Your Weekly Machen Fix: Attack on Princeton Seminary, Continued

The following excerpt was originally published in 1927.  This piece should quell any notion of Machen being a Fundamentalist.

We have seen that Princeton Seminary stands in the first place for the complete truthfulness of the Scriptures as the Word of God, and in the second place for the Westminster Standards as containing the system of doctrine that the Scriptures teach.  In the third place, Princeton Seminary holds that both these things – the full truthfulness of Holy Scripture and the system of doctrine that our Standards set forth – need, and are capable of, intellectual defence. 

Hence we cannot agree with those who think that a theological seminary ought to devote less time to the defence of Christianity and more time to the propagation of it.  Certainly it is a grievous sin to propagate what is incapable of defence.  The basic question about any message that may be propagated is the question whether it is true; and that question has been raised with regard to the Christian message in such insistent fashion in the modern world that the challenge must above all things be squarely and honestly met.

In meeting the challenge, we are fully conscious of the magnitude of our task.  We cannot agree at all with those who despise the adversaries in this great debate, who think that the “critics” are to be disposed of with a few general words of adjectival abuse.  For our part, we have profound admiration for the great masters of modern criticism; we are fully conscious of their intellectual greatness; we respect them to the full.  Who would not admire the imposing reconstructions proposed by a Baur or by a Bousset, or the massive learning of a Schürer, or the brilliancy and versatility of a Harnack, or the incisiveness of radicals like Wrede in Germany or our own American Dr. McGiffert?  Certainly we respect such scholars, opponents though they are of all that we hold most dear.  Some of them may have respected us in turn; but whether they respect us or not, we shall continue respecting them.  They are wrong, we think; all their learning is devoted to the impossible task of reconstructing on naturalistic principles what was really an act of God.  But though they are wrong, they are wrong in a grand and imposing way; and they cannot be refuted either by a railing accusation or by a few pious words.

So we try to divest our students of the notion that there is any royal road to sacred learning; we try to divest them of the notion that they can lead the modern Church without a knowledge of the original languages of Scripture and without the other tools of research.  Above all we try to give them a sense of the magnitude of the modern debate.  We try, indeed, to lead them to faith; but we do not try to lead them by encouraging them to ignore the facts.  On the contrary, we believe that Christian faith flourishes not in the darkness but in the light, and that a man’s Christian conviction is only strengthened when he has examined both sides.  We do, indeed, encourage men to come to Princeton Seminary.  For them to do so, we think, is only fair.  Historic Christianity deserves, we maintain, at least a hearing before it is finally given up; it is not fair to hear only what can be said against it without obtaining any orderly acquaintance with what it is; and to learn what is is men should listen not to its opponents but to those who believe it with all their minds and hearts.  So we do invite men to Princeton.  But after they have studied at Princeton, indeed even while they are studying here, the more they acquaint themselves with what opposing teachers say, the better it seems to us to be.  We encourage our graduates, if they can, to listen to the great foreign masters of naturalistic criticism; we desire them to hear all that can be said against the gospel that we believe.