In 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969) preached a sermon entitled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” at the First Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, New York.[1] In the decade prior to Fosdick’s sermon, Americans had suffered through the First World War, and American Protestants (particularly the Baptists and Presbyterians) were amid the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. Fosdick’s “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” was a call for liberals within Protestant churches to reject the supposed intolerance of “Fundamentalists” and to embrace, with greater tolerance, liberal views on the virgin birth, the inspiration of Scripture, the atonement, and the second coming of Christ. For Fosdick, the liberal view(s) was merely coming to terms with the findings of modern science and harmonizing Christianity with it. It was liberal Christianity.
J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937) wrote Christianity and Liberalism (1923) in direct response to the very notion of “liberal Christianity,” a category Machen flatly rejected. Fosdick argued that the liberals within evangelical churches could coexist alongside those who held theologically conservative views so long as theologically conservative Christians did not insist that those of the liberal party conform to their beliefs or try to expel them from the church. For Machen, “Mere concessiveness . . . [would] never succeed in avoiding the intellectual conflict.” There could be “‘no peace without victory’; one side or the other must win.”[2]
Some might wonder why Machen and Fosdick came to such different conclusions regarding the coexistence of theological liberals and conservatives within churches and denominations. Fosdick reasoned that good men ought to be able to disagree on miracles, inerrancy, the atonement, and the second coming, yet still affirm one another as Christians. Machen, by contrast, believed that Protestant liberals like Fosdick had forsaken the central teachings of historic Christianity. There is Christianity, and then there is Liberalism; there is no such thing as “liberal Christianity,” according to Machen.
Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism is now 100 years old, but it has enduring relevance. In what follows, I want to give a general sense of the book’s argument while also pointing out several reasons why the book still matters today.
Two Different Foundations
It might seem harsh to modern sensibilities for Machen to say that Christianity and liberalism are different religions and that there is no such thing as “liberal Christianity” (many thought it harsh in Machen’s day as well). Could Machen not have concluded, like Fosdick and others, that the two groups simply held differing views on various doctrines while both carried the title “Christian”? Machen did not believe that such toleration was an option because Christianity and liberalism rest on two different foundations. Christianity is founded upon the Bible, Machen argued, whereas liberalism is “founded upon the shifting emotions of sinful men.”[3] Unsurprisingly, Christians and liberals have come to drastically different conclusions about God and man, the person and work of Christ, the nature of salvation, and the distinction between the church and the world. The two have entirely different starting points.
Liberalism is inherently naturalistic. For that reason, theological liberals rejected the miraculous, including the resurrection and the inerrancy of Scripture (they depicted the conservative view as mere dictation), but tried to maintain Christian ethics. For that reason, liberals believed Christianity was primarily about a “way of life” rather than doctrine—an argument occasionally employed today by otherwise conservative evangelicals. But Machen rightly understood that Jesus and the apostles never separated Christian doctrine and living.[4] One cannot embrace portions of Jesus’ ethical teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and reject the bodily resurrection. For Christ and the apostles, the Christian life and Christian doctrine were inseparably linked.[5]
According to Machen, “liberal Christianity” is not just a modern spin on an ancient faith; it is an altogether different faith constructed upon a different foundation.
Saving Christianity
The Protestant liberal project in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was an attempt to save Christianity from its “cultured despisers,” to borrow a phrase from Friedrich Schleiermacher. To save Christianity from the findings of modern science and biblical higher criticism, Protestant liberals placed Christianity within the realm of human experience so that Christianity was safeguarded from modernity’s historical and scientific critiques. The truthfulness of Christianity was not dependent upon whether Jonah was a historical figure or whether Jesus performed the miracles recorded in the Gospels or even whether Christ’s bodily resurrection occurred in space and time. These things were mere expressions (or symbols) of “eternal principles” expressed by ancient people like the apostles. They were intended to teach us principles such as the power of good over evil, the value of sacrificial love, man’s complete dependence upon God, and the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man; their historicity did not matter.
The approach of the theological liberal was much different from that of the disciples whose “great weapon” for “conquer[ing] the world was not a mere comprehension of eternal principles; it was an historical message, an account of something that had recently happened, it was the message, ‘He is risen.’”[6] You cannot save Christianity, Machen reasoned, by forsaking its historicity.
Machen realized that, instead of saving Christianity from “the modern lust of scientific conquest,” Protestant liberals had forsaken Christianity by forfeiting its central teachings.[7] He explained, “In trying to remove from Christianity everything that could possibly be objected to in the name of science, in trying to bribe off the enemy by those concessions which the enemy most desires, the apologist [Protestant Liberals] has really abandoned what he started out to defend [Christianity].”[8] And if Protestant liberals thought they could save Christianity by giving up what they believed to be negotiable doctrines, they would soon find after withdrawing “into some inner citadel” that “the enemy pursues him even there.”[9] In other words, the Protestant liberal project would never be complete. Christianity would be gutted of its central teachings. No doctrinal concession would ever be enough to stop modernity’s pursuit.
Machen’s assessment proved accurate as the twentieth century progressed. Protestant liberals, in their attempt to save Christianity by refashioning it according to modernity, embraced modernity and forsook historic Christianity.
A New (Old) Liberalism
Perhaps one of the most relevant insights of Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism is related to the previous point: the Protestant liberal project is never complete; it holds that Christianity is in constant need of revision to accord with the spirit of the age. Since “Christianity is founded upon the Bible,” and liberalism “is founded upon the shifting emotions of sinful men,” it should not come as a surprise that “liberal Christianity” is in constant doctrinal flux.[10] Its standard is not the Bible, or even the teachings of Jesus—even when it claims to the contrary—but whatever accords with “modern ideas.”[11] Man rather than God becomes the measurement of orthodoxy, and man is always changing his mind.
We can observe this tendency in our own day by considering how theological liberals are beholden to the spirit of the age, particularly on human sexuality. In the early twentieth century, most liberals rejected the supernatural, including belief in Jesus’ miracles, the virgin birth, the prophecy of the prophets, and the resurrection. But those concessions were insufficient as modern ideas continued to change. In the twenty-first century, individuals and entire denominations have embraced the LGBTQ+ agenda in the name of “liberal Christianity.” It would be naïve, however, to think that even these concessions are the end of the matter. The transformation is not yet (and never will be) complete. So long as liberals, who claim to be Christians, insist on conforming Christianity to the spirit of the age, Christianity will be in constant doctrinal flux.
There is no fixed point of reference for liberalism, and therefore no fixed body of doctrine or orthodoxy. For liberals, the standard of orthodoxy is necessarily refashioned in every generation based on the false claims of popular interpreters of contemporary science, contemporary psychology, and ever-changing social mores. Machen realized the long-term corrosive effect of wedding Christianity to modernity: it results in a continually “new orthodoxy.” But even the new orthodoxy will not remain orthodox because “some future generation will have to give place to a new Liberalism, and so on (we suppose) ad infinitum.”[12] The spirit of liberalism will remain the same with its constant need for change. But the orthodoxy of liberalism is never fixed, and its doctrinal reformation is never complete.
Conclusion
Twenty-first century Christians would do well to read Machen’s classic work. For all that has changed, some things have not changed at all. Our age is still infected by the spirit of modernity, and Christians still face the temptation to conform Christianity to sinful desires. The great danger is still that we think we can save Christianity by refashioning it. In the end, however, we will forfeit the Christian faith altogether by undermining the Christian gospel.
The great temptation for some conservative Christians in the early twenty-first century may not be rejecting Christian doctrine by denying the bodily resurrection or God’s design for human sexuality. It may be to act as if doctrine is unimportant in our moment of moral chaos and social crisis. Some say, “We shouldn’t waste our time polishing the brass on the deck of the sinking Titanic,” in reference to any sort of doctrinal reflection—as if Christian doctrine is reserved for our spare time or moments of ease. Ironically, this point is precisely what theological liberals argued in the wake of World War I and the upheaval of the following decades. There was no time to argue over doctrine, they claimed. But if the Christian gospel is indeed the answer to humanity’s greatest needs in its most dire hours, then we cannot minimize the doctrines of Christ and His apostles, which are central to the Christian faith. Christianity never was, and never will be, a non-doctrinal religion.
[1] Ironically, Fosdick pastored the First Presbyterian Church even though he was a Baptist.
[2] J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 5.
[3] Ibid., 67.
[4] Ibid., 37–38.
[5] Machen makes the related point that this is true of history and doctrine. He argues from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (15:3–7) where Paul summarizes the essence of the gospel message. In verse three, Paul contends that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.” Machen notes, “‘Christ died’—that is history; ‘Christ died for our sins’ — that is doctrine. Without these two elements, joined in an absolutely dissoluble union, there is no Christianity” (Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 23).
[6] Ibid., 24.
[7] Ibid., 3.
[8] Ibid., 6.
[9] Ibid., 5.
[10] Ibid., 67.
[11] Ibid., 66.
[12] J. Gresham Machen, “Review of Harry Emerson Fosdick’s The Modern Use of the Bible,” in J. Gresham Machen: Selected Shorter Writings, ed. D. G. Hart (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2004), 462.
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