In 1920 H. L. Menchen, that irrepressible iconoclast from Baltimore, said that Southern civilization — undoubtedly the best that the Western Hemi­sphere had ever seen — had been ruined by the Civil War and had now fallen into the hands of plutocrats and Protestant barbarians. We might well guess who, according to Menchen, the Protestant barbarians were. It would be obvious, however, that as he became aware of the career of fellow Balti­morean, J. Gresham Machen, here was an exception. Not that Menchen had any real sympathy for Machen's religion or any interest in what he called 'high and ghostly matters'. Nevertheless, he saw in Machen not just another impressive intellect, but a responsive soul which, like his own, was melancholic for another world.

For Menchen, that other world was, by and large, the one of which J. Gresham and he had seen vestiges in their youth. Artistically and intel­lectually assertive, it exhaled a wonderful spirit of freedom and indi­vidualism. Much to its credit, from Menchen's point of view, it was neither Puritanical nor Victorian: both terms he considered reprehensible — for him they were swear words. Menchen's 'other world' was not overlaid with nostalgic sentimentality. He perceived in it a realism, a combative militance that fuelled a fire deep within his heart. New money and its gospel of pros­perity attended the emerging industrialism. But industrialism was heresy, and creeping standardization was its catechism. Bureaucrats — corporate and civil — were the new clerics. Canon law for this new world was a 'melting pot' uniformity, a uniformity that Menchen judged lethal if for no other reason than it was dull — active, energetic, but trivial and deadeningly dull.

Still, developing urban centers had no monopoly on banality. As Menchen's contemporary, Sinclair Lewis, described it, rural American life was boorish, repressively stupid and hypocritical.

But whether urban or rural, the ugly culture of developing America was driven at its deepest level by materialism. Enter that sensitive poet of the previous generation, Sidney Lanier. He had excoriated this deception with words written in the 1870s.

Trade, trade, trade: pah, are we not all sick? A man cannot walk down a green alley of woods, in these days, without unawares getting his mouth and nose and eyes covered with some web or other that trade has stretched across, to catch some gain or other. 'Tis an old spider that has crawled over our modern life, and covered it with a flimsy web that conceals the Realities.

Ah! but what were 'the Realities'? The older, fading world of Lanier's short life claimed to know them. Presumably Mary Day, Lanier's wife, knew them, too, as did her lifelong friend, Minnie Gresham. These two gentlewomen lived lock-stepped. They were inseparable as girls in Macon, Georgia; and after their respective marriages, they found themselves together again in Baltimore. The year 1881, however, saw them straigh­tened with contrasting pains. In it Mary's husband, Sidney, died of tuber­culosis in the Carolina mountains while Minnie presented her husband, Arthur Machen, with a baby boy, John Gresham.

The home into which John Gresham was born saw 'the Realities' of which Lanier wrote, along straighter religious lines. For Lanier religion served a serene and aesthetic ideal. The grandest gospel, as his poem 'The Symphony' (1875) suggests, was music — its power, humanity's hope. The Machens, however, revered the church. Still, to a certain degree (but a very definite degree), revered was the idea of the church, that idea not dis­associated from a wide vision of culture. Not so much Calvinist as Presby­terian in more than any denominational sense. Only certain directions were possible ecclesiastically for a family of this standing. These directions tran­scended the peculiarities and difference that plagued others. The piety attached to them smacked more of respectability than of profound holiness. Here was an atmosphere, in the words of a Machen family member, far removed from life in one of those 'small denominational churches'.

But precisely at this point we are faced with a severe perplexity. Not only was the world J. Gresham Machen knew in his early years fast dissolving, not only were its remaining bits and pieces religiously handicapped and suspect; but, following the excruciating struggles of the 'twenties and 'thirties, Machen himself (as if he were the main character in a farce) would father a group of those small denominational churches that the world of his family held in such disdain. Machen's exile could not be more thorough. To be sure, he was admired from a distance by his old world, by a conservative cultural elite, but not followed — not even by those who professed Christian orthodoxy. Neither had he maintained any place for himself in the popular dominant culture and its well-tuned, manicured, mainline, softly, safely liberal church.

By the 'thirties, the victory of the alien gospel was complete. Machen's exile now was inevitable as the church grew progressively quiet or ambiguous in its stand for Christian truth. Transcendence gave way to immanence, particularism to universalism, eternal life to the better life, the uniqueness of the ordained ministry to an ecclesiastical egalitarianism, systematic theology (and the other branches of theological science) to practical theology. Evangelicals and radicals embraced under a banner of establishmentarianism, exhibiting a common mind in their preoccupation with the immediate situation and present observable gains. The person of God, his redemptive work and worship, took a back seat to man, his experi­ence and needs. Jesus became a paradigm for personal maturity and moral integrity; even a model for success. As divine Saviour, he was progressively nondescript. A firm doctrinal Christianity was beaten (much like the man on the road down from Jerusalem to Jericho) and left for dead by those, like Fosdick, who believed Christianity's essence to be found 'in its abiding expe­riences', but never in its doctrinal content. Biblical givens and historical Christian convictions became optional 'theories', confessional revision the agenda; organizational loyalty and productivity were canonized. Admini­strative law was law!

With all of this, we must not think that the church was driven from the field or shuffled into cultural irrelevance by the dawning of the 'secular age'. Rather the church adapted so well that in its own altered state it maintained, albeit more subtly, its dominant position in the emerging cultural consensus. It can be argued, of course, that the church had lost its influence and appeal and that, as proof, American society rescinded its Christian heritage. For example, while Machen teaches at Princeton Seminary, Princeton Uni­versity produces a new kind of graduate, one who takes center stage in Scott Fitzgerald's semi-autobiographical character, Amory Blaine. In the novel, This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald writes of Amory,

Long after the towers and spires of Princeton were visible with here and there a late-burning light — and suddenly out of clear darkness the sound of bells. As an end­less dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets ... A new generation dedi­cated more than the past to the fear of poverty and the worship of success, grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken ... He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. 'I know myself', he cried, 'but that is all!'

What deliberate egotism! How consistently immanentistic! Indeed, this side of paradise and always this side! Fitzgerald reacts to the predictability of Princeton grads with an indulgent wail of dissent. One would think that the church might be a little hard on the graduates, too, but much harder on Fitz­gerald. However, the church also lives 'this side of paradise'. And while working to retain the polished Princetonian, it has simultaneously incor­porated Fitzgerald's complaint. Thus, by easily expressing its sympathy for the skepticism, even agnosticism and atheism of the renegades, the church has guaranteed its relevance. A new synthesis takes shape as does a new ministry, making room for unbelief, if not intent upon justifying its own unbelief. Here is no bare liberalism, but a conservatism and liberalism. The conservatism works chiefly for executive and administrative uniformity; it is utterly intolerant. The liberalism parades placards of doctrinal breadth, so broad as to include denial, while overlaying its message with demonstr­ations of compassionate involvement.

The power of such a subtle and complex structure is difficult to over­estimate, especially when we realize that such power was not gained apart from the culture but in concert with it. Machen stood against this structure and its power. The cost to him was great since in the end he was divested of not only his church but of a place within the culture of which that church was an integral part.

The story of Machen's stand, of course, carries us beyond his formative years proximate that world of Sidney Lanier and even his family. It covers, I believe, three distinct periods of his career. In each period he is excited to a greater precision; in each, however, he experiences deeper isolation.

The first period moves from 1909 to 1919 and might well be called 'The Church against the World'. As yet, the denominational issues seem remote and references to Presbyterianism quite general. Nevertheless, certain things are settled about the church. The year 1909 marked the 400th anniversary of Calvin's birth. Machen had a minor role in the celebration of that event at Princeton. But an address by Benjamin B. Warfield on Calvin's theology seems to have made a great impression upon him: '...it was ... certainly the finest thing ... that I have ever heard from Dr Warfield', he wrote. Probably we go too far if we say there was an awakening in Machen to Calvinism at this point. At least, his Calvinistic sympathies are plain and, from here on, they must be assumed.

For Machen, however, the church that is Calvinistic must also maintain its commitment to an informed and intelligent ministry. In 1909 this also was brought into focus by the 'Student Revolt' at Princeton Seminary. Demanded was a more practical curriculum. Machen replied:

We are able to do little for our own generation, and can only hope to conserve a spark of learning for some future awakening in the church's intellectual life. Other seminaries have yielded to the incessant clamour for the 'practical' ... I only hope the authorities will have the courage to keep our standard high, not bother about losses of students, and wait for better times. It is the only course of action that can be successful in the long run.

Machen's warning was in the interests of the church and sparing that church ministers who were 'pumped full of material which, without any real assimilation or any intellectual work of any kind, they can pump out again on their unfortunate congregations'.

The church and the world came directly into view in Machen's significant address, 'Christianity and Culture'. A prepared ministry leads the church in no retreat from its cultural task; but neither does it lead in a pursuit of cultural dominance. Instead, it preaches a message of consecration of culture. No hiding behind an anti-intellectual pseudo-piety; seminaries party to such a thing leave the church unequipped to meet the intellectual challenges of and to the faith. But lest anyone think Machen an advocate of an easy cultural relevance, he excoriates the church that, in the name of relevance, majors in matters about which all are agreed. Needed is a church unintimidated by the debate about sin, death, salvation, eternal life and God — whose champions fight against spiritual and intellectual indolence, who stand up to the attitude that is forever adapting itself to the fashions of the day.

When he takes up the subject 'History and Faith' in his 1915 inaugural, Machen clearly sets modern culture in its basic impulse over against the Bible. The church, however, wants both. The pagan direction of culture forbids this, and if the church persists, she must come to ruin. His message goes out, therefore; the church has a calling to consecration of culture, but not to compromise with it.

But certainly American culture is excepted? Or is it? Machen's 1919 address entitled 'The Church in the War' speaks in a shockingly blunt manner about postwar America and its church. It seems that even the church is Americanized. It makes common cause with the nation in sancti­fying the war dead and wounded in a gospel proclaiming the sufficiency of men who sacrifice themselves. No word about human unworthiness and sin; no message about Christ's unique and efficacious sacrifice for sinners. Lost in the synthesis of culture and church is atonement and confession. Asserted is an inherently pagan notion of self-satisfaction.

With the close of this first period, we find Machen in a precarious position. He has perceived the internal weakening of the church; he is clear about the opposition of the world to the truth and about the pagan character of culture. He sounds no retreat, only resolute articulate devotion to Christ and the Bible in the advance of the church's task of consecration. But despite the forward posture, the patterns of isolation begin to appear as he places himself at odds with the structures of mutuality that bind together American cultural and ecclesiastical life.

The second period of Machen's struggle might be called 'The Church against the Churches'. It begins in 1920 and lasts through 1928. This is the time when Machen enters the ecclesiastical arena in earnest. If the previous period had at its center his insistence upon the church's separation from the world, this era revolves around the uniqueness of the Presbyterian Church in the face of increased pressure to dismiss that uniqueness. Many Pres­byterians maybe selling their birthright, but Machen becomes the advocate for Presbyterianism and its claims.

The period begins with Machen attending his first General Assembly where he meets head-on the 1920 Plan of Union. This plan, spurred on by post-war cultural concerns as many ecumenical efforts tend to be, proposed the formation of a united church under the name, 'The United Churches of Christ in America', composed of more than twenty denominations. Machen was shocked by the plan and insisted that the Presbyterian Church cannot, as the proposal suggests, dismiss its creed to 'the level of purely denomi­national affairs'. What possibly surprises us in Machen's opposition is the strength with which he asserts Presbyterian exclusivity: There is nothing reticent about him; his vision is of nothing less than Presbyterianism for the whole world.

The Plan of Union dies in the presbyteries, but the spirit that devised it burned on, and so did Machen's opposition. Writing in 1927, for example, about what he called 'the attack upon Princeton Seminary', he says,

As over against ... a reduced Christianity, we at Princeton stand for the full, glorious gospel of divine grace that God has given us in his Word and that is summar­ized in the Confession of Faith in our Church. We cannot agree with those who say that although they are members of the Presbyterian Church, they 'have not the slightest zeal to have the Presbyterian Church extended through the length and breadth of the world'. As for us, we hold the faith of the Presbyterian Church, the great Reformed Faith that is set forth in the Westminster Confession, to be true; and holding it to be true, it is intended for the whole world.

We find Machen, therefore, pressing throughout this period for a 'confessional' understanding of the church. If, in the previous period the ministry was to be intelligent, in this period it is to be honest in terms of its vows. But more than a departure from historic Presbyterian doctrine is involved. As his popular book, Christianity and Liberalism (1923), and his famous 1925 sermon, 'The Separateness of the Church', make plain, a fatal cancer of unbelief has invaded the body. The Presbyterian Church must be preserved — the 'crying need of the hour' is the health of this once virile deno­mination. Machen fears, however, that the disease is too widespread; that it has compromised the boards and courts of the church. He poses the pos­sibility of separation by those whose consciences cannot tolerate the situation, a situation aggravated by the grievous resolution of the Fosdick case and by toleration of the Auburn Affirmationists.

Still it would be unfair to say that he is as yet wholly negative about his church. He remains committed, certainly determined to fight before the onslaught of denominational and confessional relativity and the insidious malignancy of liberalism. What is becoming clear, however, is just how much the church, even the Presbyterian Church, is moving in stride with the culture. It is also clear that Machen cannot follow.

The last epoch of Machen's career can be called 'The Church against the Church'. It stretches from 1929 to 1937. This is the time in which a true Pres­byterian Church is the objective — prosecuted first in terms of the seminary (Princeton vs. Westminster), second in terms of missions (the PCUSA Mission Board vs. the Independent Board), and third in terms of the church as a whole (the mainline Presbyterian denomination vs. what would become known as the OPC). As we might expect, this period witnesses in Machen an increasing frankness about the Reformed faith. At its beginning, with the 1929 opening of Westminster Seminary, he refers, as has been his manner, quite generally to the Reformed content of the gospel. By 1936 he moves beyond generalities. His writings, but especially his radio talks, shimmer with a simple presentation of Reformed doctrine. Two books produced by those talks, Christian Faith in the Modem World and The Christian View of Man, serve as a systematic theology in miniature.

But very meaningful is Machen's last official public address to the church, his sermon 'Constraining Love' delivered at the Second General Assembly of the new church (1936). In exegeting the phrase, 'one died for all' from 2 Corinthians 5:14, he dismisses the universalistic and Arminian inter­pretation by way of an extensive defense of the limited atonement. Where in his earlier years, and even as recently as the inception of this particular era, Machen's Calvinism has been indirect, now it is explicit.

If this signals a maturation, it arrives apace — the maturation of his pil­grimage. Out of the old world, Menchen's other world, into the new, with Machen opposed to both. The church preaches 'another gospel' which is no gospel, from which little is excluded except the Calvinism that, Machen preaches. No more distressing example of this fact exists than the visit of John McNaugher, UPCNA minister and President of Pitt-Xenia Seminary, to the 1934 PCUSA General Assembly. He has directed the UP side of the attempt at union between the UP and the PCUSA. On the floor of the PCUSA Assembly, he openly ridicules the Westminster Standards and is applauded. Things have moved far beyond the call to confessional revision. Calvinism is being shoved out the door.

Coming in by another way are those accusers whose case against the church is that it has been utterly naive about evil. Needed is talk about repro­bation and election, sin and atonement, death and resurrection. But is the church cowering? Will it return to orthodoxy and its Calvinist roots? Not at all! Besides, T. S. Eliot has converted and his 1930 poem 'Ash Wednesday' means that transcendence and the supernatural are again acceptable possibilities. But has there been any real change, or is the omnivorous nature of the church and the new culture been displayed once more? The synthetic church embraces a synthesis of biblical language and post-Kantianism. Fosdick feels compelled to deliver a message entitled, 'We must go beyond Modernism'. Neo-orthodoxy is the golden opportunity for adjustment, never repentance. Machen's gospel demanded repentance, but fewer and fewer listen.

Machen's isolation is complete. The 'other world' of Menchen, in the end, offers him little but its sympathy. The new emerging world of American progress — church and culture alike — will not even offer that. Instead Machen receives the back of the hand.

He is, to be sure, shut out, but he also is shut up unto something else altogether. He is shut up unto the Bible and yet another world, at the center of which is abiding communion with God in heaven. He claimed in his writing that already this destination asserts itself in the true church of Christ. Because of the intensity of his vision, he was shut up unto insistence upon the church's purity. At the same time, he also was shut up unto a rigo­rous Calvinism, judged anathema or expendable by the PCUSA in the interests of survival. And he was shut up to a little company of 'small denom­ination churches', the scourge of the earth, disdainfully dismissed, hardly taken seriously by 'world shakers'.

Machen's humiliation leaves him stripped. What does he have left on the plains of the Dakotas where he died? Certainly not the cultured world he knew in Baltimore or in Princeton. Not even much of that world he knew in Philadelphia. In the end he is left only with Christ and especially Christ's active obedience. For the sake of this Christ he counts loss his richest gain and pours contempt on all his pride.

Do you see it? The Orthodox Presbyterian Church begins where Machen ended and that is her secret, her genius, and her calling. She, too, has known his humiliation and isolation, but also a glory that transcends the world and culture in which she finds herself. No mere American church, nor more of the same old Presbyterianism with an acculturated message. To be sure, the OPC continues to address the issues of 'The Church and the Church', 'The Church and the Churches' and 'The Church and the World'. But in the culture, is she to dominate? Take over? Is she the purveyor of some sort of religious imperialism? Or is she to seek marriage with the culture and become indistinguishable from it?

No, in conclusion, the posture she and Machen don must be the same; it must be that of their Saviour. The posture is one of a servant in the midst of a world that does not understand and in large measure does not care.

Machen, Culture and the Church: here is a remarkable pilgrimage of incredible substance. Truly an incredible loss, but what an incredible gain!