Quotes from J. Gresham Machen

The Gospel does not abrogate God's law, but it makes men love it with all of their hearts.

Faith is indeed intellectual; it involves an apprehension of certain things as facts; and vain is the modern effort to divorce faith from knowledge. But although faith is intellectual, it is not only intellectual. You cannot have faith without having knowledge; but you will not have faith if you have only knowledge.

What I need first of all is not exhortation, but a gospel, not directions for saving myself but knowledge of how God has saved me. Have you any good news? That is the question that I ask of you. I know your exhortations will not help me. But if anything has been done to save me, will you not tell me the facts?

What is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires.

Paganism is that view of life which finds the highest goal of human existence in the healthy and harmonious and joyous development of existing human faculties. Very different is the Christian ideal. Paganism is optimistic with regard to unaided human nature, whereas Christianity is the religion of the broken heart.

A new and more powerful proclamation of the law is perhaps the most pressing need of the hour... A low view of law always brings legalism into religion; a high view of law makes man a seeker after grace. Pray that the high view may prevail.

The Church is perishing today through the lack of thinking, not through an excess of it.

The true reason why faith is given such an exclusive place by the New Testament, so far as the attainment of salvation is concerned, over against love and over against everything else in man...is that faith means receiving something, not doing something or even being something. To say, therefore, that our faith saves us means that we do not save ourselves even in slightest measure, but that God saves us.

The narration of the facts is history; the narration of the facts with the meaning of the facts is doctrine. Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried--that is history. He loved me and gave Himself for me--that is doctrine. Such was the Christianity of the primitive Church.

Involuntary organizations ought to be tolerant, but voluntary organizations, so far as the fundamental purpose of their existence is concerned, must be intolerant or else cease to exist.

There can be no greater mistake than to suppose that Jesus ever separated theology from ethics, or that if you remove His theology - His beliefs about God and judgment, future woe for the wicked and future blessedness for the good - you can leave His ethical teaching intact.

The strange thing about Christianity was that it adopted an entirely different method. It transformed the lives of men not by appealing to the human will, but by telling a story; not by exhortation, but by the narration of an event.