“Dispensational Diversity in the 1920s: the Gaebeleins, Stony Brook, and their new school”

North American 2011 Annual Meeting Evangelical Theological Society

San Francisco Marriott Marquis, Yerba Buena 7

Wednesday, 16 November, 9:20 – 10:00 am

In February 1931 Lewis Sperry Chafer travelled to Philadelphia to address the League of Evangelical Students[1]. Taking advantage of his time in the Northeast he made a quick trip to Boston and en route stopped off on Long Island to visit Frank Gaebelein, founder and headmaster of the Stony Brook School for Boys. The well-known Dispensationalist writer and conference speaker Arno Gaebelein, Frank’s father, had collaborated with Chafer in the founding in 1924 of a new theological college in Dallas, two years after the establishment of Stony Brook School.

At the time Chafer had written to Frank Gaebelein “I also have in mind, eventually, a literary course of two years, which would bridge from the preparatory or high school grades to the beginning of our Seminary work. Should such an arrangement work out, we could make a very close connection with the students that may be going through your splendid school.”[2] Now Chafer was about to propose a grander alliance: a coalition between Stony Brook, Wheaton, and Dallas. Gaebelein had written in response: “Yes, the public should know that a young man can now attend Stony Brook for his preparatory course, Wheaton for his Arts degree, and Dallas for his Theology. All three institutions could well combine in some propaganda along this line.”[3]

This proposed Stony Brook – Wheaton – Dallas trajectory provides interesting insights into the development of fundamentalism, particularly in the formative decade prior to Chafer’s proposal. Too often the focus has been on the Scopes trial and a perceived general retreat into anti-intellectualism. The 1920s were a time of evangelical realignment. New institutions such as Stony Brook and Dallas were providing fresh approaches to assist in Evangelical recovery. Forceful personalities such as James Oliver Buswell, J. Gresham Machen, and Lewis Sperry Chafer were making an impact on the whole educational scene. Alumni/ae from Wheaton College during those years would subsequently dramatically impact American Protestantism. But there were also stunning defeats. At the end of the decade Princeton Theological Seminary, once the guardian of American orthodoxy[4], would be reorganized.

The parallels with the establishment of Stony Brook School in 1922 and the inauguration of the Evangelical Theological College, Dallas, two years later are many. Many of the congruities center around the three men who were involved. Lewis Sperry Chafer and Arno Gaebelein were close friends[5] and colleagues. Arno’s son, the first Headmaster of Stony Brook School for Boys, was brought into the Dallas Seminary orbit by his father. Chafer and Arno Gaebelein made their reputation in the burgeoning Bible summer Bible conference movement. While Gaebelein, unlike Chafer, was not a Presbyterian minister, much of his itinerant ministry from Knox Church, Toronto, to First Presbyterian Church, Dallas (which helped birth the Seminary), involved a Presbyterian constituency. Both men were early attracted to Darbyite dispensationalism and made prophecy, as they interpreted it, an integral part of their ministry. Both men, involved in the establishment of rigorously academic institutions, had little formal education.

Stony Brook School and Dallas Seminary have common roots in turn-of-the-twentieth- century summer Bible conferences, influenced by the English Keswick convention which began in 1875. The next year the Niagara Bible Conference, with its strongly dispensationalist tone popularized by Presbyterian James H Brookes of St Louis, began to draw large crowds. Dwight L. Moody’s Northfield Bible followed soon after and Winona Lake Bible Conference was not far behind. These Bible conferences had a profound, and often neglected, impact on North American religious life and, with their emphasis on foreign missions, worldwide Christianity.

Musician Lewis Sperry Chafer, leaving Oberlin with his bride accompanist Ella Case in 1896, settled in Northfield in 1901. In the winter of 1907-8 John Fleming Carson, minister of Central Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, searched for a place “where the ministers and other Christian workers might gather and hold summer conferences to encourage one another and stimulate a deeper spiritual life and warmer evangelical spirit.”[6] The following summer he settled on the sleepy village of Stony Brook on Long Island and in 1909 he and evangelist J Wilbur Chapman organized the Stony Brook Assembly. It was an immediate success, drawing large crowds. From the Stony Brook Assembly grew what was initially known as the Stony Brook School for Boys.

Carson’s concern was for “sound doctrine.”[7] He had watched anxiously as Moody’s son Will had reshaped his father’s legacy and taken the Northfield schools and now possibly the Convention in a decidedly ambiguous theological direction. Carson was seminary trained[8] and knowledgably Reformed in theology. Ordained in the Reformed Presbyterian Church (“Covenanter”), in 1892 he brought his congregation[9] into the Presbyterian Church (USA).It grew to over three thousand members and became the second largest church in the denomination.  The Statement of Faith, adopted by the Stony Brook Assembly in 1912[10], was strictly orthodox and subscription was incumbent on all speakers. Its seven points included the deity of Christ, the efficacy of His sacrifice “for the redemption of the world,” “the divine institution and mission of the church,” “the broad and binding obligation resisting (sic) upon the church for the evangelization of the world,” “the divine inspiration, integrity and authority of the Bible,” and a final statement (as significant for what it included as what it left out): “The consummation of the Kingdom in the appearing of the glory of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ.” Given the temper of the times, the absence of an insistence on premillenial orthodoxy was striking and remained a feature of the breadth of eschatological diversity in both the Assembly and, later, the School.

“The secular institutions of learning are all more or less tinged with infidelity” Arno Gaebelein thundered, announcing a new school in his magazine Our Hope[11]. “Still worse are many of the institutions which are affiliated with different denominations. What is taught in these schools, colleges, and universities goes under the name of ‘Christian teaching,’ but the fatal and pernicious destructive criticism lurks beneath it. We believe that this school, which will take boys from the ages of twelve to eighteen, and will give them thorough instruction in the Word of God and the faith delivered unto the Saints, besides fitting them for entrance to any college or university, is most timely.” It was a trumpet call to action: “We believe that the Stony Brook School for Boys is the beginning of a nation-wide movement to establish Christian schools for boys and girls throughout the country.” His son shared the same vision: “Christian secondary schools, schools the curricula of which are built around the Bible, will conserve the faith of the younger generation. Secondary schools, not colleges, are the remedy because the earlier years of adolescence are the formative years of life.”[12]

The Presbyterian connection was another feature of both Stony Brook and Dallas. Lewis Sperry Chafer was a Presbyterian minister (as was his brother Rollin, secretary and registrar at Dallas) and for the first two decades of its existence Presbyterians formed the largest denominational grouping at Dallas Seminary. Stony Brook’s property was to revert to the Benevolence Boards of the Presbyterian Church if the Assembly ever ceased to function. Although Frank Gaebelein was not himself Presbyterian[13], and his father identified with the Brethren, the galaxy of Presbyterian sponsors, first of the Assembly, then of the School, is striking. Over fifty Presbyterian clergy are identified as “Founders of the Assembly” and they include ministers from Connecticut to Iowa, among them pulpit luminaries such as Maitland Alexander of First Church, Pittsburgh, and Marcus Brownson, Tenth Church, Philadelphia[14]. Denominational officials were listed: A W Halsey, Foreign Missions Secretary, Willis Gelston and Alexander Henry of the Publication Board, Philadelphia.  Prominent revivalists such as J Wilbur Chapman and William H Hubbard of Auburn, NY, an ardent Finneyite[15], were contributors.  And there were also academics such as Charles Erdman of Princeton Seminary. In those years, just before World War I, the lines were not drawn as clearly as they would be later. Stony Brook Assembly’s foundation occurred before these divisions were apparent and the School’s organization came just under the wire.  Harry Emerson Fosdick’s sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists win?,” preached in Manhattan’s First Presbyterian Church on 21 May 1922, was a watershed event and two years later, with the foundation of the Evangelical Theological College in Dallas, alignments and alliances became clearer.

Another similarity between Stony Brook School and Dallas Seminary historically can be found in their initial common commitment to the dispensational theology first promulgated by John Nelson Darby. The links between dispensationalism and Presbyterianism would make a fascinating study. It was James H. Brookes of the Walnut St Presbyterian Church, St Louis, who in the 1860s first popularized his prophetic teachings in North America[16]. His magazine The Truth, co- edited by several Presbyterian clergy[17], was influential in disseminating dispensationalism in Presbyterian circles, as was his ministry at the Niagara Convention.  Brookes was mentor to C. I Scofield following Scofield’s conversion in 1879.

Arno Gaebelein, who emigrated from Thuringia Germany to Lawrence Massachusetts that same year, was initially a Methodist. Ordained the following year (without formal education other than secondary school training in the classical languages in a German gymnasium), Gaebelein was largely self-taught, having been advised against going to seminary.[18] In 1882 he was appointed assistant in a German Methodist congregation on Second Street, Manhattan. His ministry colleague warned him about his father’s strange views when he arranged for him to board at his home. Later his landlord handed him a copy of La Future d’Israel by Emile Guers[19] and said “If you only could see this and believe it, and then preach it, how the Lord would use you and bless you.”[20] The evangelization of the Jews would become a major preoccupation of Arno Gaebelein’s ministry[21].

Six years later he had developed into an ardent dispensationalist: the prediction came true. For over forty years both in Canada and the United States Arno Gaebelein, as well as being in constant demand as a platform speaker, was a star of the summer conference circuit. At one Prophetic Week at the Stony Brook Assembly[22] his first talk had the plaintive title: “If Christ should not return, then What?” It was Arno Gaebelein who contributed to The Fundamentals the chapter titled “Fulfilled Prophecy a Potent Argument for the Bible.” As he stated, identifying Biblical orthodoxy with adventist fervor: “It is deplorable that the professing Church of today almost completely ignores and neglects the study of prophecy, a neglect which has for one of its results the loss of one of the most powerful weapons against infidelity. The denial of the Bible as the inspired Word of God has become widespread.”[23] Gaebelein was also a prolific writer, mostly self-published, and for over forty years edited Our Hope magazine. His disciplined work ethic was inherited by the youngest of his three sons, Frank Ely.

Lewis Sperry Chafer was also an auto-didact. Other than musical training and two years at Oberlin he had no formal academic or theological education. That is, other than a long association with C. I. Scofield, pastor of the East Northfield Trinitarian Congregational Church and Moody’s minister. It is quite extraordinary that several of the most influential nineteenth century and early twentieth century American fundamentalist educators, beginning with Moody himself, did not have the same educational experience that they would provide for others. Betrayed by the growing liberalism of the denominational seminaries – with certain exceptions such as Princeton – they looked for alternatives. Like many evangelicals at the time, they simply did not like what was on offer. Both Chafer and Arno Gaebelein were in favour of rigorous and demanding education[24]. “We have no sympathy with the statement that what is necessary for a preacher to know his Bible and that any other knowledge is superfluous,” Arno wrote in Our Hope.[25] In his address at the opening of Stony Brook School Frank Gaebelein set a high tone: “The boy who graduates from the Christian school must have full respect for the scholarship of his masters. Nothing is more dangerous to the faith of the youth than for him to make the disconcerting discovery that the men who have advocated his faith are men of mediocre ability.”[26]

The story has often been told how twenty-one year old Frank Gaebelein was offered the position of Headmaster of a yet-to-be-established prep school. In February 1921, while engaged in graduate studies at Harvard, he was invited by John Carson and Ford Ottman[27] to lunch at Billy the Oysterman’s restaurant on 47th St just west of Fifth Avenue. Carson was heading up the National Service Commission of the Presbyterian Church and Ford was its Executive Secretary. Work with the so-called “doughboys” had given each a concern for young men and their spiritual needs. Frank Gaebelein himself was not unfamiliar with service life, having enlisted in 1918 in the United States Army, and serving as a commissioned officer, a second lieutenant, until the Armistice was declared. After the meal Carson and Ottman huddled together in a nearby table, came back and offered Frank the job[28].”I was shocked. Remember,” years later he confided, “I was without experience of the kind being expected of me.”[29] On 27 August 1921 Frank Gaebelein was officially appointed “Principal” of the proposed Boys School” with a salary of $2400.

Their offer was not as sudden as it might have seemed that day. Ever since the Stony Brook Assembly had been incorporated in 1912 there had been discussion about a wider ministry that would take advantage of their site and location for the other nine months of the year when the Assembly was not in session. At the first annual meeting of the Assembly, 22 October 1912, reference was made to its “religious and educational work” held in the summer on the thirty-acre property and in the winter “carried on throughout the country.”[30]  By 1916 the Trustees were reporting that meetings that year had been “the most successful in the history of the Assembly.”[31] Two years later a three-member committee[32] was struck “to go into the whole question of the opening and operation of a Boys School by the Fall of 1920 and report back to the Directors.”[33] On 14 September 1919 the New York Times quoted Carson as announcing “A non-sectarian Christian college for the education of poor boys will be opened here in the Fall of 1920 on the grounds of the Presbyterian (sic) Stony Brook Assembly.”[34]

With all these delays – and the resulting loss of credibility in the project – Frank Gaebelein set about quickly and single mindedly to establish the new venture. From the outset it was clear that he had definite ideas as to what kind of a school he wanted, ideas that meshed with Carson and the Board. Set up in a small room at 156 Fifth Avenue, headquarters building for the Presbyterian Foreign Mission Board and other denominational organizations, he was not far from his father’s office at 456 Fourth Avenue. Until his death in 1945 Arno Gaebelein would never be far from his son’s side: as his son Frank said, “I am grateful to have been brought up in a home with a strong father who used his authority wisely and well.”[35]

One of the contributions that Arno made to the infant school was to bring in some of his close supporters and friends. Among these was Hugh Reginald Monro who almost immediately became Vice-Chairman of the Stony Brook School Board and served from its inception to his death in 1954. Monro, a Canadian, had gone to Buffalo as a young man, did well in the printing trade, and in 1906 moved to New York, settling in Montclair, New Jersey. At that time Arno Gaebelein was teaching a Bible study in the then prestigious Lincoln Court on Bleekman St. in lower Manhattan. Thirty-five year old Monro joined the twenty or thirty rising young business professionals who studied with him twice a week. “While I tried to water others, I was watered myself,” Gaebelein would recall.[36] Monro became an ardent dispensationalist and a generous supporter of Gaebelein’s activities, such as his 1918 Carnegie Hall Prophetic Bible Conference.[37] His interest in a school for boys had a more immediate concern, however. is oHis only son was showing early signs of instability and addictive behavior.[38] Monro was one of those wealthy businessmen who can easily grow to regard Christian organizations as their power base[39] but at this point his participation in putting the school on a sound financial basis was greatly appreciated.[40]

On 19 January 1922 at a momentous meeting of the Directors of the Stony Brook Assembly a Board of Governors was appointed to assume full responsibility for the startup of the new school with “an initial expense of not exceeding Five Thousand dollars, which should be pledged or secured prior thereto.”[41] Fifteen men were appointed to the new Board of Governors, with Arno Gaebelein heading the list. Of these fifteen, five were clergy and ten were laymen. Three dropped out almost immediately. In one case this was fortunate: “Colonel E. L. Sanctuary,” presumably Colonel E. N. Sanctuary, would later gain notoriety as the author of a virulently anti-Semitic rant titled Are These Things So?[42] Another named was the Canadian philanthropist and dispensational gadfly Sidney T. Smith, a confidant of both Arno Gaebelein and Lewis Chafer. Smith never formally joined the Board, though he was appointed to the Finance Committee.[43] He had founded the Reliance Grain Company (as well as Elim Chapel which he owned and operated) and was twice president of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange. Others are familiar names: both Ferdinand Hopkins and Robert Johnson of St Louis had already contributed generously, with buildings named after them. Among the clergy there were two from Pittsburgh: William McEwan of Third Presbyterian Church and John Knox McClurkin of Shadyside United Presbyterian, a congregation with which Stony Brook School had an ongoing link. McClurkin died the following year but his successor, Cape Bretoner A. Gordon MacLennan, was trustee for thirty-nine years. Of the original fifteen, eight stayed on for eight or more years, with Harbison and Hart continuing until after the Second World War. Their enthusiastic engagement with Stony Brook School (and loyalty to Frank Gaebelein) was a major factor in its success.

The new governors set to work quickly as Frank Gaebelein put all the pieces together for the opening of the new school in September 1922. The first meeting of a Board of Governors for the school (in contrast to the Trustees of the Assembly) was held 16 February 1922 with considerable overlap between the two bodies. In a meeting on 5 May at the Harvard Club in New York Arthur DeLancey Ayrault and William Oncken were appointed to the faculty.  Both men had impressive credentials and with Oncken came his wife, Baroness Eve von Korning, a concert pianist. “That people of this caliber consented to work under a mere beginner who had never had any administrative experience in education at all!” Gaebelein later marveled.[44]

Young Frank Gaebelein was emphatic about faculty qualification. “No man is employed whose religion is a mere profession. No matter what his antecedents he has no place on the faculty unless his Christianity is vital, unless he burns with the desire to lead others to the faith that creates true character.”[45] The first prospectus for the school attempted to avoid both formalism and pietism: “Pietism is entirely alien to the nature of the boy and is certain to antagonize him. Only by supplementing the direct teaching of the classroom with an atmosphere genuinely Christian can the boy be reached. Example is the potent fact. The adolescent boy is by nature imitative.”

The choice of the first Bible instructor could set the theological tone of the school. McClurkin had been approached but his health was uncertain. Another applicant was not appointed.[46] Finally E. J. Humeston, already known as executive secretary of the Assembly board, was asked to teach in addition to serving as pastor of Old First Presbyterian Church in nearby Huntington. He was a graduate of Colgate and Auburn Seminary, a suspect institution. Two years later the Auburn Affirmation would forever shatter the unity of the Presbyterian Church USA. The school was anxious unequivocally to identify itself as theologically sound, but in 1922 that was a challenge given developing denominational divides.

Stony Brook School opened on 13 September 1922. The inauguration ceremony drew a galaxy of leading denominational and educational dignitaries: Edgar Hill, secretary of the Board of Education of the Presbyterian Church (“He deplored the present day conditions of the professing church and showed the great need for schools for boys where the whole Bible as the Word of God is taught”[47]); Mather Abbott, Headmaster of Lawrenceville School (“A school like Stony Brook School for Boys, founded on the Bible as the Word of God, was of national importance.”); Lyman Pierson Powell,  ex-President of Hobart College, Geneva, New York (“He brought greetings of American Educators. He also emphasized the great meaning of giving boys a Christian training”) Young Frank Gaebelein then gave what his proud father called “a fine address” on the “Plan and Scope of Stony Brook School for Boys.”  He laid down five principles[48]:

(1) The Christian school must be comparatively small with a correspondingly large staff of teachers.

(2) The teachers in the Christian school must qualify as masters of their subjects.

(3) The Christian school must maintain an atmosphere that is consistent with its aim.

(4) Spiritual things must have their rightful place in the Christian school – and that place is the first place.

(5) The Christian school must ever preserve a nice balance between the religious, scholastic and               recreational phases of its work.

Francis Landey Patton, who had successfully indicted Charles Augustus Briggs for heresy, former president first of Princeton College and then Princeton Seminary, had the challenge to bring all the speechifying to a suitable climax with a stirring inaugural address on “Character Education.” Patton, whose 1869 Inspiration of the Scriptures was still being recommended by Frank Gaebelein in his Senior Bible Class in the 1950s, had come from retirement in Bermuda to help position the new school in the orthodox theological spectrum of the Presbyterian Church (USA). His address was based on the new motto chosen for the school, “Character before Career.”

Meanwhile Arno Gaebelein was also assisting in the establishment of another school. On 7 March 1922, in the Piedmont Hotel, Atlanta, he met with his friends Griffith Thomas and Lewis Sperry Chafer to draw up a plan for the establishment of the Evangelical Theological College which became Dallas Theological Seminary.[49]  A year later Chafer’s extant correspondence with Arno Gaebelein begins with the comment: “I am sorry that I cannot go to Stony Brook this summer but it is impossible. I would like so much to see Frank again and to renew my acquaintance with him.”[50] In a subsequent letter, inviting Arno to be a visiting lecturer at the new school, he writes: “I am deeply aware of my unfitness for this responsibility and trust that God will reveal His will to me in the changes He would make. I express to you how I have dreaded to undertake this great project of a new Theological School; but I cannot doubt but that it is His will and He alone must undertake and accomplish to this end.”[51]

For the next two decades Arno Gaebelein would come to Dallas for a month each year to instruct and counsel students. In his old age his son Frank Gaebelein was interviewed by David Rausch. “My father knew all the founders of Dallas Theological Seminary” he recalled[52], “Lewis Sperry Chafer … A. B. Winchester … W. H. Griffith Thomas … Knowing these men as he did, it was natural for my father to accept Dr Chafer’s invitation to become one of Dallas’ first extramural lecturers.” Rausch continued: “Was Dallas one of his favorite schools or seminaries?” Frank Gaebelein’s answer was short and to the point: “Yes.” He then went on to trace his own contribution to Dallas Seminary as trustee and regent and Griffith Thomas lecturer two times, one of which was published as his seminal The Pattern of God’s Truth.

After the first month of classes, Frank Gaebelein reported to the Executive Committee[53] of the governors. There were thirty-eight boys, average age fourteen-and-a-half, one as young as eight. Seven were day scholars. There were nine teachers and instructors, five on the staff . Gaebelein himself was teaching five classes in English, Ayrault seven. He noted “the unity of the faculty in regard to high ideals of Christian service and real affection for the boys.” One student had been suspended for using “profane and indecent language in the presence of a lady” and for smoking. At the final Governors meeting in June the advisability of preventing certain students from returning to the school in September was discussed and agreed to. It had become evident that some boys had been enrolled because their parents could no longer control them, a perennial and ongoing problem at boarding schools. As the second year started a lengthy governors meeting that went well into the night was convened. The faculty had been overworked the first year and, in spite of a financial squeeze, the Governors agreed to hire one additional teacher in English and history, a 1923 graduate from Wheaton College, Alexander MacLeod, my father, salary $1400[54].

There were continuing links between Stony Brook, Wheaton and the Evangelical Theological College, Dallas in the 1920s. Wheaton enjoyed a surge in enrollment. At the end of the decade the publication of a best-selling novel became a major recruitment asset. [55]  J. Wesley Ingles (Wheaton class of 1926) wrote Silver Trumpet while teaching at Stony Brook. On graduation from Princeton Seminary in 1929 he had been hired by the school to teach, among other things, creative writing. Two years later, recently married to my mother’s sister, he considered going for further graduate study. But the pull of Stony Brook – and Frank Gaebelein – was too great. “I sincerely appreciate the confidence you and Mr. Monro have placed in me,” he stated in a letter to Gaebelein[56]. “My two years at Stony Brook have inspired in me a loyalty such as I know for Wheaton and Princeton.” He remained at Stony Brook for another six years such were the strong ties that bound him both to the school and its Headmaster.

Perhaps it is Silver Trumpet that best describes the emotion associated with Christian schools in the 1920s. Rich Randall MacRae has left Princeton for Wharton College (a.k.a. Wheaton) and at the end of the novel[57] finally, after bitterly resenting the Christian school experience, commits his life to Christ as he hears “dear old Prexy” (the book is dedicated to Charles Blanchard, President of Wheaton while Ingles was a student there) “calling him a silver trumpet, asking him to dedicate his life to the service of Christ.” So abandoning “a few years of self gratification and worldly ambition” he yields his life to Christ. And the novel climaxes with the single sentence: “The spirit of Wharton had drawn another soul to Christ and into His Kingdom.”  Looking back on the courage of leaders like Arno and Frank Gaebelein, Charles Blanchard and Oliver Buswell, and Lewis Chafer one can be amazed at their commitment and their achievements in a time of theological and ecclesiastical turmoil. The trajectory of Stony Brook/Wheaton/Dallas led many to sacrificial kingdom service in that decade and had a profound impact on the future development of evangelicalism in America.

A. Donald MacLeod,

Research Professor of Church History, Tyndale Theological Seminary, Toronto

President. Canadian Society of Presbyterian History

adonaldmacleod@gmail.com

Website: adonaldmacleod.com