One-hundred years of Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism

Already a century ago, many Christians were noticing a seemingly subtle shift in the message issuing from Protestant church pulpits—a shift away from the gospel message and towards a focus on the religious experience of the individual person. This prompted one Presbyterian leader, John Gresham Machen (1881-1936), to write a book that remains relevant today. Here are my thoughts on One-hundred years of Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, posted at Kuyperian Commentary. An excerpt:

During the 19th century, Princeton Seminary, founded in 1812, was a bastion of Reformed orthodoxy and remained so into the first three decades of the 20th. Nevertheless, by the turn of that century, the supporting denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA), was already in the process of changing, and not for the better. Pulpits were increasingly occupied by ministers whose preaching was more influenced by the ideologies of the day than by sound biblical interpretation. The major ideology of the day was scientism, the conviction that the only genuine form of knowledge was that accessible by the scientific method. Other claims to knowledge were to be greeted by a general posture of scepticism. Even Scripture and the doctrines of the Christian faith must be subjected to the canons of science, which in turn were thought to determine what we can and cannot accept of that faith. Claims to miracles, for example, cannot be scientifically vindicated and must thus be relegated to the status of primitive myths. All that remains of Christianity is its supposed ethical core.

Read the entire article here.