Christianity and Liberalism
When liberalism rewrites faith
Description
In 1923, a New Testament scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary published a slim, combative book with an unusually calm title: Christianity and Liberalism. J. Gresham Machen was not a household name outside the Presbyterian world, and he was writing into a fight that had been building for a generation. American Protestant churches were splitting, quietly at first and then loudly, over what the old creeds were still supposed to mean. On one side were people who wanted to keep the language of faith while updating its content for a scientific, modern age. Machen looked at that project and reached a conclusion that most of his contemporaries found either bracing or outrageous.
His claim was blunt. The liberal Christianity spreading through pulpits and divinity schools was not a softer, more open version of the historic faith. It was, he argued, a different religion entirely — one that happened to borrow Christian words, Christian buildings, and Christian sentiment while emptying them of the events and doctrines they had always described. The two things could not be blended, because they answered opposite questions in opposite ways. And if that was true, then the polite talk of a broad tent inside the churches was covering over a genuine divide.
What makes the book worth revisiting is that Machen refused to argue as a mere partisan. He tried to describe liberalism at its strongest and most sincere, then show precisely where it and Christianity part company. The result is less a sermon than a piece of intellectual mapmaking, drawing a line and daring everyone to see it.
The question we’re asking : When faith is modernized to survive, at what point does it stop being the same faith?What we’ll see : How Machen tests a well-meaning attempt to update Christianity, and finds two religions wearing one name.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — A quarrel that would not stay academic
By the early 1920s, the mainline Protestant churches in America were carrying a tension that could no longer be smoothed over. The nineteenth century had handed them a great deal to absorb: Darwin, biblical criticism from German universities, a confident sense that human progress was steady and measurable. A generation of pastors and professors concluded that Christianity had to adapt or be left behind, and adaptation meant loosening the grip of the old supernatural claims. Miracles, the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection — these could be treated as symbols, as poetry, as the outer shell of a deeper moral truth.
Machen taught Greek and New Testament at Princeton, and he watched this shift move from the seminaries into the denominations themselves. The Presbyterian church was arguing about whether candidates for ministry still had to affirm doctrines that many of their teachers now quietly regarded as optional. The famous flashpoint came in 1922, when the preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick asked from a New York pulpit whether the fundamentalists would win — and made plain that he hoped they would not. The question was no longer confined to journals. It was about who would ordain whom, and under what confession.
02Chapter 2 — Doctrine is not the enemy of religion
The liberal case, as Machen presents it, rests on a warm and appealing idea: Christianity is a life, not a doctrine. What matters is the experience of faith and the moral example of Jesus, not the theological scaffolding that later ages built around them. Creeds divide; the spirit of Christ unites. On this view, insisting on specific beliefs is a distraction from religion's real work, which is the transformation of character and the building of a better society.
Machen answers that this sounds humble but rests on a confusion. Christianity, he argues, was doctrinal from its very first days. The earliest preaching recorded in the New Testament was not primarily moral instruction; it was an announcement that something had happened — that Christ died for sins and rose again. That announcement is a claim about facts, and once you make a factual claim you have made doctrine. To strip the doctrine away is not to reach a purer core underneath. It is to remove the very thing the first Christians were talking about.
03Chapter 3 — Two accounts of God, man, and the trouble between them
Having set up the method, Machen walks through the great headings of the faith and shows the two systems diverging at each one. He starts with the doctrine of God and of man, because everything else follows from it. Historic Christianity holds that God is transcendent, holy, and personal, and that human beings are genuinely estranged from him by sin. Liberalism, Machen argues, tends to blur the distance — God becomes the friendly spirit at work within humanity and nature, and sin shrinks into imperfection or ignorance that education and effort can address.
That difference decides how the two read Jesus. For liberalism, Jesus is the supreme religious teacher and moral example, a man whose faith we are meant to share and imitate. For historic Christianity, Jesus is the object of faith, not merely its example — someone worshipped, not simply followed. Machen notes the awkwardness the liberal picture creates: the Jesus of the Gospels makes enormous claims about himself, and a teacher who says such things about himself is not easily filed under gentle moral guide. The historic church took those claims at face value; liberalism has to explain them away.
04Chapter 4 — The wall that Machen would not tear down
Step back from the specific doctrines and Machen's larger argument comes into view. A religion that rests on historical claims cannot be modernized the way a philosophy can be revised. You can update an argument by improving its reasoning; you cannot update an event by deciding it would be more convenient if it had happened differently. Christianity, on Machen's reading, staked itself on things it said had occurred in Palestine in the first century. Once a movement's identity is tied to reported facts, quietly reinterpreting those facts does not refine the movement. It replaces it while keeping the sign over the door.
This is why the book's coolest and most consequential move is a refusal of the merger. Everyone around Machen wanted a broad church that could hold both parties in a single fellowship, and that instinct felt generous. Machen regarded it as a category mistake dressed up as charity. If liberalism really is a distinct religion, then keeping the two under one roof does not produce unity; it produces confusion, with a shared vocabulary hiding an unshared faith. He would rather two honest churches than one dishonest one — and he was willing to pay the institutional price, which eventually cost him his place at Princeton.
05Conclusion
Machen wrote as a partisan in a church fight he would eventually lose within his own denomination, and the book carries the heat of that moment. But its argument outlasted the quarrel that produced it, because it was never really about Presbyterian ordination rules. It was about whether the meaning of a word can be quietly hollowed out while the word stays in use — and about the peculiar dishonesty that sets in when the answer is yes and nobody says so aloud.
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