Guide to the works of J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937). Scholar. Preacher. Founder of Westminster Theological Seminary. Leader in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
Part of the Heroes of the Faith lecture series covering Machen's life and influence
Speaker A: And so it’s remarkably foolish of me to conclude this week by talking about J. Gresham Machen to an orthodox Presbyterian group, since doubtless numbers of you know at least parts of the Machen story a good deal better than I do. And in any case, as a historian, I ought to have better sense than that. In graduate school, I had a friend who studied the Middle Ages primarily, and he always used to say, well, anybody who tries to do history after about 1500 is just doing journalism, not history.
And certainly when we talk about a figure as recent as J. Greshammachin, who died on New Year’s Day 1937, we are talking about a figure who, after all, is really fairly recent. Now, you younger types may not think of 1937 as all that recent, but there are some here who remember the day.
Speaker B: And nonetheless, I think it’s important that
Speaker A: we call to mind the wonderful work of John. Some of you have been wondering what that J stood for. John Gresson Machen. There are people who don’t know the whole story, even in OP circles. And so it’s good to tell that story again, especially now that we’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the OPC.
Speaker B: But more importantly than that, Machen’s story
Speaker A: is worth telling simply because of its own inherent importance and the inherent attractiveness and testimony that Machen offered to our world. I’m basically a Reformation historian. My wife frequently remarks that I don’t know anything in the 20th century. She thinks about that, particularly about matters around the home and birthdays and things like that. I remember vividly that Cardinal cusanus died in 1477, but.
Speaker B: And so coming to Westminster and Escondido, I had to teach modern church history
Speaker A: for the first time, which I looked at as a disagreeable enterprise. In Philadelphia, I got to teach ancient church history and Reformation church history, and I said those were the good times.
Speaker B: And Fort Claire Davis had to teach
Speaker A: medieval church history and modern church history. That I didn’t think was all that
Speaker B: great, but I’d enjoyed getting into modern church history. And one of the delightful discoveries for
Speaker A: me personally has been J. Gresham Machen.
Speaker B: And in reading about him, and even more, reading his own work, being attracted
Speaker A: to the strength, to the brilliance and to the clarity of his work. If you haven’t read Christianity and Liberalism recently, if you don’t want to admit that you’ve never read it, if you
Speaker B: haven’t read Christianity and Liberalism recently, read it.
Speaker A: It’s a delight.
Speaker B: But I think to appreciate Mason fully, we need to see something of the
Speaker A: broad cultural context in which he labored. I think it was Jay took me to task the first day for not starting my overview of the history of the church in the garden, as a good Reformed person ought to do. But we won’t go back quite that far to see the overview and background to Machen’s work.
Speaker B: But it is important to realize that Machen labored as part of that great Reformed movement that began, of course, with
Speaker A: the Reformation with Calvin and has been
Speaker B: recognized as a major cultural factor in the development of the West. So that you can get books that examine the question, what did Calvinism have
Speaker A: to do with the rise of modern capitalism?
Speaker B: What did Calvinism have to do with the rise of modern democracy? What could Calvinism have to do with the rise of modern science? And even thoroughly secular historians recognize that the answer must be much in every way.
Speaker A: Now they’re still warring about exactly what and exactly how much credit should go to Calvinism. But Calvinism is recognized as a major
Speaker B: cultural force in the development of the modern west and in some of the
Speaker A: most characteristic phenomenon of the modern west, like capitalism, democracy and modern science.
Speaker B: And when America was founded, the dominant theological position of most groups in America in the 17th and 18th century was Calvinism.
Speaker A: Not only the Puritan Congregationalists in New England and the Presbyterians in the mid
Speaker B: Atlantic state, but also the Baptists and
Speaker A: the Episcopalians were largely dominated by a basically Reformed theology.
Speaker B: And so America found, to the extent
Speaker A: that religion was influential in its founding, a good dose of Calvinism in its background.
Speaker B: But the forces of Calvinism in America
Speaker A: began to weaken in the 19th century. Significantly, religious change developed in 19th century America and new forces were set loose,
Speaker B: forces particularly of individualism, which began to undermine some of the church corporateness of Calvinism, and also to undermine some of
Speaker A: Calvinism’s historic concern for society as a whole.
Speaker B: Also, the 19th century turned remarkably optimistic, and Calvinism was felt by many to be too pessimistic. There were many leading evangelical whites in
Speaker A: the 1830s who had become post millennialists
Speaker B: and said, you know, the millennium is just almost here. We’re so close that with just a
Speaker A: little push, we can usher it in. They were remarkably optimistic as to what had been accomplished culturally in America in the early 19th century.
Speaker B: And it led in that optimism in
Speaker A: many parts of American church life to
Speaker B: an Arminianizing of theology, a concentration upon
Speaker A: man and his will and his goodness and his ability. Charles Phinney became the great preacher of a free will in the matters of evangelism.
Speaker B: And even within circles that would have
Speaker A: called themselves rather reformed and Calvinistic, that
Speaker B: optimism began to have an eroding effect on. And it’s interesting when you look at
Speaker A: some of those theologies.
Speaker B: The place often where it began to
Speaker A: erode Calvinistic theology was in the doctrine of original sin. The new divinity amongst the Congregationalists in New England and the New Haven theology of Taylor and his supporters.
Speaker B: What they focused in on was an attack upon original sin. They kept saying, oh, we’re really Calvinists, we’re just making little modifications. Let’s do away with original sin. I was at a historical conference once
Speaker A: and the contemporary church observer Martin Marty was there.
Speaker B: And Martin Marty said, you know, I just was at a conference where Robert Schuller was speaking. And he said, I went up to Robert Schuller and I said, I’m interested in your phenomenon there in Southern California.
Speaker A: What kind of theology do you think you’re preaching there?
Speaker B: And Robert Schuler said, I’m a Calvinist. He said, I’ve read Calvin’s institute through time and time again. I know more about Calvin’s institutes than my theological professors.
Speaker A: I won’t tell you what seminary he went to. It wasn’t Westminster.
Speaker B: And Marty said, you know, Shuler, what you preach doesn’t sound like Calvinism. I believe all of Calvinism except for original sin. And Martin already said, I saw in
Speaker A: my mind’s eye the whole edifice of Calvinism collapsing.
Speaker B: It’s true, of course, one of the foundation stones of Calvinism, from which in a sense all the rest comes naturally, is Calvinism’s confession that we are all born lost in sin and helpless. If we are helpless in sin, there must be a sovereign God who reaches down and sovereignly saves us. And he sovereignly reaches down and saves us according to his eternal plan to
Speaker A: save his own because of the merits of Christ accrued for his own.
Speaker B: And so Calvinism in one sense at
Speaker A: least can be said to rest on the foundation of the doctrine of original sin. And in the 19th century that was gradually, gradually being eroded.
Speaker B: Also in the 19th century, of course
Speaker A: there was a growing rationalism.
Speaker B: The effects of the Enlightenment and that man centered self confidence that had such devastating effects in France began in the
Speaker A: 19th century increasingly to have an impact in America more slowly than in other parts of the world, but also there in America and also in the 19th century.
Speaker B: Then in reaction to that rationalism, many American Christians were tempted to face rationalism with an anti intellectualism. There were some American Christians who said, well, if the problem Is men being proud of their reason, then? The Christian answer is not to use reason at all.
Speaker A: And it seems like it could only be in America that we could have had a political party in the second half of the 19th century that proudly labeled itself the Know Nothing Party.
Speaker B: And there was, you see that, that strain then of anti intellectualism that also
Speaker A: began to run through America.
Speaker B: And so, as Calvinism became a less
Speaker A: pervasive cultural force in 19th century America,
Speaker B: it was American Presbyterianism in particular that
Speaker A: preserved that heritage of Calvinism that continued an important, a recognizable and unavoidable testimony to that historic Reformed faith in America.
Speaker B: Now, if you know anything about the
Speaker A: history of American Presbyterianism in the 18th and 19th century, you know it wasn’t always peaceful. There were a number of church problems and tensions.
Speaker B: And those tensions often focused on tensions between those who wanted to stress doctrinal
Speaker A: precision in the church and those who wanted to stress a vital Christian experience in the church.
Speaker B: Often the tensions were a matter of emphasis. Those who stressed experience said, well, we still believe doctrine, but what we really need is the stress on experience. And usually those who stress doctrine say, well, we need experience, but we really have to stress the doctrine. And so American Presbyterianism itself experienced tensions. And one of the great centers of
Speaker A: the defense of Calvinism, one of the
Speaker B: centers that tried to hold American Presbyterianism
Speaker A: together and to hold it faithful, was Princeton Seminary.
Speaker B: Princeton Seminary, founded very early in the
Speaker A: 19th century and under the leadership of
Speaker B: some of the best theological minds that America produced, continued a strong, important, relevant,
Speaker A: unavoidable testimony to the Reformed faith.
Speaker B: When Princeton Seminary was founded, one of
Speaker A: the commitments that it made was expressed in these words.
Speaker B: We want to develop in those who shall aspire to the ministerial office both that piety of heart which is the fruit of the renewing and sanctifying grace of God, and solid learning, believing that zeal without knowledge or knowledge without zeal
Speaker A: must ultimately prove injurious to the church they wanted.
Speaker B: Piety and learning both together were necessary,
Speaker A: Princeton declared, in order for the church to be well served. And that was the position that Charles hodge taught and BB Warfield and on down into the 20th century.
Speaker B: It was into that context, then of
Speaker A: American Presbyterianism that J. Gleffa Mason came born, a son of American Presbyterianism.
Speaker B: And as we look at him, we
Speaker A: can see him as a defender of that great tradition in the American scene.
Speaker B: He was born in 1881 in Baltimore.
Speaker A: And any of you who know Baltimore,
Speaker B: know that Baltimore is a Southern town.
Speaker A: Those of you who are Californians may be surprised to Hear that? Baltimore is a very Southern town. It was an even more southern town in 1881, and Machen’s roots were in the Deep South. The Greshams were from Machen, Georgia. Machen was a Southerner in his mentality, in his outlook, in his family. And it was a distinguished Southern family.
Speaker B: They had very fine social connections.
Speaker A: The mother and father of J. Gresson Machen were friends of the mother and father of Woodrow Wilson. That was a nice connection. Woodrow Wilson had Machen over to tea while he was president of Princeton University. There were connections with important people. Arthur Machen, J. Gresham Machen’s father, was a prominent lawyer in Baltimore and became quite. I shouldn’t say quite a wealthy man, but a very comfortably fixed wealthy man. Any of us would be glad to be so comfortably fixed.
Speaker B: It was also a very devout family.
Speaker A: Mason was raised on the catechism and the Scriptures and was perceived by his
Speaker B: parents as being a very talented young man.
Speaker A: And so was sent off to Baltimore’s own Johns Hopkins University to study. And he graduated with an AB in
Speaker B: 1901, and then seemed to have some uncertainty as to what he really ought
Speaker A: to do with his life.
Speaker B: He apparently considered for a time going
Speaker A: to law school,
Speaker B: but he kept being drawn
Speaker A: to theological study. And so in 1901, decided to go to Princeton Seminary.
Speaker B: In a sense, it was a strange decision. The family had close connections with Union Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, which was a
Speaker A: seminary of the Southern Presbyterian Church.
Speaker B: And in fact, Machen’s family were members of the Southern Presbyterian Church.
Speaker A: Machen was a Southern Presbyterian at the time that he entered Princeton.
Speaker B: And yet Machen had been very much drawn to the new.
Speaker A: The first president of Princeton Seminary, Francis Landy Patton.
Speaker B: As a great evangelical leader of the
Speaker A: time, Patton was a close friend of the family. And so Machen went off to Princeton and began to study. He studied there from 1902 to 1905.
Speaker B: He had opportunities not only to study,
Speaker A: but also to do some traveling. Twice he went to Europe for the summer to study. He particularly was impressed with Germany. He was eager to learn the German language so he could avail himself of German scholarship. In his trip in 1904, he wrote
Speaker B: back and said, you know, I’m very
Speaker A: much impressed with Germany, but the Germans need two things. Germans need the Sabbath, those Lutherans, you know, shocking.
Speaker B: And the Germans need football. He said, football teaches you a sense of fair play.
Speaker A: And the Germans could do with learning that, you know, there’s no word for fair in German. Fair is a rather uniquely English kind of concept. Germans know about right and truth and what’s according to the rules. But fair. Well, we don’t want to get off on that. Okay.
Speaker B: He was to return after his Princeton years to Germany for a year of
Speaker A: study, graduate study, studying, six months at
Speaker B: Marburg University, six months at Gottingen University. One of the letters that most annoyed
Speaker A: me that he wrote home during those years was when he was at Girding.
Speaker B: And he said, we’re having a holiday soon, and I can’t decide whether I should stay in the city and study or take the opportunity to go down
Speaker A: to Rome and see Rome. And his mother wrote back, and she said, well, dear, I’m sure you’ll make the right decision. Studying is very important, but no educated person can claim to be truly educated unless they’ve been to Rome. You really ought to go. And then she closed the letter. As a number of letters from his mother and father were closed with the words, the pecuniary question need not bother you, I can assure you on that point.
Speaker B: How we would all love to have somebody write us letters and close with the words, don’t worry about the money, just do what you want. And so, from that position of some wealth and privilege, J. Greta Machin achieved a very, very fine education. Undergraduate John Hopkins Seminary at Princeton, off
Speaker A: to Germany to do graduate work.
Speaker B: And he was perceived by those who knew him as a brilliant student. The faculty at Princeton very much wanted
Speaker A: him to come back and help them teaching there. At Princeton Seminary, those who knew him were struck by that brilliance. But Machen was very hesitant to come back to Princeton.
Speaker B: That hesitancy in the first place was the head of the literacy because he wasn’t sure he was called to the ministry. He wrestled for a long time with that. He wasn’t finally ordained until 1914. But even more fundamentally, he seems to have been wrestling in his heart with the questions of the faith itself. He never rejected the faith. He never went through a period of liberalism himself. But he seems to have gone through a real period of wrestling. Whether the faith that he learned at home was in fact true, was in fact the whole story. And his experience in Germany particularly brought that into focus for him. And the place where that came to the most strong focus was in some classes that he attended taught by Wilhelm Hermann. Hermann was one of the leading liberal
Speaker A: theologians of Germany in that day.
Speaker B: Hermann’s position can be found really rather well summarized in Machen’s book, Christianity and Liberalism.
Speaker A: Hermann’s position was the kind of liberalism that Nachen talked about in his book.
Speaker B: But Nachen clearly Was dramatically moved by his personal contact with Hermann. He said, what I see in Herman is so radically different. From that liberal indifferentism.
Speaker A: That’s captivated New England. There’s a power, there’s a vitality. There’s an attractiveness in Hermann That I find almost irresistible.
Speaker B: The letters home are remarkable. He wrote, I should say that the first time that I heard Hermann May almost be described as an epic in my life. I can’t criticize him. As my chief feeling with reference to him is already one of deepest reverence. Hermann refuses to allow the student to look at religion from a distance.
Speaker A: As a thing to be studied merely.
Speaker B: He speaks right to the heart. And I’ve been thrown all into confusion by what he says. So much deeper is his devotion to Christ. Than anything I have known in myself
Speaker A: during the past few years. A real spiritual struggle is going on in Machen soul.
Speaker B: Hermann, Machen said in his religious earnestness and moral power.
Speaker A: Has been a revelation to me.
Speaker B: Not only has he given me a new sympathy for the prevailing German religious thought. But also I hope I may leave his classroom. Better morally and in every way than when I entered. It.
Speaker A: Says, perhaps Hermann does not give the whole truth. I certainly hope he does not. At any rate, he has gotten hold of something. That has been sadly neglected in the church and in orthodox theology. And then he says, it is the
Speaker B: faith that is a real experience.
Speaker A: A real revelation of God that saves us.
Speaker B: Not the faith that consists in accepting
Speaker A: as true a lot of dogmas. On the basis merely of what others have said. You see, Hermann was teaching that religion is our experience. And something about that touched Machen at that point in his life. Maybe he had felt in himself. Something of a kind of dead orthodoxy. In his own background, in his own personal experience.
Speaker B: But something gripped him in what he saw as the sincerity and the earnestness
Speaker A: and the power of Hermann. And it shook him. It was a very important part of his life. Apparently Charles Hodge had had something of the same experience. When he’d gone to Germany before. And had met Friedrich Schleiermacher. Something of the same experience.
Speaker B: But Machen was shaken by the liberalism
Speaker A: that he faced there.
Speaker B: And it was a very important moment in his life. It was a moment that concerned his
Speaker A: mother a good deal.
Speaker B: You know, Machen corresponded regularly with his family.
Speaker A: And he was very close to his mother. Very devoted to his mother. Some have thought almost neurotically devoted to his mother.
Speaker B: I don’t think that’s true.
Speaker A: I don’t see any signs of neurosis.
Speaker B: They were just very Very close.
Speaker A: They confided in each other and with his father as long as his father was alive, for that matter.
Speaker B: But Machen wrote from Germany and said, you know, I’ve been invited to go back to Princeton Seminary. I think I need to stay three
Speaker A: more years in Germany and study. And Mrs. Nature was concerned. She didn’t like all she’d been hearing about Hermann. She didn’t know a lot about Hermann, but she didn’t think it was the best kind of influence.
Speaker B: And apparently she wrote to him and said, I think you really ought to
Speaker A: come home and go teach at Princeton.
Speaker B: And maybe said something like, get away
Speaker A: from that kind of influence.
Speaker B: And in response to that, we have the only really sharp letter.
Speaker A: Nature never wrote his mother.
Speaker B: And it’s a very important letter, I think, because it gives real insight into his character. He wrote back and said, mother, the way I hear you is that you’re asking me to recommit myself to the old faith without really thinking things through. He said, mother, what I’m afraid you’re telling me is that if I really thought it through, I’d become a liberal. And therefore, to avoid me becoming a liberal, you want me to stop thinking. He said, mother, that’s the way Jesuits
Speaker A: behave, not the way Protestants behave.
Speaker B: Mother, I believe we must be scrupulously
Speaker A: honest in our approach to religion.
Speaker B: And honesty requires that we look at every nook and cranny of both sides of a question.
Speaker A: And I want to do that. And in that letter.
Speaker B: But you find it really, through all
Speaker A: of Machen’s correspondence and all of his life, you find that integrity, that commitment to honesty.
Speaker B: He could not be satisfied until he had examined both sides of a question with scrupulous fairness.
Speaker A: In the end, he decided not to stay in Germany. He decided to come home.
Speaker B: And he decided he would take up
Speaker A: teaching at Princeton Seminary as an instructor in New Testament.
Speaker B: But he was able to do that because he felt he had given a hard look at both sides. And when he came back to Princeton, he was still not really settled.
Speaker A: I don’t think we can say in where he stood,
Speaker B: but in his honesty, in his integrity. He had gone through an experience which for the rest of his life made him a remarkably fair person. Neutral observers of the conflicts later in the Presbyterian Church always testified that Nation was fair to his opponents. Not only in a personal, courteous sense, but also fair in describing their views.
Speaker A: Even Poe, Buck, H.L. mencken and others testified to the fairness of J. Gresson Machen.
Speaker B: And Machen was always compassionate towards liberals. He was compassionate to those who went
Speaker A: through periods of doubt, he understood those things.
Speaker B: He even respected liberals as long as they were honest.
Speaker A: What troubled him deeply in his soul was when he saw dishonesty. He couldn’t abide people who signed one statement of faith and taught another. That was dishonesty and a betrayal of God.
Speaker B: And so he returned to Princeton, and in the years from. From 1906 until 1914, we see him in that Princeton context and in his studies coming to a firmer and firmer and clearer and clearer commitment to what
Speaker A: Princeton had always stood for,
Speaker B: what the president of Princeton Seminary declared to be the old Calvinistic theology without modification. Princeton was proud in declaring, there has never been a Princeton theology.
Speaker A: Oh, there was a New Haven theology, there was a New Divinity up at Harvard, but there’s never been a Princeton theology because Princeton has simply taught unmodified Calvinism. And that’s what Machen embraced at Princeton, the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechism.
Speaker B: And it was that comprehensiveness of theology
Speaker A: that appealed to Machen.
Speaker B: It was the integrity, the honesty of that theology as it wrestled with the
Speaker A: Scripture that appealed to Machen.
Speaker B: And that’s why, although Machen in later life would often make common cause with
Speaker A: fundamentalists, he never was comfortable being called a fundamentalist.
Speaker B: The fundamentalists were those who often could come up with just a handful of
Speaker A: points to summarize their theology.
Speaker B: And Matron was one who was committed
Speaker A: to a comprehensive theological position, the kind of integral, honest, full theological position that he found in the Westminster Confession.
Speaker B: He also was one who continued to be committed to intellectual rigor. He felt the seminary was a place where. Where there needed to be sound scholarship
Speaker A: and the best kind of theological rigor. He felt Princeton provided that that was part of Princeton’s honesty and service.
Speaker B: And when Nature was there as a teacher in 1909, there was what was
Speaker A: called the student revolt of 1909. Students began to complain about their professors, not fairly endemic to students, in any case.
Speaker B: But this was a particularly serious sort of revolt against three of the professors who were said to be so boring
Speaker A: as nearly to be unbearable. Nature was not one of them. He was always regarded as a very exciting teacher,
Speaker B: but nature was very concerned about this. And he wrote in a letter, the students are exhibiting a spirit of dissatisfaction
Speaker A: with the instruction that is always offered them.
Speaker B: They want to be pumped full of material which, without any real assimilation or any intellectual work of any kind, they
Speaker A: can pump out again upon their unfortunate congregations.
Speaker B: Other seminaries have yielded to the incessant
Speaker A: clamor for the practical and we are being assailed both from within and from without.
Speaker B: He was concerned, you see, that students didn’t want to think.
Speaker A: They wanted to be sloganeers and they
Speaker B: wanted to be cannon fires. And all they wanted was a pile of ammunition giving them the stick in
Speaker A: the cannon and shoot off at the enemy without any thought. And Machen said, that is never going to serve the church. Ministers need to know what they believe and they need to know why they believe.
Speaker B: They have to teach. They have to teach what they’ve really assimilated into their own hearts,
Speaker A: you know.
Speaker B: Kuyper had exactly the same approach at
Speaker A: the Free University of Amsterdam. He wanted the students to read all the opponents so that they could really
Speaker B: work through the challenges to the faith and know where they stood. He wanted them to be reformed because they really understood it and believed it,
Speaker A: not just because they were able to mouth a formula. And Machen held that same position.
Speaker B: Machen also was very concerned as part of his commitment that Calvinism remained culturally influential in America. He said, Once, 75 years ago, Christianity tended to dominate Western culture.
Speaker A: I don’t know if that was a very good historical comment, but nonetheless that’s what he saw. He said, today, paganism nearly controls Western culture.
Speaker B: And we have to reassert our Christian influence. And the only way to do that is by being doctrinally comprehensive and intellectually rigorous. If we allow ourselves to fall in with the anti intellectualism of our time,
Speaker A: we’ll only convince others that Christianity is a pleasant delusion. We don’t want that. We want to maintain our influence. And Princeton had been an influence.
Speaker B: Princeton continued to be an unavoidable presence in the national scene. One of the things that struck me as I reread some of the literature
Speaker A: of the conflict of the 1920s is
Speaker B: how the secular press could not avoid
Speaker A: taking account of Princeton Seminary.
Speaker B: The struggles that went on at Princeton Seminary were regularly on the front page of the New York Times and other papers throughout the country. And editorials in the New York Times and other papers talked about this struggle between the modernists and the fundamentalists. Princeton, you see, was an unavoidable presence
Speaker A: testifying to Reformed orthodoxy in the national scene. And surely part of the tragedy of our day is that we don’t have a voice like that anymore.
Speaker B: The Missouri Synod and Lutheran Church still
Speaker A: occasionally makes the papers as a testimony to confessional Lutheran orthodoxy. But the testimony of Calvinist orthodoxy has sort of faded away from the national scene. And surely what we would want to see if God grants us renewal is opportunity to see that kind of influence revived again. But most importantly, I think Nachen as a good Calvinist was committed to a religion and a theology that was radically God centered.
Speaker B: What he saw as the prevailing problem
Speaker A: in his day was that religion was becoming man centered and experience centered. Centered.
Speaker B: In the days of the student unrest in 1909, a Presbyterian minister had anonymously
Speaker A: written to one of the papers attacking
Speaker B: the faculty and supporting the students of Prince and insist that all doctrines shall be fashioned according to the nature and the spirit and the laws of life.
Speaker A: Machen had heard that same thing from Hermann in Germany.
Speaker B: It’s our experience, it’s our life, it’s our understanding that we then take and
Speaker A: make into doctrines which we believe. And Nietzsche saw that as a religion that was ultimately self centered and man centered. And one of the recurring cries of nation’s teaching and nations preaching and nation’s
Speaker B: appeal was that life must flow out of doctrine, life must flow out of the truth. Life must flow out of Jesus Christ as a historical person who redeemed us on the cross. Jesus is not an idea that we fashion according to our own experience and desires. But Jesus was a historical person who lived and died and was raised again from the dead and about whom we have an authoritative apostolic witness that tells us who he was and what he believed. And on that basis we live our
Speaker A: life,
Speaker B: our experience, our life, our everything
Speaker A: must be shaped by that deposit, the truth. And that point is so brilliantly developed by nature in Christianity and liberalism that I really do encourage you to read that again. Just one quote there. Christian life, Machen wrote, is the fruit of Christian doctrine, not its root.
Speaker B: And Christian experience must be tested by
Speaker A: the Bible, not the Bible by Christian experience.
Speaker B: It’s a point that’s so clear and in some ways so simple as to seem hardly needing to be said. But what Machen was to discover in his own life was that it needed to be said not only to liberals, but to conservatives. There are a lot of conservatives who are extreme conservative because it is experientially pleasant for them.
Speaker A: They are by nature sort of conservative. They feel comfortable being conservative. Kind of example of that. Maybe a little strange example.
Speaker B: I had a lot of friends in graduate school who had been raised as
Speaker A: Roman Catholics and had regarded themselves as
Speaker B: quite devout Roman Catholics. They loved the Latin Mass
Speaker A: and when
Speaker B: the Latin Mass was done away with,
Speaker A: they stopped going to Mass. And I thought to myself they were
Speaker B: very conservative Roman Catholics. But their conservativism rested in that experience, that they enjoyed the aesthetic pleasure that they derived from the Latin Mass. And when The Latin mass disappeared. Their experience wasn’t there anymore and therefore
Speaker A: they weren’t anything anymore. And I think Mason must discover, as we’ll see, that there were conservatives like that as well.
Speaker B: I want to move then, just very briefly to the more familiar part of the story, from nature’s commitment to his service to the church. Machen’s church was first of all the Southern Presbyterian church.
Speaker A: He spent 33 years in the Southern Presbyterian Church, 3/5 of his life.
Speaker B: It was really only in 1914, on the very eve of his ordination, that
Speaker A: he became a Northern Presbyterian. He was a Northern Presbyterian for about 22 years. He was no peaceful, only less than six months.
Speaker B: Months.
Speaker A: That wasn’t his choice.
Speaker B: He labored though, in that scene of the Northern church to try to see a reformation there because he saw the forces of unbelief working, eroding, undermining. And he was concerned about what he saw amongst the conservatives in the church. As early as 1916, Mason had written, the mass of the church here is still conservative, but conservative in an ignorant, non polemic, sweetness and light kind of
Speaker A: way, which is just meat for the wolves.
Speaker B: Oh yeah, the people are conservative, but
Speaker A: they don’t know why they’re conservative. They won’t invest themselves to defend, defend their conservativeness.
Speaker B: All they want is to be loving.
Speaker A: And he said they’re going to be gobbled up by the wolves.
Speaker B: He was to remark in his life the way in which liberalism had spread in the church was something of a mystery. He wrote in 1930 here as elsewhere, the destructive forces have been content to labor for the most part in the
Speaker A: dark
Speaker B: behind the scenes, eroding almost imperceptibly in so many ways and so many places.
Speaker A: And acting, he wrote, fundamentally through dishonesty. By saying they believed one thing and then acting another way.
Speaker B: He said, they keep saying they only have a different interpretation of the creed. He said it’s not a different interpretation. When the creed says he was raised on the third day and they say
Speaker A: he wasn’t raised on the third day,
Speaker B: that’s not a different interpretation, that’s a contradiction. But that kind of dishonesty deceives many
Speaker A: people
Speaker B: in a way. I think Machen for some time, my impression is, I may be wrong here. My impression is that in some ways Machen for a time in the battle was somewhat hampered by the fact that he was an honest southern gentleman. I think he really expected for a long time that there would be honesty on the other side. I think he really expected for a time that honest liberals would leave The
Speaker A: Presbyterian church, where they didn’t belong. But the doctrine of original sin caught up with him. I think
Speaker B: he labored for reform, recognizing that in the long run, an association of belief and unbelief in the church
Speaker A: was an intolerable evil. And so he worked, along with many
Speaker B: others, trying to get the church to
Speaker A: commit itself and to discipline itself according to the truth.
Speaker B: The church did seem conservative. The General assembly in 1910, again in 1916 and again in 1923, declared that all office bearers in the church must confess that the bible is infallible, that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he died a substitutionary atonement in his death, that he was raised bodily from the dead, and that he had performed miracles.
Speaker A: And ministers in the church simply thumb their nose, some of them at those rulings of general assembly.
Speaker B: The conservative tide seemed to reach a high point at the General assembly of 1925. And there the assembly explicitly criticized the presbytery of New York for allowing modernists to preach in their churches and ordaining modernists to the ministry. The delegates from the New York presbytery
Speaker A: stood up and said, we don’t care what you say to us. We’re going to go on doing what we’re doing. You don’t have a constitutional right to bind us in whom we will ordain.
Speaker B: And then, in a sense, came the moment of decision. The conservatives at the General assembly of 1925 had a working majority. They could have proceeded at that point to discipline the presbytery of New York
Speaker A: for its rebellion against the general assembly, but they didn’t.
Speaker B: They yielded instead to the appeal to establish a committee.
Speaker A: Sometimes you want to hear about study committees in the Christian reformed church. We can have a talk.
Speaker B: They elected instead to have a committee to try to study the peace of the church. The conservatives, I think, probably genuinely thought, well, we’ll give them this year’s study,
Speaker A: and then we’ll get them next year. But next year never came.
Speaker B: The summer of 1925 after the general
Speaker A: assembly met was the summer of the scopes trial, the monkey trial in Tennessee.
Speaker B: And that trial turned the national mood around. The national mood, which had been somewhat
Speaker A: sympathetic to conservative religion, was radically changed
Speaker B: by the ridicule heaped upon fundamentalism in
Speaker A: the reporting of that trial. And when the general assembly gathered in 1926, the conservatives no longer had a working majority. They found themselves a much weakened minority. And that really was the beginning of the end.
Speaker B: The assembly of 1926 had before it, as one small matter, the ratification of an action of the faculty of Princeton
Speaker A: Seminary to promote J. Gresham Machen to be professor of apologetics and ethics at the seminary. It was a matter of form and routine. The seminar always just automatically approved seminary promotions that had been voted by the faculty. They refused to approve that promotion and instead appointed a committee to investigate Princeton Seminary.
Speaker B: And that committee was what led ultimately
Speaker A: to the reorganization of Princeton Seminary, a
Speaker B: reorganization designed by the president, J. Ross Stevenson, so that Princeton now would represent the whole church.
Speaker A: What more reasonable appeal could be made?
Speaker B: Why should Princeton represent just one faction in the church? Princeton is our oldest and largest seminary. It should represent the whole church.
Speaker A: But that meant the whole church that included modernists and Calvinists. O. Stevenson said, no, we’ll always remain conservative. How has he put those two statements together? I never quite understand. Or they’ll always remain conservative. History may be able to judge whether J. Ross Stevenson was right or J. Gretzen Machen was right when Machen said, this reorganization spells the end of Princeton Seminary as a bastion of Calvinism. And so in 1929, Machen and some of his supporters withdrew and founded a small seminary in Philadelphia, Westminster Theological Seminary,
Speaker B: and hope there to continue the battle. The liberals had Union Seminary in New York pumping Modernism into the church. Now the conservatives had a seminary that
Speaker A: could pump orthodox ministers into the church. But Machen felt the battle couldn’t be left just at that point. It had to go on on every front.
Speaker B: And one of the burdens to his
Speaker A: heart was to see Modernism on the foreign mission field.
Speaker B: He tried to get the missionary arm of the church purified according to God’s word.
Speaker A: And it didn’t work. And so Mason and some of his
Speaker B: supporters decided we have to have missionaries
Speaker A: that we can be confident about, missionaries that we can support unequivocally.
Speaker B: We will found an independent board for Presbyterian foreign missions.
Speaker A: And then all the liberals smiled with glee because they felt they could get Machen on this one. He’s disturbing the peace and order of the church. They couldn’t get him for founding a new seminary because those liberals had already founded a new seminary. But now he’s attacking the agencies of the church, the only sin left in liberalism to sin against the organization and the General assembly of 1934, only nine years after there had been a conservative majority General assembly. The assembly of 1934 issued a mandate
Speaker B: that all Presbyterians must withdraw from this
Speaker A: schismatic, unruly, independent border foreign mission. There was a cry from the conservatives in the church that the General assembly was being tyrannical. But some resigned from the Independent board and some abandoned Machen. And Machen said, we cannot continue to support modernistic missionaries, that is faithlessness to the Lord. And so Machen was placed on trial. Within nine years of a conservative majority at General assembly, the consistently Reformed found themselves on trial. Machen was placed on trial through a complicated situation that can be described as nothing but a kangaroo court in the Presbytery of New Brunswick where he had been ordained. The Presbytery of New Brunswick had been formed in the days of George Whitefield by the tenants because the Presbyterian of New Brunswick was so eager to see that the Gospel should be preached. The Presbytery of New Brunswick was founded in the name of the revival and the Great Awakening that people should come to know Jesus Christ and be saved. And now it was the Presbytery of New Brunswick that placed J. Gresham Machen on trial and suspended him from the ministry for defying the mandate of the General Assembly.
Speaker B: And it was in response to that tyranny, it was in response to that
Speaker A: persecution of those who were faithful to the Lord that those who had been disciplined left the Presbyterian Church USA and founded a church that was temporarily known as the Presbyterian Church of America and eventually became the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Machen lived less than six months after the founding of the church. He was literally worn out and worked to death. Died traveling off to the Dakotas to preach in the dead of winter to a handful of small churches there.
Speaker B: It’s hard to know what would have
Speaker A: happened had Machen lived. Perhaps he could have stopped the McIntyre split that took place only a few months after his death.
Speaker B: Perhaps had he lived, he would have been able to encourage that large number
Speaker A: of conservatives who abandoned him to join him in the effort. But in the providence of God, he was taken.
Speaker B: In the providence of God, his hope to have a large church, culturally influential,
Speaker A: to testify to the American scene didn’t really develop.
Speaker B: In the providence of God.
Speaker A: I think it was revealed that a lot of conservatives really were just as much oriented to the experience of their religion as were the liberals. And they weren’t gripped by the truth. With the kind of faithfulness that Machen had.
Speaker B: I don’t think we have to say
Speaker A: that Machen was right about everything. One of Machen’s failings, I think, was that he was too brilliant.
Speaker B: Not that he wasn’t a good communicator, but many people didn’t see things as
Speaker A: quite quickly and as clearly as Machen did.
Speaker B: And Machen was so honest that he felt he had to follow those clear convictions. And maybe if he’d been around longer, he’d have been able to help others
Speaker A: see that and lead them in the way.
Speaker B: But what we can say about J.
Speaker A: Gresham Machen was that he was valiant for the truth. In his book Christianity and Liberalism, he wrote, at the present time, when the opponents of the gospel are almost in control of our churches, the slightest avoidance of the defense of the gospel is just sheer unfaithfulness to the Lord.
Speaker B: God has always saved the church, but he has always saved it not by theological pacifists but by sturdy contenders for the truth.
Speaker A: By that, J resembation did not mean theological nitpickers. Jessem Nation meant those who saw the gospel and the Reformed faith as the comprehensive expression and summary of that gospel and who were willing to contend for that. May God make us contenders for his truth. We have a very special priest this morning.
Speaker B: Now this is a real point of historical contact. When J. Gretha Mason died, he was
Speaker A: brought back to Philadelphia for the funeral service. His body. They held the funeral in the Spruce Street Baptist Church. There wasn’t a Presbyterian church, apparently, where they could have it. And they had a soloist at the funeral, DWight Poundstone, and he’s going to sing for us now at least part of what he’s saying in Matron’s funeral.