Written by K.J. Drake |
Friday, July 7, 2023
To modify the core message of the gospel in order to receive what we think of as a proper hearing will lead to unfaithfulness. There are temptations within the evangelical church to compromise at the same places where theological liberalism was found defective: the doctrine of sin, character of God, and the accomplishment of the cross. The theocentric vision of salvation cannot be substituted for a human-centered mode of self-help or moralistic pursuit.

From Machen’s intervention in this now century-old controversy (see Part 1), twenty-first century American Christians should heed his warning and avoid temptations of minimizing or modifying the concept of salvation. We should reject adjusting the atonement, sin, and our view of God to meet the tastes or fads of the day, but rather have a clear-eyed focus on sin and the cross as the core of the gospel. Likewise, the dangers of sentimentality, now in therapeutic form, must be avoided and replaced with clear theological speech. Machen’s proper ordering of the doctrine of salvation and ethics should be imitated without giving into quietism or utilitarian applications of Christian doctrine. While theological liberalism is certainly not dead and gone, few are enticed to adopt it wholesale;[1] the more persistent danger is the unwary or unwise taking steps down the path liberalism tread ignorant of its inexorable downgrade towards unfaithfulness. In this article, I will offer a few entailments of Machen’s warning for the contemporary church.
Resist Accommodation
The beginning of the road to theological liberalism came with the attempt to accommodate the concepts of Scripture to modern values. What we have received in the Word of God is meant to be the guide to faithful life under Christ and by the Spirit for all ages. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). To modify the core message of the gospel in order to receive what we think of as a proper hearing will lead to unfaithfulness. There are temptations within the evangelical church to compromise at the same places where theological liberalism was found defective: the doctrine of sin, character of God, and the accomplishment of the cross. The theocentric vision of salvation cannot be substituted for a human-centered mode of self-help or moralistic pursuit.
See Sin Rightly
As with the failure of theological liberalism, the problems of the Church in late modernity begin with a distorted view of sin, which has been detached from the holiness of God. Sin, and therefore the forgiveness of sin, has increasingly been expressed in the therapeutic register. Carl Trueman has expressed the prevailing environment as “the cultures of psychological man: the only moral criterion that can be applied to behavior is whether it conduces to the feeling of well-being in the individuals concerned. Ethics, therefore, becomes a function of feeling.”[2] On this view, sin is that which makes me or others feel bad. This therapeutic faith can be traced partially to the liberal preaching that Machen challenged in the 1920s. As a historian of the social gospel has noted, “In many ways, Fosdick epitomized a broader movement toward exploring the psychological implications of religious faith, a movement that helped to spawn the wider development of therapeutic religious models in the aftermath of World War II.”[3] Such modifications can be observed in the contemporary Church through the popularity of pop psychologists like Brené Browne and her emphasis on shame, Jordan Peterson’s Jungian-tinged emphasis on personal responsibility, or the broader shift to speak of “brokenness” to the exclusion of guilt. These trends have a truth to them, but also error.
For instance, God does address our shame, and sin does cause brokenness. However, failure to see sin in a fundamentally theocentric frame, as Machen does, papers over its severity and cost. Sin rejects God, despoils our nature, and corrupts us entirely. Sin is the antithesis of all that is good, right, and true. Sin deserves death. Sin is not limited to the “really bad stuff,” but all thoughts, words, deeds, and inclinations of the human heart against the perfect divine will. One grasps the goodness of the gospel only after the terrible verdict against sin. “The account of that work is the ‘gospel,’ the ‘good news.’ It never could have been predicted, for sin deserves naught but eternal death. But God triumphed over sin through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.”[4] Accounting for the multifaceted nature of sin is necessary and a helpful way of communicating the word of God to our culture, but we must not fail to speak of its fundamental revolt against the Holy God.[5] Preaching about sin must account for the whole life and bring all our collective and individual violations of the divine will to light. No room ought to be granted to “respectable sins” either of the culture or the Church.
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Written by K.J. Drake |
Thursday, July 6, 2023
Theological liberalism presents not merely a sub-Christian view of salvation but a different conception of it entirely, which depends on and elevates humanity rather than God. Machen sharply contrasts the liberal view of salvation, Christ as example, with Christ as vicarious sufferer in the mode of legal penal substitution. Far from being an arcane and “subtle” theory, substitutionary atonement “is itself so simple that a child can understand it. ‘We deserved eternal death, but the Lord Jesus, because He loved us, died instead of us on the cross’”[4] This is the gospel.

Understanding salvation requires a picture of the world, its purpose, and ultimately its Creator, Savior, and Judge. For this reason, J. Gresham Machen discusses salvation only after the other foundational doctrines in Christianity and Liberalism.[1] In the first chapters he established the divergence between the Christian faith and modern theological liberalism regarding God, humanity, the Bible, and Christ. Machen then turns to the gospel, the way of salvation, in order to demonstrate their opposing concepts of humanity’s plight and reconciliation. He presents a theocentric vision of salvation that proclaims sin in its fullness and centers the cross of Jesus as the Triune God’s act in history to bring gracious redemption. The Christian faith and theological liberalism diverge on the need of salvation, the basis of salvation, the means of securing salvation, and the new reality brought about by the saving activity. Most fundamentally, “Liberalism finds salvation (so far as it is willing to speak at all of “salvation”) in man; Christianity finds it in an act of God.”[2] Machen will show us how orthodoxy Christianity and theological liberalism present difference accounts of atonement, sin, the character of God, and the instrument of salvation.
The parting of ways on salvation secures Machen’s thesis that, in fact and by honest assessment, Christianity and theological liberalism are different religions: “Despite the liberal use of traditional phraseology modern liberalism not only is a different religion from Christianity but belongs in a totally different class of religions.”[3] Each religious tradition presents some sort of problem-solution schema of the world. Something has gone terribly wrong; human existence is not as it is supposed to be. Theological liberalism presents not merely a sub-Christian view of salvation but a different conception of it entirely, which depends on and elevates humanity rather than God. Machen sharply contrasts the liberal view of salvation, Christ as example, with Christ as vicarious sufferer in the mode of legal penal substitution. Far from being an arcane and “subtle” theory, substitutionary atonement “is itself so simple that a child can understand it. ‘We deserved eternal death, but the Lord Jesus, because He loved us, died instead of us on the cross’”[4] This is the gospel.
Different Accounts of Atonement and Sin
Machen presents the modern liberal atonement theories in contradistinction from the Reformation view. Fundamentally, liberal theologians posit a subjective effect of the death of Christ on the human being rather than and objective accomplishment that alters the relation of the sinner to God. Broadly conceived, the liberal views of the atonement addressed by Machen fall under the category of moral influence theories or exemplarism. “The essence of it is that the death of Christ had an effect not upon God but only upon man.”[5] Machen delineates three varieties of these modern theories of Christ’s death, each of which attribute an exclusively revelatory effect to the cross of Christ.

The cross reveals the ultimate “example of self-sacrifice of us to emulate”
The cross reveals God’s hatred of sin therefore motivating us to do so as well
The cross reveals God’s love for us.[6]

Machen acknowledges that each of these points have some basis in biblical truth, but they do not address the underlying plight of the human person before the Holy God nor account for human inability because of sin. Such atonement theories portray the problem between God and humanity as one of knowledge rather than iniquity.
The heart of the division between Christianity and theological liberalism regarding atonement is different ideas of sin. As Machen explains in his chapter on Christ,
Without the conviction of sin there can be no appreciation of the uniqueness of Jesus; it is only when we contrast our sinfulness with His holiness that we appreciate the gulf which separates Him from the rest of the children of men. And without the conviction of sin there can be no understanding of the occasion for the supernatural act of God; without the conviction of sin, the good news of redemption seems to be an idle tale.[7]
Early-twentieth century liberalism, across the whole spectrum, maintained the idea of fundamental human goodness and inevitable progress through human will and action. Sin was recast in a utilitarian form as that which adversely effects human flourishing, with the Godward direction of sin minimized or rejected. For this reason, the traditional Protestant concepts of guilt, justification, and Christ’s substitutionary death were overturned. As Machen notes, “[Theological liberals] err in that they ignore the dreadful reality of guilt, and make a mere persuasion of the human will all that is needed for salvation.”[8] Under the liberal schema, humanity’s problem was ignorance and not condemnation; therefore, the solution of the cross was reimagined.
On the various subjective atonement theories presented by liberal theologians, the revelatory aspects of the cross float in the air, lacking grounding in history or theological truth.
But they [the revelatory aspects of the cross] are swallowed up in a far greater truth—that Christ died instead of us to present us faultless before the throne of God. Without that central truth, all the rest is devoid of real meaning: an example of self-sacrifice is useless to those who are under both the guilt and thralldom of sin; the knowledge of God’s hatred of sin can in itself bring only despair; an exhibition of the love of God is a mere display unless there was some underlying reason for the sacrifice.[9]
In rejecting these views, Machen has Harry Emerson Fosdick’s controversial sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” firmly in sight. He quotes Fosdick’s repudiation of penal substitution as an example of this point: “They speak with disgust of those who believe ‘that the blood of our Lord, shed in a substitutionary death, placates an alienated Deity and makes possible welcome for the returning sinner.’”[10] Fosdick, however, is not the only, or even the main, target of Machen’s criticism but a leading example of what he sees as the theological drift of the Church from the faith of the Bible.[11]

Different Accounts of the Character of God

Machen addresses two specific critiques of Christ’s death as a vicarious sacrifice: (1) how can one suffer for another and (2) what does this communicate about the character of God. Regarding the first, he writes, “modern liberalism has still more specific objections to the Christian doctrine of the cross. How can one person, it is asked, suffer for the sins of another? The thing, we are told, is absurd. Guilt, it is said, is personal; if I allow another man to suffer for my fault, my guilt is not thereby one whit diminished.”[12] But, Machen maintains, the death of Christ is not like this. Christ’s death was unique because his person is unique, as the God-man. “It is perfectly true that the Christ of modern naturalistic reconstruction never could have suffered for the sins of others; but it is very different in the case of the Lord of Glory.”[13]
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Written by K.J. Drake |
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
Today, we stand on the other side of Christ’s first coming and long for his ultimate return. As we live in this time between Christ’s first advent and his second, the interadventum, we live in faith that although he is bodily absent from us, the ascended Emmanuel has not abandoned us. 

In John‘s prologue we are given a transcendent perspective on the identity and mission of Jesus Christ. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)
Unlike the other Gospels that begin the story of Christ with his genealogy and virginal conception (Matthew and Luke) or his public ministry (Mark), John guides us behind and above these events and history itself to the eternal ground of Jesus’s identity: The Son of Mary is the eternal Son of God.
This is the essential mystery of Christmas—that the babe of Bethlehem is Emmanuel, God with us. But to truly be God with us; he must remain God without us. In the Incarnation, the Divine Son assumes a human nature, taking on a unique relation to his creation, without undergoing change to his eternal relations with the Father and the Holy Spirit. One in substance with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit—Blessed Trinity, and one in substance with us—Emmanuel. In the following article, I will seek to show from Scripture and Church History that in becoming everything that we are, excluding sin, Christ remained everything that he was, including omnipresent. Then, in the spirit of Christmas, I will offer a word of comfort and joy as we reflect on this truth.
If Jesus Christ, in coming into our human nature, is the true way to the Father and the full revelation of God, he must remain one with the Father in divinity. John combines both Jesus’s coming and his unique relationship with the Father in John 1:14, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.” To grasp what John means here by the glory of Christ we must not look only to the manger but to the eternal foundation of Christ’s identity as the only-begotten Son. For Christ to be God in human flesh he must also be God beyond human flesh.
Learning from Church History
This recognition that Christ was wholly present in his human nature and yet simultaneously beyond (extra) that nature as the eternal Word of the Father, who is transcendent and everywhere present, is often named the extra Calvinisticum.[1] However, despite the Genevan Reformer’s name given to this idea (which is actually better called the extra Carnem [beyond the flesh]), ample support exists in the Church Fathers and across the Christian tradition for this biblical idea. For instance, Athanasius can say:
For [Christ] was not, as might be imagined, circumscribed in the body, nor, while present in the body, was he absent elsewhere; nor, while he moved the body, was the universe left void of his working and providence; but, thing most marvelous, Word as he was, so far from being contained by anything, he rather contained all things himself.[2]
One should not think that God the Son was shrunk down or limited himself by becoming a human being. Rather, he remained who he eternally was with the Father and continued as the upholder of Creation (Col. 1:17; Heb. 1:3), while also taking to himself human particularity and weakness. This is the mystery the angels celebrate when they cry before the Shepherds, “Glory to God in the highest” (Luke 2:14).
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