Machen himself, at the end of his life, he wrote an autobiographical piece that was published in a journal. And in that piece he has a line that he says, up until that time I was playing games. What he meant was he still hadn't landed on his purpose for his life. The Westminster Shorter Catechism reminds us that the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.
But how we glorify God, what our vocation and calling in life will be, is different for all of us. Did you struggle with that? Perhaps you're still struggling with it. Well, on this Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind, you'll hear how the great 20th century figure J. Gresham Machen also struggled with this. I'm Nathan W. Bingham and I'm glad you're with us today as we spend a week learning about Machen and the bold stand he took for truth. Over the next two days, Stephen Nichols will give an overview of Machen's life. Here he is to discuss those early years.
What I want to do in this episode is give you an overview of Machen's life, paying attention especially to some of those early and formative years, those early decades in his life that sort of give us that foundation. So, when you think of Machen's life, he was born in 1881. He dies in 1937. Only lived for one day in that year of 1937. He dies on New Year's Day, 1937.
As we look at his life, we can divide it into four sections. One is those early years of the foundation, and so this is 1881 up until the time in which he goes into Princeton, and that's 1902. So then he's at Princeton. He's actually at Princeton until 1929, but I'm going to divide that into what I call Princeton I, and that runs from 1902 to 1918. And Princeton, can anybody guess? Close, Princeton II, and that runs 1918 to 1929. And then, I wasn't sure what to call this, but I think we're going to call this final stretch of Machen's life, new wine skins. And this takes us from 1929 to 1937.
So we've got his foundation years, 1881 to 1902, Princeton I, 1902 to 1918, Princeton II, 1918 to 1929, and then new wine skins, 1929 to 1937. So Machen was born in Baltimore. His middle name is Gresham. Now it's spelled S-H, but the H is silent, so it's J. Gresham Machen. His mother, Mary, she was also called Minnie, was a Gresham. She was from Machen, Georgia.
Her father, Machen's grandfather, was a lawyer. And he was also a graduate of the University of Georgia. Later in life, he would be on the board of trustees of the University of Georgia.
And for a time, he even served as president of the board of trustees of the University of Georgia. When he died in 1891, this is Machen's grandfather. When he died in 1891, Machen was just a 10-year-old boy. He happened to be in Machen's home. He was visiting his children, and the final stop, they'd all moved north, and the final stop was Baltimore to see his daughter and his son-in-law and his grandsons.
There were three of them. And he wasn't ill, but there he rather unexpectedly died in Machen's home in 1891. Of course, the body is taken back to Georgia, and he's buried there in Machen.
And as a memorial for him, the University of Georgia stopped classes in early afternoon and suspended classes for the rest of the day and had a moment of silence across the university campus in honor of Machen's grandfather, John J. Gresham. He was an attorney. He had invested in all sorts of businesses, owning significant shares and railroads. And so, this is Machen's mother of that genteel, Old South, and she moves to Baltimore. Machen's father was Arthur Webster Machen. His father was the chief law clerk for the United States Senate. But Arthur Webster Machen decided he would strike out on his own. And so, he went off to Harvard University as an undergrad and stayed at Harvard as a law student. But he wanted to do it on his own, by his own support. And so, to support himself through college and law school, Machen's father wrote detective stories so you can actually find writings of Arthur Webster Machen. He was a bachelor for a few decades until he met Minnie Gresham, and then they married.
So, there they are in their home in Baltimore. Machen is the middle of three sons. There's Arthur Jr.
There's Machen. The J stands for John, named for his grandfather. But we always call him J. And then the youngest of the three is Thomas. Arthur Jr. and Thomas went on to be attorneys, very successful attorneys, in Baltimore. Well, what happens to the middle child?
Well, that's the story. So, first of all, he was quite a scholar, and this was quite a home. Machen's mother loved Victorian culture. In fact, she's going to publish a book of her own.
In 1903, she'll publish a book with Macmillan called Browning and the Bible. And it is a testament to her favorite poet and to the Bible that she loved so much. Arthur Webster Machen, in addition to being a writer who wrote those detective stories, and also he served as editor and pulled together some shorter works that he would edit and put out as volumes later, also just loved books. And he had significant resources, so he was able to put those resources to collecting rare and antiquarian books, and he loved collecting the Greek classics. After a hard day of battling out a court case, at one time he argued the most cases of any attorney in the city of Baltimore.
He was a very busy litigator. So, after a hard day at the office or in the courtroom, Arthur Webster Machen would relax by reading Greek and Latin classics in the original text. And he would often have books that would be what they call uncut pages. So, these are books that were printed with the pages folded, and they'd be together. And so, you'd have to take a knife or a letter opener and literally cut the page to read it.
So, you'd read a page, cut it, read a page, cut it, right? This was the home Machen grew up in. The texts that he was surrounded with as a child were the Bible, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which they read through as a family pretty much every year.
They were good Presbyterians going to the Franklin Street Presbyterian Church. So, we throw into the mix the Westminster Shorter Catechism. And when Machen was a good boy, he could go up to his father's library and get whatever Greek or Latin text he wanted to read of these great classics. We have his report card from his sophomore year in high school. He studied sophomore year in high school. He studied geometry, algebra, natural sciences, English, Latin, Greek, and French.
And his grades ranged from 98 to 100. So, what we have here is a young scholar in the making, don't we? Well, when he finishes high school, he goes to college, and they're in Baltimore, and he loves the classics. And right down the street from the family home is Johns Hopkins University. And the most preeminent classic scholar is on the faculty at Johns Hopkins at the time. And with a name like this, you know he's a classics scholar, Gildersleeve. So, Machen goes to study at Hopkins Classics under Gildersleeve. He excels as a student. He wins the Senior Prize and graduates as valedictorian from Johns Hopkins.
And he has no idea what he wants to do with his life. As a gift to Machen for finishing his college years, his parents send him on a European tour. So, he goes off to Europe and backpacks and takes the train and climbs the great mountains. Of course, he climbs Mont Blanc there overlooking the old city of Geneva. And he falls in love with the Alpine Mountains. He will return throughout his life to the Alps to hike mountains. And at one point, he's going to write, which is one of my favorite texts of Machen, a short little text that he gave as a talk and then published in a magazine called Mountains and Why We Love Them. So, he was first introduced to them there in the Alps. He was also introduced to the American mountains, the Machens. And this sort of takes us back to a time in American culture where when you got into those dog days of summer, many professionals just simply shuttered their office and went on an extended vacation.
So, from July and August, you would just put a gone fishing sign on the door of the office and off you would go. And the Machens had a home up in Maine. And they would travel up to Maine, and Machen loved it up there in the mountains of Maine. And even after his parents passed away, Machen would continue to go up there from time to time.
Machen was a pack rat. He saved everything. Saved receipts from suits he bought. And he saved receipts for car repairs for the automobile they kept up there in Maine for a while.
They were up there over the summers. So, this was Machen's life. And as I say, he graduates from college, and he doesn't know what to do. His older brother has already gone through law school and is beginning his law career. And his younger brother knows he wants to be a lawyer, and Machen's not sure. He does study some law classes at Hopkins in the graduate school. And then he boards a train and goes out to the University of Chicago, and he spends one semester studying international banking. So, he's either going to go into banking or he's going to go into law, but neither of those leave him satisfied. And after this semester at Chicago, he comes home, and his pastor says, you've always had a love for the Bible. You've got easily a knack for the languages.
You are a natural at them, and you enjoy Greek. Have you ever thought about going to seminary and studying at seminary? And Machen said, that's the last thing I want to do. Do you not want to go to a seminary because I don't want to be a pastor? And his pastor says to him, you don't have to be a pastor. You can just go to seminary and go off and do something else and be a scholar. And why don't you go to seminary and university at the same time?
So, we are leaving now the foundation, and we are going to Princeton I. In 1902, Machen enrolls at Princeton University in the graduate program, and he enrolls at Princeton Theological Seminary. He will receive an MA in philosophy from the university, and he'll receive, in those days they called it a bachelors of divinity, but it's equivalent to what we would say today, a masters of divinity from the seminary. So, an MA and an MDiv from Princeton as a student from 1902 to 1905.
Now, let's talk a little bit about these student years. Number one, Woodrow Wilson is currently the president of Princeton University at this time, not the seminary. There is no president of the seminary. When the seminary was established at Princeton, it was run by the faculty, and that was the case up until the 1920s when Princeton was established in 1812. It didn't have its first president until the 1920s. My day job as president of a college, and I love to think of a place that for 110 years thought the office of a president was a totally superfluous position to have.
It just puts what I do in perspective. But going back to Machen, Woodrow Wilson as the president, he happens to be a family friend of his maternal side, the Greshams. So, very often Machen found himself enjoying Sunday dinners in the president's home, in Woodrow Wilson's home.
It turns out later Machen didn't quite agree with Woodrow Wilson's politics or Woodrow Wilson's theology, but I'm not sure what came up over those Sunday dinners. What kind of a student was Machen? Well, he was brilliant. He didn't need to really work hard because he was brilliant.
Well, that can be a challenge because that means now you have extra time and you don't always have to apply yourself. And Machen loved Princeton University football games. So, if there happened to be a football game on an afternoon when he had a class, he would just simply ditch the class and go watch the football game. And we also have his notebooks while he was a student at Princeton Seminary. And here he is taking notes on people like B.B.
Warfield and Gerhardus Vos. And he's writing in these notebooks pranks to people who are sitting next to him and jokes to people sitting next to him. And they all had nicknames. This is Machen as a student. So, I'm calling this Princeton One because even Machen himself, at the end of his life he wrote, mid-30s, he wrote an autobiographical piece that was published in a journal. And in that piece he has a line that he says, really up until right around the time that Warfield was becoming seriously ill and it was clear that he was going to die.
So, this is right around 1919, 1920. He said, up until that time I was playing games. In one sense, literally. But what he really meant was he still hadn't landed on his purpose for his life. And he had a lot going on for him. A very intellectually accomplished, stellar student. But he wasn't quite sure what to do with all that.
He hadn't really found his true calling. Well, in 1905, Princeton had a tradition in the senior class that there was one class that the most standout paper was granted a prize. And that prize was a full year of study abroad for graduate work. Significant prize. And also, that paper would be published in the Princeton Theological Review, their journal.
And guess who wins? In Machen's senior year of 1905. Machen does. But there was this sort of unwritten sort of expectation that if you got that prize and went off and studied in the European University for a year, it was sort of expected that you might come back to Princeton and maybe lecture for a year in the seminary and then go off and do something else. Machen didn't want to be tied down to that. And quite frankly, he didn't need the money. So he turned the prize money back to Princeton and went anyway. So in 1905 to 1906, he's in Germany. The first stop he goes to is Marburg. And then he goes to Göttingen. At Göttingen, he is under Wilhelm Herrmann.
Herrmann, H-E-R-R-M-A-N-N. You know how the Germans like consonants. Herrmann was probably the leading liberal theologian of the day in Germany. He was a disciple of Ritchel. And Ritchel was the one who sort of culminated that whole quest for the historical Jesus of the German higher critical tradition.
Now, let's explain some terms here and let's understand the context here that Machen is walking into. If we go back to these German universities in the early parts of the 19th century, we find that they begin exploring the notion of biblical authorship. And they start in the Old Testament, and they begin postulating this idea of what we call the JEDP theory. That the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, was not written by Moses, but was written by four authorial strands.
The Yahwist, who uses Yahweh for referring to God, the Elohist, who uses Elohim, the Deuteronomist, okay, my guess what book that is, and the Priestly line, and that's mostly Leviticus, but also other pieces of the Pentateuch. The idea is, the upshot of all this is, the Bible is not a divine book from God down through His prophet, through Moses, but the Bible is a human book representing human experience and representing the human sense and encounter with the divine being. In other words, this is a total assault on the authority of the Bible. Then it spills over to the Gospels, and what we find in the Gospels is a distinction made between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith. The Jesus of faith is not the historical Jesus. The Jesus of faith is the Jesus that the Christian community, a century later, two centuries later, expands on Jesus and creates this legend and myths of Jesus. And so, the miracles are later additions, not accurate history. So, there's a Jesus of faith, and there's a Jesus of history, and higher critical scholarship differentiates between the material of the four Gospels and says, this is the Jesus of history, and this is the Jesus of faith. What's the upshot of that? Well, the upshot of that again is that the New Testament now, this is not a divinely inspired book through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but instead this is the experience of these early Christian communities of their encounter with Jesus and his teaching and come centuries later. Machen spends a year in Germany not reading about this, but seeing this firsthand.
I think this is going to significantly equip Machen for the years to come. Well, we're still in 1905, 1906. What happens when he finishes his time in Europe? Well, he goes back to Princeton, and he takes a position as a lecturer. And he holds that position, but he's not trying to push ahead to get ordained, which is necessary to get an appointment to a professorship, and he's not pursuing a professorship. He's just sort of enjoying being a lecturer. Again, he's doing things with his time.
He's having significant moments, but I don't think he's yet found his purpose. And then along comes World War I, and Machen wants to do something about it. He finds out that if he becomes a chaplain, he does get ordained finally. He gets ordained in 1914. He does get appointed an assistant professor in 1915. But he's still not sure what he's wanting to do, and the war is happening in Europe.
Woodrow Wilson now has left the presidency of Princeton and is president of the United States, and it's clear that America is about to enter into the war, and 1917 finally does. Machen knows that if he goes in as a chaplain, he'll be separated from the enlisted men, and he doesn't want to do that. He wants to be embedded with them. He thinks about going as an ambulance driver, but he hears that there are so many ambulance drivers that they're using them to load munitions instead of being an ambulance driver, and he's not sure he wants to do that either. So, he ends up going with the YMCA. Now, in those days, there weren't a lot of the social services provided by the branches of the military itself.
And so, the YMCA was an organization that would come in and promote significant social services for soldiers, like helping them with getting their paychecks home and helping them get letters to write letters back home and having books and magazines for them to buy and even hot chocolate to drink. And so, Machen is making hot chocolate. Well, he comes back from the war, and I think as he comes back from the war, he now has significant purpose. A significant purpose indeed, and you'll hear how the Lord would use Machen to impact both the church of his generation and the church today next time. This is Renewing Your Mind, and all week we're learning about the life of Machen and his defining book, Christianity and Liberalism.
Published in 1923, we produced a 100th anniversary edition, and we'd love to send you a copy along with Dr. Nichols' complete series on DVD that takes you on a deep dive into the book and the life of Machen. Request both when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800-435-4343. We'll also unlock the messages and the study guide in the free Ligonier app so that you can listen on the go. Donate today at renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes. And don't forget, if you'd like a digital-only resource package or you live outside of the U.S. or Canada, you can request the e-book edition along with digital access to the teaching series and its study guide at renewingyourmind.org slash global. Thank you. J. Gresham Machen has purpose, so how would the Lord use him? Find out as we continue the story tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. Copyright Australian Broadcasting Corporation
