Great Christian Biographies with John Piper: J. Gresham Machen 2

Calvinism as Christianity Come to Full Flower

1909, on the 400th anniversary of John Calvin's birth, Warfield gave a great address to the faculty and others gathered to celebrate that event on Calvinism. And it struck to the very depths of Machen's mind and heart what Warfield said on that day.

What he said in essence was that Calvinism is not a species of Christian theism alongside others. It is Christianity come to full flower. Quote,. Calvinism is not a specific variety of theistic thought, or religious experience, or evangelical faith, but just the perfect manifestation of these things.

The difference between it and other forms of theism, religion, evangelicalism, is the difference not of kind, but of degree. It does not take its position then beside other types of things. It takes its place over all else and claims to be these things as embodying what they claim to be.

Now, this is a weighty, weighty distinction. Alongside of, as a species, alongside, or the full-blown flower of what other things are trying to become. Now, Machen believed this. And this governed the way Machen thought about Christianity and how it interacted with everything else out there.

Lutheranism is its sister type of Protestantism. Arminianism is its rebellious daughter. Calvinism's grasp of the supremacy of God in all of life enabled Machen to see that other forms of evangelicalism were all stages of grasping God, which were yet in process of coming to the full and pure appreciation of the total God-centeredness of Calvinism.

Machen’s Defense of Christianity Against Modernism

Now, what that meant for Machen was that his mission over against modernism was not to defend a species called fundamentalism, but to defend Christianity. When he defended the Calvinistic supernaturalism of his day, he did not see himself as in any corner of Christianity.

It was Christianity. That was what drove him. So his main problem with the term fundamentalist was this, quote, It seems to suggest that we are adherents of some strange new sect, whereas in point of fact we are conscious simply of maintaining the historic Christian faith and of moving in the great central current of Christian life.

That's what set him off most deeply from fundamentalism. He was invited to be the president of Bryan Memorial University, which now I think is just Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee. And he wrote to turn it down.

Now, that move from Princeton to Bryan would have been to a presidency. It no doubt would have been a different school than it is now had he done that. But it would have taken him out of the PCUSA. It would have put him in a more ecumenical, interdenominational, premillennial atmosphere.

And he couldn't do it. And here's why. He wrote the letter of refusal like this. Thoroughly consistent Christianity, to my mind, is found only in the reformed or Calvinist faith. And consistent Christianity, I think, is the Christianity easiest to defend.

Hence, I never call myself a fundamentalist. What I prefer to call myself is not a fundamentalist but a Calvinist. That is, an adherent of the reformed faith. As such, I regard myself as standing in the great central current of the church's life, the current that flows down from the word of God through Augustine and Calvin and which has found noteworthy expression in America in the great tradition represented by Charles Hodge and Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield and the other representatives of the Princeton school.

So Machen moved in a different conceptual world than most fundamentalists did of his day. When he took on modernism, he took it on as a challenge to reformed Christianity. And so his most important book, which has just come back into print and gone out of print from Erdmann's.

This is what you should all have in your library. This is as relevant today as it was 70 years ago in 1923 when it was written. The title, Liberalism and Christianity, says almost all the story because he was not titling the book Liberalism and Fundamentalism.

The challenge of liberalism was not a challenge to fundamentalism. It was a challenge to Christianity. It was a big, all encompassing challenge. And so he he wrote the blurb for the book like this liberalism on the one hand and the religion of the historic church on the other are not two varieties of the same religion, but two distinct religions proceeding from altogether separate roots.

He had one regret, and that is that he had not titled the book Christianity and modernism because he came to feel that in calling it liberalism, he gave it too much credit because the word liberalism has a noble history.

And what's unique about modernism is that it is modern, which is no compliment nor indictment in itself. What was it? What was liberalism slash modernism? The words are used interchangeably in Machen.

I'll use them interchangeably here. Here again, he moved not nearly so quickly as the fundamentalist into showing specific fundamental doctrines that modernists were moving away from. He didn't do it that way.

He didn't jump quickly on the virgin birth and say, this is what we must talk about or the resurrection or the infallibility of Scripture. His approach was far deeper and far broader as he engaged modernism in in his day.

Modern Culture, Modernity, and the Spirit of the Age

What he did was engage in first a thorough analysis of the modern culture and the spirit of the age. And he tries to think through the relationship between modernism and what Os Guinness has been calling modernity.

Modern culture is his word for it. They're not the same. Modernism is the theological construct and atmosphere theologically that is growing out of modernity. And Machen's first efforts are to get at what this thing is and then deal with it on its own terms.

Let me read a quote about modern culture. He says, modern culture is a tremendous force. Modern inventions and the industrialism that has been built upon them have given us in many respects a new world to live in.

He's writing 1920, 23. And these material conditions have been produced by mighty changes in the human mind. The industrial world of today has been produced not by blind forces of nature, but by conscious activity of the human spirit.

It has been produced by the achievements of science. Many observes the problem for the church is that modernity has on the one hand bred forces that are inimical and hostile to Christian faith and created a world that the church loves to embrace and does embrace and must embrace.

Quote, this is a skewering quote. This could be written yesterday if you just replaced railroad, telegraph and printing press with computers, jets and fax machines. We cannot, without inconsistency, employ the printing press, the railroad, the telegraph, computers, jets, fax machines.

We cannot employ them in the propagation of our gospel and at the same time denounce as evil those activities of the human mind that produced these things. That that is the fundamental problem that I think Oz has been wrestling with, the problem of modernity.

The Three Hostile Impulses of Modernity

Now, what he says is that this calls for a critical assessment of modernity or contemporary culture. The negative impulses that are hostile to Christianity, he said, were three. One, suspicion of the past.

And that's natural. If you look around your life and you can remember the time when there were no cars, no refrigeration, no electric light, no telegraph, you can remember those days you lived. Why, you would soon become pretty persuaded that the past doesn't have very much to offer.

I mean, everything is in the future. It is a totally new world. It had been the same for six thousand years. And in the last 50, it's a new world. So who needs the past? I mean, they rode chariots for six thousand years.

Now we've got cars. There's nothing it has to offer so that you can feel some of the force of that thinking. Secondly, skepticism about truth and the replacement of the category of true with useful. And you can feel some of that when you do your experiments in order to find out how to make light, how to make refrigeration, how to make words go over wires, who gives a hoot about truth if it works?

I mean, if you can facts, if you can work computers, I mean, does it work? And so you can feel some of the the force, why true that category just kind of goes down and useful and efficient comes up. And the third is the denial of the supernatural.

Is there any such thing? It hasn't been obvious in any of our recent discoveries and we're we are we are fixing the diseases. You need prayer anymore. You just, as Dr. Fuller says, you get the rats out of the manholes, poison the rats, find new chemical that'll kill the rats and that'll take care of your black play.

Machen credits modernism. Now, that's the theological response to modernity. Machen credits modernism with really trying to come to terms with these challenges. Quote, What is the relationship between Christianity and modern culture?

May Christianity be maintained in a scientific age? It is this problem which modern liberalism, modernism attempts to solve. And in trying to solve it, liberalism or modernism has joined modernity in one, minimizing the significance of the past.

And two, accepting the utilitarian view of truth and three, surrendering supernaturalism. And all three compromises with the spirit of modernity together produce the modernist spirit in religion. It is a spirit.

It's not a set of doctrines per se or a set of denials. This is why Machen. This is so important. It's important today. This is why Machen never tired not only of criticizing the doctrinal views of people in the PCUSA, but what he called indifferentism or latitudinarianism.

President Stevenson, who was the president of Princeton in those days, did not want. He affirmed, he said, the whole Westminster Confession, but he did not want to push the liberals out. Machen never tired of saying that there's a spirit here of modernism that creates an atmosphere in which shifts away from orthodoxy happen.

And it's the spirit that minimizes truth as true and elevates truth as useful. Let me just quote from one of the modernists of that day, John McCallum, about what he understood modernism to be. Just to show you that from the inside out, we're moving in the right direction with the definition.

The liberals have accepted the enlarged view of the universe, which has been established by modern astronomy, geology and biology. Instead of blindly denying scientific facts, as obscurantists have always done, they have adjusted themselves to them.

And in so doing, have increased their faith and urbanity and consequently extended their influence, particularly with the educated classes. Liberalism is an atmosphere rather than a series of formulas, end quote.

So when the preference for the new and the naturalistic bias and the skepticism about finding what is true, when those all come together, what you have in the seminary, in the church is an extraordinary opportunity for the abuse of religious language and the manipulation of historic confessions.

In essence, modernists don't throw out Christianity. They reinterpret the creeds of Christianity and give old words new meanings. And that's the way they stay. And Machen could see that. And that's what he kept criticizing with this doctrinal indifferentism that people, President Stevenson, wouldn't recognize what was happening.

People could still be using the words of the confession and put a totally different meaning. So the virgin birth was one theory of the incarnation and the bodily resurrection was a theory of the resurrection.

And so the old facts don't correspond anymore with permanent facts. They symbolize the virgin birth is a symbol and the bodily resurrection is a symbol of a general religious principle. And those symbols are sometimes useful.

And when they're useful in a generation that can handle the term virgin birth, you use them. And if they cease to be useful in a generation that can't, they are expendable. And the general religious truth remains, and that's defined in various ways.

But it's that principle of utilitarianism in the view of truth that he saw and was so distressed about in the Presbyterian church of his day. Hundreds, hundreds of clergy in his day would not deny the confession of faith of the Westminster confession.

But by virtue of a modernist spirit had come to give it up, even though they signed it. Now, one of the most jolting sentences in all the reading I've done was the next one that I want to read to you.

Here's the quote. It makes very little difference how much or how little of the creeds of the church the modernist preacher affirms. Or how much or how little of the biblical teaching from which the creeds have been derived, he affirms.

He might affirm every jot and tittle of the Westminster confession, for example. And yet be separated by a great gulf from the reformed faith. All is denied because all is affirmed, not as true, but as useful.

There's a whole philosophy of language that has been built up to justify that kind of staying within denominations. It makes it so hard to deal with colleges, seminaries, denominations. There's this gut sense when you're around certain people.

They don't believe this. There's nothing. There's nothing happening here. The language, some of it is there, but you can't. It's like mercury. You put your finger on it. It'll zip, zip, just all over the place.

The utilitarian view of history and language leads to evasive, vague language that enables the modernist to mislead people into thinking that they are still orthodox. Listen to this. This is another incredibly contemporary and relevant sentence from his book.

What is faith, which is out there, by the way? I recommend it for the introduction alone. What is faith is worth the price of the book. This temper of mind is hostile to precise definitions. Indeed, nothing makes a man more unpopular in the controversies of the present day than an insistence upon definition of terms.

Men discourse very eloquently today upon subjects as God, religion, Christianity, atonement, redemption, faith, but are greatly incensed when they are asked to tell in simple language what they mean by these terms.

Christianity, Truth, and the Witness of the Apostles

Close quote. Now, Machen's critique of this analysis of modernism, his critique of it flows from two directions. One is a critique from inside the culture, analyzing it and its goodness or not, its benefit, its truth.

And the other is from inside the text of the New Testament. So let me take those one at a time. Machen asked modern man. Are we better off with modernity? And he grants we're better off with material things.

But are we better off in the realm of the spirit? Here's a quote. The improvement appears in the physical conditions of life, but in the spiritual realm, there is a corresponding loss. The loss is clearest, perhaps, in the realm of art.

Despite the mighty revolution which has been produced in the external condition of life. The railroad, the telegraph, fax machine, computer and so on. I lost my place. Despite the mighty revolution which has been produced in the external condition of life, no great poet is now living to celebrate the change.

Humanity has suddenly become dumb. Gone, too, are the great painters, the great musicians, the great sculptors. The art that still subsists is largely imitative. And where it is not, it is usually bizarre.

He argues that drab utilitarianism, that's his phrase, drab utilitarianism, destroys the higher aspirations of the soul. And results in unparalleled impoverishment in human life. So you can see what he's doing.

He's working from the inside of contemporary culture to show on its own terms it's bankrupt. This is his first strategy. When you take away objective norm and truth, you take away the only means of measuring improvement or progress.

You can talk till you're blue in the face about progress. But ultimately, if there's no absolute, no norm, no objective truth, you have lost anything to move from toward. And all that's left, he says, is the changes of a meaningless kaleidoscope.

So in view of those things and other observations and effects of modernity and modernism, he asked the modern man. Is your rejection of the past and is your rejection of the category of truth, is your abandonment of supernaturalism as cheap and expendable as you think they are?

Quote, in view of the lamentable defects of modern life, a type of religion certainly should not be commended simply because it is modern or condemned simply because it is old. On the contrary, the condition of mankind is such that one may well ask what it is that made the men of the past generation so great and the men of the present generation so small.

And that's the way Machen seeks to understand and critique modernity and modernism from the inside. Questions like that, unfolding its own hollowness. And that set him apart from the fundamentalists. They didn't do it that way.

They didn't go that deep. They weren't that broad. Now, his other strategy was biblical from outside of modernism. He took their claim to be biblical. They never abandoned their claim. That's what was so maddening to the to him.

He took that claim to be biblical and he went back to Paul and Jesus and he noted some very simple things. He noted Acts 1 8. He said the church from the beginning has a charter to be witnesses. He said witnesses implies events beheld and experienced.

And the charter and meaning of Christianity is faithfulness to true events through true witness. And then he said not only have there been events, but they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching, which was the interpretation of those events.

And then he went to Paul's letters and he pointed out some very interesting things. He said Paul took truth and doctrine and specificity seriously. For example, he contrasted Philippians and Galatians.

And in Philippians, he noted that Paul in prison was incredibly tolerant towards the people who wanted to make his imprisoned miserable by preaching the gospel when he couldn't. And he said, I'm glad it's preached.

And in Galatians, when they wanted to preach, he cursed them with an anathema and said that if he or an angel from heaven said what they say, let them be damned. I said, well, is that the Paul of Philippians?

I mean, what happened to this tolerance? And Machen points out that the difference is a sentence. They got the gospel right, rotten attitudes, rotten attitudes, and they got it right. Evidently, the Judaizers in Galatia got one sentence wrong.

You can be completed by the works of the flesh. That's all. And he listed off the things they probably agreed on the Trinity. They probably agreed on the scriptures. They probably agreed on the atonement.

They probably agreed on one sentence wrong. And they are anathema. Now, that does not mean every sentence wrong makes a person anathema. In fact, in the chapter on doctrine in Christianity and liberalism, he lists off all the things he won't fight about.

It's an incredible list. He is fighting anti-supernaturalistic modernism that goes right to the core of what it is. And all he's doing then is trying to show them, look, you can't be so indifferent and latitudinarian about doctrine and still call yourself Pauline.

And then he spends time on Jesus doing the same thing. Now, they may not have bought it, but in my judgment and for many, it was a successful thing. And Walter Lippmann, who reviewed from the outside that book, said the modernists, he wrote this about 10 years later, the modernists have never and never answered Christianity and liberalism.

What he meant by that was not that they are wrong about denying the resurrection, but that they're wrong about calling themselves Christian. That, Machen settled to his satisfaction, that you cannot call yourself a biblical Christian and still deny the importance of doctrine or the fundamentals.

Here's another quote. As over against the pragmatist attitude, we believers, Machen said in historic Christianity, maintain the objectivity of truth. Theology we hold is not an attempt to express in merely symbolic terms an inner experience, which must be expressed in different terms in subsequent generations.

But it is setting forth of facts upon which experience is based. And so his response to modernism, I think, stands. It is not a kind of Christianity. It is the chief, quote, the chief modern rival of Christianity and in direct opposition.

The foundational truths are surrendered, and worse, the concept of truth is surrendered to pragmatism so that even our affirmations are denials. Because they are affirmed as useful rather than true. I don't think the modernism of Machen's day is significantly different in spirit than the post modernisms or liberalisms theologically of our own day.

It is still a menace in most churches and schools and agencies. I think one of the greatest protections against it is to know the stories like Machen's. What enemy he faced, what battle he fought, the weapons he used and failed to use.

The losses he sustained, the price he paid, the triumph he wrought. If we know our history, we will be better equipped. Let me just close this part with a with a quote about hope. What was his hope? That church is still alive.

An unbroken spiritual descent connects us with those whom Jesus commissioned. Times have changed in many respects. New problems must be faced and new difficulties overcome. But the same message must still be proclaimed to a lost world.

Today we have need of all our faith. Unbelief and error have perplexed us sore. Strife and hatred have set the world aflame. There is only one hope, but that hope is sure. God has never deserted his church.

His promise never fails.