Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 27:1 (Spring 2023)
Article: Machen On The Church: An Explanation And Application Of "Christianity And Liberalism", Chapter 7
Author: Gregg R. Allison

Machen On The Church: An Explanation And Application Of Christianity And Liberalism, Chapter 7

Gregg R. Allison

Gregg R. Allison is Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. He earned his PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. He is the author of numerous articles and books including Historical Theology: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Zondervan, 2011), Sojourners and Strangers: The Doctrine of the Church (Crossway, 2012), Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment (Crossway, 2014), 50 Core Truths of the Christian Faith (Baker, 2018), The Holy Spirit (with Andreas Köstenberger, B&H, 2020), Embodied: Living as Whole People in a Fractured World (Baker, 2021), and God, Gift, and Guide: Knowing the Holy Spirit (B&H, 2023). Dr. Allison is also the secretary of the Evangelical Theological Society and currently serves as the book review editor for theological, historical, and philosophical studies for the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society.

In this essay I interact with Machen’s final chapter on the church, addressing it in two parts. Part 1 presents Machen’s historical context and a summary of his argument. Part 2 proposes several reasons why Machen’s argument is important for the church today.

Part One: Historical Context And Summary Of Machen’s Argument

Historical Context

To give a brief sketch of the historical context in which Machen addressed the church, I focus on two leading proponents—Adolph von Harnack and

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Abrecht Ritschl—of the type of liberalism against which Machen battled.

In his What is Christianity?, Adolph von Harnack decried Christianity as an institutionalized religion of dogma, an institutionalization and dogmatization that had corrupted the early church as evidenced by its councils and creedal formulations.1 In its place, he advocated a religion of the heart: the way of life that Jesus himself had taught. His method in arriving at this liberal articulation of Christianity was that of distinguishing between the kernel and the husk: the kernel, or the permanent, pure essence of Christianity, and the husk, its temporal/historical, (often) corrupted expression. As von Harnack presented the kernel, “In the combination of these ideas—God the Father, Providence, the position of men as God’s children, the infinite value of the human soul—the whole gospel is expressed” (Lecture 4).

Amalgamating these ideas, von Harnack’s liberalism consisted of three tenets.