The OPC Split of 1937 and Christian Liberty (Part 4)

In the first three parts of this series we not only explored the centrality of Christian Liberty to the debates and discussions that led to the OPC’s division, but actually spent the third part focusing on the 3rd General Assembly, which was followed shortly by the exodus of the McIntire/Buswell group and the creation of the Bible Presbyterian Church.

Aftermath In The OPC
After the division of 1937 some began to speak of the OPC as a “wet church,” which for the time was a derisive term (as it was probably intended).[1] In a booklet called “The Presbyterian Church of America and the Liquor Question” Clifford Smith defended the OPC’s refusal to speak in favor of total abstinence. He argued that while drunkenness was clearly condemned in Scripture (something all parties were agreed upon), he also classified moderate liquor consumption as a “thing indifferent” — something that is neither morally virtuous nor evil in itself.[2] He referred to moderate alcohol consumption as “among things that are morally indifferent and is to be dealt with on this basis.” Although there were perhaps those in the McIntire/Buswell camp who believed alcohol consumption in any amount to be sinful, those who wrote and published publicly on the matter generally dealt with consumption of alcohol by classifying it alongside of those things that cause others to stumble but are not sinful in and of themselves.[3]

Smith expressed a common sentiment among those who defended the OPC’s refusal to take a stand on abstinence: “Just because a thing is morally indifferent in itself, it does not follow that every Christian has free license to do it.”[4] Nevertheless, he argued, that was not a sufficient ground to forbid the thing. Smith also went to great lengths to point out that the OPC’s refusal to move on the issue as the abstainers desired did not mean that the OPC was a “wet church.” They did not have a position on total abstinence, just as the Bible did not have a position on total abstinence.

Aftermath In The BPC

When McIntire, Buswell, and company parted from the OPC in 1937, they left to form the Bible Presbyterian Church (BPC). When the first General Synod met in September of 1938 they passed a resolution stating that “we deem it wise to pursue the course of total abstinence.” This statement was re-affirmed at the Bible Presbyterian Church’s fourth General Synod.[5] There the discussion was not framed in terms of clear prohibitions from Scripture but in terms of applied wisdom.

The Harvey Cedars Resolution, which the BPC passed in 1945, is worth considering at this point. Though the Harvey Cedars Resolution was passed eight years after the BPC split from the OPC, it arguably contains what may be the most mature and careful expression of the moral position that characterized the McIntire/Buswell party within the OPC prior to the split. In that Resolution, the call to personal moral separation is framed in terms of wisdom:

We deem it wise to pursue the course of total abstinence with regard to alcoholic beverages, and also tobacco; and furthermore we are unalterably opposed to the modern saloon, and the liquor traffic in general. We urge all ministers and Christian leaders among us to discourage these and other worldly practices among the Lord's people, and to give their testimony uncompromisingly against all forms of sin.[6]

In both of the preceding statements, spanning 1937-1945 the argument of the abstainers was consistent: based on the wisdom of abstinence, abstinence was the required lifestyle of the Christian.[7] The Harvey Cedars resolution stated that this call was “in conformity to the Word of God,” though it also said that this was “without adding thereto any rules binding the conscience.” They were careful to avoid framing the discussion in terms of biblical commands or prohibition, though it arguably became, in effect, a biblical command several steps removed. For the abstainers who left the OPC, this was a matter of prudence, and the prudent thing was to avoid alcohol altogether.

In Carl McIntire’s magazine The Christian Beacon, the separation of Calvary Presbyterian Church in Seattle and of California Presbytery from the OPC were characterized in strikingly heroic terms. The Beacon portrayed them as having left in order that they “might remain true to that purpose for which it left the apostate U.S.A. Church.”[8] If this sentiment accurately reflects that of those who left the OPC for the Bible Presbyterian Church then it becomes clear that the Westminster group and McIntire/Buswell group had, from the beginning, envisioned drastically different purposes in their departures from the PCUSA to begin with. The McIntire/Buswell supporters envisioned the separated life as essential to their purpose. As D.G. Hart explains it, however, Machen’s “purpose throughout the fundamentalist controversy had been to preserve a seminary that would train ministers in Old School Presbyterian theology and a church where those seminarians could minister.”[9]

Conclusion
In his own reflection on the division of the OPC, George Marsden argues that, ultimately, the cause of division cannot entirely be placed squarely upon either the personalities or the theological issues involved.[10] Neither of them, in and of themselves, would have been sufficient to effect the division. Rather, says Marsden, each side in the conflict represented competing visions of what a Presbyterian Church ought to be. The Mcintire/Buswell group represented a vision of Presbyterianism as “a Bible-believing church witnessing to the world both in the preaching of the Word and the ‘separated life.’” The majority, says Marsden, wanted “an orthodox church whose witness would reflect an informed study of the scriptural principles in the church and its work.”[11] Marsden concludes that these two compatible visions of the church — which could (in principle) be held in balance — became incompatible when the balance between themselves was lost. Perhaps the only man who could hold the factions of the OPC in balance was Machen himself, but his death in January of 1937 meant that such questions would belong only to the realm of conjecture and speculation.

If it is true that only Machen could hold these groups together, then the uneasy alliance that opposed modernism in the PCUSA could never have held together on their own in the long-term. The majority in the OPC chose a path that would eventually put them at irremediable odds with the desire for the separated life expressed by the McIntire/Buswell group.

Even if one granted that it was wise or expedient for Christians to abstain from alcohol, was the wisdom of abstinence sufficient grounds to constitute a requirement for such abstinence? Absent a Biblical prohibition, could the Church make such a statement in the confidence that they spoke with the authority of Christ Himself? For those who left form the BPC, the answer to these questions was “Yes.” For those who remained in the OPC, the answer was “No.”

_____________

[ ] Clifford Smith, The Presbyterian Church of America and the Liquor Question. (PCA Historical Center, Buswell Collection, Box 286, File 105), 1.
[2] Ibid., 13.
[3] J. Oliver Buswell, The Christian Life (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1937), 86.
[4] Smith, 16.
[5] Minutes of the 4th General Synod of the BPS (1941), 6.
[6] PCA Historical Center. “The Harvey Cedars Resolutions,” http://www.pcahistory.org/documents/harveycedars.html (accessed Jan. 2, 2015).
[7] This was true not only of statements in print but also in personal correspondence. For instance, in a letter to Charles Woodbridge, J. Oliver Buswell argues that this whole discussion was ultimately a matter of how wisely and carefully the believer exercises his freedom. Appealing to Paul’s words in Romans 14:15-22 he argues that the offensiveness of liquor is in itself sufficient reason to forbid ever drinking it. Letter from J. Oliver Buswell to Charles Woodbridge (April 24, 1937).
[8] The Christian Beacon 2 Vol. 23 (July 15, 1937), 1, 8.
[9] D G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P & R, 2003), 170.
[10] Marsden’s concluding analysis of the split makes for fascinating reading. See George M. Marsden “Perspective on the Division of 1937” in Charles G. Dennison and Richard C. Gamble, eds., Pressing Toward the Mark: Essays Commemorating Fifty Years of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (Philadelphia: Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1986), 321.
[1] Ibid., 322.

The OPC Split of 1937 and Christian Liberty (Part 3)

In the prior two posts we considered the importance of Christian Liberty to the division of the OPC in 1937. In this post we will focus on the events themselves as they played out at the third General Assembly.

Two months after Buswell’s clarification and exchange with Stonehouse was published in The Guardian, the third OPC General Assembly convened. June 1, 1937 was a unusually warm day for Philadelphia at that time of year, reaching a balmy high of 90 degrees. The heat outside of the General Assembly’s meeting at Spruce Street Baptist Church was matched only by the heated disagreements between those factions that had formed within the OPC over the course of the previous year. Soon after this assembly convened, and before the first session had even commenced, J. Oliver Buswell “openly declared his intention to withdraw from [the denomination] if the Assembly did not take what he considered to be the only proper action on the overtures involving the question of total abstinence.”[1] Everyone would soon discover that these were not empty threats.

In the course of the assembly, three proposed overtures called for the church to endorse abstinence from alcohol. The overture from Chicago Presbytery cited prior statements by the PCUSA from the 19th century where total abstinence was endorsed. This included statements from the 1812, 1818, 1829, 1865, and 1877 General Assemblies (among others).[2] Indeed, the McIntire/Buswell group seemed to have the historical argument on their side, as temperance does seem to have held the field in 19th century American Presbyterianism. Despite valiant efforts and strong arguments for historical pedigree, none of these overtures passed.[3]

On the other hand, a contrary overture calling for caution against man-made rules was also submitted, which was successfully passed.[4] This overture referenced the Westminster Confession of Faith, Ch. 20, Sections 2-3 which read in part, “God alone is lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in anything contrary to his word…” This passage was a favorite of those who opposed making statements endorsing total abstinence.

In another failure on the part of the McIntire/Buswell group, overture no. 8 from Iowa Presbytery argued that the denomination ought to allow a broad latitude of eschatological views. This did not pass, which dealt a double blow not only to defenders of temperance but to the perceived future of dispensational premillennialism in the OPC. The McIntire/Buswell supporters in the OPC took these successive defeats as a painful signal that they were not welcome in the newly conceived denomination and that they would not have a voice in it.

Before the third General Assembly had adjourned, the McIntire/Buswell group presented and filed a formal protest. This protest was with reference to the Assembly’s rejection of Overtures 2, 3 and 6 and passing of Overture 1.[5] They offered as their reason for protest a “deep conviction that, in the interest of making clear the position on this matter which we hold, and which we believe is held by the majority of the members, of this Assembly, we should have declared that we deem it wise to pursue and to encourage the course of total abstinence.”[6]

After the Assembly convened, seventeen total Teaching and Ruling Elders left the OPC and announced their intention to form a new denomination, the Bible Presbyterian Church (BPC). They subsequently established Faith Theological Seminary — a seminary that corrected what the BPC men had seen wrong with Westminster Seminary while feeling powerless to change it.


In Part 4 we will conclude this series of blog posts by considering the aftermath of the split between the OPC and the BPC.

_____________
[1] The Presbyterian Guardian 4 (June 26, 1937), 88.
[2] Minutes of the 3rd General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America, 5-7.
[3] The specific overtures were Overture No. 2 from the Chicago Presbytery (which failed to pass 24-65), Overture No. 3 from the California Presbytery, and Overture No. 6 from the Presbyter of New Jersey (the latter two of which were rejected without a vote).
[4] This was Overture No. 1.
[5] Minutes of the 3rd General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America, 27.
[6] Ibid.

The OPC Split of 1937 and Christian Liberty (Part 2)

In the first part of this series of blog posts we talked about the environment from which the OPC emerged. We concluded by surmising that the greatest issue in the OPC was not necessarily the issue of alcohol itself, but rather the question of how Christian Liberty is to be practiced. In this post I want to focus on the events, arguments, and correspondence that drew out the importance of these issues, culminating in division.

A little over three years after the repeal of the Volstead Act, and six months before the division of 1937, J. Oliver Buswell published a book called The Christian Life in which he argued that moderate alcohol use eventually leads to drunkenness. Because of this sad reality—argued Buswell—and based upon Paul’s teachings of lawfulness versus expediency in 1 Cor. 6:12 and 10:23, he concluded in this book that total abstinence from alcohol is required for Christians.[1]

In the book, Buswell fully concedes that “the Bible does not explicitly teach total abstinence,” even granting the possibility of some hypothetical utopia where people do all things in moderation — a scenario in which he actually says drinking alcohol might be acceptable.[2] In one of the overtures that would come before the OPC General Assembly in June 1937, the New Jersey Presbytery would echo Buswell on this point, agreeing that moderate alcohol consumption is not condemned in Scripture.[3] What Buswell argued, however, is that there was such a tendency to drunkenness in Americans that they needed to abstain completely. This conclusion of Buswell was again echoed by the New Jersey Presbytery a few months later when they argued that the “tendency of the American people to go to harmful excess” with regard to alcohol was sufficient reason to condemn its use altogether.[4]

In The Christian Life, Buswell anticipated the claim that Jesus’ production of wine at the wedding of Cana was sufficient to demonstrate that its use was not completely wrong. His response was to claim that America is such a different place than first century Palestine that (even granting that the wine at Cana was alcoholic) this kind of reasoning is tantamount to saying we ought to walk in the middle of traffic because Jesus walked in the middle of the road in his own day.[5] “If it was alcoholic wine which our Lord drank in his ordinary fellowship with men, if it was alcoholic wine which he made at the marriage in Cana of Galilee (this is open to dispute), we are not at liberty to argue that he would use or approve of the using of alcoholic beverages in America today.”[6]

The majority group wondered how, absent a Scriptural prohibition against something, would one arrive at the conclusion that something was to be prohibited? At the end of the day, there was much agreed upon within the early OPC, but when it came to the alcohol question the two parties were deeply divided as to how Christian liberty ought to be put into practice.

The centrality of Christian Liberty became clear when Charles Woodbridge responded to Buswell against accusations that Westminster Seminary was a “wet campus.” Woodbridge (one of those who opposed taking a stand on alcohol) attached to his letter a lengthy quote from Charles Hodge that Woodbridge believed was relevant to clarifying the real issue. His inclusion of the Hodge quote indicates that for Woodbridge the issue was not the harmfulness of excessive alcohol use, but rather the danger of speaking as the Church of Christ on an issue where Christ Himself, in the Scriptures, did not speak.

When it is obligatory to abstain from the use of things indifferent, is a matter of private judgment. No man has the right to decide that question for other men. No bishop, priest, or church court has the right to decide it. Otherwise it would not be a matter of liberty. Paul constantly recognized the right (εξουσια) of Christians to judge in such cases for themselves. He does this not by implication only, but he also expressly asserts it, and condemns those who would call it in question. “Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth: for God hath received him. Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth.” “One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.” (Rom. 14:3, 4, 5.) It is a common saying that every man has a pope in his own bosom. That is, the disposition to lord it over God’s heritage is almost universal. Men wish to have their opinions on moral questions made into laws to bind the consciences of their brethren. This is just as much a usurpation of a divine prerogative when done by a private Christian or by a church court, as when done by the Bishop of Rome. We are as much bound to resist it in the one case as in the other.[7]

For the Westminster group, the issue was not whether alcohol could be destructive, but rather, the wrongness of the Church declaring prohibitions where the Bible had not. In many ways, Buswell’s response in his letter to Woodbridge seems to be utterly unexpected: “I agree with what you quote from Dr. Hodge.” According to Buswell, the issue was not man-made laws (which he didn’t think he was guilty of making). Buswell goes on to tell Woodbridge that for those advocating abstinence from alcohol, the real issue is how the believer is supposed to exercise his liberty, pointing to Romans 14:15-22.[8] Who are the “weaker brethren” of Romans 14:15-22, according to Buswell? “Converted alcoholics and the young people in the social swirl of today.”[9]

Following the publication of The Christian Life, the Presbyterian Guardian ran a response by Guardian editor Ned Stonehouse on Feb. 27, 1937, titled “Godliness and Christian Liberty.” In that article, Stonehouse argued that, in light of Christ’s own miracle of turning water into wine, Buswell simply went too far: “It is a serious reflection on our Lord to hold that moderate drinking inevitably leads men into a life of drunkenness, as Dr. Buswell seems to do in his recent book on The Christian Life, p. 88.”[10]

In April of 1937 Buswell responded to Stonehouse’s article not by appealing (as he had in his book) to a disjunction between Christ’s own day and modern America, but by instead arguing that he was being misrepresented. “If the reader will turn to chapter three in this book he will find that the argument is based squarely upon the scriptural doctrine of expediency.”[11] In the same issue, Stonehouse retorted that “the argument in his book goes beyond an appeal to inexpediency.”[12] To Stonehouse’s credit, pages 85-88 of The Christian Life did not make any references to Christian Liberty but rather to the raw destructiveness of alcohol, as well as the irrelevance of Christ’s own example to the modern context. This isn’t to say that inexpediency was not a part of Buswell’s argument (pages 88-91), but Buswell’s response does seem to have been an attempt to steer the debate towards what Buswell perceived to be the stronger elements of his argument.

In Part 3 of this series, we will look at the actual events of the 3rd OPC General Assembly.

____________________

[1] The Presbyterian Guardian 4 (April 10, 1937), 12.

[2] J. Oliver Buswell, The Christian Life (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1937), 86.

[3] Minutes of the 3rd General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America, 8.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Buswell, 87.

[6] Ibid., 86.

[7] Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997), 265.

[8] Personal letter from Buswell to Charles Woodbridge, April 24, 1937, 2. (PCA Historical Center, Box 285, file 14)

[9] Buswell, The Christian Life, 91.

[10] Guardian 3 (Feb. 27, 1937), 203.

[11] Guardian 4 (April 10, 1937), 12.

[12] Ibid.

The OPC Split of 1937 and Christian Liberty (Part 1)

The Orthodox Presbyterian Church emerged from a hotbed of conflict. This was a conflict that, as Darryl Hart and John Muether have argued, was to define the OPC[1] in nearly every area of its polity, doctrine, and personality even up to the present day.[2] This conflict from which the OPC emerged was not a conflict between two Christian groups who simply could not agree on some details, but — as J. Gresham Machen portrayed it — between Christianity and Liberalism: two entirely different religions.[3] The battleground of this conflict was the mainline Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) of the 1920s and 30s and the conflict arguably struck its zenith with the trial and ejection of J. Gresham Machen from its ranks. By June of 1936 the OPC was formed by Machen and a small group of conservatives who chose not to remain in the PCUSA any longer.

Because it was a child of war, the OPC was originally composed of an oddly mismatched (in retrospect) coalition that might be roughly divided into two: the Westminster group and the McIntire/Buswell group. On the Westminster side were leaders who were associated with Westminster Seminary such as J. Gresham Machen, Cornelius Van Til, John Murray, Paul Wooley, Ned Stonehouse (the editor of the Presbyterian Guardian), and Charles Woodbridge. Those who occupied the McIntire/Buswell camp were those who eventually left the OPC. This group, of course, included among them Carl McIntire and J. Oliver Buswell.

In their battles with the modernists of the PCUSA these groups found themselves sharing a similar agenda and a common enemy. George Marsden puts it this way: “As long as conservatives were confronted with the presence of modernists within their own institutions, and as long as there was real hope of retrieving control of the church, there was little time for disputes on fine points.”[4] After the split with the PCUSA, of course, these two conservative groups now shared the same house. From the perspective of hindsight it seems like a marriage that was destined to fail, but at the time it did not perhaps seem so obvious. Why, after all, should it be so hard to remain together, now that the issue of an aggressive and militant form of modernism was off the table?

In the beginning there was what might be termed a “honeymoon phase” for the newly formed denomination. One detects it in the triumphant declaration by J. Gresham Machen that in forming the OPC “we became members of a true Presbyterian Church; we recovered, at last, the blessing of true Christian fellowship. What a joyous moment it was! How the long years of struggle seemed to sink into nothingness compared with the peace and joy that filled our hearts!”[5] That sense of joy was not to be long lived or shared by all. Less than a year later, however, some of those same people would choose to separate from this “true Presbyterian Church.”

It would be a mistake for anyone to think that the sole issue which caused the division of 1937 was the issue of the church’s relationship to the alcohol question. The issues were not at all simple. As Marsden summarizes it, there were at least three primary driving issues leading to the split: dispensational premillennialism (doctrinal), abstinence from alcohol (moral), and participation with non-Presbyterians in foreign missions (ecclesiastical).[6] It was never just one thing, and there were many factors and personalities at play beyond these three, as well (not the least of which was the death of Machen in January of 1937). In George Marsden’s analysis, however, the issue of temperance was certainly “the most emotionally charged of the issues that had been raised.”[7]

Through a series of upcoming blog posts we will look more closely at this “most emotionally charged” of the issues that divided the OPC. By the end, not only will we have explored a fascinating period in Presbyterian history, but we will really see that the issue which was most pressing in the division wasn’t ultimately disagreement over the wrongness of alcohol, but disagreement over two competing visions of how Christian Liberty ought to be put into practice.

In Part 2 of this series we will consider the developments that ultimately led to the division of the OPC in 1937.

__________________________________

[1] The Orthodox Presbyterian Church was initially called the Presbyterian Church of America until it was forced to change its name by court order. However, in spite of the anachronism and for the sake of continuity I will here refer to it by its later name, the OPC.

[2] D G. Hart and John R. Muether, Fighting the Good Fight: A Brief History of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (Philadelphia: Committee on Christian Education and the Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1995), 7.

[3] See J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, new ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2009), 2.

[4] George M. Marsden “Perspective on the Division of 1937” in Charles G. Dennison and Richard C. Gamble, eds., Pressing Toward the Mark: Essays Commemorating Fifty Years of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (Philadelphia: Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1986), 299.

[5] The Presbyterian Guardian 2 (June 22, 1936), 110.

[6] Marsden, 296.

[7] Marsden, 308.

Churches, Revolutions, & Empires Now Available

Several months ago, I had the privilege of working on the eBook version of Ian J. Shaw's new book Churches, Revolutions, & Empires: 1789-1914.  In the process of assembling the book, I was able to read it and benefited a great deal from Shaw's work.  I won't be reviewing the book due to my loose involvement with it, but also because I really don't have the historical expertise to evaluate Shaw's work as a historian.  I will only say that it is very well-written, and I found it both enlightening and personally edifying.  I especially appreciated the emphasis on the explosion of missions and the role of Christians in the abolition of slavery.  Often we think of this era is a time where rationalism gained foothold and orthodox religion experienced a sort of 'downgrade,' and it is nice to be reminded that the truth is never quite so simplistic.

The book has received high acclaim from Mark Noll as well as Carl Trueman, who said "Ian Shaw is a first-rate historian and this is a first-rate book which should take its place as a standard account of the period."

You can get the book from Westminster Bookstore for 50% off right now.  If you want to see the eBook, you can purchase it from Amazon.

Book Review: Letters from the Front, Edited by Barry Waugh

It's a struggle for me to review Letters from the Front in a lot of ways. J. Gresham Machen is a hero of mine, and as a theologian I have the highest regard for him. When I came to this book, I had decided that in some ways, all he was was a theologian, and so my expectations for this book were skewed from the very beginning. Instead of a mere theologian, what I found in these pages was a more robust picture of a man, and I felt chided for seeing my heroes as being so two-dimensional.

First of all, it must be acknowledge that what Barry Waugh has done in giving us this book is nothing short of a feat. This book is the result of literally years of Dr. Waugh sitting down one letter at a time and copying them from the correspondence which Machen had saved for posterity's sake. As is explained in the introduction, it was not always the easiest thing for Waugh to do this, in terms of transcription of difficult words and the complexities of the whole process. In terms of the work put into this, we should all be grateful. These documents indeed provide a fuller picture of the life of Machen during World War I when he served in France as part of the YMCA. Readers will find much of interest in these letters. There are also interesting photographs of Machen, his family, and YMCA facilities similar to those Machen would have been living in and around during the penning of these letters.

Readers may perceive that there is a "but" coming. And indeed it is true. BUT if you are reading this book expecting to see a tremendous amount of theological reflection, of struggling over the problem of evil, reflecting upon the practicalities of his theology, you will be disappointed for the most part. At best you will find that Machen was a very caring person and that he cared for the spiritual well-beign of the men around him. This is important - Machen was not just a detached observer in the war, but a prayerful, thoughtful, and pastoral individual. When tempering our expectations, it is helpful to recall that these letters were written for Machen's family (most of them are written to his mother) so that they could understand what he was going through, who he was meeting, and simply what was going on. You get a fascinating look of what it was like for him to live near the frontlines. We hear the occasional discussion of hearing gunfire in the distance and talk about his frustrations with some of the people he meets on a day-to-day basis, but this is not a theology book. It is more a document which later historians will find of great assistance when they come to fully sketch out the life of Machen. I have nothing bad to say about the book, I just wish I had gone into it with different expectations.

[Full Disclosure: I received this book from the publisher for review purposes. However, I was not required by them to give the book a good review.]

Gaffin Translation of Ridderbos Now Available for Free

If yesterday's post on Romans 11 held any interest for you then you will be delighted to know that Dr. Gaffin has made the translation of Ridderbos which I referenced available for us to distribute. This hard-to-find document can be downloaded by following this link. I have created a zip file with it in various formats (PDF, DOC, Kindle, and ePub). Enjoy! Here is the link.

Now you no longer have to dig through the oversized section at the RTS Jackson library if you want to read this document.

91 Years Ago Today, Old Princeton Died

The folks over at This Day In Presbyterian History have a fascinating article. You see, today (February 16th) is the anniversary of day that B.B. Warfield died in 1921. I have always appreciated what J. Gresham Machen said upon reflecting on Warfield's death, and I thought it might be worth recalling:

Dr. Warfield’s funeral took place yesterday afternoon at the First Church of Princeton... It seemed to me that the old Princeton—a great institution it was—died when Dr. Warfield was carried out.

In many ways, Dr. Warfield was the agent God used to preserve the old, conservative, Confessional, Biblical heritage upheld by Alexander and Hodge. When he left, as Machen put it, Old Princeton died.

I highly commend to you the article over at TDPH. It has a fascinating anecdote from Johannes Vos that is not to be missed.

The Unprofessional Book Review: The Lost History of Christianity by Philip Jenkins

Philip Jenkins (a Catholic-turned-Episcopalian) has a way of making my world feel like it is on the verge of turning upside down. When I read The Next Christendom back in college, I started to feel my America-centric view of the universe coming undone. Now, thanks to The Lost History of Christianity I'm starting to lose my European-centric view of the history of Christianity. This needed to happen, and it was a long time a-coming.

In the same way that Americans think that World War II started at D-Day, we western Christians tend to forget (thanks, in part, to the book of Acts) that the Gospel didn't just go northwest after Pentacost, but rather, it went in all directions. I remember being in a history class and being told, "The Apostle Thomas may have gone east to India, but nobody really knows for sure. It could all just be legend." And I contented myself that something happened in the East, but that it was all lost knowledge.

Enter The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia - and How It Died. Quite a mouthful, I know. Enter Jenkins' book, smacking me across the face and reminding me what an anglo-European-centered Christian that I am.

Come to find out, there was a Bishop of Babylon, there were Christians in China, there were Christians in India, and Christians and Muslims lived along side of each other and influenced each other quite a bit in the Middle East (both for good and for ill). He spends so much time laying out the history of the Eastern churches that it's almost humorous when, in the narrative, the Catholic missionaries get to China only to find that these people already knew about the virgin Mary and were highly suspicious of these Catholics' orthodoxy.

Near the end of the book, Jenkins discusses in great length the reality that Christianity has not always been a successful religion in worldly terms. He says that Christians are used to success and often repeat quotes such as "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church," but Jenkins says that a lot of times, the blood of the martyrs was just the end of the church because they all got killed and everyone was too scared to follow Jesus. In one of his most insightful sections, Jenkins suggests that Christians need to develop a theology of failure in regard to missions. The reason is, according to Jenkins, that "The ruin of Christianity in a particular region might confound Christians who have long been accustomed to seeing the expansion of their faith as a fundamental expectation."

What if Christians do make disciples of all nations, but subsequently lose them or their descendants? How can we account for such devastating reversals as the annihilation of the church in North Africa, the crushing of Catholic missions in Asia, and, above all, the strangulation of the faith in the Middle East? Presumably, each of these failures happened regard less of countless fervent but unanswered prayers. In terms of its global reach, only in very modern times has Christianity resumed the span that it had achieved a thousand years ago. Christianization, obviously, is not an inevitable process, nor a one-way road.

Though Jenkins does offer several thoughtful answers, I couldn't help but wonder how a real dyed-in-the-wool post-millenial thinker who thinks that it is the Christian's duty to emphasize transforming the culture would deal with this book. See - the book is full of failure. Just full of it. On the one hand, we see a Christianity that is always spreading before the rise of Islam, and on the other hand we see a culturally transformative Islam that grabbed the Christian world by the throat and brought it to its knees by seizing political power. When Christians tried to play by the same game, Christians lost and their faith virtually disappeared from the Eastern world. The pragmatist within me believes that a healthy amillennial understanding of the present age vs. the age to come offers the best framework for making sense of suffering, loss, and extinction in terms of the history of far eastern Christianity.

Jenkins does make statements which some will find controversial. For example, he says that the Bible has more violent commands than does the Qur'an (using Jericho as an example) and does not spend a lot of time discussing it. He is mostly concerned that Christians see the log in their own scriptures and not think of Islam in strictly radical/fundamentalist/hateful terms. He also argues that many things which we associate with Islam were actually adapted from Christian traditions first. The foremost example is that of prostration. Today, Christians think that it was an originally Muslim practice to pray while fully prostrated across the ground. In reality, early Muslims found this practice humiliating but eventually adapted it to themselves. In essence, Jenkins says that if we'd gone back a thousand years, we would have seen a Christianity that looked a lot more like Islam (at least on the surface) than the European-looking Christianity we think of today.

For some as well, the decision to discuss Catholic, Protestant, Nestorian, Coptic, Western, and Eastern Orthodox all together as Christian may be controversial. In a sense, he is speaking of Christianity as more of a social phenomenon, though he does get theological in some places. The difficult question for me was, "How can the only Christianity which the eastern world knew for at least 500 years have been a damnable heretical Christian sect (the Nestorians)? There are no lazy answers to these questions.

In Jenkins' conclusions after reviewing all of the failures in the far east, he has a lesson to share.

Instead of seeking explanations for the loss of divine favor, Christians should rather stress the deep suspicion about the secular order that runs through the New Testament, where the faithful are repeatedly warned that they will live in a hostile world, and a transient one. Nowhere in that scripture are Christians offered any assurance that they will hold political power, or indeed that salvation is promised to descendants or to later members of a particular community.

Jenkins continues a little later, reminding us that all of the states which the Christians strove to become a part of or impose themselves upon eventually either killed them or assimilated them.

Looking at the sweep of Christian history, we are often reminded of this message of the transience of human affairs, and, based on that, of the foolishness of associating faith with any particular state or social order. Even the Roman Empire was not to exist forever.

Comparing Kingdom of Heaven with God's Battalions

About five years ago, I saw the film Kingdom of Heaven in theatres. Though the film was a bit heavy-handed in its criticisms of religion and especially Christianity, I liked it, because I'm a sucker for war epics. Two of my biggest complaints of the film were that it was extremely light on telling Balian's (played by Orlando Bloom) story.

In recent weeks, I finished reading Rodney Stark's book God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades. My impression of the book was that it is absolutely essential reading. The culture at large sees the Crusaders the way that Ridley Scott portrays them in Kingdom of Heaven: bloodthirsty, savages, murderers. And of course, the conventiona wisdom was that the Muslims - and Saladin in particular were simply gentlemen who invented chivalry. No doubt, many of the crusaders were bloodthirsty, and no doubt many of the muslims were chivalrous. The point is, the contemporary picture of both sides is not robust enough to sustain claims of fairness or accuracy over the long haul.

What Stark's book does is paint the larger picture, which I was always missing. Once I read about the second crusade and Saladin's eventual taking of Jerusalem, I immediately desired to see the film for a second time. This time, I watched the Blu-Ray Director's Cut of the film, and I just want to say that - as a film - the Director's Cut is the only version anybody should ever watch. It actually adds a whopping 45 minutes to the film! The storyline in the original theatrical version was so anemic and underdeveloped that it is almost sad to think about how much exposition Scott was forced to cut from the movie so that it could be mass consumed in its theatrical run.

Having gotten the larger picture about Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem from Stark's book, let me interact a bit with the way Scott handled the tale:

1. My first beef is the way in which the motivation for the Battle of Hattin was portrayed. In the film, Scott made it look as if the Templars were so eager for a battle that they just had to rush forth, losing most of their men to thirst, and then martyring themselves on the battlefield out of zeal.

What had, in fact, happened, was that Saladin (the supposed gentleman hero of modern historians) laid siege to the fortress of Tiberius in an effort to force the crusaders to come forth, compromising their main fighting force and strategic advantage - they ought to have remained to defend Jerusalem. When King Guy took Saladin's bait in an effort to save Tiberius, the majority of Jerusalem's fighting men were wiped out.

2. The big problem comes when Balian comes to surrender Jerusalem to Saladin. In the film, Saladin swears that everyone will go free - every man, woman, and child. He appears quite generous. In reality, the freedom of Jerusalem's inhabitants was paid for in gold. When not enough gold existed to pay for everyone's release, many were sent into slavery.

3. After receiving Saladin's terms for surrender, in the film, Balian says, "When the Christians took this city, they slaughtered every man, woman, and child" (referring to the siege of 1099). Saladin smiles and replies, "I am not those men. I am Saladin."

In reality, the situation was quite complex. The slaughter of Jerusalem occurred after the Muslim occupants of Jerusalem had received an offer for surrender. The Muslims had chosen to fight to the death. A hundred years later, when Saladin took the city, the occupants of Jerusalem accepted the terms of surrender specifially so that the women and children in the city would go free. It is the difference between leadership who says, "Damn the women and children," and the kind of leadership who says, "Let us save our families, even if we lose the city."

M'Cheyne's Healthy Self-Knowledge

"What a mass of corruption have I been! How great a portion of my life have I spent wholly without God in the world, given up to sense and the perishing things around me! Naturally of a feeling and sentimental disposition, how much of my religion has been, and to this day is, tinged with these colors of earth! Restrained from open vice by educational views and the fear of man, how much ungodliness has reigned within me! How often has it broken through all restraints, and come out in the shape of lust and anger, mad ambitions, and unhallowed words! Though my vice was always refined, yet how subtile and how awfully prevalent it was! How complete a test was the Sabbath—spent in weariness, as much of it as was given to God's service! How I polluted it by my hypocrisies, my self-conceits, my worldly thoughts, and worldly friends! How formally and unheedingly the Bible was read,—how little was read,—so little that even now I have not read it all! How unboundedly was the wild impulse of the heart obeyed! How much more was the creature loved than the Creator!—O great God, that didst suffer me to live whilst I so dishonored Thee, Thou knowest the whole; and it was thy hand alone that could awaken me from the death in which I was, and was contented to be. Gladly would I have escaped from the Shepherd that sought me as I strayed; but He took me up in his arms and carried me back; and yet He took me not for anything that was in me. I was no more fit for his service than the Australian, and no more worthy to be called and chosen. Yet why should I doubt? not that God is unwilling, not that He is unable—of both I am assured. But perhaps my old sins are too fearful, and my unbelief too glaring? Nay; I come to Christ, not although I am a sinner, but just because I am a sinner, even the chief... And though sentiment and constitutional enthusiasm may have a great effect on me, still I believe that my soul is in sincerity desirous and earnest about having all its concerns at rest with God and Christ,—that his kingdom occupies the most part of all my thoughts, and even of my long-polluted affections. Not unto me, not unto me, be the shadow of praise or of merit ascribed, but let all glory be given to thy most holy name! As surely as Thou didst make the mouth with which I pray, so surely dost Thou prompt every prayer of faith which I utter. Thou hast made me all that I am, and given me all that I have."

-From the journal of Robert Murray M'Cheyne

Now This is Why We Read History Books...

Matters came to a head in 1546 when Pierre Ameaux, a citizen of Geneva, was publicly humiliated for opposing Calvin's teaching on predestination. The council had proposed a fine, but Calvin and his colleagues insisted on something more degrading: Ameaux was forced to walk through the city dressed only in a shirt and carrying a torch.

Bruce Gordon, Calvin, 2009

Just imagine if we could get our own magistrates to re-institute this old Genevan punishment for being an Arminian. On second thought, that would require 99% of the U.S. population to go pantless from the womb, so... lets just keep this one in the history books.

Calvin 500 is Underway

My boss, Derek Thomas, has posted an update on the Calvin 500 over at Reformation 21. It sounds like the Lord is really blessing the preaching of these men. My prayer is that God would uses these sermons to glorify himself by building up his Church and bringing sinners to repentance. I would imagine that Dr. Thomas keeps us posted on Calvin 500 as the week goes on.

William Tyndale on Imputation and Union with Christ

I mentioned over at my other blog that I was reading Carl Trueman's dissertation on the Early English Reformers. Anyhow, I came across this marvelous quote by William Tyndale in his 1527 Parable of the Wicked Mammon. It shows a profound awareness of the inseparability of union and imputation (and might I add, union with Christ does not diminish or make unnecessary the need for imputation but rather allows it!) I take the second sentence as the cause of the first sentence. Here is Tyndale:

and by thy good deeds shalt thou be saved, not which thou hast done, but which Christ has done for thee; for Christ is thine, and all his deeds are thy deeds. Christ is in thee, and thou in him, knit together inseparably. Neither canst thou be damned, except Christ be damned with thee: neither can Christ be saved, except thou be saved with him.

Two OPC Ordained Servant Book Reviews

Alan Strange gives a great review of R. Scott Clark's Recovering the Reformed Confessions

Carl Trueman reviews D.G. Hart and John Muether's history of American Presbyterianism called Seeking a Better Country

God Preserving His Church

Today marks the 499th anniversary of the great Reformer John Calvin's birthday. Love him or hate him, if you are a Protestant, you owe a lot to this man. I for one am grateful for the work our great God did through him. So on this day I would like us all to pray and thank God for his preserving of his Church through fallible men like John Calvin, as well as others.

Tyndale and Original Languages

In the Church today there is little desire to learn the original languages of the Bible. Though a love for Greek and Hebrew is not John Pipers main point is this lecture on William Tyndale, it is a point that comes through with power and passion. I would recommend this lecture to all who love and cherish the Word of God.