Roy Middleton
Ned B Stonehouse, the author of this Memoir of John Gresham Machen (1881-1937), was a student of Machen’s at Princeton Theological Seminary. He subsequently became his junior colleague in the New Testament Department at Westminster Theological Seminary and then, following Machen’s early death at the age of 55, his successor. The biography was first published by Eerdmans in 1954, 17 years after the death of the subject.
Few biographers of Christian ministers have available to them the wealth of material to which Stonehouse had access. Machen was a bachelor who had a very cultured and intelligent mother to whom he was devoted. They corresponded with each other virtually weekly from his teenage years to her death, which occurred little more than five years before his own. Besides personal and family matters, Machen and his mother exchanged views on all the major episodes in his life and Stonehouse’s account is heavily dependent on these contemporary sources. Born in Baltimore, in Maryland, Gresham was the son of Arthur Webster Machen, a Harvard-educated lawyer and was raised in a wealthy, socially prominent, and God-fearing family. They were by conviction southerners and devout members of the affluent Franklin Street Presbyterian Church, a congregation of the Southern Presbyterian Church. Education. Stonehouse details Machen’s privileged education; first at a private academy, then matriculating in 1898 at Johns Hopkins University,
1A review article of J Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir by Ned B Stonehouse, published by the Banner of Truth Trust, hardback, 624 pages, £17.50, obtainable from the Free Presbyterian Bookroom.
the cradle of modern American academia, on a scholarship. At Johns Hopkins he was under the tutorship of the foremost American classics scholar, Basil L Gildersleeve, who incidentally was a friend of the Machen family. Gresham excelled in Greek and earned his BA degree with highest honours, graduating as the class valedictorian. From there he enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary, where from his first week he was a frequent guest in the home of Francis Landey Patton, the President of the Seminary, who also was a friend of his parents. He stayed with the Machens if he was preaching in Baltimore. At Princeton, the teaching and example of Patton, B B Warfield and William Park Armstrong, the New Testament Professor, were the most decisive influences on his life.
At Princeton Machen won the seminary fellowship prize in New Testament studies. He determined to use the award as funding to enable him to spend the 1905-1906 academic year in Germany studying at the Universities of Marburg and Gottingen under several of Germany’s leading liberal biblical scholars. At Marburg his Old School Presbyterian faith, in which he had been brought up, was shaken by the University’s systematic theologian, Wilhelm Herrmann, who was a disciple of Albrecht Ritschl. The German liberal was zealous, had an engaging personality and argued that the essence of genuine Christian faith lay in the experience of communion with God through Christ. Herrmann held that faith, on the one hand, and science and history, on the other, were two entirely different realms. Then, as he believed that the Bible was subject to refutation by historical research, he concluded that the Scriptures were an insufficient basis for faith.
Among those who studied under Herrmann, in addition to Machen, were Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. Whilst Bultmann would embrace Herrmann’s views, Machen and Barth would eventually reject them. However, the grounds of their rejection were totally different. Machen’s year in Germany was pivotal for the rest of his career. He would eventually become one of the twentieth century’s greatest critics of liberal theology, producing several trenchant critiques of modernism. He was singularly equipped to do this, having witnessed some of its most capable advocates at first hand by sitting in their classrooms and having himself been ensnared for a time by aspects of modernism.
Defender of the Old Princeton Tradition. Machen’s Princeton mentor, William Armstrong, prevailed on him to return the next year as an instructor in Greek, perhaps as part of a concerted effort to rescue a young man who showed all the signs of moving towards liberalism. He accepted, but only with the strongest protests about his unsuitability and having secured an assurance from Armstrong that he would not have to sign any theological
pledge nor do more than “stand on the broad principles of Reformed Theology”.2 After years of personal struggle with modernism, Machen found his vocation as one of the twentieth century’s great New Testament scholars and defenders of biblical Calvinism. Whereas Herrmann contended that the gospel was independent of history, Machen countered that the gospel was at its heart historical in nature because, he argued, Christ’s resurrection was a historical event.
The biography then details Machen’s involvement in the Fundamentalist controversy, in the losing battle to save Princeton Theological Seminary from modernism, followed by his resignation in 1929 and the founding of Westminster Theological Seminary. The final stage of the Presbyterian controversy is then outlined; Machen’s objection to liberalism being taught on the mission field resulted in him organising an Independent Board of Foreign Missions in competition with the Northern Presbyterian Church’s own mission board. This latter action led to Machen being suspended from the ministry and then his founding in June 1936 of what eventually came to be known as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC). This took place just six months before his death on 1 January 1937.
Stonehouse’s biography remains the best and the standard account of Machen’s life. In the six and a half decades since he wrote this Memoir, relatively little has been published that deals in depth with Machen’s career and thought.3 However, that is not the case regarding the controversies in which he was engaged. Both before and since this biography was first published, very many books have been written which give more detail than Stonehouse provided on the Fundamentalist Controversy and the collapse of Old Princeton, when control of the Seminary was wrested from those who stood in the Alexander-Hodge-Warfield tradition. The volumes footnoted below are merely a selection of the books that advance our knowledge of these matters very considerably beyond the account in this biography.4
2William P Armstrong to Machen, 14 July 1906, quoted in Stonehouse, p 143.
3The major exceptions to this are Daryl G Hart, Defending the Faith: J Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994; and Terry A Chrisope, Towards a Sure Faith: J Gresham Machen and the Dilemma of Biblical Criticism, Mentor, 2000.
4George M Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism 1870-1925, Oxford University Press, 1980; David O Beale, In Pursuit of Purity: American Fundamentalism since 1850, Greenville, 1986; Ernest R Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism, University of Chicago, 1970; William R Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism, OUP, 1976; Edwin H Rian, The Presbyterian Conflict, Grand Rapids, 1940; Lefferts Loetscher, The Broadening Church: A Study of Theological Issues in the Presbyterian Church since 1869, University of Penn-
The volume is, however, particularly helpful in giving the background to Machen’s major writings published during his lifetime. Machen’s thesis, in his two classic books against modernism, Christianity and Liberalism (1923) and What is Faith? (1925), is that liberal theology was not a variation within the Christian tradition but rather a different religion, since it proposed an entirely new view of Jesus and a scheme of salvation different from what was ever taught by Christianity. His biographer also details the historical background to his first major book, The Origin of Paul’s Religion (1921). Stonehouse regarded this book as excelling his other major scholarly writing. The comparison is to the work which Machen regarded as his main work, The Virgin Birth of Christ (1930), which he had been researching intermittently for a quarter of a century. Another book published during his lifetime, which had an enormous sale, was his New Testament Greek for Beginners (1923).
The dedications of the five volumes indicate something of Machen’s personal relations. The Origin of Paul’s Religion is dedicated to William Park Armstrong; he was so close to his senior Princeton colleague that he was virtually regarded as a member of the Armstrong family. What is Faith? is dedicated to Francis Landey Patton, the remaining three are dedicated to “My Mother”.
The slenderest part of the biography covers the years following his mother’s death, when the weekly letters stopped. They were the crucial years of the foreign mission controversy, the organisation of the independent board, Machen’s suspension and the formation of the OPC. In a rare few paragraphs Stonehouse, who was a participant in these events, questions Machen’s judgement. He writes, “There is an element of abnormality about the formation of an Independent Board since under ordinary circumstances the mission programme would be conducted by official agencies of the church” (p 587). This action, which ultimately led to him leaving the Northern Presbyterian Church, lost Machen the support of valuable colleagues like Oswald Allis, Clarence Macartney and Samuel Craig. On the Board’s formation, Stonehouse adds, “One finds it difficult to escape the conclusion . . . that further conferences were desirable and perhaps a meeting of conservative leaders, before the announcement of the formation” (p 588).
At its commencement the OPC included in its ranks a considerable body of men who, whilst strongly opposed to modernism, were not Westminster
Presbyterians in the mould of Machen. Shortly before he died, they ousted him from the presidency of the Independent Board and, within a year of the OPC being formed, Carl McIntire and J Oliver Buswell led a group of these men out of it to form the Bible Presbyterian Church.
The Free Presbyterian Church and Machen’s Princeton. Stonehouse details at some length the celebrations of the centenary of Princeton in 1912. Included in the volume of essays produced on that occasion is one of Machen’s early writings that helped to forge his reputation as a New Testament scholar. Presbyterian Churches from many parts of the world were invited to send delegates to the centennial. Rev Duncan Mackenzie, Gairloch, the Free Presbyterian Moderator, was invited but was unable to attend due to his health and Rev John R Mackay went in his place. The congratulatory address of the Synod signed by the Moderator and Rev James S Sinclair, the Synod Clerk, is printed in the Princeton Centennial Celebration volume.5 Writing to his mother, Machen describes the Scottish delegations, “The academic processions on Monday and Tuesday morning were exceedingly brilliant. The Scotch moderators were a show. They had knee trousers, buckles on their shoes, lace cuffs and three-cornered hats” (p 203).
Rev Donald Beaton’s theological education, along with several other early Free Presbyterian students, was at the Assembly’s College in Belfast under the Princeton-trained theologian, Robert Watts. As a minister he subscribed to the Princeton Theological Review and submitted a number of essays to the journal for publication.6 When the control of the Seminary was being wrenched from those committed to Westminster Calvinism he, as editor of The Free Presbyterian Magazine, kept his readers abreast of developments at Princeton. The August 1927 issue has a four-page article by Mr Beaton titled, “The trouble at Princeton Theological Seminary”, when he speaks of Machen as “a renowned defender of the Reformed Faith”. The article ends with these words, “There can be no doubt there is a determined effort on the part of the Modernist section of the Presbyterian Church to get some of their own way of thinking on the teaching staff of Princeton Seminary, but our prayer is that the Lord may defeat them”.7 After the American Church decided to re-organise, Mr Beaton informed his readers of Machen’s resignation and the
5The Centennial Celebration of the Theological Seminary of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America at Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton, 1912, pp 95-96.
6Rev Donald Beaton has three important essays in the Princeton Theological Journal. They are: “The Marrow of Modern Divinity and the Marrow Controversy” in vol 4:3 (1906); “Thomas Boston” in vol 5:3 (1907) and “Notes on the History of the Authorised Version of the Bible in Scotland” in vol 9:3 (1911).
7Free Presbyterian Magazine, vol 32, pp 152-155.
setting up of Westminster Seminary and noted with sadness “The Passing of the Princeton Theological Review.”8
The most extraordinary link, however, between the Free Presbyterian Church and Princeton is the fact that for a quarter of a century from 1936, the President of the re-organised Princeton Theological Seminary and the Professor of Systematic Theology at Westminster Seminary were both brought up in our Church and began their theological studies as Free Presbyterian students. John A Mackay was the President of Princeton – by then a Barthian institution, whilst John Murray was the Professor of Systematics at Westminster.9 In the month before Machen died, Murray had been discussing with him the importance of the active obedience of Christ: that the Saviour not only paid the guilt of the sins of His people but, by His perfect obedience to all the precepts of the law, placed His righteousness to their account. On the day Machen died he sent John Murray a telegram that read, “I’m so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it” (p 599).
This edition of Stonehouse’s Memoir has been re-typeset by the publishers and is unquestionably a preferable edition to the original one. However, the re-typesetting has inevitably meant that the original pagination has been lost in a standard work that is very frequently cited in other literature. The book conforms to the Banner of Truth’s usual high standard. The digital colouring of the monochrome photograph of the Westminster faculty in the end papers is a pleasant feature – though John Murray’s discipline on the rear endpaper should read “Systematic Theology” not “New Testament”.