Machen’s Serious Choice
“Jesus wasn’t a Christian” and other ways the church fails to understand the gospel.
I know this isn’t going to be the hottest take, nor even the most novel, but I am convinced that one of the most important theologians the church, by and large, needs to recover is early twentieth-century stalwart J. Gresham Machen. Machen’s writings are insightful and incisive, demonstrating the acuity and candor of a well-versed theologian doing theology in the public sphere, calling the church to recover its historic faith. His voice was needed during an era of ecclesiastical drift, when both those in the church and those leading it seemed to hold their convictions loosely amid a culture that was going through seismic changes in the aftermath of the First World War. In more ways than I can numerate here, Machen’s voice is just as needed in the church of today, as the cultural, theological, and political drift he foresaw hasn’t waned, but has waxed worse and worse over the decades.
In What Is Faith?, the church, as modernity understands it, finds itself squarely within the crosshairs of Machen’s polemic on “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3), which is a poignant thought to consider, especially since a literal century separates his original audience from those who have need to revisit his jeremiad today. Chapter 3, entitled “Faith in Christ,” offers a remarkable example of Machen’s ability to diagnose the ills plaguing the church of his day, a diagnosis that stretches right up to our own doorsteps. “The truth is,” he maintains, “that in great sections of the modern Church Jesus is no longer the object of faith, but has become merely an example for faith; religion is based no longer upon faith in Jesus but upon a faith in God that is, or is conceived to be, like the faith that Jesus had in God.”1
I can imagine no small amount of pastors taking umbrage at Machen’s verdict, especially when he suggests that Jesus is no longer the object of some church’s faith. Evangelicalism is awash with materials and programs uniquely tailored and designed to introduce individuals to Jesus. But a good question to ask when evaluating any course or piece of content is, What version of Jesus is being introduced? Not all talk about Jesus should be considered equal, of course. Discerning which Jesus is being proffered will tell you everything you need to know about how the rest of the Christian faith is being understood. In other words, one’s Christology is very revealing of one’s biblical epistemology. Machen explains:
Why then do those who reduce Jesus to the level of humanity, who regard Him (if traditional language be stripped off) simply as a Jewish teacher of long ago, the initiator of the “Christ-life” — why do such persons speak of having “faith in Jesus”? They do so, I think, because they are slipping insensibly into a wrong use of terms; when they say “faith in Jesus,” they mean really not faith in Jesus but merely faith in the teaching and example of Jesus. And that is a very different thing. It is one thing to hold that the ethical principles which Jesus enunciated will solve the problems of society, and quite another thing to come into that intimate, present relation to Him which we call faith; it is one thing to follow the example of Jesus and quite another different thing to trust Him. A man can admire General Washington, for example, and accept the principles of his life; yet one cannot be said to trust him, for the simple reason that he died over a hundred years ago. His soldiers could trust him; for in their day he was alive; but we cannot trust him, because now he is dead. And when persons who believe that Jesus was simply a great teacher of long ago, and are not particularly interested in any personal identity between that mystic experience which they call “Christ” in the soul and the historic person Jesus of Nazareth — when such persons speak of “faith in Jesus,” the expression is merely a survival, now meaningless, of a usage which had meaning only when Jesus was regarded as what He is said in the New Testament to be. Real faith in Jesus can exist only when the lofty claims of Jesus are taken as sober fact, and when He is regarded as the eternal Son of God, come voluntarily to earth for our redemption, manifesting His glory even in the days of His flesh, and now risen from the dead and holding communion with those who commit their lives to Him.2
As Machen understands it, there are really only two avenues the church can follow. “The Church,” he says, “is placed before a serious choice; it must decide whether it will merely try to trust God as Jesus trusted Him, or whether it will continue to put its trust in Jesus Himself.”3 What he is getting at is the subtle, albeit decisive difference between Jesus Christ as the ultimate example of what it means to be a Christian and Jesus Christ, the God-man from Nazareth who lived and died for the sake of sinners, you and me included. As true as it is that Jesus was and is the titular specimen of holiness ever to grace this earth, if that’s all he is, the church’s message is reduced to pointing its adherents to the life and legacy of a moral exemplar whose world barely resembles our own. This isn’t meant to diminish the impact of Jesus’s moral or ethical teachings. It’s just to say that the church has something far better, far more hopeful, resonant, and life-giving to offer than a personified paragon of divine ideals — namely, the gospel. The good news of Christ’s redemptive life, death, and resurrection constitutes the eponymous message of the Body of Christ, extended to a world bereft of genuine hope and life.
If the church becomes a hall where the example Jesus set eclipses Jesus himself — his life and work on the cross — the church ends up cutting itself off at the knees. This brings us back to Machen’s “serious choice,” that is, trusting God as Jesus trusted him or trusting in Jesus himself. “Upon that choice,” Machen continues, “depends the question which of two mutually exclusive religions is to be maintained. One of the two is the redemptive religion known as Christianity; the other is a religion of optimistic confidence in human nature, which at almost every conceivable point is the reverse of Christian belief.”4 Far too many mainstream, largely evangelical Jesus-centered discipleship programs and seminars can be condensed into Machen’s one-hundred-year-old assessment of “optimistic confidence in human nature.” Preaching and promoting Jesus as the church’s moral exemplar effectively trumpets a message whereby the church is strengthened and solidified by the continual absorption of information, which, it is believed, has the potency to produce lasting change in the hearts and lives of those in the pews.
The problem is, of course, no matter how resonant we might think the preaching of moral invectives is, it doesn’t ultimately result in lasting change; in lives that are transformed. This is because this type of messaging puts a whole lot of emphasis on humanity’s capacity to actually live lives according to the standard Jesus set. And there are over two thousand years of data that show that emphasis is woefully misplaced. We don’t need another textbook example of what it looks like to be a model Christian. We don’t even need more motivation to live up to the criterion of Christian ideals as understood in Scripture. We need to be raised to newness of life, and there is only one message that can accomplish that. There is only one announcement that is imbued with the dynamism and grace that gives life to the dead. It’s the gospel, which, as Paul says, “is the power [δύναμις] of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Rom. 1:16). Machen puts it like this:
The Lord Jesus, then, came into this world not primarily to say something, not even to be something, but to do something; He came not merely to lead men through His example out into a “larger life,” but to give life, through His death and resurrection, to those who were dead in trespasses and sins; we are Christians not because we have faith in God like the faith in God which Jesus Himself had, but because we have faith in Him.5
The Son of God didn’t take on flesh to show the rest of humanity how to become Christians. He came to make us into Christians by raising us from the dead. “Our Lord came not to teach men that they were already sons of God,” Machen says, “but to make them sons of God by His redeeming work.”6 To say that I am a Christian, therefore, isn’t to say that I necessarily follow a certain set of guiding principles; it’s to say that all my wrongdoings have been subsumed in the life and death of my one and only Substitute, my great High Priest, who willingly suffered the violence of the cross to make atonement for my sins. This is the Christian message; this is the gospel.
Accordingly, you and I aren’t Christians because we are following the example laid down by our founder. In fact, in a very striking portion of Machen’s diatribe, he suggests that thinking of Jesus as the so-called “first Christian” is more than a little misguided. As the Christ of God, Jesus is “the founder and perfecter of our faith,” not because of his moral legacy, but because he voluntarily “endured the cross,” with all of its splinters, spit, and shame (Heb. 12:2). “Jesus stands,” Machen says, “in a far more fundamental and intimate relation to Christianity than” merely its archetypal example. “He was,” Machen continues, “the Founder of our religion not because He was the first Christian, but because He made Christianity possible by His redeeming work.”7
The church of today is still faced with the “serious choice” Machen unfolds, and it is just as urgent now as it was a hundred years ago. We are either going to settle for a faith that rests on our ability to mimic Jesus, or we are going to rest on Jesus himself, the Crucified One, whose blood gives life to the dead. This isn’t a matter of semantics or ecclesiastical cosmetics; it’s a matter of life and death. Only the gospel, the announcement of what God in Christ has accomplished for sinners, has the power to make us new. As Machen reminds us, that message isn’t just at the heart of the Christian faith; this is the Christian faith. Faith is given, and Christians are born when God’s words of grace and promise are preached and received, over and over and over again. For the church to traffic in anything else is to forfeit our only hope.
J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith? (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1991), 98.
Machen, 97–98.
Machen, 102.
Machen, 102.
Machen, 113.
Machen, 84–85.
Machen, 110.