The Present Emergency

I want to pull another quote from Machen. Modern culture is here in conflict with the Bible. The church is in perplexity. She is trying to compromise. She is saying, peace, peace, when there is no peace. And rapidly, she is losing her power. The time has come when she must choose. That was Stephen Nichols reading a quote from J. Gresham Machen, calling the church of the early 20th century to pick a side, compromise and follow culture, or stand firm upon the Bible.

You're listening to Renewing Your Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham. In every age, the church must be bold in its proclamation of the gospel and defense of the truth. Well, a hundred years ago, J. Gresham Machen drew a line in the sand with the release of his now classic book, Christianity and Liberalism. And I'm so pleased that Ligonier Ministries has just released a special 100th anniversary edition of that book, and you can request your copy at renewingyourmind.org. All week, Ligonier teaching fellow and president of Reformation Bible College, Stephen Nichols, will be introducing us to Machen and walking us through Christianity and Liberalism.

So, to encourage us to stand firm and not compromise in our day, here's Dr. Nichols. On Sunday afternoons in 1935, on WIP, a radio station in Philadelphia, J. Gresham Machen went on the air to give what essentially were devotionals or just little radio talks about the Bible. It was suggested to him by one of the trustees at Westminster Seminary that this would be a good idea to raise some interest in the seminary in the Philadelphia area, perhaps even raise some support for the seminary in the Philadelphia area. Of course, Machen quite agreed with that, but he also saw it as an opportunity to proclaim the gospel, to send the gospel out over those radio waves on a Sunday afternoon in Philadelphia. The very first radio address that Machen gave was entitled, The Present Emergency and How to Meet It. Now, what amounted to his first paragraph or the first sentences that he said on that radio address were a list of the particular emergencies that were facing Philadelphians and Americans in 1935. If you were to write a list of what is the present emergency today, what are some specific things on the list?

If you want to go ahead and write it down on paper, you can. If you just want to make a sort of mental list of what are those present emergencies that we are facing. It's interesting that as Machen was putting these radio addresses out, he was thinking of how to help these people think about how theology was engaging with their life.

But he started with this issue of the present emergencies. Well, hopefully you've had a chance to put a few things down on your list. I won't ask you to read what your list is. If we had you read your list, it would sort of date this teaching series very quickly. But here was Machen's list.

Are you ready? The present emergencies or the things that would cause anxieties. Number one, moving off of the gold standard. Right. So he mentions that. Number two, he talks about unemployment. This is still a few years after the Great Depression. So he talks about unemployment. Then he talks about the NRA. Now, in 1935, the NRA was the National Recovery Administration. It was one of the New Deal programs, and of course, it was part of that response to the Great Depression. And then he mentions the brain trust, and the brain trust was that circle of intimate and close advisors to FDR.

They were his advisors. So isn't it interesting that in 1935, these were all the compelling issues that not just Machen would identify as an emergency, but were seen as an emergency. But then Machen says this, and I have a copy of that radio address. Machen says, I could talk about all these things. And he says, these are important things, and they impact people's lives. And so they have bearing on our life today.

But I'm going to talk to you about something else. And he says, instead, I'm going to talk to you about God and about an unseen world. He goes on to talk about how the seen world, right, the visible world, those pressures, the tangible pressures that are around us. He says they're so, they press on us so much, they become all-consuming. They sort of blind us to anything else, and it's all we see. And what Machen is trying to say in this very first radio address, and he ends up recording 50 of these, and they get aired over 35 and into 1936, and then even a couple just into 1937, they get aired after he died.

They were recorded in December, and he dies on January 1, 1937. But in the very first of these 50 addresses, he's teeing them up, and he's saying, you have all these pressures, not just these national pressures, but you have individual pressures. The seen world, and sometimes you feel like the seen world is caving in on you, right? He's saying that's not what's ultimate. That's not the emergency. The emergency is God and the unseen world. And the ultimate issue is not your standing in light of these seen crises. The ultimate issue is your standing in light of the ultimate emergency, your standing before God. Machen will go on to say, and maybe you feel like this is a description of this moment, Machen will go on to say, the world is weary and perplexed today.

Well, how is it with you? Are you contented with your lives as they are now? I suppose that many of you are, but some of you I know are discontented.

You're looking for something entirely different from that which you now possess. That is true of riches as well as of poor. It has little to do with your particular situation in this world. To such hungry souls, I think I have something to say. I think I have something to say to you in this little series of talks. And there are so many hungry souls today.

I mean, there's a real beauty there. I think on the one hand, you see Machen's just sympathy for people. It comes through. He wants to truly help them with what he has to offer. Now, he goes on to say, okay, you're a hungry soul.

Where are you going to find food? He says, it's not going to come from yourself, and it's not going to come from me. So, he's not setting himself up as some self-help guru who is going to turn over, you know, the keys to success and the prosperous life. He says, you're not going to find it in yourself.

You're not going to find it in me. You're only going to find it in an old book. And then he says, I'll see you next week.

And he goes off the air. But that's his opening address. And I want to start there because I think it very much speaks to what Machen was about. And not only does it speak to what Machen was about, but I think it also speaks to why we are talking about Machen right now, and why we're going to spend twelve episodes together exploring J. Gresham Machen and his book from 1923. So, I mean, that's an old book. Of course, the old book he's talking about is millennia old.

His book is soon a hundred years old, Christian liberalism. Why are we talking about this? Because no matter what age you live in, you're going to talk about the present emergency.

You're always going to be talking about it. In 1935 was the present emergency. Hitler was off the horizon, but if anyone was paying attention, you could tell that Europe was not settled.

World War I did not settle it, and you knew that. It was after the Great Depression and the slow recovery of that moment. So, it was a perplexing time. Many of the cultural elites, the intellectual elites of the 1930s, were propounding totally new ideas that had not hitherto been circulated in American culture. When Machen says it was a perplexing time, he was right.

It was the 1930s. What about the 2020s? Is it a perplexing time? But we could go back to the first century and say, that was the time of a present emergency. We could go to the third and fourth centuries in the early church. We could go to that century we loved to visit, the sixteenth century.

I think you could say in 1517, there was a present emergency. The reason I mention this, and the reason I want to spend some time on this, is ultimately we spend time with Machen because Machen gives us perspective. He gives us perspective both on the moment in which we find ourselves, and he gives us perspective on the answer.

So, I think he's worth spending time with. Just as we're beginning here, as we're laying a foundation here, I want to pull another quote from Machen. This comes from 1915. This was his inaugural lecture as a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. He had been a lecturer, but this was now his promotion to assistant professor.

And it was a tradition then at Princeton that when a professor had a promotion, they would give their lecture in Miller Chapel there on the campus of the seminary, and then it would be published in the Princeton Theological Review. And so, Machen gives his. Listen to how he ends it. Modern culture is here in conflict with the Bible. The church is in perplexity. She is trying to compromise. She is saying, peace, peace, when there is no peace. And rapidly, she is losing her power.

The time has come when she must choose. So, here's what's happening. If we go to this time period of the 1910s to 1937, the time of Machen passed his early education, and to his adult years and his vocation as a professor, as a pastor, as an author, if we come into this time period, what was going on in the culture was modernism. The issue is, how do we respond? And so, there were many in the church that said, we can accommodate modernism. We can learn what modernism has to say about human beings. We can learn what modernism has to say about Scripture. We can learn what modernism has to say about God and salvation, and we can bring that into the church so that we as a church can continue to have a voice to modernist culture, a culture that wants to sort of shove God out and shove the Bible out.

And people in the church, certain people in the church are saying, hold on, hold on. We don't have to go there just yet. We can compromise.

Right? That's what Machen says. There's a modern culture. It's in conflict with the Bible. And there's a group that says, hey, let's just compromise.

This is what Machen says to that. God grant she may choose a right. God grant the church may decide for the Bible. The Bible is despised. To the Jews, a stumbling block.

To the Greeks, foolishness. But the Bible is right. God is not a name for the totality of things, but an awful, mysterious, holy person. Not a God who is with us in the modern sense. Not a God who has nothing to offer us, but what we have already. But a God who from the heaven of his awful holiness has of his own free grace had pity on our bondage and sent his Son to deliver us from the present evil world and receive us into the glorious freedom of communion with himself.

Machen fundamentally is saying here in 1915, the issue is this. The Bible and the message of the Bible. We can get all caught up in our present circumstances, and we can allow those present circumstances to dictate our response to those present circumstances, or we can rise above that. We can get past what is on the surface, and we can get to the ultimate. We can get past the emergency and crisis of the moment and get to the ultimate crisis. We can get past the gurus and the teachers and the cultural gatekeepers of the moment, and we can get to the true voice of wisdom. We can get past the false messages of salvation, human betterment or progress, whatever that means.

Things just get better. We can get past those messages of salvation and get to the ultimate message of salvation, of new life and forgiveness of sin in Jesus Christ. This was very important to Machen. By ending his inaugural lecture as a professor, he's saying, this is what matters to me. And as I begin my career as a professor and an author and serving the church as a scholar, this is what I'm going to be about.

I'm going to be about the Bible and God and salvation. Well, how do you do, right? Well, let's move ahead to 1933. So, in 1933, Machen says, number one, we have a lot of problems in this world. And when you have problems and you've got to solve them, you need a place to stand. And the only place to stand is the Word of God.

So, so far, Machen is saying nothing different from 1915 to 1933, nothing different. Then he says, this is the answer that I give to the pressing questions that are before us. What is the responsibility of the church in this new age?

It is the same as its responsibility in every age. It is to testify that this world is lost in sin, that the span of human life, no, all the length of human history is an infinitesimal island, an infinitesimal island, not just the span of a life, but go ahead and throw in all of human history. That is but an infinitesimal island in the awful depths of eternity. There is one truth. There is a mysterious, holy, living God, Creator of all, Upholder of all, infinitely beyond all, and He has revealed Himself to us in His Word.

This is a consistent message of Machen. Now, along these decades from 1910s and into the 20s and into the 30s, he gets into all kinds of particular issues. He gets into the NRA, the National Recovery Administration. He gets into German scholarship that was dominating the scene, both in Europe and in the American universities and in the American seminaries.

He tangles with a very popular novelist who was also a missionary, and her name was Pearl Buck. He gets into all sorts of particular issues through the 10s and the 20s and the 30s, and we're going to walk through those together in the next episode. He even is involved in World War I.

He works for the YMCA through World War I, and we'll talk about that. But as he's involved in all of those particular issues, at every point he's looking past the particular issue to the ultimate issue in the ultimate solution, and that's why I find Machen so helpful. He's helpful on the particulars, but he's helpful for us to keep our eye on that big picture, to keep our eye on that perspective. One of his students at Princeton, and then followed him from Princeton over to Westminster Seminary was Alan McRae, and Alan McRae went on to be a minister and also involved with the seminary as well. And at one point he says this of Machen, all through the history of the church there has been a ceaseless struggle to maintain the truth.

Now, this should not surprise us. Before we even get out of the New Testament, we find this struggle. We find the apostles themselves dealing with it. We could go to any number of places in the epistles where you see the apostles struggling to maintain the truth. We see this with Paul in churches that he planted, that there were struggles to maintain the truth. But verses that bring this right to a laser beam focus for us are the opening verses of the book of Jude.

Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ, brother of James, to those who are called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ, may mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you. Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, Jude had these plans of writing about just how wonderful the Christian life is. I intended to write to you about our common salvation and the unity that we have and the union that we have in Christ and with each other and all of the good things that flow from that. And from there, what a great platform that we can go off and be the church. What a great epistle that would have been.

But he couldn't write it. Although that's what I wanted to write, he says, I find it necessary to write appealing to you, beseeching you, pleading with you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. It's like a prize fighter in the ring with a formidable challenger. And it's round after round after round, blow after blow, standing there, toe to toe, contending for the faith.

This is in the pages of the New Testament. There was a ceaseless struggle to maintain the truth. And this is what Machen found in the 1930s.

But you could go back to it. You could go right, hop into the third and fourth century. There was a struggle to maintain the truth of who Jesus Christ is. And what did the church do? Contended for the faith. And we've got these wonderful creeds, the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian Creed that come out of that.

We could skip ahead a little bit to the 16th century. And I think you could say that was a struggle to maintain the truth. The truth had been eclipsed. It's like scaffolding had been put over the building. Who cares about the scaffolding? You want to see the building.

But you couldn't see the building. You couldn't see the gospel because centuries of scaffolding had obscured it. And what did the Reformers do? But struggle, contend for the truth.

And what came out of that? The solas and the great Reformation confessions. And we go to the 18th century, and it was the Enlightenment and modernism, early modernism. And all of a sudden now there's this new thing of science, and the Bible is no longer to be trusted, no longer helpful. And so, the great Enlightenment thinkers embark on the false teaching.

And you move into the 20th century, and there's modernism and wave upon wave of evolutionary thinking that was dominating early American culture and liberal higher criticism in the German universities that made its way into the American seminaries. And there's Machen and a ceaseless struggle for the truth. And here we are in the 21st century with any number of struggles before us to maintain the truth. So, what are we going to do? We're going to look to Machen. We're going to see what we can learn from him. We're going to see what we can learn from his perspective on the present emergency.

And we're going to see how we can respond. We'll do that together in these next episodes as we walk through Machen, his life, and his book, Christianity and Liberalism. I haven't stopped thinking about that quote from Machen, that the span of human history is an infinitesimal island in the awful depths of eternity. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind, and that was Stephen Nichols on J. Gresham Machen, the author of the classic book from 1923, Christianity and Liberalism.

As we were reminded today, throughout history there is a ceaseless struggle to maintain the truth. So if you'd like to be further encouraged to stand firm, then I recommend Machen's book, Christianity and Liberalism. You can request a special 100th anniversary edition with your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. Along with the special 100th anniversary edition of the book, we'll send you Dr. Nichols' 12-message series that you heard from today and give you lifetime digital access to all those messages and the study guide. So visit renewingyourmind.org or give us a call at 800 435 4343. When liberalism creeps into the church, doctrine comes under attack. So how does liberalism distort what we believe about God and about man? That'll be our topic tomorrow, here on Renewing Your Mind. .