He was a man of his time and place but, given that Warfield, who was just as Southern as Machen and born before the Civil War and therefore even more closely tied to the Old South, was able to overcome his culture and see that the sort of segregation held by the Old Princeton faculty (Machen was not alone in his views at Princeton) was contrary to the Word of God so too Machen should have done the same. Racism is sin. Still, history is real. He lived in a time and place and those realities had a real, damaging effect upon him. We are products of our time.

J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937) was born in the American South. He was born fewer than 20 years after the end of the Civil War. He was born to wealth and privilege. He also inherited the attitudes of many in the American South (and in the American North) about “race” (now a dubious category),¹ethnicity, and segregation. The world into which he was born assumed the righteousness of Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. It is likely that the only African-Americans with whom Machen had regular contact were door men and porters on the train. In the last few days there has been much angst over a letter that Machen wrote to his mother in which he expressed his disagreement with his older and equally southern Princeton Seminary colleague, B. B. Warfield (1851–1921), who, unlike Machen, had come to reject racial (or ethnic) segregation. Their disagreement came to a head in 1913. Fred Zaspel explains,

In 1913, while Warfield was acting president of the seminary, he acted on these convictions administratively. The faculty had maintained that whites and blacks should remain socially separate, and Machen, Warfield’s junior colleague at the time, complains in a letter to his mother that Warfield unilaterally overruled the protest and allowed a black student to live in the student dormitory at Alexander Hall. Warfield practiced what he preached.²

The letter is ugly and painful to read and does not reflect well on Machen. It raises some larger questions, however. The first is what to do when we find that our heroes were sinful? This question has arisen before in this space. Nearly 6 years ago Thabiti Anyabwile noted that Colonial Americans, sometimes denoted “American Puritans” or “Colonial Puritans” were slaveholders. Then, as now, my response is to observe that these are good reminders that church history is, in part, the history of sin. There is strong historical, empirical evidence for the Pauline and Augustinian (and Reformed) view of original sin and depravity after the fall. As a consequence of Adam’s sin all humans are corrupt in all their faculties (e.g., the intellect, the affections, and the will). By nature, after the fall, we think wrongly, we love badly, and we choose wickedly. This means that we should not be surprised to find out about the particular sins of our theological forebears.

Second, “heroes” and “golden ages” are a bad idea on both theological and historical grounds. The only sinless man who ever walked this earth was Jesus. He is God the Son incarnate. His humanity was conceived by the Holy Spirit. He was born of the Virgin and perfectly obeyed God’s righteous and holy law all the days of his earthly life. He did so vicariously (as a substitute) for all of his elect and that righteous active and suffering obedience was imputed to all his people for their justification received through faith alone, which he himself gave them by the work of his Holy Spirit. All the rest of us are, by nature, Adam’s children and we make progress in sanctification slowly and unevenly. Romans 7:21–25

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin (ESV).

The traditional Reformed reading of this passage holds that Paul was speaking of himself, about his Christian experience. To the objection that a Christian could not speak this way, the Reformed response has been to say that only a Christian says “when I want to do right”and “I delight in the law of God, in my inner being” and only a Christian experiences the warfare to which Paul refers, and only a Christian cries out, “who will deliver me from this body of death?” and closes a ringing doxology combined with such a brutally honest self-assessment. “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” is followed by “with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” Under the historic Reformed reading of this passage, which is reflected in the Heidelberg Catechism (e.g., 60), we are not perfectionists. Because history is the account of human actions (behind which lies the secret providence of God) we understand that there are no golden ages on this earth before the coming of Christ. In the Second Helvetic Confession (art. 11; 1566) the Swiss Reformed (and others) confess:

We further condemn Jewish dreams that there will be a golden age on earth before the Day of Judgment, and that the pious, having subdued all their godless enemies, will possess all the kingdoms of the earth. For evangelical truth in Matt., chs. 24 and 25, and Luke, ch. 18, and apostolic teaching in II Thess., ch. 2, and II Tim., chs. 3 and 4, present something quite different.

This also means that just as all our heroes (e.g., Polycarp, Athanasius, Wycliffe, Luther, Calvin, and Machen) had feet of clay and real, actual sins. So also there were no golden ages in the past either. There was never a time after Eden when all was right with the world or that there were sinless men (apart from Jesus). It means that, as much as Reformed confessionalists should admire Old Princeton, not everything was right there.

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NOTES

1. There are serious questions about the history and validity of the category of “race.” Given those questions, one wonders how sustainable the category of “racism” is. One may not deconstruct “race” and then coherently affirm one of its byproducts, i.e., racism. Surely, what we mean by “racism,” is a civil evil and a sin, a violation of the second table of God’s moral law. Perhaps I am missing something but I do not see anyone addressing this problem. It would help us if we were more critical of the category “systemic racism,” and more receptive to the older category of analysis “prejudice.” By dismissing prejudice as a category we have lost a valuable tool for analyzing and understanding sin. Individuals may and must repent of prejudice but “systemic racism” is vague, nebulous, and whatever truth it may convey it has the unintended consequence of excusing particular people of particular sins.
2. Fred G. Zaspel, “Reversing the Gospel: Warfield on Race and Racism,” Themelios43, no. 1 (2018): 32.