J. Gresham Machen Bibliography

Transcription

Host: For our Sunday School sworn. I’d like to talk to you about the lives of two men I mentioned in the sermon, J. Gresham Machen and Geerhardus Vos, in 45 minutes. So it’s going to be a real challenge. But I’d like you to start with the last hymn we sung for the service. There is a Green Hill Far Away. So that’s on page 256.

So in the revised Trinity hymnal, if you go through all the pages, this is pretty unique. And the reason why is this was the last hymn put in this hymnal. This was going to be the JNR hymnal. Between the merging of the OPC and the PCA, it didn’t happen, but we ended up with the hymnal. But they said, you know, you can’t leave out Machen’s favorite hymn. The OPC said that. And so we stuck this hymnal. This is the last selection in. And that’s why it’s on this page.

Now, this is also the hymn that Machen used in regard to the Presbyterian conflict. So on May 9, 1919, was the first time he spoke in public after returning from serving in World War I on the front lines serving the soldiers. And he came back and he spoke at Princeton on the subject of the war and the church in it. And in that address he quoted from this hymn, it was the fourth line, the fourth stanza, he said that people used to say there was no other good enough to pay the price of sin. They say so no longer. If any man bravely goes over the top, he is thought to be brave enough to pay the price for sin. And so that’s a little background.

So we actually, with our four hymns, we were moving from Calvin’s favorite, I Greet Thee who My Sure Redeemer Art, to the two that were Machen’s favorite in the Presbyterian conflict and were saying at his funeral to Luther’s to the Mighty Fortress, which was the hymn of the Reformation. And part of that is because in regard to. In the 16th century, the Roman Catholic Church had gone corrupt and the Lord raised up Martin Luther.

In the 20th century, start of the 20th century, the Presbyterian Church was going corrupt, and the Lord raised up Machen, and he also raised up Vos. And so I’m going to try to tie these together for you. So the. But again, we’re kind of time challenged.

So I’m going to start in 1903. In 1903 is when Geerhardus Vos and J. Gresham Machen met at Princeton Seminary. So Geerhardus Vos was born in 1862 in the Netherlands. And he ended up teaching at the theological school in Grand Rapids for five years until 1893. And then for the next 39 years he taught at Princeton Seminary. He was professor of biblical theology for 39 years.

J. Gresham Machen was born in 1881 in Baltimore. And so when Machen graduated from John Hopkins University in Baltimore, he went to Princeton. And so he enrolls at Princeton. He’s there in 1903 now. Things are changing when Machen gets on the scene.

So Geerhardus Vos was married in 1894 to Katherine Smith. It was really how they met was he went to the library so much in Grand Rapids, the public library, that his best friend became the circulation desk person, which is Catherine. There was a little problem, though, she wasn’t Dutch and she was a Methodist, but he fell in love with her.

And so part I think of his accepting the call to Princeton was he probably needed to leave Grand Rapids because his mother didn’t speak English and it was a little tense in things, but it was also he was needed at Princeton. So he goes to Princeton, he gets married, and the first couple that calls upon the newlyweds are Woodrow and Ellen Wilson. So Vos was friends with the Wilsons all through this period of time. And so in 1903, and they were still friends in 1903, someone was talking about J.G. with me the other day.

Thank you, thank you. So Johannes was the firstborn. He was born in February of 1903. And think about this. The Voses got gifts commemorating J.G.’s birth from the Wilsons, Woodrow and Ellen, and from the Warfields, Benjamin and Annie. Could you imagine having friends like this?

I mean, so J.G. was born in February of 1903, and that was really the first year that Woodrow Wilson had moved from being a professor to being the president of Princeton College. And the college had kicked up their president to the seminary, Francis Patton. And so things were changing at Princeton all the way around because the Presbyterian Church wanted to broaden, they wanted to modernize. And Patton represented a very old fashioned evangelical model for Princeton College. So it was known as the Ivy League Bible School. And they wanted to rid that reputation, so they put Wilson in.

Wilson was the perfect choice in their minds because he had impeccable Presbyterian credentials. His father in the manse where his father pastored in Augusta, Georgia was. William was where the Presbyterian Church was started of the US, the Southern Presbyterian Church in 1862. And his father remained the clerk there for the next 37 years. And his father also said that when his son Woodrow was ordained as a ruling elder in 1897, there would be no greater honor in Woodrow’s life than being ordained as a ruling elder.

So they had their perfect honor person as far as to represent the heritage of the Presbyterian Church. But he was an utter progressive because Wilson could care less about doctrine and he really just didn’t, didn’t. You know, it’s like, oh, you can believe whatever you want to. Very much sort of like what I described this morning in the sermon. That’s Woodrow Wilson. So he takes control of the college.

But Machen in enters into the seminary where Vos is teaching. And this is right after Vos had lost the most public battle of his life. Vos had tried to stop the Presbyterian Church from revising the Confession of Faith. And so the Presbyterian Church in 1903 had revised the Confession of Faith. They had added a chapter on the love of God. They had lessened the Calvinism, double predestination. They had really lessened those things in the confession. So much so that the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, which had left earlier in the 19th century, came back in. And they had left earlier because they didn’t like the Calvinism of the Westminster standards. And with the revision they thought it’s okay to come back home. And so this is the environment into which Machen is entering.

So Machen, he was a genius in I think everything but his, I mean, Greek he was. We have his notes upon. So he gets to Princeton, he takes Vos’s biblical theology course and he really hates it. As a matter of fact, we have his handwritten notes in which in big gigantic letters at the end, right before the final paper, he says, I flunk Vos. And so this is the start of a great friendship. But you could tell the things that he got bored in. I’ve never seen this in my life. But he doodled in Greek. It’s the most incredible thing, all these doodles. It’s all in Greek.

And now I’m going to skip ahead in our story a little bit, but we have that because when he died. Machen died in January 1, 1937. His brother Arthur asked six seniors at Westminster Seminary to be the pallbearers. One of the pallbearers was John Galbraith. John Galbraith was ordained the next year as an Orthodox press trade minister and he was 24 years old. He, he died at the age of 103 and was active in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church to the age of 101.

So he was the living bridge to Machen. Him and Machen did everything together. Machen loved baseball, loved football. They would go down, watch, particularly the game of the year would be when Princeton played Penn. And the whole student body would go down and watch that football game. Plus, they were down there already where the seminary was.

But that’s jumping ahead of our story. But at first, Machen took Vos, and he just really didn’t understand him. And actually, he knew Vos’s brother better than he knew Vos in that. Vos’s brother. Bert was in the linguistics department at John Hopkins, where Machen had just got his Greek degree. And so he. Machen, was trying to describe Professor Vos to his mother. Machen wrote his mother, he was a bachelor, wrote his mother his entire life. And we have all those letters.

And what happened was, what changed is he heard Vos’s Easter sermon. So Vos had a sermon that he preached whenever someone asked, you know, all of us, you know, we have our sermons, and particularly if you’re a professor, and someone asked, do you have your sermon in the can? Well, Vos’s Easter sermon was on John 20, called Rabboni. And it’s one of the great sermons. You can read it. And Machen was stunned because it was basically. This is not like Dr. Vos in class. You know, Dr. Vos usually has a better bump of reference theologically than others, but he’s. I could tell that Machen was trying to be kind and not tell his mother that he’s probably kind of boring. And I probably can’t hear him, this little Dutchman up there talking. But this sermon had just electrified Machen, and he was just so giddy about it. And that really changed the relationship between Machen and Vos.

So Machen was the best student at the school. He and the best student, they always gave a grant to go to Germany to study. So Machen won that grant just as Vos had won that grant in 1885. They send Machen over to Germany for a year. And he’s right in the presence of the best theological liberals in the whole world, particularly at that time, William Hermann. And he loved Hermann. I believe Bill Dennison has also done some work on this. But I think a fellow student at the time when Machen was there was Rudolf Bultmann. And so, again, there’s these amazing things that happen in history where you’re sitting there going, okay, so Woodrow Wilson is giving presents to Geerhardus, Vos and J. Gresham Machen’s ruling elder. Wilson was Machen’s ruling elder for seven years.

You know, Machen is setting in he goes from that to setting in a class with Rudolf Bultmann, you know, these things. So they bring Machen back to teach Greek, because he’s phenomenal at teaching Greek. And he basically comes back and he really had to think about what he was. And he really started to come to the conviction that B.B. Warfield and Geerhardus Vos was right about the historic Presbyterian faith.

And at that time, Vos was teaching a class called the Messianic Self Consciousness of Jesus. And in it he was taking on a school of thought that believed that Jesus didn’t know what he was doing and that going to a cross was a surprise for him. It basically was popularized by Albert Schweitzer. And so that was a very dominant school of thought at the time. And Vos basically said, so this ties into the whole conference we just had. For those of you who are present. Vos was thinking in terms of the deeper Protestant conception. That man was created to commune with God. And after the fall, the Lord sent Jesus Christ the second Adam, that he might pay the price, that we might be forgiven and his righteousness might be imputed, but also that that communion bond can take place again. And Vos said, in the essence of this class, no one can take to their heart a religious savior who didn’t understand himself. So that he was getting to the heart of. They had denied the deeper Protestant conception.

And so it didn’t strike Machen at that time. Machen was having a really good time. He was teaching Greek. He was at Princeton. He was going to Princeton football games. He was just living it up. And so he was also putting off ordination. I hate to always tell if anyone’s under care here, any young men. So he put it off for eight years, and he didn’t get ordained until 1914.

But 1914 was a very big year because 1914 was when Francis Patton retired as the president of Princeton Seminary. And he was 70 years old. And so the question was, who would be the next president? B.B. Warfield wanted to be the president. He was the logical choice. He was a senior faculty member. He was the one. Well, the other choice, if you wanted to broaden the seminary, was J. Ross Stevenson. J. Ross Stevenson had been a pastor in Baltimore, Machen’s hometown. But J. Ross Stevenson represented something different. He hadn’t even attended Princeton as a student. He had been a McCormick graduate. So why would J. Ross Stevenson suddenly rise to such prominence? Well, J. Ross Stevenson knew how to pick his friends.

So in 1909 at Princeton, there had been a student rebellion. And the students were very upset with Machen and William Park Armstrong and others, they really were tired of having to study so hard in Greek and Hebrew and they wanted the seminary to lessen the courses in Greek and Hebrew and to have more practical theology courses and to have more courses based on the English Bible and not the primary languages. J. Ross Stevenson was a member of the Princeton board. The person he reached out to for help to try to figure out to do with the student rebellion was Woodrow Wilson, who was in his last year of the presidency of Princeton before going on to become Governor of the state of New Jersey the next year and then two years later the President of the United States.

So 1914, you know who J. Ross Stevenson’s reference was to be president. He had the President of the United States saying he would be a good president for the seminary. That’s not a bad reference. So the two candidates, then it came down to a one vote difference. Stevenson was elected president.

And so the very first thing that Stevenson did as president is he wanted to put some of the reforms that the 1909 student rebellion the students had been asking for. So he wanted to change the curriculum and change the amount of hours that the students studied. Now Princeton didn’t charge tuition. It’s basically could you survive? Could you put in the time in the Greek and the Hebrew and could you survive? And so this was a radical change. And so Warfield was the opponent to these changes and he had lost right by him side. They were both agreeing.

So here is Machen, one of the youngest members of the faculty. And this is one of the places where Machen blinked. So Stevenson had told Machen, we’re going to protect. So this is a compromise from the student rebellion. We’re going to protect all the language classes, an army are not going to have any Greek classes taken away. The students will still have the same hours of Greek and other things. And so Machen voted for the changes with that understanding. And I think it’s one of those things where I think after he voted, probably less than 24 hours later, he utterly regretted what he had done. You sort of get that impression reading Ned B. Stonehouse’s biography of Machen.

But Warfield, Warfield was just distraught. So Warfield never attended another faculty meeting with J. Ross Stevenson present. J. Ross Stevenson went to Europe for World War I for six months and Warfield attended every meeting. Stevenson comes back, Warfield’s not attending these meetings because he thought that Stevenson was a fraud and Stevenson was a fraud. And again, I’m going to run out of time so we can’t talk about him.

But World War I happens, and that’s really what changes J. Gresham Machen’s life. So when the war breaks out, he’s too old to enlist as a soldier, which he really wanted to do. And so he got an appointment. Ironically, Stevenson did help him with this. Got an appointment to the YMCA to go and serve on the front lines. Now in the Machen household growing up, you only spoke French at the dinner table. So he was perfectly equipped to be on the front lines of France interacting with the Allied soldiers, whatever they were called, the French and American soldiers.

And so plus, again, these things are just staggering. So German is like a sixth best language. Who goes to Germany to set in classes and be a grad student with your sixth best language? And he didn’t blink. I mean, as far as it was so easy for him. I mean those type of gifts are very rare.

But Machen had them. And so he goes to. He goes to the front lines and it changes his life. It really changes his life in that the chaplains in the churches sermon after sermon on John 6. Why bread rationing? The bread in view in John chapter six is literal bread for the war effort. If anything could be the opposite of what Jesus is saying there in chapter six, that’s it.

And then he goes and he’s finally out of his little. The Lord. This is the way the Lord’s taking him out of his little, little place in Princeton. He had been sheltered and he started to realize, talking to these soldiers stuff started to realize all this is really. They don’t know what. They don’t know what Jesus Christ has done or they believe they can save themselves. And that’s why this hymn became important to him.

So he comes back home in 1919. Now Geerhardus Vos had been totally marginalized during World War I. He was a German, Dutch German didn’t matter to the Princeton students. We’re not taking him unpatriotic. So they stopped taking his classes. And there was some good reason for it.

So we all know of the theologian Abraham Kuyper. Okay, so the Netherlands stayed neutral during World War I. But didn’t mean Kuyper had to totally be neutral. So Kuyper had been the prime minister of the Netherlands up until 1905. One of his great buddies was the Kaiser Wilhelm.

Now Wilhelm was a Calvinist. Do you guys know that he was catechized. I mean, he was. We grew up in America, American history. And we all think of the Germans were the bad guys. Kaiser was a Calvinist. Now he was loony, but he was a Calvinist. And Kuyper had a good friendship with him. So much so that in 1917. Now what’s the 1917. It’s the 400th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. So the Kaiser sends Kuyper a portrait of Martin Luther to celebrate the Reformation in 1917.

So you were guilty by association because. And also this will be interesting. Hank maybe can find this out. I read this once. I am compulsive note taker and I tend to be organized. I read this once, but didn’t either write it down or lost the note. But I had read in some article or book in regard to Bavinck was also supportive of the Kaiser in Germany during World War I. So what happens is that it’s pretty well known that in regard to the Dutch and the German. And so here’s Vos. And so no one wants to take his. I mean read F. Scott Fitzgerald all through this. He’s on campus during these times and after. It’s just unpatriotic. And that was meant so much. And so Vos’s classes absolutely dwindled. No one was attending them.

And so Machen comes back, speaks upon the war and both Machen and Vos. So Machen speaks on May 9, 1919, one week later, the Presbyterian Church met in General Assembly and officially endorsed the League of Nations, which was Woodrow Wilson’s proposal in regard to how the United States could be sort of like one big church and bring peace to the world. You no longer need the preaching of the Gospel. The League of Nations can do it. And Machen and Vos all right through it and both really reacted against it strongly. Where you can find that in Vos is at the end of the eschatology of the solitude. He’s talking about the League of Nations in that article at the end.

So the Presbyterian Church is turning in a broader direction. It’s thinking in terms of man we have this great opportunity. I mean they were pretty spoiled from 1885 until 1920. There was only seven and a half years in which the President of the United States was not either born in the Presbyterian Church, an officer in the Presbyterian Presbyterian Church or raised in the Presbyterian Church. Benjamin Harrison had been a ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church. Grover Cleveland was the son of a Presbyterian minister. Teddy Roosevelt had been raised in the Presbyterian Church before joining the Reformed Church in America. And Woodrow Wilson was not only a ruling elder, but a son of a minister in the Presbyterian Church. And the only one who really, you know, William McKinley was probably as a Methodist, was probably more devout than all those guys. He was a Bible believing Methodist. And then you have Taft who didn’t believe.

But Presbyterianism is riding high and they’re thinking, you know, here’s our opportunity. So not only the League of Nations, they also are thinking that we can have a one big Protestant church. And so they put together an organic plan of Union which 35 churches would come together in a loose preamble. And the person who presented this plan to the General Assembly on the floor of the General Assembly was J. Ross Stevenson.

So Geerhardus Vos and Machen were also against that. And Machen was the one who was writing against that. Vos didn’t write against that, Machen did. Those articles that Machen wrote became the basis of his book, Christianity and Liberalism. But both Vos and Machen had an advantage. They had someone they could fall behind and that’s B.B. Warfield. He was the leader, he was the unquestioned leader and they could be sort of behind him and he could be out front.

But on February 16, 1921, in Geerhardus Vos’s front yard, Warfield collapsed. Warfield and Vos were best friends. They walked their dogs together for 30 years. I would have just. I would have given anything. I would have. I would have for every. They walked in the morning and they walked at night. Wouldn’t you have given anything to been there? So that’s why their correspondence stops. They don’t need to write letters to each other. They walked morning and evening. And Vos had always loved dogs and so he would always have his dog behind him and walking up and down. And so Warfield had collapsed on Christmas Eve in 1920, had finally gotten back to health and this was his first day back to class. On February 16, he gets done and he collapses.

There’s a dispute upon this I talk about in the book, but I really think that’s when he collapses and he dies that night. And basically you have two options. In the main, who’s going to lead the confessional? Presbyterians, Geerhardus Vos, who had done that and failed miserably in one sense in 1903 with the confessional revision, or this young man, J. Gresham Machen, who actually was equipped for it. And Machen is the one who went forward.

So the 1920s, Machen was leading Vos by this time. Again, I don’t know if he ever recovered from World War I and he was very unpopular from that time forward and his health was never good. And so Machen goes forward and is the leading figure in the 1920s, in the pestrant conflict.

But with Vos there was one advantage to the fact that he was so unpopular. Let’s say that he was the reason that you went to Princeton. And let’s say that you got in a class where you were basically the only one other than the required classes, you were the only one sitting there. Wouldn’t that be pretty neat? And that’s what Cornelius Van Til did.

So when Warfield died, the faculty needed to replace Warfield as a conference speaker. Later that year, Vos reached out to Louis Berkhof. Louis Berkhof was the professor at Calvin College at the time, but Louis Berkhof had come from the Netherlands. They’d been part of the same church as Vos. They come to America, Grand Rapids. Vos was his hero. Berkhof had went to Princeton to study under Vos, had actually been a student with fellow student with Machen. And so Berkhof is now lined up to come replace Warfield in this conference.

But at the same time Berkhof had a young man in his classes who wanted to know what to do with his future. And it was Cornelius Van Til. And he told Van Til, you should go study with Vos. And Van Til told his best friend J.J. De Waard, we should go study with Vos. And De Waard’s wife Hattie, soon to be wife, basically said, John came home and he says we’re going to Princeton. Because they wanted to go study with Vos. So Cornelius Van Til and John J. De Waard had Geerhardus Vos all to themselves. And so they basically were cleaning everything. He was teaching in the class the same time Machen was fighting this battle on the front lines. They were soon joined a couple years later by John Murray, a Scotsman. And Murray loved Vos and Vos loved Murray. And so that’s the way the twenties went. And soon after that was Ned B. Stonehouse, another Dutch boy.

And so what happens in the Presbyterian Church is that Machen took the stand. He did now just. He had written Christianity and Liberalism published in February of 1923. It didn’t sell. It was horrible. It just sat on shelves. I mean the one wanted it.

What happened was In December of 1923, the progressives in the church who were really, really upset that the plan of Union had gotten defeated. It barely got defeated. And Machen had been the ringleader of getting it defeated. They responded with the Auburn Affirmation in which 1100 ministers gathered in Upper New York and created a document that really said like the virgin birth and the resurrection of the dead are mere theories. You can or cannot hold to them in the Presbyterian Church. They’re non essential. So that appeared in print after they got everything done on January 8th in the New York Times.

And the New York Times had a good enough sense to know there was a young professor at Princeton who had just published a book. And so January 9, 1924, J. Gresham Machen’s life really changed. Now he was the face of the confessional defense in the Presbyterian church at that 1924 General Assembly. It’s really this is where the great error was made. The Presbyterians that were confessional and Bible believing should have disciplined the Auburn Affirmation signers. But they decided to go for the Moderator.

So the Moderator controls things a great deal in the Presbyterian Church. And they had Clarence Macartney, he became the Moderator. They won some short term victories, but they really. Henry Van Dyke, who had been an arch enemy of Machen, realized that was the moment that the liberals were going to win. And it did play out that way.

And so when Machen was brought up to be appointed as the new professor of apologetics in 1926, J. Ross Stevenson objected. He was the president of the seminary and through this the Presbyterian Church created a special board to investigate because you had the president disagreeing with the faculty recommendation of Machen to become the professor of apologetics. This board investigates.

In that investigation, Machen says it’s been his privilege to study under five men and now to serve with them. And he’s so thankful for their support and everything they stood for. Well, one of those men was Vos. So Vos was behind Machen the whole time in this controversy, but Machen was on the front line. So Machen loses the battle.

And so on September 25, 1929, Machen forms Westminster Seminary. It was very quick. They had to gather a faculty together. But they have a dinner that evening when the very first class. We have a lot of Westminster grads in here, but they have a dinner that evening. And Katherine Vos and her son Bernard is attending because Katherine Vos was all for J. Gresham Machen, passionately so. She was the fighter. And she uttered the words, it’s hard to work for one institution and pray for another. Yes, that’s right. I got that right.

And so Machen starts the seminary, but Vos doesn’t go with him. And that’s always been a great question why? And I think that the answer is probably his son J.G. probably had it best. It was financial. He was in very poor health and nearing retirement and he didn’t go. I think he should have but he didn’t.

But that actually increased the friendship a little bit between Machen and Vos. They were Penthouse and Vos very, very much admired Machen. And so they kept in regular correspondence for the rest of their life. One of the interesting episodes I’ve always thought was again, how the Lord works, is that when Vos finally came to retirement in 1932, there was eight weeks in which he lived five houses apart from Albert Einstein. And I’ve always thought that people were thinking, there’s the real genius. When Einstein walked up the street and I said, no, it’s that tiny little bent over man with a cane walking his dog five houses down. There’s the genius. But I always wonder, since they were born on the same day, and I wonder if these two Germans tasked each other if Einstein was a walker. And so that would have been pretty cool to see what that talk would have been.

So Machen continues on with Westminster Seminary. Vos goes to California. Now, as soon as he goes there, his wife Katherine, dear wife, is diagnosed with dementia immediately when they get there. Now she, at that time was. Was also rising to fame because Eerdmans was publishing her children’s Bible stories. They would end up selling more volumes than anything. All the books that her husband had published the other year combined didn’t come close to what his wife sold with this. It was. People loved it.

So they would go every summer to Williamsport, to Roaring Branch, Pennsylvania, which is by Williamsport. And they had a rhythm to their life. The post office was one mile away. So Vos would walk every day with his children to the post office. But what they would do for their devotions now, they grew up Dutch. He grew up Dutch. So the old way in the Dutch growing up the way Geerhardus Vos did, you prayed before breakfast, had breakfast, read scripture and prayed after you did that again for lunch and you get this again for dinner. So you would be continually the family. That was part of what family life was. And so they’re in Williamsport, Roaring Branch.

And so what he did often was he let his wife take the Bible instruction and he would pray. And from that developed, because she kept on saying, well, there’s no good books out there. And so she developed her own stories and the children’s Bible stories. Now their daughter Mary Ann Radius also developed two books of Bible stories also. So even though I’m very indebted to Katherine Vos’s ones, the ones that reflect Geerhardus Vos’s teaching more are the daughters. So if you ever come along, Mary Ann Radius’s two volumes on the children’s Bible stories are gold. So she had her dad review them all because her dad was living with her when she was writing them. So but still Catherine’s are still fantastic. So it’s like picking nits a little bit there, but so he goes out to California.

Machen meanwhile, is in controversy because in 1932 the book Rethinking Missions had appeared. And in that book it was from Harvard University looking at Presbyterian and Protestant missionaries. And it became apparent that many, many Presbyterian missionaries believed that their sole purpose in being on the mission field was to bring Western values and the standard of living to poverty stricken areas. And one of the missionaries who firmly believed in doing this was the most famous missionary in the world and that was Pearl Buck, who had just won the prize for the Good Earth and one of the most famous novels of the late 1920s, early 30s. And so Pearl Buck didn’t believe that Jesus Christ actually lived, but she didn’t believe that should stop her from being a Presbyterian missionary because her purpose was what I was talking about this morning, a school of ethics in which you teach people to follow after the good man Jesus and raise their life. And Machen said we shouldn’t be sending money to people who don’t believe that Jesus Christ is the savior of sinners. So he started the independent board of Presbyterian Foreign Missions to have an opportunity for Presbyterians to channel money to Bible believing missionaries.

So Auburn Affirmation, and also with what had happened in the years after the Auburn Affirmation, you could state openly without discipline that there was no such thing as a virgin birth, there was no such thing as a resurrection from the dead. You could attack those and many other doctrines, but if you didn’t put your dollar in the offering plate for the Presbyterian Church, you were sinning and needed to be kicked out of the ministry. And that’s what they did to Machen. They brought him to trial for that reason and then they prohibited him from, to make a defense from the Bible.

And Machen understood this to be a violation of the formal principle of the Reformation. Okay, go back to the whole controversy of Luther in regard to how do you decide what authority is? And the reformers stood by sola scriptura, the word of God alone, so that the principle of Presbyterianism became all church power is ministerial and declarative. You are bound by thus saith the Lord. The Roman Catholic Church believes that all church power is magisterial, that the magisterium is the one who determines the teaching of the Bible for you and then rules upon it. The Presbyterian Church had turned in a Roman Catholic direction. And not only bringing J. Gresham Machen to trial, but prohibiting him to turn to the primary authority, the Word of God, to make his defense.

And on that basis, he went through the whole process. And on that basis, after he was defrocked, that’s when 10 days later, he and others gathered together to form what we now know as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Geerhardus Vos was in California. He was supportive of this. As far as we can tell, he was supportive of Machen, supported for the stand.

But Vos, by this time, he definitely was never a fighter. And the instant he retired from teaching theology, all he did was write poetry. And so Machen goes and starts the church and then pours himself into it. A lot of things happen. You’ll have to bring me back sometime to talk about all the things that happened.

But Machen goes and makes a trip out to the Dakotas over Christmas break to preach at new young OPC churches. Catches pneumonia, and he dies. And when Geerhardus Vos finds out, he immediately writes a letter to Machen’s brother Arthur, and says in it that while J. Gresham was for a short time, his student, that Vos learned more from him than he ever learned from Vos. And how to praise the Lord that he had raised up this mighty servant and all that J. Gresham had done.

So that was in January of 1937. Vos would live 12 more years. He would end up in Grand Rapids. And during that time, when he lived in Grand Rapids, they made a little place for him. Mary Ann did his daughter upstairs. And she said that all his boys, all the ones who were in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Cornelius Van Til, Ned B. Stonehouse, all of them, whenever they came to Grand Rapids, they would come to the house and they just knock and they’d go straight upstairs. And oftentimes they’d even leave the cab running out front. And two hours later they come back out, get in and go.

And so when I wrote this biography of Vos, the reason why it’s so heavily weighted towards the Orthodox Presbyterian Church is that’s where all the primary documentation is. Because everyone in our church that was fellowshipping and corresponding with him, and he in turn was very appreciative. And so, like, for instance, how do you. So if you are retired and all you do is write poetry, how do you show your appreciation for someone? You write poems for them. So, like, he wrote poems for Ned B. Stonehouse and gave them to him. Now, wouldn’t that be a Christmas gift to get a poem from Geerhardus Vos in the mail. I mean, that would be pretty cool too.

So he died in 1949. H.H. Meeter, a very famous theologian in his own right, officiated in Grand Rapids. They sent the body to Roaring Branch to be buried. There were five people present there. Princeton doesn’t send anyone. Two of the five are Cornelius Van Til and John J. De Waard, those two men in 1922 who were sitting in the classes when no one else.