Already frail in health, J. Gresham Machen kept his appointment to preach in North Dakota. For someone reared in Machen’s world, the Presbyterian Church was far from being a “little flock,” as Jesus described his church (Luke 12:32). It was powerful in every area of civil and social life.
From a family of Baltimore elites, Machen, born in 1881, had a Harvard Law School–trained Episcopalian father (Arthur Webster Machen) and a Presbyterian mother, Mary Jones Gresham. It was his mother who had the greater influence on his life, teaching her son Greek, Latin, and the classics as well as piano. He enjoyed regular Sunday dinners with Woodrow Wilson and his family after the morning service at Princeton’s Nassau Presbyterian Church.
Machen’s mentor at Princeton Seminary was B. B. Warfield, a fellow Southerner and ardent defender of orthodoxy against creeping moralism and modernism. (Warfield had also nominated Wilson for the presidency of Princeton College.) However, Warfield led the charge to desegregate the college and the seminary, while Machen, sadly, opposed the policy.
Race, Mission, and Protestant Empire
Machen’s racial elitism wasn’t uniquely Southern. In fact, Northern Protestant progressives championed an imperialistic vision of an “Anglo-Saxon” Christian nation expanding its influence (and coercive power) to “lesser peoples.” America was the redeemer nation, sacrificing itself to rescue the world—if necessary, by military means. (See Richard Gamble’s The War for Righteousness.)
Without downplaying Machen’s racial prejudice, we should mark his passionate opposition to the inherently racist “Christianizing” program of the progressives. Like Warfield, he didn’t like the Christian nationalism of the Protestant establishment because it confused the gospel with the law and violated the inherent rights of religious minorities. A fierce libertarian, Machen even voted for the Roman Catholic presidential candidate Al Smith.
Modernism from the Inside
Over the years 1905–6, Machen’s studies in Germany tested his faith. In letters to his mother, he expressed the draw to his pietistic liberal professors in Germany like Wilhelm Herrmann (the teacher of Bultmann and Barth). This wasn’t someone born to be a fundamentalist.
But precisely because of this experience, he knew modernist theology from the inside. What troubled him after his recovery of orthodox conviction was that the Presbyterian Church he knew and loved was being taken over by sycophants of these German professors. On the one hand, there were the outright liberals, like Auburn Affirmationists, but at Princeton Seminary a strange cobelligerency was formed by fundamentalists and premillennialists like Charles Erdman, who held up D. L. Moody as the paragon of evangelism and moral transformation over doctrine. In 1923, Machen dedicated his argumentative skills to the writing of his classic, Christianity and Liberalism.
The story has been told well, especially by D. G. Hart in his seminal 2003 work, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America.
Returning to Princeton Seminary, this time as New Testament professor, Machen found himself being challenged by moderates as much as by outright modernists. But missions lay at the heart of his concern. If the church he loved would only send missionaries who planted churches by preaching the gospel and administering the sacraments, he would have given the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions his full support. However, there were “missionaries” like Pearl Buck who—in the name of missions—proclaimed a different gospel.
If the church he loved would only send missionaries who planted churches by preaching the gospel and administering the sacraments, he would have given the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions his full support.
Machen founded the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions in 1933, and in March 1935 he was suspended from the Presbyterian ministry. Leaving the once-hallowed halls of Princeton, Machen founded Westminster Seminary in 1929 and subsequently led the formation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
So, long before he visited North Dakota, Machen had already surrendered his privileged place in society.
Death Far from the Centers of Power
For someone as prone to illness as Machen, canceling this trip would have no doubt extended his life. As it happened, Machen succumbed to pneumonia in Bismarck, North Dakota, on January 1, 1937.
Not only how he died but where he died is significant. Machen gave up not just the wealth and opportunity his elite family afforded but the privileged life of a Princeton scholar. The mission is driven by the message, not the other way around, and this is evident in his life as well as in his teaching. He could well have died in a grand house in Baltimore. But Christ’s “little flock” exists wherever the true gospel is preached.
Confessional, Not Sectarian
At least for a while, the halo of Christian missions could unite fundamentalists and modernists. Machen was so driven by dogmatic rigor that he dared to divide not only Presbyterians from the American religion of a generic Protestantism but to deny to the Presbyterian Church itself the right to extend to the world its frankly colonizing mission that had little to do with the gospel.
For him, missions isn’t a front for “Christianization,” which was a euphemism for “Americanization.” Erdman, a dispensationalist evangelical colleague at Princeton, was a pivotal figure in the reorganization of Princeton Seminary that led to Machen’s ouster.
The mission is driven by the message, not the other way around, and this is evident in Machen’s life as well as in his teaching.
But far from being a sectarian, whether modernist or fundamentalist, Machen (following Warfield) was a staunchly confessional Presbyterian. He didn’t like the American Protestant establishment, with all the concessions Presbyterians were expected to make to revivalists and liberals. But this was because he was, at heart, a missionary even more than a New Testament scholar and theologian. Why expand missionary activity if the message is anything other than “Christ crucified”?
The personal prejudice Machen exhibited is to be repented of, not imitated. Yet, for the most part, he kept it to himself, and not a hint of it appears in his public ministry. In contrast, anti-orthodox progressive Protestantism inscribed racism and imperialism into its increasingly amorphous civil religion.
His “sectarianism,” if we wish to call it that, was simply the creedal and confessional Christianity of a vanishing era. So, actually, it was fitting in God’s providence that Machen died proclaiming the gospel to Christ’s little flock in Bismarck, North Dakota. His last reported words came to John Murray back at Westminster in a telegram: “So grateful for active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.”
