Machen’s Lost Work On The Presbyterian Conflict Part I: The Historical Evidence -- By: James W. Scott

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 74:2 (Fall 2012)
Article: Machen’s Lost Work On The Presbyterian Conflict Part I: The Historical Evidence
Author: James W. Scott


Machen’s Lost Work On The Presbyterian Conflict
Part I: The Historical Evidence

James W. Scott

James W. Scott is Managing Editor of New Horizons in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and Publications Coordinator for the Committee on Christian Education of the OPC.

While working in the administrative offices of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, I heard rumors over the years that J. Gresham Machen, prior to his unexpected death on January 1, 1937, was writing a book about the Presbyterian controversy of the 1920s and 1930s over modernism, in which he had played a central role. However, no direct evidence of such a work (whether a manuscript or notes) is to be found among the extensive papers that he left behind.1 Those papers include notes for, and drafts of, unfinished and unpublished works, as well as published works. If Machen had indeed been writing a book on the Presbyterian conflict, his unfinished manuscript (and any notes for it) would have been saved among his papers—unless it was deliberately removed.

There is strong evidence, hitherto unpublished, that Machen was indeed writing such a book. Most significantly, there are (at least) three contemporary references to his work still extant. First, his close associate, Edwin H. Rian, wrote to Cincinnati pastor Everett C. DeVelde on August 26, 1936, that Machen “is very busy writing the book on the Presbyterian conflict.” Second, student Arthur W. Kuschke, Jr., recorded in his diary that he heard Machen tell a group of students on October 1, 1936, about writing a book “on the church split.” Third, DeVelde, after spending time with Machen in September, read a memorial to him in church on January 3, 1937, in which he declared that Machen had been writing a book to be entitled The Conflict and that it would be published “shortly.”

However, no book by Machen entitled The Conflict or pertaining to what Rian called “the Presbyterian conflict” was ever published. But in 1940 The Presbyterian Conflict was published, written by none other than Edwin H. Rian.2 Rian made no mention of Machen’s work in that book. The question is unavoidable: did Rian take Machen’s unfinished work into his possession and rework it as the book published three years later under his own name? In this article, we will consider the historical and literary evidence both for the existence and scope of Machen’s work and for Rian’s publication of an expanded version of it as his own book.

I. The Evidence From Rian, Kuschke, And Develde

Everett C. DeVelde, Sr. (1906–1991), as a stu...

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