J. Gresham Machen: Shapers of Christianity Sample Chapter

The following is taken from our forthcoming title Shapers of Christianity by Nick Needham, which presents brief sketches of twelve men from church history. The book will be released on 19 May and you can sign up for the waitlist here. The following sketch, on J. Gresham Machen, was first published as an article in the February 2023 edition of the Banner of Truth Magazine.

Liberalism on the one hand, and the religion of the historic church on the other, are not two varieties of the same religion, but two distinct religions proceeding from altogether separate roots.
(Christianity and Liberalism)

John Gresham Machen¹There are various ways of pronouncing ‘Gresham’ and ‘Machen,’ but in our subject’s case, Gresham was pronounced ‘Gressum’ and Machen was pronounced ‘May-chun.’ Confusingly for devotees of supernatural fiction, the great Christian fantasy writer Arthur Machen (no relation, though he lived at the same time) pronounced his own name ‘Macken.’ was the man in whom the tensions between traditional credal Christianity and the forces of liberalising modernism broke into the open in titanic conflict. He looms larger in the American consciousness than elsewhere; but this is not to deny that his influence has been felt in other lands. One of my closest English friends was delivered from liberalism and converted to biblical faith by reading Machen’s classic Christianity and Liberalism.

Machen was a native of Baltimore, Maryland, born on 28 July 1881. Like his great mentor B. B. Warfield, he was a Southerner by heritage and conviction; part of this heritage included membership in the Southern Presbyterian Church. Machen’s father was a brilliant and wealthy lawyer, and Machen grew up at the very heart of cultured Maryland society.

Machen studied classics (Greek and Latin language and literature) at Johns Hopkins University, followed by theology at Princeton Seminary, where he sat at the feet of orthodox giants like Warfield and Francis Patton (1843–1932). After Princeton, he spent a year studying in Germany, in 1905. Here his life was shaken to the core by the leading liberal theologian Wilhelm Hermann (1846–1922) of Marburg University, whose joyous passion in communicating Christ—as Hermann understood him—overwhelmed Machen. Hermann belonged to the then dominant Ritschlian²After Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89), founder of the school. school of German liberalism, which conceived of Jesus in terms of his practical religious ‘value,’ and the moral impact he makes on those who encounter him through the New Testament and its proclamation. Jesus, for Hermann, was not God incarnate as classically understood, but possessed all the value of God for the human soul; he was the one object in the world that awakened and inspired ‘absolute confidence and an absolute joyful subjection; [so] that through Jesus we come into communion with the living God and are made free from the world’ (Machen’s summary of Hermann’s teaching).

We may wonder why Machen was so overpowered by Hermann. Part, at least, of the answer seems to be that he discovered, in Hermann, a passionate and sincere devotion to Christ, bubbling over with life and joy, that he had not (as yet) found in biblical Christianity as represented by its contemporary teachers. When orthodoxy is dull and grey, if not quite dead, it inflicts upon itself a catastrophic wound, tempting honest souls to seek life and joy elsewhere. Machen was ‘almost persuaded’ by Hermann to become a Ritschlian liberal.

Ultimately, Machen stood firm in his Reformed faith, unwilling to trade in his belief in the Redeemer’s true deity, no matter how clothed such denials were in passion, devotion, sincerity, and cutting-edge scholarship. But he had trembled on the brink. This meant that his coming conflict with liberalism would be no detached matter; Machen had seen the face of the enemy at its most beautiful and seductive, and nearly surrendered. This enabled him to contend with liberalism as one who had felt its warm embraces, so that he grasped the nature of the conflict, as it were, from within.

In 1906, Machen began his teaching career at Princeton Seminary, with New Testament as his subject. His time at Princeton coincided with the great Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy in American Christianity. ‘Fundamentalist’ was derived from a twelve-volume essay series, The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (1910–15). The term is now pejorative, denoting a narrow-minded obscurantism, perhaps allied to religious intolerance and even violence. That, however, would be an unfair and inaccurate characterisation of the original movement, which overflowed with scholarship and mental breadth, counting among its proponents such luminaries as Warfield himself and Scottish Reformed giant James Orr (1844–1913).

As the Fundamentalist movement developed, it is true that it began taking on some of the less attractive qualities for which it later became notorious. Machen himself was always ambivalent about the name and the movement, despite coming to be regarded as its prime champion; he disliked its growing preoccupation with what he felt were cultural taboos rather than clear biblical essentials, and absence of commitment to the church’s historic creeds and confessions.³Machen was always remarkably free of cultural taboos, possessing a strong independence of thought that sometimes put him at odds with the prevalent attitudes of the day. For example, he opposed Prohibition when virtually all evangelicals approved it, approved of the movies (he was a Charlie Chaplin fan) when almost all evangelicals condemned it, and sympathised with Germany during the First World War when almost all Americans were anti-German. But as Machen said, ‘In the presence of a great common foe, I have little time to be attacking my brethren who stand with me in defence of the word of God.’ As for labels, he affirmed: ‘What I prefer to call myself is not a “Fundamentalist” but a “Calvinist”—that is, an adherent of the Reformed Faith. As such I regard myself as standing in the great central current of the church’s life—the current that flows down from the word of God through Augustine and Calvin.’

Machen’s contributions to the Fundamentalist side of the controversy included his scholarly defence of the supernatural character of the apostle Paul’s religion (The Origin of Paul’s Religion, 1921), of the virgin birth (The Virgin Birth of Christ, 1930), The Christian Faith in the Modern World, and The Christian View of Man (both 1935, originally radio lectures that year), and his masterpiece Christianity and Liberalism (1923). His central thesis in the last-named work was to critique the liberal version of Christianity as, in reality, not being the Christian religion at all, but a different manmade religion, since it denied all Christianity’s basic supernatural and historic tenets. Machen did not want to deprive liberals of their civil liberties; they were entirely free to practise their liberalism. But in the name of honesty, they must stop pretending it was Christianity. He especially detested what he looked upon as the rank insincerity of men subscribing to creeds and confessions which they manifestly did not believe, and torturing the language of those creeds to make them mean something no honest person could think they really meant.

The liberal controversy spilled over into Machen’s seminary and church. As liberalism made increasing inroads into Princeton, Machen led an exodus from the seminary in 1929 to form a new theological training school, Westminster Seminary, whose tutors included famous apologist Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987), systematic theologian John Murray (1898–1975), and Old Testament scholar O. T. Allis (1880–1973). Westminster became and remains the single most influential Reformed seminary in the world.

When in Machen’s perception liberalism made analogous inroads into American Presbyterianism, he found he could no longer conscientiously support his church’s official missionary program—it was sending out ‘missionaries’ who did not have the true gospel to proclaim. His first response was to use his wealth to fund a new independent missionary program, rooted in historic credal Christianity; but his liberal-controlled denomination tried him for ‘insubordination,’ deposing him from its ministry in 1934. With a body of sympathisers, Machen established the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1936.⁴It was originally called the Presbyterian Church of America, but legal complications resulted in its changing its name to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. The OPC continues to this day, faithful to the vision of Christianity that had gripped Machen.

Machen died relatively young of pneumonia on New Year’s Day 1937, at the age of fifty-five. He never married, and in some ways led a solitary, perhaps lonely life.⁵The only woman to whom he was in any sense attracted was a highly cultured Unitarian. The differences in religion between them proved an impassable barrier. However, his outstanding championship of historic Christianity and the Reformed faith during the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy has left an abiding legacy, in his writings, in Westminster Seminary, and in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Perhaps the noblest tribute to Machen at the time of his death came from journalist H. L. Mencken (1880–1956), well-known for his acidic witticisms, and no friend of orthodox Christianity; yet Mencken was a great friend of honesty and learning, and affirmed in his obituary of Machen that both qualities had been on Machen’s side in the Fundamentalist-Modernist conflict:

He was actually a man of great learning, and, what is more, of sharp intelligence. What caused him to quit the Princeton Theological Seminary and found a seminary of his own was his complete inability, as a theologian, to square the disingenuous evasions of Modernism with the fundamentals of Christian doctrine. He saw clearly that the only effects that could follow diluting and polluting Christianity in the Modernist manner would be its complete abandonment and ruin. Either it was true or it was not true. If, as he believed, it was true, then there could be no compromise with persons who sought to whittle away its essential postulates, however respectable their motives. Thus he fell out with the reformers who have been trying, in late years, to convert the Presbyterian Church into a kind of literary and social club, devoted vaguely to good works. Most of the other Protestant churches have gone the same way, but Dr Machen’s attention, as a Presbyterian, was naturally concentrated upon his own connection. His one and only purpose was to hold it [the Church] resolutely to what he conceived to be the true faith. When that enterprise met with opposition he fought vigorously, and though he lost in the end and was forced out of Princeton it must be manifest that he marched off to Philadelphia [home of Westminster Seminary] with all the honours of war.

To read more brief biographical sketches of leading figures from church history, from Irenaeus of Lyon and Gregory Nazianzus to John Wesley, Tikhon of Zadonsk, and B. B. Warfield, sign up for the Shapers of Christianity Waitlist.