Politics & Power Quote by John Gresham Machen

Machen is offering a counternarrative with a velvet glove over a clenched fist: you can be orthodox and still be smart. In the early 20th century, “German biblical criticism” wasn’t a neutral academic label in American Protestant circles; it was shorthand for a whole mood of modernity - historical skepticism, the dissection of scripture into sources and redactions, and a confidence that the academy could outgrow the church. Machen’s line is calibrated to meet that prestige head-on. He doesn’t rail against criticism as such. He concedes its authority by treating it as an “intellectually satisfying” competitor, then insists conservative scholarship can beat it on its own turf.

The strategic word is “also.” It’s a bid for parity and legitimacy, not separatism. Machen is speaking to anxious, educated believers who don’t want to choose between intellectual credibility and inherited faith. The subtext is pastoral and political at once: if conservatives cede the category of “serious scholarship” to liberal theology, they will lose seminaries, pulpits, and eventually denominations. He’s building a bridge for the faithful who feel trapped by the modern university’s terms of respectability.

Context matters: Machen becomes a central figure in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, arguing that liberal Christianity isn’t a gentler version of the same religion but a different religion entirely. This sentence is the recruiting pitch for that larger campaign. It reframes conservatism not as reaction, but as an alternative modernity: academically competent, institutionally ambitious, and unwilling to let “Germany” define what counts as truth.