J. Gresham Machen died 69 years ago today. The circumstances of his life are instructive, and anyone who presumes to minister (or desires to minister) in the 21st Century should ponder them dispassionately.

John Gresham’s father, Arthur, was born in Virginia, attended Harvard and practiced law. His mother, Mary [Minnie] Gresham Machen, was born in Macon, Georgia, attended Wesleyan College, and in 1903 published a book entitled The Bible in Browning. John was raised with an appreciation for logic and classical literature; he traveled to Europe repeatedly and returned to live among the cultural elite of Baltimore. He attended Princeton and studied under Henry Van Dyke and Woodrow Wilson. He also studied banking and international law at the University of Chicago. He eventually went to study in Marburg and Gottingen under men like Adolph Jülicher, Johannes Weiss and Wilhelm Herrmann, a student of Ritschl.

John Franklyn Norris, on the other hand, was born in Dadeville, Alabama and moved to Texas where he carefully nurtured his baser passions and honed the skills necessary for shooting people. It is well known that a woman was not safe alone with the man. The same year Curtis Lee Laws coined the term Fundamentalist Norris began his ministry with a radio station in full support of the Ku Klux Klan. John Birch was a graduate of his seminary in Ft. Worth. Norris was so anti-Catholic that he congratulated Mussolini on his rise to power in Italy.

American orthodox Christianity seems to have teetered for a moment between those two poles and then made a hard, wrong turn.

We are repeatedly told that this fundamentalist movement commends itself to us because of its separatism, and the claim is wrong on two counts. First of all, J. Gresham was a separatist and refused to be known as a fundamentalist; those two terms were never coterminous, not even in the beginning. Second, fundamentalism failed to be separatist at the most elementary level; if a man could draw a crowd (and J. Frank knew how to draw a crowd) there was no separatist impulse to be found in the hall. The Texas Tornado pastored a church of 5,200, one of the mega-churches of the day, and that was enough. Fundamentalism’s separatism was always very selective and convenient. One would think that theological liberalism was the only threat to the human soul.

Machen vehemently rejected fundamentalism for several reasons. The movement lacked a historical perspective, it failed to appreciate the uses and virtues of culture and scholarship, it preferred (indeed I would suggest that it introduced to the Church) minimalist doctrines and encouraged a rowdy indifference to precise thought, thereby preparing the way for neo-evangelicalism’s hobbled gospels and religious enthusiasms.

[I recall during my own studies going through the letters of R. V. Clearwaters. His correspondent was pleading that the argument was not as simple as RVC was making it appear, and that fairness required a more even-handed presentation. Clearwaters replied to say that the situation had to be kept simple to ensure the eager following they needed.]

Chester E. Tulga wrote:

Fundamentalism today is a human movement with many Biblical truths, a gospel with a rather shallow doctrinal setting, influenced largely by many dominating and domineering personalities, and many eccentricities and careless Biblical interpretations. Its interdenominationalism is a curious mixture of truth, abbreviated Christianity, high-powered promotionalism and rugged individualists who have built personal empires that take in thousands of dollars and render no accounting to anyone. Fundamentalism is a very ambiguous word and hardly deserves the glorification accorded to it by the hard core brethren. It seldom includes the great Baptist doctrines which the hard core brethren profess to love so well, even though some of them never get around to practicing them.

Professing a love for something, like professing seriousness, is not something that fundamentalists seem to follow through on.

At this point I know a certain segment of our readership is suffering from mounting blood pressure and some even risk popping an eyeball. I can understand their apoplexy: nothing is easier and more common than gigging fundamentalism.

To these people, there is not a lot I have to say. They will yet again find a way to ignore the fact that I am quoting “the good guys”. As someone recently said, “Our history is well set.”

Indeed it is, indeed it is.

And whether you consider the salad days of the movement, its later hostilities toward neo-evangelicalism or its on-going contentiousness with other separatists (perhaps including the incipient neo-evangelicalism detected within Young Fundamentalism?), The Movement continues its tired habits. We even see it today on our blogs: the crack special forces of the movement lobbing duds over the wall and running for cover, seeking to hurl vague accusations about two-book theories and attempting to intimidate the young in the safety of calmer waters.

As I say, for these there is little hope. For the rest of our readers, we hope there is at least a moment of lucid, New Year’s reflection. Machen held firmly to a two-book theory. He wrote:

It is true that the decisive thing is the regenerative power of God. That can overcome all lack of preparation, and the absence of that makes even the best preparation useless. But as a matter of fact God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favorable conditions for the reception of the gospel. False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel.

Those prior conditions of the mind present an insuperable hurdle to the fundamentalist.

Whether we talk about the culture and liturgy of the movement, its hymnody and devotional literature, “creation science” with its many rubber doctorates and speculative defenses of Revelation, its statistical studies blarney, or its selective moral outrages, we are talking about a movement enamored with false ideas.

The movement is quite fond of its sauntering bumpkins in the pulpit, its pontificating rubes, its homespun twaddlers.... I understand this. Those were good days! The crowds were large, the backslapping was fervent and cash was flowing like wine. It’s hard to let go.

But listen to these words from Machen, delivered in an address 20 December 1912:

Modern culture is a mighty force. It is either subservient to the gospel or else it is the deadliest enemy of the gospel. For making it subservient, religious emotion is not enough, intellectual labor is also necessary. And that labor is being neglected. The Church has turned to easier tasks. And now she is reaping the fruits of her indolence. Now she must battle for her life.
.
.
.
The Church is waiting for men of another type. Men to fight her battles and solve her problems. The hope of finding them is the one great inspiration of a Seminary’s life. They need not all be men of conspicuous attainments. But they must all be men of thought. They must fight hard against spiritual and intellectual indolence. Their thinking may be confined to narrow limits. But it must be their own. To them theology must be something more than a task. It must be a matter of inquiry. It must lead not to successful memorizing, but to genuine convictions.

The Church is puzzled by the world's indifference. She is trying to overcome it by adapting her message to the fashions of the day. But if, instead, before the conflict, she would descend into the secret place of meditation, if by the clear light of the gospel she would seek an answer not merely to the questions of the hour but, first of all, to the eternal problems of the spiritual world, then perhaps, by God’s grace, through His good Spirit, in His good time, she might issue forth once more with power, and an age of doubt might be followed by the dawn of an era of faith.

That was true in 1912, and today it cannot get any truer. The difference between then and now is this: you don’t have to take Machen’s word for it, you don’t have to take Tulga’s word for it, you don’t have to take dissidens’ word for it. We have nearly a hundred years worth of evidence to back it up. Look at what we have: nearly a century of clutching at false ideas and adaptation to the fad du jour. You cannot train for your whole life to become a sumo wrestler and then decide you want to be a jockey at the Preakness.

The history is indeed well set.

What remains to be discovered is whether the church will ever get those “men of another type” that Machen looked for, men of thought, men contemptuous of false ideas, men who have a care for the prior conditions of the human mind.

Selah.