PRESBYTERIAN
CHURCH
The Reading Room - History
The Bible Presbyterian Position on Ecclesiastical Separation
Introduction • The Historic Background of the 20th Century Reformation
• The BP Stance on Biblical Separation
By: Gary G. Cohen, Th.D. (Professor of Bible - Cohen University)
The Historic Background of the 20th Century Reformation
The Historic Genesis—The Briggs Address
Bible Presbyterian seminary students are usually well familiar with the details of the Briggs Trial. The original Bible Presbyterians were members chiefly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (PCUSA) at the turn of the previous century. On January 20, 1891, Charles A. Briggs was to give an “inaugural address” to the supporters of Union Theological Seminary of New York City, which was then in the PCUSA, and which in fact vied with Princeton Seminary in nearby New Jersey to be the denomination’s premium elite theological institution. Briggs, himself also a minister of the PCUSA, was being elevated to a tenured position as Professor of Biblical Theology.
Instead of the expected inspiring, possibly tedious tome on some lesser point of religion, Briggs gave an address akin to Martin Luther’s nailing the Ninety-five Theses on Wittenburg’s door—except his was in the opposite direction. He shocked the assembled crowd, by canon shot after canon shot, questioning and challenging the historic Christian faith. He summarily stated that the church and reason were foundations of truth, equal with the Scriptures. He declared that many Old Testament prophecies had not come true, nor could they be fulfilled. He questioned the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and the one-Isaiah authorship of that book, and spoke of a second chance for salvation, and suggested that sanctification was not complete at the death of a believer!
It was a theological explosion! For the next fifty years it locked that denomination and the entire Christian church, especially in America, in what became known as “The Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy,” which lasted until 1941, when the bombing of Pearl Harbor eclipsed it. The Briggs address, and his very willingness to give it at the start of a new professorial position, showed the thinking of Union Theological Seminary, its professors, and its leadership. The seminary was already corrupted! Briggs was subsequently put on ecclesiastical trial before the Presbytery of New York (filled with friends from Union Seminary), which in January 1893 cleared him as “misunderstood.” The General Assembly of the PCUSA thereupon reversed the decision of the New York Presbytery, and in June 1893 suspended and defrocked Briggs. Union Seminary promptly declared its independence from the denomination—but yet its theologically liberal faculty members remained in the denomination to help steer it toward a vastly more liberal position.
The Five Fundamentals
By 1910 five items had become the focus and canon of theological controversy. These surfaced when three men were licensed by the New York Presbytery; they stated concerning the virgin birth of Christ, “We do not deny it, but we are not prepared to affirm it as we would certain other doctrines.” The five issues became:
- The inerrancy of the Scriptures;
- The virgin birth of Christ;
- The substitutionary atonement (that Christ died as the substitute for believers);
- The bodily resurrection of Christ;
- The reality of the miracles of Christ’s ministry
These became known as the “Five Fundamentals,” and gave rise to the appellation, “Fundamentalists,” to those who supported them. The idea was that these are the rock bottom foundational understandings of the Christian faith that are necessary to be held by its church leaders, its ministers. There were and are other important doctrines, such as the deity of Christ, but these did not become the focus of disagreement. Liberals affirmed the deity of Christ; however, many defined the term so as to actually deny its historic and biblical meaning. Nevertheless, it was these five items that became the battlefield.
Then in that same year, 1910, the General Assembly of the PCUSA voted that every minister must “affirm” these five doctrines. This was also to counter a ploy of some, who were saying, “We do not deny, nor affirm them.”
Again in 1916 these five “Fundamentals” were again affirmed by the General Assembly, and then in 1923 this was repeated. Meanwhile the controversy had spread throughout America, and around the world within foreign missions organizations. Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopalian, and countless other groups and denominations were debating within themselves, in a spreading theological civil war.
The Auburn Affirmation
In 1924, after the 1923 General Assembly had again passed a resolution that belief in the “Five Fundamentals” was essential to being a minister in the PCUSA, Robtert Hastings Nichols, Professor at Auburn Seminary, New York, drew up a protest paper that became known as, “The Auburn Affirmation.” It “affirmed” (1) that the General Assembly did not have constitutional authority to bind its ministers to these five points, and (2) that there were other acceptable theories that could be maintained by ministers on each of the five items.
This affirmation was brought before the General Assembly of 1924, and, shockingly, it passed! The fundamentalist majority had waned, with 457 votes yes, 351 no, and 147 abstaining. With the majority having shifted, and the fundamentalists having not cleaned house when they had the majority, the liberal theologians (and those who went along with their denials for the sake of keeping peace in the church) now had the majority. The majority had shifted—that church denomination could no longer, humanly speaking, be salvaged.
Events of the 1930s
1930.—As a reaction to the snatching of Princeton Seminary out of conservative hands by a board reorganization of that school in 1929, Westminster Seminary was founded as a haven to train PCUSA ministerial candidates in the historic biblical Christian faith.
1931.—The Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions (IBPFM) was formed so that conservative Bible believing churches could (1) send out sound-in-the faith missionaries, and (2) could send their money to a sound missionary board—versus the PCUSA’s denominational board, which was embroiled in a plurality of controversies over what their missionaries did not believe and could not affirm, their missions moving more and more to taking the social gospel and westernization to the foreign field.
1934.—The PCUSA General Assembly, now with a liberal-and-friends majority, issued a mandate to the IBPFM to disband, as violating the peace and unity of the church.
1935.—The board members of the IBPFM were put on ecclesiastical trial by the General Assembly. Prominent among them were Dr. J. Gresham Machen, then of Princeton Seminary, and Dr. Carl McIntire, pastor in Collingswood, NJ, who would emerge in future years as the dynamic leader of the fundamentalist world, and who would serve for many years as the moderator of the new Bible Presbyterian Church (to be formed in 1937). In March, 1935, before standing trial before the Judicial Commission of the PCUSA, Machen declared at the First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania:
My profession of faith is simply that I know nothing of the Christ proclaimed, through the Auburn Affirmation, by the Moderator of that Commission. I know nothing of a Christ who is presented to us in a human book containing errors, but know only a Christ presented in a divine Book, the Bible, which is true from beginning to end. I know nothing of a Christ who possibly was and possibly was not born of a virgin, but only a Christ who was truly conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary. (pamphlet; Philadelphia: IBPFM, n.d.)
1936.—The PCUSA General Assembly affirmed the findings of the Judicial Commission and suspended Machen, McIntire, and the other members of the IBPFM. Thus 43 years after the General Assembly had suspended Briggs for denying essentials of the faith, now those upholding that faith were being suspended!
1936.—The Presbyterian Church of America, from which the Bible Presbyterian Church came, was formed out of the clear realization that the PCUSA can no longer be reformed from within. Dr. McIntire called over the radio for a “20th Century Reformation,” which would call people to separate out of denominations and groups that deny the historic Christian faith and the Christ of the Bible and which would unite “fundamentalists” into a new resurgence of faith, apart from the apostasy.
The Lord took Machen home in January, 1937. Without his unifying hand at Westminster Seminary, disagreements over the direction that seminary was to go, especially with regard to (a) the millennial question and (b) Christian liberty, surfaced. Faith Seminary was thusly formed by Dr. Carl McIntire, Dr. Alan A. MacRae, Dr. Jack Murray, and others who desired a sound school to train up faithful leaders which would be uniquely reformed, premillennial, and which would take the stand of abstinence on the alcohol question. (Recall the crime wave that crossed the USA from 1920 to 1933, the Prohibition Era, between passage of the 18th Amendment and its repeal by the 21st.)
The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, launching the USA into World War II, eclipsed church struggles, and turned the direction of countless congregations to praying for our soldiers fighting in Europe and in the Pacific. The American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC) was, nevertheless, formed in 1941, and the International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC) in 1948, much under the leadership of Dr. Carl McIntire. These councils were to provide a separatist unity plus to combat the World Council of Churches of Christ (WCCC), also formed in 1948. By 1950 out of the old liberal Federal Council of Churches (FCC), 1908, an equally liberal National Council of Churches of Christ (NCCC), came into being.
Next >
Find More Historical Articles →
WRS Journal Information
The WRS Journal (ISSN 1555-6786) is published semi-annually, with issues appearing every February and August. Circulation is currently approximately 800, with a production run of 1000 copies. Subscriptions for churches and school libraries in the U.S. are free. Individual subscriptions are available for $5 per annum (2 issues) for domestic addresses, and $10 per annum for international addresses (U.S. funds only). Please write or call to subscribe. You may also e-mail your subscription requests and/or comments to editor@wrs.edu. Back printed issues are available for $3.00 each, postage paid.
ADDRESS: The WRS Journal, 5 South G Street, Tacoma, Washington 98405 • (253) 272-0417
Opinions expressed in the WRS Journal are those of the contributors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the BPC on any given topic.
