J. GRESHAM MACHEN AND THE END OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CONTROVERSY by Samuel Jordan Kelley A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History Boise State University December 2013 © 2013 Samuel Jordan Kelley ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE COLLEGE DEFENSE COMMITTEE AND FINAL READING APPROVALS of the thesis submitted by Samuel Jordan Kelley Thesis Title: J. Gresham Machen and the End of the Presbyterian Controversy Date of Final Oral Examination: 14 November 2013 The following individuals read and discussed the thesis submitted by student Samuel Jordan Kelley, and they evaluated his presentation and response to questions during the final oral examination. They found that the student passed the final oral examination. Jill K. Gill, Ph.D. Chair, Supervisory Committee Barton H. Barbour, Ph.D. Member, Supervisory Committee Shelton Woods, Ph.D. Member, Supervisory Committee The final reading approval of the thesis was granted by Jill K. Gill, Ph.D., Chair of the Supervisory Committee. The thesis was approved for the Graduate College by John R. Pelton, Ph.D., Dean of the Graduate College. For Ben and Shannon—my only brother and my only niece iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Since I began at Boise State as a nineteen-year-old undergraduate, I have had a variety of wonderful relationships with faculty, especially in the departments of history and philosophy. As a graduate student, however, all my debts have been in the history department. Dr. Jill Gill was neither my committee chair nor my advisor when I began the Master’s program, but she took me under her wing early and helped me reorient my scholarly interests, and has worked tirelessly and patiently with me and directly on my behalf. Dr. Barton Barbour has been a perennial mentor. I have enjoyed all our conversations out in the hallway, especially as I wrote this thesis. I thank Dr. Lisa Brady for working with Dr. Gill to arrange for me to have a graduate assistantship for the 2012- 13 academic year. Finally, I am grateful to Dr. Lisa McClain, who has always graciously critiqued my work and offered invaluable advice. My brother, grandmother, aunt, friends, and coworkers have shown me much love in their forbearance. My father and mother, Thomas and Linda Sweet, have never ceased providing me with what I did not merit and what I could not obtain for myself. If there is any relationship where Christ’s love can appear as radiantly as in my relationship to my family, I have seen it in my engagement to Leslie Smith. I look forward to our future, whatever it brings. v I would be remiss not to thank publicly George Marsden and D.G. Hart, both of whom consented to phone interviews about topics closely related to this thesis. I admire their work greatly. Marsden’s influence in particular is obvious throughout. Thank you, Grace Mullen, for acclimating me to the Machen archives at Westminster. Finally, I thank Associate Dean Shelton Woods. For eight years I have talked more than listened to him and still somehow feel like I have received more wisdom from him than I will ever be able to pass on. I am confident that our friendship will last an eternity. vi ABSTRACT From 1922 to 1936, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America suffered an extended period of conflict and finally schism. This Presbyterian controversy was part of the broader fundamentalist-modernist conflict seizing American evangelical Protestantism in this era. By the early 1930s, the fundamentalists, led by Westminster Theological Seminary’s New Testament professor J. Gresham Machen, began to adopt controversial methods for combating modernism. The most notable of these was the formation of an extra-ecclesiastical, conservative foreign missions board, the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions (IBPFM). Refusing to cede his ground, Machen stood trial in the church’s court and was defrocked in 1936 when he refused to repent and be readmitted to the ministry. His actions alienated not only liberals, but even some fellow fundamentalists. Histories of the fundamentalist-modernist conflict and the Presbyterian controversy, and biographies of Machen generally take positions that echo the views of the opposing parties in the Presbyterian controversy. This thesis examines the controversy on a different level, employing historian George Marsden’s “insider- outsider” paradigm as a way to understand why the formation of the IBPFM and the Machen trial were such divisive events, even among conservatives. The argument is that Machen was not simply a cantankerous, fundamentalist but a Presbyterian who felt strongly committed to his denomination while also alienated from it because of its acceptance of modern trends. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................................................................................... v ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................ vii CHAPTER ONE: THE END OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CONTROVERSY: INTRODUCTION AND HISTORIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND ................................... 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1 Historiographical Background and Issues of Interpretation ....................................... 12 CHAPTER TWO: MODERNISM, FUNDAMENTALISM, AND THE AMERICAN EVANGELICAL HERITAGE ............................................................................................... 24 CHAPTER THREE: THE CHARACTER OF EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN PRESBYTERIANISM ..................................................................................... 50 CHAPTER FOUR: J. GRESHAM MACHEN: HALF-HEARTED FUNDAMENTALIST . 73 CHAPTER FIVE: THE FOREIGN MISSIONS CRISIS AND THE FORMATION OF THE INDEPENDENT BOARD FOR PRESBYTERIAN FOREIGN MISSIONS ............... 92 CHAPTER SIX: THE INDEPENDENT BOARD UNDER FIRE, MACHEN ON TRIAL, AND A PARADOX RESOLVED ........................................................................................ 113 CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION AND EPILOGUE: MACHEN’S LEGACY AND THE LEGACY OF THE GOSPEL....................................................................................... 139 REFERENCES ..................................................................................................................... 147 viii 1 CHAPTER ONE: THE END OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CONTROVERSY: INTRODUCTION AND HISTORIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND Supporters of Machen tend to interpret him simply at the level of the doctrine for which he stood…The other common interpretation of Machen goes to the opposite extreme and is popular among his detractors. According to these interpreters, the “time of troubles” at Princeton Seminary and Machen’s later struggles against the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. can be explained largely in terms of Machen’s personality…So, I think each of these levels for understanding Machen has some merit and perhaps they can be balanced against each other in some way. However, I do not propose to explore them any further tonight. -George Marsden in “Understanding J. Gresham Machen” (1990) Introduction In late June 1936, John Gresham Machen, a theologian, ordained minister, and spokesman for conservative Presbyterianism, until recently of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (PCUSA), made a bold proclamation. “On Thursday, June 11, 1936,” he wrote, the hopes of many long years were realized. We became members, at last, of a true Presbyterian Church; we recovered, at last, the blessing of true Christian fellowship. What a joyous moment it was! How long the years of struggle seemed to sink into nothingness compared with the joy and peace that filled our hearts! 1 1 J. Gresham Machen, “The Church of God,” Presbyterian Guardian 2 (June 1936), 98, quoted in Dallas M. Roark, “J. Gresham Machen: The Doctrinally True Presbyterian Church,” Journal of Presbyterian History 43 (June 1965), 124. 2 Machen was celebrating a new church—what became the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC)—that he and others had founded in response to the unrepentant apostasy they saw in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. This triumphant comment of Machen’s might be growing somewhat trite among students of the Presbyterian controversy and Machen. For those who are sympathetic to Machen’s views today, it is a reminder of his sacrifices and the hardships he suffered for the sake of orthodoxy eighty years ago. For many mainline Protestants—Presbyterian and otherwise—it is the self-indulgent, self-affirming remark of someone who had never really intended to settle the dispute in the PCUSA unless it was achieved “one hundred percent” on his terms; in other words, in founding the OPC, Machen had accomplished the unremarkable feat of fulfilling a self-fulfilling prophecy. Regardless of perspective, 1936 marked the end of an era in the PCUSA; the period of intense controversies in that denomination was over when Machen and those who followed him were either defrocked as the result of church trials (like Machen’s) or left of their own accord. 2 What historians call the Presbyterian controversy spanned most of the interwar period, and this thesis examines its dénouement in the years 1933-36, when the immediate issues that caused the 1936 schism came to the fore and the last straw, so to speak, was placed on the camel’s back. The fundamentalist J. Gresham Machen played a major role in the early phase of the Presbyterian controversy, but his actions