The Life And Legacy Of J. Gresham Machen

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I was just curious, how many of you before this weekend had heard of Machen? Wow, well that's a lot.
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I thought it would help to maybe just give a thumbnail sketch of his life. We talked about him Friday and Saturday, or Friday night rather.
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And some of you were here, some of you weren't. So we'll just give a thumbnail sketch of his life. But what I really wanted to do this morning is spend the bulk of our time looking at how
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Machen, I think can be an example for us for apologetics, for the defense of the faith.
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Now we're going to look at that in terms of also a way, maybe a construct, to look at how to do apologetics or what apologetics is about.
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So we're going to sort of look at the life of Machen very quickly, so you have a frame, a grid, to understand who he is and his significance.
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And then we'll spend the bulk of our time talking about apologetics and how
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Machen may be a good guide for that. Friday night started off with giving you ten facts about Machen's life.
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Now I won't do that, run through all ten facts, but Machen's dates are, he was born in 1881 and he dies on January 1st, 1937 as a 55 -year -old man.
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He was a son of privilege. His parents were wealthy.
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His mother was extremely wealthy from a family in Macon, Georgia. This is Old South, Deep South money.
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And that came to assistance in Machen later in life when he founds a seminary, founds a mission board.
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He's able to do some significant things with some of that family money that he was a part of. But he grew up in Baltimore, and there are pictures of his home in Baltimore.
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It was a very Victorian home, if you can sort of imagine. There was the parlor and the reading room, and his father was an attorney.
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His paternal grandfather was an attorney. So there was the study with the big oak desk and the walls of leather -bound books.
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This was the home of Machen. He grew up with the Bible, the Westminster Shorter Catechism.
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They were Presbyterians, and he grew up with Pilgrim's Progress. He went off to Johns Hopkins, did very well as a student, excelled in the classics, won prizes, etc.
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And then he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. He dabbled in studying international banking and international law at the
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University of Chicago. And then his pastor advised him that he should go to Princeton Theological Seminary.
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Machen went, but he went when he finally realized that he could go and not necessarily have to be ordained.
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He didn't see the ministry as his future, and it was not something he necessarily wanted. But he thought, why not?
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I don't know what I want to do with my life. I might as well go kill some time in seminary. So he goes to Princeton.
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Yes, he would ride his bike a lot, but one of my favorite stories about Machen is, in the afternoons he had a
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Hebrew class, and he excelled at languages. He was very adept at languages. He was going to go on and write a Greek grammar for Macmillan Press that was a substantive
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Greek grammar for decades. It was the grammar I actually learned Greek on. It still is in print. So he was very crack at languages, so he didn't need to sit in his
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Hebrew classes. He picked it up rather quickly, so he would spend the afternoons, especially warmer afternoons, going and watching baseball games.
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The Phillies in Philadelphia, he'd take the train down or he'd watch Princeton football games, which, you know, it's
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Princeton, it's football, so they'd always lose. But it was a game nevertheless. And he was known for what they called in those days stunting, which is sort of the good fellows sort of carrying on, nothing malicious, but just having a good time.
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That was Machen as a student. He, again, excelled at Princeton, won the prize for the senior paper, and that prize came with a nice package.
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It awarded him a full scholarship to study doctoral work in Germany.
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So Machen went, and then he returns to Princeton and becomes, this is in the 19 -teens now, becomes an assistant professor of the
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New Testament. But in his letters to his parents in the 19 -tens, while he's a student and while he's an instructor at Princeton, a young instructor, he's writing in his letters that he wants to be useful.
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That's the word he keeps using, I want to be useful. And he hadn't yet landed on what in his life he could be useful at doing.
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He is reluctant to join the ministry. He's teaching at Princeton. He's very capable, but it's not like he's committed his life and wants to be an academic.
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And from 1914 until 1918, of course, the world is at war.
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And in 1917, Woodrow Wilson, who, by the way, was a family friend, and before he was president of the
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United States, was governor of New Jersey, was also president of Princeton. And while Machen was a student and Wilson was president, he was a family friend,
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Machen had dinner on numerous occasions in Wilson's home. So, again, this was a family with connections.
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And Woodrow Wilson leads Congress to declare war in April of 1917.
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America enters World War I, or the Great War, as it was called then, rather late.
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And Machen wants to serve, doesn't want to join in the military, but somehow he is feeling compelled, as he would write in his letter, he's constrained to somehow minister to soldiers.
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And so he ends up serving and going with the YMCA. Now, I'm going to come back to that because this is where I want to spend some time with you on, and his service with the
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YMCA in World War I. Comes out of World War I, I think, with a newfound commitment.
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And then Warfield, Benjamin Warfield, who was called the Lion of Old Princeton, dies. And I think Warfield consciously and explicitly passes the mantle on to Machen to be the one who will stand up for orthodoxy.
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In the 1920s and 30s, the last 16 years of Machen's life, he is essentially embroiled in controversy with his own denomination.
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He ends up leaving Princeton in 1929. He wasn't kicked out, but he left because he saw the writing was on the wall.
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They had reorganized the board, and in the process of reorganizing the board, they had introduced a liberal element into running the seminary, and Machen could no longer remain there in good conscience.
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And so those of you who will reference the sermon, but those of you who were here for the conference and have the booklet, in there is the sermon,
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Fighting the Good Fight. He preached that sermon. It was the last sermon he preached at Miller Chapel in Princeton Seminary in the spring of 1929.
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He preached that sermon, and I think the context is incredible when you understand the context.
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And then when he realized that the board was reorganized that June, he immediately packs his bags and resigns, goes across the
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Delaware River, and starts a brand new seminary in Philadelphia. And he called that new seminary Westminster Theological Seminary, and he founded a seminary while the country is in the midst of the
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Great Depression. It's not a very wise thing to found a seminary at any time, the funding and the challenge, but he starts his up in the throes of the
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Great Depression. Westminster has remained a sort of powerhouse, if you will.
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I was a grad there, so I can say that. But it sort of received the mantle of old
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Princeton. And if you know anything about Princeton, Princeton was established because of what was called latitudinarianism at an institution not too far from here if you head directly east.
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And at that institution, there was latitudinarianism, which meant latitude over commitment to the doctrines that had founded that place.
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And so it sort of, if you will, goes from Cambridge over to Harvard, from Harvard to Yale, from Yale to Princeton, and from Princeton to Westminster.
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And then I think it went across the country and landed in Santa Clarita in Happy Valley, California. Is that okay?
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And then it went down to Louisville, Kentucky. Is that okay? And then it went to Orlando.
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No, it never went. Well, okay, maybe it went to Orlando. Where was
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I? So he found Westminster. And then in the 1930s, his denomination publishes a report called
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Rethinking Missions. And they began to change their philosophy of missions from the proclamation of the gospel to essentially humanitarian and social concerns, largely fueled by the works of Pearl Buck, the novelist,
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Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize winning novelist, missionary, daughter of missionaries to China, and her views on what missions should be about.
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In response to that, Machen found in 1933 the Independent Board for Foreign Missions.
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And when he did that, then his presbytery brought him up on charges to defrock him.
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He went through a year of a trial. This was all front page news of the New York Times, these events. Went through a year of trials, was defrocked of his credentials, appealed, as was his right, to the
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General Assembly. And in 1936, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America upheld the decision of the presbytery, and so Machen was kicked out of his denomination in 1936.
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And the next month, he founds a new denomination. It was called the Presbyterian Church in America.
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But the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America sued them. So six years later, they changed their name to the
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Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And that remains today the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
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Now, in 1967, another group of theological conservatives broke from the
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PCUSA and formed what is called the PCA, the Presbyterian Church of America, which is a conservative church.
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And this time, the PCUSA didn't sue them, so they still have the name. But Machen's church was founded in 1936.
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He spoke at the very first General Assembly of this young church. And one of those churches was a church in North Dakota that was
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PCUSA, joined in with the new denomination, and immediately fell into controversy, and it looked as if it was going to go back in.
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Machen, who was exhausted, traveled out to North Dakota to try to somehow make this possible for this church to stay in.
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It met with extremely cold weather, contracted pneumonia, did, in fact, preach and spoke, and coaxed the church to stay in the new denomination.
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But then he was struck ill, was hospitalized, and the only day he saw of 1937 was the first.
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So he dies there in a hospital in North Dakota, January 1, 1937. Machen's institutions live on.
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The Orthodox Presbyterian Church is still around, thriving, right?
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Small but mighty is what I like to say about the OPC. And his seminary,
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Westminster Theological Seminary. So there's Machen's life in a nutshell. He wrote a number of books. I mentioned his
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Greek grammar. He wrote some significant scholarly books, The Virgin Birth of Christ, The Origin of Paul's Religion.
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Both of those were scholarly responses to the views of liberalism, attacking both
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The Virgin Birth and also pitting Paul against Jesus in terms of what Christianity ultimately is, saying
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Christianity is a lifestyle. We follow Jesus. Paul turned it into a doctrine. Paul perverted
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Jesus's teachings. Machen speaks directly to that. And he speaks directly to the claim that The Virgin Birth was a myth.
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He also, as I mentioned, published The Greek Grammar. And then he also wrote more popular books like Christianity and Liberalism and a wonderful book,
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What is Faith? And then since he died, a number of his sermons have been published. If you're looking for two things to read on Machen, well, three.
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My book. I'm just going to throw that in there. The first book you want to read is
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Christianity and Liberalism. But then the other book I think you want to get a hold of is God Transcendent, which are a number of his sermons.
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And it includes in there the sermons that he recorded in December of 1936 to be aired on WIP, a radio station in Philadelphia.
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And so he recorded them at 36 before he traveled out to North Dakota, died. And then in the months that followed, those were actually aired on the
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WIP. But the manuscripts were published. And so it's a wonderful collection of his sermons.
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So Christianity and Liberalism and God Transcendent. And I think you can do pretty well by getting at Machen through those two things.
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I wanted to use Machen as a model for apologetics.
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And to do this, I want to talk about a way that I've come to sort of understand or appreciate how we can do apologetics.
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I want to do apologetics in terms of like a Texas two -step. And the two -step is, and I get the lead here from Calvin, of the knowledge of God as creator and the knowledge of God as redeemer.
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Which is to say that apologetics is about proclaiming common grace and then proclaiming saving grace.
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So that we proclaim in our lives, both our deeds and our words, that God is in fact creator and that God is in fact redeemer.
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There was a time, culturally, when we could focus our energies on God as redeemer.
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But as you know, we are moving into more and more of a post -Christian culture, post -Christian context.
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Not so much down in Lancaster where I live. You know, we're a Bible belt. We've got all the Amish and the
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Mennonites. But in other parts of the country, maybe here, we recognize that we need to talk about God and have a proper perspective on who
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God is and in light of that, who we are as a humanity created in his image, but also sinful and fallen.
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We just can't assume that people have a proper perspective on either
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God or humanity. And until they have that proper perspective on God and humanity, they're not going to understand the gospel.
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The gospel doesn't make sense unless we understand a right God and humanity.
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So I think apologetics is about proclaiming both common grace and being a testimony to God's presence in the world and then also proclaiming saving grace and being a testimony to Christ as the
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Redeemer, as the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world for the sins of his people.
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Machen, I think, shows this in his life. Now let's go back to World War I. He wants to be useful.
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He wants to serve. So he goes with the YMCA. This is before the
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USO. This is before the Army or the United States military took on a lot of the sort of social services for the soldiers themselves.
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And so they were largely dependent on organizations and largely dependent upon the YMCA to provide for that sort of social dimension and needs of soldiers' lives.
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And the symbol of the YMCA was an upside -down red triangle. And the testimonies of the soldiers, there was one soldier who said as he saw that sign, it is the last evidence that anybody cares.
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These are soldiers who are fighting in trench warfare on the front lines in World War I.
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Machen goes and serves. And the YMCA did a number of things, but probably what the soldiers appreciated most was they ran what they called huts or canteens.
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These huts or canteens were literally within shooting distance of the front lines, and they would provide soldiers with pen and paper and postage so they could write letters home.
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They would also be a way in which they could write money orders so soldiers could send money home from their pay.
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And they also provided what soldiers appreciated the most, hot chocolate. Machen would make hot chocolate.
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I mentioned this Friday night, but in those days you didn't just open up a packet and stick it in a microwave -heated cup of water.
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You had to get a fire going, and you had to put the kettle over the fire, and you had to boil the water, and then you got these big blocks of chocolate that were shipped to you, and you had to put them into water, and you had to boil them, and you had to stir them with a paddle, and you had to add milk, and then you had hot chocolate.
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Machen said at one point, I have worn one uniform ever since leaving Paris, and it is now all spotted up with hot chocolate.
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So I just picture him, right? Princeton professor, Greek scholar, turning this paddle, making hot chocolate for soldiers.
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He had a number of insights, I think, into himself, but also into human nature while he was serving there in the war.
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He was actually serving right along of the Argonne Offensive, which if you know the history of World War I, World War I was the final push of America that in fact contributed to the ending of World War I.
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It was an intense scene of battles. Machen writes about one moment where he was talking with someone in a doorway, literally turns to walk away, and a bomb goes off right where he was standing and obviously kills the person he had just been talking to.
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These are some of the experiences. So while he was a noncombatant, he certainly wasn't isolated from war.
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He would write of letters and consistently refer to the sinister noise of the canisters incessantly going off, the bombs going off, and tat, tat, tat of the rifles, of the gunfire.
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Here's some interesting... I'll just share some pieces from some of the letters he writes home. He's talking about how, of course, my feet were wet all the time.
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But finally, I quote, unquote, salvaged a pair, a dry pair of socks.
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Do you understand that word, salvage? It is a great word in the Army. When you see anything good lying around and you appropriate it, that is not stealing.
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It is salvaging. You may laugh. See, you're laughing.
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And you may think I am irreverent, but I can say in all seriousness that one of the most fervent prayers that I ever offered in my life was the prayer of Thanksgiving that I prayed that night in my duck out when
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I pulled on those dry, warm socks. He writes of another occasion that he was actually working in a hospital where there were wounded soldiers, both
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Germans and American. And he says, One German fellow said when I gave him the hot chocolate that it was even better than his mother made.
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It would have taken a harder heart than mine to keep from being touched by that. By the way, along with the hatred and the bitterness incidental to war, there are some examples of other things which, like the fair lilies and swampy ground, are all the more beautiful because of the contrast with the unlikely soil on which they grow.
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So at one of the dressing stations near the front, I saw an American wounded soldier deliberately take off his overcoat and give it to a wounded
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German who was suffering a lot worse than he. When one reflects what that little act meant, the long, cold hours of rain and damp along the way to the rear and the interminable waits, it becomes clear that magnanimity has not altogether perished from the earth.
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And then in the very next letter he writes, as they are moving, as the Germans had broken the line and they were moving the line back, he writes, as he looks through the ruins of the countryside, it is a scene of desolation so abominable.
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I've seen burnt and forced before, but the effects of shellfire are different. There was something indescribably sinister about the scene of ruin.
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So there's Machen seeing both what humanity is capable of because of the image of God and the goodness of God that does extend to the earth.
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It can even be visible in times of war. But then he's also seeing what is that dark side of human nature because of the reality of total depravity.
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And Machen comes out of the war very aware of both of those sides of human nature.
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When he comes out of the war, he writes a piece on Christianity and culture. And in that piece, he challenges the liberal view, which he sees as an accommodation, but the word he uses is that culture, the liberals had subordinated
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Christianity to culture. And what he saw in that was liberalism's inability to see that side of the equation that he saw so clearly in the war, the sinful total depravity side.
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So that liberalism was always about a rosy picture of humanity and the world and what humanity is capable of and the sort of grandfatherliness of God and the brotherhood and sisterhood of all men and women.
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Machen's war experiences would not let him see that. On the other hand, he saw what was, in some of his contemporary fundamentalists, and Machen said, if it's the difference between liberalism and fundamentalists, call me a fundamentalist.
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But he was sort of reluctant to call himself a fundamentalist. He preferred to simply be called a Presbyterian. But beyond that, there were parts of fundamentalism he didn't go along with, namely the sort of separation from culture.
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And so he says, well, here's one view where you subordinate Christianity to culture and that's what liberalism does.
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So there's no difference between the Christian and the non -Christian ultimately. But then there were the extreme fundamentalists who were advocating a separation from culture.
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And Machen makes the case that both of those are in violation of what Christ says. If you go back to the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus, remember, uses the illustration of salt and light.
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And he says, what good is salt if it has lost its distinctiveness? If it's so mixed in, it's no longer discriminative.
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It's unnoticeable. And that's a way of expressing this idea of being so immersed in culture that there's nothing distinct.
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That that's a Christianity that has lost its saltiness. And salt is both taste, but in a pre -refrigeration era, salt was about a preservation element, preserver.
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And that preservation function came through its distinctiveness. But then we have the light example.
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So no one who has a light hides it under a bushel. So you take your light and you hide it.
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See, that's withdrawal and separation from culture. Instead, what are we supposed to do?
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Be a light shining in darkness. To be salt in the world. It's tricky to be salt and light in culture.
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And many times, we get it wrong. And many times, the church gets it wrong.
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But that's what we are called to do. We are not called to mix in neither are we called to separate and withdraw.
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Let's go into hell in a hand basket anyway. Why get involved? Machen promotes what he calls the consecration of culture.
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And he also promotes what he uses as the expression of a chastened consecration of culture.
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Not sort of that triumphalism, you know, we're going to win. We're going to win back America. We're going to make everybody
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Jesus lovers again. But being faithful witnesses and proclaimers of the presence of God in culture.
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Machen expresses it this way in his essay on Christian culture. Instead of destroying the arts and sciences or being indifferent to them, let us cultivate them with all the enthusiasm of the various or the truest humanist.
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But at the same time, consecrate them to the service of our God. Instead of stifling the pleasures afforded by the acquisition of knowledge or by the appreciation of what is beautiful, let us accept these pleasures as the gifts of a
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Heavenly Father. Instead of obliterating the distinction between the kingdom and the world, that's liberalism.
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Or, on the other hand, withdrawing from the world in a sort of modernized monasticism, that was pockets of fundamentalism, let us go forth joyfully, enthusiastically to proclaim
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God the King of the world. I think
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Machen learned something about cultural engagement from his time in the war. He learned of the realities of human nature so that he was both optimistic but not naively optimistic.
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That he was pessimistic but not fatally pessimistic.
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That he was able to see the complexities of humanity and of life under the sun, as the author of Ecclesiastes puts it.
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And in that context, proclaim God through his life of engaging culture.
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So we see Machen, I think, being a model of a common grace apologetic. But the other thing he learned from the war is the urgency of the gospel.
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How's the saying go? There are no atheists in foxholes. The war has a way of putting in front of people ultimate questions that the routines of life don't always bring to the surface.
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Moments of tragedy have a way of highlighting for us what are the ultimate issues. As opposed to the sort of numbness of our entertainment culture that just simply puts those things off.
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What was put to the forefront of Machen coming out of World War I was the urgency of the gospel. And then for him, personally now, he had discovered his usefulness.
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A totally different Machen comes home. The armistice is, you know, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918.
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And you know what Machen writes home a letter, he says, you know what the best thing about the armistice was? The silence afterwards.
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He hadn't realized how incessantly noisy life was for the last eight months of his life until the armistice.
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And the calmness of the silence. It's a beautiful letter he writes home explaining the armistice and what it had done.
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After all the cheers and the shouts go up by the soldiers, then the silence. He doesn't come home until the spring of, even though it ends in November 1918, he doesn't come home until the spring of 1919.
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The YMCA, there were a number of soldiers, they just didn't all come home. And so the YMCA continued to help the soldiers.
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They continued to help them sort of transition from what would be soldier life back into civilian life.
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The YMCA ran classes for them to try to help them think through.
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This is before we have what we understand today as the whole post -traumatic stress disorders and those types of issues.
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But the YMCA was talking about those kind of things even with World War I, maybe not using that language.
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And so Machen was a part of that. And what he primarily was, even though he was serving hot chocolate all the way through, from January through March of 1919 he was a chaplain preaching sermons to these soldiers and part of the process of preparing them to assimilate back into civilian life.
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So he comes home in the spring of 1919 and he is a totally different Machen than when he went for the war in the spring of 1918.
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When he comes home to Princeton, he has now,
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I think, found his purpose. And he throws himself into the fundamentalist modernist controversy.
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And he is also thrust into it by Warfield. Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield is dying. He's going to die in 1920.
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And he explicitly pegs Machen as his successor. And he spends a lot of time with Machen in those last couple of years knowing that Machen will be the one who will pick up the mantle, and Machen does.
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And immediately he gets embroiled in the controversy and within a couple of years he publishes his book Christianity and Liberalism and it's laying down the gauntlet.
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It's exposing the Achilles heel of liberalism. And from then on it's controversy.
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Now, what's interesting is if we look at this Fight the Good Fight of Faith, because I want to look here at how
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Machen proclaimed the gospel and then I'm going to leave five or so minutes for questions. But he's talking, if you have the booklet from yesterday, you have the sermon in there
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Fighting the Good Fight of Faith, but you can also just find it online. If you just search Machen Fight the Good Fight, you'll find the sermon.
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I want to read just a couple of quotes from you. If you have the book from yesterday, I think it's page 7 that I want to read this from and then page 9.
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He says, we're thrust into a fight, right? And Paul would use this language.
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Jude would use this language. We even read it in the Philippians text in our scripture reading. I'm set for the defense of the gospel.
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And he says, what then shall we find a sufficient motive for such a course as that? Where shall we find courage to stand against the whole current of the age?
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Apply this to your context. Where shall you find courage to fight for the faith and stand for the gospel and proclaim the gospel in light of the whole current that is against you?
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If that's a family that does not embrace Christ. If that's a culture that you live in that has not embraced
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Christ. How do we do this? Where shall we find the courage for this fight that we've been called into?
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I do not think that we shall obtain courage by any mere lust of conflict. In some battles, that means, may perhaps suffice.
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Soldiers in bayonet practice were sometimes, and for all I know still are, taught to give a shout when they thrust their bayonets at imaginary enemies.
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I heard them doing it, even long after the armistice in France. That serves,
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I suppose, to overcome the natural inhibition of a civilized man to develop the proper spirit of conflict in times of war.
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Perhaps it may be necessary in some kinds of war, but it will hardly serve in this Christian conflict. In this conflict,
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I do not think we can be good fighters simply by being resolved to fight, for this is a battle of love.
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Now, this gets a little tricky sometimes, because it's easy to look at a non -Christian world and develop a spirit of disdain.
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It's easy to respond after a series of rebukes and rebuffs, to want to grunt as you thrust the bayonet, and it's easy to use theology as a weapon.
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It's very easy. Machen says, but this is a battle of love, and nothing ruins a man's service in it so much as a spirit of hate.
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Now, if we want to learn the secret of this warfare, we shall have to look deeper. We can hardly do better than turn again to the great fighter, the
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Apostle Paul. What was the secret of his power in mighty conflict? How did he learn to fight? The answer is paradoxical, but it's very simple.
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Paul was a great fighter because he was at peace. He who said, fight the good fight of faith, spoke also of the peace of God which passeth all understanding, and in that peace, the sinews of this war may be found.
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He fought against the enemies that were without because he was at peace within. There was an inner sanctuary in his life that no enemy could disturb there, my friends, is the great central truth.
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You cannot fight successfully with beasts, as Paul did at Ephesus. You cannot fight successfully against evil men or against the devil and his spiritual powers of wickedness in high places unless when you fight against those enemies, there's one with whom you are at peace.
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We fight for the faith from the position of the peace that we have with God and the standing that we have in a right relationship with God, and we see in other parts of this sermon, we know this is the truth.
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But that position then means a disposition and a demeanor that is winsome.
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Where theology does not become a weapon, but where theology becomes an invitation to consider.
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He concludes his sermon, Many have been swept away from their moorings by the currents of this age.
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A church grown worldly often tyrannizes over those who look for guidance to God's word alone, but this is not the first discouraging time in the history of the church.
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Other times are just as dark, and yet always God has watched over his people, and the darkest hour has sometimes preceded the dawn.
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So even now, God has not left himself without a witness. In many lands, there are those who have faced the great issue of the day and have decided it aright, who have preserved true independence of mind in the presence of the world.
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In many lands, there are groups of Christian people who in the face of ecclesiastical tyranny have not been afraid to stand for Christ.
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God grant that you may give comfort to them as you go forth from this seminary. God grant that you may rejoice their hearts by giving them your hand and your voice.
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To do so, you will need courage. Far easier is it to curry favor with the world by abusing those whom the world abuses, by speaking against controversy, by taking a balcony view of the struggle in which
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God's servants are engaged. But God save you from such a neutrality as that. It has a certain worldly appearance of urbanity and charity, but how cruel it is to burden souls.
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How heartless it is to those little ones who are looking to the church for some clear message from God. God save you from being so heartless and so unloving.
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God grant instead that in all humility, but also in all boldness and reliance upon God, you may fight the good fight of faith.
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Peace is indeed yours, the peace of God which passeth all understanding. But that peace is given you, not that you may be onlookers or neutrals and loves battle, but that you may be good soldiers of Jesus Christ.
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The intellectual heavyweights of the Christian faith are not the only ones called to apologetics.
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The pastors are not the only ones called to proclaim the gospel. All of us are called to proclaim the gospel. And we are locked in a battle.
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Machen learned this. There was an urgency to the gospel, an urgency to our call to proclaim
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God as Redeemer and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Now there's a wrong way to do it, and there's a right way to do it, but we're all called to do it.
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So, I would encourage you to think of yourself as an apologist of both common grace and that through your work and through your life and through your neighborliness and through your citizenship and all those things, you are pointing people to God the
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Creator. And then also recognize that through your life and your deeds and your work and your words and your testimony, that you are pointing people to Christ as the
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Redeemer. That's what we're all called to do. And we're all jars of clay, so don't worry about that.
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And if you heard the sermon this morning, or you'll hear it later, there's a key that makes all of this possible.
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But we'll talk about that in the sermon. So, there we have it. Quick look at Machen and a little thing that I've learned from looking at him and hopefully something that could be meaningful to you too.
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Let me just say one more thing and I'll see if you have a question. I wanted to give this quote and I forgot to give it to you. Out in the dressing station when the shells were falling close around,
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I somehow gained the conviction that I was in God's care and He would not try me beyond my strength, that courage would keep pace with danger, or rather, that danger, for I confess it turned out rather that way, would keep within the limits of my courage.
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In short, I understand the eighth chapter of Romans better. It's not a situation any of us would choose to put ourselves in, shells going off around us.
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And there are situations maybe that you have in your life that you wouldn't choose to put yourself in, shells literally going off around you.
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But it is in those shells that we realize of the surpassing greatness and love of God for us.
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So not only did Machen learn something about how to proclaim the Gospel to others in the war, he also learned something about what the
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Gospel means to him in his life through the war. And from that, once we learn those lessons, then we naturally give that off, we naturally give that aroma off of the beauty of the
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Gospel and what Christian hope is ultimately all about. All right.
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Hey, I timed that pretty well. We have two minutes for questions. The question was, in being in a postmodern era,
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Christianity being marginalized, is there something wrong with the preaching or is it reflective of the time that we're in? And I think it goes back to what
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Machen was talking about. If you look at Machen, he was in the context of modernity, right? And so what he sees is the church saying, oh, okay, well, let's talk about that, right?
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And there is a sense in which the church does that all the time, wrongly, but it's always doing that.
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In every age, it finds itself. And some of it, I want to say, is pure motives, really driven by reaching people.
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And they'll even quote Paul, I've become all things to all people, so I'm a postmodern to postmoderns, right?
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But I think it gets carried away with itself and it ends up accommodating. And so there's nothing then distinctive, there's nothing prophetic about the gospel.
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So I think the answer to that is yes. But the other answer to that is no, because it is also the culture piece.
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And so what we find is that in every age, there is a challenge to the gospel, to God, the veracity of his word, and that's what's happening in a postmodern culture.
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So what we need to do is be sensitive to the culture. And I would even say this, some of our methods don't work in postmodernism.
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Some of the methods that we were trained in in the 60s, 70s, 80s, evangelism, don't work.
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And I think we just have to acknowledge the culture that we live in. But at the same time, there's a line there that we cross where we overly accommodate and the gospel has lost its prophetic message.
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And so I think in a post -Christian culture, we are best served by being distinct about what the gospel is and distinct about who
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God is and distinct about humanity is. But certainly, some of the marginalization is due to the fact that there's this accommodating wing that's always been there in Christianity.
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And I don't want to give the impression, too, that postmodernism is sort of this specter that we can't fight because every age of the church has its unique challenges and opportunities.
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Every age. First century church had it. Reformation had it. Machen had it. We have it.
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And so we have to look for where's common ground and where is the gospel distinct and clearly different and speak that because some of postmodernism is good.
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Some of it challenges some of the tenets of modernity and the belief that we are essentially rational beings.
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That's not a biblical idea. We're far more than rational beings. Biblical notion.
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Or the idea that all of the life solutions are in unleashed human rationality powers.
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That's modernity. Or the belief in institutions. So to see postmodernism's critique of some of that stuff is a good thing,
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I think. To recognize the subjective element in knowledge. That's a good thing as opposed to a naivete of modernity.
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So there is common ground there, but there's also the truth question is a big one in postmodernity and that's where we have to draw the line.
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And then the exclusivity of Jesus is going to become the bigger and bigger one.
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Love is the center.
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Oh, look at the time.
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I think one of the things is we have to be careful how we use the term culture.
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So there is the creation that is God's. And so I think Isaac Watts is right.
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This is my father's world. So there is sort of the creation that we have to understand. But then there is this term that John uses of worldliness that I think is what you mean by the culture piece.
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So in that case, yes, because it is in opposition to God's view of the world. But I think we have to be careful that we don't totally mesh those two together because they are,
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I think, distinct. And this is where I think Machen, as much as he saw the depravity, the sinister side of things, was able to say, you know, if you look, you still see beauty in the world and we need to latch on to that to say to people, how do you account for this?
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Well, this is God's goodness. You know, even Paul at Morse Hill, this is a very godless culture.
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And what does he say? In Him we live and move and have our being. There is a common goodness here to God that we can appeal to.
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God causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust. And in agrarian culture, that's a way of expressing God's goodness.
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So I think we have to distinguish between culture and worldliness and see the worldliness as what we need to raise our prophetic voice against and clear our prophetic throats against.
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But at the same time recognizing this is my Father's world and we can see beauty in it and cultivate it.
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And that's why you can be scientists and software engineers and musicians and artists and carpenters and do that for the glory of God, right, as an apologist.