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.
Machen and Early Twentieth Century Liberalism
The core of liberalism can be hard to pin down, because it claims continuity with the past while introducing radical changes. But Hibbs said that “ideologies and value systems are like weather patterns, we can map them and trace their movements, but when we’re out in the world, we just see the elements.” Because they can’t be seen, people may think they can practically ignore them. But ideologies are “suggesting and supplanting, shaping and directing,” and are effective “because we can’t easily see them.” Machen focused on “the weather pattern of the theological liberalism” of his day and found it radically different from Christianity. Hibbs maintains that the theological liberalism of Machen’s day “lies beneath the liberalism of our own day,” which he calls “the new liberalism.” He believes that we must respond to the new liberalism “the same way” as the old liberalism was met. This is “a soul-sensitive and loving articulation of Biblical truth.”
Five features were identified of the theological liberalism Machen addressed, which we also see, with modifications, in our own day. These were 1) naturalism, 2) Scripture as inspiring, not inspired. 3) moral living, 4) “the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man,” and 5) paganism (as specially defined).
On the first point, liberalism rejects doctrines held to be of supernatural origin “in favor of naturally lived experience.” Biblical inspiration, Christ’s virgin birth, miracles, and resurrection are set aside, or at least rhetorically minimized and backgrounded to the imperative of moral living. This first point (naturalism) Machen identified as “the root” of liberalism. There are no supernatural interventions in the course of nature. Because liberalism attacks the supernatural origin of Christianity, it is really a different religion than Christianity. This leads to the second point, which is that the Bible may inspire to truly moral living, but we must not take it as an authority free from error. “It’s still a human book, written by human authors.” Thus the various things that it has to say may be wrong, or simply the product of the culture of the day and its values. This ties liberalism in with pluralism, which sees many different religious viewpoints as proper.
On the third point, moral living is the true objective of liberalism. Jesus is accepted as a prophet, but not a priest or king. Prophets, Hibbs observed, would exhort to right living. But Jesus’ roles as priest and king contradicts naturalism. The priestly role implies a need for salvation, and kingship would mandate submission to the divine will over human will. But if Jesus was only a prophet, he then he was just another sage, and even his admonitions are fallible.
On the fourth point, “the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man,” Hibbs said that we can consider this to be essentially religious pluralism. Machen often referred to this in Christianity and Liberalism, but Hibbs said that its meaning is “somewhat vague.” He suggested “the unified familial nature of humanity” as a possible meaning. God’s immanence was emphasized while his transcendence was de-emphasized or denied. The closeness of God and man was emphasized. From a Biblical standpoint, while the unity of the human race is clearly the truth, God also chooses people to be his own people. Liberalism, on the other hand, depicted “God as a universally accepting divine parent.” But such a deity is not the Biblical God.
On the fifth point, theological liberalism in Machen’s day embraced paganism, although this is not to be understood simply as non-Christian or pagan religion. What Machen meant was “that view of life, which finds the highest goal of human existence in the healthy and harmonious and joyous development of existing human faculties.” Hibbs further quoted Charles Taylor to say that paganism recognizes no goal beyond human flourishing in this world.
Beyond these five points, Hibbs said that deeply embedded in the liberalism of Machen’s day and our own is, in Machen’s terms, “a loss of the consciousness of sin.” This means that there is no felt need for the Christian gospel. Humanity does not stand in need of correction by any external authority, but only self-improvement. But this means that “we’re left on our own.” Thus, “God seems irrelevant, and hence so does Christ, and the sin he came to save us from.” Thus, Hibbs said, the “loss of the consciousness of sin puts humanity in a very dark place.” It is “a cement wall room of self, with no windows and no doors.” This “darkened room of self is one of the markers of … the new liberalism.”
The New Liberalism
The spirit of political liberalism of Machen’s day informed its theological liberalism, and it continues to inform today’s liberalism in its basics. It emphasized individualism and freedom. The individual has rights against any external authority, whether governmental or religious. “Any claim to authority over the individual is suspect.” This would include the claims of God’s holiness, or Christ’s exclusive salvation, or Scripture over personal choices. Liberal engagement with its anti-authoritarian arguments has become less prominent as the orthodox past has receded with time, while “naturalism has grown stronger,” Hibbs believes.
The consequence for Scripture is that “Scripture as inspiring has sunk to Scripture as expiring.” In the popular culture in which the new liberalism lives, the Bible has been largely eliminated as any source of authority, while “moral living” now means “a radical individualism.” Personal choices are deemed right particularly if they are aimed at exciting challenges or result in “the most good feeling” about oneself. “Being good becomes feeling good.”
The old liberal slogan of “the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man” has dissolved in our day as a result of “tribalism, and what some have called ‘epistemic crisis.’” This is a matter of “who can be trusted to speak the truth.” Finally, Hibbs said that “the paganism of the 1920s has grown in monstrosity to producing widespread consumerism, and a crushing weight of fierce competitiveness.” People want to live “your best life now.”
Thus, “the new liberalism is ‘the age of the individual, the age of the self,’ where all values and morals are restricted to the subjective realm. What’s inside of us must determine what’s outside of us.” Hibbs summarized the new liberalism by saying that it is “all about the therapeutic, psychological self.”
He then went on to analyze this extension to religious liberalism, which is, if anything, even more alienated from Biblical Christianity than the liberalism of Machen’s day. His comments will be reviewed in a subsequent article.
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