This recording is from the Rev. Charles G. Dennison archive, part of the “Lectures” series, delivered November 1, 1995.

I’m not sure it would be correct to describe these as our annual lectures. We have these lectures on a more ad hoc basis, but I’m glad to see among those who are here this afternoon not only our students and faculty, but some ministers from the area and other interested friends. I trust that the time that we spend together will be profitable, and the lecture that will be given will be helpful to us as well in learning something of the history of Christ’s particular, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in the twentieth century.

Before I say anything further by way of introduction and description of the lectures, I believe it would be good for us to pause and ask the Lord’s blessing in prayer. Let us pray. Our Father in Heaven, we thank you, Father, that as we have assembled together, we may assemble in the confidence that Jesus Christ has been seated upon your right hand, that he who is the head and king of the Church, who rules over all things for the sake of the Church, watches over us even now as we’ve gathered here. We thank you that as we’ve come, we may hear this afternoon from one of your servants, Reverend Dennison, as he speaks to us about the history and developments within that part of Christ’s Church known as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in the 20th century in North America. We pray, Father, that the instruction we receive through him may be helpful to us may give us a better understanding of the progress and developments and the life of your Church so that we may take to heart and learn how we may be faithful in our time in the ministry of your word among your people and among the Churches. We pray then that in all things what we do here this afternoon may bring praise and glory to your name, that it may be helpful to us and better equip us for the work of the ministry in and among the Churches of which we are members. keep sin from us in the thoughts of our hearts, the words that we speak. May all that we do bring praise to your name. We ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

Before I introduce Rev. Denison to you this afternoon, I think it would be good for me to say a little bit about the format for the lectures this year. Rev. Denison will be giving three as we term the more academic lectures, the first of which he is giving this afternoon, now at two, and two additional lectures tomorrow. The first one will be at 830, and the second one will be at 10 o’clock. Those lectures, the one this afternoon as well, will be addressed specifically to the history of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in North America. He will also be giving this evening in the First Christian Reformed Church of Sheldon a more popular lecture. to which you are all, of course, encouraged and warmly invited to come. It will be at 7.30 at the First Christian Reformed Church, and that lecture will be addressed with the theme, What is the Gospel? His lecture this afternoon is entitled, Tragedy, the OPC Struggle with Fundamentalism in the 1930s.

So he is going to trace out for us something of the origins, the beginnings of the Orthodox I won’t say anything more about the precise content of what he has to say. He knows that much better than I, and I don’t wish to steal from him anything that he might have to say.

I don’t know Reverend Dennison that well personally, and so I can only introduce him in a somewhat formal way, but I hope that through his lectures and the time that he spends among us, we may also get to know him as well as a brother in the Lord and a pastor in the Church. is a pastor-historian. He is a graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He is also presently the pastor of an Orthodox Presbyterian Church at Sewickley, Pennsylvania. Reverend Dennison is not only a pastor, he happens also to be the, and I’m not sure what that means exactly in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church circles, but he’s the official church historian, I’m told, of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And it’s in that capacity in part that he edited two books on the history of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the first of which is entitled The Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1936-1986, and another volume, Pressing Toward the Mark.

And so I believe it’s a privilege of ours to have him with us to speak on this subject that is close to him and one concerning which he knows, I think, a great deal, and I hope and trust that we will be profited and assisted by his I think it would be well for me to just put some dates in front of you and make a few comments at the beginning.

One is 1881, and that would be the birth year of J. Gresson Machen, 1881. Another, 1929, the date of the founding of Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia under Machen and others. 1933, the date for the founding of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, one of the interesting chapters in church history in the twentieth century. So those three dates.

Also an explanation of some acronyms. You have OPC, Orthodox Presbyterian Church. I think that some of you are aware that that has not always been the name of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. You see, we were the original PCA. but nonetheless the PCA, the Presbyterian Church of America from 1936 to 1939 before the courts of the land forced us to change our name. I’ll be using OPC throughout the lectures just so that you understand that in those years in which we weren’t really the OPC, we were the OPC. You might also want to take note of the PCUSA.

Those are the letters that are used to describe the large mainline Presbyterian denomination. I think you’re all aware of the difference structure-wise as we move from the Reformed to a Presbyterian context. General Assembly, Synod, Classes, Presbytery. We have Session, Consistory. Okay, you understand that those are sort of equivalent categories. I want to thank the board and faculty at MidAmerica here for their gracious invitation to me.

I am Annalisa Ross Presbyterian and I am present here with you with a deep sense of humility. knowing the great debt the Orthodox Presbyterian Church owes to the Continental Reformed tradition, and most particularly to the Christian Reformed Church. The names Gerhardus Voss, Harvey Kuyper, Cornelius Van Till, Ned Stonehouse, all one-time members of the Christian Reformed Church, have meant much for the development of a Reformed and Presbyterian consciousness in the denomination I represent.

It goes without saying that these are harrowing times for the world of Protestant orthodoxy. The Christian Reformed Church, traditionally strong with an exemplary history, now itself shows evidences of the extremities of our times. In many ways, the present circumstances for the CRC remind us of the fundamentalist modernist storm and stress period in American Protestantism earlier in the century. It will be remembered that the OPC, organized on June 11, 1936, was born in this earlier struggle. Nor can it be forgotten by us in the OPC how the CRC seemed the special servant of God’s Spirit to comfort and advise us.

J. Gresham Machen, the central figure in the OPC’s founding, believed the CRC the most blessed ally the newly formed Church had. He reflected on the greetings sent by the CRC to the OPC at its first General Assembly. he said, no other ecclesiastical body in the whole world could have sent greetings more welcome. The happiness of nation at those greetings could not have been greater, since they meant that the CRC recognized the OPC as a true Church. Correct in its separation from the Presbyterian Church in the The OPC then was not a schismatic sect in the judgment of the CRC.

But Machen went further in his remarks. He looked upon the CRC as the model of a truly Reformed Church. Separatist in the very best sense of the word, standing apart in the interests of true unity and the purity of the Church. He said the CRC was theologically consistent, never vaguely evangelical or conservative or fundamentalist, but always endeavoring to be reformed. To Machen, this meant that the CRC was not content with some partial or piecemeal presentation of the truth that the Bible contained. held firmly to that glorious system of revealed truth summarized in the great Reformed confessions of the faith.

Machen admired the tradition of catechetical preaching in the CRC, by which he said the laity were soundly and systematically trained in doctrine. He admired the exercise of Church discipline, and he admired the CRC’s commitment to make the education of its children Christian throughout. Now Machen’s high praise for the CRC was politely reciprocated by H. J. Kuyper in his December 25, 1936 editorial in the Banner. He identified the establishment of the OPC as one of the outstanding events of 1936 in the religious and ecclesiastical world.

Progress of this church, he said, will mean much for the preservation and propagation of our Calvinistic doctrines and traditions. Piper noted how carefully the banner had monitored the formation of the OPC and its early months, and concluded with these words.

Let us add that if we have been an inspiration to the leaders of the New Presbyterian Church, they have no less been an inspiration to us. We have often asked ourselves the question whether we would have been willing to suffer the hardship and calumny for our faith which they have endured the past few years. Let us not forget that our contacts with these men who have stepped out or been cast out of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. have served us as a constant warning against the perils of modernism.” Despite Kuyper’s kind words at that time, the OPC stood more immediately, more obviously, in the CRC’s debt. His words did, however, hold out the prospect for valuable service the OPC could render the CRC if times of suffering and hardship came in which the CRC was in fact face-to-face with the perils of modernism.” Subsequent history has brought great change in both denominations, and even to the once strong relationship they sustained to each other.

However, the story of the OPC’s formation and past history, both in its testimony to Christian courage and to human weakness, seems especially appropriate for CRC audiences these days. It is in the interests of discharging an old debt, then, that I am with you for these lectures. My prayer is for your profit, as we of the OPC profited from the sacrifice and service of an earlier generation that stood in the tradition represented by this institution. Let me set the stage for these lectures. I may bear the title. tragedy, hope and ambivalence, the history of the OPC, 1936-1962.

The dates mentioned take us from the year of the OPC’s birth, which I have already mentioned, to the year of Dr. Ned B. Stonehouse’s death. Stonehouse died November 18, 1962. Stonehouse is the last of three significant figures around whom these lectures are organized, the others being J. Gresson Machen and Cornelius Van Til. Each of these figures matches up to one of the words in the title. Machen matches up to the word tragedy, Van Til to the word hope, Stonehouse to the word ambivalence. These words call to mind specific crises in which each figure played a leading part.

Before we close today, we will consider Machen’s battle with fundamentalists in the OPC at the close of his life, a battle more devastating for him than the struggle he had against modernism, believe it or not. The second lecture reviews Van Til’s remarkable but narrow victory in the forties over the visions of cultural Protestantism, championed by figures like Edwin H. Ryan, that’s R-I-A-N, and Gordon H. Clark. This struggle in the 40s revealed the fragile nature of the Reformed consciousness within the OPC, but also the fact that Van Til’s theological and apologetical stand could not easily be disassociated from the Church. from the newly formed Presbyterian Church. There is hope rising from that controversy in the 40s, but this hope is qualified by a lingering ambivalence that demands careful study and scrutiny. Our third lecture looks at Ned B. Stonehouse, a fierce promoter of nation and truly an extraordinary scholar, New Testament scholar, with a worldwide reputation, and a man who proved ambivalent.

They, at least in the beginnings of an agonizing war with subjectivism, represented in the Peniel movement. That’s P-E-N-I-E-L, a movement I will explain to you later. here only noting that it consumed OPC energies directly for about 14 years and indirectly for about 21, carrying us through the period in which Dr. Stonehouse died in 1962. In setting these lectures for you, we would do well, moving on from the consideration of the title and surveying somewhat the content of each, we would do well to give more than a nod in a more cosmopolitan direction. Without conceding that the larger sociological movements are the key to understanding the particular features of a church’s history, we do not want to be ignorant of the world around us, neither its potential influence, and fret nor the pressures that providentially arise within our context encouraging us to take a better look at ourselves.

The years 1936 to 1962 saw principally a collapse of Europe and the beginning stages of Europe’s redefinition. This period ends with Europe divided by a newly built wall between an economically attractive West and an intractable, determined, although increasingly scientifically sophisticated, East.

American isolationism was a thing of the past. Old-world colonialism was dead. Asian and African interests could not be ignored and pushed their concerns and agendas upon the world. In many respects, this period is one in which a brave new world takes shape, brimming over with hostilities born from the clash of fundamentally distinct ideologies and the residual impact of nationalism and racial conflict. But in its more profound expressions, 1936 to 1962, for all its diversity and discord, signals the triumph of an immanentistic world consciousness.

The dynamics of history are now understood as at no point previously so pervasively or so consistently from within. No substantial appeal is being made to divine power or design. World War II itself and subsequent conflicts are fought without any serious theological analysis as to their apocalyptic dimensions by the traditionally Christian West. And in the East, militarist mythologies lie in ruins. The world now will be interpreted from within. But mankind is discovering a new religion. one beyond, but also the natural descendant of theological liberalism, one in which the fatherhood of God now disappears in the interests of the brotherhood of man.

In America, John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath spells out the new religion. The Jode family has lived through Egypt-like feast and famine days on the Oklahoma plains. But now the plagues of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, together with the oppression of the modern-day pharaohs, those machine-owning, land-grabbing syndicates, finds the Jodes looking to the promised land, California. The Job family is led on this pilgrimage by an itinerant ex-preacher named Cayce, who is himself in search of a replacement for his forsaken fundamentalism.

In Steinbeck’s recasting of the biblical Exodus story, Cayce becomes the new Moses, the prophet of a religion devoid of Jehovah. Before his death, Cayce passes on the new faith to his Joshua Tom Joad, the oldest of the Joad boys, who then confesses that man has no soul of his own, but only a piece of a big one.

This one great big soul, however, is no testimony to a higher transcendent reality to a heavenly world, to the God of Orthodoxy. Instead, this one great big soul testifies to a greater collective individuality found only in the common lot of humanity. See how we are not going to get outside of ourselves. There can be no appeal to anything beyond ourselves and our world.

Steinbeck’s novel therefore proclaims a new gospel devoid of God, devoid of Jesus Christ, in which faith in mankind promises ultimate triumph over adversity, whatever that adversity might be. This is the stuff with which you are to meet the Depression, the Dust Bowl and World War from even the most monumental setbacks with confidence that it is winning the battle for control over existence and over itself.

But with this confidence has come a new view of government in which the world of politics absorbs everything in sight. The media is drawn into the picture as it draws together technology and politics for the catechizing of humanity in the modern immunotistic world of consciousness.

Abandoned is the Reformation commitment to service for the sake of God and his transcendent kingdom in its present and coming glory. What remains is propaganda for the sake of political advantage and one’s supposed idea of proof, all in the name of the most eminently worthy causes. But one thing we must realize is that in all of this, religion has not lost its place in the world. It’s not as if religion itself has been abandoned. That is a misinterpretation of what is transpiring. Secularization has not meant the destruction of religion, but rather its transformation, so that religion itself is translated into the interests of political hope, in that there is, in fact, no other reality.

This radical change has been forecast by the social upheaval of the 19th century, but now became complete and the ecclesiastical reactions to the world wars, the depression, and the corollary and subsequent social crises. Therefore, the modern Church, in its boldest and most consistent expression, finds itself quite at home within the emerging order and at odds with the stubborn resistance it finds, the pocket resistance it finds, to this twentieth-century Enlightenment movement. A book appears in the sixties that summarizes the theological consensus that congealed during this time, covered by our lectures. That book, Harvey Cox’s The Secular City, was published in 1965.

It set out with powerful lucidity radical reading of Bonhoeffer’s quote world come of age unquote and quote religionless Christianity unquote Now you have to understand something about Cox at this point He does not see himself primarily as Prophetic or prescriptive as if he’s trying to establish what ought to be a as if his interest is, I have a message, I’m going to preach my message, and with this message will transform the world.

His interest, then, is not prophetic or prescriptive. His interest is primarily descriptive. He is describing what has already transpired. It’s already taken place. that the facts are undeniable. The world no longer understands itself religiously or in terms of the metaphysics attendant to a God who stands apart from the world or is to be understood in any orthodox sense. But get this, even though this has taken place now as far as the world is concerned, and the religious understanding of things has been dismissed We are not to view this state of affairs negatively. It is rather inevitable and necessary. That’s what it means for the world to come of age.

A religionless Christianity is, in fact, the point to which we were pressing all along. He says then, that this is even the inevitable and necessary conclusion to the dynamic of the biblical record, even the dynamic of the biblical record in its doctrine of creation. Creation itself pushes us to this conclusion. Secularization is the conclusion of the Scripture’s position on creation.

In the secular city, Christianity becomes the process of social change and political action in keeping with the program of reconciliation observed in Jesus of Nazareth.” Christianity becomes the process of social change and political action in keeping with the program of reconciliation observed in Jesus of Nazareth. Should anybody be surprised by the theological lay of the land since the The sociopolitical reading of the Bible has become a deluge. Jesus has been recast as the champion of a new embodiment of the kingdom of God, who was determined to overthrow Jerusalem’s priestly temple system that stood for the Roman Jewish elitists and oppressed the majority of Palestinian Jews.

I’m quoting from a representative voice. We can go even a step further in what radical hermeneutics is saying with respect to the scriptural message. The early New Testament Church now appears as a primal equality movement that was squelched by a chauvinistic male power play. leading female church leaders branded as heretics, and women viewed generally as unimportant or as a threat.” Are you surprised?

You have to remember, of course, that the Bible itself is party. party to the misrepresentation of Jesus and the early Church, which we in our naivete have embraced. We must remember that the Bible itself is party to the suppression of Jesus’ true mission, to the suppression of the early New Testament Church’s politically correct agenda. That’s why you can’t trust your Bible completely and wholly.

The Bible actually gives comfort to those who would hide in obsolete ethical directives. It gives comfort to those who would oppress women. The Bible actually gives comfort to those who would oppress homosexuals and other minority groups. Therefore, if the Bible is to remain authoritative, and we, of course, want it to remain authoritative, If we want the Bible to remain authoritative for us, something more than incidental to our present secular circumstance, this Bible must speak to us about an overarching theology of hope. We must discern in the Bible, so says J. Christian Becker of Princeton Seminary, an apocalyptic thrust that will only find its fulfillment when the triumph of God will make an end to all evil, suffering and injustice, and bring about the joy of a world at peace.” That’s our hope. It might be thought that the world of Neo-Orthodoxy would offer us some relief from this. After all, the neo-Orthodox wanted to talk about salvation and history in the interests of the Holy Other God who acts in space and time.

But the neo-Orthodox message has now been upstaged by those who have favored secularization, and they have been upstaged because they have lacked the ability to speak definitively about God’s essential transcendence. They have refused to speak concretely about the essential ontological deity of God’s Son, and they have refused to speak about the substantive nature of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and of the world to come. And this refusal on their part has left them victims in a conflict in which they have been co-conspirators. Ironically, neo-Orthodoxy has generated its own irrelevance.

This then is the situation as it has taken shape over the course of this century and gained focus from the mid-30s to the early 60s. A radical cultural and religious shift has occurred, signaling the triumph of an eminentistic world consciousness. Here is the context for the formulation of the OPC, the context for the significance of her early leaders.

Men like Machen, Van Til and Stonehouse do not deserve our attention in themselves, but as they together with the OPC and other faithful churches have given response to the societal ecclesiastical demagoguery and deceit of our time. They also commend themselves for our consideration because of the costly stand they took in reviewing their own constituency and heritage. But neither are these men themselves, much less the OPC, shielded from that all-seeing, scrutinizing gaze that is capable of detecting in them whatever log might be in their own eyes. Tragedy and J. Gresson Machen The time remaining, my purpose is not to recite history to you. You can get accounts of Meichen and the formation of the OPC from various places. My concern is to draw together for you material that is either little known or ignored in the retelling of the OPC’s early history.

Sometime during November 12-14, 1936, a young pastor named Robert H. Graham stepped into an elevator in the Manufacturers and Bankers Club at Broad and Walnut Streets, Philadelphia. Stepping in at the same time was the Rev. Carl McIntyre, the flamboyant editor of the Christian Beacon and the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Collingswood, New Jersey.

These two men were headed for the second floor and the second General Assembly of the OPC. They first met in June. This was the second Assembly meeting in November. The bond between these men went beyond their common denomination. They were both members of the new Church.

On this occasion, MacIntyre took Graham into his confidence. As Graham, now in his 87th year, remembers it, MacIntyre said, this fellow nation is getting too much power. With that statement, MacIntyre expressed the growing distrust of Nachen felt within the OPC’s fundamentalist wing. Such distrust forecast the break by fundamentalism from Nachen and his movement. That break eventually catapulted MacIntyre into the role of a fundamentalist luminary at the head of a vast empire, including the Bible Presbyterian Church. Although Machen himself died before the break where the Fundamentalists came, it occurred in May of the following year, he was able to read all the signs and carried the weight of those signs to his grave. The crisis with the Fundamentalists in the OPC broke in. nation had been prepared for the earlier crises of his career.

In fact, he seemed to rise to them. It was almost as if he enjoyed them. He faced the moderates, those he called the indifferentists. And even in facing them, no amount of humiliation that could heap upon him distracted him. They had, as you know, come after him. They came after him in 1926 in Baltimore, Maryland, the General Assembly. They attacked him in full view of the city in which he had been raised, in which he was well known, in which his family was well respected. Can you think of a greater humiliation for the man?

He had been nominated to the chair of apologetics at Princeton Seminary, an appointment that had to be confirmed by the General Assembly, but the Assembly was moved by J. Ross Stevenson, president of Princeton Seminary, who identified Machen as the spokesman for intolerance. Charles R. Erdmann, Machen’s colleague, also opposed Machen, calling him thoroughly controversial. For moderates like Stevenson and Erdmann, Machen possessed temperamental idiosyncrasies He was a man hampered by serious limitations.

Although Machen lost the battle for the position at Princeton and even saw the seminary remade in 1929, and that in the modernist direction, he was still resilient, determined, and positive in his fight for orthodoxy. Late September 1929, Westminster Seminary opened its doors in Philadelphia. Nachen gave the address. He said in that address that though Princeton Seminary is dead, the noble tradition of Princeton is alive. He was still buoyant.

And he remained buoyant throughout the long, drawn-out battle with liberalism. He stood his ground against the PCUSA hierarchy and its defense of its own Board of Foreign which harbored modernist liberals, including Pearl Buck, the famous novelist. He threw himself into an emergency organization, the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, which he, with others, formed in 1933 in protest to the denomination’s Board of Foreign Missions. For this action, he was deposed. by the PCUSA in a case that ran its course at the 1936 General Assembly in Syracuse, New York.

Then on June 11, 1936, a new church convened its first General Assembly, and about this event, Machen wrote in the Presbyterian Guardian, We became members at last of a true Presbyterian Church. We recovered at last true Christian fellowship. What a joyous moment it was. how the long years of struggle seemed to sink into nothingness compared with the peace and joy that filled our hearts. Now, that was Machen writing in June. Machen in November was a completely different man. Many remember him as a fellow much more restrained and somber. Stonehouse spoke about how much he had aged since that 1936 opening assembly for the OPC.

The first blow came to him in the revelation during the summer months that his right-hand man, H. McAllister Griffiths, had sexually compromised himself. Griffiths had been Nation’s counsel throughout his ecclesiastical trials. He had also been the editor of the Presbyterian Guardian, and now his reputation, at least as far as Nation and the close circles around Nation, were concerned, was ruined. Griffiths withdrew from most of his Church duties, but interestingly there is no evidence of Church discipline. and Griffiths retains his position in the Independent Board. So that was the first blow from H.M. in the summer months of 1936.

The next blow came in the October-November row over R.B. Kuyper’s report in the Banner on the OPC’s first General Assembly. This is what Kuyper had written. He said, the CRC would have been delighted that candidates for the ministry in the OPC were examined so closely about the anti-reformed heresies so extremely prevalent among American fundamentalists, Arminianism and the dispensationalism of the Scofield Bible.

You might well imagine Carl MacIntyre’s response. MacIntyre took Kuyper to task on two accounts. First of all, he said he was inaccurate in his recollection of what happened at that first assembly, implying that Kuyper was a liar. And secondly, he took him to task for what he considered to be his anti-premillennialism. Kuyper, in other words, was a bigot. When Kuyper responded to MacIntyre’s October 1 Christian Beacon editorial, MacIntyre refused to publish his letter. The response from Kuyper’s friend, J. Gresham Machen, was immediate.

He charged MacIntyre with deliberate sabotage. Machen was a pro when it came to recognizing power plays. He could spot it a mile away, and he recognized its insidiousness. So much so that he seriously now contemplated bringing charges against MacIntyre. He wrote to J. Oliver Buswell, president of Wheaton College, I am afraid it is my duty to take the preliminary steps to bring some kind of disciplinary action against MacIntyre. When Boswell suggested the private conference for the resolution of the problem, Machen responded that the conference he had in mind would take place within the courts of the church. It was as if Machen sensed that he and the OPC were being purposely pushed to the wall by the Fundamentalists, publicly embarrassed by them.

He sensed that the confrontation was going to come. Even after the First Assembly, during the summer months, he had confided in Kuyper, our struggles are not over. A serious conflict with the Fundamentalists is in the offing. That is what he said to Kuyper.

But where earlier in his career, Machen had himself been willing to be identified as a fundamentalist, now he rejected the term emphatically. Writing to the New York fundamentalist lawyer James E. Bennett, he said, I, for my part, am not a fundamentalist at all. He added the words, at all. And then he went on to say that I am a persecution. Machen was very critical of the Fundamentalists as things were developing here through the summer months and into the fall.

In his letter to Bennett, he implied that Fundamentalists had no real commitment to the Westminster standards. He implied an Arminianism. He suspected that their view of office essentially laid office open to any man who is washed in the blood of Christ and saved. He, with Kuyper and the rest of the Westminster faculty, with the exception of Alan McRae, believed the fundamentalist Scofield Bible dispensationalism to be terribly heretical. He also had no sympathy for the fundamentalist view of the separated life, since he saw it as a denial of the Presbyterian doctrines of Christian liberty of conscience and the regulative principle.

This then was the second blow, the October-November lull. The third blow came two days after the second General Assembly. You might recall that that Assembly ends on November 14 and places us on November 16. On that day, the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions met in Philadelphia. Machin was up for re-election as president of the Independent Board, a position that he had held since 1933, when the board had been organized.

He lost the presidency that day to an independent clergyman named Harold S. Laird, L-A-I-R-D. But more, Machen knew the Board had been captured by fundamentalism and could no longer operate honestly in terms of its constitutional commitment to Presbyterianism. The coup within the Board had been engineered by the fundamentalist lawyer James Bennett, who had no regard for Machen’s Presbyterianism, and together with MacIntyre, who was himself a member of the board, believed Machen to be vested with too much, if not papal, power. According to Mary Gresham Machen, J. Gresham Machen’s niece, the deciding vote in that election was cast by H. McAllister, who had turned on Machen after being morally discredited and had now thrown his weight to the fundamentalist Fundamentalists side before a meteoric rise in McIntyre’s movement Are all the enemies on the left Are all the enemies on the left Nation was devastated Nothing that he’d experienced from the liberals, even the moderates, affected him as much as this. He told Kuyper that the loss of the board for the cause of the Reformed faith was the greatest shock of his life. After his defeat, that very day, he phoned his sister-in-law in Baltimore, Helen Woods Machen. Her record of that conversation goes like this.

Machen said to her, they kicked me out as president. It is the hardest blow I’ve had yet. I’m done for now. I feel I’ve been driven to the final humiliation of my life. I actually pleaded for myself. pleaded that I be returned to office. My back was against the wall and the whole life of the board was at stake. And I loved it so. And now it’s gone. Absolutely wrecked. Lost to everything it stood for. Everything I stand for and the man who stand with me. Now everything is in the hands of men who haven’t the slightest notion of the issues at stake.

Everything I’ve worked for loved and suffered for has been kicked out too. I feel it’s the end for me. This time they’ve finished me.” Nothing in the remaining weeks of Nachen’s life contradicts Helen Nachen’s recollections. Nachen was not himself at the Christmas break. He was pensive, humorless, reclusive.

It seems that what the moderates and the modernists in the PCUSA had not been able to do, the fundamentalists within the OPC and the Independent Board were successful in doing. Obviously, what wounded Maychin most was the betrayal, both doctrinal and personal. Of those he had taught, of those he had been wonderfully close to, In this, something of the experience of his Savior was intruding upon him in a way that he would have never asked for in an unexpected way. So also unexpectedly, the great issues were becoming crystal clear.

And now, as the year ended, stricken with pneumonia and dying in Bismarck, North Dakota, Matron spoke of a reformed faith. He said to Sam Allen, an O.P. pastor at his bedside, isn’t it grand? And he spoke of Christ’s active obedience, sending a telegram to John Murray. He wrote to Murray about that act of obedience of Christ, no hope without it. And what of the hope? He spoke of his vision of heaven, he said it was glorious, and he died at about 7.30 p.m. January 1, 1937.

Thank you, Reverend Dennison. We had agreed beforehand, I didn’t mention that at the outset, but we would allow any who wish to ask Reverend Dennison any questions that may have arisen that you thought of during the course of his presentation. Now we will limit ourselves in asking these questions and answering them for roughly, I would say, 10 minutes. So if there are questions at this time, I’ll turn things over again to Reverend Dennison. and you may address them to him. Yes.

I would like to ask Reverend Jonathan, how do you define fundamentalism? Well, the definitions have certainly been traded about over the last 30 years, I would say. I have tended to approach fundamentalism a little bit more culturally. Yes, there are the theological convictions in Aaron’s scripture, opposition to evolution by and large, premillennial tendency towards dispensationalism. overt Arminian to covert. You have an attitude that rises above the Church, sees things in what it would consider broader categories. Pension for independency within it. But as I said, I tend to think of it more in terms, as much in terms of a cultural position than a theological position.

And so I think that the attitude of fundamentalism is socially isolationist, provincial. I think that It is individualistic by and large, supportive of public and political programs to that end. It has a very active social and political conscience, although at the same time it says that this world is going to hell in a handbasket. I think we’re all aware of the contradiction and the hypocrisy of fundamentalism.

It is militant in its approach to the culture and to the church. We’ll deal with evangelicalism in the next lecture, but I think that you can work out some nice contrasts between the fundamentalist approach and the evangelical approach along that social line. The evangelical traditionally is not militant. He’s adept at getting along. Where the fundamentalist wants all the time, the evangelical just wants equal time.

Mason was concerned about that from the right wing going forward fundamentally. You’re somewhat of an expert on Mason in that context. Mason realized today, make an educated guess, do you think he would see in the OPC or in the conservative movement in the CRC some fundamentalism? that the fundamentalists in the OPC were soundly thrashed in the next lecture.

It was a costly fight, but I don’t think that fundamentalism by and large has survived in the OPC. I think the OPC is more fighting the problems of a residual evangelicalism. I think that’s their struggle presently, so I think those folks would match up with the moderates or the indifferentists of Nations Day. Now, I’m not that conversant with what’s happening in CRC circles in great detail.

I’ve certainly had some exposure since I’m a member of the Presidentiary of Ohio and the OCC, and Dan Moss happens to serve on our session. So we had been deeply involved in the issue of the fate of the Washington congregation. So I’m a little bit familiar with that. I’ve also had to deal with Daryl Molina. I am a little bit aware of tabloid journalism, even in the church.

So the sensationalism of Carl MacIntyre and Christian Beacon may be abroad in places in the Christian Reformed Church. I don’t know whether I’m stepping on anybody’s toes. Uh-oh, there’s a member of the board back there. I’m not a member of the board or anything like that.

I just wondered why the fundamentalism gets that negative connotation. I mean, the fundamentals were the same as Mason was fighting against war against the liberals, right? Somehow or other, the term fundamentalist, that is to say, I want to hold to the fundamentals of Scripture, the main issues and teachings of Scripture, It’s something we’re also about to turn. Now, why in the history of the Church did people who tended to be narrow and to be like MacIntyre, did they captivate?

Now, they’re the bad guys. And so today, in the Christian Front Church, I think maybe that’s the point there, those of us who really want to maintain nothing more than the heart, But what the Christian farm church has always been for, don’t worry about the non-sensual for the real, the sensual, they very quickly label you as a fundamentalist. As a non-homonym, I give it some character ways, but it serves the purpose. Well, Craig, he overwatched it all.

Now, Nathan was fighting for the fundamentalist. So in a sense, he was a genuine fundamentalist. There was a period in his life, I’d say in the early to the mid-twenties, where Mayking would not shy away from being called a fundamentalist in a certain context. But he would always add, you see, I’m not going to reduce the faith to a few fundamentals. What I stand for is the full-orged, reformed faith. That’s what I stand for.

And as that increasingly began to play itself out in his consciousness, he became increasingly uneasy with the term fundamentalist and fundamentalism, because he could see that what these individuals were doing was that they were trafficking with Reformed confessionalism.

And that was what was in the balance. The fundamentalists were only going to give the tip of the hat to the confession in the end. He could see that. That was clear to him. They really weren’t concerned about chapters beyond chapter one of the Confession of Faith, the Westminster Confession of Faith. The first chapter deals with the doctrine of Scripture. So the inerrancy of Scripture was very important to them, but they couldn’t be bothered with the doctrine of the Covenant, for instance, chapter seven, or statements with regard to the law of God, or other things that were part of this comprehensive Reformed view. as that became more and more clear to Nathan, and it became clear to him, I feel, because of his contact with that original faculty at Westminster. I’m getting ahead of myself here, but that’s the next lecture.

He is really going to be going to school, as it were, under Murray and Vantill and Kuyper and Stonehouse in learning about the breadth and the comprehensiveness of the Reformed position. So he backs off. And don’t be naïve and don’t be deceived. Those who were standing for the fundamentalist position weren’t Reformed. They simply weren’t Reformed. They had no real commitment to the comprehensive statement of Reformed faith.

That’s why. That’s why the difference comes, you see. You mentioned earlier in your lecture that Mason was often accused of being stubborn and difficult to get along with, and therefore the modesty and indifference stood in his way and lost its place in the chair of apologetics. How much of that same kind of personal dynamic plays itself out with Karl McIntyre? Fair enough. Fair enough.

Again, we’re getting a little bit ahead of the story, and I want to work on that in my second lecture. Of course, MacIntyre organizes the beacon at the beginning of 1936. Here is this young firebrand. This guy has energy that will run him. I don’t know, he may have slept. He was a phenom, and Dr. Van Tilghman, when I was at Westminster Center in the late 60s, was guilty of anything, but not himself. He was his best student. So he was a phenom. And he has a magazine, The Christian Beacon, that has three times the circulation than the Christian magazine.

We might not just have a meteorological war going on here. Here’s this young Turk who doesn’t really understand the way of the land. Now, I can’t say that there wasn’t some of that there, but I can’t imagine anything more obnoxious to you than that. It was pressing to take. I mean, what I said in the lecture is correct. Nature recognized the signs of the power of what it saw. He realized, even if there were indiscretions on the other side, he realized that MacIntyre’s objective was to discredit him and the Guardian and his descendants. That was the objective. Can you talk a bit about what you see as the motivations of MacIntyre?

He did not believe his training. Yes, I think that’s correct. He came in a pre-Millennialist. He went out a pre-Millennialist. He came in, I think, convinced of Schofieldism. I think he left convinced of Schofieldism. He was adamantly in favor of the 1903 amendments to the Left-Lintern Convention of Freedom. And that wasn’t just because he wanted to have claim to the property.

I’m convinced that the man actually believed some of the stuff that was in those amendments to the confessional. Most particularly, the items that were retained in the Bible fit onto the confessional statement. All infants dying in infancy are saved. Categorically, unequivocally. He had to hold on to that statement.

So I think the motivation for MacIntyre was, look, premillennialism is right, I’m going to prosecute the case. Separated Wives is right, right, I’m going to prosecute the case. We’re going to return to the ministry, we’re going to arrest the church and the control over us, the ministry, the seminary, from making himself, and this denomination is not going to merely have Eschatological liberty, it’s going to have a premillennial preponderance. We will be the majority position.

To follow up on that, was it, I mean, I think in retrospect, it’s pretty obviously a terrible mistake for the Reformed elements to make common cause with the front-liners, thinking that somehow we could win them over or somehow this would not come back to haunt us.

Yes, that was Mason just said. That was the reflection on Mason’s attitude. I don’t know who he said it to. But Mason too has said to someone who was raising the objection of having these individuals in such positions, well, they’re a little naive, we have to give them time. Very uninformed. Well, of course, it turns out that they’re very much informed. Do we have a question yet?

I just wanted to ask what was it about Nathan’s perspective of his not being retained as president that brought him to such despondency and that Jacob’s all things are against me. It wasn’t that they were kicking him out of the seminary. It was just that they were kicking him off his position as president of the Independent Board of Missions. I’m missing something that, in his mind, made that so vital. Did he not have his fingers on how much support he really had?

He had been victimized, and we’ll have the people say more about that in the second lecture, but he was convinced that as long as he or the men that stood with him most intimately were retained in power, that they could move the Independent Board away from its emergency features.

It had been created to handle the emergency situation in the large Presbyterian Church. So he looked at it as something that would eventually play out its usefulness. And the more the Presbyterians in the Board were able to prosecute that case within the Board, he knew that the future of the board would go in the direction of its own dissolution. But once the fundamentalist rattled, there was no hope of reversing that direction in his mind. And he realized that he’d lost. And that it would spell, then, a break.

He could see it coming, not just with the independent board, but the break would come in the church. And we saw the break As good as Don in that meeting, he broke in and convinced everybody. You could see it. You could see what happened. The church itself was going to splinter and break. What was the percentage of people? I didn’t say that, did I? The deciding vote was passed by August 3rd.

You know, the 4th one. Oh yes, well, actually… How many left with MacIntyre? Yes, yes, at the next assembly, the third assembly, fourteen ministries and three elders leave, so it doesn’t look like as much as anything, but you see it mushrooms then, and because MacIntyre has this vehicle, the Christian beacon, it has this wide circulation, The OPC is not now just being discredited by the large name on the nomination.

They’re being attacked from the other side, and mercilessly attacked from the other side. It just crippled him. I mean, you could see it just disintegrate before his eyes. You could see the fight that was going to come as a result of this whole thing.

Our Father in Heaven, we thank you for your superintendence over the Church’s history, particularly these episodes that we have learned about this afternoon. We acknowledge and confess to you our own sinfulness and our own inability to, even for a moment, direct the course of the Church that it rests with its sovereign Heavenly King, Jesus Christ. We thank you that we have this privilege and this opportunity to reflect together on a period of history in a body of believers who are so close and so interdependent with us on the truth of the Gospel as contained in the Confession.

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