Further Reflections on Machen: Objectivity, Convictions, and Institutions

If modern scholarship fails to achieve objectivity, should Christians also stop striving for it?

In response to my recent post on J. Gresham Machen, readers offered thoughtful pushback on several fronts.

Some questioned whether Machen’s later turn away from “objective” methods wasn’t the right move after all.

Others raised concerns about the dangers of free inquiry, especially when it risks undermining Christian convictions.

Still others debated the wisdom of staying and reforming corrupt institutions rather than leaving them to act authentically.

Here are a few reflections in response to those critiques.

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1. Should Christians Strive for Objectivity?

A common objection was:

“The theological modernists claimed objectivity, but they were, in fact, biased. Doesn’t that vindicate Machen’s later turn toward Christian perspectivalism?”

This strikes me as a category confusion.

The problem with theological modernists wasn’t that they tried to be objective. The problem was that they weren’t. They imported philosophical and theological assumptions while presenting their conclusions as neutral scholarship. Their failure wasn’t in aspiring to objectivity, but in failing to live up to it.

The right response isn’t to embrace perspectivalism as if all truth is merely a projection of our ideological priors. It’s to strive for greater objectivity, not less.

I’ve described this elsewhere as civilized empiricism—a pursuit of truth grounded in a recognition of one’s biases, tested through dialogue with dissenting voices and institutions designed to expose blind spots. This is distinct from a kind of naïve or “brute empiricism,” where a lone thinker imagines they can arrive at truth without community, history, or correction.

If our institutions are prone to dogma, the answer isn’t to surrender to subjectivity. It’s to lean more fully into practices that counterbalance our partiality.

That means that students of faith should study with secular professors and peers, and secular scholars should welcome religious students into their classrooms.

We need shared spaces of inquiry across disagreement, not echo chambers of our own convictions.

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2. Should We Pursue Truth Before Christ?

Another objection was more spiritual in nature:

Is there not danger in pursuing truth wherever it leads, especially if that pursuit might lead us away from Christ?

I take this concern seriously. The fear isn’t just about what we might find out if we looked deeper. It’s about our own susceptibility to pride, to the allure of intellectual respectability, or to temptation masquerading as insight.

There is wisdom in spiritual caution. Not everyone is ready for every branch of philosophy or science.

But while maturity matters, I don’t believe the answer is to foreclose hard questions for fear of where they might lead. Christians often speak of the need for moral commitment to Christ prior to intellectual inquiry. But the New Testament seems to assume the reverse: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Our faith depends on something being true, and that truth is, in principle, open to examination.

Faith seeks understanding, yes, but it also rests on good reasons. We are not asked to believe blindly, but to weigh, inquire, and discern.

To do that well requires what I might call a “philosophic temper”—a posture of non-anxious, open-minded interest in truth. Some secular scholars model this better than many Christians.

(This is very different from the kind of student who learns a bit of textual criticism and suddenly becomes pro-abortion. That’s not inquiry; that’s reaction.)

One helpful way to cultivate a philosophic temper: Ask yourself what kind of worldview you’d hold if you lost your faith. Don’t just assume you’d become a Nietzschean or a nihilist. Perhaps you would continue to “act as though God exists,” like Jordan Peterson, or maintain the best insights of “religion for atheists,” like Alain de Botton. Thinking through those scenarios helps clarify what’s at stake, and what’s not, in our beliefs.

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3. Should We Stay or Leave Broken Institutions?

Finally, some readers defended Machen’s own institutional departures, asking:

Wasn’t Machen right to leave the mainline Presbyterian church and Princeton Seminary? Aren’t some institutions working at cross-purposes with their founding principles?

In my earlier post, I only revealed my views on Machen’s decision to paid subscribers, but I will say this here: Burnett’s biography has me reconsider my Protestant impulse to take doctrinal purity as the deciding factor in favor of leaving corrupt institutions.

The question applies far beyond Machen’s choice to leave his denomination and academic home. Many of us wrestle with similar choices in our relationship to academia, to the church, or to legacy institutions in general. Should we remain, or break away and start afresh?

Often our conclusions reflect our own sociological positioning. Those outside academia often see only its ideological flaws and institutional failures. Those within it, especially those embedded in its better corners, see the benefits it still offers: peer review and intellectual collaboration and camaraderie.

I’m part of academia, though not at its center. I see both its value and its limitations. (See my “Don’t Let Academia Stop You Being an Intellectual.”) I envy the acknowledgements pages in academic books, in which top scholars credit tens, if not hundreds of other academics for conversations, criticisms, and challenges that shaped the final work. That kind of collaborative refinement can’t easily be replicated on Substack. Substack has its strengths, but it doesn’t yet foster the same kind of rigorous back-and-forth.

The same dynamic plays out in the church. Many evangelicals ask, “Why stay in a theologically liberal denomination?” But consider what was lost when evangelicals abandoned the mainline: beautiful buildings, central properties in every city, and a visible presence in the cultural square. By leaving, we may have preserved our theology, but at the cost of place, heritage, and public witness. There’s a kind of escapism in that.

Doctrinal purity matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters. Institutions do more than just preserve doctrine: they order life, preserve memory, and embody truth in social form. When they lose their way, leaving is tempting, but rebuilding outside the institution is costly. You lose the infrastructure, financial, intellectual, and even architectural, that once supported your mission.

Those supports aren’t ultimate, but they’re not irrelevant either. There’s a kind of radical Protestant, or Donatist, impulse in assuming we can do without them.

“Donatism was a schism from the Catholic Church from the fourth to the sixth centuries. Donatists argued that Christian clergy must be faultless for their ministry to be effective and their prayers and sacraments to be valid.”

from “Donatism,” Wikipedia

What Comes Next?

As I continue reflecting on Machen’s biography, I find myself drawn to an earlier generation of Christian leaders—those turn-of-the-century college presidents who pursued academic excellence while holding firm to the faith. There was a window of time when Christian intellectuals helped shape the modern university—before ideological conformity closed that door.

In one sense, you could see what I’m doing as reconsidering the idea that the seminary theologian is the ideal of the Christian intellectual. Perhaps the ideal of the Christian intellectual is somewhere closer to the interface of the modern research university, the Christian faced with the objective pursuit of truth in a whole variety of areas, with empirical research, with philosophy, and so on. It’s for such an individual that the conflicts between faith and reason are raised in an institutional calling.

I’ll be drawing attention to some of these figures in the near future.

This post was written with the editing help of ChatGPT.

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