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The History of Presbyterianism
in the United States
Part 6: Modernism
C – The Conservatives Divide
While the Modernists Unite
Master Timeline
United States
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1620 – Mayflower lands
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1730s-1743 – 1st Great Awakening
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1776-1783 – American Rev.
1790-1840 – 2nd Great Awakening •
1830 – Book of Mormon
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1850-1900 – 3rd Great Awakening •
1861-1865 – American Civil War
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1870 – Scottish Common Sense
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1889 – Moody Bible Institute
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1891 – Briggs’ address
1909 – Scofield Reference Bible
1910 – Pres. G.A.: 5 Fundamentals
1914-1919 – World War I
1922 – “Shall Fund.s Win?”
1923 – The Auburn Affirmation
1925 – The Scopes Trial
1929 – Westminster Theo. Seminary
1936 – Orthodox Presbyterian Ch.
1936 – John Mackay, Princeton Sem.
Europe
1643 – Westminster Confession of Faith
1650-1800 – Age of European Enlightenment
& of Scottish Common Sense Philosophy
1770s-1900 – Rise of German Higher Criticism
1789-1799 – French Revolution
1827 – Plymouth Brethren begin meeting
1833 – Slavery Abolition Act of England
1859 - Charles Darwin – Origin of Species
1862-77 – Darby travels to the United States
United States (cont.)
1937 – Death of J. Gresham Machen
- Bible Presbyterian Ch. (McIntyre)
1966 – RTS, Jackson, MI
1967 – Confession of ‘67, Book of Confessions
1973 – PCA
1983 – Union of UPCUSA & PCUS
Auburn Signers Continued Influence
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1933 – Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions
1934 – G.A. Mandate
1935 – Machen put on trial by New Brunswick Presbytery
1935 – Various actions of G.A. secure power of Modernists
over Conservatives.
▫ Ministers serving on the Independent Board were barred
from the Assembly.
▫ A committee was formed to “assist” churches in the filling
of pulpits with new pastors.
▫ Conservative presbyteries were politically targeted.
Auburn Signers Continued Influence
• 1936 G.A.
▫ Dr. Machen appealed to the G.A. but the conviction
was upheld.
▫ Eight ministers, including Dr. Machen, were
suspended from the ministry due to unwillingness to
support denominational foreign missions.
▫ Other conservatives debated whether to leave or work
for reform from within the church.
The controversy has also been interpreted as a
rhetorical battle. To be sure, liberal evangelicals …
mastered the vocabulary of liberty, diversity, and peace,
while militant conservatives employed the less winsome
language of strife and warfare. … Moreover,
conservatives arguably lost this conflict less because of
their belligerence than their unwillingness to fight.
H&R
Recognizable Patterns
Those in control of the Presbyterian Church
in the USA argued that the church is under a
constitution, … and when it delivers a mandate,
… it must be obeyed by the members of the
church.
Similarly, the Roman Catholic must obey the
voice of the church speaking through its Pope
and councils.
Recognizable Patterns
The signers of the Auburn Affirmation saw
themselves as fighting for freedom of thought and
the progress of the church:
1st, they pled for tolerance,
then, they demanded acceptance,
then they imposed requirements,
and finally, they punished opponents.
Recognizable Patterns
The signers of the Auburn Affirmation saw
themselves as fighting for freedom of thought and
the progress of the church:
They used intellectual challenges to traditional values.
They emphasized man’s progress and development.
They used the media to label opponents
as reactionary.
They used politics to control the administrative
powers and legalities to control the judicial system.
R. K. Churchill
“The modern Reformers stood for all that
Luther stood for regarding the absolute
authority of the Scriptures, plus a great
deal more.
If the situation in the sixteenth century demanded a new
church, how much more the situation in the twentieth
century.”
Formal Division Begins
• 6/27/1935 – A meeting of conservatives in Philadelphia result
in the organization of a Presbyterian Constitutional Covenant
Union.
• Being rebuffed by Dr. Samuel Craig,
editor of Christianity Today,
previously a supporter to conservatives,
The Presbyterian Guardian is created
as an organ of public communication.
We cannot trust the world; we cannot trust that
elusive something known as ‘civilization!’ We
cannot, alas, trust the visible church. But when God
speaks we can trust Him. He has spoken in the Bible.
We can find our way through all the mists if we will
make that blessed Book our guide.
J.G. Machen, in the 1st edition
Formal Division Begins
• 6/11-14/1936 – Immediately following the suspension of 8
ministers at the PCUSA G.A., the convention of the Covenant
Union was called to order in Philadelphia.
▫ An act of association/doctrine was drawn up and signed. It
was called the Presbyterian Church of America.
▫ J. Gresham Machen was unanimously elected moderator.
▫ Westminster standards, previous to 1903 (Van Dyke)
amendments, were adopted.
▫ A resolution declaring all church property belongs to the local
congregation.
▫ All censures inflicted by the PCUSA lifted.
▫ Governmental power at presbytery level was restricted.
▫ Free and open debate was to be a premier “unwritten law”.
Formal Division Begins
• 6/11-14/1936 – Immediately following the suspension of 8
ministers at the PCUSA G.A., the convention of the Covenant
Union was called to order in Philadelphia.
• 8/13/1936 – Legal proceedings began by the PCUSA against the
PCofA over the similarity of name. (After losing, the name was
changed to “The Orthodox Presbyterian Church” in 1939.)
• 11/1936 – 1st G.A. of the PCofA convened.
First Presbyterian Church, Leith, ND
• Begun as a Sunday School in 1906, it was organized as a
church in 1910.
• Nicholas C. Emch was one of two elders elected at the
beginning.
• In 1912, the church occupied the church building owned by
the community.
• In 1932, the church
called her sixth pastor:
The Rev. Samuel Allen,
as stated supply.
The Rev. Samuel Allen
• Allen had begun his studies at
Princeton Seminary.
• But he transferred to Westminster and
was part of the first graduating class of
1930.
• Upon arriving, he set to work visiting all
the families in the congregation and
educating and persuading them about
the growing liberality in the
denomination and challenging them to
come together and leave the PCUSA as
a church body.
• Upon calling for the vote, the Leith
congregation chose unanimously to
leave.
The Rev. Samuel Allen
• Allen wanted other like-minded
congregations in the area to join Leith
in leaving the PCUSA.
• Allen invited Dr. Machen to conduct a
speaking tour during the seminary’s
Christmas break.
• Already worn out and suffering from a
cold but disregarding counsel to take
the break to rest, Machen accepted
the invitation.
• The temperature in ND at the time
averaged -20◦
• After speaking in Leith, Machen’s
cold became decidedly worse.
• Allen rushed him to St. Alexius
Hospital in Bismark to be
examined.
• Machen determined to speak that
evening at a public rally.
• Afterwards, he collapsed.
• Returning to the hospital in
Bismarck, he was diagnosed with
pneumonia.
From under an oxygen
tent in the hospital
in Bismarck:
• Telegram to John Murray: “I'm so thankful for
the active obedience of Christ. No hope without
it.”
• Last words: “Isn’t our faith glorious? It is
sufficient to the very end.”
• Machen died on January 1, 1937.
Funeral Service at
W. Spruce St. Baptist Ch.,
Philadelphia, PA
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January 5, 1937
Led by fellow professors at WTS
Hymns, Scripture, Prayer
“Not one word of eulogy was
spoken. His name was not
mentioned.”
• The pall-bearers were students and
faculty of Westminster Seminary.
• Buried, Green Mount Cmty, B’more.
“Faithful unto Death”
H.L. Mencken on Machen
“He saw clearly that the only effects that could
follow diluting and polluting Christianity in the
modernist manner would be its complete abandonment and ruin. Either it was true or it was not true.
If, as he believed, it was true, then there could be no
compromise with persons who sought to whittle away its
essential postulates, however respectable their motives.
Thus he fell out with the reformers who have been trying, in late
years, to convert the Presbyterian Church into a kind of literary
and social club, devoted vaguely to good works. …
His one and only purpose was to hold it resolutely
to what he conceived to be the true faith. When that
enterprise met with opposition he fought vigorously,
and though he lost in the end and was forced out of
Princeton it must be manifest that he marched off to
Philadelphia with all the honors of war.”
Pearl Buck on Machen
“We have lost a man whom our times can ill spare,
a man who had convictions which were real to him
and who fought for those convictions and held to
them through every change in time and human
thought. There was power in him which was positive in its very
negations. He was worth a hundred of his fellows who, as
princes of the church, occupy easy places and play their church
politics and trim their sails to every wind, who in their smug
observance of the convictions of life and religion
offend all honest and searching spirits. No forthright
mind can live among them, neither the honest skeptic
nor the honest dogmatist. I wish Dr. Machen had
lived to go on fighting them.”
Dr. Machen was by far the most distinguished
minister of the Presbyterian Church in the
USA in his generation.
The Rev. Caspar Wistar Hodge, Ph.D.,
professor of systematic theology at Princeton
Theological Seminary and a member of the
famous Hodge family, wrote, ‘I regarded
him as the greatest theologian in the
English-speaking world.’
Edwin Rian
Formal Division Begins
• 6/11-14/1936 – Immediately following the suspension of 8
ministers at the PCUSA G.A., the convention of the Covenant
Union was called to order in Philadelphia.
• 8/13/1936 – Legal proceedings began by the PCUSA against the
PCofA over the similarity of name. (After losing, the name was
changed to “The Orthodox Presbyterian Church” in 1939.)
• 11/1936 – 1st G.A. of the PCofA convened.
• 1/1/1937 – Dr. Machen died of pneumonia in Bismarck, ND
• Infighting intensifies dramatically over the issues of:
▫ acceptable views on the Millennium (Disp. influences).
▫ temperance (Fundamentalist influences).
▫ relationship of the new denomination with the Independent
Board of Foreign Missions (Issues of polity, personality and
political influences)
the Rev. Carl McIntire
The Legacy of the OPC
“In the formation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church,
Calvinism was given a new impetus in America. The spiritual
heritage of Reformed teaching which had been stifled in the
Presbyterian Church in the USA received a welcome in this
church body, and the great doctrines of the Reformation, such as
the sovereignty of God and salvation by grace alone, came to life
again. Upon this high biblical ground the Orthodox Presbyterian
Church stands, convinced that God will be pleased to use her to
his glory and to the advancement of his kingdom. The original
purpose and determination to make the church a truly biblical
and truly Presbyterian body which would carry on the spiritual
succession of the Presbyterian Church in the USA was insured.”
E. Rian
The Legacy of the OPC
“Machen rejoiced that he and his comrades had ‘become
members, at last, of a true Presbyterian church.’ … But initially
Orthodox Presbyterians were more united in their opposition
to modernism than they were in their understanding of the
genius of American Presbyterianism.
[The] OPC was a small church which continued to shrink
from defections of those with conflicting agendas. … [It]
continued to suffer losses of ministers and churches who found
greater affinity with American evangelicalism than
Presbyterian confessionalism.”
H&M
“Reckoning fully with the Presbyterian controversy
involves going beyond theological method or
rhetoric.”
• Some, such as Bryan, were anti-creedal and pietists who were
crusading for a moral gospel … the reform of society and the
maintenance of national moral standards.
• Others, like Macartney, declined to use the assemblies of the
church to enforce the church’s constitution.
• Machen’s defense of Reformed doctrine fell on deaf ears among
conservatives who were fearful of splitting the church.
• In the end, Machen stood nearly alone in upholding the
integrity of the church to proclaim the Reformed faith.
• H&R
New Covenant
Presbyterian Church
Preaching God’s Sovereign Grace
to a World of Need
128 St. Mary’s Church Rd.,
Abingdon, MD 21009
410-569-0289
www.ncpres.org
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