“America has been no exception to this decadence (experienced by Europe since the end of WW I). Liberty is being threatened and, there is coming before us in the near future, the specter of the hopeless treadmill of a collectivist state.
Certainly when we take the world as a whole, we are obliged to see that the foundations of liberty and honesty are being destroyed, and the slow achievements of centuries are being thrown recklessly away.
In such a time of kaleidoscopic changes, is there anything that remains unchanged? When so many things have proved to be untrustworthy, is there anything that we can trust?
One point is at least clear – we cannot trust the Church. The visible Church, the church as it now actually exists upon this earth has fallen too often into error and sin.”
J. Gresham Machen
The Christian View Of Man
Published 1936
Matters were very bad in Machen’s time. However 90 years later the fruit of the theology that Machen was witnessing is now being harvested by the tractor-trailer loads. Most of us would rightly think that it would be an incredible blessing to only have to deal with the error and sin that Machen was dealing with in 1936. Yet, Machen was not in error here. He lived to see the beginning rot and of understanding where it was going. Because he had that kind of prophetic insight to understand “ideas have consequences” he was hated like very few men of his time. Such is a prophet’s reward.
Machen’s observation remains sadly true. We cannot trust the visible Church… especially those church denominations that were once touted as “conservative.” Conservative denominations no longer exist. There may be conservative… (better to say Dissident) Christian congregations exist but denominationally there is nowhere to place one’s trust.
Machen though, was not only right about the Church of his era he was correct about the collectivist government that was descending upon Americans. He lived through the Wilson administration and while most Americans don’t know their history, the Wilson administration was a time of the great restraining of liberty in the US. Things had been relaxed somewhat in the intervening 17 years between the end of the Wilson administration and the time of Machen’s writing this but there is no doubt he could begin to see what was bubbling up around him. FDR had come to power and had introduced the alphabet soup legislation which was all about ushering in a collectivist state. Machen was no fool. He could read the times. Others writing about the same time, such as Christopher Dawson, were saying similar things to what Machen is saying here.
The world changed during these men’s lifetime. World War I had ended old Christendom and they were insightful enough to know that massive change had settled upon them.
We now live in the continued stream of that change. We have gone, since the time of Machen, from Revolution to Revolution as pursued incrementally. Because we live in that incremental Revolutionary change most people don’t notice it. Some do and some see that the foundations were long ago destroyed. The message today is not “the end is coming.” The message today is, “the end has come and we have to reverse and rebuild.”
And as Machen notes above… the Church will be that Institution that will provide the most opposition to re-fashioning a new Christendom. It already is proving that all the time.
