Machen, Modernity, and the Message That Never Changes
There’s only one message that never goes out of season.
Last week, I shared a rather lengthy ode, of sorts, to J. Gresham Machen’s somewhat polemical work What Is Faith? In his crosshairs was the emergent ecclesiological posture to emphasize the example Jesus left for us to follow, over against the better news that Jesus is our substitute. Despite Machen’s century-old treatment of this discussion, it feels just as trenchant as ever. Similarly, his chapter on “Faith and Works” reads as a twenty-first-century polemic of modern evangelicalism, when, in fact, he was countering the nascent teachings of his early twentieth-century contemporaries. Then, as now, those in church leadership, either in local congregations or the halls of academia, were grappling with the age-old allure of performance-based religion. This, to be sure, is a struggle that stretches back not only to sixteenth-century Germany, but also to first-century Jerusalem. To read church history is to read a lengthy tussle between how much one should emphasize faith or works in the program of salvation.
I don’t presume to resolve this tension via an online publication. I’m not that naïve. However, reading Machen stress sola fide reminded me that this is why Reformationally-minded chaps such as myself continue writing, reading, and sharing the things we do. Because it’s worth it. God’s good news that sinners — you and me included — are saved through no work or merit of their own but solely and entirely on account of Christ for them is news worth reiterating and maintaining, despite how out of vogue it might seem. Each generation of believers is made to endure all manner of societal upheaval. Contrary to popular belief, that’s not a reality reserved for Millennials. But the point is that part of “holding fast the confession of our hope without wavering” (Heb. 10:23) involves not letting the calamities and crises of the moment influence or compromise the word of our testimony, which is the word of Christ.
No matter the seismic shifts in morality, cultural values, politics, etc., what sinners need to hear remains the same — namely, “that Christ died for [their] sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3–4). And, what’s more, it is only by faith alone in this very gospel that one receives the remission of sins and is incorporated into the kingdom of heaven. In other words, notwithstanding the season in which we find ourselves, the message that never goes out of season is the word that announces that the Son of God “gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age” (Gal. 1:4), and that it is “by grace [we] have been saved through faith” (Eph. 2:8). This, to be sure, is “the centre of the Christian religion,” Machen attests, “the absolutely undeserved and sovereign grace of God, saving sinful men by the gift of Christ upon the cross.”1 He goes on to say:
Faith means not doing something but receiving something; it means not the earning of a reward but the acceptance of a gift. A man can never be said to obtain a thing for himself if he obtains it by faith; indeed to say that he obtains it by faith is only another way of saying that he does not obtain it for himself but permits another to obtain it for him. Faith, in other words, is not active but passive; and to say that we are saved by faith is to say that we do not save ourselves but are saved only by the one in whom our faith reposed; the faith of man presupposes the sovereign grace of God . . . Thus the beginning of the Christian life is not an achievement but an experience; the soul of the man who is saved is not, at the moment of salvation, active, but passive; salvation is the work of God and God alone.2
The church has been entrusted with this “good deposit” (2 Tim. 1:14) to proclaim for sinners far and wide and to preserve from the encroachment of deceit and error. This means its preachers and leaders are given the paradoxical task of being active in propagating a message that begins in passivity. Despite the tendency and temptation that often pulls us toward earning our own merit, the ministry of the Word kills those notions by laying us bare and stripping us of any illusion that our performances and achievements can cut it. They can’t. We are saved by a work of God and God alone. This, to be sure, is not only the beginning, but also the middle and end of the Christian life, too. This is the reservoir from which all our life and godliness are drawn. Thus, as the ages churn on with generation after generation chasing relief via performance, the word that lasts and remains and offers true relief is the word that tells us what Christ has done. In this, we can rest.
Grace and peace to you.
J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith? (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1991), 194.
Machen, 195, 197.
Well said, sir. (But now I have another book to add to my stack!)