Tag: Westminster Confession of Faith

Machen on Evolution

In chapter 4 of his book Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America, D.G. Hart discussed Machen’s views on science, and evolution in particular. Machen, he wrote, received a letter from William Jennings Bryan a few weeks before the 1925 Scopes trial, in which Bryan asked Machen to appear in Dayton as an expert witness. This rather put Machen on the spot. Machen’s well-known scholarly defense of the fundamentals of the historic Christian faith was being recruited by a populist evangelicalism that was deeply skeptical of academia. Though Machen was a proponent of biblical inerrancy like the fundamentalist side Bryan represented, he thought the historicity of Christ in the New Testament was more important than the historicity of Genesis, and was reticent to speak on evolution. Machen wrote back, saying that he would not testify.

Clarence Darrow (standing) questioning William Jennings Bryan (seated at left) at the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” July 20, 1925. Photo from the Smithsonian Institution Archives

Though Machen had generally avoided the subject of evolution in public statements, Machen had thoughts on the matter, and was not a six-day creationist. In The Christian View of Man (1937 – a quick review here), Machen wrote, “It is certainly not necessary to think that the six days spoken of in that first chapter of the Bible are intended to be six days of twenty four hours each. We may think of them rather as very long periods of time.” Dr. Hart described Machen’s views at some length (pp. 97–99, 105):

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“Indifferentists” and the Destruction of the Presbyterian Church

In the early 1920s, when J. Gresham Machen was in the thick of the battle for the orthodox Christian doctrines in the Presbyterian Church and Princeton Seminary,  he faced frustrating and damaging opposition from moderates, which Machen referred to as “indifferentists.”

Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism in response to liberals like Harry Emerson Fosdick. Fosdick objected to the conservative “Five Point Deliverance” of 1910, a PCUSA statement requiring new ministers to adhere to the Westminster Confession of Faith and specific points of orthodox doctrine, which included the inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth of Christ, substitutionary atonement, the miraculous works of Christ, and Christ’s bodily resurrection. Allowing attacks like Fosdick’s to go unchallenged threatened to replace the truth of Scripture with a false gospel, and yet the indifferentists preferred to preserve a superficial peace. In Stephen Nichols’ J. Gresham Machen: A Guided Tour of His Life and Thought, he writes:

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Machen on Orthodoxy

In an article in The Presbyterian Guardian, J. Gresham Machen wrote on the problems of terms commonly used to describe the historic Christian faith. Here are a few excerpts:

Many years ago, …some brilliant person said: “Orthodoxy means ‘my doxy’ and heterodoxy means ‘the other man’s doxy’.”

The unknown author of that famous definition–unknown to me at least–may have thought that he was being very learned. Knowing that the Greek word “heteros,” which forms a part of the English word “heterodoxy,” means “other,” he built his famous definition around that one word, and “heterodoxy” became to him “the other man’s doxy.”

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