This is a follow up to the post on Hart, Machen and Controversy, where more information on this excellent and recommended book can be found. I have now finished Hart’s biography of Machen, and enjoyed it thoroughly.
It is a thought provoking book, and it is not always easy to see the reasons of the facts that are put out. Machen is with secularists like Mencken against Victorian moderate Protestantism; he is with fundamentalist against modernism; and yet in some ways he is with the moderate, upper-class Protestants as far as his personal habits and culture. And the other movements also have odd points of contact, where Machen is not with them. Thus fundamentalists and mainline protestants wanted to Christianize the nation (though naturally their ideas of Christianity were a bit different); whereas Machen was libertarian, to take just one example. Hart remarks on this feature on pp.110,112
Ironically, when discussing the church both liberals and conservatives seemed to contradict themselves. For instance, conservatives considered the Bible to be the word of God and took exception to the modernist portrayal of scripture as merely the work of human writers. Yet in denominational skirmishes, they were the ones who usually spoke of the church not as a divine institution but as a voluntary association in which majority rule should prevail. In contrast, liberal and moderate church leaders often attributed to the church the same timelessness and transcendence that fundamentalists found in the Bible. Although modernists thought much conservative theology could be explained away as the product of cultural conditions, the same logic rarely applied to the church. In fact, liberals, who said the church was the body of Christ, scored fundamentalists for an excessively low view of the church and for introducing secular notions into ecclesiastical affairs.
It seems to me that this confusion of cross-currents from different issues is probably a standard feature in most controversies.� This of course, makes for strange alliances, and tangles still further the attempt to sort out movements, as well as making predictions of any given individual’s belief on any given topic difficult to manage.