Machen and the New Age
Working through a landmark Machen article, part 1
We live in uniquely wicked and degenerate times.
Such is the conceit of every “new” age and of all who forget the assurances of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes:
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. (Eccl. 1:9, AV)
J. Gresham Machen (preacher, author, professor, institution builder, and movement leader) was tasked by a social science journal1 to write about the 1933 version of what the world deemed new and what he considered quite old.
A university administrator once said, “There are only two levels of faculty morale at any institution: Low and lower than it’s ever been.” Given Machen’s years of faculty service at Old Princeton and then his founding and leadership of Westminster Theological Seminary, he might agree. At any rate, we would be wise to admit that things may be worse (in certain ways) at one time than another. Differences in degree exist, for better and worse. But is anything truly new? Machen (the consummate churchman) addresses this with regard to the church and the world:
The question of the Church’s responsibility in the new age involves two other questions: (1) What is the new age?; (2) What is the Church?
The former question is being answered in a number of different ways; differences of opinion prevail, in particular, with regard to the exact degree of newness to which the new age may justifiably lay claim. There are those who think that the new age is so very new that nothing that approved itself to past ages can conceivably be valid now. There are others, however, who think that human nature remains essentially the same and that two and two still make four. With this latter point of view I am on the whole inclined to agree. In particular, I hold that facts have a most unprogressive habit of staying put, and that if a thing really happened in the first century of our era, the acquisition of new knowledge and the improvement of scientific method can never make it into a thing that did not happen.
Machen is biblically skeptical that much is really new. Throughout the article, Machen will talk about “old things” which may be anywhere from 200-2000 years old. He does not uncritically extol all old things nor does he carelessly anachronize or imperiously import. He was a true conservative who was discerning about what he wished to conserve. Here he had especially in view those who would downplay or offload “the great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity (which) is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology,” to quote Christianity and Liberalism, his great book from 10 years earlier. The “facts (which) have a most unprogressive(!) habit of staying put” and those things that “really happened in the first century of our era (which) the acquisition of new knowledge and the improvement of scientific method can never” make untrue included those facts about the supernatural essentials of the historic Christian faith, including Christ’s miracles, substitutionary death, and glorious resurrection. While Machen preferred the term “modernism” to “liberalism” in a theological sense, note that even the very 21st-century-sounding term progressive was part of his vocabulary. None of these three terms was complimentary in this context.
Such convictions do not blind me to the fact that we have witnessed astonishing changes in our day. Indeed, the changes have become so rapid as to cause many people to lose not only their breath but also, I fear, their head. They have led many people to think not only that nothing that is old ought by any possibility to remain in the new age, but also that whatever the new age favors is always really new.
Both these conclusions are erroneous. There are old things which ought to remain in the new age; and many of the things, both good and bad, which the new age regards as new are really as old as the hills.
Sin, lust, idolatry, and hatred of God are not new, but in every “new” age there will be Christians surprised by sin who are thus in danger of a kind of demoralizing decapitation. Machen counsels us to keep our heads…even in 2024.
Read The Responsibility of the Church in Our New Age
Listen to a fine reading of the article (39 minutes) by Bob Tarullo
- by Brad Isbell
READ PART 2
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1933, no. 165, p. 3,10-12