The Impact of Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism

The following excerpt is from Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (1954; repr. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth 2019, 2020).

The unwearied and effective manner in which Machen brought into sharp focus the centrality of the Christian view of history and its decisive significance for the understanding of the gospel must be noted. In Christianity and Liberalism he expresses this thought as follows:

All the ideas of Christianity might be discovered in some other religion, yet there would be in that other religion no Christianity. For Christianity depends, not upon a complex of ideas, but upon the narration of an event. Without that event, the world, in the Christian view, is altogether dark, and humanity is lost under the guilt of sin. There can be no salvation by the discovery of eternal truth, for eternal truth brings naught but despair, because of sin. But a new face has been put upon life by the blessed thing that God did when he offered up his only begotten Son.

Machen was also beyond fundamentalism in recognizing that perhaps the most basic issue of all concerned the significance one attached to belief of the Christian message, in short, one’s attitude toward the truth itself. He held that a man might accept all the articles in the creed, including the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ, but that, if in the end he asserted that it didn’t really matter whether one believed or not, and that unbelief was as tolerable as belief, he had far more emphatically denied Christianity than the person who merely denied certain isolated doctrines. In accordance with this evaluation, Machen introduced his work, following the introductory chapter, with an entire chapter on ‘Doctrine.’ Here he shows that the message of Christianity, and of Christ himself, was doctrinal through and through from the very beginning. If one is to have a nondoctrinal religion, or one founded merely on general truth, one must be prepared to give up not only Paul, not only the primitive Christian church, but also Jesus himself. Scepticism or indifference with regard to the history of Christ, therefore, constituted in his judgment the most profound heresy of all.

Machen’s approach was also somewhat distinctive in the particularity of its application to the ecclesiastical situation of his day, and especially the one with which he was most immediately concerned. It will be recalled that the address which was to develop into the book was delivered before an elders’ association. On that occasion he had taken pains to admonish the elders to discharge their own responsibilities in all faithfulness. They were, first of all, to encourage those who were in the forefront of the battle for the Christian faith. In the presbyteries, also, they were to be faithful, and in the crisis of the day there was need of insistence that only men who were wholly loyal to the faith should be admitted to the ministry. In their local congregations they also were to take their stand for the faith; they were, for example, to demand that in the calling of a pastor primary consideration should be given to the candidate’s beliefs.

This practical emphasis finds expression especially in the final chapter of Christianity and Liberalism which is devoted to ‘The Church.’ It contains a powerful indictment of the inclusivism which allowed great companies of persons who had never made any adequate confession of faith, not only into the membership, but even into the ministry and other places of influence. There could be no peace within the church so long as this condition persisted. ‘A separation between the two parties in the church is the crying need of the hour.’ There could moreover be no programme for unity in the church which disregarded the doctrinal issue on the assumption that the doctrinal differences were trivial. Moreover, he pointed out, it would be dishonest to ‘sink doctrinal differences and unite the church on a programme of Christian service’ in view of the solemn commitment of ministers and other officers of the church to maintain the doctrines of the church. The path of honesty is the path trod by the Unitarians who frankly and honestly desired a church without an authoritative Bible, without doctrinal requirements, and without a creed.

In speaking of the deadly weakness with which the present situation was fraught, Machen, though not referring explicitly to the boards and agencies of his own denomination, in effect included them under his general indictment.

The proclamation of the gospel is clearly the joy as well as the duty of every Christian man. But how shall the gospel be propagated? The natural answer is that it shall be propagated through the agencies of the church—boards of missions and the like. An obvious duty, therefore, rests upon the Christian man of contributing to the agencies of the church. But at this point perplexity arises. The Christian man discovers to his consternation that the agencies of the church are propagating not only the gospel as found in the Bible and in the historic creeds, but also a type of religious teaching which is at every conceivable point the diametrical opposite of the gospel.

Machen went on to speak of the difficulty of contributing financial support under such circumstances and the unsatisfactory character of the alternative of designating gifts for particular missionaries. Nevertheless he was so sure that the true missionaries should not be allowed to be in want that he was asking whether it would not be better that ‘the gospel should be both preached and combated by the same agencies than that it should not be preached at all.’ Thus the essential elements of the problem with which Machen was to be faced in the thirties following the publication of Rethinking Missions were already present in the early twenties; indeed there are some evidences that this issue had previously been present in his mind for at least another earlier decade.

Public Reception

Soon after its appearance his colleagues gave expression to their appreciation of his book, and this was duly reported to his mother. Of special interest in connection with Machen’s references to the ecclesiastical situation is the fact that Stevenson and Erdman, with whom he had differed profoundly on the church union issue, were critical of these utterances. Writing on March 3rd, he says:

Next to Army Charlie Erdman seems to have been the first man in Princeton to read my book through. He wrote me a very nice note—but expressing regret that I had not made an exception of Presbyterian missionaries on p. 171. Dr Erdman really seems to think that Presbyterian missionaries are all O.K.

And the following week he said:

Dr Stevenson wrote me a long letter with praise of the book, but expressing the view that we should not stir up trouble by cutting the liberals out of the Church, but should let them remain in the Church and try to win them!

Though cordially received by the conservative religious press both within his denomination and without, the book was roundly criticized by the liberals. One facet of criticism, represented by The Presbyterian Advance and The Continent, was that liberalism as depicted by Machen was unknown in the Presbyterian Church. Machen indeed had not declared that all the liberals held to liberalism as he expounded it. While maintaining that liberalism represented ‘no mere divergence at isolated points from Christian teaching,’ and that it constituted ‘in essentials a unitary system of its own,’ he said:

That does not mean that all liberals hold all parts of the system, or that Christians who have been affected by liberal teaching at one point have been affected at all points. There is sometimes a salutary logic which prevents the whole of a man’s faith being destroyed when he has given up a part. But the true way in which to examine a spiritual movement is in its logical relations; logic is the great dynamic, and the logical implications of any way of thinking are sooner or later certain to be worked out.

On the other hand, Dr John A. MacCallum, an outspoken modernist minister of the Presbyterian Church, reviewing the book in the Philadelphia Public Ledger for April 28, 1923, admitted that Dr Machen’s position was that of ‘traditional Presbyterianism.’ He insisted, however, that liberalism, viewed as an attitude and atmosphere that had moved away from the ancient constitutions, had every right to remain in the Church. The liberals he held are men who ‘have accepted the enlarged view of the universe which has been established by modern astronomy, geology and biology. Instead of blindly denying scientific facts as the obscurantists have always done, they have adjusted themselves to them, and in so doing have increased their faith and urbanity and consequently extended their influence, particularly with the educated classes … Liberalism is an atmosphere rather than a series of formulas.’ It is noteworthy that Dr MacCallum did not face the issue involved in the fact that all Presbyterian ministers were called upon to subscribe in the most solemn terms to the constitutional formulas of doctrine.

The Unitarians were more sensitive on this point, as a review in the Pacific Unitarian (June-July, 1923) discloses:

What interests us is that from the point of view of a certain type of theology, Dr Machen’s arguments are irrefutable. His logic, it seems to us is impeccable. The issue does exist and does confront us. For the first time he has done us the great service of putting it in a clear-cut and definite form. You must be either a believer or an unbeliever, an evangelical or a liberal, you cannot be both at the same time. Our judgment is that Dr Machen puts the liberal party within the evangelical church where it has not a sound leg to stand on.

The extent to which Christianity and Liberalism came to be read, as account was taken of the struggle in the churches, is indicated by the diverse comments of Walter Lippmann and Lewis Browne. The latter, in The Nation for June 27, 1923, takes delight in the ‘godly mischief ’ which he discovers in the current situation as men like Percy Stickney Grant were ‘throwing off the cumbersome baggage’ that has kept the church lagging far in the rear. And Browne characterizes Machen’s book as follows: ‘If any imagine that the work of godly mischief, of ridding Christianity of its doctrinal barnacles, is unopposed in theological circles, they should read this precious volume. It is a broad and inclusive condemnation of any and every attempt to let light into the attic of theology.’ In contrast to this vitriolic and superficial estimate stands that of Lippmann who, in 1929, stated in A Preface to Morals:

It is an admirable book. For its acumen, for its saliency, and for its wit, this cool and stringent defence of orthodox Protestantism is, I think, the best popular argument produced by either side in the controversy. We shall do well to listen to Dr Machen. The liberals have yet to answer him.¹The Lippmann quotation is from A Preface to Morals (Macmillan, 1926), p. 32, and is used by permission.