On June 11, 1936, a small company of ministers, ruling elders, and laymen gathered in Philadelphia and constituted what was then called the Presbyterian Church of America and would later become the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. To their opponents, the meaning of the event was obvious: These men had divided the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America and formed a rival denomination. They were schismatics.

That judgment, however, assumes the point in dispute. It assumes that the true church is necessarily identified with the organization that retains the denominational name, property, boards, and numerical majority. Under that definition, the people who depart are always the schismatics, regardless of what the institution has done with its doctrine, worship, discipline, and government.

The Protestant Reformation rejected this assumption. Luther did not believe that he had abandoned the church of Jesus Christ when he renounced the jurisdiction of Rome before his excommunication. He believed that the Church of Rome had corrupted the gospel, tyrannized consciences, and used ecclesiastical power to suppress those who called it back to the Word of God. Luther’s separation from Rome was therefore not a rejection of Christ’s church but a refusal to identify Christ’s church unconditionally with a corrupted institutional hierarchy.

The same principle must be applied to the founding of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Machen and those who stood with him did not believe that they were creating a new church. They believed they were continuing a faithful Presbyterian church after the existing organization had abandoned its confession, subordinated conscience to human authority, and used its courts to silence ministers who sought to uphold the truth.

From Toleration to Institutionalization

While Machen and others were charged for their involvement in the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Mission, the controversy did not begin with that board. Long before 1933, theological liberalism had secured a tolerated and increasingly protected place within the Presbyterian Church in the USA (PCUSA). The Auburn Affirmation defended ministers who refused to acknowledge that doctrines such as the infallibility of Scripture, the virgin birth, Christ’s substitutionary atonement, his bodily resurrection, and the reality of his miracles must be received in the manner taught by the church’s standards.

The General Assembly’s actions in 1926 and 1927 effectively protected that position. Princeton Seminary was reorganized in 1929 in a manner that ended its distinctive role as the theological stronghold of Old School Presbyterianism. The problem was no longer merely that individual ministers held erroneous opinions. No church has ever been wholly free from error. Nor was the issue that every minister, missionary, or congregation in the PCUSA had become apostate. Many faithful Christians remained within it.

The problem was that unbelief had acquired institutional protection. Men could deny or redefine doctrines central to Christianity while remaining ministers in good standing. The 1927 Settlement furthered the matter. It argued that these doctrines could not be considered “essential and necessary” in the system of Christian doctrine.

The church’s agencies increasingly reflected the same theological latitude. Official boards promoted or cooperated with programs in which the uniqueness of Christ, the necessity of conversion, and the proclamation of salvation from sin were displaced by religious cooperation, cultural improvement, and social reconstruction. Of particular concern to Machen and others was the impact this had on foreign missions.

In 1932 the report Re-Thinking Missions was issued. It treated the old missionary goal of converting sinners to Christ as outdated, urged cooperation with non-Christian religions, and shifted the emphasis toward social improvement. Christ was no longer proclaimed as the exclusive Savior to whom the nations must come. Machen objected not merely to that report but also to the official Board of Foreign Missions’ failure to make clear and prompt repudiation, together with other evidence of modernism in the Board’s personnel and policies.

Machen first sought reform through the ordinary courts of the church. In 1933 he presented a documented overture concerning the Board of Foreign Missions. When the denomination refused to correct the situation, he and others formed the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions so that Presbyterians could support missionary work committed to the Bible and the Westminster Standards. Despite that action being out of step with Old School Presbyterianism, it was not against anything in the constitution of the church. Moreover, other ministers served on the boards of various parachurch organizations.

The Mandate of 1934

Machen’s action was not merely a relief for his own conscience. It began to gather attention and support in the denomination more broadly. In response, the 1934 General Assembly adopted a constitutional study that elevated support for the denomination’s officially approved missionary work to the level of an ecclesiastical ordinance. It declared that a member who refused to contribute to the official missionary program occupied “exactly the same position” under the church’s constitution as one who refused to participate in the Lord’s Supper. It described support for the denominational boards as a “definite and sacred obligation” and insisted that members were duty-bound to support them to the utmost of their ability.

The Assembly then ordered every minister and layman connected with the Independent Board to resign immediately. Refusal would be considered a “disorderly and disloyal act” and would subject the offender to discipline. Presbyteries were directed to determine whether those under their jurisdiction had complied and, in cases of refusal, were to institute judicial proceedings.¹ This transformed the controversy.

The issue was no longer simply whether the official Board of Foreign Missions had tolerated modernism. The Assembly now required ministers and church members to recognize the exclusive legitimacy of those official agencies. It claimed the authority to forbid their participation in an independent agency committed to the church’s own confessional standards. It further declared financial support for the denomination’s boards to be a sacred duty comparable, in constitutional standing, to participation in an ordinance instituted by Christ.

Machen concluded that obedience would involve sin. It would require him to support, or at least acquiesce in supporting, a missionary program he believed had compromised the gospel. It would recognize a human court’s authority to bind the conscience where Scripture had left it free. It would also concede that the denomination could place its boards and agencies on a level of obligation approaching the commands of Christ himself. His answer was direct: “I cannot obey the order.”

This was not a rejection of Presbyterian government. While Presbyterianism teaches that the church acts through its courts, it does not teach that church courts possess unlimited authority. Their authority is ministerial and declarative. They may command only according to the Word of God. The Westminster Confession explicitly teaches that God alone is Lord of the conscience² and that synods and councils may err. Submission to one’s brethren “in the Lord” is not an oath of implicit obedience to every present or future deliverance of a superior court.

The question, therefore, was not whether Machen would submit to lawful Presbyterian government. The question was whether Presbyterian government itself had been converted into an instrument for enforcing an unlawful command. Machen’s trial made the nature of the conflict unmistakable.

Condemned Without Being Heard

When proceedings began in the Presbytery of New Brunswick, Machen sought to demonstrate that the General Assembly’s mandate was contrary to Scripture and unconstitutional under the law of the church. His defense necessarily required discussion of the theological condition of the Board of Foreign Missions, the Auburn Affirmation, the reorganization of Princeton Seminary, and the constitutional limits of the General Assembly’s authority. The judicial commission refused to hear that defense.

It ruled that arguments questioning the legality or validity of the mandate could not be considered. A subordinate judicatory, it declared, could not sit in judgment on an act of a superior judicatory: “So long as such acts and deliverances stand this Commission has no power but to obey.”³

The ruling decided the case before the evidence was heard. If the mandate could not be questioned, then the only remaining issue was whether Machen had obeyed it. He admitted that he had not.

In Presbyterian Conflict, Edwin Rian drew an instructive comparison with Luther at the Diet of Worms.⁴ Luther was at least permitted to explain why he could not recant unless convinced by Scripture and sound reason. By contrast, Machen was prohibited from demonstrating why obedience to the Assembly would violate Scripture and conscience. His counsel eventually announced that the defense had nothing further to present because the court had excluded the facts and arguments essential to the case.

Machen was found guilty and suspended from the ministry. He protested that he had been condemned without a hearing because the court would not permit him to prove either that the order was unlawful or that his criticisms of the denominational agencies were true. The importance of this cannot be overstated. The denomination was not merely failing to prosecute theological liberalism. It was prosecuting ministers who resisted the institutional consequences of liberalism while refusing to hear their doctrinal and constitutional defense.

The same principle was applied elsewhere. Candidates for ministry were pressured to pledge loyalty to the church’s boards and to the present and future decrees of the General Assembly. Though doctrinally qualified, Calvin Cummings was refused reception because he would not promise what Machen called “blanket allegiance” to the boards.⁵ The machinery of the church was being used not simply to tolerate modernism but to establish compliance with the denomination’s institutions as a practical condition of ministerial standing.

Reform Before Separation

The founding of a new church was not Machen’s first remedy. The Presbyterian Constitutional Covenant Union, organized in June 1935, pledged first to seek the reform of the existing church. Its purpose was to defend the Bible, the Reformed faith, and Presbyterian church government against modernism and ecclesiastical absolutism. Only if reform failed would its members seek to continue the true succession of the Presbyterian Church separately from the existing organization.⁶

Machen explained the sequence plainly. The members of the Covenant Union were obligated to maintain a true Presbyterian church: “either by reform of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., or, failing that, by continuing the true succession of that Church separately.”⁷ At a Covenant Union rally in October 1935, he said that the organization would rejoice if the PCUSA were reformed. If it was not speedily reformed, however, the Union was prepared to “continue a real Presbyterian Church” apart from the existing modernist organization.⁸

This was not the language of men eager to divide the church. They did not begin with separation. They began with protest, overture, argument, and appeal. They sought to persuade presbyteries, synods, and assemblies. They submitted to judicial proceedings and carried their appeals to the highest court of the denomination. Truly, Machen’s arguments began all the way back in the publication of Christianity and Liberalism. It was there he argued that the liberals should be the ones to leave the denomination.

Only in 1936, when the Permanent Judicial Commission of the General Assembly affirmed the convictions and suspensions arising from the Independent Board cases, did it become clear that ordinary constitutional remedies had been exhausted. The highest court had upheld the mandate, sustained the discipline, and ratified the principle that faithful ministers could be punished for refusing an order they believed contrary to the Word of God.

The Presbyterian Guardian described this as the moment when reform of the existing organization had “utterly failed” and the Covenant Union’s pledge to continue the true church had become an immediate duty.⁹

Renouncing a False Jurisdiction

On June 8, 1936, several of the suspended ministers formally renounced the jurisdiction of the PCUSA. Their statement carefully denied that they were abandoning the ministry or declaring themselves religious independents. They maintained that they remained ministers of Jesus Christ. They were withdrawing from an outward organization that, in their judgment, had dishonored Christ’s sovereignty and had attempted to compel disobedience to his Word.¹⁰

Three days later, on June 11, the new Presbyterian body was constituted. The Act of Association explained its purpose: “to continue what we believe to be the true spiritual succession of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.” That succession, the Act declared, had been “abandoned by the present organization” bearing the old name.¹¹

The new church received the Scriptures as the Word of God, adopted the Westminster Standards as containing the system of doctrine taught in Scripture, and committed itself to Presbyterian government. This language is essential. The founders did not claim that the visible church had ceased to exist or that they were restoring Christianity after centuries of darkness. Nor did they claim that they alone constituted the universal church. They claimed something narrower and more defensible: The existing organization had abandoned the spiritual succession it once represented, and they intended to continue that succession in doctrine, government, discipline, and mission.

Institutional succession and spiritual succession had separated. The PCUSA retained the name, accumulated property, boards, bureaucratic machinery, and overwhelming numerical majority. The new body possessed very little of any of those things. But succession in the church is not secured by corporate possession. It is found in fidelity to Christ, his Word, and the gospel entrusted to the church.

Who Caused the Division?

The founding of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church did involve a visible separation. That cannot and should not be minimized. Division in the church is grievous. Those who divide Christ’s people over personal ambition, minor disagreements, or impatience with lawful authority commit serious sin. But not every separation is schism, and not every institutional unity is Christian unity.

By 1936 the PCUSA had moved beyond the passive toleration of theological error. It had protected the denials of liberal ministers, reorganized its institutions to accommodate them, employed its boards in the propagation of a compromised missionary vision, compelled support for those boards, and disciplined ministers who refused. When those ministers attempted to demonstrate that the commands were unconstitutional and contrary to Scripture, the courts refused to hear them.

The resulting division was therefore not created first by the men who left the organization. It was created by those who separated the church’s government from Christ’s Word and then demanded submission to that government as the condition of continued ministry.

This is the point of comparison with Luther. The parallel is not that the PCUSA had reproduced every corruption of medieval Rome. It had not. The parallel lies in the nature of the jurisdictional claim. In both cases, an ecclesiastical institution treated resistance to its authority as rebellion against the church itself. In both cases, faithful men answered that church authority is subordinate to the Word of God. In both cases, those who called the institution back to the truth were condemned as disturbers of the church.

Machen and his associates did not leave because the church was imperfect. They did not leave because every avenue of reform had not produced immediate success. They left when the denomination made participation in its unfaithfulness a condition of standing and used its courts to punish obedience to conscience.

The Orthodox Presbyterian Church was not founded by an act of careless schism. It was founded by men who believed that they had been compelled to choose between an institution and the Head of the church. They renounced the jurisdiction of an organization that had falsified its confession in practice, but they did not renounce the church of Jesus Christ. They sought to continue it.

Notes

1. Presbyterian Church in the USA, Minutes of the General Assembly (1934), part 1, 115–16. The mandate ordered independent Board members to sever their connection immediately and directed presbyteries to initiate disciplinary proceedings against those who did not comply. The complete language was later reproduced in The Presbyterian Guardian, June 22, 1936.
2. Not only is this position clearly laid out in the Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 20, it was also the first Principle of Presbyterianism (of eight) adopted in 1789 at the first General Assembly.
3. Edwin H. Rian, The Presbyterian Conflict (Eerdmans, 1940), chap. 8; Notes of Testimony in the Case of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. vs. J. Gresham Machen, transcription, 268. Rian records the commission’s exclusion of arguments concerning the legality of the mandate, the Auburn Affirmation, foreign missions, and the Princeton controversy.
4. Rian, Presbyterian Conflict, chap. 8.
5. “The Changing Scene and the Unchanging Word,” The Presbyterian Guardian, December 16, 1935: 86. Machen described Cummings as rejected because he would not pledge blanket allegiance to the church boards. See also the synod commission’s criticism of a candidate who refused loyalty to the “present and future decrees” of the General Assembly. The Presbyterian Guardian, December 2, 1935: 84.
6. Rian, Presbyterian Conflict, chap. 12. The Covenant Union pledged to seek reform first and, should the controlling majority prevail, to perpetuate the true Presbyterian church regardless of cost.
7. J. Gresham Machen, “The Purpose of the Covenant Union,” The Presbyterian Guardian, November 18, 1935: 54.
8. Thomas R. Birch, “The Covenant Union Page,” The Presbyterian Guardian, October 21, 1935: 31.
9. “The Covenant Union Convention and the First General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America,” The Presbyterian Guardian, June 22, 1936: 113. The same report explicitly compared the crisis to the Reformation and observed that conduct praised in Luther was being condemned in contemporary Presbyterian ministers.
10. “Syracuse Swan Song,” The Presbyterian Guardian, June 22, 1936.
11. “The Act of Association,” The Presbyterian Guardian, June 22, 1936: cover. The Assembly then constituted itself on Scripture, the Westminster Standards, and Presbyterian church government.

©Everett Henes. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• Everett Henes

  

  Everett Henes (MDiv, ThM, DMin) is pastor of Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church, where he has served since 2008. He is husband to Kimberly and father of five children and grandfather of five (and counting!). He teaches US History and Philosophy of History for Jackson College in Michigan. He is currently working towards a PhD in Humanities with a focus in US Religious History from Faulkner University. In his spare time, he enjoys competing in powerlifting and strongman and teaching homeschoolers Taekwondo.

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