J. Gresham Machen

It is the first day of January, 1937. A man lies in a borrowed bed in a hospital in Bismarck, North Dakota, two thousand miles from the city he had been building all his life. His lungs are filling. His heart is failing. He has been awake intermittently for three days. The wind that crosses the Dakota plain in January is the kind of wind that does not know what coast it is supposed to be ending at, and the room is cold by every standard a Baltimore aristocrat would have set for a sickroom. He is fifty-five years old. He had spent the holiday season preaching to small Reformed congregations in North Dakota who could not afford a more famous speaker, and pneumonia had caught him on the train. He has hours, perhaps a day. And he asks for paper.

He is barely strong enough to lift the pen. He composes a single telegram. The recipient is his colleague John Murray, two thousand miles east at the seminary Machen had founded in Philadelphia after Princeton fell. The telegram is sixteen words long.

"I'm so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it."

Read the line slowly. Stop on the noun-phrase. The active obedience of Christ. Not the passive merit of his death only — though Machen would have been the first to weep at the cross. The active obedience: the lifelong righteousness of his keeping the law on our behalf, every day a perfect day, every hour a perfect hour, every breath a perfect offering — and the whole accumulated treasure of it imputed, by sovereign reckoning, to every soul that has ever been or will ever be united to him by faith. No hope without it. The dying scholar, with breath running out and a continent of enemies between his bed and his life's work, did not reach for sentiment. He did not reach for memory. He did not reach for affirmation. He reached for the doctrine. The doctrine was holding him up. The doctrine has been holding everyone it has ever held since.

At the hour of his death, the scholar reached for the doctrine. The doctrine had been holding him the whole time.

The Baltimore Aristocrat Who Saw the Rot

John Gresham Machen was born in 1881 into the kind of old Baltimore household where Latin was spoken at table, where the library held first editions of Dr. Johnson, and where the Westminster Catechism was taught not as one option among many but as the family's confession. His mother caught him as a boy and fixed in him a particular discipline — read carefully, think carefully, pray carefully, and never assume an argument has been answered until you have steel-manned it yourself. He went to Johns Hopkins for classics. He went to Princeton Seminary for theology. And then, in 1905, he did the thing that almost broke him: he went to Germany.

The German universities of the early twentieth century were the great furnaces of Protestant liberalism. Marburg, Göttingen, Berlin — each had taken the Bible apart with the tools of higher criticism and put it back together with most of the supernatural machinery missing. Machen sat under Wilhelm Herrmann at Marburg, the most charismatic liberal theologian of his generation, and was nearly carried away by the man's pastoral warmth. Liberalism was not a cold system in those classrooms; it was a passionate redirection of religious energy. Machen wrote home in despair, half-believing, then reading the New Testament again, then half-disbelieving, then slowly — over many months — coming to a conclusion he could no longer un-think. This was not Christianity. It used the same words. It had a different gospel underneath.

Steel-man the liberals, as Machen would do for the rest of his life, before pronouncing sentence. Their motives were missionary. They watched the universities ridiculing the supernatural and concluded the church had to translate the gospel into terms the modern intellect could swallow, or lose the modern intellect entirely. They were not malicious. Many of them prayed. Many of them loved Jesus, in the warmth of an idea they had built about him. They were trying to keep the church standing in an age that had decided to stop believing in everything supernatural at once. And in that very effort — in the panicked translation work — they exchanged the gospel of Paul for a gospel of moral example, the gospel of substitution for a gospel of inspiration, the gospel of the sovereign God for a gospel of the sovereign self. The exchange was sincere. The exchange was catastrophic.

Princeton, and the Twenty-Three Years of Quiet Building

In 1906 Machen joined the Princeton faculty, and for twenty-three years he taught New Testament with a meticulousness that earned him the reluctant respect even of his enemies. His Greek was surgical. His exegesis cut close to the bone. He wrote two commentaries — The Origin of Paul's Religion and The Virgin Birth of Christ — that remain, a century later, models of how to defend a contested doctrine without either softening it or shouting at the people who deny it. He was not a polemicist by temperament. He was a scholar by vocation. The polemic that would consume his last decade was the polemic he was forced into by men who had decided, in the seminary's own halls, that the Westminster Confession the institution was charted to defend no longer needed defending.

By the early 1920s the lines were clearly drawn. The Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., to which Princeton was institutionally bound, had liberal majorities in many of its presbyteries, on its boards, and increasingly in its missions. Liberals had been ordained without being required to affirm the historic Reformed standards. Missionaries had been sent to China teaching that Christ was a moral exemplar, not a substitutionary Savior. The seminary itself was about to be reorganized to bring liberalism into its inner councils. Machen could see what was coming. Most of his colleagues hoped, quietly, that if they kept their mouths shut a little longer, the storm might pass them by.

He did not keep his mouth shut. In 1923 he published the book that would define his name for every generation after his.

Christianity and Liberalism — and the Argument That Could Not Be Answered

The argument of Christianity and Liberalism is, in essence, two sentences: Christianity is built on the supernatural action of God in history; liberalism is built on the natural moral aspiration of the human creature. The two systems share a vocabulary. They share none of the same content. They are two different religions wearing the same robes.

Machen walked the argument doctrine by doctrine. The doctrine of God: Christianity affirms a personal, holy, transcendent God; liberalism imagines God as a vague immanent Force or moral horizon. The doctrine of Scripture: Christianity confesses Scripture as the verbally inspired Word of God; liberalism reduces Scripture to a record of religious experience. The doctrine of man: Christianity teaches that man is dead in sin, unable to save himself; liberalism imagines man as climbing toward God by moral effort. The doctrine of Christ: Christianity confesses the Son as eternal God incarnate, virgin-born, crucified for our sin, bodily risen, ascended, returning; liberalism portrays Jesus as the supreme moral teacher whose example the world must imitate. The doctrine of salvation: Christianity teaches salvation by sovereign grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone; liberalism teaches salvation by moral improvement, with Christ as inspiration rather than substitute. Different religions. Same vocabulary. The vocabulary is the most dangerous part.

The genius of the argument was that Machen never raised his voice. He did not call the liberals villains. He called them what they were: people who had exchanged one religion for another. And he insisted, with the precision of the classicist he was, that the exchange was not a development of Christian thought but a departure from it. You could not have the security of the saints without substitutionary atonement. You could not have true faith without the supernatural work of the Spirit. Strip the supernatural and you do not have a reformed Christianity. You have moralism in a Christian sweater — works-righteousness with the receipts hidden in a desk drawer.

The book has never been answered. It has been ignored, dismissed, mocked, and politely set aside. It has not been answered. It cannot be answered. The argument is sound, the citations are exact, and the sentence at the heart of it — liberalism is a different religion — is exactly the sentence the modern church most needs to hear when its evangelical wing borrows a different version of the same trade.

The Exodus from Princeton

In 1929 Princeton was reorganized. The board of directors was restructured to bring liberals into governance. A man Machen had described publicly as a heretic was elected to the new board. The institution that had spent more than a century training the men who pastored America's Reformed churches had, in a single trustee vote, ceased to be a confessional Reformed seminary in any meaningful sense. Machen could not stay. He resigned, with several colleagues, and within months the small group had founded Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He was forty-eight. He had no guaranteed funding. He was, in effect, walking out of the most prestigious chair in American Reformed scholarship into a rented hall.

Within five years Westminster had become the finest theological school in America for the defense of the historic Reformed faith. Warfield's mantle had not, after all, fallen to liberal Princeton; it had fallen on the men Machen had gathered — Cornelius Van Til, Ned Stonehouse, John Murray, Edward Young — and the seminary they built together has, ninety-five years later, trained more Reformed pastors and missionaries than any liberal Princeton graduate of 1929 could ever have imagined possible.

The same year Westminster opened, the Presbyterian Church refused to discipline a missions board that was sending men with liberal commitments to the field. Machen led the formation of an independent missions board so that confessionally Reformed Presbyterians could send confessionally Reformed missionaries. The denomination tried him for insubordination. He was defrocked in 1936. The institution he had loved since boyhood declared him a troublemaker. He, in turn, with a small remnant, founded the Orthodox Presbyterian Church — a confessional denomination committed to the Westminster Confession as the only basis for ministry. He had perhaps eight months left to live. He spent them building.

The Cost of Standing

Catalog the cost honestly. The chair at Princeton — gone. The denomination he had loved since baptism — gone. Several lifelong friendships — frayed past repair. The income he had once taken for granted — reduced to whatever the new institutions could pay. The reputation he might have had as the next great American New Testament scholar — buried under the dust of a thousand polemical exchanges he had not wanted but could not escape. Even his health, finally, given over. The pneumonia that took him in Bismarck took him because he had not stopped traveling, not stopped preaching to obscure congregations, not stopped doing what a man does when he believes the deposit cannot be guarded by anyone too careful to take cold trains.

And so we return to the bed in Bismarck. The pen. The telegram. I'm so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it. Read the words slowly one more time. The man who had spent thirty years arguing for the supernatural Christ, the substitutionary cross, the imputed righteousness, was at the hour of his own death not arguing the doctrine. He was resting on it. The thing he had defended in classrooms was the thing that was holding him as the room went quiet around him. Justification by the imputed righteousness of Christ is not, on the deathbed, a debate position. It is a Hand. He was held by the Hand he had described. The lecture and the bedside were, in the end, the same room.

Why Machen Matters Tonight

The battle Machen fought is the battle the church fights now, with the names changed. If Machen rose this morning and walked into the average evangelical sanctuary, he would not see the liberalism of 1923 — too crass, too obvious, too easily refuted. He would see what is more dangerous: a working evangelicalism that confesses the cross with its lips and assumes human autonomous decision with its catechesis. A theology that grants the propositions of orthodoxy and cancels them with the practical implication that the decisive move in salvation belongs to the sinner. The gospel preached in many evangelical pulpits today denies in its mechanics what it affirms in its rhetoric. Same vocabulary, different gospel. The pattern Machen named in 1923 has not retired; it has rebranded.

The defense is the same defense. God alone saves. The creature contributes nothing he was not first given. The cross is not a moral influence; the cross is a sacrifice that secures the salvation of every soul Christ died for. The Spirit's work in regeneration is not contingent on the sinner's permission; the Spirit's work is the cause of the sinner's faith. The resurrection is bodily, historical, and the firstfruits of those whom He has chosen. The doctrines of grace are not optional. The hour you stand at the bedside of someone you love, with breath running out, is not the hour the doctrines become abstractions. It is the hour you discover, with Machen, that they were the only thing that was ever real.

Machen reminds us that some truths are worth losing everything for. Some hills are worth dying on. He lost the chair, the denomination, the friendships, the comfort, and finally the breath itself — and at the bottom of that long surrender, the only thing that remained was the Hand that had been holding him the whole time. The same Hand is holding you. The active obedience of Christ is the ground beneath your feet right now, whether you know it or not, whether the seminary down the road preaches it or not, whether your pastor mentions it on Sunday or not. It was holding Machen at the hour of his death because it was holding him at the hour of his birth, and at every hour in between, and it is holding you now. The deposit is guarded. The Guardian does not sleep.

No hope without it. Every hope through it.