Confessionalism versus Fundamentalism

Conservative Fragmentation

Put simply, the controversy that fractured the OPC during its first year concerned a choice between American fundamentalism: and the Reformed faith. If one defines fundamentalism strictly by its opposition to modernist theology, then the OPC is and always has been a fundamentalist denomination. But by such a definition conservative Lutherans, Episcopalians, Anabaptists, and even Roman Catholics would also qualify as fundamentalist, for conservative communions in those theological traditions have also opposed efforts to adapt the church’s teaching and practice to modem secular culture.

Fundamentalism, however, has a more precise definition than the mere opposition of liberalism. It also stands for certain theological emphases, among which are dispensationalist theology, revivalistic techniques of soul-winning, stem prohibitions against worldly entertainments, and a low view of the institutional church. The most important feature of fundamentalism that played havoc in the division of 1937 was dispensational premillennialism.

Dispensationalism is a way of interpreting the Bible that divides redemptive history into various ages (dispensations). In each period, according to this view, God establishes a covenant with his people, his people in turn break the terms of that covenant, and God punishes such sinful behavior with a catastrophic form of divine judgment. Dispensationalism also features a fair amount of interest in the end of the current and last age—the time between the apostles and the end of human history—known as the age of the church. Consequently, dispensationalists spend much time trying to understand what biblical prophecy teaches about the end of this age. According to dispensationalism, the age of the church will be just like other dispensations. God’s people will fail to keep the covenant and divine judgment will end the age of the church. But unlike other dispensations, Christ will return and establish his kingdom, thus inaugurating the millennium, his thousand-year reign. This is why dispensationalists are premillennialists. They believe that Christ will return before the millennium (as opposed to postmillennialism, i.e., Christ’s return will come at the end of the millennium).[2]

Dispensationalism’s chief architect was John Nelson Darby, an Anglican minister in the Church of Ireland, who eventually established the Plymouth Brethren. Owing to his tours in the United States and Canada during the late nineteenth century, dispensationalism became fairly popular among Northern Presbyterians and Baptists. The publication of the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909 by Oxford University Press also contributed greatly to the spread of dispensational views among Protestants who opposed liberalism. For many of these believers, dispensationalism seemed to make perfect sense of the social decay that they saw in America. Urbanization, industrialization, and immigration had transformed the United States from a fairly stable and homogeneous nation into one beset by poverty, crime, and distrust. History was not improving, contrary to what many postmillennialists and liberal Protestants believed. Rather, signs everywhere indicated that sinful men and women were disregarding God’s law. The only hope for improvement lay in Christ’s return when he would judge disbelief and iniquity. The task of believers was to save as many unbelievers as possible before the day of judgment.

Dispensational theology thus performed a valuable witness to historic Christianity. At a time when naturalism became the norm for modernist theology, dispensationalism preserved the supernatural character of the gospel. When many Protestant scholars were beginning to view the Bible as an inspirational book written by culturally conditioned human authors, dispensationalism nurtured a high view of Scripture as God’s word of salvation to sinners. Furthermore, at a time when many mainline Protestants saw the American nation as the visible manifestation of God’s kingdom, dispensationalism sometimes encouraged a healthy skepticism of the so-called progressive ways of the United States.

But as important as dispensationalism was for building opposition to liberalism, it also harbored a number of teachings that were at odds with the Reformed faith. Especially troublesome was the idea that God dealt differently with humankind during different historical periods. Reformed theology teaches that ever since the fall, salvation comes only through Christ, the Messiah promised to Israel and revealed in the New Testament to the church. But dispensationalism implies that God uses different means of salvation at different times, thus denying the finality of the fall and the continuity of redemption throughout the Bible. During the 1920s and early 1930s when conservative Presbyterians and dispensationalists had a common enemy, these differences were not apparent. But by the time of the OPC’s founding in 1936, points of controversy had begun to surface in ways that turned out to be explosive and divisive.

Machen himself had been critical of dispensationalism in his popular book Christianity and Liberalism. There he called it “a false method of interpretation of the Word of God” and argued that the prophecies of the Bible could not be “mapped-out” in as definite a fashion as dispensationalists taught. Nevertheless, Machen went on in the same book to point out “how great” his agreement with dispensationalists was in regard to the authority of Scripture, the deity of Christ, and the supernatural character of grace. “Christian fellowship,” he concluded, “with loyalty not only to the Bible but to the great creeds of the Church” could still unite Presbyterians and dispensationalists. The dangers of modernism were so great, however, that Reformed believers and dispensationalists during the 1920s rarely studied what divided them.

During the 1930s as conservative Presbyterians began to establish their own institutions, such as Westminster Seminary and the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, rather than merely attacking liberalism, more consideration had to be given to the beliefs for which conservatives stood. And as conservatives struggled to erect the boundaries of the movement, Machen began to see more clearly the serious ways in which dispensationalism undermined the Reformed faith and, in fact, that theological differences separated fundamentalists and Presbyterians which could not be harmonized. At the same time, the leaders of the OPC fully embraced the teaching of amillennialism as the view on Christ’s return most consistent with Scripture. Unlike premillennialists, who looked to Christ’s second coming as the beginning of his thousand-year reign, and postmillennialists, who believed Christ would return at the end of a thousand-year period of prosperity for the church, amillennialists, as John Murray explained, held that Christ’s second coming would mark the end of this age and the beginning of “the eternal age, when the kingdom of God will have been consummated.” That age would not be a literal millennium nor would it be the reign of God on earth. Instead, Christ’s second coming, or the “day of the Lord,” would be eternal and would bring the dissolution of the present heavens and earth, thus inaugurating the new heavens and new earth prophesied in II Peter 3:14.

The Controversy

In the fall of 1936 through a series of relatively benign coincidences, these differences came to the surface. The controversy intensified when R. B. Kuiper, a professor of practical theology at Westminster Seminary, reported on the OPC’s First General Assembly to the Christian Reformed Church to which he still be. longed. It would have warmed the hearts of Dutch Calvinist ministers, he wrote, to hear OP ministerial candidates questioned about “the two errors” which were “so extremely prevalent among American fundamentalists,” namely, Arminianism and the Dispensationalism of the Scofield Reference Bible. Carl McIntire, an OP pastor in southern New Jersey, in his church paper, the Christian Beacon, took exception to Kuiper’s published remarks. He claimed that the majority of the OPC was premillennialist and that the church was committed to “eschatological liberty.” He added the warning that a “premillenarian uprising” would ensue if Kuiper did not cease his “veiled and continued attacks.”

Machen thought McIntire’s editorial was politically unwise; he was especially critical of the New Jersey pastor’s unwillingness to publish a response by Kuiper, something demanded by “journalistic ethics as well as by the ethics of the Bible.” Nevertheless, the more important issue was not political but theological. Machen feared that McIntire was turning premillennialism into an “essential doctrine.” And in a letter to another premillennialist, J. Oliver Buswell, an OP minister and president of Wheaton College, Machen took aim at the Scofield Reference Bible—a book he regarded as “profoundly harmful.” The “root error” of dispensationalism, Machen wrote, was its “utter failure” to recognize “that anything irrevocable took place when Adam fell.” He admitted that he had not always felt so strongly, having devoted most of his life “to the refutation of naturalistic Modernism.” The Scofield teaching had always seemed “a side issue,” but not so “erroneous as to be opposed to Christianity.” With the formation of the OPC, however, he saw that many of the laity treated Scofield’s notes as though they were God’s Word; he also believed that dispensationalism was dominating preaching. Machen hoped that the OPC would turn “from these elaborate schemes” to the “grand simplicity” of the Reformed faith.

Disputes about dispensationalism revealed two distinct camps within the leadership of the OPC—one side Old School Presbyterian in outlook, the other fundamentalist. The Old School party, led by Machen, consisted of the majority of Westminster’s faculty, many of whom came from non-American Reformed traditions such as Scottish Presbyterianism (John Murray), and Dutch Calvinism (Cornelius Van Til, Ned B. Stonehouse, and R. B. Kuiper). This group was characterized by a high regard for the Westminster Confession, Presbyterian polity, and Reformed piety (e.g., liberty in various matters such as beverage alcohol and tobacco, where Scripture is silent). The fundamentalist party was led by Carl McIntire, J. Oliver Buswell, and Allan MacRae, professor of Old Testament at Westminster. Though Buswell and MacRae disavowed the dispensationalist label, this group was premillennialist and defended the liberty of OP congregations to use the Scofield Reference Bible. They also were less rigorous in their application of Presbyterian polity and promoted a form of piety that featured abstinence from liquor, tobacco, movies, dancing, and cards.

At its Second General Assembly, held in November 1936, these parties managed to avoid a breach, even though McIntire threatened to split the church. Machen tried to keep the two sides together, despite his own Old School sympathies, and orchestrated the election of J. Oliver Buswell as moderator. Still, theological controversy could not be avoided. As the church took up the matter of its constitution, two issues emerged which reflected the growing division within the OPC.

The first matter concerned which version of the Westminster Confession the OPC would adopt. In 1903 the mainline Presbyterian Church had amended the confession with two new chapters—one on the Holy Spirit and the other on the love of God and missions. The OPC general assembly decided that these amendments were Arminian in character and should be eliminated from the version of the Confession it would adopt. This was the prevailing view of Machen and his Old School colleagues at Westminster Seminary. But this decision drew some opposition from fundamentalists, many of whom were involved in court battles over church property. By revising the confession, they argued, it would be harder to convince public authorities that the OPC was the genuine Successor to the Presbyterian Church and that its congregations should keep their property. Many of those who voted to eliminate the 1903 revisions were also engaged in property disputes, but for them theological integrity mattered more in the long run than retaining church buildings.

The second issue concerned eschatology. A number of overtures and reports expressed the desire for “eschatological liberty” within the OPC, that is, sufficient room for different views of Christ’s return and the millennium. But the Old School party, as well as the moderator, Buswell, thought that the Westminster Standards should stand on their own without any extra provisions. And since the Westminster Confession only teaches that Christ will come again, the church was already committed to allowing different views of the millennium as long as those views did not conflict with the Reformed theology taught by the confession. Thus, even though the general assembly appeared to grant the liberty that some dispensationalists desired, it actually kept the controversy over premillennialism alive. For many in the church believed that dispensational theology was at odds with the Westminster Standards, not with regard to the millennium, but more importantly over the effects of the fall and the unity of God’s gracious ways throughout redemptive history.

While the Second General Assembly did not give the Old School party a clear victory, it did make the church’s Calvinistic confessional identity explicit. The body eliminated the 1903 amendments to the Westminster Confession which were at cross purposes with the Reformed theology of the standards. The general assembly also refused to cave in to dispensationalist pressure and go beyond the Westminster Standards on questions surrounding the time and nature of Christ’s second coming. Suffering from this setback, the fundamentalist party retaliated by taking control of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. Even though the independence of the board from ecclesiastical oversight suggested that the conservative missions agency condoned non-Presbyterian forms of church government, the board’s constitution stated that it would support only those missionaries who vowed to conduct and establish missions based on the Westminster Confession and “the fundamental principles of Presbyterian Church government.” The board’s independence at its founding in 1933, then, was merely a temporary measure to protest the desperate state of the mainline denomination’s missions enterprise. In other words, despite its independence, the board was committed to establishing and conducting Presbyterian, not independent, missions.

The fundamentalist takeover of the Independent Board, however, appeared to compromise the agency’s commitment to Presbyterian church polity. At its annual election of officers in the fall of 1936, fundamentalists on the board, especially McIntire, fearing that a Westminster clique had taken control of the OPC, successfully ousted Machen as the board’s president, a position he had held since its founding. They elected instead Harold S. Laird, pastor of an independent church in Wilmington, Delaware, and named another independent minister as vice-president. McIntire’s group was now in control of the board. Machen was deeply distressed. Close associates and family members believed that he was so hurt by the action of the board, an organization upon which he had risked his reputation, that his physical strength was seriously depleted, making him an easy prey for his fatal illness. Still, in his last letter to Buswell, Machen did not reveal his sorrow. Instead, he wrote that the Independent Board was at “the parting of the ways between a mere fundamentalism, on the one hand, and Presbyterianism on the other.” The board’s elections had revealed that it was now in the hands of dispensationalists. This led to the withdrawal of OP support for the Independent Board the following year.

The last issue that split the OPC concerned Christian teaching on personal morality. Specifically, the church was divided over total abstinence from alcoholic beverages. While this issue might seem foreign to Christians living at the end of the twentieth century, most American Protestants had supported vigorously the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, an act which prohibited the production and sale of beverage alcohol and which was not reversed until 1933. So whether Christians could drink in good conscience was still a hotly contested matter when the OPC was founded.

Debates about total abstinence came to a head at the 1937 General Assembly, though the issue had been lurking in the background for some time. Fundamentalists such as Buswell and McIntire were displeased by the Westminster Seminary faculty’s unwillingness to condemn liquor. The faculty held that to advocate total abstinence was to reject the example of Christ, who at the wedding of Cana (John 2) changed the water into wine. Nevertheless, rumors circulated throughout the church that seminary students drank in their rooms with the approval of the faculty. It did not help matters that several of Westminster’s faculty also smoked tobacco. While debates about the consumption of alcohol and tobacco concerned the significant matter of the Bible’s teaching on Christian liberty, the breach within the OPC also reflected cultural differences. A majority of Westminster’s faculty came from non-American backgrounds where drinking and smoking in moderation were acceptable. What is more, Machen had been a vigorous opponent of prohibition and was known to bring cigars to faculty meetings even though he did not smoke them himself.

Nevertheless, despite these cultural differences, an important aspect of Christian practice was at stake. At the Third General Assembly, Buswell threatened withdrawal if the denomination did not renounce drinking. Two overtures came before the assembly—one urging total abstinence came from Buswell’s Presbytery of Chicago; the second argued that simple adherence to the Westminster Standards was as far as the church could go. Each side appealed to Scripture, to precedents in American Presbyterianism, and to Machen’s own practice and convictions. In the end, Buswell’s overture lost by a large margin. The OPC based this decision on the principle that Christians should be free to follow the dictates of their own consciences in “matters where the Bible has not pronounced judgment.” Immediately following the assembly in May 1937, fourteen ministers and three elders, led by Buswell and McIntire, withdrew from the OPC and in 1938 formed the Bible Presbyterian Synod.

The division of 1937, despite its roots in the aftermath of the fundamentalist controversy, parallels remarkably a split that shook American Presbyterianism a century earlier. In 1837 the Presbyterian Church also split into two rival communions, the Old School and New School Presbyterian Churches. The issues of the compatibility of the Westminster Confession with evangelical theology, the importance of Presbyterian polity, and divergent understandings of Christian liberty contributed to the 1837 split just as they did in the OPC’s division of 1937. And both cases revealed the tensions between the Reformed faith and American evangelicalism. Just as the Old School party in the OPC rejected dispensationalism for contradicting the Reformed understanding of the fall and the covenant of grace, so the Old School Presbyterian Church opposed the Arminian theology of Charles Finney’s revivals as antithetical to Calvinist theology. Just as the Old Schoolers in the OPC made Presbyterian polity an issue when they withdrew support from the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, so the Old School Presbyterian denomination insisted that the visible church, not parachurch organizations, should oversee and regulate evangelism and missions, and therefore refused to cooperate with the voluntary associations of the Second Great Awakening. And just as Old Schoolers in the OPC opposed fundamentalist efforts to prohibit on religious grounds the consumption of alcoholic beverages, so their forebears in the nineteenth century also criticized the moralism and legalism of extreme abolitionists and prohibitionists.

In both the Old School-New School split of 1837 and the 1937 division of the OPC, then, we can see significant differences between Reformed convictions and American Christianity in the revivalist tradition. Where Reformed churches stress human depravity and the sovereignty of God in salvation, evangelicals have overestimated human initiative and underestimated the pernicious effects of sin. Where Reformed churches insist that the means of grace be supervised and regulated by church officers, evangelicals have resisted such restrictions as too confining and ineffective for reaching the widest sphere of influence. And where Reformed churches have been unwilling to go beyond Scripture in condemning specific practices, evangelicals in their condemnation of certain activities have often been influenced more by the surrounding culture than by Scripture. Just as these tensions precipitated a split between Presbyterians in the early part of the nineteenth century, so they also revealed the differences between members of the OPC committed to the Reformed faith and those informed by the theology and practices of American fundamentalism.

Some thought that Machen’s premature death on January 1, 1937, contributed to the division of the OPC. His sudden death from pneumonia while traveling to Bismarck, North Dakota, to rally support for the OPC robbed the new church of its most capable leader. As Ned Stonehouse wrote in the January 23, 1937 issue of the Presbyterian Guardian, probably the most moving piece written on Machen’s death, the deceased “was far more than a brother to many of us. He was a father in Israel and we have become orphans.” Indeed, Machen’s leadership in the formation of Westminster Seminary, the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, and the OPC made him “chief among equals.” Stonehouse went on to observe that Machen “was notably the spiritual father of a generation of theological students who Crowded his classrooms,” and he had profoundly affected their “thinking and living.” The void created by Machen’s death was great. “We have depended so much upon him in the past,” Stonehouse lamented, “that it might well appear that we could not go on without him.” But even though his “steadying hand” was gone, Machen’s “devotion to truth and duty” left a heritage of “complete devotion to principle” which would help the church to “go on under God in loyalty to the truth for which [Machen] gave his life.”

Had Machen lived, perhaps he could have provided the stability and leadership necessary to find a compromise. His own activities in the church controversies of the 1930s, however, reveal that compromise would have been difficult. Even before his death, significant disagreements emerged between him and both Buswell and McIntire. Machen had a history of resisting compromise with all his might and main when the basic positions of the Reformed faith were being attacked. Also, the takeover of the Independent Board by McIntire demonstrated important differences that could not easily be resolved. From its inception the OPC was faced with a choice between being Reformed and being fundamentalist. From Machen’s perspective there was never any doubt about what the church should be. He had left Princeton to found Westminster in order to perpetuate the training of Old School Presbyterian ministers. And he helped to found the OPC as a church in which Westminster’s graduates could minister. As it turned out, the Reformed identity of the OPC after the division of 1937 was virtually identical to Machen’s original vision for the church.

The name of the denomination, in fact, spoke volumes about this vision. When the denomination was first founded, its name was the Presbyterian Church of America. Machen had argued that this title reflected the church’s claim to be the spiritual successor to the mainline denomination. But in 1937 the Presbyterian Church in the USA took the new denomination to court, charging that people might confuse the two denominations because of similar names. In 1938 the court ruled in the PCUSA’s favor, and the leaders of the new denomination were forced to look for another name. Various ones came before the Fifth General Assembly: The Evangelical Presbyterian Church, The Presbyterian and Reformed Church of America, The North American Presbyterian Church, The Presbyterian Church of Christ, The Protestant Presbyterian Church of America, and The Free Presbyterian Church of America. In 1939 the commissioners chose “The Orthodox Presbyterian Church.” The decision was fitting for it reflected the church’s theological and ecclesiastical commitments.

In fact, Machen himself as early as 1935 chose the term “orthodox” as the proper adjective for describing the movement in which he played such a vital part. “Fundamentalism,” he wrote, was inadequate because it failed to do justice to the great heritage of Augustine, Calvin, and the Westminster Confession. “Conservative” was unsatisfactory because it gave the impression of “holding desperately to something that is old merely because it is old.” “Evangelical” was not sufficiently clear; it did not designate those who held specifically to the Westminster Standards. But “Orthodox” was fitting because the word “orthodoxy” meant “straight doxy,” or correct thinking. To see whether a doctrine was “straight” it had to be compared against the “plumb line” of the Bible. As Machen argued and as the division of 1937 revealed, the rule for the OPC’s “straight doxy” was the Word of God. The OPC defended and adhered to the Reformed faith not because it was old or because it had such great champions as Augustine or Calvin; rather, it was committed to the Westminster Confession because, as Machen declared, it is “the creed which God has taught us in his Word.”

In the end, Stonehouse’s words of consolation at the time of Machen’s death turned out to be prophetic. The division of 1937 revealed the OPC’s true colors and the heritage of “complete fidelity to principle” which Machen had left to the church. The OPC had been founded not merely because the mainline church tolerated liberalism but because Christ instituted the church to proclaim the whole counsel of God. And for the OPC, proclaiming the whole counsel of God involved the system of doctrine and polity taught by the Westminster Standards. The church was established not on the basis of fundamentalism but out of a deep commitment to and love for Calvinist theology, Presbyterian church government, and Reformed piety.

—D. G. Hart and John Muether, Fighting the Good Fight: A Brief History of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, "Part One: Origins"
https://www.opc.org/books/fighting/pt1.html