Most Christians who know about J. Gresham Machen, associate him with his most popular book, Christianity and Liberalism (1923). Even in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and extending outward to communions in NAPARC, Reformed Christians know Machen mostly through the book he wrote at the peak of the fundamentalist controversy, the one in which he argued plausibly and provocatively that liberal Protestantism was a different religion from Christianity. Controversy generates publicity, and Machen’s fame started and grew from his initial intervention into the church controversies of the 1920s and 1930s.
Yet, Machen himself considered The Virgin Birth of Christ, published in 1930 by Harper & Brothers, his magnum opus. The book’s title and the name of the publisher underscore the ambiguity of Machen himself, the gentleman scholar who took the side of populist and sometimes crass Protestantism. On the one hand, the virgin birth was one of the doctrines that fundamentalists insisted was essential to Christianity. Machen’s book, consequently, would seem to solidify his identification with those Protestants who sought to rid churches of theological liberalism. On the other hand, Harper & Brothers was a trade (not a religious or academic) press that published American authors from a wide variety of backgrounds. In other words, fundamentalists typically would have published with Fleming H. Revell, a New York religious publisher who originally brought to print the writings of Dwight L. Moody. Harper’s imprimatur indicated that despite the title, Machen’s Virgin Birth was not designed for the controversy in the churches, even if it was related. His purpose was mainly academic. This was a scholarly book that did little to help fundamentalists who wanted a quick and easy read before heading to the next meeting to strategize on defeating modernists. Weighing in at close to four hundred pages, Virgin Birth was neither a quick nor an easy read.
One reason for Machen’s own claim about the importance of the book was that the subject had followed him since he was a student at Princeton Theological Seminary. During his final year at Princeton (1904–1905), he wrote a long paper on the virgin birth for the New Testament fellowship prize. Machen’s essay not only finished first in the competition, but it also came with a scholarship that Machen used for his studies in Germany the next year. The research paper, divided in two, became Machen’s first publications, both under the title “The New Testament Account of the Birth of Jesus.” The first was published in 1905, the second a year later. Even though Machen’s work as a lecturer at Princeton after his return from Germany took him more in the direction of the apostle Paul (which led to The Origins of Paul’s Religion, 1921), he kept a hand in the scholarly literature on the virgin birth. One indication of this ongoing curiosity was his 1912 article, “The Hymns of the First Chapter of Luke,” in Princeton Theological Review.
After almost two decades away from the subject, in The Virgin Birth of Christ Machen followed the approach he had taken in his book on Paul (which he then used for some of his points in Christianity and Liberalism). Machen defended the supernatural character of Christianity through a close reading of the New Testament. He did so for the theological reason that salvation from sin depended on a direct (supernatural) intervention by God into human affairs. Nothing within a fallen world was capable of lifting men and women out of their guilt and restoring them to a loving relationship with a holy God. Machen’s emphasis on the supernatural followed from his academic purpose of taking the New Testament on its own terms. Rather than explaining away the miraculous as liberal Protestants did, Machen insisted that an honest reading of the Bible left no other conclusion but that God was from first to last the author of salvation.
D. G. Hart | “Machen’s Best Book: The Virgin Birth of Christ: A Review Article” | December, 2025
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Darryl Hart
D. G. Hart teaches history at Hillsdale College. He is has written biographies of J. Gresham Machen, John Williamson Nevin, H. L. Mencken, and Benjamin Franklin. He is an elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and lives in Michigan with his wife, Ann.
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