It’s tempting to feel that the problems of our own age are somehow different from any other, that Christianity faces a unique battle in this post-truth world. When we feel that temptation, we do well to look back at history. This month we look back at Christianity and Liberalism, written 100 years ago by J. Gresham Machen to counter the liberalism of his day.
Machen, a Presbyterian theologian at Princeton, saw that liberalism was taking over Protestant churches. In a new century where modernism was changing everything, liberal theology rejected the old Christianity as dogmatic and outdated. Miracles were unscientific; Jesus was a good man who died to be our example; and the Bible, neither accurate nor inspired, provided only general moral guidance about being a good person. Liberalism tried to keep the shell of Christianity stripped of its particulars. Yet Machen links his argument to history: “Christianity depends, not on a complex of ideas, but upon the narration of an event” (74). That is to say, the gospel is only good news if it actually happened.
It’s helpful to compare the issues of Machen’s day with those of our own. Liberalism rejected the supernatural claims of the Bible because those things did not fit into scientific materialism. Yet in today’s world of “your truth” and “my truth” it’s much more common for people to object to the Bible’s morality, simply because it disagrees with what they feel is true. Few within evangelicalism today question the resurrection, but many find the wrath of God and substitutionary atonement as repugnant as ever. In 2023, as in 1923, many question the relevance of the Bible. But while liberalism rejected the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, in our day it is sufficiency and authority that often face the strongest attack.
Machen also demonstrates that truth is innately exclusive—to accept one idea is to reject all competing ideas. “Paul was no advocate of an undogmatic religion; he was interested above everything else in the objective and universal truth of his message” (26). As Christians, we can disagree about many points of doctrine and still recognize each other as believers, but we cannot argue that doctrine is unimportant or merely a matter of opinion.
We also do well to observe Machen’s priorities: Christians ought to engage with culture in order to offer an alternative, but Machen saw clearly that the real danger was from the inside, not the outside. So too for us: drag queen story hour and cancel culture signify societal decline, but the real danger is from those rejecting God’s truth within our pews.
In one sense, the questions of our day are unique. No one before us had the option to carry the internet in their pocket or change their gender. But while the question of the moment may change, the answer remains the same: God’s inspired, inerrant, authoritative scripture reveals to us the good news that Jesus came in time and space to die for our sins and rise again.