Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 27:1 (Spring 2023)
Article: Editorial: Lessons To Learn From "Christianity And Liberalism" A Century Later
Author: Stephen J. Wellum

Editorial: Lessons To Learn From Christianity And Liberalism A Century Later

Stephen J. Wellum

Stephen J. Wellum is Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and editor of Southern Baptist Journal of Theology. He received his PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and he is the author of numerous essays and articles and the co-author with Peter Gentry of Kingdom through Covenant, 2nd edition (Crossway, 2018) and God’s Kingdom through God’s Covenants: A Concise Biblical Theology (Crossway, 2015); the co-editor of Progressive Covenantalism (B&H, 2016); the author of God the Son Incarnate: The Doctrine of the Person of Christ (Crossway, 2016) and Christ Alone—The Uniqueness of Jesus as Savior (Zondervan, 2017); and the co-author of Christ from Beginning to End: How the Full Story of Scripture Reveals the Full Glory of Christ (Zondervan, 2018); and the author of The Person of Christ: An Introduction (Crossway, 2021).

This year marks the 100th anniversary of J. Gresham Machen’s famous, and probably one of the most important theological books of the past century, Christianity and Liberalism.1 The book’s significance cannot be overstated and its larger impact on the modernist-fundamentalist debates, along with the rise of evangelicalism in the twentieth century is incalculable. Numerous reasons could be given for the book’s importance, but I will mention only three.

Three Reasons To Remember Christianity And Liberalism

First, in Christianity and Liberalism, Machen masterfully and correctly distinguishes true, orthodox Christianity from its counterfeit known as “classic liberal theology.” Due to the cultural, philosophical, and religious impact of the Enlightenment on society and the later embrace of the Darwinian

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theory of macroevolution, some within the church sought to recast Christianity to “fit” and “conform” to the current thought of the day. Convinced that Christianity could not survive unless it embraced the current “spirit of the age,” which meant for these people that Christian theology had to reject its own starting points and authority structure grounded in God and his revelation. Thus, instead of starting with the triune God who is there and who has spoken infallibly and authoritatively in Scripture, theological liberalism continued to use the language of Scripture but divorced from its theological grounding. The result of this attempt to correlate the Bible with contemporary thought (which functioned as the authoritative grid by which we read Scripture) was not the “saving” of Christianity or even making it “relevant�...