Chris Northcott Short Articles

Preparing the Ground: J. Gresham Machen on the Need for Pre-Evangelism in a Post-Christian Society

The world as we know it in the West is a world that is no longer familiar with Christian faith.

Making the case for Christ is made much more difficult in such a time, because more and more people are unaware of the basic ideas upon which the Gospel stands. No longer can we expect that New Zealanders believe in the existence of God, the creation of mankind, the broad story of Scripture, or other foundational ideas that are needed for Christianity to make any sense.

Christians today regularly think this is a new situation, and look to recent mission-minded thinkers such as Leslie Newbigin (1909–1998) who made the case that ministry in western nations must now be engaged as a missionary enterprise.[1]

But the post-Christian nature of western society arguably began much earlier. Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, American New Testament scholar and Presbyterian minister J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937) averred that Christianity in America had suffered a wholesale abandonment since the 1880s. He argued that it was necessary for pastors and theologians to take up the challenge of meeting the new intellectual climate of the age, to do what recent missiologists call “pre-evangelism”.

“Pre-evangelism”, for those who haven’t heard the term before, is engaging with worldview of a society to meet the major questions about and objections to the message of the gospel. This is not sharing the gospel, but helping peoples’ hearts and minds so that they can understand it and accept it. It is in some respects similar to apologetics, but functions more as a means of preparing the way for later evangelism rather than as a rebuttal to criticisms or the strengthening of uncertain believers’ faith.

Machen didn’t use this language but his thinking reveals how important a task he thought it was for the cause of the gospel in his day. and his words are equally important in our own.

The following are excerpts from an address he gave as an address to a Presbyterian ministers’ association in 1912, subsequently published (and available online) in in 1913 in Princeton Theological Review (1913) vol. 11 pages 1–15 under the title “Christianity and Culture.”[2] Machen is an important figure from his time who I think is underutilized in our own. I share his thoughts to promote the cause of pre-evangelism work in New Zealand. We need put spur Christians towards the idea and task of familiarizing people with Christian thought, clarifying misconceptions, and disarming objections, so that the task of evangelism can be undertaken more effectively. I hope in future to write a similar article on how Machen saw the need for pastors who actively engage in such a task.

Here is what Machen said on the subject.

“…it would be a great mistake to suppose that all men are equally well prepared to receive the gospel. It is true that the decisive thing is the regenerative power of God. That can overcome all lack of preparation, and the absence of that makes even the best preparation useless. But as a matter of fact God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favorable conditions for the reception of the gospel. False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root.” (p. 7)

Machen’s assessment of his times might surprise us today. Writing over a century ago in the USA we might expect Christian thought to be dominant. But the middle part of 1800s was a high point in Christian influence in the English-speaking world, and a decline was setting in by the late nineteenth century.[3] The symptoms he points to might also surprise us too: “During the last thirty years there has been a tremendous defection from the Christian Church. It is evidenced even by things that lie on the surface. For example, by the decline in church attendance and in Sabbath observance and in the number of candidates for the ministry. Special explanations, it is true, are sometimes given for these discouraging tendencies. But why should we deceive ourselves, why comfort ourselves by palliative explanations? Let us face the facts. The falling off in church attendance, the neglect of Sabbath observance —these things are simply surface indications of a decline in the power of Christianity. Christianity is exerting a far less powerful direct influence in the civilized world to-day than it was exerting thirty years ago.” (pp. 9–10)

He continues: “What is the cause of this tremendous defection? For my part, I have little hesitation in saying that it lies chiefly in the intellectual sphere. Men do not accept Christianity because they can no longer be convinced that Christianity is true. It may be useful, but is it true? Other explanations, of course, are given. The modern defection from the Church is explained by the practical materialism of the age. Men are so much engrossed in making money that they have no time for spiritual things. That explanation has a certain range of validity. But its range is limited. It applies perhaps to the boom towns of the West, where men are intoxicated by sudden possibilities of boundless wealth. But the defection from Christianity is far broader than that. It is felt in the settled countries of Europe even more strongly than in America. It is felt among the poor just as strongly as among the rich. Finally it is felt most strongly of all in the universities, and that is only one indication more that the true cause of the defection is intellectual. To a very large extent, the students of our great Eastern (USA) universities —and still more the universities of Europe —are not Christians. And they are not Chris tians often just because they are students. The thought of the day, as it makes itself most strongly felt in the universities, is profoundly opposed to Christianity, or at least it is out of connection with Christianity. The chief obstacle to the Christian religion to-day lies in the sphere of the intellect.” (p. 10). I am reminded here of Charles Taylor’s observation of the changed way people “believe” in God. Five hundred years ago, it took decision and effort to not believe. Today the case is reversed, and atheism is the uncritically assumed default setting of the typical western citizen (see his 2007 tome A Secular Age. It’s somewhere in there).

Machen gives two qualifiers to this argument:

“I do not mean that most men reject Christianity consciously on account of intellectual difficulties. On the contrary, rejection of Christianity is due in the vast majority of cases simply to indifference. Only a few men have given the subject real attention. The vast majority of those who reject the gospel do so simply because they know nothing about it. But whence comes this indifference? It is due to the intellectual atmosphere in which men are living. The modern world is dominated by ideas which ignore the gospel. Modern culture is not altogether opposed to the gospel. But it is out of all connection with it. It not only prevents the acceptance of Christianity. It prevents Christianity even from getting a hearing.” (p. 11)

“In the second place, I do not mean that the removal of intellectual objections will make a man a Christian. No conversion was ever wrought simply by argument. A change of heart is also necessary. And that can be wrought only by the immediate exercise of the power of God. But because intellectual labor is insufficient it does not follow, as is so often assumed, that it is unnecessary. God may, it is true, overcome all intellectual obstacles by an immediate exercise of His regenerative power. Sometimes He does. But He does so very seldom. Usually He exerts His power in connection with certain conditions of the human mind. Usually He does not bring into the Kingdom, entirely without preparation, those whose mind and fancy are completely dominated by ideas which make the acceptance of the gospel logically impossible.” (p. 11)

This final excerpt serves well as a summary statement of Machen’s assessment of the need of pre-evangelism work:

“Christianity is the proclamation of an historical fact —that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Modern thought has no place for that proclamation. It prevents men even from listening to the message. Yet the culture of to-day cannot simply be rejected as a whole. It is not like the pagan place. culture of the first century. It is not wholly non-Christian. Much of it has been derived directly from the Bible. There are significant movements in it, going to waste, which might well be used for the defence of the gospel.” (p. 12)

Articles on Pre-Evangelism

[1] His most well-known book on this is his 1986 paperback Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture.

[2] Also reprinted in Machen’s What is Christianity? and J. Gresham Machen: Selected Writings.

[3] I tangentially covered this in my PhD thesis, and speculated that evangelicals became preoccupied with the (vital) work of mission, evangelism, social activism, etc., but did so at the expense of remaining committed to intellectual formation of Christian leaders and instructing believers in the teachings of Christian faith. In a word, Christianity became complacent in the position of cultural dominance that it then held. At lecture given by David Bebbington (preeminent historian of evangelical Christianity) at Laidlaw College in 2024/25, I asked for his assessment of this very trend. He thought the same causes had led to the late nineteenth-century situation as I did.