Part 5: The Protestant Church’s Response to Gospel Substitutes
“Dark and gloomy would be the world,
if we were left to our own devices and had no blessed Word of God.”
– J. Gresham Machen(1)
On Thursday, November 3, 1921, the pastor-scholar J. Gresham Machen delivered a speech at the Twenty-Eighth Convention of the Ruling Elders’ Association of Chester Presbytery. The convention took place at Wayne Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in Wayne, Pennsylvania. There were no spotlights present. There was no big band present. And there were certainly no fog machines!
Everything about this meeting was ordinary—this was the 28th annual meeting with a whole bunch of ruling elders, after all! Or at least it should have been. Machen was asked to speak to the following topic: “The Present Attack Against the Fundamentals of Our Christian Faith, from the Point of View of Colleges and Seminaries.” And so he did. And his speech was so impactful and breathtakingly accurate to the plight of the Protestant Church of the early twentieth century, that it formed the basis of his chapter entitled “The Bible” in his 1923 publication Christianity and Liberalism.
Of course, the topic of the Christian Faith being attacked within the realm of higher education may seem like nothing new to us as Christians living in a Postmodern—and especially “post-Covid”—world. Indeed, even in 1920s America, historic Christianity had been largely rejected by the culture, as has been discussed.
But it was all too apparent to pastors, elders, and members of the northern Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) that Liberalism presented more than a problem in terms of preaching the Bible as inspired by God, inerrant in its original manuscripts, and authoritative in all matters of life and doctrine. Liberalism began as scholastic movement, rooted in Enlightenment and Post-enlightenment German thought (especially of the schools of thought stemming from Immanuel Kant, Albrecht Ritschl, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Wilhelm Herrmann). But Liberalism was not merely academically dishonest in its assessment of the historicity of Christianity and the person of Jesus Christ. (As it has proven to be over the course of the past century.) And it wasn’t just a direct attack against the integrity of Christianity in the world of academia. It berated the Scriptures themselves, subjecting them to utter scrutiny in the name of Modernity and Idealism and abused the minds of those seminary students training for gospel ministry and their posture of humility before the Word of God in so doing. This new worldview was not just popularized in Germany; by the 1900s it had made its way into the hearts of ministers in the Presbyterian, Episcopal, Congregational, Methodist, Lutheran, and Baptist churches.
The Protestant Church in America was under attack—but not by the culture; by its own pastors.
Enter Machen. By 1921, Machen had already become well established in the northern Presbyterian Church. And even by the age of forty, the Lord had graced him with an incredibly keen sense of the Protestant Church’s direct situation. Furthermore, his reputation was growing not only amongst those at Princeton Theological Seminary and the ministers in his company, but within the wider world of Presbyterianism. The speech he delivered to his fellow presbyters in November of 1921 was called “Liberalism or Christianity?” And in it, Machen impressed upon the men in attendance the need to recognize the Bible as God’s revelation and submit to accordingly.
Three years earlier, a liberal Baptist pastor by the name of Harry Emerson Fosdick had been hired to fill the pulpit at First Presbyterian Church of Manhattan, New York. Fosdick is still considered one of the greatest preachers of the twentieth century and was renowned for his oratorical skills and straight-shooting approach. It is also worth noting that Fosdick had served as a Baptist pastor for eleven years up until that point and remained a Baptist in convictions even after assuming his call to First Presbyterian. His appointment was not only therefore questionable, but purely expeditious on the part of his new church. They sadly esteemed his charismatic abilities over his pastoral qualifications. This proved to be a fatal mistake.
On Sunday, May 21, 1922, Fosdick preached a fiery sermon, entitled “And Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Men like Harry Fosdick were representative of the great hypocrisy and widespread apostasy that were increasingly being accepted within the broader Protestant Church of the 1920s. For instance, his infamous sermon was the proverbial shot heard ‘round the world. His friend and business partner J. D. Rockefeller, Jr. (son of the famed oil magnate) funded the publication and dissemination of approximately 130,000 copies of this sermon, mailing them to Protestant ministers around the nation.
The content of his heretical sermon insisted upon these falsities and many more:
Liberalism was a “[finer] flowering” of Christianity, just as Christianity had evolved out of Judaism in the time of the Apostles.
Fundamentalism is intolerant and illogical.
The virgin birth was merely an indicator of Christ being of “unusual superiority” in a no greater sense than Plato and Augustus Caesar.
The Bible is no more inspired than the Koran and is full of polygamy, slavish systems, and “the use of force on unbelievers.”
Our understanding of the Bible should be progressive.
The return of Christ is merely allegorical for hope.
A spirit of tolerance and liberality of mind is the greatest teaching of Christianity.(2)
Ironically, throughout the course of his sermon at First Presbyterian, Fosdick verbally lacerated those who held to the historic Faith, gaslighting them as being obtuse and of an older generation which was archaic and passing away. I would invite you to carefully read his following description of historic Christianity and recognize the use of his straw man fallacy in this short, but representative portion of his message:
“It is interesting to note where the Fundamentalists are driving in their stakes to mark out the deadline of doctrine around the church, across which no one is to pass except on terms of agreement. They insist that we must all believe in the historicity of certain special miracles, preeminently the virgin birth of our Lord; that we must believe in a special theory of inspiration—that the original documents of the scripture, which of course we no longer possess, were in errantly dictated to men a good deal as a man might dictate to a stenographer; that we must believe in a special theory of the atonement—that the blood of our Lord, shed in a substitutionary death, placates an alienated Deity and makes possible welcome for the returning sinner; and that we must believe in the second coming of our Lord upon the clouds of heaven to set up a millennium here, as the only way in which God can bring history to a worthy denouement. Such are some of the stakes which are being driven, to make a deadline of doctrine around the church."(3)
As an aside, it is also worth noting that Fosdick only remained in the Presbyterian Church for another three years beyond this sermon. Praise God that he was not allowed to continue to harm her more directly beyond his short tenure there! In 1925 he returned to the Baptist Church and pastored Park Avenue Baptist in New York until 1946. But Fosdick had only become all the more liberalized in his theology and dangerous in his prideful posturing before the Church of Christ. Before accepting his call at Park Avenue, Fosdick mandated that the church remove its doctrinal standards and embrace Liberalism. He eventually renamed the church Riverside in partnership with J. D. Rockefeller, Jr., and it became an interdenominational church.
But God always has prophetic voices who stand for truth at all costs in tow. Immediately after Fosdick’s sermons echoed around the nation, Machen constructed what has likewise become known as one of the greatest Christian works of the twentieth century: Christianity and Liberalism. In it, he proved that Liberalism is not merely a misinterpretation of biblical doctrine in an erroneous sense—such as Arminianism compared to Reformed Theology. Nor is Liberalism built upon apostatized doctrine—such as Roman Catholicism. Rather, Theological Liberalism is an entirely different religion and cannot be rightly called—even categorically-speaking—Christianity.
In Christianity and Liberalism, Machen proved as much by demonstrating that Liberalism actually does the following:
It demonizes right doctrine.(4)
It makes the Heavenly Father to be no true father at all.(5)
It undermines the reliability of the Bible.(6)
It subverts Christ’s incarnation into nothing more than a mere example for faith.(7)
It nullifies the necessity of the atonement.(8)
And finally, under the folly of Liberalism, the Church exists in vain.(9)
His book rightly caught the attention of those who were deemed Fundamentalists within the Protestant Church. And in time, men such as Machen—like Clarence E. Macartney, William Jennings Bryan, Lewis Sperry Chafer, Cyrus Scofield, and many other Presbyterian ministers—would unite in their efforts to safeguard the teaching of the Protestant Church and the training of her ministers for generations to come.(10)
Eventually, every Protestant denomination would split over doctrinal concerns regarding Liberalism. Modernism would eventually die in terms of believability and sustainability and give way to the Postmodern thinking of our own present day (i.e. Post-Liberalism or Progressivism). Admittedly, other conservatives, known as Fundamentalists, overreacted to Liberalism and largely adopted the heretical system of theology known as Dispensationalism, becoming reductionistic in matters of doctrine and legalistic in matters of practice. The remaining churches that did not err toward hyper-Fundamentalism or Liberalism are more commonly called Evangelical.
The American Evangelical denominations that fought the good fight of faith against Theological Liberalism include, but are certainly not limited to the following:
The Presbyterian Church in America
The Orthodox Presbyterian Church
The Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church
The Evangelical Presbyterian Church
The United Reformed Church in North America
The Reformed Episcopal Church
The Anglican Church in North America
The Southern Baptist Convention
The Free Methodist Church
The Global Methodist Church
The Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod)
The Evangelical Free Church of America
For Christ and his kingdom of grace,
- Rich
Footnotes:
J. Gresham Machen, “Liberalism or Christianity?” Princeton Theological Review (1921): 108, accessed September 11, 2022, ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials. Cf. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 67.
Harry Emerson Fosdick, “And Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” May 21, 1922, sermon.
Ibid.
Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 25.
Ibid., 55.
Ibid., 67.
Ibid., 81.
Ibid., 121.
Ibid., 139.
“Harry Emerson Fosdick,” Christianity Today, accessed September 14, 2022, https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1969/october-24/harry-emerson-fosdick.html.
