The Lord used J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism to turn my world upside down when I first read it in my doctoral program in the early 1990s. While I had grown up in a Christian home and had been reared by parents who were believers, most of my formative years were spent in a church context that was decidedly progressive, and in a high school context that was broadly evangelical at best. When I transferred—with the blessing of my parents—from a progressive Lutheran college to a flagship institution of American evangelicalism in the early 1980s, I was immediately struck by what I then thought was the excessive piety of the community I had just joined. While I suspected that its piety was not essentially different from the more tepid piety that I had encountered growing up, I still thought that it was extreme, and, as an introverted Scandinavian, positively unnerving. Many of the members of my new community seemed to be entirely too earnest, and for reasons that were not immediately clear to me. Though I eventually came to acknowledge that the piety that characterized the religious lives of my evangelical peers was not universally contrived, I graduated from that institution without a clear understanding of the place of piety in the life of the believer, and, even more fundamentally, about the nature of true piety and its relationship to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
My confusion began to abate and finally disappeared shortly after I enrolled in a Ph.D. program at a Roman Catholic university in order to pursue an advanced degree in Religious Studies. In my third semester of coursework, I was taking two courses that ended up playing off one another in what turned out to be, in God’s kind providence, a life-changing fashion. In one of those courses, a seminar with the imposing title, “The Structure of Religious Experience,” seminar participants were required to write a paper each week on a book that was written by a modern theologian on the nature of religious experience. While the books that were assigned were more or less compelling, they were all written by theologians who were committed to the false post-Kantian distinction between faith and knowledge. Each author presumed, in other words, that all of the truth claims associated with religious experience have to do with subjective and not with objective realities, for they were persuaded that the subject matter of piety and religion—including the subject matter of Christian piety and religion—does not have to do with realities that can be laid hold of by the mind. Indeed, they presumed that the essence of both piety and religion is found in an altogether ineffable subjective experience, one that eludes the grasp of the intellect in part because it manifests itself in radically different ways at different times and in different places.
The other course that I was taking that semester was a general survey of American Church History. In that course, students read books and essays that were written by theologians who had played a formative role in the history of Christian thought in the American context. Among the books that students were required to read in that course was Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, a seminal text that played an important role in what is now commonly referred to as the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy. Suffice it to say that Machen’s argument arrested my attention and helped me to finally make sense of the nature of true piety and its relationship to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Not only did it identify and effectively critique the kind of piety that I was then encountering in the books that I was reading in my seminar on the structure of religious experience, but even more importantly, it also helped me to explain why the kind of piety that I had encountered in both the church and school of my youth as well as in my more recent sojourning in the big tent of American evangelicalism was—in many if not in most cases—not essentially different from the kind of piety that Machen insisted was at the foundation of more liberal expressions of the Christian religion.
A Summary of Chapter Three: God and Man
1. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001; 1923), 54.
So how did Christianity and Liberalism arrest my attention and serve as the means to alleviating my confusion about the nature of true piety and its relationship to the gospel of Jesus Christ? While each chapter of Machen’s polemic had a profound impact upon my understanding of Christian faith and practice, it was his third chapter on “God and Man” that had the greatest influence upon my understanding of the relationship between the gospel and the piety of professing believers, for it was that chapter—more than any other—that had a paradigm-shifting impact upon my understanding of the gospel itself. Machen began his third chapter by contending that before the “account” of what God has done to save sinners from the consequences of their sin can be “received,” two “great presuppositions must be accepted”—both of which, he maintained, are “diametrically opposed” to the pervasive liberalism of the modern era.[1] The first of these has to do with how we conceive of God. The Christian religion does not consist “merely in feeling [or experiencing] the presence of God,”[2] Machen argued, because the God of the Bible is not the kind of God that can only be felt or subjectively experienced. Instead, the God of the Bible is the kind of God who can be felt or subjectively experienced precisely because he is the kind of God who can be known, and this is the case because he has revealed himself in such a way that human beings can have objective knowledge not just of who he is, but also of what he has done to accomplish the redemption of sinners. For this reason, Machen began his third chapter by insisting that despite what “modern liberalism” would have the faithful believe, it does “make the greatest possible difference what we think about God,” for “theology, or the knowledge of God,” is not “the death” of piety and religion, as committed liberals were maintaining, but on the contrary, it is “the very basis” of piety and religion. This is because both piety and religion—when properly understood—have to do with the knowledge of God and not merely with an ineffable experience of an unknowable something or other that is presumed to be divine.[3]
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 54, 55, 54, 55.
But if Machen was persuaded that “theology, or the knowledge of God,” is at the foundation of both piety and religion, then how did he think that God can be known? Unlike his more progressive contemporaries who insisted “that we become acquainted with God only through Jesus,” Machen maintained that Jesus himself was “a theist” who acknowledged “the validity of other ways of knowing God.”[4] Indeed, Jesus recognized that God was making himself known to his disciples not just through his own person and work, but even more fundamentally through “nature,” “the moral law,” and “the Scriptures.”[5]
4. Ibid., 55, 57, 55.
5. Ibid., 56, 55.
Machen admitted that when Jesus encountered his disciples he was in fact revealing “the character of God” to them in “a wonderfully intimate,” profoundly personal, and therefore intensely practical fashion. Nevertheless he insisted that Jesus’s disciples could receive that revelation as a revelation of God only because they already had “a very definite conception of God” based upon their familiarity not just with “the … heritage” of the Old Testament Scriptures, but also with the theism that was “presupposed in all that Jesus said.”[6] For this reason, although Machen was eager to affirm that there is an important sense in which “everything that Jesus knew about God” was profoundly personal and intensely practical because it “touched His heart and determined His actions,” nevertheless he was persuaded that what set the religion of Jesus apart from “modern liberalism” was Jesus own commitment to the notion that the God of the Bible is a personal being who not only can but must be known.[7] Machen argued:
6. Ibid., 56.
7. Ibid., 56.
The relation of Jesus to His heavenly Father was not a relation to a vague and impersonal goodness, it was not a relation which merely clothed itself in symbolic, personal form. On the contrary, it was a relation to a real Person, whose existence was just as definite and just as much a subject of theoretic knowledge as the existence of the lilies of the field that God had clothed. The very basis of the religion of Jesus was a triumphant belief in the real existence of a personal God.[8]
8. Ibid., 57.
9. Ibid., 58, 57, 62.
For Machen, then, the “very root” of the religion of Jesus was found in Jesus’s conviction that the God of the Bible is a personal being who can be known and not just ineffably experienced, and for that reason he insisted that “no type of religion can rightly appeal to Jesus to-day” if it denies the “conception of God” that Jesus himself embraced.[9] But that, it seems, was precisely what Machen believed the liberals of his day were doing in two distinct yet interrelated ways. The first of these was related to the “circle of ideas”[10] that informed the liberal understanding of the fatherhood of God. According to Machen, committed theological liberals were “so much impressed” with Jesus’s teaching about the fatherhood of God
10. Ibid., 62.
11. Ibid., 59.
that they have sometimes been inclined to regard it as the very sum and substance of our religion. We are not interested, they say, in many things for which men formerly gave their lives; we are not interested in the theology of the creeds; we are not interested in the doctrines of sin and salvation; we are not interested in atonement through the blood of Christ: enough for us is the simple truth of the fatherhood of God and its corollary, the brotherhood of man.[11]
12. Ibid., 61.
While Machen acknowledged that there is a sense in which “the whole New Testament and Jesus Himself do indeed represent God as standing in a relation to all men, whether Christians or not, which is analogous to that in which a father stands to his children,”[12] nevertheless he was convinced that modern liberals were subverting the true meaning of the phrase because they were using it in a sense that was categorically different from the sense in which it was being used by more orthodox believers. “The modern doctrine of the universal fatherhood of God,” Machen maintained,
13. Ibid., 61-62.
… really belongs at best only to that vague natural religion which forms the presupposition which the Christian preacher can use when the gospel is to be proclaimed; and when it is regarded as a reassuring, all-sufficient thing, it comes into direct opposition to the New Testament. The gospel itself refers to something entirely different; the really distinctive New Testament teaching about the fatherhood of God concerns only those who have been brought into the household of faith.[13]
14. Ibid., 59.
According to Machen, then, the liberal conception of God was problematic because it led more progressive believers to speak of God as “Father” in a way that “formed no part whatever of Jesus’ teaching.”[14] But it was also problematic, he contended, because it differed “even more fundamentally”[15] from the conception of God that Jesus himself embraced. Not only were committed liberals subverting a more biblically informed understanding of the universal fatherhood of God, but they were doing so precisely because they had
15. Ibid., 62.
16. Ibid., 62-63.
lost sight of the very centre and core of the Christian teaching. In the Christian view of God as set forth in the Bible, there are many elements. But one attribute of God is fundamental in the Bible; one attribute is absolutely necessary in order to render intelligible all the rest. That attribute is the awful transcendence of God. From beginning to end the Bible is concerned to set forth the awful gulf that separates the creature from the Creator. It is true, indeed, that according to the Bible God is immanent in the world. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without Him. But he is immanent in the world not because He is identified with the world, but because He is the free Creator and Upholder of it. Between the creature and the Creator a great gulf is fixed.[16]
17. Ibid., 63.
18. Ibid.
For Machen, then, the fundamental problem with modern liberalism’s conception of God was that it broke down the “sharp distinction between God and the world” that is at the heart of the teaching of Scripture, and for that reason it conceived of the God of the Bible as an impersonal force that is coextensive with “the mighty world process itself.”[17] Indeed, the liberal conception of God denied not just “the separateness between God and the world,” but even more importantly it erased “the sharp personal distinction between God and man,” and in so doing it reduced the Christian religion and the piety that is essential to it to a “pantheizing” kind of religious aspiration that was grounded not in the knowledge of what God has made known about his person and work, but in the heretical contention that because God “is not a person distinct from ourselves,” we are “at our best” when we experience the reality that in fact, “our life is [already] a part of His.”[18]
19. Ibid., 64.
20. Ibid., 63, 64.
If Machen was persuaded that the first presupposition that must be accepted before the gospel can be received has to do with how we conceive of God, he insisted that the second follows “naturally”[19] from the first and has to do with how we conceive of man. Modern liberalism’s “conception of man” denied not only “the creature limitations of mankind,” Machen argued, but even more importantly it denied what used to be “the starting point of all preaching,” namely the biblical contention that “man is a sinner under the just condemnation of God.”[20] Indeed, Machen maintained that the “very root of the modern liberal movement” was found not in “the consciousness of sin,” as it had been in earlier and more faithful movements within predominantly Christian cultures, but in “a supreme confidence in human goodness.”[21] “Get beneath the rough exterior of men, we are told, and we shall discover enough self-sacrifice to found upon it the hope of society; the world’s evil, it is said, can be overcome with the world’s good; no help is needed from outside the world.”[22]
21. Ibid., 64.
22. Ibid.
Where, then, did Machen think the “satisfaction with human goodness”[23] that was at the “very root” of modern liberalism came from? How, in other words, did he account for it? After considering the impact that the First World War might have had on the human propensity “to forget our own sins” and focus on the sins of others, and after noting how “the collectivism of the modern state … [can often] obscure the individual, personal character of sin,” Machen argued that in fact, the liberals of his day had lost “the consciousness of sin” because they had been willing—even if only unwitting—participants in “a mighty spiritual process” that was “silently” substituting “paganism for Christianity as the dominant view of life.”[24] In the not-so-distant past, Machen maintained, “Western civilization, despite [its] inconsistencies, was still predominantly Christian; to-day it is predominantly pagan,”[25] and Machen was persuaded that the reason modern liberals had lost “the consciousness of sin” was precisely because they had accommodated the pagan spirit of the age.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 64, 65.
In what sense, then, did Machen think that the spirit of the age was “pagan,” and precisely how did he think it led modern liberals to abandon “the consciousness of sin” that he insisted is at the “very root” of Christian faith, piety, and practice? Unlike many who use the term in our day, Machen was not using the term as “a term of reproach,” for he recognized—as a scholar who had studied the classics at Princeton—that ancient Greece “was glorious” even though it was relentlessly pagan.[26] Instead, he was using the term to describe the sin-denying hubris of the ancient Greek and modern minds, the hubris that he believed had prevented their humanistic efforts from being even more glorious than they in fact had been.
25. Ibid., 65.
26. Ibid.
The problem “with the paganism of ancient Greece, as with the paganism of modern times,” he argued, “was not in the superstructure, which was glorious, but in the foundation, which was rotten.”[27] Just like the humanists of ancient Greece, the humanists of modern times “were optimistic with regard to unaided human nature” and found “the highest goal of human existence in the healthy and harmonious and joyous development of existing human faculties,” yet they did so, Machen maintained, while at the same time ignoring “the disturbing fact of sin.”[28] Indeed, while Machen acknowledged that the efforts of humanists in both the ancient Greek and modern worlds were altogether worthy of praise and sincere admiration, nevertheless he insisted that their efforts were always and everywhere compromised by something important that was being “covered up,” and that something, he contended, was their inability to deal with the fact of sin “once [and] for all.”[29] But that was not a problem, Machen argued, for Christianity’s humanism “of the broken heart,”[30] which is why he insisted that the humanism of the redeemed is superior to that of those who have yet to be convicted of their own sin. In Christianity, Machen contended, “nothing needs to be covered up. The fact of sin is faced squarely once for all, and is dealt with by the grace of God. But then, after sin has been removed by the grace of God, the Christian can proceed to develop joyously every faculty that God has given him. Such is the higher Christian humanism—a humanism not founded on human pride but upon divine grace.”[31]
27. Ibid., 66.
28. Ibid., 65, 66.
Having considered the two “great presuppositions” that must be accepted before the gospel can be received, and having argued that the humanism that is founded “upon divine grace” is superior to the humanism that is “founded on human pride,” Machen concluded the third chapter of Christianity and Liberalism by considering how “the consciousness of sin” is related both to the reception of the gospel and to the piety that is essential to Christian faith and practice. While Machen recognized that the Christian religion “does not end with the broken heart,” he insisted that “it does begin with the broken heart” because “it begins with the consciousness of sin.”[32]
29. Ibid., 66.
30. Ibid., 65.
When properly understood, the Christian religion is not, Machen contended, a religion that is “busily engaged” in the “impossible task” of “calling the righteous to repentance.”[33] Instead, Christianity is committed to calling sinners to repentance, and it is committed to doing so while at the same time acknowledging that without “the consciousness of sin,” “the whole of the gospel will seem [to sinners] to be an idle tale.”[34] But if that is the case, then where did Machen believe “the consciousness of sin” that enables sinners to attend not just to the truthfulness, but also to the glory of the gospel come from? It was Machen’s answer to this question that had, in the second year of my doctoral program, a paradigm-shifting impact upon my understanding of the gospel and its relationship to the piety of professing believers. His answer helped me to see that “the consciousness of sin” that is at the “very root” of the Christian religion is the same “consciousness” that is essential to the piety of genuine believers. In short, Machen was persuaded that there is absolutely nothing that sinners can do for themselves to produce “the consciousness of sin” that is at the foundation of Christian faith and practice.
31. Ibid., 66.
32. Ibid.
While he acknowledged that the sinner’s attention to the “[p]roclamation of the law, in word and in deed, can prepare” for the experience of “the consciousness of sin,” he maintained that the experience itself is “a great mystery” that “can be produced only by the Spirit of God.”[35] Indeed, sinners can do nothing on their own to conjure “the consciousness of sin” that will constrain them to lay hold of and rest upon the gospel of Jesus Christ, but God’s Spirit can and at times does, which is why those who are the recipients of his grace are eager to receive the gospel and enter “into the warmth and joy of the house of God.”[36] “When a man has that experience,” Machen concluded, “when a man comes under the conviction of sin, his whole attitude toward life is transformed; he wonders at his former blindness, and the message of the gospel, which formerly seemed to be an idle tale, becomes now instinct with light. But it is God alone who can produce the change.”[37]
33. Ibid., 68.
34. Ibid., 66.
This is the thought that turned my world upside down when I first read the third chapter of Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism in the third semester of my doctoral program. This thought helped me to see that true piety does not have to do—as I to that point had always imagined—with an ineffable religious experience of one sort or another. Rather, true piety is the response of the whole regenerated soul to the good news of what God has done to save those who know—because of the utterly gratuitous nature of his grace—that they are lost without Christ.
35. Ibid., 67.
36. Ibid., 62.
In the second installment of this essay, I will consider the contemporary relevance of Machen’s third chapter on “God and Man”. I will suggest that the argument in his third chapter continues to be relevant to the day in which we live not just for ideological reasons, but for profoundly practical and spiritual reasons as well. In short, I will argue that the substance of Machen’s third chapter continues to speak not just to the culture in which we live, but also to those in the evangelical camp who are in danger of at least implicitly denying the assumptions that Machen believed are essential to the reception of the gospel.
