Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America

J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937), writes D. G. Hart, was the scion of a prominent and genteel Baltimore family, who studied at the finest American and European universities and, while teaching at Princeton Seminary, went on to become one of the United States's leading authorities in New Testament studies. Defending the Faith explains how a privileged and learned Protestant became embroiled in the religious disputes of the 1920s, writes Hart. This study, he continues, has much to tell us not just about the issues that unsettled—some would say unseated—mainstream Protestantism's hold on American intellectual and cultural life. But it also offers a distinctive and revealing perspective on the way we have come to assess and locate religion, science, and modernity in the early twentieth century. This biography, the first of Machen since 1955, originally appeared in 1994.