The Highway Forums General Discussion Open Forum Machen, Christianity & Liberalism

…one of the two longest chapters in the book defended Christ’s deity—he really was the son of God, and not merely a good person. The other long chapter defended Christ’s vicarious atonement: As sinners, humans have no hope to measure up to God’s standard of righteousness apart from Christ’s life of obedience and his bearing the penalty for sin on the cross. Christ’s death on behalf of believers and his righteousness imputed to Christians by faith were at the core of apostles’ witness and at the heart of any believer’s hope to escape God’s wrath and curse for sin.

… The idea of using Christianity to solve social problems for Machen was precisely a sign of liberalism’s decisive error. “Christianity refuses,” he wrote, “to be regarded as a mere means to a higher end”. Social, political, and even familial relationships, he added “exist for the sake of Christianity and not Christianity for the sake of them”. For that reason, improving society, no matter how admirable, abandoned the much more consequential spiritual problems that haunted rich and poor, strong and weak, educated and illiterate, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and ethnic-American.

The committee’s patron was the Baptist philanthropist, John D. Rockefeller (who also funded a New York City congregation where Fosdick was pastor).

Whatever the institutional origins, this report, Re-Thinking Missions, a selection for the Religious Book of the Month, was a bombshell. It rejected the old rationale for missions—evangelism and church planting—and affirmed a new purpose of social, educational, scientific, economic, and political progress. As missionaries cooperated with indigenous religious leaders, they could also equip non-Western societies with the tools of modern society. For Machen, the report was proof of liberalism in the Protestant churches to such a degree that now even the proclamation of the gospel was expendable. Re-Thinking Missions also demonstrated the teleology of the social gospel and Protestant ecumenism. Improving society had replaced saving souls even as the work of social endeavor provided the basis for cooperation across denominations and even among the world’s religions.

Instead of answering Machen with reasons for the need to modify or abandon parts of Presbyterian teaching and practice, Presbyterian leaders branded Machen an alarmist and reactionary. Almost 100 years later, American officials and elites responded in a similar fashion to physicians and scientists who challenged the protocols developed and enforced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of debate, the official response was to accuse dissenters with misinformation and disinformation.

Inside the mainline Protestant world, belittling Machen was successful if only because he led a large exodus of conservative Presbyterians into the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. But some people outside the churches saw the situation with greater objectivity and so rendered a verdict that testified both to Machen’s courage and intellectual achievement. In his obituary for Machen, H. L. Mencken wrote arguably the best assessment of the American Presbyterian church history during the fundamentalist controversy. In the conclusion of his long essay, Dr. Fundamentelis, Mencken ended where Machen had begun in Christianity and Liberalism, concluding that the intellectual changes in western thought had made the Christian religion no longer tenable.“There was a time, two or three centuries ago, when the overwhelming majority of educated men were believers, but that is apparently true no longer,” Mencken wrote. His impression in 1937 was that “at least two-thirds of them are now frank skeptics.” Still, rejecting religion “altogether” was one thing. Saving Christianity by “pumping out of it all its essential substance” was another. Such an endeavor left faith “in the equivocal position of a sort of pseudo-science, comparable to graphology, ‘education,’ or osteopathy.” Mencken then declared that such equivocation was exactly what liberal Protestants had done, “no doubt with the best intentions in the world.” Liberals had “tried to get rid of all the logical difficulties of religion, and yet preserve a generally pious cast of mind.” What was left was “a row of hollow platitudes, as empty of psychological force and effect as so many nursery rhymes.” “Religion”—Mencken could have written “Christianity”—“is something else again–in Henrik Ibsen’s phrase, something far more deep-down-diving and mud-upbringing,” Mencken praised Machen for trying “to impress that obvious fact upon his fellow adherents of the Geneva Mohammed.” Although Machen failed, “he was undoubtedly right.”