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J. Gresham Machen on the relationship between knowledge and faith

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Christian scholarship is the new Crusade
Christian scholarship is the new Crusade

Most of my readers are familiar with William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland – they are two of the most famous Christian apologists out operating today. They both cite a person named “J. Gresham Machen”, and today I want to tell you more about this person.

William Lane Craig quotes him in this chapel address to Wheaton College students. (I am adding some context to Craig’s citation: Craig started the quote at “False ideas…” and ended it at “…harmless delusion”)

We are all agreed that at least one great function of the Church is the conversion of individual men. The missionary movement is the great religious movement of our day. Now it is perfectly true that men must be brought to Christ one by one. There are no labor-saving devices in evangelism. It is all hard-work.

And yet it would be a great mistake to suppose that all men are equally well prepared to receive the gospel. 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. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.

I was actually in the audience when he gave this speech – I was there for the philosophy conference.

So Craig is citing J. Gresham Machen. What about Moreland?

Here’s an essay that Moreland wrote for Christian Leadership Ministries, the faculty arm of Campus Crusade for Christ.

He cites he exact same passage by J. Gresham Machen, as well, only he starts his citation at “God usually exerts…”.

So that’s Craig and Moreland. Citing the same passage, by the same writer. Interesting.

So who is this J. Gresham Machen anyway?

Here’s the bio:

J. Gresham Machen was professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary before becoming one of the founders of Westminster Theological Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC). This address on The Scientific Preparation of the Minister, was delivered September 20, 1912, at the opening of the one hundred and first session of Princeton Theological Seminary, and in substance (previously) at a meeting of the Presbyterian Ministers’ Association of Philadelphia, May 20, 1912. It was first published in The Princeton Theological Review, Vol. 11, 1913.

And Craig and Moreland are citing this essay, which you can read online for free. If you want to know what makes the Wintery Knight the Wintery Knight, this is the place to find your answers.

The essay was published in the Princeton Theological Review in 1913. The essay explains what the church should have done, but didn’t. And the only way out of the mess we are in now is to go back to the fork in the road and make the right turn this time.

You really need to read the essays I linked to by Craig, Moreland and Machen. It will open your eyes and show you how there can be so many Christians attending church on Sundays, and yet they have so little impact on the culture as a whole.

Autobiographical note

When I was a young man, I was exposed to the writings of William Lane Craig, J.P. Moreland, Walter L. Bradley, Greg Koukl, Hugh Ross, and Philip E. Johnson – and they changed my life. It really does make a big difference to young people when they are engaged at an intellectual level, with logic and evidence. I had no other connections to the church at that time. No one in my family, and none of my friends, were religiously inclined. I had no felt needs for religion. But approaching Christianity as knowledge worked for me. Before my conversion, I never attended the feminized church. And I was never told that Christianity was opposed to logic and evidence. Imagine my surprise to see what was being taught in the church compared to the public, testable claims to knowledge in the Bible, and the public, testable claims to knowledge that Christians scholars made in their books.

This passage from R.C. Sproul and John Gerstner in their otherwise useless book on Christian apologetics was formative for me, as well:

Secularism, on the other hand, is a post-Christian phenomenon carrying in its baggage, a conscious rejection of the Christian world view. It supplants the Christian consensus with its own structured view of reality. Less barbaric on the surface than paganism, secularism adopts a benevolent paternalism toward the not yet enlightened Christian who continues the practice of an anachronistic faith. Wearing a benign mask, the secularist loudly proclaims his commitment to religious tolerance on behalf of those weak-minded souls who still cannot bear to face a hostile, or worse, an indifferent universe, without the narcotic effect of ecllesiastical opium. The church is safe from vicious persecution at the hands of the secularist, as educated people have finished with stake-burning circuses and torture racks. No martyr’s blood is shed in the secularist West – so long as the church knows her place and remains quietly at peace on her modern reservation. Let the babes pray and sing and read their Bibles, continuing steadfast in their intellectual retardation; the church’s extinction will come not by sword of pillory, but by the quiet death of irrelevance. It will pass away with a whimper not a bang. But let the church step off the reservation, let her penetrate once more the culture of the day and the Janus-face of secularism will change from benign smile to savage snarl.

This is the problem we are facing today. We have changed Christianity into “faith” instead of KNOWLEDGE.

22 thoughts on “J. Gresham Machen on the relationship between knowledge and faith”

  1. Great post! Fantastic quotes from J. Gresham Machen and from Sproul and Gerstner.

    I’m glad you put “faith” in quotes. The problem is also that there is a general misunderstanding that faith is *of necessity* blind. This is not true. Christians have no need to blindly believe when there is ample evidence for the truth of the Gospel in which we place our trust. The faith to which we are called is trust for the future on the basis of verifiable events that happened in the past.

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  2. Great post (as usual).

    However, allow me to point out a couple of things:

    – what is lacking is “faith”.

    With that being said – I’ll put out for interpretation what “faith” is (Faith is not merely a belief in theological facts).

    Scriptural faith is simply “doing what God tells you do”. Abraham who is the father of faith because of His obedience to God (look at Genesis 22:12 – “now I know”).

    In addition – but the just shall live by his faith. (Habakkuk 2:4). One can substitute “just” for “righteous” —an individual whose personality and behavior are acceptable to God.

    The word live means “to be, think, speak, and act.”

    The term faith means “love for, always seeking, reliance on, hope in, obedience to, and trust in God

    “The just shall live by faith” -: the individual whose personality and behavior are acceptable to God thinks, speaks, and acts as one who loves, seeks, relies on, hopes in, obeys, and trusts God.

    With that being said – much of the church has gone off into “belief” and “mental ascent” as Wesley put it and has misinterpreted Pauls writing’s (ie Romans) to their own destruction (See 2 Peter 3: 16-17).

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    1. Hi Mike. This post is for you because it completely disagrees with your emphasis on belief and good behavior. It emphasizes knowledge. Facts. Arguments. Evidence. Free inquiry and the search for truth. Machen’s point is that Christianity is a knowledge tradition, and it has to be secured based on knowledge of the external world that makes Christian truth claims objectively true. He is saying that emphasis on faith and behavior is exactly the wrong way to go.

      So there’s a challenge for you.

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      1. WK, you make it sound like God doesn’t want us to have faith or to behave in a certain way. And that’s not true.

        What you want to say to Mike is that it isn’t a case of “just believe, in spite of there being no evidence, and be good”, but rather “believe because there is ample evidence and align your life with what you know to be true”.

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        1. Mike put forward good actions as a method for influencing the culture, and I am countering saying that the good actions are dependent on the true beliefs. If the universe is an accident and we are just machines made out of meat, then there is no reason to care about having a good marriage, and Christianity is false. The only motive for action that would be left is for pleasure. That’s why Machen puts the emphasis on truth – truth drives the good action that Mike and I agree on. And you can’t determine truth by watching how nicely someone behaves. Atheists can be nice, too.

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          3. You might appreciate Alex Pruss’s moral argument from intrinsic proper functions of humans as it entirely depends on the same sense of value that we tend to ascribe to sufficiently conscious moral entities such as ourselves, and not to bags of meat… In particular premise 3

            1. (Premise) Humans have intrinsic goods that do not reduce to pleasure.
            2. (Premise) If there are intrinsic proper functions in humans, probably God exists.
            3. (Premise) If there are no intrinsic proper functions in humans, either humans have no intrinsic goods or all intrinsic human goods reduce to pleasure.
            4. Therefore, probably God exists.

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  3. Should the Church be in the forefront of society? Are we not to find comfort with a secular government who allows freedom of religion and promulgates laws for the common good, protecting and providing safety for all citizens?

    As for knowledge, Christians seek their foundation in the Bible, accepting Christ, and from that which has been revealed become more aware of natural laws and the presence of the devine. Knowledge is the truth of what God has revealed as humans intellectually engage and work within the framework of His Creation to ‘subdue’ His handiwork for the benefit of mankind and develop a relationship with the Lord.

    We are blessed to have a Constitution born from the foundation of God’s truth.

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  5. Great post, WK. It’s easy for Christians to say, “just believe,” but if the belief we commend is based on fairy tales and mythology, what good is it?

    What is it about the Sproul and Gerstner apologetics book that makes it “otherwise useless”?

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    1. It has nothing there about science or the historicity of the resurrection, if I recall correctly. I never found myself referring to it in any debate since I read it in my freshman year.

      UPDATE: I just looked. There are chapters on the cosmological and teleological arguments that have no reference to science, but nothing on the resurrection. And a huge section of the book is a rebuttal to pre-suppositionalism. So that’s not really apologetics at all… but more theology. It’s not a bad book, it’s just not useful.

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      1. I’ve never read the Sproul-Gerstner book, but I do know that Sproul places a high value on logical thinking, and that does strike a chord with me. So much of Christianity today is anti-intellectual as if God placed a premium on blind faith. I’ve heard so many people say, “When faced with intellectual arguments against Christianity, I just give ’em the Gospel. It’s the Holy Spirit who convicts them, anyway.”

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        1. @Bob: I sympathize. I’ve heard that too. Thing is, Peter and Paul (cf. Acts) knew when to not “just give ’em the Gospel”, but to prepare them for the Gospel first by appealing to evidence.

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      2. Yeah, Sproul and Gerstner’s book is a rebuttal to pre-suppositionalism, which makes it an “in-house” debate book. I haven’t read the book Classical Apologetics, but I’m sure it’s not better than Sproul’s solo work “Defending Your Faith,” which is an introduction to apologetics. I actually wish that book had been the first apologetic work I read because Sproul explains logic and then gives an overview of the popular arguments for the existence of God. I wouldn’t give the book to an atheist to read, but I do recommend it to those that are green to apologetics and want to understand what defending the faith is all about.

        Here is the book at amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Defending-Your-Faith-Introduction-Apologetics/dp/1433503158/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1305035331&sr=8-1

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    1. Hello Denyse! Thanks for leaving a comment. That book was written in 1984, when they may still have been in phase one of secularisms. I think the secularists are in phase two, especially up north!

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    2. I think there’s also a failure to recognize ideological bias on the part of secularists. Secularism is presented as “neutral”.

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