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J. Gresham Machen: A Reformed Reader’s Guide

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On January 1, 1937, J. Gresham Machen lay dying from pneumonia in a Bismarck hospital after crossing the winter plains to preach for small congregations. He dictated one last telegram to John Murray. Machen didn’t name the institutions he had founded or the battles that cost his ministry. He spoke of Christ’s obedience.

Machen understood the cost of confessional conviction. He held to the Westminster Standards when doing so cost his position in the denomination and finally his ministerial standing. Readers paying a price for the same faith will find a steady companion here.

He belongs beside Martin Luther and John Calvin because he defended on American soil the gospel they recovered in the Reformation. His opponent used Christian words while changing their meaning.

I’m so thankful for active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.¹

J. Gresham MachenTelegram to John Murray, January 1, 1937

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Why Machen Still Matters

Machen saw that liberal Protestantism could keep Christian words while giving them new meanings. God, Christ, faith, and redemption remained in the sermon, yet the message had changed. Christianity announced what God had done in history through Christ. Liberalism made Jesus a moral example and religion a way of life.

The chief modern rival of Christianity is “liberalism.” An examination of the teachings of liberalism in comparison with those of Christianity will show that at every point the two movements are in direct opposition.²

J. Gresham MachenChristianity and Liberalism

He reached this judgment through a book-length comparison of each system’s teaching. His purpose was pastoral. Churches drift when familiar language hides a different message, so Machen taught ordinary Christians to ask what a preacher means by the words he uses.

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Baltimore Beginnings

John Gresham Machen was born in Baltimore on July 28, 1881, into a home of serious wealth, serious books, and serious religion. His father Arthur, a lawyer of the old school, read Latin and Greek for pleasure into his eighties. His mother Mary, a Georgia-born woman of wide learning, taught her sons the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the King James Bible, and Pilgrim’s Progress, and later published her own study of the poet Robert Browning. The family worshiped at Franklin Street Presbyterian Church, where the minister held to Southern Presbyterian orthodoxy that shaped Machen for life.³

Machen’s weekly letters to his mother became a major source for his life, while his covenant upbringing shaped his convictions about covenant children.

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Princeton and the Germany Crisis

After Princeton, Machen studied at Marburg and Göttingen, then leading centers of critical biblical scholarship. Marburg also appears in the story of Zwingli, though Machen faced a different crisis there: modern biblical criticism.

At Marburg he sat under Wilhelm Herrmann, a theologian of the liberal school of Albrecht Ritschl, and was overwhelmed. Herrmann was not a cold rationalist. He spoke of communion with God with a passion Machen had rarely heard in America, while denying nearly every historical claim of the faith. Machen’s letters home from that year show a young man shaken to the foundations, drawn to a piety he admired and terrified that the faith of his mother could not survive modern criticism.⁴

Machen returned to Princeton in 1906 and tested liberalism’s historical claims against the sources. He came to believe that Herrmann’s sincere piety rested on a religion different from Christianity. The experience left him able to answer liberal teachers fairly because he understood their appeal.

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Old Princeton and Warfield

“Old Princeton” names the theological tradition of Alexander, the Hodges, and Warfield. It defended the doctrines of grace and the Westminster Standards through careful scholarship in service of the church.

Warfield embodied that program, and Machen revered him. The two walked and talked often in Warfield’s last years, and Machen later said the older man was the greatest mind he had ever known. When Warfield was buried in February 1921, Machen wrote to his mother that it seemed to him old Princeton had died with him, and that he was gone without a successor.⁵

Machen carried that method into New Testament study by weighing language, sources, and rival explanations. Christianity makes historical claims that can be examined. The same conviction governs the Reformed doctrine of biblical inerrancy.

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War Service in France

When America entered World War I, Machen was thirty-six, unmarried, and exempt from the draft. He went anyway. Rejecting the safety of a stateside chaplaincy, he sailed for France in January 1918 to serve with the YMCA, the civilian organization that ran canteens for soldiers near the front lines. For more than a year he sold cocoa and cigarettes, wrote letters for the wounded, buried the dead, and preached whenever the army let him, often within earshot of the German guns at places like Missy-sur-Aisne.⁶

His letters, collected in Letters from the Front, show the privileged scholar serving soldiers near the front. The volume gives us his own account of that year.

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The Origin of Paul’s Religion

Machen’s first major book, The Origin of Paul’s Religion (1921), answered the claim that Paul turned Jesus’ moral teaching into a religion of redemption. Machen argued that Paul received the same gospel confessed by the earliest church.

What is really essential is abundantly plain, and may be put in a word — the religion of Paul was a religion of redemption. It was founded not upon what had always been true, but upon what had recently happened.⁷

J. Gresham MachenThe Origin of Paul’s Religion

For Machen, Christianity rests on events God has interpreted for us: the Son came, obeyed, died for sins, and rose. Paul states this received message in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, and our article on what the gospel is explains the doctrine it carries.

This is demanding scholarship, so it belongs later in a Machen reading plan. It shows how patiently he built the distinction between gospel news and moral advice.

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The Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy

The fire had been smoldering for decades, but the match was struck on May 21, 1922, when Harry Emerson Fosdick, a Baptist guest preacher at New York’s First Presbyterian Church, delivered a sermon titled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Fosdick pleaded for tolerance of ministers who doubted the virgin birth, the inerrancy of Scripture, and the literal return of Christ. The sermon was printed, retitled, and mailed to ministers across the country by a publicity firm. Conservatives answered, presbyteries filed complaints, and the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. found itself in open war over the identity of Christianity itself.⁸

Two years later came the document that defined the battlefield. The Auburn Affirmation of 1924, eventually signed by nearly 1,300 PCUSA ministers, roughly an eighth of the denomination’s ministry, declared that the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection, and the miracles of Christ were merely “theories” about the facts of the gospel, and that ministers should be at liberty to hold other explanations.⁹

Machen kept the dispute inside the church’s confession. The question was whether a confessional church could ordain ministers who denied what they had vowed to teach. Paul treated a different gospel with the same seriousness in Galatians 1:8-9.

The denomination chose institutional peace. By 1929 the confessionalists had lost control of Princeton, showing why creeds and confessions as guardrails must be received as the church’s rule rather than a ceremonial preface.

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Christianity and Liberalism

Christianity and Liberalism (1923) argues that liberalism and New Testament Christianity teach different religions. Machen compares their doctrines of God, man, Scripture, Christ, salvation, and the church, then asks ministers to speak honestly about what they believe.

From the beginning, the Christian gospel, as indeed the name “gospel” or “good news” implies, consisted in an account of something that had happened.¹⁰

J. Gresham MachenChristianity and Liberalism

Two things about the book still surprise first-time readers. The first is its tone. Machen repeatedly credits the sincerity and moral seriousness of the liberal preachers he opposes; he asks only that they stop claiming the name and the pulpits of a faith they no longer confess. Honesty, not orthodoxy, is the book’s minimum demand. Walter Lippmann, the most influential secular journalist in America, told readers of A Preface to Morals that the book was the best popular argument the controversy had produced, and that the liberals had never really answered it.¹¹

The second surprise is how current this controversy still feels. The liberal preacher Machen described finds doctrine divisive, treats Jesus as an example rather than a Savior, and bases assurance on religious experience. He has a podcast now. The names have changed, but the same error remains: replacing Christianity with a different religion while continuing to call it Christianity. In a single afternoon, this book can teach an elder or layman to recognize that substitution.

Machen addressed a system rather than every Christian error. His method remains useful: define the terms, compare the whole teaching, and ask whether the supernatural gospel is still being confessed. Ordinary disagreements among confessional believers deserve a different kind of argument.

Reformed Forum offers the full audiobook and a chapter-by-chapter discussion, both free.

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What Is Faith?

What Is Faith? (1925) shows Machen as a teacher. Saving faith has real content because it rests on Christ and his promises. Warm feeling without knowledge has no settled object.

Knowledge alone does not amount to saving faith. The Reformed distinction is knowledge, assent, and trust: faith knows the gospel, receives it as true, and rests on the Christ it announces.

The New Testament never says that a man is saved on account of his faith, but always that he is saved through his faith or by means of his faith; faith is merely the means which the Holy Spirit uses to apply to the individual soul the benefits of Christ’s death.¹²

J. Gresham MachenWhat Is Faith?

The question “is my faith strong enough?” troubles many believers. Machen answers by pointing to Christ, whom even weak faith receives whole. The same comfort stands at the center of union with Christ, the heart of the Christian life.

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The Virgin Birth of Christ

The Virgin Birth of Christ (1930) is Machen’s full historical defense of the virgin birth. He examines Matthew and Luke, the alleged contradictions, rival explanations, and the ancient parallels commonly offered against the Gospel accounts.

The doctrine identifies Jesus Christ as the incarnate Son, conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. Machen therefore treated the church’s confession here as a question about Christ himself.

Let it never be forgotten that the virgin birth is an integral part of the New Testament witness about Christ, and that that witness is strongest when it is taken as it stands.¹³

J. Gresham MachenThe Virgin Birth of Christ

Machen named the church’s responsibility in exact words: “But to send them out before they have attained such convictions, as official representatives of a Church whose faith they do not share—that is simply to trifle with human souls.” The question was whether the church may commission ministers who doubt her message.

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Greek and the Christian Mind

Machen’s most widely used book is New Testament Greek for Beginners (1923). Generations of students have learned from its patient lessons because he wanted ministers to read the New Testament closely for themselves.

That purpose belongs to Reformed hermeneutics: careful reading requires both learning and piety. Machen’s grammar served the pulpit by giving ministers better access to the text.

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The Radio Addresses: Things Unseen

Beginning in 1935, Machen taught the Christian faith in plain radio addresses for ordinary listeners. The Christian Faith in the Modern World and The Christian View of Man appeared during his lifetime, and his final series included “The Active Obedience of Christ.”

Westminster Seminary Press later gathered all fifty addresses in Things Unseen: A Systematic Introduction to the Christian Faith and Reformed Theology. It is the best starting point for readers who know Machen mainly through his controversies.

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The Fall of Princeton and the Founding of Westminster

The 1929 General Assembly reorganized Princeton Seminary under one board that included Auburn Affirmation signers. No professor was dismissed and no creed was formally changed, yet control passed to men willing to treat central doctrines as optional.

Machen answered by opening Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia with about fifty students. The new school continued Old Princeton’s union of careful learning, Reformed conviction, and service to the church.

The faculty he gathered was astonishing for a school with no endowment: Wilson, the Old Testament linguist said to have mastered forty-five languages; Allis in Old Testament; Van Til, soon to reshape Reformed apologetics; and in time John Murray, whose systematic theology carried Old Princeton’s rigor into a new generation.¹⁴

Machen recruited Cornelius Van Til from Princeton. Van Til’s apologetic work drew on the Dutch Reformed tradition surveyed in the Neo-Calvinism Reader’s Guide.

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Missions, Pearl Buck, and the Independent Board

Re-Thinking Missions (1932) treated other religions as partners in a common search for truth. The Presbyterian missions board declined a clear repudiation, and Pearl S. Buck publicly praised the report.

Machen documented the board’s tolerance of modernist teaching. When the General Assembly upheld the board, he helped form the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions to support missionaries who confessed the message they carried.

The 1934 Assembly ordered members to leave the Independent Board or face discipline. Machen refused because the Westminster Confession of Faith (20.2) teaches that God alone is Lord of the conscience. A church court remains bound to Scripture when it commands obedience.

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The Trial of Dr. Machen

Machen was brought to trial in early 1935 before a judicial commission of New Brunswick Presbytery, charged with disturbing the peace of the church and violating his ordination vows by refusing the mandate. The proceedings were brief and, even to observers with no sympathy for his theology, strange. The commission ruled the doctrinal condition of the Board of Foreign Missions irrelevant and excluded the evidence Machen had assembled; the legality of the 1934 mandate itself was likewise placed beyond argument. The only question the court would entertain was whether he had obeyed. He had not, and so he was found guilty and suspended from the ministry, a verdict the 1936 General Assembly upheld.¹⁵

Machen carried the case to church members through The Presbyterian Guardian. Its complete contemporary record is available at opc.org.

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A New Church

On June 11, 1936, in a Philadelphia hotel ballroom, Machen and a small company of ministers, elders, and congregations constituted a new denomination, the Presbyterian Church of America, renamed the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1939 after the old body sued over the name.¹⁶

The new church soon divided over Christian liberty, dispensationalism, and broad fundamentalism. Machen spent his last months defending Christian liberty against former allies who wanted to require abstinence from alcohol. The separation brought a faithful confession into a church still filled with sinners.

In December 1936, Machen kept a promise to visit small North Dakota congregations. He fell ill after preaching in severe cold and died in Bismarck on New Year’s Day at fifty-five.

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Doctrine, History, and the Gospel

Machen joined historical fact to its God-given meaning. Christ died is history; Christ died for our sins is doctrine. The gospel gives us the event and God’s explanation of it.

According to Christian belief, Jesus is our Saviour, not by virtue of what He said, not even by virtue of what He was, but by what He did.¹⁷

J. Gresham MachenChristianity and Liberalism

Christ’s example belongs to the Christian life as the fruit of redemption. It can never become its ground. Our article on the proper distinction between law and gospel explains why the gospel must remain God’s accomplished promise to sinners.

Because Christianity rests on God’s acts, assurance rests outside our changing feelings. This is the comfort guarded by the doctrines of grace.

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Machen and the Reformed Tradition

Machen was an Old School Presbyterian committed to the Westminster Standards and a piety shaped by Word, sacrament, catechism, and the Lord’s Day. He carried Old Princeton’s confessional scholarship into the twentieth century.

His example requires restraint. Machen opposed ministers who made central doctrines optional, while he resisted allies who bound consciences beyond Scripture. Separation came only after years of ordinary church process had failed.

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The Active Obedience of Christ

In his final winter, Machen preached on Christ’s active obedience. Our Lord’s suffering and death bore the penalty of sin, commonly called his passive obedience. His lifelong fulfillment of God’s law is his active obedience. Reformed theology holds both together and confesses both imputed to believers.

If Christ had merely paid the penalty of sin for us and had done nothing more we should be at best back in the situation in which Adam found himself when God placed him under the covenant of works.¹⁸

J. Gresham Machen“The Active Obedience of Christ”

Adam owed perfect obedience, and Christ fulfilled what Adam broke. Romans 5:19 declares that the many are made righteous through the obedience of the second Adam. Christ kept the covenant of works, and believers receive his finished righteousness.

Christ paid the penalty, and He merited the reward. Those are the two great things that He has done for us.¹⁹

J. Gresham Machen“The Active Obedience of Christ”

Those whom God effectually calleth, he also freely justifieth: not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for any thing wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone.

Westminster Confession of Faith (11.1)

Machen’s telegram rests on that doctrine. At death he looked away from every institution he had built and rested on Christ’s completed obedience counted as his own. No hope without it.

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Christian Liberty and the State

Machen’s politics surprise everyone the first time. The scourge of modernism was also, by the standards of his day and ours, a thoroughgoing civil libertarian. He opposed Prohibition’s enforcement regime, opposed compulsory chapel legislation, opposed jaywalking ordinances with genuine feeling, and in February 1926 appeared before committees of Congress to argue against creating a federal Department of Education.²⁰

The instinct was principled, not partisan. Machen’s political instincts ran to states’ rights and the smallest possible government, following a family heritage rooted in the South, and he cheerfully confounded every attempt to enlist him in a culture war. He declined to campaign against evolution with Bryan’s movement, defended the civil liberties of Roman Catholics and unbelievers, and insisted that the church as church must never bind consciences where Scripture is silent nor borrow the state’s sword for spiritual work. The keys and the sword are different powers; confuse them in either direction and both church and state are corrupted.²¹

Machen’s 1933 essay “The Responsibility of the Church in Our New Age” gives his clearest short account of church and state. It is free to read online.

To say to a child, “Do not tell a lie because you are an American,” is at bottom an immoral thing. The right thing to say is, “Do not tell a lie because it is wrong to tell a lie.”²²

J. Gresham MachenWhat Is Faith?

Machen’s political judgments remain matters of Christian wisdom. The binding principle comes from WCF 20.2: God alone is Lord of the conscience, and the church may command only what Scripture warrants.

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Education and Christian Scholarship

Machen’s 1913 address “Christianity and Culture” argued that Christian learning should meet unbelieving scholarship with better work. He introduced the point with these words:

False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.²³

J. Gresham Machen“Christianity and Culture”

He later defended Christian schools because every curriculum teaches some account of human purpose. Christian homes and churches therefore need schools and books that refuse to trim the faith for cultural approval.

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Mountains and the Man

Now for the Machen his students knew. The public controversialist was, in private, a warm, funny, generous bachelor whose rooms in Alexander Hall were famous. On Saturday nights he threw them open to students for games, refreshments, and conversation; the checker games were taken with mock-heroic seriousness, and shy first-year men left having been treated like sons.²⁴

And he climbed. Machen was a serious alpinist who climbed in the Alps across four decades and ranged into the Canadian Rockies whenever teaching allowed. In the summer of 1932, at fifty, he took three first-class Zermatt peaks, the Zinalrothorn, the Dent Blanche, and at last the Matterhorn itself, a summit he had wanted all his life. In a late address called “Mountains and Why We Love Them,” he described standing there in the very center of Europe, and turned the memory into meditation: the world’s grandeur is real, its civilization fragile, and the God who made the mountains is the God of the gospel.²⁵

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The Hard Pages

Our Reformed Reader’s Guides do not skip the pages we wish were not in the file. Here are Machen’s, reported plainly. In 1913, when B. B. Warfield supported allowing a Black student to live in the seminary’s dormitory alongside white students, Machen objected. He argued the point with Warfield directly, and his letters home argue the segregationist case in the language of his Southern upbringing. The correspondence is preserved in the archives and discussed candidly in the recent scholarship.²⁶

Scripture judges Machen’s prejudice plainly. God “shows no partiality” (Romans 2:11), and Christ gathers one people “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Revelation 7:9). His confession condemned the failure recorded in his letters.

The record does not show a later public repentance, and we cannot invent one. It also does not erase the rest of his work. The same rule governs Luther’s far darker pages: Scripture judges the man, and Christ remains the church’s only righteousness.

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Machen Myths Corrected

Machen worked beside fundamentalists without sharing their program. He was a confessional Presbyterian who valued scholarship, rejected dispensationalism, and defended Christian liberty against moralism.

He was convicted of insubordination for refusing to leave the Independent Board. The church court excluded his evidence about the missions board, and no court charged him with heresy.

His politics do not explain the conflict. Machen opposed Prohibition, defended civil liberty, and differed sharply from many conservative allies. His subscription to the Westminster Standards gives the consistent explanation.

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What the World Made of Machen

One measure of Machen’s stature is the respect he compelled from people who rejected everything he believed. Walter Lippmann, writing as a secular moralist, held up Christianity and Liberalism as the one argument from the controversy that the modernists had to answer and had not.²⁷

The strangest tribute came from his own city. H. L. Mencken, Baltimore’s magnificent scoffer and America’s most quotable unbeliever, followed Machen’s career with genuine admiration and marked his death with an editorial in the Baltimore Evening Sun titled “Doctor Fundamentalis.”²⁸

Strangest of all was the farewell from Pearl Buck, the celebrated novelist whose missionary views had set off the final war. Writing in The New Republic after his death, she confessed a kind of grief: Machen had been wrong, she believed, but he had been real, he had never trimmed his convictions to please anyone, and the times could ill spare such a man.²⁹

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A Recommended Reading Order

Machen wrote for three audiences: ordinary believers, students, and scholars, and the happiest way in is to meet him in that order. Here is the ladder we recommend, one step at a time.

First step, the essential Machen. Start with Christianity and Liberalism. It is short, clear, and the reason this guide exists; the 100th anniversary edition from Westminster Seminary Press is the one to buy, and the original text is free online. Follow it immediately with Things Unseen, the collected radio addresses. Hearing Machen teach the whole faith warmly to ordinary listeners corrects every caricature the first book’s reputation may have planted.

Second step, the constructive theologian. Read What Is Faith? for his account of knowledge, trust, and assurance, and then The Christian View of Man or The Christian Faith in the Modern World, the earlier radio volumes, for his doctrine of God, Scripture, and humanity. At this point add a short biography; Stephen J. Nichols’s guided tour is built exactly for this step.

Third step, the scholar and the sources. Take up The Origin of Paul’s Religion, then The Virgin Birth of Christ, with Stonehouse’s memoir alongside for the life. From there the corpus opens out: the Selected Shorter Writings, the Presbyterian Guardian files, Letters from the Front, and the scholarly biographies of Hart and Burnett. By the third step you will not need our advice about a fourth.

One practical note: Machen is unusually quotable, which makes him a gift to social media and a trap to readers. The temptation is to read anthologies of zingers instead of books. Resist it. Tweet him, but read him. His power is cumulative argument, and the famous sentences land properly only at the end of the chapters that earn them.

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The Works: A Complete Library

Logos users can shelve much of the corpus at once: the J. Gresham Machen Collection gathers seven volumes, including Christianity and Liberalism, What Is Faith?, The Origin of Paul’s Religion, and the Greek grammar, fully searchable.

Books published in his lifetime

• The Origin of Paul’s Religion (1921). The scholarly answer to the claim that Paul invented Christianity. Free text at the Internet Archive. In print at Amazon and on Logos.
• New Testament Greek for Beginners (1923). The grammar that taught a century of seminarians; still in print in an updated second edition and on Logos. The 1923 original is free at the Internet Archive.
• Christianity and Liberalism (1923). The essential book. 100th anniversary edition from Westminster Seminary Press; free text at the Internet Archive and Monergism. Also at Amazon and on Logos.
• What Is Faith? (1925). His fullest account of saving faith. Free text at the Internet Archive. Banner of Truth reprint at Amazon; also on Logos.
• The Virgin Birth of Christ (1930). The scholarly masterwork. Free text at the Internet Archive. Reprint at Amazon.
• The Christian Faith in the Modern World (1936). Radio addresses on God and Scripture.
• The Christian View of Man (1937). Radio addresses on providence, sin, and grace, published in his final year.
• A Brief Bible History (1922, with James Oscar Boyd). A survey of the whole Bible for lay readers. Free scan at Wikimedia Commons.

Posthumous collections

• God Transcendent (1949), ed. Ned B. Stonehouse. Sermons and addresses, including “The Active Obedience of Christ.” Banner of Truth edition at Amazon; also on Logos.
• What Is Christianity? (1951), ed. Stonehouse. Addresses including “Christianity and Culture,” “History and Faith,” and “Mountains and Why We Love Them,” each of which can be read in full online.
• Selected Shorter Writings (P&R, 2004), ed. D. G. Hart. The one-volume gateway to the essays, addresses, and journalism. Available from P&R Publishing. Also at Amazon.
• Education, Christianity, and the State (Trinity Foundation, 1987), ed. John W. Robbins. The education and liberty writings, including the 1926 congressional testimony. In print at Amazon.
• Letters from the Front (P&R, 2012), ed. Barry Waugh. The World War I correspondence. Available from P&R Publishing. Also at Amazon.
• Things Unseen: A Systematic Introduction to the Christian Faith and Reformed Theology (Westminster Seminary Press, 2020). All fifty radio addresses in one volume, with introductions by Sinclair Ferguson and others; the best single door into Machen the teacher. Available from Westminster Bookstore. Also at Amazon.
• The New Testament: An Introduction to Its Literature and History (Banner of Truth, 1976). Machen’s classroom survey, edited from his materials.

Free online collections

• The OPC’s Machen page, with addresses, articles, and the story of his final days.
• The Presbyterian Guardian archive, the complete run of the magazine Machen founded in 1935, free and searchable.
• Monergism’s Machen library of free ebooks and essays.
• Wikisource and the Internet Archive for public domain texts.
• ReadMachen.com, the fullest bibliography anywhere: 464 works cataloged and more than two hundred readable in full, browsable by year, type, and source. Start here when you want Machen’s own words rather than words about him.
• Log College Press, which hosts roughly two hundred of his books, articles, and reviews as downloadable PDFs.
• The Machen Seminar, an independent site cataloging the corpus, with particular attention to his politics and economics.
• The PCA Historical Center, which preserves documents from the controversy era.

Presbycast: Machen in Audio and Print

Presbycast, co-hosted by PCA ruling elder Brad Isbell, has produced one of the largest sustained popular-level collections on Machen available online. Its extensive audio and written archives combine historical interviews, primary-source readings, conference lectures, biographical discoveries, and applications of Machen’s ecclesiology to contemporary Presbyterian life.

Start with D. G. Hart’s three-part Life of Machen, the six-part Machen Series, Danny Olinger’s Remembering Machen, and Brad Isbell’s fourteen-part examination of “The Responsibility of the Church in Our New Age,” beginning with Machen and the New Age.

Two especially valuable recent contributions are Brad’s presentation of an unpublished 1925 letter, “And a Presbyterian Church for Me”, and the subsequent discussion with D. G. Hart, R. Scott Clark, and T. David Gordon on Machen’s concern for the church and the gospel.

Browse the complete Presbycast Machen audio archive and Brad Isbell’s Machen essays.

Special thanks to Brad Isbell for drawing our attention to the breadth of this collection.

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The Best Books About Machen

Stephen J. Nichols, J. Gresham Machen: A Guided Tour of His Life and Thought (P&R, 2004). The best first biography: brisk, warm, organized around the books as much as the battles, and written for exactly the reader this guide serves. Available from P&R Publishing. Also at Amazon.

Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (1954). The foundational life, by his student, colleague, and successor in the New Testament chair. Stonehouse knew the man and preserves letters and scenes found nowhere else. His admiration is open, which readers should weigh and will quickly forgive. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church gives the whole book away as a free ebook, and there is a free audiobook as well, so cost is no reason to skip it. A lending copy is at the Internet Archive, and the Banner of Truth print edition is at Amazon.

D. G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Johns Hopkins, 1994; P&R reprint). The standard scholarly study, and the book that recovered Machen from the “fundamentalist” filing cabinet by showing him as a confessional churchman and a critic of American religiosity from the right and the left at once. Available from P&R Publishing. Also at Amazon.

Richard E. Burnett, Machen’s Hope: The Transformation of a Modernist in the New Princeton (Eerdmans, 2024). The major recent reinterpretation, built on deep archival work, arguing for a more modernist young Machen than the received story allows. Read it after Stonehouse and Hart, weigh its thesis against them, and profit from its documents either way. Available from Eerdmans. Also at Amazon.

D. G. Hart and John Muether, Fighting the Good Fight: A Brief History of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (1995). The best short account of the church Machen founded and what became of his concerns after his death. In print at Amazon.

For articles and lectures, the June 2006 and January 2011 issues of the OPC’s New Horizons collect fine centennial and memorial essays, and Westminster’s Westminster Magazine maintains a Machen memorial page. Among the many centennial pieces on Christianity and Liberalism, Kevin DeYoung’s foreword to the anniversary edition is the place to start. On how Machen has been read and misread since his death, Joshua W. Jipp’s “The Quest for the Historical Machen” in Themelios 30.3 defends his epistemology against the charge of Enlightenment rationalism; it comes from outside confessional Reformed circles, so read it as scholarship rather than as a confessional verdict. The newest short treatment is Nick Needham’s chapter in Shapers of Christianity (Banner of Truth, 2025), which the publisher has posted free to read.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How do you pronounce and spell the name?

Say “GRESS-um MAY-chen.” Gresham was his mother’s family name, and he used it instead of John.

Was Machen a fundamentalist?

Machen worked with fundamentalists but called himself a Presbyterian. He was confessional, scholarly, and amillennial-agnostic, with little patience for the movement’s revivalism or moralism.

If his theology was orthodox, why was he suspended?

He wasn’t tried for heresy. The charge was insubordination after he refused to leave the Independent Board, and the court excluded his doctrinal evidence.

Is the OPC “Machen’s church”?

Machen led the OPC’s founding and served as its first moderator. The church confesses the Westminster Standards rather than its founder.

Should I read Burnett or Stonehouse first?

Read Stonehouse first, then Hart, then Burnett. That order presents the received account, its refinement, and the newest challenge.

Did Machen ever marry?

No. One serious romance ended over religion, and Machen remained a bachelor whose students, family, and correspondence received much of his affection.

Where should I start reading Machen himself?

Begin with Christianity and Liberalism, then read Things Unseen. The reading order above gives the longer path.

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A Closing Word

Machen’s grave carries the words “faithful unto death” from Revelation 2:10. His final confidence rested outside his temperament and achievements, in Christ’s obedience credited to him.

Machen’s last message gives this guide its plain ending: “I’m so thankful for active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.”

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Footnotes