The Relevance of J. Gresham Machen

Outside the small sectors of conservative Presbyterianism, J. Gresham Machen is known primarily as the lone scholar of the fundamentalist movement. Textbooks on American religion regularly cite Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism (1923) if only because he wrote from a powerful position within the Protestant establishment, i.e. Princeton Theological Seminary, the oldest seminary of the Northern Presbyterian Church. But such recognition by historians derives not simply from Machen’s status but also from the merits of his argument. When Sydney Ahlstrom, historian of American Protestantism at Yale University, called Christianity and Liberalism the “chief theological ornament” of fundamentalism he was simply confirming what 1920s intellectuals had already observed.1 For instance, Walter Lippmann praised Machen for his “acumen,” “saliency,” and “wit,” adding that his analysis of theological liberalism was “the best popular argument” produced by either side in the controversy.2 Even the irreverent H. L. Mencken admitted that if Machen’s arguments had any flaw in them then the science of logic was a “hollow vanity signifying nothing.”3

Still, whatever notice Machen attracted during his relatively short life—he died in 1937 at the age of 55— interest in him has been harder to sustain with the passage of time. For instance, the issues that engaged Machen’s learned studies in the New Testament are virtually passé in biblical scholarship today. What is more, his defense of the truth of the New Testament narratives appears to be irrelevant in an academic world where Enlightenment norms of objectivity are philosophically naive. Even in Protestant circles, Machen’s arguments against modernism appear to be anachronistic since the points of contention between evangelicals and liberals no longer bifurcate Protestant institutions. In virtually every arena in which Machen labored, his efforts would appear to be of little value.

Still, when seen from a different perspective than simply that of fundamentalism versus modernism, Machen’s significance for Presbyterians living at the beginning of the twenty-first century becomes more apparent. For he not only defended historic Christianity but couched that argument in the context of the church’s relationship to modern culture. Indeed, historians who look at Machen strictly as an example of sectarian Protestantism miss what he had to say about the difficulties confronting Reformed churches committed to being faithful in a post-Christian culture. After giving an overview of Machen’s life the following essay reflects on his relevance for the contemporary church.

The Anomalous Fundamentalist

Born on July 28th, 1881, Machen grew up the son of a prominent Baltimore lawyer, Arthur W. Machen. From his father Machen inherited a keen logical mind and a deep interest in classical literature. Machen’s organic exposure to law would later become especially evident during the Presbyterian controversies of the 1920s when he devoted considerable time to constitutional and procedural questions. Through the influence of his mother, Mary Gresham, Machen acquired a thorough knowledge of the Bible and the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Machen’s father, who hailed from Virginia, had been reared an Episcopalian. But his mother, a devout Old School Presbyterian from Georgia, insisted upon the family’s membership in Baltimore’s Franklin Street Presbyterian Church where Machen experienced the awkward amalgam of conservative Calvinism and genteel culture.

Machen chose the newly founded Johns Hopkins University for undergraduate study. As a classics major his interest in ancient literature deepened. Machen was graduated in 1901—first in his class—and continued at Hopkins for a year of graduate work with one of the leading classicists in the United States, Basil L. Gildersleeve, who was also an elder at Franklin Street Church. While Machen’s studies in Baltimore enhanced his considerable language skills, the university ethos at Johns Hopkins stimulated his academic interests more generally. Hopkins was the first university in the United States dedicated to graduate study and specialized research. It was also the first major university to be founded without ecclesiastical ties, a sign of the birth of American higher education’s secularization. Still, Machen had nothing but good to say about his experience at Hopkins and became a strong advocate of university work.

Nevertheless, during the summer of 1902 Machen considered a career in banking and international law before finally enrolling at Princeton Theological Seminary. His ambivalence to seminary stemmed partly from doubts about a career in the ministry. Victorian culture enforced informally sharp distinctions between the intellect and the emotions, between materialism and idealism, and between science and faith. Christianity, accordingly, was located in the ideal realm. In fact, religion had little to do with science, not because science was irreligious, but because scientists studied the material world, while ministers and theologians were concerned with the world of spirit. Romantic and evangelical influences furthered the divorce between religion and the world of science by placing a premium on experience and heart-felt religion. Because religion appeared inherently anti-intellectual and sentimental, Machen was reluctant to go into the ministry. Still, he persevered in his studies at Princeton Seminary, and in 1905 completed his course of study there. (Along the way he also received an M.A. in philosophy from Princeton University.)

Thanks to a fellowship from Princeton Machen studied in Germany for the academic year 1905-1906. At Marburg, the main attraction was Adolph Juelicher, well known for his Introduction to the New Testament and The Parables of Jesus. But the teacher who captivated Machen was Wilhelm Herrmann, professor of theology and a disciple of Albrecht Ritschl. At Goettingen Machen studied with the New Testament scholars, Wilhelm Bousset and Wilhelm Heitmueller. Rather than having his faith shaken, however, Machen saw in German universities that religious scholarship held a prominent place. Unlike America where popular preachers were marginal to the university, Germany’s church leaders were members of the academy. To be sure, Machen spotted defections from Protestant orthodoxy in German professors’ instruction. But the fact that religion was not isolated from the world of learning gave Machen hope for an academic career that could overcome the polarities of science and religion.

While a student in Germany Machen accepted an offer to become an instructor at Princeton Theological Seminary beginning in the fall of 1906. His initial duties included instruction in elementary Greek, a class in exegesis, and an introductory course on the New Testament. Courses in elementary Greek prepared Machen well to compose his New Testament Greek for Beginners, a textbook originally published in 1922 and still used widely at seminaries and divinity schools. Machen’s ambivalence about church work continued. But by 1914 he had resolved his doubts sufficiently to be ordained, an action that allowed the Seminary’s trustees to promote him to the rank of assistant professor.

An important factor in Machen’s vocational resolve during the 1910s was his scholarship on the apostle Paul which he first presented in 1920 as the Sprunt Lectures at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond (VA). These lectures were eventually published under the title, The Origin of Paul’s Religion (1921). Most of Machen’s early research, both as a seminarian and then as a professor, had concerned Christ’s virgin birth. This subject, in fact, was the topic for his second scholarly work, The Virgin Birth (1930). But his study of Paul was pivotal for his critique of liberal Protestantism.

Within the history of New Testament scholarship the early dates of the Pauline corpus had proved immensely difficult for liberal Protestants who wanted to retain the teachings of Jesus but had little sympathy for the particulars of Paul’s theology. As a result, many critics had argued that Paul was the second founder of Christianity who had in a sense perverted Christ’s teachings. Machen knew, however, that the most recent scholarship on the epistles made such an argument dubious. If Paul deviated from Christ, for example, why did his epistles make up such a large part of the New Testament? Machen also drew upon the conclusions of more radical biblical scholars who had concluded that it was impossible to separate the ethical teachings of Jesus from the supernaturalism of the New Testament. Consequently, Machen argued that Pauline theology was not a deviation from Jesus but rather reflected the faith of the early church. Implicit in this conclusion was the warning that if liberal Protestants were not willing to own up to the original Christians’ faith, they should think about calling themselves by a different name.

The nature and character of early Christian doctrine, according to Machen, was remarkably plain and accorded well with conservative Protestant beliefs. According to Paul, Jesus Christ was a heavenly being who came to earth, died on the cross for the sins of believers, rose again from the dead, and was present with the Christian church through the Holy Spirit. Notably important for Machen was the apostle’s stress upon the historical nature of the gospel. Liberal scholars maintained that Christ’s significance resided in the realm of ideals; Jesus’ ethical teachings were eternally and absolutely true, but his miracles, death, and resurrection were only symbols of his superiority as a moral exemplar. In Machen’s reading of Paul, however, the works of Christ, especially his death and resurrection, were not merely the product of the church’s nostalgia for their deceased leader. Rather, Christ’s death and resurrection were fundamental to the gospel. Without Christ’s vicarious sacrifice the Christian gospel became a totally different religion.

The Origin of Paul’s Religion anticipated most of the arguments Machen would use during the fundamentalist controversy. It strongly affirmed the exclusiveness of Christianity, the centrality of Christ’s death and resurrection and the truthfulness of the Bible while also admonishing liberals for reducing Christianity to humanitarianism and for minimizing the importance of traditional theology. These were positions that Machen popularized in Christianity and Liberalism (1923), a book written at the height of the fundamentalist controversy. Yet, Machen was a reluctant fundamentalist. Indeed, his views on a number of significant issues were at odds with the aims and methods of fundamentalism. Machen himself did not like the term because it sounded like a sect.

One obvious point of dissimilarity concerned Machen’s cultural and educational background. Fundamentalism was by no means as socially backward and anti-intellectual as often portrayed. But its leadership was marginal within American’s cultural establishment because it was in effect a religious expression of popular resentment against social elites.

Fundamentalists did value education and established institutions, usually Bible institutes and colleges, to perpetuate their views. Yet, fundamentalists were a world removed from mainstream academic life. Machen was much more a product of the nation’s universities and colleges than he was comfortable in Bible institutes.

He departed from fundamentalism on theological matters as well. Two important issues were dispensational premillennialism and evolution. Most fundamentalists were committed to a dispensationalist understanding of Christ’s second coming which divided history into different epochs of human faithlessness followed by divine judgment, including the church age which would see Christians apostacized before Christ’s return in judgment. Dispensationalist pessimism about the future of American churches and society contrasted sharply with liberal Protestant optimism about God’s active involvement in the progress of human civilization. Machen was by no means enamored of liberal estimates about the progressive development of society. But he was quite critical of dispensationalism and would not join any fundamentalist organization that included it in its statement of faith. For Machen, dispensationalism displayed a faulty method of interpreting the Bible and a poor understanding of the pervasive effects of the fall upon all of humanity throughout all periods of history.

Fundamentalism was also defined by opposition to evolution. Indeed, the most widely publicized event of the fundamentalist controversy was the showdown in 1925 between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan during the Scopes Trial. Fundamentalists believed that evolutionary theory and the scientific establishment that had nurtured it were responsible for the decline of Christian civilization in the United States. Opposition to teaching evolution in public schools followed logically from this perspective. Fundamentalists did not want schools to undermine the faith and morals of their children. In contrast, Machen believed that evolution was a conceivable way for God to create the earth. He had questions about the possibility of the human species evolving from lower forms of animals and insisted that God intervened in the process of natural development to create the human soul. Yet he believed it was possible to reconcile Christianity with aspects of evolution.

The one doctrine upon which Machen and fundamentalists agreed was biblical inerrancy. Yet even here the commonalities do not explain Machen’s involvement in the fundamentalist controversy. This doctrine was, according to many, the link between the learned theology of Princeton Seminary and revivalistic preaching of popular fundamentalism. A concern for the truthfulness of the Bible supposedly drove Machen to identify with a movement that otherwise gave him pause. A closer reading of his most important book reveals an argument concerned not simply with doctrinal fidelity but also with the mission and nature of the church.

The Menace of Modernism

At the time that Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism the Presbyterian Church was an important member of the Protestant establishment. To be sure, this establishment did not enjoy the sanction of government. But the personal networks and agencies which America’s largest denominations formed amounted to an organizational edifice with considerable influence and enormous prestige, so much so that it is possible to contend that the Protestant establishment “felt responsible for America: for its moral instruction, for the religious content of national ideals, for the educative and welfare functions that governments would not…carry out.”4

Presbyterians in particular had an influence on American culture disproportionate to their numbers. For instance, before the Civil War Presbyterians established as many institutions of higher education as any other Christian body during the entire nineteenth century. Princeton Seminary itself, educated more graduate students than any other college, university, or seminary during the nineteenth century. Undoubtedly, a commitment to a learned ministry as well as the Reformed understanding of culture gave Presbyterians impeccable establishmentarian credentials.

Other factors are also responsible for Presbyterian influence upon American culture. Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Methodists, and Baptists, the principal denominations of Anglo-American Protestantism, gained a strong foothold in the United States, ironically, because of the disestablishment of religion. One of the catalysts of the War for Independence was hostility from dissenting Protestant denominations to the possibility of the Church of England asserting itself as the established church in the colonies. The American Revolution, as we all know, did away with the crown and rejected a national church. Thus, the American republic began without any assistance from the institutions chiefly responsible for guaranteeing social order and stability in European culture.

Into this social and political vacuum stepped the Protestant denominations of British descent. In fact, the churches provided what little organization and uniformity existed in the new nation before 1860. The revivals of the Second Great Awakening were especially crucial to social order in the United States.

These revivals sponsored a host of voluntary agencies whose purpose was to eliminate every kind of evil, from slavery to the consumption of beverage alcohol. Because of the decentralization of political life in the early United States and the reformist agenda of those Protestants who promoted revivals, the churches assumed the role of cultural guardian. This influence was the foundation for the institutions and networks in which the Protestant establishment thrived.

Protestant dominance expanded in the period in which Machen was born. What is more, the economy of the new industries and urban centers generated wealth which could fund institutions of considerable strength. One need only think of the Baptist, John Rockefeller, and the Presbyterian, Andrew Carnegie, to be reminded of the enormous affluence of this era and how this affluence was used to finance developments in education, science, medicine, technology, art, and religion. What many Protestants thought, Presbyterians included, was that the United States was moving into a period of justice and righteousness associated with the kingdom of God. This was the era of the Social Gospel, which promised harmony between labor and management, Progressivism, which promised a more democratic society, the Student Volunteer Movement, which promised to win the world to Christ “in this generation,” and a war that was fought to make the world, not just the United States, in the words of a Presbyterian president, Woodrow Wilson, “safe for democracy.”

While Princeton Seminary’s Old School Theology still informed aspects of Presbyterian life, the denomination as a whole had departed Calvinism well before the 1920s. This is the point aptly made in Lefferts Loetscher’s history of the Presbyterian Church, The Broadening Church. Several crises during the period between 1890 and 1915 indicated that the church was losing its Reformed identity. Conservatives may have won the battles against Charles Briggs and other liberal biblical scholars during the 1890s, but they were losing the larger war. The Presbytery of New York, the source of much liberalism, continued down on its broad path. The revision of the Westminster Confession in 1903 also undermined the work of conservatives. Meanwhile, the Presbyterian Church in 1908 led American Protestantism in the organization of and support for the Federal Council of Churches, the embodiment of the Social Gospel. While the Protestant establishment may be credited with supplying moral fervor and humanitarian earnestness to many of the political and social reforms of the Progressive Era, its identity was increasingly bound by cultural norms rather than biblical imperatives.

In this context Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism less as a brief on behalf of fundamentalists and more as a chastisement of cultural Christianity. Rather than debating evolutionary theory or Christ’s return, Machen contended that the task of the church was not to advance western civilization but to save souls. The book emerged directly out of Machen’s own opposition to plans for a union of the largest Protestant denominations. What Machen objected to specifically in the plan for church union was indifference to doctrine for the sake of promoting social justice and good will. The plan relegated to the background all the essentials of the Christian faith such as the deity of Christ, the atonement, the virgin birth, favoring instead vague generalities about ethical ideals and the kingdom of God. Machen thought Presbyterians should not be content with the doctrinal platform of the proposed union because it treated the Westminster Confession of Faith as merely one expression of the progressive Christian consciousness. Those who believe the Westminster Confession to be true should insist on its truth for everyone.

In effect, Christianity and Liberalism was not an abstract argument about theology or biblical scholarship but a response to important developments in the nation’s churches. In fact, the confusion of evangelism and political activism or social reform was symptomatic of American Protestantism going back to the Second Great Awakening. From Machen’s perspective, the churches were more interested in the health of society than they were in their own faithfulness. Protestant designs for church union only proved the point.

If the church’s task was not to transform culture, then what was it? Machen’s answer in Christianity and Liberalism involved the point that the ground of the church’s identity was not its own good deeds as exemplary as they might be, but rather, in its preaching and teaching. One of the most striking features of the book on first perusal is its straightforward presentation of the teachings of historic Protestantism concerning God, man, Christ, the Bible, salvation and the church. Though Christianity and Liberalism earned Machen the reputation of being a theological bully, with the exception of the first chapter, the book reads more like a primer in Christian theology. In fact, the second longest chapter in the book is itself a defense of the importance of doctrine. In that chapter Machen repeated the argument of his book on Paul to show that at its founding the church’s identity rested upon doctrine, not good deeds or religious experience.

If doctrine was the foundation of the church, exclusiveness was its cornerstone. Machen labored uneasily under the label “fundamentalist.” But he did see the necessity of maintaining clear and definite boundaries between the church and those outside the household of faith. He also recognized that it was impossible in the American context to hold on to historic Christian truths without seeming sectarian and intolerant. Because religion had been so widely used to rally support for the common good and social improvement, to say that Christianity was first and foremost about eternal life—no matter what the public implications—was to be deemed dogmatic, narrow-minded, backward looking, and ultimately un-American.

Machen looked the charge of intolerance squarely in the eye and defended the church’s exclusivity. His defense ran along two lines. The first was civil or legal. The church, as a private and voluntary organization, as opposed to an involuntary and public association like a state or commonwealth, had every right to exclude from membership and office those who would not subscribe to its teaching. This kind of intolerance was actually fully compatible with American ideals of religious liberty. If ordinary citizens could not band together for particular purposes, such as the propagation of the Westminster Confession of Faith, then they did not enjoy genuine political freedom.5

The second way that Machen defended exclusiveness was to point to Scripture itself. Especially significant was the example of the apostle Paul’s confrontation with the Judaizers in Galatia. Machen argued that Paul’s “stupendous” polemic became in the hands of the modern church nothing more than an obscure “theological subtlety,” especially since the apostle agreed with the Judaizers that Jesus was the Messiah, that he had risen from the dead and that faith in Christ was necessary to salvation. But the Judaizers also were convinced that believers needed to keep the law in order to be saved. “From the modern point of view the difference would have seemed to be very slight,” Machen wrote, “hardly worthy of consideration at all in view of the large measure of agreement.” He observed what “splendid” reforms could have been undertaken in “Gentile cities” if the Judaizers had succeeded in implementing the observance of the Mosaic law. “Surely Paul ought to have made common cause with teachers who were so nearly in agreement with him; surely he ought to have applied to them the great principle of Christian unity.” Yet, Paul did not. The difference that separated him from the Judaizers was no mere theological abstraction but “concerned the very heart and core of the religion of Christ.” The lesson, according to Machen, was that “Paul was no advocate of undogmatic religion.”6

Machen’s defense of Christianity was sectarian and ran directly counter to the aspirations of the Protestant Establishment. He accented the church’s identity as a separate and segregated people, rather than regarding the church as an agency of social harmony and civic improvement. As Machen concluded his chapter on salvation in Christianity and Liberalism, social utility is not the purpose of the gospel. This was becoming particularly true, he felt, in the sphere of missions where liberal missionaries traveled to various parts of the world for the sake of spreading “the blessings of Christian civilization (whatever that may be)” but were uninterested in “leading individuals to relinquish their pagan beliefs.” In contrast the “chief business” of the Christian missionary was the saving of souls “not by the mere ethical principles of Jesus but by His redemptive work.”7

Of course, Machen did not like to think of himself as sectarian. He came from a prominent family, had access to the elite institutions of American learning and Protestantism, and was an active citizen. Yet, he also understood that by twentieth-century standards the church was sectarian if she maintained her mission of proclaiming the gospel. As the mainline Protestant churches knew, the great creeds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were virtually useless when it came to the work of progressive reform and building the kingdom of God. That is why the creeds proposed for church union were vague and abstract. In the end Machen believed that the church had obscured the gospel for the sake of greater influence in society. “Christianity refuses to be regarded as a mere means to a higher end,” he wrote. “Our Lord made that perfectly clear when He said: ‘If any man come to me, and hate not his father and mother…he cannot be my disciple’ (Luke xiv. 26). Whatever else those stupendous words may mean, they certainly meant that the relationship to Christ takes precedence of all other relationships, even the holiest of relationships like those that exist between husband and wife and parent and child.” Machen admitted that Christianity could accomplish many useful things in this world but if it was accepted only for the sake of greater utility then it was not really Christianity.8

The Responsibility of the Church

The understanding of the church implicit in Machen’s critique of liberalism is the greatest difference between his outlook and fundamentalists (or later evangelicals). As much as Machen’s argument rested upon a wealth of knowledge, his conception of the church differed significantly from many conservatives who assumed the church had a responsibility to maintain Christian civilization. Machen’s ideas about the task of the church have also proved to be unappealing to Protestants committed to transforming culture.

Machen believed that the church’s primary task was to witness to Christ and he cited the risen Christ’s instructions to his followers—”Ye shall be my witnesses”—as a correct summary of the church’s purpose. As he often observed, Christianity was not a religious experience that transcended doctrine nor was it an inward feeling of which doctrine was a manifestation. Rather, Christianity was “a life founded upon a doctrine…. a life produced not merely by exhortation, not merely by personal contacts, but primarily by an account of something that happened, a piece of good news, or a gospel.”9 Machen turned from the abstract to the concrete when he argued that Presbyterian witness-bearing was circumscribed by the Westminster Standards. Specifically, the denomination’s ordination vows put explicit limits upon a Presbyterian minister. The Presbyterian Church’s funds were held under a trust that obligated the church to propagate the gospel as taught in the Bible and the Westminster Confession. To use those funds for any other purpose was a violation of that trust.

Machen’s criticisms of Protestant liberalism followed in part from this understanding of the church. Liberals, he charged, were violating the church’s trust by contradicting from Presbyterian pulpits the very creed that they affirmed in their ordination vows. A significant component of this critique concerned intellectual honesty. Machen conceded that not everyone would agree that creeds were valuable. But the desirability of the Westminster Confession for Presbyterians was not at issue. Rather the problem was whether a minister or church official was faithful to his ordination vow. If a man preached and acted in accordance with the church’s creedal basis then he could hold special office; if not, then he could not speak for the church.10

Machen’s arguments were convincing to many conservatives but failed to gain the assent of evangelicals within the Presbyterian Church. For them, liberalism was certainly erroneous but confined largely to a limited number of pulpits or presbyteries. Consequently, because the majority of the church was still loyal to historic Christianity drastic measures were not needed. Machen battled this attitude toward the church’s witness for the last ten years of his life and these struggles led to the founding of Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929, the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions in 1933, and finally the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1936. In each case, the issue was not whether liberalism was flawed but whether the church compromised its witness by tolerating liberalism.

Arguably the most forceful expression of Machen’s conception of the church came in a 1933 address he gave at a meeting of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. In this setting he actually spent more time on what social scientists should not expect from the church than he did addressing the church’s positive tasks. Nevertheless, those tasks—that the church was to be “radically doctrinal,” “radically intolerant,” and “radically ethical” —restated Machen’s ideas about the witness-bearing nature of the church. At the same time he explained the limitations that constrained the church. First of all, “you cannot expect from [the church] any cooperation with non-Christian religion or with a non-Christian program of ethical culture.” “There is no such thing,” he insisted, “as a universally valid fund of religious principles upon which particular religions, including the Christian religion, may build.” Secondly, it was improper to look to the church for “any official pronouncements upon the political or social questions of the day, and you cannot expect cooperation with the state in anything involving the use of force” because the church’s weapons against evil “are spiritual, not carnal.” The responsibility of the church in the new age, then, according to Machen, was “the same as its responsibility in every age.” It was,

to testify that this world is lost in sin; that the span of human life—nay the length of human history—is an infinitesimal island in the awful depths of eternity; that there is a mysterious, holy, living God, Creator of all, Upholder of all, infinitely beyond all; that He has revealed Himself to us in His Word and offered us communion with Himself through Jesus Christ the Lord; that there is no other salvation, for individuals or for nations, save this, but that this salvation is full and free, and that whosoever possesses it has for himself and for all others to whom he may be the instrument of bringing it a treasure compared with which all the kingdoms of the earth—nay, all the wonders of the starry heavens —are as the dust of the earth.11

The profound responsibility of the church, however, did not exempt individual Christians from cultural responsibilities. Machen recognized the especially important role that families, schools and communities play in nurturing and sustaining Christian fellowship and witness. Indeed, these institutions and associations along with the church provided believers with a sense of community. In this culture, even one dominated by believers, not every item would be explicitly Christian because through common grace believers share much with unbelievers. But in a culture which allowed Christians to flourish in their various callings, God would be recognized as the giver and sustainer of all, and as such, every aspect of human life would be pursued by Christians to give honor and glory to him. Machen’s ideas about Christian schools grew out of this vision of Christian culture. What made the Christian school so valuable was its effort to bring about the “profound Christian permeation of every human activity, no matter how secular the world may regard it as being.” “A Christian boy or girl can learn mathematics, for example, from a teacher who is not a Christian; and truth is truth however learned.” But the “bearing of truth, the meaning of truth, the purpose of truth, even in the sphere of mathematics,” he insisted, “seem entirely different to the Christian from that which they seem to the non-Christian.”12

Clearly, this conception of Christian culture could not govern an entire society with a religiously diverse population. Throughout the history of the United States Protestants of British descent had tried to impose cultural uniformity on an increasingly diverse people. As an outspoken defender of political and religious liberty, Machen objected to efforts designed to yield a national culture. In fact, he embraced a cultural pluralism in which Christians would create their own institutions and associations. The purpose of Christian institutions had less to do with constructing or maintaining a Christian society than training generations of believers who would take their faith into all walks of life.

Machen was particularly zealous for civil liberties because of their close relationship to religious freedom. He repeatedly argued that the kind of intolerance he believed essential to the church’s faithfulness was not only compatible but predicated upon civil liberty. Within the involuntary association of the state, Machen reasoned,

individual citizens who desire to unite for some special purpose should be permitted to do so. Especially in the sphere of religion, such permission of individuals to unite is one of the rights which lie at the very foundation of our civil and religious liberty. The state does not scrutinize the rightness or wrongness of the religious purpose for which such voluntary religious associations are formed—if it did undertake such scrutiny all religious liberty would be gone.13

According to this view, the church was a kind of voluntary organization. It was composed of “a number of persons who have come to agreement in a certain message about Christ and who desire to unite in the propagation of that message.” Because no one was forced by law to join the church, requiring ministers and church officials to assent to certain theological views was not at odds with religious liberty. Machen thought civil liberties were so important for preserving a Christian witness that he defended the rights of non-Christians to found schools and rear children in a manner consistent with their beliefs. Religious liberty, he maintained, should be extended not just to Protestants, but to all religions.14

If the principle of religious freedom meant that the state could not interfere in religious affairs, it followed that religious bodies should not interfere in public matters. One example of this argument was his opposition to Bible reading and school prayer in public schools. Not only did such practices infringe upon the liberties of non-Christians, but they also compromised the message of the gospel. For instance, many educators held that Bible reading would reinforce common notions about good and evil. Machen countered that the central theme of Scripture, and indeed the core of Christianity, was redemption. “To create the impression that other things in the Bible contain any hope for humanity apart from [grace] is to contradict the Bible at its root.” This did not mean that schools should not enforce some kind of morality. But efforts to ground that morality upon the Bible had to be avoided. A secular moral education, Machen admitted, was by no means sufficient because “the only true grounding of morality is found in the revealed will of God.” Indeed, a secularized education, “though perhaps necessary, is a necessary evil.” But, at least it avoided the greater harm of confusing the Bible’s central teaching. And the precise harm that religious activity in public affairs could produce was to remove Christian understandings of virtue and morality from first order considerations about human depravity and grace.15

Thus Machen recognized and accepted a diminished role for the church in a secular society like the United States which not only had abolished religious establishments but also included groups of people from a variety of religious backgrounds. While modernists and fundamentalists wanted to preserve Christian civilization in the United States and were willing to use the state to do so, Machen warned about the dangers of such a strategy. The goal of transforming culture was potentially as harmful to the church as it was to civil and religious liberty.

An Otherworldly Faith?

Machen’s understanding of the church, of course, implies an otherworldly faith that does not sit well with efforts to transform the culture and redeem politics. From the perspective of many who laud a Christian world-and-life-view, Machen’s distinction between salvation and grace on the one side, and human relationships and cultural matters on the other, seems to betray a fundamentalist outlook which denies the goodness of the created order.

Yet Machen’s convictions are not far removed from the Protestant Reformers. Indeed, the distinction between the temporal and spiritual, between the calling of the church and secular vocations, is also prominent in the work of John Calvin, who wrote in Book 4 of the Institutes,

there are two governments to which mankind is subject,…the first of these, which rules over the soul or the inner man, and concerns itself with eternal life….the second, whose province is the establishment of merely civil or external justice, a justice in conduct…. Anyone who knows how to distinguish between body and soul, between this

present transitory life and the eternal life to come, will not find it difficult to understand that the spiritual kingdom of Christ and civil government are things far removed from one another. It is a Judaic folly to look for the kingdom of Christ among the things that make up this world, and to shut it up among them; our opinion, which is supported by the plainest teaching of Scripture, is that on the contrary, the fruit we reap from grace is spiritual fruit.16

This distinction between spiritual and temporal affairs in no way denies the goodness of creation or the Lordship of Christ in all spheres of life. But as Machen argued the church needed to be clear in its distinctions between its ministry and ordinances, and the other good but nevertheless non-salvific aspects of creation. This is still true since churches continue to be tempted to look to cultural or political means rather than the ministry of word and sacrament for advancing God’s kingdom. The problem with the Protestant establishment, as Machen saw it, was that it had blurred the distinctions between special and general revelation, between particular and common grace, between the supernatural and the natural. To be sure the church was trying to do things that were laudable and showed genuine concern for those in need. Still, Machen believed the church had substituted the task of improving social and cultural affairs with the work of proclaiming the gospel.

In the end, Machen teaches an important lesson for Presbyterians. He reminded the church of a lesson taught by the Reformation. The church’s responsibility was not to improve this world. The truth of the gospel does not depend on a strong economy or social harmony. Rather the church’s health rested on its trust in God and proclamation of his word. This was the question that Machen posed to the church of his day and it continues to be one that contemporary believers must ponder.

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Sep/Oct 2012).