Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 27:1 (Spring 2023)
Article: Machen On Salvation: An Explanation And Application Of "Christianity And Liberalism", Chapter 6
Author: K. J. Drake

Machen On Salvation: An Explanation And Application Of Christianity And Liberalism, Chapter 6

K. J. Drake

K. J. Drake is Academic Dean and Assistant Professor of Historical Theology at Indianapolis Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, Indiana. He earned his MDiv from Covenant Theological Seminary and his PhD in Historical Theology at Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author of The Flesh of the Word: The extra Calvinisticum from Zwingli to Early Orthodoxy in the Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford, 2021). Dr. Drake is an ordained Ruling Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America having served churches in both Missouri and Ontario, Canada. He currently attends Midtown Church (PCA) in Indianapolis.

Part One: Machen’s Argument

The foundational aspects of human existence, the questions that form the basis and structure of life, society, and thought, have increasingly receded in contemporary American life. Knowing truth, beauty, and the good, as well as the question of death and the purpose of life are the large stones without which we cannot build a coherence sense of ourselves or what we are either doing or ought to do. The traditional views of human existence offer a perplexing and difficult enough view of life. Plato likened the world to a cave. John Calvin likened it to a labyrinth.

For each man’s mind is like a labyrinth, so that it is no wonder that individual nations were drawn aside into various falsehoods; and not only this—but individual men, almost, had their own gods. For as rashness and superficiality are

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joined to ignorance and darkness, scarcely a single person has ever been found who did not fashion for himself an idol or specter in place of God.1

Our late modern existence is just as prone to the idolatry that Calvin notes here but lacks the solidity and purpose of previous sacred/social orders. The question of salvation, the string through the labyrinth of confusion and alienation from God, becomes fraught as a society fails to understand both what we are to be saved from and what a new state of rectitude might even be and instead substitute idolatrous paths of auto-salvation. A century ago, J. Gresham Machen saw such distortions of self-salvation at the heart of the project of theological liberalism.

Understanding salvation requires a whole picture of the world, its purpose, and ultimately its Creator, Savior, and Judge. For this reason, Machen discusses salvation only after other foundational doctrines in Christianity and Liberalism.2 After establishing in the first chapters the fundamental divergence between the C...