Machen Saw What was Coming
In the machinery of modern industry and government, and in worldly, pragmatic ideologies, Machen saw a real threat to liberty, society, and the church. The only solution for him was the knowledge of a God who cared enough to send his Son, beneath whose cross and in whose church is the only refuge from the decay and depravity of the world.
J. Gresham Machen was certainly prescient about the havoc theological liberalism would wreak on the mainline churches in the 20th century. He also saw the rise of fascism and ethnonationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. We would do well to consider those warnings today.
Machen’s observations about the church and the world in his great short essay Mountains and Why We Love Them were published in 1933 (based on a mountain-climbing trip of the previous year) and have never been more relevant. In 1932 Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was probably more well-known to most Americans than Adolf Hitler, who lost the German presidential election that year. But Machen, who had studied in Germany and knew it well, was keenly aware of Hitler’s threat. He looked out across Europe from a peak in the Swiss Alps and did not like what he saw:
Then there is something else about that view from the Matterhorn. I felt it partly at least as I stood there, and I wonder whether you can feel it with me. It is this. You are standing there not in any ordinary country, but in the very midst of Europe, looking out from its very centre. Germany just beyond where you can see to the northeast, Italy to the south, France beyond those snows of Mont Blanc. There, in that glorious round spread out before you, that land of Europe, humanity has put forth its best. There it has struggled; there it has fallen; there it has looked upward to God. The history of the race seems to pass before you in an instant of time, concentrated in that fairest of all the lands of the earth. You think of the great men whose memories you love, the men who have struggled there in those countries below you, who have struggled for light and freedom, struggled for beauty, struggled above all for God’s Word. And then you think of the present and its decadence and its slavery, and you desire to weep. It is a pathetic thing to contemplate the history of mankind.
Here it seems that Machen had in view modernity and its dehumanizing machinery (of state and of steel) and its godless “morality.” See the introductory chapter of Christianity and Liberalism (written 10 years before) to understand more fully what Machen had in mind. In that book, Machen had extolled “the great principles of Anglo-Saxon liberty,” meaning the tradition of individual rights pioneered in the British Isles.
Machen goes on to speak of the evil ends that modernity’s machines and men were beginning to serve:
I know that there are people who tell us contemptuously that always there are croakers who look always to the past, croakers who think that the good old times are the best. But I for my part refuse to acquiesce in this relativism which refuses to take stock of the times in which we are living. It does seem to me that there can never be any true advance, and above all there can never be any true prayer, unless a man does pause occasionally, as on some mountain vantage ground, to try, at least, to evaluate the age in which he is living. And when I do that, I cannot for the life of me see how any man with even the slightest knowledge of history can help recognizing the fact that we are living in a time of sad decadence—a decadence only thinly disguised by the material achievements of our age, which already are beginning to pall on us like a new toy. When Mussolini makes war deliberately and openly upon democracy and freedom, and is much admired for doing so even in countries like ours; when an ignorant ruffian is dictator of Germany, until recently the most highly educated country in the world—when we contemplate these things I do not see how we can possibly help seeing that something is radically wrong. Just read the latest utterances of our own General Johnson, his cheap and vulgar abuse of a recent appointee of our President, the cheap tirades in which he develops his view that economics are bunk—and then compare that kind of thing with the state papers of a Jefferson or a Washington—and you will inevitably come to the conclusion that we are living in a time when decadence has set in on a gigantic scale.
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The Cancel Cult
The New Puritans is a passionate and erudite exposé of the modern-day social-justice movement. With clarity and precision, Doyle exposes its countless flaws and hypocrisies. His book is an essential guide for anyone looking to understand why the culture war has grown so hot.
The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, by Andrew Doyle (Constable, 336 pp., $28.99)
We often hear that cancel culture does not exist, that it’s a myth concocted by right-wing conspiracy theorists to provoke a culture war. With some irony, the purveyors of this falsehood tend to call themselves free-speech advocates. They use various methods of coercion, including gaslighting, to sow doubt. How many times have free-speech absolutists been met with the “yes, but” argument? Sure, I believe in free speech, but there must be limits. You can’t just say anything you want.
Jerry Sadowitz recently learned this pattern all too well. During the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the magician-cum-comic saw his scheduled performance at the Pleasance Theatre canceled for “offensive content,” which the theater alleged consisted of “racism, sexism, homophobia and misogyny.” The theater’s director, Anthony Alderson, released a statement that exemplified doublespeak. “The Pleasance is a venue that champions freedom of speech and we do not censor comedians’ material,” it read. And then came the “but.” “This type of material has no place on the festival and the Pleasance will not be presenting [Sadowitz’s] second and final show.”
Or you could have obscenities yelled at you in public. That’s what happened to the political satirist and writer Andrew Doyle. While he was enjoying a drink with friends in a Soho bar, a man called him “a f—ing Nazi c—t.” The man was enraged at Doyle for voting for Brexit and, writing as his alter-ego Titania McGrath, for satirizing left-wing ideas on Twitter. It turns out that this man was no stranger, but the son of a close friend. Doyle, in fact, is his godfather.
What is happening? Why do public figures, comics not least among them, live in fear of losing their livelihoods? Doyle recalls the above incident in the prologue to his book, The New Puritans, which he wrote as an attempt to answer these questions.Related Posts:
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How to Read Historical Narrative
When reading these narratives, read carefully and consider all the details, both what is included and what is not. Finally, and most importantly, work hard to understand how all the Bible’s individual narrative units come together in one grand narrative, climaxing in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
The Bible records the covenantal narrative about God’s creation of all things, humanity’s fall into sin, redemption through the covenant of grace and its various administrations, and the consummation of all things in eschatological glory. God Himself is the master narrator as the One who declares the end from the beginning (Isa. 46:10) and who is Himself the first and the last (Isa. 44:6; Isa. 48:12). It is an ancient narrative told over a span of some fifteen hundred years in three different languages. The literary devices of the ancient world are not always like our own, so it can be challenging to understand what we encounter in these accounts. What follows, therefore, are three reading strategies that can help us better understand and appreciate the art of the ancient historical narrative as set forth in the Bible.
1. Understand that the unified narrative of the Bible is not always set forth in chronological order.
This can be seen in an ancient literary technique whereby the author makes a statement and then circles back to focus on important details about the event itself or how something came to be. Sometimes in the Bible, theology trumps chronology in the arrangement of recorded events. For example, Genesis 2 begins with a description of the seventh day of creation (vv. 1–3), but the rest of the chapter steps back in time to reconsider the events of day six in more detail (vv. 4–25). Genesis 10 records the names and descendants of Noah, the so-called table of nations, listed “by their clans, their languages, their lands, and their nations” (Gen. 10:31). However, in the very next chapter, we return to the time when there was only one clan, language, land, and nation in order to focus on the events of the tower of Babel. The same is true of 1 Samuel 16 and 17. At the end of chapter 1 Samuel 16, David is loved by Saul and serving full-time as his armor-bearer.
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Engaging CT’s Piece on “Side B Christians”
There is so much more to this conversation than Mason’s article lets on. There are serious, glaring theological problems with “Side B Christianity,” but Mason doesn’t address them. Rather, she caricatures and straw-man’s the sincere biblical and theological issues raised by those to her right. Nevertheless, these problems with the Side B paradigm endure, and Christians must engage them head-on with biblical discernment.
Christianity Today has published an article by a “Side B Christian” named Bekah Mason. For those unfamiliar with this terminology, so-called “Side A Christians” are those who believe that they can follow Christ while affirming homosexual identity and practice. “Side B Christians” are those who believe that following Christ means affirming gay identity while eschewing gay sexual behavior. Mason’s article is about the plight of “Side B Christians” who feel rejected both by LGBT folks on their left and by “orthodox churches” on their right. Mason argues that “Side B Christians are not a threat but an asset to orthodox churches.”
Readers would do well to reckon not only with the article’s argument but also with its problems. For example, Mason treats “Side B Christianity” as if its theological framework were uncontroversial. On her account, Side B Christians are simply people who are trying to be faithful to Christ in the face of “acerbic” conservatives who won’t let them be. But that is a caricature of the debate that has unfolded over the last 8 years or so.
“Side B Christians” treat homosexual orientation not as sin to be lamented but as an identity to be affirmed. Yes, they agree with Christians to their right that homosexual behavior is sinful and fallen, but they nevertheless don’t want to consign homosexual identity to a similar category. From Wes Hill arguing that being gay is “sanctifiable” to Grant Hartley‘s “Redeeming Queer Culture” to Gregory Coles‘ suggestion that gay orientation may be an aspect of God’s original creation design, it is clear that “Side B” folks aim to convince Christians that at least part of homosexuality ought to be redeemed rather than repented of. I don’t believe that Mason’s article is forthrightly dealing with these problems. Rather, she writes as if the debate is mainly due to the irrational rigidity of conservatives.
Mason also caricatures those to her right by claiming, “From conservative commenters, we hear that any acknowledgment of same-sex attraction is sinful.” I am one of the primary drafters of The Nashville Statement, and I know personally all of the other primary drafters. I can’t think of a single one who would agree with that statement. No responsible pastor would ever make such an asinine claim. The truth is that those of us who affirm Nashville believe that Christians should acknowledge and confess their sin no matter what it is. They should be honest about and face their own temptations and find help and strength from Christ to be faithful in the struggle. No one that I know of has argued anywhere that “any acknowledgement of same-sex attraction is sinful.” That claim simply isn’t true of any of the major parties to this conversation.
What we have argued is that same-sex sexual desire is sinful and that faithful Christians should repent of those desires whenever they experience them. They should not found an identity on such desires as though they were to be affirmed or commended. If gay orientation is any part of human identity, it would simply be an expression of the flesh. But the flesh is nothing to affirm or to celebrate. On the contrary, it is something daily to be put to death. The remnants of our sinful nature will be eradicated at the new creation, and that is why we must mortify our flesh even now (Romans 8:13).
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