Last month The North American Anglican, an online journal, published an article by Peter D. Robinson, titled, Our German Cousins: Liturgy in the Evangelical and Reformed Church. If you’ve never heard of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, that’s because it no longer exists. Its life as a denomination was exceedingly brief, lasting from 1934 to 1957—just short of 25 years. That’s not a very long time considering that some denominations have existed for centuries. The Anglican communion itself may be a 19th-century invention, but the Church of England has been around for nearly 500 years, with some arguing that it’s much older, going back to Augustine of Canterbury, the 6th-century Apostle to the English.

So what was this Evangelical and Reformed Church? It was created by the merger of two predecessor bodies, the (German) Reformed Church in the United States (RCUS) and the (German) Evangelical Synod of North America. The German Reformed were the descendants of Reformed Christians who had immigrated from German-speaking Europe, especially Switzerland and the Palatinate, the latter of which was once ruled by Elector Frederick III “the Pious” (1515-1576), who commissioned the Heidelberg Catechism in 1563. The German Reformed began in 1725 and were initially under the care of Classis Amsterdam of the Dutch Reformed Church until 1793. During the late 19th century, efforts to unite with the (Dutch) Reformed Church in America were unsuccessful.

In the middle of that century, a movement was launched within the RCUS at its seminary in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, by John Williamson Nevin (1803-1886), who was later joined from Berlin by the renowned Swiss-born church historian Philip Schaff (1819-1893). Some scholars have compared the Mercersburg Movement to the Oxford Movement within the Church of England in that it represented an effort to recover the catholic roots of the Reformed Church against the popular revivalism of the Second Great Awakening, which was affecting—negatively in Nevin’s estimation—many Protestant denominations, especially as their members moved west along the advancing frontier. The Mercersburg Movement led to liturgical renewal in the RCUS, although it remained controversial, even into the 20th century, with many members believing that it imported a pronounced Hegelian emphasis on historical progress, blunting its confessional integrity and making it too willing to unite with other denominations lacking its own Reformed identity. This, of course, is exactly what happened.

The German Evangelical Synod was brought to the United States largely by immigrants from the Prussian territories following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1817 King Friedrich Wilhelm III (1770-1840) of Prussia engineered a union of the Lutheran and Reformed churches in his realms, and the result was a nonconfessional amalgamation that incorporated elements of both traditions while mandating neither. Immigrants from these lands established the German Evangelical Synod of North America, which dropped German from its name in 1927. The denomination’s most famous members were undoubtedly Reinhold (1892-1971) and Richard Niebuhr (1894-1962), both academic theologians who strongly influenced the mid-century mainline Protestant consensus in the US, and, in Reinhold’s case, even American foreign policy.

In 1934 the two denominations united, creating the Evangelical and Reformed Church, while the Eureka Classis in the Dakotas remained outside and retained the RCUS label. Thirteen years later, as recounted in Robinson’s article linked above, the combined denomination published The Book of Worship. In many respects, this collection is similar to the Book of Common Prayer (BCP), containing orders for “Morning Worship, an Alternative Order of Worship, an Evening Service, The Preparatory Service, The Order of Holy Communion, and the Alternative Order of Holy Communion.” This material reflects both its Lutheran and Reformed heritage. Like the BCP it even prescribes a lectionary following the church calendar with epistle and gospel readings for each Sunday. Notably absent is a complete Psalter, although there is a list of “Proper Psalms for Seasons and Days.” Perusing this collection makes us appreciate the effort that went into it, with its evident concern to maintain continuity with the larger catholic liturgical tradition of the western church. One imagines that the brothers Niebuhr enjoyed meaningful worship Sunday after Sunday. Perhaps it would take a more in depth exploration of The Book of Worship to see whether there is a hint of what was to come, but from my own admittedly cursory examination, it looks pretty solid.

So what happened after this collection was adopted? The E&R Church lasted only another decade, and then it merged with the Congregational and Christian Churches to form the United Church of Christ (UCC), easily the most liberal Protestant denomination in the US. Bringing together the remnants of the German Reformed, German Evangelicals, descendants of the New England Puritans, and heirs of the 19th-century Restorationist movement, the UCC has steadily declined in both membership and influence. A solid liturgical document appears to have done little to prevent the combined denomination from losing its confessional integrity.

As a political scientist, I cannot resist making a comparison with nations and their constitutions. Reading a country’s constitutional document may or may not tell us how its political system works in the real world. The 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation reads very well indeed, claiming as it does to set up a democratic political system similar in many respects to that of Fifth-Republic France, with a president, a bicameral parliament, a government led by a prime minister, and a court system, along with a federal division of powers. However, a reasonably well-drafted document has not prevented a return to authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin. Why not? Largely because the architects of a constitution cannot induce in the people themselves a love and respect for the rule of law where it is absent. After centuries of failed attempts to adopt a comprehensive legal code under the tsars, followed by 70 years of arbitrary governance by the Communist Party, the rule of law has a shallow basis in the Russian political culture, despite the existence of dissidents seeking to nurture it. But no written statute can legislate respect for the rule of law.

Americans lionize their nation’s 18th-century founders, whom many believe to have created a remarkably balanced and virtually fail-safe constitution. But even the architects of the Constitution recognized that it could not work if the people would not respect it. As John Adams famously put it,

Providentially, Americans had had a century and a half of experience with representative government in their colonial assemblies, and they could readily adapt these traditions to a wider scale. In other words, despite the motto on the dollar bill, the founders were by no means creating a novus ordo seclorum, or a “new order of the ages.” They were establishing political institutions modelled on existing ones at the state level. That the American political system has been so successful for nearly two and a half centuries is testimony to an underlying respect for the rule of law inherited from English and colonial usage. If Americans lose their allegiance to the rule of law—if they begin to question, not just the wisdom of particular political leaders, but the institutions themselves—if they subordinate their respect for the Constitution to their partisan allegiances or to their loyalty to a demagogic leader promising what they want to hear, then a system once admired for its durability, will inevitably falter.

Returning to the life of the gathered church community, a denomination may boast a solid set of confessional standards and a liturgy embodying the historic faith and placing on the lips of worshippers the Psalms, hymns, and prayers of their forebears. Yet where works righteousness has replaced the unmerited grace of God—where faith in the saving power of Jesus Christ has given way to the regnant ideological visions of the day—the creeds, confessions, and liturgies become dead letters, testimonies to an earlier faithful generation whose descendants have, as it were, moved on to other things.

None of this should be taken as an argument for casting aside the creeds, confessions, and liturgies of our forebears in the faith. Quite the contrary. If ordinary Christians are giving lip service to a faith that no longer lives in their hearts, the retention of such standards may not keep them in the fold. Nevertheless, they are a necessary precondition for renewed catechetical efforts to impress upon children and youth the need to set their hopes, not in what the world has to offer, but in Jesus Christ himself. In so far as our confessional and liturgical documents testify to this hope, we should open ourselves to being taught by them and commit ourselves to living accordingly.

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This year marks the centenary of an important book clarifying a crucial moment in the history of North American Christianity. John Gresham Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1923) as an analysis and critique of a phenomenon making its way into the Protestant churches of North America, threatening to erode the faith of ordinary Christians in the pews. Born in 1881 in Baltimore, Machen was one of the last of the great Princeton theologians, following a long line of men associated with Princeton Theological Seminary, including Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, and Benjamin B. Warfield.

During the 19^th century, Princeton Seminary, founded in 1812, was a bastion of Reformed orthodoxy and remained so into the first three decades of the 20^th. Nevertheless, by the turn of that century, the supporting denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA), was already in the process of changing, and not for the better. Pulpits were increasingly occupied by ministers whose preaching was more influenced by the ideologies of the day than by sound biblical interpretation. The major ideology of the day was scientism, the conviction that the only genuine form of knowledge was that accessible by the scientific method. Other claims to knowledge were to be greeted by a general posture of scepticism. Even Scripture and the doctrines of the Christian faith must be subjected to the canons of science, which in turn were thought to determine what we can and cannot accept of that faith. Claims to miracles, for example, cannot be scientifically vindicated and must thus be relegated to the status of primitive myths. All that remains of Christianity is its supposed ethical core.

Machen analyzed this trend under the general rubric of liberalism. What is liberalism? According to Machen, “the many varieties of modern liberal religion are rooted in naturalism—that is, in the denial of any entrance of the creative power of God (as distinguished from the ordinary course of nature) in connection with the origin of Christianity.” Modern liberalism attempts to answer the question whether Christianity can “be maintained in a scientific age.” This has led liberal Protestants to abandon one doctrine after another until the religion with which they are left is no longer Christianity, but a completely different one: “despite the liberal use of traditional phraseology modern liberalism not only is a different religion from Christianity but belongs in a totally different class of religions.”

But there’s more. Religious liberalism, while retaining the traditional language of Christian faith, effectively drains it of its meaning, substituting something ostensibly more palatable to modern sensibilities. Liberals view Jesus merely as an example of faith rather than as an object of faith. Jesus was a great teacher whom we ought to follow. Christianity, however, views Jesus as the incarnate Son of God whose life, death by crucifixion, and resurrection have atoned for our sins, rescued us from the power of death, and given us new life. If, however, we are limited to following Jesus’ teachings, we know in our hearts that we will never be able to do so perfectly. Thus we remain in our sins. But the good news of Jesus Christ is that we do not save ourselves; God himself has accomplished something we could never hope to on our own, even with a perfect example to emulate. In Machen’s words:

Among the defects of liberalism is an inattention to sin, a tendency towards pantheism, an overly optimistic assessment of human nature, an inclination to diminish the reality of God’s judgement, and a lopsided focus on social issues, as if resolving these would somehow usher in the kingdom of God.

But the chief characteristic of liberalism is found in its view of authority. For the Christian, the ultimate authority for faith and life is the word of God, embodied in the divinely inspired Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. For the liberal, authority is vested in the religious experience of the believer. This is something that ties the liberalism of a century ago to today’s progressive Christians, as many now prefer to call themselves. No longer is the denial of miracles a distinguishing mark. Progressive Christians do not necessarily deny, say, the virgin birth or the literal resurrection. They may affirm most or even all the principal doctrines of the faith, yet retain a focus on experience through which they implicitly insist on filtering them.

Thus when I read something in the Bible, I can safely ignore the 2,000-year tradition of biblical interpretation and test it against my own personal experience of God. If I find a particular item in the Scriptures unappealing or offensive, I reserve the right to reject or ignore it. The result is a cafeteria or designer-label Christianity that leaves me fully in charge of my own spirituality, inoculated against anything that might challenge my own identity and aspirations. Moreover, as a sovereign individual, I must resist the discipline of a community of faith, even as that community is progressively reduced to a mere collection of like-minded individuals, infinitely expandable in principle through constant pulpit appeals to a shrinking congregation to be ever more inclusive.

Today the major ideology making its way into the churches is no longer scientism, whose pretensions were long ago skewered by the likes of Thomas Kuhn and Michael Polanyi. Now the regnant ideology is expressive individualism, seemingly tailor-made for a century-old movement focussed on experience. But much as 20th-century liberalism led to the collapse of the old-line Protestant denominations, the newer progressivism is unlikely to have a different outcome.

Of course, not everything in Machen’s book has aged well. His reference to Jesus as a “supernatural Person” suggests an unfortunate effort to categorize Jesus rather than simply to take him as he is, namely, the unique incarnate Son of God who saves. Furthermore, Machen’s definition of miracle as “the supernatural manifesting itself in the external world” and as something “that takes place by the immediate, as distinguished from the mediate, power of God” is not particularly persuasive, in my view. A miracle may indeed be unexpected, but that does not exclude the possibility of proximate causes capable of being observed and noted. If scientists ever succeeded in identifying, say, geological or meteorological origins for the plagues recorded in Exodus, that would in no way disprove their miraculous character. I find novelist Graham Greene more convincing on this point: if the extraordinary were to happen repeatedly, people would simply deny its miraculous character and adjust their worldviews accordingly. The fact is that the natural and the supernatural are not two different phenomena; creation itself, along with the laws by which it functions, is a miracle of God. But one needs to be open to the miraculous to recognize it.

Apart from these minor defects, Machen’s book remains relevant. True, the movement he analyzes has mutated into something quite different from what it was in 1923. Nevertheless, the same central assumption is still in play, namely, the focus on religious experience as supreme authority for faith and life. As such, we would do well periodically to reread Christianity and Liberalism to remind ourselves of how the ideologies of the day, whatever form they take, can seep into our congregations and subtly distort the teachings of the gospel. The best antidote, of course, is simply the clear and enthusiastic proclamation of the unadulterated gospel message, which is changing lives and bettering societies around the globe.

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Christianity Today recently published an article by Russell Moore titled, Bring Back Altar Calls, with the following subtitle: “They could foster the worst in evangelical spirituality. But the best of it, too.” Because the article is behind a paywall, I cannot assess the author’s argument, but I will take the occasion to look at the altar call because it is something with which I grew up, at least in part. No, not at the Orthodox Presbyterian Church congregation my parents started with another family in Wheaton, Illinois, when I was a small child. The OPC represents a rather pure form of Old School Presbyterianism, which took a dim view of New Measures revivalism in the 19th century. Worship in our congregation was based on the 1961 Trinity Hymnal, along with the use of traditional liturgical forms such as the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed, the Gloria Patri, the confession of sin and assurance of pardon, and the weekly reading of the Ten Commandments. We sang metrical psalms from the 1912 Psalter of the former United Presbyterian Church in North America.

During spring and summer holidays, however, our family would visit my grandmother and other relatives in small-town southeast Michigan, where we would often remain for weeks at a time. On sundays we worshipped at an independent Baptist church where my mother had been converted to the faith in her late teens and where my parents were married several years later. Worship was something of a haphazard affair. There was no real order of worship laid out in a bulletin. The presiding minister would simply announce the hymns as we went along. These hymns were largely the revival hymns developed following the Second Great Awakening at the turn of the 19th century. The Bible was the King James Version, and everyone brought their own copy along. Many sermons focussed on the end times reflecting a dispensational interpretive framework.

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Not far from our home in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, is one of southern Ontario’s premier universities, McMaster, known internationally as a centre for advanced scientific and medical research. What few remember is that the university once had a connection with the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Québec, the only remnant of which is the presence on campus of McMaster Divinity College, whose most famous faculty member was probably the late Clark Pinnock. 

During my first years of teaching at a neighbouring institution, I often found myself in the Mills Library at McMaster. During one visit, I happened to notice the university’s crest outside the elevators, and I was surprised to read the motto emblazoned in Greek letters above the shield: ΤΑ ΠΑΝΤΑ ΕΝ ΧΡΙΣΤΩΙ ΣΥΝΕΣΤΗΚΕΝ: “In Christ all things hold together.” This, of course, is a reference to Colossians 1:17. I imagined that hundreds of people would walk past this coat of arms every day as they moved between the floors of the library, unaware of what the words meant or of their history. According to the university’s website, “One may suppose that the motto and book were intended to express the concept, espoused in the Will of Senator McMaster, of ‘a Christian school of learning’.”

Some months ago, I came across a scanned copy of an issue of The Silhouette, the student newspaper, dated 20 September 1957. The headline reads: BAPTIST TIE IS BROKEN, followed by “Gilmour sees little change in campus atmosphere, work.” Dr. George P. Gilmour was president of the university at the time the Ontario Legislature approved the requested changes to its status.

The article hints at the motivation for the move:

Dr. Gilmour pointed out that this break with the Baptists “will make relatively little change in the atmosphere and the work of the university as far as the students are concerned. But,” he added, “it is extremely important from the point of view of public relations and community support.”

Historically, it has been difficult for universities established on an explicitly Christian basis to maintain their religious identity over the long term. The list of universities that began their existence under the auspices of the church, only to relinquish that connection much later, is a long one. The university itself started as an institution closely connected to the monasteries in mediaeval Europe. In the United States, Harvard began as a Puritan institution in 1636. Yale followed in 1701, founded at least in part in response to secularizing trends at Harvard. Princeton was started in 1746 by Reformed Christians, with its religious character lasting into the 20th century but not much beyond the first decade. I could go on, but, as I said, the list is long.

One possible reason for a university losing its confessional moorings is an underlying worldview which divides the curriculum between divinity/theology on the one hand and so-called secular disciplines on the other, parallel to the historic scholastic division between sacred and secular. Because it was assumed that these latter disciplines were subject to the canons of a neutral reason, any connection with the faith would be extrinsic at least and unnecessary at most. In McMaster’s case, this is undoubtedly why the university could so easily restrict the historic Baptist element to the Divinity College, still situated uneasily on campus as a curious vestige of its earlier affiliation.

A connection with the institutional church, even if maintained, was no guarantee that the subjects taught at the school would be approached from an integrally Christian perspective. Once more, I could rattle off a litany of universities that remain under the auspices of mainline protestant denominations but where an effort to think Christianly beyond the bounds of theology is foreign to its educational mission and has been for a long time. At the same time, the lack of a church connection is by no means a hindrance to a university maintaining a Christian identity, as seen at an institution of higher education in my hometown.

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