Quotes from J. Gresham Machen

Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist.

The Gospel does not abrogate God's law, but it makes men love it with all of their hearts.

A public-school system, if it means the providing of free education for those who desire it, is a noteworthy and beneficent achievement of modern times; but when once it becomes monopolistic it is the most perfect instrument for tyranny which has yet been devised. Freedom of thought in the middle ages was combated by the Inquisition, but the modern method is far more effective.' (1923)

Christ died--that is history; Christ died for our sins--that is doctrine. Without these two elements, joined in an absolutely indissoluble union, there is no Christianity.

The more we know of God, the more unreservedly we will trust him; the greater our progress in theology, the simpler and more child-like will be our faith

Faith is indeed intellectual; it involves an apprehension of certain things as facts; and vain is the modern effort to divorce faith from knowledge. But although faith is intellectual, it is not only intellectual. You cannot have faith without having knowledge; but you will not have faith if you have only knowledge.

What I need first of all is not exhortation, but a gospel, not directions for saving myself but knowledge of how God has saved me. Have you any good news? That is the question that I ask of you. I know your exhortations will not help me. But if anything has been done to save me, will you not tell me the facts?

What is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires.

Paganism is that view of life which finds the highest goal of human existence in the healthy and harmonious and joyous development of existing human faculties. Very different is the Christian ideal. Paganism is optimistic with regard to unaided human nature, whereas Christianity is the religion of the broken heart.

In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight.

It is usually considered good practice to examine a thing for one's self before echoing the vulgar ridicule of it.

A new and more powerful proclamation of the law is perhaps the most pressing need of the hour... A low view of law always brings legalism into religion; a high view of law makes man a seeker after grace. Pray that the high view may prevail.

The Church is perishing today through the lack of thinking, not through an excess of it.

The true reason why faith is given such an exclusive place by the New Testament, so far as the attainment of salvation is concerned, over against love and over against everything else in man...is that faith means receiving something, not doing something or even being something. To say, therefore, that our faith saves us means that we do not save ourselves even in slightest measure, but that God saves us.

The narration of the facts is history; the narration of the facts with the meaning of the facts is doctrine. Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried--that is history. He loved me and gave Himself for me--that is doctrine. Such was the Christianity of the primitive Church.

Involuntary organizations ought to be tolerant, but voluntary organizations, so far as the fundamental purpose of their existence is concerned, must be intolerant or else cease to exist.

There can be no greater mistake than to suppose that Jesus ever separated theology from ethics, or that if you remove His theology - His beliefs about God and judgment, future woe for the wicked and future blessedness for the good - you can leave His ethical teaching intact.

The strange thing about Christianity was that it adopted an entirely different method. It transformed the lives of men not by appealing to the human will, but by telling a story; not by exhortation, but by the narration of an event.

Jesus was certainly not a mere enunciator of permanent truths, like the modern liberal preacher; on the contrary He was conscious of standing at the turning-point of the ages, when what had never been was now to come to be.

A terrible crisis unquestionably has arisen in the Church. In the ministry of evangelical churches are to be found hosts of those who reject the gospel of Christ. By the equivocal use of traditional phrases, by the representation of differences of opinion as though they were only differences about the interpretation of the Bible, entrance into the Church was secured for those who are hostile to the very foundations of the faith.

Why should we be indignant about slanders directed against a human friend, while at the same time we are patient about the basest slanders directed against our God?

Christianity cannot subsist unless men know what Christianity is; and the fair and logical thing is to learn what Christianity is, not from its opponents, but from those who themselves are Christians. That method of procedure would be the only fair method in the case of any movement. [...] Men have abundant opportunity today to learn what can be said against Christianity, and it is only fair that they should also learn something about the thing that is being attacked.

I can see little consistency in a type of Christian activity which preaches the Gospel on the street corners and at the ends of the Earth, but neglects the children of the covenant by abandoning them to a cold and unbelieving secularism.

For us Jesus does not merely place His fingers in the ears and say, "Be opened"; for us He does not merely say "Arise and walk." For us He has done a greater thing–for us He died.