For a Continuing Church

The Roots of the Presbyterian Church in America

Sean Michael Lucas

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781629951072
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Historia del cristianismo

The first full scholarly account of the theological and social forces that brought about the creation of the Presbyterian Church in America, using primary archival, newspaper, and magazine material.

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Introduction: The Roots of the Presbyterian Church in America

The creation of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) on 4 December 1973 was an attempt to preserve a “continuing” Presbyterian church. Concerned by the apparent leftward drift of the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS), colloquially known as the “southern Presbyterian Church,” those who led in forming the PCA were concerned with doctrinal and ecclesiastical issues; they believed that the agencies and boards of the denomination, along with many of its ministers, had become apostate and that the only way in which the mission and tradition of the PCUS could be preserved was through a separation. When the separation happened, it brought to an end over forty years of conflict with the PCUS.

In forming this continuing Presbyterian church, the founding generation believed that it was preserving what was best from the PCUS. In particular, the leaders were trying to form a conservative “mainline” Presbyterian body, one that was committed to biblical inspiration and inerrancy, warm and winsome Calvinism, and aggressive local and global evangelization. The desire was that the new church would marry these emphases with a sense of cultural responsibility for American civilization. Like liberal mainstream Protestants, the southern Presbyterian conservatives who formed the PCA believed that the church had a responsibility to culture. These conservatives differed in how to relate to culture: while liberal Protestants issued prophetic statements or utilized educational processes to impact culture, conservatives tended to emphasize evangelism as the means of bringing cultural change. And yet these conservatives who formed the PCA were profoundly interested in preserving American civilization through their efforts.1

And so the PCA was formed to be a conservative mainline Presbyterian body. This claim undoubtedly surprises because the PCA could be read in the light of a number of other ecclesiastical divisions that littered the twentieth century. When the PCUS conflicts began in earnest in the late 1920s, the northern Baptist and Presbyterian churches were already convulsed by the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, which led to the creation of new Baptist and Presbyterian connections, the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches (1932), the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (1936), the Bible Presbyterian Synod (1937), and the Conservative Baptist Association (1947). As the strife in the PCUS came to a head in the 1960s and 1970s, there were similar troubles in denominations as diverse as the Southern Baptist Convention, the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, and the Episcopal Church. Hence, it is fair to say that the southern Presbyterian conservatives who formed the PCA bore some similarities with other fundamentalists: emphasis on key doctrinal issues, such as biblical inerrancy and the exclusive nature of salvation in Jesus Christ, a demand for evangelism as the primary mission of the church, and a willingness to separate from those deemed apostate. By separating from the PCUS to form a new denomination, southern Presbyterian conservatives followed a well-worn path.2

Yet while they followed a path that others traveled, it is notable that these church leaders actually formed a new denomination rather than joining with either the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) or the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod (RPCES), a successor denomination to the Bible Presbyterian Church. Such a determination reflects the different aims and goals that southern Presbyterian conservatives had for their new body—aims and goals that were distinctly mainline in orientation. To be sure, there were connections between followers of northern Presbyterian fundamentalist J. Gresham Machen and their southern counterparts that contributed to the development of conservative dissent within the PCUS. And Machen’s Westminster Theological Seminary did play a role in supplying conservative ministerial leadership to the PCUS. Several leaders of the “Conservative Coalition” trained at Westminster—either graduating from the theological school or transferring to a PCUS seminary for the last year of school to ease placement. Some conservatives actually pastored churches in the OPC before coming south to serve conservative PCUS congregations. Even more, many of the issues over which southern conservatives agitated were issues that caused northern Presbyterians to bolt from that denomination, specifically the inerrancy of Scripture and confessional subscription.3

Yet there were important differences. For example, while many in the Machen cohort that led the OPC in its early days sought to maintain a confessional Presbyterianism for its own sake, the majority of those who helped to develop the PCA were less interested in arguing over secondary theological issues that would distract from the larger goal of evangelizing and renewing American culture. In fact, it appeared that conservatives within the PCUS were influenced more strongly by the rising “New Evangelicalism” and its luminaries, particularly Billy Graham, than by leaders or emphases from the OPC. For example, one important link between the New Evangelicals and southern Presbyterians was L. Nelson Bell, Graham’s father-in-law and founder of both Presbyterian Journal, the magazine of southern Presbyterian conservatives, and Christianity Today, the magazine for New Evangelicals.4

Thus, rather than link arms with smaller, separatist northern Presbyterian bodies, the founders of the PCA forged a body that would emphasize conservative doctrine for the purpose of renewing American culture. But the PCA would be more than this. From the beginning, southern Presbyterian conservatives articulated right-wing social and political views that would shape the founding of the denomination and continue to characterize the vast majority of ministers and laypeople. In the post–World War II era, these conservatives articulated a religiously inspired version of conservative political ideology: anticommunism, anti-integration, and anticentralization. While the focus of much of their ideology was dedicated to critiquing leftward theological and social trends in the PCUS, many of the conservatives who would form the PCA would articulate a more positive vision of political, cultural, and religious conservatism, which would place the new body solidly on the right wing of American denominations and give it a larger-than-expected influence in the new Religious Right.5

In tracing out this argument, it is important to recognize that the creation of the PCA offered yet another example of the growing cultural divide between conservatives and liberals within American society as a whole and particularly in the South. Recent historians of the post–World War II period have noted the developing rift between progressives and conservatives throughout southern society. Before World War II, while the South may have been “solid” in a one-party way, it was far from monolithic. Deep divisions over industrialization, unionization, and desegregation wracked the Democratic party in the South, and created rival ideologies within the single partisan umbrella. While progressives articulated a worldview that exalted individual rights over societal norms, conservatives sought to buttress older social byways that maintained white supremacy, male hierarchy, and social-bond individualism. As the twentieth century progressed, southern Presbyterians would experience a “conflict of visions,” a culture war that southern and American society at large was and would be experiencing. Ultimately, southern Presbyterians resolved the internal conflict through the departure of conservatives who formed the “continuing church.” Still, the conflict within the PCUS provides yet another barometer of the changing cultural and social relations that the South and the nation endured in the final decades of the twentieth century.6

Although it was unrecognized at the time, the conflict that resulted in the formation of the PCA began early in the twentieth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, prominent PCUS ministers had moved away from the church’s historic commitments to confessional Calvinism and the spiritual nature of the church by espousing progressive theological sentiments and urging the social gospel as an appropriate response to the social ills experienced in the New South. By the mid-1920s, not only had conservatives noted these trends, but they began to articulate a position of conservative dissent that stressed fidelity to the older ways. Conservative professors such as W. M. McPheeters, the longtime professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, partnered with pastors such as J. B. Hutton, the rock-ribbed leader of First Presbyterian Church, Jackson, Mississippi, to work through the challenges raised by this “liberal group” in the church. Conservative ruling elders and ministers began to write to the Presbyterian papers, warning of the effects of the progressive agenda of confessional revision, social liberalism, and ecumenical activity. These conservatives stressed the importance of the “fundamentals” of the Christian faith as vital for the life of the church. They even sought to convince the church that ministers should commit themselves to certain fundamental doctrines by virtue of their ordination vows. By 1939, conservatives had come to believe that the situation in the church was dire, and they determined to make a stand. Led by a ruling elder from Charlotte, North Carolina, Tom Glasgow, conservatives attempted to charge the most prominent and popular progressive minister in the church, E. T. Thompson, with violating his ordination vows by teaching contrary to the Westminster Standards. When the church not only failed to discipline Thompson but exonerated him in 1941, conservatives became convinced that the progressives had captured the machinery of the church. In response, they determined to organize in order to battle for their church’s future.

While conservatives objected to the theological waywardness of their liberal counterparts, always in the background were objections to the progressives’ political and social agendas. In seeking to overturn the church’s long-standing commitment to the spiritual nature of the church, PCUS progressives intended to speak “prophetically” to their day and to work for the corporate reformation of American society. Generally, that meant involvement in a variety of social issues in the South, particularly racial integration. By pursuing social justice, progressives within the church were convinced that they could maintain Presbyterianism’s long-standing cultural hegemony. Maintaining this leadership position was vitally important for those who had long thought of themselves as the cultural custodians of American civilization. While southern Baptists and Methodists claimed overwhelming numbers—out of every ten churchgoers in the South, approximately five were Baptist, three Methodist, and one Presbyterian—southern Presbyterians were still the intellectual leaders. In order to maintain this position of leadership and to purify America from the dross of social ills, progressive southern Presbyterians saw themselves as “prophets in the Old Testament tradition, prophets who dare to speak out boldly and are prepared to meet the fate generally meted out to prophets, and which some have met in our own day.”7

PCUS conservatives shared a similar goal with the progressives—to save Western civilization as represented in the United States of America. And they shared a similar identity as the progressives; both sides cherished the fact that they belonged to a mainline Protestant denomination. But the two sides differed profoundly over the method for achieving that goal. While progressives embraced a prophetic stance that sought social justice, conservatives stood as evangelists in the old-time sense, seeking for lost souls. Committed to mass evangeli...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: The Roots of the Presbyterian Church in America
• 2. “The Odor of ‘New Theology’ ”: The Rise of Southern Presbyterian Progressive Thought
• 3. “Reasons for a Separate Existence”: Conservatives’ Defense of the Spiritual Mission and Confessional Integrity of the Church
• 4. “How Far Will the Progressives Go?” The Coalescing of Conservative Dissent
• 5. “Red and Yellow, Black and White”: Southern Presbyterian Conservatives and the Crises of Postwar America
• 6. “Can Two Walk Together Unless They Be Agreed?” Defeating Reunion with Northern Presbyterians
• 7. “The Only Hope for America”: Southern Presbyterians, Billy Graham, and the Mission of the Church
• 8. Concerned Presbyterians: Southern Presbyterian Conservatives and the Crises of the 1960s
• 9. “The Faith of Our Fathers”: The Central Issue for Southern Presbyterian Conservatives
• 10. “The Right to Present and Be Represented”: Southern Presbyterian Conservatives Organize an Institutional Response
• 11. A Continuing Church: The Creation of the Presbyterian Church in America
• 12. Epilogue: Presbyterian Identity and the Presbyterian Church in America, 1973–2013
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Subjects and Names