John Gresham Machen was born July 28, 1881, in Baltimore, Maryland, to well-educated, devoutly Presbyterian parents. As Monica loomed large in the life of the church father Augustine, so did Machen’s mother, Minnie, in the life of her son. She oversaw his catechesis in the Christian faith and in literature, kindling in him a lifelong love of both. Three of the books that made Machen’s name bear the same dedication, “To my Mother.”
After earning his A.B. in classics from Johns Hopkins University in 1901, Machen entered Princeton Theological Seminary with no settled sense of call to pastoral ministry. To this doubt was added another when he began graduate study in Germany in 1905. Struck by the intense personal faith of the liberal theologian Wilhelm Herrmann, Machen began to wonder whether the authenticity of the Christian faith depended on its historicity or whether personal experience alone might suffice. His life’s work would answer that question decisively in favor of the former.
By the time Machen returned to Princeton as an instructor in 1906, liberalism’s allure had dissipated, though he wrestled with his sense of call for several more years. He was ordained in 1914 and installed as assistant professor of New Testament in 1915. His inaugural address, “History and Faith,” stressed that the Christian faith is grounded in historical fact—it stands or falls with the reality of the events it proclaims.
Machen’s first scholarly monograph, The Origin of Paul’s Religion (1921), argued that Paul, far from having invented a new religion, based his religion on the historical Jesus: his person and work. Two years later came his New Testament Greek for Beginners, which remains in print and in the classroom a century on.
That year also saw Machen’s best-known book, Christianity and Liberalism. Since 1920, Machen had been alarmed at how deeply liberalism had seeped into his denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA). In 1922 this liberalism reached the pulpit when Harry Emerson Fosdick preached “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” He argued that the church ought to tolerate differing views of doctrines such as the virgin birth, biblical inerrancy, and substitutionary atonement. Fosdick’s sermon was a symptom of a larger modernist movement seeking to reconcile Christianity with contemporary currents such as higher criticism and Darwinian evolution. Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism was a direct response to this challenge. He rejected the idea that fundamentalism and modernism were two factions of a single faith, and asserted that the liberal denial of the supernatural was tantamount to the formation of another religion.
The 1923 PCUSA General Assembly reaffirmed biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth, substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection, and Christ’s miracles as essential articles of the Christian faith. The modernists struck back the following year with the Auburn Affirmation, signed by well over a thousand ministers, which reframed each of the five doctrines as but one acceptable theory among others.
The same divisions ran through Princeton Seminary. When the 1929 General Assembly reorganized the seminary under a single board that included signers of the Auburn Affirmation, Machen and like-minded faculty determined to establish a new seminary in Philadelphia to carry on the legacy Princeton had abandoned. The following year, Machen published his scholarly masterpiece, The Virgin Birth of Christ, a lengthy defense of the titular doctrine, one of the five points that had been reaffirmed by the 1923 General Assembly.
Machen’s days in the PCUSA were also numbered. Appalled at the inclusive approach of the denomination’s missions board, Machen spearheaded the formation of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. When he refused to abandon the new board at the direction of the 1934 General Assembly, he was tried, convicted, and suspended from the ministry. With all avenues of appeal exhausted, he led the founding of a new denomination in 1936, later renamed the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. On New Year’s Day 1937, Machen died of pneumonia caught on a midwinter preaching trip in North Dakota. As he lay dying, he sent a telegram to his Westminster colleague John Murray that simply read, “I’m so thankful for active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.”1
1 Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir, 50th anniversary ed. (1954; repr. Willow Grove, PA: Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 2004), 451.
If the fundamental problem humanity faces is moral imperfection and selfishness, then we merely need a good example to follow, and the major Christian doctrines may be reduced to their subjective appropriation rather than their literal truth. But if humanity’s deepest problem is sin and separation from God, as Machen believed it was, then history really matters. The supernatural birth of the Savior matters; his life of perfect obedience matters (“no hope without it”); his atoning death matters; his bodily resurrection matters. The Apostle Paul recognized this truth long before Machen, when he declared, “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins… if in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15:17, 19 ESV). This in no way eliminates personal experience from the Christian life; rather, it provides such experience with a sure foundation. Machen makes this very point at the close of The Origin of Paul’s Religion:
The relation of Paul to Christ is a relation of love; and love exists only between persons. It is not a group of ideas that is to be explained, if Paulinism is to be accounted for, but the love of Paul for his Saviour. And that love is rooted, not in what Christ had said, but in what Christ had done. He “loved me and gave Himself for me.” There lies the basis of the religion of Paul; there lies the basis of all of Christianity.2
He loved me—what could be more personal than that?
2 J. Gresham Machen, The Origin of Paul’s Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 317.
“The greatest menace to the Christian Church to-day comes not from the enemies outside, but from the enemies within; it comes from the presence within the Church of a type of faith and practice that is anti-Christian to the core.”
—Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 159-60.
“What I need first of all is not exhortation, but a gospel; not directions for saving myself, but knowledge of how God has saved me. Have you any good news? That is the question that I ask of you. I know your exhortations will not help me. But if anything has been done to save me, will you not tell me the facts?”
—The Christian Faith in the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 132.
“‘Christ died’—that is history; ‘Christ died for our sins’—that is doctrine. Without these two elements, joined in an absolutely indissoluble union, there is no Christianity.”
—”Christianity vs. Modern Liberalism,” in What Is Christianity? and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951), 155.
The Origin of Paul’s Religion (1921) New Testament Greek for Beginners (1923) Christianity and Liberalism (1923) What Is Faith? (1925) The Virgin Birth of Christ (1930) The Christian Faith in the Modern World (1936) The Christian View of Man (1936) God Transcendent (1949)
At Westminster Seminary California, study Machen and other scholars who have shaped the church by laying a rich theological foundation that continues to equip pastors and church leaders for faithful ministry.
