Machen and Religious Liberalism, Old and New – Part 1
By Rick Plasterer, Juicy Ecumenism.
Pierce Taylor Hibbs, Senior Writer at Westminster Theological Seminary, spoke on the relevance of J. Gresham Machen’s classic “Christianity and Liberalism” for the contemporary world at the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology on April 27. He said he has been involved in its republication on its one hundred year anniversary (2023), and he sees contemporary challenges to the Christian faith as very similar to those that Machen addressed. His work at Westminster Seminary has focused on language, and its relationship to the Trinity.
Hibbs said that Christianity and Liberalism “seems like a book that could have been written not so long ago.” The republication of the book in 2023 was reviewed in May by Riley B. Case, and an extensive review of Machen’s analysis of liberalism was given by Bishop Timonthy Whittaker in 2019. Hibbs discussion is worth noting, however, as it shows how the old liberalism has become increasingly alien to historic Christianity under the impact of today’s therapeutic culture. Hibbs noted that the book’s style is not oriented to twenty-first century sensibilities, which favor treatment of a subject to by appeal to personal affinity and evaluation and a preference for accessibility to a popular audience. The book instead offers well ordered logical argument, with the author’s personality kept in the background.
Hibbs said that although people today may profess unconcern about logical consistency, all people in the early twenty-first century, whether religious or not, “have a longing to be fully known and fully loved.” What Hibbs calls “the new liberalism” has a “super emphasis on the sacredness of the self,” and this is a point of contact with Christian apologetics. Hibbs then went on to describe Machen’s analysis of the liberalism of his day and relate it to the new liberalism.
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