(Biographies) J. Gresham Machen — John Piper

The following message is by pastor John Piper. More information from desiring. God is available at www .desiring God dot o RG.

On New Year's Eve of 1936 in a Roman Catholic Hospital in Bismarck, North Dakota One day away from his death J. Gresham Machen lay with pneumonia at the age of 55. It was Christmas break at Westminster Seminary where he was teaching New Testament at the time and his colleagues said that he looked deadly tired.

But instead of resting as His colleagues said he should have he accepted a speaking engagement in North Dakota and he took a train from the mild temperatures of Philadelphia to the 20 below zero winds of Bismarck and He spoke with Pastor Samuel Allen in several Presbyterian churches there.

Ned Stonehouse Who wrote his biography? Said there was no one sufficient in influence to constrain him to curtail his program to any significant degree. His isolation really was remarkable in those last Hours of his life.

He was the leader of the Conservative movement in the Presbyterian Church in America. No one doubted that and so he had no one above him to watch over him to hold him accountable for his schedule. His heroes and mentors Warfield and Patton were dead.

He never married so he had no wife to connect him with reality. His mother and father his mother had given him remarkable counsel over the years. They were both dead. His two brothers were 1 ,500 miles to the east.

He had according to George Marsden a personality that only his good friends found appealing and So he was incredibly isolated For a man of international stature. He had pneumonia. He could scarcely breathe.

Pastor Allen visited him on that last day of 1936 to pray with him and he told pastor Allen of a vision that he had of being in heaven and Said Sam it was glorious. It was glorious. And then a little later. He said Sam Isn't the reformed faith?

Grand. And on New Year's Day 1937 he mustered just enough strength to send one Telegram to John Murray back at Westminster and his last recorded words in the telegram were I am so thankful For the active obedience of Christ.

No hope without it and he died at 730 that night. That's a picture of Jay Gresham a chin his death Scene is a picture so much of the man's life is there. The stubbornness of Going his own way when friends urged him not to do this extra preaching the isolation far away from the centers of church life his suffering for what he Believed in with all his might his utter allegiance to the reformed faith of the Westminster confession his Getting comfort not just from general truths that Christ loved him and gave himself.

But from a specific doctrinal truth about the active obedience of Christ that he knew was his obedience and therefore fit him to be accepted into eternal life for Christ's sake. All of that was mentioned.

And he was cut off in the midst of a great work at the age of 55. The great work at that moment was the founding of Westminster Seminary and the founding of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He had not set out to found anything.

Founding Westminster Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church

He prided himself and Princeton prided themselves that not anything new had come out of Princeton for a hundred years. It was the glory of Princeton Seminary to have stood With Hodge Hodge and Warfield for a hundred years.

He had no intention of founding Seminary or a church. He had taught at Princeton for 23 years and was at the thick of everything in the ecclesiastical life of the PC USA in those days. But who he was and what he stood for made it almost inevitable in view of where that church and that seminary was going.

Westminster at that moment when he died was seven years old. The Presbyterian Church in America, which was forced legally within its first month to change its name To the Orthodox Presbyterian Church was six months old.

He had been elected its first moderator June 11 1936 and the occasion for starting that new Presbyterian Church. Was that on March 29? 1935 Machen Was found guilty of in subordination and failure to obey his Ordination vows and was stripped of his ministerial standing by the New Brunswick presbytery.

The appeal was made to the General Assembly and at the Syracuse Assembly in 1936 it failed and he was out of the ministry by vote of the entire denomination. The reason for the Insubordination that led to the censure and the indictment and the conviction and the ouster was that in June of? 1933 he had formed an independent Board of Foreign Missions to protest the fact that the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions Had endorsed a book called Rethinking missions written by layman which Machen said quote from beginning to end is an attack upon the historic Christian faith and Because he said that they were supporting missionaries of the likes of Pearl Buck.

Pearl Buck said that If someone existed who could create a person like Christ or portray for us a Christ like the Gospels then Christ lived and lives whether he once had a body and a soul or whether he is just the essence of men's highest dreams.

And when Machen read that kind of Latitudinarianism or indifferent ism as he would call it. He said I can't give my money to support a Pearl Buck. And therefore the seriousness of that decision flowing from the General Assembly in 1934 read like this Quote a church member that will not give to promote the officially authorized missionary program of the Presbyterian Church is in exactly the same position with reference to the Constitution of the church as a member that would refuse to partake of the celebration of the Lord's Supper or any other prescribed ordinance of the denomination.

In other words It was elevated. His decision not to support the board to found a new independent board was elevated to the level of refusing to come to the table of the Lord and that was the ground of his.

Dismissal a.

Machen’s Departure from Princeton Seminary

Few years earlier 1929 he had left Princeton Seminary not under the same conditions. He voluntarily left Princeton because of the reorganization of the governance structure. There was in Princeton for a hundred years a board of directors who embodied the curb conservative confessional commitments of the school and as the president Stevenson and other groups became more broad in their sympathies with the modern way of thinking they wanted to get the control of the seminary out of that group and therefore proposed the combining of the trustees and the directors the trustees having on them the more broadly minded people and that was voted on and passed Machen said if the proposed Dissolution of the present board of directors is finally carried out and the control of the seminary passes into entirely different hands then Princeton Theological Seminary as it has been so long and so honorably known will be dead and we shall have at Princeton a new institution of radically different type and in his judgment the seminary died in 1929 and by the fall of 29 a new seminary existed with Machen and others as The faculty and he said at the inaugural address September 25 1929 to the class of 50 students.

Know my friends though Princeton Seminary is dead. The noble tradition of Princeton Seminary is alive. Westminster Seminary will endeavor by God's grace to continue that tradition unimpaired now the title of this Message today is Jay Gresham Machen's response to modernism and my first answer to the question of how he Responded is that his most enduring? response were to institutions.

It was not his intention. That wasn't the way he was responding For 20 years, but the most enduring response has been Westminster Seminary which today I believe is a remarkably influential institution in evangelicalism and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church Which after 56 years has 188 churches and only 19 ,000 members but may in fact have a wider influence than the numbers would signify though probably.

They are a part of what I said this morning was the reform traditions failure to reform. Where did this warrior come from? Who was this man who came on the scene in the PC USA and? Left their seminary and were kicked out of their denomination and formed Westminster in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

What shaped him? What was his engagement with modernism over the 20 years while he taught 23 years at Princeton and what is this thing called modernism that he so Energetically opposed and can we learn anything from him today?

Machen’s Background and Encounter with Modernism

John Gresham Machen was born in 1881 16 years after the end of the Civil War. His mother was from Macon, Georgia and was educated Cultured. She wrote a book called The Bible in Browning and his father was a very well-to-do lawyer in Baltimore.

That's where he grew up. He was in a word a well-to-do Southern Aristocrat. He made at least six journeys to Europe in those days when there were no planes Flying sailing the family had a retreat house in Seal Harbor.

He went to university school for boys studied Latin from the time. He was 11. They belonged to the southern aristocratic Presbyterian Church, Franklin Street his ways of thinking about black people were Southern quote the servants are the real old-fashioned Kind-hearted southern darkies in the house.

It was a man Gripped by the southern culture in which he grew up and when he was 21 years old He inherited fifty thousand dollars from his maternal His maternal grandfather to put that in perspective his first annual salary at Princeton was two thousand dollars so he inherited 25 times an annual salary when he's 21 and a similar amount when he was 35 from his father when he died he was in a millionaire in our terms and That explains how you could read in his biography over and over again that he funded the magazine he funded the 250 ,000 books that were mailed out to the PC USA and so on.

When he died his estate was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in those days dollars That carries with a tremendous Limitations and it defines in large measure the level at which he engaged his culture and the level at which he engaged the PC USA.

When he finished High school he went to Johns Hopkins studied classics and then Kicking and screaming almost he went to Princeton Seminary for three years not at all intending to go into the ministry didn't know Whether he would or not took a year in Germany to study New Testament and there He met modernism As he came to understand it for the first time in vital compelling winsome form in the person of Wilhelm Hermann at Marburg.

It was an almost compelling overwhelming encounter. This is important. Because what Machen was doing for the next 23 years When he opposed modernism was not throwing rocks over a wall that he'd never glimpsed over.

He had been over the wall into the camp and almost was lost there to the cause. I'm gonna read an extended series of quotes from the letters home just to show you how close we came as evangelicals to losing him and What an impact this man? Herman had on him and what it should teach us about the way we present our Theology.

Princeton almost lost him because of the way they presented their theology. Here's the quotes. The first time I heard Herman May almost be described as an epic in my life. Such an overpowering Personality.

I think I almost never before encountered overpowering in the sincerity of religious devotion. My chief feeling with reference to him is already one of deepest reverence. I Have been thrown now. This is a man who does not believe in the resurrection and believe in the infallibility of the scriptures didn't believe in the virgin birth.

Okay, this a modernist. I His devotion to Christ than anything I have known in Myself during the past few years the Princeton years Herman affirms very little of Which I have been accustomed to regard as essential to Christianity.

Yet there is no doubt in my mind that he is a Christian and a Christian of a peculiarly earnest type. He is a Christian not because he follows Christ as a moral teacher, but because of his trust in Christ.

Practically if anything more truly than theoretically his trust is unbounded. Herman represents the dominant Rishelian school. Herman has shown me something of the religious power Which lies back of this great? Movement which is now making a fight even for the control of the Northern Presbyterian Church in America in New England.

Those who do not believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus are generally speaking religiously dead in Germany. Herman has taught me this is by no means the case. He believes that Jesus is the one thing in all the world that inspires absolute confidence and absolute Joyful Subjection and that through Jesus we come into communion with the Living God and are made free from the world.

It is the the faith that is a real experience a real revelation of God that saves not the faith that Consists in accepting as true a lot of dogmas on the basis of merely what others have said. Das verkehr des christen mit Gott is one of the greatest religious books I have ever read.

Perhaps Herman does not give the whole truth. I Certainly hope he does not that little phrase is so hope-giving as you read the history of this man. I certainly hope I think underlying This is a token of the way God works.

I believe as young men experience doubts underlying these intellectual doubts that he was being plummeted into there was What Jonathan Edwards would probably call a an affection a nose? That didn't operate here mainly a nose and an affection for the truth.

So that periodically as he's expressing his fascination with these new ideas. He keeps inserting. I hope it's not true. I hope it isn't true because there was this gut level. I have loved what Warfield taught I think I I certainly hope he does not at any rate He has gotten hold of something that has been sadly neglected in the church and in the Orthodox theology.

Perhaps he is something like the devout mystics of the Middle Ages they were one-sided enough, but they raised a mighty protest against the coldness and deadness of the Church and were forerunners of the Reformation end quote.

The Need for Affectionate and Engaging Orthodoxy

Now what Machen Found in Herman, I think was something that he had apparently not found at Princeton. Nor in his home church Franklin Street nor in his mother Whom he loved dearly and counted as a saint namely passion joy exuberant trust at Princeton there was solid learning there was civil formal careful aristocratic presentations of fairly cool thorough Reformed theology.

He eventually came to see that that theology was an infinitely better foundation for joy Than what Herman had? But in comparison to Herman spirit The spirit of what he had experienced in the Reformed community Almost lost him.

It came within a hair of Losing him and the lesson that I just I just throw out to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and to this group because those of you who were attracted to hear Oz Guinness and to this topic are Probably the kind of people who are toward the the war field in Ilk of human being which is a peculiar sort of person that isn't like Herman and You you need to be aware that you can lose precious young People by not as Edwards would say having affections that correspond to the glory of your affirmations.

There must be a correlation or something's not going to click in young people's lives. The experience in Germany made a lasting impact on him and on the way he carried mercy the mercy the rest of his life he said again and again that he Respected and he sympathized with modernists who could honestly not believe in a bodily resurrection from the dead.

Nor that the Bible was inerrant nor that Jesus was born of a virgin Provided. They said it and didn't stay in churches where it wasn't believed. That's what made him angry. Quote. There is my real quarrel with them referring to some of the faculty at Union in New York.

There's my real quarrel with them as for their difficulties with the Christian faith. I have Profound sympathy for them, but not with their contemptuous treatment of the Conscientious men who believe that a creed solemnly subscribed to is more than a scrap of paper.

He wanted to deal with people straight up argument for argument honestly his struggle with people Who were struggling? Was very Empathetic 20 years after his German experience. He wrote some of us Have been through such struggle ourselves.

Some of us have known the blankness of doubt the deadly discouragement the perplexity of indecision the vacillation between faith diversified by doubt and doubt diversified by faith. Now Machen came through Without losing his evangelical faith and he was called to Princeton to teach New Testament.

Which he did from 1906 until he left in 1929 and incidentally in regard to this morning's comment. He never got any advanced degree beyond Princeton. Me neither did by the way FF Bruce beyond his masters and numerous others that there is no necessary correlation between Insight and degrees.

Most of the worst teachers in the world have PhDs. There is no correlation between Pedagogical ability and advanced training. They are in two totally separate Worlds and the same is true with passion.

The same is true with orthodoxy. The only thing a PhD does is certify you in the guild. That's all it guarantees and that isn't much. He came to embrace conservative reformed orthodoxy a strong apologist now for biblical Christianity and An internationally acclaimed New Testament scholar with his book of the origin of Paul's religion.

It was still a textbook at Fuller in 1968 when I studied it with RK Harrison the virgin birth of Christ still in print and and used today now two decades. He was at Princeton teaching and those two decades 1906 to 29 were the decades that we all know about as the controversy between fundamentalism and modernism that's when it was raging to the fullest and he Made a very distinctive contribution to that Debate and what I want to do is I think get at him by contrasting his engagement of modernism with fundamentalism because you can't understand him if you only see him as one species of what's known as Fundamentalism.

Least I don't I don't think that Can be done. He was seen as an ally and he was an ally to fundamentalism. He was blasted as as guilty by association. By those who were the enemies of fundamentalism he never would accept the term himself.

Here's stone houses definition of fundamentalists. People who quote single out certain great facts and doctrines the fundamentals that had come under particular attack and were concerned then to emphasize their truth and defend them in quote.

Now there's a lot more to it than that and Machen didn't like it. Here's what he said. Do you suppose that I do regret being called by a term that I greatly dislike a fundamentalist? I most certainly do regret it but in the presence of a great common foe.

I Have little time to be attacking my brethren who stand with me in the defense of the Word of God. So there you there you hear the balance of yes and no to fundamentalism. Here's what he did not like about it.

These were his characteristics. One the absence of a historical perspective. To the lack of appreciation for scholarship. Three the substitution of brief skeletal creeds for historic confessions. For the lack of concern for precise formulation of Christian doctrine.

Five Pietistic perfectionistic tendencies, let me just insert just to give you a glimpse here for somebody like me that grew up In a home that I would call fundamentalist and and love it prize it cherish it wouldn't choose any other home to grow it up in never have joined the people at fuller where I was kicking against that prick and Using nasty language and talking like an adolescent till you're 40 years old about how bad everything was in fundamentalism.

I have no patience with that kind of debunking at all. But it took a while for me to get adjusted that there could be Christians who smoke. Listen to this listen to this quote 1905. He's just finishing up at Princeton.

The fellows are in my room now on the last Sunday night. Smoking the cigars and eating the oranges which has been the greatest delight I have ever had to provide whenever possible. My idea of delight is a Princeton room full of fellows smoking.

When I when I think what a wonderful aid tobacco is to friendship and Christian patience. I Have sometimes regretted that I never began to smoke. I mean, I think I can read that now. Takes my breath away my fundamentalist breath away.

Literally is and and it's killing about 40 ,000 people a year who don't smoke but go to work with those who do well enough. I Still believe in all those things. Six one-sided other worldliness. Seven a penchant for futuristic ghillie ism Premillennialism.

He didn't like it. He was an on millennialist. So those were the things that set him off from from fundamentalism. He was on one side and they were on the other but when it came to the modernists They were like two peas in a pod as far as he was concerned.

Calvinism as Christianity in Full Flower

Now There's a deeper issue. For why he did not align himself with the fundamentalist and this is important because this gets to the root of how he tackled Modernism in his day and I hope the definition of modernism will come out in in a few minutes more clearly perhaps than it has been so far.

He went deeper than the fundamentalist and he went broader than the fundamentalists and he owed his ability to do that to Benjamin Breckinridge. Warfield. February 16 1921 halfway through his time at Princeton Machen I Mean Warfield died.

Machen wrote home to his mother with all his glaring faults. He was the greatest man I ever knew. 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 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 it 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.

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 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 PC USA. It would have put him in a more ecumenical Interdenominational pre-millennial 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 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 Erdman's this is what you should all have in your library.

This is 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.

What he did was engaged 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 Oz Guinness has been calling modernity.

Modernity, Truth, and the Supernatural

Modern culture is his word for it. They're not the same modernism is the theological construct an 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 now. 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. Then he 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 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 we're we're 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 6 ,000 years and in the last 50. It's a new world. So who needs the past? I mean they rode chariots for 6 ,000 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 fax 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 don't need prayer anymore you just as dr. Fuller says you get the rats out of the manholes. It's poison the rats find a new chemical. That'll kill the rats and and that'll take care of your black plague.

Matron credits modernism. Now that's the theological response to modernity. Matron 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 to 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 it's not a set of doctrines per se or a set of denials. This is why mation. This is so important. It's important today. This is why mation never tired not only of criticizing the doctrinal views of people in the PC USA but what he called indifferent ism or Latitudinarian ism.

The president Stevenson who is 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. Make you 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 in 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. And Machen could see that and that's what he kept criticizing with this doctrinal indifferent ISM 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 and You can't it's like mercury you put your finger on it.

It was 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. Close quote now Machen's critique of this analysis of modernism his critique of it flows From in two directions.

One is a critique from inside the culture analyzing it and its goodness or not. It's been a bit it's 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 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 to are the great painters the great musicians the great sculptors.