One of Christianity Today’s “100 Most Influential Books of the 20th Century”, J. Gresham Machen’s earnest case for true, biblical faith and communion in Jesus Christ has been read around the world for 100 years. Originally published in 1923, this new edition features a brand-new foreword by Kevin DeYoung and is issued with the hope and prayer that the next century will be celebrated as one of reformation and renewal for Christ’s church throughout the world.
Audiobook
Narrated by Pierce Taylor Hibbs
Get the audiobook today.
Podcast
In 1923, the church in the United States was in a crisis. Modernist theology born in pre-War Europe now gripped a country experiencing vibrant technological and societal change. America in the “Roaring Twenties” was booming. Fashion was changing. Music was faster, louder. Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin were astonishing moviegoers with impossible stunts. The cities were electric. Industry was booming. The country was three years into a progressive prohibition of hard liquor. For the first time, a person could fly non-stop from New York to Seattle. President Harding was the first president to be elected by women who’d won the right to vote. Even so, much of the country remained racially segregated. Mass produced cars, trucks, and tractors had replaced horses and wagons, and were transforming the landscape. Telephones and the advent of radio meant that information traveled faster than ever.
Politics. Technology. Identity. Power. Science. Everything seems to be changing. So why not faith?
Episode 1: “The AMPersand”
with Kevin DeYoung
Arrested Development. In the 1990s, it was a hip hop group. In the early 2000s, it was a sitcom. But it’s a real psychological phenomenon that happens when, due to a variety of causes, a person or institution stops growing and ceases to thrive. And it’s a phrase J. Gresham Machen uses in his book Christianity & Liberalism to describe the consequences of a liberal theology.
In the book, Machen is describing liberals who ridicule Christians for defending a defenseless cause. It’s like defending the belief that the earth is flat, they say, or that miracles happen, or that sins need to be forgiven. What’s the point, says the Liberal. Everyone knows those things are impossible, so why bother defending them?
If that sounds familiar, it’s because we hear similar arguments from within the church today. Many are calling for a reevaluation of biblical views on sexual attraction, the sanctity of life, ethnic diversity, or even what it means to be a man or a woman. Although the topics have changed, the motivation for liberalism today isn’t all that different from that scathing critique of the church Machen confronted 100 years ago. Back then, the American church tried to compromise essential tenets of orthodox Christianity in order “to make it work.” And, as Machen predicted, it resulted in arrested development. In the years after Machen’s book, liberal protestant mainline liberal churches folded, thousands made a shipwreck of their faith, denominations split, and scores of ministries succumbed to the trajectory of theological compromise and, ultimately, to decline into the outward appearance of faithfulness—beautiful buildings and good deeds on the outside, but without a genuine saving faith in Jesus within.
So, what should we do?
Episode 2: “Reinvention”
with Rosaria Butterfield
What does it mean to be a human being created in the image of God? In the brave new world of today, that’s a loaded question. Modern culture in the West has affirmed a radical reinvention of the self that was barely imaginable when J. Gresham Machen wrote Christianity & Liberalism in 1923. Not only is LGBTQ ideology inescapable—in schools, books, movies, fashion, sports, even beer and car commercials. It has become a dogma of the mainstream.
And yet, as radical as this seems, there are prescient notes throughout Machen’s 100 year old book, words from his time that can help us make sense of our own. Principles that help us to take every thought captive, even in a world that insists on allegiance to being everything we want to be, whenever we want it, on demand. . .
Episode 3: “The Affirming Church”
with Rosaria Butterfield
What does it mean to be a human being created in the image of God? In the brave new world of today, that’s a loaded question. Modern culture in the West has affirmed a radical reinvention of the self that was barely imaginable when J. Gresham Machen wrote Christianity & Liberalism in 1923. Not only is LGBTQ ideology inescapable—in schools, books, movies, fashion, sports, even beer and car commercials. It has become a dogma of the mainstream.
And yet, as radical as this seems, there are prescient notes throughout Machen’s 100 year old book, words from his time that can help us make sense of our own. Principles that help us to take every thought captive, even in a world that insists on allegiance to being everything we want to be, whenever we want it, on demand. . .
Episode 4: “Machen: The Man”
with Stephen Nichols
On a cold winter’s day in 1921 pallbearers carried the body of one of the great theologians of the 19th and 20th centuries to a graveside in Princeton, New Jersey. Writing to his mother afterwards, J. Gresham Machen would remark that when they carried B. B. Warfield’s body out, that Old Princeton went with him. Old Princeton had been the primary seedbed for pastors and missionaries in the Presbyterian church, but now, more than 100 years from its founding, the roots of declension had taken hold and modernist theology had made inroads, infiltrating the pulpits and pews of the Presbyterian church as well. As Machen saw it, Warfield’s vital orthodoxy had been the last vestige of orthodoxy keeping Princeton from a catastrophic embrace of liberal theology.
Over the next 15 years, J. Gresham Machen’s struggle to preserve an orthodox Presbyterianism would become a touchpoint of the larger “fundamentalist controversy” boiling over in churches all around the United States. His book, Christianity & Liberalism, precipitated a series of events that culminated in Machen and other professors leaving Princeton in 1929 to plant a new seedbed for pastors and missionaries called Westminster Theological Seminary. Then, in the 1930s, Machen would break away from the mainline Presbyterian church he had spent his life in and establish a new denomination devoted to faithful teaching of God’s ancient word — an idea completely antithetical to the most influential and powerful forces of the day.
Episode 5: “Southern’s Story”
with R. Albert Mohler
In the 1980s the Southern Baptist Convention found itself at a crossroads. While many of its churches were faithfully teaching biblical Christianity, the seminaries where its pastors were trained had been immersed in theological liberalism for decades.
In a lot of stories, this is where the split would occur. But this time something different happened. Instead of dividing, a group of courageous Christians decided to change the equation. They came up with an unprecedented plan to turn Southern Seminary from liberal theology, back to its confessional roots.
Episode 6: “Supernatural”
with Thomas Keene
What’s in a name?
In the past, when Christians talked about Jesus, it was safe to assume we were talking about the son of God become man who conquered death to save the lost. You know, the person the Bible’s about.
But with the rise of liberal theology in the 19th and 20th centuries, that meaning began to change. At least for some people. Christ, liberal theologians said, might be better understood as an idea, a metaphor, or a good example, rather than the sinless supernatural savior who accomplished our redemption in the first century.
This was J. Gresham Machen’s line in the sand in 1923. If we don’t worship the same Christ, Machen said, we don’t have the same religion.
Episode 7: “Living up to the name”
with Peter Lillback
Losing is never fun. And it’s even less fun when the New York Times is paying attention. But by 1929 that’s what had happened. J. Gresham Machen had lost the fight against liberalism at Princeton seminary. Even after reading Machen’s warning in Christianity and Liberalism, the Presbyterian church voted to reorganize Princeton to allow liberal theology on faculty.
That would’ve been the perfect time to pack it in. But for Machen the fight had never been about Princeton. True Christian doctrine could never belong to a single organization, no matter how influential. So Machen did what any God fearing independently wealthy bachelor would do. He quit, poached Princeton’s best faculty, and started his own seminary.
Episode 8: “The Safest Place in the world”
with Eric Watkins
The Church. Few institutions are more unpopular or controversial these days than the Christian church. And, let’s face it, a lot of the time, even Christians don’t appear to like it very much. Every week it seems there’s a new scandal or debate splitting congregations. It can be tempting to think that maybe the church is obsolete, maybe we’d be better off going our own way.
But there’s a tragic irony in that. Sometimes it’s lost on us that in the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus says “upon this rock I will build my church” he’s not talking about flawless rich young ruler types, or even the pharisees. He’s talking about the disciples but especially Peter, the one who would later deny Christ, who needed to be confronted by the apostle Paul, and who often had to have things repeated three times before he understood it.
The point is, from the very beginning Jesus knew that his church would be filled with the messy, sinful men and women that he gave his life to save. And so he gave his apostles specific guidance on how the church should help Christians grow in faith, in repentance, doctrine and ethics through preaching, sacraments, and prayer.
The liberals of Machen’s day didn’t believe this was enough. They began to look for ways to accommodate Jesus’ vision to the culture at the expense of our core beliefs about Christ, the Bible, Salvation, God, and even our own identity. We find ourselves at a similar crossroads today, surrounded by a culture asking the question: does the church even matter?
Episode 9: “Clarity”
with Jarvis Williams
Inspiration means a lot of things to a lot of people. For some it’s the thrill of creative expression, or motivation to accomplish something great. But in a biblical theological context, it has a very specific, very important meaning: that God is the author of the Bible.
But for liberal theologians this doctrine—that the Bible is the reliable and sufficient source of God’s revelation to man—poses a problem. If we can trust the Bible, then we can trust what Jesus says about sin, about judgment, and about his being the only way to salvation. But if Jesus isn’t who he says he is in the Bible, as liberal and progressive Christians claim, how can we say anything about him at all?
Episode 10: “God Breathed”
with Greg Beale
The Bible. A divinely-inspired book so glorious and yet so debated these days that we decided to record another podcast on this essential topic.
In 1820 Thomas Jefferson completed his redacted version of the Four Gospels he called “The Philosophy and Morals of Jesus.” Although it wasn’t published in his lifetime, “The Jefferson Bible” would become a popular example of an alarming trend in post-enlightenment hermeneutics: cutting and pasting with the Word of God.
According to Jefferson and other readers and scholars since, the Bible is an imperfect text. There might be truth in its pages, but it needs a modern lens, or additions, or subtractions to purify it or to make sense of its ancient obscure meaning. There are hard things to understand in the Bible, they say, supernatural events that are difficult to believe. So, does the Bible need to change? Or do we?
Episode 11: “Just the Facts”
with Michael Horton
Facts. We like to think they can be taken for granted, but human feelings always seem to get in the way. Even in 1923, when J. Gresham Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism, liberal theologians struggled to reconcile the history presented by scripture with their experience of that history as 20th century men and women.
Although we like to think of ourselves as scientific and objective, we nevertheless remain subjectively biased, twisting beliefs like the resurrection or ascension of Christ to conform to more comfortable man-made doctrines. If anything, the 100 years since Machen wrote this book have shown us when the facts don’t align with our feelings, we will find a way to reinvent them.
Episode 12: “Facing Christ”
with Craig Troxel
A lot has changed in 100 years. But a lot has stayed the same. The church in the United States is once again in a crisis. Critical theory has gripped a nation experiencing vibrant technological and societal change. America in the 2020s is accelerating. Our screens are filled with incredible stunts and spectacle. The entire globe is connected like never before. Electric cars, Artificial Intelligence, and on demand shopping have transformed how we live and work. Smartphones and the advent of social media mean that information travels faster than ever before. . .
