Today's brown bag seminar on political economy is going to be led by Sean Rittenour, a graduate
student in the economics department who everybody knows fairly well, I think. And he's going
to be introducing us to a Calvinist revolutionary hero today. So Sean, your work's cut out.
All right, thanks. The name of the talk and discussion as appeared on the schedule is
This is J. Gressom Machin, Calvinist Revolutionary Hero and I think it's an apt description.
The bulk of my discussion, the bulk of my purely biographical information is coming
from Ned Stonehouse's biography of Machin published by Banner of Truth Trust and featuring
in a portrait, a reproduced painting of Machen in his academic garb while at Princeton Seminary.
The Dictionary of Christianity in America begins its entry for J. Gresham Machen describing
him as a quote, Presbyterian clergyman, New Testament scholar and educator. He was these
things to be sure about, he was much more and in my opinion he was one of the truly
John Gressen Machen was born in Baltimore, Maryland on July 28, 1881. His father, Arthur W. Machen, was a successful lawyer whose hobby was collecting the finest editions of available old books and reading classical literature in Latin and Greek.
W. Machen was born in Baltimore, Maryland on July 28, 1881. His father, Arthur W. Machen, was a successful lawyer whose hobby was collecting the finest editions of available old books and reading classical literature in Latin and Greek. He subsequently took up Italian after his 80th birthday.
His mother was also a cultured woman who hailed from Macon, Georgia.
And during Machin's visit to her home, Machin developed a sympathy and appreciation for the South and its culture that he felt was disappearing over his lifetime.
In fact, one of the earliest papers that had been saved was a paper he wrote when he was 17 called The Old Homestead,
which was a very sympathetic portrait of the homestead from Macon and the old southern culture of his mother.
Mace was a brilliant man who began his education at a young age in the home. His father encouraged him to read the classics and his mother catechizing him.
And he could recite, I guess, the shorter catechism at a very tender age as he described it in an autobiographical sketch that he wrote once.
When he was eight, he wrote a letter to his mother telling her how much he liked the history
of Alexander the Great his father had given him.
His former schooling was in private school.
The regular course of study was strongly classical.
Latin was included in the course when he was 12.
Greek was included when he turned 15 and continued throughout the entire course of his studies,
it was pre-college studies.
Out of a total of 86 grades in extant reports over this time, 86 grades that he had reported,
he ranked first in his class 78 times.
So out of 86 classes he ranked first in his class 78 times.
His marks were consistently in the high 90s and in the 1895-96 school year he was giving
a final grade of 99 in geometry, algebra, Latin, Greek and natural science and English
and he made a paltry 97 in French, okay.
So, that's right, very bright man.
After finishing prep school, he matriculated through John Hopkins University,
earning a bachelor's degree and staying on an extra year to take classes from the renowned American classicist Basel L. Gildersleeve.
Machen was unsure of exactly what he wanted to do after he graduated from John Hopkins.
So after his graduate year, he considered a career in economics, interestingly enough,
and he took summer school courses in banking and international law at Chicago University.
In a letter to his father at that time, he wrote,
I'm afraid I'm not going to feel any great enthusiasm for economics, and rather feel
that my choosing it to study next year is still a remote possibility, though nothing
else has come to me yet which seems better, not unlike my own case early on.
However, light may come during my stay at the university, though I don't feel that way now.
So he was kind of unsure. History, however, reveals that he did reject economics as a career,
and subsequently enrolled after encouragement from his family in Princeton Theological Seminary.
At the beginning of the 20th century, there was at Princeton Seminary a strong sense of continuity
with the classic Calvinism of people like Charles Hodge and his predecessors.
And while at Princeton, Machin studied under Francis Payton and the great B.B. Warfield, considered one of the most eminent Calvinist scholars of all time.
He quickly ran a reputation of being a fine scholar and he completed a Master's of Philosophy in 1904 from Princeton University,
while completing the requirements for the Bachelor's of Divinity at the Seminary.
Seminary. So he completed a bachelor's in divinity at Princeton Seminary and also a master's
degree of philosophy at Princeton University at the same time. He greatly enjoyed life
at Princeton, joining what was called the Benham Club, which was ostensibly an eating
club but sort of functioned similar to fraternity, not unlike the Brown Bag Seminar. A former
classmate of Machen recorded that, in the Benham Club, he, Machen, was in his element
and at his best.
At the club, fines were assessed for breaches of etiquette and at the end of the year these
fines were collected and the money sent to the Board of Foreign Missions as a contribution
from the club.
And a poor throw or a bad catch of rolls, for instance, was a fine of one cent.
For using the word mister while at the club was ten cents.
For talking shop, ten cents.
For mentioning the name of a marriageable maiden, twenty-five cents.
More refusing to give a stunt when called upon, 25 cents.
Machin seemed to enjoy nothing more than to be fined and to see others fined.
And while at Princeton, he also developed a great fondness for football games, a great
interest for collegiate sports.
And when he later went off to serve at the YMCA in Europe during World War I, he wrote
letters back to his family, pleading for them to at least send the scores, because we have
no knowledge of any football over here, and actually kind of criticized the Europeans
When you study in Germany, two things that the Germans really needed was one, two institutions that they needed. One was the Sabbath and the second was American football.
That's true. That's a good point. I guess at that time they played football on Saturday. As long as you're not a Seventh Day Adventist, I guess you're okay.
His knowledge of Greek bode him well in his studies of the New Testament, and that is what probably sent him on his way as a New Testament scholar because of his grasp of Greek.
He won the first middle prize in New Testament exegesis for 1903 and 1904 at Princeton, and the following year he was awarded Princeton's New Testament Fellowship for his article,
a critical discussion on the New Testament account of the virgin birth of Jesus, which
was published, and this was rare for this to happen for a student, it was published
in Succeeding Issues in the Princeton Theological Review, and got a lot of recognition within
the next couple of years.
The fellowship allowed him to pursue a year of advanced studies on the New Testament in
in Germany. And his affection for Princeton was such that he lamented having to leave
Princeton writing to his mother, I think, in a letter, The fellows are in my room now
on the last Saturday night. Smokings and the cigars and eating the oranges, which it has
been the greatest delight I ever had to provide whenever possible. My idea of delight is a
It's a Princeton room full of fellows smoking.
When I think of what a wonderful aid tobacco is to friendship and Christian patience, I
have sometimes regretted that I never began to smoke.
One year later, he returned from Germany to Princeton to become an instructor in the New
Testament department and was an instructor from 1906 to 1914.
He held his position until his ordination, at which time he became assistant professor of the New Testament at Princeton.
He did a year of service in the YMCA in Europe during World War I, and then devoted three years of study to what is generally considered his great work,
The Origin of Paul's Religion, which was published in 1921.
After that, and I don't have a copy of that book here, it is in the library.
After that came the book Christianity and Liberalism, which was published in 1923, which argued that theological liberalism and historic Christianity were two entirely distinct religions.
Walter Lippmann, in his book Preface to Morals, said of this work that for its acumen, its saliency, and for its wit, this cool and stringent defense of orthodox Protestantism is, I think, the best popular argument produced by either side in the controversy,
which will do well to listen to Dr. Machen, the liberals have yet to answer him, and I would argue that they still haven't answered him.
This book crushes his opposition, the opposition that was trying to find a, quote, historical, unsupernatural Jesus.
And it's interesting, if you, recently I was at Books-a-Million, I was looking up, like, works on historical Christianity.
If you look up books by popular or academic historicists, you find a number of works, particularly works by guys like Spong, so-called self-proclaimed Bishop Spong,
and some other historian out of, I believe it was Harvard, something called the Unauthorized History of the New Testament.
Basically, the New Testament is not historically sound. We all know that the early versions were not good versions of the New Testament.
We can't trust the apostles to write what really happened, blah, blah, blah.
You've quickly looked at the index, and they don't mention Machen. They don't mention F.F. Bruce. They don't mention E.J. Young.
So it's clear that they just don't know what they're talking about. They don't know the scholarship, and they don't speak to any of these issues.
So these people that claim that, well, liberalism is here to stay, again, in 1990, is basically, it's not even scholarship. It's just writings bathed in ignorance.
Now, the logic of Machen's opposition to theological liberalism led to a confrontation both within Princeton Seminary, both with Princeton Seminary and with the Presbyterian Church in the USA, which was his denomination.
After a reorganization of the board in 1929 in order to allow a more inclusive theological atmosphere at the seminary,
Machin and a number of conservative professors resigned from Princeton Seminary and founded Westminster Theological Seminary,
regarded today still as one of the finest academic seminaries in the United States.
In 1930, he published another great piece of scholarship entitled The Virgin Birth of Christ,
which kind of grew out of the article that won the fellowship at Princeton and his book, The Virgin Birth of Christ, defended the historicity of the Gospel narrative and again is still considered authoritative on the subject.
Further struggles in the Presbyterian Church in the USA over liberalism and the Church's missionary corps brought Manchin into conflict with the darling of the Liberals, Pearl S. Buck,
and led Manchin and some conservative pastors to start up the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions in 1933.
The denomination didn't like this and they took action to boot him out of the denomination in 1935.
He subsequently founded, along with several more conservative pastors, what became the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
And Machin died on January 1st, 1937 of pneumonia. He developed during a trip to Bismarck, North Dakota, rallying support for the denomination.
Now one of the things that made Machin a truly great figure, in my opinion, was his holding to the classic Reformed theology,
in that he saw Jesus Christ, the living Son of God, as the Lord of all life, a physical and intellectual, as well as his moral life.
And this led him to embrace scholarship and led him to derive from scripture a profound libertarianism.
He understood that the individual had dignity because it was created in the very image of God.
The individual is created in the image of God and therefore has an amount of dignity.
He wrote in an article published in the July 1st, 1924 Survey Graphic magazine,
Quote, it is true that Christianity, as over against certain social tendencies of the present day, insists upon rights of the individual souls.
We do not deny that fact. On the contrary, we glory in it. Christianity, if it be true Christianity, must place itself squarely in opposition to the soul-killing collectivism which is threatening to dominate our social life.
It must provide the individual soul with a secret place of refuge from the tyranny of psychological experts.
It must fight the great battle for liberty of the children of God. The rapidly progressing liberty is one of the most striking phenomena of recent years.
I think the rapidly retrogressing liberty is one of the most striking phenomena of recent years.
If liberty is to be preserved against the materialistic paternalism of the modern state, there must be something more than courts and legal guarantees.
A freedom must be written not merely in the Constitution, but in the people's heart. And it can be written in the heart, we believe, only as a result of the redeeming work of Christ.
Machen held the Calvinist doctrine that men in their natural state are totally depraved. The heart is desperately wicked and deceitful above all things. Who can know it, as it says in Jeremiah?
Machin put it this way in his book, The Christian View of Man, which was basically an edited collection of radio addresses that he made while at Westminster in the 30s.
And I think actually published only after he died. He completed these in 1936, I believe.
I believe. Machen put the issue of man's fallen nature this way. Thus all mankind through the fall sin of Adam in the Garden of Eden has become corrupt and utterly unable to please God. The individual sins that men commit are but manifestations of that profound corruption of man's nature. The fruit is corrupt because the tree is corrupt.
So, Machin didn't have a Pollyannic, I don't know if that's the right word, didn't have an overly optimistic view of human nature, in other words.
He didn't trust, he wouldn't trust people in the state, for instance, to make things better.
He wouldn't trust Bill Clinton to build that bridge in the 21st century.
And it's interesting, I found this quote out of Forum magazine in 1931.
Because of the fallen state of man, the chance of building the Kingdom of God on Earth via political means is nil.
We can't trust politicians because they're fallen individuals. In the Forum Magazine article of March of 1931, he wrote,
Our comfortable utilitarian world proved not to be so comfortable after all. And this is writing with respect to World War I.
In some directions, indeed, there was advance, even in warfare, over conditions that had prevailed before. Antiseptic surgery, no doubt, has accomplished much.
But in other directions, there was a marked decline. The notion of the nation in arms, that redoubtable product of the French Revolution, was carried on to something approaching its logical result.
Even more logical and even more damnable, no doubt, will be the results in the next war. And of course, he didn't live to see Hiroshima or Nagasaki, for instance.
Modern scientific utilitarianism, in other words, did not produce the Millennium prior to 1914.
And there is not the slightest evidence that it has produced the Millennium since that time, or that it will ever produce the Millennium in ages to come.
Evidently, Bill Clinton has not read much of Matron.
We cannot usher in the Kingdom of God using the state. We cannot persuade men with a club, was Matron's point of view.
point of view. We cannot do God's will before we trust him, but we cannot force people into that trust.
So it makes no sense to try to force people to be good using the means of the state because it won't work.
Machen was very concerned about expanding the state and the expanding statism of his day.
And in 1932 and 36, during those elections, he deserted the Democratic Party because he greatly opposed Roosevelt's policies of state advancement.
How did Machen's political philosophy then manifest itself in his views on various issues of the day?
Well, first, he was no fan of World War I. He didn't like war at all. He hated war. In 1914, Machen was relatively sympathetic to Germany's position during the war.
And he wrote in a letter to his mother, quote, the alliance of the Great Britain with Russia and Japan seems to me still an unholy thing, an unscrupulous effort to crush the life out of a progressive commercial rival.
Imperialism, whether it be British or German, he decried as satanic.
Immediately before the United States entry into World War I,
Machen wrote, quote, the country seems to be rushing into the two things
which I am more strongly opposed than anything else in the world.
An alliance, a permanent alliance with Great Britain,
which will inevitably mean a continuance of the present vassalage
and a permanent policy of compulsory military service
with all the brutal interference of the state in the individual and family life
and Family Life, which that entails.
Princeton is a hotbed of patriotic enthusiasm and military ardor, which makes me feel like a man without a country.
That's pretty strong words to his brother.
Yeah, right. He was greatly opposed to the centralization of education in America.
And, of course, he had a great – I mean, he was an educator, and so he felt very passionately about education.
On January 12, 1926, in an address before a group called the Sentinels for Freedom in Washington, D.C., he stated,
quote, one of the fundamental principles of liberty which is involved in the present issue is the principles of the right of voluntary association,
the right of persons to associate themselves voluntarily for the propagation of their own views, however erroneous they might be thought of others in the field of religion or in other spheres.
Spheres. This measure cannot be understood, that is, the measure to create a Federal Department of Education. This measure cannot be understood unless it is viewed in connection with related measures like the so-called Child Labor
Amendment or like the Sterling Reed Bill, which provided for Federal aid to the states and which really would take away what measure of states' rights we possess. The establishment of a Federal Department of
The Federal Department of Education would be a step and a decisive step in exactly the direction as those measures of which we have just been speaking. Federal aid to education inevitably means federal control. This was in 1926.
In February of that same year, Machin testified before the Senate Committee on Education and Labor and the House Committee on Education in Washington espousing exactly these same views.
And in what could have been a rebuttal of the Chicago School, he testified, quote,
People say, you know, that this Federal Department of Education is in the interest of efficiency.
They are always flinging that word efficiency at us, as though when that word is spoken, all the argument at once is checked.
Well, of course, efficiency just means doing things.
And I think the important thing to know is whether the things that are being done are good or bad.
If the things that are being done by any agency are good, I'm in favor of efficiency.
But if the things that are being done by the agency are bad, the less efficiency it has, the better it suits me.
Machen was also on record in opposition to, as he put it, the, quote, so-called child labor amendment to the Constitution,
which I think was, at that time, was maybe the 20th Amendment, I think, at that time.
And he, in fact, he wrote an article to the Presbyterian, it was a magazine for the Presbyterian Church, entitled the so-called Child Labor Amendment.
Letters on this subject were published, letters of his on the subject of his opposition to the Child Labor Amendment was published in the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times within two days of each other.
And it was odd. Looking back at like things he's written, it was almost as if he practically had like a quarterly letter in the New York Herald Tribune.
He had like six or seven letters in the span of just like a couple of years in the New York Herald Tribune.
He also had a letter on the subject published in the New Republic, opposing child labor laws on libertarian grounds.
And in an excellent article published in the Presbyterian, he argued against the Presbyterian Department of Temperance and Moral Welfare.
He thought that his denomination should not become a political lobby, and then points out that the amendment is not about child labor at all, but about increasing the power of the government over the lives of families.
The amendment would have given Congress the power to quote, and this is from the amendment, to limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons 18 years of age.
Machen recognized that this language was a legal blank check. If this amendment is adopted, he said, the control of the most intimate details of family life will eventually, in a few decades, if not in a few years, be in the hands of a centralized Washington bureaucracy, and American liberty with the decencies of the American home will be gone. Machen was a great lover of nature, enjoying walks, bicycle rides, and hikes, and mountain climbing, and he didn't have much good to say about what the government was doing with the national park system.
New York Herald Tribune explained, quote, Mount Desert Island 25 years ago contained
a small but exceedingly beautiful wilderness of mountain and forest like lake and stream.
Then came the federal government. A network of carriage roads completed or contemplated
is scarring almost every mountainside. At the side of the roads, the forest is being ruthlessly
cleaned up until every bit of natural charm is destroyed. No mossy glen or shady ravine
is apparently to be spared. And all this is being done not in a region which needed the
The Last specific issue I want to touch upon is Machen's view on prohibition, especially
considering some past seminars we've had and interest of certain professors here. Machen
opposed a prohibition, opposed the 18th Amendment, and it cost him plenty in his career and personal
Life. In the spring of 1926, Princeton Seminary's Board of Directors nominated Manchin to be
appointed to the Chair of Apologetics at Princeton Seminary. By this time, however, because of
his publications and his views, the liberals in his own denomination had enough of Manchin
and were looking for an issue with which to hang him. In May of 1926, the Presbytery of
New Brunswick held its assembly at Baltimore. Now when he was one of the about eight or
There are nine members still there that hadn't left. A resolution was introduced endorsing
the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act. Machin voted no against the resolution, against the
endorsement, but he did not speak against the resolution. He didn't give an address
on the subject. In an irregular move, the Reverend Peter Emmons asked whether he wanted
his vote, Machin wanted his vote recorded, and Machin said he did not. Nevertheless,
and its wide publicity was given to Machen's vote and it was interpreted and used by his enemies to paint Machen as having a loose and evil attitude towards temperance and even drunkenness itself.
Now falsehoods began to spread that he was wet or even a drunkard. Machen's a drunk.
And it was most often stated that the Machen family money was made in the brewery business and that he continued to depend on it for a source of income.
And none of these reports have any shred of truth, and Stonehouse does a great job, was
allowed by the family to look at the financial documents and the wills and the financial
statements of the Manchin family and found that they've never got any money, never owned
any stock in any brewery company whatsoever.
Manchin did not think prohibition was a wise policy because he disliked centralized government.
He was also opposed to the Church's entry into the political field in accordance with
the Southern Presbyterian Emphasis on Limited Scope of the Church's Functions.
His family's background was hardly prohibitionist.
There's a letter talking about how glad his happiest dad was to be able to bring out the
Madeira to serve to his guests at one of his parties with all these, you know, these Greek
and Latin speakers that he hung out with.
And Mises himself did not consider total abstinence to be correct as a principle because he did
He did not think that scripture warranted a total abstinence position on alcohol.
He once wrote to his mother that he was vigorously opposed to the efforts of William Jennings
Bryan in behalf of a Presbyterian assembly deliverance on the issue because he felt that
it only served to obscure the gospel and distract people from what the church was about.
However, he himself virtually practiced total abstinence, at least during his ministerial
career.
He didn't drink.
And as Stonehouse put it, unfortunately commitment to the biblical principle of temperance or
moderation as distinguished from total abstinence is identified by some persons with license
and no allowance is made for the possibility that the defender of Christian liberty may
consistently refrain from the exercise of that liberty.
And that happens all the time, still happening today.
With the help of these attacks, the liberals in the General Assembly overturned Machen's
and Human Action's Chairship and subsequently began an investigation into the seminary itself, which ultimately led to the liberal reorganization of the seminary, of the Board of Directors rather, and with Machen and his people leaving and founding Westminster.
Machen's legacy is one that I think all of us should aspire to. He was a great Christian, a great scholar, a great theologian and a great libertarian, respected, if not always agreed with, by most of those he ran across.
Even writers whose viewpoints were antithetical to his own, including Pearl Buck and the Unitarian Albert Diefenbach, acknowledged that he stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries in strength of character and fidelity to principle.
On Machen's death, H. L. Mencken, who was no fan of conservative Christianity, wrote that,
Though I could not yield to his reasoning, I could at least admire, and did greatly admire,
his remarkable clarity and cogency as an apologist, allowing him his primary assumptions.
Machen said something that nice about anybody?
Yeah, I know, it's hard to believe, isn't it?
J. Gresham Machen was a fine example of a conservative Calvinist whose views led him to embrace a libertarian political philosophy.
Wow, thank you very much.
The margin there, though, it seems to be a tricky margin, where the maitre is advocating that the Church itself not become political.
And yet, at the same time, he's obviously very active and feeling compelled himself to political commentary, and in some cases, testifying before Congress.
for Congress. That's kind of a tricky line to walk, isn't it?
Yeah.
As a representative of the Church.
Right. I mean, it could, yes, very well be. You just have to make sure that you're not speaking for the Church.
I'm not speaking as a citizen. And that the Church preach correctly on, say, moral and social issues.
The citizens should be sanctified enough to make what would be correct biblical decisions in the voting booth, put that on.
Yes?
What's your opinion on the following? Because you certainly know more about the arguments than I ever will.
It seems to me a misnomer to say that you do not want the Church to be political in the following sense.
I mean, I think they put the first commandment first for a reason.
And we never sort of want to say, you know, we shouldn't have any other gods before me.
Well, constantly we're trying to replace God with the state.
Now it seems to be that's the heart of his argument there,
is it's not necessarily trying to politicize the church,
but the church understanding its role is,
listen folks, if you want a jettisoned faith in God, markets, whatever you want to call it,
you're going down the path of the hammer and sickle, basically.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's, that's what I generally feel.
I haven't found anything. I haven't found an article. I have not read nearly anything that he's written.
I'm sure there's probably articles in the Presbyterian where he wrote on this subject.
He had a couple articles. One was called, Does Fundamentalism Retard Social Progress?
One was Christianity and liberty, and one was the responsibility of the Church in our new age, not to be confused with the new age of the 1980s and 90s.
And those three articles basically carry the same theme that he didn't explicitly come out and say, talk about replacing God with a little G God like the State.
But that seemed to me that's an implication throughout his entire thing, basically, and also that it's very dangerous to put our faith and trust in fallible human beings and give them the power to paternally direct our lives.
But he never came out explicitly, and he never wrote anything explicitly, like an explicit political track explaining his philosophy on political matters either.
Where do you think he would stand on this idea that politicians should deliver stump speeches from pulpits like we see all the time today?
I mean, he believed that heart and soul. So he thinks that this politicizing that goes on, like some speaking from church pulpits, is just an abuse, a radical abuse of the pulpit.
The church has no business. The church's business is to preach the gospel, to preach the Word of God, and it's not as no business giving a forum for particular political causes.
I guess it's that he would have probably seen it the same way that we'd see someone make a stump or some car dealership in the pulpits, in the service or something like that.
You know, your talk brings back a lot of memories because my grandfather on the mother side, who was a medical missionary to Korea,
was involved in that very same thing about the former independent board.
Oh really?
Yeah, he was a missionary, he was in Korea at the time, and a member of the United Presbyterian Church,
and very much a contemporary of nature.
And the problem they were having was that they were under Japanese occupation.
The Japanese were trying to force them to bow down to shrines, to the Shinto shrines, and they held out and the United Presbyterian Church ordered them to go ahead and bow down to shrines because it doesn't mean very much.
And that was one of the huge issues that led to the forming of the Independent Board.
It was not the issue, obviously, but it was basically that the straw that broke the camel's back, that was the last of the, and a number of them, my grandfather was a frock, as a result of this.
I remember when I was young, my father telling me that he had this church to crock people like J. Gresham Machin, you know, and it names some others, he says that, you know, it tells you everything you need to know about them.
But even to this day, I will not be a member of, I would never be a member of that particular nominating, you know, out of just honor to my grandfather.
You used the word liberalism several times, and can you clarify what his opponents, what they believe theologically, and define them as liberals?
and that the hardcore liberals even said that Jesus never claimed to be the Son of God, he never asked for and never, and always refused the worship of men, that basically it's, you know, Jesus was fine, but then along came Paul and spoiled all.
There was Paul that attached the notion that Jesus Christ was the Son of the Living God.
The liberal claim is that Jesus never made those claims, that Jesus was maybe an enlightened man, he was a great ethicist,
but that he wasn't really the Son of God.
And that if we study the Gospels historically, we find that yes, it's just this unsupernatural Jesus that we're talking about
about the Kingdom of God on Earth and how we should love our neighbor as ourselves.
Machin points out in this, again, as Christian Albers is such a good book, he points out
that it's just not true, that if you look at the documents, if you look at what Jesus
himself said in the Sermon on the Mount, they're very high, they're a big linchpin of their
whole argument.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was making claims for his being God.
and claims are unmistakable, particularly to the Jewish people to whom he was speaking.
And part and parcel of liberalism is denying that Jesus was really born of a virgin, that
he really was resurrected from the dead, things like that.
And denying that certain parts of the scripture was inspired, infallible Word of God.
So who, so Paul is a modern day exponent of his view?
Probably to the nth degree, I would say.
But Harry Fostick was a very influential liberal at the time, and Henry Van Dyke, who was
a friend of Matron's, wrote a virulent letter attacking Matron and attacking Matron's views
and left basically saying he was leaving the church because Matron was still in the pulpit.
And Henry Van Dyke wrote the text, You Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee, which if you read it,
you can see the liberalism that's crept into that hymn, which makes me not like it as much
as I used to.
I think it's important to point out that a primary tenet of liberalism, theological liberalism in Protestant Christianity,
is the denial that the Bible, the scripture, that you can derive doctrine for current situations in any way, or draw the scripture from the Bible.
Right, that's true.
There is a middle ground, so to speak, of people who are not literalists, and yet still believe that the Bible is the central tenet of the Protestant faith in drawing these documents, that sort of thing, the so-called New Orthodox tradition, which is very strongly formed, in a continental form, and to the extent of Presbyterian churches as well.
So, liberalism really denied that you could even do that. This document was good for back then. It's not any good for now, basically.
Everything has to be derived from experience. Not only that experience is good, but that it's all you can really rely on.
And the seduction of the liberalism was that they still use the same language. They still use the same language.
And some liberals at the time said, well, the Bible contains the Word of God, or contains what we think is the Word of God.
But that's not the same thing as saying it is the Word of God.
Does he draw a connection between theological liberalism and statism in this book?
He points out that, yeah, in the sense that it's the theological liberals that are getting about to expanding the state, because we're wanting to solve our problems with the state.
We have grave problems, not in this book necessarily, but in the 30s when he was writing, in the midst of the Depression.
And in this book, the first address was on, well, why am I talking about God?
Why am I spending radio time talking about God and not the NRA or not, you know, the unemployment crisis or whatever?
And his point is that, look, the world is not all material and we can't solve our crisis.
Our crisis is deep down the side of a moral crisis and we can't solve our problems by using fix-it government schemes that we need people...
It's only by the Holy Spirit working in our lives as a result of us receiving Jesus as our Savior and having faith in Christ, that is what will turn our crisis around.
And so he sees that liberalism that rejects that leaves us in an abyss of what else are we going to do?
If we can't be truly sanctified as individuals by the blood of Christ, by the Holy Spirit, then what are we left with?
We're left with some forms of materialist response.
I think Machen felt that the secular utilitarianism led to a tendency of finding out what would be the greatest good for the greatest people and to do that thing, which allowed stateism, kind of like Mill allowed stateism in the back door, so to speak.
Do you get the sense that he adhered to classical liberalism or was it just a
pragmatic case-by-case scenario with respect to political liberalism, not the
Christian liberalism? Yeah, I think he... Given his education he must have been
Yeah, he, the impression I got was that he was generally opposed to government intervention on all issues and he was asked that point blank from one of the congressmen at the committee. He said, what's your general view of these things? And he says, I'm generally a view of all statists or all centralized forms of activity entering in, increasing activity.
and encroaching upon the rights of individuals, but he was very clear to write on things and
speak on things that he felt he knew something about. There were some issues that people
wanted to speak about during this day that he refused to write an article about because
he just didn't feel qualified. He felt qualified to speak on education because he was an educator.
He felt qualified to speak on, say, the natural park system because he was in nature so much,
and those types of things.
Some of these quotes that I gave him were not, were from letters, so like his stuff
about his, what he wrote about World War I, for instance, was in personal correspondence,
wasn't published.
So it seems, so, I mean, he never, there's no indication, he never cited, you know, in
in any of these things, great classical liberal authors or anything like that.
But I don't know, I think part of that, I don't know exactly if that was because he
just didn't, it's clear that he had an overarching political philosophy, but the nature of the
way he was, he didn't want to overstep his bounds and speak on issues that weren't under
his thing.
I don't know how to answer that, I don't know.
Well I mean it's a complex question because from what little we know of his theological
views, it seems like there's a connection there. The theological views require that people
do things on their own, that they have a domain to act under essentially. And then if the
that the central government is controlling something and that takes those issues or those actions out of our domain.
Right. He very much was interested in the right of freedom to assembly, for instance, and felt that he believed...
He wrote a letter arguing against, I think, a law in Nebraska which made it illegal to teach foreign languages to children until they're like 16 or something like that.
like that. It felt that, you know, that was, that's just basically not allowing them to
have a classical education because they'll never pick up these languages like they need
to at one, since they're so old. He also, and so he opposed that and he said it also
he felt violated the right to, I don't know if it was a free speech issue. There's a free
speech issue in another state like in Oregon or New York, the lust laws made it mandatory
that all private institutions be licensed by the state, not just public, but private institutions.
And he felt that was a violation of these institutions' rights, both on assembly grounds and also on free speech.
But he said he was not in favor of, I think the Phi Beta Kappa Society was wanting to preach kind of like one of these,
is a radical free speech code, so that you had to be inclusive of all speech, that there
was no speech that was not unpermitted or should be censored in any way, that were for
the free flow of ideas, and Machen argued against that because, say, well, look, we're
a private institution and we have to have the right to exclude people that we don't
I'm just kind of curious. You said he was in Germany during World War I, and obviously he saw a problem with that. Did he write specifically at all about what was happening in terms of what he meant by socialism coming to a rise?
He turned there to the bureaucratization in Russia and it's clear he didn't like what was going on there and he thought that all individualism and liberty was being crushed there, but he didn't really write much about what was actually going on or anything.
There's a great account of his. He worked with the YMCA in Germany, which at that time was still the Young Man's Christian Association.
It wasn't like some health club now that you can get cheap rooms at or something like that.
They were basically kind of like a USO thing, but it was only more international.
and he was working with French troops, you know, running, as he said, like, ineptly trying to run a small, delicate test to give, I guess, cheap food to the troops and stuff.
There's a great letter that he wrote, the wash, doing laundry here is great, it makes your clothes wet, but it doesn't do much for getting them clean.
He hadn't had a bath in, like, several weeks and he said that...
This is when he was in France.
Yeah, he said, he said...
Yeah, it's typical, I suppose.
And he said that the underwear in France are cut very peculiarly.
He's having trouble with his underwear because he didn't like the way they were cut. It's really weird.
But anyway, so he sent this letter, a four-page letter, and then his parents stopped telling him,
submitted it to the Baltimore Sun. Of course, it got printed immediately, the Baltimore Sun.
And it felt kind of bad because he thought that the YMCA should have,
you know, he should have got permission from them before printing anything.
But I didn't have time to go into that. It was really fast and interesting stuff.
and other stuff. He didn't want to go into military service because he was opposed to that and didn't, in fact there was some concern about even going over there at YMCA that once they got over there they may be co-opted and have to carry munitions from one point to the next and he was concerned about that and only after he was assured by the national director that he would have no part in that, that he went ahead and took the year appointment.
Was he opposed to all war whatsoever? Was it just this particular war?
I think the real enemy was imperialism and the war that was growing out of this imperialistic verb.
That was the pre-Lincoln philosophy of conscription before we got to this.
So that's I think very much a war of imperialism.
War is fine as long as it's a war of defense.
Right, right. More of kind of a just war type of philosophy.
You know, in terms of the overall big picture here, in Makin's role and the timing of his role at the Princeton Seminary and so on,
would you consider him more or less the last of the old guard in the Princeton Theological Seminary religion and so on,
or was he somebody who made new advances and broke out in new directions and it just happened to be at the end of turning over to liberalism at this point in time?
In terms of the theology?
In terms of theology.
Well no, I don't think he considered himself making any new, I guess I don't think he felt himself was making any new additions.
Charles Hodge was fond, who was the head of the seminary a generation before, was fond of saying that an original argument has never came out of Princeton Seminary, and we're proud of it, because we're holding to the old Calvinism.
And I think, in that respect, the second adjective, revolutionary, is probably not really apropos, maybe reactionary would be a better term, that he was reacting against what he saw as this unbiblical encroachments of liberalism and he was trying to hold the fort and he was, I mean, he and a handful of hardcore seminarians were the only intellectual Christians that were holding the fort at that time.
I used to think, well, the nation's gone and that's it, but people like Sinclair Ferguson
and other writers, he is clearly, beyond just his position on scripture, was clearly a monumental
scholar.
I was reading his book and I just felt like a goof, like, what am I doing?
Just because he knew so much and wrote so well, and just a great guy.
Because at this time, most of the divinity schools and seminaries had already fallen, basically.
This was Princeton, like, I think they were kind of like the last of the...
Well, them and you had the dispensation with Dallas Seminary that was kind of starting up,
which is conservative and has produced probably some okay stuff in terms of like biblical exegesis
or biblical, say, historical stuff. But they have a different way of approaching certain parts of
The Princeton, I mean, there's definitely, when Machen left Princeton, that was pretty much, I mean, you can see that the Princeton Theological Seminary, I think, went downhill, but Westminster is continuing, I mean, still looked upon as a fine, high-level, academic, Calvinistic seminary, and again, you still have people that, high-level people coming out of there. Now, you probably don't have people,
Probably not quite the quality of Machen. I definitely think Machen had a kind of approach
not only to theology, but to culture that is no longer with us. He was very much a gentleman.
His family is a cultured family, a classically educated family, and you don't see that much
nowadays. You probably wouldn't find somebody like that at Westminster.
Okay, well, speaking of high standards, we thank you for the presentation.