Customer Reviews

Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church

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(NOTE: This is one of those rare Gary North books which is not wildly controversial even within conservative circles. Conservatives of whatever variety will love this. Only Liberals will hate it.)

Gary North here accomplishes what no one else has even attempted: a thorough look at how the liberals took over the most prominent Mainline denomination. You may think this is old news: it's not. You may think it's irrelevant: you're wrong.

Southern Baptists should pay especially close attention (and North heavily tips his hat to Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson): this is the same general plan of attack that was used in the SBC up to the conservative resurgence. It is also the ongoing strategy in many of our state conventions and at schools like Baylor and Wake Forest.

Crossed Fingers is both a scholarly history that everyone from John Frame to Adrian Rogers will appreciate, and an action manual for how to defeat liberal takeovers. It's a big book (a very big book), and some people might get lost in the preface and the forward (if you sense yourself getting lost, just move on to the Introduction. I don't recommend this, but it's a valid option), but it is must reading for anyone who cares about keeping the church faithful to it's Master.

(See also Paul Pressler's new "A Hill on Which to Die.")

Gary North does an excellent job showing how the PCUSA became a liberal church. It is complete yet interesting. Too often Reformed people (and other Christians) do not understand what causes a denomination to be corrupted. North, armed with an optimistic postmillenial world view, shows that it is weak adherence to Reformed standards that brings about this corruption. An amillenialist could not have written a book this well or this interesting, because an amillenialist has no sure hope for the church's reformation. The only thing I wish North had included is a discussion of how premillenialism, a theology held to by most of the New School party in the 1920s, contributed to the final takeover by modernists. North is right when he says similliar books need to be written by conservatives in other apostate denominations. It is hoped that others will write on the United Presbyterian Church, the Reformed Church in America, and the United Church of Christ. If you are a Presbyterian pastor or elder, and you only read one book this year, make sure it is this one!

Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church
Gary North
available online at: http://www.freebooks.com/docs/html/gncf/table_of_contents.htm
although i found it difficult to read online and purchased a second hand copy.



How do you review a 1000 page book?

Well, i finished it, actually quite an accomplishment. For North is an author i love to hate, i put the book down in disgust and picked it up the next day because i don't want to miss anything. North is a polemic, a fighter, nasty, often name calling, self centered, provocative, interesting, wordy, well i guess you get the picture. What the book is not: it is not strictly history, but rather something a little higher up the food chain, philosophic/theological interpretation of history, conspiracy theory, covenant theory in action, something like all these mixed together. North's extraordinary value as a writer and as a theologian is the confidence and strength his well tuned mental system produces in his works. His confidence in himself and his ideas is oftentimes overwhelming and always alluring. The problem i have is that i always put the book(s) down and have to ask myself "is this really true?" or "is this really Scriptural?" or is he overstating the case to win the debate in his mind. That is the great weakness of this book in particular, it really needed 6 months of careful research and fact checking in 1996 when it was published. You are always aware that he seems to bend the facts, both by omission and by simply being confidently wrong in order to support and prove his theories.

His big ideas are interesting and worth the time it takes to wade through the book. The first is the idea of crossed fingers, that the pastors/teachers/theologians of the Presbyterian church had to cross their fingers when subscribing to the Westminster confession. On the issues of 6 day creation, all children dying in infancy being saved or not, and later the big ones- Calvinism, Reformed theology, the essentials of the Christian faith itself. His major motif is a mixture of covenant theology and conspiracy theory, 1-that God deals with humanity in terms of promises and promised punishments and 2-that the liberals together plotted to grab the wealth and prestige of the Presbyterian church. He ends every chapter with the sentence: "the crucial issue is sanctions." He rightly points out that church discipline is important and if the church is unwilling or unable to fight heresy then it will end up a broad, inclusive social club where theology is replaced by institutional allegience, and the faith is replaced by a palid emotional appeal for money and power.

As far as the details, he is good with Presbyterian history, lousy fact checking when he gets into the Dutch tradition, mostly a result of where he lives intellectually. He is ok with what he includes, which has a little too much of North's pet theorizing at times, but he is lousy with the important things he leaves out, things which contradict his theories. He is good as a nice big picture overview, but each chapter needs another source of detail and historical factual additions to help balance out the way you think. So it is a good book to read if you want to embark on a long term study of Presbyterian history and are willing to unlearn and relearn significant pieces of the puzzle, but wish to gain insight into how his theory and principles bear on the issues. I don't know of another book that attempts what he has accomplished, a general history, so to replace this reading is perhaps a dozen other books, together totally far more than 1000 pages, but such is the cost of understanding and study.

Generally speaking, Crossed Fingers ends up telling me more about Gary North then it does about Presbyterian history, but his general principles are basically Scriptural even if rather steeply overlaid with his conservative economics and politics. And this is the final value, not just in CF but in all of North's books, he really does try to understand and deal with Scripture as authoritative and applicable to the problems of today, and for this he has my respect and my continued readership.

This is the only book which fully descrbes how a once Calvinist denomination came in the space of a few decades to represent the most liberal Arminianism theolgy ever expressed by a formerly orthodox church and as such, is a warning to every single orthodox church that is in the mainstream. If a church is willing to surrender orthodoxy for numbers, this is the inevitable result. By the way, The PCUSA has been on a steady decline since the 1920's and loses more members every year. The epitath of a once vital church. Resquiat in pace.

I thoroughly enjoy Gary North. I suspect most hate him. He's very blunt with his opinions and this book is certainly no exception. Sure, it's 1000 pages, but North is an easy read and the subject is very interesting.

As to the potential popularity of this book - I think North sums it up pretty good at the beginning of the book:

"I wrote this book for Christians who are tired of being milked, bilked, and forced to ride
silently in the back of humanism's bus. If this is you, keep reading. Understand, however,
that you are part of a small remnant: a person who is willing to pick up a book about one
aspect of Presbyterian Church history. The final remnant will be even smaller: those who
finish reading this book. Few are called; even fewer are chosen. But cheer up; there are
words of comfort available: "Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife
and a man of contention to the whole earth! . . . . The LORD said, Verily it shall be well
with thy remnant; verily I will cause the enemy to entreat thee well in the time of evil and in
the time of affliction" (Jer. 15:10a-11)."

Albert Jay Nock spoke of a remnant too - but he was certainly no postmillennialist like North. Despite the depressing picture North paints in this history, he remains faithfully committed to a view of things getting better in the end.

PROS:
- a thorough history of presbyterianism with particular emphasis of the battle with liberalism in the 1800-1900s
- North publishes his own books and so he is not at the mercy of editorial approval
- North is fairly repetitive. It's intentional. It helps to retain the idea he is presenting. If you read this book, you will have expressions like, "The crucial issue was sanctions." (repeated 24 times throughout the book) memorized by the time you finish.

CONS:
- the book is heavy, perhaps a less heavy type of paper could have been used.
- the font is an antiquated Times New Roman. I prefer to read in Arial.

You should read this book and allow the insight obtained to provide a much needed starting point for discussion regarding the future of presbyterianism.

Gary North sure is a lightning rod for controversy, yet
he is fun to read. He may not always be right, but he is
highly entertaining.
I would like to say that in order to appreciate this book fully,
one should learn more about Scottish Presbyterianism from the
1600's. Men like Gillespie and Rutherford, not to mention John Knox were really the spiritual godfathers of the Presbyterian movement. You can learn how they dealt with and competed with the Congregationalists. You can see their dismay in how the Congregationalists executed King Charles I, even though a Presbyterian author wrote Lex Rex.
The point of all this is that the Presbyterians were influencial in creating the Westminister Creed and Catachisms, not to mention the National Covenant and Solemn League and Covenant. As far as *crossed fingers* goes, the Presbyterians were crossing theirs since William of Orange came to power. That's when you have one Presbyterian sect after another, ignoring the Covenants sworn, and then they made modifications on certain points in the Confession of Faith. For instance, is the Pope the Antichrist or not? What about representations of Christ(painted or drawn back then; movie portraials of Christ ie "The Passion of the Christ") Also the Presbyterians outgrew their own understanding of the Regulative Principle and how to *correctly* apply it. So, before you get to the story of the PCUSA, you already have a slide into *liberalism* or a series of innovations that divided the *soul* of the Church from the late 1600's and onward.
Just for the record, I am not a Covenanter or even a Calvinist (I used to be). I just thought that this backdrop would help the uninformed reader that the PCUSA is not unique in its innovations and crossed fingers. Their forefathers did it first.