J. Gresham Machen Bibliography

Transcription

Reformed Forum Host: The following session was recorded at the 2017 Reformed Forum Theology Conference held October 6th through 8th at Hope OPC in Gray’s Lake, Illinois. Our theme was the reformation of apologetics. 2017 marked the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation. It had also marked the 30th anniversary of the death of Cornelius Van Til.

In our fourth annual Theology Conference, we sought to demonstrate how Van Til consistently applied the theological principles of the Reformation to apologetics. We then proceeded to argue that covenantal apologetics, best exemplified by Van Til, is the necessary development and true heir of the Reformation. During our adult Sunday school session, Jeff Waddington taught about Machen and Van Til.

Jeff Waddington: Good morning. Is this working? Do I have that on? Yeah. All right. The problem with wearing one of these computer watches, you now get junk emails on your wrist. It’s very, it’s very disconcerting. It vibrates in the middle of a sermon. My pleasure, beloved, to be here this morning. It’s been a delight to be here for the conference.

Had an opportunity to speak Friday night and got a wonderful conversation going amongst those who came to the VIP dinner yesterday. Was I had the privilege of just sitting back and soaking in what was taught. This morning I want us to take some time to think about two of our founding fathers, that is, founding fathers in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, that is J. Gresham Machen. Make sure you pronounce that middle name properly. Gresham, not Gresham. And then Cornelius Van Til. Or as we like to say at Westminster, Doss and Kase.

Those of you who were present yesterday, I think you heard a reference to the Dawson Kase Society was a student led organization to discuss all things apologetics. But here we’re going to be doing more of a little bit of apologetics, a little bit of apologetic history, a little bit of church history and biography, et cetera. But before we do that, I wanted to just read this from Hebrews 13:7 and then verse 8.

Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God, consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. That’s an exhortation, is it not? To follow the guidance of your leaders in the Church in particular. But then remember this foundation upon which that exhortation is based. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. That is Jesus Christ has preeminence over Doss and Kase, Dr. Machen and Dr. Van Til.

Nevertheless, it will be instructive. I hope we’ll have a Q and A time as well. Lord willing for clarification’s sake, or if there’s something I failed to mention, or you just curious, feel free to ask questions. Before we delve into our topic, let’s have a word of prayer.

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank You for the opportunity You’ve given us this morning, not only to gather together but worship on this beautiful Sabbath day, but also to consider two of our forefathers in the faith in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. We pray Your blessing upon this time that we have. May it whet our appetites to read the books that we will and learn about the lives of those that we will be thinking of this morning. And may consideration of Dr. Machen and Dr. Van Til lead us to the feet of Your Son, our Lord and Savior, who the writer to the Hebrews said is the same yesterday, today and forever. May he have all preeminence. As we were reminded this morning that we are filled with the fullness of Christ, we pray all this in Jesus name and for his sake. Amen.

So we want to look at, not just in general, the lives of Machen and Van Til, but we want to consider the consistency of their approaches to apologetics. We wanted to look at whether Dr. Machen was wise or whether Dr. Machen was smart or stupid or whatever in selecting Dr. Van Til to be his professor of apologetics when Westminster Seminary was established.

And before we do that, we need a little bit of background history, I think, in terms of what led to the establishment of Westminster Seminary, what led to the establishment of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. We are celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. And what we discover is in the history of the Church, there is often decline followed by rebirth, the Reformation, Renaissance. And that happened in the life of the mainline American Presbyterian Church, known as the Presbyterian Church USA or PCUSA, and in the schools that existed for the training of pastors, thinking especially of Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey.

Beautiful little town where the seminary is located. And I must confess that when I’ve been there and I took a course, a PhD seminar there several years ago, used to walk around the town and thought to myself, why, Lord, why? Why did we lose this? Well, that’s how God often works. The money stayed with the main line. But the truth, by God’s grace, went with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

So Dr. Machen was a professor or associate professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. And in the late 1800s into the early 1900s, there was a rapid decline in the Orthodoxy, the orthodox convictions, the biblical convictions of ministers in the Presbyterian Church USA, and that rapid decline eventually led to the undermining of the orthodoxy of Princeton Seminary. And we are able to.

How do I put it? We can put a date on, at least officially, when the school was declared spiritually bankrupt. And that is 1929. Now, it was dying. Now, this place, Princeton, as you know, still exists. It still has beautiful campus. It still is in an upscale community in New Jersey, halfway between New York and Philadelphia, by the way. That’s why the seminary and the college were located there, to keep the peace between the presbytery of New York and the presbytery of Philadelphia in the PCUSA.

But that’s back in the 1700s and early 1800s. Dr. Machen was a professor of New Testament. He is the author of a primer of New Testament Greek. Born and raised in Baltimore. And in fact, that’s now where he’s buried. If you go on 95, Route 95 through Baltimore, I believe it’s on. You can see the cemetery and perhaps even Dr. Machen’s grave, I’m not sure from the highway.

But Dr. Machen began to see, or he was seeing, the decline in the biblical and theological fidelity of not only the Presbyterian Church, what’s called the fundamentalist modernist controversy of the early 19th century. Perhaps best epitomized by the Scopes trial. That would be part of it. But it was, of course, involved more than that. Dr. Machen, in fact, was asked to be a witness in that trial. He declined.

But so he saw the decline in the biblical convictions, the commitment to inerrancy, the commitments to the sound teaching of God’s word, commitment to the Westminster standards that were the. Which are our doctrinal standards. Which were the doctrinal standards at the time of the PCUSA. Eventually, he writes several books. So he writes several books, including that primer of the New Testament Greek. He writes the Origin of Paul’s religion. He writes the Virgin birth of Christ. Those two books, along with the primer on New Testament Greek, are his most technical scholarly writings. Most of his other books are more popular.

But understand that when I say popular with regard to Dr. Machen, that it’s not the same as saying popular coming from the pen of someone like Joel Osteen. Okay, it’s a different category. Maybe I should have compared him to another Orthodox writer. But the point is, Dr. Machen tackled issues of importance, perennial issues. The nature of faith, the importance of Christian scholarship, the importance of understanding Christ’s work on the cross.

He ended up getting himself into trouble with the powers that be at the seminary. At Princeton Seminary, he became known as a curmudgeon. Charles Erdman, one of his faculty colleagues, thought he had a temperamental or personality disorder. Bunch of nonsense. Erdman was an Evangelical. In quotes. Erdman was a compromiser. And I think Dr. Machen discovered that at Princeton during these controversies that over time occurred. This is not something that happened overnight. We’re talking more broadly 100 years. 150 years, perhaps. And then at Princeton, 15 to 30 years prior to the 1929 reorganization of the board of directors and the trustees at the seminary.

Dr. Machen, known as Dossy, because if you know German, you know that Machen is the. Dasmachen is the German word for girl. And so he was called Dassi. And K’s is just an informal nickname for Dr. Van Til. Dr. Machen was professor of New Testament. But because of the popularity of his book, Christianity and Liberalism, which I trust you’ve read, I won’t ask you how many of you have read it, okay?

But it’s an excellent book, clearly written, crystal clear. I would say that Dr. Machen and Dr. Warfield, one of the hallmarks of their writing style was that it was crystal clear. And one thing about Christianity and liberalism is that it was written over 90, 80, 90 years ago, and yet it’s almost as if it were written today. So what you discover is the more things change, the more they stay the same.

So because of the popularity of Christianity and liberalism, or the effectiveness, and we’ll get into what that argument in that book was about, Dr. Machen was nominated for the vacancy in the professor of apologetics position at Princeton. Now, Princeton is an agency of the General Assembly of the PCUSA. And so the General Assembly had. And I don’t know if they still do, but at that time, they had to approve the appointments to the seminary.

And in the process, because of the political and theological turmoil, Dr. Machen’s appointment was delayed, put on hold for a year. And that delay created an opportunity for those who wanted to remake Princeton. Because you understand that Princeton may have been the last bastion of Calvinistic orthodoxy in the United States, the other Presbyterian seminaries having gone liberal at this point.

So that you had elements within the denomination that wanted to see at Princeton the variety and diversity of the denomination with regard to orthodoxy and liberalism. They wanted to see that diversity represented at the seminary. And so when the General Assembly voted to delay the vote on Dr. Machen’s appointment as professor of apologetics, that allowed the opportunity for a committee to be established to look into the problems that were occurring at Princeton.

That committee eventually reports back to the General Assembly and says that they ought to amalgamate the board of trustees and the board of directors. Now, the trustees, I believe, handled the academic appointments and the teaching. The trustee, that may have been the board of directors, the trustees handled the property, the plant, kind of like how it works within the local church. You have the session and then you have the trustees. The trustees answer to the session, but the trustees handle the condition of the building, all that kind of thing.

Those two separate bodies, which actually reflected, on one hand, those responsible for the teaching, were conservative. The trustees were liberal. And by amalgamating those two boards, the reorganization of the seminary was accomplished. So when you hear about the reorganization of Princeton in 1929, recognize that that’s not just an administrative move. That’s a move to change the color, the complexion, the orthodoxy of Princeton Seminary.

That happens. The General Assembly votes down Dr. Machen’s appointment. Prior to or during this whole controversy, they invited the seminary, invited one of its recent students and graduates to come and to teach apologetics. That was Dr. Cornelius Van Til. Dr. Van Til was born in Holland, raised in Indiana, and then was serving for some time as a pastor in Spring Lake, Michigan.

He comes and for a year he teaches as an instructor in apologetics. And when Machen was rejected for that position, the professor of apologetics, it was offered to Van Til. Did you know that had he been of a mind, he could have accepted that position? And there might have been people that might have made the argument that that would be a good thing to do to keep the seminary, keep its toes to the orthodox fire.

He chose not to. He went back to the church in Spring Lake and pastored. Dr. Machen, in addition to being concerned about the direction of the denomination, the direction of the seminary, even the direction of the country, more broadly speaking, eventually decides that he cannot stay on the faculty at Princeton with that reorganization, the amalgamation of the two boards.

And so he resigns and immediately begins setting to work to establish a new seminary, which becomes known as Westminster. So he leaves at the end of May, early June of 1929, and the new semester begins in the fall of 1929. So he had the summer to gather together a faculty to start the new seminary.

Westminster, as you may know, was originally in downtown Philadelphia, not far from 10th Presbyterian Church. And in fact, the nickname at one point for Westminster was Barnhouse Theological Seminary. We knew that because it was so close to 10th, where Donald Gray Barnhouse was the pastor at the time. Dr. Machen wanted Westminster to carry forward the old Princeton. And that’s the designation we give to Princeton in its orthodox period. It’s its period in which it was concerned to train up godly ministers who were learned from 1812, when the seminary was established, to 1929.

So it was 117 years in which the seminary was sound for the most part. Recognizing that a few years prior to 1929, the wood began to rot. There was. Someone had asked the question, would there be a split at in the PCUSA? And Dr. Warfield, before his death in 1929, said, well, you can’t split rotten wood. So that’s a hard line, but true, I think.

So Dr. Machen wants to carry forward the best of the old Princeton tradition at Westminster. So he has to, practically speaking, needs to carry over with him. In addition to himself, he needs to convince his colleagues or some of his colleagues at Princeton to come with him to establish the school in Philadelphia. And he does. He has O.T. Allis, he has Robert Dick Wilson. He does get a former student from Princeton, Ned Stonehouse, and he wants Van Til.

Van Til says, no, thank you. And I think he sends O.T. Allis out from Philadelphia, out to Michigan, no success. He sends Ned Stonehouse. He says, well, Ned, you’re Dutch. Maybe you’ll have greater success in convincing Dr. Van Til. No. So finally, Dr. Machen himself travels out to Spring Lake and is able to convince Dr. Van Til that he should come east to serve as the professor of apologetics.

You can get this story in several books. One would be Ned Stonehouse’s biography of Machen. There’s also Defending the Faith, or the Defender of the Faith, Darrell Hart’s book on Dr. Machen. There is John Muether’s biography of Cornelius Van Til. So you get the story from Dr. Van Til’s side. So Dr. Van Til agrees to come and to teach apologetics.

Now, the question is looking at the writings of Dr. Machen, who admittedly is a professor of New Testament, although the book Christianity and Liberalism is not a New Testament book per se. And Dr. Van Til is the professor of apologetics, though the question has been raised and debated within the OPC and in broader context as to whether Dr. Machen knew what he was doing when he asked Dr. Van Til to come on the faculty.

Given the difference between Dr. Van Til’s method, what we call presuppositional apologetics, or now covenantal apologetics. And is that consistent with Dr. Machen, who people assume reflects the old Princeton approach to apologetics, which would be classical or in some instances it looks like evidentialism, particularly in Dr. Machen’s case, because he’s a New Testament scholar, so he’s not engaging in discussions of philosophical arguments proving the existence of God.

He’s looking at criticisms of the New Testament in particular, where attempts are made to undermine the authority and the integrity and the veracity of the New Testament. That’s why Dr. Machen writes on the origin of Paul’s religion and the virgin birth of Christ, two supernatural elements that are denied by the liberals. So the question is, Dr. Machen looks like an evidentialist or a classical apologist. Dr. Van Til is a presuppositional apologist. Those don’t go together.

If you were in attendance yesterday at the conference, you know that Dr. Van Til and the classical approach do not mix. You heard a stellar, I think, discussion of classical apologetics and Thomism in particular. That is classical apologetics owes much of its influence to the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, the medieval Roman Catholic theologian. Are these two approaches, assuming they’re two disparate approaches? And that’s another question, whether that’s really, in fact the case.

I would argue pretty much in line with Dr. Bahnsen’s chapter on this topic in Pressing Toward the Mark, which is the book that was published at the 50th anniversary of the founding of the OPC. If you don’t have that book, you should. I don’t want to guilt you into it, but if you’re a member of the OPC and you don’t have that book, you should have it. And there have been more recent publications to augment that, because you understand the 50th anniversary was several years ago.

Dr. Bahnsen argues that while there are differences between Machen and Van Til, there is a meeting of the minds between the two, that what you will have is a journey, a pilgrimage. You might even use the word evolution in the restricted sense that Dr. Machen has is coming to realize in the book. Christianity and Liberalism manifests this awareness that apologetics involves the defense of the Christian faith, not a defense of generic religion.

In other words, you want to argue for the existence of some sort of God. That’s typically how classical apologetics works. It first argues for the existence of some sort of God, and then it looks at the Bible to see if that’s possibly a communication from God to man. That’s called what Van Til called the blockhouse method. Blockhouse, of course, referring to the blocks of ice that used to be stored and then brought around to families to put in their old ice boxes, their old refrigerators.

And that’s what Dr. Van Til meant. And that approach to defending the faith is popular and the Lord even blesses it to the strengthening of believers and the saving of sinners. However, the fact that God can get clear water out of a rusty faucet does not mean that we ought to make our faucets as rusty as possible.

And so Dr. Van Til, the question that Dr. Bahnsen wrestles with, and I knew that I was going to be running out of time. The question that Dr. Bahnsen wrestles with in his chapter in Pressing toward the Mark is specifically the question of whether Dr. Van Til really was willing to work with evidences.

The Van Tilien approach to apologetics is accused of not being willing to work with evidences. That is looking at historical matters in the New Testament. And you would have heard this yesterday, that you start a defense of the Christian faith by arguing for the generally true nature and reliable nature of the New Testament. And then you work toward recognizing Jesus as the Son of God and Jesus as the Son of God gives his approbation to the Old Testament. So then the Old Testament is the word of God. You see how that works?

And that’s selling the store, that’s giving away the store. Rather that’s a failure to defend the Christian faith. But anyways, Dr. Bahnsen in his chapter discusses the fact that Dr. Van Til is not opposed to dealing with evidence, historical facts, whether the New Testament is true in, say, the resurrection. See Dr. Machen. The nature of his work as a New Testament scholar was of course to look to deal with the evidences, the historical evidences for the truth of God’s Word, the New Testament in particular.

He gave his best efforts in a scholarly way to defending the supernatural origin of Paul’s religion. In other words, was Paul a follower of Christ or was the inventor of a new religion? No, Paul is a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ. And Dr. Machen would defend the virgin birth of Christ as a true historical event.

See, the issue is Dr. Van Til. What? Simply asked. He says, I’m happy to deal with evidence, although my colleagues in the Old Testament and the New Testament department do this as a matter of course. And they do it better than I could ever do it. That’s what he said. But he says everything is evidence for God.

We live in God’s world under the rule of the triune God. We are surrounded by his revelation, both in nature and scripture. We are made in God’s image. You see where this is going. Everything everywhere at all times is Evidence for God. So as a Van Tilien, I have no problem with looking at evidence now.

I would have to do my homework and think about the arguments that are being used. But Dr. Van Til is going to ask a question like, well, what is your standard for assessing whether the virgin birth happened? Because everybody, these New Testament scholars, even today and back then, were not coming to the text without a philosophical commitment, a worldview.

They come with a worldview. They say, well, either God is not involved in the universe, they’re theistic, or they’re pantheistic and you can’t distinguish between God and the universe, or that everything is God, so therefore everything is supernatural, which means, therefore nothing is supernatural. And so Dr. Van Til simply asks a question. What is your state standard for evaluating whether there is evidence for the truth of the New Testament?

The typical example is made of, and we heard about this yesterday, the resurrection. People like to just drop the resurrection, the fact of the resurrection, into the middle of a conversation, an apologetic conversation. This happened to me. I was at Harvard University. Don’t ask me how I got there. I had a friend who was being installed as a chaplain.

So here I am at a table in the President’s club at Harvard 15 years ago, and I get seated at a table with. It was a setup. My friend, who is being installed as a chaplain, put me at a table with a bunch of atheists and another well known author who, let’s just say at the time at least, was not a fan of Van Til. He had an amazing conversion experience years later, supposedly, and he dropped the resurrection in the middle of the conversation.

And Dr. Van Til, and I believe Dr. Machen would want to know, okay, how are you going, how are these atheists going to assess the resurrection? Are they going to look at it, as Dr. Tipton pointed out yesterday, if you are an Epicurean or an Epicurean, if you follow Democritus, the philosopher who believed in what’s called atomism, that atoms fall through the air and they swerve.

So that if that’s what you believe, you look at the resurrection, you say, oh, that’s an unusual swerve in the atoms. Or you might say, well, you know, I didn’t think resurrections could happen in a natural universe, but maybe I have to rethink that. They don’t actually look at the resurrection and understand it in its context of the history of the work of redemption. They don’t understand that the resurrection is the fulfillment, the culmination of God’s plan and execution of redemption.

So Dr. Van Til has no problem wrestling with the question, is the Resurrection true? He just wants to make us aware of the fact that when we ask that question, we need to take into consideration the biblical context. As Dr. Tipton noted yesterday, when Paul uses the resurrection in Acts 17, he doesn’t do it in a vacuum. It doesn’t drop out of the sky from nowhere.

Paul leads up to that by talking about God’s goodness to his creation almost. God sends the rain on the just and the unjust. God determines where you will live, what period of time you will live in. And Paul goes on to say that God he cites from two poets, Epimenides and I forget the other one right off the top of my head. But he says in him, for God is not far from us. We are indeed his offspring. That’s a citation of one of the Greek poets. And in him we live and move and have our being. That’s a citation from another Greek poet.

And so Paul in Athens, on Mars Hill, when he deals with the resurrection, is dealing with it in its biblical context. Whether he’s giving citations of specific texts or not, he’s using the Bible to give the context. And Dr. Bahnsen in his chapter, argues that Machen knew what he was doing when he asked Dr. Van Til to come on board to the faculty of Westminster Seminary.

Now, as you know or don’t know and you’re going to find out right now, Dr. Machen went on to be defrocked. He established Westminster in 29. He established the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions because the PCUSA Board of Missions was sending out unbelieving ministers to the mission field. That is what led to his downfall.

Within the PCUSA, the General Assembly determined that it was as wrong to not support official denominational agencies as it was to not partake in the Lord’s Supper, which was a ghastly argument anyways. So he ends up being defrocked. And that’s what leads to the founding of what is now known as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In 1936.

Dr. Machen was running himself ragged and went out to the Dakotas to do some encouraging of the troops, you might say, of the churches out there. He already was sick and got pneumonia and died on January 1, 1937. So we don’t know how things would have unfolded had both of them, both Dr. Machen and Dr. Van Til, lived together, but they did have eight years or seven and a half years to work together.

So I have to believe that Dr. Machen was not completely ignorant of the differences between old Princeton’s standard classical evidential approach to apologetics and Dr. Van Til’s approach, which those of you who’ve attended this weekend’s conference should know is actually not new but is built upon the heritage of the Reformed Scholastics.

He was bringing insights from standard Reformed theology that can be found in the greats of the Reformed Church, Turreton, Owen in England, and so on and so forth. He was bringing those to bear on apologetics. That was what was unique about Dr. Van Til’s approach. He was allowing his theology to shape and to color his apologetic. Rather than treating apologetics, the classical method is to treat apologetics as a pre theological discipline or practice, which is utter nonsense.

Do you think it’s ever a good thing to pretend that Christ is not Lord of the universe? That’s what you have to do if you’re going to follow the classical method. Not that you are meaning to do that, but you have to theoretically do that. So I would say looking ahead, seeing as Dr. Busey did this yesterday with his charge.

And did you notice those of you who were here, that his charge, his wrap up to the conference. There was a shift from the lecture to the sermon at the end. Those of you who were present, you could see that Dr. Busey became the preacher at the end. And so I want to say going forward, at least one thing should come out. And it’s not necessarily directly related to what I’ve said, but it’s this and that is that we need men to think like Van Til and write like Machen. Think like Van Til, write like Machen.

Now as I say, I think if you read Christianity and Liberalism, you’ll discover that Dr. Machen understood because he says that liberalism is not a form of Christianity. It’s another religion altogether. And I think that Dr. Van Til and Dr. Machen talked with one another. There’s a concept that they cross fertilized. Dr. Van Til knew that Dr. Machen handled the specifics of historical details in the New Testament.

Was Paul a disciple of Christ or was he inventor of. Did he take Jesus, religion, pristine religion, and compromise it with ideas like union with Christ, Christ and justification, sanctification and the kingdom and so on and so forth. And Dr. Machen deals with those kinds of details or the virgin birth. Is the virgin birth because it’s only in two of the four gospels. Does that mean it’s not true? Is it important? Does it matter if we deny it, that kind of thing?

Dr. Van Til understood that that was important. He wouldn’t deny it, he would embrace it. These two men supported one another. We don’t have any evidence that they were at war with one another. And so we do not have, as some have suggested, a conflict in the very foundation of the OPC. We can both wrestle with the details of history, but we also need to ask the question, what do you understand by history? Because ultimately, as you’ve often heard, no doubt history is his story. It is God’s story. God is sovereign over both all history and redemptive history. It’s not as if redemptive history is floating in space, ignoring the rest of the history of the world around it. All right, that’s all I have to say. Are there any questions? Yes, sir.

Audience Member 1: Do you think Van Til, how would Van Til and Machen, would they give a different response or one just a longer response?

Jeff Waddington: Well, certainly the issue of whether the Resurrection. Well, Van Til deals with the historicity of the resurrection when he goes after Karl Barth. And Dr. Tipton would be able to chime in here if he cares to. That right lane is that Dr. Van Til deals with the historicity of the resurrection when he’s dealing with Barth. His criticism of Barthes is that there’s a problem in Barth called dimensionalism that comes from Immanuel Kant.

That’s the noumenal realm and the phenomenal realm. And the noumenal realm is where God is, where our faith resides, religion. The phenomenal realm is the world of facts. And Barth tries to protect the Bible and the Christian faith from historical attacks by placing it in the noumenal realm. The problem with that, of course, is once you put it in his so called noumenal realm, it can’t get to us and we can’t get to it.

So yes, both of them. Now, Dr. Machen did write on Barthes, believe it or not, a few years ago someone uncovered, I think it was an essay that Dr. Machen did on Barth in the early years of Barth’s influence in the 30s, obviously before Dr. Machen died in 37. But he yielded to Dr. Van Til because Dr. Machen did not consider himself qualified to wrestle with some of the philosophical niceties.

So yes, both of them would have addressed the historical truthfulness of the resurrection, that it actually happened in time and space. But Dr. Van Til no doubt would have wanted to ask your friends, what do you understand history to be? What do you understand the world to be? Is God at work in the world at all times? Or do they see in the PCUSA they gave up the Westminster standards as their doctrinal standard years ago. And some of that is due to the influence of Karl Barth. That answer your question? Okay. Yes, sir. Paul?

Audience Member 2: Yeah. I can say as a general rule, I’ve been impressed with Dr. Krueger’s work and it appears to me in his. Which book were you referring to again?

Jeff Waddington: Yeah, okay. The first book that the blue book, the COVID with the bluish green cover he deals with. He has a lot of books with the word canon. There’s the question of canon, but his approach does include within it there is the Van Tilien influence. The question would be whether he’s fully consistent with Van Til’s approach. I’ve not caught anything myself that’s inconsistent with it. I really appreciate Dr. Krueger is the expert, in my opinion today in Reformed circles on the formation of the canon.

Here. Yes. I would say that his is the most sophisticated discussion of the formation of the canon that I. Right. And he has a multifaceted or a multi pronged answer to that question. But I would say to put it briefly would be to say that he’s giving a sophisticated defense of the self attestation scripture. In other words, there’s no point in which the books of the Bible don’t function as books of the Bible even when the canon is being formed.

In other words, say the New Testament canon, and you have the early church didn’t have the complete New Testament books were being written, but as soon as they’re being written, they’re entering into circulation in the church under God’s providence. Right. So from the beginning, those books are functioning as the word of God even before the church. So he’s trying to circumvent the idea that it’s the church that determined the books of the canon, which is a typical traditional way of dealing with how and why the books we have in the Bible, particularly the New Testament, are there.

So he would argue that from the beginning, each book is already operating under God’s sovereignty as scripture. It’s not like it exists and circulates. And 300 years into the life of the New Testament Church, they decide this is scripture. What they discover or what the church does is to recognize that scripture is scripture. But they do not determine that it is scripture.

See, that’s the error of Dr. Gerstner. He said, and I think Dr. Sproul says the same thing, that the canon that is the books of the Bible are an imperfect collection of perfect books. And that’s erroneous because that’s giving the authority to determine what ought to be in the Bible to the church. And you know our Westminster standards do not allow that the authority for which it must be believed is not the witness or testimony of man or any church, but the Holy Spirit speaking the Scriptures. Any other questions?

I hope that this made some sense. We got kind of dropped into the middle of a conversation in terms of recommendations, if you’re interested. David Calhoun has a two volume set on old Princeton that would give you and it’s well written, easily understood history, Banner of Truth. Two volume set on old Princeton that would give you see the background to all of this.

And then as I mentioned already, Dr. Stonehouse’s biography of Machen which is available through the historian of the OPC and then Dr. Van Til’s biography by John Muether, the historian of the OPC, that’s available through PNR, that’ll give you background. But Dr. Bahnsen’s article or chapter is online but it’s also available in the book Pressing Toward the Mark. But you can find it online. I generally don’t want to recommend the Theonomic Place website, but that’s where you have it’s Covenant Media Fellowship. You find the on their website, you can get the article and download it. That’ll give you Bahnsen’s discussion of this matter.

I think the Van Til and Machen’s consistency with one another was probably an issue raised not only at the founding of the OPC, but perhaps when we had the split with the Bible Presbyterian Church. There was criticisms of Westminster being under the influence of foreigners, Scotch and Dutch in particular, without naming names of course. That was Murray and Van Til.

Right. So you get so and there’s also an article from the Ordained Servant by Darrell Hart and John Muether where they argue that they do take Bahnsen. They do challenge Bahnsen at some points, but I don’t think the Bahnsen and Hart and Muether are necessarily at odds with one another. They’re more complementary. Hart and Muether argue that Machen was wise to hire Van Til, especially in light of what happens after Machen leaves Princeton.

Princeton becomes the bulwark of Neo orthodoxy. So classical liberalism lasts very short for a very short time at Princeton. So you know Van Til being an expert on Barth, no matter what you hear from some people, Van Til was the guy to have at Westminster during the rise and heyday of Neo orthodoxy in the church, but also at Princeton. So you can read Dr. Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism. But if you really want to wade into the deep waters, you can read Dr. Van Til’s Christianity and Barthianism, and that title was chosen purposely by Dr. Van Til to reflect the Christianity and Liberalism title that Dr. Machen’s book had.

Reformed Forum Host: We hope you enjoyed this session from our 2017 Theology Conference on the Reformation of Apologetics. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to listen to or watch the other sessions from this conference, you can find audio and video versions available@reformedforum.org.

Jeff Waddington: Amen.