J. Gresham Machen Bibliography

The Bible Teacher and Biblical Facts

Have men the right to interpret the Bible as they please?

IN THE sphere of education, facts are having a hard time. The old-fashioned notion of reading a book or hearing a lecture and simply storing up in the mind what the book or the lecture contains–this is regarded as entirely out of date. The other day I heard a noted educator give some advice to a company of college professors. It is a great mistake, he said, to suppose that a college professor ought to teach; on the contrary he ought simply to give the students an opportunity to learn.

This pedagogic theory has been having its natural result; it has joined forces with the natural indolence of youth to produce in present-day education a very lamentable decline. The decline has not perhaps been universal; in the sphere of the physical sciences, for example, the acquisition of facts is not regarded as altogether out of date. But in the spheres of literature and history, and still more in that of language-study, the tendency is perfectly plain. An outstanding feature of contemporary education in these departments is the growth of ignorance; pedagogic theory and the growth of ignorance have gone hand in hand.

The undergraduate student is being told that he need not take notes on what he hears in class, that the ex-, ercise of the memory is a rather childish and mechanical thing, and that what he is really in college to do is to think for himself and to unify his world. He usually makes a poor business of unifying his world. And the reason is clear. He does not succeed in unifying his world for the simple reason that he has no world to unify. He has not acquired a knowledge of a sufficient number of facts in order even to learn the method of putting facts together. He is being told to practise the business of mental digestion; but the trouble is that he has no food to digest. The modern student, contrary to what is often said, is really being starved for want of facts.

But if that condition prevails in the sphere of general education it is tenfold worse in the sphere of the Christian religion and in the sphere of the Bible. Bible" classes to-day often avoid a study of the contents of the Bible as they would avoid pestilence or disease. But surely that tendency should be resisted. It does seem to me–hopelessly out of date as it may be regarded–that the first function of the Biblical teacher is to impart a simple knowledge of what the Bible contains. Discussion may come later, but the first thing is to let the Bible–the whole Bible, not an expurgated Bible–the first thing is to let the Bible speak for itself.

The Abandonment of Historical Method

A generation or so ago this notion of letting the Bible speak for itself, or at least letting the individual Biblical writers speak for themselves, was exalted to the dignity of a principle. The principle was called “grammatico-historical exegesis.” The fundamental notion of it was that the modern student should distinguish sharply between what he would have said or what he would have liked to have the Biblical writer say, and what the writer actually did say. The latter question only was regarded as forming the subjectmatter of exegesis.

This principle, in America, is rapidly being abandoned. It is not being abandoned in theory; lip-service is still being paid to it. But it is being abandoned in fact. It is being abandoned by the most eminent scholars.

It is abandoned by Professor Goodspeed, for example, when in his translation of the New Testament he translates dikaioo, “justify,” by “make upright.” I confess that it is not without regret that I should see the doctrine of justification by faith, which is the foundation of evangelical liberty, thus removed from the New Testament; it is not without regret that I should abandon the whole of the Reformation and return with Professor Goodspeed to the merit-religion of the Middle Ages.

But the point that I am now making is not that Professor Goodspeed’s translation is unfortunate because it involves–as it certainly does–religious retrogression but because it involves an abandonment of historical method. Whether a sinful man may become “right eous” or not does not interest the modern translator: but the historian must certainly admit that it did interest the Apostle Paul. And the translator of the New Testament, to be true to his trust, must place the emphasis where Paul placed it and not where the translator thinks it should be placed.

What is true in the case of Paul is true also in the case of Jesus. And modern writers have abandoned the grammatico-historical approach. They persist in construing Jesus as though they could have wished that Jesus had said certain things. The question what Jesus actually said is quite forgotten. In one of the most popular recent books on the psychology of religion–The Reconstruction of Religion by Professor Ellwood–I came upon the following amazing assertion. “Jesus,” the author says, “concerned himself but little with the question of existence after death!” ¹ In the presence of such assertions any student of history may well stand aghast. It may be that we do not make much of the doctrine of a future life, but the question whether Jesus did so is not a matter of taste but an historical question which can be answered only on the basis of an examination of the sources of historical information, which we call the Gospels.

And the result of such examination is perfectly plain. As a matter of fact, not only the thought of heaven but also the thought of hell runs all through the teaching of Jesus. It appears in all four of the Gospels; it appears in the sources, supposed to underly the Gospels, which have been reconstructed, rightly or wrongly, by modern criticism. It imparts to the ethical teaching of Jesus its peculiar earnestness. It is not an element which can be removed by any critical process but simply suffuses the whole of Jesus’ teaching and Jesus’ life. “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” “It is good for thee to enter into life with one eye rather than having two eyes to be cast into the Gehenna of fire”–these words are not an excrescence in Jesus’ teaching but are quite at the center of the whole.

At any rate if you are going to remove the thought of a future life from the teaching of Jesus, if you are going to reject the prima facie evidence, you can do so only by a critical grounding of your procedure. And my point is that that critical grounding is now usually thought to be quite unnecessary. Modern American writers simply attribute their own predilec-

TUCKED away almost at the end of a magazine entitled with unconscious irony “Christian Education” is the address by Professor Machen which The Sunday School Times gladly gives to its readers as its contributed leader this week. “Christian Education” is the organ of the Council of Church Boards of Education in the United States of America, representing the various evangelical Protestant denominations, but sadly misrepresenting their historic creeds and the true Church of Christ. Its December issue is devoted to the annual Conference of the National Association of Biblical Instructors held at Columbia University, New York, in December of 1923. The President of this Association is Professor Charles Foster Kent, (of Yale, the well-known destructive critic who gained notoriety through his editorship of the Shorter Bible and who now plans to capture America’s colleges for unbelief by his “Schools of Religion.” The magazine reports Professor Kent’s address, in which he refers to the Lord Jesus Christ as one of the great “pioneers of human thought and experimentation.” Other addresses were by extreme radicals, such as Professor B. W. Bacon, of Yale, speaking on “The Biblical Teacher and Liberalism,” in which he refers to “John the Apostle (according to tradition) whatever John he may have been,” as one who in his New Testament writings wisely and tactfully dodged such questions as the physical resurrection, the judgment day, and the visible second return, “by spiritualizing these ideas. The ancients knew very well that it was a spiritualizing Gospel. Its author refused to know Christ after the flesh; he knew him after the Spirit. We, if we are wise, will seek to apply such principles to the problems of our own time.” Other Modernists, including Professor Henry T. Fowler, of Brown University, Professor Irving F. Wood, of Smith College, and the like, delivered their addresses in complacent rejection of the facts declared in the Word of God. Then came Professor Machen’s address. It would have been interesting to watch the faces of that group of “Christian educationists” while he uttered his masterly, scientific, unequivocal and unanswerable message. If the reader keeps in mind the setting and atmosphere in which Dr. Machen dealt these giant strokes for the truth and the Gospel, his utterance will be seen to have an almost unique significance.

by J. Gresham Machen, D.D., Professor of New Testament Literature and Exegesis, Princeton Theological Seminary

tions to Jesus without, apparently, the slightest scrutiny of the fact.

This wholesale abandonment of historical method is being summed up in the use of one word–the word “interpretation.” Formerly when men had brought to their attention perfectly clear assertions they used to accept them or else deny them. Now they no longer deny, but merely “interpret.” History, men say, must be interpreted in accordance with the thought of our own age. But I sometimes wonder just where this business of interpretation will stop.

I am in a company of modern men. They begin to test my intelligence. And first they test me on the subject of mathematics. “What does six times nine make?” I am asked.

I breathe a sigh of relief; many questions might have placed me very low in the scale of intelligence, but this question I think I can answer. I raise my hand hopefully. “I know that one,” I say. “Six nines are fifty-four.”

But my complacency is short-lived. My modern examiner puts on a grave look. “Where have you been living?” he says. ““Six nines are fifty-four– that is the old answer to the question.”

In my ignorance I am somewhat surprised. “Why,” I say, “everybody knows that; that stands in the multiplication-table; do you not accept the multiplicationtable?”

“Oh, yes,” says my modern friend, “of course I accept the multiplication-table. But then I do not take a static view of the multiplication-table; every generation must interpret the multiplication-table in its own way. And so of course I accept the proposition that six nines are fifty-four, but I interpret that to mean that six nines are a hundred and seventeen.”

And then the examination gets into the sphere of history. The examiner asks me where the Declaration of Independence was adopted.

That one also I think I know. “The Declaration of Independence,” I say, “was adopted at Philadelphia.”

But again I meet with a swift rebuke. “That is the old answer to the question,” I am told.

“But,” I say, “every one knows that the Declaration of Independence was adopted at Philadelphia; that stands in all the history books; do you not accept what stands in the history books?”

“Oh, yes,” says my modern friend, “we accept everything that stands in the history books–hundred-percent Americans we are. But then, you see, we have to interpret the history books in our own way. And so of course we accept the proposition that the Declaration of Independence was adopted at Philadelphia, but we interpret that to mean that it was adopted at San Francisco.”

Interpretation, a Substitute for Denial

And then finally the examination turns to the history of the Christian religion. “What do you think happened,” I am asked, “after Jesus was laid in that tomb near Jerusalem about nineteen hundred years ago?”

To that question also I have a very definite answer. “I will tell you what I think happened,” I say: “He was laid in the tomb and then the third day he rose again from the dead.”

At this point the surprise of my modern friend reaches its height. The idea of a professor in a theological seminary actually believing that a dead man rose from the grave! “Every one,” the examiner tells me, “has abandoned that answer to the question long ago.

“But,” I say, “my friend, this is very serious that answer stands at the center of the Apostles’ Creed as well as at the center of the New Testament; do you not then accept the Apostles’ Creed?”

“Oh, yes,” says my modern friend, “of course I accept the Apostles’ Creed; do we not say if every Sunday in church or at least if we do not say it we sing it of course I accept the Apostles’ Creed. But then, then, do you not see, every generation has a right to interpret the Creed in its own way? And so now of course we accept the proposition that ’the third day he rose again from the dead’; but we interpret that to mean, “The third day he did not rise again from the dead.”

In view of this modern art of interpretation one may almost wonder whether the lofty human gift of speech has not been rendered entirely useless. If everything that I say can be interpreted to mean its exact opposite, what is the use of saying anything at all? I do not know when the great revival of religion will come. But one thing is perfectly clear. When it does come, the whole elaborate art of “interpretation” will be brushed aside, and there will be a return, as there was at the Reformation of the sixteenth century, to plain common sense and common honesty. It is a very great mistake to suppose that as Biblical teachers you “have a right” to interpret