J. Gresham Machen Bibliography

Transcription

Host: This program is a production of the Reformed Forum, an organization devoted to producing and distributing Reformed theological content for a connected age. Online@reformedforum.org this is Christ the Center, episode number 267. Today we speak with Darrell Hart about the reorganization of Princeton Theological Seminary.

Welcome to Christ the Doctrine for Life, your weekly conversation of Reformed theology. This is episode number 267. My name is Camden Bussey. I’m recording here from Wheaton, Illinois. I’m very pleased to welcome back to the program. It’s been a long time, but we are very pleased and blessed to have with us again as a panelist, Jason Pickard. He’s a graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary with an M. Div. But he’s working with RUF International now at Texas A and M University. Welcome back, Jason. It’s great to have you again.

Jason Pickard: Hey, it’s great to be here, Ken. Thanks.

Host: Well, you have Johnny Football down in Texas A and M. I suppose I’ll call you Jason Theology.

Jason Pickard: There we go.

Host: Okay.

Jason Pickard: My son’s name is John, so we can call him Johnny Theologian or something.

Host: Yes, that works. That works. Well, it’s good football days down in Texas A and M lately, so hopefully that continues. I know our friend Jonathan Brack will be happy and we’ll give a big hearty gig emergency to all the Aggie fans.

But we have a guest with us who’s been on the program before and he’s living in the great state of my football team, the University of Michigan. Don’t ask, but we’re very pleased to welcome back to the program Darrell Hart, who is visiting assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan. He’s also written a number of books and articles on American Presbyterianism, in particular specializing in J. Gresham Machen. Welcome back, Darrell. It’s great to have you on again.

Darrell Hart: Thanks for having me.

Host: Camden, we are very pleased to welcome you back and to discuss a very important subject in the history of American Presbyterianism. We are going to be speaking today about the reorganization of Princeton Theological Seminary that happened not quite 100 years ago. Darrell has written an article in the Confessional Presbyterian Journal titled the Reorganization of Princeton Theological Seminary and the Exhaustion of American Presbyterianism, which I believe began as a. As an address at a conference at Greenville Theological Seminary. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

Before we get into our subject, I do need to mention that Christ the Center. This program is listener supported and we encourage you to visit us online@reformedforum.org Donate to pledge your support Today we need more people to partner with us to help us to do all that we do. We have a number of exciting projects and programs lined up, including the the recent release of Proclaiming Christ. We’d also like to spin Philosophy for Theologians back up and a couple other things. But we need your help. Please visit us online today@reformedforum.org donate. Thank you so much for your support of everything we do at Reformed Forum and this particular program, Christ the Center.

Well, gentlemen, when I received this copy, the Latest Confessional Presbyterian Volume 8, the 2012 edition has a number of articles in here about Princeton Theological seminary. Last year, 2012 was the 200th anniversary of its founding. Is that correct, Darrell?

Darrell Hart: Yes, it is. Yes.

Host: And that was celebrated, I believe, with a conference at Greenville Theological Seminary. Is that correct, too?

Darrell Hart: Yes, that’s true.

Host: Tell me about that conference and some of the participants and I guess the reception of this lecture at the conference, how did it go?

Darrell Hart: Well, it was an interesting event. I think most of the seminary students, faculty, families showed up, but then also contingent from that part of the southeastern United States. And I remember Carl Truman presenting on Warfield and oh, I can’t remember everyone else. I have my copy of the Confessional Presbyterian here somewhere, but we just interviewed

Host: Paul Helseth on Right Reason and the Science of Theology at Old Princeton. So he was there as well, I believe. Fred Zaspel, it looks like, on Princeton in Evolution.

Darrell Hart: Well, he actually couldn’t make it, but someone else presented his paper and I had to show up partway through the conference because I was teaching here. But anyway, it was an enjoyable time, my first time at Greenville or in a function connected with the institution.

Host: Well, there’s plenty more articles in this issue of the Confessional Presbyterian if you’re interested in picking one up. I suppose I should mention you can find them@cpjournal.com and it’s a useful volume. A lot of great material in here that you’re going to be reading for many, many hours. Good stuff that will occupy your mind for time to come.

Of course, we have a wide range of listeners, a lot of Presbyterians, a lot of people that will be familiar with the that I’m speaking about, this reorganization of Princeton Theological Seminary. But there will be other people that are new to the subject and others that are Baptists or Congregationalists or Christians of different stripes or non Christians that are not going to be familiar.

Darrell, could you rehearse just quite basically what happened in 1929 at a very high level before we start to look into the particulars that brought this reorganization about.

Darrell Hart: Right. Well, the reorganization of Princeton Seminary in 1929 more or less was the culmination of at least the first stage of controversies within the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. The Northern Presbyterian Church, which is the governing body of Princeton Seminary to this day. Princeton Seminary was founded as an agency of the General assembly of the church, and it still was during the 1920s.

And so there had been controversies within the church over liberalism and conservatism. J. Grossen Machen emerged as probably the most public and popular spokesperson for the conservatives. That led to an investigation of Princeton Seminary and a plan to reorganizing it. To reorganize the seminary, which occurred in 1929.

What the reorganization did was to change the board of directors at the school and make the conservatives a minority in governance of the school. And at that point, Machen wouldn’t abide the changes and founded Westminster Seminary that same year, 1929.

Host: Wow. So there’s a lot going on there, a lot of legalities, a lot of questions about why this happened.

Darrell Hart: I assume for two years. Actually, the initial report that recommended the reorganization came to the General assembly in 1927, I believe. And then lawyers kept it from happening for two years as both sides parties argued that it was either constitutional or unconstitutional, both according to church law, but as well as New Jersey state law.

Host: And so from one angle, there’s a lot of questions about what’s going on here with the reorganization. But if I get this correct, please correct me if I’m wrong. There were two boards. There was a board of directors, which I believe oversaw academics, and a board of trustees that oversaw the rest of the affairs at the seminary. And they decided to create one board from the two. So they took a third of the new board members from the directors, a third from the trustees, and then a third from a new bunch. Is that correct?

Darrell Hart: Yes.

Host: And so basically, I guess the significance here is why this happened, but also the shift in power between conservatives and progressives or modernists, whatever word we want to use there. And that’s what we’re going to unfold today in our episode, trying to describe why this happened and what its great significance was.

Darrell, one thing I really appreciate that you and John Muther have done especially, is your book Seeking a Better Three Years of American Presbyterianism. I know Jason’s read that book and has also remarked on how useful it is. And one thing you do there is really trace American Presbyterianism from its beginnings. We’re not going to go all the way back there, but pretty close.

Could you speak a little bit about John Witherspoon and his significance as an early American Presbyterian in order to lay the foundation or start to describe the climate or environment out of which old Princeton arose?

Darrell Hart: Right. I mean, Witherspoon is an enigmatic figure and a lot of people have studied him. And he is, of course, the only pastor, clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. And he came to America, North America, in 1768 to preside over the College of New Jersey, which is now known today as Princeton University.

And he was in some ways a compromise candidate between the old side and new side controversy that had split the colonial church between 1741 and 1758. But Witherspoon had been a member of the Evangelical Party in the Church of Scotland, so he was regarded as conservative. He had proved himself to be that way by writing some pieces mocking some of the moderates or liberals in the Church of Scotland. So he looked like a good fit, and then he just fit right in into the British colonies by embracing the cause of liberty.

And he preached a sermon in 1775 that is reproduced practically everywhere in the founding documents of the United States. And it was circulated, I believe, by the Continental Congress. And he makes some rather startling claims in there about sectarianism, but likening denominational differences to sectarianism. So obviously he’s trying to rally everyone to the side of independence from Great Britain. But it’s odd that a man who was in many respects a solid, committed Presbyterian would also say these things about denominational differences. It’s not at all unusual. It’s happened many times throughout church history as well as American church history.

But it does, it seems to me, it does send an early signal for the Presbyterian Church USA. And Witherspoon had a big hand in creating the first General assembly, trying to. To create a national structure for the Presbyterian Church. And so at the very beginning, almost on the ground floor, you have a kind of civil religion, better perhaps than a lot of other kinds of civil religion throughout the history of the United States, but a kind of civil religion that is informing the Presbyterian Church.

And it is still striking to me that the church would adopt the name that it does by putting the name of the nation in its own name. It’s not unusual for other churches to do that as well, although other churches might choose North America or just America, but here it’s full blown United States of America. And again, it does suggest that the origins of the 1st General assembly and when the denomination becomes a national structure that it’s very much identified with the nation itself.

Host: Yeah.

Darrell Hart: And I think that carries over then throughout the history of the church, so that even conservatives in the church are going to have a sort of double mindedness about serving the nation and serving the kingdom of God and maybe have to do some fudging to make that work.

Host: So can you also describe for us the founding then of old Princeton and situate that against the life of Witherspoon? Where is this happening and when for the listeners?

Darrell Hart: Well, Witherspoon is actually in some ways responsible for the kind of dissatisfaction with the College of New Jersey, which was, even though not a denominationally run school, was pretty much the Presbyterian College, but in the era, I mean, someone like James Madison trained under, studied under Witherspoon. And the college during the late decades of the 18th century gained the reputation for turning out more politicians than ministers.

And anyone who wants to read more about this, arguably Mark Noll’s best book is called Princeton and the Republic, and it’s about the college in New Jersey during this era of Witherspoon’s presidency and then his successor, Samuel Stanhope Smith. And it’s also a very important study of the kind of political theology that’s going on in the new nation and how Presbyterians fit in with that. It’s a precursor in many respects to America’s God, but it’s more succinct and in some ways more accessible than Noel’s big book, America’s God.

So anyway, there’s this dissatisfaction in the Presbyterian Church with the College of New Jersey, and they’re not producing ministers. So eventually there’s a proposal to have a seminary which was a relatively novel institution for Protestants in America as well. And so one of the first seminaries was Andover seminary, founded in 1808 in reaction to changes at Harvard Divinity School.

So Presbyterians convinced the General assembly to found the Princeton Seminary in 1812. And it is now going to be the source for ministers for the Presbyterian Church. Now, eventually it won’t be the only source because there will be other seminaries founded by synods or by maybe in some cases presbyteries within the Presbyterian Church. But Princeton is the oldest and the one that has the initially the direct imprimatur of the General Assembly. And it’s and again, the reason is because they need ministers for this expanded nation.

I think at one point in say, 1815, there may be the figure something like 100 ministers for 400 congregations or something like that. That may be off. It’s been a while Since I looked at my notes, but it’s some kind of odd proportion like that. So there really was a need for more clergy or more pastors.

Host: So, yeah, I think that’s about right. If I recall, recently I read an article to the effect it’s 1 in 3 or 1 in 4. It was really a problem.

Darrell Hart: Right.

Host: What happened at Princeton? How successful was it? Maybe between 1812 and 1922, for instance, what were some of the. Some of the shifts or how did it grow and develop and meet these challenges?

Darrell Hart: Well, very small institution at first. Only three faculty through, say, 1830. The original faculty were Archibald Alexander, Samuel Smith, Samuel Miller, excuse me, and Charles Hodge was the third. But Princeton did hold on to Reformed orthodoxy, I would argue, better than most other Reformed seminaries in the United States, partly because they were using turrets for so long until they started to assign Hodge, until Hodge produces systematics.

Princeton came out on the side of the Old School Presbyterians in The split in 1837, somewhat reluctantly, but still clearly on that side in defending the decisions that went into the Old School, which was to reject the New Haven theology that was fairly prominent in some New School circles. A kind of parachurch, a preference for parachurch agencies that also was associated with the Second Great Awakening. And in fact, in some cases, New School Presbyterians were also rejecting the federal theology of the Westminster Standard. So Princeton stood with the Old School on that and became, in fact, pretty much the only Old School seminary in the North. Most of the Old School strength was in the southern parts of the United States.

And so when you get to 1869 and the old School and New School are coming back together, Hodge is still there, and he’s still arguing against a reunion because he thinks that the New School never adequately addressed the problems that were in its ranks. But by that point, it’s a whole new wave of Presbyterians, a whole new generation of ministers are in the church. And so the opposition to the reunion in 1869 is a very small one.

And for a lot of people in conservative Presbyterian circles today, they look at the Old School, New School, and myself included the Old School, New School reunion as a real important turning point in the history of Presbyterianism. And. And in some ways, the loss of that Old School voice that probably, I think if there was or were a golden age of American Presbyterianism, and I don’t like speaking of Golden Ages because it’s always a church militant. There are always all sorts of problems in the church. But you have maybe a dozen, at least a dozen theologians, seminarians, seminary faculty, who are teaching and expounding Reformed orthodoxy, teaching a high view of the church, teaching sound convictions about worship and good solid churchmen to boot. So that’s why a lot of these men’s writings are still in print and thankfully Banner of Truth has kept a number of them in print as well, even some of the more obscure ones. So it really was a great period and Princeton was part of that old school tradition.

Host: One thing you’ve mentioned before in classes and lectures and also even in this article is the history of Presbyterianism seen through two cities, mainly New York and Philadelphia. Most of the time you say what comes from New York is usually bad and what comes from Philadelphia is oftentimes good. Princeton itself is geographically roughly in between the two. How was it caught in the middle of some of these developments leading up to and then I guess beginning in 1922?

Darrell Hart: Well, in some ways you can trace that all the way back to the colonial era where Princeton is in the Presbytery of New Brunswick, which was a presbytery created to give the new side ministers like Gilbert Tennant, who was a fairly fiery preacher at the time and not really abiding, pardon me, the rules, well, of the Presbyterian Church. So this was the Presbyterian of New Brunswick was sort of a release valve for a lot of the hot minded revivalists.

And so it has a new side pro revival, in some ways anti ecclesiastical tinge from its beginning. And yet that’s where Princeton Seminary is located and most of its faculty through the years are members of that presbytery. And it’s situated midway between Philadelphia and Princeton and I mean Philadelphia and New York.

But I think in some ways the balance of power is with. Well, it depends on where the headquarters of the Presbyterian Church are. If the headquarters are in Philadelphia, maybe Philadelphia has more weight with Princeton. But if when headquarters shift to New York, it’s going to have more, the balance of power will shift there because again, Princeton is an agency of the General Assembly.

And so in the 1920s, by that point the headquarters for the Presbyterian Church were located more directly in New York City, even though Philadelphia itself still had at the Witherspoon building there at Chancellor street and Walnut, this great building of the Sabbath School Board and Presbyterian publications, some agency like that. I think for a while it was more or less the headquarters for the Presbyterian Church. And then it eventually became mainly the publication center for the Presbyterian Church. When I think the stated clerk and other officers in the church would have been in New York City.

So Princeton was old school, but still caught in some ways caught up in the politics of the church. And I think it was never going to escape that. And the reorganization of 1929 was very much proof of that.

Jason Pickard: I’m just curious about the, you know, the close connection between going back to Witherspoon between the Church and State. Is that a carryover from his days in Scotland?

Darrell Hart: That is unclear. And I’m actually hoping in days ahead to look at Presbyterian politics in Scotland, Northern Ireland and North America and see how it plays out. Because there are at least three strands or four strands of Presbyterianism. Well, three between the late 17th century and the American Revolution where you have Scottish. The Kirk itself.

And so the people who are ministers, who are in the church itself, have to take a certain view of the state, given that they are part of the establishment. But you have Covenanters who won’t go into the Kirk and they’re going to remain separate and they have their own view of the state and the importance of the national Covenant.

And then you have the associate Presbyterians led by the Erskine brothers. They leave the church in 1733, and they also have their own understanding of politics and the relationship between church and state. And so Witherspoon himself is coming out of Scotland and he’s coming out of the Kirk, the established church. So I don’t know if he represents some kind of mainstream view among evangelicals in the Scottish church or not. And that’s, I think, something that would be very interesting to map out.

I was recently in Ireland over the Thanksgiving week and spent some time in Northern Ireland and in the Republic and became aware of huge Presbyterian involvement in politics in Ireland, which is not unusual or not surprising to anyone who followed the troubles in Northern Ireland and the involvement of someone like Ian Paisley in the politics of relationships between Roman Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. But. So it’s a long winded answer to say, I’m not sure. But I also, again, Witherspoon is one of these enigmatic figures and the historians that I’ve read of him on his politics don’t easily situate him in Scottish views of church, state relations or relationship, even of Scotland to England in the United Kingdom.

Jason Pickard: Thank you. And just one more question. I was just thinking about the early days of Princeton and what kind of paved the way for these shifts. I’ve read before at the centennial of Princeton Seminary, that people are already sounding a warning about changes going on. So was this development. Obviously, things don’t happen all at once, but how long were these internal discussions going on and tensions starting to emerge? Do we know any of that?

Darrell Hart: Well, in 1909, I believe it was, there was a student rebellion because they didn’t care for the curriculum at Princeton. Around 19, I guess around the Centennial, Princeton also finally, the seminary finally appoints its first president. And so that’s an indication of some changes there. I believe the first president was Francis Landy Patton, who was solid conservative Presbyterian thinker and pastor.

But if you read about Warfield’s involvements in many of these debates, he was very much worried about what was happening to the seminary during these periods and curriculum revisions that were being forced on the faculty in the light of these student rebellions. But also Warfield was also very much worried about the Presbyterian Church that was sponsoring and overseeing the seminary because of the revisions to the Westminster standards that had been going on during the 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century.

And Warfield opposed them, but he wasn’t able to persuade enough people to prevent those revisions from happening. And that those revisions were responsible for the merger between the pcusa, the Northern Church, and the Cumberland Presbyterians, who were probably the least Calvinistic of Presbyterian churches in the United States. So there was a lot of muddy water swirling around the seminary.

And that the seminary held out as long as it did as part of mainstream Protestantism after the Civil War especially, is fairly remarkable.

Host: Now, of course, we can’t speak much about New York and American presbyterianism in the 1920s without talking about Harry Emerson Fosdick. Could you explain some of his role in the precipitation of all these events? Who was he and what was his influence upon Presbyterianism?

Darrell Hart: He was probably the most popular liberal preacher, Protestant preacher of the first half of the 20th century. He was a Baptist. And the way that he became an issue for Presbyterians was that he was the stated supply preacher at First Presbyterian Church in New York. So you could well wonder why a Presbyterian church would have a Baptist minister as its pastor. You could also well wonder why they’d have a liberal preacher as their pastor. Estated supply.

And what’s also interesting, though, is the sermon that he preaches in 1922 entitled shall the Fundamentalists Win? I think he’s actually preaching at Baptist at that point because the word fundamentalism, actually its origins are in debates among Baptists, both Southern and Northern, and the late teens and early twenties. In fact, one of the editors of a Southern Baptist newspaper, Curtis Lee Laws, I believe, is responsible for coming up with the name fundamentalism. And so I think Fosdick was addressing those issues in Baptist circles, even though he was preaching from a Presbyterian pulpit.

But the kind of case that he made there, then, about this, about fundamentalism and. And how it was turning out all sorts of good people from the church, how inerrancy and the virgin birth of Christ were not nearly as important as some of the world issues facing the United States and other nations trying to keep peace and restore order after World War I.

And he called for greater tolerance in the church. I mean, these were things that were red meat for conservatives who were worried about peace, where the church was going. So I think unintentionally, unwittingly, Fosdick ended up creating a controversy in the Presbyterian Church. I think he had intended to create one among the Baptists, but he didn’t realize what was coming among Presbyterians. So right away, overtures from Philadelphia are coming to the General assembly to remedy this situation in New York City.

Host: Hmm. What happened in 1925? What was the special commission that occurred at that time?

Darrell Hart: Well on the heels of Fosdick’s sermon, the Presbytery of New York also ordained two men to the ministry who would not affirm the virgin birth. They did not deny it, but they would not affirm it. And this was a very controversial matter, not simply because of the importance of the virgin birth to Christian orthodoxy, but also because the Presbyterian Church had already been on record, going back to 1892, as declaring, excuse me, the virgin birth, along with inerrancy and vicarious atonement and a couple other doctrines as being essential and necessary for ministry in the church.

There were questions about whether the General assembly had the power to declare these doctrines as essential and necessary. And this goes all the way back to the adopting act of 1729 and what that act meant. But still the church was on record as the virgin birth being essential and necessary. And so if the Presbytery of New York was going to ordain men who would not affirm the virgin birth, then they were in violation of what the General assembly decided.

So that played out over the course of three years. Eventually, there was almost a split in the church in 1925, where once again, the assembly affirmed the virgin birth as an essential and necessary article. The liberals in New York, both in the Synod of New York and the Presbytery, were willing to, at least according to some memoirs, willing to consider starting a new Presbyterian denomination, which is something that actually Machen argued for in Christianity, liberalism. He thought that there really should be a separation of the two parties, the liberals and the conservatives.

But Charles Erdman intervened. At that moment. He was the moderator of the General assembly. Of 1925, did not want to see the church split. He was also, for people who don’t know this, professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and well regarded as an evangelical, not as an old school Presbyterian, but still as conservative. He was an editor of the Fundamentals, which was a series of tracts published in the Teachers that defended certain doctrines of the faith. He wrote a glowing biography, small one, of Dwight Moody. So he was pro evangelism, pro revivalism. He was also pre. Millennial of some kind. So he was by no means a liberal.

And yet he also didn’t want to see the church split. So he appointed a Commission in 1925 to study what was dividing the church, Even though for a lot of people at Princeton it was very obvious what was dividing the church. But he was hoping for a different answer.

And that commission eventually came back with its report and argued a lot of different things. Argued for greater charity in the church, argued for how good the church was in so many ways, and also had an implicit warning to conservatives that they needed to cut it out. They needed to stop criticizing people because they were in danger of being libelous. So it was a very, very important moment in the. That turned, I think, really turned the Presbyterian controversy away from conservatives.

And at that point, once that commission came back with its report, in my reading of the history, the cause of conservatism was pretty much over. But it took a while still for it to play out and to spill over onto Princeton Seminary. And I do think the effects of that report calling for unity, greater charity in the church, was also an impetus for reorganizing Princeton and trying to tone down any controversy that was happening there at the seminary. And you might imagine there was controversy going on there since some of their faculty were very much opposing what the commission was doing. And some of their faculty, like Erdman, were responsible for creating that commission.

Host: Well, clearly you mentioned that there is a controversy and that people were aware at Princeton, people were aware of what divided the different factions and parties in the denomination. Was the reorganization of Princeton that eventually came about. Was that viewed as a solution to this, or was it incidental to that?

Darrell Hart: No, it was viewed as a solution. There’s a long history. It’s really quite striking. There’s a long history in the Presbyterian Church of basically redistricting presbyteries to avoid controversies. It happened. Well, it happened in the creation of the Presbytery of New Brunswick in 1738, where, okay, we have these revivalists who are fairly worked up about the importance of these revivals. If we give them a presbytery. Maybe they’ll play on their own and won’t create controversy in other parts of the church.

After reorganization or the reunion of the old side and new side. In 1758, there were still lingering controversies between the two sides. And again, I believe in Philadelphia there was an effort to redraw presbytery lines to accommodate those differences. In the 1830s, when old schoolers and new schoolers are going at it in Philadelphia, there’s a creation of two presbyteries to try to alleviate the situation.

And then going even beyond 1929, conservatives are still active in the presbytery of Philadelphia and the Presbyterian of Chester, which is in southeastern Pennsylvania. And there, the General assembly between 1936 and 1938. Redraws the Presbytery lines. So that conservatives again lose the majority in those presbyteries. So what happens with the reorganization of Princeton in 1929 is a redrawing of administrative lines, hoping again to quell the controversy and in the church.

So they did think it would solve the problem. And in fact, it did in a way. I mean, because Machen left. Although that led to a whole other series of controversies in the 1930s. And whether Westminster really had a place in the church. And of course, that gets complicated with the controversy over missions and the formation of an independent board. Because foreign missions, which is out the sky. The scope of the article that I wrote. So the controversy gets a second wind in the 1930s. But in effect, the reorganization did solve the problem at Princeton.

Host: Clearly, there are many historians and people today and a variety of Reformed Presbyterian churches that see this reorganization as a process or an action of the liberal or modernist leaning group to shift the balance of power in their favor. Other people may dispute that. How has Princeton itself interpreted this action both then and now?

Darrell Hart: Well, then they interpreted it as an merely an administrative change. And there’s a certain sense in which that is true and fair. But it also goes with the broader denial in the Presbyterian Church of the real theological issues that were before the church. And if you have the idea of whether the virgin birth was actually part of Christian orthodoxy, part of the teaching Scripture, part of the teaching of the Westminster Confession, whether there could be room for error on that. You obviously have theological problems that the church really didn’t want to grapple with after reorganization.

And once John Mackay becomes the President in roughly 1937, Prince had actually remains one of the more conservative institutions within the Presbyterian Church, USA by virtue, if you want to consider Bardianism, conservative but compared to liberalism or compared to Modernism or even compared to other kind of generic Protestantisms, Bardianism was far more interacting with teachings of Calvin and, and Zwingli and other reformers and Heidelberg Catechism and the reformed orthodoxy, the 16th and 17th century.

So as Princeton begins to hire people who are Bardian in training or Bardian in the background and they can do that throughout the late 30s and 1940s because there are European scholars who are looking for somewhere out of another war torn Europe. So Princeton becomes this home for some European Bardian refugees during this period and really does is identified in many respects with Neo Orthodoxy in America.

But again there is this New York, well, not Philadelphia, but Princeton split because there’s another kind of Neo Orthodoxy in New York that’s associated with Reinhold Niebuhr and Union Seminary which is not the same, same thing as the Higher Octane theology, it seems to me, of Bardianism, where I think Bardians were actually trying to interact with Reformed doctrine and dogma, whereas Niebuhr and the Neo Orthodoxy in New York were more ethical, more political, certainly way more political than Barth ever was. So, you know, ironically, Princeton does become a conservative voice in the pcusa. Not conservative, as many of those conservative Presbyterians outside the PCUSA would construe it. But still because of this influence of Barth at Princeton, it’s a more conservative place than other Presbyterian institutions. And in some ways you could argue that still is the case to this day.

Jason Pickard: Dr. Hart, we know that in the years leading up to this Machen had written his famous book Christianity and Liberalism. And will you just tell us for a few minutes about how important that book was in this whole discussion?

Darrell Hart: Well, it was probably arguably the most important book Machen read. It’s likely the book that he wrote that’s still reading. And it came right in 1923 at a time when the Presbyterian controversy was probably the hottest. It was. And Machen himself wrote the book in some ways less with what had happened with Fosdick or the Presbytery of New York than with what happened in 1920 when he was a commissioner to the General Assembly.

And there was a report there before the General assembly for a plan that would unite all of the Protestant denominations in an organic union of churches. And it was called A Plan for Organic Union. And at that point the churches were part of a federated union, meaning they belonged to the Federal Council of Churches. So there was a. Just as the early American United States were part of a confederation or federation of states where a lot of the states still had a lot of authority. The churches had similar relationship with the founding of the Federal Council of churches in 1908. They still had a lot of authority, but now people wanted to have a much more, much closer union and have one united church. And I think they were going to call it the United Protestant Church of America or something like that.

And there was a similar church Founded in 1925 in Canada, the United Church of Canada, which brought Anglicans, Methodists and Presbyterians together. Well, Machen thought that was a terrible idea to unite all the churches like this, because he basically said, well, you’re denying the legitimacy of a Presbyterian witness, that somehow Presbyterianism is no better, no worse than Baptist or Congregational or Methodist, all the other churches that are participating in this union. So he was very much alarmed by that.

A number of other prince of faculty were. Benjamin Warfield also wrote against the plan of organic union. And so Machen actually at that point began to network with other conservatives in the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania area. And he gave some talks based on his opposition to the plan of union. And one of those talks eventually went into print in Princeton Theological Review, and it became the backbone for Christianity and liberalism.

So, in effect, what Machen is really writing against in Christianity and liberalism is the kind of Protestant ecumenism that was going on, which had very little regard, if any, for doctrine. And it was also based very much on trying to project a social gospel or Christianize America through these united churches. And so he’s also writing against that. That doesn’t mean that he wasn’t also opposed to Fosdick or what was happening in the presbytery of New York. But I think it’s very interesting to see the backdrop of what happened in 1920 and that plan of organic union as a basis for what Machen wrote.

But of course it went beyond that and it promoted him before the wider public. And he became in some ways a celebrity after that book, but also some other circumstances that happened to make that book prominent. So that when people wanted somebody to speak for the fundamentalist or conservative point of view in the debates of the day, he was very much the go to guy for editors and conference organizers and the like.

Machin was the stated supply at First Church, Princeton, in the last six months of 1923, and his last sermon there, on the last Sunday of 1923, he preached a sermon that in some ways has looks like a shout down to Harry Edmondson Fosdick and the earlier sermon that he preached, shall the Fundamentalists Win? And I’m not sure that it’s the best exegesis in the sermon.

But he does score a number of very important points about the need for orthodoxy in the church, but also the need for liberty in society. And you have to distinguish between the church and society when you’re thinking about liberty and intolerance or not. But it very much enraged one of the church members there, Henry Van Dyck, who was formerly a professor of English at Princeton University and also an ambassador to the Netherlands during the Wilson administration.

So he resigned his position, but he held a press conference to resign his pew. And in doing so he pointed to what he called the bilious preaching of J. Gress and Machen. And so Machen’s sermon, then that sort of pushed Van Dyck over the edge, ended up being reproduced in newspapers around America in ways similar to the way that Fosdick’s sermon had been reproduced back in 1922. So that really did probably make him more of a celebrity than the book. But it also forced people to read the book because Fosdick didn’t have a book to go with his sermon the way Machen now did with Christianity, liberalism.

Host: Right, Right. Yeah. It’s so often the case that these books end up being cornerstones or capstones or places for people to go and people to latch onto. I could see how that would be the case. This dispute with Henry Van Dyke illustrates that this debate was not just simply an academic one happening within a denomination amongst the clergy, or even within the seminary amongst academics. Did this climate spill out between pastors and laypeople alike in the Princeton community?

Darrell Hart: I wish I knew the answer to that. And I think that would be a great either thesis or dissertation topic to identify the church members there in Princeton and the relationship between the university and the seminary and how that played out in that congregation of First Presbyterian Church. There were other congregations in town as well. Well. And I’m sure you could go to correspondence and even maybe some memoirs or diaries and get a whiff of some of that, but unfortunately, I just. I don’t know, would be an interesting

Host: study for someone to do. Maybe there’s an enterprising young student out there who’d like to take that up.

Darrell Hart: No, because you have some very prominent people in that congregation who are many of them academics or professors at Princeton. So it would be a window in a number of themes and subjects.

Jason Pickard: Dr. Hart, kind of along those lines. Maybe it’s a little obvious by now, but with the way Presbyterianism in America developed, reaching middle upper class people, professors, politicians did, just the concern to keep up with the cultural elite and to appeal to its constituency, just overtake itself.

Darrell Hart: Could you say that again? Does it what?

Jason Pickard: You have a lot of high players in society, so to speak. So did there creep into the church this concern that we have to keep up with these cultural elite people, with our message and our theology?

Darrell Hart: Yes, I think that’s the case, and I’m not sure when it happens. I mean, for instance, when Samuel Miller is writing about the manners of ministers in the maybe 18 teens, 18 twenties, and he’s talking about, you know, ways to use your handkerchief or, you know, ways to talk to ladies. I mean, in some ways it’s good to have manners. And, you know, I’m sure there we’ve all encountered ministers who maybe could have better manners. But on the other hand, when you’re styling your ministry to go after the manners of a particular class or leadership group in a society, you clearly could lose touch with other people. So that’s happening early on, conceivably. And Presbyterians aren’t the only ones guilty of this. Other denominations are as well.

But then, after the Civil War and the reunion of the old school and new schools, I continue to be struck by how many immigrants came to America between 1870 and 1920. And you really don’t have any reform of immigration law in America until 1924. And a lot of the Anglo American Protestants in the denominations all coming, having a British background, Presbyterians, Baptist, Congregationalists, Methodists, Episcopalians, they don’t know what to do with all these teeming masses yearning to be free, especially when they are a little swarthier than they were before and they’re coming and they’re not Protestant.

And so they’re trying to hold onto a version of America that’s much more English and Protestant, or at least Northern European, than it’s becoming in the late 19th century, thanks to these immigrants that are coming. I mean, it’s staggering. You have more immigrants coming in one decade, say the 1880s or the first decade of the 20th century than you had the entire population of America in, say, 1860. I think it’s something like that, or maybe 1850. But it’s remarkable how many people the United States took in during those periods. And it’s understandable why Protestants would not know what to do with all these people. And they’re going into cities oftentimes, living in very desperate situations and conditions and working in also deplorable circumstances, oftentimes in various kinds of industry.

So, again, it’s understandable why Protestants would be concerned about this. But if again, you start to turn your ministry into one that’s more social than it is actually spiritual. It’s a recipe, I think, for what happened, I think, in the 1920s. Other people would disagree with that interpretation that I give. But I still think that’s the case.

Host: How fast was the turnaround from the reorganization of Princeton, or I should say transition then to Westminster Theological Seminary? What was the timeline from when Machen left and then started hiring people and creating an entirely new seminary?

Darrell Hart: Well, on the surface it was from early June to September. Now, he had to. I didn’t see this much in the correspondence, but it’s been a while now, so I may not be remembering well my graduate school days. But he must have had other plans in view in case the reorganization went through. But still was virtually three and a half months to get facilities, faculty, curriculum, just to produce a catalog, publicity materials, have some kind of workable library for students to use. It’s a remarkable accomplishment that they could do that in such, what, 15 weeks, roughly.

Host: It’s really, really astounding.

Darrell Hart: Yeah.

Host: Now we can look and analyze more at what actually happened here with the reorganization. But one thing we don’t always focus on or don’t always explore, at least on our programs here at Christ the Center here, what happened in the aftermath. We like to start to pick up the story with Westminster and then start to trace, you know, Napark style developments that have happened more conservative side of Reformed and Presbyterian history. What happened at Princeton in the decade following the reorganization, for instance?

Darrell Hart: Well, I think it was. My sense is that it was an institution that had lost a lot of its vitality. You had people still, conservatives still teaching there, like Voss, like Caspar Wister Hodge, like William Park Armstrong, Machen’s colleague in New Testament, who had been his mentor. But they were at the end of their careers. And within the first, first four years, I think of the 1930s, all of them have retired and the people that they hired to replace them. I didn’t do a lot of work in looking at them, but they aren’t people whose names I recognized.

And so it just seems like Princeton really lost a lot of its stature after the founding of Westminster. And it takes until MacKay comes to be president in roughly 1937, that Princeton then begins to pick up some energy, intellectual excitement again. So there’s a period of maybe eight years where it feels like it’s in the doldrums. And then they begin to get some momentum back. But in some ways it never really recovers what it maybe was in the nineteen teens and twenties.

When you remember that places like Fuller Seminary, which comes along in 1947, or Gordon Conwell Seminary, which becomes a merged institution in the 1960s, they to this day are producing, each of them are producing more Presbyterian ministers than all of the Presbyterian seminaries put together. So in many respects the energy and theological. Presbyterian theological education is still not in the official Presbyterian institutions. It’s in evangelical, so called evangelical seminaries. It’s remarkable.

Jason Pickard: Dr. Hart, do we have any idea of why some of more of the conservatives didn’t come with Machen to Westminster? I mean, like a guy like Voss for instance, was he not invited to come or do we know?

Darrell Hart: Oh, I think they were invited. I’m almost positive they were invited. But I think the real issue was one of pensions and Gary North’s book. I don’t recommend Gary North a lot, but Gary North’s book Crossed Fingers, which is on the Presbyterian controversy and he does the financial angle on it all.

And when you have, you know, if you think about it yourself, if you’re within two or three years of retirement and you’re going to potentially lose all of your pension if you leave the institution, I mean, that’s an incredible sacrifice to make. Machen himself was independently wealthy because of money on both sides of his family. So he not only could afford to take the risk, but he could also help to underwrite part of the seminary.

I’m not sure about Robert Dick Wilson, who died within a year after Westminster started. He had been an Old Testament faculty member at Princeton. I don’t know if he were independently wealthy or if he knew his days were numbered and he was going to go anyway. But I do think that that issue of retirement and pension was a big factor and I think Machen understood that and didn’t hold any grudges about that, even though he would have loved to have had them.

Host: It’s also clearly a big factor also in this breaking off of what became the orthodox Presbyterian Church. Why so many ministers come with. Now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you, Darrell, about Jim Scott’s recent article in the Westminster Theological Journal that suggests or seems to try to build a historical case that Edwin Ryan’s book the Presbyterian Conflict was actually mostly written by J. Gresham Machen. Have you seen this piece?

Darrell Hart: I haven’t yet. I’ve heard about it and I think I saw an excerpt from it somewhere or, you know, a manuscript or something. But I need, I need to see it. I talked to Jim a little bit too, maybe a year ago when I was through town for Christian Ed, Christian Education Committee meetings. And I’ve heard reactions, people saying he makes a very strong case. And I’ve heard other people saying that that wouldn’t hold up in court. So I don’t know.

Host: Well, this has clearly been a conspiracy theory that’s been floating around for a little while. I think I heard it from you once over a cigar one day.

Darrell Hart: Right.

Host: But could you just explain a little bit of the plausibility here for people before we close up?

Darrell Hart: Sure. Well, Ed Ryan was Machen’s defense counsel, actually, during his trial in 1935, had studied with Machen at Princeton Seminary, came out. He was a general secretary for the board of Westminster Seminary and a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian church. And in 1940 he wrote a book called the Presbyterian Conflict, which was a history of the events, many of which we’ve been talking about here.

And it’s also a very useful book. The OPC has reprinted it and useful for the historical documents that he has at the back. There are about 40 different documents as part of the appendices, which are very useful for looking at the way the Presbyterian controversy played out. But Machen was also working on a book at the end of his life. The manuscripts are still there in the archives at Westminster Seminary. And he was in some ways talking about the controversy or the conflict in Protestantism.

So I believe, and I haven’t read Jim’s article, but I believe he’s arguing that Ryan in effect, took that idea and maybe even took more than the idea in producing this book. And that’s probably as far as I should go since I haven’t read the article and I don’t want to do an injustice to Jim’s.

Host: Sure. Well, we encourage people to go read the article for themselves. The latest issue, the Westminster Theological Journal. Darrell, I do want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us. We always enjoy having you and having you share with us so much of what you know about Presbyterianism. We really appreciate your time today.

Darrell Hart: Well, thanks, Kendall. I do enjoy it. So thanks for having me. Good to talk to you, Jason.

Jason Pickard: Yeah, good to hear from you.

Host: Yeah, we do want to let people know. Jason, can we point people to website so they can read more about RUF International, especially at Texas A and M? Maybe find an update about what you’ve been up to?

Jason Pickard: Yeah, yeah, sure. You can always email me jason.pickarduf not Rufi, just Ruf.org and I don’t have my own personal website, but there is a national website if you just go to www.ruf.org international I think that’ll get you in the right spot.

Host: That’s a Reformed University Fellowship, which is a ministry of the Presbyterian Church of America in America. Sorry, getting my eras of Presbyterianism mixed up here. Of course. Darrel’s available online. You can find him at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale Edu. But most of you probably know him from OldLife.org he’s always blogging there several times a week and there’s always a big comment thread. So if you’d like to participate, Visit online at oldlife.org and follow along.

You can find us online@reformedforum.org There you’ll find information about all of our programs as well as everything that we’re up to, including new programs that have been spun up most recently. So visit us there and subscribe and listen and provide your feedback by mailing us@mailformedforum.org or tweeting us ReformedForum. We want to thank everybody for listening and we hope you join us again next time on Christ the Center.