Machen on the Bible: Reflections on Christianity and Liberalism Chapter 4 “The Bible” (Part 2)

It is now time for an assessment of Machen’s view of Scripture as outlined in part 1. Of course, in some respects it is outdated. 2023 is not 1923, and vice versa. Particulars of Machen’s positive characterization of the Bible, as well as his negative characterization of liberalism, do not fit precisely into our current setting. Yet we will argue below that Machen’s position in Christianity and Liberalism as it relates to the Bible still retains value for those seeking to uphold classic Christian belief today and to resist ever-present cultural pressures to reshape Christian confession and practice for the sake of presumed current relevance, even at the cost of fidelity to the Bible and its key doctrines. We offer three observations in support of this assertion.

1. The Battle Was Real and Sadly Is Not Over

1. Yancey and Quosigk, One Faith No Longer, 213.

George Yancey and Ashlee Quosigk’s study One Faith No Longer: The Transformation of Christianity in Red and Blue America (as mentioned in part one) documents that Machen’s concern was not a tempest in a teapot of his own making. In fact, a fascinating finding of Yancey and Quosigk’s book is that it is actually “progressive Christians” today (their term for the heirs of Machen’s liberals) who are more the aggressors in the ongoing dispute between historic Christian confession and modern alternatives to it like Machen rejects. “Progressive Christians are more likely to reject conservative Christians than vice versa.”^[1] Christians in the Machen mold (whom Yancey and Quosigk term “conservative Christians”) are threats to social order, according to progressives. They are “lacking the compassion and tolerance needed to build an honorable society,” progressives hold.^[2] Whole chapters of One Faith No Longer document this:

2. Yancey and Quosigk, One Faith No Longer, 213.

The rejection of conservative Christians by progressive Christians in chapter 2, the critique of the pro-life movement by pro-life progressive Christians in chapter 3, and the reluctance of progressive Christians to have Christian friends who disagree with them on the topic of Islam in chapter 7 all provide evidence that progressive Christians distance themselves from conservative Christians in ways that do not happen in the opposite direction.^[3]

3. Yancey and Quosigk, One Faith No Longer, 213.

One might read Christianity and Liberalism today as a quaint (or infuriating) and unjustified attack on other Christians who were just trying to stay in step with their times. This would be to misread the fact that Machen responds to a movement away from foundational biblical teachings that had been underway in the Western Protestant tradition for over a century when Machen’s book appeared (see below). The church as the gospel believing and proclaiming body of Christ was often under covert siege and being undercut from within. The faction of the church that was redefining and redesigning Christianity (which, Machen argued, does not lend itself to human redefinition, because it is not of human origin) was called “liberal” in his day and lives on currently in “progressive Christianity” in important respects.

Christianity and Liberalism and the view of the Bible informing it are, then, not an irrelevant blast from the past but foundational reading for where we are and how we got here. If there is truth in the gospel message and creedal articulation of it through the centuries leading up to statements of faith like the Westminster Confession or the Baptist Faith and Message, Machen is merely illustrating a dynamic like Paul identified at Corinth in the church’s opening decade there: “For there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized” (1 Cor. 11:19). Christianity and Liberalism, whatever its undoubted limitations, is just another chapter in a long struggle for the truth of the gospel as it has been misappropriated and even turned against true believers ever since the rise of the apostolic church.

4. For a statement of the problem see Dean Inserra, The Unsaved Christian: Reaching Cultural Christianity with the Gospel (Chicago: Moody Press, 2019).

This is not to deny that the community of “true believers” is itself imperfect in belief and practice, in need of ongoing renewal, and often containing participants whose confession or practice of the Christian faith is so sketchy as to be inauthentic.^[4] But this is perhaps seldom directly due to overt acquisition and appropriation of liberal views; it is more likely the result of inadequate uptake of the grace of the gospel and the transformation of conviction and life it mediates.

5. Subtitled The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century, 2^nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006).

2. The Spirit and Substance of Liberalism Are Still Alive

6. See Livingston, Modern Christian Thought, chapter 4.

For perspective on Machen’s arguments, it is important to concede that classic liberalism in the exact forms known to Machen has taken on different forms and applications today. A book that epitomized liberalism in Machen’s time was Adolf von Harnack’s What Is Christianity? This book appeared in 1900 and is widely acknowledged as a classic statement of liberal conviction tracing back to Friedrich Schleiermacher and advanced by Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889). These are German developments, but English readers can trace the progression in a book like James Livingston’s Modern Christian Thought.^[5] The sequence of names leading up to Harnack as listed by Livingston consists of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English), Schleiermacher, and Horace Bushnell (American), all thinkers grouped under the rubric “Christianity and Romanticism.”^[6] The direct line forward from this theologically is found in what Livingston calls “The Ritschlian Theology and Protestant Liberalism,” championed in Livingston’s telling by Ritschl, Wilhelm Hermann, Harnack, and in the US by Walter Rauschenbusch, who is associated with the rise of the social gospel.^[7]

7. See Livingston, Modern Christian Thought, chapter 11.

Significantly in this history, Livingston’s next chapter chronicles pushback against liberalism: “Movements of Recovery and Conservation: The Princeton Theology.”^[8] This was, of course, Machen’s location. Livingston attempts to refute this “Princeton Theology” as B. B. Warfield represented it. Livingston’s defense of liberalism against Warfield is itself an example of a contemporary historical theologian (Livingston) rejecting the Christian tradition as articulated by Warfield (and reaffirmed by Warfield’s colleague Machen) in terms of its de- and reconstruction by the liberal alternative.

8. See Livingston, Modern Christian Thought, chapter 12.

After Machen’s lifetime, the tumult of the Depression and the Second World War and then the Cold War and onward saw the rise of numerous attempts to formulate theologies claiming positive associations with the Christian heritage but markedly different from the historic and creedal Christianity represented by Machen. Examples of these modern and then postmodern systems are presented by Livingston in volume two of his Modern Christian Thought.^[9] Some examples are American empirical and naturalistic theology (e.g., William James, John Dewey), dialectical theology (Barth, Brunner, Gogarten), Christian existentialism (Tillich, Bultmann), political theology including Latin American liberation theologies (e.g., Moltmann, Gutiérrez, Boff), process theology, feminist theology, black theology, and post-liberal theology.

9. Subtitled The Twentieth Century, 2^nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006).

Manifestly, these and other theological systems that arose in Harnack’s wake differ in particulars from the “liberalism” with which Machen interacted. But a more recent book by Michael J. Langford entitled The Tradition of Liberal Theology^[10] shows the persistence and durability of “liberal” as a term loosely descriptive of all the theological systems described by Livingston. Like Langford’s own rendering of liberal theology, these systems do not accord the authority to Scripture that pre-Enlightenment Christianity did. Langford indicates this when agreeing with George A. Lindbeck (a proponent of post-liberal theology) that “revelation is rarely, if ever in the first instance propositional”; it is rather relational in that “the person of Jesus” is revealed, not propositions about him.^[11]

10. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014.

But in the Bible and faith drawing from it, confessing Christians have typically not found it either possible or necessary to distinguish between Jesus’s person and biblical assertions about him; this would seem to be a recipe for replacing what the biblical witnesses claim about Jesus with what human rationality constructs as an alternative. This separation could even be termed historically indefensible in light of contemporary knowledge of the New Testament and its setting.^[12] If we refuse to understand the person of Jesus in terms of the earliest and best witnesses to him historically speaking, we only show that we have settled on a different Jesus and religion using his name than the Jesus of historic Christian faith, which has sought to affirm the biblical Jesus, however fitfully and imperfectly. This is exactly what Machen was arguing had happened in mainstream theological thought and biblical interpretation of his time.

11. Langford, The Tradition of Liberal Theology, 15–16 n. 22.

Similarly, Langford (like the movements described by Livingston above) links the liberal tradition generically to “the rejection of the verbal inspiration of Scripture.”^[13] The spirit and substance of liberalism is still alive, not in close positive correspondence to Harnack’s liberalism but in the common rejection of an epistemology, view of history, and understanding of Scripture that would allow Machen’s view of the Bible and its message to carry normative or compelling weight today.

12. See, e.g., Darrell L. Bock, and Robert L. Webb, Key Events in the Life of Jesus: A Collaborative Exploration of Context and Coherence, WUNT 247 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), with essays by a dozen scholars whose view of the Jesus event in its part and whole would concur substantially with Machen’s and contrast with the low view of the New Testament’s historicity and therefore doctrinal authority in liberalism and its heirs.

3. History Still Matters

To the studies cited in the previous section by Livingston and Langford may be added the work of Gary Dorrien in the form of his book Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit.^[14] For our purposes this book’s importance is stated in its subtitle: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology. This complex and brilliant book affirms the important truth that modern Western Protestant theology has been ruled by “idealistic logic”—modes and systems of thought enshrining the absolute importance, the truth if there could be such a thing, of the idea. In this dominant train of theological reasoning, history in the sense of events with implications normative for reason has taken a distant second place. While “historical critical” study of the Bible has felt confident in denying the validity of most of the Bible’s innumerable historical claims, it has lacked the power or at least will to sustain claims regarding historical events that go against the premises of the reigning idealistic logic.

13. Langford, The Tradition of Liberal Theology, 6.

A good entrée to a core conviction linking Machen to biblical writers and much subsequent Christian tradition, and dividing him from the idealistic logic that has dominated in Protestant thought since the Enlightenment, is Machen’s essay “History and Faith” (1915). It discusses a particular watershed issue separating Machen (who insisted that he was a historian) from other biblical scholars, likewise claiming the status of historians, whose historical work proceeded under the auspices of “historical criticism” as this was informed by the idealistic logic under which “critical” scholarship including liberalism has operated since the Enlightenment.

14. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Few statements of similar brevity have so carefully and eloquently described the historical-critical quest for Jesus under Enlightenment premises—and the failure of that quest as of Machen’s time—a finding that anticipated the verdict pronounced in the late Colin Brown’s unparalleled two volume study that recently appeared.^[15] In Machen’s essay he brings to a fine point a key question of history:

15. Colin Brown with Craig A. Evans, A History of the Quests for the Historical Jesus, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2022).

The Bible contains a record of something that has happened, something that puts a new face upon life. What that something is, is told us in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It is the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The authority of the Bible should be tested here at the central point. Is the Bible right about Jesus?^[16]

16. “History and Faith,” in Ferm, ed., Issues in American Protestantism, 262–276 (here 264).

Then Machen lines out a contrast between two views of Jesus, one historical on the assumption that the Gospels describe an event that happened, the other “historical-critical” under the idealistic logic that steered liberal biblical interpretation. Who was this purportedly resurrected Jesus?^[17]

17. Chart constructed from words, most quoted verbatim, in Machen, “History and Faith,” in Ferm, ed., Issues in American Protestantism, 264.

18. “History and Faith,” in Ferm, ed., Issues in American Protestantism, 268.

The chart above summarizes what we might call the problematic logic of the liberal Jesus as Machen calls it to account. He points to three problems. (1) The liberal account fails in its mission to separate the natural from the supernatural in the Gospel narrative.^[18] A book by British scholars that would explore the failure of this mission more fully appeared in 1931.^[19] In critical analysis of the New Testament, scholars were unable to find a level of the tradition in which Jesus was not regarded as divine, contrary to the historical-hypothesis that he was merely human and could be shown to be so on source or form critical grounds. (2) The liberal Jesus is a monstrosity.^[20] Liberals represented him as a teacher of the good, a prophet, a pure God-worshipper . . . but he harbored a messianic consciousness. He said he would return on the clouds of heaven. “A humble teacher who thought He was the judge of all the earth! Such an one would have been insane.”^[21] (3) “The liberal Jesus is insufficient to account for the origin of the Christian church.”^[22] To account for the rise, survival, and persistence of the church and veneration of Jesus from his time forward to our time requires a historical hypothesis—something real that happened, not merely an idea—sufficient to account for the real effects of Jesus seen in actual history. The liberal Jesus who remained dead in the grave had no such potential.

19. Edwyn Noel Hoskyns and Francis Noel Davey, The Riddle of the New Testament (London: Faber and Faber, 1931).

Only the historically grounded claims preserved in the Gospels (albeit foretold in many an Old Testament passage) explain Jesus as he must have actually appeared alive following his public death, and as he has been remembered, in human history and cultures worldwide. This proposal deserves all the more consideration in light of the observation that far more people internationally name him as Lord currently than ever before in world history, despite the power and authority of historical-critical reasoning and idealistic logic in centers of Western learning for over two centuries, resulting in widespread intellectual dismissal of all or most biblical truth claims.

20. “History and Faith,” in Ferm, ed., Issues in American Protestantism, 269.

Machen’s shrewd and trenchant appeal to history in the essay touched on above was followed almost 100 years later by nearly two dozen essays exploring the continuing question of the relation, if any, between the Christian faith and history: Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith?^[23]

21. “History and Faith,” in Ferm, ed., Issues in American Protestantism, 273.

The liberal, idealistic logic answer tends to run two ways: yes, the verdict of historical critical reading can and does negate the testimony of the sources, especially at points of great consequence like the claim that Jesus rose from the dead and promised he is returning in judgment. Or if he did make such claims, they were mistaken, which indicates he was indeed a man of his times. But no, history cannot and does not support the fides quae of historic Christianity, which must find its final justification elsewhere, if indeed any such justification as it relates to the historical figure of Jesus even exists.

22. “History and Faith,” in Ferm, ed., Issues in American Protestantism, 273.

Machen’s answer, outlined above, anticipates the range of positive responses contained in Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith? Machen’s insight into the importance of the question, and his tack in responding to the revisionism and skepticism of his time, remain instructive in 2023.

23. James K. Hoffmeier and Dennis R. Magary, eds., Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith? A Critical Appraisal of Modern and Postmodern Approaches to Scripture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012).

Conclusion

24. I.e., The Virgin Birth of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1980 [1930]); The Origin of Paul’s Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1978 [1925]).

As we conclude, it remains only to comment that there is much more to say about all of these matters; no claim is made to have given a full account of Machen’s view of Scripture, much less liberalism’s discounting or reconstrual of Scripture’s witness over a number of generations prior to Machen, at his time of writing Christianity and Liberalism, and in the century since. I conclude with a few projections of what I see as the promise of Machen’s theologically sophisticated biblicism, if it might be so termed.

25. See Terry A. Chrisope, Toward a Sure Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Dilemma of Biblical Criticism, 1881–1915 (Ross-shire, UK: Mentor, 2000).

First, Machen takes the Bible’s testimony to a savior, salvation, and the alternate of eternal judgment with the seriousness that it deserves in the church and in a Western world where “jeer” seems more apt than “fear” when it comes to popular response to God and the gospel message. We do well to follow Machen’s lead, for the sake of retaining our integrity as witnesses to Christ and also so that we might stay strong in the face of cultural pressures to give ground in ways that would nullify our faithfulness to what has been entrusted to us. This is not to suggest that all cultural pressures should be resisted or are perverse. But surely in the United States currently many are.

26. Told in biographical studies like Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1955); William Masselink, J. Gresham Machen: His Life and Defence [sic] of the Bible (apparently a privately published doctoral dissertation from ca. 1938); Paul Wolley, The Significance of J. Gresham Machen for Today (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1977); D. G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

Second, Machen knew his stuff. Readers with only casual familiarity with Machen and who may be underwhelmed by Christianity and Liberalism should be reminded of Machen’s seminal studies on the virgin birth and Paul’s theology,^[24] his contribution and competence as a New Testament scholar,^[25] and his fascinating life story,^[26] including the bitter blow of condemnation by his own denomination due to liberal intolerance shortly before his untimely death.^[27] It is a rich, inspiring, informative, and disturbing life story all at once, and well worth digesting as part of the history of gospel witness in North America. Particularly important in the current climate is Machen’s combination of scholarship at a high level in the service, not of his reputation or scholarly plaudits, but of the church and its faithfulness to Scripture for the sake of its priorities of evangelism and equipping the saints for the work of ministry and world mission.

27. See Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen, 469–492.

Third, Machen upheld a view of God’s majesty in Christ and the gospel message that are commensurate with the opportunities and needs of our world in this precarious post-pandemic hour. On the one hand we see world church explosion in numbers—the fields are white unto harvest for the education of pastoral leaders to shepherd hundreds of millions of newer believers and to develop theological training centers and strategies to establish and extend church health and further mission.^[28] On the other hand are the specters of Christian persecution, erosion of Christian conviction in the West, and the adulteration of Christian witness in the form of ecclesial complicity in ideologies of the right or left. One might also mention the moral corruption continually surfacing among church leaders both Catholic and Protestant. Given such pressures as well as any number of others that could be named, it may not be melodrama to imagine that we are in such an hour or era as Jesus described in the Olivet Discourse.

28. See, e.g., Michael Ortiz, “Theological Education Can’t Catch Up to Global Church Growth,” Christianity Today, June 2, 2023.

Machen’s time between two World Wars (during the first of which Machen saw plenty of devastation firsthand during civilian service in France^[29]) may easily have seemed as apocalyptic to him as ours may to us, especially when Christian witness was being subverted in scholarship and pulpits as drastically as he shows. His deep grounding in Scripture and respect for the intellectual enterprise in service of God’s redemptive self-disclosure in Christ serve as an example for our own appropriation of grace and dedication to kingdom causes as we face these times of combined socio-political uncertainty yet Christ-grounded hope.

29. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen, 275–282.