Guide to the works of J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937). Scholar. Preacher. Founder of Westminster Theological Seminary. Leader in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
Discussion of Machen's contemporary relevance covering chapters 5-8
This is a special production of Presbycast. And now chapters five through eight of the Significance of J. Gresham Machen Today By Paul Woolley
Paul Woolley: Chapter 5 Government and Francis Landy Patton Princeton Theological Seminary was governed in what seemed like an odd way in academic circles. Yet to a person acquainted with ecclesiastical government, it was not unusual. There were two boards of control. One was called the Board of Directors. It controlled the academic side of the institution. Members of the faculty were elected by the directors. The other controlling board was the Board of Trustees. It held the real property of the seminary. Elections to these boards were originally in the hands of the General assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the usa but later boards began to elect their own successors as terms expired. The General assembly, however, retained the rights to replace one third of the trustees at any one of its annual meetings. It could also veto the election of any one to the Board of Directors.
Customs and rules in the first half of the 19th century seem almost unbelievable to a member of modern academic community. Students were expected to attend every class punctually. If absence was necessary, they were to obtain formal leave. If addressed in class by a professor, the student was to stand. Students were expected to be in their room studying between morning prayers and breakfast from 9 to 12 and from 2 to 5 unless on necessary duties elsewhere. Chapel services were held both morning and evening, and student attendance was required. There was no charge for tuition. The academic year in the late 1830s had two terms. One ran from early November to early May, with a vacation of two weeks in February. The other ran from mid June to late September.
There was, of course, no reference to Christmas or Easter in the schedule. Juniors were expected to produce a paper every four weeks, middlers every three weeks, seniors every two weeks. These class designations were not yet in use, however. The ceremony proceeded with relatively little change on through the 19th century, but the academic year was altered to something more like its present outline.
Effective day to day administration lay in the hands of the faculty, since there were no resident administrative officers outside of the faculty employed to administer the institution during the 1880s. A new chair in Princeton, the Stewart Professorship of the Relations of Philosophy and Science to the Christian Religion, was filled by the Reverend Dr. Francis Landy Patton. Chapter 6 J. Ross Stevenson Patton’s Successors President of Princeton seminary was the Rev. Dr. J. Ross Stevenson, who moved into the office at the age of 48 from the Scotch Irish area of western Pennsylvania.
He had received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Washington and Jefferson College and had pursued his theology at McCormick Seminary in Chicago with a following year at the University of Berlin. After a Missouri pastorate, he taught church history at McCormick until he became pastor of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City in the year 1902. In the same year came his first official connection with Princeton, when he was elected to the board of directors of the seminary. It was an evil day for the seminary. For pious and believing though he was, he had no understanding of or love for the great tradition which the theologians of Princeton had been building for 90 years.
Elected in 1914 to the presidency of the institution, he made it his goal to end the distinctive contribution of Princeton and to make it instead a seminary which should be representative of all the streams of theology, widely variegated, though they were to be found in the Presbyterian Church in the USA Stevenson was impressive in the pulpit in his later years. He frequently recited from memory, in very moving fashion, the log catenae of biblical passages which might feed the soul. It was hard to realize that such a pious person was bending every effort to disrupt the legacy of the earlier Princeton theologians which a majority of the faculty and directors were defending. The leader of that majority was, of course, Bebe Warfield. He was ably supported by many of his colleagues. It was a highly distinguished faculty.
William Park Armstrong was a native of Selma, Alabama, a quiet city not yet known the world around. He became a devoted Princetonian, graduating from both the college and the seminary. He showed administrative gifts that connected him with the Princeton bank and Trust Company. One of his sons carried on the tradition as president of Middlebury College and a trustee of Princeton University. But Armstrong’s greatest gift was as a New Testament scholar.
Going to Germany. After he finished his course at Princeton, he listened to Huicker and Marburg, to Harnack in Berlin and Theodore Zahn in Erlingen. Every one of them was a prodigious worker, and the world noted what they had to say. Armstrong returned to Princeton to be the assistant for whom Dr. George T. Purvis had sought so long. Purvis was to be guide to Armstrong for only one year, but deep admiration for Purvis remained with Armstrong. He succeeded to the Vacant Professorship in 1903 and married Rebecca Purvis in 1904. These facts are recounted primarily because Armstrong was Mason’s beloved mentor.
Today Armstrong is almost forgotten, largely because he published little. His article on chronology of the New Testament in the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia was a splendid example of his capabilities. However, it was Machen’s opinion that one factor which inhibited the full development of his powers in later years was the violent criticism he suffered in the student revolt that occurred in the seminary at the end of the first decade of the 20th century, which included ill considered criticism of the faculty. There was no real justification for it in Armstrong’s case, though all his students will recognize that reading his script from the blackboard was a task for a cryptanalysis. Chapter 7 W.P. armstrong and Machen it was Armstrong who built up Machen in the study of the New Testament during his regular course at Princeton Seminary after a year of concentration on Greek at Johns Hopkins under one of the leading American classical scholars of the time, Basil L. Gildersleeve.
As Machen pursued further studies in Germany, hearing Hullacher, Johannes Weiss, and Ehrman at Marburg, and Wilhelm Bossuet at Gottingen, Armstrong kept in touch with him and encouraged him. Machen was greatly impressed by Wilhelm Ehrman. He was faced as never before by the sharp question, what is Christianity? Harnick had asked it a few years before in his general lectures at the University of Berlin, but Ehrman’s answer was warmer and appealed more largely to the whole man.
Machen was not hasty about reaching his final conclusions, and therefore when Armstrong invited him to assist him in the Princeton teaching, he he hesitated. But Armstrong, or Army, as Machen was later to affectionately call him, pointed out that as an instructor he would not be required to submit to the confessional standard required of voting members of the faculty. So at last Machen consented to accept the invitation.
Gradually he became convinced that the only version of Christianity which could be accepted as true was the Orthodox one. Christianity was what the Bible described it as being, or it was not true at all. As a result of that conviction, he accepted the invitation to become a voting member of the Princeton Seminary faculty as Assistant professor of New Testament, the post which he occupied as long as his connection with Princeton lasted.
Upon the occasion of his inauguration into that chair, he delivered an address under the article History and Faith. The Bible offers news, something that has happened. Not philosophy, but history. What is Christianity? Page 171 Christianity is a message about something that has happened.
And what happened. Jesus Christ came into this world, lived, died, and rose from the dead. That last named fact is unavoidably supernatural. In fact, the story of Jesus cannot be separated from the supernatural. No other construction hangs together, and the supernatural Christ of Paul and of the Gospels is confirmed by experience, but he only became known through the Bible. The Bible is at the foundation. Lose the Bible and you lose all the Chapter 8 Westminster Theological Seminary Princeton Theological Seminary was reorganized in the spring and summer of 1929. The General assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the USA which controlled it, abolished its board of directors and nominated a new single board of trustees to be the authoritative organ of direction and control. This was done in the interest of the policy of President Stevenson to make the seminary representative of the varied schools of theological thought which were to be found within the Presbyterian Church in the USA
As a result of this action was the determination by some members of the faculty not to teach any longer in Princeton Seminary. This made possible the founding of a new seminary in Philadelphia which took the name Westminster Theological Seminary. It turned out there was a Methodist Protestant institution of that name in Westminster, Maryland. Apparently no one immediately concerned with the Princeton secession was aware of that fact. It very occasionally caused some confusion.
Mail sometimes had to be forwarded. And there was one student who had rolled in Westminster Philadelphia, who was many months later to discover to have done so under the impression that he was beginning his studies in the Methodist institution. On another occasion, a legacy was paid by a bank to the Philadelphia institution which a few weeks later was discovered to have been intended for the other Westminster and was of course, returned to the bank for forwarding to the proper destination.
The purpose of the institution was to carry on the work which Princeton Seminary had been doing prior to this time. It followed that pattern closely. Even the stunt nights of the old parlor of Alexander hall were continued, and in the early years of Westminster evoked great enthusiasm. Machen was still the star of such occasions.
Machen’s Philadelphia living quarters resembled in many ways those he had occupied in Princeton. It was still quite a chore for him to find a place to live, but he ultimately selected two rooms with a small kitchen on the 22nd floor of Chancellor hall at 212 S. 13th St. It is sure that the kitchen never saw any cooking, but the refrigerator provided a good storage place for the soft drinks that always attended a session of the Checker Club. Its sessions continued in Philadelphia as they had in Princeton, but less frequently, as Machen was so often away on weekends preaching.
During the first years of Westminster, the windows of the Chancellor hall apartment had the same southern exposure that the Princeton rooms had. But it was a very different scene that spread itself below them. A busy city with commercial elements, clubhouses, hotels, church towers, crumbling brownstone fronts, and all the varied manifestations of urban life were there. In contrast to the green trees and lawns of the seminary campus in Princeton. The significance of this was not merely geographical. Westminster was physically set in the middle of urban decay and urban need. Students who walked between their living accommodations and the seminary saw the effects of sin spread before them in their repulsive nakedness, they knew what they were going to deal with as pastors.
Host: You’ve been listening to chapters five through eight of the Significance of J. Gresham Machen Today by Paul Woolley. We’ll serialize the remainder of the book in sections of approximately four chapters each over the coming weeks. Thanks for listening.