John Gresham Machen was born July 28, 1881, in Baltimore, Maryland. His parents, Arthur and Mary (Minnie), were well educated, widely read, and committed to their Presbyterian faith. As Monica loomed large in the life of the great Church Father Augustine, so too did Minnie in the life of her son Gresham. From his earliest years, it was largely she who oversaw his catechesis both in the Christian faith and in literature more generally, kindling in her son a lifelong love of both. He repaid her in kind: three of the books that made his name bear the same three-word dedication, “To my Mother.”
Machen earned his A.B. in classics from Johns Hopkins University in 1901, having been elected during his time there to the exclusive Phi Beta Kappa honor society. In 1902, he began studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, entering with no settled sense of a call to pastoral ministry—an uncertainty that was not resolved by the time of his graduation in 1905. To this doubt was added another when he began graduate studies later that year in Germany. Struck by the intense personal faith of one of his professors, 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 decidedly in favor of the former.
When Machen returned to Princeton Seminary as a New Testament instructor in 1906, the initial allure of theological liberalism, as he had seen it embodied in his professor, had dissipated. He continued, however, to struggle with his sense of call for several more years, finally coming under the care of a presbytery in 1913. He was ordained to the ministry in 1914 and installed as assistant professor of New Testament the following year, at which time he delivered his inaugural address, “History and Faith.” In this address, he stressed that the Christian faith is grounded in historical fact—it stands or falls with the reality of the events it proclaims.
The First World War had already broken out in 1914, the year of Machen’s ordination. From the time the United States joined the war in the spring of 1917, Machen felt that he should be involved in the war effort in a ministerial capacity. The best option for him, it turned out, was the YMCA. He spent most of 1918 as a YMCA secretary staffing a canteen that served French, and later American, troops, only able to deliver sermons and lead Bible studies on occasion. After the Armistice in November of that year, he spent several more months in Europe preaching at various American military camps, returning to Princeton in the spring of 1919.
Machen published his first scholarly monograph The Origin of Paul’s Religion in 1921, arguing that Paul, far from breaking with the religion of Jesus to invent a new one, based his religion on the historical Jesus: his person and his work. In 1923, his New Testament Greek for Beginners appeared—a grammar so effective that during Machen’s lifetime, even schools out of sympathy with his theology used it to train their students, and a century later it remains in print and in the classroom.
That year also saw Machen’s best-known book, Christianity and Liberalism. Already in 1920, serving as a commissioner to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA), Machen had been shocked by the degree to which liberalism had seeped into the denomination. The Plan of Organic Union, a proposal for the eventual unification of well over a dozen American Protestant denominations on the basis of minimal doctrinal affirmations, was the parade example of such liberalism. Two years later, the same impulse reached the pulpit. On Sunday, May 21, 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick, a professor at Union Theological Seminary, preached a sermon entitled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” at the First Presbyterian Church of New York City. In it, he argued that doctrines such as the virgin birth, the second coming, biblical inerrancy, and the substitutionary atonement were adiaphora and the church ought to tolerate different understandings of them. 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.
Just a few months after the publication of Christianity and Liberalism, the PCUSA General Assembly reaffirmed biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection, and Christ’s miracles as essential. The modernists struck back the following year with the Auburn Affirmation, which reframed each of the Assembly’s five doctrines as but one acceptable theory among others. The Affirmation drew signatures from well over a thousand ministers in the denomination. In another blow to Machen’s camp, a special commission appointed by the 1925 General Assembly concluded the following year that the unrest in the PCUSA could be traced to a lack of tolerance rather than confessional erosion. In 1925 Machen also wrote What Is Faith?, advocating the union of faith and knowledge rather than separating them, as the liberals were wont to do.
The same divisions within the broader denomination were present at Princeton Seminary as well. Indeed, the president of the seminary, J. Ross Stevenson, had backed the Plan of Organic Union at the 1920 General Assembly. A special committee appointed by the 1926 General Assembly to investigate this discord reported the next year in favor of reorganizing the seminary. The 1929 General Assembly combined the two boards that had previously overseen the seminary into one, which included two men who had signed the Auburn Affirmation. Machen and like-minded faculty acted quickly and by the end of July 1929 had determined to establish a new seminary in Philadelphia to carry on the legacy Princeton had abandoned. Machen would express the same conviction in his opening address that fall. 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 had parted ways with Princeton Seminary; now his days in the PCUSA were numbered too. Appalled at the inclusive approach defended by the missions board, Machen spearheaded the formation of a new, conservative missions board, the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. When Machen refused to abandon the new board at the direction of the 1934 General Assembly, he was brought up on charges. In 1935, his presbytery tried and convicted him, leading to his suspension from the ministry, a decision that was upheld by the following year’s General Assembly. With all avenues of appeal exhausted, Machen led the founding of a new denomination, the Presbyterian Church of America, in 1936, which came to be called the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1939. 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 John Murray, a colleague on the Westminster Seminary faculty, 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 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954), 508.
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.
