Free Republic

In 1923, J. Gresham Machen, then professor at Princeton Seminary, wrote the book, Christianity and Liberalism. The book was a response to the rise of liberalism in the mainline denominations of his own day. In short, Machen argued that the liberal understanding of Christianity was, in fact, not just a variant version of the faith, nor did it represent simply a different denominational perspective, but was an entirely different religion altogether. Put simply, liberal Christianity is not Christianity. So insightful is Machen’s volume, that it should be required reading certainly for all seminary students, pastors, and Christian leaders. What is...

Churches that accept society’s dogma on marriage and sexuality may think of themselves as “affirming,” but the global church sees them as “apostate.” Meanwhile, it is the height of imperialistic narrowness for a rapidly shrinking subset of white churches in the West to lecture the rest of the world — including those places where Christianity is exploding in growth or where Christians are being martyred — on why they are wrong and how everyone else in Christian history has misread Scripture regarding the meaning of marriage. (RNS) Whenever people today say that Christianity needs to update and adapt its moral...

Wally was a sweet fellow and very graciously lent me volume one of the Battles edition of Calvin’s Institutes. A while later I visited him in his luxurious office at the local “tall-steeple” PCUSA congregation in order to return the book. I was full of questions. In conversation, Wally mentioned that he was a graduate of Princeton Seminary. I had heard about this fellow “Machen” so I asked Wally about him and about Westminster Seminary. His jovial face quickly turned red with anger at the very mention of the traitor Machen and the rebel seminary. Mind you, this was about...

On New Year’s Eve, 1936, in a Roman Catholic hospital in Bismarck, North Dakota, J. Gresham Machen was one day away from death at the age of 55. It was Christmas break at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, where he taught New Testament. His colleagues said he looked “deadly tired.” But instead of resting, he took the train from Philadelphia to the 20-below-zero winds of North Dakota to preach in a few Presbyterian churches at the request of Pastor Samuel Allen. ... He had pneumonia and could scarcely breath. Pastor Allen came to pray for him that last day of 1936,...

The town where J. Gresham Machen, the founder of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, last preached before his death has shown up again in the news, this time in a horrible way. While Machen's direct denominational influence was fairly narrow, as the key leader of the secession from the Northern Presbyterians and founder of Westminster Theological Seminary, Machen has a lasting role in American Calvinism that is far larger than the Orthodox Presbyterian Church which he founded. In his own lifetime, however, Machen's role was even more important and went well beyond Reformed circles. As a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary,...

What does it mean to be a conservative in the United States? Dictionaries are not much help on this one, since like most reference works, they turn out to yield fairly bland and abstract conceptions. For instance, the Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines the adjective conservative as either "relating to a philosophy of conservatism" or "constituting a political party professing the principles of conservatism." Webster's does go on to say that being conservative has to do with the maintenance of "existing views, conditions, or institutions." In other words, conservative is supposed to be synonymous with "traditional," "moderate," and "cautious," favoring...

The following essay was originally published in Biblical And Theological Studies by The Members of the Faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary, (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912). The article was later to be transformed into one of the chapters in Machen's book The Origin of Paul's Religion. This essay is now in the public domain and may be freely copied and distributed. The electronic edition of this book was scanned and edited by Shane Rosenthal for Reformation Ink. In this edition the footnotes have not been included and in a few places the spelling has been modernized. Original pagination has...