J. Gresham Machen

— “I’m so thankful for active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.”

Machen’s final telegram to John Murray, 1937¹

Overview

J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937) was an American Presbyterian New Testament scholar who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary and, after its 1929 reorganization toward a more liberal direction, led the conservative faculty who left to found Westminster Theological Seminary.² His best-known book, Christianity and Liberalism (1923), warned that “modern liberalism, even when it is not consistently pantheistic, is at any rate pantheizing,” tending, in Machen’s own words, “to break down the separateness between God and the world.”³ Kenneth Stewart credits Machen and “the Princeton theology” he carried with him with lying “deep in the background” of the Reformed and evangelical movements that spread through the following century.⁴

Life and Ministry

Machen taught New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary during the controversy between American Protestant modernism and conservative, confessional Presbyterianism that dominated the 1920s. In 1929 the seminary’s board was reorganized, and, in Micah McCormick’s assessment, “Princeton Seminary soon lost the strong confessional (and evangelical) stance it once maintained.”⁵ Machen and a circle of conservative colleagues left to found Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia that same year as the “successor seminary of Old Princeton,” carrying forward its confessional New Testament and systematic theology instruction.⁶ His junior colleague in New Testament at the new seminary was his own former Princeton student and a recent doctoral graduate of the Free University of Amsterdam, Ned B. Stonehouse.⁷

Machen went on to promote an independent board for Presbyterian foreign missions, a step for which he was “eventually removed from the ministry of the Presbyterian Church USA.”⁸ He died in 1937. As he lay dying, Machen dictated a final telegram to his friend and Westminster colleague John Murray, consisting of two sentences: “I’m so thankful for active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.”¹

Theological Contribution

Against the liberal Protestant tradition running from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Karl Barth, which grounded theology in religious experience rather than in verifiable claims about God, Machen defended what Craig Carter calls classical theism’s “rational theism”: Carter writes that Machen “speaks for the Great Tradition when he writes that ‘rational theism, the knowledge of one Supreme Person, Maker and active Ruler of the world, is at the very root of Christianity.’”³ On Machen’s own reading of the Gospels, the God Jesus addressed as Father was, as Carter quotes him, a Person “whose existence was just as definite and just as much a subject of theoretic knowledge as the existence of the lilies of the field that God had clothed.”³

Within the Reformed tradition, Machen restated the Calvinist account of grace against Arminian theology in similarly uncompromising terms, terms Loraine Boettner later quoted approvingly: “A Calvinist is constrained to regard the Arminian theology as a serious impoverishment of the Scripture doctrine of divine grace; and equally serious is the view which the Arminian must hold as to the doctrines of the Reformed Churches.”⁹ Machen also continued the Princeton tradition, running from Archibald Alexander through Charles Hodge and A. A. Hodge, of affirming the active obedience of Christ, the teaching that Christ’s lifelong obedience to God’s law, not only his death, is credited to believers for their justification. He preached a sermon on the doctrine, and, as his final telegram shows, it remained the substance of his own hope at death.¹⁰

Historical Significance

A popular account holds that Princeton’s confessional theology was “eclipsed” by the 1929 reorganization and “found its new home” only in the seminary Machen founded at Philadelphia. Kenneth Stewart calls this account a “mythology,” pointing out that the majority of Princeton’s own faculty, Calvinists including Caspar Wistar Hodge Jr. and Geerhardus Vos, remained at their posts and continued to train students after Machen’s departure.¹¹ Even granting that correction, Stewart still places Machen and “the Princeton theology” he carried to Westminster “deep in the background” of the transatlantic Reformed resurgence later associated with Westminster figures such as John Murray and, through them, with Martyn Lloyd-Jones and J. I. Packer in Britain.⁴ The controversy that cost Machen his ministerial standing in the Presbyterian Church USA is treated in its own right at Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the denomination that grew out of it.

Related Doctrines

References

J. Gresham Machen, telegram to John Murray (1937), quoted in Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954; repr. 1978), 508, quoted in Micah John McCormick, “Introduction,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 1. ↩ ↩²
Kenneth J. Stewart, “Hardier than Supposed: The Resurgence of Calvinism Across the 20th Century,” Themelios 50, no. 2 (2025): 286. ↩
J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (1923), 56-57, 63, quoted in Craig A. Carter, “Do We Worship the God of the Bible?,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 9. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Stewart, “Hardier than Supposed,” 286. ↩ ↩²
McCormick, “Historical Survey,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ,” 73. ↩
Samuel Eldon Waldron, “Sola Fide in Norman Shepherd,” in Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 163. ↩
Stewart, “Hardier than Supposed,” n. 38. ↩
Stewart, “Hardier than Supposed,” n. 39. ↩
J. Gresham Machen, quoted in Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 242. ↩
McCormick, “Historical Survey,” 72-73. ↩
Stewart, “Hardier than Supposed,” 288. ↩