Dr. Gordon A. MacLennan, a Presbyterian minister, once paid tribute to J. Gresham Machen at a Westminster Theological Seminary dinner. He said, “What is it in Dr. Machen that stands out above everything else? I have given much thought to my own question. To me the answer does not lie in his scholarship, or in his teaching ability, or in his literary skill, great as all these are. In my opinion the one feature about him that overshadows everything else is this: his burning passion to see the Lordship of Christ exercised in his church.”

Unless one understands this he will never understand John Gresham Machen, his moves or his moods. That he was a man of contention, like Jeremiah, is undoubtedly true. The reason? In his day, as in ours, historic Christianity was in conflict, the honor of the Son of God was involved, and Machen was of sterner stuff than to sit under his own vine and fig tree and disregard frontal attacks against his Saviour.

He was nurtured in a godly home in Baltimore, Maryland. At John Hopkins University he was exposed to the finest kind of classical education. He graduated with high honors, studied at Princeton Theological Seminary and later, on a fellowship, en· gaged in post·graduate work in Germany. He honed his mind on brilliant, if destructive, scholarship. At Marburg he sat at the feet of Dr. Wilhelm Hermann, a renowned but deeply devout liberal. The personal piety of this intellectual giant made a deep impression on him. In consequence he passed through an agonizing period of doubts. Gradually he emerged from the shadows. Years afterward he would sometimes tell his classes that it was chiefly the reading of the Bible that dissipated his doubts. If, like Jeremiah, he was a man of contention, he was also, like Jeremiah, a man of compassion. Having gone through deep waters, he was able to enter sympathetically into the intellectual perplexities of other disciples of Thomas, especially college students subjected to rationalistic and mechanistic philosophy.

He returned to the States and took a post on the faculty of Princeton Seminary. It is true, I think, that some scholars are not good teachers, and some teachers are not too able scholars. Machen combined excellent scholarship with great pedagogy. As one who studied under him for three years, I can testify that his teaching was stimulating, clear, thorough, and always biblically oriented.

His writings projected him into the orbit of international fame. From his pen came books such as The New Testament Greek for Beginners, Christianity and Liberalism, What is Faith?, The Origin of Paul’s Religion, a masterful apologetic, and the Virgin Birth of Christ, hailed as the most complete and exhaustive defense of that cardinal doctrine ever produced; a massive work.

In 1928, Princeton Seminary was organized in a way that virtually insured the locking out of the pure Calvinism that school of the prophets had long stood for. The liberal wing of the (then) Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (now the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.) secured a beachhead in the control of the seminary. Machen saw the word Ichabod, “the glory has departed,” written in gilt-edged letters over that institution. (Subsequent sad developments there have proved abundantly that he was right.) He and three other members of the Princeton faculty, including Cornelius Van Til, left and founded Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. Ned Stonehouse and R. B. Kuiper were added to the faculty.

In the early 1930‘s, the Presbyterian Church faced a serious crisis. It came to light that the cancer of unbelief had been actively at work in the official Board of Foreign Missions. Dr. Machen took up the cudgels. He wrote a pamphlet titled, Modernism and the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. He carefully documented his material, never descending, as some do in controversy, to wield the weapon of personal abuse. He took the matter into his Presbytery and called for an investigation of the Board. He decried the blasphemous public pronouncements of Mrs. Pearl Buck, a Presbyterian missionary-teacher laboring in China.

The issue was blandly whitewashed. Machen appealed his case to the General Assembly, the highest court in the church, and got nowhere. With a number of other evangelicals backing him, he set up another organization to serve as a clearing-house for missionaries unreservedly committed to the propogation of the pure, unadulterated gospel of Christ. They called it The Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions.

The following General Assembly ordered the members of the new Board to disband. They refused. Machen, together with other ministers and elders identified with the movement, were disciplined and ejected from the church. That same Assembly sent a mandate out to the whole church calling for all its members to give blanket financial support to its official Boards. Not to do so, said this mandate in effect, involved one in sin, just as refusal to participate in the Lord’s Supper did. This brutal ruling, in principle, so elevated the word of man that it placed that word on authoritative parity with the Wo.rd of God. Many who watched the proceeding with heavy hearts believed that then and there the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. became officially apostate. The iniquitous Confession of 1967, in which the great creedal standards of the church were reduced to a doctrinal shambles became the final step in apostasy.

Dr. Machen spearheaded the organization of another denomination, now the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. A number of office-holders and laymen, aware of the tragic decline and fall of a once great church, joined those who had been turned out of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. At its first stated General Assembly, Dr. Machen was elected Moderator, and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church was on its way.

Not long after the birth of the new church, the illustrious New Testament scholar was called to be with his Lord.

(To be continued)

Henry W. Corny is a minister of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the author of the novels Son of Tears on the life of Augustine and Rebel Prince on the life of Absalom.