J. Gresham Machen Bibliography

Transcription

Camden Busey: Welcome to Christ the Center, your weekly conversation of Reformed theology. This is episode number 493. My name is Camden Busey. I’m the pastor of Hope Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Gray’s Lake, Illinois. We’re back for another great episode talking about Reformed theology, church history, all sorts of fun things. Today I have with me our guest returning to the program, Dr. Darrell Hart, who is distinguished associate professor of History at Hillsdale College and an expert on American Presbyterianism. Welcome back, Darrell. It’s good to talk to you again.

D. G. Hart: Thanks, Camden, for having me. Good to talk to you.

Camden Busey: You bet. We’re looking forward to this. Got a lot of stuff coming up. As many people know, well, at least the OPC folks, we are just over a week away from the 81st anniversary of the founding of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. It wasn’t called the Orthodox Presbyterian Church when it was founded, but we got sued by the PC USA and had to change the name and we settled on OPC. But that was founded on June 11, 1936.

And you know the work of J. Gresham Machen and his story and how Machen was instrumental the founding of the church. We’re going to speak about Machen today, especially on the occasion of the fairly recent publication of the Person of Jesus radio addresses on the Deity of the Savior written by J. Gresham Machen, now published in book format by Westminster Seminary Press there in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We’re going to talk about that today, but before we get to that, I got a couple announcements.

I do want people to recognize that we’ve got some events coming up, of course, the Reformed Forum Conference. We’re looking at October 6th, 7th and 8th, 2017. That event will be held here at Hope OPC in Gray’s Lake. We encourage you to block that off and we’re working on details to have them published for you shortly.

But we have some other events too. It’s going to be the year of the conference with Reformation 500. As many of you know, Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 theses onto the Castle Church door in Wittenberg, Germany, back in 1517. And so to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, our friends over at Redeemer Church in Hudson, Ohio, are hosting the Remembering and renewing conference on June 23rd and 24th.

So this conference is featuring Dr. Carl Trueman as well as Dr. T. David Gordon, who’s a professor of religion at Grove City College. Our long term listeners will certainly know both of those names and we encourage you to visit them online and Find out more information about this event and you can register@rememberrenew.org that’s rememberrenew.org if you come to our conferences, you’ll know Mark Van Drynan. He’s on our board at Reformed Forum and he’s an elder at Redeemer Church in Hudson, Ohio.

It’s also pastored by Scott Wright, who is the brother in law, one Dr. Craig Troxell. So if that means anything to you, then that should be an event that you definitely want to keep on your calendar. And if you’re around Ohio or could get there June 23rd and 24th, visit them online at RememberRenew.org Darrell, it’s not too far from you. I’d take it probably a couple hours Ohio in between us. Unless I’ve got a boat I can cut across the lake, but that would take me a while.

D. G. Hart: Right. But you lose an hour one direction.

Camden Busey: You’re right with the time zone change. Yeah, I’m still, you know, I’m back to my. I grew up, of course, in central time zone. So when I lived in Philadelphia for those years, it was actually hard for me not to subtract one hour automatically from all published times. So if it ever said the game was on at seven, I always just. You just automatically subtract one. I don’t know if you ever got to that state when you were living in Wheaton. But then to come back to the central time zone now I feel a little bit more at home where I’m always an hour in the past.

D. G. Hart: Right. No, I feel when we were in

Camden Busey: California, oh man, that must have been terrible.

D. G. Hart: Well, but one of the great things about it is because you’re out of sync with the workday in the east, you can actually kind of hide. You come into work and people are already at lunch on the east coast, you come back from lunch and people are gone. I mean, actually you can get away with a lot if you’re doing much of your work in reference to the East Coast.

Camden Busey: Sure, sure. No, it definitely makes sense. But then the downside is I imagine some big nationwide events are starting at like 3pm, right.

D. G. Hart: But it means you don’t have to stay up late.

Camden Busey: Right.

D. G. Hart: On the other hand, it means that if you want to watch a late night game the way you can in the east, you know, you can look for a game to start at 11 o’. Clock. If you don’t, if you can’t sleep or something, you don’t have that option out there because the country’s closed by 11 o’ clock on the West Coast.

Camden Busey: Sure is. These are first world problems. This is what we call them. Machen lived in a different time, although not too far removed from us. And certainly the more things change, the more things stay the same. Machen battled with liberalism during that great modernist fundamentalist debates of the early 20th century. And things have their own permutations, but we still battle with a lot of liberalism in a variety of different formats in the current church.

But Darrell, I wanted to open up this book, just talk more generally about the history surrounding it. I know the folks over at Westminster in Philadelphia are very excited about this. Westminster Seminary Press is doing some interesting work and they’re looking to expand their publishing endeavor. And so this isn’t just a one off, but they’re actually seeking to publish many books and expand that.

But this book is here in front of me, the Person of Jesus Radio addresses on the Deity of the Savior. This is a collection of radio addresses that machen delivered in 1935. Darrell, could you talk a bit about Machen’s context and what was going on specifically in 1935 just to set the stage for us as we open up to what he was doing?

D. G. Hart: Sure. Well, that was the big year of his trial by the Presbytery of New Brunswick. He was tried for starting the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions which began a year prior to that after efforts to overture to the Presbytery had failed from 33 trying to reform the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church.

And the reason why there was an obvious need for reform, at least in Mache’s mind and other conservatives, was the report on foreign missions called Rethinking Missions, also known as the Layman’s Report, a report sponsored by, underwritten by the Rockefeller foundation and then staffed or peopled by representatives from the big denominations. And the report actually was written by a professor of philosophy at Harvard University, William Hocking. So it had a lot of establishment credentials or imprimatur all over it.

But it basically said that the old rationale for missions was over. That basically the rationale or this work that missionaries should be doing is helping better human life, whether it meant necessarily following Western models or not. But agriculture, economics, political reform, those are the sorts of things that missionaries should be pursuing and worrying about heaven and hell just was no longer an issue.

Now that was the committee’s report and churches had to finesse that in different ways. And it’s not as if the leadership of the Presbyterian Church favored that outcome. But they also, just like today, I mean, the dynamics are so remarkable as far as how you distance yourself or critique people who are on your side or who are part of your world, but you don’t want to come out against them.

You know, you think about a Hollywood star or somebody like that who says something stupid. Well, do you condemn them if it means that you’re going to look like you’re a fundamentalist in condemning them or something? So I think the leadership of the Presbyterian Church had to finesse that. But it gave Machen an obvious target beginning in 32. And if the church didn’t respond adequately, then he went forward and formed an independent board.

And he was tried, then brought to trial. There’s actually even a mandate of 1934 by the General assembly basically concluding that any kind of effort like this outside Presbyterian channels would be unconstitutional and illegal. So Machen really never thought he had a chance to defend himself in trial, to challenge even the legality of that mandate of 34.

So anyway, his presbytery finally brings him to trial in 1935. He was instructed to. The presbyteries were instructed to bring members of the independent board to trial. So Macham was one of those and one of the most visible trials because it was held in Trenton, which is just between, you know, halfway between roughly New York and Philadelphia.

So a lot of press could get there. The Presbyterian Church was still very much a part of the main line. And oftentimes controversies in the Presbyterian Church were covered on the front page of the. Of the New York Times. So Machen got a lot of coverage in that. And anyway, that long winded answer to the context for this and actually seeing the book, I’ll just keep this answer going a little bit longer.

Camden Busey: Makes my job easier.

D. G. Hart: I have taken my drugs today, so just. And it’s been a while since I had coffee. But anyway, I was sort of surprised to see this come out when. And I wrote an endorsement for the book, but I was not aware of the manual manuscript behind this. And I’m actually kind of flabbergasted that Machen actually had the time during that year even to go on the radio or to draft these addresses, given how busy his affairs were both with the trial, but also with the seminary and other church matters.

Camden Busey: Just to sketch it out for some listeners who might not be aware of all the dates. But Westminster Theological Seminary was founded in 1929, and that followed the heels of reorganization of the board at Princeton Theological Seminary. And so by 35, Westminster had already been going for six years. Was that still meeting? Well, I guess it had to have been meeting down in Pine Street.

D. G. Hart: Right, right, right. And the reorganization of Princeton is sort of the first phase of the Presbyterian controversy that runs roughly from 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick’s famous sermon, or infamous shall the Fundamentalists Win? Which runs. And that phase runs to roughly 1929 and then 1932 to 1936 is really the second phase of the Presbyterian controversy, which involves the missions part of it. And then Machen’s trial, his appeal to the General assembly of 1936, that assembly upholding the verdict of the Presbytery of New Brunswick. And so then comes the Establishment of the OPC. June 11, 1936.

Camden Busey: I’m interested in considering not only the perception of Machen, but also the conscious views, if there were those of the main establishment in the main line. You mentioned the Rockefeller foundation earlier. If I’m not mistaken, Rockefeller, I don’t know if he personally or just the foundation was involved in establishing Fosdig’s church in New York, were they not?

D. G. Hart: Right. Although I think what happened was Fosdick preached his sermon as a stated supply at First Presbyterian Church, or it could have been. I’m pretty sure it was First Pres. And not Broadway, but he gave that sermon in a Presbyterian church. He was a liberal Baptist minister, but he was the stated supply for a Presbyterian church when he had to leave then after the controversy that he started the session there.

And Fosdick himself came to an understanding that he should probably step down from that position. And so it’s around that time that Rockefeller then began to construct a church on Riverside Drive that became Fosdick’s pulpit. The other part of the story, that is one that a lot of conservative Presbyterians know, especially in the opc. But the other wrinkle in that is that the publicist for the Rockefeller foundation was Raymond Fosdick, brother of Harry Emerson.

So there were some pretty close ties. Rockefeller himself was a Baptist. And I suspect that there wasn’t as much transparency in some of this as professional bureaucratic expectations would have.

Camden Busey: Was the Rockefeller foundation basically interested in funding things that seem to be big and large and effective? I guess what I’m getting at is they seem to be theologically principled, or was it more or less just trying to direct their funds in a way they thought was useful?

D. G. Hart: I don’t know really a good answer to that. I know, for instance, they funded a number of social scientific endeavors in the 30s, and that was still a relatively new field of study. I know that at least John Rockefeller personally funded the University of Chicago in 1892, that university started and it was a non sectarian school.

But the Div school at University of Chicago, still a well regarded one in mainline circles, was Baptist. The founding president, William Rainey Harper of Chicago, was another Baptist. Again, these are much more on the order of a Fosdick kind of Baptist than a conservative one.

And in fact the, the Baptist controversy probably starts even before the Presbyterian controversy does. And the Baptist controversy over liberalism, the Presbyterian controversy over liberalism plus Scopes trial, they all get lumped together oftentimes by historians as the fundamentalist controversy. But in some ways each of those was distinct in a way I would argue, but I’m also one of those historians that splits rather than lumps. But I do think they all have a certain, certain narrative of their own, that is, you know, and so peculiar features to themselves as well.

Camden Busey: And polity and ecclesiology adds a whole different layer to the narrative and it needs to play out, has more teeth in the Presbyterian sphere.

D. G. Hart: There’s even a controversy among the Southern Baptists around this same time. And this, what’s it called, the statement on faith and ministry or something like that comes out in 1925 by the Southern Baptist Convention. And E.Y. mullins, who was the president of Southern Baptist, was a kind of wishy washy guy. Whether he qualified as a modernist is not clear.

But Machen wrote a really long review of Mullins and was quite critical of Mullins. So. And one of the reasons why, I think the controversy also extended into Southern Baptist circles because it was possible oftentimes for Baptists, despite, you know, their own polity, for Baptist ministers to move back and forth between the Southern Baptist, what do they call it?

Camden Busey: Convention.

D. G. Hart: Right. And the American Baptist Convention. I mean, you know, as much as those larger umbrellas stood for something distinct, ministers themselves could move around depending on what the congregation wanted. Which is the nature of Baptist polity anyway.

Camden Busey: Well, yeah, I mean, that certainly has something to do with it. The Presbyterians on a different side, of course, organized around presbyteries, which are viewed as regional churches. And the presbyteries have the traditional, at least in American, and I believe even in older world, have the power and the authority to credential ministers.

And traditionally that’s why in American Presbyterianism, ministers are members of the presbytery and not of local congregations, which is one difference from the Continental view. But Machen was a member of the presbytery of New Brunswick. How were they perceived or what was their reputation? Where would you put them on the, on the spectrum of Presbyteries at the time, are they far left? Are they right? Are they just kind of a mix?

D. G. Hart: Well, I think it’s one of the ironies that presbytery, in fact, because it starts. That presbytery started back in 1738, roughly, and it was a compromise by the press or the synod. There was one synod at the time, and the name is escaping me regionally, but I think it was the Synod of Philadelphia. But there may have been a Synod of New York by that time as well.

Anyway, the tenants were a factor by then in the Presbyterian Colonial Presbyterian Church, and they were promoting revivals, and they basically created a presbytery to give the tenants a sphere of operation. It was the presbytery of New Brunswick, which runs basically to northern New Jersey, which puts it at least in having grown up in Levittown, which is northern suburb of Philadelphia, that New Brunswick region has always been oriented more to New York City than to Philadelphia.

Now, of course, that has something to do with media markets, and there weren’t media markets back then, but I still think that there was a. In northern New Jersey, there was an orientation more toward the north, into New York, Connecticut, New England. And in Philadelphia there was more of an orientation perhaps to the middle States and to the heartland, say, Shenandoah Valleys, Susquehanna river valleys and the like.

So anyway, that presbytery was founded to be a pro revival presbytery. So in our typical categories, we would think of revivalists being conservative, but by the 20th century, I would say was probably very much part of the mainstream. And probably the outlier within the presbytery was Princeton Seminary, which was dominated. Wasn’t exclusively conservative, but it was dominated by conservatives. And that’s why the reorganization of Princeton was important, to maybe bring that presbytery more into conformity with the, you know, the general contours of the PCUSA. So I think by the 30s, New Brunswick was. It wasn’t outspokenly liberal, it was probably moderate, but it would have. It would have not wanted to. The Presbyterians would not have wanted to rock the boat. Yeah.

Camden Busey: Well, you mentioned in the past, usually, at least in American Presbyterianism, from our perspective, things associated with New York are generally bad and things associated with Philadelphia are generally good. So if New Brunswick is leaning a little bit more toward the side of New York, that might indicate perhaps some of their instincts or at least desire to find approval.

D. G. Hart: Right. And listeners should take that with a grasp. It’s funny, I’m a Philadelphia boy, and Philadelphia generally hates, at least hates New York teams. So there’s some of that coming through.

Camden Busey: It’s a little brother problem. Chicago has the same problem with New York, often called second City. The better of us would like to say that has to do with our rebirth after the fire. But most people know it has to do with a second class status to New York. And Philadelphia is often treated as a sixth borough.

D. G. Hart: Right. But then we have this complex that happened in the nation’s original capital.

Camden Busey: Exactly. Yeah. There’s a lot going on there and historical memory. I suppose that has to do with some of these things. I’m wondering. Machen eventually makes his way down to Philadelphia with. With Westminster. But I take it Machen was Machen living on campus at the time when he was still teaching at Princeton? I know for a time he was and always had his checkers clubs and whatnot.

D. G. Hart: No, he lived at a building called the Chancellor street apartment building, which is on Chancellor and 13th. And Ann and I still have a condo in Center City that we rent out. And the few times we’ve had access to it and stayed there, we look out to the right is the Chancellor’s building and he had a penthouse. I’m not sure if he’s a top. Yeah, right. Downtown Center City.

And it’s also within. We also look straight ahead at the Witherspoon Building, which was the headquarters for publications and also for the denomination in some ways, some of its offices, which is just around the corner from the Chancellor. So Machen could walk easily to work over to 1528 Pine. It’s probably three and a half blocks. And you know, he liked to jaywalk.

Camden Busey: Yeah, right.

D. G. Hart: I mean, not because he thought he was jaywalking. He just liked to cross the street whenever he could and not have to go to the corner. And wait. And of course, he wrote a letter to the editor of one of the Philadelphia papers opposing jaywalking legislation in Philadelphia,

Camden Busey: of all things, which is kind of Princeton.

D. G. Hart: Yeah, right.

Camden Busey: Was he living on campus at Princeton when he was a professor?

D. G. Hart: Yes, he lived in Alexander hall there. 39 Alexander.

Camden Busey: So it makes sense.

D. G. Hart: Which I’ve never seen, but yeah, since

Camden Busey: he was a member of the presbytery out there. I know it’s a counterfactual, but do you think things might have been different from for him if he was a member of the Presbytery of Philadelphia in 35?

D. G. Hart: Yes, yes. I mean, in fact, he tried to transfer to the Presbytery of Philadelphia. And this was one of the early items in the trial, his submission stub, or whatever the stub was called, the transfer documentation, hadn’t gone through, even though they had approved the transfer because the paperwork hadn’t gone through, technically they could rule he was still under the jurisdiction of the Presbyterian of New Brunswick. Because if Philadelphia had had to do it, it would have been. It would have been much more. Even if they had been forced to try him, I think there’s a better chance he would have been able to defend himself and actually be acquitted.

Camden Busey: Were other ministers involved with the independent board acquitted?

D. G. Hart: No, none.

Camden Busey: Were none of them?

D. G. Hart: Not to my knowledge. McIntyre? I can’t remember all of them, but they all went down.

Camden Busey: How was Machen viewed more broadly? I want to eventually bring our way back to his involvement with the radio and these radio addresses that have been published by Westminster. But I mean, to get there and to understand what Machen was doing and how I suppose he was perceived and how effective he was, it’s interesting to me to think how different groups looked upon him.

I imagine that many people in the Presbyterian establishment viewed him as just a troublemaker. You know, you’ve got a denominational seminary and so you got this guy who has to go start another one and then you have the same guy effectively start a competing mission board. And in their minds he’s not supporting the work of the church and he’s redirecting funds elsewhere. And so you see him as somebody who’s maybe idiosyncratic and not wanting to go along with the status quo.

But on the other side, I imagine many people, especially with the history of the opc, saw him as a strong figure who stood up for orthodox doctrine and was willing to stand up to people who were compromising it in their view. I mean, was he polarizing figure? I mean, was it hard to find people in the middle or did he really, really kind of drive people towards the extremes in terms of their reaction to him?

D. G. Hart: Yeah, well, there were the fundamentalists and other conservatives who clearly looked up to him and supported him and admired him. And you know, we have to say that as capable and as gifted as Machen was, he did have a platform that a lot of other conservatives did not have. Being at Princeton, being in a mainline church gave him a wider presence than other fundamentalists may have had.

Now that also means though, that he probably had. We could compliment him for having more courage because if you stick your neck out in that setting, you have much more to lose. So, you know, just because you have a bigger platform doesn’t mean that you rock the boat, are more inclined to rock the boat, unless you’re a late night comedian or something. So that’s part of something to keep in mind.

But within Presbyterian circles, you know, I think people either loved or hated Machen. And I think what, you know, Machen might have been more successful if he could have drawn more moderates to his side. But people who are critical of the establishment, even critical of figures who are perceived to be evangelical, like a Charles Erdman or a Robert Speer.

And, you know, they were evangelical of a kind, but not in the way that we understand evangelicalism today necessarily. They were much more, at best, New school in their thinking. But because he alienated those people or supporters of those people, it made it really difficult so that he didn’t have a large following within the pcosa, but outside the church.

I mean, you have. What makes Machen pretty remarkable is you have, you know, people writing about him, like H.L. mencken writes two positive pieces about Machen, even though he says he disagrees with Machen’s theology. In the obituary that Mencken wrote about Machen, he said he puts Calvinism in his closet of horrors, right next to cannibalism, which is a great line in my estimation.

But Walter Lippmann, a prominent columnist and advisor to presidents, although he’s at the beginning of his career in the 20s, he also writes about Machen very favorably. Even Pearl Buck, one of the Presbyterian missionaries who threw gas on the fire of controversy in the 1930s, she wrote an obituary of Machen for the New Republic magazine.

And it was. She spoke quite highly of his courage and consistency, and she complimented him for being more consistent and more honest than a lot of the other people in the church. So even though she disagreed, I mean, I think there was that. That element to Machen. You knew where he stood. He wasn’t going to compromise.

And, you know, on the one hand, that could make him a son of a gun. You know, you feel. And this is. I think what’s interesting is the way that evangelical historians have treated Machen. It was sort of like he just. He was too wrapped up in his ideas. He wouldn’t compromise when he could have compromised. And yet his contemporaries saw that as something that was really admirable. And that’s a curious thing.

Camden Busey: It is a curious thing. The neo evangelical movement would see that as a weakness, whereas he could have been even that much more influential. You almost would want him to be principled to a point, but then be willing to compromise to a degree in order to reach the. The greatest number of people. But that would be a grave misunderstanding of who Machen was and what he was doing.

I Mean in these addresses, in the book, these radio addresses, it’s solid, excellent material, but it’s solid orthodox theology. He’s really focusing on the basics in terms of the person of Jesus, a very solid orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, about the deity of Christ, about his work of atonement and about his bodily resurrection.

This is all true as Reformed people, as very confessional Reformed people. We all get behind this as Christians. But this shows Machen in his broadside. It’s not compromised, but at the same time it’s material that all Christians ought to believe. These are the basics. But at the same time, Machen is a top notch scholar and he’s also a confessionally Reformed Presbyterian.

He has definite convictions. He’s not just a basics only guy, but so much of it seems his media involvement, other than reports of his involvement in the church courts, it seems like a large number of people are going to get to know Machen on the radio from hearing stuff like this. Baptist, for example, would love this book. But Machen’s not talking about his Presbyterianism in here. He’s talking about the basics of the faith.

Do you think there’s a large number of people that kind of flocked to Machen because he was a defender of the faith, but yet they didn’t realize maybe all of the edges of the man, they only saw him kind of at his foundational level, not all of his confessional particulars.

D. G. Hart: Right. And I think that’s a fair point and well put. So listeners would, you know, would probably marvel at how simple and clear and orthodox he was and how much they could learn from him. They wouldn’t know about the seminary and its Presbyterian involvements necessarily. But people, you know, because of Machen’s reputation, obviously leaders of other organizations of evangelical or fundamentalist ones did, you know, were aware of Machen and they would then, you know, not simply listen to him, but then invite him to participate in what they were doing.

So someone like William L. Riley, who founded the World Christian Fundamentals association, one of the first organizations to use the word fundamental in its title, Riley invited Machen to be a member and Machen would not join because of its. They had a premillennial stance in their 9 points or 13 points of doctrine.

And then even William Jennings Bryan invited Machen to testify at the Scopes trial. And Machen sort of got out of that by saying he had another, an existing engagement to vacation with a.

Camden Busey: With a Unitarian woman.

D. G. Hart: No, that wasn’t it. It was just his mother. But he also said in that letter to Brian, that he wasn’t an expert in the Old Testament, he was an expert in the New Testament, which is true.

But I think Machen wanted to avoid what he thought would become a circus, which it did, or a bit of one. But there were other people who did try to, you know, include him in other endeavors, institutional. And at that point Machen’s theology and ecclesiology would come into play.

So, you know, listeners may not know about the Presbyterian aspects of Machen, but other people who, you know, who looked at him as a peer and tried to include him became aware of that over time. And even he, I mean, even John Rockefeller, they vacationed up on Mount Desert island in Maine and the Machen’s were in Seal Harbor. A lot of prominent and academic families vacationed there.

The Rockefellers were on the island. They worshiped at the same community church and Rockefeller invited Machen to preach there a number of times. Machen did preach early on, but over time he saw the deleterious effects of church unionism and so he declined to preach anymore there. So, you know, again, people who would follow up with Machen to participate in certain things, that’s when they would learn more about his, you know, the other aspects of his convictions.

Camden Busey: Yeah, because otherwise you’d see him. You were invited by John Rockefeller to preach at his church and you turned it down. Like, what are you thinking?

D. G. Hart: Right.

Camden Busey: It just doesn’t compute for a lot of people. But then, you know, to understand Machen truly and understand his convictions and the reasons he held them starts to make more sense, Right? Yeah. What was Machen’s media involvement at the time? You mentioned Mencken, Buck and also the New York Times, which would have news on the Presbyterian Church on the front page. That is extremely rare for us these days. But we also have whole host of other forms of media and news gets out in different ways. What was kind of. What was the media culture at the time and how did Machen use some of these forms of communication to further his causes?

D. G. Hart: Well, I would say he was much more involved with print media and helped to start, I mean, the magazine for conservative Presbyterians. Their outlet through the 20s was a magazine called the Presbyterian, which was a weekly magazine that goes. I think it goes back to the 1830s when it was founded. I still think that’s a dissertation or at least a master’s thesis project worth pursuing.

But then there were the editorial board at the Presbyterian split over the reorganization at Princeton. And so the people who favored Westminster and opposed to reorganization of Princeton then started a new magazine which Was Christianity Today the original, not the one that came in the 1950s.

And this is, this was a, this was owned by what became Presbyterian Reform Publishing. I mean, so that the Craig family started that Samuel Craig was the owner and founder. And Machen was part of that up until 1935, when again the controversy over the independent board became one where the editors were divided.

And Christianity Today was critical of the independent board. Machen was maybe too sensitive, but he was sensitive about that. And that led Machen then to found the Presbyterian Guardian. So those kind of involvements would suggest that Machen, who did read a lot and he wrote letters to the editor of New Republic magazine. I think he liked magazine as a format, as a medium of communication.

And I, I recommend magazines regularly to students and to subscribe to them because you oftentimes receive articles, ideas that you wouldn’t necessarily encounter when you’re just looking for things that you want to, you know, that agree with you or subjects you’re interested. Magazines can force you to read different things.

Camden Busey: But we get that filter bubble now. There’s an important role for the editor, not only of the newspapers in terms of how they present the information to you, but especially in the, in the magazines as well. And there’s also some more deliberate thought in a magazine that things slow down a little bit so that we can have some more depth and perspective on many of these changing issues.

D. G. Hart: Right. So, I mean, I don’t, I don’t want to. I mean, when we think of media and technology, we oftentimes think of electronic ones and we discount, say, formats like the book or like the magazine. And so Machen was in much more in the print media side of things. But radio was a relatively new technology. The Scopes trial was the first nationally broadcast show, as it were. Sort of like the O.J.

Camden Busey: trial was for television in the 90s.

D. G. Hart: Right. And so, I mean, people didn’t know necessarily what radio would become. And I would have loved to have heard, been there when somebody pitched to Machen, yeah, you really should do these radio broadcasts. And he probably would. I mean, he wrote negatively about the racket of radios when he was at hotels in New York trying to write books, which is where he would go oftentimes to get away to write the actual noise.

Camden Busey: Not like a racket, like a conspiracy or.

D. G. Hart: No, but I mean, just like.

Camden Busey: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

D. G. Hart: I mean, just to kind of non stop noise. He argued for the value of quiet and separating yourself from that.

Camden Busey: He’s an alpine climber, he’s a mountain man. He wants to be out in the wilderness.

D. G. Hart: So I don’t think he was necessarily inclined toward or favorably inclined toward radio. But I also think it probably suggests that he was open to new technologies and open to reaching a larger audience through something like the radio again, which was a relatively untested medium.

And he was on the. I’m pretty sure the other addresses which were published, the Christian View of Man and the Christian Faith in the Modern World, were also sets of radio addresses. He gave posts, one published in 36 before his death, one published posthumously in 37. So he gave a lot of radio talks. Just off the top of my head, it looks like with this book and those other books, he must have done maybe upwards of 60.

And they were all on a radio station called WIP, which today is a sports talk radio format that I listen to every morning thanks to streaming audio. And it drives my wife nuts that I do it and I try to turn it down and keep her in mind, but it’s one way of keeping up with Philadelphia sports. But it’s just kind of ironic even to look at the history of that station and.

And what it. The different formats. It was. I think it was a music format when I was growing up, pretty much just top 40 stuff. And then it eventually became sports talks. So I don’t know what the format was in the 1930s. And they. They may have just been looking for content. Who knows at that point?

Camden Busey: Yeah, I’m no historian of technology, but there aren’t by any chance any early forms of recordings of Machen’s voice anywhere, are there?

D. G. Hart: Well, Grace Mullen, now deceased, who was the archivist at Westminster, she and others from Westminster checked, and I think the best they came up with was some kind of recording that we don’t have any device to play it on. I mean, it was some kind of early form of recording. I have no idea what that might be.

Camden Busey: Might have been one of those, like, wax cylinder things. It’s like some Edison invention or something.

D. G. Hart: Right. But I even think it predates something like that because the technology, what I heard, was so far removed. But even then, it may be that, you know, the thing anything would have recorded then would have been in that format, but that they still didn’t really find anything by Machen. But people have tried to find it. And, you know, I don’t know how much radio stations save what. What they.

Camden Busey: What they was probably just out into the ether, you know.

D. G. Hart: Right. And even now, I mean, with digital stuff, it’s easier to save. Takes up a lot less space. But whether they still do. It is another question.

Camden Busey: Well, to get back to the issue of Machen’s kind of polarizing effect on many, I mean, he still had this group of people that were really closely drawn to him and the fundamentalists came to him and he had kind of a coalition of sorts. And Even when the OPC was founded and organized June 11th, 1936, there were many people present that once Machen had passed, they kind of turned and looked at each other in the room and realized that maybe they didn’t belong together.

I’m thinking of the Bible Presbyterians in 37 who eventually left over some differences of doctrine, but also some differences over social issues. Again, another counterfactual. But do you think the figure of Machen might have held such groups together longer if he would have happened to live longer than he did 1-1-1937?

D. G. Hart: Well, given his reputation for being impolitic and unwilling to compromise, the answer from evangelical historians would be of course not. But you know, I think being among the older people, being the professor of many of these people who studied with him at Princeton or Westminster, I think that would have had some effect.

I think it was easier for MacIntyre and people who went into the Bible Presbyterian Church to attack Van Till and Murray and Westminster without Machen there. And it would have been harder to do that even though it was happening even while Machen was alive, because McIntyre in effect led a coup of the Independent board and kicked Machen out.

And I mean this was in the fall meetings of the Independent board. They had a vote on who would be the president and they did not vote for Machen. And Machen was very hurt by it. And I think blamed McIntyre for engineering that vote. And his relatives, his brother and sister in law think that he was so wounded by that vote that it made him ripe for pneumonia, which he caught when he went out to South Dakota to rally troops for the, for the OPC and that’s what took his life 1-1-1937.

There are actually affidavits testifying to that effect that the vote about the board really did devastate Machen and you know, compromised his, or at least made him susceptible to disease. I don’t know if that’s true or not. And I don’t think the family was prone to hysterics. On the other hand, the death of someone can lead you to maybe over dramatize certain things.

So I really don’t know the truth of that. I do know that Machen did, did write to the effect that he was deeply hurt by that vote. So that’s only to say that even while he was alive, he wasn’t able to satisfy people who were critical of the seminary and of the ethnic contingent, the Dutch and the Scottish elements there, who were basically not teetotalling, meaning that they would. They weren’t in favor of prohibition, which is. Which became an issue at one of the 1936 General Assemblies. And they were also critical of premillennialism, especially dispensationalism, which was, some argue was a factor. An early source of theology in the Bible, Presbyterian Church.

Camden Busey: All this history is of course fascinating, but I guess kind of to draw things to a close and think about Machen’s effectiveness or perhaps influence on the present day. Machen is a peculiar figure. You know, as we’ve had discussions about being a New Testament guy, finding himself on the radio and finding a broad following is kind of unusual.

Do you find any perhaps parallels to the modern day? Do you find that Machen is a model for how to carry himself in the present day that many people could, could learn from? How do you think Machen’s kind of peculiar circumstances instruct us one way or the other now?

D. G. Hart: Well, what I think of as you ask that question is I’ve listened to a podcast with an author, Matt Dresner, I think it is, teaches foreign affairs or international relations at University of Chicago, but he has a new book out, I think, about public intellectuals. And he tries to distinguish between those two and the ways and part of what’s responsible for this in some ways is the rise of social media, Twitter, blogs, other formats like this.

So if you think about the rise of radio as a new social media, as it were, and Machen trying to situate himself in this, again, I think all of his instincts ran toward print culture, print media, but, you know, he was seemingly willing to try out this other media. And I don’t know, I wish I knew the answer to what his thought process was like to evaluate, you know, what he thought he could do with this.

Was it just a question of numbers? You reach more people? Did he think much about the effectiveness of the medium? And I think there is something about radio that is even more word friendly than television, which is very much image centered. And he didn’t have to worry about television that wasn’t coming for another 10 to 15 years. Although, you know, there were movies around and he actually liked the movies from what I could tell.

So, you know, and I think back then to a book that came out last year or the year before about brand Luther or something. Andrew Pettigre had a really fascinating book about how Luther became popular through the print and publica. I mean, the publication and distribution of cheap, relatively cheap kinds of pamphlets.

They weren’t pamphlets and they were really small books, but still that was part of it. But then also there were images of Luther, paintings of him that went around. So there was this cultivation of a brand of Luther. And it reminded me when I read that book how much sort of early print culture and the rise of the printing press was comparable in a way to the rise of the Internet that you can. It was a cheap way to get. To get. Communicate widely in a way.

So people have always been having to evaluate. Maybe they don’t evaluate, but these different outlets through innovations in media have always been part of, well, human existence. But significant developments in the life of the church have also been there. Someone like Pastor Greg Reynolds up in New Hampshire has thought a lot about media, technology and ecology.

I don’t think necessarily Luther or Machen or others have thought about what a medium like print or radio or the Internet might do to your message or to what you’re trying to do. So that’s back to my original part of the answer, which was, I wish I knew Machen’s thought process about that.

And I think too, though, it was a way to advertise the seminary. I’m pretty sure that the radio addresses in those other two books were part of the Westminster Seminary Radio Hour or something like that. And there were a number of relatively popular radio shows. Even the Church. What’s the Christian Reform broadcast called? It was just off the campus of Trinity Christian. It’s right, the Back to God Radio Hour that was a prominent vehicle for Christian Reformed pastors. There was the Lutheran Hour of the lcms. So, I mean, I think these kinds of programs were part of the way to get the message of your institution out there. And so I think he was probably also doing this for the team, for

Camden Busey: doing it for Westminster, getting some exposure.

D. G. Hart: Yeah, right.

Camden Busey: That makes perfect sense. Machen’s such a fascinating figure. Of course, people can read more about him. You can read his own books in his own writing, especially Christianity and Liberalism. But this new title, the Person of Jesus, which is a collection of radio addresses on the deity of the Savior. You can find out more information at Westminster Seminary Press. You can visit them online. We’ll have links to everything in the episode description. WTSbooks.com has a good price on them.

Of course, you can read about Machen. And I’d recommend Darrell’s books first and foremost, and there are many available through the OPC and, and through other means. We’ll have a short bibliography and links to all this available. Of course. Darrell’s got some other stuff up his sleeve. We hope in future weeks to talk to him about his. What is it? A spiritual, religious biography of H.L. mencken.

D. G. Hart: Ah, religion.

Camden Busey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not very spiritual. He interacts with religion, though, and we look forward to talking to you about that. But you can find Darrell online at several places. You can find find him at Pathios. He puts the protest in Protestant and of all places, you can find it in their evangelical channel. I think that maybe someone’s playing a joke on you, Darrell, but that’s where it is. Oldlife.org and tweet him. Oldlife. You can find us online@reformedforum.org where you will find information about all of our programs as well as how to get in touch with us. I want to thank everybody for listening and we hope you join us again next time on Christ the Center.