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

For all the worries about democracy’s death after 2016, some of the most ardent worriers also seem to think restricting debate will advance democratic ideals. Concerns about misinformation and disinformation (and even malinformation) are not merely the fears of a few journalists or professors. Government agencies and big tech companies have cooperated to prevent the spread of claims that depart from certain institutional views. Another set of worries follow from those troubled by the free flow of ideas. These liberal worriers argue that restricting access to information violates freedom of speech, which in turn threatens the very character of a democratic society.

As novel as the recent debates about freedom of speech in journalism and politics may sound, one hundred years ago the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (PCUSA) established a precedent for suppressing speech, ideas, and assembly. This is ironic if only because churches are not typically supposed to have a diversity of ideas like a democratic society. On paper, church officers and members are united in faith, worship, and piety. But when a disagreement surfaces, Presbyterians, at least, have a variety of ecclesiastical processes for fostering debate and preventing the abuse of power. As good as the Presbyterian system may be, it failed J. Gresham Machen when he spoke out against liberal theology and its influence within the PCUSA.

His book, Christianity and Liberalism, published one hundred years ago in 1923, was a warning to American Protestants about the dangers of theological modernism. Within the PCUSA, that book met a chilly reception. For twelve years after publication, Presbyterians leaders used various methods to muzzle Machen, as I will show. Worse, rather than responding to his arguments in the give and take of ecclesiastical debate, many influential Presbyterians labeled his criticisms incautious and even extreme. By the end of his career, his Presbyterian peers brought Machen to trial for violating his ordination vows and spreading “misinformation” within the church. In hindsight, the Presbyterian controversy was a poignant instance of elites deeming certain views unacceptable and then using institutional levers to suppress those ideas.

…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.”

Jeff McDonald introduces several significant points about William Jennings Bryan, including his early life and upbringing in a strong evangelical tradition, his belief that schools and universities posed a problem to religious freedom, and his concern that students could be led away from faith into unbelief if they fell under the influence of mind worshipers. The author also notes Bryan’s political career and his advocacy for economic and religious freedom, as well as his influence on the Democratic party and his ongoing relevance to current political issues.

…So desperate was Machen that he decided, with the consent of other faculty members, to give Van Til free rein in the department of apologetics and offered whatever salary was necessary. As a last resort Machen suggested that Van Til only come for one year in order to "rescue... the Princeton tradition." Under the pressure of Machen's arm twisting Van Til finally accepted the offer. The rest, as they say, is history.

The circumstances under which Machen chose Van Til may indicate that apologetical method mattered less than the politics of starting the new seminary. In other words, if Machen had been able to choose a professor of apologetics strictly on the basis of what he perceived as the theological merits of the individual, perhaps he would have chosen someone more in harmony with Old Princeton's tradition of evidentialism. Though this hypothesis is plausible, Machen's choice turned out to be astute because of the congruity between Van Til's apologetics and Machen's understanding of the relationship between church and culture.

The Problem of the Enlightenment

For a variety of historical reasons American Presbyterians throughout the nineteenth century were fully committed to the Enlightenment and scientific methods as the surest means for arriving at truth. Though still believing in the authority of Scripture, the best—or at least the most widely accepted—way of demonstrating the truth of the Bible was by appealing to reason and Scripture's harmony with nature and the self-evident truths of human experience. Even though the Presbyterian theologians who taught at Princeton Seminary, such as Charles Hodge and Benjamin B. Warfield, believed in and defended the sinfulness of man, including human reason, their fundamental acceptance of the Enlightenment also produced apologetics that in many cases deemed the mind to be a reliable and authoritative guide to truth, including the truths of the Bible.

Old Princeton's apologetic also implied a certain attitude toward the American nation. The United States was heavily indebted to the Enlightenment. Having rejected the crown or established church as a way to maintain social stability, the Enlightenment ideals of science and reason provided America with a rival form of cultural authority, one that was available to all right-thinking people and did not depend upon family blood and place/land. The scientific method and right procedures of argumentation gave to Americans public criteria for determining the true, the good and the beautiful. Thus, the church and the nation shared a similar outlook. Unlike the situation in Europe where the Enlightenment was explicitly anti-clerical (e.g. the French Revolution), in the United States most Protestants imbibed the ideals of the Enlightenment and supported the War for Independence which rested upon those ideals.

This was the tradition out of which Machen worked as an American Presbyterian and a member of Princeton Seminary's faculty. Yet, his argument against Protestant liberalism questioned the close identification of the church with American culture, a tradition that extended back to the American revolution. Machen recognized that the church was fundamentally different from society, and that its faith and practice stood above (and at times against) the norms of America. The mainline churches, he argued, had compromised their witness because they had substituted the ideals of liberty, democracy and equality for the good news of the gospel.

Machen's recognition of the antagonism between church and culture made him sympathetic to confessional ethnic communions like the Dutch Calvinist tradition from which Van Til came. He admired, for instance, the confessional witness of the Christian Reformed Church, its practice of catechetical sermons, its system of Christian schools, its college and seminary. He also esteemed the CRC's separateness from the wider culture, its ghetto mentality as it were, rooted in the conviction that the church must avoid all associations that might compromise its witness. In an editorial for the Presbyterian Guardian written shortly before founding of the OPC, Machen praised the CRC's practice of church discipline which "preserved its separateness from the world." This was precisely the opposite of what Machen saw in Protestant mainline denominations where in order to gain the acceptance of the world churches had adjusted their preaching and ministry. As Machen wrote in Christianity and Liberalism, "religion is thought to be necessary for a healthy community; and therefore for the sake of the community [people] are willing to have a church." But, he added, Christianity could not be treated this way. "The moment it is so treated it ceases to be Christian... Christianity refuses to be regarded as a mere means to a higher end...."

Van Til was not only reared in the CRC but he came out of a tradition with a fundamentally different attitude toward the Enlightenment. Because in Europe the great philosophical developments of the eighteenth century were so hostile to the church, Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, took a dimmer—if not hostile—view toward the Enlightenment. A good indication of this difference is the name of Abraham Kuyper's political organization in the Netherlands, the AntiRevolutionary Party. Van Til's apologetics extended this insight from the intellectual and political realms to that of theology and the defense of the faith. Thus, he made the antithesis, that is, the fundamental difference and antagonism between believers and non-believers, central to the task and method of apologetics. The authority for believers was God's Word, not reason. Appeals to the reasonableness of Christian truth were doomed to fail because without the effectual calling of God's spirit human rationality was in rebellion against God and would not be persuaded of the gospel's truth.

The Church Against the World

Van Til was a great choice to teach at Westminster because his apologetics provided the theoretical foundation for Machen's conception of the relationship between church and culture. If Machen wanted the church to be separate from the world, Van Til's methods supplied the reason for this separation. To be sure, believers and unbelievers hold some things in common—thanks to the grace God showers upon both groups through his providential care. But Machen recognized that the task of the church, namely, proclaiming the gospel and nurturing the faithful, was fundamentally different and at odds with the agenda of the world. Van Til simply put flesh on the skeleton of his mentor's understanding of the antithesis. Machen may not have blamed the Enlightenment for American Presbyterians' failure to maintain the antithesis. But remarks he gave before a Dutch Calvinist gathering on the importance of Christian schools suggest that only three years before the end of his life he saw how the project of a public rationality had undermined the identity and separateness of the community of faith.

Book Title: Crossed Fingers
Subtitle: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church
- the first book to identify and discuss in detail the five points of liberalism and the rival theological positions. It is also the first published book that "follows the money" by tracing the sources of the funding of theological liberalism in twentieth-century America. One man, more than any other, was the primary source: John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

“The fact that it is not discussed is indicative of just how powerful the system is. You can trace the major figures on Wikipedia. This is hidden in plain site. It literally would be possible to piece together the history of the American Establishment by using nothing except texts from various articles published on Wikipedia. But no one does it. I am too busy, and there's not much incentive for younger historians to pursue such a task. It would ruin their careers, assuming that they ever got into a position in academia where they could have a career worth ruining.”

“Most importantly, Machen favored individual rights and families over governmental powers.

Machen detested governmental control of individuals; as he stated in the introduction of Christianity and Liberalism, “Personality can only be developed in the realm of individual choice. And that realm, in the modern state, is being slowly but steadily eradicated.”

I do think William Jennings Bryan was an underrated and practical supplement to Machen in some vital areas (mostly cultural & political - he was a good early critic of evolution as presented in the classroom - and some fundamentals)…

https://www.garynorth.com/public/19223.cfm

https://www.garynorth.com/public/7634.cfm