J. Gresham Machen Bibliography

Transcription

Host: This program is released under a Creative Commons license. For more information, visit creativecommons.org. This is Christ The Center episode 32. Today we speak with Darrell Hart about J. Gresham Machen. Welcome to Christ the Center Doctrine for Life, a weekly conversation of Reformed theology.

My name is Camden Busey, and I have with me today Jeff Waddington, who is teacher of the congregation at Calvary Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Ringos, New Jersey. We also have Nick Batsig, who is interim pastor at Christ the King PCA in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. And we also have Gary Johnson, who is senior pastor at Church of the Redeemer in Mesa, Arizona. And rounding out our wonderful panel today is Dr. Darrell Hart, who is director of academic programs at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, as well as adjunct professor of Church history at Westminster Seminary, California. Good evening, guys.

Jeff Waddington: Hi, Camden.

Nick Batsig: Hey, Camden.

Gary Johnson: Hello.

Host: We are excited today because we’re going to speak about somebody who’s very near and dear to many of us, Jay Gresham Machen. We are going to speak with Dr. Hart about his studies in Machen. He’s written and edited several books pertaining to Machen and also is an elder in the OPC, the very denomination that Machen founded. And many of us have had ties either attending or being involved in Westminster Theological Seminary, also an institution that Machen began. But first, we want to talk about any recent publications, any new volumes that are out, anything worth mentioning.

Jeff Waddington: Nick, you had a book you wanted to mention?

Nick Batsig: Yeah. Apparently you guys have talked about it. Stephen Nichols, Jesus Made in America, which I just picked up today and started reading through it, looks really good. I was telling Jeff it looks kind of like a much more scholarly version of Mark Driscoll’s Vintage Jesus. And it’s interesting because Nichols takes the cultural. He looks at the cultural representation of Jesus from the Puritans. Basically, The Passion of Christ is the title of the book and looks at the implications of what that has on how people view Jesus, what they think about him in America.

And it’s interesting, in the introduction, he talks about how Billy Sunday, the evangelist in the early 1900s, basically attacked Germany for its higher criticism and basically said the quote was, turn hell upside down. And what do you find stamped on the bottom, made in Germany. And Nichols basically says, now we could say the same thing, made in America. So it looks like it’s a really interesting sort of easy but scholarly read.

Host: That’s excellent. Yeah, I’ve seen that book before, but I didn’t really know. I didn’t dig into what it was about anything else out there.

Jeff Waddington: Yeah, the IVP Essential Reference CD collection, release number two is out. And that. That has all the dictionaries, you know, basic reference work that you might want to. To have or that’s coming out. Those are forthcoming books.

Darrell Hart: The.

Jeff Waddington: The one that I’m really excited about is the complete Calvin and Hobbes box.

Host: Yeah, I think that was assigned for my ST101 class.

Darrell Hart: Just kidding.

Jeff Waddington: Then there’s the. Yeah, there’s the Accordance software. I guess that’s more Mac oriented. Is that correct?

Host: Yeah, Accordance is what Bible Works is to Windows, except it’s on the Mac.

Jeff Waddington: Right. And in terms of books, instead of. Then there’s the New Media Frontier that’s coming out in September. I don’t know why we would be interested in blogging and vlogging or podcasting. I don’t know what that has to do with us, but there it is for people to consider. And then there’s that book with the couch on the COVID Is that right?

Darrell Hart: That’s right.

Jeff Waddington: Reforming or Conforming, Edited by some guy by some guy named Gary Johnson.

Darrell Hart: Yeah, Ron Gleason.

Host: Yes, exactly. Don’t forget Ron. We’ll be speaking with Ron here in a few weeks. We’re excited about that. Also, we will be speaking with Martin Downes soon about his chapter or contribution to the book. And of course, Jeff, we need to sit down sometime and talk to you about your chapter. But we’ve got a lot of people here today that have dealt with that book. We’re really excited about that. And that’s going to be a good one. So what’s the date on that one?

Jeff Waddington: That’s September 30th.

Gary Johnson: That’s correct.

Jeff Waddington: The end of September.

Host: Yeah.

Nick Batsig: Champion. I just wanted to mention two conferences. I was up at the alliance of Confessing Evangelicals today. This year’s PCRT, I don’t know if we talked about this already, is going to be on Justification. I think it’ll be a good one to promote, really encourage people to go to the PCRT in April and then the Gospel Coalition Conference. I’m not sure the exact dates. I think it’s like April 21st through the 23rd. And that is just loaded with good preachers and theologians.

Host: So speaking of justification, we have mentioned John Fesco’s book that’s forthcoming on Justification. Really important volume and work there. So we’re excited about that as well. And I’ll make sure that I get all these books into our show notes and of course, those two conferences. Nick, into our calendar.

Jeff Waddington: Camden.

Host: Yeah,

Jeff Waddington: go ahead, go Ahead, Gary, the

Gary Johnson: book that just came out about the Calvin’s Institutes that Pete Lillback was.

Host: Yeah, the Theological Guide to Calvin’s Institutes.

Gary Johnson: I just got it today.

Host: Yeah, we have a couple of those around. We’re hoping to have a review on that coming out shortly. I just read through the table of contents and it was very impressive.

Jeff Waddington: Yes, one final, I think one final book, and that is in November, Richard Gamble’s first volume of his Whole Counsel of God due out. That’s just, just under 900 pages for the first of what will be an intended three volume set.

Gary Johnson: Wow.

Nick Batsig: And it’ll probably be another year after we say November because. Hasn’t been pushed back for a year.

Jeff Waddington: Oh, it’s been pushed back for one or two years. Yeah.

Host: Well, there you go.

Jeff Waddington: But the first time it’s. The first time it’s shown it’s been publicly announced, let’s put it that way.

Nick Batsig: Good.

Host: Has anybody been reading anything that isn’t new that they would like to mention?

Gary Johnson: Yeah, I’m working my way through Thomas Blake’s work. It has been ever republished on his book on the Theology of the Covenants. Maybe in the process of trying to put that in a more readable form. It’s a 1652 edition that I got from David Lachman.

Jeff Waddington: One of those. Yeah.

Gary Johnson: Yeah. And anyway, it’s, it’s significant. Roland Ward makes reference to it in his work. And so I’m in the process of working through that and maybe trying to put it in a more modernized English later down the road with some introductory comments and editorial footnotes.

Host: Okay.

Jeff Waddington: Nice, nice. That was a gift to you from the church, wasn’t it, Gary?

Gary Johnson: Correct. Yeah, they gave it to me and I am busy trying to assimilate the Old English style, which I haven’t read in a long time.

Host: Yeah, well, that’s about all we have, it sounds like to mention. So we’ll close this section of our show and continue on. Now, Darrell, you’ve written several books, including A Secular Faith Deconstructing Evangelicalism, books I’m sure many of our listeners have read, but also a biography of Machen entitled Defending the J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America, and also edited a collection of shorter writings by Machen. When we look at your biography and Machen’s history as well, there seems to be some parallels.

Darrell Hart: Some.

Host: Several significant parallels. Both having spent some time in Baltimore and studying at Johns Hopkins, being involved in the OPC, I guess just to get started. What led you to study Machen I

Darrell Hart: I was at Harvard Divinity School after studying at Westminster where we had only used Machen’s Greek grammar and a little bit from the Origin of Paul’s Religion. And I was taking a course in American religious history with William R. Hutchison, who was one of the great church historians up there at Harvard. And he assigned Christianity Liberalism in the class, devoted part of a chapter in his book the Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism, which is a classic study of liberal Protestantism. He devoted half a chapter to Machen.

And after reading that book by Machen and studying with Hutcheson, I said, there’s something to this guy. And lo and behold, I studied at Westminster, so I felt some affinity even though it hadn’t developed while I was a student. And I did a reading course with Hutchison and got to know Marsden and Noel during that time who were also encouraging me to do dissertations. And which is what happened when I went to Baltimore and studied at Hopkins.

Host: Now you mentioned the book the Origin of Paul’s Religion. Jeff and I were just talking earlier today. If you would rip the covers off the Origin of Paul’s Religion and Christian Christianity and Liberalism and maybe blanked out the names of the particular theologians that are mentioned, it would totally pass for a contemporary book. The issues that he’s dealing with are still creeping and popping up even today. And I mentioned to you, Jeff, that it’s almost, we could turn it almost into a theological mad lib where you just insert the name of whichever scholar you want and his views would pop up in there.

Darrell Hart: The problem is that a lot of people today who consider themselves evangelical or Reformed haven’t read Christianity Liberalism and they don’t see themselves repeating the same mistakes that were made by Protestants a century ago. So the historical amnesia is remarkable right now. And I think you’re exactly right that Christianity Liberalism is still very relevant. But unfortunately people aren’t reading or studying or thinking today in the light of the controversy between so called fundamentalists and so called liberals.

Host: Now, one of Machen’s chief antagonists, if we want to put it, was a guy named Harry Emerson Fosdick. Just to get the discussion moving a little bit, a little bit of his background, he was a liberal pastor, a modernist pastor, Baptist guy at a very large, an active, if we want to put it, church in Manhattan. Is that correct?

Darrell Hart: Well, he was when, when the controversy, controversy started, he was stated supply at First Presbyterian Church, New York City. So to have a Baptist preaching at a Presbyterian church was something of an anomaly. And when he was forced out of that Pastorate because of the controversy in his controversial sermon from 1922, shall the fundamentalists Win? John D. Rockefeller built a church for him on Riverside Drive.

Host: Now, that sermon, I read that today, and I was very surprised. Jeff, also you have mentioned the thrust and the charge at the end of that sermon is also something that is very contemporary. Those views that we see reverberating even today in current controversies in Reformed theology.

Darrell Hart: Part of the point of the sermon is that fundamentalists are talking about things such as inerrancy and the virgin birth of Christ, and they are irrelevant compared to the world problems. And this is. I mean, there were significant world problems. Fosdick was actually referring to what some people today call the Armenian genocide after World War II one. And that was an important problem. I myself, being a great fan of a Armenian Canadian film director, Adam Egoyan, who made a movie, a great movie about the Armenian genocide called Ararat. I wouldn’t want to trivialize that, that political problem.

But what Fosdick couldn’t quite keep in mind was that the eternal truths may be still even more important than real problems like the ones that Armenians were experiencing after World War I. So is there a higher reality? Is there a higher truth? Is there life after death? And if so, then maybe the fundamentalists had a point. If there isn’t, if this world is all there is, or if this world is going to sort of glom into some other kind of paradise on earth or some kind of kingdom of God, well, then maybe the fundamentalists were sort of stuck in the mud and not going to help us out.

Host: I see. The quote I was referring to says, this is Fosdick preaching now. And now in the presence of colossal problems which must be solved in Christ’s name and for Christ’s sake, the fundamentalists propose to drive out from the Christian churches all the consecrated souls who do not agree with their theory of inspiration. What immeasurable folly.

Darrell Hart: It’s a great. I mean, it’s a great line. It’s a great couple of. It’s a great paragraph, really. I mean, he was. There was. There was a good reason why he was such a popular pastor and preacher on the. On the radio as well. Even into the 30s and 40s now, were the.

Host: Was his church. Well, his church was socially active, active in different social programs. What were Machen’s particular views on that and the relation of the church to activism, the government, those types of institutions?

Darrell Hart: Well, you actually see in the introduction to Christianity Liberalism, I can imagine some people reading that introduction and thinking, what on earth is Machen talking about? Because he’s talking a lot about political problems in the United States as a way of trying to develop what’s really important about Christianity. And so he mentions things like laws in different states to prohibit the teaching of foreign languages in schools, all of them directed largely at Roman Catholics and parochial schools. But Machen saw that these were also going to have implications for Christian Day schools that Lutherans and Christian Reform sponsored. So he was very alarmed at Progressivism, the progressive political movement of the day, oftentimes fueled by liberal Protestantism.

And I think he especially was alarmed after world World War I, where there was a lot of religious idealism fueling that war. Woodrow Wilson being a great spokesman for that, the forerunner of George W. Bush as far as taking democracy to the whole world. And Machen himself was very ambivalent about Wilson’s policies during World War I. And I think his own experience, he served on the front in France, not as a soldier. He was a YMCA secretary of office things. Mixing hot chocolate and selling cigarettes to the soldiers, and also trying to lead Bible studies.

But he saw incredible devastation on the front. And I think he saw the collapse of Western civilization then and began to think through the relationship between cult and culture and thought it might be important to have a different configuration of that relationship, one that was much less optimistic and progressive, and one that separated Christianity from the culture. And so he was very critical of the social gospel. He doesn’t mention the social gospel much, but he always says that the aims of the church are different from the realms of politics or education and things like that. And the church must always remain loyal to her calling, which is to proclaim the good news of Christ and disciple the nations, not politically, but spiritually.

Host: Now maybe for those listeners who are not familiar with some of the. With the other major controversies surrounding Machen, could you give us some background, maybe, at the theological issues surrounding the mission board and what caused Machen to eventually be removed from the Presbyterian Church, eventually giving birth to the OPC.

Darrell Hart: Before you get there, just briefly. Machen was leading among conservatives in the 20s, trying to remove liberalism from the church. And two important events happened in 1925. The Special Commission appointed by his colleague at Princeton Seminary, Charles Erdman, basically blamed conservatives for the controversy in the Presbyterian Church and threatened conservatives that if they didn’t shut up, they would be disciplined themselves. And that led to an investigation of Princeton Seminary itself, which also found, basically, Machen to be the problem there. There was a controversy between him and Erdman and the president of the seminary, J. Ross Stevenson so basically after losing those battles, Machen founds Westminster Seminary. And conservatives look like they don’t have much of a role in the Presbyterian Church. US It’s a very small seminary, maybe eight students at first, and then all of a sudden dropping in their lap is this missions controversy.

There was the so called Layman’s Report on Protestant Foreign Missions which studied foreign missions. It was no slouch of a study because the guy who wrote, the chairman of the committee who wrote the report was William E. Hocking who taught philosophy at Harvard University. So when do churches ever get philosophy professors at Harvard to write their reports? And basically he argued that the old rationale for doing foreign missions which was to save souls was passe. It was the old order, it was the old theology. What the church, what Christianity needed to do was cooperate with other world religions and try to reform their societies and make them in some ways more like the west, but also be indigenous. It was kind of multicultural and yet also indifferent to the native cultures in many ways. But basically it repudiated the old gospel that preached Christ and the necessity of believing in Christ to escape condemnation. And this created a great furor. This was a great opportunity for conservatives to say this is liberalism in the church once again. Because the Presbyterian Church was one of the co sponsors of the, of the report. So Machen tried to get the Board of Foreign Missions to respond to the report. When they failed to do that, he went ahead and started the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions which was then deemed to be unconstitutional by very unconstitutional means in the Presbyterian Church. And Horse was eventually tried and suspended from the ministry.

Host: What was his actual intention there? Was that supposed to be a permanent institution?

Darrell Hart: I think his intention was to be as much of a pain in the neck as he could be at that point. I think after he lost at Princeton he was, he was increasingly bitter. Which is which when you, when you, when you look at what happened to him personally and the way he was vilified by colleagues at Princeton who then would say who me? Who me? I said anything bad about Machen, you know, it’s he who was saying bad things about me. And on the floor of the General assembly of 1927 he was, he was, he was challenged for his views on the 18th amendment and prohibition. He was considered to be unethical because he wouldn’t support Prohibition. For him it was much more of a political problem that the state should decide this is not the federal government. And yet his more morals were challenged because of that. So he was deemed to be Unfit to teach apologetics and ethics at Princeton in large part because of his views about prohibition. So he was increasingly embittered.

And I think the independent board was a way for him to try to get under the skin of his foes. I don’t think he ever expected that it would go the way it did, that they would treat him as unconstitutionally as they did. If you look at the way the proceedings went, it’s amazing. There was a point at which Machen could not even appeal one ruling of the General Assembly. Basically he had no defense. He could not. He could not challenge the legality of a certain law. He was. They just silenced him. They just said, the commission said they wouldn’t even hear him. It really was a remarkable, remarkably unfair trial.

Host: But the failure of Presbyterian government right now at the time was Machen. So you were saying he didn’t expect them to bring him up?

Darrell Hart: Well, I don’t think he expected us to go that way. I do think that he thought that Westminster and the independent board would be the seeds of a new denomination.

Host: That’s what I was asking if he had that in his mind.

Darrell Hart: I mean, as early as 1920 even, Machen said it really may be the time for a separation of the two factions of the church. Separation of conservatives and liberals. And the remarkable thing is that in 1925 it looked as if the liberals were actually going to leave the. The denomination because the General assembly had reaffirmed the virgin birth as an essential and necessary doctrine of the church. And so the, the Presbytery of New York and the Synod of New York, which was dominated by liberals, they knew that if the virgin birth was going to be affirmed, they couldn’t. Many of their ministers would no longer be in good standing. And so they were. They were actually ready to leave. But before they could leave, Charles Erdman, a good evangelical teaching at Princeton Seminary Pastoral Theology, decided to appoint this committee that then found the conservatives to be the blame and not the liberals. And so Erdman saved the day for keeping the church together, supposedly. But at the same time he dismissed the conservatives as the bad guys.

Nick Batsig: Dr. Hart, this might not be really a fair question, but. Or an easy question to answer, but why do you think more men did not side with Machen who were like minded by and large, when he, you know, finally had to leave, why didn’t they leave with him? I know that could be a multi layered question.

Darrell Hart: Believe it or not, I’m actually going to appeal to Gary North.

Jeff Waddington: Wow.

Darrell Hart: You wrote this big book called Crossed Fingers, right. And you know Marx was right about a lot of things. And one of those things, as Truman would tell us, follow the money and pensions and. Right. So, I mean, north makes a very good point that so many of the older conservative men were so invested in the pension plans of the church that it would have been difficult. Now this could be a way of trying to whitewash. Wasn’t Machen really just a jerk and that people didn’t like him and didn’t want to go with him? And I actually think you can find far more evidence that he wasn’t a jerk. That he was actually a pretty neat guy who was very popular with the students and his adversaries actually held him in high esteem. But I do think the financial issue was significant. And that would explain why even his closest colleagues at Princeton, William Park Armstrong, who was his mentor when Machen was a student in New Testament, and also Gerhardus Voss, both decided to remain at Princeton.

Host: His wife was sick at the time, was she not? Voss?

Darrell Hart: Voss, maybe. I’m not sure. But even then their pensions were such that, I mean, they were very close to retirement at Princeton and they would have had to give that up, especially

Host: if you have medical bills.

Darrell Hart: Right?

Host: Yeah.

Gary Johnson: So, Darrell, doesn’t. Doesn’t that speak volumes about Robert Dick Wilson?

Darrell Hart: It does. And, and the other thing, I mean, on the other side of this, you could say that Machen could afford to do this because he came from a very wealthy family, he was a bachelor, he didn’t have to take care of a family, so he could take a risk. What’s important to remember though is that for close to a decade, the controversy really started for Machen in 1920 when he was first time commissioner to the General assembly and saw J. Ross Stevenson, the president of Princeton Seminary, present a report on a plan for organic union of all the denominations in America, Protestant denominations. And Machen saw that liberalism was underwriting this agenda for Protestantism, ecumenism. And so there was going to be a controversy at Princeton as a result of that. But Machen was very careful to follow the cues of his senior faculty members and various other people throughout all the 1920s.

And I think once the conservatives lost Princeton, with the reorganization of Princeton in 1929, Machen said, that’s it. I’m going to have to go on my own here and not follow the counsel of my more timid conservative colleagues and actually try to do something on my own. So Mecha was very wealthy and for the first seven, eight years of Westminster Seminary’s existence, he was, I think, underwriting it either he plus his mother were underwriting it to the tune of a quarter of the budget. And this was a time when tuition was non existent. Students went for free and they didn’t pay faculty lavishly. But faculty were teaching in center city. Philadelphia wasn’t exactly an inexpensive place to live.

Gary Johnson: OT Alice also was financially invested in school.

Darrell Hart: And the seminary leased buildings from the Alice family. The buildings at 1528 Pine for a dollar a year, which also helped the budget.

Host: Now his intent when he started Westminster in terms of hiring faculty was to maintain at least some continuity with Princeton. Is that correct?

Darrell Hart: He insisted, he thought that their only real say appeal to. I mean, he definitely wanted to perpetuate old Princeton. That was in his mind all along. And the only way that. That he thought they could legitimately have a claim to old Princeton was to have half the faculty have taught at old Princeton. And the guy who turned out to be crucial to that was. Was Van Til, who had taught for a year at Princeton. Actually, Van Till got the job that Machen was denied because of Machen’s views on Prohibition, ironically. And so Machen, while he’s trying to start the seminary, is having to make trips to Indiana or Michigan, wherever Van Til was at the time, trying to twist Van Till’s arm and especially twist Van Till’s arm so he would twist his wife’s arm to live in, in Philadelphia. And it was, it was, it was not clear that Van Till was going to do it. Machen was almost desperate to get.

Host: Yeah, the account in John Meether’s biography of Van Til is really interesting just to see how much Machen pursued Van Til for those reasons. And I think it was that personal visit. I forget if it was Stone House.

Darrell Hart: Stonehouse also went several times.

Host: Yeah. And Stone House, I think, as the story goes, eventually told Machen, you know, you’re gonna have to go visit this guy yourself to get him to come out. Letters aren’t gonna cut it right. That’s interesting. Now the other book, we’d already talked briefly about Christianity and liberalism, but the earlier book, the Origin of Paul’s Religion, what was Machen dealing with? What was the theological structure and system he was addressing?

Darrell Hart: Well, basically, and it’s been a while since I’ve looked at that, but naturalistic accounts of Paul. So Machen was trying to defend the supernatural origins of Christianity, that Christianity didn’t emerge from the other religions of the time. It wasn’t one of the other sort of redemptive cults of the. Of the era. But there was. He was trying to Defend its uniqueness and its supernaturalness. At the same time, though, Machen is very attentive and this is relevant for contemporary biblical studies as well. Was very aware of the human side of Scripture and talks about Paul being a theological genius. He attributes. Attributes all sorts of agency to Paul that is well beyond say, a kind of dictation theory of inerrancy. I mean, he really attributes creativity to Paul. At one point he asks or says that Paul even went beyond Christ’s teachings to actually figure. Christ never actually laid out how Gentiles would be included in the church. It was Paul’s great contribution to be able to do that. Now, undergirding all this is, of course, some belief in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and Providence. But he’s remarkably attentive to the humanity of Scripture and Paul’s humanity, which again suggests you can have a high view of Scripture and a high view of the human authors themselves.

Gary Johnson: The book was so significant that Adolph Harnack reviewed it.

Darrell Hart: Right.

Nick Batsig: Dr. Hart, I was going to ask about Machen’s time in Germany. If you could just talk briefly about that. I know there are stories about how Machen was afraid that he would be leavened. I don’t know if that’s the right way to put it. He would be leavened by German higher criticism.

Darrell Hart: I think that’s the way Stonehouse tells a story. And I think that Stonehouse was relying more on Machen’s mother, perhaps at that point, who was afraid that her son was going to be leavened by the German higher criticism. When you think about it, and you think how much the Princeton seminarians were exposed to the history of higher criticism, I don’t think Mache would have been really surprised by what he learned. I think what was surprising was for him to study with William Wilhelm Hermann and find out that this guy was deeply devout and to see that liberals weren’t just these abstract figures who were questioning core doctrines, but in fact were pious Christians or at least professing to be and trying to practice their faith in various ways. And I think the other factor that came to a head in Germany was especially after William Park Armstrong invited Machen to come back and teach it. Princeton. To teach at Princeton, you needed to be a minister. So Machen needed to decide whether he had a call to the ministry. And so Machen had a vocational crisis. Was he of the cloth to be a member of the clergy?

And the Victorian assumptions about Protestant clergy of the time, combined with Machen’s own family background, there was no clear. There Were there were no ministers in his family. They were all attorneys, bankers, successful people in the professional world. And Machen, I think, was fearful that he would have to leave that behind, even at a seminary. I mean, a seminary is partly the academy, but it’s also more the church. And I think Machen felt like he might have to shut himself off from some cultural and worldly endeavors that he enjoyed, such as going to the theater, such as playing bridge with the Armstrongs. I mean, during the summertimes in Princeton between 1906 and 1914. And he may actually be upset with me if he were living for me to tell this, but he would go to the Armstrong summer evenings, and they would have watermelon and they would play cards. And Machen said that the seminarians would go ballistic if they knew he was playing cards.

So there are all these sorts of cultural amusements that Machen enjoy throughout his life, but he sort of knew that to be a minister, you had to keep them private or. Or give them up. And I think that was also partly what was coming to a head in Germany. I’m not saying there weren’t real intellectual difficulties that he may have experienced there by. By being exposed to a higher dose of higher criticism, perhaps. But I guess my own reading of the correspondence, and especially when factoring in the vocational crisis that he clearly faced, I tend to think it was more on that side than on the other side. But I could be wrong.

Jeff Waddington: Darrell, what is your take on. Is it Terry Chrysippes book which deals with Machen’s time in Germany?

Darrell Hart: It’s been a long time since I looked at it, so I really can’t say. I probably just shouldn’t say anything.

Gary Johnson: I have a question for Darrell even more probing.

Darrell Hart: Sure.

Gary Johnson: What happened? What happened in the case of Warfield suddenly announcing to his family after his stay in Europe that he was going into the ministry? I mean, there’s just a veil of silence over that.

Darrell Hart: Are you asking me about Warfield? Yes. I don’t know. You’re the Warfield expert here, Gary, not me.

Gary Johnson: Guys, I first met Darrell in the bookstore at Westminster, and I promptly went up to him and asked him about why Machen was so upset with Warfield that he would write that letter to his mother about Warfield being this incorrigible tyrant, because it’s puzzled me ever since.

Darrell Hart: Well, I would imagine that our wives could reveal all sorts of tirades that we’ve experienced. And because Machen wasn’t married, he had to vent with his mother. And so I’ve Been at faculty meetings where even conservative colleagues have done things that have really annoyed me. And I’ve probably said some things to my wife comparable to what Mache may have written to his mother about Warfield. So I. I guess I. I just don’t. I’m not. I don’t find it all that surprising.

Now, the. Is it evidence of a lack of Christian grace or a lack of sanctification? Sure. But anyway, I. That’s what I think is going on, that a lot of the correspondence with machines between Machen and his mother, you know, and this is going to. This is going to feed all those sorts of rumors that, oh, Machen was Mama’s boy and maybe he wasn’t fully male and all that sort of thing. You know, his. His father. His father didn’t marry until he was in his mid-40s. His brother didn’t marry until he was in his mid-40s. There seems to be something of a family pattern.

Host: Well, he had a prospect for marriage, did he?

Darrell Hart: Not according to Stonehouse.

Gary Johnson: Unitarian girl.

Darrell Hart: But I mean, some of the. I actually, when I was at my dissertation defense at Johns Hopkins, one of Machen’s nieces came to my defense.

Gary Johnson: Really?

Darrell Hart: Because she happened to live next door to one of the Hopkins faculty, history faculty. And he saw the list of dissertation defenses coming up, recognized the name Machen and knew her maiden name and said, hey, isn’t this one of your relatives? And so she came, was very gracious, had Ann and me to her home, took us to the Greenmount cemetery so we could find where the Machen plot is and gave us some keepsakes as well. But in talking to her and also Arthur Machen, his nephew, and Mary Gresham Machen, his other niece, they wondered if Stonehouse may have played that up too much in order to counter the rumors that Machen wasn’t fully male or hetero or something, you know? Yeah, but I. I don’t. I mean, I think Machen was interested in women, but I don’t know that it was any kind of anything close to really romantic.

Host: I see.

Darrell Hart: But there’s so much formality in the correspondence, too, it’s hard to tell.

Host: Yeah.

Gary Johnson: The reason I ask you the question is when you read that letter that Machen wrote to his mother about being upset with Warfield, and then later on when he writes and says that Warfield was the greatest man he ever knew.

Darrell Hart: Right.

Gary Johnson: You wonder, what did Warfield do to get him so irritated? And you said it was because Warfield allowed a black student into the dorm.

Darrell Hart: Right.

Gary Johnson: And said that the matter was settled. There’s no debate.

Darrell Hart: Right. And so Machen was upset about that. Yeah.

Gary Johnson: It reflects poorly on Machen, but gives you an assessment of war.

Darrell Hart: Yeah, I mean, and this. This is all sort of kind of relative relativism. But Harvard pristine. Harvard was liberal Unitarian. Harvard was not admitting Jews or blacks during that time. I mean, it was. The north was no less segregated than the South. It’s just that the north didn’t have all the Jim Crow laws that the south did, nor did the north have the demographics that the south did. Which means that whites were clearly in the majority in the north in a way that parts of the south they weren’t. But Machen was a man of his times, and so that was part of his being upset about that.

Gary Johnson: Dr. Hart, I would recommend people to read the chapter that Brad Gudlach wrote in the book that we did on Warfield’s. The recent release book that I edited on Warfield which portrays Warfield’s sensitivity to that issue.

Darrell Hart: I mean, I could get back at jigarry and talk about how Warfield was also maybe an evolutionist because of his time breeding horses. Yeah. Which would. Which would. Which would maybe startle a number of listeners. But anyway, all men had feet of. All of men have feet of clay, so.

Gary Johnson: That’s right.

Nick Batsig: Dr. Hart, I’m wondering if you could tell us just a little bit about Machen’s preaching, because I know with men like Warfield and Machen, we often hear about these great scholastic works they produce because they were just amazing theologians. But maybe, I don’t know. Have you come across things that you could share with us about the sermons in God Transcendent or just stories that you’ve come across about Matron’s preaching?

Darrell Hart: I am. I think he was a great writer and a great. Probably a great order. I’ve never heard him. No, no recording survive. But I’ve been struck by how many times I’ve taught about Machen that students, even contemporary students, iPod, Internet savvy students will read Christian liberalism and see that. That there’s a real clarity of style to Machen. So he was a great communicator. But. And this is, I think, a possible subject for somebody who wants to do a dissertation, which is to look at the sermons of that era, the sermons being produced by. By Princeton Seminary graduates. I don’t think that presbyteries today, at least in the OPC, would be overly impressed with these sermons as far as being exegetical, as careful as they should be. And yet, I mean, someone like Clarence McCartney has collections of sermons. He was a board member at Princeton. He was a colleague of Machen’s as a student, board member at Princeton, board member at Westminster. One of the great preachers of the era. And I haven’t been overly impressed with his sermons either, as far as what we think today sermons should do. So I’m wondering what sort of homiletics courses were being taught, who was teaching them, and what the ideal of a good sermon was back then. So Machen was always clear in his presentation of the Gospel, but he could get pretty far from the text.

Gary Johnson: McCartney was also a lifelong bachelor.

Darrell Hart: Right, right. One great example of Machen getting far from the text. And Camden, since you brought up Fosdick, shall the fundamentalist win? Machen basically had a rival sermon to that preached at the end of 1923. So it was almost a year and a half later. And I can’t remember the title, but Machen goes so far from the text that I can’t even remember what the text. What the text for the sermon was. But he goes on to a long harangue about civil liberty and how if there’s ever going to be a revival in the country, there needs to be a return to civil liberties. And then he also talks about how there also needs to be intolerance in the church.

So he makes all these sorts of really good points, and there’s one section in particular where he illustrates how relativistic liberalism is by saying, 6 times 9 no longer means 54, it means 108. Or, the Constitution of the United States was written not in Philadelphia, but San Francisco, because we as moderns need to reinterpret these old truths in the light of contemporary developments. And so he leads people on to finally, okay, you affirm when you recite the Nicene Creed or the Apostles Creed that Christ died from the dead on the third day. And the person says, well, no, we no longer. That’s the old way of conceiving of Christ’s resurrection. We no longer believe that. No, we’re modern men. So when we affirm that Christ was raised from the dead, we really mean Christ wasn’t raised from the dead. And it’s a great. It’s a very effective rhetorical device to show how relativistic liberalism is. But again, I’m not sure he was faithfully preaching the text at that point. I mean, there is a place for doctrinal sermons, I think. And actually, I’m quite a fan or an advocate. I can’t call myself a fan. Because there’s so little of it. An advocate of catechetical preaching. So I think there’s a real place for doctrinal preaching. But as far as the sort of exegetical preaching that’s valued in Westminster Seminary circles both east and California, I actually not sure Machen would measure up.

Gary Johnson: Of course, you know, there was McCartney’s famous sermon, shall unbelief Win, which was a response, response pick.

Darrell Hart: Right. But the notable thing, I mean, and Machet always credited McCartney with being the one to sing almost single handedly stand up to Fosdick in the church. And Machen had great respect for McCartney. At the time, McCartney was a minister in Philadelphia at Arch Street Presbyterian Church, which is an amazing facility building and it looks like it’s the sort of church that will endure well beyond our Lord’s return because it’s really built to stay. And Machen preached there several times. But the reason why I think of Machen’s sermon at the end of 1923 as kind of rival to Fosdick’s is because Machen’s sermon created a great furor in the press.

One of the pew holders at First Presbyterian Church, Princeton at the time was Henry Van Dyke, who taught literature, yes, but also taught literature at Princeton University, had been the ambassador to the Netherlands during the Wilson administration. So this guy was well connected, a well respected writer. And he resigned his pew after that sermon and held a press conference, sent out press releases and kind of was a dandy about it. And so Machen’s sermon was reprinted throughout the press around the country in ways comparable to the way the ways Fosdick’s sermon was circulated. And so in some ways that caught the public eye in a way that Fosdick’s sermon did, and in a way that I think McCartney’s didn’t. Even though McCartney’s was a direct response within like a month or so of

Gary Johnson: the Fosdick sermon, just for a light of application. Can you imagine that happening today? The major presses like USA Today carrying a sermon like that? Not a chance.

Darrell Hart: Well, some of the presidential candidates have been getting close to sermonizing, but, well,

Host: even Fosdick, he was on the COVID of Time magazine, which might not be as strange as today if you know someone like a Joel Osteen or somebody was on the COVID But still it was a different time. One thing Mitha wrote referring to Machen on preaching, I have this quote here. He says, although he never taught homiletics, there is valuable instruction from Machen for young preachers. And Machen said The Bible is the only way to avoid monotony in the pulpit, he told his students. And when the cross of Christ is faithfully preached, only then can the minister experience the joy of elevating listeners out of the crash and jazz and noise and rattle and smoke of this weary age. So it’s interesting to see Machen’s own views or own thoughts as he taught and encouraged his students in preaching, even though he didn’t teach that himself.

Gary Johnson: Darrell, didn’t Machen’s book, the Christian Doctrine of Man, originate as a series of radio lectures?

Darrell Hart: Right. The Christian View of Man and Christian Faith in the Modern World. The One Christian Faith in the Modern World, published post posthumously, were a series of radio addresses given on, of all things, for those people in the Philadelphia area. Wip, the sports station. Right. And it was a way for the seminary to do publicity. Sunday afternoons, Machen would do a talk and it would go out and it would. He was expositing, oftentimes the Shorter Catechism, trying to address specific issues in the church. So it was a little bit of Sabbath instruction on the radio, and none of those survived. The tapes do not.

Gary Johnson: We have no recordings of those?

Darrell Hart: No.

Nick Batsig: Dr. Hart, I wanted to ask you about Machen’s notes on Galatians. Thankfully, John Skilton edited those and got them into print. But what triggered Machen to write those chapters in Christianity Today on Galatians at that time? What was the historical context? I mean, did that. Was that the same liberalism struggle? Was that an answer to that?

Darrell Hart: Well, I think at the practical level, it was probably his turn, as one of the editors of the magazine, to supply something, and he was probably trying to do something that was relatively easy for him compared to other things that he might do, because this was, at the time, I believe, of the missions controversy and when the independent board was gearing up. But specifically, whether, you know, it’s been such a long time since I looked at those that I can’t necessarily see references directly to the controversies of the time. My sense was. My recollection is that he played it fairly straight and didn’t try to use that as a mechanism to get at liberals or to get at the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions or something. Okay.

Gary Johnson: You know, at the end of those notes, there’s a review of Edwin Burton’s commentary in the old ICC, which had just been released, and Machen responds to

Darrell Hart: that,

Gary Johnson: and he credits Burton as being a great philologist, but wouldn’t know the theology of Paul from the other side of the moon.

Host: What are some areas that we can really learn from Machen today, given the theological trends in Reformed circles.

Darrell Hart: Well, I mean, for me, and this could be very personal, and so you could take it with a grain of salt or maybe two grains. But I think the one, the value of polemics. There seems to be a real reluctance today to engage in polemics, that somehow it’s uncharitable, that somehow people’s feelings will be hurt, that even. That there’s a sense that we’re all on the same page and we don’t need to be critical of each other because everyone’s good. It’s all good. And as if error hasn’t been part of the church throughout its history, as if error hasn’t always needed to be corrected. I mean, Machen wrote brilliantly several essays about the importance of controversy, how you can’t escape controversy. Even in the New Testament, the church has always been engaged in controversy. So people shouldn’t. Shouldn’t back off from that and think it’s somehow unchristian to engage in controversy. Now, on the other hand, I also think Machen understood that some people were temperamentally not wired that way. So, you know, you got to figure out what your calling and duties are.

And the other thing I would say has to do with the importance of the. The church and being a churchman and so being engaged in the actual affairs of a particular communion or denomination, but being concerned what goes on at General assembly, being concerned what goes on in the agencies of the church, not just looking at the local congregation and looking at that as a good ministry, but then looking at the corporate church, looking at what. Everything that’s going on in the. In the denomination and, you know, and not necessarily trying to poke your nose everywhere, because Matron was always aware of. Of what was proper procedurally, whether it was appropriate for a Presbyterian, Presbyterian, this presbytery, to be sticking his nose in the business of another presbytery. So you always have to be aware of the book of church order, the way you do these things. But on the other hand, because it is a corporate body, if you’re Presbyterian or Lutheran or Episcopalian, I mean, what’s going on in another diocese or synod, I mean, or classes or presbytery is important to what’s going on in the church corporately. So to be engaged in that way is, I think, also important. And what’s undercutting that, I think, increasingly, is a kind of low view of the church and evangelicalism being sort of the identity for all conservative Protestants. And so it doesn’t really matter what church we belong to. As long as we’re evangelical, it’s okay.

Host: Yeah, excellent.

Gary Johnson: I also think that Machen’s emphasis on the role of history and apologetics is as relevant today as it was when he was stressing it, because that’s becoming a crisis, coming to a point of crisis in modern day evangelicalism, because the post modern emphasis upon history is. Or the lack of it or its de emphasis is becoming increasingly popular.

Host: Yeah.

Darrell Hart: Do you mean history of theology, Gary,

Gary Johnson: or the role of history and apologetics? Machen’s emphasis upon the historicity of the New Testament.

Host: Okay, Right, right.

Darrell Hart: No, exactly.

Host: Well, we would encourage, of course, everyone to read Machen. Where would you start if you hadn’t read any Machen? Where would you urge people to begin? With Christianity and Liberalism.

Darrell Hart: Yeah. I still think, although, I mean, and this is going to sound self promotional, I mean, many of the essays that I helped to get back into print in the Selected Short Writings were originally Stonehouse had put together in what Is Christianity? So if you can find the old copies of Stonehouse’s edition of that, that’s fine, but many of those essays are really quite brilliant.

Host: That’s available from pnr. It’s good to get. And Christianity and Liberalism, of course, as timely as ever, even though it’s what, 70, 80 years old now.

Darrell Hart: Right. But also those two works that Gary had mentioned from the radio addresses, the Christian Faith in the Modern World and the Christian View of Man are very accessible.

Gary Johnson: And what is Faith? That is perhaps one of my favorites.

Darrell Hart: Yeah, I actually think that gets neglected oftentimes.

Gary Johnson: I have given away dozens of copies of that book to people who had never heard of Machen and found that that book, I gave that away as a evangelistic tool back when I was in college when it used to be a paperback edition that I think Erdman’s kept releasing.

Darrell Hart: Yeah, it’s the right hook to the left jab of Christianity and Liberalism. It really is. I mean, it was a one, two punch that he had in those two books regarding Liberalism, Christianity, Liberalism, and then what is Faith? Published within two years of each other. And in some ways its claims are even bolder in there than Christianity, Liberalism. Yeah.

Gary Johnson: By the way, Darrell, I read somewhere that of all of his writings, his Greek New Testament grammar outsold all his other books combined.

Host: Well, that might be Westminster’s fault.

Gary Johnson: I used it.

Host: I used it too.

Jeff Waddington: So did I. Camden.

Host: Yes, sir?

Jeff Waddington: I’d like to make a plug for Darrell’s dissertation, Dr. Fundamentalis. If you read Defending the Faith and you enjoy that and you want a little more detail. The dissertation is well worth reading.

Darrell Hart: Yeah, I had to thank you. I appreciate that. But I had to for a university press. Basically, they. I had a friend who was an editor I played basketball with at Johns Hopkins. So he, and he, he liked to, he did a dissertation himself on a loser in American history. So he, he liked to print books about losers and American history. But he didn’t know Machen from Adam and then all the Presbyterian denominational history, well, that kind of had to go. So there is more of that in the dissertation.

Host: Excellent. And for the record, it is pronounced Gresham.

Darrell Hart: It is Gressem.

Jeff Waddington: That’s right.

Host: Anyway, just for the record. Well, thanks, Darrell and Gary, Nick and Jeff, we really appreciate this time you guys have spent to come. We appreciate you coming over, Darrel, and being able to talk to us about our forefather in many ways. For us involved in the OPC and also for others involved in Westminster and just Reformed theology in general. We would like to point people to the website. You can go to castlechurch.org, you can read today’s shown notes and download the bibliography. You can also get a hold of us@castlechurch.org contact or subscribe to our feeds and see what else is going on. But until then, we want to thank you for listening and we look forward to having you back. Next time on Christ the Center.