J. Gresham Machen Bibliography

Transcription

Camden Busey: Welcome to Christ the Center, your weekly conversation of Reformed theology. This is now episode number 609. My name is Camden Busey. I’m recording from Gray’s Lake, Illinois, the Reformed Forum studio. I’m happy to be here and I’m happy to be with some friends. Let me introduce to you first we have Jim Cassidy, who serves as the pastor of South Austin OPC down in South Austin, Texas. Welcome back, Jim. It’s great to speak with you, as always.

Jim Cassidy: Good to be here, Camden.

Camden Busey: Yeah, we liked having you. And for now, I think you got things set up through the end of the year with a place to meet. But has there been any progress with your church? Can people pray for you? Because I know there have been some issues with the city council and whatnot and they’re kicking you out.

Jim Cassidy: Yeah, yeah, thanks for asking. I appreciate that. We do have to the end of the year, for which we’re grateful. We have our eye on a public school that we might be able to use in the interim.

But the more exciting news, perhaps for everyone to pray about. We can’t give the details or the particulars, but there is a building, a church building that has come on our radar and we are. We are angling to. To see whether or not we can purchase it. So we are currently raising funds and putting some money in the bank so as to be able to put a down payment on that. And, and we’re very excited about it, but we still need some things to be put in place before we can pull the trigger on that. But we do appreciate your prayers and the concerns of God’s people in order that hopefully in 2020, maybe we’ll be able to get into our own place. So we’ll see.

Camden Busey: Very good. Well, we’ll indeed think of you and pray for you in that regard. And certainly the Lord will work something out which will be for your good. So we look forward to seeing how that. How that unfolds. But we also want to introduce our guest today. We’re very happy. I’m ecstatic, really. If you can’t see to have our guest with us. It’s been a little while, but we always love having Dr. Darrell Hart. Darrell Hart teaches history at Hillsdale College out in Hillsdale, Michigan, the great state of Michigan. Welcome back, Darrell. It’s good to speak with you.

Darrell Hart: Great to be with you. Thanks for having me. It’s a little awkward, odd doing it with a actual. What do they call it, a video blog or a vlog, because we have this video stuff. Anyway, I feel like I’VE gone into the realm of blocking heads. Tv, Right?

Camden Busey: Right. Well, yeah, which is great. I’ve seen some of those and I enjoy those footage where you get some of those guys on there. I forget. I think it is that website. There are several, I think, where they have these people on and they do these kinds of things and just debate each other about whatever is going on. It’s kind of part of the altnet. I wouldn’t say alt right or alt left because there are many varieties. But it’s not the darknet either, because it’s not illicit or weird. It’s weird, but people talking about things that traditional media don’t typically address.

So I don’t know if we’ll venture into those areas. But today we hope to be speaking about Christianity and liberalism by none other than Jay Gresham Machen. And there’s a new edition of this book which is available from Westminster Seminary Press. We’re very thankful to them for sending me a review copy. I’ve got the paperback here. There’s also a hardcover edition, which I take it. I don’t have one, but I take it, given the design and the look of this, that it’s a companion volume, printed and bound very similarly to the John Murray Sermons volume. So this is what they call a legacy edition. So it not only has the full text of Machen’s work, but also includes new essays by the faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary, the current faculty, on a whole host of issues.

And you can find essays in there by folks obviously like Sandy Finlayson, by our friends Lane Tipton, Carlton Wynne, president, Lillback has a piece. The whole faculty’s got a piece in there, and you can check that out, which is available now from wherever books are sold, especially wtsbooks.com and I assume they’re going to probably have one of the best deals on it for you. But it was another opportunity. If we’re going to talk mechanically, certainly we could have our friend Darrell on Darrell’s written a ton on Machen is one of, if not the I would just say he is the foremost authority on Jay Gresham Machen. And it is Gresham. That’s a little bit of an OPC shibboleth.

But we’re delighted to speak about Machen today and particularly the historical context of this book. Real quick, a couple things to mention before we get started on that subject. Just our theology conference is coming up October 12, 2019, and you can register for that@reformedforum.org conference. So we encourage you to head on over there. The early bird rate is still in effect until August 31, or at least through August 31. And if you head on over, you can get in and come and we’re going to be discussing Romans 7:14. And the theme of the law is spiritual. So it gets into a lot of issues on the law and spirit as redemptive historical eras, really gets into a lot of issues that Machen addresses in his notes on Galatians, which is a tremendous book. If you don’t have it, try to dig up a copy there. If you’re interested in that sort of thing.

We’d love to see you. We’d love to visit with you. So head on over to reformedforum.org conference and if you can come visit us in Gray’s Lake, Illinois, October 12th. We look forward to seeing you. Well, Darrell, thanks again for coming and looking forward to talking. We’ve had several conversations on Machen in the past here on the program of and so no doubt we’ll cover some of that material again, but I’ll try to put links in the episode description to our previous conversations. Nevertheless, it’s still probably how much are they? 12 years. I think I’ve met you 12 years ago. I think we started doing the program 11 years ago. 11 and a half. So one of those early ones back in my apartment, I think you were on as a guest. I think we had you and Ann over for dinner. Had a good time. Maybe I had a good time, maybe you didn’t.

Darrell Hart: Whenever I have a dinner, that’s a good time.

Camden Busey: But I think you also were on a program with Gary Johnson or something like that. I think he ripped on Machen a little bit. I don’t remember. So I’ll send people off on a wild goose chase to dig up on why he may have caused offense somehow. I don’t remember.

But today we’re going to be speaking about Christianity and liberalism. And I want to, just for those who don’t know, this is really a classic in Presbyterian theology and history. And it was written, I believe the text, the copyright date was 1923, if I’m not mistaken.

Darrell Hart: Yes, that’s right.

Camden Busey: And you know, there’s so much going on with the modernist fundamentalist debates at the time, the conflict that was arising, which eventually gave rise to the formation of Westminster theological seminary in 1929, coming out of Princeton and then the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1980, 36. But understanding Christianity and liberalism, not only what’s in it in terms of its content, but also the historic Context of the book provides a really helpful shortcut and a way for understanding so much of 20th century American Presbyterianism and really World Presbyterianism and in some ways just Protestant thought and Catholic thought.

I’ve done some study in Roman Catholicism. In 1910 they had an anti Moffat oath and there was serious waves that were coming through all forms of the Christian church and all quarters of it. It was a great challenge and it led to a lot of conflict and a lot of theological disruption. So we wanted to take the opportunity today, since this new edition exists, just to use as an excuse to revisit the subject and talk about this history once again and kind of rehearse some of these lessons, because the better we know them today, the better we’ll be able to meet the next wave of challenges that comes in the church. Darrell, when were you introduced to this book? Do you recall when you first picked it up and read it?

Darrell Hart: Well, if your cameras could pick this up. I actually purchased this copy of the book for a dollar at the used bookstore at Westminster, but didn’t read it until I was at Harvard Divinity School after studying at Westminster. And I took a course my first semester there with William R. Hutchison, the great historian of Modernism and Protestant liberalism, who devotes at least a half a chapter in his book on Protestant Modernism to Machen in covering the objections to Modernism. And so for that course we read Machen. And that was when I first discovered that this was sort of interesting. I had already done a degree at Westminster, so it felt a little odd that I hadn’t read Mate Jeanette Westminster. The explanation then was that, and I think this is true, when Westminster started in 1936, most people would have already read Christianity Liberalism before going there, because that was just sort of what that was, the self selecting study list for students.

But by the time I was going to seminary, I had read Francis Schaeffer, but I hadn’t really even heard much of Machen except that Schaefer referred to him. So that was the first time I read it. And I did a reading course on the old Princeton theology with Hutcheson and received a lot of encouragement from a number of other historians to do a dissertation on Machen, which I did at Johns Hopkins.

Camden Busey: True Johns Hopkins, everyone.

Darrell Hart: Just as Johns was a family name given to the boy. And just as we have, that happens where you get a family name as your first name.

Camden Busey: Yeah, well, I’m not going to list them all, but I have my set of Machen inspired and Machen related titles here on camera. Camera two, you Guys don’t see that camera, but it’ll be in the exported version. And a lot of Darrell’s books, many of which he also edited Machen’s shorter writings, but then also kind of a biography, an intellectual biography, history of Machen. And Barry Waz also edited Letters from the Front, which were letters that Machen wrote from World War I in the field when he served in the YMCA. Correct. As he was serving over there.

There’s tremendous history and it’s wonderful to read about him. And of course, he was instrumental in, some would say the founder of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Perhaps that title is inappropriate to talk about founders of churches not being the Messiah himself, but nonetheless, he was instrumental in the founding of our denomination. It wouldn’t ex exists, humanly speaking, apart from his instrumentality. And of course, the founder of Westminster Theological Seminary. So, Darrell, maybe you can provide a thumbnail sketch for folks who are not up to speed with OPC mythology.

And we mean mythology. I say that jokingly, but this is a founding narrative, so it’s true history, but we rehearse it because retelling the story also provides kind of a context and an understanding of who we are in the present day. But for those who might not be familiar with some of the modernist fundamentalist debate, I mean, I wondered if you could provide for us a thumbnail sketch before we get into those years in the 20s per se, and the specifics of this book.

Darrell Hart: Right. Well, let me just say briefly that point about narratives I’ve been thinking about of late, partly because there’s so much discussion in America about nationalism, the founding, and whether the New York Times 1619 project, now with slavery and narratives really matter. And what’s striking to me, thinking about differences between the OPC and the pca, for instance, or even the urc, those denominations or federations don’t have the narrative that the OPC does. That doesn’t mean the OPC is better. We just have a much clearer narrative than those other communions do, and easier for us to talk about our founding and actually take some encouragement from it.

Camden Busey: Not to say that it’s a powerful thing.

Darrell Hart: Machen hasn’t taken hits of late from some of the woke people out there. He has, but still, when you look at the issues involved in the 20s and 30s. So, anyway, I’ll try to answer your question. So the fundamentalist controversy per se goes on, in my understanding, at two levels. There’s a denominational level and there’s the national level. The national level, we don’t need to talk about A whole lot because it involves the fundamental. Excuse me, the Scopes trial and William Jennings Bryan in Dayton, Tennessee, and the prosecution against John T. Scopes for teaching evolution contrary to Tennessee state law.

Now, of course, that story in some ways also involves Presbyterian. The Presbyterian controversy, because William Jennings Bryan was an elder in the Presbyterian Church, and he actually asked Machen to testify at the Scopes trial, which Machen declined. Said he wasn’t an expert in Old Testament. In the Old Testament, which he wasn’t. But it was kind of a dodge because I don’t think he really wanted to testify there at that trial. I think he knew it wasn’t going to turn out well. So. So it’s not as if you can keep these two things distinct.

But in Presbyterian circles, and I hope we go back to the origins of the book, but in Presbyterian circles, the controversy started really in 1922 when Harry Emerson Fosdick fired the first shot. He preached a sermon at First Presbyterian Church. I think it was first shall the Fundamentalist Win? He sort of said these fundamentalists were bad Christians for trying to exclude other people from the the church. He highlighted the ideas of inerrancy, but also premillennial dispensationalism. And from there, then Presbyterians began to respond to a modernist preaching in a Presbyterian church. Fosdick was one of the leading modernists of the era, one of the most popular preachers of the era. He was also a Baptist. So there was a real anomaly of a Baptist preaching in a Presbyterian church. So there’s a. Any number of issues that Presbyterians could raise objections to.

And so conservatives in the presbytery of New York raised objections. Clarence McCartney, who was a prominent conservative in Philadelphia, also issued a statement against Fosdick. And from there you had a series of skirmishes at the local presbytery level that reached up to the national level with the General assembly back and forth in 1923, 24, 25, with great hopes put in who would become the Moderator of the General Assembly. Conservatives won that vote in 1924 with Clarence McCartney becoming Moderator. But this was a church, too, that had a big bureaucratic machinery, and it would be hard for someone just in office. And their moderators did actually stay in office the whole year. It wasn’t just for the duration of the assembly to change the church. So McCartney didn’t do much.

1925, though, was the real turning point, at least as it relates to Machen and confessional Presbyterianism. Clarence. No, not Clarence McCartney. Charles Erdman, a colleague of Machen at Princeton was the Moderator. There had been a series of resolutions to affirm the virgin birth. And four other doctrines. Like the atonement as essential doctrines for the church. Necessary and essential doctrines. Which goes all the way back to the language of subscription in the adopting act of 1729. It’s a peculiar wrinkle in American Presbyterian history. And we don’t need to get into the weeds. But still it was possible for the church to affirm necessary and essential articles of faith. The church was ready to reaffirm that in 1925. Again, liberals in New York, who had ordained two men who would not affirm. Wasn’t that they denied the virgin birth, but they would not affirm the virgin birth. Liberals were worried. They thought they might have to leave the church.

Instead, Erdman appoints a committee. This is different. It’s a different Erdman. There’s only one E in Charles Erdman, as opposed to the publisher, which is two E’s. He appoints a committee, special committee to investigate. And that leads eventually to, in my estimation, a whitewashing of the controversy in the church. Pretty much blaming conservatives for making it becoming too belligerent. Which then leads to another committee to investigate the controversy at Princeton. Because Erdman, sorry, was a faculty member. Machen was a faculty member. People thought something was going on at Princeton. And something was going on at Princeton. Although I think it still remained fairly civil on campus.

And that led to a report that recommended administrative changes to the structures of governance. At Princeton Seminary in 1929. Which basically meant the board of directors. Which was responsible for the theological content for the faculty. Content of the seminary’s program was now. It had been majority conservative board of directors. It became now minority conservative board of directors. And it was at that point that Machen decided with other conservators. To found Princeton Seminary, sorry, Westminster Seminary in 1929 in Philadelphia. And then you had a bit of an interlude. Conservatives, the way I read it, didn’t know what to do because they had lost. They had. I mean, they started a seminary. But, you know, it’s sort of like starting a seminary in the.

Camden Busey: In.

Darrell Hart: I don’t know what the equivalent would be. Say, a new seminary in the CRC or something.

Camden Busey: What would you do in the Great Depression, too?

Darrell Hart: Right. But what do you do as outsiders to try to minister in a church that you think has basically gone liberal? And then in 1932, a report on Protestant foreign missions comes out called Rethinking Missions. Which really questions whether missionaries should be involved in preaching the gospel. To save people from going to hell. And it advocates a much more humanitarian posture for Protestant foreign missions. Machen opposes that, gets into a series of struggles for that.

He’s eventually brought to trial in 1935 for again being belligerent and being a fighter, for questioning his peers in the faith, for not showing loyalty to the church, even the charge of lying, breaking the ninth Commandment, for lying about fellow ministers. And that leads to an appeal to overturn his conviction by the Presbytery of New Brunswick in 1935. It’s appealed to the General assembly of 1936. The assembly upholds that appeal. I mean, upholds the verdict of the Presbytery. So Machen then starts with other conservatives. Again starts the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, June 11, 1936, the 14th birth date, birthday of my father, who was born on June 11 too.

Camden Busey: I don’t know if I knew that. That’s tremendous. You know, there’s so much. There’s so many things we can dive into. And of course the OPC particularly has quite a few resources to go into all the different details. And there are also some books available from the Committee on Christian Education as well as a Committee for the Historian where we encourage people to check those out. If you go to opc.org you can find a link to publications and you can find especially Darrell’s book with John Mether Fighting the Good Fight, which I’d recommend that you can also find a book that Machen wrote, although his name’s not on it, called the Presbyterian Conflict. Right. And there’s a. Really Darrell’s laughing because there’s a. We talked to Jim Scott before. He has a two part article or two essay, two articles in the Westminster Theological Journal at least laying out the detective case that Edwin Ryan perhaps. I’ll just say it perhaps stole a manuscript that Machen had been working on and maybe finished it and then published it as a book with his name on it. So, you know, Jim Scott wrote it. I’m just saying what Jim Scott put in the article. But I found the case rather compelling.

Darrell Hart: Did I put you on the record?

Camden Busey: Oh, he’s meticulous. It’s tremendous, the articles. Can I put you on the spot and ask you what you think about that story? Are you convinced?

Darrell Hart: I wouldn’t say I’m convinced, but I mean, I.

Camden Busey: It’s compelling at least.

Darrell Hart: So, you know, beyond reasonable doubt. No. So if I were on the jury. But I think also the way I’ve read the history and I remember when I was doing research, coming across a manuscript in the archives and I wondered about it. I wondered what had happened to it, and I never really followed up to compare it to anything. So I think, you know, I mean, Jim obviously has a bias, as every single person does, you know, and I think he tried to argue against his own bias to keep it in check. So I think he tries to make a plausible case, not just so the OPC comes out on top. Somehow. I don’t think this is really an OPC project necessarily, but it becomes convenient.

Camden Busey: Because Edwin Ryan, again, I apologize to anyone, if I’ve offended anyone. I don’t mean to speak ill of somebody who’s deceased and unable to defend himself, but Jim Scott at the same time has laid out many facts and history that indicate that this might have been the case. And apparently at the time it was also well known Machen was working on a history of the Presbyterian conflict. And Edwin Ryan had access to his study and I believe was the first person to enter the study after Machen had died. And so these are all verifiable facts to one degree or another. And so no one’s found the manuscript, so it went somewhere. But the issue, why this might be a convenient thing for the OPC to do or somebody in the OPC to do, is Ryan eventually went back to the Presbyterian Church USA and became kind of a black sheep or a figure to see. He went out from us because he wasn’t one of these pilgrim.

Darrell Hart: And he took a job down in Jim’s territory, not in Austin, but in San Antonio at Trinity University, which was. Is. Was Presbyterian affiliated institution. He was administrator down there.

Camden Busey: Yeah. I really recommend people dig in and read those articles. They’re fascinating, or our previous conversations on them on the program. But, you know, there’s so much I could ask. But let me ask you this to start, Darrell, where does Christianity and liberalism fall within Machen’s own bibliography? What other books did he write? What was he doing at this time and what did he do in the years following relatively, or before?

Darrell Hart: Right. Well, the dates are getting a little sketchy in my memory because I don’t work with this directly, but if I recall correctly, 1921, two years before Christianity and Liberalism. But the. The Origin of Paul’s Religion comes out, which was a series of lectures given at, I think, Union Seminary, Richmond. And so he had been working on the. The Paul and the. I mean, you could see the fingerprints of the origin of Paul’s religion on. On Christianity, liberalism. And he draws on some of the material. He even footnotes it at times. But it’s a case for Seeing Paul’s religion as supernatural and the origins of Christianity being supernatural, as opposed to try to explain it naturalistically on natural grounds, which was really very much at the center of the debate between conservatives and modernists in the 1920s.

1922, his Greek grammar, New Testament Greek grammar, comes out. And so 1923 is when Christianity liberalism comes out. Two years later, he publishes what Is Faith? Which was another sort of. It was another shot in the fundamentalist controversy. Doesn’t receive as much attention as. It’s really a good book, though, about the intellectual components of faith. That it’s not. Faith isn’t simply a feeling or something. So he’s arguing against that strain of liberalism and trying to defend the intellectual plausibility and the intellectual bona fides of Christianity. And then at the end of that decade, he manages to put together a work that he had been working on since an undergraduate. Then at seminary. They received bds back, Bachelor’s of Divinity back then. The Virgin Birth of Christ, which he considered his magnum opus, which was a defense of the biblical account of the virgin birth, that it wasn’t some extraneous insertion into the text to make Jesus into some kind of supernatural figure. And then in the 30s, a couple of collections of essays, one of them published posthumously, came out, but those are based on radio addresses that he was doing on behalf of the seminary.

Camden Busey: Yeah. Perhaps my favorite essay he wrote is the one on mountain climbing.

Darrell Hart: Right. Which I don’t think made it into any of those. It is in the selected shorter writings that I was able to edit. But that’s a great piece. It really is.

Camden Busey: And just for anyone who hasn’t read Machen or hasn’t had an eye or an ear to recognize, he’s a tremendous writer. And I was just lamenting my own writing to some friends a couple days ago, and I’ve got a book coming out. My publisher’s gonna hate me for this, but, I mean, I’ve got a book coming out, and I’m reading the proof. And I don’t know if you’re this way, Darrell, but, I mean, you’re a tremendous writer, too. And I aspire to write like you, and. No, honestly, but I read my writing, you know, years after, and you’re like, oh, man. Some of these passages I wrote years ago, you’re like, man, I wish I could just. I honestly said, I wish I could wave a Machen wand over this and just, you know, apply his style to it, because it’s so good and so clear and succinct and honestly, Theologians, especially systematicians, would do well to read more Machen, if for no other reason than just to imbibe his clarity of style and his economy.

Darrell Hart: Although I was here, I’m back in Hillsdale now briefly. I’m on sabbatical and we’re staying at our summer cottage in Massachusetts, which need not sound overly pretentious because it is in a Methodist campground. It really is still active Methodist campground and we don’t really want there. But I was here for a pre semester conference about the classics and Machen was trained as a classicist and he grew up learning Latin and Greek. He went to Hopkins and majored in the classics, did a master’s degree in Greek. And I think it’s another case for the importance of the classics. And this is where my education was misspent and I. And if I had to do it all over again, I think I go back and be a classics major.

Camden Busey: Well, you know, I did not receive a classical education either when I was growing up. The classics were Pac Man, I think, or Coke, Coca Cola Classic. Like that’s what you thought of. You know, the true literary classics are nowhere to be seen or heard. Nevertheless, we can learn a lot there. Jim, are you still with us? I’m wondering what your experience is with Machen and Christianity and liberalism. Do you remember the first time you read it?

Jim Cassidy: Yeah, I do. Camden. It was my first year at seminary at Westminster. I was still a pretty young convert and I was even newer to the Reformed faith. And so I was still kind of learning my way coming out of evangelicalism.

And Machen, of course, brought me a long way towards coming to the Reformed faith. Because so much of what he was saying about the arguments and the tropes that you might find in modernism liberalism, I was hearing as an evangelical, which was surprising to me because they were, in my mind anyway, the conservative Christians that were out there. They were pro life and whatnot. And yet much of their theology sounded an awful lot like what Machen was saying about the theology of liberalism. So that was. That was remarkable to me and will always stand out in my mind also is clarity.

But if I can make one other statement about the book and maybe Daryl can field. Maybe it’s a question or a comment, I don’t know, but we’ll see what comes out. So when, when Machen wrote the book, one of the things that struck me about it is that, you know, it’s happening during the fundamentalist modernist controversy. And when we hear the word fundamentalist, which Machen was, he was dubbed a Fundamentalist. And he was taking the fundamentalist side in the controversy. Oftentimes we think it’s sort of, you know, kind of a lack of integrity in scholarship, sort of a hackneyed approach to polemics and apologetics. And Machen did not ring that way when I, when I read this book. In fact, he was quite even handed in my mind. He was balanced. He had integrity. He went to original sources. He was. He was treating liberals with respect. And so that was something that jumped out at me when I read the book. And I don’t know if Darrell’s got any comments or thoughts about sort of the way in which he intellectually honestly engaged with the writings and the thought of actual liberals and how that was received among liberals.

Darrell Hart: Yeah, I would say at the end it wasn’t necessarily received that well that well. Although I think most serious liberals took Machen’s arguments seriously because he was not engaged in mere polemics, he was engaged in polemics, but he was trying to do something that was serious and trying to take the other person’s point of view into perspective as much as possible. And I think how I came to Machen through that course at Harvard Div. School with William R. Hutcheson, I think he recognized that Machen was actually doing something unusual for fundamentalists.

The other part of that, though, there are two kinds of historians, I guess you could argue there are lumpers and splitters. I’m a splitter. Typically the history of fundamentalism has been written by lumpers. And so you put in everybody who’s opposed to liberalism and you call them fundamentalists and you don’t really see the diversity of views there. And I’ve tried to rescue something like confessional Presbyterianism, you know, partly to rescue Machen from the badge or the label of fundamentalism, which isn’t a great thing.

But even Machen himself, this is where another person point where his life intersected with William Jennings Bryan, who was actually a much more interesting figure also than the ways, even I think, the way confessional Presbyterians regard him. But when Bryan died five days after the Scopes trial, his fans, friends in Dayton started a college, Bryan Memorial College, and they asked Machen to be the president. Machen declined. But in that letter he said, I never call myself a fundamentalist. I call myself a Calvinist. If the choice has to be, if it’s only between fundamentalism and modernism, then I am a fundamentalist of the most pronounced stripe. But I prefer to call myself a Reformed Christian or Calvinist, not a fundamentalist. Because he thought that fundamentalism really was trying to reduce Christianity to something of a bare few points of fundamentals. And that really wasn’t the tradition of Princeton, old Princeton or the tradition of confessional Presbyterianism.

And truth be told, the word fundamentalism actually started with Southern Baptists in 1922 or so. I think it’s not Frederick Lee Laws, it’s somebody Lee Laws, Curtis Lee Laws, the editor of a Southern Baptist paper newspaper adopts that term. So it really has Baptist origins. And this actually points also to the Fosdick, the importance of the Fosdick sermon. He was preaching as a Baptist and he had Baptist, I think, on his mind when he was preaching that he was pushing back against the fundamentalist Baptists. And he didn’t seem to think that this could actually set something off among Presbyterians, which it wound up doing as well. So there’s a really, I hate the word complicated right now. It’s way overused. It’s a convoluted series of events that are coming together there. But again, oftentimes historians lump it all together as fundamentalism. And I think it’s an injustice to any number of the variations that are going on in the 1920s and trying to understand those people in their own times.

Camden Busey: Would you see some analogues with what we deal with today, with the evangelical vote? And you have anything lumped in there from historic Calvinism all the way to some version of Christianity that you find in Netflix series the Family. I don’t know if you’ve seen that, but it’s the shadow organization apparently trying to run the American political scene.

Darrell Hart: Exactly. And yes, so you can have everyone from Franklin Graham to

Camden Busey: Paula White. Yeah, exactly.

Darrell Hart: Or you know, even Joel Osteen, although he stayed out of the political stuff. But. And I mean, I’ve been saying this about evangelicalism for a while, so it’s kind of a dead horse. But that’s another word that just become a lumping word that doesn’t do justice to the variety of people in something that is a Protestantism outside the main line, which is one way of trying to think about it. But yeah, so. And boy, have historians, scholars, journalists ridden that evangelicalism thing hard. We don’t need to get into.

Camden Busey: No, well, that’s for another.

Darrell Hart: I mean, I would say, and I don’t know where you wanted to go with this, but the specific context of the book is actually the General assembly of 1920. Machen was a first time commissioner at the General assembly and this was the culmination of. At this General assembly was the culmination of 50 years of progressive Protestantism, which I would actually say was very much supportive of a Christian nationalism. And their shining moment was helping to win World War I, which, even though Machen served in the YMCA, he was not in any way sympathetic to the English in that struggle. He had studied in Germany in graduate school. And he was much more sympathetic to Germany in some ways, partly because of friendship, partly because he was suspicious of the English or the British Empire. And this is a, you know, a different Germany from the Germany that emerges in the 30s with Hitler. So let’s also try to keep that straight. The Kaiser is not Hitler.

So, I mean, Machen was standing up. So at the 1920 General assembly, there’s a proposal for the union of all Protestant churches in the United States, the Organic union. They had had a Federal Union in 1908 with the Federal Council of Churches. Now they wanted to merge into one. It was a colossal failure, but it was plausible because the same thing happened in Canada. And in 1925, similar era. You have the formation of the United Church of Canada, which took Anglicans, Presbyterians and Methodists and put them into one church, although it wound up creating four churches, because there were Anglicans, Presbyterians and Methodists who stayed out of the United Church, which would have happened in the United States as well. But Machen saw this coming and he heard the report. The report was. Was given by the president of Princeton Theological Seminary, J. Ross Stevenson. And I’m sure he was thinking, what on earth is going on here?

And so he then gives an address. He meets the General assembly was at Philadelphia, in Philadelphia. He meets other conservatives in that area. I’m sure he knew some from Philadelphia. But then there was also the presbytery of Chester, which is just south and east west of Philadelphia. And he gave a talk in 1921 called Christianity or Liberalism, I think was called. And that became an essay that was published in the Princeton Theological Review. So the origins of the book actually go back to 1920. He was thinking about this even before Fosdick preached his sermon. And he was reacting again to what’s important to see about that Protestant movement of ecumenism that was going on from the Union, the reunion of the Old School and New school Presbyterians in 1869. And Presbyterians were prominent in this Protestant ecumenical endeavor. It was also very much a social gospel endeavor. These people wanted to Christianize America.

And for all the flack that Machen’s taking of late for his. His clear error, if you want to call it sin, about race. He saw, though, that these People are also guilty of a kind of white Christian nationalism. And he was opposed to using the church in that way. And that’s part of where this book comes from. He does talk, exclude. Well, not exclusively a lot about theology in the book, but he also talks about society and politics a number of times. And he’s very critical of the social gospel movement. He doesn’t call it that directly, but he talks about using Christianity to solve certain social problems. And he’s very critical of that, especially I think it’s in chapter six or so, the chapter on the church.

So I think Machen, I mean, and he wasn’t lone one doing this. I’ve done a lot of work on HL Mencken. Mencken also saw this progressivism and opposed it. He was not a fan of where the United States went in World War I. And there were other kind of constitutional libertarian types who were opposed to these developments, both in the church and in the nation. But I don’t think I recognized as much what Machen was up to in the book when I. When I wrote my dissertation. And I’ll, you know, I don’t know. I can’t remember what you do for show notes and I’ll try to send you a link and you want to put it up there, but that’d be great. Michael. Michael Doran or Duran. I’m not sure how to pronounce his name. He’s a. He’s a foreign policy guy. He worked in the Bush administration. And now I’m not sure what think tank he works for, but he published a piece in First Things about two years ago about American foreign policy. But he was writing favorably about William Jennings Bryan and sort of contrasting the liberal Protestant understandings of America’s role in the world versus the fundamentalist one. And there I think Machen would fit in Durand’s analysis. And so there was more going on than simply a controversy in the church over the virgin birth of Christ. It was also, these were mainline churches. These were important American institutions, and they were supporting a nationalist vision in many respects.

Camden Busey: Yeah.

Jim Cassidy: I wanted to ask about the substance of the book because we’ve sort of been talking about the historical content, which is really important, excellent stuff. But also just, you know, it seems to me that maybe diving into the argument of the book, and I know that it’s got. There are various aspects of it, but Darrell, could you take us a little bit into the line of Argum documentation that Machen is making and why he’s making it that way? And I don’t know Just maybe talk about the substance of the theology and the argumentation of the book.

Darrell Hart: Right. Well, it’s a fairly simple. Fairly simple argument. And that goes to the clarity of Machen’s thought. He didn’t gum it up and try to make it convoluted and try to make it. I mean, I think it’s. It’s subtle in aspects, but it’s also still very straightforward, which is why I think the book is easy to read.

So he basically notes in the introduction that the modern world has changed dramatically from the way the world was when Christianity started. So how is it possible, especially in an age of science, to hold on to these old beliefs that Christianity maintains, especially supernatural beliefs based on supernatural realities. And he then says that liberalism is a response to that. Liberalism is trying to adapt Christianity to these modern realities. And so what liberals try to do is to take the essence of Christianity and these abstractions about the love of God, the brotherhood of man, etc. These are somehow the essence of Christianity. And these other beliefs about Jesus as virgin born or as rising from the dead or things like that, we don’t really need those. Those are just externalities to Christianity.

And then Machen’s going to walk through the book under doctrine of God, doctrine of man, doctrine of Christ, doctrine of the church, doctrine of salvation, and show how you can have Christianity without these things that liberals think are external to the faith, that actually Christianity is bound up with these things. So that leads him to conclude or to argue throughout that liberalism really is a different religion, that these broad humanitarian kinds of ideals that liberals espouse, they sound good. They try to link them to Christianity in some way, but they’re not Christianity. So that’s why it’s a different. Different religion. That, in broad strokes, I think, is the substance of the book, but it’s a very doctrinal book in the sense that he walks through, in effect, the major loci. Loci Lochi of, however you say it, of systematic theology.

Camden Busey: Absolutely. You know, that emphasis on the historic nature of the Christian message is replete throughout the entire book. But it’s not just the fact that it is historic in one sense, but also that the work of Christ continues to be evident and applicable in history now. So of course it matters what happens 2,000 years ago, but it’s also. We’re connected to it ultimately through the work of the Holy Spirit and him applying the death and resurrection of Christ unto us. I was just reading it again today, and especially the chapter on doctrine. He has a whole chapter, Every chapter is Really a chapter on doctrine, but there’s one specifically titled chapter on doctrine and it’s tremendous, it really is. And I’d encourage everyone to read it to just be reminded about these things.

Did this book, Darrell, serve? I got a couple questions on this point. One, I’m interested to see if it had an influence outside of Presbyterian circles. Because of course, as I mentioned, modernism was something that affected everything, affected the whole world, not just even Christianity, affected art in every cultural aspect of the world. It touched in one way, shape or form. But, you know, so my question in one sense is did Machen have an effect outside of traditional Reformed and Presbyterian circles, but then also within the Presbyterian circles particularly, did this book serve as kind of a, a magnet for like minded people or somewhere you could hang your hat or somewhere you could identify?

In the current Presbyterian environment, especially like with our brothers and sisters over in the pca, there tends to be a desire to have networks of like minded people within the denomination that might assist in effecting change. And, and frankly, I don’t know if that was such a thing in the 20s and then in the 30s, and even if it was or wasn’t a thing, did this book kind of function in a way of helping people to find like minded brothers and sisters and fighters in the faith?

Darrell Hart: Well, the book became very popular and it wasn’t through Machen’s own doing or the plausibility of his argument or the giftedness of his writing. He was preaching at Nassau Street Presbyterian Church in Princeton during the winter of 1922, I think maybe 23. And he was preaching with the controversy in view. One of the pew holders in the church was, what’s his first. Henry Van Dyck, who was an English literature professor at Princeton, who was the ambassador of the United States to the Netherlands during the Wilson administration. He was also very friendly with the Machens. In Machen’s correspondence, correspondence with his family, he would refer to Van Dyck as Uncle Henry. So I don’t know where those connections came from. Machen was in those kind of muckety muck circles, which is another reason why it took a lot of courage for him to, you know, to go against these people.

But Van Dyck did not like what Machen was preaching. So he called a press conference, as you could, as something of a political figure to resign his pew at the church. And he did it because of Machen’s preaching. And Machen said in one letter that so this must have been in 23, that the reporters were thick as flies at his dorm room. Door because he still lived in the dorm as a single man. And also he said that his sales of his book spiked from like a thousand a year to 4,000. So all of a sudden, Machen was on the radar of the media, such as it was then. And from then on, he is regularly asked to speak right, to represent the fundamentalist perspective.

And in fact, during the Scopes trial itself, the New York Times wanted to run a series. What Does Evolution Stand For Now? What Does Fundamentalism Stand For Now? Machen didn’t write under the title of what does Fundamentalism Stand For Now? I think he wrote under what Does Christianity Stand? It could have been what does Fundamentalism Stand For Now? But he was the one that they found to contribute to that series, which was in the. And he doesn’t address evolution at all in that essay for the Times. But that’s just one example of ways in which he was repeatedly asked to speak or write to represent that. So, you know, Machen was in sort of the right time at the right place, and then he became a figure.

And I mean, Princeton itself became a kind of network. So also, as Machen became popular, enrollments increased at the seminary, which is one of the reasons why some people didn’t like Machen, because they thought that they were bringing in the wrong kind of students. Oh, sure, the wrong kind of students being graduates of Bible colleges and not graduates of Presbyterian colleges. So Princeton was, in some ways the network. Westminster also became a network, although machen, in the 30s, he and other conservatives founded something like the Presbyterian Constitutional Covenant Union or Covenant Constitutional Union. It’s a pccu, which basically was an organization set up. And the PCA also did something like this, that if we lose certain votes, then this is ready to go to start the new denomination. So there were those kinds of networks. The other part of your question about

Camden Busey: international influence or ecclesiastical influence, I mean,

Darrell Hart: Korea, there were people who were following Machen, conservatives in the Korean Presbyterian Church who sort of used Machen as the model for what they were trying to do to oppose liberalism as they understood it in their communion. Of course, it gets really hard sometimes to see exact parallels between what’s going on in the United States and Korea. And they may have missed some of the message. And, you know, you can’t draw the lines clearly. But still, that was an inspiration in Korea. Also in Northern Ireland, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, I think, is what they’re still called, and there’s still a small communion in Northern Ireland. And they started with a controversy very similar to what Machen was undergoing And Machen in fact was in Ireland at the time of a trial that was going on in the Presbyterian Church of Ireland. And there were great affinities and great admiration of Machen among the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. So those are two examples. He also had influence on Canadians. You could even argue that the resistance of Presbyterians in Canada to the United Church of Canada, that 1925 body formed, drew some inspiration from Machen. They invited Machen to be the president in effect of the Knox Theological College, which was their seminary in Canada. He had, I think, especially in the English speaking world. Machen was a known quantity. I don’t know as much say about German speaking Protestantism to say that in

Camden Busey: researching Machen, no doubt you’ve read many if not all of his available letters. I suspect. How did he deal with that, with that pressure and that being thrust into the, the public eye? In a way, was it something he struggled with?

Darrell Hart: Well, I still remember one letter he wrote to his mother around 1930 or so when I think he said something to the effect like, I wish I could retire from these controversies and just sit back and write big fat thick books and climb mountains. Yeah, I think it did weigh on him. He was a man of means, at least family money. So he, when he had time for leisure, he could go to places like Switzerland and climb mountains, you know, so we don’t need to feel incredibly sorry for him. He found ways, outlets. But he still, I mean he, because he didn’t have a family, I mean he, as a bachelor, he had in some ways more time on his hands to devote to these things.

And every, almost every single student who studied at Princeton or Westminster, especially Princeton because I think at Westminster it became too much for him to interact with students the way he wanted to. But everyone spoke very affectionately of him. Even those who might have been liberal who disagreed with him, spoke of him being accessible. Of course he was living in the dorm, but you know, somehow he managed to juggle a lot of balls. But you know, you know, I mean, I think temperamentally was he a fighter? I mean the Machens and the Greshams as Southerners had probably some fight in them. His brother Arthur, his older brother was ran for Congress in 1926 on the anti prohibition ticket in Baltimore. Not successfully, you know, so I mean, he may have gotten some of this honestly, but his younger brother was an architect and wasn’t really involved in such things.

So people have tried to attribute the book, his involvement in the controversies to his temperament. You know, I don’t know, it’s hard to do psychological stuff from afar.

Camden Busey: Precisely.

Darrell Hart: And it’s hard also to think that, wait, this is somehow bizarre. I don’t understand why people would necessarily see this as bizarre. But then I’m also a person who’s drawn to being provocative or to people who are provocative, to people who think outside the box, who aren’t drawn to the party line. And Machen was not drawn to the party line. See, I don’t.

Camden Busey: I don’t interpret Machen. And I struggle with people that would see Machen as kind of a provocateur. I don’t read him that way at all. I mean, in my brief time in the Reformed Church and specifically within the OPC, I’ve been a member for only 12 years. I grew up in the mainline Presbyterian church, but a conservative one at that. But I’ve come increasingly aware of the fact that people don’t know. People who are outside of this mindset don’t know how properly to interpret a pilgrim in the way that Machen was a true pilgrim seeking a better country and working that out ecclesiastically and consistently.

Because I’ve seen this in other cases, too, and encountered people with various. Even opinions of me or friends of mine or Reform Forum or whatever that don’t understand what we’re shooting for and misinterpret a pilgrim ethic and a fighting spirit for the truth in those sense, for belligerency or some sort of maltemperament or as the Coen brothers might say or Buster Scruggs might say, misanthrope. You know, So I wonder, you know, and maybe we are all misanthropes. I don’t think so. But I think often this pilgrim mentality is misinterpreted. And I don’t find Machen to be a misanthrope at all. But that’s just me. But then it would be easy to write my opinion off because people would see me perhaps as one of them too.

Darrell Hart: Right, Right. I mean, if. If you look at the people who have. Who have criticized him on temperamental grounds, I do think they have a standard that most people could not measure up to.

Camden Busey: Yeah.

Darrell Hart: So it makes me think that they basically disapprove of what Machen did, but they don’t really have a good argument for it, so they’ll use that one. I mean, I don’t mean to belittle those arguments, but, I mean, Machen made, as you indicate, he did not take cheap shots. He really tried. I think he really tried to refrain from taking cheap shots. And one of the criticisms of the book was that he didn’t name enough names. But Machen didn’t want to prosecute people in the book and call them liberal in the book without actually going through the procedures of either a trial or letting them defend themselves in some way. So he wasn’t going to take cheap shots like that. But.

Camden Busey: Such, I mean, such was the conviction they convicted him in the PC usa, you know, prior to it being read. I mean, they made up their minds and didn’t even afford him necessarily a proper trial and just viewed him as someone who needed, like a cancer, you needed to get. To get rid of them.

Darrell Hart: I mean, it’s an odd way of thinking about dissent. I mean, I guess dissent can go too far. And I think we’re living in a time where it may be. But if you’re a Protestant, how can you ever think that dissenting is a bad thing? Where would Protestantism be without a Lutheran, a Zwingli? Or if you’re an American, how could you ever think dissenting is a terrible thing? I mean, you don’t have the War for Independence and American independence without some kind of dissent. So either on national grounds or on Protestant grounds, you can still say that there’s something valuable to dissent, and then, you know, then maybe talk about questions of what’s going too far. But that’s going to be a hard line to draw.

Camden Busey: Right. And that’s one reason why, church wise, we very much appreciate protecting the rights of the minority through parliamentary procedure, as difficult as that may be, and as much as that might try our patience, there is a tremendous reticence, at least in the General assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church ever to call the question, that’s just not something you do. You do not do that. Why? Because of our narrative?

Darrell Hart: Exactly. Exactly.

Camden Busey: Lesson learned. Anyway, I don’t mean lesson learned as if I tried to do that. I mean lesson learned, we learned the lesson from history, which is why we don’t do that.

Darrell Hart: Right.

Camden Busey: Oh, my. Darrell, what would you say? We’ve perhaps already addressed this question, but what would you hope or desire for new readers of Christianity and liberalism who are reading it in who knows this, whatever world we’re living in now, Evangelical wise, liberal wise, truth is whatever you want to make it. How would you want to see Christianity and liberalism finding a new voice and a new application for people today?

Darrell Hart: Give money to me to start a nation. I’m kidding.

Camden Busey: The Machen Fund.

Darrell Hart: I would like to see people who are not in Reformed churches join Reformed churches, because I think that’s what Machen was Also trying to do was to defend a Reformed church and save the one he was in. And he was, you know, I mean, I really think it’s important that the last chapter is about the church and the importance of the fellowship of the church, the importance of sacraments, the importance of worship. And it’s another piece of the argument that oftentimes people miss. And he talks in there at the very end about what a blessing it is to go to a congregation where there’s real fellowship and there’s real bonds around the word and around the table. So I think, you know, aside from joining a Reformed church, if that’s not possible, if that’s not where someone’s convictions are at least becoming serious about in their involvement in the local church and, or denomination and, or federation, etc. And keeping an eye out on the activities of their, their minister or their ministers at the, you know, at the denominational level. I think that would be a fair thing that Machen was, was about, and I think that would be a fitting tribute in a way.

Camden Busey: Yeah, that’s. That’s tremendous. I. I can’t recommend this book more highly than any book written by human. It’s so important. And if you haven’t read it, then I encourage people to pick up a copy and read it, to study it, also to study the history. Darrell did a series on machen@calvary OPC years ago that we recorded and still online. I’ll try to put a link to that in the description as well. But perhaps we can do some more things in the future. But in the meantime, of course, Christianity and Liberalism. Now, the Legacy Edition, available from Westminster Seminary.

Darrell Hart: You get a car with that? You should.

Camden Busey: What car would it be, do you think?

Darrell Hart: Isn’t that. Isn’t there a legacy. Isn’t there a legacy brand out there or model?

Camden Busey: I think there is. I can’t recall now. I think it might be.

Darrell Hart: I’m not in that league, but I thought there was. I thought I saw an ad once anyway.

Camden Busey: The Legacy Edition. Yeah, you’re right. I’m sure there is. Thank you very much to Westminster Seminary Press for sending copy of this so we can work through it. And I do encourage people to visit them online@wtsbooks.com if you don’t have a copy, pick one up. And you can always keep your eyes open to the Reform Forum store once in a while. Ryan Noah finds some first and second editions of the book and they’ll pop up and we’ll put them up there for a reasonable rate, usually less than what you’re going to generally find them from, you know, collector or whatnot. I don’t know how Ryan finds this stuff, but he finds it. And I’ve got a copy myself. Let’s see here. Old one here with dust jacket. So you know, you can find these old ones to Reverend Arthur Wake. I don’t know if you know him. No, have no idea. I hope. I was kind of hoping you did know him because then I could say my copy’s worth more. From a co worker in Christ’s Vineyard, Harvey Brown, Richmond, Virginia, May 1, 1924 in this one.

Darrell Hart: Wow.

Camden Busey: This is a 1924, since it’s second edition. But anyway, they’re out there. So of course you can, you can visit Hillsdale College online, Hillsdale Edu, a great school. Darrell teaches there, of course. Our friend Richard Gamble, who’s on the program recently, he also teaches there and church as well, where Darrell serves as a ruling elder. You can visit Pastor Everett Hennis, another friend of ours, a good group of folks out there, and hope to visit sometime soon. But if you’re traveling through Michigan, head on over to them. Where are you about the center of the mitten, right in the middle, kind of, aren’t you?

Darrell Hart: Well, at low center, about 18 miles north of Southern Michigan, the entire Indiana border, actually.

Camden Busey: It’s a good place. It’s a good country. Anyway, you can find us online@reformedforum.org we encourage you to visit us there and of course, sign up for the conference. We’d really like to see you in October, but we of course want to thank everybody for listening. We hope you join us again next time on Christ the Center.