For the scope of our present essay, we’ll examine Machen’s libertarianism in terms of voluntarism, the principle of relying on voluntary action and freedom of choice, particularly when associating with ecclesiastical structures. This voluntarism was worked out in many of Machen’s letters about church and civil politics, and ultimately was forced in Machen’s deposition from the PCUSA, and then his and his allies’ immediate and subsequent convocation of the OPC as a new denomination.

Dr. John Gresham Machen (July 28, 1881 — January 1, 1937) became a confessionally Reformed Presbyterian minister and New Testament scholar renowned for his zeal defending civil as well as religious liberties. As a conservative Protestant activist, Machen in the 1920s and ’30s fought the currents of Modernism he saw as corroding the doctrinal integrity of Princeton Seminary and the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America: respectively, the seminary and the mainline church of his day. The denouement of that struggle was not the reform originally intended for the existing institutions. Instead, his victory came in the form of a “faithful remnant” of ministers and seminarians to establish new Christian institutions. With the decay of Christian orthodoxy in the U.S., Machen was the central agent spearheading Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929 and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1936, hoping to preserve a confessionally Reformed legacy.

Although a confessional churchman, Machen has been described by some scholars as a libertarian. Yet, it’s important to qualify that “libertarian” in the 21st century does not mean the same as what “libertarian” might have meant in Machen’s day. A pithy example of Machen’s reflexive defense of civil freedom is his objection to jaywalking laws because he believed pedestrians should be able to cross roads even if inconveniencing motorists to stop, criticizing “the expense of liberty.” Machen ranted to a newspaper, “After all, the most serious objection to these doctrinaire, paternalistic laws is the bad effect which they have upon the mentality of people. I do think we ought to call a halt to the excessive mechanization of human life. When I am in one of those over-regulated Western cities, I always feel as though I were in some kind of penal institution.” But of course, for Machen, a standard vehicle in traffic had only 20 horsepower with a top speed of 45 mph, so this example of “liberty” illustrates the obvious difference of his era with the complexities of our modern world.

Libertarianism as a worldview has evolved in ways that no doubt would be denounced by Machen, so if “libertarian” for Machen had its present-day definition, then he would avoid that label with more vigor than with which he distanced himself from the label of “fundamentalist” which was much closer to his conservatism. Be that as it may, without its modern connotations, “libertarian” most fundamentally means advocating liberty in thought and conduct, and that individual liberty is best achieved by limiting the power of a centralized government. Machen often lamented the overreach and overgrowth of the federal government, especially in education and militarization.

Whether Machen was right or wrong in his political views, he was a libertarian in the basic sense.

Machen was very much an independent thinker, recognized by friend as well as foe as militant in his jealousy to protect essential gospel truths from the insidious inroads of liberal theology, which later became more described as Modernism, exposed and dismantled in Christianity & Liberalism (1923), his best-known work. Machen was vexed by what he and many of his colleagues saw as systemic failures in Presbyterianism: a form of church government designed (in theory) to protect the Christian society with principles of parity, plurality, accountability, and submission among “the rulers,” the elders in graded church courts, and “those ruled,” the members of local congregations.

Perhaps an antinomy of Machen’s personality is that he rigorously propounded a very high view of personal freedom and autonomy, yet, for his entire career he remained faithful to Presbyterianism. Anyone who doubts this is liable to drown in his affirmations of it up to the final years of his life.

“… When a man has once come into sympathetic contact with that noble tradition of the Reformed faith, he will never readily be satisfied with a mere ‘Fundamentalism’ that seeks in some hasty modern statement a greatest common measure between men of different creeds. Rather will he strive always to stand in that great central current of the church’s life that has come down to us through Augustine and Calvin to the Standards of the Reformed faith. …
The presentation of that body of truth necessarily involves controversy with opposing views. …
In all controversy, however, the great principle of liberty should be preserved. I am old-fashioned in my belief that the Bible is true, but I am equally old-fashioned in my love of freedom. I am opposed to the attack on freedom in whatever form it may come. …
Just because I believe in liberty, I believe in the right of purely voluntary association. I believe in the right of a voluntary association like the Presbyterian church. And true Christian fellowship, not forced organizational union of those who disagree in the whole direction of their thought and life, is the real need of the hour.   J. Gresham Machen, “Christianity in Conflict,” 1932

Our question may be: Why would a person who believes in formal submission to power structures — including a system of oaths and vows under ecclesiastical authorities — be so gung-ho about individual rights? Machen’s writings on personal freedom developed in the historical context of trying to cleanse his Church from aberrant ideologies he watched erode its doctrinal integrity; and obviously, it’s outside our scope to account for everything he ever wrote. Yet, anyone who peruses Machen’s work may infer his explicit defenses of personal liberty actually were broadly consistent and coterminous with his implicit defenses of intermutual submission. These he held in tension.

So, examining Machen’s various writings, how may we synthesize his libertarian and Presbyterian sensibilities instead of settling for contradictions in his thinking? Well, without overcomplicating a complex and nuanced subject, the simple answer is that Machen believed in the individual being accountable, submitting to ecclesiastical authorities — but when authorities coerce the individual to violate his conscience and principles, that’s the time when the individual must draw the line.

Put differently, as much as Machen believed that the Christian should submit to an elder-governed church, he believed that the Christian also has the right to leave if he is compelled by conscience. It is irregular for a member of the institutional church — such as a minister under a presbytery or a member under a session — to conscientiously resign membership, which may entail renouncing his vows, such that he may immediately become a member at another branch of the visible church without transfer, or may temporarily be a member at no institutional body. Yet, church authorities, through their misconduct, often directly cause or at least create conditions for such irregularities.

For the scope of our present essay, we’ll examine Machen’s libertarianism in terms of voluntarism, the principle of relying on voluntary action and freedom of choice, particularly when associating with ecclesiastical structures. This voluntarism was worked out in many of Machen’s letters about church and civil politics, and ultimately was forced in Machen’s deposition from the PCUSA, and then his and his allies’ immediate and subsequent convocation of the OPC as a new denomination.

After this examination of Machen, we’ll revisit a milestone controversy in modern Presbyterianism which, for better or worse, fatefully shaped the trajectory of one denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, in juxtaposition between ecclesiastical accountability and individual liberty. When that top Court’s verdict was set down, a sizable minority of GA commissioners dissented, postulating that resignation of membership is unprecedented in church history. As this survey will demonstrate, that is factually inaccurate. It’s just not true. Presbyterian and Reformed scholarship is found as prolific with credible ballast upholding “Christian Liberty and Liberty of Conscience.”

A reasonable person might think the notion of a church as a “voluntary organization” is a truism of the most tautological; yet there would seem to be some professional practitioners of “ministry” in the PCA who may still need such clarification from their own rudimentary governing standards.

“There is sometimes a salutary lack of logic which prevents the whole of a man’s faith being destroyed when he has given up a part. But the true way in which to examine a spiritual movement is in its logical relations; logic is the great dynamic, and the logical implications of any way of thinking are sooner or later certain to be worked out.” Christianity and Liberalism: Legacy Edition, J. Gresham Machen, 1923, p. 177.

“A variety of contexts are important to consider when reading Machen. The most obvious, though perhaps not the best, is the so-called fundamentalist controversy of the 1920s and 1930s in which Machen played the role of highbrow-fundamentalist. …
The reason why the fundamentalist controversy may not be the most useful study for understanding Machen better is that much of the literature on that episode in American church history overlooks important differences among America’s largest Protestant denominations. Machen himself preferred to be called a Calvinist rather than a fundamentalist. For that reason, the history of American Presbyterianism is a more important context for appropriating Machen.” — J. Gresham Machen: Selected Shorter Writings, edited by D.G. Hart, “For Further Reading”

“To be sure, we do not want to engage in Machen-envy and exaggerate our own plight or cast every contemporary disagreement in apocalyptic terms.” Christianity & Liberalism: 100th Anniversary Edition, Foreword, Kevin DeYoung

The author admits that all Machen’s writings had respective historical contexts, yet the principles he espoused are apposite. So, the best method to explain Machen’s libertarianism/voluntarism is to just block-quote his writings with as much context as feasible, avoiding overburdening our survey.

1. Machen on the church’s operation and law keeping as a civil entity 

“At the foundation of the life of every corporation is the incorporation paper, in which the objects of the corporation are set forth. Other objects may be vastly more desirable than those objects, but if the directors use the name and resources of the corporation to pursue the other objects they acting ultra vires of the corporation. So it is with Christianity. It is perfectly conceivable that the originators of the Christian movement had no right to legislate for subsequent generations; but at any rate they did have an inalienable right to legislate for all generations that should choose to bear the name of ‘Christian.’ It is conceivable that Christianity may now have to be abandoned, and another religion substituted for it; but at any rate the question what Christianity is can be determined only by an examination of the beginnings of Christianity.”  Christianity and Liberalism: Legacy Edition, J. Gresham Machen, 1923, p. 20

“One of the most important elements in civil and religious liberty is the right of voluntary association—the right of citizens to band themselves together for any lawful purpose whatever, whether that purpose does or does not commend itself to the generality of their fellow men. Now, a church is a voluntary association. No one is compelled to be a member of it; no one is compelled to be one of its accredited representatives. It is, therefore, no interference with liberty for a church to insist that those who do choose to be its accredited representatives shall not use the vantage ground of such a position to attack that for which the church exists.… a true Christian church will be radically ethical.” J. Gresham Machen, “The Responsibility of the Church in Our New Age,” 1933

“On the contrary, it [the General Assembly] has always maintained that the right to control the property of the members of the Church, to assess the amount of their contributions, or to prescribe how they shall dispose of their money, is utterly foreign to the spirit of Presbyterianism. Every contribution on the part of an individual member of the Church must be purely voluntary. In fact, the Presbyterian Church itself is a voluntary association. All of its members voluntarily associate themselves with the Church, and maintain their affiliation with it no longer than they voluntarily choose to do so. All that they do for its support, therefore, is a voluntary donation, and there is no power which can compel them to contribute to any ecclesiastical object to which they are not willing to give.”  Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. 1934, General Assembly Minutes, as extracted by J. Gresham Machen in “Statement to the Presbytery of New Brunswick,” 1935

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