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J. Gresham Machen's Response to Modernism

The Tragic End and the Institutions

On New Year's Eve, 1936 in a Roman Catholic hospital in Bismarck, North Dakota J. Gresham Machen was one day away from death at the age of 55. It was Christmas break at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia where he taught New Testament. His colleagues said he looked "deadly tired." But instead of resting, he took the train from Philadelphia to the 20-below-zero winds of North Dakota to preach in a few Presbyterian churches at the request of pastor Samuel Allen.

Ned Stonehouse, his New Testament assistant said, "There was no one of sufficient influence to constrain him to curtail his program to any significant degree" (see note 1). He was the acknowledged leader of the conservative movement in Presbyterianism with no one to watch over him. His heroes and mentors, Warfield and Patton were dead. He had never married, and so had no wife to restrain him with reality . His mother and father, who gave him so much wise counsel over the years, were dead. His brothers lived 1500 miles to the east. "He had a personality that only his good friends found appealing" (see note 2). And so he was remarkably alone and isolated for a man of international stature.

He had pneumonia and could scarcely breath. Pastor Allen came to pray for him that last day of 1936, and Machen told him of a vision that he had had of being in heaven: "Sam, it was glorious, it was glorious," he said. And a little later he added, "Sam, isn't the Reformed Faith grand?"

The following day—New Year's Day, 1937—he mustered the strength to send a telegram to John Murray his friend and colleague at Westminster. It was his last recorded word: "I'm so thankful for [the] active obedience of Christ. No hope without it." He died about 7:30 p.m.

So much of the man is here in this tragic scene. The stubbornness of going his own way when friends urged him not to take this extra preaching trip. His isolation far from the mainline centers of church life and thought. His suffering for the cause he believed in. His utter allegiance to and exaltation of the Reformed Faith of the Westminster Confession. And his taking comfort not just from a general truth about Christ, but from a doctrinally precise understanding of the active obedience of Christ —which he believed was his own obedience in Christ and would make him a suitable heir of eternal life, for Christ's sake.

And so Machen was cut off in the midst of a great work—the establishment of Westminster Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He hadn't set out to found a seminary or a new church. But given who he was and what he stood for and what was happening at Princeton, where he taught for 23 years, and in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., it was almost inevitable.

Westminster Seminary was seven years old when Machen died. The Presbyterian Church in America (which was forced under law to change its name, and became the Orthodox Presbyterian Church) was six months old, and Machen had been elected the first Moderator on June 11, 1936.

The occasion for starting a new Presbyterian church over against the huge Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. was that on March 29, 1935 Machen's Presbytery in Trenton, N.J. found him guilty of insubordination to church authorities (see note 3) and stripped him of his ordination. An appeal was taken to the General Assembly at Syracuse in the summer of 1936 but failed.

The reason for the charge of insubordination was that Machen had founded an independent board of foreign missions in June of 1933 to protest the fact that the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions endorsed a laymen's report (called Rethinking Missions) which Machen said, was "from beginning to end an attack upon the historic Christian faith" (see note 4).

He pointed out that the board supported missionaries like Pearl Buck in China who represented the kind of evasive, non-committal attitude toward Christian truth that Machen thought was destroying the church and its witness. She said, for example, that if some one existed who could create a person like Christ and portray him for us, "then Christ lived and lives, whether He was once a body and one soul, or whether He is the essence of men's highest dreams" (see note 5).

How serious was it that Machen could not give or endorse giving to this board? The General Assembly gave answer in Cleveland in 1934 with this astonishing sentence:

A church member ... that will not give to promote the officially authorized missionary program of the Presbyterian Church is in exactly the same position with reference to the Constitution of the Church as a church member ... that would refuse to take part in the celebration of the Lord's Supper or any other prescribed ordinance of the denomination (see note 6).

A few years earlier Machen had left Princeton Seminary to found Westminster Seminary. This time he wasn't forced out, but chose freely to leave when, the governing boards of the seminary were reorganized so that the conservative Board of Directors could be diluted by liberals (see note 7) more in tune with President Stevensen and with the denomination as a whole (see note 8).

Machen said,

If the proposed ... dissolution of the present Board of Directors is finally carried out ... [and] the control of the Seminary passes into entirely different hands—then Princeton Theological Seminary as it has been so long and so honorably known, will be dead, and we shall have at Princeton a new institution of radically different type (see note 9).

Well Princeton Seminary did die, in Machen's eyes, and out of the ashes he meant to preserve the tradition of Charles Hodge and Benjamin Warfield. So when he gave the inaugural address of Westminster Seminary on September 25, 1929 to the first class of 50 students and guests, he said,

No, my friends, though Princeton Seminary is dead, the noble tradition of Princeton Seminary is alive. Westminster Seminary will endeavor by God's grace to continue that tradition unimpaired (see note 10).

The title of this paper is J. GRESHAM MACHEN'S RESPONSE MODERNISM. What we have seen so far is, I believe, the most enduring response he made: namely, the founding of these two institutions: Westminster Seminary (which today is a major influence in American evangelicalism) and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (which now, 56 years later, has only 188 churches and about 19,000 members, but may have a witness more significant than its size (see note 11)).