Christianity and Liberalism (1923) is most certainly J. Gresham Machen’s most enduring published work. In it, he essentially argues that the theological Liberalism of his day was diametrically opposed to historic Christianity. However, though we are now 100 years removed from its publication, Christianity and Liberalism still speaks profoundly to us and our present evangelical church. Although it pervades the book, much of that relevance can be found in Machen’s final chapter, simply entitled “The Church.” His four key points, directed at pastors and church members alike, outline their respective duties. According to Machen, pastors and church leaders must do the following:
Encourage their leaders—“[Christian officers] should encourage those who are engaging in the intellectual and spiritual struggle [i.e., contending for the faith]” (p. 178, 100th Anniversary ed.).
Establish biblical qualifications—“Christian officers in the Church should perform their duty in deciding upon the qualifications of candidates for the ministry” (179).
Exercise their duties—“Christian officers in the Church should show their loyalty to Christ in their capacity as members of the individual congregations” (179).
Educate their members—“[T]here must be a renewal of Christian education. . . . Christian education is the chief business of the hour for every earnest Christian man” (180–181).
Gospel Sufficiency
In the first of the four duties above, Machen encouraged church leaders in his own day to exercise careful discernment in recognizing and testing qualified men before ordaining them. Our intentional efforts to raise up sound, healthy leadership should be undergirded by a genuine love for their soul and wellbeing before we call them to a place of spiritual authority. While we should certainly be in the business of equipping men holistically for the ministry—leading them in their knowledge of the Bible and theology, guiding them in the art of spiritual maturity, and coming alongside them in their development of people skills—we also need to have the courage to say “not yet” or even “no” to men who are not presently fit for ordained gospel ministry (James 3:1). Oftentimes, it is the leaders who were not sufficiently prepared for ministry in advance who later become the most susceptible to disavowing their commitment to the historic gospel message.
In Machen’s day, gospel integrity was, indeed, worth protecting against the Protestant church’s growing number of counterfeits. The Bible’s teachings concerning the fundamentals of the Christian faith were not to be sacrificed upon the altars of cultural accommodation, alluring academic interests, or socially progressive ideations.
One of the underlying questions of the progressives in the early 1920s and ’30s was, “Does Christianity exist as the enemy of Social Progress?” This question echoed throughout the hallways of academic institutions, inside local coffee shops and gathering places, and even in the precious sanctuaries of Protestant churches throughout America. After all, the traditional, historic faith clung to supernatural matters concerning Jesus, such as his virgin birth, miraculous healings, resurrection from the dead, and return at the end in power and glory—not to mention his divinity itself. Modernity, fresh off the heels of Post-Enlightenment philosophies, rejected such claims on the basis of their supernaturalistic presuppositions. Therefore, the authority, inspiration, and inerrancy of the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments were the prime target for Modernism’s inquisition of the Christian religion. Today, it is the sufficiency of Scripture that is the target of Postmodernism’s religious inquisition. (I’m grateful for the late, well-loved PCA pastor, Harry Reeder, for his insights on this matter.)
The witness of the modern-day evangelical church in America has seemed to decline over the course of the past few decades. We have so widely embraced expediency, commercialism, consumerism, complacency, and concentrated efforts to pull in large numbers of people at the expense of sound doctrine and personal holiness before the Lord and the watching world. We have largely reduced the role of biblical theology in our discipleship of the whole person for Christ, in an effort to be relevant to the culture. We have fallen prey to the plight of celebrity culture and consumerism and taken far too bureaucratic an approach in the election of our ministry leaders and pastors.
May we, like Machen, hold fast to the historic faith once for all delivered to the saints! To do this rightly, we must embrace the gospel of grace. The term gospel refers to a message pronounced that is true in nature, good for its hearers, and beautiful in effect. It tells of a real event with real ramifications.
My good friend, Brett Eubank, who serves as the associate pastor at Rivermont Evangelical Presbyterian Church (Lynchburg, VA), has encouraged me to think of our exposition of Scripture and the preaching of the gospel message in light of these terms. Each generation of modern-day believers, generally speaking, is motivated to respond to the proclamation of the gospel through the lens of our own worldview-defining rubric:
Is it true? (Baby Boomers)
Is it real? (Generation X)
Is it good? (Generation Y)
Is it beautiful? (Generation Z)
The Bible answers each of these questions sufficiently! The gospel message of Jesus encompasses each one of these elements. It is historically true, doctrinally real, ethically good, and sublimely beautiful. Machen understood this as well. In Christianity and Liberalism, he famously stated, “‘Christ died’—that is history; ‘Christ died for our sins’—that is doctrine. Without these two elements, joined in an absolutely indissoluble union, there is no Christianity” (27). This union between history and faith promotes our eternal good before a holy God (Gal. 2:20; Rom. 3:21–24; 4:24).
We have fallen prey to the plight of celebrity culture and consumerism and taken far too bureaucratic an approach in the election of our ministry leaders and pastors.
But Scripture also contains a countless number of amplifications of the gospel—that is to say, it proclaims various facets of the gospel, rooted in Christ’s death and resurrection. On every page of God’s holy Word is written the message “that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations” (Luke 24:45–47). Such a message of divinely-instated and divinely-accomplished salvation from sin and its curse—death and eternal destruction—is the hallmark of the Christian faith. Without the message of eternal life in Christ, secured and guaranteed by his sinless life, atoning death, and resurrection, there is no hope.
The church has no other unifying message than Christ and him crucified. And yet, in every generation the visible church has been met with both inherently false gospels and detractors from the true gospel. This has been and always will be the case. And it began taking shape even during the ministries of Jesus’s Apostles. We should not be surprised, then, by the sheer volume of present-day “Deconstructionists” either leaving or radically altering our evangelical churches. At the outset of the gospel’s proclamation, Jesus warned us that such events would occur as a direct result of the enemy’s infiltration tactics. Satan has sown tares among Christ’s wheat (Matt. 13:24–30, 36–43). The church must, therefore, be on guard so as not to believe the lies of the enemy, or what we might call “gospel substitutes.”
Gospel Substitutes
So, what exactly are gospel substitutes? In what form do they come? And what are some examples? First, gospel substitutes are essentially messages that promise salvation from sin and justification before God by any means other than Christ. They come primarily in two forms: theoreticism and pragmatism. But they are more than just ideas and works. They are systems of ideas and/or works that promote self-sufficiency over God’s sufficiency to save us from sin and its effects. These competing theories and practices are not harmless. They have a real, lasting impact upon not just Christ’s church but also society as a whole. And they are systematically propagated by their professors to a generation through the abuse of good institutions, such as education and legislation.
But of course, the propagation of ideas pervades all of life. False ideas in matters of faith and practice have consequences upon both society as a whole and her individual members. So the church has been and will be affected by the perversion of her integrity because of the culture’s disavowal of truth. And, collaterally, the culture has been and will be affected by the church’s embrace or rejection of truth.
In the words of Machen, “What is today [a] matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires.”1 Today, our American culture—not to mention the Western world—has promoted a preponderance of gender identifications, along with Critical Race Theory, harmful political policies regarding the sanctity of human life, and authoritarian overreach into the lives of private citizens, organizations, and institutions in matters of health, daily routines, business, worship, and the like. One need only briefly consider the freedoms that we took for granted before March of 2020 to understand that new, anti-Christian political theories of salvation and atonement saturate our culture and are quickly making inroads into the evangelical church.
As a concerned pastor, citizen, and student of history, I am all too aware of these gospel substitutes, and I’m sure you are, too. We see them every day, in news articles and in conversations with our friends and neighbors whom we love. But there is nothing new under the sun. The progressive era of Machen’s day promoted a host of social grievances. And the quickly evolving entertainment industry (that was just starting to become the audiovisual juggernaut that it is today) made these grievances massively alluring and accessible on a scale never before seen. These social grievances included, but were hardly limited, to the following:
The breakdown of marriage
Abortion
Sexual promiscuity
Anti-Christian education
Individualism over and against community and family
Prolonged adolescence and worsening immaturity
Drug culture
Relative “truth”
Hedonism
Nihilism
Escapism
In her article “The Woke Bohemian,” my friend Laura Terrell, who is an author and researcher, has provided us with the following insights:
All of these gospel substitutes and more have not only remained but worsened in our postmodern society. Therefore, Machen’s approach to consecrating the culture is just as relevant and vital today as it was 100 years ago. The individualistic pursuit of personal happiness and relative truth that began at the turn of the last century has reached its logical conclusion in the form of a constant search for meaning in gender ideology, the quest for fame, the escapism of drugs and entertainment, and so many other idols. After all, ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ and thus, like the ancient cultures before us, every modern culture has a god (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Whenever a culture chooses a god other than the true God of the Bible, the result is always madness, as seen first in the rampant hedonism of the Roaring Twenties and again in the chaotic nihilism of the 2020s.
In light of this, we must consider the following question: What is an appropriate response to our culture’s madness? In short, we must proclaim the unadulterated gospel to a dying world. When anti-Christian theories of atonement and salvation pervade a culture, the work of far-reaching, generation-transcending evangelism becomes more basic. We preach Christ—the whole Christ. When a society is destroyed by its own vices, like Narcissus foolishly mesmerized by his own appearance, the basic work of the church becomes that of sowing and planting the seed once more (Ps. 126). When the church sows and plants in good faith, her fervent prayer will inevitably be that the Lord of the harvest, Christ Jesus, by the appropriation of his Spirit, would water it and ready it and beautify it for the Final Day. Even so, come, Lord Jesus!
God send us ministers who, instead of merely avoiding denial of the Cross shall be on fire with the Cross, whose whole life shall be one burning sacrifice of gratitude to the blessed Savior who loved them and gave Himself for them!
— J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 180