Machen, war, and the church

As one can see from the title of this blog I will address the topic of politics and the church with some of the writings of J. Gresham Machen as a guide.

When it comes to voluntary associations, civic organziations, political involvement, or community service, Machen was fully in favor of the individual Christian giving himself to the service of others. A champion of individual liberty, Machen believed, as Stephen Nichols has noted, Christians should "organize themselves in accordance with their consciences for the furtherance of political and social ends that they think right."

However, because of his commitment to the doctrine of the spirituality of the church, Machen was unwilling to bend to the pressures of the day that believed the church collectively should make official pronouncements upon current political or social questions. David Calhoun, in his research on the history of Princeton Seminary, said Machen's "civil libertarianism and his Southern perspective kept him from identifying America and Christianity as many twentieth-century evangelicals have."

In Machen's article "The Responsibility of the Church in Our New Age" he speaks of a true Christian church as being radically doctrinal, radically intolerant (in the gospel message of Jesus Christ as the way of salvation), and radically ethical. What marks off a true Christian church from society is the "function of the church in its corporate capacity is of an entirely different kind. Its weapons against evil are spiritual, not carnal; and by becoming a political lobby, through the advoacy of political measures whether good or bad, the church is turning aside from its proper mission, which is to bring to bear upon human hearts the solemn and imperious, yet also sweet and gracious, appeal of the gospel of Christ."

On April 2, 1917 President Woodrow Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress asking the U.S. to enter WWI. Wilson, a family friend of Machen's parents in his younger years, uttered the now famous words, "The world must be made safe for democracy."

"Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them."

Machen would come to disagree with his former acquaintence. In a series of talks that were formed in the book The Christian Faith in the Modern World he would state,

"Little did I think that a war supposed to make the world safe for democracy would be followed by an era in which in Italy and in Germany, as well as in Russia, democracy and liberty would be openly despised and would be replaced by a tyranny far more crushing and soul-killing in many respects than the cruder tyrannies of the past."

In words that now seem prophetic Machen continues,

With these latter words Machen was actually describing America. A bumper sticker that has been riding the back of cars for years says, "If you give up freedom for security, you'll have neither." Interestingly those with that bumper sticker are likely, more often than not, registered Republicans. Yet it was under a Republican President that the U.S. instituted the Patriot Act and government investment in security has skyrocketed. And it continues under a Democratic administration.

Though the wars in Afganistan and Iraq could be argued that the purpose is to make the world safe for democracy and that this is even a good thing for the future of the gospel in those nations, that would not be the view of the 750,000 Christians who have fled Iraq as a result of the war there. It is the acts of a "Christian" nation that has resulted in Christian refugees. It was a "Christian" nation that entered a war that was supposed to "end all wars," but began a soul-wrenching despair that still affects America and the world many decades later.

It was this conservative confessional Calvinist who opposed compulsory military service, not because he was a pacifist (Machen served with the YMCA in WWI, partly because he felt he could better identify with and therefore minister to soldiers, than as a chaplain who outranked them), but because he felt it was a threat to liberty and "brutal and un-American in itself," as he wrote to his congressman. "Compulsory military service does not merely bring a danger of militarism; it is militarism."

The picture of someone strongly opposing compulsory military service nearly a century ago is a Reformed Presbyterian. The picture brought to mind today that still dominates a similar view, though it is over four decades old, is of a "draft-dodging" hippie. How times change.

The picture to the right represents a common mix of American patriotism and Christianity (the "you" obviously addressing an American audience).  It is understandable why people would think like this. It is true the American soldier has defended his or her country and has fought bravely for ideals of American freedom. But the statement on the shirt is more than just a theological slip of the tongue.

When we step back and really think about it, we should realize that the two deaths are imcompatible. One is temporal, the other is eternal. One died willingly and vicariously, suffering under the wrath of God. The other, while dying, likely killed with a machine gun or bomb, possibly even accidently killing a civilian or one of his own. The freedom for which Christ died was freedom from death, completed in his resurrection, so that we may be raised to new life now and in the age to come. To compare the two is to lower the value of Christ's death and Person.

Machen's words in an address in 1919 entitled "The Church in the War," though speaking of the modern attitude toward mankind in his day, including soldiers returning from WWI, could easily be applied to the thought of the T-Shirt.

"Obviously this modern attitude is possible only because men have lost sight of the majesty of Jesus' person. It is because they regard him as a being altogether like themselves that they can compare their sacrifice with his. It never seems to dawn upon them that this was no sinful man, but the Lord of glory who died on Calvary. If it did dawn upon them, they would gladly confess, as men used to confess, that one drop of the precious blood of Jesus is worth more, as a ground for the hope of the world, than all the rivers of blood which have flowed upon the battlefields of France."

Machen "not only defended Calvinist orthodoxy against the sentimentalism and moralism of theological modernism," as D.G. Hart accurately explains (from an article that no longer exists online), "but, more pointedly, he opposed Protestant strategies designed to preserve a Christian nation which sacrificed doctrinal fidelity for cultural influence."

It was this stance that left Machen feeling at many times "like a man without a country."