Wheaton College & President Buswell: campus and church knavery

(Nineteenth in a series; 10/25/2024 views/listens over 11,000)

First, a word about the significance of this article. What Wheaton College president, Phil Ryken, and his trustees have done over the course of this past year is to distribute and celebrate a document of 122 pages and 421 footnotes denouncing Phil’s predecessor, former Wheaton President J. Oliver Buswell Jr., as racist. The document, released September 14, 2023, and written by Ryken’s faculty and staff, purports to show that President Buswell kept Blacks off Wheaton’s campus because he was a racist segregationist. After issuing their denunciation, they removed Buswell’s name from Wheaton’s former “Buswell Library” and campus signage.

Ryken’s employees had two years to produce their document. Several archivists were paid to assist, handpicking primary and secondary sources from campus archives. What all these employees couldn’t grasp, apparently, is the campus intrigue behind what they term Wheaton’s “ad hoc” segregationist admissions policy. No, the story had to be dumbed down. Too many details would jeopardize their work marshalling enough moral indignation sufficient to justify their intended public shaming of President Buswell.

As we’ve demonstrated in the prior 18 articles in this series, J. Oliver Buswell Jr. was no racist. What we turn to documenting now is the maelstrom of political conspiracy and insubordination President Buswell had to cope with during the time when the Task Force declares Wheaton’s president himself was simply enforcing his own racist segregationist commitments.

Younger siblings quickly learn the blame game, and use it well. When scholars use it, those looking on should find it repulsive, and turn away.

Churchmen and the work of reform

Wheaton College’s former (1926-1940) president, J. Oliver Buswell Jr., was deeply involved in the work of church reform. This work as a churchman was a fundamental reason Wheaton’s Trustees disliked and fired him.

The Task Force Report acknowledges Wheaton’s Trustees were originally attracted to Buswell because he was an “outspoken fundamentalist” who held to orthodox Biblical doctrine.¹ As time went on, though, correspondence and minutes surrounding Wheaton Trustees’ conflict with President Buswell document their growing distaste for Buswell’s labors for the reform of Christ’s Church.

Working to expose and oppose false doctrine in their own Presbyterian Church in the United States of America from the late 1920s through the middle of the 1930s (see this earlier article), Princeton’s J. Gresham Machen, Wheaton’s J. Oliver Buswell, and their fellow church reformers had unity of heart and mind. This unity continued through the PCUSA’s 1935-36 discipline and defrocking of a number of these men, concluding with the 1936 defrocking of J. Gresham Machen.

Divisions in the new denomination

Immediately, Machen, Buswell, and fellow former PCUSA pastors began organizing a new denomination named the Presbyterian Church of America.² But tragically, this new work quickly decayed into fierce infighting among the men, requiring Machen and Buswell together to give themselves to the work of peacemaking among their fellow reformers. A proud and querulous group, within the first year of their new denomination, the denomination split.

At first, Buswell and Machen’s peacemaking looked hopeful. Their comradeship is documented in the correspondence that flowed between them. Air Mail and Special Delivery letters were punctuated by Western Union telegrams, all so frequent that one writer summarizes their joint work:

An extremely close relationship was maintained between Dr. Machen and Dr. J. Oliver Buswell, president of Wheaton College. Throughout the last year of Machen’s life (1936), the two men corresponded almost continually, often confiding in one another, with each frequently requesting counsel of the other. Both men had been put on trial by their respective presbyteries, and their bond was strong. Machen often spoke at Wheaton College, and a large number of the students at Westminster Seminary came from Wheaton, with Buswell’s encouragement.³

In their private correspondence, these two reformers demonstrated a shared commitment to find a unified way forward which their schismatic brothers would be likely to accept. Even a brief comparison of the doctrinal conflicts in their former denomination with those in their new denomination painfully reveals that, with the prestige of a new organization at stake, the scandal of pride and its fruit of envy, jealousy, and pettiness brought shame down on the heads of their compatriots—a shame which, among conservative American Presbyterians, remains to this day.

Reading the articles, minutes, and correspondence documenting this conflict highlights the stark contrast between the subjects fought over back in the former denomination and those fought over in the new denomination:

Former Presbyterian Church in the United States of America:

• Denial of inspiration and authority of Scripture
• Denial of miracles
• Denial of Virgin Birth
• Denial of Divinity of Jesus Christ
• Denial of Resurrection of Jesus Christ
• Denial of Substitutionary Atonement

New Presbyterian Church of America:

• Should Bibles contain study notes
• Bickering over amillennialism, premillennialism, postmillennialism
• Disagreements over imputation
• Disagreements over apologetics
• Disagreements over beverage consumption of alcohol
• And in the end, the final battle and split was over whether to cooperate in missions work with fellow reformers/congregations who didn’t immediately join their new denomination

Readers may have noted the most recent piece in this series was published back on May 14, and there’s been nothing more until now. An explanation is in order.

Tragic death and tragic division

The deeper I’ve gone into the gigabytes of primary source material on my laptop from this 1936/37 conflict, the more disheartened I’ve become. Surveying the present state of all the teeny-tiny Protestant and Reformed denominations (Presbyterian and otherwise) whose doctrinal commitments are limited to carefully curated museum exhibits displaying the prophetic leadership of past centuries’ church fathers (which equally, but unintentionally, also display our present silence concerning those areas of wickedness which define our own time), I’ve been wondering what might have been had our fathers a century ago done the hard work of dying to their pride? What might have been if, after they were expelled by the PCUSA, they had maintained their unity?

Repeatedly, I’ve thought of the similar tragedy of the division among the 16th century reformers under Martin Luther and John Calvin. Why did God not overrule both divisions? Why did Calvin and Luther not succeed in finding a middle way concerning our Lord’s presence in the Lord’s supper? Why were Buswell and Machen unable to make peace between the two factions lined up behind them?

Should our heroic reformers five centuries and one century ago bear some of the blame?

In any event, a few months prior to the Presbyterian conflict’s critical moment, J. Gresham Machen suddenly died of pneumonia. It was January and he was on a speaking engagement out in glacial North Dakota.

The schism came to a head during the new denomination’s May 1937 General Assembly. God called Machen home, and a couple months later the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America made shipwreck of their unity.

Fighting on two fronts

For our purposes, it is important to understand the pressures the work of reform of the liberal PCUSA, then keeping the peace within the Presbyterian Church of America, brought to bear upon President Buswell. Keep in mind he was already bearing the weight of peacekeeping within his trustees, administration, and campus of Wheaton College. President Buswell had fires to put out, both in his work at the college and his work in his denomination, and these two rivers of pressure were interrelated in ways that have been left hidden or uncommented upon by Wheaton’s historians.

Defending two fronts is more than twice as difficult as defending one, especially when both fronts’ enemies coordinate their strategies. Such was the case in the growing hostilities and eventual ouster of President Buswell by Wheaton’s Board of Trustees.

During the years leading up to the expulsion of Buswell and Machen by the PCUSA, President Buswell’s right hand man back at Wheaton College was Registrar and Vice President Enock Dyrness who, along with Dean of Students Wallace Emerson and Vice President of Business Affairs George V. Kirk, constituted Buswell’s Executive Administrative Council.

The name Dyrness should be prominent in any history of the Buswell years at Wheaton, but also any history of the schism of 1937 during the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America. In fact, Enock Dyrness was the third man in the conflict over Black admissions which also included President Buswell and Wheaton Trustee Hugo Wurdack.

Trustee Hugo Wurdack and Vice President Enock Dyrness

Consider the correspondence. President Buswell was working to unify his Board of Trustees behind adopting a policy that Black applicants would be admitted to Wheaton. The key correspondence in this insider battle was letters and memos which flowed between Buswell and Wheaton Trustee Hugo Wurdack of St. Louis. Wurdack presented an obstacle to Buswell’s proposed official policy that Blacks would be accepted, and the sensitivity of Buswell’s correspondence with Wurdack is painfully apparent.

At the end of that correspondence, something unusual happened which passed by the Historical Review Task Force Report without comment. This is the final letter concerning this matter sent from Buswell to Wurdack, and note his enclosed memo:

Chief executives with experience answering to a board while leading employees and constituents of an organization are sensitive to the relationships between members of their administration and members of their board. To put it another way, no one is in a better position to undercut his boss than the vice president who cultivates a relationship with his boss’s board members.

The memo above documents President Buswell’s vulnerability to the influence brought to bear on his board by his Vice President Enock Dyrness; and specifically, Dyrness’s influence on Trustee Wurdack. Keep in mind this summary statement by Buswell:

Mr. Wurdack is the only one connected with the College who has ever objected to our having colored students in any definite way… I do not know of anyone else who has committed himself on this point.

Concerning opening up admissions to Black applicants, between Trustee Wurdack and Vice President Dyrness, President Buswell steps carefully:

I am enclosing a copy of a memorandum to Profesor Dyrness which I am now dictating, but which I will not send to him until I have had time to hear from you again, just in case I might have misunderstood your thought.

I am afraid you did not note the last paragraph of my letter. What you advise me to do is precisely what I said I intended to do. I am therefore taking the liberty of quoting that paragraph again.

“Now there is a considerable amount of pressure being brought to bear upon me from certain quarters….”

Then, in his draft memo, note how Buswell phrases his proposed policy change to Dyrness: “I suggest that we admit colored students hereafter.” Dyrness is Buswell’s vice president and this is the most sensitive and conflicted matter he faces in his leadership of Wheaton College, but he is reduced to writing his subordinate “I suggest” this policy change.

Both his letter to Wurdack and his draft memo to Dyrness demonstrate that, between the two men, President Buswell was walking on thin ice. Administrators answer to their executive officer—not the trustees on his board—but those who have held executive office know what is on display above is too often the realpolitik of chief executives’ leadership.

Wheaton trustees and administrators undermine their president

Dig deeper and we find Wheaton’s top administrators under President Buswell were chronically disloyal and insubordinate.

Emeritus Professor of History at Seattle Pacific University, Michael Hamilton did his PhD work at Notre Dame under George Marsden and Nathan Hatch. Wheaton College was the subject of his 1994 dissertation, The fundamentalist Harvard: Wheaton College and the continuing vitality of American evangelicalism, 1919-1965. Longtime member of the Board of Advisors at Wheaton’s Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, Hamilton thoroughly documents the disloyalties President Buswell suffered from his subordinates:

Buswell faced significant internal opposition from his executive administrative council—Wallace Emerson, the dean of students; Enock Dyrness, the vice president in academic administration; and George V. Kirk, the vice president of business affairs. …his three lieutenants routinely united to oppose his policies and plans. They frequently tried to derail his proposed new faculty hires, especially those who subscribed to Reformed theology. They resisted his plan to start a seminary at Wheaton.

Nor did they limit their opposition to straightforward policy disagreements. All three of them would take their complaints to individual trustees with whom they had personal relationships.

* * *

Emerson, Dyrness, and Kirk [were] nursing their grievances in the company of each other and the executive committee of the trustees, which gave them a full and sympathetic hearing for several months. During the time the trustees and the administrators were swapping complaints about Buswell, neither took any meaningful action to resolve the problems. As Buswell later bitterly protested to the trustees, “It must be remembered that many accusations made against me in secret were never discussed with me, and further that I never failed to comply with any request the board made clear to me.”

* * *

It is hard to tell from the historical record exactly how the most powerful member of the board, lawyer Herman Fischer, felt about Buswell. On the one hand, he professed to have some reservations about firing him. During the summer of 1939 he admitted that Emerson, Dyrness, and Kirk had forced Buswell to labor “under greater difficulties and more resistance than we have realized.”⁴

Franklin Dyrness

Enock Dyrness had a brother named Franklin Dyrness.

Around two decades ago, I received a small batch of files from one of my fellow presbyters in Great Lakes Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in America. Rev. Seth Dyrness knew of my keen interest in J. Oliver Buswell and the circumstances surrounding his departure from the presidency of Wheaton College. Enock Dyrness was Seth Dyrness’s uncle, but now we bring to the fore Seth’s father and Enock’s brother, the Rev. Franklin Dyrness.

The files Seth passed on to me contained correspondence of his father, Franklin, detailing aspects of the founding and first years of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, Westminster Theological Seminary, and the Presbyterian Church of America. Why is Franklin Dyrness a key character in this history of President Buswell’s last years at Wheaton?

The following excerpts from the minutes of the first three General Assemblies of the Presbyterian Church of America provide the background to the schism which took place during the Third General Assembly, in June of 1937; and specifically, Franklin Dyrness’s leadership leading up to that schism.

First, this excerpt from the minutes of the first General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America held June of 1936:

The moderator was asked to appoint a committee on Foreign Missions to be composed of six members with the moderator as an ex officio member, making seven in all, which committee shall take under its consideration the foreign missions interests of the Presbyterian Church of America and make suggestions to local congregations as to their foreign missions giving and to the next Assembly as to a permanent foreign missions program.

It was moved that the moderator appoint a committee of five to prepare for the incorporation of a board of foreign missions and for the incorporation of a board of home missions and church extension.

The matter was ordered referred to the committee on Home Missions and Church Extension.

Then this from the minutes of the Second General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America held five months later, in November of 1936:

The report of the Committee on Foreign Missions was presented by the Chairman, the Rev. F. S. Dyrness.

It was moved and carried that the report be received and filed, and that the recommendations be adopted.

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN MISSIONS
Before His ascension our Blessed Lord came to His disciples and spake unto them, saying, “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world.”

* * *

Further in view of the existence of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, your committee would suggest that nothing be done by this Assembly relative to the establishment of an official Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church of America, but that instead a committee on foreign missions, of five members, be appointed to report to the next General Assembly and to make at that time any recommendations it might deem advisable.

The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America recognizes the right and freedom of every individual church member and every local church to support with its gifts any particular orthodox missionary enterprise, but at the same time it takes a special pleasure in commending the program and work of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions to the Church at large, and in suggesting that this work receive the sympathetic co-operation of local churches and church members, in so far as that may be possible.

It was moved and carried that a committee of five members be elected to report to the next Assembly in the matter of foreign missions. The following persons were nominated: Ministers: Dyrness, Woodbridge, Marston, Rankin, Pitcher, McIntire, W. T. Strong, Sloat, and
Elders: J. S. Wurtz, T. L. Hodge, and Harry Frazer. [emphases added]

Then the following excerpts from the minutes of the Third General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America held June of 1937. Keep in mind that, five months earlier, the Second General Assembly had stated it took “special pleasure in commending the program and work of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions to the Church at large….”

History repeats itself

Read on and note something drastic has changed, causing a complete reversal of the attitude and support of the Presbyterian Church of America for the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions:

The Report of thc Committee on Foreign Missions was presented through the Chairman of the Committee [Franklin S. Dyrness], and is recorded in the appropriate place below….

REPORT OF THE FOREIGN MISSIONS COMMITTEE
The report of the Foreign Missions Committee to the Third General Assembly, Presbyterian Church of America, consists of the following two resolutions whose adoption we urge upon the Assembly:

I

WHEREAS your committee feels that the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions as it is now constituted is out of accord with the provisions of its charter and not consistent with the fundamental principles of Presbyterian Church government which are held by the Presbyterian Church of America, as evidenced by the fact that the practice of certain members of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, including the President and Vice-President, in matters of church government is that of Independency rather than Presbyterianism, which practice was virtually endorsed by the majority on the Independent Board when, at its meeting May 31, 1937, said majority refused to insist that its members bring their practice into accord with the principles of true Presbyterian Church government, or else resign from said Board; and as further evidenced by the resignation from the Board of the following members: Mrs. J. B. Griggs, Miss Marguerite Montgomery, Mrs. A. L. Berry, Miss Mary W. Stewart, the Rev. Paul Woolley, the Rev. Ned B. Stonehouse, the Rev. Edwin H. Rian, and Murray F. Thompson, whose resignation reads as follows:

In view of the decision of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions refusing to condemn independency in church government and to uphold its charter provisions favoring Presbyterian church government, we believe that the usefulness of the Independent Board as an agency to promote the object for which it was founded, the conduct of truly Presbyterian Foreign Missions, is at an end.

We therefore present our resignations from the Board effective immediately…

The General Secretary of the Board, the Rev. Charles J. Woodbridge, has resigned for the same reasons.

THEREFORE be it resolved that this General Assembly does not find itself able any longer to recommend the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions as an agency for the propagation of the Gospel as set forth in the Westminster Standards.

In a mere five months, the Presbyterian Church of America went from “commending the program and work of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions” to adopting the motion, “be it resolved that this General Assembly does not find itself able any longer to recommend the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions….”

Why did the men of the new Presbyterian Church of America’s Foreign Missions Committee who had been delegated the task of founding the new denomination’s own Board of Foreign Missions call for the Assembly to denounce the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions?

Because, as they claimed above, the formerly commended missions agency was in favor of “Independency rather than Presbyterianism.”

As a reminder, this was precisely the same charge against Buswell, Machen, and their fellow reformers leading to their ouster from their former denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. Here is a June 1, 1935, Associated Press newspaper account detailing the final actions of that denomination’s General Assembly in confirming the defrocking of J. Gresham Machen:

REFUSED TO QUIT INDEPENDENT BOARD
__________________
[By the Associated Press]

Syracuse, N.Y., June 1 — The one hundred and forty-eighth assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. ordered disciplinary action today against a New York city acting elder for his participation on the Independent Board of Foreign Missions, a fundamentalist group. The assembly instructed the Synod of New York to instigate action against James E. Bennett, New York lawyer, for his refusal to resign from the independent organization. Previously the Presbytery of New York had refused to act.

Formed by Dr. Machen

Formation of the independent board in 1924 by the Rev. Dr. J. Gresham Machen, of Philadelphia, rivaling the officially recognized group, precipitated a fight between fundamentalists and modernists. Dr. Machen and several associates already have been tried on charges of refusing to resign from the board, decisions in which are expected to be handed down by the judicial committee either tomorrow or Wednesday.

There were many issues contributing to the division of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, culminating in the defrocking of Machen in June of 1935. There were just as many issues contributing to the division of the new Presbyterian Church of America two years later, in May of 1937. Nevertheless, the formal acts of both General Assemblies were their condemnations of the same organization—the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions—whose independency posed a threat to their own organizations.

Putting a fine point on it, the former denomination’s hostility is reported concerning their denomination’s troublemakers, that they “refused to quit” the Independent Board of Presbyterian Foreign Missions; and then, the new denomination’s hostility is stated in terms of “the practice of certain members” of the Independent Board of Presbyterian Foreign Missions being “that of Independency rather than Presbyterianism.” The men of Westminster Theological Seminary weighed heavily on the side of the condemnation of what was termed “the practice of certain members.”

Let us remind the reader that the man disciplined by the former denomination for his support of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions was J. Gresham Machen, but he had died between the old and the new denominations’ General Assemblies, and thus was not present for his new denomination’s discipline of his former colleagues for their continued support of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t so much the independency of the mission itself which was the source of the conflict as it was the commitment of its board to allow several of its members to continue in independency, but this is a distinction without a difference.

Uncharitable judgments

Speaking personally, I have some direct knowledge of similar things and am sympathetic to the men here under attack by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America. Although 35 of their fellow pastors and 17 elders from their former denomination immediately joined in chartering the new Presbyterian Church of America, after one denomination turns away from God and His Truth, it’s not uncommon for a specific congregation to shy away from quickly joining another denomination. I recall the night our session of Grace Presbyterian Church in Wisconsin discussed the transfer of our church after our vote to leave the Presbyterian Church (USA), taking up the matter of which denomination should be next?

By then we had whittled it down to either the Christian Reformed Church or the Presbyterian Church in America, and one wise elder commented, “Well, if we go into the PCA, we’ll probably get twenty more years before it goes bad.”

He wasn’t being cynical. He was prescient. The year was 1991, and it was only twenty-six years later that, having transferred into the PCA, we watched the PCA’s Covenant Theological Seminary and Missouri Presbytery cavorting in support of Revoice and the gay Christian movement.

But leave that behind. We are not discussing present, but past, Presbyterian General Assemblies, and there are a couple things left to be said about the 1937 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America’s schismatic repudiation of their former fellow reformers for refusing to disassociate from the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions.

Blind leading the blind

First, J. Gresham Machen had been elected moderator of the previous (Second) General Assembly, and had requested his friend J. Oliver Buswell to stand for moderator of the next (Third) General Assembly—which Buswell did, and was elected.

Second, as the sitting Moderator, Buswell suffered the indignity of having to join a protest against that Assembly; and specifically, a protest against his Assembly’s condemnation of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. Here are a few excerpts from that Protest:

The undersigned hereby respectfully protest the action of the Third General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America in rejecting the minority report of the Committee on Foreign Missions and adopting the report of the Committee, for the following reasons:

1. The action of the Assembly in adopting the majority report included a condemnation and a judgment upon the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, a body which has no organic nor ecclesiastical relationship to the Presbyterian Church of America.

* * *

5. The declaration concerning the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions is in effect an attack upon a Christian institution which has been used gloriously of the Lord in the great battle in defence of the faith. The Independent Board should have the best wishes of all the members of the Presbyterian Church of America rather than the official condemnation of the General Assembly…

It was ungrateful for the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America in less than a year after its organization not only to turn its back upon the Independent Board but definitely to attack the Independent Board’s integrity.

Signed—

J. Oliver Buswell, Jr., etc.

Then the minutes record:

It was moved and carried that the Moderator appoint a committee to prepare an answer to the protest.

Then, a few sentences later, this:

The Moderator announced the following as members of the Committee to answer the Protest. The Revs. Dyrness, Woolley, and Elder M. F. Thompson.

The timeline

Precisely when did this happen?

Between June of 1936 and June of 1937.

Back then to Michael Hamilton’s dissertation, who writes:

At least as early as 1936, Buswell faced significant internal opposition from his executive administrative council—Wallace Emerson, the dean of students; Enock Dyrness, the vice president in academic administration; and George V. Kirk, the vice president of business affairs. For the remainder of the Buswell presidency, his three lieutenants routinely united to oppose his policies and plans.⁵

At Wheaton College under his tenure as President and at the Third General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America under his term as Moderator, the Dyrness brothers opposed J. Oliver Buswell Jr.

From this point on, Wheaton’s trustees take an increasingly hostile posture towards President Buswell, with a particular focus on his work as a Presbyterian churchman.

Two years after Franklin Dyrness is successful in getting the Presbyterian Church of America’s Third General Assembly to condemn the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, leading that Assembly’s sitting moderator, J. Oliver Buswell, to protest the action, President Buswell is finally successful in resolving the battle over Black admissions at Wheaton, sending a memo to Franklin’s brother, Wheaton Registrar Enock Dyrness, “I suggest that we admit colored students hereafter.”

Six months after the memo declaring Wheaton admissions open to Blacks, Enock Dyrness was finally successful in his joint efforts with his fellow members of President Buswell’s Administrative Cabinet to undermine Buswell among Wheaton’s Trustees.

On January 20, 1940, Wheaton’s Board of Trustees fired J. Oliver Buswell Jr.

Now that the reader has finished the history President Phil Ryken and his Trustees’ Historical Review Task Force avoided in their Report, it’s a little more clear why this history wasn’t acceptable for public consumption. Think how much easier it is to call a man “racist” than to explain the difficulties that man faced as he worked to integrate his campus.

Anyhow, who cares about the church? Wheaton isn’t a church—it’s a college! What does President Buswell’s work as a churchman have to do with his work in higher education? Forget the Dyrness brothers. Stop changing the point.

Everyone important agrees: Buswell was racist.

(Nineteenth in a series; 10/25/2024 views/listens over 11,000)

Tags: Church reform, Enock Dyrness, Franklin Dyrness, Herman Fischer, Historical Review Task Force, Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, J. Gresham Machen, J. Oliver Buswell Jr., Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Phil Ryken, Presbyterian Church in America, Presbyterian Church of America, Racism, Wheaton College, Wheaton College denounces J. Oliver Buswell Jr.