ACTS BIBLE
The Remnant Church, Since Acts — class 11 of 13 · J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism
By 1900, disputes over the Bible, miracles, and Christ's identity had moved from universities into pulpits, seminaries, and mission boards. Ministers who used the same Christian words could preach very different messages.1
Theological liberalism sought to reconcile Christianity with modern thought. Its advocates differed, but the dispute reached the center of the faith: is Jesus the incarnate Son of God or chiefly a moral teacher? Did He rise bodily, or does resurrection describe His continuing influence? Does salvation mean that Christ rescues sinners, or that people gradually improve?2
On May 21, 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick preached "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" at First Presbyterian Church in New York. He called for "a spirit of tolerance and Christian liberty," and warned liberals against intolerance too. He wanted Christians who disagreed about the virgin birth, biblical inspiration, and Christ's return to remain in the same church. He feared that excluding those who accepted modern scholarship would drive educated young people away from Christian fellowship.3
Fosdick appealed to Christian love and the needs of people beyond the controversy. Machen's objection concerned what that fellowship would teach about Christ and salvation. Courtesy matters, but it leaves a question unanswered: which disagreements can a church embrace while still proclaiming the gospel entrusted to it?
The Social Gospel movement, prominent in the United States from about 1870 to 1920, called Christians to confront poverty, exploitation, and industrial cruelty.4 Those were real wrongs, and Christians had a duty to act. The doctrinal dispute concerned salvation: could reforming society take the place of Christ bearing sin and giving sinners new life? Better working conditions matter. They cannot reconcile a sinner to God.
This is the danger carried forward from Class 2: hollow name-bearing, keeping Christ's name while emptying His message.5 Familiar words can conceal a changed gospel. Paul warned that false teachers would arise within the flock (Acts 20:29-30), and rejected another gospel even when it arrived through a respected messenger (Galatians 1:6-9). The question comes back to the message being preached.
The early twentieth century saw a major fight between historic Christianity and theological liberalism. This conflict showed up in many denominations, but the Presbyterian controversy around Princeton Seminary gives us one of the clearest examples.6
Princeton had been a center of conservative Reformed theology. It defended the authority of Scripture, the reality of Christ's miracles, the substitutionary atonement (Christ's death paying in full for sin, reconciling sinners to God), the bodily resurrection, and salvation by grace. But the wider denomination increasingly made room for ministers and teachers who denied or redefined those doctrines.7
J. Gresham Machen, a New Testament scholar at Princeton, became a central figure in the conflict. He had studied in Germany under liberal teachers and knew the arguments he opposed.8
Understanding an argument is part of answering it. First Peter 3:15 calls for a defense made "with gentleness and respect." That requires listening carefully enough to answer what the other person actually believes.
In 1923, he published Christianity and Liberalism. The book's central argument is often summarized this way: theological liberalism isn't a different flavor of Christianity; it's a different religion using Christian vocabulary.9
For Machen, admiration for Jesus could not settle disagreements about who Jesus is. Doctrine tells us whether He is God in the flesh, whether His death bears our guilt, and whether He rose from the dead. Those claims determine the message a church preaches.10
After Princeton's reorganization in 1929, Machen helped found Westminster Theological Seminary to continue its old Reformed teaching. The dispute over missions later led to his suspension from ministry and, in 1936, the formation of what became the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.11
Machen died in North Dakota on New Year's Day 1937, at fifty-five. In a final telegram to John Murray he said, "I'm so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it."12 Active obedience means that Christ lived the perfect life we failed to live. His righteousness is credited to everyone who trusts Him. The Savior who obeyed for us also died for our sins and rose from the dead. Machen's comfort at death was the same gospel he had defended in life: Christ has done what we could never do for ourselves.
In Christianity and Liberalism, Machen examines what each teaching says about God, humanity, Scripture, Christ, and salvation. His conclusion is that the disagreement concerns the gospel itself.13
Calling Jesus a great teacher is not the same as confessing Him as the incarnate, crucified, and risen Lord. If a minister means the first and his hearers understand the second, familiar language has concealed a disagreement they need to understand.
Christian love requires us to make that disagreement clear. It also requires patience with the person who disagrees. Defending the gospel gives no permission to misrepresent someone or treat him with contempt.
Paul speaks with the same clarity in Galatians 1 when he warns against "another gospel." His point isn't that Christians must enjoy controversy. His point is that the gospel isn't ours to revise.
Jude tells believers to "contend for the faith" (Jude 3). That word contend doesn't mean be quarrelsome for sport. It means defend what has been entrusted. The faith was delivered to the saints; it wasn't invented by them.
The first issue in the modernist conflict was Scripture. Is the Bible the final authority, or is it a religious document that modern people may correct?14
Liberal theologians appealed to historical scholarship and religious experience when questioning biblical claims.15 Studying a text's history is necessary. The dispute begins when a reader's prior judgment about what God can say or do becomes the rule by which Scripture is accepted or rejected.
If miracles are ruled out before the witnesses are heard, the conclusion has already been decided.
In 2 Timothy 3:16, Paul describes Scripture as theopneustos, "God-breathed" or "inspired by God."16 The word identifies Scripture's divine source; its parts alone don't explain every detail of how inspiration works. Verses 16-17 connect that source with Scripture's work of teaching, correcting, and training the believer. Human authors truly wrote, but God truly spoke.
That is why the Bible equips the people of God. It corrects us. It doesn't wait to be corrected by us.
Machen objected to retaining the Bible's authority in name while rejecting its account of Christ. A preacher cannot deny the virgin birth, the atonement (Christ's death paying in full for sin, reconciling sinners to God), and the bodily resurrection and still claim to preach the same gospel as the apostles.17
The second issue was the cross. Historic Christianity says that Christ died for sinners, bearing guilt and satisfying divine justice. The cross isn't merely an example of love. It is the place where the debt is paid.18
Jesus' cry "It is finished" (John 19:30) translates tetelestai (Greek: 'it is finished,' Jesus' cry from the cross (John 19:30); class 2's word): "it is finished" or "it is accomplished." John has just said that Jesus knew His work was accomplished and spoke to fulfill Scripture (John 19:28).19 His death completes the work the Father gave Him.
"Paid in full" expresses the saving significance of that completed work. The case that Christ bore His people's sins rests on passages such as 1 Peter 2:24 and the wider biblical account of His death. It isn't an extra meaning that can simply be read out of one Greek word.
The cross certainly shows God's love. It certainly calls us to sacrificial living. But if that's all it does, then guilt remains. A moving example can't justify the ungodly. Inspiration can't cleanse sin. A martyr can't save unless He is also the Lamb of God who takes away sin.20
Machen saw that if you lose the substitutionary cross, you lose Christianity. The gospel becomes advice, not news. It becomes "try harder in the spirit of Jesus" rather than "Christ has accomplished what you could not."
Modernism was optimistic about human nature. It believed education, democracy, science, and moral effort could bring the kingdom. Then the twentieth century brought world wars that shattered confidence in human progress.21
The Bible's diagnosis was being confirmed rather than outgrown.
The doctrines of grace explain why human progress cannot save us. We are dead in sin until God gives life. Education can increase our knowledge, and reform can restrain injustice, but neither can give us a new heart.
Jesus says, "No man can come to me, except the Father... draw him" (John 6:44). The Greek verb helkyō can mean draw or drag.22 In John 6:37-45, the Father gives people to the Son, draws them, and teaches them; those who hear and learn come to Christ. The Reformed reading understands this as God's effective work in bringing the sinner to Christ. That conclusion rests on Jesus' whole argument; the verb alone doesn't settle how His drawing relates to the sinner's response. The necessity of the Father's action is explicit.
This doesn't make people puppets. It tells the truth about bondage. A sinner left to himself will use religious language to protect himself from God. He will even call his unbelief humility, sophistication, or compassion. Grace has to do more than advise. Grace has to conquer.
That is why salvation is God's work from start to finish. God chooses, Christ redeems, the Spirit gives life, and the sinner comes because mercy has opened blind eyes.
The dispute over missions concerned what missionaries were sent to do. Were they to call people to repent and trust Christ as the only Savior, or to help people of different religions improve their lives and seek God together? Machen argued that changing the answer changed the mission.23
Schools and hospitals serve real needs. Christians should care for their neighbors without making help conditional on conversion. But a school or hospital cannot take the place of telling people who Christ is and what He has done to save sinners.
The risen Christ commands His church to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to obey everything He commanded (Matthew 28:18-20). A disciple follows Christ. Serving someone's needs while leaving him without the gospel does not fulfill that command.
Machen helped establish the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions in 1933 because he believed missionaries must carry this gospel. The ensuing dispute over the board brought his denomination's disciplinary action against him.24
The stakes reached the people hearing the missionaries. Were they being told that Christ alone could save them?
Machen defended the gospel and lost his standing in the denomination he had served. Princeton was reorganized, his independent mission board brought disciplinary charges, and he was suspended. He helped start a new church, then died at fifty-five.25 Why did faithfulness cost him so much?
Another conflict had already put fundamentalism before a national audience. In July 1925, John T. Scopes was tried in Dayton, Tennessee, for teaching human evolution in violation of Tennessee's Butler Act. William Jennings Bryan joined the prosecution; Clarence Darrow helped defend Scopes. Their confrontation over the Bible and evolution drew national attention. Scopes was convicted and fined $100. In 1927, the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the conviction because the judge, rather than the jury, had imposed the fine. It did not strike down the law.26
The Scopes trial concerned what a public-school teacher could legally teach. Machen's dispute concerned what Christian ministers and missionaries must believe and preach. The controversies overlapped in public debate, but a courtroom verdict on a teaching law could not settle the truth of the gospel.
Nor does defending true doctrine excuse every action taken in its name. Christians can become needlessly divisive, dismiss serious questions, or treat an opponent cruelly. Those failures must be faced. Losing an institution does not prove that a person is faithful, any more than keeping one proves that he is right.
If Christ preserves His church, why can its faithful teachers lose their pulpits and seminaries?
Christ promised that the gates of death would not prevail against His church (Matthew 16:18).27 He did not promise that believers would keep every building, office, or reputation. His promise rests on His power to preserve His people, not on their control of an institution.
Westminster, the mission board, and the new denomination outlived Machen. They continued training ministers and sending missionaries, and helped carry Reformed teaching into the next generation.28 Being put out of a building is not the same as being put out of the church.
After Machen, Cornelius Van Til became one of the important voices at Westminster Seminary. Van Til argued that unbelief isn't neutral. People don't stand above God and evaluate Him from a safe, independent platform. Every person reasons from a heart posture, either in submission to God or in rebellion against Him.29
Van Til applied that argument to biblical scholarship. A scholar who rules out God's revelation has already taken a position on God before interpreting the evidence. Van Til asked whether the scholar would submit his own judgment to the Creator's Word.
Van Til's apologetics (the reasoned defense of the Christian faith) can be difficult, but the basic point is simple: there's no spiritually neutral ground. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. When modern thought rejects that starting point, its problem isn't lack of information only. Its problem is worship.
The modernist conflict isn't over. It repeats in every generation.
A church can retain its music, buildings, and charitable programs while losing the gospel. Jesus may be praised as a moral example while His work as crucified substitute and risen Lord goes unpreached. Salvation still rests in Christ alone.
Feeding the hungry, teaching children, caring for the sick, and defending the weak are Christian duties. So is proclaiming the Savior who obeyed perfectly, bore our sins, and rose from the dead. People need both our care and the gospel. Doing useful earthly good does not remove their need to be reconciled to God.30
Machen teaches us to ask clear questions:
Ask those questions of the teaching you hear, and of your own faith. Your hope needs more than familiar religious words. It needs the Christ those words name.
From 1900 to 1950, the remnant had to say no to a polite counterfeit. Machen and others didn't preserve the faith by being nostalgic. They preserved it by refusing to trade the Bible's gospel for modern religious optimism. Scripture remains final. Christ's cross remains finished. Grace remains sovereign. The church's mission remains the making of disciples from all nations.31
Next class: the twentieth-century recovery, old books pulled back off the shelf, Sproul on the holiness of God, and grace found again.