ACTS BIBLE
The Remnant Church, Since Acts — class 11 of 13 · J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism
By 1900, the pressure that had been building in the nineteenth century could no longer be treated as a distant academic problem. The question was no longer, "Will modern skepticism influence the church?" It had already entered pulpits, seminaries, mission boards, and denominational leadership.1
Many leaders still used Christian words: God, Jesus, sin, salvation, kingdom, resurrection, gospel. But the meanings had changed. God became a general religious ideal. Jesus became a moral teacher. Sin became social immaturity. Salvation became human progress. Resurrection became the disciples' continuing inspiration. Gospel became the message that humanity can improve.2
Harry Emerson Fosdick, from a New York pulpit in 1922, preached a sermon titled "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" His case, in his own spirit if not his exact words, ran like this: educated modern people can no longer believe in virgin births, blood atonement (Christ's death paying in full for sin, reconciling sinners to God), and bodily resurrections; if we chain Christianity to those claims, we will lose a whole generation; so let us keep the moral heart of Jesus and hold the miracles loosely, and in doing so save Christianity for the modern world.3 It captured most of the great Protestant denominations in a generation, and versions of it are still preached today. If your answer to Fosdick is only a scowl, you have not answered him.
The charity thread sharpened here too. The Social Gospel movement, prominent in the United States from about 1870 to 1920, interpreted the kingdom of God as involving social as well as individual salvation and aimed to better industrial society through biblical language about charity and justice.4 It raised real concerns about labor, poverty, and industrial cruelty. But when those concerns were cut loose from substitution, new birth, and the authority of Scripture, mercy was redefined as social reconstruction. Christian love became a program for human progress.
This is why the modernist conflict belongs in Acts Bible's remnant history. The danger wasn't simply unbelief outside the church. The danger was hollow name-bearing inside the church: carrying Christ's name while emptying His message.5
Remember the diagnosis from Class 2: do not bear God's name to emptiness. Modernism didn't always throw away the name. Often it kept the name and drained it.
That is more dangerous than open paganism because it teaches people to think they have Christianity while they are being handed something else. This repeats the biblical pattern of false teachers arising from within (Acts 20:29-30; Galatians 1:6-9). Fallen humanity has not changed; the remedy isn't reform or revised doctrine but salvation in the true Christ.
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 became the central figure in the fight. Machen was a New Testament scholar, not a shallow culture warrior. He had studied in Germany, knew the liberal arguments from the inside, and understood that the issue was truth rather than personality or tone.8
Notice the method before the argument. Machen could state liberalism at its strongest because he had learned it from its own teachers. That is 1 Peter 3:15 in practice, a defense made "with gentleness and respect" begins by honestly understanding the person you answer. A strawman wins applause. An honest answer wins a hearing.
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
That was explosive because it refused the polite compromise of the age. Many people wanted to say, "We all agree on the spirit of Jesus, even if we disagree on doctrines." Machen answered that doctrines are not detachable decorations. They tell us who Jesus is, what sin is, what the cross did, and whether there's any good news at all.10
When Princeton was reorganized in 1929 in a way that weakened its old confessional stance, Machen helped found Westminster Theological Seminary. Later, after conflict over missions and denominational discipline, he helped form what became the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He died on New Year's Day 1937, worn down at fifty-five, in a hospital bed in North Dakota after insisting on one last winter preaching trip. His final recorded words were a telegram dictated to his colleague John Murray: "I'm so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it."1112 Active obedience: not only that Christ died for our sins, but that He lived the perfect life we could not live, and that whole obedient life is credited to everyone who trusts Him. That is our confession's own doctrine, and a dying man's whole comfort. Machen spent his last breath on that same truth: salvation is Christ's work, complete, from His first obedient breath to His final cry, and none of it is ours to supply.
Our anchor is Christianity and Liberalism. Machen's key claim, paraphrased, is that liberalism and Christianity differ not at the edges but at the center. Liberalism uses Christian language, but it teaches a different view of God, a different view of man, a different view of Christ, a different view of salvation, and therefore a different gospel.13
That matters because people often imagine doctrinal conflict as unloving. Machen shows the opposite. If two messages use the same words but mean different things, love requires clarity. A sick person isn't helped when medicine labels are swapped.
Machen was arguing for honesty, and honesty was being read as meanness. If someone denies the supernatural Christ, the real atonement (Christ's death paying in full for sin, reconciling sinners to God), the bodily resurrection, and the authority of Scripture, they should not be told that they are simply emphasizing a different aspect of the same faith.
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
The liberal answer often sounded reasonable: the Bible contains profound religious insight, but it reflects ancient limitations. Modern scholarship must sift it. Modern ethics must improve it. Modern experience must reinterpret it.15
But once that move is made, Scripture no longer rules. It is ruled over.
Paul says that Scripture is "God-breathed" (2 Timothy 3:16). The Greek word theopneustos joins theos (God) and pneō (to breathe). The picture isn't that humans had religious feelings and God later approved them. The text is breathed out by God. 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.
Modernism often reversed that order. It let the modern age sit in judgment over apostles and prophets. The result was predictable. Hard teachings disappeared first. Then miracles. Then wrath. Then substitution. Then the exclusive claims of Christ. Eventually, the word "Christian" remained, but the faith once delivered was gone.16
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.17
Jesus' cry "It is finished" (John 19:30) isn't the sigh of a martyr whose influence will continue. It is the announcement of completed work. Tetelestai (Greek: 'it is finished,' Jesus' cry from the cross (John 19:30); class 2's word) means finished, completed, paid in full.
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.18
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.19
The Bible's diagnosis was being confirmed rather than outgrown.
The doctrines of grace cut against modern optimism because they tell the truth about us. We are not spiritually sick people who need encouragement only. We are dead in sin until God gives life. We don't need religion as an accessory. We need resurrection. This pattern of fallen humanity trusting human effort and optimism rather than sovereign grace in Christ repeats from Scripture to today's mission field.
Jesus says, "No man can come to me, except the Father... draw him" (John 6:44). The word translated draw has the sense of effective pulling, not polite suggestion. The Father must act.
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 modernist conflict also reached missions. If Jesus isn't the only Savior, if the cross isn't necessary payment for sin, and if all religions are imperfect human searches for God, then why send missionaries to call the nations to repent and believe?20
Missions becomes education, medicine, development, or cultural exchange. Those can be good works. But they are not the Great Commission by themselves.
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). That mission assumes that Christ has authority over all nations, that people need to become disciples, and that His commands are not optional religious suggestions.
Machen understood that doctrine and mission belong together. A church with no gospel has no mission, only activity. A mission board embarrassed by the uniqueness of Christ isn't carrying the Great Commission. It is carrying the name to emptiness.21
This is why the remnant had to contend. The point was never winning arguments. It was preserving the message that saves.
Here is the uncomfortable shape of this era, and a student will notice it without help.
Machen made the argument and the argument held. Then Princeton was reorganized out from under him, he started a seminary and a mission board, was tried and suspended by his own denomination for it, and started a church, and he was dead at fifty-five.22 The modernists kept the buildings, the endowments, the pulpits and the universities. If being right is supposed to look like something, it did not look like this.
Worse, the side that lost the institutions often behaved badly afterward. Fundamentalism turned separation into a reflex, split from people who agreed with it on the gospel, treated learning itself as suspect, and let a courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee define its public face for fifty years.23 That caricature stuck because parts of it were earned.
So take the objection at full strength: if the truth wins, why did the truth lose the century?
The answer is that we were promised a different thing. Christ said the gates of death would not hold against his church (Matthew 16:18).24 He did not promise it would keep its buildings, its universities or its respectability, and it has lost all three before, in the Alpine valleys, at Constance, and in the jail cell where Bunyan wrote.
And the losing was not the end of the sentence. The seminary, the mission board and the small denomination Machen founded outlived him, and the theological recovery of the second half of the century ran through the institutions the losers built rather than the ones they were expelled from.25 Class 12 is that story. 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.26
This matters for the modernist conflict because liberalism often presented itself as neutral scholarship. Van Til helped expose that claim. The issue wasn't unbiased modern people correcting naive ancient believers. The issue was covenantal: would the creature submit 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 keep Christian music, Christian buildings, Christian nonprofit language, Christian holidays, and Christian moral concern while losing the gospel. It can preach Jesus as therapist, activist, mascot, or example while avoiding Jesus as crucified substitute and risen Lord. This hollow name-bearing continues the same fallen pattern; the answer remains salvation in Christ alone, not technique, relevance, or optimism.
That is why charity must be tested by doctrine. Feeding the hungry, teaching children, caring for the sick, and defending the weak are not optional ornaments. But if the church forgets sin, wrath, atonement (Christ's death paying in full for sin, reconciling sinners to God), resurrection, and new birth, its mercy becomes a Christian-branded humanism. It may still do useful earthly good, but it no longer bears witness to the Savior who came to seek and save the lost.27
Machen teaches us to ask clear questions:
Those questions are not rude. They are loving. They protect people from being handed another religion under familiar labels.
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.28
Next class: the twentieth-century recovery, old books pulled back off the shelf, Sproul on the holiness of God, and grace found again.