Been reading voluminous correspondence between Buswell and Machen about intense conflict at the beginning of their Presbyterian Church of America between premils and amils. Growing most heavy in November and December of 1936, in his letter to Machen dated December 4, 1936, Buswell says:
I do not question the right of a professor in a truly Presbyterian seminary to teach the amillennial view if he believes it. You do not question the right of a professor to teach the premillennial view if that is his conviction. It has seemed to me however that the shift of emphasis from historical critical apologetics to philosophical apologetics has resulted in a very strong and disproportionate emphasis upon the amillennial view. This, in my humble judgment, has resulted from a philosophical conception which has unconsciously been allowed to creep in, and has not been the result of careful critical Biblical scholarship.
A few letters followed, then Machen suddenly died. This was the center of the controversy which, the following year, split the new denomination. It’s my conviction this conflict would have found a resolution if Machen had lived, and that is God’s providence, inscrutable as it remains.
To Moscow, all one would have to change in the text above is amil to postmil, and the thrust behind it being political rather than philosophical. Love,