J. Gresham Machen Bibliography

Transcription

Speaker A: This morning I’m offering you a whistle stop tour of Presbyterian progress and protest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The scene that I’m setting presupposes an imaginary dazzling series of lectures on which this lecture builds. Lectures that describe the Northern Presbyterian Church after the close of of the American Civil War, and lectures which would of course include at least five key data points.

First, after being divided for decades, the majority of Old School and New School Presbyterians voted to reunite their denominations back into one which had been divided for doctrinal and ecclesial reasons. On the whole, the New Schoolers while, while tethered to confessional moorings, tended to give themselves a lot of rope. And the Old School Presbyterians were tied more closely to the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms, even if that might occasionally leave them out of touch with currents or fads in American religious life.

For the second data point, there’s Princeton professor Charles Hodges. A notoriously pessimistic prophecy, a gift which is occasionally allowed to Presbyterians if we prophesy it must be pessimistic that even if all the heretics of the Church would come from the Old School, it would be the New School Presbyterians who would always defend them.

Third, there’s the intriguing case of Charles Briggs, a New York seminary professor who developed a deficient understanding of of biblical authority. He was eventually ejected, along with some others from ordained ministry. Curiously, he was raised in Old School piety. When he deviated from orthodoxy, he was defended by a New School New York presbytery.

Fourth data point here, setting up this morning’s lecture, there’s the story of confessional revision in 1903, in which systemic changes were offered to the Church’s subordinate standards. It was a debate that the Old School folk like Charles Hodge lost. For in 1903, the Calvinism of the Westminster standards was softened in order to accommodate a more doctrinal diversity in the church. Still Calvinism, but definitely the milder sort.

Fifth, and finally, there’s the Union of the Presbyterian Church in the north with the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, because 1903 was really just a prelude and a setup for 1906. Now, this is a curious story for denominational geneticists. The Cumberland group was a rare breed of Presbyterians that was Arminian in its soteriology and interestingly, serious Calvinists in the one church and serious Arminians in the other. Both opposed the Union, although they were a minority. They disagreed about important doctrines, but they agreed about the importance of doctrine after 1903. As I said, the confession Was still recognizably reformed.

And so if this active union between these two churches was to take place, both Calvinists and Arminians would be subscribing to the same still rather detailed system of doctrine. And what would that say about doctrine? A subscription would be basically relegated to Christianity’s most basic concepts. And which basic concepts no one would really know.

What you need to know is that most presbyterians considered that a small price to pay for progress. And progress was defined in terms of size. A bigger church would surely be a better church and would surely allow for more impact on the culture around them. Well, that was just the porch. Now for the house. Progress was the thing. And following the American civil war, Reconstruction, at least in theory, and the rise of research, universities and charitable responses to industrialism. With all of that, Western civilization felt a tremendous sense of progress, both in society and in the church.

Across America, progressive clergy saw seminaries not as a place for learning theology and tedious things like biblical languages, so much as a place to incorporate recent developments in humanitarianism, sociology, psychology and comparative religions. Not for the first time, church leaders argued that religion is action, Christianity is a life we live here and now. And seminarians need to be exposed to social problems and be taught how to apply social cures. Pastoral courses then equipped seminarians to lead churches at home that had become multi service centers. And for those who considered service abroad, missions courses suggested that the key ambition of the missionary might not be the redemption of individuals with the gospel, but the transformation of societies with American values.

Soon the promised land and the good news could be identified by really any conservative, rather any progressive clergyman. It was democracy, material prosperity, scientific progress, and of course, world peace. Outside the seminary, progress could sometimes take sinister forms. Ahead of Germany, by about a decade, it became faddish to sterilize and in some cases lobotomize undesirables. In America, the mentally incompetent, the unproductive, and of course, the incorrigible. State and federal governments toyed with a variety of theories for improving society. Darwinian style.

Eventually, churches began to shift their emphasis too, from the reform of individuals to the reform of societal structures. Labor reforms, social justice became not merely the interest of thoughtful Christians, but the focus of churches, their pastors, their sermons. Washington Gladden, a congregationalist minister, and Walter Rauschenbusch, a baptist minister, Led the charge for the social gospel at the turn of the 20th century. Now, as it happened, preachers of the social gospel, such as Gladden or or Rauschenbusch also accepted the higher criticism of the Bible, rising above textual criticism and advocating the use of comparative religions and subjective theories of textual development. Theologians reinterpreted and pared down and then dismissed increasingly large swaths of the Bible.

Identifying the culprits for the rise and spread of liberalism is a favorite parlor game amongst conservative churchmen. After two world wars, it takes very little persuading to convince American evangelical historians that the fault lies with Germany. As it happens, the blame game started earlier than that, long before the opening disasters of the 20th century. The evangelist Billy Sunday told his audiences that if you turned hell upside down, it would say made in Germany.

Of course, there is something existentially satisfying in blaming others for our problems, and it just felt right to blame Schleiermacher and his spiritual children for what was happening in America. Mind you, I can think of at least three homegrown factors that contribute to liberalism in America, in addition to the imported themes that I’ve just mentioned above. Nonetheless, the identification of Germany with liberalism was hardly arbitrary. It was fashionable to keep up with the Germans. And even if American theologians read German works more as badges of respectability than as sets of propositions to consider, the influences of German universities tended to be corrosive to orthodoxy.

But here’s the point. Whatever the causes of liberalism, it was excitement about American social and educational reform that effectively hid how far theology could drift in the hands of the progressive clergy and even those who disagreed with theology. Theological trends in American seminaries, even those who disagree with these things, still thought that progressive theology couldn’t be so dangerous if it was advocating such useful and beneficial social changes. The increased prioritization of issues of the day rather than issues of eternity, created safe spaces for theological error. And yet it is doubtful that liberalism could would have ever gained the prominence that it did without the assistance of pastoral training centers.

Having buried Charles Briggs in a comment a moment ago, it seems a little awkward to bring them back up again. But history is like that sometimes. Professor Briggs, with his deficient view of Scripture and more, was defrocked by his denomination. But that didn’t mean that he took off his academic regalia. He continued to teach at Union Theological Seminary, which, in order to keep Briggs and other progressive professors employed, became independent of the Presbyterian denomination. Independent. But the New York Presbytery gave the institution its benediction and readily accepted its graduates as candidates for pastoral leadership and ministry.

Inevitably, the graduates of Union Theological Seminary were eyed carefully by those outside of New York City. And when in 1910, no less than three graduates of the institution who were also Candidates for licensure would not affirm the virgin birth of Christ and yet were still licensed by the New York Presbytery. It became a matter for the Presbyterian General assembly to address. The 1910 assembly did something interesting. It eventually insisted that not only the virgin birth of Christ, but a total of five fundamental doctrines were to be understood as essential and necessary. The assembly went on to add that other doctrines were equally so, although it didn’t specify what they were.

Of course they were right. These were fundamental doctrines and other doctrines were equally so. But there’s a striking aspect to this decision, and it’s significant for the Church moving forward. First, in emphasizing the fundamental doctrines as essential and necessary for the ministers of the Church, rather than insisting that the full range of doctrines taught in the confession and catechisms were necessary for ministers, the 1910 assembly was employing a new school understanding of confessionalism. For those interested in the genealogy of ideas, there’s a plausible long distance relationship between new side thinking that’s in your modern age class, or whatever it’s called here at this time in the 18th century, the New School in the 19th century, and what would come to be known as fundamentalism in the early 20th century.

Second, and even more obvious, the problem facing the 19 assembly, 1910 assembly showed the immediate fruit of the ecclesiastical union with the Cumberland Presbyterians. It’s another reminder that it’s not just enough to have a confession, you need to hold it to have and to hold. Funny that language seems to have wider relevance, doesn’t it?

Third, old school protests against this shrunken version of confessionalism, by now expected as routine by General Assemblies, just didn’t happen. They were conspicuous in their absence. The Philadelphia presbytery, always a vocal group, they were silent. The Princeton theologians were silent too. These were the bastions of confessionalism. But they were now fighting for the survival of basic Christianity in the Church. They knew that they had already lost the battle for the Reformed faith. It seems to me that there may also be a psychological, and not simply a, if you will, a strategic aspect to old school silence.

Historians describe the intellectual leaders of the right wing of the Church at Princeton Seminary as. As an increasingly isolated body of intellectuals. True enough, but we should not assume that they were unaware of that isolation. I think they are profoundly conscious of their seeming irrelevance. For instance, theologians look like veterans fighting old battles in their dreams. But the changes in seminaries and in sermons were real, not imagined. Old doctrines really were being renegotiated in all of the old denominations.

In addition to denying the five doctrines, the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth, Christ’s death as an atonement for sin, Christ’s bodily resurrection, and the historical reality of Christ’s miracles. Progressives were not only arguing that these doctrines were mere theories or mere possible constructions of biblical data, but they were also having major questions about Jesus identity, the return of Christ or the mission of the church.

Now, of course, there were ministers and theologians who were concerned about the rise of modernism or liberalism in the church. And with oil money from Texas, where else? And theological perspectives from denominations across America, ministers and theologians teamed up to write 12 pamphlets on key doctrines. The series of pamphlets on these fundamental doctrines were published between 1910 and 1915 and they vigorously defended basic orthodoxy as revealed truth rather than debatable theory, as the progressive clergy preferred to say.

The most prominent progress progressive preacher inside the Presbyterian Church was Henry Sloane Coffin, an immensely popular preacher and later the president of Union Theological Seminary. The Great War, what we now know is only the First World War, resulted in the largest loss of life then known in extra biblical human history. This didn’t look like progress and Coffin admitted that the world is vastly more tragic than we thought. But you see, these were doubts and as historian Richard Gamble has written, they were not anything resembling real disillusionment. The war had helped progressive clergy become aware that progress was not as easy as they thought. Some also thought that progress might not be inevitable, they had thought, but the definition of what stood for progress remained the same.

In his adoring biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eric Metaxas tells us how between the wars, Bonhoeffer found the elites on Henry Coffin’s country estate, consumed with talk about the possibilities for progress in politics and in education and so on. And it struck him that Jesus Christ was completely peripheral to this progressive vision. All of that did not change with the First World War. Coffin’s the best known preacher in the church, but by far the best known of all progressive preachers was the Baptist preacher Henry Emerson Fosdick.

Fosdick was sort of inside the Presbyterian Church. He served as a regular guest preacher at the First Presbyterian Church in New York city. And in 1922 he chose that venue to launch an all out delayed attack against the conservatives and their writings in this church. His sermon was entitled shall the Fundamentalists Win? Sermon titles were sometimes clear at that in those days.

Fosdick’s sermon was a delayed response to the fundamentalist pamphlets and by itself the sermon made a splash. But with John D. Rockefeller’s money, it made waves. Rockefeller money ensured that the sermon was printed as a pamphlet and that the pamphlet was distributed across the nation. And when the General assembly required the New York Presbytery to investigate Fosdick’s theology before permitting him to continue as a guest preacher, Rockefeller responded by just building Fosdick the Grand Riverside Baptist Church in Morningside Heights.

In Rockefeller, Progressives had found the premier financier of the Progressive movement, building what was essentially a cathedral for Fosdick just to thumb his nose at the General Assembly. But in Woodrow Wilson, more than any other political leader, the Progressives found their political ally. It was only a matter of time before Wilson led America out of neutrality and into the First World War. In 1917, he declared that the American flag was the flag of humanity. This was the war which America was entering to end all wars.

America was in was an instrument in the hands of God. America was a new Israel. American history could be learned from the Old Testament. But America was more than a new Israel for Wilson and for progressive clarity, clergy rather, America had a messianic rule which assumed in a new way international dimensions. In the language of service, America would lift the burdens of the world, grant freedom and uphold the righteous. All Wilson’s phrases.

When servicemen died unless they were known to be Jewish, they were given grave markers with Christian crosses. Monuments were decorated with angels. Plaques assured readers that these men were all destined for heaven for having fought in this war. The war which Wilson would eventually enter became a saving work of the highest kind, and the clergy preached this. Ultimately, as historian Richard Gamble notes, Wilson reassigned the divine attributes of Christ to the American nation. The US was the mediator, the light of the world, the peacemaker, the bringer of salvation.

And of course, as Augustine noted long ago, and as Gamble highlights too, if America is the Savior, its opponents become demons. If any country or cause is too closely identified with the Church, well, then all the opponents are infidels and heretics. This was a problematic formulation. I hope you’re far enough along in your seminary curriculum to realize that. And it’s in some ways analogous to the biblical theological era on church state relations that’s found in the original Westminster Confession of Faith. But that’s for another time.

What you need to know now is that ultimately, politicians were able to use an open only two willing churches for their own propaganda purposes. And the churches felt privileged to serve in that way. In the end, Wilson was deeply mourned as a religious icon in his death. The former British former at that time, still former now, I guess the former British prime Minister David Lloyd George proclaimed that Wilson was a failure, but a glorious failure. He failed as Jesus Christ failed and like Christ, sacrificed his life in pursuance of his noble ideal. He had come so close to the progress that he had sought. He was compared to Moses on the edge of the Promised Land. He was John the Baptist, unable to see the kingdom. There was a man sent from God whose name was Woodrow Wilson to bear witness to the light of the world, Lloyd George wrote.

By the 1920s, the grand old churches of America, especially in the north, had failed to keep their ministerial focus. They were in the process of losing the gospel and they had become pawns of politicians. The church looked no better in its seminaries than on its mission fields. This is certainly not just true of the Presbyterian Church. It was true of pretty much all of them.

It was in the middle of these developments that J. Gresham Machen was born in Baltimore as the second of three sons to a 53 year old Harvard trained lawyer and his young wife. Both Machen’s father and mother were cultured southerners. His mother had published a novel, his father a few novels, short stories. His mother was his chief influence. She taught him the Scriptures, she made him memorize the Shorter Catechism. And much of what we know about Machen comes from his letters back home to his mom.

He attended private school and after graduation from John Hopkins with a focus on classics, he did a year of graduate study and a stint in business school. Machen finally decided to enter Princeton Seminary in 1902. He was sporty, fun loving seminarian with addictions to tennis, cycling, mountain climbing, watching football and playing checkers. He did not enjoy Hebrew or homiletics and he complained that afternoon classes were an evil invention, which seems to me entirely reasonable.

While at Princeton Seminary, he organized his remaining free time after seminary and sports by earning a Master’s degree simultaneously at Princeton University, where Woodrow Wilson happened to be the then university president. Machen’s next port of call, once the theological bug bit, was Germany. At Marburg he studied under leading liberals of his day, and he left his lectures sometimes wondering how he could hold on to his Christian faith. He was forced to work out whether and why orthodox Christianity was really true, why the Bible really should be trusted, and the piety and the persuasiveness of some of his professors was impressive.

Machen’s brother was worried about him and asked why he didn’t study under Zahn, one of the great conservative scholars of the day. Machen said that’s not the Princeton way, which doesn’t hide from students the current state of scholarship, whatever it might be. His studies on the continent went well enough, and Machen had sufficiently set himself apart as a student at Princeton that his former New Testament professor asked if he’d return to Princeton. He declined. But when BB Warfield was asked by the president of another academic institution for Machen’s current address, the old man optimistically refused to give it to them. He declared that they couldn’t have Machen. He was coming to Princeton. And in 1915, he finally did. He said he’d come for one year. It remained his home for the next 14, save for his life as a Red Cross worker in the trenches of World War I, captured so wonderfully as an that horrible experience captured so wonderfully in Barry Waugh’s edition of Machen’s war letters.

Well, the battle between the fundamentalists or the conservatives and the modernists or liberals had begun when Fosdick had raised his standard in the sermon of 1922. Everything before that were just really big skirmishes. This was all out war. And the most memorable response to Fosdick came from Machen. He entitled his 1523 reply Christianity and Liberalism, a provocative title, to say the least. His purpose, he said, was not, he modestly declared, was not to decide the religious issues of the day, but merely to present the issue as sharply and clearly as possible in order that the reader may be aided in deciding it first himself.

In the process of clarifying, Machen argued that in countenancing liberalism, the Presbyterian Church was really countenancing a religion other than and opposed to orthodox Christianity. The problem, Machen argued, went far beyond individual doctrines. Although the book would discuss a number of the most important ones, the errors which the church used in, used to take seriously were now almost passe. For example, Charles Erdman, Machen’s colleague at Princeton Seminary, didn’t hold to biblical inerrancy. That got Charles Briggs into a lot of trouble. It got Charles Ehrman into no trouble at all. And he was indeed considered a moderate in the controversy, a middleman with such positions now considered moderate, even mainstream. Machen’s conviction that he was fighting for the survival of doctrine itself appeared to others just to be a curious fascination with the Eddies of religious life.

In his work, Machen pronounces the importance of doctrine in many different ways. Sometimes it’s a plea for intellectual honesty. Machen points out that at ordination, ministers have to make vows. They are asked if they sincerely receive and adopt this confession of faith of this church as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures. And he goes on to say, if these constitutional questions do not fix clearly the creedal basis of the Presbyterian Church, it’s difficult to see how any human language could do so sometimes.

Machen argued from confessional specificity. If the Westminster Confession of Faith were vague or allowed for many different positions, liberals might get a little bit of sympathy from him. But the confession is not vague, as Machen says. The confession, whatever its faults may be, is certainly not lacking indefiniteness and yet another place Machen expresses the problem in terms of attitude. The importance of doctrine, he says, concerns not so much the question or not merely rather the question as to the content of the doctrines that we are to set forth, but rather the attitude that is to be assumed with regard to all doctrines as such.

The official reply to this rising concern among the conservatives or confessional thinkers like Machen was penned at the end of 1923 and was submitted to the General assembly of 1924. Remember that in 1910 the assembly had required all ministers to hold to at least five fundamental doctrines. In 1924, almost 1,300 ministers signed what came to be known as the Auburn Affirmation. The signers said that the General assembly, in enforcing these five fundamental doctrines, was requiring a kind of after the fact subscription for ministers who had only signed on to the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms. They were doing something extra confessional.

The confessionalists maintained that since doctrines like the bodily resurrection of Christ were already clearly taught in the Confession of Faith to which ministers were supposed to subscribe or, or in the case of all the ones who are in ministry had already subscribed, that incoming ministers and existing ministers should not really have trouble affirming these doctrines. The virgin birth is in the Westminster Confession of Faith already these were doctrines not additional to, but integral to the Reformed system of doctrine.

Gordon Clark’s response to the Auburn Affirmation amongst the confessionalists is typical when future historians of the church evaluate this present age. The publication of the Auburn Affirmation will stand out in importance, like Luther’s nailing up his 95 theses. But it will be important for a different reason. The reason the Auburn Affirmation is so important is that it constitutes a major offensive against the word of God. It, or at least its theology, is the root of Presbyterian apostasy.

Officials in the Presbyterian Church in the USA have commonly spread the rumor that there’s nothing doctrinal involved in the Auburn Affirmation. The rumor, regardless of its source, is untrue it is true that the Auburn Affirmation is a cleverly written document with some pious phraseology slightly obscuring its real intent. But once a person has seen exactly what it says, there is no disguising the fact that it is a vicious attack on the word of God.

In 1925, Charles Erdman was elected Moderator. The moderate was elected Moderator of the I like how that sounded of the General Assembly. And in an attempt to diffuse the tensions in the church, he did what Presbyterians always do. He appointed a committee. The committee was tasked with discovering the cause of disunity in the church and and pointing the way to peace. A year later the committee was pleased to report that it happily had found no traces of liberalism in the church. Actually, the sad cause of disunity was a party of conservatives located in Princeton. They thought that made unwarranted accusations against ministers in good standing.

For the record, I think it’s fair to say that even at this point most ministers in the church were not at that point liberals. But a great many were willing, if not liberals themselves, a great many were willing to retain liberals within the church. They were happy to minister alongside liberals and between them the liberals. And these moderates maintained a majority in the assemblies of the PCUSA from 1925 to this day.

The remainder of the story can be and must be told quickly. The 1926 General assembly appointed a new committee to focus on Princeton Seminary from whence many of these disruptive conservatives came. They didn’t need to say it. Everyone knew that it was Jay Gresham Machen that they were targeting. Subsequent marginalization of Machen and other like minded professors at Princeton led Machen to respond with the founding of a new seminary in downtown Philadelphia.

But in spite of broad opposition to the the reorganization of Princeton which allowed the liberals to gain control and distress with the moderates and liberals in the church. Machen was only able to draw away a few thankfully talented professors and students from Princeton. He was unable to attract the retired or almost retired professors who remained behind. It was hard to start a new seminary as Wall street was crashing and the Great Dep beginning. It was even harder to see Christians give their hard earned money to missionaries of the church when some of those missionaries no longer believed the Gospel.

See the mission field was also a battlefield. Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner Missionary to China Pearl Buck was a trophy for liberal Presbyterians. An accomplished woman leaving her mark on the world stage. It also happened that she thought Christian distinctives were hardly necessary for Chinese peasants. Indeed, she publicly referred to historical understandings of salvation as merely superstitious. The mission’s board was led by the prince of all the moderates, Robert Elliot, Speer, and they decided, after some study, that Buck did not need censure.

Machen again could not agree, and he took the lead in forming an independent board of foreign missions, a critical step in his life and a critical juncture in his gradual separation from the Presbyterian Church. This board encouraged conservative churches and individuals to support what was effectively a parachurch institution rather than an institution of the church. And as it happens, Presbyterians beginning in the early 19th century had vigorously supported parachurch institutions, especially in the new school branches of the church. They supported new school institutions that rivaled denominational institutions. The denomination had a board for home missions. There was also a parachurch board for that. The denomination had a board for foreign missions. There was a parachurch equivalent all the way.

But when Machen started this institution, liberals suddenly took umbrage at the idea of. Of a parachurch ministry that could potentially drain funds away from their favorite missionaries. By 1935, all the members of Maachen’s independent board who were ordained in the PCUSA were suspended from ministry. Machen’s own journey during these years was a brutal one. He tried to move his credentials to the presbytery of Philadelphia, where he now lived and where people, at least a majority of ministers and elders, still supported his confessional outlook.

The clerk of the denomination said there had been an error in the paperwork and Machen was to remain a minister in the New Jersey presbytery, which incidentally wanted to try him for different errors or for schism in particular, committee meetings met behind closed doors comprised solely of his opponents. There were surprise meetings, moving deadlines, devious methods of every sort of. And Machen was slowly maneuvered to the sidelines. Indeed, he was never really given a chance to defend himself. He was forced to answer yes, no questions, like a child. No record of the meeting was permitted, even when he said he’d pay for his own stenographer. And then the PCOSA closed its archives on Machen.

Opposition to Machen was bitter. It could be expressed rather crudely it as in an anonymous letter which addressed him as the professor of bigotry and read, you got a well deserved spanking today. Now just stop calumniating your brethren and broaden out your miserable theology and learn to be a Christian or get out. This particular letter is quoted in a THM thesis which was produced at Princeton Seminary.

Once they reopened their archives, a man named Wayne Hedman points out that the Letter was posted From Baltimore on June 2, 1926, the time and place of the General Assembly. The letter, which had been blacked out with Magic Marker, did what Magic Marker does over time. If you’ve lived long enough, you’ll know that Magic Marker fades. And Hedman could see that this letter came from the church’s own Board of Christian Education or from someone inside that institution pilfering letterhead for a grumpy letter.

Other charges against Machen, such as Charles erdman’s assertion that Dr. Machen’s tone and methods of defense should disqualify him from promotion, were more cautious in tone, but much more damaging because they were spoken before the whole church and then, courtesy of the New York Times, published before the world. Some of the opposition appears to be petty nastiness, but it’s important to overlook just how dangerous Machen appeared from the vantage point of those who are trying to promote the progress of peace.

Machen was saying, there are people around us prophesying peace, peace when there is no peace. Well, that was not an acceptable message in the 1930s, either in church or in politics. You may remember it’s about this time that there’s another oddball, this one in England, who worried about false proclamations of peace. Career bureaucrats in the state had no more patience with Churchill than career bureaucrats in the church had with Machen. Both men were, in their own way, seemed to be warmongers, cranks that ought to be ignored, if possible. Silenced, preferably.

Machen was finally defrocked. He was removed from the ministry of the pcusa. The trial was a charade, a travesty of justice. A group of ministers responded by renting a hall and starting a new denomination, what they called the Presbyterian Church in America. I usually get asked often on elevators, what makes the OPC different than the PCA if we’re only going one floor, I’d just say we were the PCA first, after all.

In 1936, the fledgling church named itself the Presbyterian Church in America. It was called the Presbyterian Church in America, but it was supported only at. It was supported not only at home, but also abroad. There were brave foreign missionaries who left their pensions and their salaries with the big Presbyterian church and joined this new denomination, including a certain Richard Gaffin and his wife laboring in China.

The PCA was promptly sued for having a name too similar to their opposite. And so they chose a new name that highlighted differences with the mainline church, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. But since no one dared to sue the PCA that started in the 1980s. This detail also explains another area where the two denominations diverge. The real difference between the PCA and the OPC is that the PCA has better lawyers. I’d add that if we were going to the third floor.

The seminary and the denomination that Machen started both attempted to move forward by looking backward. They recognized that Presbyterians had surrendered the city in order to hold the Citadel. They had given up Reformed theology with the thought they could still hold on to the basic elements of orthodoxy. And it didn’t really work. So both the seminary and the denomination attempted to self consciously recover the riches of the Reformed faith. As with the seminary, so with the denomination it was pretty hard to start one.

During the Great Depression, many congregations were unhappy with the old denomination, but with its federal organization, they would lose everything if they would leave the peace USA. If 100% of the eldership and 100% of the congregation voted to leave, the church would retain the property, just like the Episcopal Church does today. Even if entire congregations would leave to join the opc, they’d have to start over in a storefront, in a home, or worse.

Machen was speaking on behalf of this new denomination in North Dakota in December of 1936, not the place where anyone should be, including North Dakotans in the winter. He was exhausted after this long battle and developed pneumonia. He died on January 1, 1937. Famously, and I hope you’ve heard this by now, it is like the third week of seminary. His final words were sent in a telegram to his dear friend John Murray. I’m so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it. He’s buried in Baltimore. His gravestone reads Faithful unto death in Greek.

Well, thankfully, not only the denomination, but also this seminary weathered those storms and survived the loss of a great leader. Almost a century later, the continued existence of Westminster Theological Seminary reminds us of a vision worthy of humble promotion and gracious defense. Machen founded a biblical seminary. He wanted to teach in such a way that the faculty would not only commend a system of doctrine, but be persuading people of that system from the scriptures. He wanted graduates to have the skill to to build theology from the ground up. Not to reinvent the wheel, but to show people where it comes from. This is our immediate heritage and part of what comes to mind when the Westminster brand of education, if you will, is mentioned in North America and abroad.

Machen advocated a confessional seminary. The Westminster name is meant to remind us of an older heritage as well. It recalls the some of the richest Protestant confessional documents the last milestone of the Long Reformation. The seminary’s motto, emphasizing the whole counsel of God, that’s a little Greek lesson for you right there. Reminds us that theological flourishing requires a confession longer than 10 points on a website. Those are lovely. They remind us that Christianity is accessible. Bullet points on a website can appear fresh and creative, and like snowflakes, no two are alike. But in terms of equipping the church for its ministry of teaching for the long haul, these are inadequate for the church’s thriving.

Third, Westminster was intended to be what would later be termed an evangelical seminary. And in addition to believing in Reformed doctrine of the church, we also believe in the Reformed doctrine of the communion of the saints. From the beginning, Westminster welcomed to its student body those who wanted to be part of the recovery and proclamation of Christ’s gospel in every age. This too is part of our Westminster tradition. Knowing where the boundary lies between confessionally and experientially defined communions, but talking at the curb instead of lobbing verbal grenades over the fences.

Fourth, Westminster was of course intended to be a practical seminary. To state the obvious, Machen and his colleagues wanted to build a place where consistories and sessions would want to send their prospective pastors, a place where qualified people could grow in their gifts and graces. It was started for the sake of the church. He intended a seminary and not just another graduate school. And that continues to be a useful vision.

The church desperately needs improvement in the quality of its preachers and preaching of its pastors and pastoring. Surely the heart of Westminster’s continuing purpose must lie with mentoring men to be the kind of pastors and churchmen that congregations covetous and presbytery’s prize. Our desire is to be a constructive and useful seminary, I would think. And for obvious reasons, Westminster has tended to promote those goals by paying attention to teaching. Surely it’s also obvious that those goals will be furthered by working on our skills and listening. What are we doing well? Where are we falling short? How can we improve and help the church better? Not just its pastors, but others who want to learn as well.

Finally, Westminster was founded as an embodied seminary with a physical presence. Not that there was many other options in 1920s other than maybe a seminary by correspondence. But the physical presence of the seminary proved to be important. By providing men and women a richly resourced residential sanctuary for two to four years of study, Westminster has been able to serve a constituency well beyond cities on the east coast coast.

Admittedly, the seminary curriculum has always had a western slant. But just as Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, written for one particular audience and occasion, has really proved useful over a hundred years for a wide variety of ecclesial contexts and ecosystems. So, too, I hope this seminary in a Philadelphia suburb will continue to prove to be a powerful pride protest against false progress in the Church and the world, and a compelling witness to the depth and the beauty and the wisdom of the Reformed tradition as it’s captured in the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms and the three Forms of Unity and other parts of our wonderful heritage.