Machen's Big GA Adventure
Be warned, presbyter—your first General Assembly can change you!
By Brad Isbell
J. Gresham Machen’s first General Assembly radicalized him and changed the course of his career and life. The Machen of 1920 was already a different man than the one who took a steamer in January of 1918 to France, where he would see total depravity writ large in blood, smoke, and mud. Optimism died in the trenches alongside millions and millions of sons of Christendom. Machen’s hope for the world was found in the work and witness of the church (as we’ll see below), but Machen found too much of the world infiltrating the church.
Machen was, however, “kind of a big deal” as he approached his 40th year. From the Stonehouse biography:
By the year 1920 he was frequently invited to supply the pulpits of large and influential churches especially in the Northern Presbyterian Church. And the number of his speaking engagements of other sorts was growing apace. He was thankful for such opportunities and filled his engagements with enthusiasm.
…however, his enthusiasm was tempered by a sober and even anxious estimate of the state of the church as a whole. When therefore he was selected as a commissioner to the General Assembly of 1920 at the Spring meeting of the Presbytery of New Brunswick, he was not animated by a spirit of self-congratulation or elation.
We’ve made the point before that Machen was good at fighting but did not enjoy fighting. We also see that Machen, like many who have or will attend presbyterian assemblies this month, was not thrilled with every aspect of the process. And he did not believe that all was well.
Machen did not believe that the disaster of the Great War demanded new doctrine or new measures, and he came to see the new ecumenism as an accelerant for doctrinal declension.
In the period preceding the Assembly the Inter-Church World Movement was in the foreground of attention, and gave expression to this tendency. And the fact that it gained considerable vogue in the Presbyterian Church, and even made an appeal for a time to such a solid person as Machen’s intimate friend “Bobby” Robinson, was evidence to Machen of the acute danger that was confronting the distinctive testimony of the Church to its Calvinistic confession and even to historic Christianity in general.
Machen did not desire to bring the affairs of the world into the church, yet he could not ignore trends in America and the wider world that affected the church, so he had to talk about it.
The distress at such tendencies in the Church was aggravated by the spirit of the times as it manifested itself in the life of the nation. Centralization and bureaucracy were growing rapidly; and there was a feverish outbreak of “100% Americanism.” Machen confessed that at times he was “world weary” as he contemplated the situation. “When I turn for refuge to the Church of Christ,” he wrote his mother on Jan. 28, 1920,
”I find there exactly the same evils that are rampant in the world—centralized education programs, the subservience of the church to the state, contempt for the rights of minorities, standardization of everything, suppression of intellectual adventure. At least it destroys my confidence in any human aid. I see more clearly than ever before that unless the gospel is true and there is another world, our souls are in prison. The gospel of Christ is a blessed relief from that sinful state of affairs commonly known as hundred percent Americanism. And fortunately some of us were able to learn of the gospel in a freer, more spiritual time, before the state had begun to lay its grip upon the education of the young.”
Machen’s mother also lamented the progressive Christian Nationalism of the day and, like Machen, distrusted the tendency to put the church at the service of national, social, or political ends. This helps explain why Machen opposed prayer in public schools and advocated for the rights of all types of private schools, even those thought to be injurious to the nation, such as foreign-language schools and socialist schools (see Christianity and Liberalism).
To this his mother replied: “I don’t believe you are more tired of hundred percent Americanism and the subservience of the church to the state than I am! And I am truly thankful that you hold on to the gospel of Christ, of which I am not ashamed. You are a son after my own heart in that.”
Machen already knew that the church was in trouble, but the Northern presbyterian church’s flirtation with a banal, nationalist ecumenism at the 1920 assembly was what really got his attention.
The opening of the Assembly did nothing to allay Machen’s fears. At a preliminary meeting on evangelism the impression received was that there was a greater emphasis upon Americanization than upon salvation in the modern missions program. And the main emphasis of the retiring moderator’s address was upon “pseudo-patriotism.” But the big issue of the Assembly was that of church union, and the action taken with regard to it was so distressing that everything else seemed in comparison with it to be a mere trifle. The opportunity of association with old friends had been delightful (still a big part of GAs!); the routine business had been tolerable (well, sometimes this is the case); but as he wrote his mother:
“The great disaster and disgrace of the Assembly was the adoption of the plan of organic union with about twenty other church bodies. This action now goes down to the presbyteries to be ratified by them in order finally to become law. The Preamble of the Plan of Union sets forth the things in which all the constituent churches are to be agreed. Everything else is regarded as of secondary importance. The Preamble is studiously vague; a man could subscribe to the creed contained in it without believing in the essentials of the Christian faith. The action, if ratified, simply means that the Presbyterian Church, so far as its corporate action is concerned, will have given up its testimony to the truth...”
Now we see a bit of Machen the churchman, and we see the collision course for future controversy with the Great Men of Princeton and the church set.
To add to Machen’s dismay the majority report of the committee on the church union proposal was presented by President J. Ross Stevenson of the Seminary! And there was a sense of outrage that a matter of such far reaching consequences had been allotted a total of only one hour for presentation and debate. In the ten minutes which the opposition managed to secure, a minority report opposing the plan was presented but to no avail.
Machen did not sleep much the night following the adoption of the report. “The defeat of the proposed Plan of Union in the presbyteries,” he averred, “is the most important object now before the Church. I wish I could devote myself exclusively to that for a year.” During the succeeding months he did indeed give himself unstintingly to this cause. No fewer than three articles from his pen on the subject appeared in The Presbyterian. He also engaged in public debate on a number of occasions.
Machen entered the fight, whether he relished the fight or not. And that fight would continue until the end of life on the first day of January, 1937.