Machen and the Church

Thu Apr 10 2025

Because he cared for the health of the church, J. Gresham Machen entered controversies over the essential doctrines of the Christian faith. Today, Stephen Nichols explains how Machen promoted conviction and clarity in the church. For your donation of...

Summary

Renewing Your Mind Podcast Summary: “Machen and the Church”

Episode Information

Title: Renewing Your Mind
Host/Author: Ligonier Ministries
Episode: Machen and the Church
Release Date: April 10, 2025

Introduction to J. Gresham Machen and His Legacy

In the episode titled “Machen and the Church,” Dr. Stephen Nichols delves into the significant contributions of J. Gresham Machen, a pivotal figure in early 20th-century American Christianity. Machen is renowned for his staunch defense of orthodox Christianity against rising liberalism, particularly through his seminal work, Christianity and Liberalism. Dr. Nichols sets the stage by highlighting Machen’s unwavering commitment to the gospel and his readiness to confront controversy to preserve Christian truth.

[00:00] Speaker A: “When controversy and conflict showed up at his door, he was going to face it and he was going to help the church come through it and help the church understand a more clear understanding of the gospel and to help the church stand on conviction.”

Machen’s Stand Against Liberalism

Dr. Nichols explores Machen’s critical stance against liberal theology, emphasizing the clear dichotomy Machen drew between Christianity and non-Christian ideologies.

[00:21] Speaker B: “When J. Gresham Machen drew a line in the sand over 100 years ago with the release of his book Christianity and Liberalism, the line was clear. One was Christianity and the other wasn't.”

Controversy as a Catalyst for Clarity and Conviction

Machen’s life was marked by persistent controversy and conflict, particularly during the 1920s and 1930s. Dr. Nichols explains that Machen did not seek out disputes but recognized that defending the faith would inevitably bring him into conflict. He references Machen’s mentor, Warfield, to illustrate the tradition of theologians engaging in “the throes of controversy and conflict” rather than remaining in scholarly isolation.

[01:10] Speaker A: “When Machen didn’t seek out these conflicts, but he recognized what they could do for the church. And so ultimately, controversy and conflict bring clarity and conviction.”

Machen’s Defense of Doctrine

Dr. Nichols teases the upcoming discussions on Machen’s doctrinal positions, promising an in-depth exploration of Christianity and Liberalism in future episodes. Machen was dedicated to teaching and defending what he considered the true doctrines of Christianity against liberal reinterpretations.

[00:21] Speaker B: “Don’t forget that if you’d like digital access to the complete series you're hearing this week, its study guide, and the ebook edition of Christianity and Liberalism…”

Machen and Princeton Theological Seminary

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to Machen’s involvement with Princeton Theological Seminary. In 1927, Machen authored The Attack upon Princeton: A Plea for Fair Play to address the theological shifts threatening the seminary’s Reformed heritage. Dr. Nichols underscores Machen’s pivotal role in defending the seminary’s commitment to the inerrancy of Scripture and Reformed doctrine.

[09:00] Speaker A: “For over 100 years, Princeton Theological Seminary has stood firmly for the full truthfulness of the Bible as the word of God and for the vigorous defense and propagation of the Reformed or Calvinistic system of doctrine, which is the system of doctrine that the Bible teaches.”

Machen was alarmed by the General Assembly’s decision to dissolve the board of directors and trustees, fearing it would dilute the seminary’s theological rigor. His response was to establish Westminster Theological Seminary, ensuring that theological education remained steadfastly Reformed.

[15:30] Speaker A: “We will train specialists in the Bible. Just as a medical school trains specialists in medicine and a law school trains specialists in the law, a seminary will train specialists in the Bible.”

Machen’s Vision for Theological Education

Machen envisioned seminaries as institutions of high academic and doctrinal standards, akin to medical or law schools. Dr. Nichols highlights Machen’s analogy to emphasize the necessity of rigorous training for those responsible for nurturing the church’s spiritual life.

[16:45] Speaker A: “We have our law schools to train lawyers. We have our medical schools to train doctors. Do we want high standards in these fields? Similarly, we must ensure that those who care for our souls are equally well-trained.”

Machen and Confessional Standards

The episode further explores Machen’s dedication to confessionalism—the adherence to established confessions of faith as a unifying and defining element of the church. Dr. Nichols illustrates how Machen valued confessions like the Westminster Standards not merely as historical documents but as living declarations that guide and preserve the church’s doctrinal integrity.

[22:00] Speaker A: “When Machen is talking about the church, he ultimately wants us to see that the church is the confessional church. It is our privilege to stand on our confessions with clarity and with conviction.”

Machen’s emphasis on confessional standards was a response to the theological liberalism that threatened to blur doctrinal lines and compromise the church’s witness.

[24:00] Speaker A: “These are confessions that define and animate a church... What a privilege it is to do that for the one reason that those standards present not a man-made creed, but what God has told us in his holy word.”

Machen’s Impact on Missions

Although briefly touched upon, Dr. Nichols mentions Machen’s involvement in missions, specifically criticizing approaches that prioritize preaching over holistic care. Machen advocated for a balanced mission strategy that included both evangelism and tangible support for communities.

[18:30] Speaker A: “Machen founded the new mission board... to stand on the conviction of God's Word and to give God's people answers to hard questions.”

Conclusion: Machen as a Churchman Defined by Conviction

Dr. Nichols concludes by reaffirming Machen’s role as a dedicated churchman who prioritized doctrinal purity, rigorous theological education, and steadfast confessional standards. Machen’s legacy, as portrayed in the episode, is one of unwavering commitment to defending the gospel against liberal challenges and ensuring the church remains a beacon of truth and conviction.

[23:10] Speaker A: “When Machen's talking about the church, he ultimately wants us to see that the church is the confessional church... standing on our confessions with clarity and with conviction.”

Notable Quotes

Understanding Conflict:

[00:21] Speaker B: “One was Christianity and the other wasn't.”
Defending the Seminary:

[09:00] Speaker A: “Princeton Theological Seminary has stood firmly for the full truthfulness of the Bible as the word of God...”
The Privilege of Confession:

[24:00] Speaker A: “What a privilege it is to do that for the one reason that those standards present not a man-made creed, but what God has told us in his holy word.”

Looking Ahead

The episode sets the stage for a deeper exploration of Machen’s work, specifically Christianity and Liberalism, promising detailed analyses in subsequent episodes.

This comprehensive summary captures Dr. Stephen Nichols' in-depth discussion on J. Gresham Machen’s profound influence on the church, his defense of orthodox Christianity, his pivotal role in theological education, and his unwavering commitment to confessional integrity. Through notable quotes and structured sections, the summary provides a clear and engaging overview for listeners new to the topic.

Transcript

A (0:00)

When controversy and conflict showed up at his door, he was going to face it and he was going to help the church come through it and help the church understand a more clear understanding of the gospel and to help the church stand on conviction.

B (0:21)

When J. Gresham Machen drew a line in the sand over 100 years ago with the release of his book Christianity and Liberalism, the line was clear. One was Christianity and the other wasn't. You're listening to Renewing youg Mind as we spend a week getting acquainted with Machen and his classic book Christianity and Liberalism. Don't forget that if you'd like digital access to the complete series you're hearing this week, its study guide, and the ebook edition of Christianity and Liberalism, we'll unlock it for you regardless of where you live in the world, when you give a donation of any amount@renewingyourmind.org global. Well, to continue this week's study, here's Dr. Nichols on Machen and the church.

A (1:10)

Much of the 1920s and the 1930s was for Machen, a life of controversy and conflict. And you could say, well, one thing controversy and conflict brings is ulcers, or maybe it is headaches. But Machen would have you think a little bit differently about what controversy in the church and what conflict in the church bring about. Now, he didn't go about seeking these. In fact, it's a little bit like Jude. Remember those first opening verses from Jude? I wanted to write to you about this. I wanted to write to you about our common salvation. And you can almost sense the pent up joy, hope that Jude has. But instead, because of false teachers, I have to, I have to write to you about contending for the faith. Conflict and controversy was not something Machen sought out. But curiously enough, when you stand for the truth, sometimes it just has a way of finding you. His mentor Warfield said, it's not for us the cool closets of the scholars reflection. You know, we hear about the scholars and their ivory towers, right? That's not for the warfields and the Machians. Or we can go back to the Reformers, the Luthers and the Calvins. Or we could go back to the church fathers, the Athanasiuses of the world. Or we could go back to the apostles, Peter, Paul, James, Jude. It's not for them the cool closets of scholarly reflection. It's right in the throes of controversy and conflict. So while Machen didn't seek it, he recognized what it could do for the church. And so ultimately, controversy and conflict bring clarity and Conviction, clarity and conviction. I found this great quote from a piece that Machen wrote in 1927. He was defending the idea against the criticism that all you do there at Princeton and all you do in your classes is talk about the negative. You're always bringing up your opponents, and you're always refuting your opponents, and you're always introducing students to the negatives. You should just simply teach the positives, right? Well, Machen had a response to that. He said, all our examination of objections, right? So all of our negative teaching, our studying of the opposing views, all our examination of objections to the gospel is employed only as a means to lead men to a clear understanding of what the Gospel is and to a clearer and more triumphant conviction of its truth. This is true. It is true again and again in the pages of church history. You go back to. We talked about it, the controversies in the early Church regarding the person of Christ. That was a time of controversy. It was a time of conflict. You go back to the three hundreds. The son of Constantine, Constantius, supported the Arian bishops. The bishops who followed the heretic Arius, who's denying the deity of Jesus Christ, had the full support of the emperor. And here's Athanasius, right? We call him Athanasius contramundum, Athanasius against the world. Here's Athanasius in the throes of conflict. But what is the result of that clarity of the Nicene Creed? That Christ is truly God and truly man, that is, he is two natures in one person. That's clarity and then its conviction. Athanasius was exiled from his post as bishop more than he was actually in it. That's how much he suffered for the truth. But it was a stand, and it was a stand worth taking because the gospel was at stake. I start here with Machen as a churchman for two reasons. Number one, he's sometimes seen as sort of a curmudgeon, especially his detractors and his critics. They sort of painted him as a sort of killjoy, stick in the mud, curmudgeonly figure, you know, who had the sign Keep off my grass and would stand there and say, hey, you kids, get off my lawn kind of a person. That wasn't Machen. That was not Machen at all. But when controversy and conflict showed up at his door, he was going to face it, and he was going to help the church come through it and help the church understand a more clear understanding of the Gospel and to help the church stand on conviction. Well, as we look at Machen and The church. I want to analyze this along four lines. First, Machen and doctrine. And then secondly, Machen and the seminary. We talked about Westminster, talked about Princeton. I want to go back into that to see how Machen was looking at that in terms of theological education for the church. So I want to sort of drive by there again and take another look. Machen in doctrine, Machen in the seminary. Machen and missions. We've touched on that already too, but it's worth revisiting. And then finally, Maachen and confession. The role of confessions of faith in the life of the church. Machen and confession. So first, Machen and doctrine. Now I'm going to tease you a little bit. Don't hold it against me. To be continued. So we talk about Machen and doctrine. I'm going to say to be continued, because this is what we're going to spend the final six episodes on. We're going to spend those episodes on Christianity and liberalism and walk through the chapters of that book. Because the chapters of that book are doctrines. That's all they are. So Machen and doctrine. This is just a little teaser for you to come back and catch future episodes. So stay tuned. But let's do talk about Machen and the seminary. In 1927, Machen wrote and published at his own expense a PC entitled the Attack upon Princeton, A Plea for Fair Play. I have here one of the original copies that was printed up and distributed from 1927. And I want to read to you this first paragraph. He starts off with a question for what does Princeton Seminary stand? This is what he says. For over 100 years. So Princeton's founded 1812. He's writing this 1927. 115 years of a legacy of this seminary. For over 100 years, Princeton Theological Seminary has stood firmly for the full truthfulness of the Bible as the word of God and for the vigorous defense and propagation of the Reformed or Calvinistic system of doctrine, which is the system of doctrine that the Bible teaches. Gotta love Machen. You know exactly where he stands. The Bible teaches the Reformed faith, Calvinist doctrines. But he goes on to say this. This conservative stand of the institution has been DUE Certainly since 1870, when the present method of electing the professors was introduced simply and solely to the conservative majority in the board of directors. But now, by action of the last General assembly, that's the General assembly of the Presbyterian denomination, which has oversight of Princeton as a denominational seminary. But now by the action of that General assembly, that board is to be dissolved and the control of the institution is to be placed in different hands. What is now a majority in the affairs of the seminary is to become a minority, and the policy of the institution is to be reversed. Now, what is Machen talking about with these seminary politics? Princeton seminary up until 1927, had two boards. It had a board of directors that governed the faculty and curriculum and policy of the seminary. And it had a board of trustees that raised all the money and took care of the facilities. The board of directors was a small group, and the vetting to be on that board was rather significant. And they were the ones that controlled the ethos of the seminary. The board of trustees was a broader group that was brought in, but they did not have power over the control or the direction or even the sort of atmosphere of the seminary. The decision was to dissolve both of them and then unite them. And what that effectively would do is reduce the board of directors to a minority and give the majority control now to that broader board with broader interests and a broader, wider approach to theology and church life. When that was voted on by the General assembly, it took a year to be instituted. And then once it was instituted, that's when Machen left. But the key here is understanding what the seminary was about. The seminary would stand on the absolute truthfulness of God's word. As you look over seminary education, or you look over theological education in the United States or across Europe, you see that again and again and again, these institutions that were founded on conviction and founded on a commitment to teaching the word of God and then proclaiming and propagating the word of God, that over time they would compromise and drift and eventually apostatize. And I bring this up because as goes the seminaries, so goes the denominations that it's the seminaries and the theological institutions that are training the leaders, the teachers, the writers, the heads of the denominational institutions. It's the theological institutions that are training them for the generations to come of those denominations. And this is why it is so important when we're talking about the church, to pay attention to these institutions that train our ministers and train our lay leaders in the church. And so Maachen was very concerned with what was happening at Princeton Seminary. He was going to take a stand. And when Princeton Seminary had sold its birthright, he's going to found a new seminary to train ministers in the way they should be trained. In addition to this idea of being firmly grounded and standing upon the conviction of God's Word, the other thing that Machen saw in seminaries is that seminaries need to be a place of solid learning, as he comes to call Westminster Theological Seminary a place of solid learning. What Machen means by that is we have our law schools to train lawyers. We have our medical schools to train doctors. Let me ask you a question. Do you want there to be high standards at our law schools and high standards at our medical schools? I think the answer is yes, because why? We might depend upon those lawyers and depend upon those doctors for our very life. So their education matters. Now, what about the person who is feeding us the bread of life? What about the person who has been charged, not with caring for the body, but under God, caring for the soul? Do we want them to be trained? Do we want them to be qualified? I think the answer is a resounding yes. When Machen gave his inaugural address back in that Bucolic September of 1929, he said, we will train specialists in the Bible. Just as a medical school trains specialists in medicine and a law school trains specialists in the law, a seminary will train specialists in the Bible. The third thing that Machen said, and it goes back to what we were talking about. Why do you spend time talking about opposing views? Why don't you just positively teach the truth? Why are you always concerned about refuting others? Machen says this a Christianity that avoids argument. And he doesn't mean that. You know, this is one of those words in contemporary parlance that we tend to have too narrow of a meaning of the word argument. We tend to often view as argumentative without seeing it as its classic definition of a reasoned argument or a reasoned propositional defense. Right. Christianity that avoids argument is not the Christianity of the New Testament. There are hard questions. People have hard questions. They have hard questions. When we start thinking about God and his existence, about Christ and his exclusivity, when we start thinking about the ethical demands of the Bible, when we start reading the Bible, we bump into difficult questions. It's not our task as Christians to run from those questions. It's actually our task to run into those questions. And it's certainly the task of training ministers to not avoid and duck the hard questions, but to be able to stand not on their own thoughts, but stand on the solid and sure word of God and give God's people answers. Answers to these hard questions. So we're talking about Machen and the church. We do need to think about Machen's contribution to the seminary. Well, I've mentioned missions. I mentioned 1933, the infamous rethinking Missions report. To put some texture on that, I mentioned Pearl Buck won the Nobel Prize for literature. Daughter of medical missionaries in China, herself a missionary and a novelist. She also said, I am weary unto death with this incessant preaching. Missions needs to stop being about preaching. It needs to stop being about the proclamation of the gospel. We need to simply care for people. I am weary unto death with this incessant preaching. Can you not in your mind immediately go to Paul, to Timothy? Preach the word. Preach the word. I can never imagine Paul thinking we've preached the gospel one too many times. Well, that's where it was. That's where Missions was. And so for a concern for faithfulness and the church's task to proclaim the gospel, Maachen founded the new mission board. So we've got the church and doctrine which I teased you with. We've got the church and the seminary. We've got the church admissions. But I want to spend the remaining time on the church and confession. Now, by this, I mean the confessional standards, the standards of the church. Now, for the Presbyterian Church, this would be the Westminster standards. There's a great quote, and I'm going to get to it. But I want to lead up to it. In our previous time together, I mentioned the sermon that Machen preached at that second General assembly from November 12th to the 15th of 1936. The opening sermon that he preached was on Second Corinthians 5, 14, 15. It was on, as I mentioned, the constraining love of Christ. Well, in that sermon, he gets into this sort of rhetorical chain of what a privilege it is to be a church. And he's going to give a series of things that it is a privilege to be. Because after coming out of literally 15 or 16 years of controversy going back to 1921 and maybe even a little bit before, he has had nothing but controversy in his life. And now he's got this seminary and now he's got this new denomination and he's got clarity and he's got conviction and he's got people standing with him. You can sense the joy now in his voice. You can almost feel the burden sort of coming off his back a little bit. He says, what a privilege to carry the message of the cross unshackled by compromising association to the world. We get to proclaim the message of the cross to the world and we are no longer shackled by associations with compromisers. What a privilege to send the gospel to foreign lands. What a privilege to proclaim the gospel to the souls of people who sit in nominally Christian churches and starve for the Lack of the bread of life. People who show up to a church expecting to be given bread and are given stones. What a privilege it is to be in a church, a denomination that will have pulpits that will give the bread of life to starving people. Well, then he has one more. It's a long one. His final privilege. So hang with me through this. What a privilege it is to proclaim not some partial system of truth, but the full glorious system which God has revealed in his word. Talk about the whole counsel of God. Right, the whole counsel of God. It's a privilege to proclaim this which is revealed in God's word and summarized in the wonderful Westminster standards of our faith. What a privilege to get those hallowed instruments in which the truth is summarized down from the shelf and write them in patient instruction by the blessing of the holy Spirit upon the tablets of our children's hearts. Isn't that beautiful? Take the standards off the shelf and write them onto the hearts of the next generation. What a privilege to present our historic standards in all their fullness in the pulpit and at the teacher's desk and in the Christian's home. What a privilege to do that for the one reason that those standards present not a man made creed, but what God has told us in his holy word. When Machen's talking about the church, he ultimately wants us to see that the church is the confessional church. Now we talked about these times of controversy. They come in the first centuries, second century, third century, fourth century, even into the fifth century with Chalcedon in 451. What came out of that? Right, but the creeds, the Apostles creed, the Nicene creed, the Chalcedonian creed. We talk about the 16th century controversy. What came out of that? The confessions of the various Reformation movements. So we've got Geneva and we've got our Dutch friends and their beloved flower, the tulip. And eventually we've got the three forms of unity with the Belgic confession and the Heidelberg catechism and the Canons of Dort, the confession of the Dutch reform. We've got the Westminster standards of the Presbyterians. We've got the London Baptist confession for the Baptists, London Confession of 1689. These are confessions that define and animate a church. And this is what Machen was so excited about. And this is what Machen said is our privilege. When we talk about Machen as churchmen, ultimately we realize that it is our privilege to stand on our confessions with clarity and with conviction. So that's Machen as a churchman.