Christianity & Liberalism

Reading J. Gresham Machen’s justly famous Christianity and Liberalism one hundred years after it was originally written is eye-opening.  Not only does it open up a window into the sometimes forgotten Fundamentalist-Modernist debates of the early twentieth century, but it now reads like a Jeremiad, a prophetic glimpse into our own cultural quagmires. Machen’s deep concern about, and repudiation of, the liberal Christianity of 1923 is now eerily prescient, seeing that so many of his concerns are all the more relevant in 2023. Much like re-reading George Orwell’s 1984 or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reading Christianity and Liberalism alerts us to troubling historic trends that too many have taken too lightly. The heterodox and sometimes heretical liberalism of Machen’s day has become all the more strident and prevalent in our own. Theology is not exempt from the truism that hindsight is 20/20.

John Gresham Machen was Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary in the early 1920’s before he led a revolt in response to the liberal theology gaining ascendance at Presbyterianism’s leading theological outpost. He went on to form Westminster Theological Seminary as an orthodox and evangelical alternative in 1929.  Looking back, the thesis he advanced in Christianity and Liberalism is striking and perhaps even shocking. Amidst the growing trend to accommodate historic Protestant Christianity to the modern, scientific culture – and the subsequent temptation to forfeit significant elements of classic Christian doctrine – Machen opined that liberal theology “is not Christianity at all, but a religion which is so entirely different from Christianity as to belong in a distinct category.” The Christian liberalism of his day, he went on, is “not only a different religion from Christianity but belongs in a totally different class of religions.” He even goes as far as to say that the “chief modern rival of Christianity is ‘liberalism’.”

For those of us who have witnessed and lamented the ongoing deterioration of classical Christianity regnant among the post-modern liberals of the last one hundred years, Machen’s judgment is both satisfying and surprising. It is satisfying because it confirms something we simply knew must be true: liberal Christianity tends to play perilously on the knife’s edge of orthodoxy. It has been all too willing to sacrifice core Christian beliefs at the altar of social and political commitments. Liberal theology, we have often suspected, was too ready and willing to replace a vertical Gospel with a horizontal one, in which social atonement tends to eclipse divine-human atonement. Machen’s thesis is surprising, however, because it seems like it came too early. How can he, in 1923, be claiming that liberal Christianity is not even worthy of the name “Christian”? Were not liberals in the early twentieth-century, despite their theological shortcomings, still on an acceptably orthodox theological spectrum? Well, not according to Machen anyway.

Machen’s assessment alerts us to a fascinating and troubling question: If he believed that the liberals of his time were already beyond the pale of Christian orthodoxy, what then should we make of the Christian liberals of our newly enlightened and awakened age? In other words, if Machen was on to something in 1923, what does that mean for our own assessment of liberal Christianity some one hundred years later? How has his judgment fared the test of time? Questions like these can only be answered by looking into Machen’s concerns about the perils of the liberalism of his day. By doing so, we are able to see more clearly into the magnified perils of our own.

The primary problem Machen diagnosed among his liberal counterparts was an allergic reaction to doctrine. They were quite happy to affirm the ethical teachings of Jesus, selectively considered, as representative of Christianity. But they were reluctant to affirm the doctrinal roots which underpin these teachings. Christianity as a “way of life” is considered an acceptable mode of existence, but Christianity as a prescribed set of doctrinal certitudes is considered heavy-handed and over-wrought. The liberal is satisfied with the moral teachings of Christ, so long as they accord with his general social and ethical norms; but he is reluctant to affirm the specific doctrinal content undergirding them. For the liberal, the Christ who teaches us to love God and love our neighbor is satisfactory for an account of the moral life, and even for the salvation of the human race. Machen demurred: “But if any one fact is clear ... it is that the Christian movement at its inception was not just a way of life in the modern sense, but a way of life founded upon a message. It was based, not upon mere feeling, not upon a program of work, but upon an account of facts. In other words it was based upon doctrine.”

The reluctance among liberals to whole-heartedly embrace the full doctrinal content of the Holy Scriptures – substituting in its place a meager affirmation of watered-down ethical teachings of Jesus – is apparently nothing very new. The difference is that post-modern, progressive liberals are all the more committed to a project of evacuating Christianity of its doctrinal certitudes. This is nowhere more apparent than in the contemporary insistence that truth be increasingly reduced to feeling. Where once Christians used to ask, what is the truth? – an answer to which could only be derived from the authority of Holy Scripture – it has now become commonplace to ask instead, how do I feel? The second question renders truth subject and captive to the emotional and psychological experience of the individual, rather than the predicate of God’s inviolable self-revelation. On this understanding, biblical doctrine must surrender itself before the personal and psychological experience of the autonomous human individual. It is no wonder, in this paradigm, that “Don’t judge lest you be judged” becomes the lodestar of a truncated and emaciated post-modern gospel. What was true in Machen’s day, in other words, is all the more true in ours. Human feeling and desire have become sacrosanct; biblical doctrine less so.

The liberal Christian proclivity to set to the side the robust doctrinal affirmations of the Bible, in favor of  a type of Christianized therapeutic moralism, ostensibly undergirded by Jesus’s teachings, leads to a soft-pedaling of the doctrine of sin. “According to the Bible,” Machen writes, “man is a sinner under the just condemnation of God; according to modern liberalism, there is really no such thing as sin. At the very root of the modern liberal movement is the loss of the consciousness of sin … Characteristic of the modern age, above all else, is a supreme confidence in human goodness.” This position baffled Machen seeing that, without a realistic understanding of sin, it is impossible to appreciate the unique role of Christ. Absent a resolute affirmation of the biblical doctrine of the fallenness of humanity, it is needless to maintain the necessity of the meditation of Christ. ‘Without the conviction of sin, the good news of redemption seems to be an idle tale.”

The loss of, or we might even say the rejection of, a biblical doctrine of original sin has continued unabated among post-modern liberals. It is not that they reject, per se, that humans can be sinful, it is that sinfulness is now registered in another idiom. Although they are quick to downplay a doctrine of original sin – the belief that every last human is born into a condition of culpability before God which can only satisfied by repentance of sin and belief in Christ – they are nevertheless happy to replace it with a conception of systemic or societal sin. Sin, on this view, is not a condition which requires individual accountability before a thrice-holy God, but rather a condition of oppression under which many humans suffer our culture’s historically oppressive patriarchy, racism, and homophobia, not to mention the most recent fashionable and cultural sin of transphobia. Sin, for the post-modern liberal is always “over there” rather than “within.” It tends to be external rather than internal. The result is a dramatic change in an understanding of salvation. Salvation becomes liberation from the oppression of societal forces (like racism, biological sexual norms, and climate change) rather than liberation from our sinful nature and sinful actions, that is, from our failure to follow Christ in whatever He says. In Machen’s time, sin had become diminished; in our time, it has become politicized and sexualized. The disease is the same, but the symptoms are worse.

Machen was just getting started. In his mind, the liberal failure to accept orthodox Christian doctrine originated from a loss of confidence in the authority of the Bible. It is not, as he perceptively noted, that liberalism does away with the teachings of the Bible as a whole. The problem is more nuanced than that. The liberal is content to accept certain aspects of Christian teaching as recorded in the Scriptures, but is far less interested in the aspects of Holy Scripture which run against his moral presuppositions. Selective teachings of Jesus might pass muster, for instance, but the whole counsel of God fails the ultimate test. “The impression is sometimes produced that the modern Liberal substitutes for the authority of the Bible, the authority of Christ. He cannot accept, he says, what he regards as the perverse moral teachings of the Old Testament or the sophistical arguments of Paul. But he regards himself as being the true Christian because, rejecting the rest of the Bible, he depends upon Jesus alone.” The Doobie Brothers’ hippie anthem, Jesus is Just Alright with Me, comes directly to mind. Jesus is “just alright” for liberals, so long as they can dismiss the whole counsel of the Prophets and Apostles who exist to bear witness to Him. Jesus is acceptable, in other words, so long as he is domesticated and selectively interpreted.

The liberal tendency to re-fashion the Scriptures according to its fashionable assumptions is nothing new. Think only of the scissors and paste job Thomas Jefferson performed on the New Testament a century before Machen’s lament. Jefferson was suspicious about the miraculous assertions of the Bible, and so he simply excised them. A century after Machen, Jefferson’s theological heirs are suspicious about the moral teachings of the Bible. Whereas Jefferson, for example, could not countenance the biblical teaching concerning the Virgin Birth or the Trinity, his liberal successors are unable to countenance the biblical teachings regarding sexual immorality. And so they simply excise them. One chapter and verse after another is relegated to the dustbin of a liberal revisionist history. Whereas Jefferson decided to interpret the Bible through the lens of his own anti-supernaturalist assumptions, the post-modern liberal does so on the basis of his “cultural locatedness” (the phrase du jour), which invites new readings of the Bible that must bow before the idolatry of self-identity. In the current milieu, one is encouraged to read the Bible through the interpretive lens of one’s ethnicity, “gender”, or even sexual preference. No matter the century, the liberal attitude is the same: the Bible must become a mirror in which my reflection is the clearest.

The next casualty of the liberal project is not difficult to predict. It has, Machen noted, has a defunct, moralistic understanding of the person of Christ. “There is a profound difference … in the attitude assumed by modern liberalism and by Christianity toward Jesus the Lord. Liberalism regards Him as an Example and Guide; Christianity as a Savior: liberalism makes Him an example for faith; Christianity, the object of faith.”  It is a serious misreading of the liberal Christian, however, to say that he does not speak very often of Jesus. The liberal preacher, for example, “has the name of Jesus forever on his lips.” But the Jesus that is preached is often no more than a moral exemplar of faith, as opposed to the utterly unique and necessary mediator of salvation between God and humanity. There is no small difference between Jesus being a model for faith in God, and the Christian conviction that faith in Jesus is the only possible way to God.

Despite the warning from C.S. Lewis that the Lion Aslan is surely good, but never safe – “Who said anything about safe?” said Mr. Beaver – the liberal consistently attempts to domesticate Jesus. The Christ who comes to bring peace has remained a staple of contemporary liberal preaching. And they are not wrong. However, the Christ who comes to bring a sword, and with that sword to bring judgment upon any who fail to believe in Him, is conspicuous by His absence. The Christ who welcomes little children into his arms is picturesque; the Christ who forbids sodomy is grotesque. The Christ who enters Jerusalem on a lowly donkey is memorialized; the Christ who returns on a war horse to judge, make war, and strike down the godless nations, is conveniently forgotten. The real Jesus, the one we actually encounter in the Bible, remains a skandalon for the liberal of every age. Jesus is far too serious and august for the sensible progressive taste. He is too honest about the true human situation, and a shade or more judgmental than is comfortable to the sensitive contemporary soul. He is far too perfectly clear about what holiness actually entails. Jesus, therefore, must be carefully deconstructed to align with the sentimentalized, psychologized, moralized, and sexually permissive version that better suits the spirt of our time. The liberal of Machen’s time has grown up, and he is all the more wary about Jesus.

Machen goes on: a failure to seriously and sincerely reckon with the Christ we find in the Holy Scriptures led the liberal Christian of Machen’s time to undervalue and undermine the meaning of salvation. Salvation has less to do with the reconciliation between God and sinners accomplished in Christ as it does with the amelioration of social ills exemplified by Christ. Christianity, for Machen’s liberal, is a cipher, simply a means “for the betterment of conditions upon this earth.”  The tragic result is the false dichotomy between doctrinal Christianity and applied Christianity, the former increasingly absorbed by the latter. The great doctrines of the Christian faith were still given considerable lip-service, to be sure, but their real import was measured by their impact on the social good.  This rendered liberals susceptible to the notion that human institutions, under the influence of Christianity, might produce a people who conformed to the great moral teachings of Jesus (The most important of which, unsurprisingly, were “Do unto others as they would do unto you,” and “Do not judge lest you be judged.”). But, in Machen’s view, unless the doctrinal import of Christianity is upheld, any social improvement is bound to be vacuous. Unless the sinner is reconciled to God by means of the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, all attempts at social improvement are empty. It did not matter whether such attempts were influenced by Christianity or not.

Turning the tables, Machen insisted that applied Christianity was useless unless a doctrinal Christianity was its heartbeat. “The liberal believes that applied Christianity is all there is of Christianity, Christianity being merely a way of life; the Christian man believes that applied Christianity is the result of an initial act of God. Thus there is an enormous difference between the modern liberal and the Christian man with reference to human institutions and the state, and with reference to human efforts at applying the Golden Rule in industrial relationships.” The chief purpose of the Christian, Machen went on, is not to exert the influence of Christian teaching upon civilization, per se, but rather the saving of souls through the proclamation of Christ’s redemptive work. The Christian, in other words, believes that “there can be no applied Christianity unless there be a Christianity to apply.” Under the liberal paradigm, the missionary work of the church is altered altogether. Missionaries become nothing more than heralds of the “ethics of Christianity” rather than witnesses to redemptive life and work of Jesus Christ, apart from whom sinners remain alienated from God regardless of how ethical they may become.

The liberal Christian of Machen’s time is now one hundred years older. But he bears all the marks of his original upbringing, perhaps especially as it regards salvation. The post-modern liberal remains fascinated with the symptoms of the disease of fallen humanity – especially its hatred, prejudice, and bigotry – but is less interested in its root cause; what Christians have always called “Original Sin.” He never tires of his assertion that humankind is basically good, despite innumerable examples to the contrary. And so the ongoing degradation of humanity is never more than the occasion for increasing moral reformation, as opposed to a complete transformation of human existence through sharing in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ Himself.  Jesus as Teacher is altogether sufficient for the liberal, when in fact what is needed is a miraculous new life wrought by the Holy Spirit. Such a miracle would require faith in Jesus Christ and repentance of sin. But it is exactly repentance that has become the problem, because repentance assumes that we are sinful to the core. The liberal progeny of Machen’s ire may have difficulty believing in a God who is omnipotent and omniscient, but have very little difficulty in demanding that God must be omni-affirmative and omni-tolerant, particularly when it comes to their socially, politically, and sexually constructed identities. The liberal of the twentieth century has grown up. He is increasingly the master of his own being, and so has so very little to repent of. He is more and more sympathetic with the sophistic serpent’s question from Genesis Chapter 3: “Did God really say?”

At last, Machen turns his attention to the Church, where we find some of his most poignant laments. The Church, he points out, is the only true answer to the problems of human society, for it is in and through the Church that humankind finds the answers to the deepest ailments which plague us. “The Church is the highest Christian answer to the social needs of man.” Machen was forthright enough to admit that the Church has its obvious faults. But his diagnosis of the occasional weaknesses of the Church is revealing: “But one cause is perfectly plain – the Church of to-day has been unfaithful to her Lord by admitting great companies of non-Christian persons, not only into her membership, but into her teaching agencies … Such persons, moreover, have been admitted not merely to the membership, but to the ministry of Church, and to an increasing extent have been allowed to dominate its councils and determine its teaching.” The irony is chilling, for this means that the greatest threat to the Christian Church is not from enemies without, but from within. The irony would not have been lost to the Apostles Paul and John, whose letters frequently alert us to threats to the Gospel from those within the Church.

Given his position, Machen needed to face a serious question head on: What about the unity of the Church, the great family of God? Are we not all called to get along in a spirit of Christian fellowship despite our doctrinal differences? It was exactly the “despite” that disturbed Machen. Of course Christ has established a unified people of God through His redeeming death and resurrection – the Gospel necessitates it – but that fellowship is not achieved despite heterodox doctrinal inclinations but precisely on the basis of a shared Christian orthodoxy. Liberals may regard doctrinal differences as “trifles,” but conservatives regard doctrine as “matters of supreme moment.” And that makes all the difference for unity. A supposed “unity” based on wildly different conceptions of God, Christ, sin, salvation, and the Church is no unity at all.

It is telling that Machen highlighted the particular faults of Presbyterian and Anglican ministers in this respect. He notes that far too many minsters of these Churches are ordained into ministry of the Gospel under the ostensible agreement to uphold and proclaim the orthodox truths laid out in their creeds, confessions, and orders of worship. And yet they proceed at a moment’s notice to decry and deny what they have solemnly sworn to protect and preserve. Such is the tragic and modern history of mainline Protestantism: a failure among its ordained ministers (with some exceptions among them who are still fighting the good fight) to believe and preserve what it means to be truly Protestant, faithfully Evangelical, and historically catholic. And above all, to be good shepherds of Christ’s sheep. The threat that Machen observed in 1923 has continued unabated and with profound effect ever since. Mainline Protestants have led the charge in the liberalizing and de-naturing of the Church. The most glaring example of which has been the slow and determined efforts by the modern and post-modern liberal progressive to foist upon the Church the poison of the Sexual Revolution. Machen had his own concerns, but could he have imagined an ordained minister in his native Presbyterian Church affirming and even celebrating sodomy, abortion, or transgenderism? It is tempting to say that Machen must be rolling in his grave. That is probably so. But perhaps he is also experiencing a sense of sanctified satisfaction in knowing that where his deeply prophetic insights went unheeded, the liberal cancer would only metastasize. Even if Machen might not say “I told you so,” he did try to tell us so.

Gary Dorrien, who is no conservative, has written perhaps the most important history of American Liberal theology, The Making of American Liberal Theology (3 vols). In this magisterial and profoundly insightful work, Dorrien defines liberal theology by its “openness to the verdicts of modern intellectual inquiry, especially the natural and social sciences; its commitment to the authority of individual reason and experience; its conception of Christianity as an ethical way of life; its favoring of moral concepts of atonement, and its commitment to make Christianity credible and socially relevant to modern people.” I suspect J. Gresham Machen would heartily agree with this definition. And I feel sure he would say that this definition is like a symptom that reveals a disease. Liberal theology was far too willing to acquiesce to modern intellectualism; it was far too willing to sacrifice historic Christian orthodoxy at the altar of expressive individualism; it was far too willing to reduce the beauty and depth of new life in Christ to mere ethics; it was, therefore, susceptible to superficial and moralistic understandings of the person and work of Jesus Christ; and, because it began from a defensive and passive posture, it therefore felt the need to justify itself to a skeptical world. Liberalism, we might say, had lost its first love.

In all these ways, liberal Christianity was not ready or willing to be truly Christian. And the proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. Liberal Protestant churches have, since the time of Machen, been dying on the Vine, experiencing precipitous decline in membership and attendance. Perhaps post-modern liberal Christianity is not attractive to Christians because it is not actually Christian. This is no reason for us to underestimate the desperate death rattle of liberalism, however; desperate people do desperate things and can achieve desperate results.

Machen began Christianity and Liberalism with the assertion that Liberalism was not really Christian at all, but a totally different class of religion. Near the end of the work he was bold enough to assert that “Christianity is being attacked from within by a movement which is anti-Christian to its core.” One need not appreciate every last aspect of Machen’s theological commitments to appreciate his prophetic insight. Liberalism that goes by the name of Christian has not become more biblical and orthodox in the intervening one hundred years. Quite to the contrary: the anti-Christian commitments have become all the more pronounced. The only difference between 1923 and 2023 is that post-modern liberalism has doubled down on its distaste for historic Christian orthodoxy. So let us ask a blunt and tantalizing question: If Machen was willing to describe his liberal opponents as “anti-Christian,” how would he describe post-modern liberals?

My favorite portion of Machen’s book comes near the end. Fully aware that heterodoxy and heresy were not unique to his time – and that enemies of the Church are a perennial aspect of the Church’s existence before the Lord returns – he took solace in Jesus’ promise that the gates of hell should never prevail against His Church. “God has not deserted His Church; He has brought her through even darker hours than those which try our courage now, yet the darkest hour has always come before the dawn.” There is no doubt that we live in a very dark hour. But Machen was right then, and he is right now. The darker hours of post-modern liberalism are not stronger than the bright dawn of the gospel of our Lord Jesus, for “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”