"Burnett's book deserves a wide reading both for its persuasive interpretation of a remarkable historical epoch and for stimulating our reflection on these larger concerns."
--Interpretation

"Burnett has opened up new lines of inquiry that are of high importance for the very conservative Protestant culture that most venerates Machen's memory."
--Calvin Theological Journal

"Machen's Hope provides an impressively detailed and comprehensive account of the intellectual formation of one of the most influential Christian scholars of the past century."
--George Marsden, professor emeritus, University of Notre Dame

"In this fascinating and groundbreaking book, Burnett gives us the gold-standard work on Machen's life and intellectual development, while at the same time offering fresh insights into the key controversies that shaped his career. It is a must for anyone interested not only in Machen but in a formative period of American church history."
--Suzanne McDonald, professor of systematic and historical theology, Western Theological Seminary

"J. Gresham Machen was at the heart of theological controversies in the 1920s and 1930s that racked the American Presbyterian churches. U.S. Presbyterians have arguably never fully recovered and have had difficulty in finding their way ever since. The time is ripe for a reconsideration of Machen's life and work. Richard E. Burnett's careful and judicious intellectual biography is exactly the kind of study that Presbyterians of all stripes will need if they are ever to regain their bearings on the American scene and reverse their long, slow drift into oblivion."
--George Hunsinger, McCord Professor of Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary

"The burden of the book is to detail how thoroughly the younger Machen was committed to the 'modern' academic fashions he experienced as a student at both Johns Hopkins University and Princeton University, but then how he became a dedicated opponent of theological 'modernism' even while retaining some habits of mind from his earlier embrace of 'modern' forms of thought. Burnett reveals especially how much Machen's engagement with contemporary New Testament criticism originating in Germany influenced the shape of his later theological and ecclesiastical commitments.
"Machen's Hope does not so much challenge [earlier biographies] as show how much more can be revealed about Machen's intellectual life from even more diligent research and by posing a wider array of interpretive questions. . . . Burnett's clear and often compelling prose only adds to the achievement of this unusually thoughtful, unusually revealing, unusually impressive book."
--from the foreword by Mark A. Noll