Most striking in these Baptist developments is the degree of tolerance and room for open discussion that most representatives of both liberal and conservative views showed toward each other. During the decades spanning the turn of the century the “Baptist Congress” provided a forum in which both sides vigorously represented their views. During the same period most Baptist seminaries still included both conservatives and liberals. Even in the midst of the ongoing debates, the various traditional segments of Northern Baptists strengthened their ties by the formation in 1907 of the Northern Baptist Convention. Yet the new Convention included explosive new elements that could easily trigger a chain reaction. In 1897 one astute observer predicted that “old and new will wage a war of extermination, and neither will live to gain the satisfaction of having destroyed the other.”14 The explosion was delayed, however, and ten years later a similar analyst did not find the outlook so clear. “Two parties are in process of formation in the denomination…,” said Professor H. C. Vedder. “At times there are symptoms that their opposition may break out into an open warfare; at times a peaceful issue seems not only hopeful, but certain.”15
In part this hope must simply have reflected the enthusiastic optimism and activism of the evangelicalism of the age. These years were, as Gains Glann Atkins in retrospect described them, “the Age of Crusades.” They were filled with “a superabundance of zeal, a sufficiency of good causes, unusual moral idealism, excessive confidence in mass movements and leaders with rare gifts of popular appeal.”16 Although they had deep-seated ideological differences, most American Protestants were not first of all ideological in orientation. So, in spite of the ongoing debates, they were uniting on the home front, as the formation of the Federal Council of Churches in 1908 best attests. Looking abroad, the fires of revival could be seen around the world17 and certainly the rank and file of American Protestants saw no conflict between revivalism and the essence of Christianity. Considering the advance of missions, the nineteenth seemed Protestantism’s greatest century and many a judicious observer supposed that the new century might be greater still. The clouds of emerging controversy, however real and ominous, were in most of America hardly noticed in the midst of the bright halos of surrounding light of evangelical idealism. “On the whole,” recalled Atkins, “the ten or fifteen years before the war were, controversially, a kind of Truce of God.”18
There was another reason why this was a time of peace even within a group with as much diversity as the Baptists. Although the issues were well aired and strenuously debated in the seminaries and among the denomination’s leadership, they were not well known on a popular level. Albert H. Newman, probably the leading Baptist historian of the time, in 1905 provided an unusually clear analysis of the current status of the theological debates. Newman identified three major parties among Baptists in America. At one extreme were the liberals with their dazzlingly impressive academic strength. On the other extreme were the premillennialists, whom Newman characterized as “intensely anti-rationalistic,” uncompromising concerning Scripture, tending to equate higher criticism with the Devil, and working through independent agencies and Bible institutes. In the middle was a moderate conservative party, “still in the vast majority” and controlling most of the working forces of the denomination. Despite these major divisions, the debates inspired no large-scale public interest. “Even in New England and the Middle States,” Newman estimated, “not one Baptist member in ten is conscious of any important change in theology or departure from the old Baptist orthodoxy.” For the Western and Southeastern states his estimate was not one in twenty; for the Southwest, not one in a hundred. Newman, who himself apparently considered such ignorance compatible with invincibility, concluded that the denomination “never possessed so many advantages and never encountered so few obstacles to progress.” “‘Things are getting better,’” he said, “and not worse.”19
The moderate character of the dominant conservative party, standing between the two aggressive new movements on the extremes, was one reason for optimism. Although some Baptist conservatives insisted on the inerrancy of Scripture in detail,20 this position was far from being a test of Baptist orthodoxy. The leading conservative Baptist theologian of the time, Augustus H. Strong, president of Rochester Theological Seminary, had a concept of truth that reflected the influence of some of the same philosophical trends that were shaping theological liberalism. While holding a high view of Biblical authority, Strong’s starting point was that truth was not doctrinal or prepositional, but rather “the truth is a personal Being, and that Christ himself is the Truth.” Strong attributed the intellectual difficulties in the church to a view of truth that was too abstract and literal. People mistakenly supposed that the perfection attributed to the deity could be attributed equally to statements about Christ made by the church, the ministry, the Bible, or a creed. “A large part of the unbelief of the present day,” he said, “has been caused by the unwarranted identification of these symbols and manifestations with Christ himself. Neither the church nor ministry, Bible or creed, is perfect. To discover imperfection in them is to prove that they are not in themselves divine.”21
Strong rejected very explicitly the idea of Scripture as inerrant and in his influential Systematic Theology eventually dropped language that might even suggest such a conclusion.22 Statements similar to Strong’s could readily be found elsewhere among Baptist conservatives. Robert Stuart MacArthur, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in New York City (which became a fundamentalist center under his successor, John Roach Straton), in 1899 strongly defended traditional Christianity while maintaining that “A true doctrine of inspiration may admit mistakes, or at least the possibility of mistakes, in history and biographical statements, while it denies error in matters of faith and morals.…”23 Even Curtis Lee Laws, editor of the conservative Watchman-Examiner (and in 1920 inventor of the word “fundamentalist” to describe this Baptist party), did not insist on inerrancy, emphasizing the “experimental” verification of the Bible’s truth rather than its value as scientific statement. Like the dispensationalists and (as will be seen shortly) the Princeton theologians. Laws viewed the objective character of Biblical truth as analogous to the laws of physics. Like the Princetonians, he viewed Biblical truth as known by common sense. “The infallibility of the Bible is the infallibility of common sense, and of the experimental triumph within us.” Yet, as this last phrase suggests, the truth of Scripture known by common sense was the truth of its “living power.” “It is our authority,” he said, “because it does for us what our souls need.” In Laws’s view this was by no means subjectivism. But one’s common sense knowledge of the objective truth of Scripture came by way of intuitive confirmation, not as scientific demonstration. This view separated Laws from the more characteristic fundamentalist insistence on inerrancy. An intuitive sense of the “living power” of Scripture was not dependent on the Bible’s accuracy in scientific detail.24
Such emphasis on the personal, the dynamic, and the experiential gave conservative Baptists something in common with their liberal brethren who carried these principles to more controversial conclusions. The real problem for conservatives such as Strong, MacArthur, and Laws was the liberal drift away from supernaturalism in Christianity. In 1897 Strong argued against those who loudly proclaimed “Back to Christ,” but who meant “Christ as a merely ethical teacher—a teacher who made no claim to supernatural knowledge and power.” Said Strong:
It is not such a Christ as this to whom the penitent has looked for forgiveness and the sorrowing for comfort. It is not for such a Christ as this that the martyrs have laid down their lives.25
By 1907 Strong, unlike some of his Baptist contemporaries, was genuinely alarmed. “We seem upon the verge of a second Unitarian defection,” he observed, “that will break up churches and compel secession, in a worse manner than did that of Channing and Ware a century ago.”26
Despite the relatively good feelings that prevailed among Baptists in the decades
before the Great War, there had been scattered forebodings of things to come. In 1907 a large element in southern Illinois left the Illinois Baptist Convention to join the Southern Baptist Association, in protest over the liberalism at the University of Chicago. In 1909 a dispensationalist-inspired secession from the leading Baptist church in Grand Rapids provided the nucleus for a secessionist Baptist association which formed in Michigan during the next decade.27 In 1913 moderate conservatives founded Northern Baptist Seminary in Chicago to counter the influence of the Divinity School at the University. The same year the Baptist Congress came to an end, partly because the debates between extreme liberals and extreme conservatives had become too acrimonious.28 Yet among Baptists in general there was little to presage what was to come. A spirit of harmony, cooperation, and activism seemed to prevail.
XIII. Presbyterians and the Truth
Among Northern Presbyterians harmony seemed to occur only in brief interludes between controversies, and this was the case even during the relatively peaceful decades before the war. Two reasons in particular accounted for the difference between Presbyterians and Baptists. One was that the Presbyterians had developed organizational machinery for dealing with all differences through a series of ecclesiastical courts, the highest of which was the annual General Assembly. These courts, together with the perennial presence of a conservative party ready to prosecute doctrinal sins of either omission or commission, reduced the chances that Presbyterians would let theological differences coexist, or sleeping dogmas lie.
The character of the conservative Presbyterian party differed substantially from that of the moderate Baptist conservatives. A number of factors had converged in shaping the conservative Presbyterian ethos. Ethnically it represented the continuation of a Scottish and Scotch-Irish heritage which in the early twentieth century still had considerable force. This ethnic identity, however, had been preserved largely by the perpetuation of a highly articulated and heavily theological religious tradition. The symbols of this tradition were the Confession of Faith and Catechisms of the Westminster Assembly. The “Shorter” and the “Larger” catechisms (the “Shorter” being shorter only relative to the “Larger”) were carefully engraved upon the minds of the young through arduous and awesome processes of memorization. Children of ten years were commonly taught to memorize such Shorter Catechism answers as:
God having, out of his mere good pleasure, from all eternity, elected some to everlasting life, did enter a covenant of grace, to deliver them out of the estate of sin and misery, and to bring them into an estate of salvation, by a Redeemer.1
In the Kentucky home where Benjamin Warfield was raised the memorization of the 107 answers was ordinarily completed by one’s sixth year.2 Literacy was a virtual prerequisite for such faith, although sophisticated education was not essential.
Equally important was the Confession of Faith, which summarized and systematized Biblical teaching. While only some conservative Baptists were confessionalists, virtually all conservative Presbyterians in the Scotch-Irish tradition were. From the day in 1729 when the Presbyterian Church in America first adopted the Confession as its official creed, the Scotch-Irish party fought for mandatory loyalty to the detail of its Calvinistic doctrines on the part of the ministry. Contrariwise, Presbyterians from the New England and English Puritan traditions, who also helped form the church in America, insisted that the creed should be interpreted with more latitude. This debate, although sometimes subsiding, continued right into the twentieth century. The broader New England and more “American” party became associated with revivalism which, especially in the New School movement of the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, brought with it demands for a more flexible version of Calvinism. The Scotch-Irish Old School party, strongest in Pennsylvania, at Princeton Seminary, and in the South, although including a warmly pietistic strain, continued to put doctrine first. It insisted that the Westminster standards represented as closely as was humanly possible the system of doctrine contained in Scripture.
In connection with such traditions. Old School Presbyterians had preserved a distinctive view of truth. They tended to view truth in its purest form as precisely stated propositions. This applied not only to the Confession, but also to the infallible Scriptures that the Confession summarized. In either case truth was a stable entity, not historically relative, best expressed in written language that, at least potentially, would convey one message in all times and places.
This view of things was particularly compatible with the Scottish Common Sense philosophy. No doubt it was not coincidental that this philosophy developed in Scotland where Presbyterianism was strong. Certainly in America some of its most ardent and persistent supporters, especially of the Scotch-Irish party, were those who emphasized the importance of traditional Reformation dogmatic statements.
These affinities were reinforced by direct connections. Just before the American Revolution, Princeton College secured as president an outstanding Scottish clergyman and educator, John Witherspoon, who made the college the center for Scottish Realism in America. By 1812 when the Presbyterian Church established its own seminary at Princeton, Scottish Realism was likewise what the faculty taught. It would be difficult to exaggerate its influence on Princeton theology in the nineteenth century.3
Many Americans during the first half of the century employed the Common Sense categories, but at Princeton the appeal had especially to do with their conscious preservation of the classic Protestant emphasis on scriptura sola. Combating Roman Catholic apologists, the defenders of the Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had to stress the sufficiency of Scripture as the only rule of faith and practice. This position implied a corollary, “the perspicuity of Scripture.” If, as the Protestants argued against the Catholics, neither the church nor tradition was essential to understanding the Biblical message, then it was necessary to claim that even simple Christians could understand the essential message of the Bible on their own. “The Scriptures are so perspicuous in things pertaining to salvation,” affirmed Francis Turretin, the seventeenth-century theologian whose Latin text was used at Princeton, “that they can be understood by believers without the external help of an oral tradition or ecclesiastical authority.4 This meant that in interpretation of the essentials of Scripture the common sense perceptions of the common man could be relied upon. “The Bible is a plain book,” said Charles Hodge. “It is intelligible by the people. And they have the right and are bound to read and interpret it for themselves; so that their faith may rest on the testimony of the Scriptures, and not that of the Church.5
At Princeton, as well as in much of the rest of nineteenth-century Protestant America, the idea that a person of simple common sense could rightly understand Scripture was grounded in the more general affirmation of the Scottish philosophy that in essentials the common sense of mankind could be relied upon. “That man is capable of real knowledge to a certain degree,” Archibald Alexander told the first students at Princeton Seminary in 1812, “all must admit.…” Any assertion to the contrary was self-contradictory. “The fact is,” Alexander continued,
that we are so constituted by our nature that we are under the necessity of believing many propositions. By no reasoning, or voluntary effort, can a man cease to believe that he exists, that he perceives, that he feels pleasure and pain, that other beings exist, etc.”6
Any sane and unbiased person of common sense could and must perceive the same things.
Here and in other Common Sense statements we find the affirmation that basic truths are much the same for all persons in all times and places. This assumption is crucial to an understanding of the view of Christianity at Princeton and in fundamentalism generally. At nineteenth-century Princeton, unlike the situation among most later fundamentalists, the underlying philosophical basis for this assumption was frequently articulated in opposition to the currents of the day that threatened to erode it. The formidable Princeton Review, long under the editorship of Charles Hodge
, repeatedly presented detailed and laudatory expositions of the Common Sense position.7 Sir William Hamilton, the leading nineteenth-century proponent of the Scottish system, recieved especially glowing praise. He was a “matchless genius,” the “Socrates” of his age, “like a pure intelligence.” His philosophy was “the one perennial philosophy of common sense … the only true philosophy.” It was “the consummation of that of Bacon.” Among other things, the reviewer asserted, “He seems, in no degree, under the influence of what is called the historical development of human intelligence.”8
Such eternal truth, whether revealed in Scripture or in nature, was best refined by the scientific method. Baconianism appeared everywhere in the writings of the Princetonians,9 just as it did among American scientists of the era.10 The Princeton theologians saw themselves as champions of “impartiality” in the careful examination of the facts, as opposed to “metaphysical and philosophical speculations” such as those of German Biblical critics.11 Following the precepts of Baconianism, the Princetonians described the proper function of science as “taxonomical,” or the gathering and classifying of facts. While dispensationalists used this method to classify the historical data in Scripture, Princeton theologians applied it more traditionally to the task of arranging theological statements. They often drew an analogy between theology and the hard sciences. As Charles Hodge said in introducing his Systematic Theology:
If natural science be concerned with the facts and laws of nature, theology is concerned with the facts and the principles of the Bible. If the object of the one be to arrange and systematize the facts of the external world, and to ascertain the laws by which they are determined; the object of the other is to systematize the facts of the Bible, and ascertain the principles or general truths which those facts involve.12
Using the analogy to natural science, Hodge considered truth adequately supported only when it was based on the exact apprehensions of intellect, and not on indefinable feelings. In answer to Friedrich Schleiermacher, who argued that true religion was grounded on feelings, Hodge insisted that “intellectual apprehension produces feelings, and not feeling intellectual apprehension.”13 Although certainly not opposing religious feelings per se14 Hodge attacked all the trends of his day which based knowledge of Christian truth on such experiences. When Christianity becomes, as the Germans said, “the life of the soul,” then, said Hodge, “the word of God is made of none effect.” If “the beautiful solo of Dr. Bushnell,” should “seduce us from cleaving to the letter of Scripture, by telling us the Bible was but a picture or a poem,” then the cause of the true faith would ultimately be lost. When, however. Professor Edwards A. Park of Andover proposed at mid-century that the theology of feeling should be seen in opposition to the theology of intellect, Hodge insisted that the two were inseparable and that Park’s views were “not the language of the heart, but of a head made light by too much theorizing.”15
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