In Matthew 16:13–17 Jesus asked his closest followers two questions of enduring significance. (1) “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” (v. 13) and (2) “Who do you say that I am?” (v. 15). The first of these questions was answered with a variety of opinions from mistaken but admiring crowds. “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others say Jeremiah or one of the prophets” (v. 14). Of course, there were others answering the question in Jesus’s own day who were not so admiring. Many accused him of blasphemy (Matt. 9:3), demon possession (John 7:20), and even of occultic demon manipulation (Matt. 12:24). Whether generally friendly or openly hostile, the variety of public opinions about Jesus of Nazareth all fell woefully short of the truth. Each opinion was the product of the reasoning faculties of Jesus’s contemporaries aided by the faulty presuppositions of their experience and worldview and not the result of divine revelation. When the Lord Jesus himself pressed the question personally to the disciples, it was Peter who spoke the truth about Jesus: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (v. 16). This answer, the true confession, was not the result of Peter’s reasoning faculties nor the natural outworking of his presuppositions. The truth of this conclusion was grounded in the fact that it was divinely revealed: “Blessed are you, Simon bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood did not reveal this to you but my Father who is in heaven” (v. 17).
1. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009 [originally published, 1923]).
In his enduringly relevant classic, Christianity and Liberalism, J. Gresham Machen argues convincingly that the theological commitments of liberalism amount to a fundamentally different religion than Christianity.[1] Nowhere is this fact more clearly illustrated than in the comparison between liberalism’s doctrine of the person of Jesus Christ as compared to that of orthodox Christianity. As the Enlightenment ran its course in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, some philosophers and biblical scholars had taken an openly hostile view of Jesus, regarding him as a false prophet with a deluded mind or an egotistical agenda (e. g., H. S. Reimarus and L. Feuerbach).
2. See Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press, 2011 [originally published, 1830]).
Others, however, though fully committed to enlightenment methods and ideas, attempted to maintain a reverent view of Jesus. Friedrich Schleiermacher, for example, had argued that Jesus was the chief exemplar of a pure and unfettered God-consciousness, the experiential feeling of absolute dependence.[2] For American liberal theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, Jesus was both the greatest preacher and the most prolific actor with respect to radical social action, ushering in the kingdom of God by breaking the chains of systemic social sins and liberating those oppressed by the systems.[3] This was the species of enlightenment ideology embraced by the liberalism of Machen’s day.
3. See Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1917).
Like those who hailed Jesus as John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets, liberal preachers and theologians wished to maintain some reverence for Jesus as an exemplary figure, even as the first and quintessential Christian, but their rejection of the authority of divine revelation inevitably resulted in their failure to believe and confess the truth about Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Therefore, just as the religion of liberalism is altogether different than Christianity, so the Jesus revered by liberalism is an altogether different figure than the Jesus of the true Christian faith.
Machen’s treatment of the person of Christ is the subject of Chapter five of Christianity and Liberalism. Before considering the gospel message of salvation in Chapter six, Machen says, “We must consider the Person upon whom the message is based. And in their attitude toward Jesus, liberalism and Christianity are sharply opposed.”[4] Over the course of some thirty pages, Machen states, re-states, and defends the thesis that true Christianity regards Jesus of Nazareth as the object of faith while liberalism can, at best, regard him as the example of faith:
4. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 69.
The modern liberal preacher reverences Jesus; he has the name of Jesus forever on his lips; he speaks of Jesus as the supreme revelation of God; he enters, or tries to enter, into the religious life of Jesus. But he does not stand in a religious relation to Jesus. Jesus for him is an example for faith, not the object of faith. The modern liberal tries to have faith in God like the faith which he supposes Jesus had in God; but he does not have faith in Jesus.[5]
5. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 73.
In the remainder of Part 1 of this essay, I will summarize Machen’s trenchant critique of the liberal view of the person of Christ in four parts to set his argument forward as an example of the kind of courage, clarity, and winsomeness needed to “contend earnestly for the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). Part 2 of the essay will offer a summary of a few of the ideological challenges facing orthodox Christology today followed by a reminder from Machen of the unchanging truths of orthodox Christology, which function as the right answer to falsehood in every age.
1. The Jesus of History is the Christ of Faith
6. This nomenclature was coined by Albert Schweitzer in his 1906 book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede. Since Machen’s time, two new so-called “Quests” for the historical Jesus have occurred in the field of critical biblical studies. For a helpful summary and assessment of the “Quests,” see Alister McGrath, The Making of Modern German Christology: 1750–1990, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994). See also C. Marvin Pate, 40 Questions About the Historical Jesus, 40 Questions Series, ed. Benjamin L. Merkle (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 2015).
Machen’s critique of liberal Christology’s belief in Christ as a mere exemplar of Christian faith can be broken down into four distinct themes. First, liberal Christology is based entirely on a historical-critical methodology that posits a sharp dichotomy between the Christ of orthodox Christian faith and the Jesus of history. This dichotomy is usually traced back to the German scholar H. S. Reimarus, who sought to use the methods of historical-critical research to separate fact from fiction in the accounts of the actions and words of Jesus found in the canonical gospels. This undertaking, eagerly embraced by other enlightenment thinkers, would later come to be called “The Quest of the Historical Jesus.”[6] Fundamental to the quest was the philosophical argument that an ancient historical record cannot be trusted as fact since the truth of what is being claimed cannot be demonstrated in the present. If historical truth itself cannot be demonstrated, then nothing can be demonstrated from historical truths. Nothing universally binding, and certainly nothing supernatural, can be based in the claims of history, however true those claims may be. This idea is what G. E. Lessing called the “ugly broad ditch” that could not be crossed.[7]
7. G. E. Lessing, Proof of the Spirit and Power. Interesting historical note: the writings of Reimarus on the historical Jesus were not published by Reimarus for fear of their controversial impact. His student and admirer, Lessing, published the writings after Reimarus’s death as anonymous writings. See McGrath, Making, 28–32.
Machen rehearses the claim of Lessing’s “ugly broad ditch,” observing that, “for modern liberalism, a supernatural person is never historical.” He notes that, for liberals, “The problem could be solved only by the separation of the natural from the supernatural in the New Testament account of Jesus, in order that what is supernatural might be rejected and what is natural might be retained.”[8] The entire project is based on the presupposition that the supernatural cannot be real and the claims of historicity cannot be trusted. This, of course, is question-begging. If one presupposes the existence of a real and personal God, which the Scriptures both presuppose and proclaim, then the notion that this God can communicate the facts of history accurately through the medium of written testimony and the very notion of supernatural intervention in the world are both perfectly plausible. Thus, Machen concludes,
8. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 91.
[T]he process of separation has never been successfully carried out. Many have been the attempts—the modern liberal Church has put its heart and soul into the effort, so that there is scarcely any more brilliant chapter in the history of the human spirit than this ‘quest of the historical Jesus’—but all the attempts have failed.[9]
9. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 91.
The New Testament treats the supernatural as the historical, never suggesting any basis for the separation of the two, and the proponents of historical-critical methods have failed to demonstrate why readers of the New Testament should not do the same.
2. Jesus Must Be More Than Mere Example
10. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 74.
Secondly, Machen critiques liberal Christology because the claim that Jesus is merely the exemplar of faith (and not the object of faith) is a self-refuting claim. Even after the historical-critical text-chopping of the search for the historical Jesus is done, it is still agreed that the Jesus of history believed himself to be “the heavenly Son of Man who was to be the final Judge of all the earth.”[10] On the one hand, it would be absurd to claim that we should imitate Jesus in this belief. More devastating still is the fact that, according to the fundamental commitments of liberalism, Jesus’s belief concerning himself was actually false. Machen asks, “What shall be thought of a human being who lapsed so far from the path of humility and sanity as to believe that the eternal destinies of the world were committed into His hands?”[11] Such a high view of oneself in comparison to other men is not merely a delusion to be pitied but a moral atrocity of the highest order. Machen is exactly right that the liberal Jesus “has a moral contradiction at the very centre of His being—a contradiction due to his Messianic consciousness.”[12]
11. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 74.
12. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 98.
3. Jesus Inhabits a World Where the Transcendent God Can Perform Miracles
13. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 87.
A third theme of Machen’s critique of liberal Christology has to do with the inconsistency of liberalism’s wholesale rejection of the very possibility of miracles. Here, as with his critique of the historical-critical method, Machen seeks to demonstrate the perfect consistency of believing the biblical accounts of supernatural miracles, including those wrought by Jesus, when one believes in the biblical claim that there is a real, personal God who is the Creator of the universe. Machen says, “The possibility of a miracle, then, is indissolubly joined with ‘theism.’ Once one admits the existence of a personal God, Maker and Ruler of the world, then no limits, temporal or otherwise, can be set to the creative power of such a God.”[13] The wholesale rejection of miracles is a rejection of the fundamental claims of theism. Thus, for the liberal, an alternative view of the world is required. One possibility for the liberal is the worldview of deism. On this worldview, God has no direct interaction with the world once he has set it in motion “like a machine.”[14] Thus, there is no divine special revelation, no ruling providence, and certainly no miracles. The other worldview left open to the liberal is pantheism in which God is conceived as entirely impersonal and is “identified with the totality of nature.”[15]
14. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 85.
15. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 86.
Historically, these two worldviews have been adopted by liberal thinkers.[16] On both of these worldviews, the liberal is forced to hold together entirely incompatible beliefs. On deism, how can personal religious experience, the fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man, and the building of the kingdom of God on earth—all basic commitments of the religion of liberalism—be compatible with a view of the world in which God is not immanent in any way? What ground does the liberal have for claiming as the supreme exemplar of true religion one who is only known to him from the pages of a book that thoroughly presupposes and proclaims one true, living, and personal God, who providentially governs the world by secondary causes and works wonders in the world by a mighty hand and outstretched arm?
16. For example, Reimarus and Lessing held to a deistic worldview, which was common in the early phases of the enlightenment. Schleiermacher, on the other hand, held to a basically pantheistic worldview. Other liberals tended more toward pantheism, or in the case of Hegelian liberal thinkers, such as D. F. Strauss and F. C. Baur, panentheism, which exhibits a certain “pantheizing” tendency.
If deism posits a God whose transcendence separates him entirely from the world he has made, pantheism errs in the opposite direction. On pantheism, God is not transcendent at all. So immanent is he that he is indistinguishable from the world. On this worldview, what is the basis for believing in a natural order of things at all? What are perceived as distinct laws of nature, operating as component parts of the larger universe, are really illusory. All is one, and all is God. With the very notion of the natural order of the universe undermined and the belief that all of the events in the universe are to be identified with God and his act, there remains no conceptual space to distinguish between the natural and the supernatural and thus no space for affirming the former and rejecting the latter. Furthermore, the very same Bible that is the sole source of knowledge about Jesus Christ proclaims from its very first verse a profound Creator/creature distinction, which is diametrically opposed to pantheism. Noting the conundrum of clinging to the existence of Jesus as an exemplar of faith when the only source of knowledge about him declares him to be a miracle worker, Machen quips, “The New Testament without miracles would be far easier to believe. But the trouble is, it would not be worth believing.”[17] Thus, in its rejection of miracles, liberalism is woefully inconsistent with its own basic commitments.
17. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 88.
4. Jesus Requires Truth, Not False Information
A fourth theme of Machen’s critique of liberal Christology is the inherently deceptive rhetoric by which liberal preachers and theologians speak about Jesus. Machen focuses here on the way liberals will speak about the deity of Jesus. He observes,
18. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 93.
The liberal preacher, it may be said, is often ready to speak of the “deity” of Christ; he is often ready to say that “Jesus is God.” The plain man is much impressed. The preacher, he says, believes in the deity of our Lord; obviously then his unorthodoxy must concern only details; and those who object to his presence in the Church are narrow and uncharitable heresy-hunters.[18]
19. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 94. Though Machen cites not sources, he is accurately representing his opponents. Consider Schleiermacher: “The Redeemer, then, is like all men in virtue of his identity of human nature, but distinguished from them all by the constant potency of His God-consciousness, which was a veritable existence of God in Him” (Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 385). This is how Schleiermacher accounts for the divinity of Christ.
This particular tendency was commonplace in the liberalism of Machen’s day, which had moved past the trend of deism and toward a pantheistic worldview. Thus, the liberal preacher will use the word “God” but mean something quite different than what the orthodox Christian means. “God, at least according to the logical trend of modern liberalism, is not a person separate from the world, but merely the unity that pervades the world.” Thus, when the liberal preacher says that Jesus is God, he means “merely that the life of God, which appears in all men, appears with special clearness or richness in Jesus.” This belief, though using the terminology of Christianity, “is diametrically opposed to the Christian belief in the deity of Christ.”[19] When Christians claim that Jesus is God, it reflects the highest possible estimation of the person of their Savior, who is “identical in nature with a Maker and Ruler of the universe.” However, when the liberal says that Jesus is God, it is “not because they think high of Jesus, but because they think desperately low of God.”[20]
20. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 94.
This manner of speaking about the deity of Jesus is not merely a matter of confusion but of deception. The liberal preacher who says, “Jesus is God” speaks sincerely because he “attaches indeed a real meaning to the words and that meaning is very dear to his heart.” Nevertheless, Machen avers that he is still guilty of deception because the meaning attached to the words by the speaker does not match “the meaning intended to be produced in the mind of the particular person addressed.”[21] Thus, in a fundamental way, the liberal preacher is not being truthful when he says to a Christian, “I believe in the deity of Christ.”
21. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 95.
When Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism, the enlightenment spirit of the age had been ruminating and maturing for some three centuries. The Christianity of Scripture and the ancient creeds was deemed an untenable relic of a premodern world. In the circles of academia, like those inhabited by Machen, open belief in the ancient faith was socially and professionally costly. Such costliness is to be expected, as the Scriptures repeatedly warn, and Machen knew the eternal cost of rejecting the true Christian faith is far more severe than the exclusion and persecution that can result from embracing it. Furthermore, the true joy of embracing the truth far exceeds the comfort derived from the accolades of men, both in this age and in the age to come. It is for this reason that Machen spoke, taught, and wrote with such clarity in defense of orthodoxy for the love and glory of Jesus, the only legitimate object of saving faith. Like Machen in the twentieth century and like Peter in the first century, may Christians today confess with sincere faith that “Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt 16:16) contending earnestly for “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).
In Part Two, I will offer a summary of some of the main ideological challenges facing orthodox Christology, considering how they differ from the liberalism of Machen’s day but how the precious truths they undermine are the same truths undermined by liberals and all false teaching. Part Two will conclude with a reminder from Machen of the unchanging truths of orthodox Christology, which function as the right answer to falsehood in every age.
