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

like to once again welcome those who are with us. We always have the students, of course, to acknowledge your goodness to us and your faithfulness over all your works, that you have given to us a night’s rest and that in this day we have a gift from your hand.

This beautiful day we may see the sunshine and the power and wisdom of your hand in creation and providence. We may also be before you as those who are clothed with the righteousness of Jesus Christ, whereby we can find acceptance and access to your throne of grace.

We thank you, Father, that again this day we may reflect for a few moments through the instruction of Rev. Dennison upon the life and the history of the Church that Christ is gathering by his Spirit and word. We pray that as we reflect together with him on the history of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, that you would give to us eyes of faith to see how you are through your providence and in fulfillment of your counsel gathering that Church, that people chosen unto everlasting life, whom you have purposed to give to your Son. and whom he purchased with his own precious blood, that in all of the fragility and all of the growth as well as weakness of the Church, we may be able to see beyond those whom you used in your grace to build that Church, see the hand of your mercy and your faithfulness, that we may see the glory of your redemptive work in history. Father, we pray as well that we may also be taught to see our own weakness to see the sinfulness of your people, to see how much we need to humble ourselves before you and look alone to the Lord who reigns over all, to build his church and to establish his kingdom. So we pray as well for your blessing upon Reverend Dennison as he speaks to us. Empower him and strengthen him, give him clarity of expression so that through this we may be well instructed and your name may be praised. Keep sin from us, we ask, and cleanse us of all our unrighteousness. So we pray these things in Jesus’ name, amen.

I will not this morning introduce Rev. Dennison again in terms of who he is and things of that sort, but I will say this, he is presenting now at this hour the second of three lectures on the history of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Yesterday he addressed the topic, Tragedy, the OPC’s struggle with fundamentalism in the 1930s, the beginnings of the OPC. In this hour, his address is entitled Hope, the Influence of Cornelius Fentill and the Rejection of a Cultured Protestantism, promoted by Gordon Clark and Edwin Ryan.

Just a note yet about our schedule. This lecture is scheduled for 8.30. The second lecture this morning is scheduled for 10.30. I’m not sure exactly when we’ll be finished with this first hour, but we should at the very latest be done at 10 o’clock so we can have a time of fellowship and a break together at ten o’clock.

So there will be time again, as was true yesterday, for some questions at the end, I believe, of Reverend Dennison’s presentation. Welcome again, Reverend Dennison. It’s good to do these mornings. Early morning things are better than after lunch. Everybody’s falling asleep. Here are a few more women in here.

On December 4th, 1936, J. Oliver Buswell, president of Wheaton College, member of the OPC and of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, wrote to J. Gresham Machin for the last time. Machin was usually prompt with his responses, especially to Buswell, But this time he left the letter unanswered, at least temporarily, intending to reply during the upcoming Christmas break. Once at his brother’s home in Baltimore, over the Christmas break, Machen began an answer to that letter, but never finished. As I indicated yesterday, Machen died on New Year’s Day, 1937. A hint as to why Machen found it so difficult to respond to Buswell appears in a draft fragment that has survived. Machen’s tone in that fragment is abrupt.

He seems to be grieved about the persistent intractability and obtuseness of his fundamentalist opponents. He had already concluded in his November 27 letter to Boswell that the fundamentalism represented by James E. Bennett was unethical and sub-Christian. Not only had Bennett’s victory, he was the New York lawyer, the fundamentalist New York lawyer, Not only had Bennett’s victory in the independent board meant the impossibility for the board to be true to its charter, that is to Presbyterianism, but Bennett himself had engaged in a smear campaign against Machen to achieve his goal. Adding this to an already well-developed contempt for MacIntyre’s underhandedness, and for the mean-spiritedness of H. McAllister Griffiths, Machen had no patience for Buswell’s attempt to massage Schofield dispensationalism. As Machen said in the draft fragment, quote, The use of the Schofield Bible is a very terrible evil that is doing untold harm doctrinally and morally to the souls of men. In short, from Machen’s point of view, dispensationalism is heresy. Two further elements in Boswell’s letter undoubtedly annoyed Machen. The first was the veiled charge that Machen and his friends at the Presbyterian Guardian and at Westminster Seminary were, quote, undemocratic and dictatorial, unquote.

That they were envious of MacIntyre’s ability to start the magazine, The Christian Beacon, and to conduct it with such a degree of success. As I indicated yesterday in the question and answer period, The Beacon had a circulation three times as large as The Guardians, and that within the space of a few months.

Machen’s unseating as president of the independent board was therefore, according to Buswell, in the interests of the spirit of democracy. And although he never said so openly, Buswell was certainly implying that the action of the board in unseating Machen was an indirect form of discipline.

The other thing that had to annoy Machen was Buswell’s attack upon the Westminster apologetic, at the center of which, although he is never named by Buswell, was the figure of Cornelius Van Til. Buswell first observed that Machen may not be in agreement with what has been taking place at Westminster in that area of apologetics.

Nevertheless, the position of the seminary, said Buswell, has shifted over the past five years. Buswell supported what he called historical apologetics and biblical exegesis, the type represented by figures like James Orr, Robert Dick Wilson, and Machen himself in Machen’s works on the origin of Paul’s religion and the virgin birth. But now, Boswell observed, the tendency at Westminster was to substitute what the faculty was calling a theological apologetic with what Boswell called a philosophical apologetic. Westminster said Boswell was headed in the wrong direction. Its new position was dangerous, weakening the critical position of its graduates and their practical usefulness. Interestingly, Buswell linked the new Westminster apologetic with our millennialism.

As if in his mind, the two were joined inseparably as if they had bled into each other. Buzwell does not explain himself here, but what he may have had in mind was the fact that fundamentalists found evidentialism more conducive to their own system. In the insistence upon the priority of proofs, that in fact being essential to the evidentialist position and the primary to the evidentialist position, They were laying groundwork even for their eschatological schemes, which could be said to depend upon evidences. While it is incorrect to say that presuppositionalists dismiss or ignore proofs, they most certainly assign them a limited and subordinate position. As a result, Their position appeared to evidentialist fundamentalists like Buswell as substance-less theorizing, and their view of the future as dabbling in the regions of ether and abstraction. Buswell preferred the demonstrably concrete, earthy reality. such as were consistent with his interest in an earthly millennium.

Where Machen stood on the apologetical question continues to be debated into our present day. Maybe some of you are aware of Greg Monson’s argument in the book Pressing Toward the Mark, his article Machen, Van Til and the Apologetical Tradition of the OPC. Bonson’s argument is that Machen and Van Til’s apologetics are actually compatible, if not one. I think that an honest assessment of the facts must drive us to a different conclusion. There was the argument, however, coming from the other side, from that which Bonson presents.

That side is represented by Alan McRae, a professor early on at Westminster Seminary, himself a premillennialist and evidentialist. Alan McRae states that Machen privately scoffed at Van Til’s position, but this seems inconsistent with the testimony of others, including Van Til himself.

The truth of the matter most likely has to do with Machen’s re-education, and also with his loyalty to the seminary and to its faculty. Regarding Machen’s re-education, he had in many ways become the student of the faculty that he had assembled. Now, I know that that is something that causes a great deal of discussion when it is raised in OP circles. Machen is usually looked upon as a person who came into the situations at Westminster full-blown and fully matured theologically. But in actuality, Machen was a man in motion.

He was a man in transition, moving from and evangelical Presbyterianism to a confessional-reformed Presbyterianism. He was learning what it meant to be reformed in the strictest sense of that word, and his education seems to have commenced with the organization of Westminster in 1929. His re-education was theological in the deepest sense, no longer generalities about Presbyterianism, or if you look at Machen’s works prior to 1929, you will see that there are very few references to distinctive Reformed doctrines, or exposition of them. There are general references to the Reformed faith and to Presbyterianism, but very few specific treatments of detailed doctrines. So no longer generalities about Presbyterianism and the Reformed faith, but particularities. Interest in the covenant, interest in eschatology, interest in the active obedience of Christ, something that he was learning about from John Murray, that documentable.

And according to Oswald T. Ellis, Manchin’s interaction with and response to dispensationalism took place in the last years of his life. virtually ignorant of the movement prior to the 30s. It was as if he were learning about it for the very first time as the debates begin to develop in the early 30s. But admittedly the most difficult area was apologetics. Frenation was devoted to the Princeton apologetic of B.B. Warfield.

There are many examples of this. There’s an article that he wrote for the Woman’s Home Companion in 1925 entitled My Idea of God, which has been republished a number of times. See, Machen got around. Woman’s Home Companion, he was widely recognized as a popular writer on the religious scene in the 20s and 30s.

But Van Til’s apologetic position was no quick study. So Machen, much like yourselves, was in the position of listening. But while he was listening, he had to continue to preach and teach. And when he preached and when he taught, at least along the lines apologetics, his message was clearly, unmistakably, evidentialist, and an expression of his past commitment to natural theology. If you need proof of this, I invite you to look at the book, The Christian Faith in the Modern World, and Machen’s article in that book, actually a radio talk that he gave in the last year of his life, entitled, How May We Know God? But even though this is true now, Machen is continuing in this evidentialist line, committed to natural theology, and as contrary as it may sound, he is completely committed personally to Bantils. On an intellectual level, we have a confused state. On a personal level, it’s not confused at all.

He is personally committed to Vantill. This was undoubtedly because of Machen’s personal fondness for the man. Vantill was magnetic. He was incredibly winsome. He was tremendously popular. He was great to be around, just as Machen was great to be around.

There are the stories of Machen and Van Til’s train trip to Chicago. They spent a couple of days on the train together talking about these very things. That often used as evidence that Machen at least was willing to tolerate Van Til’s position. There was a great bond between them. But Machen also respected loyalty. And there wasn’t anyone as loyal as Van Til. to the movement. He could see the broad picture. He had no narrow myopic view. So there was Vantill’s loyalty to the cause. But there was also Machen’s conviction that the seminary must present a united front against all attacks. Vantill is our man. We will defend him. We will stand behind as far as the public attacks of a public interest in our case is concerned.

So because of these things, Buswell’s attack in his letter certainly left Machen deeply annoyed. As a secondary aspect of this whole thing, Machen’s response to Buswell It could be very well that Machen didn’t know what to say on the matter. So he delayed. But at least he could see this much as he reflected about the situation.

If Van Til was right, the critics’ razor was about to be applied to the Princeton apologetic and to Machen’s own view of American Presbyterians. he could see the consequences. Machen had been banking on his message that Westminster Seminary and the OPC were the true spiritual descendants of Princeton Seminary and the Presbyterian Church USA. Thus he hoped to avoid the charge of schism. We are the continuing Church. They left us, we didn’t need them. You know how the argument goes. And by root of that argument, appeal to a general Presbyterian population for support. Maybe even appealing to them that they come over and join the OPC.

Machen’s position drove him to fight tenaciously at the OPC’s second General Assembly. That’s November 12 through 14, 1936. to fight tenaciously at that Second Assembly for the adoption of the Westminster Standards in their pre-1903 form. The additions in 1903 to the Westminster Standards, to the Confession, had severely crippled the Calvinism of the Confession and had sent the Church in an Arminian direction, and away from the original commitments of the PCUSA. Thus, the PCUSA had forfeited its right to the heritage it claimed. And Machen and the OPC, in Machen’s mind, were laying claims to the original intention and commitment of the PCUSA. By going back to the pre-1903 forms, the OPC through Mason was then laying claim to this heritage.

However, MacIntyre and other fundamentalists argued for the retention of the 1903 editions. MacIntyre spoke in favor of an overture from the Presbytery of New Jersey, his own presbytery I might add, to delay the question of the adoption of the Confessions form until the next General Assembly. And in the meanwhile, MacIntyre intended to solicit support through his magazine, the Christian Beacon, in the Presbyteries and among the Church’s membership for the adoption of the Standards in their post-1903 form. According to MacIntyre, the continuing Church could lay claim to true spiritual succession with the fullest possible leverage in pending property settlement cases only if the 1903 amendments were retained, only if the doctrinal standards at the point of making the suit, only if those doctrinal standards and statements were identical.

But Nathan saw a delay, a calamity beyond words. And it was in this context that Van Til rose to his feet. and spoke on Machen’s defense and in defense of his position. And as a result of that, this Machen-Vantill alliance soundly defeated the Tending Motion. Machen and Vantill stood together, therefore, against the perceived threat of Arminianism within the 1903 edition. the threat of Arminianism, which they considered to be veiled even within the fundamentalist gospel.

They spoke on behalf of a deeper Presbyterianism, a full-orbed confessional Calvinism that they felt undergirded Old Princeton and the Old Church, regardless of what the problems would be between them and their assessments of Old Princeton and the Old Church.

What Vantow and the other members of Westminster’s young faculty knew and what now had become clear to Machen was the significant difference between the Presbyterianism they loved and the so-called, quote, American Presbyterianism, unquote, promoted by Presbyterian fundamentalism. By Buzwell and MacIntyre.

The fundamentalist version of Presbyterianism placed great stock in its vision for America. Despite their premillennialism, these people, for all their pessimism about this world, were truly bully on America. Their evangelistic and moral zeal was connected to their patriotic ardor. By and large, politically, they opposed big government and anything that smacked of socialism. These things, rising to the level of those things that they opposed within theology and within the Church. Here were the champions of American individualism and democracy as they understood it. Features they felt had to be reflected in the church as well as in society.

In their missions enterprises, they saw themselves as exporting American values as much as exporting the gospel. They blended their energetic, evangelistic enterprising with the commercialism of their day. George Marsden, the historian, has compared MacIntyre fundamentalism to the sales division of a modern corporation. But that insight carries much more sting than Marsden ever imagined. As we might expect, Presbyterian fundamentalists generated a strong protectionist spirit, highly suspicious of and downright hostile to foreign influences.

H. McAllister Griffiths expressed himself on this issue in this way. Those who came to dominate the policies of Westminster Seminary and the OPC were not of American Presbyterian background. He had in mind John Murray, the Scot from the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and professors Kuyper, Stonehouse, and Van Til, all of whom he identified as being of, quote, Holland Dutch extraction. Griffiths charged these men with deliberately plotting an attack on modern dispensationalism.

But it was an attack that got out of hand and got away from them. And in the course of it, they inadvertently destroyed the heritage which biblical democracy revered in American Presbyterianism. Pre-millennialists no longer felt welcome, they said, said Griffiths rather. As a result of this attack, pre-millennialists no longer felt welcome in the OPC.

Alan McRae, that’s M-A-C-R-A-E, Alan McRae stood on similar ground, but was more specific. When he resigned from Westminster Seminary in May 1937, McCrae complained that, quote, control of the faculty has passed into the hands of a small alien group without American Presbyterian background.

Later on, he indicated that he meant no offense to Murray. We know who’s left. He had in mind, indeed, the Dutchman, and among the Dutchman he singled out one in particular, whom he held responsible for the mess things were in, Van Till. So Cray said, quote, The effect of Van Till’s teaching upon the students had more to do with my resignation than anything else.”

The apologetics question therefore equaled, if not exceeded, in importance in the mind of McRae the eschatological question he was himself a premillennial. In this, McRae echoed Buswell and all the fundamentalists saw the new seminary and church headed in directions foreign to those for their vision of American Presbyterianism.

The whole matter came to a head in the Third General Assembly, June 1 through June 4, 1937. Now, the mood of that assembly was set early on when the assembly voted overwhelmingly to organize its own committee on foreign missions. And thus the denomination abandoned the independent board that in the previous November had unseated Machen from the presidency of that board. The Assembly then proceeded to reject overtures calling for the endorsement of total abstinence, these coming from the Fundamentalists, this being a plank in the Fundamentalists’ platform.

When those overtures were rejected and the Assembly concluded, the fourteen ministers and three elders withdrew from the Church, and the following year the Bible Presbyterian Synod was organized Justifying its action on the ground that the OPC had departed quote from the historic position of American Presbyterianism unquote So the OPC was not the continuation of the old church There were differences you see the OPC was not the continuation of the old church and In that, the OPC now stood publicly opposite American Presbyterian fundamentalism, in addition to being intolerant of theological liberalism within the old church.

But as Machen himself perceived before his death The OPC was turning out to be at odds with the old Church in a far deeper sense, and here the figure increasingly taking center stage at Westminster and in the consciousness of the Church was Van Til, a man who was virtually turning the study of apologetics head over heels. Van Til’s apologetic was revolutionary in two ways.

Van Til did not see the task of apologetics as that of establishing the validity of first principles for the doing of theology or of thinking theologically. He did not see the task of apologetics as that of establishing the validity of first principles upon the basis of natural reason and in the interests of a natural theology. as had been the case in the classical position represented in Princeton. For Van Til, apologetics was the defense of the faith, not the defense of the possibility of the faith, or not the defense of the possibility of faith.

It was the defense of the faith. And as such, Van Til concluded, apologetics presupposes the faith. The Bible’s truth in its revelation of the ontological trinity, and in its redemptive historical center, the self-attesting Christ. But further, the faith Vantill sought to defend was that of the Reformed churches expressed in their creeds. And therefore, Vantill’s apologetic was self-consciously biblical, theological, and ecclesiastical. In the second place, Vantill’s apologetic was philosophical.

It was so overtly a sin for which the Boswells of the Church could not forgive him. But this had even greater significance to the wider currents of mainline Presbyterianism, American Presbyterianism considered in its widest sense. Provencial recognized within mainline Presbyterianism, as he did within mainline Protestantism generally, the streams of enlightenment thought at work. These streams had become a mighty river.

Confirmation for Van Til’s assessment comes from a strange place. In 1977, Henry Steele Comminger, he’s not a member of the OPC, published The Empire of Reason. His thesis is simple. The enlightenment of the 18th century, with its boast in human autonomy and natural reason, did not fare as well in Europe as is ordinarily thought. actually faltering and sputtering in Europe, the Enlightenment crossed the Atlantic and found a home in the developing colonies. Now we may not buy all of Comminger’s thesis, but at least this much seems clear. He does make a good case for how well the Enlightenment did in this country.

Moving the discussion into Presbyterian circles, Dr. Mark Knoll, N-O-L-L, wrote on the influences upon James Madison in the December 1987 issue of Pro Rega. Noel finds a central influence on Madison in John Witherspoon, Presbyterian president at the College of New Jersey, eventually Princeton University, and Madison’s teacher. Witherspoon was a Scottish immigrant and a clergyman who emerged quite the spokesman for the Enlightenment version of public religion. His roots were in the common-sense philosophy of the Scottish realists, but in the end his view of man in so many ways was indistinguishable from the Enlightenment idea.

Man could, it seems, with a mind unaided by revelation, determine truth and could progress in that truth for the sake of the betterment of society, a worthy goal seemingly in itself. From Witherspoon to the 1930s, the Presbyterian steamroller had been on the move.

It may have espoused an evangelical theology, even a robust Calvinism within the walls of the Church in various places at various times. But it struck common cause with Enlightenment ideology under the banner of autonomous reason in the public realm. In time, however, Enlightenment ideology moved into the Church and overshadowed the Church’s message. There were a few brave souls holding out in the back room for the old theology, but even they had hardly grasped what had gone wrong, since in their own way they had capitulated to autonomous reason and the cultural vision of the establishment and what that meant for American Presbyterianism.

A place in the establishment, you see. Now, this scenario added to the tragedy of J. Russell Machen. His outspoken, intelligent, militant stand for orthodoxy earned him a one-way ticket out of the Church, but also out of the culture of which that Church was an integral part. Machen had himself become an alien. in a culture that he knew better than any other person around him.

He was born and bred in the best of Baltimore society. He was speaking French as a child around the dinner table. His parents were reading to him the classics. His father in his eightieth years was teaching himself Italian. I mean, this is the kind of culture that this man grew up in.

Machen knew that cultured Presbyterianism at its best, but his stand for orthodoxy placed him outside the church, but also outside of the culture of which that church was an integral part. He had become an alien. He had become a counter-cultural figure in the best sense of that word.

And the movement that he had fathered was, from its beginnings, disenfranchised. without establishment credentials, the OPC was nothing less than a Presbyterian anomaly. Presbyterians are always establishmentarian. They are so by definition. That’s what it means to be a Presbyterian. So the OPC was now cast in the role of a Presbyterian anomaly. It simply did not fit the form in a nation where the Presbyterian Church is the establishment.

It was Van Til’s philosophical apologetic that enabled him to see these things better than even Machen. Better than most, even who were or have been a part of the OPC. But this much is clear. The OPC was not a mere continuation of the old church. since that old church, even at its best, was infected with the viruses of the Enlightenment.

Van Til knew it simply would not do to return to the establishmentarianism of American Presbyterianism. Here, beyond the millennial issue, the temperance question, debates with modernism per se, was the crucial issue. for the OPC, the tie to American culture inherent to American Presbyterianism, had been severed. They had a route of appeal to the general populace, not through their theology, but through their politics, economics, and sociology.

And when they saw, not able to articulate it possibly this way, when they saw the deconstruction of that bridge going on in the early days of the OPC, they had to get out. They had to leave. because it was an attack upon their essential identity. Of course, the establishment Presbyterians did not need a bridge at all, since they were very well integrated into the culture. Their response was contempt.

Contempt for the OPC and for Van Til, particularly. contempt for Van Til, especially, for telling them that the world that they had helped to make, the world in which they believed in, was, in fact, rotten. Van Til’s greatest struggle would not be with the fundamentalists in the 30s, however. Instead, in the 40s, he battled a residual evangelicalism and a tangential Presbyterian elitism. A residual evangelicalism and a tangential Presbyterian elitism.

The first chapter of this struggle was the battle over the Committee of Nine, directed at the 8th General Assembly in 1941. The motion to establish this committee reads like this, that a committee of nine, six ministers and three elders be elected by the General Assembly to study the relationship of the OPC to society in general, and to other ecclesiastical bodies in particular, with a view to bringing into the next General Assembly recommendations suggesting ways and means whereby the message and methods of our Church may be better implemented to meet the needs of this generation, and the OPC may have an increasing area of influence and make a greater impact on life today. Now, to tell you just how important the church perceived this issue at the time, the motion, the establishment of this committee of nine, it took six ballots to elect a full slate of members. Van Til was not elected until the fifth ballot. The other members of the committee of nine were the ministers, Edwin Ryan, R-I-A-N.

R.D. Kuyper, interestingly. Robert Strong, Burton Goddard of Gordon College. Clifford Smith. The elders were C.A. Freitag, Murray Forst Thompson. and Gordon Clark. According to the Reverend Lawrence Ayers, the driving force behind the idea for this committee was none other than Edwin Wyatt, who was himself a Presbyterian elitist.

And who, although he wrote a very fine, excellent book, and I’ll be happy to sell you a copy, entitled The Presbyterian Conflict. We have recently republished that book. The best account, in fact, in short treatment of the struggles of the 20s and 30s, I might add. So although he did write this fine book, there being some evidence that Nietzsche actually stood behind that work.

Ryan was working off of Machen’s materials since Machen was working on a document the last summer of his life entitled The Conflict. No one knows where those notes went after Machen’s death. It’s tough for me to put in good words for Ryan. You’ll see why eventually.

Despite the book, the book itself is excellent. I like to see the figure of Machen standing behind it. But although he did write this very fine book, he dreamt about the OPC. I’d be willing to bet that he spent some sleepless nights over this too. He dreamt about the OPC as a very, very large Presbyterian body with the cultural clout of the PCUSA. Now Ryan dominated the committee. and he had six others agreeing with him.

That meant the two, if my math is correct, descended. The elder, Mary Forrest Thompson and Dan Till. It would be interesting to investigate R.B. Kuyper’s attitude in this, but I don’t have any clues about that presently. The public debate at the assembly focused on the fear that if the majority got its way, a super committee was in the offing that would become a permanent bureaucratic feature in the Church’s future. Remember the objective? They were going to investigate ways that they could make more impact upon public life. have a super committee established that would be virtually determining their posture towards society and culture in general. You see, that was what was in the battle.

In actual fact, the point was whether the OPC was to reclaim a lost American Presbyterian heritage. But a return to that heritage under the leadership of a man like Ryan would mean an uncritical acceptance of the Presbyterian Cultural Synthesis. Van Til and Thompson’s minority report won the assembly and the committee was dissolved. Minority won. This loss for Ryan signaled a breach between him and Van Til and a breach between him and the other members of the faculty at Westminster Seminary. the institution where he was the president of the board of trustees.

Still, when the suggestion arose in the mid-forties for the organization of a Christian university, strangely enough, this man who was seemingly the odd man out now, this man Ryan became the general secretary for the association responsible for managing this whole affair.

Ryan had definite ideas about the shape and form the Christian university should take, ideas that were of variance with the seminary men and others who had been brought into the enterprise from outside, from the Christian Reformed Church, for instance. Ryan thought the university should stand in the interests of the American Presbyterian cultural line, and it was at that time that William B. Erdmann, gave a great deal of money to the Association. Instead of using that money to take care of property matters, Ryan diverted those funds to purchase gratis memberships in the Association for the Right People. By stacking the Association with those of like mind, Ryan planned to redirect the university movement.

The plot was discovered, however, by the board and Ryan was fired. Subsequently, members of the Presbytery of Philadelphia from the OPC visited Ryan early 1947 to prefer charges against him for breach of trust. It was at that point that Ryan fled the OPC.

He fled claiming that he had re-read the fourth book of Calvin’s Institutes and had been convinced that Machen and the OPC had been schismatic all along. That’s what found its way into the press. But of course, if Machen and the OPC had been schismatic all along, he was guilty also of schism, so he had to repent, which is what he did. He repented and returned to the PCUSA, the church whose cultural elitism he had never left.

I might say that Brian did very well for himself. Subsequently, he rose to the position of assistant to the president at Princeton Seminary, the last position he held in his public life. I might also add that Brian is still alive, living in San Diego.

The second chapter in Van Til’s struggle during the forties involved some of those who had been a part of the Committee of Nine, Robert Strong, Clifford Smith, and Gordon Clark. Ryan was involved also, but not as directly, since the interests of these men, Strong, Smith, and Clark, the interests of these men were more evangelical and less elitist.

Events had been put in motion in 1940 when J. Oliver Buswell had been removed as president of Wheaton College because of his involvement in the Presbyterian controversy. That removal of Buswell led to a chain of events, and by 1943, Gordon Clark, a Buswell appointee, a very gifted Christian philosopher who was teaching at Wheaton, found little sympathy for his Calvinism within the new administration. So without a job, Clark became the interest of a congregation in Philadelphia who wished him to become its pastor. Since Clark was a layman without seminary training, he had to secure certain requirement waivers before the General Assembly, which he did at the 1944 assembly. Prior to that assembly in 1944, four ministers, some of whom had been a part of a committee of nine majority, caucused for two days on the State of the Church.

They drafted a plan for action in the OPC and distributed it to a selected group of men on May 11, five days before the Assembly convened. The plan pleaded for a return to the theme of true spiritual succession to the PCUSA. It also pleaded for a strong program of evangelism. It opposed the narrowness of Westminster Seminary and the Presbyterian Guardian. in favor of church-controlled seminaries and magazines, and in favor of greater cooperation in the fundamentalist evangelical world. It listed as a specific objective the ordination of Gordon Clark, a figure those responsible for this plan felt greatly important for the realization of their greater goals.

The fight was on. Clark was ordained August 9, 1944, but a complaint was filed and found its way to the General Assembly in 1945. The complaint argued many things, but chief was the question of Clark’s orthodoxy on the matter of the incomprehensibility of God. Clark defended the primacy of the intellect in a way directly at variance with Van Til’s formulation of the principle of analogy.

Simply put, according to Van Til, God’s knowledge is an extension of his ontological difference from man, or creator-creature distinction. Therefore, there is a qualitative difference between God’s knowledge and man’s knowledge. Man’s knowledge is like God’s knowledge. It is analogous to God’s knowledge, but it is not the same as God’s knowledge. For Van Til, Clark’s position destroyed the creator-creature distinction, and was guilty of a gross rationalism. Clark, on the other hand, believed God’s knowledge incomprehensible in a quantitative sense, that is, God knows infinitely more than man can ever know. However, God’s and man’s knowledge are of the same kind. Any other physician, said Clark, ends in skepticism, if not mysticism.

Still, the larger issue in this whole debate was whether the OPC would maintain a course that moved it away from the unfortunate features of American Presbyterianism, even in its evangelical expression and toward a more reformed and antithetical identity. Clark had become the front man for a fight to bring the Church back to the American tradition. Once more, the cry went up that the OPC was under the thumb of men who represented reformed traditions from other lands.

But for these, with the ever so powerful thumb, such as Van Til, alliance with the fundamentalists and evangelicals in the interests of recapturing American society employed suspicious means to gain suspect ends. It would land the church right back in the soup out of which it had come.

The third and final chapter in Van Til’s struggle involved the figure of Floyd E. Hamilton. Floyd E. Hamilton. Although the General Assembly failed to find for the complainants on the doctrinal issue in the Clark case, It did find the procedures of the Presbyterian of Philadelphia irregular. Still, Gordon Clark’s ordination stood, but the mood in the church was tense. The plan for action did, after all, call for the recapture of the denomination in the cause of American Presbyterianism. Now comes to center stage the figure of Floyd Hamilton. Hamilton was an able man, but a fierce defender of Clark and an even fiercer evidentialist. So in that respect, he was not of a mind with Clark, interestingly.

His appointment to a seminary post in Korea was under review by the Foreign Missions Committee. While the committee was willing to send Hamilton to Korea as a missionary, it would not approve his appointment to a seminary position because of his theological position.

Those who had favored the Committee of Nine majority and the plan for action decided to make their stand, their all-out stand, over the issue of Hamilton’s appointment. As a result, two entirely different slate of candidates were put up before the Assembly for consideration for positions in the Board for Foreign Missions. After a day’s debate, the Assembly sustained the Foreign Missions Committee by returning to office a majority of those who opposed Hamilton.

The margin of difference in the Assembly was one vote. But the defeat was far greater than the margin of difference. Many who favored Hamilton, who stood for the plan of action, who supported Gordon Clark and his position, who represented the broad evangelical cause, resigned from their General Assembly Committee assignments before the end of that assembly. And within a year and a half, most of those men had left the OPC, including Gordon Clark.

As sad as these departures were, the hope of the OPC had been preserved. Van Til had been the central figure, the representative figure, in the further development of this Presbyterian anomaly that resisted all efforts to make it an extension of American provincialism. Instead, this church’s interests would be Catholic. that is worldwide and reformed, not simply American.

Well, thank you, Reverend Dennison. I think there should be time for some questions, and so we’ll do as we did yesterday. I’ll give it back over to Reverend Dennison. We should break no later than 10 o’clock. Are there any questions? The kinds of tensions and struggles you’re describing within the OPC, do you see those same kinds of tensions within the PCA today? No. Well, I certainly don’t see anybody in print picking up on the dynamics that I’ve gone over.

As far as I can see, the PCA has made its decision. It’s made its choice. It has determined, and I believe that from the outset, that it will be an American Presbyterian body, even though it has congregations in Canada. It will be basically a United States American, in that narrow sense, phenomenon.

Oh yes, and I think if any of you have traveled in the South and you’ve visited some PCA churches, You know what I’m talking about. It’s nothing for a PCA congregation during the election season to be treated to a political candidate stepping into the pulpit and making his political pitch to the congregation. That’s routine in some places. I don’t see any evidence in the PCA that the dynamics have been sorted out.

I think also that in addition to that, I think they’ve proven themselves ecumenically. They are really throwing their weight towards the NAE and towards the World Evangelical Fellowship. Now Horton’s an interesting phenomenon, right? He’s definitely an anomaly in the PCA. Is there much of a movement there? I’m not quite sure where Greenville is going to come down.

It seems to me that they wish to be representative of an old school Southern Presbyterianism. Now if the PCA is broad enough to think of themselves in terms of Hey, the borders of the USA, the good old US of A, has Morton narrowed things even more, in a sense, by drawing it into a regional context. Southern Presbyterianism is what we’re interested in, and I think he’s quite upfront about that, if I’m not mistaken. They want to be seen as the defenders of southern, old school, southern Presbyterianism.

I don’t see much future for that. I mean, there’s certain cultural buttons that that pushes, you know, local control, away from bureaucracy, empowerment to the ruling elders, those kinds of things that do get a response. But I have to believe that the that the push for us, for God’s people, has to be beyond these either regional or ethnic or national boundaries. You’ve got to push beyond those things. One more on that.

What about the folks who are leaving the OPC to join the PTA? Are they conscious of what they’re doing? I think that beneath… Yes, I think that there’s always… I think that there is… People suspect it, but they can’t articulate it. You know what I mean? It’s running through their veins, but they can’t put it down on paper. It’s like what was happening during the debates between the RPC-ES, the OPC, the PCA on merger. Why is it that the RPC-ES is so attracted to the PCA, but the OPC is not? How do you account for that? Is it just the matters that get front page?

Oh, you know, those OPs are nothing but a bunch of theological nitpickers. They don’t really have any philosophy of growth. They want to be small. They boast about being small. You know, that kind of thing. You know, we don’t want those kind of people around.

They’re negative. That’s front page. That’s front page. But what’s really, I think, sticking in the craw is the fact that the OP simply is not to be swallowed or digested by the broad American evangelical point of view. It’s not going to happen. They recognize that there’s something that resists. For instance, you see, the OPC has no cultural bridge. Fundamentalism does, and it’s militant in its approach. Evangelicalism does. It’s the velvet glove approach. I’m quite gentlemanly about it, but as I said yesterday, the fundamentalists want all the time and the evangelicals just won’t equal time.

I think that it’s just something that won’t go down, and I think that as these men leave the OPC, they are realizing increasingly that there’s something that doesn’t fit for them in the OPC. There’s something in the air. There’s something in the water. It just doesn’t fit.

So they leave, and I think it’s in the interest of broader issues of a cultural Presbyterianism, of an evangelical variety. I can say, you know, you get the old picture of the relationship of the Reformed Church to the Evangelical Church, where you have the two blocks, you know, I mean you’ve probably done that, where you have the two squares that, you know, you have the Reformed Church, you have the Evangelical Church, and there’s an overlapping down here in the corner. between the two. Then there’s the other approach which sees one square, one large square, called the Evangelical Church, and in the corner of the large square there’s this little square called the Reformed Church. I think the people who have left the OPC have opted for that latter approach. Probably not as much as McCrae feared. I think that in many ways McCrae’s fears were personal.

He was facing students were coming in from Van Til’s classes, and McCray was interested in using a great deal of archaeological evidence to prove his case for the validity of scripture. Not that these things aren’t useful, you see, and interesting, but Van Til was saying, no, the issue is deeper than that. How do you view evidence? What’s the philosophy behind it? Your approach to these evidences, that kind of thing.

And McCrae was very interested personally in maintaining the loyalty of the students. And he was losing his following. And so therefore it threw him in a crisis position. He was a very astute person. He saw that he was going to be a marginal individual in the future of Westminster. He saw that clearly. And there just wasn’t going to be any prospects for him professionally there.

In addition to the theological matters, they were important, and the apologetical issue, which was very important to him, there were personal matters too. But I think that, as I said, the fears of McCrae were probably greater than have actually been realized in the OPC, and I’ll say that for this reason. It’s not that individuals coming out of Westminster, going into the OPC, haven’t embraced the apologetics of Vantel. But sadly, as is the case in many pastors, that isn’t a front-burner issue for them once they hit the pavement. They had a very difficult time working out that apologetics in relationship to the details of pastoral life. McCrae’s criticism, or Buswell’s criticism, was correct. Unfortunately, Van Til’s perspective ended up being somewhat theoretical to many of the individuals, and they embraced it somewhat naively. Van Til’s apologetic is a learned language.

And if you don’t keep practicing the learned language, you lose it. You might claim that you still know it. And that’s what most, I think, OP ministers have done. They claim that they still know the stand to apologetics. They’re committed to it. And I think they’re committed to the idea, possibly in the interest of what they consider to be a consistent reform position, you see. And so the apologetics stance becomes somewhat tangential. to what’s really moving and motivating them. So, as I say, the band-took apologetic is a learned language and unless you keep involved with it, your ability to handle it and to use it and to profit from it is greatly diminished.

Yes. Was the split between Van Till and Clark necessary? They certainly thought so. If it was necessary in your mind, could their disagreement over that, could they still have stayed in the bounds of the Westminster Concession Estate and still have a disagreement? The OPC said they could. See, Clark was never disciplined.

None of the complaints were ever sustained except the one that there had been certain improprieties in the way they went about licensing him and ordaining him. They conducted his exams for licensure and ordination at the same time. General Assembly saw that as an irregularity and sustained a complaint in that respect. But there was no other complaint or dimension of the complaint sustained by the General Assembly.

So the Assembly voted that Clark’s position was legitimate. It was within the bounds of the confession. And that’s the judgment of the Church. As to whether the discussion was substantive, I believe it was tremendously substantive. There were more issues involved, as you know. The free offer of the gospel was involved. The nature of faith in the believer, that was involved, too. All of these questions were pertinent.

But as Michael Hackenberg in Pressing Toward the Mark, I think, has successfully demonstrated, even beyond these theological and even philosophical issues, was that broad question of whether the OPC was going to be reformed in an international sense, or American Presbyterian in a narrow sense. Providentially, as things worked out through the Floyd Hamilton instance, the church was moved in that international reform direction.

I don’t happen to believe I agree with John Frame. I don’t happen to believe that the debate was near foolishness and virtually substanceless. I mean, I almost get the impression that John is saying, if I were there, things would have been different. That’s a little hard to take. I haven’t read the book, I know Gary.

I think that even beyond the theonomic critiques that there are those who have generally felt that the Westminster apologetic is in a state of decline at the seminary and in the OTC. I think that that’s probably accurate. Now I think that at the same time Westminster East would be adamant in saying that that is not correct.

And you have Dr. Knutson, Robert Knutson, as the head of the department now in apologetics. And you have Bill Edgar, who’s come into the department. And I’ll tell you, I have the greatest respect for Dr. Knutson. And even though I know he’s been very supportive of the Dewey-Viridian point of view, and even stood opposite of Van Tillen in some respects. I have a great deal of respect for Knudsen, and I think that his interest is to maintain a Van Tillen perspective, but not without critique.

I think Bill Edgar is probably the nicest guy you ever want to meet. He’s just a marvelously generous individual. But Bill’s training is not specifically in philosophy. as was Van Til’s, is more in the arts and in culture generally. So there’s a different edge to Edgar’s apologetic than there had been previously.

Now some would say that possibly that’s a weakening of it and I think the jury’s still out on that. I think that there’s been a turn. I think that the interest, at least the general feel of things, and I can’t say this is true for Knudsen or for Edgar, so it’s not really fair. to say that about them. But as far as Frayn is concerned, and the influence that he has, and as far as Verne Poitras is concerned, there has been a turn, and that turn involves a certain enamorment with linguistic analysis, language philosophy. And there are those who contend that this does in fact mean a turning away from the Vantillian Insights. So, there’s a new direction.

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