Justified True Belief

(●) The New Testament scholar who told his own church that liberal Christianity was not a version of Christianity but a different religion, and who lost his ministry rather than take it back. + In 1923 a Princeton professor of New Testament published a short book with a plain title, Christianity and Liberalism, and made an argument that almost nobody in American religion wanted made. The modern liberal preacher, he said, was not a Christian holding an unusual opinion or two. He was the representative of a different religion altogether, one that had grown up inside the churches and had kept all the old words while emptying them. Walter Lippmann, one of the most influential secular journalists in America and no friend of orthodoxy, read it and called it the best popular argument either side in the quarrel had produced. The fundamentalists claimed Machen as their champion, though he disliked the label and would not use it of himself. The word had a definite meaning then. It named the loose alliance of conservative Protestants who had set out to defend a short list of doctrines they regarded as non-negotiable, and it came from a series of pamphlets, The Fundamentals, published between 1910 and 1915. Twelve years after the book appeared, his own presbytery put him on trial and stripped him of the ministry. A presbytery is the regional council of ministers and ruling elders that in a Presbyterian church ordains a man, oversees him, and can also discipline him, so the court that removed him was made up of the neighbors he had worked beside for years. He spent the last months of his life building a seminary and a denomination out of the wreckage. He is on a Christian apologetics site for a reason that has outlived the quarrel he was in. Machen’s question was not whether Christianity is comfortable but whether it is true, and he insisted that the answer depends on things that either happened or did not happen in Palestine in the first century. One fact about him a reader will remember: he was a lifelong bachelor who wrote a Greek grammar for first-year students in the same year he wrote the book that split his church, and both are still in print.

(●) 1881 AD: Born in Baltimore to a lawyer old enough to be his grandfather, in a house where the catechism and the classics were both learned early. + John Gresham Machen was born on 28 July 1881, the middle of three sons. His father, Arthur Webster Machen, was a Baltimore lawyer born in 1827, in his mid-fifties when this son arrived, with a library and a habit of reading Latin for pleasure. His mother, Mary Jones Gresham, was a Georgian, born in Macon in 1849 and a graduate of the Wesleyan Female College there, twenty-two years younger than her husband. She is the one who sat the boy down with the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the question-and-answer summary of Presbyterian doctrine that generations of children learned by heart before they were old enough to argue about any of it. The first question asks what the chief end of man is, and the child answers that it is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. She was a writer herself, and in 1903 published a study of the Bible in Robert Browning’s poetry. The household was Southern, comfortable, and bookish, and it belonged to Franklin Street Presbyterian Church, where the boy made his own profession of faith at fourteen. He entered Johns Hopkins in the autumn of 1898 to study classics under Basil Gildersleeve, then the most formidable Greek scholar in America, and came out in 1901 with a Phi Beta Kappa key and a command of Greek that would sit under everything he later wrote. The classics were not a detour on the way to theology, and it is worth being clear about why. A man who has spent four years on Homer and Thucydides has learned to read an old text as something written by a particular person, in a particular language, in a particular century, with other documents lying around it that can be compared against it. He then opens the Gospels and does the same thing there, because it is the only way he knows how to read. Machen never stopped doing that, and most of what follows in his life comes out of it.

(●) 1902 AD: He entered Princeton Seminary without meaning to be a minister, and collected its prizes anyway. + He was in no hurry to choose a life. He stayed at Hopkins a further year for graduate work in classics, and he spent that summer at Chicago taking courses in banking and international law, which is not how a man spends his holidays when he has already decided to be a minister. In the autumn of 1902 he arrived at Princeton Theological Seminary anyway, still weighing whether his life belonged to the law, to classical scholarship, or to the church, and hedging even there: he enrolled at the same time for a master’s degree in philosophy at Princeton University, which he took in 1904. The seminary suited him, and it kept handing him its prizes. In 1904 he won the Middler prize in New Testament exegesis, the award given to a second-year man (a middler, in the old seminary word) for close study of the text in its original Greek, for a paper on the opening of John’s Gospel. The following year he took the senior essay contest with a study of the New Testament accounts of the virgin birth, a subject he was still working on a quarter of a century later when he published the technical monograph on it. He graduated that spring with the faculty already thinking of him as one of their own. What he did not have, through any of this, was a settled sense that he ought to preach. He wrote home about it repeatedly. The gifts everyone else could see were, to him, an argument he had not yet accepted.

(●) 1905 AD: A year in Germany left him unable to say whether he still believed, and it was nine years before he would let anyone ordain him. + In 1905 he crossed to Germany for a year of study, one semester at Marburg and one at Göttingen, which is simply what a promising young American scholar did in those years. At Marburg he sat under Wilhelm Herrmann, the leading systematic theologian of the liberal school. A systematic theologian is one whose work is to set out Christian doctrine as a connected whole, God, sin, Christ, salvation and the rest fitted together, rather than to work over single texts the way a New Testament man does, so Herrmann was teaching the shape of the whole thing to students who had come to Germany to learn it. The experience nearly ended Machen’s ministry before it began. Herrmann was not a scoffer. He was a warm and evidently devout man who believed that the heart of religion is an inner experience of Christ’s moral power, and that the historical claims of the creeds are the outer shell around it. Machen wrote to his father in real distress that he had been thrown all into confusion by what Herrmann said, because the man’s devotion to Christ ran deeper than anything he could find in himself. It is worth pausing on that. The man who would spend his life arguing that liberalism is another religion first met it in a teacher he loved. He came back to Princeton in the autumn of 1906 as an instructor in New Testament, and the confusion did not lift quickly. Ordination in the Presbyterian church required a man to stand up in front of witnesses and say, without crossing his fingers, that he received the Westminster Confession as containing the system of doctrine taught in Scripture. The Confession is the long statement of doctrine drawn up in the 1640s by an assembly of English divines meeting at Westminster, with Scottish commissioners sitting among them, and Presbyterian churches take it as their constitution under Scripture; a minister who says that sentence is promising what he will teach for the rest of his life. For years Machen would not say it. He taught, he studied, he wrote, and he waited. Whatever his later reputation for hardness, the position he defended so fiercely was one he had spent nine years deciding he could honestly hold. He was ordained at last on 23 June 1914, at Plainsboro, New Jersey, having been elected assistant professor the month before, and was installed in the chair on 3 May 1915 with an inaugural address called "History and Faith." Then the war came. He sailed for France in January 1918 and served with the YMCA there into 1919, running a canteen hut near the front and handing out hot chocolate and tobacco to soldiers who had just come out of the line. He was thirty-seven, a professor of Greek, ladling chocolate within earshot of the guns. It was not restful work, and he said so in his letters home; in the last weeks of the fighting he was carrying wounded and dead off the field as a stretcher-bearer.

(●) 1923 AD: A short book, Christianity and Liberalism, argued that the modern preacher and the apostle were not in the same religion, and it was read far outside the church papers. + The quarrel had a spark and a date. On 21 May 1922 Harry Emerson Fosdick, a Baptist preaching in a Presbyterian pulpit in New York, delivered a sermon called "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" that treated the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection and the second coming as opinions a modern Christian was free to leave behind. The sermon was printed and mailed to tens of thousands of clergy. Machen’s own case was already in print. He had given an address at Wayne, Pennsylvania, in November 1921 that the Princeton Theological Review published the next year as "Liberalism or Christianity," and he now expanded it into a book that Macmillan brought out in 1923. It did not argue about any single doctrine. It argued about categories. Two religions, he said, were sharing one set of buildings, one seminary system and one collection plate. Both used the words God, Christ, sin, salvation and faith, and they meant different things by every one of them. The liberal preacher was not being wicked, and Machen went out of his way to say so; in most cases the man was entirely sincere, and thought he was doing the church a service by saving what could be saved. He was simply not preaching Christianity, and the honest course was to say that out loud rather than to keep the peace by leaving the words undefined. The reception told him he had found the nerve. Conservatives circulated the book everywhere. Walter Lippmann, who believed none of it, praised it in A Preface to Morals as the best popular argument the whole controversy had produced. And in the same year, almost as an aside, Machen brought out New Testament Greek for Beginners, a textbook that has taught first-year Greek to seminarians for a century.

(●) 1929 AD: When the church reorganized Princeton Seminary, he walked out and founded Westminster Theological Seminary. + Then the trouble came home to his own faculty. Princeton had been the fortress of confessional Presbyterian scholarship for a century, a school that took the church’s written creed to be true and defended it with the full apparatus of the university, and the church now proposed to reorganize its governing boards in a way that would give the majority party control of the school. Machen’s own position went first. In May 1926 he had been nominated to the chair of apologetics and Christian ethics, but an appointment like that needed confirmation from the General Assembly, the yearly national court to which every presbytery sends ministers and elders and where the whole denomination settles its business, and the Assembly never gave it. Part of what was held against him was strikingly unreligious. He had voted against a presbytery resolution endorsing the Eighteenth Amendment, the national prohibition of alcohol, on the ground that it is not the church’s business to tell the state what laws to pass. He waited two years for a confirmation that did not come, and withdrew his own name on 28 June 1928. That vote was of a piece with the rest of him. He had a libertarian streak that embarrassed his allies as often as it annoyed his opponents, and it had been on public display only a few months before the nomination: on 25 February 1926 he travelled to Washington to testify before the House and Senate committees on education against a bill to create a federal department of education, arguing that a government monopoly on the shaping of children’s minds is a danger whatever party holds it. A man who will say that to a congressional committee is not going to trim his sails for a church court, and the church court knew it. When the reorganization went through in 1929, Machen left with a handful of colleagues and founded Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, which opened its doors on 25 September that year with fifty students. He put his own money into it and taught its New Testament courses himself. He told the opening gathering that the new school existed to carry on what old Princeton had stood for: that the Christian religion is true, that it welcomes and can bear scholarly defense, and that it should be proclaimed without fear or favor.

(●) 1935 AD: His own presbytery tried him for disobedience and took his ministry away, and the next year he founded the denomination that became the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. + The last act began with missionaries. Machen had become convinced that his own denomination’s mission board was sending out men who did not believe the gospel it was chartered to spread, and a man who thinks that has to decide what to do with the offering plate. What he did was help found the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions in 1933, an agency outside the denomination’s control through which congregations could support missionaries they had satisfied themselves about, and he was elected its president. The General Assembly of 1934 answered with what came to be called the Mandate: ministers who sat on the independent board were ordered to resign from it, on pain of discipline. He refused, and the Presbytery of New Brunswick tried him. The indictment ran to six counts, but the six were only six ways of putting one charge, that he had disobeyed a lawful order of his church. Proceedings opened in February 1935, and when he came to argue his case, on 7 March, the chair ruled that the theological and legal merits of the Mandate itself were out of order. That ruling is the hinge of the whole business. He was not permitted to say why he had disobeyed, only whether he had, and he had. At the final session, on 29 March 1935, the commission found him guilty and suspended him from the ministry, and on 1 June 1936 the General Assembly meeting at Syracuse rejected his appeal. Ten days later, on 11 June 1936, he and those who went with him constituted a new denomination in Philadelphia, the Presbyterian Church of America, and chose him as its first moderator, the minister who presides over its assembly for the year. A lawsuit over the name forced a change in 1939, two years after his death, to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He was fifty-four, without a pulpit in the church of his baptism, and starting over.

(●) 1937 AD: He died of pneumonia in North Dakota on New Year’s Day, after wiring a friend one sentence about the obedience of Christ. + In the last week of 1936 he travelled to North Dakota in bitter cold to preach and to encourage the scattered ministers of the new church, which was six months old and had almost nothing behind it. He was already ill when he went. Pleurisy, an inflammation of the lining around the lungs that makes every breath hurt, turned into pneumonia, and on 1 January 1937 he died in a hospital in Bismarck, at fifty-five. From his bed he dictated a telegram to John Murray, his colleague at Westminster: he was thankful for the active obedience of Christ, and there was no hope without it. That is a technical phrase, and it repays unpacking, because the dying man chose it deliberately and had spent his life among people who knew exactly what it meant. Reformed theology distinguishes two sides of what Christ did. His passive obedience is his suffering the penalty that sinners deserved, the cross and everything that led to it. His active obedience is the whole lifetime of righteousness he actually lived, every day of it kept perfectly, and which is credited to those who trust him, so that they stand before God not merely with their debts canceled but with someone else’s record in their hands. A man who has spent his life in controversy might be expected to reach at the end for something about the fight, a word about who had been right. Machen reached instead for the doctrine that says his own record was not what he was standing on. He was buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, under a stone whose inscription is in Greek and says that he was faithful unto death.

What He Taught

(T1) Liberal Christianity is not a mild form of Christianity but a different religion using its vocabulary. + Imagine a bank that keeps its name, its marble lobby and its old signage, and quietly stops honoring deposits. It is not a bank with unusual policies. It is something else operating under a trusted sign. That is the shape of Machen’s central claim, and everything else he wrote in the controversy hangs on it. By "liberalism" he did not mean generosity, or political opinion, or a soft manner. He meant a specific movement in the churches, sometimes called modernism, which held that the permanent value of Christianity lies in its moral and spiritual life, and that the historical claims wrapped around that life, a real incarnation, a real atoning death, a real empty tomb, are the temporary packaging of a first-century world. Strip the packaging, said the liberal, and you keep the treasure. Machen answered that when you strip the packaging away you do not find the old treasure sitting there waiting. You find a different one. Go through the words one at a time and the substitution is visible in each. God, in the liberal message, is fatherly to everyone by nature, rather than a Father to those he adopts by grace. Sin is immaturity and bad environment, rather than guilt. Jesus is the finest example of religious experience, rather than the Lord who died for sins. Each of those is a coherent position and a man could hold it honestly, which is exactly why Machen thought the confusion so serious. None of them is the position of the New Testament, and Paul had already ruled on what to do when a message contrary to the apostolic one arrives wearing Christian clothes (Galatians 1:8). Two things are worth saying about how he made this argument. He was careful never to accuse liberals of dishonesty in believing what they believed; his charge of dishonesty was aimed only at holding office under a creed one has rejected. And he insisted the question was historical rather than merely doctrinal, settled by evidence about what the first Christians actually proclaimed, which is why he spent his professional life on the sources rather than on the platform.

(Q) "the great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology." + Source: J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, chapter 1 ("Introduction"), page 2 (Macmillan, 1923). The sentence comes on the book’s second page, before any particular doctrine has been discussed. He is stating the thesis he will spend six chapters defending, and the sting is in the last clause: the shared vocabulary is not a comfort but the reason the situation is dangerous (T1).

(T2) The gospel is news before it is advice, and the news arrives with its meaning attached. + A friend calls to say the surgery went well. That is news, and you did not have to do anything to make it true. Now suppose she says instead that you really ought to be more hopeful about life. That is advice, and it lands very differently. Machen’s point is that the earliest Christian preaching was of the first kind. He was answering a slogan that ran through the churches of his day and has not gone away: Christianity is a life, not a doctrine. He agreed at once that Christianity produces a life, and said so warmly. The early Christians astonished their neighbors by how they lived. The question is how that life got produced. The Stoic and Cynic preachers of the same period had high ideals and told people to live up to them, and their exhortations changed nothing much. The Christians did something stranger. They reported an event. Here he brings in the earliest summary of the message we possess, older than any Gospel: Christ died for our sins, he was buried, he was raised on the third day (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). Notice what is in it. "Christ died" is a report of something that happened, the kind of claim a historian can investigate. "For our sins" is an interpretation of what the happening means. Machen’s word for that second element is doctrine, and his point is that the two arrived together and cannot be pulled apart. Take away the event and doctrine becomes speculation about nothing. Take away the meaning and you have only an execution, one of thousands under Roman rule. That is why he thought the liberal program self-defeating. A religion of ideals can be improved and updated. A religion founded on news can only be reported or denied, and Machen was content to let it stand or fall as news.

(Q) "It transformed the lives of men not by appealing to the human will, but by telling a story; not by exhortation, but by the narration of an event." + Source: J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, chapter 2 ("Doctrine"), pages 47 to 48 (Macmillan, 1923). He has just granted everything the slogan-makers wanted granted, that Christianity from the beginning was a way of life, and has asked the awkward follow-up question: how was that life produced? The answer is the sentence quoted (T2). He adds immediately that such a method seemed foolish to the ancient world and seems foolish to modern preachers, and that the strange thing is that it works.

(T3) Faith is trust in a person, and nobody trusts a person he knows nothing about. + You are choosing a surgeon. Someone tells you that trusting her is a matter of the heart and that asking about her training would spoil the purity of the trust. You would think they had lost their mind. Trust in a person always rides on things you believe are true about that person, and the more serious the trust, the more the beliefs matter. Machen thought the modern church had talked itself into the opposite. Faith, it was said, is confidence in a person rather than assent to a creed, and the more it can be freed from propositions the more childlike and pure it becomes. He gave a whole book, What Is Faith? (1925), to showing that this is psychologically false and biblically false at once. A proposition, for the record, is simply a statement that can be true or false: "the tomb was empty" is one, "how wonderful" is not. His biblical case rested on the letter to the Hebrews, which says that whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him (Hebrews 11:6). Those are propositions, and the writer makes them the condition of drawing near at all. Faith, then, is not the opposite of knowledge but is built on it, the way a marriage is built on knowing whom you married. He was equally clear about what faith is not. It is not the sum of the propositions. A man can believe every clause of the creed and be lost; the demons manage the orthodoxy and none of the trust. Faith is resting on Christ for salvation, and Machen’s claim is only that you cannot rest on someone you have not been told about.

(Q) "Confidence in a person is more than intellectual assent to a series of propositions about the person, but it always involves those propositions, and becomes impossible the moment they are denied." + Source: J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith?, chapter 2 ("Faith in God"), page 48 (Macmillan, 1925). The book grew out of a course of lectures given at the Grove City Bible School in the summer of 1925. Machen has just quoted Hebrews 11:6 and is drawing the balance carefully: he concedes in the first clause everything the "faith is trust, not creed" party wants, and then shows in the second what their slogan cannot survive (T3).

(T4) Christianity begins at the broken heart, which is why a religion of self-improvement cannot get to it. + Think of a man who eats well, reads good books, takes up the cello at forty, and becomes by every measure anyone can apply a better version of himself. There is nothing wrong with any of that, and Machen was the last man to sneer at it. He had an unexpected admiration for ancient Greece, called it pagan with no contempt at all in the word, and said the modern world had not begun to equal its achievements. Paganism, in his usage, is not idol worship at all but a view of life: the view that the highest human goal is the healthy and joyous development of the powers we already have. On that view the human problem is that we are underdeveloped, and the remedy is training. Against this he set what he took to be the first note of the Christian gospel, which is not encouragement but grief. Something has gone wrong that no amount of development repairs, and until a person feels that, the whole message sounds like an idle tale. He was blunt that this is the hardest part of the gospel to get a hearing for, in his century or any other, because nobody wants to be told they are in the wrong. Two guards he put on this, both of them worth noticing. He denied that Christianity ends at the broken heart, and said plainly that the Christian is not called to a life of beating his breast. Sin is faced once, and then, by the grace of God, thrown into the depths of the sea, after which a Christian is free to develop every faculty God gave him with more joy than the pagan ever had. And he refused to make the Greeks the villains: their trouble, he said, was not the building, which was glorious, but the foundation, which was rotten, because there was always something that had to be covered up.

(Q) "Paganism is optimistic with regard to unaided human nature, whereas Christianity is the religion of the broken heart." + Source: J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, chapter 3 ("God and Man"), page 65 (Macmillan, 1923). He has just defined paganism as the view that finds the highest goal of human life in developing the powers we already possess, and has insisted the word is not being used as an insult (T4).

(T5) A minister who has stopped believing his church’s creed should resign from it rather than reinterpret it. + A man takes a job as an accountant at a firm, decides two years in that double-entry bookkeeping is a superstition invented by the Venetians, and goes on drawing the salary while quietly keeping the books his own way. Whatever else is true, something has gone wrong there that has nothing to do with accounting. That is the shape of the conviction that cost Machen everything, and it is narrower than its reputation. Machen was not saying that unbelievers must be driven out of the country, or that liberals are bad men, or even that they must stop preaching. He was making a point about contracts. A confessional church, one founded on a written statement of doctrine drawn from Scripture, is a voluntary body, and a man who takes its ordination vows makes a promise about what he will teach. If he comes to think the statement false, he has an honorable option available at any moment: he can leave, and say why, and start or join something that believes what he believes. What he may not honorably do is keep the salary and the pulpit while emptying the words. He pressed the point from the other side too, which is the part usually forgotten. He argued that the liberal preacher would gain by leaving. He would no longer need equivocal language, no longer need to avoid giving offense, and would win the full personal respect even of his opponents. Machen genuinely thought candor would be better for everyone, including the men he was arguing against. Two honest observations sit against this. The first is that it works only if the confession really is the church’s constitution rather than a historic document it has quietly outgrown, and by the 1920s many Presbyterians sincerely believed the latter. The second is that Machen’s own end shows the rule has no favorites: when the church he was defending judged that he was the one breaking his vows, the machinery he had appealed to was turned on him, and he obeyed his conscience and left. He asked no one to do anything he did not do.

(Q) "Honesty, despite all that can be said and done, is not a trifle, but one of the weightier matters of the law." + Source: J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, chapter 7 ("The Church"), page 165 (Macmillan, 1923). The phrase "the weightier matters of the law" is lifted from Jesus’ rebuke of the Pharisees for tithing herbs while neglecting justice and mercy and faithfulness (Matthew 23:23), and Machen is turning it on his own denomination: keeping the machinery running is the mint and dill, and telling the truth about what you believe is the weightier matter (T5).

(Q) "The Church is perishing today through the lack of thinking, not through an excess of it." + Source: J. Gresham Machen, "Christianity and Culture," Princeton Theological Review XI (1913), pages 1 to 15; delivered on 20 September 1912 as "The Scientific Preparation of the Minister" at the opening of Princeton Seminary’s one hundred and first session. He was thirty-one, not yet ordained, speaking to incoming students, and the address is the clearest statement of what he thought a seminary is for. His answer to the culture question is neither surrender nor retreat but consecration: cultivate the arts and sciences with all the enthusiasm of the keenest humanist, and give them to God. In the same paragraph he warns that a church which retreats to matters nobody disputes, better housing for the poor and the like, will win real victories and still lose its power, because sin and death and salvation are where the argument actually is.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The book outlived the quarrel, and its question is still the one that gets asked. + A century on, Christianity and Liberalism has never been out of print, and it is read by people who could not name a single figure in the Presbyterian conflict of the 1920s. What travelled was not the church politics but the question: is this the same religion, or is it another one wearing the name? Its unusual authority owes something to who praised it. Walter Lippmann was an agnostic and one of the most influential political columnists in America, and in A Preface to Morals (1929) he set Machen’s little book above everything either side had produced, admiring its acumen and its wit as a defense of orthodoxy he himself could not accept. That is a rare thing: an opponent conceding that the case has been put as well as it can be put. The argument became a permanent tool. When later Christians have wanted to say that some new proposal changes the religion rather than restating it, they have reached for Machen’s categories. C. S. Lewis was making a related distinction a generation later when he insisted that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be, both men said, is moderately important.

(†) He left institutions behind him, and they trained the men who rebuilt conservative scholarship. + Machen’s more durable legacy is a seminary, a denomination and a grammar book. Westminster Theological Seminary gathered around him a faculty whose influence ran far past their own communion. Cornelius Van Til taught its apologetics and built the presuppositional school, which holds that a believer and an unbeliever differ not only about the evidence but about what is allowed to count as evidence, so the argument has to begin with the assumptions underneath it rather than with the facts on top. John Murray, the Scottish theologian who received the telegram from Bismarck, was another. So was Ned Stonehouse, who had been Machen’s student and became his biographer and his literary executor, and Oswald T. Allis, who held the Old Testament chair. Through them the conviction that confessional Christianity can do first-rate technical scholarship, rather than merely denouncing it, passed to a generation. That conviction escaped the Orthodox Presbyterian Church almost immediately. Harold John Ockenga and Carl F. H. Henry, the architects of the postwar evangelical movement in America, wanted exactly what Machen had wanted, a Christianity that could hold its own in a university, even though they chose a broader and less separatist path than his. The historian George Marsden and others have traced that lineage directly. And the Greek grammar of 1923 kept doing quiet work all along, teaching the language of the New Testament to students who had no idea whose side its author had been on. There is a smaller line of influence worth naming, because it has grown recently. Machen’s insistence that the church speaks with authority only where Scripture has spoken, and should keep out of the business of directing the state, has been taken up by writers such as D. G. Hart as a model for Christians uneasy with the marriage of faith and partisan politics. It is a strange afterlife for a man remembered as a fighter, but it is his own position, held at real cost in 1926.

(†) Christians who agreed with his theology have divided ever since over whether he was right to leave. + The disagreement began among his own allies and has never been settled, and both sides deserve stating properly. The clearest way to see it is to look at two men who were on his side of the theology and would not follow him out of the door. Clarence Macartney had led the conservative cause in the General Assembly and won its moderatorship in 1924, and he called the way Machen was cast out lamentable, but he thought the response too radical and stayed where he was. Oswald T. Allis, the Old Testament scholar who had left Princeton for Westminster in 1929, resigned his chair in 1936 and also remained in the old denomination. Neither of them followed him, and many who shared his convictions to the letter judged that a compromised church is still a church, that the ministry is exercised where God places you, and that walking out surrenders to the other party everything you were trying to protect. Machen’s reply was that a promise is a promise and a court that will not hear your defense has already answered you. Even the going out did not stay united, which is the part of the story his critics reach for first. In 1937, months after his death and barely a year after the founding, the new denomination split when Carl McIntire, J. Oliver Buswell and a group of ministers and elders withdrew to form the Bible Presbyterian body. They went over two issues: premillennialism, the belief that Christ will return before a thousand-year reign on earth, and total abstinence from alcohol. Machen had refused to make either one a test of fellowship, a test of fellowship being a point you must agree on before the church will have you. The episode is often read against him, and it does show the cost of the separatist road, of leaving a church rather than staying inside it to fight. It also shows him holding a line he had held for twenty years, the same line that had counted against him when he voted against the prohibition resolution: the church may bind consciences only where Scripture binds them. Where a reader lands on this is likely to follow their own tradition. What can be said fairly is that Machen was not a schismatic by temperament. He spent thirteen years fighting inside the courts of his church before those courts removed him.

(†) Where his own record falls short: he fought to keep a black student out of the seminary dormitory. + The ledger has another column, and it is not about his theology. It is about a letter. On 5 October 1913, Machen wrote to his mother about a black student who had been given a room in the Princeton Seminary dormitories and who might at any time be moved into his own. He objected, and he wrote that the objection was the faculty’s too: to his knowledge not a single member of it agreed with B. B. Warfield, the senior professor of theology, the same Warfield whose defense of Scripture Machen admired all his life, who wanted the student housed with everyone else. Warfield carried the day. Machen did more than write home about it: by his own account he argued with Warfield for two hours. The episode is documented from Machen’s correspondence, which is held in the seminary archives at Westminster, and D. G. Hart takes it up in the opening chapter of Defending the Faith. It is not a matter of reading modern assumptions back into an old letter. A Christian of his own seminary, holding his own doctrine of Scripture, sitting in the office down the hall, reached the opposite conclusion at the time and acted on it. Two things need saying, and neither cancels the other. The first is that this was private conduct and family correspondence rather than published teaching; he did not build a theological defense of segregation into his books, as some of his Southern contemporaries did, and his writing on race is thin rather than voluminous. The second is that this makes the failure worse in one respect, not better. He knew what the apostolic answer was. Peter had said it in the house of a Roman officer, that God shows no partiality (Acts 10:34), and Paul had put it as plainly as it can be put, that there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28). James calls showing partiality in the assembly an offense against the faith itself, and a sin (James 2:1, 9). The sharpest witness against him is his own closing page. Christianity and Liberalism ends with Machen asking whether there is anywhere left that two or three can gather in Jesus’ name and forget the things that divide nation from nation and race from race, and unite in gratitude at the foot of the cross. He wrote that ten years after the letter. A man can see the country he cannot yet walk into, and the honest thing is to say both halves out loud.