GODFREY: Well, I hope all of our listeners know who J. Gresham Machen was. He was one
of the greatest scholars and champions of the faith that the American church has seen. He
taught at Princeton Theological Seminary in the first decades of the twentieth century
and was one of the leaders in the battle at that time against the rising tide of
what in those days was called "modernism" that we know as "liberalism" as well. And
liberalism was the fruit of scholarly attacks on the Bible that suggested that the Bible really
was not the Word of God, but that the Bible was the word of man and that there were valuable
things in the Bible. One could learn things about God from the Bible, but the Bible was
not entirely reliable or true and had to be subjected to human evaluation and criticism.
And as that modernism, that liberalism, began to develop, it began to attack all
sorts of fundamental Christian teachings. It attacked the notion of miracles. It attacked the
physical resurrection of Christ from the dead. It attacked the substitutionary atonement of Christ.
And so, those who reacted against the rising liberalism in the name of protecting
the fundamentals of the faith became known as "fundamentalists." And Dr. Machen was probably
the most articulate and the most scholarly of the leaders of the fundamentalist reaction, even
though he always remained a little uncomfortable with the label of "fundamentalist" because he
was concerned that we not reduce Christianity to just a few fundamentals. He wanted a full orbed,
full biblical Christianity. And as he faced that struggle in his own Presbyterian church,
and to some extent with some connected to Princeton Seminary, he wanted to write
a book in defense of the point of view that he and others was defending, and he did that
in his early classic work, Christianity and Liberalism, published in 1923, and that work
is so important. It's the fruit of scholarship, but it's not really a scholarly book in the
sense that only scholars can read it. It was very much written for the church and was very
much written with chapters looking at basic issues in controversy, a chapter on the Bible,
a chapter on Christ, a chapter on the church and other chapters as well. And
it is just a wonderfully readable and effective defense of these things in a way that seems
entirely contemporary today. The issues have really not gone away and this book still very
much speaks to the issues that we face. So I encourage everybody to read this book.
But when it first came out, it was very controversial, in part, because of its title,
Christianity and Liberalism. That title was Dr. Machen's very clear declaration: "There are two
religions competing in our day," he said. One religion is the religion of Christianity, which is
a religion that has been around for two thousand years and has had integrity for two thousand years
as to what it is that it teaches and believes. And now, a new religion that claims to be Christian,
but in fact is not, and that's what so enraged his critics that he was clearly saying,
"Liberalism is not Christianity. You have to choose between Christianity and liberalism."
The liberals had been saying, "Well, we're Christians with just different theories
about things. We're Christians that share a faith with you conservatives. We just talk about things
somewhat differently." And Dr. Machen said, "That's not true at all. It's two different
religions." And, as I say, that book is as valuable and as insightful and as helpful
today as it was a century ago. In some ways it's discouraging that we haven't been able to move
beyond these challenges to Christianity which have been so effectively answered,
really, for over two hundred years. We've had good answers to the challenges that
liberals have posed but have not been able to successfully drive them from the field.
BINGHAM: What do you think is the root cause? Is that going back to your comment earlier,
"It's not trusting in the authority of Scripture"?
GODFREY: Yes, I think that's very much it. It's a matter of authority. Is the Bible the revelation
of God? Is the Bible God speaking to us? Is the Bible therefore entirely reliable? And
the liberals were saying, "The Bible is helpful. The Bible is insightful. The Bible is useful.
The Bible contains the Word of God." Part of what really distressed Dr. Machen is what he saw as the
fundamental dishonesty of liberals. They weren't willing to say, "We just don't believe parts of
the Bible." They always wanted to try to express themselves in a way that would not be clear to
people in the churches. And Dr. Machen had thought that was just dishonest, and that if you want a
new religion, at least, have the integrity to confess that you have a new religion. And yeah,
it was a turning away from the Bible and reliance on the Bible, but Dr. Machen went further,
and I think he was right. It's a turning away from God. It's creating God in your own image. It's
creating God to say the things you want to hear, rather than listening to what God says that you
ought to hear and need to hear. And so, it really is two different religions at work.