How J. Gresham Machen Should be Treated by Modern Readers
In the summer of 1932, the Presbyterian scholar J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937) took a break from a speaking tour across Britain and France to climb the Alps for a month. As a bachelor who had inherited investments worth millions of today’s dollars from his wealthy parents, Machen possessed the freedom to mountaineer whenever he wished. Whether he had the physical capacity was less certain. An enthusiastic—but untalented—sportsman in younger life, by 1932, Machen was fifty-one, sickly, and 20 pounds overweight. He would die less than five years later from pneumonia caught on an ill-advised preaching tour through North Dakota in December. Already in 1932, Machen’s doctor warned him to quit climbing.
Machen refused. For “the Matterhorn is a symbol as well as a mountain,” “the place where more than any other place on earth I had hoped all my life that I might stand,” as Machen later explained to a group of pastors. Thus, after two weeks of climbing practice and scaling lesser-known Swiss peaks, Machen began the ascent of the Matterhorn. Bad weather forced him to shelter for a week in a hut halfway up the mountain. But finally, on the eighth day of climbing, Machen reached the summit and looked down on Europe “from its very center.”
As he sat there, with his feet over Italy and Germany and France to his left and right, Machen “saw the vastness of the Italian plain, which was like a symbol of infinity . . . the whole glorious round of glittering peaks, bathed in an unearthly light.” To Machen, Europe was “that fairest of all the lands of the earth,” where “humanity has put forth its best” and “looked upward to God.” But from the Matterhorn, “the history of the race seems to pass before you in an instant . . . you desire to weep. It is a pathetic thing to contemplate the history of mankind.” From the Matterhorn, Machen recognized—with fascism, technocracy, and planned economies in view—that “that we are living in a time of sad decadence,” that “the end of that European civilization” approached, and that “Luther [may] prove to have lived in vain.” “I can see no escape from that conclusion in the signs of the times; too inexorable seems to me to be the march of events. No, I can see only one alternative . . . [that] There is, far above any earthly mountain peak of vision, a God high and lifted up who, though He is infinitely exalted, yet cares for His children among men.” According to Machen, this memory stayed with him forever as “a very terrible thing”—a Wordsworthian spot of time that came to him “in hours of darkness and discouragement.” Indeed, Machen kept retelling the story of his Matterhorn climb in essays and letters, throughout the frustrated last years of his life.1
Machen’s experience on the Matterhorn—at least, as he depicted it later—drew upon three separate intellectual identities that shaped him as a writer. First, and most importantly, Machen was a Reformed churchman, committed to a supernatural God who both transcended creation and revealed himself in it. But alongside his Christianity, Machen’s experience also shows him to be a classicist, who believed that a specific cultural tradition—the art, literature, and philosophy of Old Europe, along with its Greco-Roman antecedents—was a model fixing the best that humanity could achieve through natural reason. And Machen shows himself a Romantic, who thought that encountering the sublime in nature and art inspired pleasure, awe, and terror in a way that somehow ennobled or enlightened the soul.
Too often, Machen is reduced to the first identity. Many well-read Protestants have skimmed Machen’s best-known work—Christianity and Liberalism (1923)—and vaguely remember it as a historical witness to the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy and a warning about the perennial dangers of theological liberalism. Churchmen regularly invoke Machen’s name on lists of the Reformed pantheon, alongside Hodge, Warfield, and Bavinck. As if Machen’s work were comparable in topic and style to these systematic theologians.
But Machen was an essayist and a New Testament scholar, not a theologian. His writings more often digress into educational theory, social criticism, and the political disputes of his time than they elucidate infralapsarianism or Eucharistic theology. He was a man who loved a good argument and thought that “the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight.” Machen shares more with the twentieth-century apologists like C. S. Lewis or G. K. Chesterton, than he does with Reformed theologians.2 He was perhaps the most forceful writer, as a writer, that the American church has yet produced. No wonder that non-Christian literary figures such as Harold Bloom and H.L. Mencken have admired Machen’s prose, without believing any of his doctrines. If Machen is underread today (he certainly is), perhaps it is because we expect him to be someone that he never pretended to be and spent much of his life trying to avoid becoming—an Old Princeton systematician.3
As an apologist, Machen devotes little attention to countering the arguments of atheists or agnostics against faith in Christ. There are places in his works where the “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord” trilemma and similar techniques of classical apologetics appears—his essay on “History and Faith” (1915), for instance—but they are rare. Rather, as Machen’s most recent biographer has stressed4, Machen believed that it was the cultured admirers of Christianity, not its despisers, who represented the greatest threat to faith in the modern world. It was those learned and humanitarian persons who valued Christianity’s morals and psychological consolation without accepting its supernatural dogmas—the Jordan Petersons and Jonathan Haidts of our own day—who constituted the greatest temptations to apostasy. Machen’s apologetics, then, were always aimed at demonstrating the impossibility of having Christianity without Christ, at inviting these cultured admirers to try out real doctrine.
Nowhere is this better displayed than in What is Faith (1925): probably Machen’s second-best-known work, celebrating the centennial of its publication this year. What is Faith, based on a series of lectures that Machen gave at Grove City College at the height of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy, seeks “to defend the primacy of the intellectual” against the “anti-intellectual tendency in the modern world” and the “false and disastrous opposition . . . between knowledge and faith” (22) that this tendency sets up. Pragmaticism and mysticism—not unbelief—are Machen’s primary opponent, by which Machen meant intellectual movements that reduce Christianity to either social work or ineffable personal experience. And against these foes, Machen exalts the revelation of God in Christ and the disciplined reasoning of grammatico-historical exegesis.
Yet What is Faith is also a highly Romantic work that contrasts the intellectual contemplation that comes from encountering God in the sublime with non-rational mysticism. Consider this passage on how humans acquire knowledge of God through general revelation. “There are some men who look upon a mountain as a mere mass of rock and stone, a thunderstorm as a mere phenomenon of the atmosphere, and a fair flower as a mere combination of leaves and petals. God pity them—the poor blind souls! But when the eyes of our souls are opened, then as we stand before a great mountain range we shall say: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills: from whence shall my help come?’” (76). “The contemplation of the universe . . . brings us to the very brink of infinity; the world is too vast for us, and all around it is enveloped by an impenetrable mystery” (76). Unless the Holy Spirit instills faith in the soul, God in nature is only a source of terror and despair. “The mysterious power that explains the world still, we say, will sweep in and overwhelm us. . .. [Christ] carried us a little on our way, and then left us, helpful as before, on the brink of eternity” (115).
Moreover, according to Machen, Romantic introspection brings humans to gloom just as much as meditation upon the natural world. “[T]here is also an infinity within. It is revealed in the voice of conscience. In the sense of guilt there is something that is removed from all relativity; we stand there face to face with the absolute. True, in the humdrum of life we often forget; but the strange experience comes ever again. It may be in the reading or witnessing of a great drama5; the great tragedies, in the world’s literature, are those that pull aside the curtain of the commonplace and makes us feel anew the stark irrevocableness of guilt. It may also be, alas, in the contemplation of our own lives. But however conscience speaks, it is the voice of God. The law reveals a Lawgiver and . . . the Lawgiver’s awful righteousness” (76-77).
For Machen, saving faith is the only relief from the despair of general revelation. Here, Machen’s Romanticism approaches existentialism; no beneficial knowledge of God is possible apart from an I-Thou encounter.
Machen thought all intercourse between persons as mysterious, with the potential to transform someone in an instant. Thus, even the knowledge of God that Christians have in scripture is analogized, in Machen’s work, to “our relation with an earthly friend” (77). For “what makes our relation to another person, whether a human friend or the eternal God, such an ennobling thing is the knowledge which we have of that character of that person,” acquired through “direct contact . . . in the depths of the soul” (37). Once Christ is “revealed as very God” and we make “the supreme venture of faith . . . a mystery to us who possess it,” we find that “[t]here is now for us no awful Beyond of mystery and fear. We cannot, indeed, explain the world, but we rejoice now that we cannot explain it” (116-117).
Machen has often been criticized for holding a supposedly naïve epistemology that fails to wrestle with Kant and treats facts, history, and science as accessible to human reason without regard to the noetic effects of sin. And indeed, there are passages in Machen’s writings—especially in his early essays—that bolster this criticism. Machen’s rhetoric can overflow beyond what his strict logic should allow.
Machen was a classicist, and he shared many suppositions that Kant and his followers condemned in eighteenth-century Classicism. But Machen was also a Romantic, who believed in strict limits on human reason. Even the sublime can only enlighten once the Holy Spirit has opened our eyes. And, for Machen, encountering God, or indeed any person, is much greater than gathering true propositions about that person.
Machen will be read much more often and much more fruitfully if we stop trying to treat him as a theologian and as a source for the theological debates between fundamentalists and modernists. Let us read him instead as a model for how Christian learning speaks to the controversies of the modern world. Let us read him as we would read a Lewis or a Chesterton—as an apologist who presses his readers, as much through his rhetoric as through his argument, to look into the mysteries of this life and see God there.
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