The Ecumenical Vision of John A. Mackay

Abstract

Despite a religious background that he himself later called “completely parochial,” John Mackay matured into a Christian leader with a remarkably inclusive vision. “If it is to be truly ecumenical,” Mackay declared, “the Church must transcend every boundary … As the Church, it must rise above every human division.” To go beyond such boundaries, Mackay not only engaged in standard ecumenical ventures such as the YMCA and the World Council of Churches, he also raised his voice to protest social and political evils, whether found in Nazi Germany, the Communist Bloc, or the United States. Mackay also reached out to movements such as Pentecostalism, often ignored by many mid-twentieth century ecumenical Protestants. Beneath Mackay’s inclusiveness lay his faith in a Christ in whom all things ultimately cohere and who even now leads his people beyond existing boundaries toward the fulfillment of cosmic unity in Him.

Keywords

Ecumenical mission Latin America church Mackay Letter to Presbyterians

John A. Mackay, who served as the third president of Princeton Seminary from 1936 to 1959, is often remembered as the person who revived the school after the Fundamentalist Controversy of the 1920s. The memory is accurate, but Mackay did more than heal an institutional wound. He offered a dynamic vision of a worldwide Christian community engaged in mission. In a message for alumni two and a half years into his presidency, he discussed what that vision entailed for those whom Princeton was preparing for ministry. He did so by way of an extended analogy:

There are two familiar vantage grounds from which to survey a country side. There is the turret of the old castle atop its rocky eminence, from which the surrounding plain or the approaches through the valley can be surveyed by a watcher’s eye. There is the road along which a wayfarer travels, that crosses the plain, wends its upward course through the valley, and then traverses a lofty sky line where immense spaces open up to right and left of the range.¹

“The outlook from a theological seminary,” he insisted, “must combine the double vision from the turret and the road. It must scan the unchanging landmarks seen from the ancient fortress and blend them with the ever changing prospect that greets the traveler’s eye.” Mackay wished to supplement Princeton’s traditional emphasis on “the everlasting truths of the Gospel” with a vivid interest “in the highways and byways of contemporary life in order to understand the human situation and meet its need.” Moreover, this engagement needed to operate from a global perspective. As the president of Princeton Seminary, Mackay taught a course in the field of ecumenics, a field which he virtually created himself, and which he gave an expansive definition: “the Science of the Church Universal, conceived as a World Missionary Community: Its nature, its functions, its relations and its strategy.” Perhaps John Mackay most graphically underscored his all-encompassing notion of the subject when he observed, “It is the function of Ecumenics to work toward the development of a Christian strategy for the Church in our time that shall be the spiritual equivalent of Geopolitics.” The task of this article is to sketch some of the events and influences that led him to this sweeping vision and to provide some illustrations of the implications he drew from it.²

I

John Mackay’s early life appeared singularly unlikely to promote an ecumenical vision. Born in Inverness in the Scottish Highlands in 1889, Mackay was reared by his parents in the tiny Free Presbyterian Church after it seceded from the Free Church in 1893. The secession occurred in response to the Free Church’s passage of a Declaratory Act interpreting the Westminster Confession so as to emphasize the love of God and to downplay human depravity and God’s predestination of the elect. The Free Presbyterians, holding to a rigorous interpretation of the confession, rejected this leniency, generally avoided contact with other groups, did not permit musical instruments in worship, and sang only from the Psalms. Although he always respected what he had gained from his upbringing in the denomination, Mackay later spoke of its shortcomings: “It was instilled into me … that our ideas and practices were so much purer than the ideas and practices of others that we were not on any account to mingle with them in religious fellowship.”³

Yet in this “proudly and completely parochial” environment, Mackay underwent a spiritual experience—a “quickening,” he called it—which pointed him toward a broader horizon. While participating in a Scottish communion season in the village of Rogart north of Inverness in July 1903, he experienced Christ as “a personal Presence,” but also as the One in whom all things would ultimately cohere. “From the first,” he wrote,

my imagination began to glow with the cosmic significance of Jesus Christ. It was the cosmic Christ that fascinated me, the living Lord Jesus Christ who was the center of a great drama of unity, in which everything in Heaven and on earth was to become one in him. I did not understand what it all meant, but the tendency to think everything in terms of Jesus Christ and a longing to contribute to a unity in Christ became the passion of my life.

The remainder of Mackay’s life entailed an expanding sense of the unity glimpsed at Rogart.⁴

Mackay’s education enlarged the vision. Awarded a scholarship, he began secondary schooling in the fall of 1903 at the Inverness Royal Academy where he formed friendships with John and Donald Baillie, both of whom subsequently became distinguished theologians. After graduating in 1907, he briefly attended Glasgow University, but a fellowship made possible his transfer to Aberdeen. Since no Free Presbyterian congregation existed there, Mackay first attended a Free Church, and then joined a Baptist chapel. In 1910 he heard Robert E. Speer of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. present an eloquent case for mission and for young men and women to consider whether they were called to the foreign field. Mackay’s extensive reading, his experience of worship in churches other than the Free Presbyterian, a growing sense of the body of Christ as an ecumenical fellowship transcending the denominations, increasing contacts with people in the Free Church, and then the information that the Free Church was eager to sponsor a missionary to Latin America and would be pleased if that person were Mackay himself—all of these events led to the moment in 1913 when he resigned as a candidate for the ministry in the Free Presbyterian Church.⁵

Mackay’s educational preparation then took him abroad. Having won a fellowship funding further study, he went to Princeton Seminary in September 1913. The choice was a logical one, for Mackay already had positive associations with Princeton. He knew, for example, that Robert Speer, whom he greatly admired, had attended the school; and the pastor of the Free Church where the Mackay family transferred its membership recommended Princeton heartily. One of the professors who moved him greatly was Charles R. Erdman. Nearly six decades later, well into his retirement, Mackay declared that “the personality, teaching, and friendship of Professor Charles Erdman proved to be one of the most creative experiences in my life! For this man became for a young Scottish student the finest pattern he had known of what it means to be a Christian.” In the decade following Mackay’s student years at Princeton, both the seminary and the Presbyterian Church were rent by the so-called Fundamentalist controversy, and Erdman displayed an irenic conservatism that sought to hold the school and the church together for the cause of common witness and mission—a commitment that further shaped Mackay’s own desire “to contribute to a unity in Christ.” At Princeton Mackay also won a theology prize, accompanied by funds that would allow him to travel once again for further education in preparation for his missionary vocation. Where to travel was not immediately self-evident when the young Scot reached graduation. By 1915, Great Britain, France, and Russia were at war with Germany and its allies. Thus one usual course of study for fellowship recipients—a trip to visit universities on the Continent—was not feasible, especially for a citizen of the United Kingdom. Knowing that Mackay planned to work as a missionary in Latin America, the seminary’s professor Benjamin Warfield recommended that the young man spend time in Spain in order to understand better the language and culture of the people to whom he would be ministering in Latin America.⁶

From the fall of 1915 until the summer of 1916, Mackay studied in Madrid except for brief periods of travel to other places in Spain. No other year of his life contributed so dramatically to broadening his religious perspective. Intellectually vibrant, Spain was far from the stultified and repressive atmosphere that would characterize it after General Francisco Franco’s forces won the civil war that raged from 1936 to 1939. Mackay lived in the Residencia de Estudiantes—a community inspired and organized by Francisco Giner de los Ríos, a champion of academic freedom and research, who had died only a few months before Mackay’s arrival. Some years later Mackay said that Giner resembled Christ teaching “his disciples on the hill slopes beside the placid sea.” Through the Residencia at various times came such figures as Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel, José Ortega y Gasset, and Miguel de Unamuno. During Mackay’s stay in Madrid, Unamuno was already 51 years old and an established scholar at the University of Salamanca, but he visited Madrid from time to time, staying at the Residencia during his sojourns. On one of these visits, Mackay met Unamuno and was quite taken by Don Miguel. A Basque of passionate intensity, Unamuno attacked every form of religious hypocrisy. He believed that the realities of the Christian message were not found in “bloodless logic,” and the true religious life did not bring certainty and peace but an “agonizing struggle.” For Unamuno “truth breaks and life is fulfilled only upon the road when one is pressing onwards, loyal to the heavenly vision.” From Don Miguel, Mackay learned to appreciate the great mystics of the Spanish tradition, especially John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. If he had a saint, Mackay would say thereafter, it was Teresa. Unamuno also introduced Mackay to Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard. Their writings underscored Unamuno’s own emphasis that truth was found not in abstract propositions but rather in the midst of struggle and journey—“only upon the road when one is pressing forward.” These themes resonated with strands of piety in which Mackay himself had been reared. One of the first books given John Mackay as a boy was an illustrated edition of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the classic expression of a Puritan piety depicting the Christian’s path to salvation as an arduous journey through sin, doubt, and temptation. Perhaps Unamuno’s greatest contribution to Mackay was to deepen his awareness that within the Spanish-speaking world a religious tradition already existed from which the Protestant missionary might draw. That tradition—the “other Spanish Christ” Mackay would later call it—though overlaid by contradictory elements, was something indigenous within Hispanic Christianity to which the Protestant could appeal.⁷

After his study in Spain, Mackay returned briefly to Scotland, was ordained to missionary service by the Free Church, got married, and sailed with his new bride to Peru. In Lima, he reestablished an already existing school under the auspices of the Free Church with himself as the school’s principal. With growing numbers of students drawn to the school, Mackay made plans to offer a higher level of instruction—an aspiration made possible in part by the fact that Mackay received educational credentials from the University of San Marcos in Lima. During his first years in the city, he presented a thesis on Unamuno that was accepted at San Marcos and opened the way for him subsequently to give lectures and offer courses there. Mackay soon became part of a network of young Peruvian intellectuals who hoped for a regeneration of their nation and its culture.

One glimpses Mackay’s approach to his work from the report he prepared for a congress on Christian work meeting in Montevideo. The report expressed concern about attitudes sometimes manifested by missionary agencies. It warned against boards which, in the words of one correspondent, “do not know, nor appear to have any special desire to know,” the countries to which they are sending workers. It advised that “South Americans are becoming increasingly sensitive about what they regard as the inveterate incomprehension of missionaries.” The report also highlighted the religious obstacles to the Protestant cause—for example, hostility from the Roman Catholic Church, particularly the tendency of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to ally with reactionary governments and to resist liberal efforts on behalf of religious freedom. But Mackay’s report found encouragement in many students’ new seriousness and engagement with intellectual issues. “The champions of this new mental attitude,” said the report, “proclaim that intellectuals should not be simple spectators of life’s drama, but actors in it … They should be prophets of glories to come and not priests of glories spent.” To capture and direct that mood, the Protestant churches needed to embody a “new prophetic spirit” in which “Scripture and literature, art and science must be made vocal, to broadcast through South American lands the eternal connection between sin and suffering.” The goal was to “touch life at as many points as possible.” As “comprehensive a program as possible of missionary activity” was required so that all the “different aspects of life may lead the thoughts of men to the Christ.” To achieve this comprehensive program, the evangelical movement should hesitate to import European or North American ecclesiastical forms that might have little use in the South American context. In fact, the missionaries “should make provision for the delivery of a religious message without the ordinary trappings of a religious service. It is our conviction that the greatest opportunity of the present hour in South America is theirs who will deliver God’s message as it was once delivered by the sea of Galilee and on the Athenian Areopagus without any of the elements of worship.” Mackay’s was a vision of a missionary enterprise centered on the person of Christ, innovative in its methods, and cognizant of the fact that redemption entailed not only salvation of individual souls (though that was absolutely essential) but also of “literature, art and science”—in short, the totality of human life.⁸

Mackay in fact changed his own ministry. He resigned from his school in Lima and gave up his lectureship at San Marcos. His new job description was special lecturer and writer on religion under the South American Federation of the YMCA. The YMCA gave Mackay a venue for the kind of ministry he had praised at the Montevideo Congress. Like Jesus by the Sea of Galilee or Paul at the Areopagus, he had found a place where he could deliver “a religious message without the ordinary trappings of a religious service.” Many young men who probably would not set foot within the door of a church sanctuary would come to the YMCA. Moreover, work through the Y had the advantage of allowing Mackay to avoid being dragged into ecclesiastical controversies that were tangential or even detrimental to confronting people with the person and claims of Christ. Mackay worried that requiring members of the Y to be affiliated with an evangelical church was too restrictive. He was happier with the revised 1931 formula adopted by an international YMCA that made loyalty to Jesus Christ, rather than membership in a church, the requirement for Y membership. This is not to say that Mackay’s goal, as he said in a letter to a friend, was to create a vague or diffuse “influence” of Christianity throughout Latin America—though that indeed was valuable—but rather to generate “passionate hearts which in virtue of a personal experience of divine power become themselves generators of a new ‘movement’ in thought and life.” The forms and institutions, Mackay seemed to be saying, would adjust themselves accordingly if the spiritual center of the Y’s message were put front and center.⁹

Reminiscing nearly 50 years after he had gone into work with the Y, Mackay recalled,

While Jesus Christ became increasingly real and meaningful to me, I had lost faith in the church, I mean the church as an organization, a structure. I continued to attend church services, but I no longer belonged to any denomination.

As I reflect on this mood it would appear that two phenomena produced my antichurchism. The first was my disillusionment with the two denominations to which I had ecclesiastically belonged. The second was the tragic phenomenon of the Hispanic Catholic Church to which I had devoted a great deal of study. This church throughout the centuries had become Christ’s patron, relegating Him to a very secondary position. The result: I lost faith in the church. I continued to attend church services, but I no longer belonged to any denomination.¹⁰

Mackay’s “antichurchism” did not, of course, persist. During a furlough in late 1929 into 1930, he went to Europe where he again saw Unamuno and also some of the thinkers who were then shaking the theological world. For several months, he and his family lived in Bonn, Germany, where Karl Barth was just beginning his time on the theological faculty. Mackay attended Barth’s lectures and the weekly evening meetings for students in Barth’s home. He got to converse with Barth privately as he tutored Barth in English. On a side trip to Switzerland, he also met Emil Brunner and Eduard Thurneysen. These thinkers encouraged Mackay’s reengagement with the church, but the nature of their thought encouraged dynamic reengagement. Or as Mackay in 1937 quoted Brunner,

The fact that God’s Word is not a static theory, that it is not a Word which man can manipulate as he chooses, but that it is a living personal challenge has been forgotten. When dogma has ceased to be witness, that is, to point to something behind and above itself, then it is fossilized into a concrete “Word,” a fetish.

This was not an outlook likely to promote a set of changeless ecclesiological propositions. It produced instead, as Mackay would say following Unamuno’s trope, a view from life’s road.¹¹

Within three years of his return to his work with the YMCA in Latin America, Mackay gave tangible evidence of his renewed commitment to the church. In 1932, he accepted a position with the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the USA and worked at the agency’s headquarters in New York City. Then when the presidency of Princeton Seminary was due to become vacant with the imminent retirement of J. Ross Stevenson, the search committee offered the position to Mackay who, after initially declining, accepted the offer. Mackay recalled years later that the decisive moment in his decision to accept was the advice of a “Methodist friend of mine” who “said to me that a theological seminary can be a mission field.” And it was a mission field in which, as his professorship in ecumenics attested, he would seek to encourage a sense of “the Church Universal, when the latter is conceived as a missionary community.”¹²

II

In his years as president of Princeton Seminary, John Mackay quickly became a major leader among “ecumenical Protestants”—that is, among those denominations and theological schools that provided the bulk of the support and direction to groups like the Federal Council of Churches (the National Council after 1950), to organizations such as the YMCA, the Student Volunteer Movement, the World Student Christian Federation, and to the various conferences and movements leading up to the formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948.¹³

A brief overview of only some of Mackay’s outside activities during his years as president of Princeton Seminary underscores the important role he played not only within the Presbyterian Church but broader intellectual and religious circles as well. Even while working for the Board of Foreign Missions, he had already become part of the Theological Discussion Group, a biannual gathering of younger theologians initially organized by Henry Pitney Van Dusen. Among the other members of the group were Wilhelm Pauck, Walter M. Horton, John C. Bennett of Union, the Niebuhr brothers, Samuel McCrea Cavert, the General Secretary of the Federal Council of Churches, and Paul Tillich, who had recently fled to America from Hitler’s Germany. The group also included African American scholar Benjamin E. Mays, then Dean of the School of Religion at Howard University, and Georgia Harkness, initially of Elmira College in New York state and by 1939 a professor at Garrett Biblical Institute (now the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary) in Evanston, Illinois. Although these breaches in the walls of racial and gender discrimination seem small from today’s perspective, the presence of Mays and Harkness represented at least a nascent awareness that the church, if it were to be truly the church, had to transcend barriers of race and gender.¹⁴

Members of the Theological Discussion Group played important roles in preparing for the 1937 Oxford Conference on Church, Community, and State. Mackay wrote the initial draft of a statement for the conference section on the Universal Church and the World of Nations. He coined the phrase that became the motto of the conference: “Let the Church be the Church.” Five years later at the Delaware Conference sponsored by the Federal Council in March 1942—it was so named because the delegates met in Delaware, Ohio—Mackay was again a major figure. This first large gathering of ecumenical Protestants following the United States’ entry into World War II drew together not only leading clergy from the denominations, but notable Protestant lay people such as Alfred M. Landon, the Republican candidate for president in 1936, and also John Foster Dulles, a future Secretary of State under the Eisenhower Administration. The then current Secretary of State Cordell Hull sent a special representative to the meeting. The nature of attendees attested to the cultural clout and prestige that this ecumenical gathering carried. The resolutions of the conference, issued as The Churches and a Just and Durable Peace, helped to set the discourse within which plans for a postwar world were drawn up. At the Amsterdam assembly that launched the World Council of Churches in 1948 Mackay was again present as a member of the provisional committee, then later of the WCC’s central committee. He served as moderator of the General Assembly of his own Presbyterian Church in the USA from 1953 to 1954. In 1954 he was also elected to a five-year term as president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. This brief list touches only a few of the many significant responsibilities that Mackay undertook in addition to his duties as president of Princeton Seminary.¹⁵

But more important than the list of committees chaired and meetings attended was the vision of Christianity these activities expressed and which Mackay sought to have the seminary embody. The reinvigorated belief in the church that marked his thought from the 1930s onward gives an important clue to that vision. When he coined the phrase, “Let the Church be the Church,” he meant it as something more than a tautology. In A Preface to Christian Theology (1941), he offered the draft he had prepared for the Oxford Conference:

Let the Church be the Church. Let the Church know herself, whose she is and what she is. Discerning clearly her own status as the community of Grace, the organ of God’s redemptive purpose for mankind, she must by a process of the most merciless self-scrutiny, become what God intended her to be … This involves a revivified sense of God as the real living God, the “god of the whole earth,” over against a God who is no more than a dialectical process or a member of a polytheistic pluralism. This means concretely that the Church recognize herself to be the Church of Christ, the organ of God’s purpose in Him. It must be her ceaseless concern to rid herself from all subjugation to a prevailing culture, an economic system, a social type, or a political order. Let the Church live; over against all these let the Church stand.¹⁶

Mackay, in short, believed that the church needed to know itself as locus of the redemptive activity of God; and since God was not defined by a particular culture, economic system, or form of political government, neither should the church be limited by these. That realization was, he believed, especially essential for those who lived in the shadow of Nazism and the Communist Revolution. In face of these surrogate religions that would make either blood or class the defining reality of human community, the Christian church recognized no borders. Or as he wrote shortly after the Oxford Conference,

If it is to be truly ecumenical, the Church must transcend every boundary. It cannot be the Church if it perpetuates class distinctions within its membership. As the Church, it must rise above every human division and provide mankind with a true unity, the only unity, the redemptive unity expressive of the purpose of God in Christ Jesus … A church consciousness must be engendered in all Christians, not in order that the Church may become an end in itself … but that all Christians may recognize that the divinely appointed order for the fulfillment of God’s purpose in Christ in a disordered, perishing world is the Christian Church.

As part of that mission, the church had to be prepared to stand against governments and policies when they promoted moral disorder. “While not aligning herself with any political party or faction, or unfurling the banner of any social theory or group,” Mackay insisted, “the Church sets forth in the boldest relief her diagnosis of unhappy situations in which the welfare of men is being compromised and the principles of righteousness violated.” He enacted that prophetic concern most memorably through his authorship of “A Letter to Presbyterians.” Mackay wrote the document during his year as moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly (1953–54) and during the high point of American fears of communist subversion, fears symbolized by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Often crude and savage in manner, Senator McCarthy claimed to possess evidence that the government was riddled with communists and their sympathizers. He seldom offered specific evidence to substantiate his charges, but before his fellow senators censured him in 1954, he had managed to cast aspersions of disloyalty upon the State Department, elements of the United States Army, and upon the American clergy. While Mackay had no doubt of the evil of communism, he found equally dangerous the fanatical spirit willing to violate the rights of individual conscience or to hold people guilty by reason of “casual association” with others who may have espoused questionable views. Hence Mackay, in his capacity as moderator, proposed to the General Council—which functioned as a kind of executive committee of the denomination between the then annual meetings of the General Assembly—that it write to the denomination a letter setting forth the theological issues posed by McCarthyism. Mackay drafted the letter, it was adopted unanimously by the Council with modest changes, and then sent out on November 2, 1953 to all presbyteries and sessions. At the same time, the letter was given to the press and sent to President Eisenhower, the Secretary of State, and Presbyterian members of Congress.¹⁷

“A Letter to Presbyterians” readily granted that communism constituted a genuine threat to the nation but the document also warned that fear of communism had bred dangerous excess: “a subtle but potent assault on basic human rights” that one could see in the tendency of some congressional investigations to become inquisitions and in attacks upon “citizens of integrity and social passion.” “Treason and dissent,” warned the letter, “are being confused.” Noting that the church “has a prophetic function to fulfill,” the Letter reminded Presbyterians that the “Church does not derive its authority from the nation but from Jesus Christ” and that it therefore owed “its supreme and ultimate allegiance” to him. That loyalty did not mean that the church had a mandate “to present blueprints for the organization of society and the conduct of government,” but it did have a prophetic duty “to proclaim those principles, and to instill that spirit, which are essential for social health.” Perhaps the most dangerous attitude the Cold War engendered was the tendency to make a fetish of security, and the statement developed that point at some length.

That we have the obligation to make our nation as secure as possible, no one can dispute. But there is no absolute security in human affairs, nor is security the ultimate human obligation. A still greater obligation, as well as a more strategic procedure, is to make sure that what we mean by security, and the methods we employ to achieve it, are in accordance with the will of God. Otherwise, any human attempt to establish a form of world order which does no more than exalt the interest of a class, a culture, a race, or a nation, above God and the interests of the whole human family, is foredoomed to disaster.¹⁸

The Letter went on to observe that powerful “revolutionary forces” were at work in the world—forces that constituted “in great part the judgment of God upon human selfishness and complacency.” None of this implied that communism represented, as its adherents believed, the wave of the future. It would ultimately fail. “No political order can prevail which deliberately leaves God out of account … For that reason Communism has an approaching rendezvous with God and the moral order.” In fact, because that system would ultimately fail, Americans should “ever be on the lookout for the evidence of change in the Communist world, for the effects of disillusionment, and for the presence of a God-implanted hunger.” Therefore, the statement advocated a willingness by American leaders to “take the risk, even the initiative, of seeking face-to-face encounter with our enemies.”¹⁹

“A Letter to Presbyterians” represented a social engagement characteristic of Mackay’s entire ministry. As the principal of the Anglo-Peruvian School in Lima, he and his wife Jane hid a young friend and teacher at the school who had engaged in a public protest against the policies of Peruvian President Leguia. The Mackays did so at risk to their school and themselves. During the 1930s, as noted above, Mackay spoke against both Nazism and Bolshevism as dangers against which the church must witness. In the post-World War II era, Mackay called for dialogue with Communist nations, including recognition of the People’s Republic of China at a time when the US government refused to do so. He also associated with the National Advisory Committee on Farm Labor which worked on behalf “of the indigent migrant workers, whose woes have been so shamefully exploited in our country.” He rejoiced in the fact that through the National Advisory Committee he had the opportunity to work with extraordinary individuals such as Frank Porter Graham, a former president of the University of North Carolina who had defended the academic freedom of his school by inviting Bertrand Russell and Langston Hughes to give public lectures; A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and pioneer civil rights leader who proposed the 1963 March on Washington; and Norman Thomas, a champion of social justice and perennial leader of America’s Socialist Party. Even into his ninth decade, John Mackay maintained the posture of prophetic protest. In a baccalaureate sermon to the seminary class of 1971, he decried American involvement in the Vietnam War as “the disastrous and meaningless struggle that continues to go on in Southeast Asia.” With regard to Latin America, he referred to the “involvement of our government in facilitating the emergence of the present Brazilian regime [as a result of the military overthrow of civilian authority] which is one of the most tyrannical regimes in Latin American history” and sadly noted the “tragic fact that our country’s attitude toward Brazil has not been inspired by concern for the many millions of impoverished people in that country who live a dehumanized life.” He noted “the revolutionary expectation” that was rising in the region and had acquired powerful symbols in the deaths of the Columbian priest Camilo Torres and of the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara who had gone to fight in Bolivia. Unlike many American students who romanticized these figures in the 1960s and 1970s—then and later it was common to see college age youth wearing tee shirts with the image of Che—Mackay did not idealize them. But he did see them as God’s warning of possible judgment. For Mackay the commitment to prophetic social witness was not an addendum to the ecumenical mission of the church. It was a logical extension of the vision he had glimpsed at Rogart as a lad of 14—a vision of “the cosmic Christ … who was the center of a great drama of unity.” More than half-way through his presidency at Princeton Seminary, he spoke of prophetic witness as being grounded in eschatological hope:

History itself shall not end in frustration … For that reason I feel much closer to the chiliasts than to those who relegate the victory of Christ to a time beyond history. I am not with the chiliasts in all the trappings of their outlook. But I am with them in the spirit of what they are trying to say. We have a right to expect that, though we go through revolutionary fires and oceans of sorrows, Jesus Christ shall be acclaimed Lord within history. That is part of our Christian hope. Our labor in the Lord shall not be in vain at the last.²⁰

Perhaps because of the strain of traditional piety that lay beneath his prophetic activism, John Mackay was also able to appreciate movements that many ecumenical Protestants of his day did not esteem. In an address in 1950, Mackay welcomed the ministry of the young Billy Graham who only a year earlier had burst into national fame with revivals in Los Angeles and who had yet to attain the widespread acceptance in mainstream circles that he would later attain. At a time when most mainstream Protestant leaders either ignored Pentecostal churches or dismissed them out of hand, Mackay put in a good word for them, too, in the 1950 address. “These groups,” he acknowledged, “are oftentimes dismissed as Christianity’s ‘lunatic fringe’ because of certain objectionable features which they manifest. Yet, according to the clear evidence of spiritual results, they are doing a great work in which Christ is present.” Mackay was noting what subsequent students of religion have sometimes argued: namely, that the Pentecostal movement in Latin America promoted social uplift by encouraging education, self-discipline, and communal ties. At about the same time, Mackay formed a friendship with a South African Pentecostal who had moved to America in 1948, believing he had a call to bring the Pentecostal witness to traditional Christian denominations. Learning of Mackay’s openness, David DuPlessis phoned him in Princeton in early 1952, had a good conversation, and received an invitation to visit. The visit went well, and DuPlessis took delight in John Mackay’s remark, “I would rather put up with the uncouth life of the Pentecostal, than be bound by the ascetic death of the formal churches.” Mackay eased DuPlessis’s way into ecumenical circles and introduced him at the International Missionary Council meeting in Willingen in July 1952 as his “great Pentecostal friend.” During his retirement, a charismatic movement, claiming that its followers had received the gift of tongues (glossolalia), arose within the Presbyterian Church and sparked controversy in some congregations and presbyteries. Leaders of the movement consulted John Mackay who helped bridge the gap between them and the denominational leadership. Behind the scenes, he also used his influence to get the General Assembly to commission a study of the charismatic movement.²¹

John Mackay defied simple labels. In some ways, he appeared to be the quintessential “ecumenical Protestant.” He participated in organizations such as the YMCA and the World Council of Churches as well as the conferences that paved the way for the latter. Moreover, he espoused progressive social and political causes—also a stance often identified with ecumenical Protestantism. Yet most persons of that stamp had little appreciation for Pentecostalism or, at least at the outset of his career, even Billy Graham. John Mackay was one of the few establishment Protestants who could count as his friends two men named Graham from North Carolina—the evangelist Billy Graham and the liberal educator Frank Porter Graham. Mackay was almost certainly the only mainline Protestant leader who could speak of his “great friend,” Assemblies of God pastor David DuPlessis and then give a similar designation to socialist Norman Thomas. The breadth of Mackay’s contacts and sympathies exceeded those of most other ecumenical Protestant leaders. Also, despite the fact that many historians and sociologists have subsequently depicted mainline Protestantism in the late twentieth century as growing disengaged from evangelical piety, such was emphatically not the case for John Mackay. At the heart of his ecumenical vision lay what he liked to call a “luminous” encounter with Jesus Christ. Over the years, Mackay saw ever-expanding meaning in what he had experienced at Rogart in 1903, and that encounter remained at the center of his life, work, and thought.

Mackay’s ecumenical vision also gave the lie to any caricature of ecumenism as willing to erase all theological differences for the sake of creating unity among churches or for the purpose of constructing more efficient ecclesiastical bureaucracies. Mackay retained a deep respect for confessional distinctions. “There is no future,” he wrote in a discussion of his own Presbyterian heritage in 1960, “to a vague, colorless, lowest common denominator, ecumenism. You cannot belong to the Christian Church in general, any more than you can belong to the human race in general.” True ecumenism entailed paradox. “On the one hand,” said Mackay, “I am today a more convinced and loyal Presbyterian than I have ever been before. On the other hand, I am less of a Presbyterian absolutist and sectarian than at any time in my life.” In fact, he believed that “Presbyterians”—like all Christians—“must experience the reality of Christ through an exploration of their own heritage if they are to bring understanding and zeal to the cause of Christ’s Church Universal.” Only by grounding their faith in the distinctiveness of a particular tradition could Christians discover the reality of faith or bring what was too often “the stratospheric realm of the ecumenical” down “to the work-a-day world of the local.” Mackay realized that emphasis upon one’s own theological tradition easily degenerated into parochialism and sectarian pride. The cure for this narrowness resided in awareness of what lay behind all Christian confessional traditions: “Christian truth is personal truth, it is commitment to a Person, loyalty to a Person who is the Sovereign Lord. And that Person, the Living Christ, is ever moving beyond the frontiers of today. His truth cannot be contained within rigid dogmatisms, nor His Kingdom within narrow ecclesiastical boundaries.”²²

Mackay’s ecumenical vision, in short, was inspired by devotion to the Christ in whom all things ultimately cohere and who even now is leading his people beyond existing boundaries as history moves toward the fulfillment of cosmic unity in Him. As the Christian church joined in that mission, the form of its unity would become clearer. “It is on the road of missionary obedience,” Mackay declared to a 1957 meeting of the International Missionary Council in Ghana,

that the unity of the Church of Christ will be achieved and will prove most effective. It is on this road and only on this road that a pilgrim, missionary Church, which subordinates everything in its heritage to the fulfillment of its mission, will discover the structural form which will best express its oneness in Christ.

Only as the churches came down from the turrets of their castles and travelled the road of passionate engagement in mission would they discover what ecumenism truly is.²³

Footnotes

1

John A. Mackay, “The Outlook,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 32 (Jan. 1939): 1. For a fuller assessment of John Mackay, see James H. Moorhead, Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 370–421; and John Mackay Metzger, The Hand and the Road: The Life and Times of John A. Mackay (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010).

2

Mackay, “Outlook,” 1; idem, Ecumenics: The Science of the Church Universal (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964). The latter work developed out of the lectures and topics that Mackay had covered in the course on ecumenics that he taught at Princeton Seminary.

3

John A. Mackay, “John A. Mackay, ‘The Glory and Peril of the Local,’” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 48:3 (1955): 11; James Lachlan MacLeod, The Second Disruption: The Free Church in Victorian Scotland and the Origins of the Free Presbyterian Church (East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell, 2000).

4

John A. Mackay, God's Order: The Ephesian Letter and This Present Time (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 7–8.

5

John A. Mackay, “Theological Triennium: For What?,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 52 (1959): 5.

6

John A. Mackay, “The Great Adventure,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 64 (1971): 31. On the Presbyterian conflict and Princeton, see Lefferts A. Loetscher, The Broadening Church: A Study of Theological Issues in the Presbyterian Church since 1869 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1954), 136–48, and George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, second ed. (New York: Oxford, 2006), 109–18.

7

John A. Mackay, The Other Spanish Christ: A Study in the Spiritual History of Spain and South America (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2001 [1933]), 147; H. McKennie Goodpasture, “The Latin American Soul of John A. Mackay,” Journal of Presbyterian History 48 (Winter 1970): 265–92; Gerald W. Gillette (interviewer), “John A. Mackay: Influences on My Life,” Journal of Presbyterian History 56 (Spring 1978): 20–34; Solomon Lipp, “Francisco Giner de los Ríos—Modern Educator of Spain,” History of Education Quarterly 2 (September 1962): 168–81.

8

Christian Work in South America: Official Report of the Congress on Christian Work in South America at Montevideo, Uruguay, April 1925, 2 vols. (New York: Revell, 1925), 2: 299–377. The quotations are from 300, 309, 365, 366, 367.

9

Basil Mathews, John R. Mott: World Citizen (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1934), 349; Metzger, Mackay, 152, 156–57.

10

John A. Mackay, “Let Us Remember,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 65 (1972): 28.

11

Metzger, Mackay, 193; John A. Mackay, “The Restoration of Theology,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 31 (April 1937): 16.

12

Gillette, “John A. Mackay,” 33.

13

I derive this usage of “ecumenical Protestantism” from David A. Hollinger, “The Realist–Pacifist Summit Meeting of March 1942 and the Political Reorientation of Ecumenical Protestantism in the United States,” Church History 79 (September 2010). See also William R. Hutchison, ed., Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1989).

14

Heather A. Warren, “The Theological Discussion Group and Its Impact on American and Ecumenical Theology, 1920–1945,” Church History 62 (December 1993), 528–43. For more on Harkness and Mays, see Gary Dorrien, The Marking of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 390–430.

15

On the Delaware conference and its aftermath, see Hollinger, “Realist–Pacifist Summit Meeting”; Dennis L. Tarr, “The Presbyterian Church and the Founding of the United Nations,” Journal of Presbyterian History 53 (Spring 1975): 3–32.

16

John A. Mackay, A Preface to Christian Theology (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 171.

17

John A. Mackay, “The New Idolatry,” Theology Today 10 (October 1953): 382–83. For more on the General Council's letter, see James H. Smylie, “Mackay and McCarthyism,1953–1954,” Journal of Church and State 6 (August1964): 352–65.

18

“A Letter to Presbyterians concerning the Present Situation in Our Country and in the World,” Theology Today 11 (April 1954): 15–21; quotes from 16, 17, 18, 19. Daniel L. Migliore, “‘The Majesty of Truth’: Meditations on ‘A Letter to Presbyterians,’ 1954,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 6 (1985): 78–80.

19

“Letter to Presbyterians,” 20, 21.

20

See the following articles by John A. Mackay in the Princeton Seminary Bulletin: “A Representative American of the 1960s: James Joseph Reeb,” 60:1 (1966): 33–39; and “The Great Adventure,” 64:2 (1971): 31–38; also John A. Mackay, “Call to Discipleship,” Theology Today (July 1950): 217–27, with the extended quotation from 226.

21

John A. Mackay, “Splendor in the Abyss,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 44 (1950): 5–15; quotes from 5, 8, 9, 12, 13; idem, “Portent and Promise in the Other America,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 47 (1954): 13; Joshua R. Ziefle, “The Place of Pentecost: David Johannes du Plessis, the Assemblies of God, and the Development of Ecumenical Pentecostalism” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton Theological Seminary, 2010); Robert R. Curlee and Mary Ruth Isaac-Curlee, “Bridging the Gap: John A. Mackay, Presbyterians, and the Charismatic Movement,” American Presbyterians: Journal of Presbyterian History 72 (Fall 1994): 157–72. For an example of a sociologist's reflections on the Pentecostal movement in Latin America, see David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).

22

John A. Mackay, The Presbyterian Way of Life (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1960), xiii, 220–223 ; idem, “The Glory and Peril of the Local,” 11.

23

John A. Mackay, “The Christian Mission at This Hour,” Theology Today 15 (April 1958): 35.

Author biography

James H. Moorhead is the Mary McIntosh Bridge Professor of American Church History at Princeton Theological Seminary and also serves as senior editor of The Journal of Presbyterian History. A native of Pennsylvania, he taught at North Carolina State University prior to coming to Princeton in 1984. His most recent book is Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture.