[augustinus]

Since the topic is "Machen Exercises," I thought it might be appropriate to say a word about the author of New Testament Greek for Beginners. Machen was born in 1881 in Baltimore, the scion of a cultured Southern family with roots in Georgia and Virginia. At Johns Hopkins University, Machen's esteemed teacher of Greek and Latin was Basil Gildersleeve, perhaps America's greatest Classicist and a fellow Southerner, who alternated between teaching the Classics and fighting Yankees during the War. From Gildersleeve, Machen acquired his lifelong love of the Classical languages and Greco-Roman literature.

After completing his undergraduate work at Johns Hopkins, Machen did graduate work at Princeton University before entering Princeton Theological Seminary. After completing his seminary education, Machen did further graduate work in theology at several German universities before returning to Princeton as Professor of New Testament in 1906. Machen served the Presbyterian Church at Princeton Seminary until 1929 when he left to found Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where he served in the same capacity until his death in 1937.

Machen became the most scholarly spokesman for Historic, Biblical, Orthodox Christianity in the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy of the 1920s and 1930s. I would commend to you students of New Testament Greek all of Machen's other books, especially Christianity and Liberalism (1923) and What Is Faith? (1925). Otherwise, the two most important books on Machen are Ned B. Stonehouse's J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir and D.G. Hart's collection titled J. Gresham Machen: Selected Shorter Writings.

J. Gresham Machen remains one of my spiritual and theological "heroes," and I have been impressed by his erudition and eloquence ever since I first read Christianity and Liberalism back in 1970.