What Richard Burnett was able to accomplish with new biography, Machen’s Hope, is a marvel of historical research. Nearly comprehensive in its historical scope, it leaves few stones unturned in its quest to elucidate the socio-cultural background in which Machen was born and reared, served and worked, and struggled and persevered in his life’s work. This book covers every major era of Machen’s life and even includes biographical details of the generations that preceded his parents on both sides. Burnett also explains in granular detail the development of the cultural and intellectual movements around which Machen was raised. Most notable perhaps is the development of the intellectual climate of the new and growing Johns Hopkins University. Not only was Machen a student at Johns Hopkins, but he also lived within walking distance of the campus from his childhood. The establishment of “the first scientific university” patterned after the great German universities had a far reaching and long-lasting impact on the development of higher education in America, and Machen was right at the center of it.
The primary theme of this work will elicit some controversy. Burnett is challenging the narrative that Machen was tempted towards the Modernism of German higher criticism for a brief time during his studies in Germany, which he soon rejected by becoming a stalwart opponent of it. To be sure, the story is a bit more complicated than that, but Burnett posits, as the book's subtitle indicates, that Machen was something of a committed modernist from his time at Johns Hopkins until early in the second decade of the 20th century.
His argument seems to ride on Machen’s expressed desire to use “scientific” methods in biblical studies. Trained as a classicist under Basil Gildersleeve at Johns Hopkins, Machen was interested in applying the critical “scientific” methods of classicism to the interpretation of Scripture. Burnett takes this, alongside Machen’s tortured internal conflict surrounding ordination and his reticence to join the faculty at Princeton Seminary, to mean that Machen was truly a committed modernist and was unconvinced that he would be able to pursue his studies with freedom if he agreed to be an ordained minister or serve on the faculty at Princeton Seminary.
However, I believe a much simpler explanation is readily available. The dichotomy Machen was struggling with was not modernism versus conservatism or fundamentalism; it was academia versus pastoral ministry. He didn’t believe that he would be able to engage in the “scientific” study of the Bible to his liking as a professor at Princeton. In this context, “scientific” is not a placeholder for “modern”; it is a placeholder for “academic.” Burnett rightly recognizes and demonstrates that Machen’s doubts as to his ability to serve at Princeton to his liking were alleviated over time because of his exposure to the rigorously academic, or “scientific,” work of his Princeton colleagues William Park “Army” Armstrong and Francis Patton, among others.
Take for instance the work of Robert Dick Wilson, who was committed to a scholarly and scientific investigation of the Old Testament as evinced by his work, “Scientific Biblical Criticism,” “A Scientific Investigation of the Old Testament,” and his inaugural lecture, “The Lower Criticism of the Old Testament as a Preparation for the Higher Criticism.” Of course, these works were faultfinding of the various critical methodologies, but they were by no means “unscientific.” Wilson simply disagreed with where the “science” pointed. And this serves as an indicator that the words “scientific” and “critical” or “modern” were not synonyms at Princeton.
The dichotomy Machen was struggling with was not modernism versus conservatism or fundamentalism; it was academia versus pastoral ministry.
A similar argument can be made from the work of O.T. Allis, who used archaeological discoveries to combat critical methods applied to the Psalms in his work, “The Bearing of Archaeology Upon the Higher Criticism of the Psalms.”
It is true that Machen was optimistic about the “modern” scientific methods of the burgeoning American university system and supported them quite rigorously, as Burnett amply shows. Burnett also shows that Machen awoke to a “tremendous defection” when he realized that the modern American university system that he had championed was bearing the fruit of unbelief and forsaking the gospel of supernatural Christianity. The change in Machen’s views on the American university was not an ideological shift from modernism to conservatism. He simply realized that the modern university was not what he had thought it was. In other words, he didn’t go from supporting their modernism to opposing it; he merely realized that he ought to have been opposing it all along.
Any new biography of Machen will have to contend with the fact that there is a growing crowd of Machen biographers. There have been several biographies of Machen written, and the first has, in many ways, stood out as definitive (if not a bit hagiographical). Ned Stonehouse’s biography was written with full access to the complete written correspondences of Machen’s estate as preserved in the archives of Montgomery Library at Westminster Theological Seminary. Dr. Stonehouse also had the benefit of being a student and personal friend of Machen, serving on the faculty at Westminster Seminary with Machen for almost a decade. No new biography of Machen will be able to compete with that kind of personal insight. Knowing this, Burnett seeks to complement (and sometimes subtly critique) the Stonehouse biography by providing a veritable mountain of historical background to the events of Machen’s life.
The result is that the careful reader will come away with a rather clear sense of the air that Machen breathed and the water in which he swam. However, it seems as if Burnett gets a bit carried away at times. There are sections in this book wherein Machen isn’t referenced for 30 or 40 pages at a time, and when Burnett does bring it back to him, the connective tissue between the historical excursus and its impact on Machen’s actual life and thinking sometimes feels thin. To put it another way, at several points in this work, Machen’s tree gets lost in the forest of historical background.
All said and done though, this book is tremendously helpful, offering a unique view into the life and times of J. Gresham Machen not found in any previous work on the subject. What must have been uncountable hours spent poring over the personal correspondence of Machen in the basement of Westminster’s library and the rigorous research into the niche corners of American Protestant higher education has paid off in a marvel of historic work on a man whose efforts helped preserve orthodox Reformed Christianity for the generations that followed.