Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host, and President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. John Wilsey teaches both church history and philosophy at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He earned his academic degrees in those very areas, and prior to coming to Southern Seminary, he taught in the same fields, and then most recently served at Princeton University as the William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Life. That’s a part of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton.
He’s the author of dozens of articles and several academic books, including One Nation Under God, and American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion. He’s most recently the author of God’s Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles. That book chronicles the interplay between religion and foreign policy in what we have to recognize as one of the most important epics in American history. Professor John Wilsey, welcome to Thinking in Public.
John D. Wilsey:
Thanks so much for having me, Dr. Mohler.
Albert Mohler:
So, why? Why this book? There hasn’t been much written on John Foster Dulles in the better part of a half-century, and you’re talking about events that began well over a century ago, and you’re writing about the life and faith of a man who really wasn’t known for having much of a faith. So, how’s that for an introduction to a new book?
John D. Wilsey:
Yeah, exactly. Well, it’s interesting, Dr. Mohler. John Foster Dulles is such an interesting contrast as a Secretary of State to the Secretaries of State we’ve had since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Here’s a guy who uses a lot of religious rhetoric in framing his foreign policy positions. He’s also someone that’s very relevant to us, I think, in terms of America’s place in the world in a post-Cold War age.
Albert Mohler:
Well, Professor, as you look at John Foster Dulles, I think it’s important to remind those who are joining this conversation and listening to it that there once was a time when John Foster Dulles was amongst the ten most important and powerful human beings that walked upon planet Earth. And yet his name has now receded into memory, unless people are taking off or landing in one airport in Washington, DC. But I can tell you that I have been fascinated with John Foster Dulles my entire adult life, simply because, to me, he represents one of those figures who actually did ride world events and drove world events. And he and his brother, who became the founder of the Central Intelligence Agency, were the epitome of a certain class of Americans and a certain American caste system that really hasn’t existed for at least a half-century but used to rule the United States, almost like a hereditary aristocracy in the United Kingdom.
John D. Wilsey:
Sure. I mean, Dulles is born in 1888. He dies in 1959. He has a full life and his lifespan sort of embraces that period in American history where America goes from being a continental power to being a superpower. So, not only does his life embrace that period, but he, as you said, helps to shape American history and American position in the world, post-World War II.
Albert Mohler:
Well, let’s put it this way. John Foster Dulles was the third United States Secretary of State in one family within the period of 60 years.
John D. Wilsey:
That’s right.
Albert Mohler:
I think that’s pretty… Well, it’s not just pretty astounding. That’s unprecedented.
John D. Wilsey:
It really is. His church in Watertown, New York, where he grew up, his father was pastor there, First Presbyterian Church of Watertown, New York. They take a lot of pride in continuing to boast that they are the only church in the United States from which you had two Secretaries of State emerge, as well as a head of the Central Intelligence Agency. They carry that with great pride even today.
Albert Mohler:
Okay. So, lay this out for us. People don’t know the story and that’s why you wrote this book. Tell them the story. So, how did you end up with three Secretaries of State from one family in such a short amount of time?
John D. Wilsey:
Well, as I said, John Foster Dulles was born in 1888. He was born in Washington, DC. He was born inside the home of his grandfather, John Watson Foster, his maternal grandfather who had been Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison in 1892 and 1893. His mother’s family were diplomats. Now, you have John Watson Foster, who had been Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison. You had his uncle, Robert Lansing, who is also on his mother’s side, who was Secretary of State from 1915 to 1920 under Woodrow Wilson. But then on his father’s side, his father was a pastor, theologian, was pastor for about ten years in Detroit, and then he was pastor at Watertown First Presbyterian Church from 1887 until 1904. And so, on that side, you have Presbyterian missionaries, Presbyterian ministers, and theologians, and Presbyterian lay elders.
So, you have this confluence in John Foster Dulles of a diplomatic heritage, and then also a Presbyterian heritage, and they kind of meet. They sort of join together in John Foster Dulles. When he comes of age, he goes to Princeton University. He matriculates in 1904. He graduated in 1908. He received his law degree from George Washington Law School in 1912. He was hired at Sullivan & Cromwell, very important, very significant international law firm in Manhattan. He went to that law firm in 1911, same year he got married, and he was managing partner of Sullivan & Cromwell from 1926 until he retired in 1949. He served on the Federal Council of Churches during the Second World War. He was also deeply involved in the formation of the United Nations. He attended the first, second, third, and fifth meetings of the General Assembly. He also negotiated the peace treaty with Japan that diplomatically concluded World War II in the Pacific. That treaty was ratified in 1952. And then, of course, he served as Secretary of State from 1953 to his death in 1959 under Eisenhower.
So, as you said, John Foster Dulles, I write in the book, stands astride on diplomacy in the world and the Cold War like a Colossus. I can’t really think of another figure in the diplomatic arena that stands above John Foster Dulles, certainly during the 1950s.
Albert Mohler:
And I think we really have to underline, we’re talking about diplomacy. We’re actually talking about the affairs of the world because, in this case, diplomacy is not about the niceties of sending ambassadors here and there. It’s about world war, the reconstruction of civilization. It’s about the definition of human rights. It’s about the victory or defeat of Western civilization. I mean, we’re not just talking about diplomacy in the sense of formal exchanges between governments. We’re talking about decisions about whether there is war or not, which government is actually to be recognized as legitimate, whether or not sovereignty is actually an applicable national concept and claim.
I want to go back though to something. And that is that I began by talking about the amazing character of this class. And I want us to think about that because I think that’s a radical distinction to the United States that we know, but there once was a time when a rarefied group of families, basically descended from the Mayflower families and a few others, who really did provide the Brahmin, you might say, aristocracy of the United States, just to give a little bit of background here. It was often said that the greatest check, the most profound check, upon the potential tyranny of an English king was the perpetual power of 200 families distributed to the nation, and that was the nobility. And by the way, they were armed families.
But basically, you can look today, and you look at all the titles spread throughout, hereditary titles in Britain, and a lot of them go back to those 200 families. And the United States was actually a smaller number of families, but in one sense, John Foster Dulles was born into two of them, which was often the case. You had a merging of two of these families. And so, you’re really talking about the fact that he was one of the last of the hereditary leaders of the United States in that sense.
John D. Wilsey:
Yeah, it’s so true, and it’s really amazing. When he was at George Washington Law School, he lived with his grandparents, the Fosters, and to read his diaries from those years when he was a student at George Washington Law School, it’s a pretty charmed existence that he has, even before he’s a well-known quantity because of his family line. One of the young ladies that he courted, and you can definitely see had a great deal of romantic interest in, was Helen Taft. He writes these entries about how beautiful she was …
Albert Mohler:
The daughter of a President.
John D. Wilsey:
That’s right—the daughter of William Howard Taft. He went to her coming out party that was held at the home of Oliver Wendell Holmes. And these kinds of encounters and contacts were sort of commonplace. They were rather quotidian for him.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. To kind of fast forward to something that really isn’t in your book because it’s later in impact, one of the big historic meanings of the Kennedy family is that Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch of that family, was determined to show that an Irish immigrant family could emulate that same social status and access. And of course, having his son become the first Irish Catholic president, first Catholic president of any kind, but specifically coming from an Irish Catholic background, President of the United States, that was the great achievement of the family. But becoming the United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James, which Joseph P. Kennedy the father held, in many ways, that rattled the establishment a lot more, because it was not the Joseph P. Kennedys who were appointed to that kind of position, but it was the John Foster Dulleses.
John D. Wilsey:
Right. Right. And then when Kennedy goes and visits Ireland just months before his assassination, that was electric, you know?
Albert Mohler:
Right. And then you can understand why, I think … I think all of us, you don’t have to be Irish to appreciate the sense of pride that Ireland had in the fact that, not only had one of its sons done well, Joseph P. Kennedy did well financially, but that’s quite a different thing by his own reputation than the reputation of his son as President of the United States.
But there was a class structure. We have all kinds of issues about caste and class being discussed in 21st century America in a very different context, but it’s at least important to remember that there once was really an official caste system, and it was very hard for anyone to break into it. Those families generally did not want their sons and daughters to marry outside of that circle. They had very privileged schools. By the way, they were definitively Protestant, and that was not just a theological statement. In fact, I’d argue they weren’t theological enough, but it was a statement of the fact that Roman Catholics were shut out of this system, and so were the so-called sectarians, which would have included both of us as Baptist. Presbyterians were the lower end of that caste system.
John D. Wilsey:
Right. You know what’s interesting too, Dr. Mohler, is that John Foster Dulles comes from—on the one hand—a provincial sort of north-country New York background. He grows up in the country, grows up in the middle of nowhere, really …
Albert Mohler:
It’s genteel country, though, let’s be clear.
John D. Wilsey:
Sorry?
Albert Mohler:
It’s genteel country.
John D. Wilsey:
It is. He doesn’t go to Groton. He doesn’t go to an elite boarding school. But on the other hand, he does come from, like you said, I mean, this sort of American aristocracy. And it’s interesting, he went into the Senate after Senator Robert Wagner fell ill, and he was appointed to that, to fill that vacant Senate seat by Governor Thomas Dewey. And he filled that Senate seat from July through November as the Senator from New York. While he was a Senator from New York, all his colleagues in the Senate didn’t really know whether or not to accept him into their club or not. But then on the other hand, too, when he ran for the seat in the special election that November, he ran against Herbert Layman who was Jewish, and Herbert Layman won that election very narrowly, largely because accusations of Dulles being an anti-Semite stuck. Equally, of course, he denied it and everything else. Those accusations of being an anti-Semite, they were powerful accusations.
Albert Mohler:
But that class, let’s be honest, that class was fairly anti-Semitic, at least in terms of its socialization, if not in terms of its ideology. I will simply say, at that point, that they basically tried to keep everybody out. That would include the two of us, as I say, as well as Catholics and Jewish citizens as well. We’re in America that’s so different now and in an America, in which, I mean, we’ve had many Presidents elected over the course of the last 60 or 70 years who come from very different backgrounds than used to become American Presidents. And of course, it was never uniform, consider… Well, just to say, Andrew Jackson who definitely did not come from that caste, Abraham Lincoln who definitely didn’t come from that caste.
But in a sense, there was a return to it with kind of a patrician class, and it certainly included figures such as the Roosevelts, by definition, a part of that Dutch aristocracy in the United States and people like Wilson. And it’s a reminder of the fact that the Northern aristocracy had Southern homes and often married Southern girls. And so, you had a fusion of these power structures.
But there’s a theological aspect of this, and as much as I would love to talk about John Foster Dulles simply because of the events of his life. I mean, this was someone who, as a very, very young man, was really deeply involved in Wilson’s attempt to build a League of Nations. I mean, in a way that can’t be explained by anything other than divine providence, frankly, he was in those rooms and actually had a role to contribute to Wilsonian diplomacy going all the way back. Of course, the fact that his close relative was Secretary of State had something to do with it. But nonetheless, then you fast forward, you realize this guy was everywhere. He’s the Forrest Gump of 20th century American history. You can’t look anywhere without him being in the room.
John D. Wilsey:
That’s so true. That is so true. It’s fascinating. He is. He’s everywhere, and such a young man too. He’s such a young man. He gets appointed to the Reparations Commission at Versailles, and that was actually in spite of his connection to Robert Lansing. As you know, Woodrow Wilson was not a big fan of Robert Lansing because he thought Robert Lansing was going to steal the show at Versailles and Wilson wanted to kind of run things.
Albert Mohler:
Lansing thought he was too, by the way.
John D. Wilsey:
That’s exactly right. So, he received that commission because of his connection to Bernard Baruch who was a friend of his grandfather, right, going right back to the land.
Albert Mohler:
Money connections.
John D. Wilsey:
Yes, that’s right. So, when he goes to the Reparations Committee, I mean, the guy is only, I mean, he’s in his, what? He’s in his late twenties, early thirties. And, yeah, he becomes friends with John Maynard Keynes on that commission, other people like Norman Davis. In fact, there’s John Foster Dulles and Norman Davis, the two of them writing the text of Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, the War Guilt Clause, which was going to be one of the most important background causes to the Second World War. So, there it is, right there in the center, as you mentioned.
Albert Mohler:
As John Maynard Keynes, by the way, famously had pointed out.
John D. Wilsey:
That’s right. Wilson asked him to stay on at Versailles after he departed and went back to the States. He personally asked John Foster Dulles to stay there because he trusted him, wrote him a handwritten letter requesting him to stay in Versailles and kind of mock things up, and Foster sent that letter back to his wife with a note that said, “Check this out.” He received this personal letter from Wilson.
Albert Mohler:
Right. Right. Well, you fast forward to say the reason why we talk about John Foster Dulles today, he was Secretary of State in the Eisenhower years, at least most of them, and really helped to create the post-war order as we know it. But what I want to talk to you about is something that will make Secretary of State have to wait and is my main interest. Because when you look at John Foster Dulles, you’re looking at a theological type as well, and a theological type that had an outsized influence in American religious life, and still does in American Christianity, if it is mostly important for demonstrating why especially that model of American Christianity is so much in eclipse and retreat. John Foster Dulles was a theological liberal, and his father was a theological liberal. So, put that into context for me.
John D. Wilsey:
Sure. His father was a liberal, he was liberal. I think the one period in his life, Foster’s life that kind of brings into very stark relief his liberal commitments was during the Presbyterian controversy as …
Albert Mohler:
Well, just hold on. If you don’t mind, tell us about the dad. Establish his father’s theological identity here.
John D. Wilsey:
Yeah. So, his father studied in Europe, studied in Germany, received a PhD in Theology at the University of Berlin. He came back to the States as a Presbyterian minister, sort of committed to liberal theology.
Albert Mohler:
So, at Berlin, and forgive me for interrupting, but it’s necessary for us to set the stage here, in Berlin which wasn’t the origin of theological liberalism in Germany, but it did become the capital of it. And you had figures such as Adolf von Harnack and others who argued that Orthodox Christianity was just the forced combination of Jewish theology and Hellenism and Greek philosophy. You had people openly calling the Bible nothing more than ancient Near Eastern literature and denying the supernatural. And it was out of that context that John Foster Dulles’s father came to ministry.
John D. Wilsey:
Right. His father writes a book in 1907 called The True Church, and he contrasted what he called the evangelic churches, Presbyterianism being sort of the paragon, with the Roman Catholic model, hierarchical, authoritarian, and heavy-handed. And he said that the true church were the evangelic traditions, especially marked by Presbyterianism and Lutheranism, and the hierarchical denominations were the false churches. Right? And another thing about his father, his father, he became a theologian on a faculty at Auburn Theological Seminary in Auburn, New York, starting in 1904, the same year that Foster went to Princeton, and he remained there until his death in 1931. He was Professor of Theism and Apologetics, and consistently, Allen Macy Dulles who’s Reverend Dulles’s father, he detached the transcendent from the eminent. For him, it was all eminent. He was a liberal post-millennial.
Albert Mohler:
Again, very German.
John D. Wilsey:
Very German.
Albert Mohler:
The essence of German Protestant liberalism.
John D. Wilsey:
Sure, sure. Very much so, and rejecting Augustine’s division between City of God and city of man, instead seeing the two of these two, the City of God and the city of man are not separate, and they’re not opposed to one another. They’re the same. Right? So, Dulles grows up in that culture, in that context. His father preaches three times on Sundays. He’s there, he grows up in that world. And during the Presbyterian controversy, he and his father are writing letters back and forth to each other where his father is coaching his son how to reject the five points of fundamentalism that were becoming the points of controversy during that time.
Albert Mohler:
Well, that controversy has to be explained. And by the way, the religion of Allen Macy Dulles and of John Foster Dulles was basically what the Germans called Culture Protestantism. So, it was basically that all the theological and doctrinal impulses were directed into the improvement of society, but behind that was the understanding of a moral law. It wasn’t the denial of the existence of God, but God’s basic function was to provide a moral law and then to trust that human beings could bring in the Kingdom in the name of Christ by cultural engagement and action.
But it turns out that the Presbyterian controversy wasn’t even sparked by a Presbyterian. The Presbyterian controversy was sparked by a Baptist, and by, I will say, one of the most infamous Baptists of all time, Harry Emerson Fosdick. When I teach theology, and frankly, even when I teach apologetics, I just have to go back to Harry Emerson Fosdick over and over again because he’s one of the most honest theological liberals who ever existed. He was just absolutely blatant in denying most of the supernatural. His theory was, as the theory of liberalism always has been, that Christianity has to change with the times and the times were anti-supernatural. People don’t believe in a virgin birth. People don’t believe in the parting of the Red Sea. People don’t believe in this. Just like Rudolf Bultmann in Germany said, “People don’t believe in Heaven and Hell. They do believe in turning a light switch on and off.”
And so, it’s this anti-supernaturalism, and it’s not just that, but Harry Emerson Fosdick was the preacher at the First Presbyterian Church. And so, strange as that sounds, all this was sparked, it wasn’t created by, but it was sparked by, a Baptist preacher in the First Presbyterian Church pulpit in New York City declaring that the great enemy of the church was not apostasy, but fundamentalism.
John D. Wilsey:
That’s exactly right. He did a sermon entitled ‘Shall the Fundamentalists Win?’ Right?
Albert Mohler:
So, define the fundamentalist and lay out the conflict.
John D. Wilsey:
Right. So, what Fosdick was attacking in that sermon were the five points, the so-called five points of fundamentalism, which were actually doctrinal deliverances to the Presbyterian Church in 1910, and again in 1916. And so, there’s an acrostic that I like to kind of use, and I teach my students this in church history too. The acrostic for the five points of fundamentalism is MARVIN. Right? So, you have ‘M’, the historicity of miracles. Right? The ‘A’ stands for substitutionary atonement of Christ; the ‘R’ stands for bodily resurrection of Christ; the ‘V’, of course, you’ve probably guessed it, right, the virgin birth; the ‘I’ and the ‘N’ stand for the inerrancy of scripture. So, I didn’t get those from myself—those are from Molly Worthen. That’s an acrostic she made up, and I think that’s very helpful. But those five points of fundamentalism were specifically what Fosdick was going after, and not only those doctrinal statements but also, he rejected the idea that these things were obligatory.
Albert Mohler:
Right. Just to interrupt here. They were obligatory. They were a part of the standards for the Presbyterian ministry and so, it wasn’t as if these issues weren’t defined. Presbyterians said, “These are the requirements for anyone who will accept ordination in the Presbyterian Church.” So, this was fundamentalism as Fosdick denied it, and as both the Dulleses sought to fight. Fundamentalism was basically a matter of holding Presbyterians to the very standards that they had adopted. So, what’s the argument against that?
John D. Wilsey:
Dulles’s argument against that was not so much against the doctrines, although he did deny the virgin birth, and he was rather doctrinally illiterate by his own admission later in his life. It wasn’t so much that it was about the doctrines. It was, for Dulles, he wanted to go against the modernist. His strategy for arguing against the fundamentalists was to stress constitutionalism. It goes strictly by the Presbyterian form of government. Right? So, it was unconstitutional, Dulles said, for the General Assembly to compel doctrinal fidelity to the doctrinal deliverances of 1910 and 1916. Unless all the Presbyteries in the nation had consented to those doctrinal deliverances, then it was wrong for the General Assembly to deny the licensure or the ordination of someone who denied say the virgin birth. So, that was his argument.
He had three phases of involvement in the Presbyterian controversy from 1924 through 1926. In the first phase, I argue that Dulles had sort of a partial victory and a partial loss. In that particular phase, he defended Harry Emerson Fosdick from being removed from his position. He was not removed, but the judicial commission said, “Well, Fosdick, you’re a Baptist. You need to not be a Baptist and you just need to become a Presbyterian.” And he didn’t do that, and so he quit the church. The second phase and the third phase were over licensure issues.
Albert Mohler:
Right. And those really aren’t as germane. The important point is that this is how mainline Protestant denominations were lost to heresy. I mean, just the bottom line. This is how theological orthodoxy collapsed. It collapsed, (a) because of a lack of will; it collapsed, (b) because relationships were more important than the truth; and it collapsed, (c) because they began to define themselves in terms of the rules of their denomination rather than what the church through the centuries had called the rule of faith. And you give that up, and I mean, these guys, they gave away the store.
John D. Wilsey:
They did. They did. By the time Dulles is finished with his involvement, he has achieved complete victory, right, from the modernist side. And it results in the formation of the OPC, new mission organizations, the founding of Westminster Seminary. So, yeah, it is a point of no return.
Albert Mohler:
And, by the way, it wasn’t just that the liberals won. It’s that the liberals kicked out the conservatives. Now, I mean, constitutionally, some would claim, well, they weren’t really kicked out, but they were about to be because, I mean, given Dulles’s argument, if the great enemy of the church is not heresy, it’s anyone who would want to kick anyone out for heresy.
John D. Wilsey:
Which is ironic because that’s what Harry Emerson Fosdick argued that the fundamentalists were trying to do to the modernists.
Albert Mohler:
Right.
John D. Wilsey:
And it turned out that that’s exactly what the modernists did to the fundamentalists.
Albert Mohler:
That’s right. And of course, one of the great observers of all of this, who was also a participant in a different arena, was J. Gresham Machen who did start Westminster Seminary and famously and rightly said in his book, Christianity and Liberalism, “We’re not talking about two variants of a religion. We’re talking about two different religions. Christianity, religion number one; liberalism, religion number two.” But liberalism fit the times. It fit the class of which he was a part, a class that did not want to be defined theologically, but wanted to be defined in terms of secular norms. And John Foster Dulles, I guess this is one of most embarrassing things to me, just reading as much as I’ve read about John Foster Dulles and studied him over time. This is the most arrogant worldview I could imagine. Liberals accused the conservatives of arrogance in claiming the truth, but the same thing’s true actually on both sides. And by the way, the conservative who’s holding to scriptural authority just has to say, “Well, as much as possible, this is not about me. It’s about the Scripture.” But when it came to Dulles and his caste, they had a vision of the world that was, they felt, superior to any other vision, and they were basically willing to do anything to see it come to pass.
John D. Wilsey:
Yeah, that’s right. I think you see that very clearly in Dulles’s involvement with the Oxford Ecumenical Conference in 1937, and you see that sort of banishment of transcendence, the emphasis on eminence, and the …
Albert Mohler:
And by that, you really mean that it’s not just the transcendence of God that is downplayed. It’s the fact that it’s really classical theism, including claims of divine revelation and active divine sovereignty in the world.
John D. Wilsey:
Oh, exactly. Absolutely. By then, Scripture has lost all of its authority, and what has taken its place? Well, you mentioned it a few minutes ago, the moral law which is the ultimate authority. And for Dulles, the moral law is going to frame his entire imagination during his years serving as Secretary of State and early as the Cold War.
Albert Mohler:
Okay. So, John, I want to put John Foster Dulles on trial. The Soviets did, by the way, and they would have done it for all the wrong reasons. But I want to put John Foster Dulles on trial, and you are his trial attorney.
John D. Wilsey:
Oh boy.
Albert Mohler:
I just want to turn to John Foster Dulles and say, “What moral law?”
John D. Wilsey:
He would answer that by defining it in operational pragmatic terms.
Albert Mohler:
I’m waiting.
John D. Wilsey:
Okay. So, his view of the world, his view of reality is, he used to say this all the time, that the dynamic prevails over the static. So, the change is kind of the fundamental rule of all of life, but the …
Albert Mohler:
That’s not a moral law.
John D. Wilsey:
One exception to that is the moral law. When God created the universe, He established it as a moral system. And you see sort of the same operation of the moral law effected through the physical laws, through the laws of nature. So, one of the things I write about in my book is his love of nature, his love of sailing, his love of fishing.
Albert Mohler:
I understand that. But my point is, Mr. Dulles, you have never answered the question about what’s moral about a moral law.
John D. Wilsey:
Well, what’s moral about a moral law, I think that he would say, would be the ethical teaching of Christ as summarized in Matthew 5, “let your light shine before men in order that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” For him, he quoted that verse all the time.
Albert Mohler:
So, how do we know what a good work is?
John D. Wilsey:
A good work is that which is self-sacrificing. A good work is that which is meant for the benefit of others, sort of the Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man sort of ethic, a universalized brotherhood of man, cooperation, cooperation between individuals, churches, and then all the way up to nations, moral as in the rule of just law, and the knowledge of right and wrong, which is universal. Right? It’s something like the way Kant might have argued it. A categorical imperative, a sense of right and wrong that is inherent in every human being which is going to be brought forth in the ethical teachings of Jesus.
Albert Mohler:
So, let me just say, Mr. Secretary, I will press my case in another context, but what you’ve basically done is to make the world safe for people who think just as you think. It’d be a wonderful world filled with sailing ships, and wonderful people, and Sunday afternoon parties, but how exactly you actually intend to translate that into real-life remains to be seen. And it’s just theologically vacuous and that’s the problem with what Alasdair MacIntyre called the Enlightenment Project. It ends up with this entire superstructure of morality that’s not standing on anything.
And so now, let me just leave my prosecution of the Secretary and come to you and say when you look at this, I have a hard time with John Foster Dulles figuring him out because, on the one hand, you do have this abstract mindedness. On the other hand, you have a calculating, cold warrior because when he was Secretary of State, it was in what was then one of the hottest periods of the Cold War, a titanic struggle between the West and the Soviet Union for the domination of the world and for influence globally. He was no pushover as Secretary of State.
John D. Wilsey:
That’s right. But at the same time, he’s accused of being a priest of nationalism. Mark Toulouse in his book, The Transformation of John Foster Dulles, says that he’s a priest of nationalism. And I really, I love that book. It’s a very well-argued book, and I appreciate that scholarship, but I disagree with Toulouse’s ultimate conclusion. The way that Dulles defines nationalism in the ’30s when he is at the height of his internationalist sort of idealism, he defines nationalism as worship of the nation, the deification of the state. And even in the ’50s, Dulles is not ever really doing that. He still argues in the same way that he always had.
Albert Mohler:
Well, he’s profoundly not doing it. I mean, he saw the threat of Nazi Germany and the actual attempted deification of the state. I mean, here’s the issue, and here’s the problem with the historical. I’ll just say this as a conservative. It’s the historical pragmatic problem with liberalism is that it creates a situation in which the high-mindedness has to be violated by the very same people once they take responsibility.
John D. Wilsey:
Oh, wow! That’s true. That’s true. He has an encounter with his old friends from the FCC in 1955.
Albert Mohler:
The Federal Council of Churches.
John D. Wilsey:
The Federal Council of Churches, yeah. So, people like Samuel M. Cavert, people like G. Oxnam Bromley, people like that. There were about half a dozen of them that gathered in his home in 1955. They had dinner. They sat around his study, and they kind of were hard on him. They said, “You’ve changed. You’re no longer the high-minded idealist of the ’30s and ’40s. Now you’re a nationalist.” And John Foster Dulles listened to their objections. But you’re right. That insight that you just pointed out, it really is seen in that encounter because now John Foster Dulles is not sitting in a comfortable armchair just being a world order theorist. Now he’s a policy-maker. Now he’s responsible for American foreign policy. And now we’re dealing with nuclear weapons, which of course, they weren’t dealing with in the ’30s and early ’40s. And when he has the responsibility of Secretary of State and as a policymaker, the calculus has changed now. And so, yeah, you do have an accounting for some of that change as a result of the fact that he is now a responsible policy-maker.
Albert Mohler:
But John Le Carré could not come up with a better plot than the reality of this period because you end up with John Foster Dulles serving Dwight Eisenhower, five-star general, Supreme Commander of allied forces in Europe, and the President who had to define the Cold War during his eight years in office. You had John Foster Dulles as his Secretary of State. You had his brother as the international master of the dark arts as the founder of what is now the Central Intelligence Agency. And what must family reunions have been like in that family?
John D. Wilsey:
In Forster and Allen, Allen Dulles, the CIA head, they were very close. It’s interesting some of their family dynamics. Allen Dulles was always the little brother. We can always see they’re close, but Allen always defers to his older brother …
Albert Mohler:
Who by the way, was not, coincidentally, given all of his years as managing partner in an international law firm, was fabulously rich, which his brother was not.
John D. Wilsey:
Right. And his [inaudible 00:40:48] was also a partner that same law firm too, which is interesting. His brother was not. One of the reasons why his brother is not was his brother was, well, he had a different personality than Foster. Right? He was a bon vivant, a pipe-smoking sort of womanizing figure who liked the finer things in life, whereas Dulles, he had high tastes, but he also enjoyed getting a free haircut as a Senator at the Senate building.
Albert Mohler:
Well, let’s just say that the greatest line, `and you know how much I love Winston Churchill who did not love John Foster Dulles, the greatest line about John Foster Dulles was simply when Churchill was asked for his estimation of the American Secretary of State, and Churchill simply responded, “Dull, duller, Dulles.”
John D. Wilsey:
That’s right. And the only person I know that can carry… The only bull that carries his own china shop with him.
Albert Mohler:
That’s right. That’s right. And let’s face it, there’s so many things going on here. Like I say, John le Carré could not come up a better than this. So, when Allen, excuse me, when John Foster Dulles was managing partner in probably the leading international law firm based in New York City, he had prominent Nazis as clients.
John D. Wilsey:
He did.
Albert Mohler:
I mean, prominent Nazis as clients.
John D. Wilsey:
And he himself was on the board of, for example… I’m drawing a blank on the name of the outfit. Farben, I believe is what is it.
Albert Mohler:
IG Farben.
John D. Wilsey:
Yeah, that’s right, IG Farben. He was on the board of IG Farben which produced chemical agents for poison gas. He was also on the board of International Nickel Corporation which produced armor for German tanks. He didn’t close Sullivan & Cromwell’s offices until 1935, and he only did so because all the partners were in open rebellion against him, including his brother, Allen, who demanded that he closed the Berlin offices, and he was forced to. If he hadn’t, those partners would have gone and formed a rival law firm.
Albert Mohler:
But like I said, this is like Alan Furst. It’s like fiction. And then you bring that all the way down to the period of the Eisenhower administration and the early Kennedy administration for Allen Dulles. And I mean, you’re really talking about some of the most… The Bay of Pigs. I mean, you’re talking about just about every major event. Go back to Forrest Gump. It’s not just John Foster Dulles. You put John Foster Dulles together with Allen Dulles and they are just about everywhere. They represented, as you say, two very different personalities, but they also represent that caste that I was talking about that has now largely disappeared. It hasn’t completely disappeared. So, for instance, the current Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, appointed by Joe Biden, I mean, he does come from something like that kind of a background, although it includes very prominent Jewish people.
So, it shows you how that class of leadership and international influence has changed somewhat. It would not have included Jewish participants back say the early 20th century, but it certainly would now, and many others as well. But it is still a certain kind of preparation. So, by the way, you mentioned that John Foster Dulles didn’t go to Groton or Choate Hall or schools like that. And yet, someone condescendingly from the top of that class would say, “Well, young Mr. Dulles didn’t have to.” It’s the people on the lower rungs who have to go to those schools in order to show that they are a part of that meritocracy and all the rest. So, it’s just fascinating to look at this, both for what continues in American history and what doesn’t. But your book is really interesting, I think for attempting, and this the second book, attempting to talk about John Foster Dulles and his faith, and there just wasn’t much.
John D. Wilsey:
Yeah, that’s right. And that’s one of the frustrating things about John Foster Dulles is with all of his rhetoric, and I do believe that he believed what he was saying. I don’t think that his rhetoric was simply [inaudible 00:45:13]. I do believe he believed, but his rhetoric was so full of religiosity all the time. It gets tiresome to read because it’s like he repeats himself.
Albert Mohler:
And it appears sanctimonious from a distance.
John D. Wilsey:
That’s right. And yet, as you said, there’s just not very much there in the way of foundation. Right? So, someone like Mark Toulouse can write an entire book on a mere 13 years of his life from 1937 to 1950 and say that the man has a change from prophet of realism to priest of nationals. And again, I don’t agree with Toulouse’s thesis all the way. I don’t go with him all the way. There is substance to that critique. I think that part of that critique is lodged in the fact that he lacked a deep theological doctrinal set of commitments to base his moral theories on.
Albert Mohler:
And see, John, I want to tell you, I think that’s, in many ways, the importance of your book, which by the way, I just want to commend again. It’s a good read, and the readers of your book come to understand all the issues we’ve been talking about here. And maybe if they didn’t before, I think biography, historical biography, is a fantastic way to get into it because you come to understand how this life made sense from the late 19th century, going all the way through the hottest years of the Cold War right up into the brink of the Kennedy years. But you also see, and I’m a theologian, so I mean, you also see that at the end of the day, those who were committed to theological liberalism at the beginning of the 20th century came to the middle point of the century, and what they were holding was an empty bag because what they wanted to do was to keep some kind of morality while surrendering the hard doctrines, as they would call them, of Christianity.
But that there’s another point here, and that is that there are historians right now in the 21st century who are trying to kind of resurrect or rehabilitate the legacy of people like John Foster Dulles by arguing that even though they could not maintain the Protestant mainstream forever, they did perpetuate it for maybe 40 or 50 years beyond where it would have collapsed in the 1920s. And there’s an interesting argument to be made there, but that presumes that the effort is to try to hold something institutionally together, even though there’s no truth that comprises its purpose. I’ll give them credit. I think in some ways they did cut a deal that perpetuated the Protestant mainstream for another 50 years. They surrendered any kind of theological orthodoxy in the 1920s, but their numerical decline didn’t really show up catastrophically until the 1970s. So, yeah, credit where credit is due. You perpetuated your institution for a half-century. But at the end of the day, that collapse was massive. As Christ said, “The fall of that house was very great.” And I think it’s a warning to evangelical Christians today.
John D. Wilsey:
Yeah, agreed. Agreed. Not only was it a widespread collapse, it’s permanent. It’s permanent.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. Yeah.
John D. Wilsey:
So, yeah, I mean, that’s something that is really tragic and a tragic element, I think, in Foster’s life and ironic too. When he’s on his death bed in April of 1959, he died on May 24th of ’59, he’s laying in his death bed, surrounded by his wife and his family, and he wants them to sing him the hymns that he grew up with as a child. Some of his favorite hymns, “Work, for the Night is Coming,” which is a title of one of my chapters in the book.
Albert Mohler:
It’s also a post-millennial theme.
John D. Wilsey:
Absolutely. They’re all sort of these liberal kind of hymns. But it’s “The Spacious Firmament on High.” Gosh, he had several favorites. And so, in that sense, he was very pious. He had these sort of private, inner devotional elements to his faith, but again, they were grounded in either faulty theology or an understanding of Christianity that was only operative, only pragmatic, and not doxological, not dedicated to the glory of God, as of course, Calvin was completely dedicated to in his Institutes of the Christian Religion.
Albert Mohler:
So, this is always an interesting question to ask an author. But at the end of this project, were you glad you began it?
John D. Wilsey:
Oh yeah. Yeah. He was a fascinating figure to study. My family and I went together to all the major places of his life. We went to Watertown, saw this church. It’s where he grew up. We actually traveled out to Duck Island, the island that he owned out in the middle of Lake Ontario.
Albert Mohler:
It’s not easy to get to.
John D. Wilsey:
I’m sorry?
Albert Mohler:
That’s not easy to get to.
John D. Wilsey:
No. No. We had to hire a Canadian fisherman to take us out there. It’s a two and a half hour cruise out to the island. The island itself is beautiful. It’s mostly inhabited by snakes now, but it is beautiful, and you can see his attraction to it. Of course, I spent a year at Princeton, just a half a mile or so from where he lived, about a half a mile from where his uncle lived who was the librarian at Princeton Theological Seminary for many, many years. So, we were sort of immersed, not just me, but my whole family. We even named our cat after him, Foster the cat. So, our lives were sort of immersed in the Dulles family, and it was a great deal of fun. It was a great deal of fun.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I hold to my own theory of history, which is that there are certain moments that define truth and our Christian challenge in a unique way. There are certain lives as a part of those epic sort of moments that really help us to understand what’s at stake. So, when I read about John Foster Dulles, including reading your excellent book, God’s Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles, I can’t help but to read it thinking that I need to learn from his life lessons for my own. And that means that sometimes reading about the life of someone who came to very different theological conclusions than my own. It makes it all the more interesting.
And there’s a part of me looking at John Foster Dulles that goes, “That was a very privileged life, an incredibly privileged life.” As a teenager, having direct contact with those powerful people in the world, being able to walk into any house, including the White House with people knowing who you are, that’s a very privileged life. He never had to worry about want or deprivation. But at the end of the day, the simple truth of the Gospel, the eternal truth of God’s Word, the reality of the one true, living God, that’s all I know to bank life on. And the tragedy of so many of these lives is that what they did bank their lives on turned out not to last. And so, John Foster Dulles is not discussed a whole lot today. And frankly, ironically, even the bust of John Foster Dulles that existed at Dulles International Airport has been now removed so you don’t even see John Foster Dulles in the airport that was named for him.
John D. Wilsey:
Right. One of the places that we went to, my family and I, we visited his grave in Arlington which sits adjacent to the USS Maine Memorial in Arlington. You go see it now today, of course. He’s surrounded by people like Leonard Wood, General Leonard Wood. A few plots down from him is Eisenhower’s Chief Justice of the Supreme Court that Eisenhower named to the Court in 1953, Earl Warren. His grave is just right down from his. And then visiting the grave also of his parents, Allen Macy, and his mother, and then there’s also his sister, and her family, especially the one of the Dulleses. Obviously, the graves in Arlington are very well kept and clean. Everything’s beautiful there. The cemetery in Auburn, New York that contains the remains of his father and that family, it’s a beautiful cemetery. It’s a Victorian park-like cemetery. But you know, it’s not as well kept. Right? And standing there alongside those graves and seeing time sort of embrace and take over that graveyard, it really gives sort of a memento mori, especially when you immerse yourself in a life like Dulles’s.
Albert Mohler:
Which is to say, “Remember old man, you shall die.”
John D. Wilsey:
That’s right. As you are now, I once was. And as I am now, you one day will be. You can definitely learn that when you study history.
Albert Mohler:
Well, thank you for this conversation, Professor Wilsey. It was fun to read your book and even more fun to talk with you about it.
John D. Wilsey:
It has been fun. Thank you so much.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, John Wilsey, for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 150 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab, Thinking in Public. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, go to boycecollege.com. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public. Until next time, keep thinking. I’m Albert Mohler.