It is worth asking if the third chapter of Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism is at all relevant to the age in which we live. Does Machen’s chapter on “God and Man” have anything to say to those who are living a century after its original publication? In addition to a growing number of personal narratives like my own that testify to the paradigm-shifting power of Machen’s third chapter, I would argue that his work continues to be relevant for at least three reasons. All of these are related in some sense to the Western world’s increasing hostility to the assumptions that Machen believed are essential to the reception of the gospel.
Three Areas of Relevance
1. Understanding The Spirit of the Age
1. By “pantheizing tendency” I mean a tendency to conceive the ultimate reality of the universe as an impersonal force that is presumed to be coextensive with the natural order of the world in which we live.
In the first place, Machen’s third chapter continues to be relevant because it calls our attention to the subversive dangers of a pantheizing tendency that is even more pronounced in our day than it was in the early decades of the twentieth century.[1] As the penetrating insights of Peter Jones are making more than clear, the contemporary church is being challenged by an increasingly authoritarian form of neo-pagan spirituality that is posing an existential threat to all forms of religious and cultural expression that are grounded in the Creator/creature distinction that is at the heart of the biblical narrative, and that is essential to the good news of the gospel.[2] What Jones’s efforts are establishing, among other things, is not only that Machen’s diagnosis of the problematic nature of the pagan mind was remarkably prescient, but also that his critique of the pagan mind continues to be relevant because it helps contemporary believers understand not only where the neo-pagan impulse comes from, but also how it differs from the foundational assumptions of the Christian religion. For this reason, Machen’s work continues to be relevant because it offers useful insights on how the faithful should preach and teach in order to address effectively what is foundational to the relentlessly pagan and increasingly ominous spirit of the age in which we live.
2. For example, see Peter Jones, The Other Worldview: Exposing Christianity’s Greatest Threat (Bellingham, WA: Kirkdale Press, 2015). See also the website for Dr. Jones’s ministry.
2. Understanding Ourselves
Machen’s third chapter is relevant in the second place because it calls the attention of present-day readers to the very real dangers that ought to be associated with an understanding of the self that is often simply presumed to be true, especially in many sectors of contemporary American evangelicalism. Having taught in a broadly evangelical context for a quarter of a century, I’ve seen that many American evangelicals have accommodated an understanding of the self that is grounded in what could be described as a kind of “Invictus tendency,” a tendency that I am persuaded minimizes—if not outright denies—those assumptions about God and man that Machen believed are essential to the reception of the gospel.[3]
3. In Part One of this essay, I argue that according to Machen, the first presupposition that is essential to the reception of the gospel has to do with how we conceive of God. In short, the God of the Bible is a personal being who can be known. The second presupposition has to do with how we conceive of man. Human beings, he argued, are sinners and for that reason “stand under the just condemnation of God” (ibid., 64).
In the concluding stanza of his famous poem “Invictus,” William Ernest Henley defiantly declares, “It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”[4] I am not suggesting that Machen’s third chapter is relevant because contemporary American evangelicals are eager to declare that they are the masters of their own fates and the captains of their own souls. Rather, I am suggesting that Machen’s third chapter continues to be relevant because many American evangelicals in fact have accommodated—even if only unwittingly—an understanding of the self that gives every indication of being more indebted to the spirit of Invictus than it does to those assumptions that Machen insisted are at the foundation of Christian faith, piety, and practice. If there is merit to this claim—as I obviously think there is—then evangelicals who concur with Machen’s argument should be concerned about the understanding of the self that many of their American evangelical brethren give every indication of having accommodated. That understanding of the self is difficult if not impossible to reconcile with those assumptions that at least Machen believed are essential to the reception of the gospel, and for that reason it is potentially subversive of saving faith itself.
4. William Ernest Henley, “Invictus,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems /51642/invictus, accessed June 1, 2023.
Since this is a bold suggestion, it is worth asking where Machen might find this wrong understanding of the self being manifest in the world of contemporary American evangelicalism. I suspect he would find it in at least three places. (1) He would find it in the common evangelical contention that genuine freedom is libertarian freedom because libertarian freedom presupposes precisely what libertarians themselves insist is essential to genuine freedom, namely a capacity not just for a form of moral liberty, but for moral autonomy. (2) In a related place, he would find this understanding of the self at least implicitly manifest in a faulty evangelical contention that says:
To the extent God is providentially governing the world that we inhabit, he is doing so in a general and not in a particular sense. He does this because he is eager to defer, in one way or another, to the gift of libertarian freedom that libertarians insist he has given to creatures like us.
(3) He would find this understanding of the self also being manifest in a pretension that is presently being presumed by those evangelical scholars who at least implicitly deny what Machen contends is a reality, namely, that the humanism of the redeemed is “higher” than the humanism of those who remain lost in their sins.[5] In this regard, I think Machen would urge contemporary evangelical scholars to consider Cornelius Van Til’s assessment of how the awareness of the Creator/creature distinction and the consciousness of sin should inform our understanding of the world in which we live. “What is true with respect to the existence of the whole space-time world,” Van Til argues,
5. For related discussion, see, for example, J. Gresham Machen, “Christianity and Culture,” in J. Gresham Machen Selected Shorter Writings, ed. D. G. Hart (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R, 2004), 399-410.
is equally true with respect to the meaning of it. As the absolute and independent existence of God determines the derivative existence of the universe, so the absolute meaning that God has for himself implies that the meaning of every fact in the universe must be related to God. Scripture says constantly that the world has its whole meaning in the fact that it was created for the glory of God. This appears most beautifully in Revelation 4:11, where the redeemed creation joins in one grand Hallelujah chorus in praise of the Creator: “Worthy art thou, our Lord and our God, to receive the glory and the honor and the power: for thou didst create all things, and because of thy will they are, and were created.” … If we hold with Paul (Romans 11:36 KJV) that “of him, and through him and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever,” we see clearly that the existence and meaning of every fact in this universe must in the last analysis be related to the self-conscious and eternally self-subsistent God of the Scriptures.[6]
6. Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology, 2nd ed., ed. William Edgar (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2007), 58.
3. Understanding Liberal Theology
Finally, and in the third place, chapter three of Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism continues to be relevant because there is a striking similarity between the liberals that Machen was challenging in his day and liberals that more conservative evangelicals are challenging in our own. Just as in Machen’s day, influential theologians are now claiming that the Christian religion does not have to do with laying hold of and submitting to the objective content of what God has made known, but with experiencing the presence of God in a more subjective sense. Another way of stating this point is to say that just as in Machen’s day, many in the big tent of contemporary American evangelicalism are conceiving of the Christian religion in subjective and not in objective terms, and this is leading them to insist that doctrines have value not because of the objective truths that they convey, but because of the subjective experiences that they facilitate.[7]
7. For more on the ongoing debate between conservative and postconservative evangelicals, see Reclaiming the Center: Confronting Evangelical Accommodation in Postmodern Times, ed. Millard J. Erickson, Paul Kjoss Helseth, and Justin Taylor (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004); Paul Kjoss Helseth, “Right Reason” and the Princeton Mind: An Unorthodox Proposal (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2010), chapters 5-7.
Conclusion
What this renewed focus on subjective and not objective realities suggests, then, is that while Machen’s third chapter was not about doctrine, nevertheless it is finally relevant to the age in which we live because it helps us understand what is ultimately at stake in those discussions about the nature and purpose of doctrine that are ongoing in the contemporary evangelical camp. Just as in Machen’s day, contemporary disagreements about the nature and purpose of doctrine are really just disagreements about who God is and who we are, which is just to say that disagreements about the nature and purpose of doctrine are really just disagreements between competing visions of what Christianity is and what it is ultimately all about.
