J. Gresham Machen Bibliography

Transcription

Host: This is Office Hours from Westminster Seminary, California. Call the show now at 760-480-8477. Email us at officehoursscal.edu now. Scott Plun,

R. Scott Clark: Westminster Seminary, California what is

Host: the biggest ecclesiological problem facing the Reformed churches today? What is your advice for shepherding this dear brother in a winsome but persuasive way? So my question is, how do we respond to those objections where grammatically the mood is imperative, but it is truly a Gospel passage? My question is, where does that phrase come from historically and biblically, and how is it defined?

D. G. Hart: Hi again.

R. Scott Clark: The response to our first episode of

D. G. Hart: Ask the Props was so terrific we’re

R. Scott Clark: doing it again in September. You have questions for our faculty and and they have answers. Your question might be about a biblical passage or some aspect of Christian teaching, church history, church life, or the Christian life. Call us with your questions and office hours. We’ll find an answer from our faculty and we’ll broadcast it this September 2011.

If we use your question, we’ll send you a copy of Always Reformed Essays in Honor of W. Robert Godfrey, available through the bookstore at Westminster Seminary, California WSCAL Edu Bookstore. Call us at 760-480-8477. That’s 760-480-8477. With your question, leave a message with your name, your email address, and your shipping address. We won’t broadcast anything but your name. If we use your question, we’ll send you a copy of the book just for playing. Don’t miss out.

D. G. Hart: You’ll learn. You’ll have fun.

R. Scott Clark: You may get a free book. Call office hours now, 760-480-8477. Don’t forget to like the Office Hours page at WSCAL officehours or give us a rating or even a review on itunes. And that will help others find Office Hours. And thanks for listening to Office Hours.

D. G. Hart: All Christians everywhere have faced pressure to conform to the prevailing ethos, to think like the surrounding culture, to act like the surrounding culture, to fit in, and even to make Christianity acceptable to the surrounding culture. Through the centuries, Christians have resisted that temptation with varying degrees of success. Some of the early Christians refused to confess and were put to death for it. In the modern period, Christians haven’t been martyred as much as they’ve been marginalized and shunned.

One of those who walked away from social and ecclesiastical influence because he refused to conform was Jay Gresham Machen. With us today is Darrell Hart, visiting professor of church history at Westminster Seminary, California, and author of many books, among which are Defending the Faith, J. Gresham Machen, and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America. Darrell recently contributed the chap no More the Rise, Fall and Resurrection of J. Gressom Machen’s Warrior Children in the volume Always Reformed. These titles and more are available, as always, through the bookstore at wscal.edu bookstore. Hi, Darrell, and welcome back to Office Hours.

D. G. Hart: Scott, Good to be here.

R. Scott Clark: You’ve written a provocative title. What are you talking about? Who are Machen’s Warrior Children? We’ll go from there.

D. G. Hart: I am particularly concerned, I think, in the chapter to deal with the Orthodox Presbyterians. And chapter in some ways reflects my writing, the 75th anniversary history for the OPC coming up this summer, where the book will be released. The book is titled between the Times. There’s a period in the OPC’s history after 1967 when the church is either tired of fighting.

A number of factors contribute to a lack of polemical identity for the opc, a lack of being militant and a backing away from that. And that characterizes the church probably for couple of decades. And so there is a recovery of a kind of reform militancy in the OPC that’s interestingly bound up with the church’s own recovery of its history. So anyway, that’s primarily what I’m writing about in this chapter for the listener

R. Scott Clark: who might not be intimately familiar with the history of the opc, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Well, why should anyone care about the Orthodox Presbyterian Church? And second, and we’ll get to this, what are some of the controversies that wore people out?

D. G. Hart: Well, the first question why people should care is that if you at least you care about Reformed Protestantism, the OPC is an important expression of it. No matter how small the church may be, the OPC is in many respects an embodiment of that old Princeton tradition that was very important and useful to a number of Protestants throughout the world in the 19th century. And in that sense, the OPC at least represents something bigger than itself. Plus, the OPC is an example of the difficulties that Reformed churches have faced throughout their history, going back to the 16th century. So the OPC’s difficulties can be instructive for reform Protestants in other communions, particularly in North America. European developments are different, obviously. So that’s one reason why people might care.

And a lot of people like Machen, a lot of people from inside reform circles to more broadly evangelical circles, they think very highly of Machen. And the OPC is an expression of many of Machen’s concerns. I think there’s great continuity. I don’t think the OPC was a mistake that got away from Machen somehow. So if people appreciate Machen, they should actually think about the institutions that he founded, one of which was Westminster and one of which was the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, although he did not do that alone, of course.

The second question, though, about why the OPC lost its energy for fighting, I think, and I can’t remember if this is in the essay or the chapter, but the confession of 1967 represented the end of an era of a battle between the mainline church, the PC USA, the Presbyterian Church in the USA, and the OPC, being the faithful remnant that had separated in 1936. So for roughly three decades, the OPC had kept up a fight with the mainline church, saying, you conservatives who are in the pcusa, if you really want to be conservative, you should join us, the opc. And someone like Robert Marsden wrote a series of very interesting articles in the 30s and 40s for the Presbyterian Guardian about conservatives and why you need to leave the PCUSA.

Well, in 1967, the PCUSA came out with their confession of 67 and their book of Confessions and really changed who they were constitutionally. And constitutions matter a great deal to the orthodox Presbyterians. So there was no longer this church that was in effect, the same on paper. They were now different. And so the OPC lost that fight. Very few churches left the PCUSA to join the opc, and the OPC was, you know, reconsidering its options in America and how they were going to be.

And the evangelical conservatives looked more promising in ways. Plus, there were the rise of new communions, the Reformed Presbyterian Church Evangelical Synod, which was sort of a spinoff from the Bible Presbyterians, they looked like a saner group than the original MacIntyre Group. Sorry to use that pejorative language. And then the PCA, the Presbyterian Church in America, starts in 1972. And so it looks like perhaps the OPC can join something bigger than itself. We’re just a small little group. We fought all these battles. It hasn’t gotten us anywhere. Maybe now we can join something bigger. And so that is, I think, an important dynamic in the 1970s within the OPC.

Host: You’re listening to Office Hours from Westminster Seminary, California.

R. Scott Clark: Some of the battles that were fought by the OPC weren’t just with folks in other communions or with other communions, but they were internal struggles. Describe some of those.

D. G. Hart: Well, in the 1940s, when you, with the rise of the neo Evangelical movement, the rise of the popularity of people like Billy Graham, but the establishment of Fuller Seminary and of Christianity Today. People like Carl Henry, Harold John Aucingay are important evangelical leaders, some of whom actually had ties to Machen and Westminster. And they want to do for evangelicalism what the mainline church had already done for Protestantism.

So they want to form a national association of evangelicals that will rival the Federal Council of Churches. They want to found a magazine like Christianity Today that will rival Christian Century. So they want to do for conservatives what the mainline churches have already been doing for liberals or moderates or however you want to characterize. And folks in the OPC have to figure out if they’re going to join in that conservative Protestant mix of endeavor. And because the evangelical project involved both Arminians and Calvinists to start, the OPC said, we’re not going to cooperate with Arminians. And so they stayed apart. That was one battle.

There was a battle over Gordon Clark’s teaching about knowledge, human knowledge, knowledge of God. That’s very arcane sort of set of considerations important for theology. And I think the OPC took the right side in that. Clark versus Van Til was an important part of that controversy, but John Murray was very much involved in it as well. And that also cost the OPC some supporters in the 1940s who went elsewhere.

By the time the 50s rolls around, roll around, and the OPC is about 20 to 25 years old, those things have settled out. And again, the OPC is largely a fairly small conservative denomination. And interestingly, about that time, too, the OPC begins to have conversations with the CRC about Christian Reform Church, about merging, because of the strong Dutch presence in the OPC at the beginning with people like Van Till and Ned Stonehouse and RB Kuyper. So anyway, there were a series of battles in the early years of the OPC that. Where the OPC had to figure out what it meant to be Reformed and what it meant to be evangelical and what they were going to do about that difference.

R. Scott Clark: One of the more significant struggles that the OPC faced in its early days was its relationship to American fundamentalism. You touched on that. Can you elaborate on that? Because that ran the risk of derailing the OPC or killing it right in the crib, didn’t it?

D. G. Hart: Right, the most. This is true even at the time of the Reformation. But most times there’s a church split, there’s an identified enemy, and in the case of the opc, the enemy was liberalism. And so there were lots of conservatives in the PCUSA the mainline church that opposed liberalism.

The question was, once they got outside the church, outside the enemy now, what was the basis for their opposition? Was it the basis of some fundamentalist ideas, such as maybe dispensational premillennialism or creation? Or was it a kind of reform confessionalism that I think did characterize Machen and other original faculty at Westminster? So that that was a dynamic in the first year of the OPC’s existence that led to a split between Orthodox Presbyterians and Bible Presbyterians. And I don’t want to be uncharitable to the Bible Presbyterians. They did reflect a wing of American Presbyterianism that had lost some of its confessional identity. So they were in some ways being true to an older Presbyterian ideal. But it wasn’t as confessional as the Americans, Scots and Dutch, who were at Westminster Seminary. So that was a reason for a split between a kind of confessionalism and a fundamentalism.

R. Scott Clark: And there were arguments about Christian liberty.

D. G. Hart: Right.

R. Scott Clark: With respect to alcohol consumption, can you elaborate?

D. G. Hart: That was finally what broke the church in 1937. There was an overture to have all the ministers vow to abstain from alcoholic beverages. And the country had recently passed through an experiment with dry legislation.

R. Scott Clark: What is that?

D. G. Hart: Oh, just prohibition in the Volstead act, where the sale and distribution of alcohol was prohibited. This was an early stage in the war on drugs. So it wasn’t unusual for Americans to think that alcohol was evil. And there was an ethnic dynamic to this battle. Murray being a Scotsman who liked his wee dram and which is a little bit of Scotch. Van Til and Stonehouse especially was a very big smoker. Not to say that there was any legislation back then against smoking, but there were lifestyle matters that. That separated some of these ethnic Protestants, the Scots and the Dutch, from the American Protestants. And so that battle over alcohol was one that finally drove the two apart. But the OPC affirmed liberty of conscience on these matters because Scripture did not speak to actual alcohol, it spoke to drunkenness. And of course, the OPC would oppose drunkenness. But as far as whether people should abstain entirely to avoid drunkenness, it can

R. Scott Clark: be made to look, it being the OPC, can be made to look incessantly controversial. In the 30s, 40s, into the 50s and 60s, I was just. I was thinking of the Peniel controversy, which was a controversy within the OPC about Pentecostalism and charismatic movement and how the OPC was going to relate to that. And if you take each one of these individually, it’s possible to portray the OPC and with them confessionally Reformed Protestants as incessantly internally divided, controversial. Is that fair, or is there another way of looking at all of these different controversies?

D. G. Hart: It is fair and accurate. And actually, then you could say laudable. If we are living in the age of the church militant. I mean, if you were living as the church militant, then the church is supposed to be militant. And one of the very interesting features of Machen’s arguments through the 20s and 30s, when he was criticized for being mean and intemperate and being a controversialist, he would pick up the New Testament, which is what he taught and studied, that’s what he was an expert in, and say that the New Testament was a polemical book virtually from start to finish, that Galatians itself is all about polemics.

But Jesus was actually no meek and mild rabbi, just kind of running around affirming people. There’s controversy all the time. And that’s because there’s a lot of sin in the world, even among Christians, and so even within the church, you’re going to have constant temptations either to commit sin or to be unf faithful. And that doesn’t mean the OPC was always faithful or without sin in the way it dealt with certain problems. But the OPC in some ways knew intuitively that the church is a militant institution. It had been formed in that context or environment in the 30s, and so it wasn’t going to be ashamed of that. In fact, if it weren’t for the controversies both in the 1930s, in the case of the OPC, or the controversies in the 1520s or the controversies in Netherlands in the early 17th century, you don’t have Reformed orthodoxy, you don’t have Reformed churches. So controversy can actually, or militancy can actually be a very good thing.

R. Scott Clark: The other night, you spoke to the board and the faculty, and you made an interesting exhortation. And as part of your address, you challenged of us who identify with Machen to identify with the institutions that he founded. A lot of folks identify with Machen who have no interest in the institutions that he founded. When we come back, I want you to address this problem. Can one really, actually identify with Machen and say, you know, I’m with him, if, as you said, you’re not a member of the OPC.

Host: In the 17th century, John Bunyan gave us the character Mr. Valiant for truth. In the 20th century, God gave us another Mr. Valiant for truth. Jay Gresham Machen, the founder of Westminster Seminary. The spirit of Machen lives on at Westminster Seminary, California where for 30 years we’ve been fulfilling his vision of preparing men for ministry and teaching them to be expert in the Bible. Wscal.edu 888-480-8472 Westminster Seminary, California For Christ, His Gospel and his church.

D. G. Hart: The short answer is, of course you can. I think of analogies like, I am a follower in some ways of Wendell Berry, who’s a great writer on behalf of farms and local communities. And I’m not a farmer. I’m about to maybe live in a small community. But it’s possible to generalize from someone’s particular experience in writing and find truths by which one can live. I have a very good friend, John Meether, who’s a fan of the New York Mets, the arch rival of the Philadelphia Phillies. My team. I can, though sometimes identify with parts of the Mets out of my friendship with John.

So it’s possible for people who read Machen to say, yeah, especially Christianity Liberalism say, yeah, that’s a great book. I want to do that. But the interpretation of Machen has often meant trying to separate the genius of his argument in Christianity Liberalism from then the way he kind of went off the rails with being so narrow and militant.

So was it really necessary to leave Princeton to found Westminster? And then was it really necessary to start the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions? And was it really necessary to go to trial by the Presbyterian of New Brunswick? And was it finally necessary to start a whole new church? Why not even join the Southern Presbyterian Church? And that’s a wing of interpretation of Machen that tries to separate the argument of Christianity Liberalism from the later institutions. But I think if you read the book carefully, you can see how much he had the Presbyterian controversy in mind in writing the book, although trying to write for a more general audience. And then also how the arguments in Christianity Liberalism were pointing in the direction of a separation between the two parties in the church, the conservatives and the liberals. And the establishment of a truly Reformed church and seminary was a way to start that, to start to train ministers who would minister in that church. The missions controversy was another way to try to alert people to the real problems in the church and the need to send out missionaries committed to the gospel and then finally the establishment of a new denomination.

R. Scott Clark: Isn’t the difference also a different view of the relative importance of the visible institutional church? The modern evangelical or neo evangelical enterprise since the 1940s has been an attempt to have some version of the evangelical faith, but without a commitment to expression in a particular view of the church and life of the church.

D. G. Hart: Right. And so the point I made the other night at the conference was that evangelicals will oftentimes admirably try to preserve the gospel, and that’s a good thing. But. But there’s also more in scripture than merely the gospel. There are pastoral epistles, for instance, that talk about how to set up a church and how to preach the word and the kind of pastoral oversight that should go on in a church. So it seems that the gospel goes hand in hand with the body of Christ, that the gospel of Christ goes with the body of Christ. And there has to be an embodiment in this thing that we call the visible church. And again, I think Maachen was very much committed to that. So those interpretations that try to separate Machen from the institutions oftentimes lean more in the direction of, well, it’s possible to have the gospel without having reformed churches or faithful churches in some way.

R. Scott Clark: Brad Longfield several years ago wrote a volume in which he surveys the people around Machen. Very helpfully, I thought, and in an interesting way tries to put Machen in his context by filling in the picture as to the other people who are part of the story. But towards the end of the volume, he raises the fundamental question. Was Machen right to separate?

D. G. Hart: Having recently written on Scottish developments in the 18th century, it seems to me that if they had stayed in, it would have been like the experience of the associate Reformed Presbyterians. So they went along with the established Kirk, reinstituted in 1690, weren’t necessarily wild about everything that was going on, and then they just fought battles and battles and battles, and then eventually they had to form a new church.

There have been evangelicals in the pcsa. The Evangelical Presbyterian Church, for instance, left the church in early 1980s over frustrations over various points of doctrine as well as homosexuality. So it would have been a constant headache to stay in. Now, that’s, again, that goes with being in the church of Christ. It’s not as if the OPC is free from headaches itself, as its history will attest. But I think Bob Godfrey has argued well that oftentimes separations like this are a form of discipline, that it’s a way of disciplining a communion to say, we’re going to leave you. And that’s precisely what was at issue in many of the controversies of the 1920s and 30s. Was was there any more discipline in the church, or was it going to be an undisciplined church that would tolerate practically everything except for intolerance?

R. Scott Clark: Doesn’t the argument that they should have stayed in. Also assume that those who stayed in would have been the influen influencers rather than the influenced. Doesn’t the ecclesiastical culture begin to change the assumptions and change what’s plausible? And the line of what will be tolerated keeps being pushed back.

D. G. Hart: For any students out there who are listening, there’s a great research topic waiting, which is the conservatives who stayed and what happened to them. People like Clarence McCartney, people like Oswald T. Alice, people like Samuel Craig. There’s even a magazine that they published up until 1947 or so, the original Christianity Today. So it’d be easy to follow some of this and see how they did and see what kind of regrets they had or what kind of strategies they had. But to put that all on Machen and to say that if he had stayed, all those people would have rallied around and accomplished something is not believable in my estimation.

R. Scott Clark: I remember an interview in The, I think, 80s on television with a leading

D. G. Hart: layman, L. Nelson Bell. Nelson Bell, Billy Graham’s father in law.

R. Scott Clark: Yes. And it was about a controversy probably over homosexuality in the PC usa, the Presbyterian Church usa, the mainline Presbyterian, mainly liberal denomination in North America. And through the course of the interview, Bell says, well, you know, things are starting to really decline and we’re going to have to start thinking about doing something. I thought by the mid to late 1980s, the trajectory of the mainland was fairly clear. And it was a little surprising to me to hear an important layman sounding as if, well, you know, maybe we ought to begin thinking about this. And it seems to me some people were thinking about this in 1920.

D. G. Hart: Right. And someone. Some could argue, and I myself would, that conservatives dropped the ball much earlier than that. I mean, developments were occurring in the Presbyterian Church after the reunion between the Old School and new school in 1869 that were truly troubling for someone who was trying to take the confessions seriously.

And I’ve done a little bit of work. And there were some conservative voices opposing certain measures. I don’t know, for instance, if there was any conservative Presbyterian opposition to the formation of the Federal Council of Churches and the Presbyterian Church’s membership in it. The Federal Council was not a good development for American Protestantism, even though they were trying to do a number of laudable things. So, you know, one could argue that Presbyterians had fallen asleep at the switch a lot earlier than even the 1920s.

Host: You’re listening to Office Hours from Westminster Seminary, California, one of the test cases.

R. Scott Clark: I think that might give us a way to answer Brad Longfield’s exhortation is to look at Edward Carnell. I was alerted to it. I think it’s Rudolph Nelson’s book about the strange case of Edward John Carnell, the Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind, in which he recounts Carnell’s repudiation of Machen. Talk about that case because it’s a striking event, really.

D. G. Hart: Right. Carnell was writing a book on the case for orthodoxy in the 1950s, part of a series written by Protestants, liberal neo orthodox and then this evangelical group. And he goes after Machen to identify the problems with Machen. That Machen was holding onto a doctrine that was tangential to the faith, which is, namely the doctrine of the church, that that was the wrong doctrine upon which to found a church, of all things. Carnell really did throw Machen under the bus.

And Bob makes the interesting point that this was a time when Fuller Seminary was trying to to cozy up with the pcusa. So Carnell may have been saying that for ulterior reasons, but it generally speaks to the lack of ecclesiology in so many evangelical or neo evangelical circles that even affects, ironically, the PCUSA.

Originally, when Fuller Seminary was founded in 1947, a fair number of the faculty were Presbyterian and tried to transfer their credentials into the Presbytery of Los Angeles. They were not allowed to do so, and the PCUSA had to write a report to identify the problems with a parachurch organization. They had come close to identifying some of the problems with parachurch organizations with Machen’s independent board. But some people in the Presbyterian Church recognized that those reasons weren’t really adequate and were in effect, wrong. So they had to improve those reasons.

So now coming full circle to the present, Fuller Seminary trains more Presbyterian ministers for the Presbyterian Church USA than all of the Presbyterian seminaries, denominational seminaries do together. So both sides. The Presbyterian Church USA doesn’t really have a well informed ecclesiology on some of these matters. It was kind of arbitrary the way they decided to go. One way with Westminster and the independent board, another way with Fuller and Fuller itself is, I think, evangelicalism more generally, even Christianity Today. A number of the editors there are members of mainline churches. And I think it has seriously compromised the thoughtfulness and the witness of evangelicals who remain inside the mainline churches.

R. Scott Clark: We spend a lot of time talking about the mainline and staying in or leaving. The real underlying question here is the relation of Christ and culture. Because the main line is closer to the American culture and the sideline, those who withdrew from it are ostensibly a little farther removed from the culture is that true? How is the NAIPARK world? How are we doing? Are we really, in your estimation, doing what it is that we were meant to do, starting from, let’s say, Machen’s separation from the mainline? Or are we all that different really from the mainline?

D. G. Hart: Several ways of answering that. One aspect of the answer would be to compare the churches today with the churches as I knew them when I was studying with Bob Godfrey as a seminarian at Westminster Philadelphia. 79, 81. I would argue that church life is markedly better now than it was then, certainly at least in congregations, but also at denominational levels. I won’t necessarily name names, but I think that case can be made that reform Protestantism has done better since then.

On the other hand, what was also happening then at that time, when I was in seminary, was the emergence of the religious right. And I don’t want to get into politics, but you brought up Christ and culture. And I think cultural matters or cultural issues or social issues have been at the heart of the religious right’s prominence regarding sex, marriage, procreation, rearing children, etc. What’s very interesting in my narrative of American religion and politics is that conservatives in the sideline churches, whether they call themselves fundamentalists or evangelicals or even Presbyterians, were in some ways fairly happy with a mainline Protestant America because the standards of decency were pretty good. There was a civil religion that was in some ways laudable. It maybe got went into extremes, but a lot of sideline people were patriotic people and they wanted to think well of their country, and adding a little Christianity to that or a Christian founding is an okay way to do that.

Well, in the 1960s, the mainline churches gave up the project of a Christian or Protestant America and kind of realized that hitching their wagons to America was not so smart because America hadn’t been such a great place for such a long time, given the way they treated women, blacks, Vietnamese at the time, et cetera. So they took it, kind of turned anti American, at least at the leadership level. So now what Protestants are going to stand up for Christian America? Well, along comes a religious rite, you know, a few years after this, and they become quite effective in actually reviving an older Protestant America argument that goes back to John D. Rockefeller, Josiah Strong in the late 19th century, Lyman Beecher, a New School Presbyterian in the earlier 19th century. So there’s great continuity between Lyman Beecher, Josiah Strong and Jerry Falwell.

And I think my own sense is that evangelical or conservative Protestant involvement in politics has not been good for our churches. That it has distracted us from the gospel and the cause of Christ. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t really important issues in culture and society and politics that Christians as citizens need to be concerned about. But it’s still not clear to me that those are of the order of the kingdom of God or the kingdom of Jesus Christ and how people are going to have to give an account one day for themselves and where they stand with Christ. It seems to me that’s a message, as John Tresca was saying at the conference, that no other institution can adequately is even given the task to do so. If the church wants wants to engage in politics or culture wars matters and is losing sight of preaching the gospel, then who else is going to do it?

Host: Thanks for listening to Office Hours from Westminster Seminary California. Don’t miss an episode. Subscribe now to Office Hours in itunes. Find all the shows at wscal.edu officehours. Copyright Westminster Seminary California.

D. G. Hart: All rights reserve serpent.