Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 27:1 (Spring 2023)
Article: SBJT Forum
Author: Anonymous

SBJT Forum

Cambden M. Bucey is the Executive Director of Reformed Forum and historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He earned his PhD in historical and theological studies with a focus on systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In addition, Dr. Bucey serves as an evangelist for Hope Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Grayslake, Illinois, where he previously served as its pastor. He is the author of Karl Rahner in the Great Thinkers Series (P&R, 2019) and Lamentations, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah: A 12-Week Study (Crossway, 2018). He is married to Erica, and they have three sons.

SBJT: What would you say is the significance of Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism for today’s church?

Cambden M. Bucey: This year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the publication of J. Gresham Machen’s book, Christianity and Liberalism. Written to address an existential threat to Christianity, this book issued no uncertain sound regarding the thinly disguised enemies of Christ and his kingdom.

Theological liberalism had entered the church. It was a theological movement that re-considered Christianity according to modern knowledge, science, and ethics. It emphasized the importance of reason and experience over doctrinal authority, and it denied many fundamentals of the faith, including the inspiration of the Scriptures, the death of Christ as an atonement for sin, and the bodily resurrection of our Lord. Machen viewed liberalism not merely as a deficient form of Christianity but as an entirely different religion, because apart from the transcendent God accomplishing redemption in history, we have no hope (1 Cor 15:1–8).

Theological liberalism rejected supernaturalism. It asserted that Christianity is a way of life and not a doctrine. Liberalism attempted to circumvent the specificity and strictures of explicit doctrinal expressions by considering each of them as merely particular expressions of a singular shared human experience. Creeds and confessions merely gave historical and contextual shape to something greater and deeper. Liberalism emphasized the universal fatherhood of God, the universal brotherhood of man, and an admiration for Jesus’s character. For liberals, Christianity concerned ethics and social

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change. What happened two-thousand years ago was really of no consequence to them. All that matters was how we live in response.

J. Gresham Machen was quick to express that as an historical phenomenon, Christianity is absolutely concerned with facts and doctrine. While liberals were only concerned with Jesus’s ethical teachings and moral examples, Machen’s basic concern was the identity o...