From Machen’s intervention in this now century-old controversy (see Part 1), twenty-first century American Christians should heed his warning and avoid temptations of minimizing or modifying the concept of salvation. We should reject adjusting the atonement, sin, and our view of God to meet the tastes or fads of the day, but rather have a clear-eyed focus on sin and the cross as the core of the gospel. Likewise, the dangers of sentimentality, now in therapeutic form, must be avoided and replaced with clear theological speech. Machen’s proper ordering of the doctrine of salvation and ethics should be imitated without giving into quietism or utilitarian applications of Christian doctrine. While theological liberalism is certainly not dead and gone, few are enticed to adopt it wholesale;[1] the more persistent danger is the unwary or unwise taking steps down the path liberalism tread ignorant of its inexorable downgrade towards unfaithfulness. In this article, I will offer a few entailments of Machen’s warning for the contemporary church.
1. For a contemporary critique of liberal Christianity in tradition of Machen see Roger E. Olson, Against Liberal Theology: Putting the Brakes on Progressive Christianity (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2022).
Resist Accommodation
The beginning of the road to theological liberalism came with the attempt to accommodate the concepts of Scripture to modern values. What we have received in the Word of God is meant to be the guide to faithful life under Christ and by the Spirit for all ages. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). To modify the core message of the gospel in order to receive what we think of as a proper hearing will lead to unfaithfulness. There are temptations within the evangelical church to compromise at the same places where theological liberalism was found defective: the doctrine of sin, character of God, and the accomplishment of the cross. The theocentric vision of salvation cannot be substituted for a human-centered mode of self-help or moralistic pursuit.
See Sin Rightly
2. Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 79.
As with the failure of theological liberalism, the problems of the Church in late modernity begin with a distorted view of sin, which has been detached from the holiness of God. Sin, and therefore the forgiveness of sin, has increasingly been expressed in the therapeutic register. Carl Trueman has expressed the prevailing environment as “the cultures of psychological man: the only moral criterion that can be applied to behavior is whether it conduces to the feeling of well-being in the individuals concerned. Ethics, therefore, becomes a function of feeling.”[2] On this view, sin is that which makes me or others feel bad. This therapeutic faith can be traced partially to the liberal preaching that Machen challenged in the 1920s. As a historian of the social gospel has noted, “In many ways, Fosdick epitomized a broader movement toward exploring the psychological implications of religious faith, a movement that helped to spawn the wider development of therapeutic religious models in the aftermath of World War II.”[3] Such modifications can be observed in the contemporary Church through the popularity of pop psychologists like Brené Browne and her emphasis on shame, Jordan Peterson’s Jungian-tinged emphasis on personal responsibility, or the broader shift to speak of “brokenness” to the exclusion of guilt. These trends have a truth to them, but also error.
3. Evans, The Social Gospel in American Religion, 143.
4. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 115.
For instance, God does address our shame, and sin does cause brokenness. However, failure to see sin in a fundamentally theocentric frame, as Machen does, papers over its severity and cost. Sin rejects God, despoils our nature, and corrupts us entirely. Sin is the antithesis of all that is good, right, and true. Sin deserves death. Sin is not limited to the “really bad stuff,” but all thoughts, words, deeds, and inclinations of the human heart against the perfect divine will. One grasps the goodness of the gospel only after the terrible verdict against sin. “The account of that work is the ‘gospel,’ the ‘good news.’ It never could have been predicted, for sin deserves naught but eternal death. But God triumphed over sin through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.”[4] Accounting for the multifaceted nature of sin is necessary and a helpful way of communicating the word of God to our culture, but we must not fail to speak of its fundamental revolt against the Holy God.[5] Preaching about sin must account for the whole life and bring all our collective and individual violations of the divine will to light. No room ought to be granted to “respectable sins” either of the culture or the Church.
5. For helpful discussion of sin in all its depravity see Cornelius Jr. Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996); Mark Jones, Knowing Sin: Seeing a Neglected Doctrine Through the Eyes of the Puritans (Moody Publishers, 2022).
See God Rightly
6. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 113.
The minimization of sin stems for a minimization of God’s nature. Much for the same reasons as Fosdick a century ago, the Church can be tempted to emphasize “the bright side of God” to win the young.[6] One-sided images of God, who is love without wrath, fail to capture God’s grandeur, power, and holiness—and for that reason betray His nature as love as displayed on the cross. Contemporary preaching often offers a buddy Jesus, a divine genie, or an eternal insurance policy, rather than the true and living God. Ulrich Lehner has rightly described how many in our culture treat God, especially among the young: He is, “like a psychiatrist who treats each of his patients the same way, a friend whom we can call in times of need. But when things are going great, we don’t bother him much. Thus, God doesn’t play a role in our lives, and grace has no chance to transform us. Why change your life for such a God? He makes no demands.”[7] But this neither works nor is it true. What could possibly offend such a god, and who could possibly want to worship him?
7. Ulrich L. Lehner, God Is Not Nice: Rejecting Pop Culture Theology and Discovering the God Worth Living For (Ave Maria Press, 2017), 2.
The therapeutic god of late modernity has no more appeal to the young than the Christian kitsch that embody such spirituality. While it might have superficial attractiveness, such an idol is ultimately empty. Much like the Lost Generation after WWI, our age calls out for meaning, realism, and true hope, which is impossible by human initiative. We can observe this in the revivals of Nietzschean vitalism and the moral certainty and apocalyptic zeal of modern progressivism, which from the right and the left vie for the allegiance of many. Nor can this overly sentimental god resolve the banal and work-a-day nihilism that has cast a pale over much of our culture. Machen’s offer of the true God and the true gospel articulated sub species aeternitatis (from the standpoint of eternity) can offer a message worth hearing. “Such is the Christian life—it is a life of conflict but it is also a life of hope. It views this world under the aspect of eternity; the fashion of this world passeth away, and all must stand before the judgment seat of Christ.”[8] The true Christian life is a summons by divine grace through faith to a new life and existence offered in obedience to God, which He works in us. The standard and goal for living is not the passing aspects of culture, but the very nature of the eternal Triune God revealed in the life of Christ through the Holy Scriptures.
8. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 125.
Only by considering the true God, who will judge the world and who is both love and light, can we recalibrate our view of sin and the true glory of the cross of Jesus. Here the infinite God of love and the eternal God of life took our hatred of him and the death we deserve. Only from this perspective can we truly understand the death of Christ—the God of perfect righteousness, holiness, power, and wisdom. Such a love is neither uninteresting nor unremarkable, as if forgiveness is God’s job. In light of the perfection of God and our rank imperfection, that God would redeem sinners by such a costly sacrifice as the death of the incarnate Son of God is the most startling revelation of God’s holy love. If Christ is a mere example, we are left impotent and despairing; for to truly grasp the standard of divine righteousness is also to know our failure to attain this righteousness. Jesus, the divine Son of the Father, one with Him eternally and sharing in the infinite majesty of the divine essence, bore our guilt, shame, and the wrath against sin to secure for us a righteousness not our own and assurance of pardon, no mere model of self-improvement or positive affirmation.
See the Cross Rightly
9. This is in keeping with the doctrine of the inseparable operations of the Trinity. For a thorough defense and explanation of this doctrine see Adonis Vidu, The Same God Who Works All Things: Inseparable Operations in Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021).
To properly communicate and to avoid misrepresentations of the doctrine of penal substitution, we too must follow Machen and the Christian tradition by understanding the nature of the cross as a thoroughly Trinitarian act and avoid crude caricatures that are unbefitting of God. The cross itself is an act accomplished jointly by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit according to the one divine will.[9] The death of Jesus should never be portrayed as if the loving Son stands in the breach between us and a reluctant, cold, and demanding Father. Such a picture is nothing other than mythology that perverts the biblical revelation of God and his salvation. The Father sends the Son in love, and the wrath that Jesus propitiates on this cross is just as must his own hatred of sin as the Father’s and the Holy Spirit’s. There is no distribution of divine attributes between the Triune persons; it is the whole Trinity who wills and accomplishes salvation. “The fundamental thing is that God Himself, and not another, makes the sacrifice for sin—God Himself in the person of the Son who assumed our nature and died for us, God Himself in the Person of the Father who spared not His own Son but offered Him up for us all.”[10] Leading from this, the contemporary church should avoid an imbalanced doctrine of salvation that focuses exclusively on the Son. A proper Trinitarian perspective on the mission of the Son and the cross, which leads us back to the Father in the Spirit will be much less susceptible to the distorting pressure of modern therapeutic culture and more in keeping with the Christian tradition.
10. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 111–12.
Conclusion
11. Eldred Cornelius Vanderlaan, Fundamentalism Versus Modernism (New York: H.W. Wilson Company, 1925), v.
“Salvation” is the longest chapter in Christianity and Liberalism; Machen built to this theme throughout the work. What is at stake between the divergent theologies of orthodox Christianity and theological liberalism is nothing less than one’s eternal relationship with God. For all the struggle of the Fundamentalist-modernist controversy, the combatants had largely left this most crucial of questions aside. In a 450-page handbook on the various publications of the ongoing controversy published in 1925, the editor Eldred Vanderlaan excuses the absence of a section on atonement “because the present discussion has dealt little with these questions.”[11] Machen saw to the heart of the controversy as nothing less than the salvation accomplished and applied by the Triune God. In light of the challenges to the Church presented by theological liberalism, Machen addresses the existential heart of the human predicament. The very relation of sinful humanity to the Holy God and eternal life was at stake. He expresses the fundamental truth of his predecessor John Calvin “for us the substance of life is set in the death of Christ.”[12] The church one hundred years on from Christianity and Liberalism ought to face opposition to the orthodox faith with the same courage and clarity as Machen.
