Date of Award
1996
Document Type
Dissertation - Restricted
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Theology
First Advisor
Carey, Patrick W.
Second Advisor
Heinze, Christine F.
Third Advisor
Hinze, Bradford
Abstract
J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937) is widely regarded as having been the leading spokesperson for Princeton's Reformed Orthodoxy during the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early twentieth century. At a time when many within the denominational power structures of America were calling for liberty, tolerance, and unity on the basis of the accommodation of doctrine to the theological and philosophical presuppositions of modern biblical and historical scholarship, Machen, clinging to the theological and philosophical presuppositions of the Princeton Theology (a major nineteenth-century American school of Reformed thought), was unyielding in his condemnation of this growing trend. Liberty and unity on the basis of doctrinal revisionism cannot be tolerated, he argued, because doctrines are not merely the changing symbolic expressions of an ineffable subjective experience. They are, rather, the objective and unchanging foundation upon which Christian life is based, for they participate in and give witness to the reality of the historical facts which underlie the Christian religion...