Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 03:4 (Winter 1999)
Article: Christianity at the Crossroads: E. Y. Mullins, J. Gresham Machen, and the Challenge of Modernism
Author: Sean Michael Lucas

SBJT 3:4 (Winter 1999) p. 58

Christianity at the Crossroads:
E. Y. Mullins, J. Gresham Machen,
and the Challenge of Modernism

Sean Michael Lucas

Sean Michael Lucas is the Archives and Special Collections Librarian at the Boyce Centennial Library of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He also serves as the Associate Director of the Center for the Study of the Southern Baptist Convention. Mr. Lucas is completing his doctoral studies at Wesminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He has published other articles and written a number of book reviews.

Introduction

By the end of the First World War, religious conflict loomed on the horizon in the United States. Theological liberals cooperated with denominational loyalists to gain control of northern Baptist and northern Presbyterian denominational machinery.1 As the liberals consolidated their gains and insulated themselves from criticism from the left, they also found themselves trying to protect their position from the theological right. Theological conservatives, stirred awake by large-scale church union plans of the Interchurch World Movement and the American Council on Church Union, began to examine in earnest the naturalistic presuppositions of the liberals. For some conservatives, the examination of liberal naturalism extended to the creation of the world and the consummation of the age. These conservatives, taking the moniker “fundamentalist,” pledged to do “battle royal for the fundamentals.” Rallying around forceful propagandists such as J. Frank Norris and William Bell Riley, fundamentalists organized under the banner of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association. Generally focusing on evolution, Riley and Norris coordinated the attack on naturalism within the Northern and Southern Baptist denominations. Others, such as William Jennings Bryan, led the fundamentalist crusade against evolution in the northern Presbyterian Church.2

The attack on theological liberalism, or modernism, did not come solely from fundamentalists.3 Other evangelicals of a more scholarly bent were troubled equally by the challenge of naturalistic modernism. E. Y. Mullins, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and J. Gresham Machen, professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, sought to answer the challenge of theological liberalism for their respective constituencies. That Machen contended for traditional forms of orthodoxy is well known to historians of American religion. His Christianity and Liberalism (1923) is still an important window on the issues that troubled American Protestantism in the 1920s. Less well k...