Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism by Timothy Gloege

Author:Timothy Gloege [Gloege, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2015-04-26T21:00:00+00:00

Seven: Pure Religion

Frank Hagerty was a dealer in grain, animal feed, and flour in Arch Spring—a now-defunct speck of a town in west-central Pennsylvania. He was a world away from Chicago, but he could not escape its products. The grain he sold, raised in the surrounding farmlands, was no doubt touched by McCormick farm equipment. He had probably also leafed through his share of Montgomery Ward or Sears and Roebuck catalogs. But on this spring day, the Chicago institution on Hagerty’s mind was the Moody Bible Institute, to which he was writing a letter of thanks for a complimentary copy of the Institute Tie. It was a publication he “shall be glad to receive in the future,” he explained, since he had “the greatest interest in the success of the work founded by Mr. Moody.” Given this affection for the revivalist, it was a little surprising that his letter was not going to D. L. Moody’s son Will in praise of the Record of Christian Work. But Hagerty had heard rumors “that there is danger of the Unitarian influence at Northfield.” In contrast, he had “never heard such intimations about the ‘Moody Bible Institute’ ” or that anyone associated with it had deviated from their promotion of “the whole Bible, the Atonement, and the Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He enclosed a modest donation of eight dollars with a promise, if finances allowed, to “give more substantial aid” in the future.1

Moody’s Northfield ministries were not the only worrisome institutions to conservatives in the first decade of the twentieth century. As fear of radicalism turned many respectable evangelicals in a churchly direction, they were surprised by what they found. Rather than a quiet haven to harbor the long-standing traditions of their denomination, they met new voices intent on aligning that tradition with a particular form of modernity. Perhaps it was an article in their denominational paper questioning the virgin birth of Jesus; or their church’s young pastor discounting the Old Testament miracles; or their son, back from the denominational college, spouting Charles Darwin. In each case, the institutions that were supposed to ensure religious purity seemed themselves to be infected with a new contagion. And it seemed to be spreading to nearly every respectable middle-class denomination across the country. Some, like Frank Hagerty, had already begun rallying around MBI or other institutions that they believed embraced the “Whole Bible.” But many others felt isolated, perhaps totally alone, in their concerns.

What could be done to address the modernist threat? Lyman Stewart, an oilman from Los Angeles, believed he knew the answer. God had blessed him financially, and he was now ready to give back. He would sponsor a hard-hitting exposé of the “new theology,” a sort of spiritual “muckraking,” and then send it free of charge to every minister and Christian worker in the United States. It would spur a movement to purify the denominations of modernity’s errors.

Stewart enlisted the help of Henry Crowell, but like many others who had done this, he would find that he had recruited a partner intent on controlling the project.

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