A Mountaintop Prophecy

J. Gresham Machen, a 20th century Reformer if ever there was one, was not only a superb theologian but also an avid environmentalist. In both the realm of theology and the realm of nature, he witnessed the horrible ravages of modernism. While modernism brought unprecedented efficiency and wealth to the West, it also brought the decline of the intellect, moral vacuity, and the loss of purpose. Both Christianity and the environment were laid on the altar of human progress. As Machen in his later years reflected upon the ravaging of Christian orthodoxy and unspoiled environmental beauty, he recalled one of his many trips through the Eastern Alps:

"Then there is something else about that view from the Matterhorn. I felt it partly at least as I stood there, and I wonder whether you can feel it with me. It is this. You are standing there not in any ordinary coutnry, but in the very midst of Europe, looking out from its very center. Germany just beyond where you can see to the northeast, Italy to the south, France beyond those snows of Mont Blanc. There, in that glorious round spread out before you, that land of Europe, humanity has put forth its best. There it has struggled; there it has fallen; there it has looked upward to God. The history of the race seems to pass before you in an instant of time concentrated in that fairest of all the lands of earth. You think of the great men whose memories you love, the men who have struggled there in those countries below you, who have struggled for light and freedom, struggled for beauty, struggled above all for God's Word. And then you think of the present and its decadence and slavery, and you desire to weep. It is a pathetic thing to contemplate the history of mankind." (Hart, Collected Works, 435)

Machen was one of those great men, standing upon the mountainous legacies of the Apostle Paul, Athanasius, Augustine, Luther, and Calvin. He was the man called by God to stand athwart a lethal threat to the Church and cry "Stop!" Try as he did, the heartlands were ravaged by economic progress and the hearts of sinners were ravages by a ruinous belief in human goodness. Yet, through this man, God sustained the Presbyterian Church in the US, now in the small denominations known as the OPC, PCA, and EPC, as well as through numerous seminaries, such as Westminster Philadelphia, Westminster California, Covenant Seminary, and Reformed Theological Seminary. Modernism lies on the trashheap of history, and Christ's Church stands once again upon the ashes of a major world movements, living out the promise that the gates of hell will never prevail against God's Church.

The aforementioned memory of Machen was written in the twilight of his life, 1933. Just a few years later, thugs in Italy began to terrorize the populace and secret forces would shattered windows in Germany. The tanks of Hitler, fueled by a Darwinistic view of a hierarchy of human value and ongoing historical progression, rolled over the illusory hopes of a naive generation. Machen once noted that the ideas of one generation would move armies in the next. He grieved over the looming war that would follow the end of his life, but it took tanks to remind humanity that peace is borne upon the back of human sacrifice and to remind Christians that are hopes are borne upon the back of our Messiah.