Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church

This book details the step-by-step program of infiltration used by modernists to take over the Northern Presbyterian Church. The infiltration process began as early as 1870, culminating in the expulsion of the conservatives in 1936. It presents the compromised midway theology of the majority wing of the Church: New School Presbyterians and fundamentalists (after 1910). I t also shows why the conservatives were unwilling to defend the Westminster Confession through court actions against heretics except in the 1890's, and even then, they refused to deal with many of the fundamental theological issues. The conservatives, from Charles Hodge to J. Gresham Machen, were themselves unwilling to accept all of the Confession, especially in the key area of creationism. Because they crossed their fingers when they swore allegiance to the Confession, the modernists also crossed theirs, and all but six of them got away with it.