We’re continuing our series on American Presbyterian history, focusing specifically on the Northern Presbyterian Church during the 1910s and 1920s. This period sets the stage for the formation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1936. While we’re leaving out important topics like missions, which were exploding during this era, our focus remains on the theological controversies that shaped these pivotal decades.

Last week we discussed Charles Briggs and his trial, which led to the revision of the Westminster Confession. According to some, this represented the triumph of the new school vision of a broadening, less confessional church. To understand the significance of these events, we must grasp the scale we’re discussing.

The Size and Growth of the Northern Presbyterian Church

In 1900, the Northern Presbyterian Church reached one million members. Remember, this denomination started with just a handful of people in the early 1700s. Two hundred years later, it had grown to one million members.

What’s often overlooked in histories of this era is the continued explosive growth. From 1900 to 1920, the Northern Presbyterian Church grew from one million to 1.6 million people, gaining 600,000 members over twenty years. To put this in perspective, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church today has about 30,000 communicant members. We’re talking about a body an order of magnitude larger than the OPC.

Around 1920, the PCUSA was baptizing 40,000 babies annually and 40,000 adult members, totaling 80,000 baptisms every year. That’s more babies baptized annually than the entire OPC membership today. When the OPC formed in 1936, it started with about 5,000 people, making it barely a blip on the scale of the Northern Church.

This rapid growth inevitably impacted the church’s ongoing struggle over its identity.

Three Interconnected Movements

Three movements were influencing the Presbyterian Church during this time, though they weren’t identical: dispensationalism, premillennialism, and fundamentalism. The early 1900s, along with the late 1800s, represented a time of tremendous change in America and worldwide. Industrialization, urbanization, the rise of modern science, and the establishment of modern educational institutions with doctoral degrees were transforming society.

The Rise of Fundamentalism

During this period of change, some in the church pushed back against modernism in both culture and church. They became identified as fundamentalists, a term that initially came from a series of publications starting around 1910 called “The Fundamentals.”

These publications were funded by Lyman Stewart, a Presbyterian dispensationalist oil baron. Stewart had originally intended to enter ministry and had saved $150 for seminary. Instead, he invested that money in the oil business during the Pennsylvania oil boom and became extremely wealthy, though he remained a godly man. He used his wealth to fund these theological essays on topics like the virgin birth of Christ, the fallacies of higher criticism, justification by faith, the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, the errors of Mormonism, and what would become the Jehovah’s Witness movement.

Contributors to “The Fundamentals” included B.B. Warfield, the prominent Presbyterian theologian; Scofield of the Scofield Reference Bible; and even Charles Erdman, who would later become an opponent of J. Gresham Machen.

Machen’s View of Fundamentalism

Machen later expressed ambivalence about being called a fundamentalist. He preferred the term “orthodoxy,” asking why Christians needed this new term when they already had “orthodox Christians.” This preference likely influenced the choice of the name “Orthodox Presbyterian Church” after Machen’s death.

Historian George Marsden defines fundamentalism as “militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicalism.” The term “militant” refers to aggressive opposition, not military action.

In 1935, a year before the OPC’s formation, Machen clarified his position:

I never call myself a fundamentalist. There is indeed no inherent objection to the term, and if this disjunction is between fundamentalism and modernism, then I am willing to call myself a fundamentalist of the most pronounced type. But after all, what I prefer to call myself is not a fundamentalist, but a Calvinist, that is, an adherent of the Reformed faith. As such, I regard myself as standing in the central current of the Christian life, the current which flows down from the Word of God through Augustine and Calvin, which has found noteworthy expression in America in the great tradition represented by Charles Hodge and Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield and the other representatives of the Princeton School.

Machen saw himself not as a fundamentalist, but as a confessional Presbyterian.

Distinguishing Machen from Popular Fundamentalism

Daryl Hart, an OPC ruling elder and the world’s leading expert on Machen, makes an important distinction:

Machen was indeed concerned about the dangers of cultural modernism that cultural modernism posed to a traditional faith, but he was even more worried about modernism of American Protestantism and the cultural outlook upon which Protestant reconstructions of Christianity rested. For Machen, the moves by Protestants to modernize the faith and not efforts of cultural modernists to move beyond Christianity comprise the greatest danger to Christianity.

While Machen was concerned about challenges from modern science and philosophy, his greatest concern was the church itself adapting to the modern age by changing its theology.

J. Gresham Machen: Early Life and Background

John Gresham Machen was born July 28, 1881, in Baltimore. Though we don’t think of Baltimore as a southern city today, it was considered southern in the 1800s. Many southerners had moved there after the Civil War. Maryland was a border state during the war, remaining in the Union but maintaining slavery.

Machen’s father was a prominent attorney who eventually argued before the Supreme Court. Originally Episcopal, he began attending Franklin Street Presbyterian Church, a Southern Presbyterian congregation in Baltimore, even before marriage.

Machen’s mother was from Macon, Georgia, and came from a wealthy southern family. Her father served as a ruling elder in the Southern Presbyterian Church for 44 years. She was exceptionally godly and scholarly, later authoring “The Bible in Browning” about Victorian poet Robert Browning’s use of scripture. She was twenty-two years younger than her husband, who married in his forties.

The family attended Franklin Street Presbyterian Church, where Machen became a communicant member at age 14 in 1895.

The Influence of Home Education

Machen later reflected on his education:

In Baltimore, I attended a good private school. It was purely secular. In it, I learned nothing about the Bible or the great things of the Christian faith. But I did not need to learn about these things in school, for I learned them from my mother at home. That was the best school of all. And in it, without any merit of my own, I will venture to say that I had acquired a better knowledge of the contents of the Bible at 12 years of age than is possessed by many theological students of the present day. The shorter catechism was not omitted. I repeated it perfectly, question and answer, at a very tender age, and the divine revelation of which is so glorious a summary was stored up in my mind and heart.

Like B.B. Warfield before him, Machen didn’t grow up on a Kentucky farm but in a wealthy southern family with parents who loved the Lord and took responsibility for their children’s spiritual nurture. His parents also read “Pilgrim’s Progress” to him, which had a lasting influence.

Ned Stonehouse, an early Westminster Seminary faculty member who wrote Machen’s biography, noted the significance of this home instruction:

There was moreover careful instruction of the shorter catechism and a commitment to memory of questions and answers. To this, he later attributed to a significant degree his love of the noble tradition of the Reformed faith as expressed in its classic symbols as over against the meager skeletal creeds of a mere fundamentalism.

Machen believed in the core doctrines that fundamentalists emphasized, but he saw himself as a confessional Presbyterian whose theology went far beyond skeletal creeds.

University Years and Early Career

At 17, Machen attended Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, studying classics and graduating in 1901 at age 20. Uncertain about his future, he briefly went to Chicago planning to study law and banking at the University of Chicago but didn’t like it and left.

In 1902, he decided to study theology at Princeton Seminary. Though a Southerner in the Southern Presbyterian Church, he chose Princeton, eventually joining the Northern Presbyterian Church from which the OPC would emerge.

At Princeton, Warfield and other distinguished faculty taught at this large institution. Machen enrolled simultaneously as a master’s of arts student at Princeton University, studying with Woodrow Wilson, who was then university president and later became U.S. President.

Despite attending seminary, Machen told his father he wasn’t pursuing ministry and wouldn’t seek ordination until age 32.

A Character Who Enjoyed Life

Machen was quite a character during his seminary years. He complained that the seminary was run like a boarding school and compared the uneven tennis courts to the Swiss Alps. Later, as a professor, he helped oversee resurfacing those courts.

He had extensive travel experience, having climbed the Matterhorn at one point. He called afternoon classes “an evil invention” that prohibited fun and recreation. He traveled to New York City for plays, attended Johns Hopkins lacrosse and football games, rode his bike from Princeton to Philadelphia for games, went ice skating on the Delaware Canal, and at least once skipped Hebrew class for a Princeton football game.

Machen enjoyed life and its pleasures while excelling academically at two intensive graduate institutions.

The Crucial Year in Germany

In 1905, having finished degrees at both Princeton University and Princeton Seminary, Machen followed the common practice of studying theology in Germany. There he encountered Wilhelm Hermann, arguably the most prominent liberal Christian scholar of the time.

Hermann taught that Christianity was primarily moral, not dogmatic. For Hermann, Christianity wasn’t fundamentally about theology but about how we live. We don’t need to worry about the Bible’s historical accuracy because what we need is its moral teaching to follow Christ’s example.

This theology deeply challenged Machen. He wrote to his father: “Hermann speaks right to the heart. And I have been thrown into all confusion by what he says. So much deeper is his devotion to Christ than anything I have known in myself during the past few years.”

To his brother, he wrote: “Hermann affirms very little of what I have become accustomed to regard as essential Christianity. And yet there is no doubt in my mind that he is a Christian, and a Christian of a peculiarly earnest type.”

This year in Germany could have changed Machen’s entire trajectory. However, while wrestling with liberal theology, he somehow concluded that the church needed intellectually engaged study and teaching of scripture. Despite his past frustrations with Princeton, he decided it would be the right place for such work.

Return to Princeton and Teaching Career

After his year in Germany, Machen was offered a position as lecturer of New Testament at Princeton Seminary, teaching Greek alongside B.B. Warfield, Francis Patton, and other faculty. True to form, after his first faculty meeting, he wrote that it was “long and stupid.”

Starting in 1906, Machen began establishing his reputation as a New Testament scholar. In 1912, he started teaching Sunday school to teenagers at First Presbyterian Church in Princeton, later becoming superintendent with one condition: he didn’t have to lead singing. In the 1920s, he became a stated supply preacher there.

To become an assistant professor, ordination was required. He was ordained in 1914 in the Northern Presbyterian Church and became assistant professor of New Testament in 1915.

Restlessness and Political Views

During this period, Machen showed considerable restlessness, considering leaving the seminary. Union Theological Seminary in Richmond (the Southern Presbyterian seminary, not the liberal one in New York) tried to recruit him. His lifelong single status may have contributed to this restlessness.

Machen held libertarian political views that influenced his perspective throughout life. He opposed U.S. involvement in World War I, though he was patriotic and wanted to help soldiers. These political views included opposition to jaywalking laws (which he saw as government overreach), establishment of national parks (federal overreach), a federal board of education, and a child labor amendment to the Constitution.

World War I Service

Though opposing the war, Machen wanted to support the soldiers. He considered becoming a chaplain but decided it wasn’t right for him. Instead, he took leave from Princeton and served with the YMCA in France, essentially mixing hot chocolate and providing comfort for soldiers.

His letters from the front (published in “Letters from the Front”) show how the war’s tragic realities humbled him and pushed him toward being more of a non-millennialist.

Post-War Unification Efforts

The era after World War I saw widespread unification efforts. The League of Nations was established in 1920. In Canada in 1925, the United Church of Canada was formed, uniting Methodists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians.

A similar organic union effort began in the United States during the war, initially involving 30 denominations seeking to become one church. By 1920, this was down to 18 denominations invited to form the United Churches of Christ in America, including Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Methodists, and others.

The 1920 General Assembly of the PCUSA passed a resolution to join this union. Machen attended this assembly, and this effort radicalized the remaining 16-17 years of his life.

Opposition Within Princeton

Two Princeton Seminary faculty members, J. Ross Stevenson and Charles Erdman, vocally supported this union. Erdman had even written for “The Fundamentals,” yet now supported joining a national union church. This concerned Machen deeply. These men claimed to be Presbyterian and believe the Bible and confession, yet supported ignoring all differences to unite as one denomination.

Stevenson later became Princeton Seminary president and would claim: “I wish to state most emphatically that I do not want an inclusive seminary at Princeton, as would include modernist liberals or those of whatever name who are disloyal to the standards of the Presbyterian Church.”

Yet both supported the union effort, creating significant conflict with Machen, who insisted that Presbyterian distinctions and catechetical teachings mattered.

Machen’s Response to Union Efforts

Machen was not impressed by the organic union plan. He wrote that it “left out not some, but practically all of the great essentials of the Christian faith.” The plan’s preamble “shows how utterly vague and nullifying would have been the testimony of such a merger” and demonstrated “that there were many in our church who seem perfectly indifferent to doctrine.”

Though the plan was defeated in the presbyteries, a third of them actually voted in favor, representing significant support.

Before this time, Machen had established himself as a conservative New Testament scholar. After this, he would rise to prominence not just in conservative Presbyterianism but in the broader fundamentalist movement as someone willing to fight for scripture against modernism.

The Death of Warfield and Changes at Princeton

In 1921, both the union effort failed and B.B. Warfield died. Machen said “the spirit of old Princeton left with Warfield.” He feared Princeton Seminary wouldn’t be the same.

Harry Emerson Fosdick’s Challenge

In 1922, a significant event occurred. Harry Emerson Fosdick, a liberal Baptist minister serving as stated supply preacher at First Presbyterian Church of New York City, preached a sermon called “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” that rocked Protestant America.

Fosdick argued:

Already all of us must have heard about the people who call themselves the fundamentalists. Their apparent intention is to drive out of the evangelical churches men and women of liberal opinions. We should not identify the fundamentalists with the conservatives. All fundamentalists are conservatives, but not all conservatives are fundamentalists. The best conservatives can give lessons to the liberals in a true liberality of spirit, but the fundamentalist program is essentially illiberal and intolerant.

Fosdick wanted conservatives who could share views with liberals doubting the Bible without insisting that church members believe the Bible. He mentioned fundamentalist insistence on the virgin birth, special theory of inspiration (caricaturing inerrancy), and substitutionary atonement.

John D. Rockefeller Jr. had 130,000 copies of this sermon printed and distributed. After Fosdick left First Presbyterian, Rockefeller brought him to a Baptist church and built a massive cathedral for him to preach in.

The Response and Machen’s Book

Clarence McCartney of Arch Street Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia quickly preached a response sermon: “Shall Unbelief Win?” This began a friendship between McCartney and Machen as they discussed responses to liberalism.

Following the union plan and Fosdick’s sermon, Machen was invited to speak at Moody Bible Institute’s conference, corresponding with the publication of his most important work: “Christianity and Liberalism.”

Machen wrote:

Christianity they will tell us is a life and not a doctrine. Now that seems to be a devout and pious utterance, but it is radically false all the same.

Machen argued that Christianity without historical foundation isn’t Christianity at all. If you try to have something like Christianity that’s merely moral and not based on biblical history, biblical inerrancy, and a Christ who lived, died, and was raised for us, you don’t have Christianity. You have a different religion, which he called liberalism.

Machen saw that what Hermann taught in Germany was invading the church and gutting Christianity of its substance. Following 1 Corinthians 15: “If Christ has not been raised, our hope is in vain.”

The Ordination Crisis

That same year, New York Presbytery ordained two Union Seminary graduates who would not affirm the virgin birth of Christ. This created immediate conflict at that year’s General Assembly, which once again affirmed five fundamentals of faith: inerrancy, virgin birth, vicarious atonement, bodily resurrection of Christ, and the reality of miracles.

The General Assembly issued corrective instruction to New York Presbytery about allowing a Baptist to minister in a Presbyterian Church.

Looking Ahead

This would lead to the Auburn Affirmation, where liberals would argue that the General Assembly lacked authority to require belief in these essentials, and furthermore, that these things weren’t even true anyway. This would create a major firestorm we’ll examine next week.

Conclusion

“Christianity and Liberalism” remains as relevant today as it was 100 years ago when Machen wrote it. Machen was an incredibly clear writer, and this book provides a powerful defense of what Christians need to believe: that Christ lived and died and was raised for us in reality.

The conflicts of this era weren’t merely academic debates but struggles over the very nature of Christianity itself. Machen’s insistence on confessional Presbyterianism and historical Christianity would shape the formation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and continue to influence conservative Presbyterianism today.