Fundamentalist–modernist controversy

By the end of the 1930s, proponents of theological liberalism had, at the time, effectively won the debate,[2] with the modernists in control of all mainline Protestant seminaries, publishing houses, and denominational hierarchies in the United States.

Between 1829 and 1850, the Princeton Review, the leading Old School theological journal under the editorship of Charles Hodge, published 70 articles against higher criticism, and the number increased in the years after 1850.

The General Assembly responded with its famous Portland Deliverance, affirming that the Presbyterian Church holds that the Bible is without error and that ministers who believe otherwise should withdraw from the ministry.

However, the 1910 General Assembly, acting outside its scope of authority, dismissed the complaint against the three men and at the same time instructed its Committee on Bills and Overtures to prepare a statement for governing future ordinations.

In 1910, a wealthy Presbyterian layman, Lyman Stewart, the founder of Union Oil and a proponent of dispensationalism as taught in the newly published Scofield Reference Bible, decided to use his wealth to sponsor a series of pamphlets to be entitled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth.

It is worth pointing out that the only people who actually embraced the name "fundamentalist" during the 1910s were committed dispensationalists, who elevated the premillennial return of Christ to the status of a fundamental of the Christian faith.

The Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions consequently called for a meeting of Protestant leaders on the topic and in early 1919 the Interchurch World Movement (IWM) was established with John Mott as its chairman.

in 1874, three years after The Descent of Man was published, and argued that if Charles Darwin's theory excluded the design argument, it was effectively atheism and could not be reconciled with biblical Christianity.

In the early period, it must have appeared far from clear that Darwin's theory of natural selection would come to be hegemonic among scientists, as refutations and alternate systems were still being proposed and debated.

Bryan argued that Germany's militarism and "barbarism" came from their belief that the "struggle for survival" described in Darwin's On the Origin of Species applied to nations as well as to individuals,[10] and that "The same science that manufactured poisonous gases to suffocate soldiers is preaching that man has a brute ancestry and eliminating the miraculous and the supernatural from the Bible.

[13] Germany, or so Bryan's argument ran, had replaced Christ's teachings with Nietzsche's philosophy based on ideas of survival of the fittest, and the implication was that America would suffer the same fate if unchecked.

Ultimately, Bryan could not convince even Machen to back his position, and the Assembly simply approved a resolution condemning materialistic (as opposed to theistic) evolutionary philosophy.

The Committee's minority report recommended a declaration re-affirming the denomination's commitment to the Five Fundamentals of 1910 and to require New York Presbytery to force First Presbyterian Church to conform to the Westminster Confession.

At the same time, Henry Sloane Coffin of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City issued a statement saying that he did not accept the Five Fundamentals and that if Fosdick were removed from his pulpit, they would need to get rid of him too.

Two weeks after the General Assembly of 1923, 36 clergymen met in Syracuse, New York, and, using Nichols' paper as a base, ultimately issued a declaration known to history as the Auburn Affirmation.

The General Assembly's issuance of the Five Fundamentals not only eroded this tradition, but it flew in the face of the Presbyterian Church's constitution, which required all doctrinal changes be approved by the presbyteries.

In response, the New York commissioners, led by Henry Sloane Coffin protested that General Assembly had no right to change or add to the conditions for entrance to the ministry beyond those affirmed in the reunions of 1870 and 1906.

At the same time he had been campaigning against Darwinism (largely unsuccessfully) within the Presbyterian Church, William Jennings Bryan had also been encouraging state lawmakers to pass laws banning the teaching of evolution in public schools.

(Given the present-day contours of the evolution–creation debate, in many states in 1925, evolution continued to be taught in church-run institutions at the same time that its teaching was banned in state-run public schools.)

In response to the announcement that Bryan would be attending the trial, renowned lawyer and committed agnostic Clarence Darrow volunteered to serve on Scopes' defense team.

Although the prosecution of Scopes was successful, the trial is widely seen as a crucial moment in discrediting the fundamentalist movement in America, particularly after Darrow called Bryan to the stand and he appeared little able to defend his view of the Bible.

(Probably the reason why the issue of evolution has obtained such an iconic status within the popular consciousness about the fundamentalist–modernist controversy is that it represented the one point where internal church politics intersected with government, specifically public school, policy.)

The report went on to conclude that the Presbyterian system had traditionally allowed a diversity of views when the core of truth was identical; and that the church flourished when it focused on its unity of spirit.

However, to combat a perceived lack of training in practical divinity, a number of more moderate New Schoolers were brought in, including Charles Erdman and J. Ross Stevenson, who by 1920 was the president of the seminary.

They commissioned a study of missionaries in India, Burma, China, and Japan and launched a separate inquiry under the chairmanship of the philosopher and Harvard professor William Ernest Hocking.

"[17] Then, in a November 1932 speech before a large audience at the Astor Hotel, later published in Harper's,[18] Buck decried gauging the success of missions by the numbers of new church members.

Erdman responded that the Board was committed to historic Evangelical standards and that they felt that Pearl S. Buck's comments were unfortunate, but he hoped she might yet be won back to the missionary cause.

J. Gresham Machen now published a book arguing that the Board of Foreign Missions was insufficiently evangelical and particularly that its secretary, Robert E. Speer, had refused to require missionaries to subscribe to the Five Fundamentals.

In New Brunswick Presbytery, Machen proposed an overture to General Assembly calling on it to ensure that in future, only solidly evangelical Christians be appointed to the Board of Foreign Missions.

By the 1920s, it was clear that every mainstream Protestant denomination was going to be willing to accommodate modernism, with the exception of the Presbyterians, Southern Baptists, and the Missouri Synod Lutherans, where the situation was still unclear.