During the first half of the twentieth cen­tury J. Gresham Machen was widely re­garded as conservative Protestantism's most articulate and forceful defender. When he died suddenly on January 1, 1937 at the age of 55, Presbyterians and Re­formed mourned the loss of a man who had almost single-handedly kept Calvin­ism alive even if not entirely well. Casper Wistar Hodge, the grandson of Charles Hodge and one of Machen's colleagues at Princeton Theological Seminary, wrote that with Machen's passing, the church had lost "the greatest theologian in the English-speaking world." W. J. Grier of the Irish Evangelical Presbyterian Church believed that no one else of his generation more resembled John Calvin than Machen.

And The Banner of the Christian Reformed Church editorialized that "the cause of orthodoxy has lost its most prominent cham­pion in our country, the Church of Christ a truly great reformer."

A short list of Machen's accomplish­ments over his relatively short life justi­fies these assessments. He had taught New Testament since 1906, first at Princeton Seminary until 1929, and then at the newly formed Westminster Theological Semi­nary for the last seven years of his life. His care for and accessibility to students alone would have been sufficient to shape the lives of many Presbyterian pastors and scholars. But Machen was more than a gifted teacher. He was also the foremost conservative New Testament scholar in the United States and displayed his wisdom and expertise in books such as The Origin of Paul's Religion (1921) and The Virgin Birth of Christ (1930). In these works, which received the praise of conservatives and liberals alike, Machen defended the historical reliability of the New Testament narratives, demonstrated the connection between the historical Jesus and Reformed orthodoxy, and revealed the inadequacy of naturalistic accounts of Christ and the early church. Furthermore, he wrote and spoke constantly to popular audiences. The most significant of his popular writings were two books written at the height of the funda­mentalist controversy. The first was Chris­tianity and Liberalism (1923), a book that argued intelligently for the essential in­compatibility of liberal Protestantism and historic Christianity. In the second, What is Faith? (1925), Machen defended the intellectual integrity of Christianity while exposing the anti-intellectualism and sub­jectivism of liberal theology.

But he was more than a popular teacher, accomplished academic and gifted writer. He was also a prominent figure in the ecclesiastical controversies that surfaced during the 1920s and 1930s as the North­ern Presbyterian Church accommodated liberal theology. The fundamentalist con­troversy understood correctly was arguably the most significant battle of twentieth-century church history. For the last six­teen years of his life Machen was con­sumed by that struggle in every aspect of his life, from personal relationships to pro­fessional advancement. In fact, what made Machen so remarkable was his courage and dedication to a cause that was so un­popular and cost him so dearly.

Unlikely Fighter⤒🔗

Machen's courageous stand for the Re­formed faith could not have been predicted by his early life and training. He was born (1881) and reared in a prominent Balti­more family with deep ties to the South, and ran in the elite circles of the North­eastern cultural establishment throughout his life. His father, Arthur W. Machen, from Centreville, Virginia, was a well-re­spected lawyer, member of various cultural institutions, and elder in the Franklin Street Presbyterian Church. His mother, Mary Gresham Machen, from Macon, Georgia, was an author and devout Presbyterian who taught all three sons the Westminster Shorter Catechism and all the kings of Is­rael and Judah. She was hostess to numer­ous dignitaries in the Machen home. Machen's parents surrounded him with all the finery of Victorian culture and encour­aged him to pursue a first-rate education.

Machen's academic training was also unusual for someone identified with a movement known for its ignorance and anti-intellectualism. He did not leave home to go off to a university but enrolled at the nearby Baltimore institution, The Johns Hopkins University — one of the pace-set­ting schools associated with the academic reforms of the late nineteenth century. Machen was a classics major and particu­larly enjoyed the Greek language and lit­erature. After graduating first in his class in 1901, he stayed on at Hopkins for a year of graduate work in classical Greek. He left Baltimore the following year to reside in the small town of Princeton, New Jer­sey, where he enrolled in the regular course at Princeton Seminary as well as a Mas­ters program in philosophy at Princeton University. Machen found his studies at the seminary to be a bit confining — he did not care for the practice of required atten­dance. But he distinguished himself to the faculty, winning several prizes in New Testament studies. He followed up his training at Princeton with a year-long stint in Germany, one semester at Marburg and one at Goettingen, for advanced work in Biblical and theological studies.

Even though Machen displayed a supe­rior gift for biblical languages and an abil­ity to contribute to the field of New Testa­ment scholarship, he remained undecided about a vocation until he was thirty-three. No one in his family had ever been or­dained as a minister or had become a semi­nary professor. Machen also was known to enjoy college football games, the the­ater, golf, tennis and mountain climbing. Because of the expectations of students and church folk, he wondered whether becoming a seminary professor might require liv­ing a less active and less pleasurable life.

Plus, Machen had doubts about how deeply he had appropriated the Christian faith. His studies at Johns Hopkins, Princeton and in Germany had exposed him to biblical scholarship that questioned the veracity of Scripture. But Machen's doubts went deeper than intellectual con­cerns. Integrity demanded that whatever he decided to do with his life be something of ultimate consequence. This was even more the case if he went into biblical schol­arship and the training of ministers. Until Machen felt entirely comfortable with work as a seminary professor he would not fully embrace the work and life of theological education. Even so, he returned from Germany in 1906 to become a lec­turer in Greek and New Testament at Princeton Seminary and by 1914 had re­solved his doubts sufficiently to pursue ordination, a step required to become an assistant professor, a position in which he remained for the next fifteen years.

Though Machen settled into the routines of seminary life, becoming a popular pro­fessor, identifying with the seminary's theological tradition of Calvinism and a high regard for the Bible, and participating actively in a local church, he still de­sired a more vigorous outlet. The outbreak of war in 1914 among European powers and America's eventual involvement pre­sented such an opportunity. Machen knew that as a minister he could not bear arms and considered becoming a chaplain or ambulance driver. He eventually decided to serve as a YMCA secretary and was stationed in France from 1917 until the Ar­mistice. Exposures to the horrors of war made a profound impact upon Machen. Already skeptical about the direction of Western culture, Machen became even more aware of the false optimism and high regard for human accomplishments after serving in the war. Most Presbyterians of Machen's day, even the strict Calvinists would have been postmillennialists. But the war convinced Machen that the direc­tion of human history was not improving. Consequently, he returned to the United States in 1919 with a sober estimate of human nature and where Western society was headed.

The Presbyterian Conflict←⤒🔗

Machen's experience during the first World War also turned out to be a form of training for the battle with theological lib­eralism of the 1920s and 1930s. After studying in Germany he knew firsthand the destructive nature of recent biblical scholarship. But seeing how thoroughly the mainline denominations in the United States had identified liberty, democracy and social justice with the cause of Christ made Machen all the more resolute in op­posing the witness of the American church. He believed most Protestants had become so concerned with the economic and po­litical problems of this world that they had abandoned all interest in Christ's conquer­ing sin and death and giving hope for the world to come.

Evidence of liberalism in the Northern Presbyterian Church took a variety of forms. It could take shape in such obvi­ous forms as Harry Emerson Fosdick's sermon, "Shall The Fundamentalists Win?" in which the noted modernist re­duced such doctrines as the virgin birth and the inerrancy of Scripture to old fashioned ideas that were no longer appropriate for educated Christians. Or liberalism could manifest itself in the various denomina­tional agencies which did not so much deny cardinal doctrines but did pursue a range of activities, from medicine to education, which undermined the church's task of proclaiming the gospel and saving souls from sin and death. As Fosdick himself said in his notorious sermon, the world order was being torn to shreds politically and economically and all fundamentalists offered in response was the virgin birth of Christ and his literal second coming. "What incredible folly!"

But Machen was up to the challenge. He worked with other conservatives to orga­nize a movement that opposed liberalism within the denomination. He also became a major reason for conservative students enrolling at Princeton Seminary, many of whom would also join conservative ranks. And one of the reasons for Machen's in­creasing visibility was his important, even if short, book, Christianity and Liberalism. In that work he made a clear case for the essential antagonism between historic Christianity, a religion of sin and grace, and theological liberalism, a religion of morality and uplift. Even though the book rankled many liberals, it remains what one historian has called "the chief theological ornament" of conservatives.

Still, despite the favorable reception Machen's book received from journalists and observers of the ecclesiastical contro­versy, Christianity and Liberalism met with opposition from fellow Presbyterians. In fact, when the 1925 General Assembly appointed a committee to study the cause of the dispute within the denomination, the committee's report blamed conservatives for name-calling and failure to use the for­mal procedures of church polity.

The irony of the church's refusal to con­demn liberalism was that it did so in the name of tolerance and diversity. Yet, such liberality did not extend to conservatives. In fact, the policies of toleration embraced by the Northern Presbyterian Church could be quite vindictive. This was especially the case for Machen who over the last ten years of his life experienced numerous in­dignities from church officials who prided themselves on Christian love, forbearance and preserving the unity of the church.

In 1926 the directors of Princeton Semi­nary nominated Machen to fill the open chair of apologetics, a decision that re­quired the ratification of the General As­sembly. But his opponents at the seminary, who were moderate evangelicals, as well as denominational officials used his political views against him (he opposed Prohibition in a church that voted Repub­lican more often than today's Christian Right) and circulated rumors that he was temperamentally deficient and not equipped to assume the new teaching responsibilities. To make matters worse, Machen's opponents used this episode to launch an investigation of Princeton Semi­nary, the only denominational agency that consistently affirmed the church's theo­logical standards and also criticized liber­alism aggressively. The committee given the task of investigation recommended a reorganization of the seminary's adminis­tration, a change that moved conservatives from a majority position on the old board to a minority status on the new board. Machen believed that this administrative shake-up compromised Princeton's theo­logical identity and so he founded Westminster Seminary in 1929 to perpetu­ate the theological and polemical tradition of Old Princeton.

Perhaps the greatest indignity Machen faced because of his consistent and faith­ful opposition to liberalism in the Presby­terian Church came a few years before his death. In 1933 he led the formation of the Independent Board of Presbyterian For­eign Missions, an agency designed to send out conservative missionaries and protest the liberal policies and practices of the of­ficial denominational missions board. Of course, church officials objected to the new agency as a rival to their own. But rather than following due process, church offi­cials drafted an official document, the Mandate of 1934, that declared the Independent Board unconstitutional and re­quired presbyteries to bring Independent Board members to trial. In the winter of 1935 Machen was eventually brought to trial by his presbytery. When it came time for Machen to present his defense the ju­dicial commission ruled that it would hear no evidence concerning liberalism in the official missions board or the legality of the Independent Board.

As he said, "I am to be condemned on the ground that I have disobeyed a lawful order but am not al­lowed to be heard when I offer to prove that order is not lawful."

He added that the judicial commission had "dishonored Christ" before it had humiliated him. But the humiliation Machen experienced at the hands of the Northern Presbyterian Church's denominational machine was truly astounding for its blatant unfairness. According to the religion editor for a Bos­ton newspaper, the ruling against Machen was "deplorable" and "unpardonable," es­pecially since Machen affirmed "the very letter of the church's belief."

Yet, Machen was undeterred. After ap­pealing his case to the General Assembly and losing the appeal, he and 5,000 other conservatives formed in 1936 the Ortho­dox Presbyterian Church. And only six months later he traveled to North Dakota to rally support for the new denomination and answer charges from local mainline Presbyterian ministers that he was a dis­reputable fellow. During that trip in late December Machen came down with pneu­monia and died on New Years Day, 1937.

It was an ironic end to an impressive life. A man who had grown up in the lap of wealth and refinement and who gave himself unceasingly to the cause of the Re­formed faith, died in the Roman Catholic hospital of a small provincial mid-West­ern town. Machen's life could have turned out very differently. He could have com­pleted a Ph.D. and contented himself with a teaching career. He could have won the approval of friends and peers by avoiding controversy in the church. But Machen had the courage of his convictions. He knew that it was not enough just to lecture in the classroom or write scholarly books. The cause of Christ demanded an ever vigi­lant stand for the truth and opposition to error. It also demanded the integrity of the church's witness. It was one thing for individual ministers and church members to be orthodox. It was another entirely for such orthodoxy to be reflected in the agen­cies and policies of the denomination at large.

Machen also had the comfort of his con­victions. He knew that his only true hope, both in life and death, was in his Savior, Jesus Christ. On his death bed he wrote in a telegram to a colleague at Westminster: "the active obedience of Christ, no hope without it." That hope gave Machen the courage to stand for his Lord even when that stand was very unpopular. And that same hope provided comfort when he suf­fered the consequences of his faithfulness. It is no less the case today that the church of Jesus Christ needs the same kind of faithfulness and courage that Machen ex­hibited in his day.

When J. Gresham Machen wrote Chris­tianity and Liberalism in 1923, the book was not the sort that would win friends or advance his career. He pulled no punches. Machen's thesis that liberalism was "un-Christian" infuriated many Protestants who still maintained great influence within America's leading cultural institutions. Machen also wrote that liberalism was "the greatest menace to the Christian Church" and was "a type of faith and practice that (was) anti-Christian to the core." "Whether or not liberals are Christians," he added, "it is at any rate perfectly clear that liber­alism is not Christianity." Just as bold was his assertion to Protestants who were still suspicious of Roman Catholics that al­though the Church of Rome represented a perversion of the Christian religion, "natu­ralistic liberalism (was) not Christianity at all."

The polemical character of Christianity and Liberalism also made it the kind of book that someone with Machen's education and breeding would not have been expected to write. Because of its blatant critique of lib­eralism, Christianity and Liberalism identi­fied its author immediately with a movement known for its anti-intellectualism, revival­ism and exotic teachings about the Lord's return. As a scholar, committed churchman and confessional Presbyterian, Machen would not have been readily mistaken for a fundamentalist. So the question is why Machen would write a book that identified him with a popular religious cause which gave him noticeable discomfort.

To answer this question requires atten­tion to the origins of Christianity and Lib­eralism. Critics of fundamentalism and Machen's book have argued that he was criticizing the lofty and inaccessible views of liberal theology in Germany which he had learned while a student there from 1905-1906. But in reality Machen had the American church scene much more in view. From his perspective the errors of liberalism stemmed as much from the American context as they did from Ger­man higher criticism or liberal theology.

Liberalism and Church Union←⤒🔗

In 1920 Machen was a first-time delegate to the General Assembly of the Northern Presbyterian Church. There he heard about plans for the union of the largest Protes­tant denominations in the United States. (None other than the president of Princeton Theological Seminary, J. Ross Stevenson, presented these plans to the delegates.) The plan would have allowed for the autonomy of the participating denominations but en­couraged greater cooperation on all fronts. Aside from the plan's implicit assumptions about the nature of Christianity and the task of the church, it embraced the ideals of modern business practices. By coordinat­ing and cooperating everywhere from for­eign missions to the work of local churches, Protestants could achieve greater efficiency. What was the sense of having five different congregations in a small town or three different denominations repre­sented in missions work to a particular country when these congregations and missionaries were duplicating each others' efforts? In effect, the plan — a similar one resulted in the United Church of Canada (1925) — saw little difference between Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Con­gregationalists, Episcopalians and Lutherans. All American Protestants were engaged in a similar work and so should consolidate their enterprises.

American Protestant plans for church union were hardly new. Ever since the Civil War, Protestants had ventured into a number of cooperative efforts. Among Northern Presbyterians alone church union and cooperation was a dominant concern from 1870-1920. In 1869 Old School and New School Presbyterians reunited even though some of the Old School theologians at Princeton Seminary insisted that the New School had never repudiated the Arminianism of some of its ministers. In 1873 Northern Presbyterians led the way in founding the American branch of the Evangelical Alliance, an interdenominational organization that promoted a vari­ety of missions, educational and philan­thropic endeavors. In 1880 the Presbyte­rian Alliance came along as an alternative for Presbyterian denominations that re­sisted cooperation with non-Presbyterians in the Evangelical Alliance. These ecu­menical efforts led to the 1906 union of the Northern Presbyterian Church and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, a com­munion that had been formed in the first half of the nineteenth century and was ex­plicit in its rejection of the Calvinism in the Westminster Standards. Finally, in 1908 the largest Protestant denominations formed the Federal Council of Churches with Presbyterians again playing a lead­ing role in the negotiations. In all of these cases the theology of the respective de­nominations' confessions took a back seat to Protestant desires to Christianize the United States. Fears about the growing prominence of Roman Catholicism, Sabbath-breaking, and the consumption of al­cohol prompted Protestants to put aside differing understandings of the nature and means of salvation in favor of reforming American society.

The 1920 plan for church union that Machen heard, built on nearly half a cen­tury of Protestant ecumenism. It called for even greater consolidation and further weakened the doctrinal identity of the Prot­estant communions. Aside from arguing for greater efficiency, the plan furthered the churches' identification with America's ideals of liberty and democracy. Machen and other faculty members at Princeton wrote articles for Presbyterian periodicals in opposition to the plan. In almost every case the principal objection was what the plan would do to the distinctive theology and practice of the Presbyterian Church.

Even though the plan went down to de­feat, it alerted Machen to the serious de­cline of theological identity among North­ern Presbyterians. His efforts to oppose the plan put him in touch with other conser­vatives in the denomination, especially in the vicinity of Philadelphia. During a speaking engagement for elders in South­ eastern Pennsylvania Machen gave an ad­dress that turned out to be the substance of Christianity and Liberalism. Conse­quently, the book is best understood as an extension of his criticisms of church union as well as a thoroughgoing broadside against American Protestantism's capitu­lation to its culture.

Liberalism Defined←⤒🔗

In this book Machen discusses four senses of liberalism. The first and the one that attracted the most criticism from fun­damentalists was the identification of lib­eralism with naturalism. Theological lib­eralism, accordingly, was an effort to ex­plain Christianity apart from miracles or supernatural intervention and special rev­elation. The motive for a naturalistic un­derstanding of Christianity stemmed from liberalism's commitment to scientific ac­counts of truth. For Christianity to be plausible to modern educated men and women the church would have to remove those elements that made no sense from a scien­tific perspective. In this sense, liberalism was an apologetic strategy to reconcile the claims of Christianity with the findings of modern science. While Machen conceded the sincerity of this strategy, he still op­posed it forcefully. His reason was that by removing the "particularities of the Chris­tian religion" to which scientific objections may arise, liberal Protestants had actually changed Christianity into an entirely dif­ferent religion, one without the "doctrines of the person of Christ, and of redemption through his death and resurrection." For this reason he argued that liberalism rep­resented "a return to an un-Christian and sub-Christian form of the religious life."

Though the naturalistic assumptions and conclusions of liberalism received the most strenuous objections from fundamentalists, Machen went farther and talked about liberalism in a second sense as a form of mor­alism. The best example of liberalism's moralistic outlook was its conception of Christ. Unlike historic Christianity, Machen argued, which regarded Christ as the object of Christian faith, liberals con­ceived of Christ as the example of Chris­tian faith. What mattered most about Christ, then, was not what he accomplished for believers through his life, death, resur­rection and ascension. Rather the liberal Christ was the teacher of ethics par excellence. Machen wrote, "The plain fact is that imitation of Jesus, important though it was for Paul, was swallowed up by something far more important... (T)he redeeming work of Jesus, was the primary thing for Paul." The early church, he added, did not look to Jesus simply for practical guidance and moral conviction but instead commit­ted to Him "the eternal destinies" of their souls.

Perhaps even more alarming than the naturalistic and moralistic senses of liber­alism was the Social Gospel, the third sense of liberalism that Machen critiqued and the one most directly evident in Protestant plans for church union. Here liberals used Christianity to better American society or saw it as a means to a greater social good. Here liberalism functioned as a form of American civil religion where Protestants assumed that the health of the United States depended upon the moral teaching of Christianity. This assumption was part and parcel of church union efforts that disregarded differences of doctrine and polity in order to cooperate in matters of social reform. But according to Machen, such utilitarianism perverted the gospel and denied the church its ultimate source of power.

The Christian religion cannot be treated in any such way," he wrote. Chris­tianity "refuses to be regarded as a mere means to a higher end." Christ Himself said as much in Luke 14 when He explained that unless a believer was prepared to leave his family he could not be one of Christ's disciples. "Whatever else those stupendous words may mean," Machen concluded, "they certainly mean that the relationship to Christ takes precedence over all other relationships, even the holiest of relation­ships like those that exist between husband and wife and parent and child.

The fourth and last sense of liberalism discussed by Machen concerned the mat­ter of intellectual honesty. Here he called attention to the creedal basis of the vari­ous Protestant denominations. All of the communions, from Baptists to Episcopa­lians, he argued, were founded upon a creed and required some form of subscrip­tion for ordination. In the case of the Pres­byterian Church the confessional basis of ordination was the Westminster Standards. Whether it was desirable for such creedal subscription was not at issue. Instead, the problem was that the constitution of Prot­estant denominations made ordination de­pendent upon subscription and liberals had no right to church office if they did not hold to the creed of their communion. If a minister desired to combat the creedal for­mulations of his church he was free to do so as an American but not under the aus­pices of his church. For this reason Machen argued that liberals should leave the Prot­estant denominations and found their own organization for the propagation of liberal Christianity's message. He conceded that such an action had certain disadvantages, such as "the abandonment of church buildings," "the break in family traditions," and "the injury to sentiment of various kinds." But there was one "supreme" advantage to such a decision, namely, "the advantage of honesty." In fact, the Unitarian Church practiced precisely this kind of intellectual honesty by being a communion "without an authoritative Bible, without doctrinal re­quirements, and without a creed."

Machen's sweeping critique of liberal­ism, then, concerned far more than the Bible's teaching about creation or the re­turn of Christ. For him the very heart of the gospel was at stake. And central to the gospel were the creeds and confessions by which the church had articulated and de­fended the teachings of Scripture. Machen believed that the church's witness de­pended on its theological witness, not on social reform or making America a Chris­tian nation. He rightly detected, however, that American Protestantism had lost its theological identity by confusing its mis­sion with that of the American nation.

The liberal preacher has very little to say about the other world," he wrote. "This world is really the centre of all his thoughts." Con­sequently, the weary soul seeking a place "to forget for the moment all those things that divide nation from nation and race from race, to forget human pride, to forge the passions of war, to forget the puzzling problems of industrial strife" had almost nowhere to turn. But if the church could "gather together humbly in the name of Christ, to give thanks to Him for His un­speakable gift and to worship the Father through Him," then it would truly "satisfy the needs of the soul.

This understanding of the gospel and the mission of the church made Machen an undesirable figure in mainstream Protes­tantism. But it also made his critique of American Protestantism arguably the most profound and thorough of the twentieth century. At a time when evangelicalism is increasingly known for its political views rather than its theological convictions or biblical teaching, Machen's message is no less valuable today than it was when he delivered it almost 75 years ago.