would build a better world. In Re-Thinking Missions the liberal Protestant notion of the kingdom of God advancing through the spread of western civilization was less Eurocentric than it had been prior to World War I. But Hocking’s understanding of cultural improvement still depended on western notions of civilization.
The report on foreign missions reignited conservative Presbyterian arguments about the dangers of theological liberalism and gave plausibility to their objections to the indifference of denominational officers. The Presbyterian Church USA had been a co-sponsor of Re-Thinking Missions but was no more responsible for the report than any of the other participating communions. Ignoring critics became much more difficult when Pearl S. Buck, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Good Earth, daughter of Presbyterian missionaries to China, and a woman on the Presbyterian Church’s missionary rolls, welcomed the report s findings. In a couple of magazine articles and public
talks, Buck expressed relief that missions could finally proceed without outdated, crude theological formulas. Opposition to the report and objections to Buck’s remarks would eventually force her resignation from the Presbyterian missions board. But the church s officials refused to condemn either her words or Hocking s report to a degree that would satisfy conservatives. Machen was one of the conservatives to take issue with the church’s Board of Foreign Missions and drafted an overture in 1933 that called for reform of the agency. The Presbytery of New Brunswick failed to act on this proposal, but the Presbytery of Philadelphia did adopt Machen’s overture and sent it to the General Assembly. When the commissioners rejected the proposed reforms, Machen countered with the creation of a new foreign missions agency: the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions.
Presbyterian officials may have been reluctant to condemn Buck and Hocking but they had no trouble spotting Machen’s errors. The General Council of the General Assembly found that the new missions board was unconstitutional, arguing that contributing to the official agencies of the denomination was as much a requirement for church members as the Lord’s Supper. In turn, the General Assembly of 1934 adopted the Council’s study of the Presbyterian Church’s constitution and ruled that the Independent Board was illegal. It also instructed all presbyteries with members of the board on their rolls to bring those board members to trial. In 1935, the Presbytery of New Brunswick complied and tried Machen in Trenton, New Jersey, before a crowd of his supporters and newspaper reporters. The charges ranged from a violation of his ordination vows and defiance against the church’s lawful authority to contempt for his superiors in the church. One of the more amazing aspects of this trial, aside from the irony of liberals conducting an ecclesiastical proceeding that many Americans associated with the Middle Ages, came when Machen’s counsel tried to defend the Westminster professor. Before the defense could begin, the Presbytery of New Brunswick’s judicial council ruled that it could hear no testimony that questioned the General Council’s interpretation of the church’s constitution or its determination that the Independent Board was illegal. When Machen told reporters that he had been condemned without a fair hearing, he did not exaggerate.
But while the Westminster professor appeared to be the victim of a miscarriage of Presbyterian justice, his initiatives were nevertheless losing support among conservatives. At Westminster, Machen alienated a majority of the board of trustees when he established the Independent Board. Several high-profile trustees, including Clarence Macartney, judged that the new agency was inflammatory and deemed that its associations with the seminary were preventing graduates from gaining calls within the Presbyterian Church. For Macartney the
whole point of starting Westminster had been to reform the church from within by producing a group of conservative young pastors. Rather than force the majority of the faculty who supported Machen and the Independent Board to resign, in 1935 Macartney and some of the other board members resigned from their responsibilities instead. The seminary was also responsible for alienating other conservatives, such as Carl Mclntire, a flamboyant and entrepreneurial New Jersey Presbyterian pastor who would go on to be a powerful voice of anticommunism among the Old Christian Right. Mclntire inherited many of the conventions of US Presbyterianism, including a form of civil religion and opposition to vices such as alcohol and tobacco. Because the faculty at Westminster included hyphenated Americans (three were Dutch-Americans and one a Scottish-American) who did not follow American expectations, a division developed within the ranks of Machen’s followers.
These fractures among conservative Presbyterians left Machen with a small and apparently marginal body from which to form a new communion. The members of the Independent Board who were tried and convicted appealed their cases to the General Assembly of 1936. With little fanfare the assembly upheld all of the convictions. Machen and his conservative peers had already planned their response, which was a new Presbyterian denomination. On June 11,1936, the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA) became the vehicle for the conservatives who had opposed the spread of liberalism in the Presbyterian Church USA. Its first General Assembly convened in Philadelphia only a few blocks from the campus of Westminster Seminary, and the commissioners elected Machen their first moderator. By the time the assembly convened the following year, Machen was dead, Mclntire had decided to leave the new denomination to form another conservative Presbyterian body (the Bible Presbyterian Synod), and the Presbyterian Church USA had brought a civil suit against Machen’s communion over the new denomination’s name.
Machen’s premature death on January 1, 1937 deprived the Presbyterian Church of America of its most celebrated figure but his survival would not likely have stopped the division with Mclntire. The immediate cause of his death was a cold that turned into pneumonia during a trip to speak to a small group of conservatives in North Dakota during the week after Christmas, 1936. But Machen had already been suffering from a case of betrayal since Mclntire orchestrated a takeover of the Independent Board for Foreign Missions, which had ousted Machen as president. Indeed, differences among conservatives had been mounting during the last months of 1936. Articles from the Westminster faculty that were critical of dispensational premillennialism 13 put some like Mclntire (who had sympathies for dispensationalism) on the defensive. The issue that drove an institutional wedge between these opponents of modernism
was alcohol: Mclntires wing of the PCA proposed an overture in support of Prohibition within the church and the majority, led by the Westminster faculty, rejected the proposal on the grounds of Christian liberty. Even so, it was a telling debate. The non-native-born faculty members at Westminster came from Reformed backgrounds where drinking alcohol was common. But for a wide swath of American Presbyterians, both liberal and conservative, total abstinence had become the national and Christian norm. When Mclntire complained about the direction of the PCA under the influence of hyphenated Americans at Westminster and formed a new church, he was in effect faulting the church that Machen had created for not being truly American. Not only were its leaders like Cornelius Van Til and John Murray from Dutch and Scottish backgrounds respectively, but their theology (of Christian liberty) and their piety (which countenanced beverage alcohol) was foreign to American Presbyterianism.
The civil suit by the Presbyterian Church USA on August 13, 1936, registered a similar complaint, namely, that the PCA could not legitimately present itself by as an American Presbyterian communion. Attorneys argued before the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas that the name “Presbyterian Church of America'’ was too close to the “Presbyterian Church in the USA,” and would confuse the public and divert support and attendees from the established to the fringe denomination. The defendants countered that the Presbyterian Church USA did not have a monopoly on the word “Presbyterian”, since at least four other communions had the word in their names. They also contended that, given all the publicity surrounding Machen and the Presbyterian Controversy, few Americans would mistake the PCA for the Presbyterian Church USA. On June 27, 1938, the judge hearing the case ruled against the PCA on the grounds that the new denomination was confusing, would hamper and impair the work of the plaintiff church, interfere with its orderly procedure, and disturb the resources of support in its field of activity. 14 Two years later, to comply with this ruling, the PCA changed its name to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
The reasons for the new name were various, and the record of votes on alternatives was humorous at times, but it captured Machen’s opposition to the drift of US Presbyterianism as practiced by the Presbyterian Church USA. He recovered the Old School Presbyterian doctrine of the spirituality of the church and argued repeatedly that either through humanitarian efforts or social activism the Presbyterian Church was turning away from its spiritual mission. Machen’s most important statement of this argument came in 1933 before a gathering of political and social scientists who had requested various clergy to address the question of the church’s responsibility in the light of domestic and
international woes. Machen’s response followed closely the logic of Old School Presbyterians:
... you cannot expect from a true Christian church any official pronouncements upon the political or social questions of the day and you cannot expect cooperation with the state in anything involving the use of force. Important are the functions of the police.... But the function of the church in its corporate capacity is of an entirely different kind. Its weapons against evil are spiritual, not carnal; and by becoming a political lobby through the advocacy of political measures whether good or bad, the church is turning aside from its proper mission, which is to bring to bear upon human hearts the solemn and imperious, yet also sweet and gracious, appeal of the gospel of Jesus Christ. 15
In the nineteenth century that understanding of the church had been acceptable even if Presbyterians in the United States had no direct experience with ecclesiastical establishment. By the time of Machen’s trial the spirituality of the church had no plausibility thanks to the overwhelming identification by US Protestants, both modernist and fundamentalist, of Christ’s cause with the nation’s wellbeing. Even so, it was the motivation behind conservatives like Machen who desired a version of Reformed Protestantism that was both true to the genius of Reformation theology and free from the encumbrance of national destiny. In the setting of a political order that played no favoritism with its religious institutions, Machen’s secession was the American version of Chalmers’ Disruption and Kuyper’s regretful withdrawal. The crucial difference was the absence on Machen’s part of an effort to create a shadow religious establishment.
The Princeton Theology Exported
Roughly a decade before his death, Machen received an invitation to become the principal of Knox College, the Presbyterian Church of Canada theological school at the University of Toronto. John Gibson Inkster, pastor at Knox Church in Toronto, was the man who proposed Machen to Canadian Presbyterians at their 1926 General Assembly. As much as this invitation may have tapped Machen’s notoriety as an ecclesiastical controversialist, it also reflected natural bonds between the then Princeton professor and Presbyterians in Canada. Inkster himself had frequently invited Machen to occupy the pulpit in Toronto. Machen also regularly sent seminary students for summer internships and guest preaching to assist the church in Canada. The idea of selecting Machen to head the Toronto
school was not far-fetched from the Canadian side, even if it made no sense to an ecclesiastical leader who was in the thick of a fight in his own country.
In fact, Machen’s nomination made even more sense to Canadians considering the struggle in which Presbyterians had battled just prior to the search for a principal lor Knox College. The same variety of ecumenism that had Protestants in the United States consider an organic union of the largest denominations actually succeeded in Canada. The idea of a united church in Canada emerged as early as 1902 with impromptu remarks by William Patrick, the principal of a Presbyterian college in Manitoba, during greetings delivered to a gathering of Methodists. Although Patrick broached the idea of closer cooperation independently, Canadian Methodists interpreted his comments as the formal position of Canadian Presbyterians. The following year the Methodists submitted a formal invitation to the Presbyterians which became the basis for the creation of a committee that soon included Congregationalists as well. By 1906 the proposal had extended to Anglicans and Baptists in Canada. A 1912 vote by Presbyterians on the plan for union revealed that the measure had support from a majority of the church. The vote also demonstrated a sizable opposition party that considered union to be a form of ecclesiastical suicide. In 1915 an organization dedicated to opposing union, the Presbyterian Church Association, started activities with a conference at St Andrew’s Church in Toronto and a formal declaration “to maintain and continue the Presbyterian Church in Canada.” 16
World War I stalled union plans but in 1921 the proposal gathered steam, with advocates unwilling to consider any arrangement short of union and opponents charging that the issue was dividing the Presbyterian Church. A chief debating point was the name of the church: union supporters denied that any Presbyterians who remained outside the merger could continue to use “Presbyterian Church of Canada,” since union was technically supposed to absorb this ecclesiastical body. On the other side, opponents were adamant in maintaining that they were continuing the witness and work of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. In 1924 the Assembly approved the plan for union and left to each congregation the decision of whether to enter the United Church. Any failure to vote would be interpreted as approval. On June 10, 1925, when the United Church of Canada held its inaugural worship service at Toronto’s Mutual Street Arena, the Presbyterian Church in Canada persisted but had shrunk to one-third of its previous size. Of the denomination’s 379,762 communicant members, 154,243 voted to remain Presbyterian; the proportion of congregations refusing union was smaller, 302 out of 4,509, with 211 resisting congregations in southern Ontario alone. Such resistance to church union by no means stemmed from the sort of Old School Presbyterian outlook that Machen espoused. But enough affinities existed between conservatives in Canada and
the United States that Machen appeared to be a viable leader to opponents of union in Canada.
In Northern Ireland, Machen proved to be a source of inspiration to conservatives who feared the increasing prominence of liberal theology in the theological colleges of the Irish Presbyterian Church. In 1927 he visited Belfast as the guest of a former student, W. J. Grier, an Irishman aspiring to the ministry who had studied for two years at Princeton but needed to complete his course at the General Assembly’s theological college in Belfast. After giving a series of lectures in Edinburgh, Manchester, and Liverpool, Machen arrived in Belfast on June 7 at the height of an investigation into the teaching of James Ernest Davey, a professor who taught theology at the General Assembly’s college and who had drawn fire from conservatives for questioning the infallibility of Scripture and the reliability of Christ’s teachings. The trial of Davey was one in a series of protests initiated by the Presbyterian minister James Hunter, who had led opposition to liberal trends among Irish Presbyterians since 1904 when his assembly passed a resolution expressing sympathy with the House of Lords’ decision to remove the property and assets of the United Free Church of Scotland and return it to the smaller Free Church (see Chapter Ten). Hunter believed that siding with the United Free Church against the Free Church put Irish Presbyterians on the wrong side. In Davey’s case, the evidence of ambiguity toward, if not outright departure from, the theology of the Westminster Confession was much easier to spot than choosing the correct ecclesiastical allies. In fact, Hunter had access to Grier’s own notes from Davey’s lectures.
Machen delivered talks he had given elsewhere about the contest between liberalism and historic Protestantism, and preached to a packed church during both morning and evening Sunday service; he estimated as many as 1,700 turned out at night. The large crowds were a function of the publicity surrounding the Davey trial. During Machen’s stay, he had lengthy conversations with Grier, Hunter, and other conservatives about the situation. But in the end, the Princeton professor’s inspiration and counsel could not alter the willingness of Irish Presbyterians to give Davey the benefit of the doubt. Not helping the conservatives was the revelation that Grier had added comments to his notes on Davey’s lectures, raising questions of whether the student had doctored the evidence. By the summer of 1927, the Presbytery of Belfast had already acquitted Davey on all charges. In the appeal to the General Assembly the conservatives lost again: the vote was 707 to 82. In response, Hunter renounced his office in the Irish Presbyterian Church and within four months helped to found the Irish Evangelical Church (later the Evangelical Presbyterian Church). Its original congregations were few and its members often met in small groups within private homes. If the controversy among Presbyterians in Ireland indicated
Machen s appeal to conservatives beyond the United States, the outcome of the affair also presaged how small the actual numbers of militant Presbyterians backing Machen in the United States would be almost ten years later.
One last example of Machen’s influence outside the United States for conservative Presbyterians opposed to liberalism and ecumenism comes from Korea. Even though Korean Presbyterianism exemplified a successful case of a church formed by foreign missionaries developing an indigenous identity, it remained wedded to North American norms despite significantly different environments. One of those important differences was political: while Presbyterians in the United States and Canada who sent missionaries to Korea enjoyed unchecked religious freedom, in the first half of the twentieth century the Korean church endured the rule of a hostile and aggressive Japanese Empire. After 1910, when Japan annexed Korea, Japanese policy was designed to extinguish Korean identity and any efforts that might support independence. Japanese control ran from a coercive military presence to such cultural measures as controlling the content of school curricula, requiring the use of the Japanese language, and enforcing the Shinto practice of shrine worship. Christian churches in Korea also came under rigorous Japanese surveillance and indigenous pastors and foreign missionaries experienced imprisonment and deportation respectively if they failed to comply with the regime. An unintended consequence of Japan’s treatment of the churches was to make Christianity tremendously popular in Korea, since the faith, especially Protestantism, became closely identified with Korean nationalism. But responses to Japanese rule and Shintoism were mixed. In the 1930s some of the largest Korean Presbyterian synods encouraged church members to participate in shrine worship by concluding that it was simply a political ritual without explicit religious significance. Other synods opposed Shintoism and for their defiance saw their schools and universities closed. In addition to these different responses to Shintoism were theological disagreements among Korean Presbyterians. Here either foreign missionaries introduced liberal theological trends among Koreans, or Korean natives who had studied in North America or Europe brought back the new theology when they returned home.
Hyung-Nong Park (1897-1978) was one of those native Koreans who tried to adapt theological developments in the United States to the situation in Korea. After receiving an undergraduate degree from Geumrung University in China, he traveled to the United States to study at Princeton Seminary during the heyday of Machen’s influence. He left Princeton in 1929 with two degrees and enrolled at the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, to pursue a PhD in the New Testament. When he returned to Korea in 1933 he taught at Pyongyang Theological Seminary, from which he opposed liberal theological
trends in the Presbyterian Church of Korea, particularly over critical and modern readings of Genesis and initiatives to soften New Testament prohibitions against the ordination of women. This opposition earned him the nickname the “Machen of Korea.” In 1938 the Japanese government closed the school and Park went into exile in Manchuria. He taught at Dongbuk Theological Seminary until the end of World War II and befriended Presbyterian missionaries from the United States, among them Bruce Hunt of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. After the war, Park returned to South Korea to train ministers for the Presbyterian Church of Korea.
Between 1946 and 1959, when the Presbyterian Church of Korea was reconstituted, Park taught at a number of seminaries and was instrumental in a number of church divisions. The first occurred in 1951 when opponents to Shintoism, Park among them, insisted that the church should discipline those who had participated in shrine worship. When these critics themselves split and Park returned to the mainstream Presbyterian Church, another division occurred in 1953 over women’s ordination, with the small pro-ordination group founding a separate Presbyterian communion. Finally, another division among the Korean Presbyterians took place in 1959 over the denomination’s membership in the World Council of Churches. Park perceived the international body to be a proponent of liberal Protestantism under the guise of ecumenism. He argued for membership in an alternative agency established by Carl Mclntire, the International Council of Christian Churches. Because Mclntire was willing to assist Park in establishing a conservative seminary, Park’s new denomination, the Hapdong Presbyterian Church, initially joined Mclntire’s council. Membership lasted for only a year, partly owing to Mclntire’s inability to let affiliated institutions oversee their own affairs. Even so, from the example of the Presbyterian controversy in the United States, Park had learned a theology predisposed to oppose liberalism and ecumenism based on social activism. He also recognized the importance of theological education for the identity and direction of church life. As much as those lessons may have been ill-suited to a church that was trying to establish its own standards and mechanisms of oversight, they illustrated the appeal of Machen’s conservative arguments to Presbyterians in small denominations around the world.
The doctrine of the spirituality of the church was not as important in Canada, Ireland, or Korea as it was to Machen’s own understanding of Presbyterianism. Even for Machen’s followers in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the spirituality of the church could be a minor matter compared to fighting liberalism, the Social Gospel, and non-discriminating forms of ecumenism. But the doctrine of spirituality was crucial to Machen’s own struggles with utilitarian forms of Protestantism that set aside the particular convictions of Reformed Protestantism for the generic
quest to build just and righteous societies through interdenominational cooperation. The spirituality of the church animated his opposition as much as it underscored the distinct character of Presbyterianism. It made him as suspicious of fundamentalist indifference to distinct parts of Reformed theology and church order as he was critical of liberalism. As such, Machen’s understanding of the church’s spiritual character and mission was one more instance of modern Reformed Protestant efforts to disentangle the ministry of word and sacrament from Calvinist assumptions about the church’s responsibility for the social order. For the church to be the church, she would need to abandon old habits that tended to reduce Christianity to strategies for personal and social wellbeing.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN