Image: J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937)
Yesterday morning I started preaching my way through Hebrews
11, the great faith chapter. As part of
my preaching preparation for this topic, I also started reading J. Gresham
Machen’s What is Faith? (1925;
Eerdmans reprint 1962).
In the opening chapter, the Reformed defender of orthodoxy in
the face of modernism, who had taught at Princeton and later withdrew at the
formation of Westminster, attacks the modern shift in educational philosophy, from
facts to experience. Though written in
the 1920s it has an uncanny contemporary ring to it, particularly for the ears
of any who have done any college level teaching.
Here are some of Machen’s thoughts:
…The old fashioned notion of reading
a book or hearing a lecture and simply storing up in the mind what the book or
lecture contains—this is regarded as entirely out of date. A year or so ago I heard a noted educator
give some advice to a company of college professors.—advice which was typical
of the present tendency in education. It
is a great mistake he said in effect, to suppose that a college professor ought
to teach; on the contrary he ought simply to give the students an opportunity to
learn.
This pedagogic theory of following
the line of least resistance in education and avoiding all drudgery and all
hard work has been having its natural result; it has joined forces with the
natural indolence of youth to produce in present-day education a very
lamentable decline….
The undergraduate student of the
present day is being told that he need not take notes on what he hears in
class, that the exercises of memory is a rather childish and mechanical thing,
and that what he is really in college to do is to think for himself and to
unify his world. He usually makes a poor
business of unifying his world. And the
reason is clear. He does not succeed in
unifying his world for the simple reason that he has no world to unify. He has not acquired a knowledge of a
sufficient number of facts in order even to learn the method of putting facts
together. He is being told to practice
the business of mental digestion: but
the trouble is that he has no food to digest.
The modern student, contrary to what is often said, is really being
starved for want of facts (pp. 15-17).
Interestingly, just after I read this I attended an
orientation meeting at a large university which my daughter will be attending
this fall in which the president told the parents that the administration did
not want our children simply sitting in the classroom listening to lectures and
taking notes. I’m thinking, however,
that there might not be anything wrong with that. Some knowledge simply needs to be transferred
from those who know it to those who don’t.
And there’s not much for the student to work with till he has mastered
some basic facts.
Machen’s discussion of pedagogy, of course, had a spiritual
end. His point was that the modern shift
in education also reflected a modern shift in Christian doctrine and
practice. Modern liberals did not want
to bogged down with doctrinal precision in defining who Jesus is, particularly
given that they were dismantling the traditional and confessional view of Jesus. They preferred the mystical approach. Just trust Jesus, but don’t bother with
controversial attempts to define who he is.
So Machen observes:
The preacher says: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou
shalt be saved.” But how can a man possibly act on that suggestion, unless he
knows what it is to believe (p. 43).
He later adds:
It is perfectly true that faith in a
person is more than acceptance of a creed, but the Bible is quite right in
holding that it always involved acceptance of a creed. Confidence in a person is more than
intellectual assent to a series of propositions about the person, but it always
involves those propositions, and becomes impossible the moment they are denied
(p. 48).
JTR
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