Mid the Pines

'Neo-Fundamentalist' / 'Post-Modernist' Controversy in the PCA

Is "Fundamentalism" a danger to the PCA? Or is lack of charity the true danger?

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Ryan Biese
May 26, 2022
∙ Paid

In the 1920-1930s, the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy came to a head in the northern Presbyterian Church with renowned scholar and Princeton professor J. Gresham Machen at the center.

Machen held faithfully to the historic doctrines of the Reformed Faith as summarized in the Westminster Standards (the Confession and Catechisms) against the Modernists and Liberals who wished to accommodate the culture and the scientific age in hopes of remaining relevant.

Machen insisted no accommodation or broadening was necessary. In all his pleading for confessional integrity, Machen was criticized by his opponents as ‘temperamentally deficient.’

Now a century later, some have attempted to portray the current upheaval in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) as a continuation of the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy:

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