From its very beginning, true Christianity has been threatened by false teachers that disguise themselves with the terminology of the Christian faith but define the terms in radically different ways. These are the wolves in sheep’s clothing that Jesus and the apostles warned us about (see Matt. 7:15 and Acts 20:29). In Machen’s day, the most threatening wolf among the sheep was classic liberalism in the mold of Schleiermacher, Strauss, Von Harnack, and Rauschenbusch. Such thinkers and their disciples had feasted on the fare of enlightenment modernism and were feeding it in large supply to the unsuspecting masses. In our day, the modernist presuppositions of that age have given way to postmodernism with a plethora of ideologies that are hostile to the faith once for all delivered to the saints. Many of these ideas find happy expression under the banner of “progressive Christianity” where they are comfortably peddled with historic, Christian labels. But make no mistake, the labels are not defined in historic, Christian ways. As with the liberalism of Machen’s day, the progressive ideas of our own day are not really a version of Christianity but a different religion altogether.
Major Ideological Challenges to Orthodox Christology
Many are the challenges facing true Christianity generally, and Christology specifically, under the present-day banner of progressive Christianity. In Part One, I summarized the major critiques Machen leveled against liberal Christology. In this second part of the essay I will briefly survey just three of these destructive ideas and how they impact Christology in particular. I will follow this with a summary of three historic, orthodox Christological convictions evident in Machen’s chapter on the person of Christ because no matter the specific form of the doctrine of wolves, the doctrine of the true sheep is consistent from age to age. “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Heb. 13:8). His sheep hear his voice; he knows them, and they follow him (John 10:27). Just as Christ himself does not change, neither does his trusted and true voice to his beloved sheep.
1. Religious Pluralism
One of the banner truths of progressive Christianity today is religious pluralism. According to the ideology of pluralism, all religious truth claims have validity as pathways to ultimate fulfillment. The real test for the legitimacy of religious truth is not the distinctive claims of a particular religion but the common ground they all share. For example, a Muslim may regard Muhammed as the greatest and only infallible prophet, a Buddhist may seek nirvana through transcendental meditation, and an orthodox Christian may seek heaven through faith in Jesus and forgiveness of sins. These evident differences, however, are not the heart of true religion according to pluralism. The heart is to be found in certain moral principles they all share, rooted in love for one’s fellow man. By prioritizing the common principles of love and basic morality (what true Christianity understands in terms of general revelation, common grace, and natural law) over the particularizing doctrinal claims of each tradition, pluralism seeks to eliminate any claim of uniqueness on the part of Christianity or any other religion.
It is not difficult to see how pluralism directly affects the historic doctrine of the person of Christ. Orthodox Christians in every age have believed and confessed that the Lord Jesus Christ, who became truly human, is also truly God from all eternity. Christians affirm the doctrine of the Trinity, that the one true and living God exists eternally as three distinct persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. One of these divine persons, the Son, “took on flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) as Jesus of Nazareth. The eternally begotten Son of God became the temporally born Son of Mary—two distinct categories of sonship, one and the same Son. If pluralism is true, however, then the historic Christian doctrines of Trinity and incarnation cannot be true. If the eternally divine Son became a man and opened the way for his sheep to have eternal life, that particular way is unique among all other claims. That is, if the New Testament claims about the deity of Christ are true, then its claims of exclusivity are necessarily true as well. If, as pluralism would have it, the New Testament claims of exclusivity are not true, then the deity of Christ is necessarily untrue also, and the historic Christian doctrine of the incarnation becomes mere myth or metaphor.[1]
1. For a clear example of how pluralism undermines orthodox Christology as described here, see the works of John Hick. See John Hick, Ed. The Myth of God Incarnate, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1977); John Hick, Ed. The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Wipf and Stock, 2004), John Hick, The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralistic Age, 2nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006).
2. Feminism
Another dominant ideological force of progressive Christianity is feminism. The general narrative that women have been subjugated by men throughout history—and that the chief moral aim of mankind ought to be liberation of women from this oppression—has made its way into the discourse of Christian theology at the hands of feminist theologians. Noting the prevalence of masculine names, imagery, and language for God in the Bible—God as warrior, God as “Father,” male pronouns for God, etc.—feminist theologians have sought to “liberate” Scripture from the “androcentric patriarchy” of the cultural ethos in which it was written. This inevitably resulted in a feminization of God-talk that took many forms—appealing to the language of “goddess,” searching for biblical and theological warrant to call God “Mother,” and the explicit use of feminine pronouns for God.
Direct re-thinking of Christology was not far behind the broader trends of feminist theology. Feminist theologians were quick to raise the question of whether a male savior could savingly represent females and whether female priests and pastors (a non-negotiable commitment of feminist theology) could adequately represent a male Christ to their flocks. Thus, the maleness of the incarnate Lord is presented by feminist theologians as a serious problem to be solved rather than a positive aspect of the good news. Some find the maleness of Jesus to be irreconcilable with feminist principles and thus abandon any semblance of Christianity altogether.[2] Others see the problem in the patriarchal worldview of Christian interpretations of Jesus’ maleness, so that the entire theological and philosophical foundation of traditional Christianity must be upended and re-written before a male savior can have any significance, much less saving benefit for women.[3] This upending of the foundations must reach, not only to the interpretations of holy Scripture, but into the very presuppositions, intentions, and claims of the Scriptural authors themselves. In this way, feminist theologies stand on the shoulders of classic liberalism’s embrace of historical-critical interpretation of Scripture that treats the text as a mere human product rather than the authoritative word of God.
2. This is the path taken by Mary Daly in Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).
3. This is the general approach of feminist theologian Rosemary Ruether in “Can Christology Be Liberated From Patriarchy?” in Reconstructing the Christ Symbol: Essays in Feminist Christology, ed. M. Stevens (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 29.
Radical feminism has a less provocative little sister in evangelical egalitarianism. While egalitarians do not openly embrace historical-critical methods and the denial of the authority of Scripture those methods entail, they do embrace many of the philosophical presuppositions of feminism, especially the inherent suspicion that male language for God and the ontological maleness of Christ is a problem to be solved rather than a positive feature of the good news that is the saving message of the gospel of Jesus Christ.[4]
3. Individualism
4. For one example of an egalitarian who treats the maleness of Jesus as a problem and then solves it by suggesting that Jesus is somehow female-adjacent because his human generation does not involve a father, see Amy Peeler, Women and the Gender of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022). See especially Chapter 5, “The Male Savior.”
A third ideological trend that characterizes much of progressive Christianity is the triumph of expressive individualism. Drinking from the same wells as pluralism and feminism, the cultural ethos of the present day is characterized by a commitment to each individual’s ability to create his own identity with accountability to no one but himself.[5] This autonomous authority of self-definition finds its most radical expression in transgender ideology. Where feminism questions the place of the maleness of Jesus in the bigger story of the Christian gospel, transgender ideology undermines the very reality of his maleness altogether. Whether or not Jesus was a man, a woman, or some non-binary “other” becomes an open-ended question in the worldview of contemporary gender theorists.[6]
5. For a scholarly tour de force into two centuries of philosophical trends that gave rise to today’s gender theories, see the aptly titled Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl Trueman (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021).
6. For an example of radical transgender ideology applied to gender of Jesus, see this story in “The Telegraph” from November, 2022 concerning a sermon by a research fellow that identified the spear wound in Jesus side as a depiction of female genitalia, making Jesus’ body such that it could be penetrated. The sermon was defended by Michael Banner, Dean of Trinity College at Cambridge, as a legitimate exploration of Christian interpretations of Jesus.
What is one to do in the face of such destructive ideological trends that undermine the truth about Jesus? The Apostle Paul warns the Colossian church about the grave danger of godless ideologies that threaten to imprison them: “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ” (Col. 2:8). The effective safeguard against such captivity with respect to the doctrine of the person of Christ is not the intellectual mastery of every false idea but a biblically anchored faith in the person of Jesus Christ: “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority” (Col. 2:9–10). Paul’s method to “destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God” is to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). Christians in every age need to be firmly rooted in the divinely revealed truth about the person of Christ to be able to discern truth from error and remain free from the captivity of godless philosophies that will dominate the spirit of every age until the Lord Jesus returns. With that objective in view, we return to Chapter 5 of Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism.
Key Convictions of Orthodox Christology
1. The Necessity of Divine Revelation
Woven throughout Machen’s critiques of liberal Christology, he states positively the unashamed convictions of true Christianity concerning the person of the Savior, who is the object of the faith, not merely its exemplar. I’ll identify three such convictions here. First, for Machen and all true Christians since the end of the apostolic period, the true identity of Jesus can only be known by the authoritative divine revelation of holy Scripture. The only first-hand testimony available about the person of Jesus is the New Testament. This is why Machen is so critical of liberalism’s commitment to maintain some reverent attitude about Jesus while neglecting the fundamental message of the only legitimate source for knowing him at all. Machen observes, “The truth is, the witness of the New Testament, with regard to Jesus as the object of faith, is an absolutely unitary witness. The thing is rooted far too deep in the records of primitive Christianity ever to be removed by any critical process.”[7] For Machen, a right understanding of Jesus is grounded in Scripture as God’s word. The liberals of Machen’s day and the progressives of today are committed to the authority of their own reasoning faculties and completely bound by the presuppositions of their cultural moment. True Christians, like Peter, are dependent on the supernatural revelation of God as they confess that Jesus, the object of their faith, is “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16).
7. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 73.
The True Humanity of Jesus
A second conviction of sound Christology expressed by Machen is a robust commitment to the true humanity of Jesus. The New Testament is clear that “Jesus certainly led a true human life, and in it He came into those varied human relationships which provide opportunity for moral achievement.”[8] This clear biblical teaching always had its detractors and always will. Machen notes the heresy of Apollinarianism as a case in point: “The Apollinarians rejected the full humanity of the Lord, but in doing so they obtained a Person who was very different from the Jesus of the New Testament.”[9] Emphasizing the true humanity of Christ was a priority of liberalism in order to maximize the notion that his messianic function was merely exemplary. Of course, because orthodox Christians affirm the full humanity of Christ, we have no difficulty affirming that his life set an example to follow, as Scripture states plainly (see John 13:15, 1 Cor. 11:1, 1 Tim. 1:16, 1 Pet. 2:21-23, etc.). The affirmation of true humanity, however, is not the full truth concerning the person of Jesus. He is truly human but more than human as well. As such, he is truly our example but more than our example as well.
8. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 80.
9. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 97.
One could make the case that progressive Christianity, on the other hand, has a problem with the affirmation that Jesus is truly human. It is not as though progressives are interested in denying this claim. Rather, the claim is undermined by the progressive commitment to philosophies that corrupt a biblical understanding of humanity. The inherent goodness of divine authority over human creatures, the beauty of the created design of a sexual binary of male and female, and the virtue of distinct gender roles and responsibilities within the shared dignity of image-bearing are all matters integrally related to a biblical doctrine of humanity and are all rejected by progressive principles.
The True Deity of Jesus
A third conviction of orthodox Christology affirmed by Machen is the true deity of Jesus Christ. By denying the deity of Jesus as the eternal second person of the Trinity who became man for us and for our salvation, the liberals of Machen’s day rendered Jesus’s humanity of no value to anyone. A merely human Christ may demonstrate what a life free from the oppression of sin looks like, but such a Christ offers no rescue to those hopelessly imprisoned to its curse. The Scriptures are clear that it is God who saves, not mere man. As such, the Jesus of Scripture, the Savior of the world, is truly God. Machen emphasizes the New Testament teaching that Jesus is a “supernatural person.” Reminding his readers of the error of Arianism, in which Jesus was supernatural but not divine, Machen goes on to clarify that Jesus is a truly divine supernatural person. He explains, “[I]f Jesus is a supernatural person He is either divine or else he is an intermediate Being, higher indeed than man, but lower than God. The latter view has been abandoned for many centuries in the Christian Church.” He goes on to state that “Arianism is dead.” Therefore, for Machen, if Jesus “is not merely man, but a supernatural person, the conclusion is that He is God.”[10]
10. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 96.
Whether by outright denial or by subtle re-definition of deity, both the liberalism of Machen’s day and the progressive Christianity of our own is uncomfortable with the abundant New Testament testimony that Jesus of Nazareth is to be identified entirely with the one true and living God who created the heavens and the earth. Such a straightforward confession would entail what, to them, is untenable: Jesus is Lord. For, if Jesus is Lord, the testimony to his life and ministry, the exclusive way of salvation in him, and especially the ethical demands of living in covenant with him as written down and approved in the New Testament by his apostles, are binding on the consciences of all men.
Conclusion
For J. Gresham Machen, Jesus of Nazareth is who the New Testament says he is, which means he is not the Jesus fabricated by modern or post-modern ideologies. “The liberal Jesus [and the progressive Jesus], despite all the efforts of modern psychological reconstruction to galvanize Him into life, remains a manufactured figure of the stage. Very different is the Jesus of the New Testament and of the great Scriptural creeds.”[11] He is the eternally begotten Son of God, himself truly God, who became man and was born of the virgin Mary. He lived righteously, suffered, died, and rose again for us and for our salvation. This Jesus is one known, not by human intellectual achievement but by divine revelation alone. May this divinely revealed Jesus be the one to whom we cling for salvation and for whom we contend as the object of “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).
