Category: Quotes & Commentary

The Worldview Machen On The Modern Age — A Rebuff To Hart’s R2K Machen

“The truth is there can be no real progress unless there is something that is fixed. Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.” Well, Christian doctrine provides that place to stand. Unless there be such a place to stand, all progress is an illusion. The very idea of progress implies something fixed. There is no progress in a kaleidoscope

That is the trouble with the boasted progress of our modern age. The Bible at the start was given up. Nothing was to be regarded as fixed. All truth was regarded as relative. What has been the result? I will tell you. An unparalleled decadence—liberty prostrate, slavery stalking almost unchecked through the earth, the achievements of centuries crumbling in the dust, sweetness and decency despised, all meaning regarded as having been taken away from human life. What is the remedy? I will tell you that too. A return to God’s Word! We had science for the sake of science, and got the World War; we had art for art’s sake, and got ugliness gone mad; we had man for the sake of man and got a world of robots—men made into machines. Is it not time for us to come to ourselves, like the prodigal in a far country? Is it not time for us to seek real progress by a return to the living God?

J. Gresham Machen
The Creeds and Doctrinal Advance

1.) Notice how integrated Machen’s worldview here is in this excerpt. He starts with the necessity of the absolute given-ness of the Scriptures and the Historic Christian Doctrine that they convey. From there he segues into the reality that without the Archimedian fixed reference point there can be no progress. And the progress which Machen is referring to is not merely progress in the Church but progress in culture and social order. Machen explicitly says because of the loss of fixity that is provided with and by Scripture and the Christian doctrine that flows from it, “there is decadence, there is liberty prostrate, there is slavery stalking almost unchecked upon the earth, the achievements of centuries crumbling in the dust, with sweetness and decency despised.”

    Now clearly this is worldview thinking at its best.

Machen, writing as a Christian Minister, and a Doctor of the Church, tells the Christian community that unless they return to Scripture not only will all hope of progress is abandoned but also regress into old chaos and dark night is guaranteed.

2.) Notice also, how Machen connects the teaching of Scripture to what some style the “common realm.” Machen, like all good worldview thinkers, explicitly notes that when we embraced Science apart from Christian doctrine, Art apart from Christian doctrine, Man apart from Christian doctrine the consequences were war, ugliness gone mad, and robots. Machen clearly sees a connection here between Scripture, Christian Doctrine and all of life. Machen’s faith is not a privatized faith that is cordoned off from the public square. Machen’s faith is not a faith that appeals to Natural Law to govern science, art, and man. Machen’s faith is not a faith that would keep him from boldly speaking as a Christian minister to the life issues of the time. Machen’s faith was a wholistic integrated faith as this quote clearly reveals.

3.) In his appeal to return to the living God is implied the idea that should man return to the living God then the problems he makes mention off will find themselves receding. Man will no longer be a robot and a machine but instead will discover again his manishness. Art will no longer be ugliness gone mad but will once again find its proper place and role in God’s world. Science will no longer be prone to producing War but will be harnessed for the glory of God.

Machen finds in God’s Word and Christian doctrine not only the resolution to individual men’s hostility to God and God’s hostility to them, but Machen also found in God’s Word and Christian doctrine the resolution to a world gone mad and a civilization undone by sin.

And for that R2K must re-invent the Machen of History so that he is, as one R2K advocate recently put it one who believed that, “fighting these (cultural) battles was not the ministry of the visible church.” Quite to the contrary this piece reveals a man of the visible Church fighting with an eye not only to the Church but also to the cultural issues in the world.

Francis Nigel Lee on Pietism

Speaking to Pietism

“Here he [Satan] makes the Christians so heavenly-minded that they are of no earthly use. They spend all of their time in church or at prayer meetings, they lose all of their zeal for the Creator God and this world of His. In this case the church becomes other-wordly, unearthly and irrelevant to real life. It becomes progressively more and more alienated from the real issues. It becomes foreign to God’s world. Lonely and defeated, this kind of church then surrenders all the other areas of life outside of the church to the forces of anti-Christ. And these forces of anti-Christ ultimately surrounds and destroy this pietism. What pietism therefore produces, above all, is its own gravediggers.”

Francis Nigel Lee
A Christian Manifesto, 17:00

Machen, The Worldview Thinker … The Machen Hart Never Told You About

“What has Christianity to do with education: What is there about Christianity which makes it necessary that there should be Christian schools? Very little, some people say (R2K “Christians, for example — BLM). Christianity, they say, is a life, a temper of soul, not a doctrine or a system of truth; it can provide its sweet aroma, therefore, for any system which secular education may provide; its function is merely to evaluate whatever may be presented to it by the school of thought dominant at any particular time. This view of the Christian religion…is radically false. Christianity is, indeed, a way of life; but it is a way of life founded upon a system of truth. That system of truth is of the most comprehensive kind; it clashes with opposing systems at a thousand points. The Christian life cannot be lived on the basis of anti-Christian thought. Hence the necessity of the Christian school.” 

~ J. Gresham Machen

“It is this profound Christian permeation of every human activity, no matter how secular the world may regard it as being, which is brought about by the Christian school and the Christian school alone. I do not want to be guilty of exaggerations at this point. A Christian boy or girl can learn mathematics, for example, from a teacher who is not a Christian; and truth is truth however learned. But while truth is truth however learned, the bearings of truth, the meaning of truth, the purpose of truth, even in the sphere of mathematics, seem entirely different to the Christian from that which they seem to the non-Christian; and that is why a truly Christian education is possible only when Christian conviction underlies not a part, but all, of the curriculum of the school. True learning and true piety go hand in hand, and Christianity embraces the whole of life — those are great central convictions that underlie the Christian school.”

~ J. Gresham Machen

Quotes From Rittenhouse’s “For Fear Of The Jews” — In Their Own Words

“Without exaggeration, it may be said, that that great Russian social experiment was indeed accomplished by the hands of the Jews… It is true there are no Jews in the ranks of the Red Army as far as privates are concerned, but in the committees and in the Soviet Organization, as Commissars, the Jews are gallantly leading the masses of the Russian proletariat to victory … The symbol of Jewry, which for centuries has struggled against capitalism, has become also the symbol of the Russian proletariat, which can be even seen in the face of the adoption of the Red five pointed star, which in former times, as it is well known, was the symbol of Zionism and Jewry.”

“The Communist”
April 12, 1919
Newspaper published in Kharkoff

“The fundamental fact is incontestable, the Soviet Bureaucracy is almost entirely in the hands of Jews and Jewesses, whilst the number of Russians who participate in the Government of the Soviets is ridiculously small.”

“The Red Gazette”

“The Bolshevist revolution in Russia was the work of Jewish brains, of Jewish dissatisfaction, of Jewish planning, whose goal is to create a new order in the world. What was preformed in so excellent a way in Russia, thanks to Jewish brains, and because of Jewish dissatisfaction, and by Jewish planning, shall also, through the same Jewish mental and physical forces, become a reality all over the world.

The American Hebrew
September 10, 1920
Boasting of the Jewish Led Bolshevik Revolution

“According to Benjamin H. Freedman, founder of the League for Peace with Justice in Palestine, ‘by the summer of 1916, Great Britain was giving favorable consideration to surrender to Germany. Germany was anxious to make peace and to devote her attention to the development of her 1903 concession from the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Germany offered Great Britain liberal terms of surrender. Germany demanded neither reparations nor indemnities and offered to restore the pre-war territorial integrity and political independence. of all nations occupied by Germany during the war.

During the days Great Britain was deciding whether to accept or reject Germany’s surrender terms, Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the World Zionist Organization, proposed to the British War Cabinet that in consideration of the promise of Palestine to the Jews of the World by Great Britain they would bring the USA into the war as Great Britain’s ally. The British War Cabinet accepted the arrangement.”

Stan Rittenhouse
For Fear Of The Jews –pg. 48-49

Rittenhouse sources from Freedman’s “Time to Tell.”

Machen, The Postmillennialist — Part II

“But this is not the first period of decadence through which the world has passed, as it is not the first period of desperate conflict in the Church. God still rules, and in the midst of darkness there will come in His good time the shining of a clearer light. There will come a great revival of the Christian religion; and with it will come, we believe a revival of true learning: The new Reformation for which we long for and pray may well be accompanied by a new Renaissance.”

J. Gresham Machen
The Modern Use of the Bible
Princeton Theological Review, 23 (1925), p. 81

Machen would have never countenanced the current militant amillennialism as found in R2K. Any representation of Machen that he was no culture warrior — that he was a man uninterested in the Transformation of age — is just idiocy on stilts.