J. Gresham Machen

A little-known Machen letter makes for good reading on the 145th anniversary of his birth. Happy Machen Day! "Permit me simply to say that in my judgment we shall not bring the world to Christ by that kind of 'influence,' which involves disloyalty to Christ. ...

A previously unpublished Machen letter, in which he looks south... and ahead.

Machen: “I think I am just about as strongly opposed to the reading of the Bible in state-controlled schools as any atheist could be. “For one thing, the reading of the Bible is very difficult to separate from propaganda about the Bible. I remember, for example, a book of selections from the Bible for school reading, which was placed in my hands some time ago. Whether it is used now I do not know, but it is typical of what will inevitably occur if the Bible is read in public schools. Under the guise of being a book of selections for Bible-reading, it really presupposed the current naturalistic view of the Old Testament Scriptures. “But even where such errors are avoided, even where the Bible itself is read, and not in one of the mistranslations but in the Authorized Version, the Bible still may be so read as to obscure and even contradict its true message. When, for example, the great and glorious promises of the Bible to the redeemed children of God are read as though they belonged of right to man as man, have we not an attack upon the very heart and core of the Bible’s teaching? What could be more terrible, for example, from the Christian point of view, than the reading of the Lord’s Prayer to non-Christian children, as though they could use it without becoming Christians, as though persons who have never been purchased by the blood of Christ could possibly say to God, ‘Our Father, which art in Heaven’? The truth is that a garbled Bible may be a falsified Bible; and when any hope is held out to lost humanity from the so-called ethical portions of the Bible apart from its great redemptive core, then the Bible is represented as saying the direct opposite of what it really says. J. Gresham Machen, in “The Necessity of the Christian School”

Presbydelphia, 90 years ago.

Fighting Machen (link in reply)

Tonight at 9:30 PM ET: youtube.com/watch?v=s1lDMGyi…

On 1/1/37, Machen died of pneumonia while visiting tiny, insignificant churches. He "had been sick for most of the prior month...It must have been his strong sense of duty or the urgency of the times that drove him to honor that scheduled engagement on the wintry Dakota plains."