J. Gresham Machen was born in Baltimore on this day in 1881, into a prosperous and cultivated Presbyterian family. After studying at Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, and Princeton Theological Seminary, he continued his education in Germany before returning to Princeton Seminary as an instructor in New Testament. He would become one of the most accomplished conservative New Testament scholars of his generation, producing important works on Paul, the virgin birth of Christ, and the character of the Christian faith.

Yet Machen is remembered not just as a scholar. He became one of the central figures in the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy, helped establish Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929, organized the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions in 1933, and played a leading role in the formation of the Presbyterian Church of America in 1936, renamed the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1939. These actions earned him a reputation as a controversialist and, in the judgment of his opponents, a schismatic.

This reputation is not entirely accidental. Machen did contend sharply against theological liberalism. He did leave Princeton when its reorganization made it impossible, in his judgment, to continue the theological tradition for which it had long stood. He did defy the Presbyterian church’s order to abandon the Independent Board. But Machen did not understand himself as the representative of a new religious party. He regarded himself as a confessional Presbyterian, an orthodox Calvinist, and an heir of Old Princeton.

This self-understanding is crucial for interpreting his opposition to the Social Gospel. Machen was not simply defending older customs against modern reforms. Nor was he resisting every attempt to address poverty, injustice, education, labor, or public morality. He believed that something much deeper was at stake: the nature of Christianity itself.

The Social Gospel’s Appeal—and Its Danger

The Social Gospel arose in response to real human suffering. Industrialization had brought extraordinary economic development, but it had also produced overcrowded cities, dangerous working conditions, labor exploitation, and widespread poverty. Theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch and other Social Gospel leaders challenged the churches to recognize that Christianity concerned not only isolated individuals but also institutions, social relationships, and public life. At its best, the movement exposed Protestant complacency and called Christians to reckon with forms of injustice they had too easily ignored.

Machen’s concern was not that the Social Gospel cared about these things. His concern was that it frequently redefined Christianity in order to address them. Sin became less a rebellion against God and guilt before his judgment and more selfishness, oppression, or social maladjustment. Salvation became less deliverance from condemnation through the atoning work of Christ and more the moral advancement of humanity. The kingdom of God became less the sovereign reign of God inaugurated through Christ and more a program of social reconstruction. Jesus became less the incarnate Son of God who died for sins and rose from the dead and more the supreme teacher of brotherhood. Christ and the gospel were increasingly valued as instruments of social progress rather than received as the Savior and the saving message of God.

As these changes accumulated, the church itself was redefined. It became less the steward of the mysteries of God and more an agency of social uplift. Its ministers became religious technicians, moral educators, or social reformers. Its mission was increasingly measured by the improvement of society rather than by the faithful proclamation of Christ crucified and risen.

The Gospel Before the Imperative

Machen’s objection was, therefore, theological before it was political or institutional. Christianity, he argued, is first a revealed and redemptive religion. It begins not with what man must do for God, but with what God has done for sinners in Jesus Christ. That distinction lies at the center of Christianity and Liberalism, published in 1923. Machen argued that liberal Protestantism was not merely a defective or incomplete form of Christianity. It was a different religion altogether. Historic Christianity was redemptive; liberalism was essentially nonredemptive. It retained Christian words while changing their meanings.

Machen expressed the difference in one of his most memorable sentences: “Liberalism is altogether in the imperative mood, while Christianity begins with a triumphant indicative.”¹ Liberalism begins with commands: Imitate Jesus, establish brotherhood, improve society, build the kingdom. Christianity begins with an announcement: God has acted, Christ has died for sinners, Christ has risen, and redemption has been accomplished.

Christianity certainly contains imperatives. It commands love of God and neighbor. It demands holiness, justice, mercy, and self-denial. But those commands are not themselves the gospel. They rest on the prior announcement of divine grace. The Christian does not act in order to complete Christ’s saving work. He acts because Christ’s work is complete.

This explains why Machen cared so deeply about doctrine. Doctrine was not an intellectual ornament added to Christian life. It declared the meaning of God’s saving acts. As Machen famously wrote, “‘Christ died’—that is history; ‘Christ died for our sins’—that is doctrine.”² The bare event of Christ’s death is not yet the gospel. The gospel proclaims what his death accomplished.

Without that revealed meaning, the cross may be treated as an example of courage, self-sacrifice, or solidarity with suffering humanity. It may inspire people to labor for a better world. But an inspirational cross cannot atone for sin. A moralized Jesus cannot reconcile the guilty to God. A symbolic resurrection cannot justify sinners.

“The primitive Church,” Machen wrote, “was concerned not merely with what Jesus had said, but also, and primarily, with what Jesus had done.” The world was to be redeemed “through the proclamation of an event.”³Christianity did not begin as a society organized around the ethical principles of a deceased teacher. It began with the news that the crucified Christ had risen and his death had been the saving act of God.

Machen’s emphasis on accomplished redemption also explains his concern about the depth of sin. The Social Gospel frequently presented humanity’s problem in social or environmental terms. Change the conditions in which people live, improve their education, reform unjust institutions, and human beings will increasingly become what they ought to be.

Machen did not deny the value of improved conditions or just institutions. He did deny that such reforms could reach the root of the human problem. “Man is not merely ill,” he wrote, “but he is dead, in trespasses and sins.” What is needed is not merely social rehabilitation but, as Machen wrote, “a new life,” “given by the Holy Spirit in regeneration.”⁴ Social reform may restrain evil, relieve suffering, protect the weak, and punish wrongdoing. These are genuine goods. But it cannot remove guilt before God or renew the human heart. No arrangement of society can make the sinner righteous. No political program can raise the spiritually dead.

The gospel therefore directs the sinner away from his own moral achievement and toward Christ. “Christ will do everything or nothing,” Machen wrote, “and the only hope is to throw ourselves unreservedly on His mercy and trust Him for all.”⁵ Faith is not another human work added to Christ’s contribution. It is the empty hand receiving the gift of salvation.

This did not make Christianity barren or socially indifferent. Machen readily acknowledged that the gospel produces obedience and good works. “The result of such faith is a new life and all good works,” he wrote, “but the salvation itself is an absolutely free gift of God.”⁶ The order is decisive. Good works are the fruit of salvation, not its substance or foundation.

The same order governed Machen’s understanding of Christianity’s place in society. Christianity, he acknowledged, “will indeed accomplish many useful things in this world.” It may strengthen families, encourage honesty, restrain cruelty, produce generosity, and contribute to a healthy community. Yet, he immediately added, if Christianity is accepted merely to accomplish those things, “it is not Christianity.”⁷ This is one of Machen’s most penetrating criticisms of the Social Gospel. Christianity must not be made the servant of a supposedly higher social goal. The church does not preach Christ because Christianity is useful to civilization. It preaches Christ because he is Savior and Lord. Social benefits may follow, but they cannot become the standard by which the gospel is valued.

What Gospel Would the Church Send?

The conflict became concrete in the controversy over Presbyterian missions. The decisive question was no longer simply how theologians defined Christianity. The question was what message the church was actually sending into the world. In 1932, Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen’s Inquiry After One Hundred Years proposed a new understanding of Protestant foreign missions. The report reflected a broad mainline desire to restate the missionary enterprise in terms acceptable to modern religious thought. It retained the language of missions and evangelism but altered their content.

The report spoke of Christians seeking knowledge of God alongside the adherents of other religions. It broadened evangelism to include education, medicine, philanthropy, and the quiet influence of Christian character. It encouraged cooperation with morally constructive forces within non-Christian religions and resisted older claims about the exclusive necessity of faith in Christ. Machen did not object to missionaries operating schools, hospitals, or relief ministries. Protestant missions had long included such work. The question was whether these works remained subordinate to the commission to proclaim Christ or had been detached from that commission and made ends in themselves.

The uniqueness of Christ stood at the center of the dispute. “Salvation,” Machen wrote, “was not merely through Christ, but it was only through Christ. In that little word ‘only’ lay all the offence.”⁸ Once that “only” was surrendered, missions inevitably changed. Missionaries no longer went primarily as heralds announcing the only Savior of sinners. They became participants in a common religious search or agents of education and social improvement.

For Machen, this was the Social Gospel translated into denominational policy. The theological transformation he had described in Christianity and Liberalism was no longer confined to books and seminaries. It had entered mission boards, promotional literature, and official church agencies. This created a crisis of conscience. If the official Presbyterian mission boards tolerated or supported a nonredemptive message, ministers and church members were being required to finance work that contradicted the gospel and the church’s own confession. Machen therefore helped form the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, whose purpose was to support missionary work faithful to Scripture and the Westminster Standards.

The Presbyterian General Assembly responded by ordering ministers associated with the Independent Board to resign from it. Machen refused. His answer was direct: “I cannot obey the order.”⁹ He did not regard this as rebellion against legitimate Presbyterian authority. He believed the church had exceeded its authority by commanding support for agencies that had departed from the church’s own doctrinal standards.

Machen was tried and suspended from the ministry. The judicial proceedings largely refused to consider his allegations about the doctrinal condition of the mission boards. The institutional question—whether he had disobeyed the church—was treated as though it could be separated from the theological question of what the church was commanding him to support.

Doctrine Must Govern Institutions

For Machen, the two questions could not be separated. Doctrine had to govern institutions. If Christianity was true, then its truth had to determine what seminaries taught, what mission boards proclaimed, and what church courts required. Westminster Seminary was therefore more than a refuge for displaced conservatives. It was an institutional argument.¹⁰ The Independent Board was an institutional argument. The new Presbyterian church formed in 1936—later renamed the Orthodox Presbyterian Church—likewise understood itself not as a new sect but as a continuation of historic confessional Presbyterianism.¹¹

The movement from doctrine to institution is the key to understanding Machen’s fight. Theological liberalism redefined the gospel. Denominational agencies spread that redefinition. Church courts demanded support for those agencies. Machen concluded that faithfulness required more than writing books and lodging protests. It required the formation of institutions capable of carrying the redemptive gospel forward.

This does not mean that Machen lacked a social vision. He wrote forcefully about education, parental rights, liberty of conscience, and the dangers of bureaucratic centralization. He opposed the state’s monopolization of education and warned against forms of social management that diminished human freedom and responsibility. But his social vision was not the Social Gospel. It was ordered around the church, the family, Christian education, liberty, and the conversion and sanctification of sinners. He did not believe the institutional church had been commissioned to reconstruct society. Nor did he believe that social usefulness could define the purpose of Christianity.

Machen guarded the order of the Christian faith. God acts before man responds. Redemption grounds obedience. Doctrine gives meaning to history. Regeneration precedes true reform. Social consequences flow from the gospel, but they are not the gospel. His answer to the Social Gospel was therefore not simply no. It was a deeper yes: yes to Scripture, yes to the saving acts of God in Christ, yes to the atoning cross and bodily resurrection, yes to regeneration by the Holy Spirit, yes to missions that proclaim Christ as the only Savior, and yes to churches governed by confession rather than the moral fashions of the age.

Machen opposed the Social Gospel where it became another gospel. He did so because he believed that sinners needed more than moral instruction, improved surroundings, or a more efficient society. They needed reconciliation with God. They needed forgiveness. They needed new life. They needed the eternal Son, who became incarnate, lived in perfect righteousness, died for sinners, and was raised for their justification.

Why remember Machen, besides the fact that it is his birthday? Because the tenacity and faithfulness he displayed in defending the gospel are as necessary today as they were in his own time. We remember him not merely because his work mattered in the controversies of the 1920s and 1930s, but because the church is still fighting the same fundamental battle. Theological liberalism continues to retain Christian words while emptying them of their biblical meaning. Christ is still reduced to a moral teacher, salvation to human improvement, and the church’s mission to social usefulness.

Machen reminds us that the church does not serve the world by offering it a diluted Christianity. It serves the world by proclaiming the whole counsel of God and the only Savior of sinners. Commemorating Machen is more than an exercise in Presbyterian history. It should renew our resolve to recognize false gospels, to resist institutional compromise, and to confess without embarrassment that sinners need more than reform: they need forgiveness, regeneration, and reconciliation with God through Jesus Christ.

Notes

1. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Macmillan, 1923), 41.
2. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 24.
3. Christianity and Liberalism, 25.
4. Christianity and Liberalism, 125.
5. Christianity and Liberalism, 22.
6. Christianity and Liberalism, 129.
7. Christianity and Liberalism, 137.
8. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 111.
9. “Syracuse Swan Song: The 148th General Assembly,” The Presbyterian Guardian, June 22, 1936: 130. See also the account of the Independent Board controversy in Edwin H. Rian, The Presbyterian Conflict (Eerdmans, 1940).
10. On the purpose and founding of Westminster Theological Seminary, see J. Gresham Machen, “Westminster Theological Seminary: Its Purpose and Plan,” in Selected Shorter Writings of J. Gresham Machen, ed. D. G. Hart (P&R, 2004), 187–205.
11. For the new church’s understanding of itself as continuing historic Presbyterianism, see “The Act of Association,” The Presbyterian Guardian, June 22, 1936: cover; and R. B. Kuiper, “Why Separation Was Necessary,” The Presbyterian Guardian 2, no. 11 (September 12, 1936): 225–27.

©Everett Henes. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• Everett Henes

  

  Everett Henes (MDiv, ThM, DMin) is pastor of Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church, where he has served since 2008. He is husband to Kimberly and father of five children and grandfather of five (and counting!). He teaches US History and Philosophy of History for Jackson College in Michigan. He is currently working towards a PhD in Humanities with a focus in US Religious History from Faulkner University. In his spare time, he enjoys competing in powerlifting and strongman and teaching homeschoolers Taekwondo.

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