Historians have struggled to make sense of J. Gresham Machen. The earliest interpretations of conservative opposition to liberalism (in the church) looked to region and economics. Conservative Protestants were supposed to be rural, economically backward, and poorly educated. That outlook might have looked sensible to people who viewed conservative Protestantism through the lens of the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. But it made it very hard to understand Machen who was urban, wealthy—and especially well educated. He attended private schools in Baltimore before going to Johns Hopkins University where he majored in Classics. His mentor, Basil L. Gildersleeve, one of the most preeminent classicists of his day, was also an elder at the Machens’ home congregation, Franklin Street Presbyterian Church. Machen stayed at Johns Hopkins to complete a master’s degree in ancient Greek literature before he attended Princeton Seminary, where he found New Testament studies a congenial outlet for his academic instincts. Before teaching at Princeton, Machen also did a year of study in New Testament at German universities. All that schooling turned Machen into the man H. L. Mencken dubbed “Doctor Fundamentalis.”

Machen’s intellectual background also gave him a different critique from common fundamentalist objections to Protestant liberalism. Unlike the views popularized in Bible conferences and Bible colleges, Machen avoided debates about human origins or the return of Christ. His book Christianity and Liberalism featured the vicarious atonement. This was for Machen a doctrine far more crucial to the gospel than debates about the beginning and end of human history. Liberal Protestants, as Machen argued, thought they could save Christianity by getting rid of its supernatural appearance. By so doing, the church could appeal to modern men and women who were accustomed to “following the science.” Machen countered that sinners had no solution for human sinfulness before a holy God without the perfect life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. Liberals might think that following Jesus’s remarkably wise teachings was a good way to live virtuously. It was no match, though, for reconciling sinners with God. Only a divine supernatural intervention, through Jesus Christ, could save humankind. Liberal Protestantism’s attempt to save Christianity by eliminating miracles was the reason Machen condemned modernism as a different religion. Liberalism did not preserve Christianity. It substituted morality for the saving work of Christ.

The Ancient World and Education

Of course, as a professor of NT and a Presbyterian minister, Machen was well equipped to see the danger of liberalism. At the same time, his training in Greek and Roman antiquity also heightened Machen’s awareness of the distance between Christianity’s antiquity and American Protestantism’s modernity. The introduction to Christianity and Liberalism, perhaps one of the oddest parts of the book, gives away Machen’s concerns as someone whose imagination was filled with the ancient world.

When he tried to appeal to readers outside the church, Machen looked for plausible analogies. He picked one from the sphere of education. Machen lamented a series of state laws passed during the Red Scare of the 1920s to bar teaching foreign languages in public and private schools before the eighth grade. Worries about a divided loyalty to the United States had prompted some of these laws. But Machen saw them as an attack on teaching ancient languages: “no foreign language, apparently not even Latin or Greek, is to be studied until the child is too old to learn it well.” Machen worried that modern curricula were cutting Americans off from the great literature and history of the past.

It was not just the ancient authors whom Machen admired but also the “classics” of European literature. That is why he made sure readers understood that his complaints about the “Un-Christian” nature of liberalism was not a reason to avoid all pagan literature. “Socrates was not a Christian,” he wrote, “neither was Goethe; yet we share to the full the respect with which their names are regarded.” These non-Christian writers towered “immeasurably above the common run of men.” If believers were in any way superior to non-Christians, the reasons owed solely to the “undeserved privilege” of God’s grace, which ought to make believers “humble rather than contemptuous” of great writers.

Machen’s emphasis on filling the minds of students with content, rather than training them in how to learn, dovetailed with his understanding of the importance of catechesis. Instead of exposing believers to the spiritual lives of saints, Machen underscored the significance of doctrine. “The most important thing of all,” Machen wrote, for turning the church away from its liberal drift, was “a renewal of Christian education.” Just as students in American schools were being ruined by an emphasis on method, the churches were languishing under the illusion that “Christianity is a life and not also a doctrine.” As a result, ignorance of Christianity prevailed in both the church and more broadly in American society. The remedy was instruction in Christian doctrine, first in the home and then in whatever educational institutions churches could create. “Christian education is the chief business of the hour for every earnest Christian,” Machen wrote in the conclusion of Christianity and Liberalism.

Marking the Influence of Paul

Machen’s writing about the Bible also showed, often without any fanfare, the benefit of reading and thinking about the Bible with the aid of a classical education. One example comes from Machen’s introduction to The Origin of Paul’s Religion (1921):

The importance of [Paul’s] achievement must be apparent to every historian, no matter how unsympathetic his attitude toward the content of Christianity may be. The modern European world, what may be called “western civilization,” is descended from the civilization of Greece and Rome. Our languages are either derived directly from the Latin, or at any rate connected with the same great family. Our literature and art are inspired by the great classical models. Our law and government have never been independent of the principles enunciated by the statesmen of Greece, and put into practice by the statesmen of Rome. Our philosophies are obliged to return ever anew to the questions which were put, if not answered, by Plato and Aristotle. (20)

Readers will have a hard time finding a more concise description of the importance of Greco-Roman civilization for the history of the West.

With that background in mind, Machen pointed out how odd and remarkable was Christianity’s rise within an ancient world dominated by Greek philosophy and Roman politics.

How comes it that a thoroughly Semitic book like the Bible has been accorded a place in medieval and modern life to which the glories of Greek literature can never by any possibility aspire? How comes it that the words of that book have not only made political history—moved armies and built empires—but also have entered into the very fabric of men’s souls? (20)

The intrinsic merits of the Bible were alone insufficient to explain its importance within a culture dominated by Greek and Roman literature. Machen’s answer to the cultural riddle he described had to be the author of some of the most cherished passages of the NT. And yet, Machen was able to spot Paul’s significance largely because of his training as a classicist. As he put it, the reason for Christianity’s spread in the Gentile world (Greek and Roman) “must be sought in the inner life of a Jew of Tarsus.” Machen added, “in dealing with the apostle Paul we are dealing with one of the moving factors of the world’s history.”

Machen’s evaluation of the NT elevated this part of Scripture well above the common ways of regarding Paul that comes from VBS students making maps of the apostle’s missionary journeys or even from weighty debates about justification by faith alone. Of course, no one wants to minimize one of the most important doctrines associated with the Protestant Reformation, nor should anyone minimize attention to Paul’s work as an evangelist and church planter. Even so, because Machen looked at Scripture partly through the lens of a classical education, he saw what those Christians, not similarly educated, miss. Christianity became a force in world history through incredibly unlikely influences that included both the work of the Holy Spirit and the genius of the Apostle Paul. Machen saw Paul in the light of a classical education’s “big picture”—namely, the history of civilizations and the philosophical and political questions formulated by Greeks and Romans. 

If modern people continue to pay homage to the Greco-Roman world—both when as tourists they visit Greece and Italy and in many of the public buildings (inspired by Greek and Roman architecture) in which contemporary national and local governments conduct their business—Machen was clearly on to something in describing Christianity as a world-shaping force in human history. Of course, Machen did more than that. He worshiped the God of the Bible, worked in seminary and church to educate Christians in the doctrines of the Reformed faith, and took an active interest in the well-being of the church. But thanks in part to his background in the classics, Machen also recognized Christianity’s remarkable place in the history of the world.

The Cross of Christ in Greco-Roman Context

One of the doctrines that Machen thought was essential to understanding Christianity was the vicarious atonement. This is why the chapter on salvation in Christianity and Liberalism was the longest and included a long defense of the significance of the cross. Contrary to those who called this doctrine “subtle,” Machen considered it simply what the NT taught. The real objection to the doctrine was not intellectual difficulty but human pride, a sense that modern men and women did not need something so primitive. But for Machen, without the reality that the doctrine described, Christians had no hope of salvation. “The atoning death of Christ, and that alone, has presented sinners as righteous in God’s sight,” Machen declared. “The Lord Jesus has paid the full penalty of their sins, and clothed them with His perfect righteousness before the judgment seat of God.”

It might be a stretch, but Machen’s critique of liberalism reflected his training as a classicist. The ancient world that he had studied as a student at Johns Hopkins was filled with sacrifices to gods, not to mention the Old Testament’s own system of sacrifices. Tourists who visit the most historic sites in Greece, such as the Temple of Delphi, cannot help but notice the elaborate provisions for sacrificing bulls and goats to Apollo. Of course, Christ’s sacrifice for sin was on a completely different order if only because this was a sacrifice of a god-man who died but also rose again before ascending into heaven. Even so, as different as the Christian atonement was from the sacrifices that filled Greek and Roman mythology, the ancients, unlike modern people, understood that human beings were inferior to divine beings and needed to satisfy those gods to obtain their blessing. From the perspective of a classicist, Christianity’s reliance on the sacrifice of Christ was not bizarre or primitive. From the perspective of many modern Christians, however, the cross of Christ looked like an embarrassment.

The prominent German NT scholar, Rudolph Bultmann, once remarked that “We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.” That sentiment was one of the chief impulses behind refashioning Christianity for modern men and women. It generated interpretations of Scripture that explained away God’s direct and miraculous interventions into human history. It also spurred pastors and theologians to feature Jesus’s ethics instead of theology.

J. Gresham Machen knew otherwise. Of course, part of the reason that he held on to the parts of Christianity that Bultmann found incredible was that Machen knew himself to be a sinner who needed the salvation revealed in Scripture. But he had reinforcement from his classical education. The ancient world of Greek and Roman authors was suffused with gods who intervened in human affairs and demanded acts of reverence. As unlikely as it may seem, the study of the Greco-Roman world immunized Machen from thinking that modern notions of society, education, or anthropology were more reliable than ancient authors on the purpose of human existence or the imperatives that attended divine worship. By inhabiting intellectually the ancient world, Machen was especially well equipped to doubt that advances in modern thought had replaced historic Christian convictions. He knew, thanks to the Bible, with help from the ancient world, that humans could never outgrow questions about their status before God.

The author is an OP elder and professor of history at Hillsdale College. New Horizons, October 2023.