Machen and the Church

When controversy and conflict showed up at Machen's 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. One hundred years ago, in 1923, J. Gresham Machen drew a line in the sand when he released his classic book, Christianity and Liberalism. And that line in the sand is clear, even just from the title of the book. What Machen is saying is liberalism is not Christianity.

You're listening to Renewing Your Mind this Monday, and I'm glad you're with us. The Lord used Machen in significant ways, and not just through his writing of Christianity and Liberalism, but I do want to mention that you can request a special 100th anniversary edition of that book with your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. Machen navigated controversy and conflict to bring about clarity and conviction. To help us better understand Machen and his significance in the 20th century, you'll be hearing messages this week from Stephen Nichols' new series on Machen and this classic book. We're picking up at a discussion of Machen and the Church.

Here's Dr. Nichols. 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 Machens, or we can go back to the Reformers, the Luther's and the Calvin's, or we could go back to the church fathers, the Athanasius's 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. 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 300s, 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 it's 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 and doctrine, Machen and the seminary, Machen and missions. We've touched on that already too, but it's worth revisiting. And then finally, Machen 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're talking 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 piece he entitled, The Attack Upon Princeton Seminary, A Plea for Fair Play. And 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 is founded 1812.

He's writing this 1927. One hundred and fifteen 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.

You've got to love Machen. You know exactly where he stands. The Bible teaches the Reformed faith and 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, Machen 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. So, 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, right?

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? The 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, Machen 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 and missions, 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 2 Corinthians 5, 14 to 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 in our 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 sixteenth century, controversy.

What came out of that, right? 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 churchman, 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. That was Stephen Nichols on this Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind, discussing J. Gresser Machen, the churchman. Today's message is part of a twelve-part series from Dr. Nichols that surveys the life of Machen and walks us through his classic book, Christianity and Liberalism. That book was first published in 1923, so this year Ligonier Ministries released a special 100th anniversary edition, and that special edition book plus digital access to the entire series and study guide can be yours for a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org.

This has been a popular resource this year, so call us at 800 435 4343 or request your copy at renewingyourmind.org while supplies last. Your generosity is helping bolster the proclamation and distribution of Bible teaching that's uncompromising and that's faithful to the historic Christian faith. It's one thing to know what you believe, it's quite another to know why you believe it. Tomorrow Stephen Nichols will consider Machen the apologist, how he defended what he believed. That's Tuesday here on Renewing Your Mind. .