So I was wrong. This week’s chapter of Christianity and Liberalism, which I am reading because I am participating in this round Tim Challies’ Reading Classics Together, is not about the message of Christianity, but about “the person upon whom the message is based. The Person is Jesus.”
Machen starts the chapter by making this point: In true Christianity, Jesus is the object of faith, while in liberalism, he is merely an example of faith. In other words, a Christian will put his faith in Jesus. He will, to use Machen’s words, stand “in a truly religious relation to Jesus.” The modern liberal, on the other hand, “tries to have faith in God like the faith which he supposes Jesus had in God; but he does not have faith in Jesus.”
I have to admit that I found this chapter more difficult to follow than the previous chapters. (And while I’m complaining, let me say that it’s long, too.) It wasn’t that any of it was hard to understand, but that I couldn’t always see how Machen was fitting it all together, so I put some points into bulleted lists to help me see the overall structure of the chapter. I’m using those lists here and adding a few notes to them.
Reasons Jesus should be the object of the Christian’s faith:
- For Paul, faith in Jesus was the primary thing.
- The original apostles made Jesus the object of their faith.
- Jesus presented himself as the object of faith.
Machen summarizes:
The truth is, the witness of the New Testament, with regard to Jesus as the object of faith, is an absolutely unitary witness. The thing is rooted far too deep in the records of primitive Christianity ever to be removed by any critical process. The Jesus spoken of in the New Testament was no mere teacher of righteousness, no mere pioneer in the new type of religious life, but One who was regarded, and regarded Himself, as the Saviour whom men could trust.
Reasons Jesus can’t be simply an example for us:
- Jesus considered himself to be the Messiah; we can hardly imitate him there. What’s more, if, as modern liberals believe, this claim is untrue, it’s a “moral stain upon Jesus’ character.” How can he then be a good example for us?
- Jesus had no sense of sin, and if Jesus is sinless, then he isn’t just one of us. There is a big difference between what Jesus experienced and what we experience. “That difference prevents the religious experience of Jesus from serving as the sole basis of the Christian life.”
That Jesus didn’t need to rid himself of sin and can’t, then, be our complete example doesn’t mean he isn’t human, nor does it mean he isn’t our example in any way. He is our ethical example and he is also our example when it comes to our relationship with God. But most of all, he is our Saviour.
These contrasting views of the primary role of Jesus—Saviour or example?—come because Christianity and liberalism see the nature of Jesus differently. “[L]iberalism regards Jesus as the fairest flower of humanity; Christianity regards Him as a supernatural Person.” Liberalism rejects miracles, “and with the miracles the entirety of the supernatural Person of our Lord.”
Reject the miracles and you have in Jesus the fairest glower of humanity who made such an impression upon His followers that after His death they could not believe that He had perished but experienced hallucinations in which they thought they saw Him risen from the dead; accept the miracles, and you have a Saviour who came voluntarily into this world for our salvation, suffered for our sins upon the Cross, rose again from the dead by the power of God, and ever lives to make intercession for us.
Once again, we see that Christianity and modern liberalism are really two different religions: first, in the presuppositions (chapter 3); next, in the authority by which the Christian message is received (chapter 4); and now in the central person upon whom the message is based (chapter 5). Coming up, it’s the sixth chapter which discusses the message of Christianity, the gospel itself.