Karl Adam, a Roman Catholic theologian, famously wrote in 1926 that Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans fell like “a bomb on the playground of the theologians.” That may be true for academic theology, but for the life of the church one could argue that that epithet is more fittingly attached to J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, published only three years earlier. Machen’s book is well-known for its strident defense of theological orthodoxy, but in fact his central concern was for integrity among those who claim to subscribe to the Westminster Standards and to embrace the polity of the Presbyterian church while denying both in practice. As the church has faced theological challenges since 1923, Machen’s book has proved to be among the most important, enduringly relevant works published in the last century. In our current crisis of integrity, Machen’s classic work may have yet more wisdom for us.
The Problem of Dissonance
What is our crisis of integrity? In fact, there are arguably multiple crises that fit this description, but I have a particular one in view, one that seldom receives much attention on account of (at least) our preoccupation with real cultural and theological problems outside ourselves. Within a few years of being in the ministry, freshly minted seminary graduates often struggle with the sobering dissonance between the idealism of belonging to a confessional church and the on-the-ground reality of what they witness. What one might expect in a body that cherishes, even parades, its confessional adherence and detailed polity runs up against the solemn reality of how that confession and polity sometimes function—and don’t—in the church’s work.
And the closer one looks and listens, the more disturbing the picture can become. To protect the reputations of respected ministers or elders, carefully written and wisely worded provisions in a Book of Discipline designed to advance justice and truth might simply be ignored when consideration of their use is not only appropriate but explicitly requested by those affected. Speeches (and silences) on the floor of church courts may seem odd and unexpected, until one learns just how much of the church’s business is done at the water cooler or by text or e-mail or social media, rather than deliberated and debated publicly, or how strongly friendships appear to function in church decisions. I once heard about a senior, respected churchman who gave a brief speech against consideration of serious concerns brought by anxious church members via a presbyter regarding the pastoral conduct of another minister. The concerns were summarily dismissed in the brief speech simply on the grounds that the accused was a long-serving and respected pastor. I could go on. And on.
Whereas seminary students and graduates may be inclined to affiliate with one communion or another based on what that communion is on paper, they seldom seek out the wisdom of those who are able to speak to the reality on the ground. Before long, they learn the wisdom of those who know better and advise, “since all communions have their problems, choose whose problems you want to live with.” The stories quickly pile up with experience, and before long, early idealism gives way—in some to cynicism, in others to departure from the ministry.
In my close to twenty years of teaching seminarians, mentoring ministers and elders, and advising church members and sessions or consistories in contexts of church discipline, I have been struck by how often Christians express concern with this phenomenon and yet how little ministers, elders, and other church leaders seem to recognize its effect on congregations. It’s not hard to understand why Christians struggle here. It is a sobering, scandalous thing to witness a reluctance, even refusal to use the heralded confessions and polity of our church when the welfare of the sheep of the Shepherd is at stake. In our church membership classes, candidates are routinely encouraged by their teachers to learn carefully the theology and polity of our churches. But watching pastoral ministry and church courts in action tends to prove to the saints that there is more going on than what our polity texts say. Our brothers and sisters in Christ are far more capable of recognizing the evidence of politicking and friendly alliances than their elders sometimes give them credit for.
In my most recent re-read of Machen’s classic, I was struck by something I had not noticed in earlier readings, at least not in the same way, namely, his timely concern with this matter of integrity in confessional contexts. In each topic he considers, from the nature of doctrine itself to the doctrine of the church, he is in fact summoning the reader to integrity, that fitting and necessary virtue discoverable in the coherence between professed commitment and courageous, though sometimes costly, practice.
Of course, he knew this first-hand. We should read Machen with conscious sensitivity to the tragic relationship of his concern for integrity to his biography: he was prosecuted by a confession-subscribing and polity-committed church for a violation of church polity, while that same communion had failed—indeed refused—to prosecute others for theological heterodoxy. To forget this while reading Machen would numb us to much of the verve and vigor of his argument, and may blunt its potentially valuable force in our contexts. If, as I suggest, we are indeed facing a crisis of integrity in our confessional churches and related contexts, then Machen’s classic may be of real help to us yet again. To appreciate how this may be, however, we should recall how his concern with integrity reflects the unique story and conditions of American Presbyterian confessionalism.
The Adopting Act
Concerns with orthodoxy and integrity have gone hand-in-hand from the beginning of American Presbyterianism. The first American heresy trial concerned Samuel Hemphill, a promising young preacher recently arrived from Northern Ireland. The trial took place in the 1730s, soon after the “Adopting Act” of 1729. What was the subject matter of his heresy trial? In addition to concerns about dishonesty in his confessional subscription, he had plagiarized his sermons.1 Interestingly, the double-sided nature of this first heresy trial mirrors Machen’s concerns two centuries later. In fact, though anchored in Christian and Reformed foundations, Machen’s explosive missive belongs to the distinctly American presbyterian story of debates over confessional subscription, for which the 1729 Adopting Act is the touchstone.2
The Adopting Act aimed to resolve a vulnerability threatening early American Presbyterianism. The unprecedented level of detail in the lengthy Westminster Confession and Catechisms created a significant challenge to the traditional pattern of an unqualified subscription, and would in due course provoke a momentous turn in the history of symbolics.3 Apparently anticipating the difficulties of a full subscription, some Westminster divines opposed the imposition of subscription. It would not prove to be a practical difficulty in England, but in the American colonies the question took on fresh importance. In the 1690s, the Presbyterian bodies in Scotland, England, and Ireland had each adopted the Confession and required subscription to it. But this prompted great unrest in each of these contexts as controversies ensued over the disconnect between the intention of the subscription requirement (protection against heretodoxy) and the actual result of it (failing to protect against heterodoxy, or leading to great concerns over the imposition of a merely human standard, or both).
What if subscription on the part of ministers is required, but it is not enforced in the application of its polity?
In 1721, the Synod of Philadelphia received an overture requiring subscription to the Westminster Standards. This led to a sermon the following year, preached by Jonathan Dickinson, which denounced the idea of submitting to a man-made document rather than only to the Bible. For Dickinson, such subscription would represent a reversion to the Romanism from which they escaped rather than a proper embrace of the sufficiency of Scripture for the church’s faith and life. In the years to come, tensions grew as immigrants arrived from across the Atlantic, resulting in a division between the Scots and Scots-Irish who favored, and the New Englanders who opposed, confessional subscription. In 1727, another overture was presented, this time by John Thomson, which called for confessional subscription by all ministers and ministerial candidates, advancing with special emphasis the value of subscription for keeping at bay the various dangerous errors of the time. Again Jonathan Dickinson responded, arguing that if the need for subscription is rooted in the need to defend the gospel, all Christians must defend the gospel, and so, by parity of reasoning, all Christians would have to subscribe to the standards, a requirement that, under the circumstances, would only further divide and confuse the American church.
The “Adopting Act” of 1729, in which American Presbyterianism accepted a form of confessional subscription, represented a compromise on the question and an innovation in the history of symbolics. For members of the American Presbyterian church, no subscription would be required, for the gates of the church should be as wide open as the gates of heaven may be. For ministers and prospective ministers, however, a qualified subscription would be expected, one which still allowed for individual scruples. The agreement was reached in the morning of September 19, 1729, and that afternoon several ministers presented various scruples, all of which were determined to be acceptable in terms of the agreement reached that morning.
The story doesn’t end there, of course. In the next decade, “strict subscriptionists” unsuccessfully attempted to impose their model of subscription on the church by claiming that that had been the intention of the 1729 Synod. Instead, the church’s resolution reached with the Adopting Act became the foundation of American Presbyterian life and a principal factor in the subsequent story of that Church, becoming fixed as a matter of constitutional law by the 1788 Synod.
As James Payton explains, the Adopting Act represented a divergence from the traditional understanding of subscription up through the Reformation, a divergence provoked by the level of detail and comprehensive scope of the Westminster Standards and the unique circumstances of colonial American Presbyterianism. Whether one views the Act’s compromise favorably or unfavorably, the settlement in favor of subscription to the “system of doctrine” proved unstable in subsequent generations, and invited the phenomenon of various presbyteries and communions with marked differences from one another. In some of these contexts, the Westminster Standards’ role was eventually reduced infamously to the level of providing mere “instruction and guidance,” as in the 1967 modification reached by the United Presbyterian Church.
Christianity or Liberalism: The Adopting (But Not Using) Act
This backstory belongs to the context in which Machen found himself in the early twentieth century. His work breathes the air of this environment, and represents a vigorous attempt toward a course correction, but with a difference. The concerns with heterodoxy and biblicism that had led to the decisions of 1729 and 1788 would, in Machen’s context, admit of a third. What if subscription on the part of ministers is required, but it is not enforced in the application of its polity? What if the enforcement that does take place is selective, reflecting personal or ideological motives? Machen’s book is in part a response to Harry Emerson Fosdick’s 1922 sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” and also the expansion of a well-received public presentation to the Chester Presbytery in 1921 (published by The Princeton Theological Review a year later), but his argument in fact reaches further and deeper than responding to Fosdick’s provocation. For Machen, subscription is important, but no model of subscription is sufficient, for the very best confession of faith and church polity ever imagined is useless, or worse, when not rightly used.
This is the context of Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, which is not fundamentally an argument regarding theology or confessional subscription, but regarding integrity. Repeatedly in his work, we note his concern with matters of morality and not only of orthodoxy. For Machen, a church needs both a creed or confession and a form of government by which the content of that confession can be preserved from error. But that government requires men of integrity, or else the confession is worth less than the proverbial paper it’s printed on. This is where Machen saw the sinister danger lurking in liberal theology. In the introduction to his book, Machen defends the need to present the issue of his day “sharply,” and refers as well to how many in his day preferred to engage intellectual battles in what Francis L. Patton called “a condition of low visibility.” The issue, sharply identified by Machen, was between Christianity and its lethal liberal counterfeit. But their difference, he argued passionately, is not at the level of the words on paper but our relationship to them. The true nature of Liberalism is, he insisted, “hidden by the duplicitous use of traditional terms and categories by liberal clergy” who lacked the integrity to either honestly announce their disagreement with the confession or to discipline those who show by their preaching or practice that they reject it.
Heirs of Machen?
Machen’s words sit comfortably alongside the more recent remarks of theologian John Webster:
We should be under no illusion that renewed emphasis upon the creed will in and of itself renew the life of the church: it will not. The church is created and renewed through Word and Spirit. Everything else—love of the brethren, holiness, proclamation, confession—is dependent upon them. Yet it is scarcely possible to envisage substantial renewal of the life of the church without renewal of its confessional life. There are many conditions for such renewal. One is real governance of the church’s practice and decision-making not by ill-digested cultural analysis but by reference to the credal rendering of the biblical gospel. Another is recovery of the kind of theology which sees itself as an apostolic task, and does not believe itself entitled or competent to reinvent or subvert the Christian tradition. A third, rarely noticed, condition is the need for a recovery of symbolics (the study of creeds and confessions) as part of the theological curriculum—so much more edifying than most of what fills the seminary day. But alongside these are required habits of mind and heart: love of the gospel, docility in face of our forebears, readiness for responsibility and venture, a freedom from concern for reputation, a proper self-distrust. None of these things can be cultivated; they are the Spirit’s gifts, and the Spirit alone must do his work. What we may do—and must do—is cry to God, who alone works great marvels.4
As both Machen and Webster recognized, the question of integrity is not only before the local and regional expressions of the church, but also before the institutions and organizations that serve the church in some way. In our time, as institutions of theological education scramble to reinvent themselves in a new, challenging economic, ecclesiastical, and cultural environment, we have the opportunity to feature in that reinvention a recovery of the priority of moral formation as central to ministerial education. It must matter again what kind of men we are training for service in the church, and not only how well they can recall and repeat the words of our rightly cherished confessional standards.
But Machen’s chief target is the visible church. Since Machen’s day, many have wanted their own theological and ecclesiastical efforts to be seen as falling under the aegis of his. But the person in our day who truly breathes the air of Machen’s tour-de-force will not only concern himself with an attachment to the Confession and Book of Order but also with their proper, impartial, and courageous (because sometimes costly) use. To him, failure of nerve and lack of courage will be as repugnant as ignorance and incompetence. To him, silence in a just cause will be outrageous. As a man of integrity, he will be—he must be—as averse to the disingenuous and duplicitous as he is the erroneous and heterodox.
1. Plagiarizing one’s sermons is something which I have yet to see appear on the disciplinary floor of contemporary presbyterian church courts. To read about the trial, see A Vindication of the Reverend Commission of the Synod: in answer to some observations on their proceedings against the Reverend Mr. Hemphill (Philadelphia: Andrew Bradford, 1735).
2. On the Adopting Act, see James R. Payton, Jr., “The Background and Significance of the Adopting Act of 1729,” in Pressing Toward the Mark: Essays Commemorating Fifty Years of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, ed. by Charles G. Dennison and Richard C. Gamble (Philadelphia: The Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1986), 131-145.
3. See Payton for fuller discussion of these points.
4. John Webster, “Confession and Confessions”, in Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics II (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 83; as quoted by Stafford Carson, “Recovering Reformed Catholicity,” Theology in Scotland 26(S) (2019): 20.