J. Gresham Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism a century ago.[1] Why should it still be of interest today? One reason is that the major argument of the book has proven correct.
1. This essay will cite Christianity and Liberalism: Legacy Edition (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Theological Seminary, 2019).
Machen argued that in his day, “Christianity” in terms of the historic beliefs found in the Bible and confessed by the church was undergoing a transformation. Something called “liberalism”[2] was replacing it. More accurately, it was hijacking the church’s heritage and taking congregations and even whole denominations in doctrinal and ultimately practical directions that were disturbing and incompatible with what “Christianity” had tended to authorize and signify in previous times.
2. This term will be defined and discussed more fully in the second part of this article.
The aptness of Machen’s analysis is confirmed in a recent sociological analysis by George Yancey and Ashlee Quosigk entitled One Faith No Longer: The Transformation of Christianity in Red and Blue America.[3] In eight chapters they sketch the history and current status of an in-house battle for the soul of the church that has proceeded (in North America, but with international reverberations) under the title “the Modernist-Fundamentalist conflict.”[4] The authors draw a straight line from the analysis of North American Christianity found in Machen’s 1923 book, to similar observations (with a different focus) in James Davison Hunter’s 1992 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Control the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics in America,[5] to Yancey and Quosigk’s 2021 findings in One Faith No Longer.[6]
3. New York: New York University Press, 2021.
4. See One Faith No Longer, chapter 1. For a succinct characterization of this conflict see Gregg R. Allison, The Baker Compact Dictionary of Theological Terms (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2016), 89. For a helpful introduction with primary source readings from 1883 (T. T. Munger) to Shailer Matthews (1924) and including Russell H. Conwell, Walter Rauschenbusch, Washington Gladden, and J. Gresham Machen in between see Robert Ferm, ed., Issues in American Protestantism: A Documentary History from the Puritans to the Present (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1976), 220–288.
5. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
6. See, e.g., One Faith No Longer, 87–88.
What Yancey and Quosigk treat as urgently needed insight was already, in its theological and ecclesial dimensions, being described by Machen generations ago. A book so far ahead of its times deserves revisiting today. Below we explore what Machen had to say about the Bible in relation to the dispute he chronicled. In part 1 we will describe Machen’s claims and argument. In part 2 we will discuss the continuing importance of Machen’s outlook in our current setting, especially for those in a confessional denomination like the Southern Baptist Confession who in many ways continue Machen’s legacy, as well as for Presbyterian groups (like my denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America) with more direct ties to Machen.
Part 1: The Bible in Christianity and Liberalism
Machen’s remarks on the Bible are found in chapter four, following an introduction and chapters entitled “Doctrine” and then “God and Man.” Following Machen’s treatment of the Bible are chapters entitled “Christ,” “Salvation,” and “The Church.” Historically, Christianity and Liberalism was the expansion of a talk given to lay church leaders (called ruling elders in Presbyterian polity) and published in The Princeton Theological Review in 1922.[7] It was not intended to be a comprehensive and technical account of the subject but a clear statement of developments affecting the whole church in a time of national and international ferment and upheaval in the wake of the First World War. The chapter on the Bible covers just 11 pages, barely six percent of the total book. Despite its brevity, it sounds a clear and forceful note.
7. See “Preface,” Christianity and Liberalism, xxi.
1. History, Revelation, and Experience
Machen begins by affirming what he had argued in previous chapters: liberalism had failed to give adequate recognition to “the living God” as well as to “the fact of sin” (71).[8] This was because liberalism’s outlook was not sufficiently grounded in Scripture. The correct and necessary view on these matters must be found in the Bible and its message. But just what is the Bible, that it should be viewed as the arbiter of such fundamental matters as Machen’s alleged living God and the very nature of humans?
8. Page references in this section are to Christianity and Liberalism (n. 1 above).
In reply Machen stresses revelation: “The Bible contains an account of a revelation from God to man, which is found nowhere else” (71). Machen concedes that something can be known of God through natural means, like the majesty of creation and the bite of conscience. But these knowledge sources pale compared to the “absolutely new” revelation that makes “communion with the living God” possible for “sinful man” (72).
That revelation centers on Jesus. Salvation does not come by way of ideas people arrive at, something discovered by humans, but by “something that happened” (72). What happened was that promises made in Old Testament times were fulfilled in Jesus’s coming as recounted in the New Testament. The knowledge of eternal truth alone (even if we could discern it) would not bring salvation but despair: we would see that we are truly lost. The Bible is unique in containing and conveying “the narration of an event” without which the world remains dark and people remain “lost under the guilt of sin” (72).
Machen notes that some object to the idea that salvation depends on an event that occurred long ago, recorded in ancient documents that must be deciphered and that require a certain knowledge of history to grasp. Machen does not cite, but is well aware of, something called “Lessing’s Ditch.” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) was a German intellectual who propounded the idea that “contingent truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.”[9] This dim view of history as a source of positive knowledge for Christian salvation was widespread in liberal scholarship of Machen’s era, as it remains common today. Leaving aside the fact that Machen is not talking about “a truth of reason” but an act of God in Christ, Machen does not accept this reasoning as normative. This is not merely because he believes that the Bible’s reports of events are sufficiently accurate and sound. It is also because of “evidence found in Christian experience” (73).
9. Lessings sämmtliche Werke, Richard Gosche ed. (Berlin: G. Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1882), 7:273. My translation of “Zufällige Geschichtswahrheiten können der Beweis von nothwendigen Vernunftswahrheiten nie werden.”
This may seem surprising, because one of Machen’s objections to liberalism was that it privileged human experience, in the sense of the feeling or intuition of God, over the testimony of Scripture. But Machen is not against experience or in denial of its value and importance. His argument is that if we “make trial of” (i.e., accept and commit to) the New Testament testimony to Jesus’s death and resurrection “on a certain morning long ago” (73), we find that testimony to be sound and secure.
What distinguishes Machen’s appeal to experience from liberals’ appeal to the same? Liberals say that because experience is necessary, experience is all that is necessary. All you need is “a present experience of Christ in the heart” (73). The fact of the empty tomb, of Jesus’s exemplary life, of his atoning death—such factual matters may be true or not true, in liberal estimation. What matters for them is the religious experience associated with “Jesus,” however tenuous the relation between what experience makes of Jesus and what history (and the Bible’s witness) claim about him.
Machen insists on a positive and necessary connection between the events recorded in the New Testament (which he considers historical, not mythical, recorded in documents that are genuine, not forged) and valid Christian experience. Experience cannot substitute for documentary evidence. But given such historical evidence as the Bible contains, present experience can provide striking confirmation “which adds to the documentary evidence that wonderful directness and immediacy of conviction which delivers us from fear” (74).
Mention of fear justifies a pause to refresh the memory of what liberalism typically taught (and in its descendants still teaches today). In liberal understanding, “fear” is out of place in talk of the Christian God of love. A pastor and later scholar who grew up in liberalism but later critiqued it was H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962), who in 1937 famously summarized the liberalism of Machen’s era like this: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”[10] Informed experience of God would, in theory, necessarily be without fear given such understanding. But Machen assumes a living God like that portrayed by Jesus—one who spoke frequently and openly about eternal judgment. For Jesus, hell was real. Unless Jesus was mistaken, fear of God is reasonable and even wise, for the sake of seeking an alternative to such a fearsome destiny. As Jesus put it, “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28).
10. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 193. This is a reprint of the 1937 edition.
But is what the Bible says about Jesus and hell true? Even if the Bible contains revelation, as Machen claims, is that revelation trustworthy? That is the next issue Machen takes up as he continues to explain the contrast between the Bible as understood in Christianity and the Bible as understood in liberalism.
2. Plenary Inspiration
For Machen, a Christian reading of the Bible affirms not only the doctrine of revelation but also the doctrine of inspiration. This means that God worked in the composition process of biblical books in such a way that what biblical authors wrote was protected from error, in spite of reflecting the human distinctives of the various authors. For example, Old Testament writers wrote in Hebrew (or in a few cases Aramaic), while New Testament writings were composed in the lingua franca of the Roman empire, which was Hellenistic Greek. Luke–Acts and Hebrews are written in a more complex literary style; John’s letters reflect a simpler style. Some writers expressed the message entrusted to them by the Holy Spirit in poetic form, others in prose, some through historical writings, and still others through letters, whether to groups or to individuals. Through it all, God (who does not lie: Titus 1:2) spoke using the words of the writers, resulting in a Bible rightly termed the “infallible rule of faith and practice” (75) by all who trust in Jesus based on its testimony.[11]
11. Machen quotes a description of the Bible found in many Protestant sources from before his time and since.
By “plenary” Machen means “all” of Scripture (see 2 Tim. 3:16). He notes that many dismiss this view as amounting to verbal dictation or some other mechanical means of transmission. Machen views this as a caricature. Plenary inspiration does not deny authors’ distinctiveness or their use of often ordinary means of acquiring information (see, e.g., Luke 1:1–4). Nor does it suggest that those who uphold inspiration need take no interest in the historical setting or cultural background of biblical writings. Rather, plenary inspiration denies “the presence of error in the Bible. It supposes that the Holy Spirit so informed the minds of the Biblical writers that they were kept from falling into the errors that mar all other books” (76).
Attacks from the side of liberals on the complete reliability of all of Scripture are, Machen states, frequently simplistic and uninformed. Liberals still want to attribute a measure of divinity to Scripture, but this is because they view it as totally human, while they define “God” as “just another name for the course of the world with all its imperfections and all its sin,” a “pantheizing” move in Machen’s estimation with roots in Schleiermacher (77).[12] “But,” insists Machen, “the God whom the Christian worships is the God of truth” (77). An erroneous Bible does not comport with such a God as biblical writers (and Jesus) characterize him.
12. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834) is often called the father of liberalism.
Machen admits that some truly Christian persons deny the doctrine of plenary inspiration. But they still depend on Christ’s death and resurrection for their salvation. They “accept the central message of the Bible,” though they believe the Bible is a literary work not originating in or directly dependent on the Holy Spirit’s superintendence (77). Machen views their relatively low view of Scripture as mistaken. But he distinguishes them from liberals “because they have accepted as true the message upon which Christianity depends” (77).
Yet this “mediating view of the Bible” which wants to retain the force of its message while denying the necessary truth of its content runs into a problem: Jesus’s own high view of Scripture (77–78). How can those claiming to follow him as their Lord at the same time question the accuracy of the Scriptures whose truthfulness he affirmed? In historic Christian understanding, based in part on Jesus’s precedent in drawing on and applying Scripture to himself, the Bible’s truth and authority extends to all of Scripture and not just parts deemed valid by current tastes or understanding.
3. The Liberal, the Bible, and Jesus
What about the liberal insistence that truth and authority rest in Christ, not in the Bible? Machen notes that liberals claim this. They typically reject the contemporary authority of much of the Old Testament due to its “perverse moral teaching,” nor can they affirm “the sophistical arguments of Paul” (78). So they highlight the words of Jesus. But Machen points out that Jesus’s words alone are insufficient to set forth the way of salvation. “The meaning of Jesus’s redeeming work could hardly be fully set forth before that work was done” (78). The proclamation of the cross and the resurrection required the apostolic witness (alongside its Old Testament foundation). To construct a Jesus using his words viewed in tension with or apart from the Old Testament and Paul (and other New Testament writers) results in an impoverished portrait of Jesus.
Moreover, even this Jesus must be edited to suit liberal conviction. For example, the Gospels represent Jesus as teaching about hell, a notion which liberals reject. For Machen, “the suspicion often arises that the critic is retaining as genuine words of the historical Jesus only those words which conform to his own preconceived ideas” (79). The same could be said about other cardinal doctrines like Jesus’s pre-existence, virgin birth, most or all of his miracles, full divinity, bodily resurrection, and literal return in cosmic judgment. Liberalism typically rejects these teachings of the Bible and their binding force for Christian confession, teaching, and life.
The result is a truncated Jesus. “It is not Jesus, then, who is the real authority, but the modern principle by which the selection within Jesus’ recorded teaching has been made” (80). The Sermon on the Mount is central here. “Certain isolated ethical principles of the Sermon on the Mount are accepted, not at all because they are teachings of Jesus, but because they agree with modern ideas” (80).
Since for the liberal Jesus is no longer the first-century Jewish preacher and teacher conscious of being “the heavenly Messiah” (80), the real authority becomes the consciousness or experience of the individual Christian. But individual experience “is endlessly diverse, and when once truth is regarded as only that which works at any particular time,” as in the time Machen is writing about liberal views in the 1920s, “It ceases to be truth. The result is an abysmal skepticism” (80).
To objections that dependence on Scripture is deadening or artificial, Machen points to the vitality produced by the return to Scripture at the Reformation (81). Implicit in this commendation of the Reformation is the vitality of Christian confession based on a high view of Scripture among believers worldwide extending right up to Machen’s time. If the Bible were merely a human word, as in liberal understanding, the world would be “dark and gloomy,” lacking a saving and “blessed Word of God” (81). But given a revealed Scripture fully inspired and true, the world has been gifted with “the very Magna Carta of Christian liberty” if it cares to receive it.
Machen concludes by underscoring the contrasting foundation of Christianity, on the one hand, and liberalism, on the other. The former is based on the Bible. Liberalism is based on ever-shifting liberal conviction. “It is no wonder, then, that liberalism is totally different from Christianity” (81).
In part two of this essay, we will consider the ongoing significance of Machen’s fourth chapter on the Bible. In particular, we see the ongoing “battle for the Bible,” the enduring threat of liberalism, and the fact that history, as Machen understood it, still matters for doctrine, ethics, and life.
