A lecture given at a conference on “Contending for the Faith” at Seventh Reformed Church (RCA) in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on February 18, 1995, by William s. Barker, Vice President for Academic Affairs Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

Last June President Sam Logan and I were startled and surprised at the biennial convention of the Association of Theological Schools in Atlanta when the Dean of a rather liberal Baptist seminary in Maine went to a microphone at a plenary session and said, “What this organization needs to do is to get back to the teachings of such figures as Thomas Aquinas, Jonathan Edwards, and J. Gresham Machen.”

We were surprised but also pleased because Dr. Machen was the founder of Westminster Seminary. His convictions have shaped our institution, but he was not so popular with those whom he opposed. In fact, he was put out of the Presbyterian Church USA in 1936. And yet the Presbyterian Historical Society has awarded its Francis Makemie prize for the best book on Presbyterian history in 1994 to Westminster faculty member Darryl Hart for his Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Johns Hopkins University Press). Also, a 1991 publication by Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (Oxford University Press), after comparing the views of leading liberals, conservatives, and centrists in the early part or this century, concludes: “In retrospect… it appears that Machen's fears about the secularization of the church without distinct doctrinal boundaries were well founded.”[i] And: “Clearly, Machen was correct in insisting that the church could not truly prosper if it abandoned the intellectual realm to the exponents of a naturalistic worldview.”[ii] He further comments: “The decades since… have witnessed the theological fragmentation allowed by the church's earlier decisions, so that a report adopted by the 1988 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church could conclude, 'our unity is merely formal and our diversity is divisive'“ — hardly the outcome envisioned by the centrists in the 1920s.[iii] It would seem that Dr. Machen, though dead for 58 years, still has something to say to us.

Sixty-five years ago Westminster Seminary was in its first year, founded in 1929 by Dr. Machen, then 48 years old and at the peak of his scholarly influence as a Professor of New Testament at Princeton. Seminary for the previous twenty-three years. Seven and a half years after the founding of Westminster, Machen died of pleurisy and pneumonia, on January 1, 1937, in a Roman Catholic hospital in Bismarck, North Dakota, where he had gone to speak during the Christmas break. Not only did he begin Westminster Seminary, but also the denomination which became known as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, out of which also came a group that are now, since 1982, a significant part of the Presbyterian Church in America.

He has been recognized, not only by Bradley Longfield and Darryl Hart, but also by people as diverse as his contemporaries Henry L. Mencken and Walter Lippmann and church historians Ernest Sandeen and George Marsden, as the intellectual leader of early 20^th Century Fundamentalism. “Fundamentalism,” however, was a label he preferred not to use. When invited in 1927 to become the President of the newly formed Bryan University in Dayton, Tennessee, where the Scopes Trial was held in 1925, Machen declined and explained:

…thoroughly consistent Christianity, to my mind, is found only in the Reformed or Calvinistic Faith; and consistent Christianity, I think, is the Christianity easiest to defend. Hence I never call myself a “Fundamentalist.” There is, indeed, no inherent objection to the term; and if the disjunction is between “Fundamentalism” and “Modernism,” then I am willing to call myself a Fundamentalist of the most pronounced type. But after all, what I prefer to call myself is not a “Fundamentalist” but a “Calvinist” – that is, an adherent of the Reformed Faith.[iv]

What I should like to describe is Machen's appreciation of the Reformed Faith and of the Reformation and how that affected his way of contending for the faith. Primarily a New Testament scholar, acclaimed by Adolf von Harnack for his work The Origin of Paul's Religion, and an apologist for supernatural, orthodox Christianity, he nowhere wrote an extended treatise on the Reformation. But scattered throughout his polemics, his lectures, and his radio broadcasts are references to the Reformation era that show where he stood on its continuing relevance to the contemporary church.

1. The Bible as God's Written Word.

The first point is the unique authority of the Bible. In the first of his final series of radio broadcasts, in the fall of 1936, Dr. Machen spoke on “The Progress of Christian Doctrine.” Referring to the Reformation, he described how some people understood that era as a sweeping away of all authority for the sake of total freedom. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “the foundation of the Reformation was the Bible. Other authorities in religion were rejected, but they were rejected not in the interests of human autonomy, but in the interests of the authority of the Word of God.” He went on: “It ought never to be forgotten that the belief in the full truthfulness of the Bible and the absolute authority of the Bible's commands is the foundation principle of the Protestant Reformation. A so-called Protestantism that rejects that principle is no Protestantism at all.”[v]

In the next of his radio talks, on “The Creeds and Doctrinal Advance,” after speaking' positively of the historic confessional statements, he said, “The subject matter of Christian doctrine, it must be remembered, is fixed. It is found in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, to which nothing can be added.” But recognition of this fact brings with it neither a static condition of the human mind, nor is it inimical to progress. “On the contrary, it removes the shackles from the human mind and opens up untold avenues of progress.” The foundation in Scripture provides a fixed standpoint. Machen claimed:

The truth is, there can be no real progress unless there is something that is fixed.  Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.” Well, Christian doctrine provides that place to stand. Unless there be such a place to stand, all progress is an illusion. The very idea of progress implies something fixed. There is no progress in a Kaleidoscope.[vi] 6

But the Reformation provided an example of the Scriptures being handled with the best possible scholarship. In an earlier series of radio addresses, during the first four months of 1935, Dr. Machen, speaking on “Shall We Defend the Bible?” said:

…why is it that so many theological seminaries have become nurseries of unbelief and have dragged the churches that they serve down with them? It is partly because of that anti-intellectualistic attitude of pastors and evangelists, of which I spoke just now. Despising scholarship as they did, and leaving it in possession of the enemy, they discover today that in the long run they cannot get along without it. When revival comes in the Church, we may be perfectly sure of one thing. We may be perfectly sure that with it and as a vital part of it will come a revival of Christian learning. That was true of the Reformation of the sixteenth century, and it will be true of every reformation or revival that does any more than merely scratch the surface.[vii]

In our day of challenge to the scholarly role of theological seminaries, we need to hear Machen's call for Reformation-type scholarship to produce real specialists in the Bible.

2. The Reformed Faith as the Augustinian, Pauline, Scriptural Tradition.

That leads us from the formal principle of the Reformation, sola Scriptura, to the material principle, sola gratia, sola fide - salvation by grace alone, through faith alone. In his 1925 book entitled What is Faith? Machen spoke of the doctrine of justification through faith alone as a “liberating doctrine”[viii] and described it as “at the very centre of Christianity”: “The salvation of the Christian is certain because it depends altogether upon God: if it depended in slightest measure upon us, the certainty of it would be gone. Hence appears the vital importance of the great Reformation doctrine, of justification by faith alone”[ix] Critical of some Liberal interpretations of the Epistle to the Galatians which saw there only a contrast between external ceremonial religion and a religion based on great principles, Machen argued:

Most emphatically the contrast was not between a lower law and a higher law; it was not between an external, piecemeal conception of the law and a conception which reduces it to great underlying principles; but it was a contrast between any kind of law, no matter how sublimated, provided only it be conceived of as a way of obtaining merit, and the absolutely free grace of God.

In other words, what was at stake, just as in the Reformation era, was the very gospel itself. Machen continued? “The truth is that the prevailing Modernist interpretation of Galatians, which is in some respects apparently just the interpretation favored by the Roman Church, makes the Apostle say almost the exact opposite of what he means.”[x] In his classic 1923 book, Christianity and Liberalism, Machen argued similarly: “As expounded by Luther and Calvin the Epistle to the Galatians became the 'Magna Charta of Christian liberty.' But modern liberalism has returned to the old interpretation of Galatians which was urged against the Reformers.” He argued: “In this way the whole achievement of the Reformation has been given up, and there has been a return to the religion of the Middle Ages.”[xi]

Near the beginning of his time on the Princeton Seminary faculty, in 1909 when Machen was only 27, there was a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Calvin's birth. Professor Benjamin Warfield gave an address on “The Theology of John Calvin” which made a strong impression on the young Machen. In it Warfield had defined the essence of Calvinism as lying in the majesty of God sustained in his reaction to the sinful creature: “The Calvinist is the man who has seen God, and who, having seen God in His glory, is filled on the one hand with a sense of his unworthiness to stand in God's sight, as a creature, and much more as a sinner, and on the other with adoring wonder that nevertheless this God is a God who  receives sinners.” Ned B. Stonehouse's biography of Machen continues:

Warfield had insisted in the lecture that it was gravely misleading to identify the formative principle of Calvinism with the prominent points of difference from Lutheranism, “its sister type of Protestantism,” or from Arminianism, “its own rebellious daughter.” And speaking of Calvinism and Lutheranism, he said that “they have vastly more in common than in distinction.” On the other hand, he was zealous to guard against the view that Calvinism might       be regarded as simply a variety of Christian thought,          experience and faith alongside of other varieties. [Warfield said] “I think it is important to insist that Calvinism is not a specific variety of theistic thought, religious  experience, evangelical faith, but just the perfect manifestation of these, things Calvinism comes     forward simply as pure theism, religion, evangelicalism, as over against less pure theism, religion, evangelicalism.[xii]

These convictions came to characterize Machen as well. He regularly described himself as in the Old Princeton tradition of Charles Hodge, Warfield, and Geerhardus Vos, which was simply the Calvinistic, Augustinian, Pauline, or Scriptural tradition of emphasis upon the sovereignty of God's grace: “…I for my part rejoice greatly in trying to stand in the great current of the Reformed Faith.”[xiii]

He himself had grown up, from before age 8, on the Westminster Shorter Catechism and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.[xiv] He grew to appreciate the Heidelberg Catechism[xv]  as well as, all the great historic creeds of the church. In Christianity and Liberalism he scoffed at the idea that they represented dead orthodoxy:

After listening to modern tirade's against the great creeds of the church, one receives rather a shock when one turns to the Westminster Confession, for example, or to the tenderest and most theological of books, the “Pilgrim’s Progress” of John Bunyan, and discovers that in doing so one has turned from shallow modern-phrases to a “dead orthodoxy” that is pulsating with life in every word. In such orthodoxy there is life enough to set the whole world aglow with Christian love.[xvi]

The historic creeds, however, do not have their origin in Christian experience.

The creeds of Christendom are not expressions of Christian experience. They are summary statements of what God has told us in His Word.. Far from the subject-matter of the creeds being derived from Christian experience, it is Christian experience which is based upon the truth contained in the creeds; and the truth contained in the creeds is derived from the Bible.[xvii]

In “The Progress of Christian Doctrine” he imagines what it would be like if all the creeds of Christendom were suddenly wiped out from human memory, and supposes that, as long as the Bible remained, they could be built up again, perhaps in another nineteen centuries. Only the Bible is essential to the, church. “How terrible, however, the loss would in that case be! How terrible it would be if we had to start all over again in our study of the Bible without help from the great creeds, without help from Augustine, without help from the great theologians of the Reformation!”[xviii]  As we have already seen, Machen liked to term the Reformed Faith simply “consistent Christianity”: “It is, I hold, just consistent Christianity; and consistent Christianity in the long run is the Christianity that stands firmest against unbelief.”[xix] He refers at one point to a certain eminent scientist who said that from the point of view of science, Calvinism is “the only respectable theology” and Machen comments: “ Calvinism alone does justice to the unity of the world, as it certainly alone does justice to the teaching of the Bible.”[xx] 

3. Contending for the Faith: The Church as Distinct from the Culture

This brings us to our third point, the need to take a firm stand against unbelief, whether manifested in the world or in the church. In 1930 the Christian Reformed editor, of The Banner invited Machen to write on “A Future for Calvinism in the Presbyterian Church?” His article in the issue for April 4 of 1930 described the sad state the Presbyterian Church USA had reached in the 1920s, particularly the controversy surrounding Harry Emerson Fosdick, then the Auburn Affirmation, and then the reorganization of Princeton Seminary. Bemoaning the fact that God had not seen fit to raise up an Abraham Kuyper in their midst, Machen said to his Dutch-American brethren: “One thing, at least, is clear - if there is to be any conservation of the sound element in the Presbyterian Church, we must have a truly Reformed and ringingly polemic, source of ministerial supply.”[xxi] He then describes his fledgling seminary of fifty students and eight full-time faculty members, with the institution’s commitment to the Westminster  Confession and the Presbyterian form of church government. He expresses thanks for three of those professors from the Christian Reformed Church, the young Cornelius Van Til and Ned B. Stonehouse and the experienced R.B. Kuiper. These were men prepared to stand for the faith in the midst of unbelief, for you, he said to the Christian Reformed Church, “have kept alive in this country the torch of true learning and true devotion to the Reformed Faith.”[xxii]

Machen believed in ringing polemic. He despised what he termed “indifferentism.” In Christianity and Liberalism he described Luther's spirit:

It was a great calamity when at the “Marburg Conference” between Luther and the representatives of the Swiss Reformation, Luther wrote on the table with regard to the Lord's Supper, “This is my body,” and said to Zwingli and Oecolampadius, “You have another spirit.” That difference of opinion led to the breach between the Lutheran and the Reformed branches of the Church, and caused Protestantism to lose much of the ground that might otherwise have been gained. It was a great calamity indeed. But the calamity was due to the fact that Luther (as we believe) was wrong about the Lord's Supper; and it would have been a far greater calamity if being wrong about the Supper he had represented the whole question as trifling affair. Luther was wrong about the Supper, but not nearly so wrong as he would have been if, being wrong, he had said to his opponents: “Brethren, this matter is a trifle; and it makes really very little difference what a man thinks about the table of the Lord.” Such indifferentism would have been far more deadly than all the divisions between the branches of the Church. A Luther who would have compromised with regard to the Lord's Supper never would have said at the Diet of Worms, “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, God help me, Amen.” Indifferentism about doctrine makes no heroes of the faith.[xxiii]

After describing the serious theological differences between Calvinism and Arminianism, Machen goes on to say:

Far more serious still is the division between the Church of Rome and evangelical Protestantism in all its forms. Yet how great is the common heritage which unites the Roman Catholic Church with its maintenance of the authority of Holy Scripture and with its acceptance of the great early creeds, to devout Protestants today! We would not indeed obscure the difference which divides us from Rome. The gulf is indeed profound. But profound as it is, it seems almost trifling compared to the abyss which stands between us and many ministers of our own Church. The Church of Rome may represent a perversion of the Christian religion; but naturalistic liberalism is not Christianity at all.[xxiv]

Machen's polemical spirit is shown also in an address published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in January of 1933, “The Responsibility of the Church in Our New Age.” There he described the church, as it ought to be, as radically doctrinal, radically intolerant, and radically ethical. By that he meant that Christianity is based on a message that is true, that “one could not be a worshiper of the God of Christianity and at the same time be a worshiper of other gods,” or that “ one could not accept the salvation offered by Christ and at the same time admit that for other people there might be some other way of salvation,” and that professions of the truth led to increasing holiness of life.[xxv] Machen said:

The Reformation, like primitive Christianity, was radically doctrinal, radically intolerant, and radically ethical. It preserved these characteristics in the face of opposition. It would not go a step with Erasmus, for example, in his indifferentism and his tolerance; it was founded squarely on the Bible, and it proclaimed, as providing the only way of salvation, the message that the Bible contains.[xxvi]

Because of these radical commitments, setting Christianity off from the surrounding culture, Machen believed that revival would necessarily be accompanied by controversy. In an address given in London on June 17, 1932 he said:

Every true revival is born in controversy, and leads to more controversy. That has been true ever since our Lord said that He came not to bring peace upon the earth but a sword. And do you know what I think will happen when God sends a new Reformation upon the Church? We cannot tell when that blessed day will come. But. when the blessed day does come, I think we can say at least one result that it will bring. We shall hear nothing on that day about the evils of controversy in the church. All that will be swept away as with a mighty flood. A man who is on fire with a message never talks in that, wretched, feeble way, but proclaims the truth joyously and fearlessly, in the presence of every high thing that is lifted up against the gospel of Christ.[xxvii]

Allan Bloom, in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, has described the one virtue of modern higher education as openness. In contrast to that prevailing attitude of today, Machen would contend for definiteness, the vigorous assertion of discoverable, definable, and defendable truth.

Machen drew a sharp line of distinction between the church and the society at large. In the society at large he was a libertarian, even appearing at a Philadelphia City Council hearing to oppose an ordinance that would have prohibited his jay-walking on the way from his residence on 13th Street (between Walnut, and Locust) to the Westminster Seminary classrooms at 1528 Pine 'street. In this realm he was what would be termed today a “pluralist.” This was in part because he perceived the culture as having already proceeded far down the road to naturalism. This important thing was to preserve civil liberty so that Christianity would always have the freedom to make its message known. In the realm of the church, however, discipline must be exercised to preserve Purity of doctrine and of life. He saw the church as a voluntary organization – that is, one belonged to it by personal conviction and choice – not as in the case of the state, to which one belonged ordinarily by virtue merely of birth. Whereas in the state freedom of thought and expression must be maintained, in the church standards of teaching and of conduct must be upheld. This accounts for the fact that at one and the same time Machen contended for the truth within the church and protected the Church from the surrounding secularism. In his youthful address at the opening of the 101^st year of Princeton Seminary, on September 20, 1912, speaking on “Christianity and Culture,” Machen decried the “tremendous defection from the Christian Church” during the previous thirty years, roughly the time since his birth on July 28, 1881. He saw the problem as lying “chiefly in the intellectual sphere. Men do not accept Christianity because they can no longer be convinced that Christianity is true. It may be useful, but is it true?” This called not for a shying away from the culture, but rather an aggressive foray into it:

Under such circumstances, what more pressing duty than for those who have received the mighty experience of regeneration, who, therefore, do not, like the world, neglect that whole series of vitally relevant facts which is embraced in Christian experience - what more pressing duty than for these men to make themselves masters of the thought of the world in order to make it an instrument of truth instead of error.[xxviii]

Machen's hope was for a new Reformation. This was not to be in the making of new creeds or confessions. “I think it is clear,” he said, “that ours is not a creed-making age.” This was partly because that work may be largely completed:

There may be improvements in statements here and there, in the interests of greater precision, but hardly any such great advance as that which was· made, for example, at the time of Augustine or at the Reformation. All the great central parts of the Biblical system of doctrine have already been studied by the church and set forth in great creeds.

Rather what was needed to bring about a new Reformation was a straightforward, intelligent reading of Scripture. Deploring his generation's misinterpretations of Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, he longed for a Luther-like breaking through of “the medieval rubbish of the fourfold sense of Scripture which the Reformation brushed aside”: “A new Reformation, we think, like the Reformation of the sixteenth century, would be marked, among other things, by a return to plain common sense; and the Apostle would be allowed, despite our likes and dislikes, to say what. he really meant to say.”[xxix]

What was needed for this to happen was a new Renaissance of learning to precede a new Reformation, and this was why Machen dedicated so much of his life to Christian education. “I wonder when we shell have that revival of learning which we so much need, “ he pondered, “and which I verily believe might be, in the providence of God, as was the Renaissance of the fifteenth century, the precursor of a Reformation in the Church.”[xxx] “Such a revival as was needed would be the work of the Spirit of God, but one of the means the Spirit would use would be “an awakening of the intellect”: “The new Reformation, in other words, will be accompanied by a new Renaissance; and the last thing in the world that we desire to do is to discourage originality and independence of mind.”[xxxi]

Machen himself was obviously an independent thinker. I have chosen to quote him at some length so that the strength of his intellect, character, and spirit might be apparent. To those who disagreed with him, he seemed to be contentious. On the other hand, his allies were won not only by his argument, but by his wit and warmth. It scarcely needs to be said that he was not without faults. Like all of us, he was a captive of his time. In October of 1913 he strenuously objected to Dr. Warfield's announcement to the Princeton Seminary faculty that an African American student would be housed in the dormitory. Machen had no objection to having African Americans in his classes, and rejoiced at their progress in learning, but his Southern roots balked at social intimacies that would occur in the dormitory, where he himself lived for the sake of fellowship with the students. To be fair, George Marsden points out that President Lowell of Harvard would not, at that time, allow African Americans to reside in the dormitories[xxxii] and according to Machen's correspondence with his mother, not only he but the entire Princeton Seminary faculty opposed Warfield's proposal.[xxxiii]

Machen was perhaps unduly pessimistic about his own time. He beheld Mussolini making war “deliberately and openly upon democracy and freedom” and Hitler, “an ignorant ruffian” as “dictator of Germany, until recently the most highly educated country in the world.” An avid mountain-climber, he had climbed in the Alps and kept a picture 'of the Matterhorn displayed in his office at 'Westminster Seminary. On November 27, 1933 he addressed a group of ministers in Philadelphia on “Mountains and Why We Love Them”:

Then there is something else about that view from the Matterhorn. I felt it partly at least as I stood there, and I wonder whether you can feel it with me. It is this. You are standing there not in any ordinary country, but in the very midst of Europe, looking out from its very centre. Germany just beyond where you can see to the Northeast, Italy to the South, France beyond those snows of Mont Blanc. There, in that glorious round spread out before you, that land of Europe, humanity has put forth its best. There it has struggled; there it has fallen; there it has looked upward to God. The history of the race seems to pass before you in an instant of time, concentrated in the fairest of all the lands of earth. You think of the great men whose memories you love, the men who have struggled there in those countries below you, who have struggled for light and freedom, struggled for beauty, struggled above all for God's Word. And then you think of the present and its decadence and its slavery, and you desire to weep. It is a pathetic thing to contemplate the history of mankind.

Machen then asked the question: “What will be the end of that European civilization, of which I had a survey from my mountain vantage ground – of that European civilization and its daughter in America? What does the future hold in store? Will Luther prove to have lived in vain?” In this dark view of his time, Machen held out only one bright ray of hope:

No, I can see only one alternative. The alternative is that there is a God – a God who in His own good time will bring forward great men again to do His will, great men to resist the tyranny of experts and lead humanity out again fnto the realms of light and freedom, great men, above all, who will be the messengers of His grace. There is, far above any earthly mountain peak of vision, a God high and lifted up who, though He is infinitely exalted, yet cares for His children among men.[xxxiv]

That was the vision that Machen set before the audience gathered for the opening of Westminster Seminary on Wednesday, September 25, 1929, when he spoke on the new school’s purpose and plan:

Church history should make us less enthusiastic about a modernity which is really as old as the hills; and amid the difficulties of the present time it should give us new hope. God has brought his church through many perils, and the darkest hour has often preceded the dawn. So it may be in our day. The gospel may yet break forth, sooner than we expect, to bring light and liberty to mankind. But that will be done, unless the lesson of church history is altogether wrong, by the instrumentality, not of theological pacifists who avoid controversy, but of earnest contenders for the faith. God give us men in our time who will stand with Luther and say; “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, God help me. Amen.”[xxxv]

Machen could not foresee in the 1930s that the Fascism of Mussolini and Hitler and the Communism of the Soviet Union would eventually be overthrown. Nor could he hp.ve been aware, on the other hand, of the horrors of the atrocities committed under those regimes. He also could not anticipate the sensitivities of the so­-called “political correctness” of our contemporary scene. In some ways he sounds like those dated “dead, White European males” that now tend to be deplored. But he had' a grasp of the eternal verities. He saw that we must hear, with all of our intelligence and learning, God's written word, the Bible, that we must receive its message of salvation by grace alone through faith alone, and that we must earnestly contend for that faith of the Reformation, the faith once delivered to the saints. Like Paul he was not ashamed of the gospel.

His last recorded spoken words, uttered to 'Rev. Samuel J. Allen in that Bismarck, North Dakota hospital as he lay dying on December 31, 1936, were: “Sam, isn't the Reformed Faith grand?”[xxxvi]

 

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NOTES:

[i] Braaley J. Longfield, Presbyterian Controversy (New York and Oxford: Oxford U. Press,1991), p. 234.

[ii] Ibid., p. 229.

[iii] Ibid., p. 234.

[iv] Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir, 3rd ed., (Edinburgh and Carlisle, Pa.: Banner of Truth, 1987), p. 428.

[v] Presbyterian Guardian 7: 1 (January 10, 1940), p. 8.

[vi] Machen, God Transcendent, ed. Ned B. Stonehouse, (Edinburgh and Carlisle, Pa.: Banner of Truth, 1982), p.166.

[vii] Machen, The Christian Faith in the Modern World, (New York: Macmil!an, L936), pp. 65-66.

[viii] Machen, What Is Faith? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1925, 1979), p. 181.

[ix] Ibid., p. 200.

[x] Ibid., p. 186.

[xi] Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1923), pp. 144, 143.

[xii] Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen, pp. 176, 177.

[xiii] Machen, The Christian View of Man, (Edinburgh and Carlisle, Pa.: Banner of Truth, 1984), pp. 228, 1 1; cf. also Machen, _The Origin of Paul's Religion, (New York: Macmillan, 192 1), p. 7.

[xiv] Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen, pp. 40, 41.

[xv] Machen, God Transcendent, p. 157.

[xvi] Christianity and Liberalism, p. 46.

[xvii] Machen, God Transcendent, p. 158.

[xviii] Machen, "The Progress of Christian Doctrine," Presbyterian Guardian, 7: 1 (January 10, 1940), p. 8.

[xix] Ibid., p. 9.

[xx] Machen, The Christian View of Man, p. 48.

[xxi] Machen, "A Future of Calvinism in the Presbyterian Church?" The Banner, April 4, 1930, p. 320.

[xxii] Ibid., p. 333.

[xxiii] Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, pp. 50-51.

[xxiv] Ibid., p. 52.

[xxv] Machen, "The Responsibility of the Church in Our New Age" reprinted from Vol. 165 of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, (Philadelphia: January, 1933), pp. 4-6.

[xxvi] Ibid., p. 6.

[xxvii] Machen, "The Importance of Christian Scholarship, " in Education, Christianity, and the State, ed. J,ohn w. Robbins (Jefferson, Md. : Trinity Foundation, 1987) , pp. 28-29.

[xxviii] Machen, "Christianity and Culture," Christianity, and the state, pp. 54, 52.

[xxix] Machen, What Is Faith? pp. 183-184.

[xxx] Machen, "The Importance of Christian  Scholarship, " in Education, Christianity, and the State, p. 15.

[xxxi] Machen, "Faith and Knowledge," in Education, Christianity and the State, pp. 5-6.

[xxxii] George M. Marsden, "Understanding  J. Gresham Machen, 11 Princeton Seminary Bulletin XI: 1 (February, 1999), pp. 49, 56.

[xxxiii] Letters to Mary Gresham Machen of October 5 and 2, 1913 in the Archives at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia.

[xxxiv] Machen, "Mountains and' Why We Love Them. 11 Christianity Today, August, 1934, pp. 68-69; also published as a pamphlet, n.d., pp•' 10- 12.

[xxxv] Machen, "Westminster Theological Seminary: Its Purpose and Plan," in Education, Christianity, and the State, p. 151.

[xxxvi] Stonehouse, J. Gresham.Machen, p. 507.

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WRF member, Dr. William S. Barker, is Professor of Church History Emeritus, Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia), former President of Covenant Theological Seminary, and former Moderator of the PCA General Assembly.