Progressive Ideology and the Downfall of Mainline Denominations
by Riley B Case, Juicy Ecumenism:
Several months ago WORLD magazine recognized as its 2023 book of the year J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, which is not a new book but a 100-year old reprint.
The book contrasts orthodox Christianity with religious liberalism and argues that the two are not different interpretations of the same religion but are, in fact, two different religions. Written at the height of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, the book was controversial at the time of publication 100-years ago. Machen was a professor at Princeton Seminary, one of the last hold-outs against religious modernism in the mainline denominations.
By 1926 the leading religious journal of the day, the Christian Century, would announce that the fundamentalist-modernist controversy was over and the fundamentalists had lost. Henceforth, that perspective on Christianity would sink further into obscurity and irrelevance, eventually fading into oblivion. A few years after his book was published Machen was “defrocked” by the Presbyterian Church. He went on to found Westminster Seminary and to form the Reformed Presbyterian Church.
Christianity Today listed Christianity and Liberalism as one of the 100 most influential books of the 20th Century. I first read the book in 1973, fifty years after its first publication, and remarked in my notes that the book was still as relevant as when first published. Fifty years after, I would agree with World magazine that it is even more relevant.
Today it can be argued that Machen’s perspective was correct and his critics were wrong. It is not that “fundamentalism” (conservative Christianity) was dying and modernism was the wave of the future. It is rather that the Christianity represented by the modernist leaders of the mainline churches is dying and that evangelical and traditionalist Christianity, so spurned by the modernists of 100 years ago, is the best hope for the future of the faith.
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