COMMITTEE ON CHRISTIAN EDUCATION FEATURE

Orthodox Presbyterians may not warm to the question but it is one that follows immediately from Richard Burnett’s biography of J. Gresham Machen: would anyone know (or care about) Machen if not for the Presbyterian controversy of the 1920s and 1930s that led to the 1936 formation of the OPC? This is not to say that Machen was nothing more than a controversialist—the father of Machen’s warrior children, as some might have it. The question is merely a way to imagine Machen apart from those events. What was his significance as a biblical scholar, theologian, or apologist? Can Machen rival Karl Barth, a contemporary who like Machen also studied at the University of Marburg with Wilhelm Hermann? Graduate students in theology continue to pore over Barth’s writings in order to complete an advanced degree. They do not do so with Machen. His most scholarly books are dated in the world of New Testament studies. His most widely read books, Christianity and Liberalism (1923) and What Is Faith? (1925), show the signs of ecclesiastical controversy. For that reason, Machen’s place in history depends greatly on his opposition to theological liberalism. (For the record, Barth’s opposition to Hitler and the Nazis gave him a hearing that he might not have had if merely an academic theologian.)

This perspective makes Burnett’s rendering of Machen a remarkable if not outlandish undertaking. Church controversy has little role to play in this biography.

Readers with some awareness of Machen’s convictions might be tempted to read Burnett’s title, Machen’s Hope, as a phrase with theological or pastoral significance. Those same readers would be wrong. The hope that Burnett finds in Machen’s life is not Jesus Christ but the modern research university. (By the way, one of the treats of this book is the long leash editors at Eerdmans gave Burnett for including lengthy and extensive quotation from Machen’s correspondence, seemingly more than Ned Stonehouse’s biography, also published by Eerdmans.) One of the first uses of the phrase, “Machen’s Hope,” comes in the chapter on Machen’s time as a graduate student in Germany. “Where Machen expressed greatest confidence,” Burnett writes, “was in the future of the universities of the United States.” The author proceeds to give a close reading of a talk that Machen delivered at his German fraternity (technically burschenschaft) on the state of American universities. (Burnett deserves praise for translating from the German this presentation by Machen that lasted probably close to an hour; “The Universities of the United States” is an appendix to the biography.)

A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, for both a BA and MA in classics, Machen did inhale the heady aspirations for specialized research. What is now taken for granted in American higher education was revolutionary when Machen began his university education (1898). This means Burnett has a point about Machen’s optimism about research, the expansion of knowledge, and academic inquiry as the road to lasting truth. This high estimate of the university and applying the tools of science to all areas of inquiry, from the natural sciences to the study of Scripture, also allows Burnett to portray Machen as a “modernist”—the book’s subtitle is “The Transformation of a Modernist in the New Princeton.” But using this lens to understand Machen—the proponent of the highest academic standards—does not explain why Machen entered the Presbyterian controversy and came out on the other end in a new Presbyterian denomination, a process that took sixteen years—half of his entire professional career (1906 to 1936). Burnett almost sets readers up to expect that Machen will not start a new seminary but a new university or research center. Since Machen did not enter the university world, readers of Burnett’s book may well surmise that Machen entered church controversy as a way to take out his academic frustrations.

The point at which Machen’s modernism transformed, as Burnett tells it, came in the mid-1910s about the time that Machen was ordained (1914) and became a voting member of Princeton Seminary’s faculty. His inaugural address, “History and Faith” (1915), was one of Machen’s first public critiques of liberal theology. Here he went after the so-called “liberal Jesus,” who became an “impossible figure” on historical ground thanks to the supernaturalism that pervaded Christ’s being and doing. Machen believed that recent New Testament scholarship had finally proved that the Jesus of nineteenth-century German liberal theology was “a failure.” Burnett takes issue with Machen’s critique, first, because many people continued to write sentimental, liberal biographies of Jesus. The new scholarship that Machen promoted did not put an end to the liberal Jesus.

Burnett also contends that Machen had more or less constructed a straw man since the Bible professors at Princeton University had not embraced philosophical naturalism, which Machen argued was the only alternative to supernaturalism. Instead, the university’s religion scholars remained attentive to the parts of Jesus’s life that lay beyond scientific explanations. They did so by employing “spiritualistic” (as opposed to naturalistic) philosophy. This was one place where Machen broke with modern scholarship. It showed an antagonistic attitude to the academic world that had nurtured him. What might well have helped Burnett at this point would have been to look at Christianity and Liberalism where Machen admitted that liberal Protestants had admirably tried to preserve the spiritual and moral components of Christianity without its supernatural character. What Machen asked about liberal Protestantism (was it still Christianity?), Burnett could well have asked of “spiritualistic philosophy”—was it still theism?

Burnett’s depiction of Machen as a modernist totters when it traces the influence of Johns Hopkins on his subject. As much as the ethos of the modern university marked Machen’s education and early career, Burnett uses it as the key to unlock Machen’s career at Princeton Seminary. To evaluate the seminary by Johns Hopkins is one thing, and Machen did much of this when he was a seminary student. But to keep the comparison going—seminary in the light of the university—Burnett uses Princeton University as the standard for the seminary. In fact, the “New Princeton” in the book’s subtitle is not the seminary but the university. Controversies over religion on campus in the 1910s (one involving Billy Sunday, another with guest lectures from the liberal president of Andover Seminary) become the means Burnett uses to evaluate Machen’s early scholarship and changes at Princeton Seminary in the 1910s. Burnett assumes that teaching the Bible or the study of religion at Princeton defined the standards of the university. Machen was on the outside helplessly looking in from the outmoded institution of a seminary.

What Burnett does not notice is that the study of religion at the university was considerably different from the university standards Machen learned at Hopkins while studying ancient Greek and Latin texts. He found a path to the New Testament by recognizing that he could use the methods and rigor of the classics in the study of another set of documents from the ancient world. The “scientific” nature of the classics was several steps removed from the sentimental and literary approach to the Bible in most undergraduate courses. In the case of the new field of comparative religion, that “science” also ran contrary to the classics by lumping all religious expressions into one generic religion rather than focusing on the differences between authors and texts as characterized the study of Rome and Athens.

Even in his concluding chapter, Burnett continues to look at Machen more through the lens of the university than the Presbyterian Church. He reads closely Machen’s articles and lectures during the last decade of his life that bear on education and scholarship. The politics of Princeton Seminary and the church receive a wave of the hand, however. “Machen’s decision to leave Princeton was long in the making,” Burnett writes. The conflicts within the seminary and denomination “seemed intractable.”

Readers may conclude that Burnett’s biography distorts Machen. What may be more accurate is to acknowledge Burnett’s use of categories, some of which are peculiar to his own understanding, that do shed a different light on the circumstances of Machen’s life and work. In that way, Machen may look like a modernist who became a conservative. Either way, Burnett’s interpretation fails to explain how most people remember Machen—namely, as the odd, highly educated, and wealthy defender of historic Christianity.

The author is an OP elder and professor at Hillsdale College.

Machen’s Hope: The Transformation of a Modernist in the New Princeton, by Richard E. Burnett. Eerdmans, 2024. Cloth, 638 pages, $45.99.