Daily Inspiration Quote by John Gresham Machen

Machen is doing two things at once: narrowing the entire Christian message to a single, technical-sounding doctrine, and making it feel like oxygen. "Active obedience" is Reformed shorthand for the claim that Jesus didn't merely die to cancel guilt; he lived a fully obedient human life that is credited to believers. Machen’s sentence is brisk because he’s fighting on a specific battlefield. In the early 20th century, American Protestantism was splitting between modernists who recast Christianity as ethics, uplift, and religious feeling, and confessional conservatives who insisted the faith stood or fell on concrete, supernatural claims. Machen was the latter’s most articulate combatant.

So the subtext of "No hope without it" isn’t private piety alone. It’s an indictment of any gospel reduced to moral example. If Christ is mainly a teacher, then salvation becomes self-improvement with hymns. Machen’s line refuses that bargain. It says: my standing with God doesn’t rest on my progress, sincerity, or social usefulness; it rests on someone else’s completed obedience. Gratitude ("thankful") is strategic here. He’s not presenting a theory to admire but a transfer to receive, designed to cut the nerve of religious performance and its constant anxiety.

There’s also a polemical edge. "Active obedience" had become a litmus test: remove it, and atonement shrinks into mere pardon without positive righteousness. Machen treats that as existentially lethal. Hope, for him, isn’t optimism or resilience. It’s a verdict. Without Christ’s obedient life counted as yours, you’re left with a blank account and a God who still demands what you can’t pay.