Christianity and Liberalism: Chapter 3

Guess what? I still don’t have a copy of Christianity and Liberalism. I first ordered it on May 12, and twice since UPS has returned my order to Amazon.ca as “undeliverable.” On Tuesday a lovely man in the help department of Amazon.ca told me that they’d been having problems with UPS shipments to the territories, and he could solve my problem (so he thought) by shipping my order express mail for free. It was all good until that night when Canada Post locked their workers out and the mail service in Canada stopped completely. So I’ve still got no book and I don’t know when or if I’ll ever have one. But I do have a PDF copy, and I’ve printed the chapter so I can still participate in Tim Challies’ Reading Classics Together.

This week’s chapter discusses the doctrines of God and man. These two doctrines, writes Machen,” are the two great presuppositions of the gospel. It follows then that any faith system that gets the doctrine of God and the doctrine of man fundamentally wrong is not really Christianity at all. What Machen shows us in this chapter is that on both of these points “modern liberalism is diametrically opposed to Christianity.” 

True Christianity teaches objective truth about God. God is not known merely through our feelings of him, but by what reveals about himself to us. Some modern liberals, however, consider it unnecessary to have any kind of concept of God in order to know him, but believe that feeling a sort of God-presence is enough.

Others among them say that it is only through the life of Jesus that we understand God’s character. In response to this, Machen argues that while it is true that the incarnate Christ revealed God, he revealed him against the backdrop of “the Old Testament heritage and of Jesus’ own teaching.” When Jesus says that those “who have seen me have seen the Father,” it is assumed that those who learn more of God from Jesus already have a concept of God. Jesus himself, Machen says, was a theist, and likewise, “at the very root of Christianity is the belief in the real existence of God.”

The one definitive term that you might find a liberal using in regards to God is “Father,” and even then, what they mean by the fatherhood of God is something completely different than what a Christian means by the it. God is not, according to true Christianity, just a kind of universal Father to all humankind. 

The gospel itself refers to something entirely different; the really distinctive New Testament teaching about the fatherhood of God concerns only those who have been brought into the household of faith. 

When summing up the section on the doctrine of God, Machen writes that modern liberalism may not be completely pantheistic, but it is certainly “pantheizing,” for it obscures the distinction between God and man, or God and the world. 

Modern liberalism pantheizes when it comes to the doctrine of man, too, because of its tendency to deny the creaturely limitations of mankind. What’s more, it minimizes the effects of sin. In true Christianity, the very starting point of faith is facing the reality of sin. Machen puts this common loss of consciousness of sin down to 

a mighty spiritual process which has been active during the past seventy-five years. … The change is nothing less than the substitution of paganism for Christianity as the dominant view of life. Seventy-five years ago, Western civilization, despite inconsistencies, was still predominantly Christian; today it is predominantly pagan.

Paganism has a high view of the human nature, whereas Christianity “is the religion of the broken heart.” It doesn’t end there, mind you, but it always starts with the consciousness of the depth of sin. And without the consciousness of sin, there is no meaningful call to repentance; without the consciousness of sin, there is no Christianity at all.

In both these areas, the doctrine of God and the doctrine of Man, what Machen calls “modern liberalism” stands in direct opposition to real Christianity. It’s not much different than the kind of belief that exists in some present day churches, although we might use another label for it. 

Next week’s chapter is on the Bible and I’m looking forward to it. Anyone want to place a bet on whether my book will be here by then?