The inauguration of the United Church of Canada on June 10, 1925 was an auspicious day for The New Outlook. Page after page of the first issue of the newly minted denominational magazine reminded readers of the past accomplishments of the uniting parties and promised even greater ones ahead. But at one point, editor W. G. Creighton digressed from the paper's celebratory tone to deliver some harsh words: “And we think that those people who see in the name selected some sinister craving after a wicked modernism are scaring themselves with a shadow that has no substance back of it save in their own fervid imaginations.”Footnote 1
Meanwhile a minority of Presbyterian delegates continued to meet, defying the moderator's declaration that the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada had adjourned for the last time on June 9. Encouragement for their act of resistance arrived in a letter from a prominent American fundamentalist who supported their opposition to becoming part of the United Church. “In these days of defection and unbelief,” wrote J. Gresham Machen of Princeton Theological Seminary, “your Church is like a city set on a hill.” Comparing their ordeal to what was happening in the United States, he identified what he saw as their common source: “a compromising interdenominationalism.” Machen's letter was written into the Acts and Proceedings of the Presbyterian Church of Canada along with a motion of appreciation for his help “in securing men for our congregations and minority groups, and for his substantial and continued interest in our cause.”Footnote 2
At first glance it seems odd to come across allusions to modernism and fundamentalism in connection to the founding of the United Church. Studies of the fundamentalist controversy have tended to pass quickly over Canada, stopping only long enough to mention the name of Baptist minister T. T. Shields, and a few other skirmishes. In arguing that American fundamentalism in the 1920s was a distinctively northern U.S. development, George M. Marsden suggestively remarks that the closest parallels to it were found not in the southern states but in Canada. Yet while he mentions in passing the opposition of “Presbyterian conservatives” to church union, he too turns to T. T. Shields and the Baptists to illustrate “direct carry-overs from the United States controversies.”Footnote 3
Studies of religion in Canada also leave the impression that Canada escaped the worst of the controversy over modernism, regarding it as unrelated to the wrangling over church union that was taking place at the same time in congregations, courts of law, the Dominion Parliament, and provincial legislatures of the country. In his fine study of the resistance to church union, for instance, N. K. Clifford dismisses a connection, observing that it was influential laymen, rather than ministers, who led the resistance to church union. He insists that their aim was to defend an institution, rather than a doctrine. While recognizing that some of the leaders were sympathetic to fundamentalism, he views the contest as a legal rather than a theological one.Footnote 4
Likewise historian Michael Gauvreau finds no evidence of a “widening gulf between religious modernists and anti-modernists” between 1870 and 1930. He muses that “the theological outlook of men such as the Rev. George Campbell Pidgeon might well have qualified them to head a group of militant conservatives within the church,” since his use of the Bible in preaching was “far more ‘literal’ than the interpretations of the Bible advanced in some Canadian theological colleges by the 1920s.” There were, he adds, no leaders in Canada comparable to J. Gresham Machen and other prominent fundamentalists in the United States.Footnote 5
Instead we find these two men on opposite sides of an issue that rivaled the fundamentalist controversy in intensity: whether Presbyterians in Canada should unite with Methodists, Congregationalists, and the hundreds of “local union churches” that had been organized with the expectation of joining a venture to form one church. Pidgeon served as the last moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Canada before church union and was elected as the first moderator of the United Church; Machen provided theological ammunition both before and after 1925 for the Presbyterians in Canada who refused to become a part of it.
Were these concurrent controversies as unrelated as historians have tended to assume? There are clues that suggest another possibility: that the debates over church union in Canada and fundamentalism in the United States provided an outlet for tensions over confessional identity that had vexed Protestants since the sixteenth century, with institutional repercussions in North America that were particularly acute for the Reformed tradition. Like their forebears, twentieth-century Protestants disagreed not only about doctrine, but about the place of the institutional church in society; they differed not only over the fundamentals of the faith, but in their attitudes to modern organizational values such as centralization and efficiency.
The debate in Canada grew more raucous when those opposed to church union exchanged tactics with the party in the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) that was waging its own battle over confessional identity under the banner of defending the fundamentals of the faith. Machen, by then well known as a scholar, was chief among the defendants. Much to their chagrin, union supporters in Canada found themselves in his crosshairs. Machen's defense of doctrine was tied to his critique of an inclusive church and a case for protecting religious and civil liberties against church and government bureaucracies. A turning point in the Canadian controversy came when Machen's fundamentalist categories were transposed and applied to church union supporters, casting a group of mainly moderate evangelicals into the role of modernists or worse: apostates who could no longer be considered Christian.
I. Competing Varieties of Confessional Identity
The failure of the sixteenth-century reformers to agree on doctrine divided Christendom into confessional states that reflected varying degrees of success in positioning Protestantism as a political force in Europe. Only in Scotland, suggests James H. Moorhead, did the Reformed confessional family manage to achieve its ambition of forming a national church. Even there, subscription to a confession of faith that was a product of the Westminster Assembly in the 1640s was not necessarily strictly enforced, though all clergy in Scotland were required to vow adherence to it at the time of their ordination. Elsewhere creedal subscription was contested as early as the eighteenth century, with some church leaders questioning the propriety of requiring subscription to any creed. To those who felt that creedal subscription was necessary to prevent doctrinal deviation, easing that expectation would be, as one eighteenth-century New England pastor put it, to build a “city without walls.”Footnote 6
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, attempts to express the faith in terms that would be understandable to the contemporary age further challenged the elevated standing of the Westminster Confession. Its defenders conceded that not every regulation in the lengthy document ought to be enforced, but insisted that its articles contained a system of doctrine that was integral to the faith. In the United States, those who defended creedal subscription led the charge to define which of those articles were essential. By the 1890s, biblical inerrancy topped a list that included the virgin birth of Jesus, the substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and accepting his working of miracles as a fact.
A new statement of faith approved by the PCUSA in 1903 went further in fostering an attitude that Bradley J. Longfield describes as “a loose understanding of confessional subscription.”Footnote 7 Few would have disputed, adds Moorhead, that the revised confession of faith was more congenial to the modern mind in insisting that none of its doctrines should obscure God's love for humanity.Footnote 8 The revised doctrines were also more compatible with Arminianism, a competing system of theological principles that had influenced Methodists and even some Presbyterians. A more Arminian understanding of Calvinist doctrinal positions was one of the factors that facilitated a reunion of the Cumberland Presbyterians with the PCUSA around the same time.
Meanwhile Presbyterians in Canada were considering an even more ambitious union, and they too readily incorporated Arminian insights when working with Methodists and Congregationalists to put together a theological statement. Evidently impressed by the American statement, the subcommittee on doctrine drew heavily on both it and the articles of faith of the Presbyterian Church in England in drafting theological articles for the Basis of Union in 1905.Footnote 9
In retrospect, what is striking is that there is scant evidence of either the Basis of Union or Methodist theology being tagged as modernist at that point. More remarkable for observers at the time was how longstanding disagreements over such doctrines as predestination and free will had been so quickly resolved. Reviewing the work of the committee two decades after union, Randolph Carleton Chalmers maintained that its chief concern was not how to resolve differences between fundamentalists and modernists, but how to bring together the Calvinist and Arminian streams of Protestant theology. Old doctrinal disputes had been set aside in order to present a united front against “a rising tide of paganism” that was threatening to engulf Canada. “To save Canada for Christ was paramount,” he insisted, and they saw church union as a venture that brought them together to meet a mutual foe.Footnote 10
Only later did the focus shift from questioning compromises that resulted from efforts to make Arminian and Calvinist doctrines compatible, to protecting fundamentals of the faith. Even future critics would initially praise the doctrinal statement of the Basis of Union. In 1909 an editorial in the Presbyterian Record (initialed by the editor Ephraim Scott, a strident opponent of church union a few years later) described it as a “full, simple, and Scriptural” statement that “must impress every thoughtful reader.” Few Presbyterians would find any substantial differences between it and the Shorter Catechism or the Confession of Faith, he conjectured, and Methodists and Congregationalists would “doubtless find it in equally substantial accord with their accepted beliefs.” Commending it to other churches considering union, he praised it as “a standing testimony to the essential unity of the Protestant Evangelical Church, both in this and in other lands.”Footnote 11
It was not the substance of the doctrinal statement itself that first caused consternation, but a provision that Congregationalists had insisted on: that ministers need only to be in “essential agreement” with it when they took their ordination vows. Even so, this issue was not new to the Presbyterian Church in Canada, according to Daniel J. Fraser, Professor of New Testament at Presbyterian College, Montreal. In an article in the Harvard Theological Review, Fraser disabused readers of the notion that the Presbyterian Church demanded rigid subscription to a seventeenth-century confession. (A few years later when he became president of an organization with the express purpose of thwarting church union, such comments would come back to haunt him.) He disclosed that among the “various methods of casuistry” to “mitigate the severity of this ordination test” was recourse to a phrase said to have been devised at the time of the Presbyterian union in 1875: “as adopted by this Church in the Basis of Union.” Fraser claimed that this formulation was tacitly understood to allow for considerable liberty. Despite his own opposition to church union, he applauded the choice of wording proposed for candidates for ministry in the United Church: “essential agreement” was a compromise that would provide relief to “many a sensitive candidate for ordination” who felt torn between intellectual integrity and insincerity.Footnote 12
Those who came across Fraser's article would have found little evidence that modernism among supporters of church union was a concern. In his view it was Methodist conservatism that was indirectly impeding union, due to what progressive Presbyterians viewed as “dogmatic intolerance of scientific investigation, scribal literalism, a lack of human kindness, and a certain almost cynical indifference to causing public scandal.”Footnote 13 To complicate matters further, some leading Presbyterian supporters of union were regarded as fundamentalist stalwarts. A case in point is Principal William Caven of Knox College, among the few Canadian contributors (in his case posthumously) to the series of publications known as The Fundamentals, and an ardent supporter of organic union. Historian John T. McNeill reported that Caven gave what observers described as “the greatest speech of his life” at the 1903 General Assembly, where he “poured out his soul on behalf of Union.”Footnote 14 Strong support for church union among respected conservatives and moderates made for awkward alignments once opposition to union was reframed as a defense of the fundamentals of the faith.
Doctrine was not the only aspect of confessional identity that caused strife in North American Protestantism in the early twentieth century. The controversies over fundamentalism and church union featured a new round in the ongoing debate about the church's role in society. Calls to defend the faith against theological modernism coincided with resistance to the PCUSA's plans to improve its organizational efficiency by restructuring various agencies “in the name of a more effective ministry to the nation and the world.”Footnote 15 Meanwhile the uniting traditions in Canada prepared for a similar organizational shift in designing what they hoped would become “a national Church, National, not in any sense State-controlled or, or State-controlling, but for the friendly service of the whole nation.”Footnote 16 Its mission was to become as contentious an issue as the rather conservative statement of faith in its Basis of Union. The case for church union in Canada, as presented by its supporters, pictured Protestants sharing a common faith and cooperating to create an efficiently-run church that would shape the nation; critics belittled their aspirations and condemned the creation of “one big church.”
II. J. Gresham Machen as Cross-Border Controversialist
The involvement of J. Gresham Machen in these controversies offers a unique vantage point from which to examine the issues and tactics of the opposing parties. As the leading spokesperson for confessional orthodoxy, Machen famously fought theological modernism. However, as D. G. Hart notes, Machen's antagonism to early twentieth-century ecumenism has generally been overlooked as a factor in the controversy.Footnote 17 It was his unwillingness to form a union with denominations that did not adhere to the Westminster Confession that endeared him to anti-union Presbyterians in Canada. Hart convincingly argues that what also set Machen apart was rejection of a political role for the church that was ultimately more prescient and “modern” than progressive Protestants, who were still working with the presuppositions of Victorian culture.Footnote 18 This too caught the attention of those who opposed church union in Canada.
Hart traces Machen's attacks on liberalism to the 1920 General Assembly of the PCUSA in Philadelphia. There, as a first-time delegate, he heard a report that shocked him: a proposal to unite nineteen evangelical denominations that included a statement of faith formulated from confessional creeds he considered contradictory. Attempting to reduce the various doctrinal standards to a “common faith” had, claimed Machen, resulted in a creed so vague that even a Unitarian could affirm it. His objection to the plan would have sounded familiar to Canadian church leaders who followed the church union negotiations: critics objected that the language of its theological preamble was ambiguous and bland, and the clergy were not required to subscribe to any creed.Footnote 19 Attending the assembly was a turning point for Machen, argues Hart, since it triggered his involvement in Presbyterian church politics. He fought against the plan in addresses, articles, and sermons that were honed into a bestseller a few years later with the publication of Christianity and Liberalism.Footnote 20
Machen soon learned that the president of Princeton Seminary and several influential members of the faculty supported the plan to unite.Footnote 21 To make matters worse, by 1923, many ministers in the denomination had signed the Auburn Affirmation, a proposal to limit General Assembly's authority to impose the five fundamentals as a test of faith. Machen opposed the initiative, warning that the church was “becoming what the Auburn Affirmationists call an ’inclusive’ Church.” In countless communities, he complained, the result was a church that was little more than a Rotary Club.Footnote 22 He and others concerned about the fundamentals suffered a further setback in 1925 when a commission appointed by the General Assembly of the PCUSA reported that defining particular articles of the Westminster Confession as “essential” was unconstitutional; instead that determination was left to the presbytery when examining a candidate for ministry.Footnote 23
Not surprisingly, Machen joined a conservative campaign launched during the first half of the 1920s to pressure liberals to withdraw from the PCUSA or be driven from it if they could no longer profess its official belief.Footnote 24 He condemned the dishonesty of ministers who remained in a church whose doctrinal standards they no longer upheld, insisting that “evangelical churches are creedal churches.”Footnote 25 By implication a so-called “creedless” church (as critics were fond of calling the American ecumenical alternative) was no longer evangelical. His rallying cry until his death in 1937 was both provocative and blunt: liberalism was not merely a heterodox expression of Christianity, but a non-Christian and rival religion.Footnote 26
Machen also objected to the standardizing and centralizing of programs and procedures that the PCUSA and other denominations had adopted, and opposed similar tendencies in government as well. Ecumenical unity was in his view “often a union with the world against the Lord, or at best a forced union of machinery and tyrannical committees.”Footnote 27 He dismissed the social programs of the “modern” church as having more to do with bettering conditions on earth than preparing for heaven. The mission of the church, he believed, was strictly spiritual and only indirectly, at most, to Christianize the social order. Hence he was wary of attempts to “help” immigrants by approaching them with a Bible in one hand and a cudgel offering them “Christian Americanization” in the other.Footnote 28
This stance placed Machen on the opposing side of a number of moral and social reforms promoted by Protestant progressives. He was against Prohibition, child labor legislation, regulation of private schools, establishing national parks, and Philadelphia's law against jaywalking.Footnote 29 Reflecting on the sad state of affairs in 1929, he lamented that liberty was out of date, replaced by standardization and efficiency, even in nature: “In the region of Maine that I have visited in summer off and on for the last thirty years, I have seen the wild exuberance of woods and streams gradually giving place to the dreary regularities of a national park.”Footnote 30 He opposed church union on similar grounds: “I am opposed with all my mind and heart to the depressing dream of a monopolistic Protestant church organization placing the whole Protestant world under one set of tyrannical committees and boards. . . . Just because I believe in liberty, I believe in the right of purely voluntary association.”Footnote 31
Christianity and Liberalism appeared in 1923, securing a prominent international role for Machen in the debate over theological modernism just as a pivotal new phase of resistance to church union was beginning in Canada. Readers of Christianity and Liberalism who wondered how Machen might appraise the common faith affirmed by supporters of church union did not have far to look: its opening pages belittled all such efforts: “In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight.”Footnote 32 As for hopes of creating a Christian Canada, he disparaged “the liberal program for unity” because it was based on the assumption that doctrinal differences were mere trifles, readily resolved by uniting around a program for Christian service.Footnote 33
III. Transposing the Debate on Church Union in Canada
It is little wonder then that Machen and opponents of church union in Canada discovered they had much in common in their dissatisfaction with denominational decision-making in the 1920s. In Canada, the truce that had delayed implementing church union because of the war came to an end in 1921. Opponents at first reacted mildly, perhaps wrongly assuming that the energy driving the movement had dissipated after years of inaction. Ephraim Scott, the long-serving editor of the Presbyterian Record (who made no secret of his own opposition), praised the Presbyterian delegates to the 1922 General Assembly for discussing church union “with a measure of detachment, with little anxiety as to the outcome.” He added, “The good spirit and tone of the Union debate has been noted and re-noted, in speech and press, as if a bear garden had been expected.”Footnote 34
That mood did not last long. Indignation replaced judicial calm once it was clear that the Joint Committee on Church Union was preparing to implement the agreement as quickly as possible. Daniel J. Fraser (by then the principal of Presbyterian College, Montreal) headed, at least formally, the reactivated Presbyterian Church Association, although much of the operational control was in the hands of the Ontario branch.Footnote 35 Its aim was to fight passage of the Act of Incorporation in the Dominion and provincial legislatures and, failing that, to raise doubts about the theological groundwork that had been laid for the new church and the public role it hoped to play.
There were hints of a budding relationship between the Presbyterian Church Association and fundamentalist sympathizers at a meeting held in Toronto's St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in the fall of 1922, described by the Presbyterian Witness as displaying “great plainness of speech.” Those opposed to union dusted off old arguments, disputing what Jesus had meant when he prayed “that they all may be one” and wrangling over voting procedures. But some came armed with a new line of attack, bluntly accusing the unionists of harboring modernist tendencies. Methodists, once spurned by some Presbyterians as backward in their theology, were targeted as the chief source of this new threat. One of the speakers (unnamed by the source, but likely J. G. Inkster, minister of Knox Church, Toronto) reportedly received warm applause when he declared “that the most ardent supporters of union are those who have lost the things that really count: it is the Modernist movement that is at the back of it, especially in the Methodist Church.”Footnote 36
A speech by a layman that was later distributed as a pamphlet also echoed fundamentalist concerns. Thomas McMillan insisted that the continuing Presbyterians stood for “the great Fundamentals of the Christian Faith for which our forefathers fought and died” and characterized the Basis of Union as the result of theological compromise. While he admitted that the latter affirmed the Bible as the standard of doctrine, he argued that many groups, including Christian Scientists and Roman Catholics, claimed as much. Moreover, agreeing with the statement was “only a condition for entrance to the work of the ministry, not a regulation principle as to teaching.” There was no way to discipline a minister whose teaching was not in harmony with the Basis of Union, he warned: “So long as he can find people to listen to him, he may go on wrecking congregations without limit.”Footnote 37
Anti-unionists winked at those in their own ranks who were closer to modernists than fundamentalists in matters of doctrine as they attempted to reframe their resistance to church union as a defense of the faith. A contributor to the Presbyterian Witness defended Methodists against Inkster's accusations, questioning how he “squares his theology with that of some of his anti-Union friends.” He dared anyone to say that the late William Caven and other union supporters that he listed had lost sight of the realities of the faith, as Inkster had claimed, retorting: “I will take my chances with them, rather than with a party so lost to truth and humility and charity.”Footnote 38 An editorial reminded readers of the relaxed position on the Westminster Confession that Fraser had taken in Harvard's journal, which appeared to differ little in practice from vowing to be in “essential agreement” with the Basis of Union's doctrinal statement. The editor drolly claimed to be puzzled that those who denounced such views “as heresy and subversive of the very foundations of the Christian faith” had somehow managed to reconcile their convictions “to the leadership of one by whom they are held and taught.”Footnote 39
The Basis of Union, formulated decades earlier, now drew renewed scrutiny. Replicating the tactics of American critics of church union, their Canadian counterparts claimed that “the Church formed by the organic union of the Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational Churches of Canada will be a Church without a creed.”Footnote 40 An editorial in the Presbyterian Witness advised that the best reply to such false notions was to counter with the theological articles themselves: a careful reading would “make it apparent that not only shall we have a creed when we enter the United Church, but that we shall have substantially the same creed that we have always had.”Footnote 41 Ephraim Scott's earlier praise of that statement came back to bite him. R. E. Welsh, a professor at Wesleyan Theological College in Montreal, taunted him for his 1909 editorial, noting its marked contrast to his present description of the United Church as a “creedless” church that had opened its door to error.Footnote 42
The Presbyterian Church Association believed that if the unionists were denied the rights to church property, they would lack the spirit to go through with their plan.Footnote 43 They thus used another arrow in their quiver: contesting the claim of “The United Church of Canada” to property held under the title of “The Presbyterian Church in Canada.” In their view the “new” church was not legally entitled to hold Presbyterian assets. Lawyers for the plaintiffs defended that claim by comparing the Westminster Confession and the Basis of Union to make the case that the doctrine of the Presbyterian Church in Canada “is forever fixed and that if any change in doctrine takes place the Church ceases to be the Church she was.”Footnote 44 This was more than a moot point: hanging over plans to proceed with church union was the specter of the 1904 ruling of the British House of Lords in what was referred to as the Overtoun Appeal. In a verdict returned just as church union negotiations were getting underway, the court had awarded all the assets of the Free Church of Scotland to the “Wee Free's,” a small number of Presbyterians who had opposed Scottish church union. Supporters of church union in Canada were apprehensive about how common law might be interpreted if those resisting church union were to take their case to London on appeal.
To counter a similar legal challenge over church assets, the uniting churches sought enabling legislation for incorporation as The United Church of Canada from the Dominion Parliament and the legislatures of Canada's nine provinces.Footnote 45 In an effort to defeat the bill, opponents expanded their efforts to inform the public about the dangers of church union, many of them echoing Machen's warnings about “one big church.” Ephraim Scott turned to writing letters (some of them directed to editors of secular newspapers, “with thanks for past favours” handwritten at the top of a few) to press that point. A circular letter that asked “Why Oppose Church Union?” framed the question before the legislatures as a matter of religious liberty that ought to concern not only members of the three uniting churches, but all Canadians. Claiming that the unionists were taking a step backward to medieval times by creating an outward and mechanical union, he warned that the new church would be given “corporate civil powers” by an Act of Parliament. Presbyterians would be forced to be members of it “by civil pains and penalties.”Footnote 46
The vote in the Dominion Parliament was crucial, and as it approached, J. W. MacNamara, secretary of the Presbyterian Church Association, proposed a related line of attack. He suspected that opposition to Roman Catholicism was one of the motives behind church union. Well aware that a sizable number of Members of Parliament were Catholic, McNamara wrote to E. Lloyd Morrow after the proposed legislation was introduced in the spring of 1924, and plotted what to do with that bit of information, writing: “This is pretty hard to prove but I believe it is, nevertheless, a fact, and I think our Roman Catholic friends should realize it.”Footnote 47
Morrow had a handy means of delivering that message: a dissertation that had earned him a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago had been published as Church Union in Canada. He had warned that the “Big United Protestant Church might cause racial and religious strife in Canada” if French- and English-speaking Catholics sensed that their civil and religious liberties were threatened.Footnote 48 He dismissed as absurd the argument that a Protestant national church was needed to “obliterate these precious religious differences, in order to mould the character of our citizenship.” Canada was already bound together by imperial, national, economic, familial, and religious bonds that were unbreakable. “Beware of the religio-political motives for Union,” he warned, for it might actually divide Canada by creating a split with Quebec “if a United Protestant Church were strong enough and unchristian enough to start a quarrel with our fellow-Christians of the Roman Catholic faith.”Footnote 49 The Presbyterian Church Association purchased 500 copies of Morrow's book and sent a copy to each member of the House of Commons and Senate of the Dominion Parliament and the provincial legislatures.Footnote 50
Such efforts, however, ultimately failed to prevent passage of the United Church Act. According to the terms of the bill, Presbyterian churches would become part of the United Church on June 10, 1925 unless a majority of a congregation's members voted to remain outside. The last hope of preserving the Presbyterian Church in Canada was thus to limit the losses by convincing as many Presbyterians as possible not to join forces with union supporters. Both sides pulled out all the stops to win in contests that divided family and friends long after the votes were counted.
The opposition launched a campaign to raise doubts about the theological soundness of the uniting parties. In a letter to a union supporter in 1924, George Pidgeon confided that he had heard a rumor that the “anti's” were planning to turn the controversy into a debate about modernism, a charge he personally considered “utterly baseless.” His suspicions were confirmed when the “anti's” used arguments similar to Machen's in Christianity and Liberalism as a blueprint for casting Methodists as not only liberal but apostate, an attention-grabbing move aimed at damaging the theological reputation of the unionists. He protested the “absolute dishonesty” of those who claimed that “Church Union is the Canadian form of Modernism” while retaining Fraser as president of the Presbyterian Church Association.Footnote 51 Letters he received from ministers raised similar concerns, one of them providing examples from Fraser's sermons and noting that at the General Assembly a year earlier he had been the only minister willing to preach in Ottawa's Unitarian Church.Footnote 52
In his study of the resistance to church union, N. K. Clifford plays down the portrayal of church union as a modernist project, suggesting that only a few local congregations condemned the Methodists in such terms.Footnote 53 However, the distribution of pamphlets across the country, as well as the attention to the allegation in both religious and secular papers, explains why union supporters were nervous. Publications aimed at a specific congregation could make an impact well beyond it. A case in point is the pamphlet distributed by the Kew Beach Presbyterian Church Association that contrasted “What the Unionists Demand” with “What the Presbyterian Fundamentalists Ask.” It explicitly linked the anti-union cause with anti-modernism, denouncing the Basis of Union as theologically deficient for not stating “a belief in the absolute inspiration and infallibility of the Scriptures.” It claimed that union would require Presbyterians to “pool our money and resources and our organization with the Methodists whose leaders no longer teach or believe in the atonement nor the inerrancy of the Bible.” The organizational outcome was not a true church but a “worldly alliance based upon human efficiency.”Footnote 54
Even Ephraim Scott seemed surprised by the attempt to rescript the church union debate. Curious about the reference to the Methodist Church as “apostate,” he wrote to the secretary of the Presbyterian Association to inquire. J. W. MacNamara explained that the pamphlet in question was a local initiative that was circulating in advance of the congregational vote. While he denied having seen it, he admitted he had “heard considerable regarding it.”Footnote 55 His letter mentioned a compilation of quotations taken from materials printed by the Methodist Book Room. He likely had in mind “An Open Letter to the Members and Adherents of the Presbyterian Church,” issued on October 24, 1924 with five Toronto congregations as signatories. The pamphlet boasted that the original documents from which the quotations had been lifted were available for inspection at the Toronto branch of the Presbyterian Church Association. The extracts were said to prove that “the officials of the Methodist Church are Apostate,” no longer believing in the atoning death of Christ or the infallibility of Scripture. “The Methodist Church of to-day has no longer any message for a sin-burdened world.” The pamphlet appealed to Presbyterians to consider whether they would turn over training of their ministers and instruction of their children to “a so-called United Church in which the Methodist body will be in a large majority and therefore the dominating factor.”Footnote 56
Similar accusations about the Methodists hit the daily newspapers a few weeks later when the Toronto Globe published a letter from Justice James Craig that repeated them. Whether or not the current theological statement in the Basis of Union was doctrinally sound was not the issue, he warned, predicting that it “may be and very likely will be changed to suit the views of those modernists who appear to control the policy of Unionists. The majority of the Union Church will be largely Methodist, and, therefore, supporters of the modernist views.” One could live in a small place like Gananoque, Ontario, and read Craig's letter republished in a local paper there. It was also printed as a pamphlet and distributed to members and adherents of congregations in eastern Ontario such as Lansdowne, Fairfax, and Sand Bay Presbyterian.Footnote 57
Pamphlets produced by the Red Deer, Alberta, branch of the Presbyterian Church Association featured similar theological accusations; they also echoed complaints of American fundamentalists about the ecclesial model of the plan of union. One criticized the Basis of Union for its “tendency to ecclesiasticism and centralization,” and urged members to scrutinize the United Church Act “to see how many of the vital matters are to be decided by the General Council of the United Church.” The pamphlet stoked fears of the unionists' political aspirations and dashed them at the same time, insisting that “the fruit bearing capacity of a church depends not on its numerical greatness, nor upon its power to dictate to governments, nor upon any aspect of temporal power, whether Roman or Protestant.” The social order could be made Christian “only to the extent to which the men and women who constitute that order are genuinely Christian.”Footnote 58
Union supporters in the Presbyterian Church rushed to defend themselves and their Methodist counterparts. Pidgeon, responding as convener of the Presbyterian committee on union, complained of an anti-union rally where unionists had been likened to modernists for departing from traditional standards of doctrine, and denounced letters in the daily press that accused them of deviating from Christian teaching. On the contrary, he countered, “nearly all the men who have led in the evangelistic campaigns of these three churches are Unionists and they feel that the Basis of Union puts in the forefront the vital truths of our religion.” He named Principal Fraser, as usual, along with Thomas Eakin, Professor of Old Testament (and later principal) at Knox College, to make the point that modernist approaches to the Bible had influenced both sides.Footnote 59
Correspondents from across the country joined in expressing objections in issue after issue of the Presbyterian Witness. A minister from Perth, Ontario, remarked that while he had never seen the term “modernist” defined, it was being used “as a sort of heretical brand with which to stamp almost the entire ministry of a great Christian Church, which was born in revivalism, and has attained its present position by emphasizing the evangelical truths of the Bible.”Footnote 60 Another from Westmount, Quebec, described “a concerted action” in Montreal and elsewhere to present the issue before the church as “Fundamentalism versus Modernism with the opponents of Union championing the old and cherished beliefs of the church.” He singled out the Kew Beach pamphlet for its “unfair and unintelligent attack” on the Methodists. The only way to assess the charges fairly, he suggested, was to look at the theological statement of the Basis of Union, “which, as everyone who has studied it knows, is thoroughly evangelical.”Footnote 61 The support that poured in included a letter from Huntsville, Ontario, from a man opposed to church union: “I respectfully decline to believe, as I have recently been urged by pamphlet and otherwise, that the Methodist Church is an ‘apostate’ Church and that she has ‘no message for a sin-burdened world.’ I happen to know better from experience, a much safer source of opinion than printed pamphlets.”Footnote 62
Methodist leaders in Canada were stunned and furious to hear their church described as not only creedless and modernist, but apostate. Chafing from the disparaging comments, T. Albert Moore, secretary of both the Methodist General Conference and the Joint Committee on Church Union (and later the first general secretary of the United Church), fired off a personal letter of protest to a Presbyterian minister who had offered federation as a compromise between the two sides. The Methodists “did not take any part in your debate, we were not involved and we acted with high restraint,” Moore complained. “Your people [the Presbyterian Church Association] deliberately dragged us in and argued that we are of such character that association with us in Church fellowship would be betrayal of Christian honor.” In his view, the aspersions were the result of “deliberate invention” rather than misunderstanding.Footnote 63 His letter to S. W. Dyde, principal of Queen's Theological College and a supporter of church union, complained of efforts made over the past six months to convince congregations that the survival of Christianity was at stake in defeating the Methodists. Moore expressed concern for the loss of votes (probably 20,000 in Ontario congregations alone he estimated), but also dreaded the prospect of being “forced to face a generation in which we are confronted with a body organized in fierce antipathy to us, animated by hatred and mislead [sic] by falsehood.”Footnote 64 Casting the case against union in anti-modernist terms provoked Moore, who was to become a powerful executive in the new church, thereby further complicating the relationship between the United Church and the non-concurring Presbyterians after 1925.
Condemning the union cause in such terms also caught the attention of denominations not directly involved in union negotiations. T. T. Shields, minister of Jarvis Street Baptist Church, Toronto, commended Presbyterians who spurned becoming part of the United Church. Reportedly preaching on one occasion for over an hour on the dangers of the proposed union, Shields scorned the idea of “a church as being a great organization under one Government” since it had “absolutely no warrant in the Word of God. It is pagan. It is Rome.” Warning of its political aspirations, he echoed the typical fundamentalist concern for religious liberty: “What right has any church to impose its will on the Government of any free people? You will have to ask the permission of the United Church to live after a while.” Shields singled out “The Blessed Hope,” one of T. Albert Moore's pamphlets, as an example of the “infidel literature” associated with the union movement, perhaps adding to Moore's bitterness over the Presbyterian Church Association's portrayal of Methodists as modernists.Footnote 65
IV. 1925 and Beyond
While issues of confessional identity stoked the two controversies, the reality that church union was achieved in one country, but not the other, affected denominational dynamics in different ways. In Canada the majority of Presbyterians became part of the United Church in 1925. When questioned about their suitability for ministry, its ordinands were asked if they were in essential agreement with a slightly revised version of the theological articles in the Basis of Union that had been drafted two decades before the consummation of church union. However, a third of Presbyterian congregations voted to remain outside the United Church. They adhered, as before, to the Westminster Confession as their statement of faith, and their ministers vowed subscription to it at the time of their ordination.
In the United States, the party in the PCUSA that Moorhead describes as the “moderate conservatives” opted for confessional tolerance in 1925 (and further alienated the fundamentalist wing) by denying the General Assembly the authority to designate particular articles of the Westminster Confession as “essential.” Those persuaded by the case for church union in Canada would have found a kindred spirit in Robert E. Speer, the well-known Secretary of Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions who played a pivotal role in those deliberations. Insisting that a divided world was “in desperate need of unity in Christ,” he pleaded “for a comprehensive Christianity encompassing the insights of various theological perspectives.”Footnote 66
But who should leave when bickering factions find themselves unable to share the same theological house? Machen argued that withdrawing and leaving the church to liberals would be a violation of trust, since it was they who had strayed from the Westminster Confession.Footnote 67 Yet he was among those who left the “The Presbyterian Church in the United States of America” to form “The Presbyterian Church of America.” The latter quickly faced a legal complaint involving more than property issues: a court ruled that the name of the new church was too similar to the former. Those who had left then became the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
The legal outcome in Canada was different. Insisting that the uniting congregations had left the Presbyterian Church in Canada to form a new and different church, the non-concurring members refused to give up the name “Presbyterian Church in Canada.” In doing so, they defied the Act of Parliament that stipulated that the three uniting churches—names and all—had been incorporated as The United Church of Canada. There was no resolution of the dispute until T. Albert Moore retired in 1936 and handed over the responsibilities of what had become the most powerful executive position in the United Church to someone whose memories of the controversy were less bitter.Footnote 68 The dispute over the name was settled only after lengthy negotiations that included amending the United Church of Canada Act in 1939 to allow the continuing Presbyterians the use of their pre-1925 denominational name, while not denying the United Church's claim to have amalgamated it.
However, resolving the legal issues did not settle the underlying theological and institutional tensions of confessional identity that had stoked the controversies in the first place. Presbyterians who supported the venture of church union were by and large theological moderates, rather than modernists as their detractors had claimed. A certain brand of fundamentalism, akin to Machen's confessional orthodoxy, still appealed to the conservative wing of the continuing Presbyterian Church in Canada. Yet to preserve their distinct identity as Presbyterians, they had little choice but to cooperate with those whose theology was no less liberal than some of the “apostate” unionists.
The ironies of that situation are illustrated by Machen's continuing involvement in the affairs of the Presbyterian Church in Canada after 1925. Less than a year after sending a letter of encouragement to the Presbyterians who had refused to adjourn on June 9, Machen was invited to preach and lecture at two large Presbyterian congregations whose members had opposed church union. The sermon on “The Mission of the Church” that he preached at Knox Church, Toronto, and MacVicar Church, Montreal, was subsequently published in the Presbyterian Record, still edited by Ephraim Scott. A note explained that the address had been delivered in several places in the United States and recently published in an American Presbyterian magazine. But Machen's message must have sounded just as relevant to his theological allies in Canada.Footnote 69
Machen reiterated that his target was not only theological modernism, but “organizational Church union.” He lambasted those “who cherish the notion of one universal Church organization, mapping out the work for the whole world through some central committee, assigning a place to every man and allowing no place whatever for the Spirit of God, trying to bring all Christendom under its sway.” That vision he dismissed as a “depressing and hateful dream” and an obstacle to fulfilling the prayer of Jesus “that all may be one”—alluding, whether intentionally or not, to the passage from John's gospel often quoted by Canadian supporters of church union.Footnote 70 He warned that many denominations were now “completely dominated by the non-Christian forces,” declaring that if the Plan of Organic Union had been implemented in the United States a few years earlier, the Presbyterian Church in America would have ceased “to be Christian in its corporate capacity.” Echoing his earlier words of encouragement, he praised his listeners for their courage, assuring them that their church was a “like a City on a hill” and an example “to all those throughout the world who love the Lord Jesus Christ.”Footnote 71
Behind the scenes more was at stake for Machen. Since Principal Alfred Gandier and the faculty of Knox College had resigned after a legal ruling on distribution of assets awarded it to the Presbyterians, the flagship theological school was without a principal. Ned B. Stonehouse recounts that Knox was one of several seminaries hoping to persuade Machen to leave Princeton. A. Donald MacLeod's investigation of Machen's papers in the archives of Westminster Theological Seminary confirms that a group of Presbyterians, described by J. G. Inkster as “sound and pronounced conservatives,” were keen to nominate him as Knox College's principal at the upcoming General Assembly. However, their plan hit a snag. Just days earlier, Machen had been nominated for, and had accepted, the Chair in Apologetics at Princeton, pending the General Assembly's approval.
Stonehouse reports that although Machen had “assisted great numbers of theological students of Princeton to labor in Presbyterian Churches in Canada,” he felt there was too much at stake at Princeton to leave.Footnote 72 Machen's correspondence indicates that during his visit to Canada, he was still expecting the honor—and with good reason, since approval by the General Assembly was typically only a formality.Footnote 73 Machen knew there was opposition to his appointment, but he confidently wrote he had “not the slightest notion” that the appointment would be contested. Claiming that he was unworthy of the honor and convinced that his duty was to remain at Princeton, he declined to let his name stand for the position at Knox.Footnote 74
With Machen unwilling to make a move to Toronto, the Knox College Board of Management recommended Thomas Eakin, a professor from Presbyterian College in Montreal who had served as acting vice-principal after Gandier's departure. MacLeod describes Eakin as representing “a different axis” from confessionalists who, no doubt hoping for someone more like Machen, fought the appointment. The turning point came when Ephraim Scott, well known for his confessionalist sympathies, rose at the General Assembly to endorse Eakin, after being assured during a private conservation of his theological soundness, specifically his beliefs about the inspiration of Scripture.Footnote 75 Among those unhappy with Eakin's appointment were some fundamentalist-leaning confessionalists at Knox Church in Toronto. The opposition included A. B. Winchester, its retired minister and a leader in founding Evangelical Theological Seminary (1924), a school noted for its dispensationalist theology (later renamed Dallas Theological Seminary). In a letter to his friend Lewis Sperry Chafer, who had been named its president, Winchester complained that Eakin had “ever been known as an advanced Modernist,” and expressed doubts about his claims of faithfulness to the Westminster Confession.Footnote 76
As for Machen, the General Assembly of the PCUSA vetoed an appointment for the first time in its history and denied him the promotion he had expected. His dismay at the snub and disappointment with the investigation into tensions at Princeton that followed, led to his departure. He would go on to form Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia in 1929. One can only conjecture how the history of Presbyterianism in both countries would have been different had Machen left Princeton for Toronto, rather than Philadelphia. Would he have been able to use his position to rally fundamentalists in and beyond the Presbyterian Church in Canada? His influence was instead indirect, with some of the graduates of his new seminary recruited to help with the shortage of Presbyterian ministers in Canada after church union.Footnote 77 It is these graduates of Westminster Theological Seminary that Joseph C. McClelland likely has in mind in noting the arrival of an “influx of conservative Calvinists to fill Presbyterian pulpits,” thereby strengthening the tendency toward “rational orthodoxy”—another way of referring to Machen's variety of fundamentalism.Footnote 78
Machen's sympathizers also shored up fundamentalist attacks on the United Church after 1925, perpetuating what its leaders believed to be a distorted image of a church that was modernist, no longer evangelical, and perhaps not even Christian. R. J. Wilson, a church executive whose role had shifted from coordinating publicity for the pro-union side to handling requests for information about the United Church, complained that in the United States “the fundamentalist press is sedulously circulating the idea that the Presbyterian Church (continuing) stands for evangelical religion and the United Church quite definitely for a surrender of the evangelical position.” Presbyterian churches from other countries treated the United Church's delegations with little respect, he claimed, and in his view fundamentalist meddling was to blame.Footnote 79
The United Church vigorously defended its own understanding of what it meant to be evangelical, insisting that it did not oblige one to adopt the theological formulations of the gospel message propounded by fundamentalism. “Can nobody stop the use of these absurd terms, Fundamentalism and Modern?” asked an exasperated J. R. P. Sclater, pastor of Old St. Andrew's United in Toronto. Fundamentalist beliefs were not fundamental to the faith, he maintained, nor were the modernists particularly modern. Attempts to label Christians as one or the other were succeeding only in “chloroforming the mind.”Footnote 80
Concerned that the quarrel was “unquestionably doing damage to evangelical religion,” Sclater preached a series of sermons that were published as Modernist Fundamentalism. He contrasted the “reverent study of the Bible” with the doctrine of “mechanical, verbal inspiration” that he claimed was a new theory adopted by proponents of fundamentalism.Footnote 81 Events suggested to Sclater that the debate about biblical criticism, once assumed to be over, had been reimported to Canada, making it “necessary to reassure our people that evangelicalism is only strengthened when it is liberal.”Footnote 82 Upholding the theological articles on Scripture and revelation in the Basis of Union, he made a bold claim: “The more our document is studied the more any fears that our Church stands for an ultra-liberal position will be dissipated. It is, as a matter of fact a thoroughly conservative statement.”Footnote 83 But most of the United Church's theological opponents were unconvinced that a church could be identified as both liberal and evangelical.Footnote 84
As for the continuing Presbyterians, it was a Canadian influenced by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth whose leadership proved to be more decisive than Machen's. To fill one of the vacancies created by church union, Knox College invited Walter Bryden, a minister serving a pastoral charge in southern Ontario, to give two weekly lectures in church history. In 1927 he was appointed as Professor of Church History and the History and Philosophy of Religion. Despite being at theological odds with both the conservative and liberal wings of the Presbyterian Church, he became principal in 1945.Footnote 85 In his position of influence at Knox, Bryden championed a theological perspective unlike either fundamentalism or modernism or even the progressive orthodoxy of the moderates.
Bryden shared suspicions of the United Church's “modern” assumptions, and joined fundamentalists in repudiating both its inclusive statement of faith and ambitions for a public role in Canada. He explained his reservations about the ecumenical movement in Why I Am a Presbyterian, a book written nearly a decade after union to aid students in responding to antagonism in university circles to “denominationalism.”Footnote 86 There are echoes of Machen's Christianity and Liberalism in his allegation that “a great deal of the Union sentiment which has found expression in modern times is the direct result of a modernistic outlook upon life, which is not essentially Christian.”Footnote 87 Bryden's problem with the Basis of Union was not that it differed from the Westminster Confession, but that there was in it “no new compelling vision of God.”Footnote 88 To him it was “obvious that the United Church as a whole has had no very serious sense of the tremendous role that doctrine must play in the real life of a Church.”Footnote 89
Bryden's ecclesiology also disclosed a complaint that was common to anti-modernists, anti-unionists, and anti-ecumenical Barthians: the doctrine of salvation was ignored and the “task” of the church as an enterprise had become paramount.Footnote 90 Rather than focusing on its mission in Canada, he insisted that “the true Church belongs to no age and no country, is conditioned by no climate, and in the hearts of believing men, is supreme over all patriotisms or loyalties of any kind.” He feared that some of his Presbyterian co-religionists were in danger of going where the unionists had led by “estimating themselves and the significance of their Church in the light of this country, and the conditions obtaining here, alone.”Footnote 91
Church union in a sense defused the fundamentalist-modernist controversy among continuing Presbyterians in Canada by compelling those who were at odds over doctrine and the task of the church to work together. Not all were happy with the resulting compromises, but in reality the conservative wing was left with few options. MacLeod bluntly states the dilemma of those who had “voted to remain Presbyterian because they hoped a purged Presbyterian Church in Canada would be ‘sound.’” Instead, they found themselves in “a denomination of theological extremes, held together because they did not want to haemorrhage more members.”Footnote 92 The controversy decisively shaped the United Church of Canada as well. The largely concocted, but convincingly publicized, threat of modernism transformed middle-of-the-road pragmatists into innovators whose theology was suspect, a reputation that proved difficult to shake.
