The church being known as a pilgrim people would obviously go back to the early church. Peter’s writings to the early church refers to them as strangers and aliens. How do you achieve that now? How do you try to follow that? If you become successful and prosperous, this seems a difficult thing to be. Does it mean that you and I always have to keep moving— leaving somewhere and setting up again so we are always in exile? That’s not what it means.

It does mean, of course, trying to serve God, to glorify God, to love God, and to love one’s neighbor. Let that be the guiding motive and not let success in the world be what you want to accomplish. So, consumerism and worldly advancement—seeking wealth and riches and fame—those are things that a pilgrim people doesn’t do. In some ways, I guess that seems obvious, but on the other hand, it becomes more difficult when you take on more responsibilities in life. You get older, you have a family, you have bills to pay, etc. You have a business that you want to see go well; you love employees that you want to see paid. So, how does that work for a pilgrim people?

This gets into all the questions about Christ and culture, and questions about vocation are bound up with that too. But for case of the OPC, I think it meant going back to Machen and the kind of stands that he took. It meant not trying to gain fame and influence at the expense of being firm in your convictions and resolute in your statements. It meant taking a stand when there’s a controversy, not avoiding it or evading it for the sake of maintaining your position.

If you need to be a pilgrim people in that case, then so be it. In fact, it may be much more often the case that you need to be a pilgrim people than to gain the praise of the world. So, knowing this is a way of preparing people that you’re not necessarily going to be rich and famous if you become a Christian, especially if you become an orthodox Presbyterian.

Adapted from a transcript of the video.

Reformed worship is distinctive because it uses only the Bible and not human traditions or human wisdom for knowing how to worship aright. That leaves Presbyterians in a difficult position, because the Bible doesn’t provide an explicit order of worship. If we are going to follow the Bible in worship, there must be some measure of creativity.

I would prefer for Presbyterians to be more uniform in their order of worship. Presbyterians, however, have been very reluctant to have a General Assembly mandate things in a top-down fashion. Even though we have the “Directory for the Public Worship of God” in The Book of Church Order, we have wanted to give congregations great leeway in how they execute the directory. I think this has hurt Presbyterians at times—when you can go into different Presbyterian churches and have a different kind of service, a different order, and yes, even a different tone as well.

But there is a seriousness that characterizes Reformed and Presbyterian worship because trying to follow God’s Word means avoiding anything that would offend God or would be objectionable. There are all sorts of examples throughout the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, of people offending God with bad worship or false worship. Presbyterians are particularly eager not to engage in false worship, and that’s what the regulative principle tries positively to establish, but exactly what that has meant for Presbyterians has been harder to execute.

If you go to Presbyterian services in Scotland as compared to Ireland as compared to Canada as compared to present-day America, even though they all may be conservative churches, they may be following different kinds of patterns in worship, which is unlike Lutheran or Anglican churches. There you might have greater uniformity between the churches because they’re either using an Anglican prayer book or Lutheran service book. So, that uniformity is something I think Presbyterians still need to work on but with the idea of God as a consuming fire and thus the need to approach him with reverence and awe (Hebrews 12:28). I think this idea has characterized Christians throughout all times, but Reformed Presbyterians have made it particularly important.

Adapted from a transcript of the video.

Reformed militancy is something that comes up when you consider J. Gresham Machen because he was known to be a fighter. He defended it and militancy for noble, worthwhile causes that most people would agree with. The question becomes whether Machen overdid it or have Presbyterians have overdone it.

Reformed militancy is contending for the faith. Quite simply, what I think sometimes people forget or miss about Machen is that being a professor at Princeton, he was part of an institution that had a long history of polemical theology. I even think there were appointments in the nineteenth century that included the title of systematic and polemical theology or something like that. And if you go back and read the Princeton Theological Review and before that the Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, you see article after article written by Princeton faculty and other Presbyterian leaders critical of developments in the church—transcendentalism, abolitionism, and developments in Scotland. I mean they were writing about everything, and they were oftentimes critical of it. So, it wasn’t at all unusual for Machen to do this from his position at Princeton. There was a long history of it.

But the church, you could argue, or American society, you could argue, had become softer by then, and there were efforts to try to make everybody get along and harmonize. And so, now you have someone come along who’s a fighter that doesn’t fit so much. I would argue that Calvin, Knox, and going back through Presbyterian history—back to Europe and the British Isles—Presbyterians have always been fighters. They’ve been sons of a gun. So, you know all the sudden now, they’re supposed to be nice. Where does that come from?

Adapted from a transcript of the video.

The Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy occurred in the 1920s. When I teach it, I typically talk about the social aspects of it, the high points being the Scopes Trial of 1925 and the effort to remove the teaching of evolution from public schools. This wasn’t simply an anti-science movement, though there were clearly aspects of that. Indeed, “science vs. faith” is a recurring theme in the history of Christianity.

But William Jennings Bryan and others were concerned about eugenics, which was a prominent feature of the scientific establishment at this point in time. Eugenics was the idea that you could breed better human beings. It is the fruition of Darwinism in many respects. There were efforts at the time to restrict unfit people from from procreating. Advocates sometimes even included Roman Catholics in this prohibition. Protestants were worried that Roman Catholics were breeding like rabbits. Eugenics was a way to try to control the population. Bryan recognized this, and the textbook that was under review during the Scopes trial did teach eugenics. So this wasn’t simply science versus faith. This was also an issue of public health.

Denominationally, there were controversies in the Baptist world over theological liberalism. There was also a controversy in the Presbyterian world over theological liberalism. Those dates don’t coincide with the Scopes trial. So you have all these controversies coming together—some denominational some political. Some historians, as people tend to do, lumped these different groups together and called them “fundamentalists.” But when you look at the particular aspects of this lump, whether Baptist or Presbyterian, they don’t line up. In some ways you lose a real sense of what was going on in the Presbyterian side of this controversy if you just call it the “Fundamentalist Controversy.”

For instance, I was recently reading a piece by a grad student at Stanford trying to link Machen and his views on inerrancy through McIntire to Schaeffer to the Christian right. This was quite a set of lumping to do. The student didn’t seem to be aware of the particular nuances to the Princeton view of inerrancy and other concerns that Machen had in his critique of liberalism.

If you just use these categories like “fundamentalist,” “evangelical,” or “mainline,” you miss a lot of the detail. For me at least what makes history fun is the variety—it’s the way things don’t line up. It’s the jostling of ideas. There’s a tension there. You can divide historians into two groups: the splitters and the lumpers. People that use “fundamentalism” as a handle are the lumpers; I’m a splitter.

Adapted from a transcript of the video.

Dr. D. G. Hart speaks about the Old School-New School Controversy in the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, which lasted from 1837 to 1870 in the North.

The Old Side/New Side controversy occurred in colonial presbyterianism between 1741 and 1758 with a couple of stages in between. It was a controversy that grew out of the first—I don’t like to call it great, but pretty good awakening. That’s a phrase I get from an old friend, who is now deceased, Leo Ribuffo, historian at George Washington University. It’s not my own, but I do think it’s a useful way of thinking about the way we talk about events. We say it’s great. Well, there was a Great Depression. How great was the Great Depression? We tend to think, oh, a Great Awakening, well, it must be really great!

But for those who oppose the awakening, it wasn’t so great. So that was the old side. They were concerned that the people promoting revival were violating all sorts of presbyterian procedures, preaching outside of bounds, going into the town of another church and preaching there without the permission of the pastor, ordination requirements, requiring ministers to give a conversion narrative.

That related to piety as well. Did someone need to be converted to be a minister? The old side would have said, well, of course they must be a Christian, but is conversion the only way to become a Christian? Or could you be a covenant child baptized, reared in the church, make profession of faith with not ever having a conversion experience? Those were the issues going on.

In the heat of the moment, the pro-revivalists were very concerned and very convinced that they were right and probably a tad self-righteous about it. So the old side said, no, we’d like to back away from this. The church synods went their separate ways. They reunited in 1758 with a plan of union that few people actually study. If you do look at it, it’s a curious document. It was able to heal this breach in the church.

The next stage of the presbyterian church is to form the first General Assembly in 1789. This is a very early stage of the church. Presbyterianism in America only started in 1706. So the church is in its adolescence as it’s working out these events and circumstances.

Adapted from a transcript of the video.