Truth Really Matters

The bright seminary professor was young, just 30, when his perspective changed.  A 78 year-old missionary spoke in the chapel on the dangers and struggles he had experienced in violent anti-Christian cultures.  The old man reminisced on how the seminaries had changed in his lifetime, from studying and exploring theology to the current controveries:  “Now the very vitals of faith are attacked.”  He said that some in his shoes might be glad to withdraw from the fight, but rather he wished he were just starting out, “that he might have a part in the great struggle of the Church.”

Moved by the exhortation, the young professor looked around upon the student body, thought of the “desperate narrowness” displayed in the exam papers he had been grading, thinking of the defection of many universities from the faith, and wondering just how many of his fellow faculty members actually believed in a supernatural Christianity.

He realized that in former ages, one might be tempted to trust in Church leaders . . . but that certainly was not prudent now.  His conclusion:  “Either we shall sink into hopeless discouragement or else we shall remove our confidence altogether from men, and trust solely and absolutely in the divine Spirit . . . There is only one thing to say – “Not by might, nor by power, but by thy Spirit, O Lord God of hosts.”

That young man was one of the bright stars of the age in biblical scholarship, had studied in America and abroad at the finest institutions, and was now teaching at the preeminent school in the country . . . and his conclusion was no more profound than that of a newly born again bricklayer, or the bricklayer’s homemaking wife, namely, that the battle is spiritual and our strength is in the Lord, not in the brilliant scholarship or erudite arguments of academia.

The year was 1911.  That seminary, notably, was Princeton, and the young man was John Gresham Machen (1881- 1937), often cited as “J. Gresham Machen.”  (Pronounced gress’um may’chen.)  I just finished reading the biography, Machen’s Hope:  The Transformation of a Modernist in the New Princeton, by Richard E. Burnett.  The author sees that 1911 incident as a turning point for Machen.  Until that point in his life he had placed great hope in the university system, but lately he had seen widespread defections among administration and faculty.  He had complained about the sleepiness of the students, but now saw them as “totally unconscious” of the challenges ahead.  Yet he saw great movings of the Spirit and growth of a fervent church in lands overseas.  This pattern seems to have only increased in the century since.

I have heard references to Machen for many years, but have never looked into his life until I found this biography.  His most cited book (to my knowledge) is his 1923 work, Christianity and Liberalism, in which he distinguishes a fundamentalist, Bible-believing faith from a liberalism which he contends is not Christianity at all.  His intent was to show that true Christianity is not merely a ‘life’ apart from a doctrine, neither just a collection of doctrines, but rather “a life founded on a doctrine.”  His book drew the battle lines between conservatives and liberal Protestants for the rest of the century.

Machen led a revolt against modernist theology at Princeton and was forced out of both the school and his Presbyterian denomination, leading a group of faculty out to form Westminster Seminary in 1929 and helping to found what became the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Francis Schaeffer, in his book The Great Evangelical Disaster, makes the case that Machen’s “defrocking” was perhaps the most significant U.S. news story in the first half of the 20^th century, as it was representative of the decline of all the major denominations in the country.

In Machen’s 1913 publication on Christianity and Culture, he analyzed the decline of the church’s influence on the culture and on the intellectual struggles of the day.  He noted that our whole system of schooling works to keep religion and culture far apart.  Five days a week the student acquires knowledge with no connection to the spiritual.  The natural sciences are divorced completely from theology.  History is separated from the true and vital arc revealed in biblical revelation, and Jesus, in particular, is never mentioned as a historical figure, despite His overwhelming impact on the last two thousand years.  When Sunday comes, the instruction has little exercise for the intellect and noone is expected to prepare, certainly not the student, neither much effort if any for the Sunday School teacher.

Is it any different today?

Machen grew up in a conservative, Calvinistic, “Old School Presbyterian” family and congregation in Baltimore.  The family was well-off and the Franklin Street Church’s pastor was a young, energetic intellectual.  Harris Kirk was “at home in the classics, in literature, in art, architecture, and music, in history, in science, in philosophy, in theology.”  He became a mentor to young John, who had just earned a bachelor’s degree in classics at Johns Hopkins U.  Kirk may have influenced John’s developing convictions that the “rigidly scientific method” he had learned in Greek literature studies might be applied to the New Testament.

The bio never explains just what a “rigidly scientific method” in language studies means.  I have always suspected that those outside the physical sciences (social science, history, psychology, etc.) love to appropriate the terminology of science to prop up the vagueness of their fields.

The president of JHU, Daniel Gilman, and many of the faculty were modernist “Christians” at best – secular presuppositions trumped biblical theology in every discipline.  Machen loved the analytical courses on Homer and Plato, and embraced the idea that the same scholarship could be applied to the Bible, an infinitely more important book.  The fallacy is, of course, that secular scholarship will always treat the biblical text as if produced by primitive ancients espousing mythology;  miracles are out of bounds immediately.  Mythology is worthy of study, but let no one consider there is any historical or metaphysical truth to be found!  (The modernist “Christian” then, as now, would be a theistic evolutionist, for example, despising the historicity of Genesis chapters 1 to 11.)

After a year of graduate study at Johns Hopkins, Machen entered Princeton Seminary in 1902.  He was disappointed to discover that his fellow students were “exactly like ordinary college fellows,” not spiritually mature at all; in fact, the student culture was akin to a secular fraternity.  He also found his courses boring, not rigorous at all like his experience at JHU.

At this time, Princeton University (formerly Princeton College) had just undergone a coup, replacing their traditionalist president with Woodrow Wilson, intending to transform “Old Princeton” into “New Princeton.”  Wilson initiated swift reforms to cast aside its former Christian “dogmatism”; for example, as Burnett puts it, “to emancipate Princeton from the intellectual shackles of such conservatism when it came to biology, but also when it came to interpreting the Bible.”  In other words, evolution is the new dogma in biology and despite paying lip service to the Bible, we’ll allegorize it whenever convenient.

Wilson was the ideal leader for this transformation with his pedigree as a committed and pious Presbyterian.  He continually affirmed his “positive faith” in Jesus Christ while secularizing every aspect of the “New” Princeton.  The phrase “wolf in sheep’s clothing” comes to mind.  By 1906 Wilson was hiring non-Christian faculty and led the board of trustees to formally declare Princeton U. to be a “nonsectarian institution.”

Woodrow Wilson, of course, eventually becomes the President of the United States and is instrumental in executing the Versailles Treaty at the end of WW1, its terms largely responsible for the eventual outbreak of WW2, along with much of the continuing chaos in the Middle East.  Wilson was the prototype of the modern Democrat – he knew best how the people of the world should live, whether they like it or not.

In 1905-6 Machen spent a year in Germany, enjoying the rigor of their university system, the faculty-scholars, and the sociable German students.  He found himself defending  American efforts in the late 19^th century to establish universities on the same level, emphasizing research and publication, along with teaching.  The philanthropy of industrialists like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Leland Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and John D. Rockefeller helped institutions like JHU, the U. of Chicago, and MIT with resources to build facilities, acquire libraries, and hire notable faculty.

Daniel Gilman, the first president of JHU saw the possibilities as limitless, as long as the benefactors and leaders of these new universities “cannot be suspected of personal, sectional, political, or denominational prejudices.”  We can see in this Satan playing the long game.  First, transform the universities away from their Christian roots by emphasizing scholarship and progress.  Then replace their Christian worldview with that of Darwin and Marx, expunging any trace of the Gospel, indeed, making the Christian Gospel the despised enemy of academia.

John’s parents hoped that he would choose the ministry as a profession.  His father, Arthur, wrote to him that the nation was in desperate need of both a spiritual and an intellectual mode of preaching in its pulpits.  Arthur saw a “lamentable spread of infidelity” across America.  “This generation has almost ceased to be Christian; it would not be surprising if the next generation were godless.”  This was in 1903!

John’s mother, Mary, was distressed at times over the doubts that John expressed, doubts that were inevitable from his coursework in Germany under a faculty that included quite a few unbelieving heretics.  John insisted to his mother that his integrity forced him to explore all points of view.  Truth really matters, after all.  “There is just one way for me to attain a strong Christian faith – namely by patient, absolutely free investigation of all contending views in a large-minded reverent way.”

Too many modern ‘professing’ Christians claim to do that as they ‘deconstruct’ their faith, but from what I’ve heard there is little if any exploration of the biblical side of the argument.  The typical deconstructor embraces hearsay that justifies a reprobate lifestyle and avoids the best apologetics at all costs.  Often, evolution is a linchpin for deconstruction, but the newborn skeptic knows nothing of the creationist literature.  How weak and, frankly, hypocritical!

Machen’s principal area of investigation was the veracity of the New Testament record.  In John’s collegiate naivete he considers the skeptics to be “the best minds of the day,” and that they “ask for nothing but fair investigation.”  In his later years, though, his stock criticism of liberals was their lack of honesty, sincerity, and integrity.

The modern Marxist left has pegged the meter by refusing debate, embracing cancel culture, vilifying and persecuting – even prosecuting those who embrace godly values.  When they have complete political control, in Communist or Islamic countries, they have no need for debate at all, with the power to imprison, torture, and execute.  Accordingly, Christians must be vigilant and stay on offense, speak truth, and proclaim the Gospel relentlessly.

Machen began his teaching career at Princeton Seminary with some frustration.  He struggled to put courses together that he was happy with, and judged faculty meetings as “particularly long and stupid,” “a trying interruption” to his work.  He found preparation for his first lecture on Textual Criticism to be painful.  The students thought he went too fast, but he was worried about staying ahead of the students in preparing lectures.

I recall preparing to teach my first course at AFIT (Air Force Institute of Technology), a graduate course on statistical physics.  I had a bit of the same panic, at first, to insure I stayed ahead of the students.  But one climbs the learning curve in any new endeavor, including teaching.

Over the next couple of years Machen ‘awoke’ to skepticism within the camp.  A professor at Princeton U. (not the Seminary), Lucius Miller, published his essay “Modern Views of the Bible,” in which he opined, “. . . science has created an entirely new universe for us.  We are living in a different world from that inhabited by our grandfathers.  Evolution has raised anew, and in different form, the questions of the ultimate whence and whether.  The new astronomy and the new biology have made the universe so big that man has trembled for his age-long importance.  The new physics and chemistry have made him fear for his very soul’s existence.”

Miller argued that for the modern man, traditional arguments to defend the existence of God and the veracity of the Bible no longer applied.  He went on to assume the Bible was filled with legends and mistakes and that “we must employ historical criticism to find out the facts and then bring the facts to our Christian standard for a final estimate.”

Sadly, Machen agreed with that last point, not yet realizing that when you start your ‘criticism’ with atheistic presuppositions, your conclusions will invariably be atheistic.  Princeton U. President Wilson liked the essay:  “I have read the article with careful attention and do not see how any reasonable person could object to it.”  Princeton had stood firmly against skeptical criticism throughout the 19^th century, but not anymore.

The Seminary showed some infection in 1909 when a student movement against the rigor of the coursework went public.  They wanted courses to be more ‘relevant,’ with material they could use in the pulpit after graduation.  Machen was disappointed in the intellectual laziness he saw and stood against changes to the curriculum.

The ‘revolt’ hit the regional press, much to the embarrassment of the administration.  The press was sympathetic to the students; for example an editorial in the Philadelphia Ledger:  “Less theology and more sociology must mark the progress of teachers and preachers in the future; otherwise churches must fail to command respect and patronage adequate for the mission they seek to accomplish.”  Of course, this depends on just what the mission is.  It might not be wise to let the world define the church’s mission.

Machen wrote privately to his family that the leader of the revolt “is a bright fellow who has loafed and treated the Seminary course as a joke.”

These were attacks on secondary fronts, however.  The principal front was, as always, whether the Bible is TRUE, in fact, the inerrant word of God.  As Machen awoke to his need to enter the fray, he saw three possible outcomes.

First, “Christianity may be subordinated to culture.”  Briefly, the culture may select aspects of Christian principles or practice that are suitable while rejecting the supernatural, the lordship of Jesus Christ, the lostness of humanity, and the Gospel as the ultimate solution.  Machen:  “Men do not accept Christianity because they can no longer be convinced that Christianity is true.”

I agree.  His point is still the basis for the use of sound apologetics.  Modern western culture has many wild streams, but the main point is whether God is there and whether He has revealed TRUTH to us in Scripture.  If the Bible is TRUE, there is no other truth in its class.  If man is lost in his sins and his eternity depends on the one and only Saviour, then that is the central issue of life . . . everyone’s life.

A second possible outcome is isolation.  Christians can isolate themselves from the culture, despising every aspect of it.  Machen warned that “the Church is perishing today through the lack of thinking, not through an excess of it.”  Machen anticipated Francis Schaeffer in wanting to engage every aspect of the culture, including the intellectual disciplines and the arts, demonstrating that the Christian worldview uniquely informs all human accomplishment.  Without such engagement, he warned, “The great current of modern culture will sooner or later engulf her (the Church’s) puny eddy.”

These thoughts led Machen to the third outcome, consecration.  Instead of conceding biblical studies to the enemy, or “destroying the arts and sciences or being indifferent to them, let us cultivate them with all the enthusiasm of the veriest humanist, but at the same time consecrate them to the service of our God.”  He echoes (anticipatorily) here Cornelius Van Til, and the biblical principle espoused in 2 Corinthians 10:3-5, “. . . casting down imaginations . . . and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.”

Machen’s ideas here were fully developed in his 1913 essay, “Christianity and Culture,” published in the Princeton Theological Review.

Machen recognized that the churches were largely oblivious to attacks from the culture and the academic establishment.  The churches of his day simply did not understand that the universities had become profoundly opposed to Christianity.  Amazingly, this blindness has persisted for the last century.  It seems that only in the last few years that conservative Christians have come to recognize the dangers to their children from the entire educational establishment.  If American Christians have any hope in rescuing our nation from Marxism, wokism, and tyranny, they had better rescue their children out of the government’s school system.

There has always been a remnant, of course, who have invested in Christian schooling and home schooling.  COVID, surprisingly, helped a lot to wake people up to the degradations of the K-12 system.  Hopefully, more and more children will be educated within a Christian worldview through 12^th grade and, if desiring college, find one of the few colleges that won’t try to destroy their minds and hearts.

In 1913 Machen hosted two promising students who were deciding between the seminaries at Princeton and at Union Theological Seminary.  Both schools at this point used critical methods, but came to different conclusions.  Machen explained that the student should really learn what Christianity is before learning all the objections to it.  With help from Charles Erdman (fellow faculty), they had some success in convincing one of the prospects that Princeton was the better choice.  But the experience drained Machen.  Such battles shouldn’t exist between seminaries!

In 1914 Machen was offered an opportunity to write Sunday School curriculum for the PCUSA.  He was grateful that the denomination’s head wanted a conservative (unusually), but disappointed that he was constrained on content.  “I am carefully warned not to make it too ambitious.  Apparently modern pedagogy has a horror of facts.  Impact upon the spiritual life, but as little history as possible – that seems to be the idea.”

This is perhaps an insight into the deliberate degradation of content that has plagued the ‘canned Sunday School’ industry of the last century.  I’ve seen such evidence repeatedly over the years whenever we visited an SBC Sunday School.  Worse is the built-in temptation for teachers to despise studying in lieu of merely following the ‘quarterly.’  Sigh.

Machen was distressed at the volume of work demanded – “I am to furnish them every week for fifty-two weeks without intermission with material amounting to about ten pages of print.”  Also, he was directed to adopt a ‘chatty tone.’  Nevertheless, he snuck in as much historical background as he could.  Occasionally, he had battles with the editors.  Overall, the experience gave him considerable insight into the experience of typical American churchgoers.

In 1915 Dr. Erdman invited Billy Sunday to preach at Princeton, filling a downtown auditorium with 20,000 people.  Machen was thoroughly impressed.  Sin was made exceedingly sinful which helped Sunday make the case that God’s mercy is so boundless.  “In the last five or ten minutes of that sermon, I got a new realization of the power of the gospel.”  Nothing about the ‘social gospel,’ the presentation was just “so aggressively and uncompromisingly old-fashioned.”

The local papers had nothing but disdain for Sunday’s preaching.  Machen:  “I like Billy Sunday for the enemies he has.”

President John Hibben of Princeton U. refused to let Billy use Alexander Hall on campus.  The university was in an uproar over the Seminary’s invitation to Sunday.  The incident made clear the separation between university and seminary.

Machen:  “Of course ‘the peculiar Sunday theology’ is really just a circumlocution for the old word ‘Christianity.’”  The conservatives had followed the pattern that Jesus established – put the issues on the table and let the divisions be plain for all to see.

Immediately after the refusal to let Billy Sunday preach on campus, Pres. Hibben invited Albert Fitch to give a series of lectures.  Fitch was president of Andover Theological Seminary and a graduate of Harvard and Union Theological Seminary.  Fitch was a Unitarian, denying the deity of Christ, the virgin birth, and the existence of Hell and the devil.  The journal Presbyterian declared, “If this be a specimen of ‘academic freedom’ and professorial infallibility, the less we have of it the better.”  Another editorial was entitled “Baal Priests in Alexander Hall.”  It concluded, “The downfall of Princeton University is one of the most striking of the signs of the times.  The Carmel fire is falling again.  If the Lord be God, follow Him; if Baal, follow him.”

The split between university and seminary was now public and severe.  In criticizing Billy Sunday’s sermons, Princeton U. Dean Andrew West called out some of Billy’s most outrageous declarations:  “If a minister believes and teaches evolution, he is a stinking skunk, a hypocrite, a liar,” and “If a woman on the avenue plays a game of cards in her home, she is worse than any blackleg gambler in the slums.”  West also found vulgar and indecent Sunday’s preaching against immodest dress, lewd dancing, and promiscuity.  West applauded Hibben’s exclusion of the evangelist from the campus.

The author argues that these events were a trigger for the 1915 fundamentalist-modernist controversy.  West and Hibben came under attack, especially because of their disengenuousness.  West claimed that with “few exceptions” the university still taught “the fundamental, historical, evangelical Christian faith.”  Hibben defended his invitation to Fitch insisting that Fitch taught “essential elements of Christian belief” and was not in “his formal teachings a Unitarian.”

Machen accepted ordination and a promotion from Instructor to Assistant Professor in the Seminary.  In his inauguration service he defended the proposition that the Christian faith is rooted in history.  “For gospel means ‘good news,’ tidings, information about something that has happened.  In other words, it means history.  A gospel independent of history is simply a contradiction in terms.”  He decried modern preachers and historians who claimed that Jesus was a myth, that even if He existed had nothing supernatural about Him.

Furthermore, it is absurd to construct a Christian faith around a mythological or naturalistic Jesus.  Only Jesus’ resurrection from the dead can explain the rise of the Christian faith and the churches.  “The resurrection of the dead is a fact of history.”

That’s the ground upon which John Gresham Machen would stand for the rest of his life.  Machen served for 14 months at the front lines of WW1 as part of the YMCA’s ministry. Afterwards, he wrote that the war came because the church had failed, especially “to tell modern people that they are sinners.”  Even returning soldiers must be told of their sins, even heroes need forgiveness . . . “If Christianity does not end with the broken heart, it does begin with it.  The way to Christ lies through the conviction of sin.”

Indeed.  I wonder if Richard Burnett plans a second volume for this biography.  This work takes the young theologian to the point where he finds his foundations and takes a public stand against modernism.  What Machen is mostly known for occurs after the point where Burnett closes.  For example, one of the quotes for which Machen is most widely known comes from his 1921 paper, “The Second Declaration of the Council on Organic Union” in the journal Presbyterian:

“Modern naturalistic liberalism and Christianity are two distinct religions; they are not only different religions, but they belong to two entirely different categories.  There could be no greater contrast than that between these two.  A man who decides for one decides against the other.”

Amen.  The difference between the two is Heaven or the Lake of Fire, for eternity.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com