Hart, Clark, and Gordon on Machen's Concern for the Church and the Gospel

In January 1925, J. Gresham Machen sat down on New Year’s Day to type a letter to a little-known Southern Presbyterian pastor named Hugh W. Watt White in Bedford, Virginia. The letter, preserved in Machen’s personal files under a separate “S.O.” (Southern Office) heading, reveals a man who already saw himself as a pilgrim and a stranger in his own church—and who was surprisingly pessimistic about the Southern Presbyterian Church (PCUS) as well. The letter offers a window into Machen’s thinking about controversy, ecclesiastical compromise, and the limits of evangelical cooperation, and it raises questions about how far gone the Southern church really was by the mid-1920s.

The Southern Church and the Problem of “Great Men”

Machen’s letter was prompted by an article in The Presbyterian of the South, a newspaper that he found “just about the most discouraging reading which has come into my hands for some time.” The immediate issue was a policy of the PCUS foreign mission board that shielded missionaries from public criticism unless formal charges were brought. Machen saw this as a tactic to silence critics—the same tactic used by modernists at his own church’s General Assembly. He insisted that when a man publishes his views in print, “what he says is a fair subject of discussion for the whole world.” The problem was not private opinions but public testimony.