J. Gresham Machen, History, And Truth

By George M. Marsden

Calvin College

I would like to thank Lucie Marsden, Richard Mouw, Mark Noll, and Davis Young for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this paper. None of them shares responsibility for its shortcomings. This study was presented at the Jubilee Conference, August 31-September 3, 1979 at Westminster Theological Seminary.

A half century ago, when in 1929 Westminster Theological Seminary first opened its doors, the intellectual and religious mood of the era differed strikingly from that of today. Naturalistic pragmatism, the dominant intellectual movement of the day, was simultaneously casting its brightest lights on modern society and burning itself out in an atmosphere of banality and meaninglessness. Joseph Wood Krutch, whose brilliant analysis of The Modern Temper appeared the same year as did Westminster, faced directly the stark implications of the prevailing assumptions of modern thought. The explanation of all aspects of human nature and society in terms of undirected natural forces, Krutch lamented, necessarily undermined all the high ideals that had been so much trumpeted by the humanistic, artistic, and religious leaders of generations past. Carl Becker, perhaps most perceptive of the American historians of the day, similarly pointed out the utter inability of modern persons to find either religious or rational certainty in an indifferent universe. “What is man,” asked Becker, “that the electron should be mindful of him!”[1]

J. Gresham Machen was an anomaly in that era. His intellectual contemporaries certainly considered him so. One after another they came away from his works somewhat awed that anyone with such antiquated views could argue for them so well.

Machen was, in terms of the categories of the day, a fundamentalist. Although he never endorsed the term, neither did he ever repudiate that movement of co-belligerants who were militantly defending supernaturalistic Biblically-based evangelicalism. Yet to be a fundamentalist and to be a genuine intellectual seemed to most persons almost a contradiction. Machen appeared fully to understand the tenets of modern scholarship; yet he was willing to concede nothing to its assumptions or implications. Many other Bible-believing Christians of the day also refused to bow the knee to the gods of modern civilization and modernism, yet Machen’s combination of fundamentalism and prowess in modern scholarship made him almost unique. While dimensions of this unique resistance to modern trends might be explained on religious, psychological, or even sociological grounds, the present analysis will focus on the intellectual or philosophical issues involved. By looking first at his distinctive views of history, fact, and truth, it will attempt to identify, and to some extent evaluate, the central assumptions undergirding Machen’s thought.

Machen’s thought, as that of fundamentalism generally,[2] has been characterized as lacking any traces of modern historical sensibilities. A recent and rather sophisticated study of the response of conservative Protestants to the historicism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, cites Machen as exhibit number one to illustrate “a-historical” thought. The prevailing view in modern culture, shared by religious modernists, was that human thought was best understood in terms of the changing patterns of cultural development. Machen totally rejected such views, insisting that “truth is not relative but absolute.” While there might be “fluctuations between this age and that age …. there is a gold standard of truth.” Such a position, this interpretation claims, indicates that for Machen, “history …,” in the modern sense of natural cultural forces crucial to knowing man’s humanity and the meaning of truth, “did not exist at all.”[3]

Such a claim that Machen’s outlook was essentially “a-historical” might seem a bit startling to someone familiar with Machen’s work. Over and over again, perhaps more than anything else, he stated that Christianity was basically “historical.” “This book is primarily historical,” reads the opening sentence of his recently republished Literature and History of New Testament Times. “The sacredness of history … does not prevent it from being history; and if it is history, it should be studied by the best historical method which can be attained.” “Christian piety,” he said here and elsewhere, “must be grounded firmly in historical knowledge.”[4]

Machen himself surely wrestled with the question of history, which he recognized as the critical issue of the day. Trained first at Johns Hopkins, which was the virtual cradle of modern academic thought in America, and afterward in the German universities, which then were the hands that rocked the cradle, Machen was thoroughly exposed to modern critical scholarship. So enamored was he of the efforts of German theological liberals to ground Christianity on an idealistic, moral, or experiential basis safe from historical criticism, that when in 1906 he accepted a post as instructor at Princeton Seminary, he did so only with what he described as the gravest reservations imaginable. His firm intention was to return to Germany after one year. Clearly in 1906 he was convinced that he could not in good conscience become a regular member of the Princeton Seminary faculty, let alone seek ordination in the Presbyterian Church.[5] When nine years later, his reservations having been quite thoroughly resolved, he finally had received a regular faculty position at the seminary, it was not surprising that he chose as his inaugural topic, “History and Faith.” Here he defined most fully his characteristic affirmations concerning the historical character of Christianity. “The student of the New Testament,” he began, “should be primarily an historian.” “The Bible is history,” he went on. “The Bible is primarily a record of events.”[6]

Since the gospel meant “good news,” it was “history” or “information about something that has happened.” And after explaining the necessity of a real historical, or factual, basis for Christianity, Machen came back to the question that seemed autobiographical. “Must we stake our salvation upon the intricacies of historical research ?” History, he admitted, can at best establish only probabilities. And if we find these probabilities sufficient to make a trial of the Christian faith, the living experience of faith will turn the probability into a conviction of certainty. The historical facts of the matter were, as Machen often repeated, absolutely crucial to religious experience. Hence the Bible was the essential foundation on which faith must rest. “If the Bible were false, your faith would go.”[7] Convinced of the critical place of historical study in the defense of the faith, Machen was dedicating his formidable scholarly talents to proving that “the record of events” in the Bible was more probably correct than any other explanation of the origins of Christianity. His two great works, The Origin of Paul’s Religion and The Virgin Birth of Christ are testimony to his lifetime devotion to historical scholarship.

Yet was Machen an a-historical historian? This question is worth exploring because it will throw some light on Machen’s whole intellectual outlook. The question is, of course, phrased prejudicially from a twentieth-century point of view as to what is properly historical. A better way to ask it is: How did Machen’s view of history differ substantially from that prevailing among most other twentieth-century historians?

One aspect of the answer to this question is both obvious and central. Machen accepted the influence of supernatural forces on human history. So, unlike most of his historian contemporaries, he did not limit historical explanation to factors that could be explained in terms of natural causes.[8] This did not mean that he ignored naturally developing cultural forces. Machen was quite adept at distinguishing the characteristic traits of Greek, Hebrew, or modern cultural influences. Yet in the case of the Bible, he always credited fully its claims to supernatural origins and supernatural explanations of historical phenomena. The arguments of his historical works, The Origins of Paul’s Religion and The Virgin Birth were designed to demonstrate that the hypothesis of the absolute truth of the supernaturalistic Biblical claims better explained the facts than did competing naturalistic explanations.

Yet another philosophical difference between Machen and his secular historical contemporaries lay behind this central Biblically-defined supernaturalism. Machen insisted that the Christian religion “is based squarely upon events, it depends upon historical facts.”[9] Machen, however, differed considerably from the prevailing opinion of twentieth-century historians, whether secular or liberal Christian, as to the very meaning of “fact” itself. It is in this difference that we can begin to see Machen’s distinctive view of truth, and of how persons know the truth.

Machen’s view of fact, truth, and knowledge can perhaps be seen most vividly by setting it against what is almost its extreme opposite. Nowhere was this opposite and prevailing view stated more clearly than in the work of the brilliant secular historian, Carl Becker. Becker was a thorough-going naturalist and pragmatist. He held a view of truth close to that of William James and John Dewey, that our ideas are not mirrors of reality, but plans of action. The human mind performs the important function of organizing its experience, even though it has no way of demonstrating that what the mind experiences corresponds to anything outside of itself. “Truth” is essentially that which is regarded as an acceptable account of reality at a particular time and place; so what may be unquestionably “true” in one era may come to be “false,” and even unintelligible, in another. With great clarity and charm, Becker argued persuasively for these views within the American historical community.[10]

In 1931 Becker delivered to the American Historical Association a very influential presidential address entitled, “Everyman His Own Historian.” The starting point for his argument was that although a series of events in the past no doubt actually occurred, these events exist for us only as ideas or affirmations about the past that we now hold in memory. History, then, is the meinory of the past. It is not the past itself, which is gone forever. It is, for all practical purposes, our concepts about the past, which concepts exist in the present. This view means that history is primarily and essentially a matter of interpretation. The “scientific” historians of the nineteenth century, Becker observed, had attempted to get behind interpretation to a rigorous examination of the actual factual events, letting the meaning of these facts speak for themselves. Yet, said Becker, while it was proper to try to establish what the facts were, “to suppose that the facts, once established in all their fullness will ‘speak for themselves’ is an illusion.” Facts exist only in a framework of ideas and perceptions. When one chooses out of the immense mass of sensations some aspects to remember and to record, that initial work of history already involves the interpretation of selecting certain facts and not others. Moreover, the original chronicler relates this information in the interpretive framework of his own understandings and preconceptions. Later historians in turn select and interpret the records about the past in terms of their preoccupations, frameworks of ideas, practical interests and the like. Hence, said Becker, to set forth historical facts is not comparable to “dumping a barrow of bricks.” Historical facts were not cold or hard entities that kept the same form wherever placed. Rather they varied according to the time, place, and perspective of the historian. So historians do not deal with absolute truth. Their views of the past “will inevitably be a blend of fact and fancy.” Historians then are committed to “the keeping of the useful myths” of a society. What will appear true and valuable according to the assumptions of one time and place inevitably will appear antiquated and bizarre in terms of preconceptions of those who live in another era or culture.[11]

When Machen said that Christianity was firmly grounded on historical fact, clearly he meant by “fact” something quite different than what contemporaries such as Becker meant by “fact.” “There is one good thing about facts,” said Machen, “—they stay put. If a thing really happened, the passage of years can never possibly make it into a thing that did not happen.”[12] Becker, on the other hand, reserved this changeless quality for the now-past series of events that presumably actually happened. “Facts,” however, in any practical sense meant our memories of these now-inaccessible events. Not only did Becker say, “left to themselves, the facts do not speak;” he added, “left to themselves they do not exist, not really, since for all practical purposes there is no fact until someone affirms it.”[13] Machen said just the opposite. “The facts of the Christian religion remain facts no matter whether we cherish them or not: they are facts for God; they are facts both for angels and for demons; they are facts now, and they will remain facts beyond the end of time.”[14]

Machen furthermore rejected the view of Becker, and of many Americans of the day, that facts (or events in Becker’s sense) were properly open to a variety of theories of interpretation, each of which might be valid in relation to its time, place, and point of view. ‘Machen regarded events as inherently having a fixed significance—that is the significance they had in God’s eyes. Our knowledge of events then was proper knowledge not when we simply knew that the events took place but when we knew the events in terms of their proper significance. In the case of Scriptural events this significance was revealed by God himself. Hence our knowledge of the “facts” of Biblical history could not be separated from the significance of these facts. That significance was not dependent on an interpretation or theory that we imposed upon it and hence subject to change. Rather, facts had one proper significance and the function of the human mind was to apprehend what truly were the underlying facts.

So insistent was Machen that the human mind should not impose its categories on reality, but rather discover the truth that was already there, that he became quite suspicious of the modern use of the word “interpretation.” “I hesitate to use the word ‘interpretation,’ “ he told the students with regard to Biblical exegesis at the opening exercises of Westminster in 1929; “for it is a word that has been a custodian of more nonsense, perhaps, than any other word in the English language today.”[15] Each age need not have a new creed for understanding the Bible. Doctrine did not develop except in the sense of discovery or rediscovery. The need at the moment was for “a rediscovery of the great Reformation doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture” which indeed was an assumption oil which Machen’s full outlook rested. The Bible was a plain book for plain persons, so at Westminster the key to proper understanding of Scripture was “to cultivate common sense.” Only by common sense, by which Machen meant clear, open-minded, and informed thinking, could persons find truth. Such good sense, which should lead to common conclusions for all rational persons, was nearly the opposite of “interpretation.”[16]

Machen on numerous occasions appealed to “common sense” in opposition to modern thought.[17] What he meant by “common sense” was essentially the view of knowledge of Scottish Common Sense Realism, which had been the overwhelmingly prevailing philosophy at Princeton Theological Seminary. This view, moreover, had been dominant in the tradition of conservative Southern Presbyterianism in which Machen had been raised, and had been a major factor in almost all of nineteenth-century American academic life.[18] Common Sense Realism asserted, as indeed most persons seem to believe, that the human mind is so constructed that the real world can be the direct object of our thought. We can perceive what is actually there. Philosophers, especially since Locke, however, had interposed between us and the real world the concept of ideas. These ideas, they said, were the real objects of our thoughts; hence we do not know things at a distance, but in our minds. Thomas Reid (1710–1796), the principal formulator of Scottish Realism, responded that only philosophers would take seriously such an absurd account of reality. The doctrine of ideas, he said, would only lead to skepticism as it already had in the philosophy of his countryman, David Hume. Everyone knew, Reid asserted, that a real world exists and that we can have knowledge of it. We cannot rationally explain this power of mind anymore than we can rationally explain why we breathe air. Any philosophy, however, that denies such powers is as worthless as one that denies that we breathe.[19]

The issue of historical knowledge is one that especially clearly separates the Common Sense philosophy from philosophies built around theory of ideas. We have, in fact, already seen an excellent example of the difference in the contrast between Carl Becker’s pragmatism and Machen’s view of the past. According to the theory of ideas, the past exists only in our minds. Strictly speaking, it exists only in the present. Common Sense, by contrast, asserts that the past can be a direct object of our thought. When we remember the past, we remember a real past. Hence, we need not be apologetic about important human knowledge being grounded simply on testimony about the past. Courts of law depend entirely on such knowledge. In fact, most human knowledge is of this sort. Such knowledge is, technically speaking, based on “probable reason” as opposed to demonstrative reasoning such as used in mathematics. Yet, said Thomas Reid, in a line of argument that was echoed in Machen’s inaugural on “Faith and History,” we gain certainty on the basis of the accumulative strength of “probable” knowledge. “That there is such a city as Rome,” said Reid, “I am as certain of as any proposition of Euclid ….”[20] Historical knowledge was just of this sort.[21] In “History and Faith” Machen argued that historical knowledge established only “probabilities” on the basis of reliable testimony and the like. Yet, Christian experience and other considerations could turn such knowledge into certainty.[22]

Machen, as a great many American thinkers of the nineteenth century, had built another edifice of assumptions on the foundation of common sense. He held a thoroughly Baconian or inductive view of how truth should be obtained.[23] In Machen’s view nothing could be held true if it did not pass the test of conformity to the rules of empirical scientific inquiry. This meant an open-minded and unprejudiced examination of the facts, the classification of such facts, and the formulation of careful hypotheses that could be shown to be the best explanation of the facts. The facts themselves were regarded as individual entities whose actual relations had to be defined and classified. Crucial to the whole enterprise was establishing as certainly as possible exactly what the facts were.

Most of all Christianity must meet such empirical tests or it would not be worthy of belief. This was no abstract or merely theoretical issue for Machen. It was as deeply personal as anything could be. Through his early years he seemed to be wrestling constantly with the question, “Did the things that the Bible says happened really happen ?” This appears to be the issue that tore him between his desires to remain in Germany or return to Princeton. It is “a purely intellectual question, a question of fact, before me for settlement,” he wrote in 1906 in an extraordinarily impassioned protest against some cautions from his mother about German scholarship. It demands “a perfectly free, impartial examination …,” Machen retorted. “It is primarily historical work, which requires absolute honesty.” Only when one had thoroughly appreciated the opposing position, he argued in this candid display of his Baconian commitments, could one rest with “anything like certainty.” Ultimately the question was whether “the old view has the facts on its side.”[24]

Machen’s insistence throughout his life that Christian faith must be thoroughly grounded on such firm empirical scientific knowledge of the facts, was the trait that more than any other separated him from most of the scholars, even Christian scholars,[25] of his day. His impressive demonstrations in his academic works that, at the least, traditional understandings of the Bible could be defended on just the grounds they were so widely attacked—their empirical reliability as historical accounts—were certainly among the most remarkable intellectual achievements of the era.

* * *

Yet Machen’s basic assumptions raise a number of interesting questions. The most perplexing is, why does he draw the implication from the common sense observation that if Christianity be true it must be historically true, that then one should be able to demonstrate that it is historically true. I does not seem to follow necessarily from the Pauline and common sense statement (“if Christ be not risen … your faith is also vain”) that we should therefore expect to establish a purely empirical demonstration of the historical truth of the Christian faith. Machen’s conclusion seems indeed to follow from his assumptions as to the nature of historical facts and our ability to know such facts; but he does not appear to offer any firm base for holding his very strong Baconian version of these assumptions in the first place.

A related question has to do with the proper role of subjective aspects in knowing religious truth. Machen certainly recognizes the legitimacy of such aspects of religious experience; but, doubtless in reaction to modernist attempts to make such aspects the entire ground of faith, he seems determined to minimize these elements.[26] At most they play a confirmatory role. True to his strong Baconianism he repeatedly insists that nothing less than universally reliable and objective tests are adequate as true foundations for faith. So, for instance, in a revealing passage in What is Faith?, Machen rejects an attempt to ground faith in Christianity on “a sense of beauty.” The problem, he says, is that “it cannot be forced upon those who desire it not.” Since, “there is no disputing about tastes,” the method must be incorrect; “… no universally valid decision can be attained.”[27]

This general tendency in Machen’s thought to minimize subjective elements raises an important issue concerning Machen’s view of history. Not only does Machen reject the radical subjectivism and relativistic implications of approaches such as Carl Becker’s, but he virtually eliminates any legitimate place whatsoever for perspective or point of view. All points of view other than the correct one are simply failures to see the facts as they actually are. Culturally conditioned limitations of point of view are not only traits that persons ought to eliminate from their perspective, they are traits that have been eliminated by those who discover the truth. So he thought it was nonsense to talk about the “mind” of an era preventing us from understanding it, since such differences could be overcome. Instead, he said, we can understand perfectly well a writer such as Aristotle if we only learn our Greek and determine his meaning.[28] By clearly definable scientific, rational, and objective procedures, one can simply eliminate subjective or culturally conditioned aspects of knowing.[29] Hence, even in knowing the distant past and its significance, a universally valid decision can be attained.

Such a view of history has some strengths that are lacking in most twentieth-century views. It emphasizes the stable and unchanging elements both in the human condition and in God’s will and hence the abilities of persons in one era to make sense out of another era. In Machen’s day the past was commonly regarded not only as vastly different from the present, but also inferior to it. Machen, on the other hand, saw past and present as strikingly similar. “Modernity,” he observed, “is really as old as the hills.” The present was a “dark age,” as he liked to call it; yet the church had recovered from other ages just as dark.[30] The remarkable resurgence of evangelical Christianity during the past fifty years suggests that Machen’s view in this respect may have been more accurate than that of almost any of his historian contemporaries.

Yet there is something missing in this view of history also. The principal missing element is that, having so little place for legitimate differences in point of view, there is virtually nothing in Machen’s thought that suggests a sense of the human limitations in understanding afflicting true Christians as historically conditioned creatures. Certainly it is not incompatible with the view that there is a fixed and God-ordained truth about the real world, a world that is in a real sense a world of “facts” that do not change and which we can apprehend, to say that nonetheless our knowledge of this real world is limited in important ways by our historical situation and point of view. Christians especially should be ready to acknowledge such limitations when they actually exist.

This observation raises a broader question about Machen’s views on Christians’ limitations in knowledge of truth. Machen did acknowledge a limitation, but this limitation seems to have to do only with the extent of our knowledge, but not with its quality. So he often said that what we know is “true so far as it goes.”[31] This view was derived from his Baconian inductionism, which he regarded as applicable to all areas of human inquiry. Whether the subject were philosophy (as in determining Aristotle’s meaning, or theology (“Theology is just as scientific as chemistry”),[32] or history, objective determination of the most probable truth usually could be obtained. Though, of course, there was much we did not know in all of these areas, what we did know by careful scientific procedures was “true so far as it goes.”

Non-Christians, in Machen’s view, were only slightly more limited (though critically so) than Christians in their potentialities to obtain such objective knowledge. In their case also, the limit was only in the extent of their knowledge, not in quality. Even the truth of Christianity could be demonstrated to them scientifically, except for one barrier. Their own sin acted as a sort of lens that prevented them from seeing their own sinfulness. So all they lacked were some crucial facts. “In order to come to the Christian view,” Machen says in a typical statement, “it is necessary only to be scientific.” But, he adds, “no one can be truly scientific who ignores the fact of sin.”[33] Only by the work of the Holy Spirit could these blinding effects of sin be removed and persons be able to recognize their own sinfulness and hence have a sense of their own need.

The leading question that this view raises is whether there is any proper basis for such a high estimate of human intellectual potentialities in general and Christian potentialities in particular. In either case, Machen suggests, much of what a person knows can be determined objectively by scientific procedures. In all areas of knowledge persons are endowed with a potential for 20/20 vision, even though they can no t see everything.

An alternative view which preserves Machen’s emphasis that Christian faith must be built on knowledge of real historical events, yet which takes into account the limitations of our own point of view and historical circumstances, can be clarified by expanding the analogy to vision. This view presupposes, as Common Sense philosophy also does, that the human mind is so constructed by its creator as to be capable of seeing something of the real world, external to itself. Yet in this view, each human goes through this life encumbered by a series of lenses, like the multiple-lensed glasses used by eye doctors, which could, distort, and in some areas even block out one’s sight of the real world. Among these are cultural lenses shaped by living in a particular time and place, intellectual lenses shaped by training and the fashions of the day, social lenses shaped by one’s groups, psychological lenses shaped by personal experiences, lenses of religiously held values, biases, and commitments, and numbers of others. Unregenerate persons would, in addition, have some especially crucial aspects of their vision blinded and distorted by the lenses of their own sinfulness. In addition to not being able to recognize their real needs, their entire outlook would be badly thrown off center by a disposition to regard some aspect of the creation as though it were the absolute creator. Nevertheless, even through such lenses persons would be responding to data from the real world, seeing evidences of the true creator and his creation. In many limited respects they could see and understand the workings of the creation with relative clarity. Yet their overall vision would be so distorted as not to recognize the fundamental pattern and meaning of reality, especially as it centers in its relation to the Triune God.

Regeneration would remove, at least in principle, the blinding effects of sin, especially those which kept persons from recognizing their own needs for dependence on God, their creator and redeemer. It would supply instead the spiritual lens of the Holy Spirit, who enables them to perceive and understand the fundamental outlines of reality and its true spiritual dimensions. Nevertheless, this regenerating and illuminating work of the Holy Spirit would not remove the other lenses that distort and darken human vision. They still would be creatures very much limited by the lenses of the cultural, intellectual, social, psychological, and other aspects of their experience. Even at best, then, they would continue to see as though darkly in a looking glass; though indeed they would be perceiving something of the true outlines of the real world, a world external to themselves and independent of the creations of their minds.

When we come to knowledge about personal relationships, including those between God and humans, we encounter yet another obstacle to attaining something like objectivity. Such relationships take place in the contexts of the immense complexities of historical situations for which we do not have access to many of the crucial factors involved. Even in dealing with statements of Scripture, which we may take to be the absolutely honest truth, such limits are substantial. While we may be confident that what Paul says is true, we must recognize just as certainly that often we understand only imperfectly what Paul meant or what is the proper significance of what he meant for us today. Although in a sense the facts may be before us as certainly as are the letters on the eye chart, we may be able to apprehend only the rows of the largest letters with any certainty. Soon we get to the limits where our vision is badly blurred and often mistaken. Indeed, not only do the lenses of our own biases blur our vision, but the facts of Scripture are far different than letters on an eye chart. They appear not as discrete entities, as though they were on golden plates dropped from heaven, but as parts of the extremely lush forests of real historical and linguistic situations. About these we now have only fragmentary information. Through the aid of the Holy Spirit the Scriptures are perspicuous enough on the large matters of the history of redemption and the provisions for salvation. Illumined by the Spirit we may proclaim this Word boldly and fearlessly. Yet when we begin to near the limits of our relatively clear vision we should be eager to acknowledge our frailties.

Compared with Machen’s view, one of the considerable advantages of this alternative is that it should lead to fewer controversies. Machen’s view, because of its claim to scientifically-based objective knowledge, in which only one point of view could be correct and in which we can know that correct view, leaves very little room for legitimate difference of opinion among Christians. The epistemologically more modest alternative, on the other hand, explains how even deeply committed Reformed Christians who are as fully rational and scientific as we might wish are still likely to differ considerably over some basic questions of faith and practice. When clear and fundamental issues of God’s truth versus incompatible alternatives, such as those described in Christianity and Liberalism, are at stake, it permits and demands firm stands. Yet it suggests that we reserve our “Here I stand” responses for occasions when confronting the central challenges of our age.

A Christian presuppositionalist approach to truth, rather than a Baconian inductive one, has far more room in it for such recognition of legitimate differences in point of view and so should be much more compatible with the alternative here presented.

Presuppositionalists hold that persons’ views of reality are, not determined objectively, but are shaped substantially by preexisting starting points in their thought. While Christian presuppositions sharply separate the basic outlines of a Christian worldview from those of non-Christians, Christians themselves may be expected to be separated in many of their opinions by a host of secondary preconceptions. Even our knowledge of Christian presuppositions, our knowledge of the Triune God as creator, revealer, and redeemer, is imperfect and limited. Given these limitations in our first principles it necessarily follows that the conclusions we draw from them are imperfect and limited. Nonetheless we can be sufficiently sure both of the first principles and of the unchanging truths of God’s revelation and redemption to stake our lives on them, to live and die for them.

We must emphasize in conclusion that on points such as the latter one just made Machen’s epistemology, whatever its secondary weaknesses, far surpasses that of most of his contemporaries. Although he himself did not often put it this way, his common sense affirmations were in fact based on presuppositions concerning the Triune God revealed in Scripture.[34] In fact, Machen took a Biblically founded view of reality as basic and derived an epistemology from it. His great insight was that the prevailing view of “truth” in modern thought was in conflict with the view assumed in Scripture. In the modern view the focus of the meaning of “truth” was shifted from the way things are to how humans perceive and interpret them. Such a move shifts the locus of truth from God the Creator to the human mind. The mind itself becomes the ultimate creator, which has been a basic assumption in most of modern philosophy and culture, at least since Kant. Once the locus of truth is shifted to the human mind, two possible consequences prevail. Either one might assert the legitimacy of subjectivism, as was done in much of modern theology, or one might end with skepticism as was true of the disillusioned intellectuals of the 1920s such as Joseph Wood Krutch and Carl Becker. Machen found the latter consequence more consistent and indeed seems to have stared this grim possibility in the face during his student days in Germany. He demanded a view of truth that was more consistent with what he already knew to be implied by Biblical revelation.

The Common Sense philosophical tradition provided a basis for this important insight. It affirmed, as Scripture took for granted, that the human mind is structured by God in such a way as to have access to knowledge of the real world. Most importantly, consistent with a Biblical view, it affirmed that we can know about historical events in such a way that we can rest our faith on them. Common Sense insisted, as Scripture took for granted, that if the events did not really take place, then there was no basis for our faith. Furthermore, it said that we can trust reliable testimony as to the occurrence of such events. This testimony was guaranteed by the revelation of God himself in Scripture.

These points seem so essential to the preservation of Biblically-based Christianity versus its twentieth-century competitors that the limitations in Machen’s view with respect to his grounding this knowledge of God’s world and revelation on Baconian induction are certainly secondary. Moreover, Machen argues for his position so well, and true to his inductionism, seldom says anything without strong support, that his work is still most worthwhile and compelling today. No historical summary of his views begins to do justice to their genius. Yet in terms of the broader Christian tradition that Machen represents, it is surely not irreverent to suggest that all humans, even the rare genius saints, are to some extent limited by the views of a particular time and place.

Notes

1. Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), p. 15. Cf. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929).
2. Regarding fundamentalism generally, I make such a claim illustrated basically by dispensationalism, in “Fundamentalism as an American Phenomenon: A Comparison with British Evangelicalism,” Church History XLVl (June 1977), pp. 215-232. James Barr’s polemic Fundamentalism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977), is based largely on his assumption that such modern historicist views are the only views compatible with rationality and that fundamentalists entirely lack such views.
3. Grant Albert Wacker, Jr., “Augustus H. Strong: A Conservative Confrontation with History,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1978, pp. 10-13, based in turn on Machen’s radio address, “Life Founded upon Truth,” The Christian Faith in the Modern World (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1936), pp. 87-102. Machen makes similar points in What is Faith? (Grand Rapids: Win. B. Eerdmans, 1946 [1925]) and several other places. Wacker does not claim that Machen lacked a “sense of history” as meaning a keen interest in the past. He means, however, that Machen’s view is just the opposite of that expressed by José Ortega Y Gasset (also in 1936). “Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is … history.” Cited Wacker, p. 10.
4. The New Testament: An Introduction to its Literature and History, W. John Cook, ed. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1976), p. 9 (originally published as Sunday school materials ca. 1916.)
5. Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1954), pp. 130-145. Machen came back to Princeton in 1906 after apparently soliciting assurance from his mentor, William P. Armstrong, that he needed to sign no theological pledge nor do more than “stand on the broad principles of the Reformed Theology.” (Letter of July 14, 1906, quoted p. 133.) In a September 1906 letter to his mother he wrote that “Nobody ever started a work with more misgivings” and that “of course intellectually I shall be living to a greater extent in Germany than I was last year.” (pp. 137-138). Stonehouse refers to “his firm expectation of leaving at the end of a year to prepare for another profession.” (p. 145).
6. What is Christianity? and other Addresses, Ned B. Stonehouse, ed. (Grand Rapids: Win. B. Eerdmans, 1951), p. 170.
7. Ibid., pp. 182–183.
8. One of many examples of this point is found in Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1946 [1923]), pp. 106-107.
9. Quoted by W. Masselink, Professor J. Gresham Machen: his life and Defence of the Bible (Printed in Germany by the author, n. d.), p. 49, from “Bulletin 4, Aug. 1924, of the 4th. Biennial meeting of the conference of theo. seminaries and colleges, in the U. S. and Canada, art. ‘Faith and Knowledge’, p. 12.”
10. Among the works on Becker are Charlotte Watkins Smith, Carl Becker: On History and the Climate of Opinion (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1956); Cushing Strout, The Pragmatic Revolt in American History: Carl Becker and Charles Beard (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1958); Burleigh Taylor Wilkins, Carl Becker: A Biographical Study in American Intellectual History (Cambridge, ‘Mass.: M. 1. T. Press, 1961).
11. Becker, Everyman His Own Historian: Essays on History and Politics (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966 [1935]), pp. 233-255.
12. What is Faith, p. 22.
13. Everyman, p. 251.
14. What is Faith, p. 249.
15. “Westminster Theological Seminary: Its Purpose and Plan,” What is Christianity? p. 226. Cf. What is Faith?, pp. 145-146.
16. Ibid., pp. 226-227.
17. E.g., What is Faith? p. 27. Cf. Machen, The Christian View of Man (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1937), p. 156, “The Bible is a wonderfully common-sense book.” Cf. the discussion of this point in John C. Vander Stelt, Philosophy and Scripture: A Study in Old Princeton and Westminster Theology (Marlton, N. J.: Mack Publishing Co., 1978), pp. 202-220.
18. This is a central point in the following recent works: Vander Stelt, Philosophy and Scripture; Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977) ; Herbert Hovenkamp, Science and Religion in America, 1800-1860 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1978) ; John W. Stewart, “The Tethered Theology …,” uncompleted Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Michigan, ca. 1976; Jack Rogers and Donald McKim, Scripture in the Reformed Tradition: Foundation, Form and Function (New York: Harper and Row, forthcoming).
19. S. A. Grave, The Scottish Philosophy of Conimon Sense (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), espec. pp. 11-28.
20. “Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man” (1785), The Works of Thomas Reid, William Hamilton, ed., fifth ed. (Edinburgh, 1858), p. 482.
21. Grave, Scottish Philosophy, espec. pp. 29-34.
22. What is Christianity? pp. 182-183. Cf. Machen, “Christianity in Conflict,” Contemporary American Theology: Theological Autobiographies, Vergilius Ferm, ed. (New York: Round Table Press, 1932), pp. 262-263.
23. The works by Bozeman and Holifield cited above point out the immense prestige of Bacon in nineteenth century American thought.
24. Letter of Sept. 14, 1906, quoted in Stonehouse, Machen, pp. 139–140.
25. This point becomes most clear in Machen’s “The Relation of Religion to Science and Philosophy,” a review of E. Y. Mullins, Christianity at the Cross Roads (N. Y., 1924), Princeton Theological Review XXlV (January 1926), pp. 38-66. Mullins tried to defend traditional Christianity by separating religion from science and basing the truth of Christianity on “a personal relation” known by “Christian experience.” Machen found this “anti-intellectual.”
26. For instance, he mentions or alludes to these aspects in What is Faith? pp. 135 and 243, but says very little about them.
27. Ibid., p. 136. Machen’s view here can be contrasted to that of Jonathan Edwards who made a “spiritual sense” basic to seeing the truth of Christianity, hence giving the work of the Holy Spirit a far greater role in changing basic apprehensions than does Machen.
28. “Life Founded Upon Truth,” The Christian Faith in the Modern World, pp. 91-92.
29. This is his point in the passage just cited, What is Faith? p. 136. It is also the point of his frequent objection to talking about the “minds” of various cultures and eras.
30. “Westminster Theological Seminary,” What is Christianity? pp. 229–230; cf. “Christianity in Conflict,” Contemporary Aincrican Theology, p. 273.
31. What is Faith? pp. 32 & 52.
32. “The Relation of Religion,” PTR XXIV (Jan. 1926), p. 51. Cf. What is Faith? p. 33.
33. What is Faith? pp. 134–136.
34. Machen does occasionally talk about “presuppositions.” He recognizes, for instance, that the conclusions that one draws from the study of the New Testament are controlled by one’s presuppositions. Yet the “presuppositions” of the Christian view Machen does not consider to be the starting point in his apologetic. Rather, these he sees as established on the basis of scientific evidences and theistic proofs that appeal to open-minded rational persons. Cf. “The Relation of Religion to Science and Philosophy,” PTR (January 1926), pp. 52, 59-60.