“A terrible crisis unquestionably has arisen in the Church. In the ministry of evangelical churches are to be found hosts of those who reject the gospel of Christ. By the equivocal use of traditional phrases, by the representation of differences of opinion as though they were only differences about the interpretation of the Bible, entrance into the Church was secured for those who are hostile to the very foundations of the faith.”
Christianity & Liberalism
One point covered yesterday in Sunday School as we continue to work through Machen’s “Christianity & Liberalism” is that Liberals are forever accusing Biblical Christians of having a “mean” God and a “mean” faith. Their reasons for their existence, in part, is to give us a kinder and gentler Christianity. However, the ironic part here is that the Christianity of the liberal is an example of “The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.” Liberal Christianity, that seeks to get rid of all the “cringe factor” in Biblical Christianity is, in point of fact, the cruelest and meanest “Christianity” going. It yields a God who cannot save, a Christ that is not God, a salvation that is only experiential and emotional, and a anthropology that tells man he is basically good and just needs a few tweeks. It is the meanest of all faiths because it leaves men damned.
Machen was dealing with men who had emptied Christianity of its historical and doctrinal meaning and were refilling it with a content that was not Christian in the least. We fight the same battle today in our Churches with that problem. “Christianities” like R2K, Federal Vision, Dispensationalism, New Perspective on Paul, Roman Catholicism, Arminianism, Pentecostalism, all empty Christianity of its original historical and doctrinal content in favor of a redefined Christianity that is no Christianity.
Machen wrote “Christianity and Liberalism,” but today we could write books titled “Christianity and R2K,” “Christianity and Federal Vision,” “Christianity and Arminianism,” etc. because it is all bogus Christianity and it is all mean and cruel to those who embrace it.