Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 27:1 (Spring 2023)
Article: Machen On God And Man: An Explanation And Application Of "Christianity And Liberalism", Chapter 3
Author: Paul Kjoss Helseth

Machen On God And Man: An Explanation And Application Of Christianity And Liberalism, Chapter 3

Paul Kjoss Helseth

Paul Kjoss Helseth is Professor of Christian Thought at the University of Northwestern, St. Paul, Minnesota. He earned his PhD from Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and his MA from Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters, and the author of Right Reason and the Princeton Mind: An Unorthodox Proposal (P&R, 2010), and a contributor to Four Views on Divine Providence (Zondervan, 2011).

Introduction

The Lord used J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism to turn my world upside down when I first read it in my doctoral program in the early 1990s. While I had grown up in a Christian home and had been reared by parents who were believers, most of my formative years were spent in a church context that was decidedly progressive, and in a high school context that was broadly evangelical at best. When I transferred—with the blessing of my parents—from a progressive Lutheran college to a flagship institution of American evangelicalism in the early 1980s, I was immediately struck by what I then thought was the excessive piety of the community I had just joined. While I suspected that its piety was not essentially different from the more tepid piety that I had encountered growing up, I still thought that it was extreme, and, as an introverted Scandinavian, positively unnerving. Many of the members of my new community seemed to be entirely too earnest, and for reasons that were not immediately clear to me. Though I eventually

SBJT 27:1 (Spring 2023) 51

came to acknowledge that the piety that characterized the religious lives of my evangelical peers was not universally contrived, I graduated from that institution without a clear understanding of the place of piety in the life of the believer, and, even more fundamentally, about the nature of true piety and its relationship to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

My confusion began to abate and finally disappeared shortly after I enrolled in a PhD program at a Roman Catholic university in order to pursue an advanced degree in Religious Studies. In the third semester of the coursework that was required by the program in which I was enrolled, I was taking two courses that ended up playing off one another in what turned out to be, in God’s kind providence, a life-changing fashion. In one of those courses, a seminar with the imposing title, “The Structure of Religious Experience,” seminar participants were required to write a paper each week on a book that was written by a modern theologian on the nature of religious experience. While the books that were assigned were more or less compelling, they were all written by theolo...