Standing Firm for the Faith – J. Gresham Machen

One of the great sorrows of modern Fundamentalism is that many of her future leaders are woefully ignorant of the lives and ministries of her past leaders. Fundamentalism was birthed by men who were passionate for truth, burdened for the lost, and committed to a pure and obedient church. In failing to remember their lives and stories, we stand in danger of forgetting and forsaking the movement they started. One of the more significant individuals in the early history of Fundamentalism was the scholar-preacher, J. Gresham Machen. Although many of us are passingly familiar with Machen’s name, we associate him mainly with the teaching of New Testament Greek and the founding of Westminster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. Thankfully, the story of his life and ministry has been preserved for us in a small volume written by one of his former students and co-laborers, Ned B. Stonehouse. Entitled, J Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir, this biography is available through Banner of Truth publishers.

John Gresham Machen was born on July 28, 1881. His parents were deeply committed to Christ and raised their three boys in an environment where the Bible was honored, family prayers were regular, and where membership and attendance at the services of their church were considered sacred obligations and genuine privileges (p. 21). His father, Arthur Machen, was fifty-four years of age when Gresham was born. He was a prosperous lawyer in Baltimore and as such, assured himself that his boys were raised with a deep appreciation of learning and culture along with their personal commitment to Jesus Christ. This commitment to cultivating the Christian life in his family bore rich fruit in all three of the Machen sons but particularly in J. Gresham. By the time he was twelve, he possessed a mastery of Biblical material and the Westminster Shorter Catechism far beyond his tender years. In 1898, Gresham enrolled at Johns Hopkins University in pursuit of a degree in the classics. He excelled academically during his student years and graduated with honors in 1901. The following year, he enrolled at Princeton Seminary where he would eventually spend most of his teaching ministry. At the end of his seminary training, Machen was awarded a fellowship to study theology in Germany with the invitation to return to Princeton to teach. During his year in Germany, Machen would be exposed to both the allurement and the danger of liberal theology and Higher Criticism. One professor in particular, Wilhelm Herrmann, was particularly captivating to Machen. His dynamic teaching style, magnetic personality, and his apparent religious fervency initially masked the danger of the liberal theology he was teaching. Machen was thrown into a spiritual confusion that would last for several years as can be seen in this excerpt from one of his letters home:

“I can’t criticize him (Herrmann), as my chief feeling with reference to him is already one of deepest reverence. Since I have been listening to him, my other studies have for a time lost interest to me; for Herrmann refuses to allow the student to look at religion from a distance as a thing to be studied merely. He speaks right to the heart; and I have been thrown all into confusion by what he says – so much deeper is his devotion to Christ than anything I have known in myself during the past few years. I don’t know at all what to say as yet, for Herrmann’s views are so revolutionary. But certain I am that he has found Christ; and I believe that he can show how others may find Him – though, perhaps afterwards, in details, he may not be a safe guide.” (p. 106)

Machen was to later conclude that the Christ Herrmann taught was not the historical Christ of the Bible. Having thus personally experienced the power and dangerous allurement of liberal theology, it is no wonder that Machen devoted significant energies in combating liberal theology when it surfaced in America within his denomination. One of the major weapons he wielded in the fight was his pen. His articles and letters reveal an appreciation for men who were passionate about evangelism and who were willing to fight for biblical orthodoxy. After hearing Billy Sunday preach, he wrote the following words in a letter, “The sermon was old-fashioned evangelism of the most powerful and elemental kind. . . . The climax was the boundlessness of God’s mercy; and so truly had the sinfulness of sin been presented that everybody present with any heart at all ought to have felt mighty glad that God’s mercy is boundless. In the last five or ten minutes of the sermon, I got a new realization of the power of the gospel.” He went on to conclude, “Every morning, on the page of the paper devoted to Billy Sunday, a Unitarian statement appears in opposition. I like Billy Sunday for the enemies he has.”

Machen’s first major book was his treatise defending the virgin birth of Christ. His second, and perhaps most influential work was a defense of Biblical Christianity against the advances being made by liberalism entitled Christianity and Liberalism. Still in print, this work contends the doctrines that have been given up by Liberals have left them with a Liberalism that is in fact not Biblical Christianity at all. So convinced was he of this dichotomy that he was willing to stake his entire academic career, reputation, and ordination in the Presbyterian church to fight against any intrusion of Liberalism in his denomination and in the seminary where he taught. Perhaps his statement lamenting the inclusivism being promoted by men (Dr. Erdman in particular) in leadership best explains the battle he would later fight.

“Dr. Erdman does not indeed reject the doctrinal system of our church, but he is perfectly willing to make common cause with those who reject it, and he is perfectly willing on many occasions to keep it in the background. I, on the other hand, can never consent to keep it in the background. Christian doctrine, I hold, is not merely connected with the gospel, but it is identical with the gospel, and if I did not preach it at all times, and especially in those places where it subjects me to personal abuse, I should regard myself as guilty of sheer unfaithfulness to Christ.”

That battle would culminate with the reorganization of Princeton Seminary in the Spring of 1929, Machen’s departure from Princeton to found Westminster Theological Seminary that same year, and Machen’s excommunication in 1936 from the denomination to which he had devoted most of his ministerial life and energy. Ultimately, the battle he fought for Fundamentalism would claim his life. He died on January 1, 1937.

Perhaps the best summarization of Machen’s influence in the fight for truth was recorded by a Boston newspaper after the Presbyterian Synod had rendered its final decision against Machen preserved in the following statement:

“Strangest of all church trials in modern times is that which has just convicted Prof. J. Gresham Machen of disobedience to the authorities of the Presbyterian Church . . . Here is a man of distinction in scholarship and unquestioned devoutness who for twenty years and more has declared that those who control the power of his communion have repudiated the authentic and official Presbyterian faith in favor of a modernistic emasculation of the pure Gospel of the Bible and the Reformation. . . It amounts virtually to this: one man is declaring that, in administrative effect, his whole church has become heretical.”

May the Lord grant to Fundamentalism young men as committed to battling for truth, orthodoxy, and biblical separation in our day as Machen was in his.