This is Thinking In Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. Richard E. Burnett is the executive director and managing editor of Theology Matters. Professor Burnett, welcome to Thinking in Public. I saw that you had written a new biography and a new major historical work on Gresham Machen. But I did have to wonder in the onset what could be much different than what had been presented before.
So I want to ask you straight up front in terms of the different kind of argument you make and the different kind of historical terrain you cover. Did you start out pretty much knowing this is the direction the project would take or was it a surprise to you?
I think if I began by I wondering about several threads. I began reading Machen. There were things that were missing and I wanted to get into the narrative and find out what was behind some of these stories. Well, in my estimation, Gresham Machen lived one of the most important lives of his time, and modern evangelicals do not realize how much of Machen lives within the movement as an argument. And in my mind, Machen is a fairly consistent conversation partner.
And so as I started as a very young theologian to think about Gresham Machen, thinking about the late Gresham Machen, thinking about the Christianity and L iberalism Gresham Machen. You really spend a lot of time going back to the origin story. So did you plan to do that or was that something of a surprise to you? I wanted to trace these threads and figure out how he got to where he came by the s. And so there were surprises. I did not, but there were clues that suggested that he had questions.
Of course, the question about his period of, I think Stonehouse calls it torturing doubt. I was curious about that. I was curious about what had happened in, at Johns Hopkins, but also in Germany and the idea that he was a consistent champion of old Princeton.
