J. Gresham Machen (d.1937): Among the Evangelicals?
This question regarding a deceased Christian scholar is neither impertinent or flippant. The truth is that Machen’s legacy is contested, with numerous interpreters insisting that the label ‘evangelical’ would not have been applicable to him. The basis for their objection will be examined. But this paper will maintain the applicability of this term to Machen on account of four lines of evidence.
1. Machen, with his colleagues, attracted student followers to Princeton and later from Princeton to Westminster because of his reputation as a defender of historic orthodoxy. Charles Woodbridge, Harold Ockenga, Cary Weisiger, Percy Crawford and Marcellus Kik all became his disciples in this way. Machen had lent enthusiastic support to the 1926.00 founding of a new evangelical student ministry (The League of Evangelical Students) which was soon present on more than 50.00 American college and university campuses. This organization linked Machen with evangelical Christian leaders in evangelical schools in Wheaton, Illinois, Xenia Ohio, and Dallas, Texas.
2. While not willing to self-identity as fundamentalist (he declined the presidency of Bryan College) he nevertheless openly associated with fundamentalists such as evangelist Billy Sunday on numerous occasions, ultimately inviting him to address the student body of his new Philadelphia seminary. Machen also showed a willingness to make common cause with other conservative evangelical causes. He taught summer classes in the Winona Lake summer school of the Bible. In tours of the United Kingdom, he travelled on behalf of the Bible League, an interdenominational evangelical cause, whose roots extended back to the Spurgeon era.
3. Some of his students went on to become leaders of collaborative evangelical enterprises. At the request of outgoing Park Street Church, Boston, pastor, A. Z. Conrad, Machen recommended Ockenga to be his successor. Ockenga went on to help in the founding of the NAE and Fuller Seminary; he was eventually president of Gordon-Conwell Seminary. Marcellus Kik, like Ockenga, part of Westminster’s first graduating class, would eventually assist Carl Henry in editing CT magazine. Consistent with this embrace of evangelical causes, after Machen’s death, the faculty of Westminster Seminary were charter members of ETS at its 1949.00 founding.
4. Machen’s own writings regularly referred to evangelical Christianity in a positive light. This will be demonstrated by allusions to his published popular writings, _Christianity and Liberalism_ (1924), _What is Faith?_ (1925),_The Christian Faith and the Modern World_ (1936), and _The Christian View of Man_ (1937).
All this being so, how are we to account for the counter- claim, that Machen saw himself not as evangelical but Reformed?
1) This approach treats the terms Reformed and evangelical as distinguishable and perhaps opposite. Accordingly, many persons loyal to Machen’s memory would object to the suggestion that ‘evangelical’ is an appropriate term to apply to him. Yet Machen, while clearly ready to distinguish his position from fundamentalism, did not so draw the line with evangelicalism.
2)This approach projects onto Machen attitudes displayed by numerous of his followers, who in the 1940’s (subsequent to his passing in 1937) worked to purge the movement he created of those who sought wider links with American evangelicalism, especially if that American evangelicalism did not adopt a separatist approach toward theological modernism. This was the reason given for refusing to participate in the new National Association of Evangelicals (1943). This was the reason why various Machen supporters (among them Robert Strong, Gordon Clark, Cary Weisiger) re-affiliated to other denominations. This is why Westminster Seminary faculty members declined invitations to join the board of directors of the re-founded Christianity Today magazine in 1956.00 (though they would consent to supply articles in the 1950’s and 60’s)