On a cold winter’s day in 1921 pallbearers carried the body of one of the great theologians of the 19th and 20th centuries to a graveside in Princeton, New Jersey. Writing to his mother afterwards, J. Gresham Machen would remark that when they carried B. B. Warfield’s body out, that Old Princeton went with him. Old Princeton had been the primary seedbed for pastors and missionaries in the Presbyterian church, but now, more than 100 years from its founding, the roots of declension had taken hold and modernist theology had made inroads, infiltrating the pulpits and pews of the Presbyterian church as well. As Machen saw it, Warfield’s vital orthodoxy had been the last vestige of orthodoxy keeping Princeton from a catastrophic embrace of liberal theology.

Over the next 15 years, J. Gresham Machen’s struggle to preserve an orthodox Presbyterianism would become a touchpoint of the larger “fundamentalist controversy” boiling over in churches all around the United States. His book, Christianity & Liberalism, precipitated a series of events that culminated in Machen and other professors leaving Princeton in 1929 to plant a new seedbed for pastors and missionaries called Westminster Theological Seminary. Then, in the 1930s, Machen would break away from the mainline Presbyterian church he had spent his life in and establish a new denomination devoted to faithful teaching of God’s ancient word — an idea completely antithetical to the most influential and powerful forces of the day. 

Politics. Technology. Identity. Power. Science. Everything seems to be changing. So why not faith?

Visit christianityandliberalism.com for more on the book, audiobook, and show.

Music: “Line in the Sand (C&L)” by Timothy Brindle Produced by Nobody Special Wrath and Grace Records Music Licensing Codes: HGUBSIMJ58IH3NEB XOORY3CLGEDUW4C5