Great Christian Biographies with John Piper: J. Gresham Machen 1

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. No 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 Machen 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.

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 a 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 PCUSA 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 months 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 Lehman 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 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.

No, 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 J. Grisha Machen's response to modernism and my first answer to the question of How he responded is that his most enduring response were two 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?

John Gresham a chin 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 $50 ,000 from his maternal. His maternal grandfather to put that in perspective his first annual salary at Princeton was $2 ,000 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 $250 ,000 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 going to 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 Have been thrown all into confusion by what he says. So much deeper is his devotion to Christ than anything. I have known in Myself during the past few years the Princeton years Haman 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. Hermann represents the dominant Rishelian school. Hermann 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. Hermann 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. That's fair care.

This Christmas. God is one of the greatest religious books. I have ever read. Perhaps Hermann does not give the whole truth. I Certainly hope he does not that little phrase. It's 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 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. Now what Machen Found in Hermann, 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 Hermann had? But in comparison to Hermann spirit The spirit of what he had experienced in the Reformed community Almost lost 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 Hermann 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.

A huge 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 HM 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'm 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 all-millennial 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.

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.

A matron 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.