Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 27:1 (Spring 2023)
Article: Machen On The Necessity Of Christian Doctrine: An Explanation And Application Of "Christianity And Liberalism", Chapter 2
Author: Fred G. Zaspel

Machen On The Necessity Of Christian Doctrine: An Explanation And Application Of Christianity And Liberalism, Chapter 2

Fred G. Zaspel

Fred G. Zaspel is one of the pastors of Reformed Baptist Church in Franconia, Pennsylvania. He earned his PhD from the Free University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is also the executive editor of Books At a Glance and adjunct professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. He is the author of several books, chapters, and articles, including The Theology of B. B. Warfield: A Systematic Summary (Crossway, 2010).

Part One: Machen’s Argument

Context

In a day of burgeoning technological advance, charmed by Charles Darwin and the new understanding of origins apart from God, and with modern civilization bursting with self-confidence, old biblical truths of supernatural religion and divine rule over all things began to seem outdated and irrelevant. This was the atmosphere of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the hey-day of classic theological liberalism. If God was no longer needed to explain the origin of the world, neither was he needed to explain the origin of a holy book—or of Jesus. And within such a context, notions of sin and accountability fade, belief in the miraculous seems embarrassing, and elaborate teachings of incarnation and atonement are deemed unneeded. But such is the thought-world of theological liberalism in any age.

But giants of faith rose to the challenge, fueled by a robust trust in the

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truthfulness of Scripture and equipped with all the learning contemporary education had to offer. Old Princeton Seminary was long recognized as a bastion of the Reformed faith marked by a deep piety and the most informed scholarship of the day. Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield was—in his own day and since—recognized as the most widely and deeply learned of all the Princetonians, and J. Gresham Machen, his famous student, carried the banner after him.

Machen’s vigorous campaign against this new “liberalism” and for Christianity as historically defined, was sustained via teaching, speaking engagements, and extensive publications. Liberal theology had made its way from the university to the pulpit, and God’s people were being infected with its poison. Machen recognized that it was not a debate reserved for the ivory tower. It was much more than an academic issue, and because he understood the threat he took his fight to the streets, as it were, exposing for everyone the danger this new liberalism posed. Publications such as his Christianity and Liberalism,1 The Origin of Paul’s Religion,