Richard Burnett, Machen’s Hope: The Transformation of a Modernist in the New Princeton. Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2024 Pp. x + 591.  $45.99, cloth. A Review by Dr. Samuel Logan 

One can be sure that one’s book will attract attention when it focuses directly on a matter which has already received the attention of website creators.  For “proof positive” that Richard Burnett’s work addresses an interest, even if not a genuine “need,” this is the actual address of a functioning website: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/the-quest-for-the-historical-machen1/

The purpose and goal of the book is summarized by the author as follows:

This book tells the story of the birth, life, crucifixion, death, and resurrection of “Machen’s Hope.”  It is a story that yields important information about how many American churchmen, scholars, and educators understood the relationship between history and faith, religion and science, philosophy and theology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Quite significant in terms of how Machen thought about Princeton was the presence and influence of Woodrow Wilson who served as the President of Princeton University and as the Governor of the state of New Jersey before winning the U.S. Presidential election in 1912, thus becoming the 28th U. S. President, serving in that office from 1913 to 1921.  With respect to his role as Princeton’s president, Wilson was clear about the necessary relationship between the university and the Christian faith: Here were his very words when speaking to the Presbyterian Union’s annual meeting in New York City – “Princeton University will be . . . safe in its search for truth . . . as long as it continues to be pervaded by the spirit of the living Christ.” (p. 83, emphasis added). Of special interest is the section entitled “Machen’s Hope,” (pp. 131 - 32). 

The first sentence of this section says a lot about Machen and his “hope.”

Where Machen expressed greatest confidence . . . was in the future of the universities of the United States themselves and he enumerated three reasons:

1. The quality of their leadership (p. 131)
2. The abundance of resources available to them (p. 132) 
3. The attitude of scholarly humility.  Machen said that: “By and large a humbler mood prevails in the universities of the United States.”  “One devotes oneself to conscientious detail, which forms the necessary basis for every great scientific progress and live in hope.  I share this hope.”  pp. 133 – 34.

This theme of hope runs through much of the book. Burnett introduces the theme under the heading “The Impossibility of Entering the Ministry,” and, to substantiate that heading, Burnett offers several explanations, most of them focused on what Machen believed was his greatest weakness.  Here are his comments that are relevant to this matter (p. 140):

On January 14 [1906], he wrote to his father about “the practical certainty“ that he “can never enter the ministry” and he asked rhetorically “Is there nothing else but that for a person of ordinary intelligence to do in the world?  It really seems so, yet the search has to be my task . . .  For one to speak of the Christian ministry in one breath with myself is hypocrisy.”

Burnett does a superb job in providing the answer to Dr. Machen's question in numerous places in the book and, in fact, the very title of the book points in that direction. Beginning with Chapter Three, “Student Year in Germany, 1905 – 06”), the book’s main theme becomes clear.

“Instead of making our theological seminaries merely centers of religious emotion,” he declared, “we shall make them battlegrounds of the faith, where, helped a little by the experience of Christian teachers, men are taught to fight their own battle, where they come to appreciate the real strength of the adversary and in the hard school of intellectual struggle learn to substitute for the unthinking faith of childhood, the profound convictions of full-grown men... The chief obstacle to the Christian religions today lies in the sphere of the intellect.” (p. 299, emphasis added)

And finally (for this review), what about Machen’s racial views? For those of us who deeply appreciate the good that we believe Dr. Machen did, this is a difficult point.  For this native Mississippian and former segregationist, it is especially painful. Overall, I believe that Burnett does an accurate and fair job in dealing with this very fraught subject.  It seems to me that Dr. Machen could accurately be called “racist” in some of his views and Burnett is accurate and fair in pointing this out: (pp. 341 – 43). 

On the other hand, those who totally reject everything that Dr. Machen said simply and solely on the basis of his genuine errors regarding racial differences make an equally – and possibly even greater - error. 

And here I believe that Burnett brings us appropriately “back to our senses.”  Here is his conclusion:

Machen went to be the Lord on January 1, 1937. This is what he saw when he entered the presence of the Lord. Believers of “every tribe and language and people and nation” saying with a loud voice,

“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain,

to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might

and honor and glory and blessing!”

And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying,

“To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb

be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!” (Rev 5:9–13; ESV) 

J. Gresham Machen is no longer a racist or segregationist. He is cheek-by-jowl with the redeemed of all nations praising the Savior. Can we say the same for the contemporary advocates of segregation? If not, then perhaps we ought to exercise just a modicum of charity toward a man who died thirty years before the civil rights movement reached its apex in America.

At any rate, it doesn’t seem that one can say — by any biblical measurement — either that Machen was completely successful or that he was a total failure.  On the “failure“ side, the lingering legacy of racial disparity to which Machen contributed continues to create SOME of the unnecessary “divisions” and “factions” in contemporary churches.  On the other hand, his work in theological education has produced extraordinarily positive results – at Westminster Theological Seminary (both Pennsylvania and California) and at the many other schools at which graduates of the two Westminster Seminaries teach (pre-eminently Covenant and Reformed Theological Seminaries, both with significant numbers of Westminster alumni on their faculties). 

It seems appropriate to conclude this review of MACHEN’S HOPE by quoting its final words: “In a telegram to his colleague John Murray, his [Dr. Machen’s] last recorded words were ‘I’m so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.’” 

As has been said already above, “THANKS BE TO GOD.”

Dr. Samuel Logan is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He is President Emeritus of Westminster Theological Seminary, was the International Director of the World Reformed Fellowship from 2005 to 2015 and the Associate International Director of the WRF from 2015 to 2022.