Common Sense Tragedy

Machen's Hope:
The Transformation of a Modernist in the New Princeton
by richard e. burnett
eerdmans, 638 pages, $45.99

Every year, in a course I teach on American history, I make my students read J. Gresham Machen. If you want a taste of early-twentieth-century Protestant ­fundamentalism—and have no patience for stereotypes of red-faced ­Bible thumpers ranting about monkey trials—you could do a lot worse than this conservative Presbyterian scholar. His 1923 book, Christianity and Liberalism, argues that liberal Christianity is not a heterodox form of Nicene faith. It is a different religion entirely: paganism in progressive academic dress. To prepare students for the reading, I explain Machen’s 1929 break with Princeton Theological Seminary and his later break with the Northern Presbyterian Church, as well as his role in founding a more conservative seminary and denomination. Most history books present these events as the highlights of his career. After all, fundamentalists don’t compromise or learn from their enemies, right? They hunker down with like-­minded believers, nursing their revulsion from modern scholarship and cultural change.

But Machen defied caricature. A product of Johns Hopkins University and graduate study in Germany who contributed to the New York Times, he was “not simply another Fundamentalist on the order of ­William ­Jennings Bryan and the simian faithful of Appalachia,” wrote his grudging admirer H. L. Mencken. Richard Burnett’s deeply researched biography, Machen’s Hope, goes further than previous studies in challenging everything that readers think they know about what makes a fundamentalist.

Burnett barely mentions church schisms. He makes a persuasive case that this thin-skinned Calvinist was, for most of his life, not a poster boy for fundamentalism but a “conservative modernist” who urged Christian scholars to defend old-time religion using the cutting-edge methods of the research university. Burnett’s book examines the transformations of early-twentieth-century American intellectual life through the story of a man who wished that so much had worked out differently. It invites readers to ponder what higher education would look like today if history had not betrayed Machen’s ideals.

The son of a lawyer and a well-traveled, theologically minded mother, Machen grew up in upper-class Baltimore. Both of his parents read Greek. His mother wrote a book on the poetry of Robert Browning. Machen studied classics at Johns Hopkins, which had been founded only a quarter-century earlier with the goal of overthrowing the traditional American model of church-run liberal arts colleges. Instead of inculcating ­students with a Bible-based curriculum meant to transmit timeless wisdom, Hopkins emulated the cosmopolitan research universities that had taken root in Germany. Faculty focused on research breakthroughs rather than teaching. They answered to peer experts in their fields, not to the guardians of religious orthodoxy. Machen graduated as valedictorian in 1901, a full-throated advocate for the new university paradigm. He later wrote that the founding of Hopkins in 1876 had spurred Americans’ “inner intellectual independence,” much as 1776 had inaugurated their quest for political freedom.

A year at Princeton Theological Seminary left him cold. He found his fellow students dull and his courses far less rigorous than classes at Hopkins. On the advice of his undergraduate mentor, the classicist Basil Gildersleeve, he fled to Germany. He spent the fall in Marburg and the spring in Göttingen, hearing lectures by liberal theologians whose piety inspired him, even if they seemed iffy on Jesus’s resurrection, the reliability of the Gospels, and other basic articles of faith.

When he learned about the Germans’ new “history-of-religions” method—which treated Christianity as one faith among many, shaped by Jewish and Greco-Roman influences—he did not flee to firmer ground. Instead, Machen mined their approach for ways to demonstrate the historical claims of Scripture, even as his studies fed his own crises of faith and vocation. When his mother worried that exposure to the latest trends in biblical criticism would weaken his confidence in the Bible, he brushed off her objections. “There is just one way for me to attain a strong Christian faith—namely by patient, absolutely free investigation of all contending views in a large-minded, reverent way,” he explained in a letter.

Machen’s family urged him to enter the ministry. He agonized and dodged. In letters home, he condemned his own failure to live by “what an ordinary man regards as the ordinary morals of the world.” After a year in Germany, he returned to Princeton seminary to teach the New Testament, and was finally ordained in 1914. Some historians have interpreted his enigmatic references to “deep-seated” moral faults that he begged his family “not to think you can understand”—and his life as a bachelor with no close female friends other than his mother—as evidence that Machen may have been sexually attracted to men.

Burnett takes no interest in such speculations. He does not mention the letters that have intrigued other ­historians, and stresses that matters of psychology lie beyond the scope of his project. Yet throughout the book’s long quotations from Machen’s correspondence—much of it with his mother, Minnie—his personality shines through. High-strung and sensitive to perceived slights, Machen fretted about whether his colleagues read his work and overinterpreted students’ indifference to his lectures. Over the years he came to appreciate more populist expressions of Christianity, but he remained a snob, and sometimes dismissed university administrators he disliked as “common.” Professors across the street at Princeton University may have snubbed Machen because they looked down on evangelicals. But they also avoided working with him because he was a difficult colleague.

Burnett also downplays Machen’s Southern identity: the plantation-owning grandfather; the mentor (Gildersleeve) who fought for the Confederacy; the visit to Gettysburg, where Machen lamented the “Yankee victory” that began America’s long decline into “progressive disregard of the principles of constitutional government.” He narrates without comment Machen’s hysterical reaction to the seminary’s decision to let a black student live in the dormitory where Machen resided (previously, administrators had rented rooms in town for the seminary’s few black students). The event so scandalized Machen that he considered moving out and even quitting his job.

These angles—sex and race—obsess many historians working today, and in a full biography they would deserve more scrutiny than they receive here. However, Burnett’s subject is not really Machen as an individual, but rather the great tragedy of Machen’s life: his failed attempt to reconcile secular academia with orthodox Christianity.

He was no typical fundamentalist. He had no interest in end-times prognostications or fights about evolution. For most of his career, he did not use the term “biblical inerrancy.” This fundamentalist shibboleth, he feared, led to caricatures of the biblical authors as divinely inspired stenographers, and encouraged pointless appeals to long-lost “original autographs.” Machen preferred more traditional language describing the Bible as “the only infallible rule for faith and practice”—which still denied the presence of errors in the Bible, but kept the focus on basic presuppositions about historical reliability, divine authority, and the redeeming work of Christ, rather than small ­discrepancies.

In 1912, we find him preaching to seminarians on “the Scientific Preparation of the Minister” and the need to cultivate a “real University atmosphere” at the seminary, while enthusiastically supporting Woodrow Wilson’s campaign for the White House as “Democracy’s only hope.” When Wilson served as president of Princeton University, Machen had become acquainted with him and cheered his efforts to raise the caliber of students and faculty. He politely overlooked ­Wilson’s decisions to end Sunday evening chapel and hire a notorious modernist to teach the university’s few remaining Bible courses.

Nevertheless, Machen recognized that orthodox Christianity was losing ground in favor of what one Princeton University president called “spiritualistic philosophy.” He did not feel at home in the seminary, either. Most of his colleagues ignored the German scholarship that had rocked the world of biblical criticism. Instead of honing their Greek and Hebrew, his students campaigned for English Bible classes and “practical” courses in sociology. During wartime service with the YMCA in France, Machen realized that even the ministry organizations he had once trusted were now promoting a vague social gospel instead of evangelical faith.

Throughout his career, Machen had trusted in “common sense.” Surely, he wrote, “no genuine historian could be satisfied” with a naturalist Jesus who was merely a moral exemplar and archetypal Jewish prophet. He clung to the idea that the empirical methods he had learned at Hopkins, Marburg, and Göttingen would convince anyone with an open mind—even scholars in mainstream academia—that Jesus was the Son of God and had risen from the dead. His determination to engage secular thought and culture would inspire a younger generation of evangelical teachers and evangelists. Men like Carl Henry, Harold Ockenga, and Francis Schaeffer studied with Machen or devoured his books, and looked to Machen’s example as they tried to lead a renaissance in conservative Protestant intellectual life in the years after World War II.

They had their work cut out for them, precisely because Machen had failed so badly, betrayed by the very tradition that had shaped him. He was a product of common sense realism, a philosophy that rebutted the skepticism of David Hume by insisting that all people could access the truth if they trusted their senses and the moral and logical principles that God impressed upon human minds. This worldview dominated American colleges and seminaries for most of the nineteenth century. At evangelical schools, it held sway for longer still. But as the research university model revolutionized elite academia, common sense impulses strangled their own Christian roots. The faculty of Princeton University, like secular academia more generally, replaced the God of Christianity with the gods of science and personal experience. They encouraged good behavior during “religion emphasis week” but paid little attention to the state of students’ souls.

Only in the last fifteen years of his life did Machen fully accept that he and his secular colleagues were working from different assumptions about the world. One must be willing to entertain the possibility of divine miracles and the reliability of Scripture before being able to consider the claims of the Gospel. “The minute a professing Christian admits that he can find neutral ground with non-Christians in the study of ‘religion’ in general, he has given up the battle,” Machen wrote in 1933. At Westminster Theological Seminary, which Machen helped found after leaving Princeton, students like Francis Schaeffer took to heart his example as a Christian thinker who engaged with secular thought rather than fleeing from it. They continued to appeal to common ground between Christians and nonbelievers, but often combined that traditional approach with “presuppositionalist” apologetics that cast religion’s encounter with modernity as a clash between incompatible worldviews, not a debate over shared evidence.

In the decades since Machen’s death in 1937, the trends he observed have accelerated. The “history of religions” method that thrilled him as a graduate student and disillusioned him later in his career paved the way for the rise of Religious Studies departments, which have divested Christianity of the privileged status it once enjoyed. For most of the twentieth century, plenty of professors across different disciplines continued to attend church, but—except on explicitly Christian campuses—most drew a strict line between their private spiritual lives and their work as teachers and researchers. In 2009, sociologists found that only about one-third of American professors were certain that God exists. Today “godless universities” remain a punching bag for conservative activists, just as they were a century ago.

What kind of academic environment would have satisfied Machen? In a pluralistic culture, should we take his vision seriously? Perhaps he would have accepted seminar discussions and conference panels that grant Christianity no special status, but do ask participants to acknowledge their own foundational assumptions. He would caution against the postmodern vogue for denying objective truth; he believed that Christ’s resurrection was a historical event, not a matter of personal opinion. But he would stress that we all have a starting point that shapes how we select and interpret evidence. As increasing numbers of intellectuals drifted from Christianity, it infuriated him to watch them treat their “spiritualistic philosophy” as a neutral baseline that needed no interrogation.

On most secular campuses today, modernist Protestantism has given way to an ambient philosophy that mixes naturalism and anemic liberalism with vulgarized Marx, Freud, and Foucault. Surveys show that the American public has frighteningly low confidence in higher education. The recent challenges to campus DEI policies and the left’s ­ongoing crisis over anti-Semitism in its ranks suggest that more and more people in academia are no longer content with unstated assumptions.

Crises bring opportunities for a frank discussion of foundations. Perhaps that discussion will involve a new entente between supernaturalist religion and modern intellectual inquiry. This does not mean that scholars should start footnoting personal revelations. But maybe it means that they should acknowledge, when relevant, that naturalistic assumptions are just that—assumptions. The Yale historian Carlos Eire recently tested the waters. In They Flew: A History of the Impossible, published last year, he examines eyewitness accounts of early modern people who claimed to see Catholic saints levitate and perform other miraculous feats. Eire explains that the book ­focuses more on “raising questions” than on answering them definitively. He vows to be “evenhandedly skeptical,” questioning implausible materialist explanations as often as he doubts the miraculous.

In my experience in the university classroom, students hunger for a chance to learn about other people’s worldviews, and to examine their own. Richard Burnett has persuaded me to assign, alongside Christianity and Liberalism, one or two of the letters from Machen’s student days, when he argued that “‘safe’ and ‘dangerous’ are words that must be banished absolutely from the vocabulary of the student. He must seek simply for the truth.” One of the most important lessons today’s undergraduates can learn is that no person, no matter how easily we might caricature him, is born with a mature set of beliefs. Even for Machen, faith was a struggle. We have the obligation to struggle, too.

Molly Worthen is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Image by Djkeddie, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.