TURNING POINTS IN AMERICAN PRESBYTERIAN
HISTORY PART 9:
THE SPECIAL COMMISSION OF 1925
D.
G. Hart and John R. Muether
Progressive
Presbyterians were not content with the revisions to the Westminster Confession
that
were
approved in 1903. There was more work to be done to bring the Presbyterian
Church into
greater
harmony with the modern world. The center of the progressive movement was in
the
Presbytery
of New York, which pressed the liberal agenda on three fronts. First, on May
21, 1922,
Harry
Emerson Fosdick, the Baptist supply pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in
the City of New
York,
rallied liberals with his famous sermon, "Shall the Fundamentalists
Win?" Although the sermon
wasa
plea for tolerance, most Presbyterians, liberal and conservative, would have
answered the
title's
rhetorical question in the affirmative, because it appeared that the
conservatives were strong
enough
to force the liberals out of the church.
A
year later, the Presbytery took the provocative step of ordaining two graduates
of Union Seminary
who
could not affirm the virgin birth of Christ.
Finally,
the Presbytery convened a gathering in Auburn, New York, in December 1923. It
produced
"An
Affirmation designed to safeguard the unity and liberty of the Presbyterian
Church in the United
States
of America." The Auburn Affirmation questioned the constitutionality of
General Assembly
deliverances
that proclaimed certain doctrines as necessary and essential beliefs for
Presbyterian
ministers, and it went on to describe those doctrines (the inerrancy of
Scripture,
the
virgin birth of Christ, the vicarious atonement, Jesus' resurrection, and his
miracles) merely
as
theories about the Bible's message. Within a year, the Auburn Affirmation
secured
the signatures of 1,300 Presbyterianministers.
Conservatives
fought back in the General Assembly of 1924, when they narrowly elected a
conservative
moderator, Clarence Macartney, and managed to secure the dismissal of Fosdick
from
the
First Presbyterian pulpit. The Assembly failed to take action against the
Auburn Affirmationists,
however,
as many conservatives believed that they lacked sufficient votes to win that
battle.
Instead,
a showdown took place a year later at the General Assembly of 1925, meeting in
Columbus,
Ohio.
Many commissioners were convinced of the creedal infidelity of the Presbytery
of New York.
Henry
Sloane Coffin, however, was prepared to defend the Presbytery. He preached the
preceding
Sunday
at the First Congregational Church of Columbus, the former pulpit of social
gospeler
Washington
Gladden. In his sermon, "What Liberal Presbyterians Are Standing
For," he put forth his
case:
"We question whether we have any right to call ourselves a Christian
Church, if we exclude
from
its ministry any whom Christ manifestly does not exclude from the gift of His
Holy Spirit."
The
Assembly elected Charles Erdman of Princeton Seminary as its moderator.
Although Erdman's
theology
was evangelical, J. Gresham Machen considered him to be the candidate of
modernists and
indifferentists.
Upon his election, Erdman quickly proved Machen right. He held a two-hour
private
meeting
with Coffin, listening to his plan to lead the Presbytery of New York and its
sympathizers out
of
the Assembly, should the Judicial Commission rule unfavorably.
Desperately
seeking to avoid a walkout, Erdman agreed to permit Coffin to read a protest if
the
Judicial
Commission ruled against the Presbytery. The Commission did, in fact,
determine
that the Presbytery had acted improperly in ordaining men who could not affirm
the
virgin birth of Christ, which was "the established law" of the
Church.
Conservatives
seemed to be on the brink of victory, and liberals prepared to leave.
Then
Coffin approached the platform of the assembly, as his biographer describes:
He
was pale and showed the effects of the strained and sleepless nights during
which he had
been
in conference seeking to avert this action. In a firm voice he read a prepared
statement
on
behalf of the Commissioners of the Presbytery of New York protesting the
decision as
contrary
to the constitution of the church and declaring the purpose of the New York
Presbytery
to maintain its constitutional rights in licensure.
But
Coffin's threatened exodus did not take place, because of a bold and desperate
move by
Erdman.
Yielding the chair to the vice moderator, Erdman proposed from the floor that
the Assembly
establish
a special commission "to study the present spiritual condition of our
Church and the causes
making
for unrest, and to report to the next General Assembly, to the end that the
purity, peace,
unity
and progress of the Church may be assured."
Erdman's
stroke of parliamentary genius was unanimously approved. Later that night he
met with
liberal
commissioners and urged them not to leave the church until the Special
Commission reported
to
the next assembly. Erdman then appointed fifteen committee members, mostly
"respected
loyalists."
The most well known and influential member of the committee was his close
friend, Robert
E.
Speer, secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions, who would later clash with
Machen over the
latter's
claim of modernism on the Board.
In
the ensuing year, the Special Commission met four times. Machen argued before
the Commission
that
the cause of the unrest in the church was "reducible to the one great
underlying cause," which
was
the presence of modernism in it. Coffin countered that the differences were due
to
"misapprehension."
Fighting this battle would "plunge the church into calamitous litigation
and
hinder
us from doing our work and building the kingdom of God." "It is
ruinous," he continued, "to
divide
existing forces. We ought to work harmoniously together and emphasize those
things in which
we
agree."
In
the unanimous report that the Commission presented to the 1926 Assembly, it
agreed with Coffin
that
there was "evangelical unity" in the church. American Presbyterianism
stood for toleration and
progress,
shaped by "two controlling factors":
One is, that the Presbyterian system
admits to diversity of view where the core of truth is identical.
Another is, the church has flourished
best and showed most clearly the good hand of God upon it,
when it laid aside its tendencies to
stress these differences, and put the emphasis on the spirit
of unity.
Coffin
could not have authored a more agreeable conclusion. "It seems to be
everyone's wish to
keep
the peace," he wrote.
When
the Commission presented its report, Clarence Macartney, two years removed as
the
Assembly
moderator, moved to excise certain sections and to dismiss the Commission. His
older
brother,
Albert J. McCartney, rose in rebuttal with withering words of ridicule:
"Clarence is all right,
friends.
The only trouble is he isn't married. If that old bachelor would marry, he
would have
less
time to worry over other people's theology.... I know that if mother could come
back, there would be
room
for him and for me to say our prayers in the same words on her knee at that old
home of ours
in
western Pennsylvania. I believe there is room for him and for you and me, to
say our prayers in
identical
language in the Presbyterian Church."
The
younger Macartney's motion was denied, and in 1927 the General Assembly
approved the final
report
of the Commission with only one dissenting vote. The effect was to grant
freedom to the
Presbytery
of New York to reject the virgin birth of Christ as an essential tenet of the
church, and to
vindicate
the signers of the Auburn Affirmation.
The
report underscored that Presbyterian unity required the end of "all
slander and misrepresentation"
within
the church. The focus of attention, then, fell on one particular source of
recent unrest:
the
factions within the faculty of Princeton Seminary. The school's reorganization
in
1929
brought two signers of the Auburn Affirmation onto its new, thirty-member
Board. Convinced
that
this would lead the school into a decline into theological liberalism, Machen
left Princeton and
formed
Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia.
The
General Assembly of 1925 marked the decline of conservative strength in the Presbyterian
Church;
no subsequent assembly elected a conservative moderator. It also raised Henry
Sloane
Coffin's
visibility in the church. Together with Erdman, he forestalled the liberal
exodus that most
observers
regarded as inevitable. According to Time magazine, Coffin went to the General
Assembly
"as
he had gone before, one of the many commissioners from the Presbytery of New
York. He
returned
the acknowledged leader of the liberal elements of his church."
Nearly
two decades later, in 1943, the General Assembly would elect Coffin as
moderator, a symbolic
vote
in two respects. First, it confirmed Coffin's role in the church he nearly
walked out of in 1925.
Second,
since he was president of Union Seminary at the time, the vote represented a
healing of the
breach
between the Presbyterian Church and the Seminary in the liberal Presbytery of
New York,
and
a vindication of Charles A. Briggs, fifty years after his heresy trial.
Dr.
Hart is the director of fellowship programs and scholar in residence at the Intercollegiate
Studies
Institute
in Wilmington, Del.; Mr. Muether is the librarian at Reformed Theological
Seminary in
Orlando,
Fla., and the historian of the OPC; both are OP ruling elders and members of
the
Committee
on Christian Education. Reprinted from New Horizons, October 2005
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