What Would J. Gresham Machen Do? (part 1)

Presbyterians don't know how to clap. We know how to sing without anyone leading the music. We can sing with the organ leading the music, but we don't know how to clap. We can recite things publicly together very well, but we just haven't mastered that clap thing yet.

I was with your pastor's brother about two years ago in Omaha, and after the service, we'll all meet down here and I'll give you some good stories about his childhood. These King Kong dreams? No, that's not, we've got much better stories we can tell than that.

We'll wait till he leaves and just be among friends. I have a text I want to read tonight. We're not going to be expositing this text by any stretch. I think we'll be coming back to it again and again.

Machen, the Gospel, and the Need for a Biblical Frame

But Machen would be very disappointed in us if we spent the whole night just talking about him without framing our thoughts around a biblical text and without reminding us that we're not really here to talk about Machen.

We're here to talk about what Machen talked about, which is about the gospel and about Christ. The text is 1 Corinthians chapter 15. Now, I understand you are going through a sermon series right now on 1 Corinthians, but you're at chapter 10, so it'll be about five more years until you get to chapter 15.

1 Corinthians chapter 15, these are very familiar verses with us, but these are verses that factored significantly in Machen's life because they factored significantly in the times in which Machen was laboring, if not contending, for the faith.

So here we read at 1 Corinthians chapter 15. And by the way, I'm reading from the English Standard Version, which I've taken to call these days the English Superior Version, and it warmed my heart that not only am I in Massachusetts, but that you all use the ESV.

This is beautiful. Verse 1. Now, I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preach to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preach to you, unless you believed in vain.

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

Then He appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared also to me.

For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, that it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me, whether then it was I or they.

So we preach, and so you believed. That text factored significantly for Machen, because it summarizes what is at the essence of Christianity. And Machen was working at a time when the church, his church, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, was all but ready to hand over its birthright, and to drift away from what is to be at its center and at its core.

Machen's Final Journey to North Dakota

To start with Machen, I want to start you with December of 1936. Machen had just finished a very busy term at Westminster Theological Seminary. He was its de facto president, although he didn't appoint himself as president.

Westminster, curiously enough, functioned as a seminary for decades without a president. The faculty ran the seminary. And when they sought accreditation, the Accreditation Society said, we never heard of a seminary without a president.

You have to have a president. But Machen was the de facto president in those early years. He had just started the seminary in 1930. You know what hit in 1930, don't you? The Great Depression. Why would you be starting an educational institution in the throes of the Great Depression?

So here he was come 1936. He was very tired. He had been laboring for years. He had spent all this time grading students' papers, which is a challenge. And he was very tired. He was, in fact, exhausted.

He had just finished a series of radio addresses, sermons for WIP in Philadelphia. They would be aired from January 1 and then on into the new year. So he was busy in the studio taping all of these sermons to go out.

And he boarded a train. Now, I didn't drive here from Lancaster. I flew here. But Machen never liked planes. In fact, he once said, all I can say is that I wouldn't lower myself by going up in one of those noisy, stupid things.

He took the train. And when he went to Europe, he went by boat. But he took the train out to North Dakota. Now, it was winter. The train took him into Chicago. And, I don't know, I'd like to think that he was reminiscing back when he was a young man, 21, going on 22.

He had spent the summer at the University of Chicago. He had just graduated from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He had won the Classics Prize, so he had established himself as a scholar. His father and his grandfather were lawyers.

In fact, his paternal grandfather was the chief clerk of the United States Senate. So he comes from a family of law. And so, graduating with a significant degree from Johns Hopkins, he thinks maybe international law and banking is where he's going to go.

So he goes off to the University of Chicago to study international law. But he was only there for a summer, decided it wasn't for him, and went back. So here he is in 1936. Years later, now he's 55 years old.

And I often think, what was he thinking about as he pulled into Chicago? Was he thinking, what if he had gone that route of law or banking or what he was thinking of, how his life would have turned out so differently?

But he changed trains there in Chicago and then headed on to North Dakota. Now, it was always harsh in North Dakota, the winters. But this was extremely harsh. It was a series of sub-freezing temperatures.

He was exhausted, and he contracted pneumonia. And on January 1, 1937, in a hospital in North Dakota, Machen died. Now, what I want to do with you in our first session is give you 10 facts about Machen's life.

Now, that sounds really boring, but historians, we like facts and dates. So I'm going to give you facts and dates. And here's the first fact. Machen died in North Dakota. Now, that should raise a question.

What was he doing in North Dakota? In fact, why would anyone be in North Dakota? He was in North Dakota because that summer, he had significantly involved, was the leader of a group that formed an entirely new denomination.

That new denomination would come to be called the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And in North Dakota, there was a congregation that had decided to leave the Presbyterian Church in the USA, the church of which Machen had been a member, and the church which had defrocked him, kicked him out, defrocked him of his ministerial credentials.

And so Machen was founding a new church. And this church initially joined in with Machen's new church. But then there was a group that thought they made a mistake. And the whole thing was about to fall apart.

And Machen was so concerned about his fledgling denomination that in the midst of his exhaustion, when his colleagues at Westminster Seminary begged him not to get on that train and go out to North Dakota, but instead to just take two weeks of rest, he gets on a train and he goes to North Dakota.

And when he's there and he's exhausted, he preaches, he spends as much time as he can with the leadership, with the congregation of that church, and he convinces them to stay in his new denomination, that it's worth it.

And he contracts pneumonia, and he dies. Machen dies in North Dakota because Machen is fundamentally a churchman. Machen is fundamentally concerned about the church, his church, which, yes, is the Presbyterian church, that it was selling its very soul by adopting modernity and modernity's sensibilities.

So that's why he died in North Dakota. He was exhausted because he had spent literally the last two decades of his life in wranglings over theological and ecclesiastical debates. It all started in 19, well, we could say 1922, I guess.

It was a sermon preached by Harry Emerson Fosdick, who at the time was the most popular preacher in America. His radio show had slightly few more listeners than no co-listeners. And it was heard around the country.

And when Fosdick would preach a sermon on Sunday morning, it would be on the front page of the New York Times on Monday morning. Fosdick was hailed as America's pastor. Fosdick preached a sermon in 1922 called, Child, the Fundamentalists Win.

And in that sermon, he went after what had been called the five fundamentals. And he basically set up the idea that you can be a Christian without adhering to the five fundamentals. There's the view of the inerrancy of scripture.

And there's a view of the authority of scripture and a high view of scripture. But there's another way to think about scripture. And you can be a Christian and hold that view. And yes, there's the biblical teaching on the virgin birth.

But there's another way to think about the birth of Christ. Look through history. Great leaders are spoken of as having spectacular births. And so the biblical authors framed it as a virgin birth. But we can't take it literally.

We can't take that seriously. And so we can see that Jesus' birth was special. And we can still be Christian. And yes, the Bible talks about miracles. But these were ancient people. These were mythological people.

They didn't understand things. They didn't understand the phenomenon of existence. And so they had to rely on miracle to explain things for them. But we have something now in the modern world. We have science.

And so we can frame our understanding of how God interacts with us differently. So you can be a Christian and not believe in miracles. And yes, the Bible talks about Jesus coming again and his second coming.

But, you know, the kingdom is really about human flourishing. And all this talk about Jesus coming again and bringing in the new heavens and the new earth is really just us realizing that we need to overcome our social problems.

And once we've overcome those social problems, we will bring the kingdom to earth. And that's what it means when we anticipate the second coming of Christ. And you can believe all these things and still be a Christian.

Don't let the fundamentalists win because they're narrow and mean and intolerant and restrictive so they can't win. And if they win, Christianity loses. That sermon sets Machen on a 10-year fight. He publishes the book in 1923, Christianity and Liberalism, this book.

I'll read from it. I'll give you some quotes from it later. Christian Liberalism. Then he publishes a sequel, What is Faith? He goes after Fosdick. Here's Fosdick. Sorry, he's a Baptist, but he's preaching in a Presbyterian pulpit.

And Machen goes after him. He shouldn't be in a Presbyterian pulpit. It had more to do with the fact that he didn't think Jesus was God and scripture was inerrant than him being a Baptist, by the way.

So Machen spent the 20s in battles. And then he spent the 30s in battles. In 1933, he formed a new mission board called the Independent Board for Foreign Mission. There was a famous missionary. She was actually a child of a missionary.

She grew up in China, and she was a novelist, and she won the Pulitzer, and she won the Nobel Prize, and her name was Pearl Buck. And she was a Presbyterian minister. But she published something widely distributed among the Presbyterian church in which she said missions must change.

Missions must not be about the gospel. Missions must not be about beliefs and telling people that their belief systems are wrong and that the Bible presents the only truth. Missions should be about improving the social conditions of humanity everywhere.

And so her letters and her writings contributed to a denominational task force put out entitled Rethinking Missions. And the Rethinking Missions encouraged the church to forget about its task of the Great Commission and instead to become a humanitarian organization.

And Machen said, if this is what my denominations mission board is going to be, I cannot in good conscience send students out, send would-be missionaries out, and give my money to an organization that's going to have that as its direction.

So he forms a new mission board, and for that he gets put on trial, heresy trial, as a minister in his congregation. And the trial lasts two years, and then he is defrocked. And then he forms his new church.

So from 1922 to 1936, you can begin to understand why Machen might be on the brink of exhaustion. He has been literally embroiled in controversy for the last 15, 16, 17 years of his life. So our first fact about Machen is that he died in North Dakota.

And there actually is some, believe it or not, significance to that fact. The second fact about Machen, and now we'll back up a little bit, is he was born in Baltimore. He was born in Baltimore. Now, this introduces us to the home life of Machen.

Machen's father was a lawyer. His grandfather was a lawyer. Machen's mother comes from Georgia. A lot of wealth, big wealth. In fact, Machen used a lot of that wealth to subsidize Westminster Seminary and to subsidize his new mission board.

And he also never really needed to take a salary from Princeton, so he drew a very small salary from them. But what he really learned in that home was three things. The Westminster Shorter Catechism, Pilgrim's Progress, and the Bible.

Those were the three things Machen learned most in his home. His dad was also a scholar. His dad was a book collector. Had a library of rare books and even some manuscripts. And his father would relax in the evening by reading the ancient poets in the original Latin and Greek.

And sometimes the modern poets in German and French. Isn't that what you folks do in your home? This is what everybody does in their home, right? They sit around and read Horace in the original. Machen went to Johns Hopkins.

That's what you did if you lived in Baltimore. You went to Johns Hopkins. And there he studied classics. And as I already said, he distinguished himself as a young student. But he didn't know what he wanted to do with his life.

But the second fact is he was born in Baltimore. The third fact about Machen is that he served in World War I in the YMCA. Now, I'm just going to give you a little teaser here. Because we're going to come back to this in our Sunday school together on Sunday.

We're going to have a little bit more Machen in Sunday school. But my favorite story about him in World War I was that he would serve hot chocolate to the soldiers coming off the front in France. And in those days, you didn't get hot chocolate in a little packet that you mixed in a cup in a microwave.

You would get blocks of chocolate. And you had a kettle. And you had wood. And you had water. Those were your ingredients. Oh, and a big paddle. I forgot the big paddle. And so you would start the fire.

You'd put the kettle on the fire. You'd put the water in the kettle. You'd boil the water. You'd put the chocolate in. And it would melt as you moved it around with the paddle. So I just picture Machen on the front, chocolate drips all over his uniform, handing out cups of coffee to soldiers as they were coming off the front in World War I.

World War I, though, had a significant impact on Machen. I'll just give you this as a little insight into his character. In between serving in World War I and Hopkins, he did go to Princeton Seminary.

But he only went to Princeton Seminary under the condition that he would not be ordained. He would just go there to study. And when he was there studying, again, he distinguished himself as a student, won the prize of the senior paper, which awarded him a full fellowship to do doctoral work in Germany.

And Machen didn't want to take it. He didn't want to take it because the hitch was that the expectation was he'd come back and teach for a couple years at Princeton. And Machen wasn't sure he wanted to do that.

But then he decided to go to Germany anyway. He came back as an assistant professor at Princeton in 1915, as an assistant professor. But when war breaks out in 1917, he wants to go and serve. Prior to that point, I don't think he knows what he wants to do with his life.

Yes, he's teaching New Testament. He's at Princeton. He doesn't want to get ordained. And he's very reluctant. And as soon as war breaks out, he leaves and wants to go serve in the war somehow. Not as a military man, but in some ancillary way.

But when he comes back from World War I, it's all bets are off. He is as serious and committed as can be. Serving in World War I had a significant impact on Machen. We'll look at it in more depth in Sunday School.

But that's the third fact. He served in World War I in the YMCA. Fourth fact, I already touched on. He studied at and taught at Princeton. Now, when Machen went to Princeton, his favorite thing to do in the afternoons was skip Hebrew class and go watch Princeton football.

Princeton is not known for its football, so the games were very disappointing. He at one time writes a letter home to his parents saying, If only it were 15 degrees cooler outside, I'd get a lot more done.

Machen, in other words, was not all that serious of a student. I love his comment about cool temperatures and not being a serious student. That's why I think all the great minds come out of New England.

You don't hear about great theologians coming out of Florida. Edwards, Massachusetts, it's cold. What else is he going to do? He's going to study. If only we could lower that temperature 15 degrees, how much more we would get done.

While he was at Princeton, he did teach, taught New Testament. Then he went to the war, came back, taught New Testament again. At the end of the 19-teens, his mentor, Benjamin Warfield, was fading. He was dying.

Just before Warfield died, Machen had a conversation with him. They were talking about how the winds were changing in the church they were serving, the Presbyterian church. And how the modernists and liberals were making their way, not just into the Presbyterian church, but into the Baptist church and into the Lutheran church and into American culture at large.

This was a significant season of theological change, the 1900s and 1910s and 1920s. Machen, looking at it, was asking his beloved mentor, Do you think that the church will split? Warfield said to him, You can't split dead wood.

Meaning, as far as Warfield was concerned, the writing was already on the wall. He was setting Machen up to recognize that Machen would be the outsider. And the irony of this is that it was a denomination that was committed to two things, the word of God and the Westminster standards.

And the denomination had come to the conclusion that we shouldn't take either one of those two things seriously. So what do you do? How sad is it that you have to leave because of your commitment to who you are?

You have to leave, not them leave. You have to leave. So Warfield, I think, was setting him up. Machen was just a young man in 1919. Warfield was about to die. And so when he says that to him, he sees where this is going.

And he's preparing Machen for what Machen may very well have to do. There was a new president installed at Princeton. And the former president, Patton, well, here's a great quote. This is one of my favorite quotes from Francis Patton.

In 1912, Princeton had turned 100 years old. This seminary was founded in 1812. Turned 100 years old and Francis Patton delivered a address and he said, In the centuries to come, should the theological paleontologist dig it up and should he be inclined to study it, he will be constrained to say that at least the men of Princeton belonged to the order of vertebrates.

What is he saying? Princeton had theological background. The president who replaced Patton, though, was a moderate. He wasn't a liberal. But if you study the story, you find that it really wasn't the liberals who undid the denomination.

It was the moderates, the ones who said we should tolerate everybody within the church. They were in the majority. The liberals were in the minority. And the theological conservatives, we call them the fundamentalists, were also in the minority in the denominations.

And the moderates won the day. Stevenson, J. Ross Stevenson, was a moderate. And he had essentially harangued Machen from the time he became president. When Machen published his book in 1925, Stevenson sent him a nice letter.

Congratulations on your book being published. It's what presidents do when they're faculty. But then he said, Come and see me. And in person, he told him, Don't write anything like that ever again. That's not who we are.

That's not the message that we want to send. Now, I was just talking with your pastor in his study. And the remarkable thing about this book to me is not just that he's dead on, not just that he gets it right down the center, but that he's winsome in the book.

He's incredibly winsome in the book. The issue was not Machen's demeanor. The issue was Machen's stand for truth. And so come 1929, Machen recognizes that he's no longer welcome in his seminary. So he packs up his belongings, crosses the Delaware River into Philadelphia, and starts a new seminary, Westminster Theological Seminary.

And he says, We will carry on the noble tradition of Princeton, which is to say there will be theological backbone at Westminster. So his fifth fact is he founded Westminster Theological Seminary. Now, one of his first students, in fact, a number of the Princeton students, followed Machen to Westminster and then graduated from Westminster.

And one of them is a rather famous pastor here in the state of Massachusetts, Ockingay, Harold John Ockingay, from Park Street Church in Boston. He was one of Machen's students at Princeton, followed him to Westminster.

And when he was installed at Point Breeze Church in Pittsburgh, before he took the church in Boston, and I think Ockingay ended up going in a trajectory that was not quite the trajectory Machen would have hoped him to go.

But this was back in the 1930s. He asked Machen to come and preach his installation service. And this is what Machen said to him. I am just going to tell you for your comfort to stay forever in the presence of the angels of God to study the great mystery of this holy book.

The whole world is your province as a preacher of the gospel of Christ. Be interested in the teachings of science, in literature, in philosophy, in art. Do not be content with a superficial study of this holy book above all.

Instead, be a scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of God, who brings forth out of his treasures things new and old. Do not be content merely with a chance acquaintance with the Bible, but seek to study it in the light of the grand exegetical tradition of the Christian church.

Keep your contact with the grand central tradition of the church of Jesus Christ. And as you study this book, new glories will be revealed, and you will see that against it, all this world has to offer, with all its pleasures and all its turmoil and all of its noise, is as nothing.

And despite the threatening that we have received in these days against the gospel of Jesus Christ, now remember, he was just kicked out of his denomination. So when he talks about threatenings, he's for real.

The threatening that we have received in these days against the gospel of Jesus Christ, you will know that nothing, no hostility of the world, no adverse decisions of souls and bodies of the visible church, no defections, no hostility can ever separate you from the great heritage that God has given you and your blessed congregation in this book.

I think Machen's vision for his student Ockengee well summarizes his vision for all of his students and the reason he founded Westminster Theological Seminary. He founded Westminster to promote what he called specialists in the Bible, because that's what the church desperately needed at a time where it was drifting away, further and further away from scripture.

So he founded Westminster. Fact number six. I mentioned this earlier, but he founded a mission board. Now I find this so significant. Rarely do you find somebody who writes a Greek grammar, a theological classic, New Testament scholarly works, and founds a mission.

It shows what Machen's heartbeat really was. And it also shows what the real effect of liberalism was. Machen founded the mission board because his denomination had abdicated its role in following the Great Commission.

Machen founded a mission board because at the end of the day, all of his efforts were pointed to one thing, as the prophet says, that the knowledge of the glory of God may cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

That's why he founded a mission board. Where there is a liberal church, there is no preaching. And where there is no preaching, there is no mission. Foreign, domestic, there is no mission. And without mission, what is the church doing?

It's a social club. It's a social club. Now, I was repentant of coming to Massachusetts and not talking about Jonathan Edwards. I've done a few books on Jonathan Edwards, and I feel like he's upset that here I am in his home state.

I'm talking about a guy from Baltimore in Philadelphia. At least Machen vacationed in New England. I'll talk about that in a little bit. Seal Harbor, Maine, I don't know if that counts for you folks. It's still New England.

But I can't remember why I was telling you about Edwards. But one of the reasons why I wanted to mention Edwards to you was that as you look at the life of Edwards, you know that he was kicked out of his church, Northampton, voted out of his church.

And when he was voted out of his church, he had all kinds of options. There were people in Northampton who invited him to stay right there and start a church. He had Scottish friends who invited him to go back to Scotland and start a church there in Scotland, pastor a church in Scotland.

He had an invitation to go to Boston to preach. Now, he loved Boston because they had all the cheese and the chocolate and the paper. So that's why he wanted to go to Boston. He had to wait for it to come on carriage out to Northampton.

But what does he do? He goes west to the beautiful Berkshire Mountains. It's a wonderful country. Who doesn't like to go traveling through the Berkshires? Why not live there? You know why he went there?

To be a missionary to the Stockbridge Indians, the 150 or so Mohicans, Mohawks, and what were called Brothertons that lived in rudely constructed log cabins and teepees on what is now a golf course. But that beautiful plain on the Housatonic River surrounded by the Berkshire Mountains, he went as a missionary.

And when you look at what Edward's life was about, it was about that verse, that the knowledge of the glory of God would cover the earth as the waters cover the seas. And so Machen founding a mission board makes perfect sense.

We'll look at this in our second session a little bit more. Fact number seven, he founded a denomination and he preached a lot. One of my favorite things to do, I did a book on Machen. I did a lot of research in the Machen archives at Westminster.

And I loved to read through his sermon manuscripts. And I noticed that he'd have these sermon manuscripts. He'd handwrite them and he'd have these sermon manuscripts. And in the margin of the sermon manuscripts, there would be dates and initials running down the column.

You know what that was? That was re-preaching the sermon. See, that's the luxury that itinerant pastors have. They get to come up with five or six really good sermons. And then they just preach them again and again and again and again and again.

And that's what Machen was doing. See, you're a poor pastor. He's got to come up with 52 of these things every week. I'll tell you one more Edward story and we'll get back to Machen. Whitefield came to Edward's church in Northampton on a couple of occasions.

And on one occasion he went there. And after he preached, Jonathan and Sarah were having a conversation in their home. And Sarah said to Jonathan, why don't you preach like that? And after that, Edward stopped writing out his sermon.

He would write out an outline and preach the outline. Prior to Whitefield, he wrote out the sermon and preached the sermon. Now he didn't read it. He had it memorized. That's how his mind functioned. There's no way he could read it.

You look at the manuscript, there's no way he could read it. But he'd write it out. And in the writing out of it, he had it memorized. He was a genius. And then he would preach it. But after Whitefield, he would write an outline, preach the sermon, Monday morning go into his study, write what he preached.

But see, this is what happened. Mike, I'm sorry. I almost called you Pat. That's terrible. Pastor Mike invites folks here to his church and his wife says to him, why don't you preach like that? But see, you've got to come up with a sermon every week.

So, you know, not everyone's going to be a home run. You've got to give them some breaks. But Machen preached a lot. And one of my favorite facts about him as a churchman is that there was three summers in a row where Machen visited a small church in New Jersey on pretty much every Sunday that he could to teach a Sunday school class of kids.

That is a remarkable fact to me. It really shows that at the end of the day, Machen was concerned about the church, that his heartbeat was the church. Now, what's interesting about this is here's a guy who didn't want to be ordained.

Here's a guy who said, okay, I'll go to Princeton Seminary when he realizes that he can go and that he doesn't have to necessarily be ordained. And then he spends his entire adult life pouring his life into the church.

So Machen founded a denomination and he preached a lot, which is to say he was a churchman. Fact number eight, he wrote The Virgin Birth of Christ. Now, rarely does a piece of scholarship last more than five or ten years.

It's just the way things work. Those of you that study any field, you know that the copyright date makes all the difference. And so when you're doing a piece of work in a scholarly context, you have to have the most current sources.

Do you know that The Virgin Birth, the book by Machen from 1930, is still recognized as a credible and significant contribution to New Testament scholarship on the question of the virgin birth of Christ?

It's not consulted merely as an historical text. It's consulted as a scholarly text making a contribution to the study. That's virtually unheard of, of scholarly books having a shelf life that lasts now into 80 years plus.

Which is to say Machen was a scholar at a time when the church did not value scholarship. Let me set the stage for you. It's modernism. And we'll look at this next in our time together. Let me set the stage for you now.

It's modernism. And modernism raises a question. Do we need God? I mean, look down the road. We just built the Empire State Building. Do we need God? We can hop on an elevator and be lifted into the heavens themselves.

And we have a new thing that we've discovered. Vaccinations. We used to think that diseases were because the gods or God was happy with us or not happy with us. But now we know. It's the germ theory of disease.

And we have vaccinations. And we used to think that it rained or it didn't rain based on whether God was happy with us or not happy with us or the gods. And maybe if we did a little dance we could get the gods to see it our way and give us the weather that we want.

But now we know. Because we have meteorology. We understand how gulf streams work and barometric pressures rising and falling. That's why it rains. Do we need God? And much of modernist culture shouted back a resounding no.

We don't. And we throw some of the early 20th century psychologists into the mix and it gets even worse. So we throw William James into the mix. Another son of Massachusetts. And his varieties of religious experience.

His idea that religion is great. Not because it's true. Because it's a wonderful crutch in your life. And we could throw Freud into the mix. And now we understand the modernist question. Do we need God?

The modernist said no. We can live life just as well, better, without him. And then comes the liberal. And the liberal doesn't know what to do. Because the liberal had always assumed that Americans would always want God.

And the liberal had always assumed that everybody would always want the church. They could compete with each other. But they couldn't compete with apathy. And so you know what the liberal church did? They just simply accommodated to culture.

To keep culture interested in the church. And Harry Emerson Fosdick was a magician at it. You know who his pupil was? If you don't know the name Fosdick or his work, his pupil was Norman Vincent Peale.

Fosdick out-Pealed Peale. But what was Norman Vincent Peale all about? Experience. The experience of religion can enhance your life. Don't get hung up on the details. Don't worry about if it's true. What can it do for you?

You know what Machen does? He drops a nice little piece of scholarship into that. The virgin birth of Christ. We'll see it next together as we look at Christian liberalism. But Machen says the church must be about the sturdy.

That's the word he uses. The sturdy defense of the faith. Not just talking about experience. I love the hymn we sang. Thank you for singing that hymn. That was a delightful hymn. That's one of my favorite hymns.

You know what hymn I'm not a big fan of? You ask me how I know he lives. He lives within my heart. I'm not sure what that means. Little Jesus running around in there. You know those 1910s hymns that have that sort of waltz?

I always feel like I'm in a roller skating rink. The organ. Machen didn't say, oh, you ask me how I know he lives. Hey, he lives within my heart. He wrote the virgin birth of Christ. With footnotes. That scholarship took seriously.