As it happened, Machen succumbed to pneumonia in Bismarck, North Dakota, on January 1, 1937. Not only how he died but where he died is significant. Machen gave up not just the wealth and opportunity his elite family afforded but the privileged life of a Princeton scholar. The mission is driven by the message, not the other way around, and this is evident in his life as well as in his teaching. He could well have died in a grand house in Baltimore. But Christ’s “little flock” exists wherever the true gospel is preached.

Already frail in health, J. Gresham Machen kept his appointment to preach in North Dakota. For someone reared in Machen’s world, the Presbyterian Church was far from being a “little flock,” as Jesus described his church (Luke 12:32). It was powerful in every area of civil and social life.

From a family of Baltimore elites, Machen, born in 1881, had a Harvard Law School–trained Episcopalian father (Arthur Webster Machen) and a Presbyterian mother, Mary Jones Gresham. It was his mother who had the greater influence on his life, teaching her son Greek, Latin, and the classics as well as piano. He enjoyed regular Sunday dinners with Woodrow Wilson and his family after the morning service at Princeton’s Nassau Presbyterian Church.

Machen’s mentor at Princeton Seminary was B. B. Warfield, a fellow Southerner and ardent defender of orthodoxy against creeping moralism and modernism. (Warfield had also nominated Wilson for the presidency of Princeton College.) However, Warfield led the charge to desegregate the college and the seminary, while Machen, sadly, opposed the policy.

Race, Mission, and Protestant Empire

Machen’s racial elitism wasn’t uniquely Southern. In fact, Northern Protestant progressives championed an imperialistic vision of an “Anglo-Saxon” Christian nation expanding its influence (and coercive power) to “lesser peoples.” America was the redeemer nation, sacrificing itself to rescue the world—if necessary, by military means. (See Richard Gamble’s The War for Righteousness.)

Without downplaying Machen’s racial prejudice, we should mark his passionate opposition to the inherently racist “Christianizing” program of the progressives. Like Warfield, he didn’t like the Christian nationalism of the Protestant establishment because it confused the gospel with the law and violated the inherent rights of religious minorities. A fierce libertarian, Machen even voted for the Roman Catholic presidential candidate Al Smith.

Modernism from the Inside

Over the years 1905–6, Machen’s studies in Germany tested his faith. In letters to his mother, he expressed the draw to his pietistic liberal professors in Germany like Wilhelm Herrmann (the teacher of Bultmann and Barth). This wasn’t someone born to be a fundamentalist.

But precisely because of this experience, he knew modernist theology from the inside. What troubled him after his recovery of orthodox conviction was that the Presbyterian Church he knew and loved was being taken over by sycophants of these German professors. On the one hand, there were the outright liberals, like Auburn Affirmationists, but at Princeton Seminary a strange cobelligerency was formed by fundamentalists and premillennialists like Charles Erdman, who held up D. L.

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