A Small Alien Group Without Presbyterian Background

Presbyterion 50/1 (Spring 2024): 111–127 “A SMALL ALIEN GROUP WITHOUT PRESBYTERIAN BACKGROUND”: FINGER-POINTING AMONG PRE-WORLD WAR II AMERICAN PRESBYTERIANS Kenneth J. Stewart* SETTING THE STAGE The Central Character Allan A. MacRae (1902–1997) was a Californian by upbringing, who, after gaining two degrees at Occidental College, Los Angeles, studied briefly at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles before going on to Princeton Theological Seminary; there he graduated in 1927. Excelling in Oriental languages, he was granted a Princeton fellowship which enabled him to undertake advanced studies at the University of Berlin. With his doctoral studies incomplete, he was called back to the USA in 1929 to assist Robert Dick Wilson, who had left Princeton in support of J. Gresham Machen and the new Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia. Within a year, Wilson was dead and MacRae had become the full colleague of another Princeton émigré, Oswald T. Allis, at the Philadelphia seminary. The Date and Venue On May 15, 1937, the pages of the Presbyterian Guardian, a semi-monthly magazine closely associated with J. Gresham Machen—with the support of Westminster Seminary and the emerging Orthodox Presbyterian Church—reprinted a letter that spoke of the work of an “alien group” tending to dominate the seminary and nascent denomination. The words were those of the Westminster Seminary faculty member Allan MacRae, who opined: Two of the three founders [of the seminary] have died and the other has left the seminary. Control of the Faculty and direction of its policies has passed into the hands of a small alien group without American Presbyterian background. This group shows little desire to perpetuate the noble traditions which were once characteristic of the Presbyterian Church U. S. A.1 * KEN STEWART is Emeritus Professor of Theological Studies at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. 1 The Presbyterian Guardian 4, no. 3 (May 15, 1937): 50. 112 PRESBYTERION: COVENANT SEMINARY REVIEW 50/1 The Wider Significance Since May 1937, four writers have drawn attention to MacRae’s complaint, which formed part of his resignation from the seminary. Each of the four writers has parsed MacRae’s protest in a way that yields a distinct meaning. Edwin Rian, writing in The Presbyterian Conflict in 1940 (an eyewitness account of Machen’s struggles and the founding of the seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church), suggested—after the fact of MacRae’s resignation and withdrawal—that the writer represented an extraneous, fundamentalist strain of Presbyterianism that did not need to be accommodated in the new seminary and new denomination. Alternatively, George P. Hutchinson, writing almost four decades after the event in The History Behind the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, found in MacRae’s complaint a kind of legitimation for the separate existence of the broader type of Presbyterianism for which MacRae had appealed. Still more recently, John Frame, attempting to explain the centrifugal tendencies unleashed by the ecclesiastical upheavals of the 1930s, has identified the MacRae episode as one in which the work of “Machen’s warrior children” was on display. Still more recently, in The Dispensational-Covenantal Rift, Todd Mangum described the May 1937 confrontation as a significant event in the sundering of a hitherto broad fundamentalist coalition.2 The Occasion of MacRae’s Complaint Ferment had arisen within the young Orthodox Presbyterian Church (founded in 1936) when certain Westminster Seminary professors used the pages of the quasidenominational Presbyterian Guardian to cast American dispensational premillennialism in an unfavorable light.3 As well, in that post-Prohibition era, the Westmin2 This letter, bearing an original date of April 2, 1937, is cited in Edwin H. Rian, The Presbyterian Conflict (1940: reprinted Philadelphia: Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1992), 213, and George P. Hutchinson, The History Behind the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod (Cherry Hill, NJ: Mack, 1974), 228. The episode has been further commented on by John Frame in his essay “Machen’s Warrior Children” in Sung Wook Chung, Alister McGrath and Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), chap. 5. R. Todd Mangum, The Dispensational–Covenantal Rift: The Fissuring of American Evangelical Theology from 1936 to 1944 (Carlisle, PA: Paternoster, 2007), 32–43. In a further ironic twist, the first writer, Rian, himself abandoned the Orthodox Presbyterian movement in 1947, finding himself out of sympathy with the young denomination’s determination to distance itself from wider evangelical causes. In his old age, Rian elaborated on some of the reasons for his 1947 withdrawal in his article “Theological Conflicts of the 1920s and 1930s in the Presbyterian Church and on the Princeton Seminary Campus,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin n.s. 5, no. 3 (1984): 216–23. 3 The literary offensive was launched by Westminster theologian John Murray, who penned a series of articles on “The Reformed Faith and Modern Substitutes,” beginning with the December 16, 1935, issue of the Presbyterian Guardian; the series continued into 1936 in the February 3 and17, March 16, April 20, and May 18 issues. In that final instalment, Murray took aim at dispensational premillennialism. “A SMALL ALIEN GROUP WITHOUT PRESBYTERIAN BACKGROUND” 113 ster professors had also opposed the imposing of restrictions on the Christian use of alcohol. The complainant, Allan MacRae, charged that the professors in question had taken aim at premillennialism in a way not seen prior to the denominational division of 1936. Ever since the era of the publishing of The Fundamentals (c. 1909), theological conservatives of various stripes (Presbyterians among them) had submerged their differences and made common cause.4 MacRae, who was fronting for a determined premillennialist wing of the new Orthodox Presbyterian denomination, had wanted to see that forbearance continued and even expanded. By May 1937 he no longer believed that this accommodation remained possible. With his freshly minted University of Pennsylvania PhD in hand, he departed from Westminster to become the founding president of a new seminary at Wilmington, Delaware. Yet, behind these skirmishes about what ought to be the American evangelical view of eschatology and alcohol, there were larger issues lurking. THE LARGER ISSUE: THE WANING OF ANGLO-SAXON DOMINANCE IN AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM J. Gresham Machen, in attempting to erect a successor seminary to Princeton in summer 1929, had faced setbacks in his attempt to take with him to Philadelphia a full range of Princeton faculty members. Some, while prepared to lend Machen support of other kinds, resisted his entreaties that they join him in Philadelphia. His longstanding mentor, professor of New Testament William Park Armstrong, declined to leave Princeton and remained at his post until his death in 1944. The revered Casper Wistar Hodge (the last of the Hodges to teach at Princeton) similarly declined. Hodge stayed in his Princeton theology post until his death in 1937. Biblical theologian Geerhardus Vos stayed on to complete his long Princeton career in 1932.5 All these remained in the denomination which suspended Machen from its ministry in 1936. Thus, in 1929, Machen had achieved only partial success in faculty recruitment; he had secured commitments from Princeton Old Testament scholars Robert Dick Wilson and Oswald T. Allis, and from the former Princeton instructor in apologetics Cornelius Van Til. Paul Woolley, a Princeton ThM graduate who had engaged in graduate study in Europe, became lecturer in church history and registrar of the new seminary. One year later, the Scot, John Murray, left Princeton (where he 4 James H. Moorhead, Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 278, indicates that Lyman and Milton Stewart, the Presbyterian oilmen who funded the publication and distribution of The Fundamentals, adhered to premillennialism. Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 21, characterizes The Fundamentals of 1909 as “non-belligerent” compared to a more strident fundamentalism which followed WWI. 5 These details are provided in Moorhead, Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture, chap. 13, and Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1954), 449–50. 114 PRESBYTERION: COVENANT SEMINARY REVIEW 50/1 had fulfilled a one-year lectureship in theology as colleague to Caspar Wistar Hodge) and joined the Philadelphia faculty. This mixed success in recruitment left the new Philadelphia seminary in a quandary. With fall 1929 approaching, Westminster lacked a systematic theologian, a teacher of pastoral theology, and a second teacher in New Testament. The filling of these gaps illustrated the problem Machen faced: that of demonstrating continuity with Presbyterian Princeton. Adding to this challenge was the fact that one of the select carry-overs from the old Princeton faculty, Robert Dick Wilson, was frail. He would pass away in 1930 at age 74. Wilson seems to have prepared for this eventuality by urging a young protégé, MacRae, to return from the University of Berlin with his doctoral studies unfinished.6 MacRae, on the scene from 1929 forward, would stand in the gap created by Wilson’s demise. Machen did secure a commitment from Princeton alumnus and Christian Reformed minister R. B. Kuiper to come as lecturer in theology for one year. Machen also secured as his own associate in New Testament Ned B. Stonehouse, a Princeton alumnus of Christian Reformed heritage who had just secured the ThD in New Testament at the Free University of Amsterdam. Standing back from this assembled faculty, it appears that this was a team made up of a blend of longstanding Americans as well as Americans who were recent immigrants. It was the unforeseen effects of the now-deceased Machen’s recruitment against which MacRae protested. Yet, there were several weaknesses in his complaint. FIVE WEAKNESSES INHERENT IN MACRAE’S COMPLAINT I. MacRae Had Only a Modest Perch from Which to Launch His Complaint It seems that MacRae was protesting in 1937 against seminary colleagues who, he claimed, were dominating the young OPC while being virtual “outsiders” who had only a modest connection with the Presbyterian heritage he was claiming to uphold. Such records as we have of MacRae tell us no more than that he belonged to the Presbyterian Church USA prior to his Princeton days. He was a Michigander by birth, converted early in life, who was transplanted to California when his father (a medical doctor) developed a health condition that required the family’s relocation. Occidental College, Los Angeles, from which MacRae graduated in 1922, had ceased to be a Presbyterian school in 1910. MacRae proceeded to a brief period of study at 6 Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen, 449–50. MacRae’s career is sketched in a chapter of the 1986 Festschrift R. Laird Harris et al., Interpretation and History: Essays in Honor of Allan A. MacRae (Singapore: Christian Life, 1986), 25–30. MacRae would eventually complete a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1936. Important supplementary details are furnished by Andrew M. McGinnis in a biographical sketch within archival materials held in the PCA Historical Center, Covenant Theological Seminary, St. Louis, MO, https://pcahistory.org/mo /macrae/index.html, accessed August 22, 2023. “A SMALL ALIEN GROUP WITHOUT PRESBYTERIAN BACKGROUND” 115 BIOLA.7 Like some other BIOLA students, he was directed to Princeton by R. A. Torrey, dean of BIOLA from 1912 to 1924.8 On arrival, MacRae was plainly aware that Princeton Seminary (from which he gained the BTh in 1927) had had Dutch Americans on its faculty for some time. MacRae’s registered grievance of 1937 cannot be dismissed as though this was merely the venting of a theological “nativist.” His argument in fact stopped short of insisting that no immigrant American ought to be on a seminary faculty. MacRae’s actual concern was that Westminster Seminary—a school originally brought into existence to train future Presbyterian ministers, and then (after the 1936 ministerial suspension of Machen) an institution serving the nascent Orthodox Presbyterian denomination (of which MacRae himself became a minister)—had only recently fallen under the preponderant influence of minister-theologians whose theological orientation seemed to lie outside American Presbyterianism. This shift had happened for two reasons. Most obviously, there had been the removal by death of MacRae’s mentor, Robert Dick Wilson (d. 1930), and of the seminary founder, Machen (d. 1937). Further, Oswald T. Allis, also a faculty “original,” left the seminary voluntarily in 1935 as he did not support the existence of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Mission, the promotion of which had brought Machen and many of his allies into collision with the denomination. Allis’s resignation, accompanied by the resignation of fourteen trustees who shared his opposition to that Independent Board, came in response to an ultimatum from the clear majority of the seminary faculty (MacRae among them). Either the faculty and trustees would stand by the Independent Mission Board which Machen had championed, or the faculty majority would resign and by doing so force the closure of the seminary.9 It was by this forced thinning of the ranks (to which MacRae had been a party), as well as by the decease of senior faculty members, that the young seminary (and also the eventual emergent denomination) was now left preponderantly in the hands of those “hyphenated-Americans” who so concerned MacRae. In MacRae’s view, they lacked appreciation for the range of evangelical beliefs and emphases which had long existed within the coalition of conservatives in the old denomination. This was not an utterly baseless concern (as we shall see), and the reverberations of the issue he raised still linger. Yet, MacRae’s siding with the faculty majority in 7 Robert J. Dunzweiler, “Tribute,” in Harris et al., Interpretation and History, 26. McGinnis (see n. 6) indicates that friends to MacRae from Occidental College encouraged MacRae to join them there. Another clear example of a student sent from BIOLA to Princeton by Torrey was Donald Gray Barnhouse (1895–1960). See J. A. Carpenter, “Donald Grey Barnhouse,” in D. G. Hart, Dictionary of the Presbyterian and Reformed Tradition in America (1999; reprinted Phillipsburg, NJ; P&R Publishing, 2005), 26. 9 Rian, The Presbyterian Conflict, 64. Allis would remain in the PCUSA, working as an independent scholar, until his death in 1973. See the biographical sketch by John H. Skilton in Walter A. Elwell and J. D. Weaver, Bible Interpreters of the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1999), 122–30. 8 116 PRESBYTERION: COVENANT SEMINARY REVIEW 50/1 1935 against American evangelical Presbyterians still loyal to the agencies of the Presbyterian Church USA had itself helped to bring about the narrowing of emphasis against which he now protested. II. The “Melting Pot” Factor A second weakness in the argument of MacRae’s resignation letter of 1937 that we need to consider is that the blend of ethnicity and theology which MacRae alleged was hindering the progress of the young Orthodox Presbyterian Church and Westminster Seminary was at the same time an issue confronting both American Presbyterianism and wider evangelicalism elsewhere. It was clear from the start that the vaunted tradition of Princeton theology could not now sustain itself in Philadelphia without securing reinforcements from other Reformed streams. Westminster Seminary had come to depend on John Murray, a strict Sabbatarian Highlander associated with the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, to be its theological voice; on Cornelius Van Til, who had been serving a Christian Reformed congregation as recently as 1928, to articulate a stance on apologetics (one, in fact, which was distinguishable from that of pre-1929 Princeton). It relied increasingly on Ned B. Stonehouse, a man who was Christian Reformed by upbringing and a graduate of Calvin College, to fill the instructional role vacated at Machen’s passing. Stonehouse had done his theological training (BTh, MTh) at Princeton and followed up with a ThD from the Free University of Amsterdam (1929). He had been ordained in the PCUSA in 1930. R. B. Kuiper was a seasoned Christian Reformed minister who had done a graduate year at Princeton and would at different times serve both Calvin College and Seminary as president. After that one-year stint as theological lecturer at Westminster, Kuiper had taken up his deferred service as president of Calvin College, only to return to Westminster permanently in 1933.10 It is worth noting that Princeton, the alma mater of MacRae, had trained all four of those just named, and had already employed two of them in short-term lectureships. Meanwhile, Princeton itself—from which core faculty members had departed to found Westminster—was facing highly similar staffing dilemmas. Those departures from Princeton to Philadelphia had opened the way for the older seminary to issue an invitation to two conservative Reformed Church of America men, Samuel Zwemer (in 1929) and John Kuizenga (in 1930), to join the Princeton faculty. A veteran missionary to the Muslim world, Zwemer came as professor of missions and the history of religion; Kuizenga came from the faculty of Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan, as lecturer in theology and ethics. He would eventually fill the Charles Hodge Chair of Theology.11 The gaping hole in Princeton’s Old Testament department was, in part, filled by the arrival (from Philadelphia) of the 10 See the entries for each in Hart, Dictionary of the Presbyterian and Reformed Tradition in America. Upon his retirement from Westminster in 1952, R. B. Kuiper returned to Grand Rapids, having accepted the presidency of Calvin Theological Seminary. 11 Moorhead, Princeton Seminary, 369, 422. Hart, Dictionary, 139. “A SMALL ALIEN GROUP WITHOUT PRESBYTERIAN BACKGROUND” 117 German Reformed scholar Henry S. Gehman. In 1936, the seminary presidency was filled by John A. Mackay (1889–1983), an alumnus whose Scottish ecclesiastical background was almost indistinguishable from that of John Murray, who left Princeton for Westminster in 1930. Elmer Homrighausen (a Princeton alumnus, also German Reformed by background) took up a post in Christian Education in the post1936 era. Upon the death of theologian C. W. Hodge in 1937, a refugee from Germany named Otto Piper temporarily filled that role before being re-assigned to New Testament.12 The Zurich Reformed theologian Emil Brunner’s visiting professsorship in 1938 was a further example of the same phenomenon; in his case it provoked open hostility from some faculty, as well as students and constituents, on account of his espousal of dialectical theology.13 By the second half of the same decade (the 1930s), Princeton would employ an additional Dutch-American, Frederick Bronkema, as instructor in theology; a decade later, yet another, John W. Wevers, joined the faculty as instructor in Old Testament languages.14 Czech refugee Josef Hromadka would lecture in Princeton from 1939 to 1947.15 Hungarian refugee and theologian Bela Vasady (1902–1992) would lecture there in the 1946–49 period.16 It is not difficult to imagine that there may have been voices inside the Princeton constituency uttering concerns very much like those voiced by MacRae in 1937. Historian of Princeton Seminary James Moorhead describes an anxiety at this time “that the seminary was about to be overrun with the new theology from Europe.”17 But the very fact that these events at Westminster and at Princeton were unfolding in a somewhat parallel fashion suggests that something of much wider significance was playing out. Viewed at this level, what was unfolding in American theological education in this period was in effect the ending of the hegemony of the earlier immigrant groups: the English and the Scots-Irish. As America filled up with immigrants in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth, it was only to be expected that schools of higher education (seminaries among them) would welcome these immigrants into their student bodies and faculties. In 1870, the Presbyterian Church USA had approved a pre-existing German-language seminary at Dubuque, Iowa, known as the “German Theological School in the Northwest,” as suitable for ministerial candidates from that region.18 By that point, the New Jersey seminary was steadily enrolling Dutch-Americans. The year 1882 marked the year of 12 Moorhead, Princeton Seminary, 369, 423, 425, 437. Moorhead, Princeton Seminary, 423. 14 Princeton Seminary Bulletin, 32, no. 3 (1938): 4; and 40, no. 2 (1946): 5. 15 Jan Milic Lochman, “Josef Hromadka: Ecumenical Pilgrim,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin, 20, no. 1 (1999): 41–46. 16 J. B. Payne, “Bela Vasady,” in Hart, Dictionary, 267–68. 17 Moorhead¸ Princeton Seminary, 424. 18 The school eventually became Dubuque (Iowa) Theological Seminary, https://udts. dbq.edu/aboutudts/missionandtradition/, accessed July, 19, 2019. 13 118 PRESBYTERION: COVENANT SEMINARY REVIEW 50/1 Geerhardus Vos’s addition to the Princeton faculty. As well, four times in the space of the next thirty years, Dutch theologians would serve as Stone Lecturers: Abraham Kuyper (1898), Herman Bavinck (1908), Henry Dosker (an immigrant Michigander, by then church historian in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1916), and Valentine Hepp (1930). One can observe the same assimilation of immigrants and rise to influence in theological education in the careers of German-Americans Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) in Rochester (NY) Theological Seminary, and in a younger generation, such as Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) at Union Seminary, New York, with brother Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) in a significant post at Yale Divinity School.19 These examples serve to illustrate that there was underway in American theological education a trend which, much more readily than earlier, provided opportunities for those not native-born in its classrooms and at its lecterns. Why would Princeton or Westminster not also reflect these demographic changes? MacRae had evidently not faced the implications of what was unfolding around him. It is true that his concern was the preponderance of foreign-born faculty members at Westminster brought on by the death and removal of their colleagues. But the wider situation hardly told in his favor. III. Playing the Premillennialist Card A third weakness in MacRae’s argument was his suggestion that the criticisms being levelled at the premillennialism he and others favored somehow demonstrated the agenda of this “alien” theological emphasis. While interesting, this premise needs to be qualified on account of multiple kinds of contrary evidence, both internal and external. Until his voluntary withdrawal in 1935, there had been within the Westminster faculty a Princeton-educated Old Testament scholar with a Berlin PhD, Oswald T. Allis, who both then and subsequently was known as one of the harshest critics of the kind of premillennialism MacRae represented. The next year (1936), Allis published two articles critical of dispensational premillennialism in the Evangelical Quarterly.20 Allis was many things, but he was no hyphenated-American. His was the very traditional kind of evangelical American Presbyterian voice which MacRae claimed was now under-represented at Westminster. MacRae’s standing with the faculty majority in support of Machen’s tie to the Independent Mission Board had in fact occasioned Allis’s departure. John Murray, the faculty critic who most perturbed MacRae on this issue by singling out dispensational premillennialism as an 19 On the Niebuhr brothers, see the entries in Hart, Dictionary, 177–78. Allis’s public criticism of dispensational premillennialism was so well known in the mid-1930s that students at Westminster Seminary drew attention to this on their becoming aware of MacRae’s public complaint. See Rian, Presbyterian Controversy, 212–13. Allis’s Evangelical Quarterly attacks on premillennial dispensationalism appeared in EQ 8 (1936): 22–35, 272–89. Working as an independent scholar in the 1940s, Allis published works on this subject, such as Prophecy and the Church (1945), for which he is still remembered. 20 “A SMALL ALIEN GROUP WITHOUT PRESBYTERIAN BACKGROUND” 119 example of a false substitute for the Reformed faith, had published this rather incendiary material under the watchful eye of J. Gresham Machen in May 1936.21 That Machen had no vested interest in restraining Murray from writing as he did is clear; Machen had uttered highly similar warnings against the acceptability of dispensational premillennialism as long before as 1923.22 Also within the Westminster faculty from which MacRae would now depart was Paul Woolley, the registrar and lecturer in church history. Woolley, who had grown up in Moody Church, Chicago, and who made no attempt to conceal his own premillennial convictions, was part of the faculty majority with which MacRae now found fault.23 Woolley did not grant the accuracy of MacRae’s claim that premillennialism itself was under attack. Under attack was instead premillennialism of the dispensationalist variety. The frontal attack on premillennialism issued in the Presbyterian Guardian was part of a wider attack emanating from a variety of sources in the 1930’s. Murray was no doubt conscious that his critique was one shared by contemporary writers such as William Rutgers, Philip Mauro, Arthur W. Pink, and G. Campbell Morgan. This critique of dispensationalism was being echoed in the Southern Presbyterian Church (PCUS) in these same years; the denomination launched a review in light of the growing influence in its churches of Dallas Theological Seminary.24 The 1930s was a decade in which a clear demarcation was being introduced between defenders of covenant theology and advocates of dispensationalism. And this leads us to consider external evidence bearing on MacRae’s complaint. Though MacRae did not advertise the fact, his sympathies (and the sympathies of at least some of those on behalf of whom he acted) lay there—with dispensational premillennialism. MacRae, sincere in his Presbyterian allegiance, was attempting to counter these current efforts at demarcation. Sincerely identifying as Presbyterian, he was part of a widespread Protestant subculture which looked upon dispensational premillennialism as the natural ally of evangelical Christianity. This view was as widely accepted in greater Philadelphia as it was elsewhere. MacRae’s Westminster colleague in Old Testament, Edward J. Young (1907–1968), had arrived as a student at Westminster in 1933 having already embraced this very outlook in his Presbyterian 21 Presbyterian Guardian materials as cited in note 2. See Machen’s comments on the subject in his Christianity and Liberalism (New York: MacMillan, 1923), 48, 49. There he termed this current premillennialism “a false interpretation of the Word of God.” 23 For details about Woolley, see Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen, 448, 449, 451, and John R. Muether and Danny Olinger, eds., Confident of Better Things: Essays Commemorating Seventy-Five Years of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (Willow Grove, PA: Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 2011), 8, 13. 24 Daniel Hummel, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2023), 192–98. The Southern Presbyterian investigation of dispensational teaching is described in Todd Mangum, The Dispensational-Covenantal Rift (Carlisle, PA: Paternoster, 2007), chaps. 4 and 5. 22 120 PRESBYTERION: COVENANT SEMINARY REVIEW 50/1 upbringing in California. As Young began to reconsider the validity of this view during his studies at Westminster, he found his own student ministry opportunities curtailed by local conservative Presbyterian ministers (otherwise sympathetic to Westminster) who insisted that he toe the dispensational line or find student ministry opportunities elsewhere.25 The late J. Gresham Machen had been glad to have dispensational premillennialists as his co-belligerents in the fight against theological modernism; but because he recognized that dispensational views worked to undermine the overall unity of biblical teaching, he had no intention of ensuring the continuance of such views in the seminary or the fledgling denomination with which he was so closely associated.26 Yet MacRae was still attempting to hold these views in combination thirty years later in his acting as a revising editor for the New Scofield Bible.27 All this being said, MacRae’s attempt to portray the hostility to his eschatological views as only the inadvertent consequence of the passing of colleagues Wilson and Machen and the voluntary resignation of Allis was inadequate. This was a quarrel that was being played out on a much wider canvas. IV. Uncertain Sources of Graduate Theological Training in the Inter-War Period Further, MacRae’s aired grievance seems to have been out of touch with the practical challenge of securing conservative Protestant academics in the inter-war period. It is well documented that from the early decades of the nineteenth century, Americans had been crossing the Atlantic to gain advanced and graduate level theological education of a kind unavailable (at that time) in the USA. This had been the experience of Charles Hodge, and also his contemporary at Andover, Edward Robinson, in 1826– 27.28 This trend became more pronounced with the inauguration of the European 25 Davis A. Young, For Me to Live is Christ: The Life of Edward J. Young (Willow Grove, PA: Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 2017), 50. Merrill T. Macpherson and Donald Grey Barnhouse closed the door to Young’s further student ministry involvement in their congregations over this issue. 26 Machen’s extended reasonings (by letter) with a supporting minister who shared MacRae’s outlook are described in the recent volume by Brian L. DeLong, Standing Against Tyranny: The Life and Legacy of Arthur F. Perkins (Self-published, 2023). 27 Significantly, Wilbur M. Smith, formerly of Moody Bible Institute and later of Fuller Theological Seminary, shared in that same revision. In the 1930s, he had been one more Presbyterian who saw the dispensational scheme as lending assistance to Bible believers. See the dispassionate evaluation of the New Scofield Bible in Christianity Todayˆ, April 17, 1967. The analysis is viewable at https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1967/april-14/changes-in-scofie ld-reference-bible.html, accessed March 4, 2023. 28 Hodge had met Robinson (of Andover) unexpectedly in Paris, where both had come to study Near Eastern languages. Moorhead, Princeton Seminary, 101, and Paul Gutjahr, Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 106–07. The influence of German theology in pre-Civil War America has been explored by Annette G. Aubert, The German Roots of Nineteenth-Century German Theology (New York: “A SMALL ALIEN GROUP WITHOUT PRESBYTERIAN BACKGROUND” 121 PhD or ThD. No such doctoral program of any kind was available in the States until Yale introduced the research doctorate in 1861. Yale was rapidly followed by the University of Pennsylvania (1870), Harvard University (1872), and Princeton University (1879). Harvard Divinity School offered the first theological doctorate in America (the ThD) in 1914. 29 Princeton Seminary did not inaugurate a theological doctorate until 1940, with the first degrees granted in 1944.30 The seeking of such advanced theological degrees (in Europe or America) had been complicated, however, by the association of most of these programs with the higher-critical study of the Bible. This was the backstory of such controversies as the Briggs heresy case of the 1890s. Charles Briggs, a convert of the 1859 revival and graduate of Union Seminary, New York, had his theological trajectory shaped by spending the years 1866–1869 at the University of Berlin. He had abandoned belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible, maintained that the Scriptures were not free from error, and taught that sanctification could be advanced after death. The Presbyterian Church USA removed him from its ministry in 1893.31 Yet, twentieth-century figures such as Machen, Wilson, Allis, and MacRae had emerged from such German theological study more strongly committed to orthodoxy. However, on the whole, it can be said that European university graduate programs in biblical and theological studies exposed American students to unsettling views.32 But from the early twentieth century onward, a new European university beckoned Presbyterian and Reformed students from the American side: the Free University of Amsterdam, established under the leadership of Abraham Kuyper in 1880. By the 1920s this university was becoming a highly attractive place to study for Americans wishing to pursue graduate theological education in a confessional setting.33 Oxford University Press, 2013). 29 For Yale, see https://visitorcenter.yale.edu/tours/women-yale/yales-first-women-phds# :~:text=The%20Yale%20Graduate%20School%20of,granted%20in%20the%20United%20 States. For Harvard, see https://studyofreligion.fas.harvard.edu/pages/thd-program. Accessed February 27, 2023. 30 Moorhead, Princeton Seminary, 441. 31 Bradley J. Longfield, “Charles Augustus Briggs,” in Hart, Dictionary, 43, 44. 32 This process and influence is surveyed in Mark Noll, Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America (1986; 2nd rev. ed., Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1991), chap. 2. 33 George Harinck, “Valentijn Hepp in America: Attempts at International Exchange in the 1920s,” in George Harinck and Hans Krabbendam, eds., Sharing the Reformed Tradition: The Dutch-North American Exchange, 1846–1946 (Amsterdam: Free University, 1996), 116, 128. “Between 1880 and 1940, one of three Th.D. dissertations defended in the Vrije University were submitted by foreigners.” The historian of the Free University, Arie Theodorus van Deursen, makes plain that theology was the discipline most attractive to foreigners in this period. Not until 1936 did other disciplines overtake it in popularity. Van Deursen, The Distinctive Character of the Free University of Amsterdam, 1880–2005 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 160, 161. 122 PRESBYTERION: COVENANT SEMINARY REVIEW 50/1 And shortly, the Free University of Amsterdam (the school from which Ned B. Stonehouse gained the ThD in 1929) would become one of the research universities of choice for Americans (Dutch and otherwise) who wanted doctoral studies in theology, church history, and biblical studies in a setting which showed reverence for the Protestant confessions of the Reformation era. By the 1920s, the German universities were becoming less attractive for political as well as theological reasons. Meanwhile the British universities were just then beginning to develop their own graduate programs in theology and biblical studies. Accordingly, theologian John Murray had done such a graduate year in Edinburgh in 1928, with a scholarship granted to him by Princeton. In this period from the 1920s onward, the Free University’s North American influence would grow considerably, due to the academic reputation of its theological faculty. It would be a sign of the prominence to which the Free University had risen among conservative American Presbyterians that an eventual colleague to MacRae at Faith Seminary (founded 1937), the theologian R. Allen Killen, completed a Free University doctorate in modern theology. Another eventual colleague— and the successor to MacRae after the founding of Biblical Seminary in Hatfield, Pennsylvania—Robert Vannoy, himself completed a doctorate in Old Testament studies at the Free University.34 What these examples illustrate is the relative difficulty faced in the inter-war period both by conservative evangelical Americans seeking suitable venues in which to undertake doctoral study and by institutions of that same conviction in securing suitably trained faculty. This situation did not fundamentally change until the postWWII era, when especially the British faculties of divinity began to draw American evangelical postgraduate students in numbers.35 Where were the better-acclimatized evangelical seminary faculty of the type MacRae would have preferred to be found in 1937? It was the dearth of such available candidates that had led to his being invited in 1929 to join the new Philadelphia faculty with his own German doctoral studies unfinished. Again, MacRae had not faced the implications of what was unfolding around him. V. MacRae Portrayed the Reformed Theological World as Monochrome If we can return to MacRae’s original complaint of May 1937, we can see that what was protested against was the added reality that a theological faculty, by default composed of men of such perspectives as we have been describing, was now “calling the shots” from within the independent Westminster Seminary in a way that would 34 Killen and Vannoy, faculty colleagues to MacRae, with Free University doctorates, both contributed to the Festschrift compiled in his honor in 1986. See Harris et al., Interpretation and History, 17–24, 67–74. 35 This dramatic development in the 1950s is documented by Noll, Between Faith and Criticism, chap. 6. “A SMALL ALIEN GROUP WITHOUT PRESBYTERIAN BACKGROUND” 123 determine the direction of the young Orthodox Presbyterian Church.36 The gist of MacRae’s complaint was that there was a theological “junta” operating, a junta which lacked openness toward American evangelical values. He traced this alien approach most of all to the Christian Reformed Church, from which three current faculty members had emerged. Their approach, in MacRae’s view, was gradually seeping into evangelical Presbyterianism in America. If only it were that simple! Here, MacRae was not fairly representing the situation as it existed. Historians from within the Christian Reformed tradition have identified not less than three factions within that denomination, all of which were vying for dominance in the opening decades of the twentieth century. 37 These were: 1. the confessional Reformed tendency which traced its roots to the 1834 Secession movement, the Afscheiding, within the Netherlands. This had come to be well represented in the American Midwest by means of mid-nineteenth-century migration to Michigan, Illinois, and Iowa. This party thought of itself as Reformed as defined by adherence to doctrinal confessions; it was uneasy using the term Calvinist, as this terminology had not been employed in the Netherlands by followers of the Secession. To them, the term was associated with the Kuyperians.38 2. the Kuyperian tendency (also labelled Antithetical) which was intent on spelling out the implications of Calvinism for a new age and on creating alternative Christian schools, labor unions, and political parties. This movement, known at its late-nineteenth-century origin as the Doleantie, withdrew from the National Reformed Church in 1886. It 36 D. G. Hart, Between the Times: The Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Transition, 1945– 1990 (Willow Grove, PA: Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 2011), 25–26 acknowledges that the theological leadership of the young seminary and denomination was provided from this immigrant perspective. So also, D. G. Hart and John Muether, Fighting the Good Fight: A Brief History of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (Willow Grove, PA: Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1995), 47–50. 37 These parties or tendencies in the Christian Reformed Church of the early twentieth century are helpfully described in Henry Zwaanstra, Reformed Thought and Experience in a New World (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1973), chap. 3, and in James Bratt, Dutch Calvinism in Modern America: A History of an American Subculture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984), chap. 3. Bratt indicates that three distinct emphases already existed in the Netherlands circa 1900 (31) and that in the USA four developed. One, which he termed “Optimistic,” was largely associated with the Reformed Church of America; the others, which he termed “Confessionalist,” “Positive Calvinists” (corresponding to Zwaanstra’s “Americanist”), and “Antitheticals,” were all present within the CRC. The first was descended from the Afscheiding; the latter two from the Kuyper-led Doleantie (37). 38 This point is emphasized also by van Deursen, Distinctive Character of the Free University, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans: 2017), 159. 124 PRESBYTERION: COVENANT SEMINARY REVIEW 50/1 had come to be represented in North America after a less-than-total merger of this movement with the first (the Afscheiding) in 1892. 3. an Americanist tendency which was interested in “joint witness” with other American Christians. At this faction’s urging, the Christian Reformed Church would join the National Association of Evangelicals in 1943.39 Each such tendency had its own spokesmen and its own newspapers. Their common commitments to the Reformed Confessions gave them a basis for laboring together while disagreeing about many items of strategy. Now, the implication is that R. B. Kuiper, Cornelius Van Til, and Ned Stonehouse, while willing to affiliate with the emerging Orthodox Presbyterian Church in connection with their service at Westminster Seminary (which collaboration might suggest an Americanist orientation on their part), in fact had strongest affinity with the first group named, the confessionalist tendency within the CRC. Their ideas about strict Reformed confessional orthodoxy and cooperative Protestant effort were really very different from what MacRae and others like him had hoped to see materialize in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.40 And, to return to the complexion of the Westminster faculty, though from a distinct ethnic and theological background, the theologian John Murray was equally from a strict confessionalist background. The Scottish denomination from which he hailed—the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland—had departed from the Free Church of Scotland in 1893 on account of that denomination’s introduction of a looser form of confessional subscription (provided for in an 1892 Declaratory Act), and this half a dozen years in advance of a divisive church union of the Free Church with the United Presbyterians. That union of 1900 itself left a skeleton confessionalist Free Church of Scotland struggling for its existence; but with it the Free Presbyterians would not contemplate reunion.41 In the newly founded Orthodox Presbyterian Church, John Murray (true to his Free Presbyterian roots) became one of two outspoken advocates of the exclusive use of the Psalms in congregational singing.42 In short, the Westminster faculty was over39 Henry Zwaanstra, Catholicity and Secession: A Study of Ecumenicity in the Christian Reformed Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 43. 40 A window into the uneasy dealings between such CRC confessionalists and wider American evangelicalism is provided in A. Donald MacLeod, C. Stacey Woods and the Evangelical Recovery of the University (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2007), 68–71. Within the conferences of the League of Evangelical Students, individuals such as Cornelius Van Til spoke dismissively of the need to prioritize student evangelism. 41 s.v. “Declaratory Acts” and “Free Presbyterian Church,” in Nigel M. Cameron, ed., Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1993), 237–8, 339–40. Free Presbyterians judged the continuing confessionalist Free Church to have been concessive in co-existing with this reduced subscription over seven years and thus resisted a post-1900 rapprochement. 42 Hart and Muether, Fighting the Good Fight, 173–74. Murray could be termed “A SMALL ALIEN GROUP WITHOUT PRESBYTERIAN BACKGROUND” 125 whelmingly made up of strict confessionalists (drawn from two sources). These individuals brought with them to Westminster and to the fledgling OPC a pre-existing commitment to strict doctrinal orthodoxy and a disinclination to make common cause with other evangelical Protestants. Such viewpoints soon permeated the new denomination also. All this being said, Allan MacRae could have been more discriminating in his judgments. He had earlier, fruitful dealings with members of the “Americanist” wing of the CRC as representatives of that tendency threw their weight behind the cause of the cooperative League of Evangelical Students in the mid- and late 1920s. This was a movement, initiated by Princeton Seminary students, which championed a supernaturalist Christianity in American colleges and theological seminaries in opposition to creeping theological liberalism. MacRae had worked shoulder to shoulder in that cause with like-minded Dutch Americans, drawn from both the Christian Reformed and Reformed Church in America constituencies, before and after his return from German graduate studies.43 What he believed he could see plainly enough was that the majority of the faculty of Westminster Seminary (Dutch- and Scots-Americans collectively) were not of that “make common cause” variety. The hegemony that they had not been able to achieve in their native CRC, they seemed determined to achieve in the seminary (in which they had survived the founders) and in their adoptive denomination, the young Orthodox Presbyterian Church. This transfusion of Dutch-American and Scottish confessionalism into the OPC was plainly observable and fraught with implications for the future. But was it unPresbyterian? As is well known, the felt grievance of MacRae and those who sympathized with his complaint became the basis for a division in that young denomination. By late 1937, there emerged a new Bible Presbyterian Church which shortly created its own seminary, Faith Theological Seminary, in Wilmington, Delaware. But that division of 1937 did not fully lance the irritating boil to which MacRae’s 1937 resignation letter drew attention. Repeatedly, during its first decade of existence, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church would experience polarization over this same underlying issue: would the young denomination find its identity in strict confessional orthodoxy (of a kind already illustrated by one party within the CRC, or in the Free Presbyterian Church in Scotland) or in a broader, more collaborative stance that emphasized comintransigent in his defense of exclusive Psalmody. The struggles over this question are described in greater detail in Hart, Between the Times, 37–47. 43 The work of the League of Evangelical Students has recently been explored by Jeffrey McDonald, “Advancing the Evangelical Mind: J. Gresham Machen, Melvin G. Kyle and the League of Evangelical Students,” in Religions 12, no. 7 (2021), https://www.mdpi.com/20771444/12/7/498. Through involvement with the League of Evangelical Students, MacRae will have come to know such supportive CRC individuals as Clarence Bouma, Louis Berkhof, and Martin Wyngaarden (all of whom had a Princeton connection), as well as like-minded persons from the Reformed Church of America, such as Albertus Pieters and John Kuizenga. 126 PRESBYTERION: COVENANT SEMINARY REVIEW 50/1 monalities with other evangelical Protestant bodies within the USA? As the first of these tendencies regularly triumphed over the second, numerous other persons migrated out of the OPC into other Presbyterian bodies which welcomed those wider affiliations and associations—associations the OPC was determined to resist.44 MacRae’s protest was therefore in a real sense a harbinger of coming troubled decades. Before the 1940s were out, there was a second withdrawal from the Machen-led movement; it centered around both the acceptability of the philosophy of Dr. Gordon H. Clark and the recurring question of wider relationships with American evangelicalism.45 In the 1970s, because the thorny issue of relationships with wider evangelical Christianity had never been satisfactorily resolved, it proved to be a serious impediment when a reunion of Orthodox Presbyterians and the then Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, was actively considered.46 CONCLUSION Allan MacRae, albeit in a confused fashion, had definitely put his finger on something real when in May 1937 he resigned from the faculty of Westminster Seminary, citing the efforts of those “aliens without American Presbyterian background” in setting the course for young Westminster and the nascent Orthodox Presbyterian Church. But he was himself hardly the epitome of a Presbyterian of long standing and hardly the one to argue as a “defender of the sacred flame.” He also showed insufficient awareness that Protestant theological education everywhere in America was ending its Anglo-Saxon phase by embracing other ethnicities. He also minimized the difficulty of locating suitably orthodox faculty members in an era of scarcity. He did not acknowledge the diversity within the Christian Reformed constituency from which three of his colleagues had been drawn. Supremely, he muddied the waters over which eschatological views would be permitted in the seminary and new denomination by obscuring important differences between his preferred dispensational premillennialism and an older historic premillennialism. His muddled protest performed the service of drawing attention to the fact that the loss by death of J. Gresham Machen and Robert Dick Wilson and the voluntary withdrawal of Oswald Allis (over the issue of the Independent Mission Board) had left the orientation of the new seminary and denomination unduly dependent on voices and personalities which, while present from the beginning, would now operate 44 This winnowing of the young Orthodox Presbyterian Church in the 1940s is described in Douglas Douma, The Presbyterian Philosopher: The Authorized Biography of Gordon H. Clark (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015), chap. 8, and Hart, Between the Times, 21–31. 45 It was in this context that Edwin P. Rian, original chronicler of the controversy swirling around Machen, in The Presbyterian Conflict (1940) himself withdrew to rejoin the Presbyterian Church USA; see n. 2 above. 46 Hutchinson, Story Behind the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical, 400–01. A union of the Columbus Synod of the Bible Presbyterian Church (having taken the name Evangelical Presbyterian Church) and the Reformed Presbyterian Church took place in 1965. “A SMALL ALIEN GROUP WITHOUT PRESBYTERIAN BACKGROUND” 127 in the absence of compensating counterweights. By a process of subtraction, confessionalist Christian Reformed and Free Presbyterian voices had become the dominant voices in both seminary and denomination. Allan MacRae had presciently identified the underlying tension which would recur again and again in the opening decades of the movement launched by the heroic Machen.