This book is simply outstanding. Please read it.
The theological controversies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries sundered the church, in many ways irreparably. Just as it has been noted that Western Philosophy is merely a series of footnotes on Plato, it could well be said that the history of the American church in the 20th and early 21st centuries is but a series of footnotes on the Modernism/Christianity debate.
The main question of Modernism/Liberalism is this: How can Christianity continue in the face of the destruction of its core assumptions by the discoveries of modern science? The answer it gives is by re-tooling the Christian message to exclude or render into metaphor any reference to the supernatural, and reduce Jesus of Nazareth to a faith healer and moral teacher on the level of Confucius, the Buddha, or Lao Tzu. Jesus showed us the way to live our lives in such a way as to foster more empathy, concern, and zeal for social improvement of those less fortunate, a schema he called the "Kingdom of Heaven." We don't need to believe in something as implausible as virgin birth, or vicarious atonement, or supernatural resurrection, in order to lean in to living the life that Jesus advocated.
But, just as Pierre Bosquet, an observer of the charge of the Light Brigade, is said to have quipped:
C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre: c'est de la folie ("It is magnificent, but it is not war: it is madness"), and Richard Bentley, referring to Alexander Pope's lyrical translation of the Iliad, told him that "it is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope; but you must not call it Homer," Modernism/Liberalism might be, to some, a brilliant compromise between the consolations of faith and the findings of science, but we mustn't be snookered into calling it Christianity. It most emphatically isn't.
Machen makes this point definitively, and to my knowledge it hasn't been refuted in the 94 years since. Going point by point, he compares and contrasts Christianity and Liberalism and refutes the notion that they are the same. He doesn't argue against the truth of Liberalism, he just argues, successfully in my opinion, that when Liberalism claims to be Christianity it misspeaks.
The sad part is that people who don't know the difference probably can't be bothered to read this book.
The prose of the early 20th century retained the formality that gave elegance to the writings of the 18th and 19th centuries, but remains imminently readable.
I started seeing Liberalism behind every bush for a little while after I finished this, but there have been new developments since then, which led me to a study of Neo-Orthodoxy and the mid-20th century. I'm now exploring Barth, Tillich, Van Til, and RC Sproul, and as things approach the present day, the context and perspective I'm getting is really helping me understand the present controversies. Even the verbage that Evangelicals use is carefully crafted to avoid the heresies of the last hundred years.
It's fun to see where we came from. As my dad always told us growing up: "The people who know, know."
