What's worse Heresy or Schism? / Fundamentalism and Modernism

http://www.piratechristianradio.com/fftf/F4F030912.mp3

"Has anyone ever heard of Schleiermacher? -- No?-- May it stay that way!!!"

Presbyterian Controversy

The Presbyterian Controversy is due at the library and no more renewals allowed.  AAAhhh.  Last minute quoting.

Chapter 2 is on Gresham Machen and his response to liberalism.  He had some good things to say. Let's just shamelessly get some of it.

Young, energetic, and aggressively conservative, J. Gresham Machen had been watching the Fosdick-Macartney duel with rapt attention.  For more than a decade Machen, assistant professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, had been warning the church of the destructive consequences of modernist theology.  In November 1921 he distilled his ideas into a brief, poignant address entitled "Liberalism or Christianity "  As the title implied, Machen had concluded that the liberal religion preached by Fosdick and his kind was not simply a variety of Christianity but a different faith altogether.  "At every point," he declared, "the liberal movement is in opposition to the Christian message."

... "The cause of spiritual decline was clear to all who cared tyo see.  The 'glories of the past' had vanished with the rise of naturalistic, Liberalism, which to Machen's mind was rooted in naturalism, denied any supernatural intervention of God into history.  In an effort to accommodate the faith to culture, liberal theology had sacrified 'everything distinctive of Christianity," leaving nothing but a "sordid life of utilitarianism."
Liberalism not only departed from the historic christian tradition on every fundamental doctrine but, most important, denied the value of doctrine itself.  Having accepted the premises of modern historicism, liberals believed that creeds were "merely the changing expression of a unitary Christian experience."  Fosdick was a perfect example of this tendency:  "All theology" he said, "tentatively phrases in current thought and language the best that, up to that date, thinkers on religion have achieved; and the most hopeful thing about any system of theology is that it will not last.  In contradistinction to this relativism  Machen argued, historic Christianity had always held that creeds were not merely expressions of Christian experience but statements of the facts on which experience was based.  Doctrines, composed of historical 'facts' plus the meaning of the facts, were the very foundation of the Christian message.  The modernist derogation of doctrine, Machen insisted, separated it from any legitimate claim to the title Christian. 
.. Religious authority provided another point of contention   The bible, God's inspired and inerrant Word, authorized all genuinely Christian doctrine;  but "Christian consciousness' or "Christian experience"  provided the touchstone for the claims of liberalism.  Machen agreed that experience did have a place in the Christian life;  but it was secondary, not primary. ... The facts of the bible, not christian consciousness, stood as the foundation of the faith.
Machen subscribed wholeheartedly to the Princeton doctrine of inspiration;  that is, he held that 'the Holy Spirit so informed the minds of the biblical writers that they were kept from falling into the errors that mar all other books."  Nevertheless, he allowed some leeway on the question of biblical inspiration.
Liberalism's Christology fell far short of the christian view of Jesus.  Modernists denied the miracles, the virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement, and the deity of Christ.  While Christians accepted Jesus as the divine Savior who had paid the price of sin on the cross, liberals looked on him as simply an example of moral perfection.  but sinful humanity could not be redeemed by the example of a man.  The deny the supernatural and the substitutionary atonement was to deny Christianity. (p. 28-30)

Let's skip ahead slightly to hear something about the Scottish Common Sense philosophy, which somehow fits into this debate.

The Scottish philosophy of Common Sense had been developed primarily by Thomas Reid (1710-1796) and Dugald Stewart in Glasgow and Edinburgh to refute the idealism of Bishop Berkeley and skepticism of David Hume.  Contrary to the thinkers who has followed Locke in claiming that 'ideas,' not external realities, are the objects of our thought, Common Sense philosophers maintained that we can and do know the real world directly through our senses.  Ideas, Reid argued, were mental acts, not mental objects.  Therefore, to have an idea of any object was to perceive the object itself, not just a mental image. Anyone in the right mind (except, perhaps, a few skeptical philosophers) knew that the objective world, the self, causal relationships  and moral principles existed.  Without this common sense, life would be quite literally impossible.
Truth, these philosophers maintained, was a single entity, absolute, permanent, and discover-able by all people through all ages.  Following seventeenth-century thinker Francis Bacon, they argued that the one sure way to arrive a the truth was through the inductive scientific method.  Flights into the fanciful world of metaphysical speculation and hypotheses could never lead to certainty.  (p. 34)

I don't really know enough philosophy to say much about it.  But when it has to do with philosophy of science (the only philosophy course I ever took)  I'm with Karl Popper.  He says that things can only be provable if they are also falsifiable.  Also, we had a long thread dealing with Luther on reason, as treated by Becker in "The Foolishness of God"  (see this blog).

For sure, metaphysical speculation cannot "prove" anything.  That we know.  And Lutheran theology allows for more paradox than say Calvinist.

The Scottish tradition, in maintaining the reliability of knowledge, provided a firm foundation for Thornwell's efforts to reconcile the claims of science and religion.  Like his Northern contemporary Charles Hodge, Thornwell refused to concede the impossibility of Natural Theology.  ... Thornwell's epistemological convictions buttressed his doctrine of scriptural authority.  (p. 34)

In 1912 Machen delivered a speech--later published as "Christianity and Culture"--that not only revealed the resolution of his crises but in large measure set the agenda for the remainder of his career.  The church, he maintained, was facing a desperate emergency precipitated by the secularization of modern culture...  The defection from Christianity was rooted in modern culture's apathy or outright hostility to the gospel.  Since the universities were the intellectual greenhouses of the nation, the cultural apostasy had to be stopped there or it would not be stopped at all.  'What is today matter of academic speculation," he warned, 'begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires.  In that second stage, it has gone too far to be combatted;  the time to stop it was when it was still a matter of impassionate debate.'  (p.46)

Machen had returned from Germany from his studies under liberal theologian Wilhelm Herrmann, who had deeply impacted him, to see how far the experience threatened to move him away from conservative Christianity.  He had known for himself, how far a university experience can move you intellectually.  Hence, he saw the main arena for the discussion in the university and seminary.   From there the impact would spread.

But contrary to Hermann, Machen insisted that the biblical witness could no be ignored once Christ was known;  if the bible could be proven false, faith woud crumble.  History and faith could not be divorced.  To Machen's mind, liberalism was intellectually bankrupt. (p. 49)

I agree.  Liberalism is intellectually bankrupt.  You can't even speak with liberals.  The moment you bring up facts, logic, doctrine, the Bible, the word, text, they pretty much flush with anger.

Another person involved in the Presbyterian crisis was Jennings Bryan, who also became involved in the famous Scopes Trial.  His main thrust against evolution and Darwin was linked to its effects on society.

Two books that Bryan read during the war, Headquarters Nights by Vernon Kellogg and The Science of Power by Benjamin Kidd, convinced Bryan that evolutionary theory was at the root of the world's problems.  Kellogg's work demonstrated the influence of Darwin on German military officers;  and Kidd attempted "to trace a straight line from Darwin through Nietzsche to the growth of German nationalism, militarism, and materialism."  For Bryan the connection was sealed.  The civilized world had gone to war because it had tured away fro the philosophy of the Prince of Peace to a philosophy of Might makes Right  based on the Darwinian hypothesis.  In 1920 Bryan told the World Brotherhood congress that Darwinism was 'the most paralyzing influence with which civilization has had to contend during the last century.'  Nietzsche, who merely carried Darwinian theory to its logical conclusion, had 'promulgated  philosophy that condemned democracy... denounced Christianity .. denied the existence of God, overturned all standards of morality... and endeavored to substitute the worship of the superman for the worship of Jehova.'  (p. 68)

I have to admit a great deal of sympathy with Bryan's point of view.

Henry Sloan Coffin was a liberal leader in the controversy, trained at the new Yale University, as well as under Wilhelm Herrmann.  I am struck by his views on his subscription to the confessions.  Personally, I have chosen to vow loyalty to the Lutheran confessions, and mean every word of it.  Thus I should not be surprised that some Calvinists have problems with their confession, as I would have problems with it, too.  But this here is a somewhat different matter.  Here Henry Sloan Coffin wants to have his cake and eat it, too, have complete liberty in the way he deals with subscription.  This would be the way a "liberal" (not to say apostate) subscribes to the confessional standards.

In subscribing to the Westminster confession of Faith Coffin did not believe that he was accepting the doctrines stated in the Confession.  Rather, as he later maintained, 'The formula means to me that under the supreme authority of Christ I receive the confession as setting forth in seventeenth century thought and language the principal doctrines which have grown out of and foster the religious experience of protestant evangelical Christians, and which it is my privilege to teach in the best thought and speech at my command for those to whom I minister.'  This interpretation of the subscription vow obviously gave Coffin a great deal of leeway in accepting the confession.  Unlike Machen, he saw no difficulty in a loose adoption of the creed.  Indeed, Coffin seemed to intimate that no creedal affirmations at all should be required for ordination when he wrote, 'to acknowledge that a man possesses the spirit of god and is equipped to serve the Kingdom, but to hold him unfit to minister in our select theological club because he does not wholly share the views of the majority, seems to me perilously like blasphemy against the Holy Ghost.'  In any even, Coffin did not believe that creedal differences should bar one from ministry.  There was no inconsistency, he maintained, 'in worshiping and working, or even in occupying a position of leadership, in a communion with whose creed, or ritual, or methods one is not in full sympathy'. (p. 86) 

One could pull one's hair out.  He could just say, "we don't need a church, we don't need a creed, we can all believe as we want", but instead he accuses those who disagree with him with the sin against the Holy Spirit.  What a scandal.  Shame on him.  This is how it is rationalized:

Coffin had adopted the historicist assumptions which had been gaining ground in America in the preceding generation.  While for Machen history was a record of facts that remained true for all time, historicist thinkers understood history to be profoundly colored by the historian's perspective.  ... Coffin had learned his historicism not only at Edinburgh and Marburg but also at Union. ... In 1892 Arthur McGiffert, Coffin's teacher and then colleague, delineated the assumptions of the modern church historian, stating, 'A sharp distinction must be drawn between divine truth and our conceptions of that truth;  that, though the former is always and eternally the same, unchanged and unchangeable, in our conceptions of it--in other words in our doctrines--there has been as real a development as in our institution."  Later in the same speech he asserted, 'The historical study of Christian doctrine reminds us that human notions and conceptions change fro age to age, that even the categories of thought undergo more or less of a revision, and it thus teaches us, that, if we will be true to the truth as it has been revealed unto us, we must from time to time adjust our statements to the new conditions.'  To McGiffert's mind and to his student coffin's, the shifting patterns of thought throughout history required constant reinterpretation of doctrines.  Creeds were only 'man's attempt in the best thought and language at his command to express his religious experience.'... True to the tradition of Friedich Schleiermacher, religious experience provided the ahistorical bedrock of the Christian faith for Coffin.  "Religion is experience, " Coffin believed.  "It is the response of man's nature to his highest inspirations.  It is his intercourse with Being above himself and his world.' Under the rubric of experience Coffin included feeling, intellect, and will, but warned of exalting one of these elements to the detriment of the whole. 
Inasmuch as experience provided the foundation of religion it necessarily had to be the basis of preaching.  The minister of God was 'not to repeat what others have said in Scripture or out of it;  he is to say what he is sure of, because he has experienced it and believes it as he believes himself.'  Likewise, Coffin advised his congregations  "If any man here is trying to make himself believe anything about God, or Christ, or the bible, or the christian life, let him be sure that he is looking at some man-made view of the Divine, a mere idol.  When God's truth comes along, it does its own convincing... Its inescapableness is the test of its diviness." (p. 89-90)

WHAT UNMITIGATED DISASTER.  He sounds like another Swedenborgian.  All this because they thought the Bible isn't true. Why DID they bother with church careers?

I have to quit here, for today.
 

Presbyterian Controversy / Millenialism /Holiness

We are still looking at the Presbyterian Controversy.

"While some Christians were trying to make peace with modernity through liberal adaptation, others developed more conservative innovations.  As the country was struggling through the era of Reconstruction, a new type of millennial thought, dubbed dispensational premillennialism, was winning adherents.  Developed primarily by the Englishman John Nelson Darby around 1840, dispensationalism asserted that the history of the world was divided into seven dispensations including the historical "parenthesis" of the current church age.  Grounding his theology on a complex literal interpretation of the prophetic Scriptures, Darby maintained that the present era would steadily deteriorate until it ended with the secret rapture of the church and the return of Christ.  Popularized by Darby on seven missionary journeys to the United States and Canada from 1862-1877, dispensationalism received its greatest impetus from annual Prophetic and Bible Conferences initiated in 1875 and from the publication of the dispensationalist Scofield Reference Bible in 1909.  The founding of the Moody Bible Institute in 1886, the bible Institute of Los Angeles in 1907, and numerous bible schools, gave dispensationalists institutional bases from which to propagate their doctrine.  
The rise of the Holiness movement lent further support to conservative Christianity in the late nineteenth century.  Springing mainly from Wesleyan roots, the Holiness teachings were also propagated in America by adherents of the more Reformed Keswick and Oberlin movements.  Despite the resultant doctrinal variations, all Holiness teaching stressed a literal biblicism, emotional fervor, strict moral conduct, and most important sanctification through the work of the Holy Spirit.  Disseminated through camp meetings, conferences, and Holiness denominations such as the Church of God and the Nazarenes, perfectionism became a pervasive theme in conservative theology.   Holiness doctrines inspired a dramatic concern for social work among the poor, resulting in the establishment of nurseries, diet kitchens, relief programs, and employment bureaus to help the needy.  Through at least the early part of the twentieth century, therefore, conservative evangelicalism and social concern were wedded in an effort to christianize America." (p.21)

I just marvel at all these people coming up with their own thing and having the audacity to preach it far and wide.

American gnosticism

http://mercyjourney.blogspot.ca/2012/10/sasse-de-confessionalization-of.html

Interesting Sasse translation by Matt Harrison on American masonic, gnostic connections and deconfessionalizing of the church.

Presbyterian Controversy / "Fundamentalism"

On "Fundamentalism", from The Presbyterian Controversy

Between 1910 and 1915 conservatives of various shades joined forces to publish a series of twelve volumes entitled The Fundamentals:  A Testimony to the Truth.  Financed by California oil magnates Lyman and Milton Stewart, the works contained a series of essays by British, Canadian  and American theologians on such issues as scriptural authority, sin, salvation, the virgin birth, missions, and sabbatarianism.  Approximately three million volumes were distributed to "every pastor, missionary, theological professor, theological student, YMCA and YWCA secretary, college professor, Sunday school superintendent, and religious editor in the English -speaking world."  These works were more important for their symbolic value than for their contributions to theology:  as historian George Marsden has argued, when the term  fundamentalist  was coined in 1920, "it called to mind the broad, united front of the kind of opposition to modernism that characterized these widely know, if little studied, volumes."  In contradistinction to post-World War I fundamentalism  however, the majority of the articles in The Fundamentals manifested a nonbelligerent tone.  In the midst of postwar polarization many moderates who wrote article for The Fundamentals, like Presbyterians Charles Erdman and Robert Speer, would find their position almost impossible to maintain.  (p.21) 

At Amazon.com we can see that the Fundamentals are still available, here.  Somehow, nothing is moving me to rush out and get a set, though I might some day see if the library has them.

As I said, in our growing up, the conflict was framed such that we were always waiting on tenterhooks to see what a pastor would preach on Easter and other holy days, to see if it resembled anything in the Biblical witness.  Being good, little citizens and church-goers we put up with the state employed, pampered official pastor, but taught ourselves other things in the homes and other Bible studies.  My confirmation classes were under such a liberal pastor and I can honestly say that the time spent was completely useless.  I still have my notes from such times.  There were discussions about spending money, such as, if we did not spend money on church buildings and maintaining congregations what could we all spend the money on and how would it be best spent.  We formed groups and debated this.   Then I remember there being something on Mother Courage by Berthold Brecht.  It is not really surprising that the state church is suffering much decline in Europe.

Tolstoy and Prebyterians 3

Ok, the "Presbyterian Controversy"  is really not coming along, but the book has now been renewed for the third time;  it seems no one is actually looking for that book, nor the Swedenborg compendia which are languishing by the front door.  But we will say a few things about it below and provide an introduction.

On the other hand, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is about half through, since I've sat up late to get at least as far as Levin and Kitty finally agreeing to get married.  It was a strange deal between the two and mostly I feel sorry for Kitty, which is probably Tolstoy's objective here, seeing that the liberation of women, so to speak, needed to happen at some time.  The novel is starting to seem somewhat eternal, not in terms of the depth of the subject matter but according to the length of it.  I've begun skipping things about politics and economics just to see how it would go with Levin and Kitty.

Poor Kitty reminds me of some women in Jane Austen's stories, who seem to have no options in life except to try and make a good match, all the while trying to maintain their dignity, sensitivity and sense of romance--not a simple matter.  I suppose for women it is always such a thing, needing to marry for love and common sense at the same time since a poor match for a woman is much more devastating to her and her offspring, her health and joy, than  for most men.  Still, among these nobles, the double bind was something even more torturous.  (This reminds me of all the other poor Queens I've read about, who got married off into foreign lands into more or less traumatic situations, Catherine the Great, Catherine the wife of Henry VIII, and Marie Antoinette.  These are just the well-known ones.  To mind comes also Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of "Infidel", who fled her country finally because she was expected to make an advantageous match with someone whom she did not love romantically.)  Yes, this is the stuff of heartache, long novels, plays and movies.

But poor Kitty--she agrees to marry Levin even before he can confess to her something he really feels she needs to know, all for the sake of his own "sincerity".   He needs to tell her that he is an "unbeliever" and that he has not been chaste before marriage.  He supplies his diaries for her to read all the details regarding this sort of subject matter.   Kitty cries because he gives her all this information--too much information, as we say today.  However, the fact that he is an "unbeliever" is ok, since is such a great soul.  Eieiei... what a match made in heaven indeed.  They have been so in a torturous love all this time, but no one knew this about Levin.  Poor girl Kitty, having to make her decisions of "yes" or "no" with such little choice and knowledge base, as her sister Dolly explained once to Levin.  Yes, I do feel kind of bad for the women.

And then we have Anna Karenina, who was probably married early also in this kind of horse trade fashion and now has discovered romantic love.  She will be the tragic heroine.

I am intrigued how Tolstoy will develop further his theme of soul and brotherhood of man, so we do have to finish this long book.

So, let's try and connect this to the Presbyterian controversy.  Somehow following the "enlightenment" and into the romantic period we get a philosophy or theology which wants to dispense of "believing" in the Bible as a "real" truth, in the common sense. In its place we get a "real" Christianity, which can dispense with the written word and go only with a "spiritual" sense.  I don't know exactly how this happened but it seems to me that generally the German writers get blamed for this and this may be so.  Usually Schopenhauer comes up and what's his name, who wrote regarding "Christianity and its cultured despisers."  (I don't really know that much about it because when it comes to reading theologians, I always curve back to Luther, leaving the others aside.  This is because Luther can make me happy in Christ in a single paragraph, hedonist that I am.  The American Lutherans in LCMS could probably provide more literature on this, since they largely ended up in America for religious liberty reasons and had probably undergone this same controversy in Europe already.)

So it happened that the American Presbyterians also came under the sway of German philosophers and theologians, and people like their own transcendentalists had fallenl nicely into step with these trends, though I'd probably agree with a good chunk of their criticism of Calvinism.  There arose among them a number of liberal theologians, who felt they were unfairly castigated by their conservative "bretheren" and pleaded for tolerance for themselves in the church.  The eventual cause of the outbreak of the controversy and the ensuing battles was a sermon by a Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, a liberal Baptist preaching in a Presbyterian pulpit.  The occasion was Sunday morning, 21 May 1922, in New York.  The title of the sermon was "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?"  We can see that the battlelines were already drawn and likely entrenched.

"A liberal Baptist preaching by special arrangement in the Presbyterian Church, Fosdick had become increasingly dismayed by conservative intolerance of liberal Christians. Since the close of the war, liberals and conservatives had been sparring on such issues as biblical authority, evolution, and foreign missions.  In response to the escalating militancy of the fundamentalists, Fosdick launched a counteroffensive and thereby precipitated the Presbyterian controversy." (p. 9)

The faction that was called the "fundamentalist" held the line at these doctrines:  the virgin birth of Christ, the inerrancy of Scripture, the substitutionary atonement, and the literal second coming of the Lord upon the clouds of heaven.

(--That does indeed make me also a "fundamentalist" by American nomenclature.)

"Fosdick specifically addressed all but the third of these 'opinions', contrasting the 'points of view' of fundamentalist Christians with those of their more progressive counterparts.  Fosdick allowed that many devout Christians believed that the virgin birth was an historical event, that 'it actually happened; there was no other way for a personality like the master to come into this world except by a special biological miracle.'  But, he argued, many others within the evangelical churches accepted another point of view.  These Christians held that 'those first disciples adored Jesus --as we do;  when they thought about his coming they were sure that he came specially from God--as we are;  this adoration and conviction they associated with God's special influence and intention in His birth--as we do;  but they phrased it in terms of a biological miracle that our modern minds cannot use.'  Likewise, while many evangelical Christians affirmed the inerrancy of the Scriptures and the literal second coming of Christ on the clouds of heaven, others believed the Scriptures were 'the progressive unfolding of the character of God' and taht development, not supernatural intervention, was God's way of working out his will ih the world." (p. 10)

According to Fosdick the church should just stop bickering about this and accept the liberal faction the way it is, so it can get on with its work and attract young people to it.  (Isn't if funny how things like these are always done 1.  to attract young people  2.  get more work done  3.  for those with the firmer opinions expected to bow to those with the flimsier opinions rather than the reverse.)

This assault on orthodoxy were met by the "fundamentalist" champion J. Gresham Machen.  He condemned Fosdick's preaching as "dreadful undogmatic Christianity."  Another leader in the fight, Clarence Edward Macartney from Philadelphia, gave a point by point response to Fosdick in a sermon titled:  "Shall Unbelief Win?"   He contended that "the naturalistic views described by Fosdick were simply irreconcilable with the doctrinal position of the Presybterian Church.  It was therefore the duty of the church and all evangelical Christians to make this incompatability known, to fight for the faith--'earnestly and intelligently and in a christian spirit'  but nevertheless to fight." (p. 11)

"The virgin birth, he maintained, far from being myth or rubbish, was historical fact; the Bible was the inspired and authoritative Word of God; and premillenarians, though mistaken in their exegesis, were at least loyal to the 'Person and claims of Jesus Christ.'  Liberal preaching, on the other hand, was 'slowly secularizing the chruch.'  The minority of modernists and rationalists in the church, Macartney argued, depended on the tolerance of evangelicals to let them spread their message.  But tolerance could only end in an emasculated gospel.  The future was clear.  If left unchecked, liberalism would lead the church to a new type of Christianity,  'a Christianity of opinions and principles and good purposes, but a Christianity without worship,  without God, and without Jesus Christ." (p. 11)

--As for myself, having lived mostly in the second half of the 20th century, I have been able to observe the effects of this liberalizing tendency in the Canadian Churches.  In Canada the United Church was formed in 1925 by uniting mostly Presbyterians and Methodists, along with some other groups.  My own experiences with encountering individuals from these churches, largely from singing in community choirs with them, hiring them as staff, and from reading their publications sent to us for our clinic waiting room, has shown to me the extent of their discomfort with the Bible.  In all encounters, the Bible can be used as anyone pleased.  Supposedly it contradicts itself all over the place.  (This is mostly by hearsay, because their Bible knowledge was actually not that extensive; -- this would by corollary of saying that it's all wrong;  why would you study it.)  Talk centers about liberal politics and how the Bible is not true.  A strange doctrine for a church.

Once I went to hear a talk by an Edmonton woman doctor who had spent most of her life in Nepal founding and running a hospital somewhere in a remote location.  When she returned to Canada, she said she could not believe what had happened to her denomination (originally Methodist).  It was disheartening for her to discover, that all the faith had been hollowed out and practically collapsed in her absence.

All of this makes me think of how Matthew Harrison keeps quoting Luther:  the gospel is a sudden heavy rainshower (Platzregen);  it has come and watered and then it is gone.  If we will let it go, it will be gone, to our own sorrow and regret.  We will be in a post-Christian society.  But the rain will move on.  And it seems it is moving to China and such other places.  In meeting Chinese Christians I have discovered their ripeness for learning about God.  They've been through Communism, Atheism and Buddhism, etc.  All of it is philosophy, they say.  But Christianity tells the truth about God.  So it is.  Amen.  Lord, keep us in your grace, help us and leave us not.

Enough for today...

Tolstoy and Presbyterians

The autumn weather in our parts has been extraordinarily wonderful with heat and bright blue skies and hardly any frost so far.  We are savoring it to the last drop.

I wanted to write about the Presbyterian controversy, but in my spare time have taken to reading a book a friend lent me, the famous "Anna Karenina", by Tolstoy.  This led me into looking up the story of Tostoy's life and philosophy.  There was a movie made about his life, recently, called:  "The Last Station";  most parts of this movie are found on Youtube.  Tolstoy met a very strange end, dying in a train station, after leaving his family in order to live as a homeless wanderer; an idea of asceticism had possessed him.  In reading bits and pieces of his "Confessions", it seems that he had taken some strange ideas, discarding orthodox Christianity, becoming a pacifist and some kind of promoter of human unity through love.  We all, of course, want unity and love and no war, but there is here something in play which reminds me of things I have recently come across in 19th century writing. He decries church doctrine such as the trinity and creation.  He fumed at the Bible saying that light was there before the sun, (which in our days is no problem at all with the factor of the cosmic rays being there at the beginning).  It seems that the 19th century was roiling over Darwin's doctrine in all countries and many lost their nerves over their faith in the Bible.  This does lead us directly into the Presbyterian controversy by accident.

Let's have a look at our library book once more, Longfield's "The Presbyterian Controversy".

"From 1922 until 1936 the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. was wracked by conflict.  sparked by a sermon of Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, a liberal Baptist preaching in a Presbyterian pulpit, the Presbyterian controversy raged for fourteen years over such issues as ordination requirements, the mission of Princeton seminary, and the orthodoxy of the board of foreign Missions.  Though at the height of the conflict in the mind 1920's the church managed to hold together, the controversy resulted in a loosening of the church's ordination standards, the reorganization of Princeton theological Seminary, the creation of Westminster theological Seminary, and the eventual founding of the Presbyterian Church of America."  (p. 4)

Why does this matter to the rest of us?--I'm not really solid on U.S history but it seems like this controversy is something of a prototype for the controversies in other denominations related to the issues related to Biblical liberalism vs. literalism.  The famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 falls into this time period and involves some of the same people.

"The Presbyterian controversy was one major aspect of the wider fundamentalist--modernist controversy of the era.  In the cultural crisis that followed World War I, differences within the church, which had been developing for over fifty years, exploded.  Numerous factors contributed to this disruption.  In the intellectual arena, the advent of Darwinism, historicism, higher criticism of the scriptures, and comparative religion all strained traditional modes of thought."

While there were many changes in thinking and also in society, strangely, however, the war of the controversy was strangely said to have been one among the "generals".   This is probably because among the general population these changes are not so great that they change their view of the world.  Most important things stay the same even as the world changes.

The Presbyterian controversy was, by and large, a conflict among generals;  it was they who prosecuted the war and they who worked to galvanize a constituency.

This is really kind of sad.  This sort of thing is often top-down.  And lately, too, I have learned how the academic elite calls Bible believers all kinds of names and the average person is disregarded.  How much sorrow has been caused even lately all over the place by oppressive measures.

This is all I'm going to say right now.