I had to buy a new lawn mower this year. My other one was 13 years old, and I'm not a tinkerer. I've done everything I could do with it basically. Hey Todd, you know, spark plug, air filter, that kind of stuff. It's been good though, we've had it for 13 years. Bought a new one, push mower. truck yeah see that's it you know it's funny we paid like this is a funny thing we paid like I think $600 for the mower when we bought it like 13 years ago but here's the thing that's really interesting well they you know what they're pushing electric mowers So, I was like, can I get one that's like, makes extra blood? I laughed at the guy. I said, are you guys really pushing those? He goes, I'm not. I could tell he didn't like that. Man, you know, the less, when I go out to mow, it's not a joy. I mean, I love to do it. I love the way the yard looks afterwards, but I want to get it done. I don't have to swap out a battery or putts around, you know? I want to get it, you know, I want to get it done. Yeah. I was actually using a chainsaw yesterday. We had some limbs way on the back part of the property that came down. Talking about a two-stroke engine. And I thought getting that thing to run. It would run, and then it would kind of die out. And I thought, you know what? I'm going to get an electric one. So there's... Well, I will explain. It's funny you say that. I am thinking about... Milwaukee makes a small one with only like a 12-inch blade. And I've moved over to Milwaukee, so that's my whole platform now. And that would work for us, because we're never going to cut down a tree. It's to cut up branches and stuff. So if I was cutting down a tree, though, I'd want... I'd want the power, you know? I'll wait one more minute, see if... Cool. So they think. Hey, Diane, how are you? What's that? Well, I don't know if you knew this, not only Tim Keller, but Harry Reader died. I didn't know that. Harry Reader died. Actually, the day before Tim Keller, he was in a car crash. Oh my goodness. So Harry Reader died, I guess, on Friday. Tim Keller died on Saturday. Here's an interesting thing. Another guy died on Saturday. You guys probably don't know, but in many ways, he's been more influential in this congregation. Gordon Keddy. He's an RPCNA minister. I've used his commentaries. In fact, I used him extensively in 1st and 2nd Samuel. Dr. Keddy. So, again, he's an RPCNA professor and minister. A dear, dear man. Steven Smallman died about a week ago. He's kind of a fairly big name in the PCA. Huh? Yeah, yeah. Aberdeen and Edinburgh were his schools. And then he came to Westminster. Yeah. Who's the guy that you use for old testament commentary a lot? You might be thinking of Dr. Davis, Ralph Davis. Yeah, I use him a lot too. But I've heard you quote Keddie before. Gordon Keddie, yeah. And Keddie was really, he was a profound scholar, really important scholar for the RPCNA. Just a really gifted dude. So a lot of very prominent men have gone to be with the Lord. I think he went into hospice care on Friday and died on Saturday. It was within a day or two. I was thinking about what I preached last week in the evening, the transition from Elijah to Elijah. That just continues to march on. I'm sure everybody has one of these, the handout. And then also, the books did come in if you want these. Probably take just one a family, because we've got six of them. They're well worth reading, and you can read them easy. What are they? 190 pages, something like that. But all kidding aside, it's spaced. I mean, it's really a... No pictures, though. No, no pictures. To that end, for Todd, I did get a different picture of Machen this week. Todd said, hey, you keep using the same picture. I see that. Looks like Todd says, if you look him up, that picture is the one you see everywhere. In fact, in fairness, I have that picture in my basement framed next to Calvin. So again, that kind of sets the tone for where I am with patients. Huh? He's in the appendix. Yes. Well, we're presently studying a bit of contemporary Presbyterian Church history after Dr. Godfrey's great lectures leading up to the 20th century. I thought it might be helpful and useful to continue on into the 20th century. And I was just talking with Jeff about this, I'm not sure why, but these lessons from Sunday School have been put on Sherman Audio and they're being downloaded like really pretty incredibly. Yeah, so it's a great blessing. Well, again, I was hoping the history would be useful. And also, this is the 100-year anniversary of Machen's book, Christianity and Liberalism. So one of the things we've sought to do is give some attention to the context surrounding the writing of the book. Last week, we learned that Christianity and Liberalism was published in 1923. The book, again, is a series of lectures. They were reworked to be a series of journal articles And folks convinced Machen that the material was so helpful, he should put it together as a book his Christianity and Liberalism. On the previous Lord's Day, we took a few minutes to look at the introduction of the book. And there were four things we want to remember from that study. First of all, Machen didn't identify himself as a fundamentalist per se. He did think of the fundamentalists as genuine believers. Second, from Machen's perspective, those in the church being described as modernists and liberals should probably be described as naturalists. That's because their view of Christianity was, by and large, one that had little interest in anything that was supernatural. And the third thing we learned, and this is really the biggie, and we'll see that again over and over this morning, is that Machen's estimate of liberalism's Christianity is that it wasn't Christianity at all. And then fourth, one of the reasons he saw the modernist view as exceedingly dangerous is that they used a lot of Christianese, but the words were typically divorced from the historical and biblical meaning. And that's sort of a brief review of the introduction and what we're going to pick up this morning. So let's have a word of prayer and we'll get to work. Our Father in heaven, we gather as men and women who seek to hallow your name. and to hallow it in such a way that it doesn't diminish that we're truly your children who call you Father. Help us to live in that balance, in that holy tension, that you're a creator and you're holy. And yet, through Christ, we are children who enjoy intimate communion with their Father. Lord, we pray as we think about the work that Machen did, the way you used him as an instrument in your church would be instructive and a blessing to us. Lord, as we mentioned a few moments ago, we think of these dear men's families who've gone to be with you. Harry Reader and Tim Keller, Gordon Caddy, Steve Smallman. We lift these families up before you as they surely mourn and just thankful that each of these men had the hope of the gospel undergirding their translation from this life to the next, and pray that that would be a comfort in the families as they grieve the loss of ones who were precious to them. So sustain them and bless them in this time. And again, we thank you that we can gather here this day as men and women who live in light of our glorious resurrection. So bless our study, bless our time. We ask all these things in Jesus' name, amen. I was asked by someone last week if Machen ever married, and it was a great question. And as I sometimes do, I want to use that question as a side door to get back to Christianity and liberalism. The short answer is no, Machen never married. It's not as though there weren't suitors. There were. There were actually a number of women who thought he was a fine and attractive man and probably a good catch. And in fact, there was one woman in particular that Machen was smitten with. Machen's family would vacation in Seal Harbor, Maine. And in the 1920s, he met a woman there named Mildred B. Stearns. He described her in a letter as intelligent, beautiful, and exquisite. And for quite a long time, they were utterly devoted to one another. But they would never get married or engaged, for that matter. because she was a Unitarian who attended a Methodist church. Machen sought to teach her and encourage her, and even had his mother meet with her to encourage her in Bible study. But heartbreakingly, she wouldn't embrace the Orthodox faith of Machen. After a meeting with Miss Stearns, a meeting that his mother had with Miss Stearns, I want you to see what Mother Minnie wrote to J. Gresham. Miss S paid me an evening visit and we talked a little while about Bible study and kindred topics, but I don't think I helped her much. I know more about your perplexities than you expect, and everything that troubles you is redoubled in my own heart. As far as we know, after Miss S, Machen never had another serious love interest. It's probably worth pointing out that when he died 36 years later, 35 years after the latter, she went to his funeral. She showed up. They apparently hadn't had contact forever. Well, on its face, that whole situation is easy to understand. A believer shouldn't be unequally yoked. But I think in Machen's mind, the case was very clear. At this point in his life, There was no doubt he was going to be a frontline fighter for orthodox Christianity. Had he married a woman with heterodox views, it would have made his commitment to orthodoxy look hypocritical, not to mention he would end up having to fight for orthodoxy both outside his home and inside it. And here's the thing. Unitarians not only had a heretical view of the Trinity, their focus for Christianity as a religion was centered on humanitarian projects and social change. And while humanitarians took pride in the fact they had no creed, there were a couple doctrines that they promoted with great vigor. One was the love of God as they defined it, and the other was the universal fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. And the reason I point this out is because those are two of the steadfast doctrines that the theological liberals embraced in Machen's day. The love of God as they defined it, and also the universal fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man. So you can kind of see how a relationship with Miss Stearns would have been devastating to Machen's ministry. And while the modernists that Machen was dealing with, that they weren't Unitarians per se, They had a lot of similar views. They were willing to scrap almost any Christian doctrine for the sake of social progress, except those two. This is why that question of matron marrying was a good side door to Christianity and liberalism. The second chapter is simply entitled, Doctrine. the second title, excuse me, the second chapter of the book Christianity and Liberalism. And in it, Machen argues that the church needs to return to a healthy appreciation of sound doctrine, and that apart from that, God's people are stripped of their vitality. And he begins to lay out the great errors of liberalism. In fact, the second chapter, he'll lay out most of the errors he will address in the rest of the book. And then he'll go on to address those errors through the lens of various Orthodox doctrines, the doctrine of God and man, Bible salvation, and church. But the big point of chapter 2, and that's where we are, is that a robust commitment to Christian doctrine is necessary for a robust Christianity to stand under the pressures of the world. Again, I'm going to come back to this in a moment. But the two doctrines, the only two doctrines that the liberals were concerned with was the love of God And as we'll see really next week, the love of God as they defined it in the universal brotherhood of man. Well, one of the things Machen's doing in chapter two, and you begin to see this unfold, he's already given us a hint that this is part of his tactics. But one of the things he does in chapter two is he begins to press not only the importance of good doctrine, but he also really begins to lament the dishonesty of the theological liberals. And the fact that those two doctrines, the love of God and the universal fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man, are so central to their way of thinking. And he lays their tactics bare and explains that the way they would downplay their theological downgrade was by using the familiar mantra, doctrine divides and we don't want to be offensive. That was the big thing, right? Again, we might think, oh, doctrine divides. That's like a 1980s evangelical mantra. No, no, no, no, no. It's been around for more than 100 years, well more than 100 years. So let's take a peek at how Machen, excuse me, got my words all mixed up this morning. So let's take a peek at how Machen addressed those things in chapter two. He writes, few desires on the part of religious teachers have been more harmfully exaggerated than the desire to avoid giving offense. Only too often that desire has become perilously near dishonesty. The religious teacher in his heart of hearts is well aware of the radicalism of his views, but is unwilling to relinquish his place in the hallowed atmosphere of the church by speaking his whole mind. Boy, this is so spot on. If you've dealt with guys in this place, this is exactly what they do. They use languages, smoke and mirrors, to cloak their views. Again, I've talked about the controversy that existed a number of years ago, the federal vision, and how it attacks the doctrine of justification by faith alone, which is what Calvin calls the hinge of all true religion. These guys who held to the federal vision, they would say, ABC, and then you'd call them on it and they'd go, yeah, but that's not what we mean. Here's what we mean. And so you'd say, but But if you mean that, here's where your thoughts are going to go. But that's not where our thoughts are going to go. We believe ABC. But you just said you don't believe ABC. And it just went through that circle because they didn't want to come out and say, here's the thing. We deny justification by faith alone. Because had they come out and said that, they would have lost whatever pension they had in the church or whatever thing they were invested in, their job, whatever. And they didn't have the integrity to do that. And that's just what he's sort of pegging them with. He's basically saying, your desire not to offend, it isn't for the sake of the gospel. It's because you hold aberrant views and you care more about your position in the church than truthfully articulating what you believe. Again, this is why Machen was so despised by the theological liberals and really disliked by the moderates. You see, while the liberals and moderates of Machen's day did have different doctrinal commitments, both groups held to the preeminence of Rodney King theology. Can't we just all get along? And the moderates, wittingly or unwittingly, became tools for the liberals. What made Machen so effective in his arguments and so frustrating to his adversaries is that he was clear. And he wasn't so committed to the idolatry of Niceness that he couldn't state things that were obvious. And so when they would say, don't make much of doctrine, he knew what they meant. Don't make much of historic doctrine. Let us make much of the doctrines we believe, the things we believe really are important, just not what the Church has believed for the last 2,000 years. Let me make much of the new, more creative doctrines. Look what Machen wrote. Such is the way in which expression is often given to the modern hostility to doctrine. But is it really doctrine as such that's objected to, and not rather one particular doctrine in the interest of another? Undoubtedly, in many forms of liberalism, it's the latter alternative which fits the case. There are doctrines of modern liberalism just as tenaciously and intolerantly upheld as any doctrines that find a place in the historic creeds. Such, for example, are the liberal doctrines of the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man. These doctrines are, as we shall see, contrary to the doctrines of the Christian religion. But doctrines they are, all the same, and as such they require intellectual defense in seeming to object to all theologies. The liberal preacher is often merely objecting to one system of theology in the interest of another. He understood that every single person is a doctrinaire, whether they acknowledge it or not. The issue isn't whether or not folks will hold tightly to certain doctrines, it's which doctrines they're going to hold tightly to. That is, inevitably, the only question. And the theological liberals, they held firmly to the universal fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Now, surprise, surprise, where do you think this teaching originated? Germany That's not a trick question that's amazing isn't it who would have thunk that It actually began in the fame to being in school And the father of that teaching was a man a man named out of on Harnock One of Harnock theological goals was to distill Christianity down to its basic Essence and in a book entitled what is Christianity? He argued the essence of Christianity is the universal fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the infinite value of the human soul. When you just sort of strip away all the trappings, that's basic Christianity. The universal fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the infinite value of the human soul. So everyone, born by nature, they're born into God's family. We're all God's children. And for all of God's children, the reason we have any record of Jesus is so that his ethical life can teach us how we're to sort of treat our extended family. And the most Christian thing a person could do, again, according to Van Harnack, is to open their heart to God, to feel God, and to feel Him in such a way that He's your Father and you want to live out the golden rule. That's the essence of Harnack's Christianity. It was a doctrinal system for folks who wanted to shed the supernatural orthodoxy of Christianity and make it altogether earthly and natural. And this deadly cancer spread like crazy in the Presbyterian body. And Mason's argument against this, besides making it clear that that view wasn't in any way Christianity, was to say, let's just stop with all this talk that you're hostile to the doctrine. Because you're not. You embrace very specific, aberrant ideas, just not biblical ones. And all your ruminations about tolerance and avoiding giving offense, they're just a smoke screen for your false doctrine. Because here's the problem. If these guys went back and went into their churches and they said these things that they believed and said them candidly, they would have lost their jobs. Well, Machen's going to deal extensively with the universal fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man in chapter 2, which is about the doctrine of God and man. But what Machen wanted to assert in this is that genuine Christianity, doctrinal Christianity, is based on historical facts. And doctrine is really simply the application of those historical facts. And that's just how you find the Bible making historical claims and applying those claims to formulate doctrine. So look what he writes. This is really helpful and very incredibly thoughtful. Machen writes, the narration of the facts is history. The narration of the facts with the meaning of the facts is doctrine. Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. That's history. He loved me and gave himself for me. That's doctrine. Such was the Christianity of the primitive church. That guy, what he said is, I look at it and I say, what do we need? We're to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our being. So you can see where he's trying to go with this, but it's where he goes from there. I mean, those are our two commands. Yeah. See, the difference in what you just said and what he would say is you said, you can see where he wants to go there. But that's not where you just, where you want to go there is not at all where he wanted to go there. Right? The universal fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man, it destroys virtually every Christian doctrine, right? Because if you believe that, why would we ever preach the doctrine of adoption? Or the doctrine of regeneration? You must be born again. No, no, you don't need to be born again into God's family if you're already in God's family. And if you don't need to be born again, then you must not be a sinner. And if God's gonna accept you, God must not be holy. And yes, so that's where he goes. He's gonna go in a completely different place than you would. That's the whole point. So it's a great question. Yeah. Again, that was why I laid that out as I did. Machen was saying, you know you're just pretending you're pretending this is not what you believe because you can read their writings and they were very clear about these things in their journals like I say he wrote a series of articles what is christianity he wrote actually a treatise called the essence of christianity and again he wasn't he wasn't obscure in these things so I mean it's a great question but it's exactly what they do you know in our own context Let's go back 60 years. That's when there would have first been the ruminations in the Christian Reformed Church to move in the direction of having women be deacons. And here was the argument at first. listen nobody what we think women should serve as deacons but nobody nobody in the christian reform church thinks they should be elders or pastors that was exactly the argument they made and it was a lie you just couldn't call them on it because in quiet conversations they would say that you know that they had but they couldn't go to their church in nineteen seventy or even nineteen seventy five and say you know what we want with nineteen seventy they couldn't go into church is a we want to ordain women to the office of uh... minister works out now and i think that there was a lot of attention and by the way i don't say that uh... i'll say that in a way that's just archery i know that was the motivation i know some of those people I hope they repent at some point, but yeah. So again, it's these weasel words. The reason I brought it up is because if you're just looking at what that statement is, you can really say it wasn't that bad. Well, and you know what? Here's the thing. A lot of this has come into the church. You know, you should love your neighbor. I know when I say this what everybody's going to respond with, but who is your neighbor? Now we're all going to say, well, we know the parable of the Good Samaritan. OK. But here's the way that one parable is extended, that it means the whole world is our neighbor. And that is not what Jesus was saying. And if you look at overwhelmingly in the Bible, your neighbor is thought to be a fellow believer. I mean, all the neighbor commands in Israel were assumed it was a fellow Israelite. So again, it's just a horrible misuse of scripture. And it's today too. Here I'll give you a children's song that came out of this movement. Red and yellow, black and white. They are precious in his sight. that was written by a theological liberal. Again, I'm not saying there isn't some truth to it. But make no mistake what the goal of that song was. This is exactly what you said, what Machen said. They use our terms and then they pour their meaning to it. That's what Paul's saying, that it sounds right. You know, we are called to love God, we are called to love our neighbor, but that's not what they mean. And the word that sets it apart is universal, the universal. And this is why it's so important to make distinctions, right? For example, this will become clear also as we move on because They not only used that kind of language in terms of the universal Father to God, they denied the Trinity. They denied the deity of Christ. They denied that Christ ever claimed to be the Messiah. They denied the Bible was inspired or infallible. All the dominoes crumble, and that becomes clear as we move on. At the heart, the modernists believed if the world challenged some piece of biblical history, the world must be right. That's kind of the way they thought. And this was a time in world history, again, we've talked a little bit about this, where union was on everyone's mind. Let's all come together. Let's all join and make a strong, prosperous America. And it was a distinctly America-centric kind of view in their thinking. And so if we're looking around and the smart people in the world say, no, you can't believe in Genesis. You can't believe in the creation account. You can't believe. that that that some person was a god man and and and a the little more to jettison all that history doesn't matter doctrine doesn't matter because again for them at its essence you see christianity is a life not a doctrine that was another big mantra and again we hear that today even in evangelicals christianity is not a life excuse me not a doctrine it's a a life right you hear that all the time this is where it originated I mean that was their language that as it is today, and it's just as dangerous. And Machen didn't deny that sound doctrine, when it's believed and put into practice in life, would result in a changed life. Look what he wrote. In the first place, we do not mean that if doctrine is sound, it makes no difference about life. On the contrary, it makes all the difference in the world. From the beginning, Christianity was certainly a way of life. The salvation that it offered was a salvation from sin, and salvation from sin appeared not merely in a blessed hope, but also in an immediate moral change. The early Christians, to the astonishment of their neighbors, lived a strange new kind of life, a life of honesty, of purity, and of unselfishness. From the beginning, Christianity was certainly alive. But the life, according to Machen, and again, I would say according to the Bible, was the product of the true gospel being preached and believed. Look at the next quote there in your handout. But if any one fact is clear on the basis of this evidence, it is that the Christian movement at its inception was not just a way of life in the modern sense, but a way of life founded upon a message. It was based not upon mere feeling, not upon a mere program of work, but upon an account of facts. In other words, it was based upon doctrine. And here's where I want to sort of wrap up this section on Mason. He wasn't speaking about doctrine as this sort of cool pursuit of intellectual knowledge. It was history and doctrine. It was what the facts of history dictated that tell us what God accomplished to save sinners. That's what he wanted people to wrap their minds around. That's the essence of When people say well the Bible is not a history book whoa Really because all those things in the Bible didn't happen historically We should leave now. I'll meet you at itty-bitty bar when they open Why not If they didn't happen in history It's not a true faith. His life, his death, his resurrection. They're probably liberals. No, I'm just kidding. Anyway, the liberal theological project in the end was nothing more than a graceless set of commands to make the world a better place based on what contemporary sociologists were saying in the early 20th century. The same sociologists say something different today, and liberal Protestantism still follows along. But it always consists of commands that are centered on, man, you've got to do this. We've got to make a better society. Huh? Humanism. A kind of humanism, yeah. Look there at the final quote in this section, and we'll see how Machen sums this up. Here is found the most fundamental difference between liberalism and Christianity. Liberalism is altogether in the imperative mood. Do this, do that. While Christianity begins with a triumphant indicative, liberalism appeals to man's will, while Christianity announces first a gracious act of God. You see, the difference is night and day. Liberalism, when all else is stripped away, is, you must so that. And biblical Christianity is, it's finished. And those are night and day. Different. Any other questions? Well, in chapter three, Machen dealt with the doctrines of God and man. Naturally, the focus was on how liberals got it wrong. Again, there's a quote there for you. It's been observed in the last chapter that Christianity is based on an account of something that happened in the first century of our era. But before that account can be received, certain presuppositions must be accepted. The Christian gospel consists in an account of how God saved man. And before that gospel can be understood, something must be known about God and about man. The doctrine of God and the doctrine of man are the two great presuppositions of the gospel. With regard to these presuppositions, as with regard to the gospel itself, modern liberalism is diametrically opposed to Christianity. Machen is telling us the only way we're going to rightly understand the gospel is beginning with a right understanding of God and a right understanding of man. You see, the liberal argument was you don't really need to know God doctrinally. You don't even need to know him as he reveals himself in the scripture. Or at least you don't need to know him in any way that would involve primarily a cognitive process. What you really need to do is just kind of feel God, to feel that he's a father figure. I'm not going to go down this rabbit trail unless you have questions. But this actually goes back to another German liberal who was actually one of the teachers of von Harnack, a guy named Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher, his enterprise, again, he was right at the end of the Enlightenment, and Schleiermacher's project of theology was to say, we just got to jettison all doctrine and turn Christianity into a God-consciousness, a kind of feeling of God. Again, feelings, nothing more than feelings. But that's kind of where these folks had picked up. Again, they're in the line of Schleiermacher. And as I mentioned above, the universal fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man, and there's a lot of what Machen would deal with in this chapter, right? Because they weren't saying, okay, for me to call God father, I need to be reconciled to him. They were simply saying, no, you just need to have a feeling of it. Right? And in doing all this, you see, they had jettisoned any sense that God's holy and man's sinful. And apart from that, there can be no saving message. That's the point of this book. Doctrine divides. Let's just get along. That's not a new phenomenon. Let's have a Christianity that primarily focuses on how you feel. These are not new ideas. They're just not new ideas. Well, you can glance here at the next quote I put down. Machen writes, the liberal conception of God differs even more fundamentally from the Christian view than in the different circle of ideas connected with the terminology of fatherhood. The truth is that liberalism has lost sight of the very center and core of the Christian teaching. In the Christian view of God, as set forth in the Bible, there are many elements, but one attribute of God is absolutely fundamental in the Bible. One attribute is absolutely necessary in order to render intelligible all the rest. That attribute is the awful transcendence of God, the holiness of God, that's what he means. From beginning to end, the Bible is concerned to set forth the awful gulf that separates the creature from the creator. Can anybody think of a contemporary theologian who's written a book on the holiness of God? Right, R.C. Sproul, that was his most famous book. And I'm sure that had something to do with why Sproul wrote that. Sproul wrote that when he still had one foot in this world. Right? Again, the great error of liberalism as it pertains to God and man is making them too far alike. It's making us like God and God like us. And again, that's very much what we see in some shades of the evangelical world, isn't it? They not only have lost a sense of who and what God is, they've lost any semblance of the biblical teaching. The men and women are separated from this holy God because of their sin. Machen goes on to write, now he's writing about sin, and again their defective view of sin. He writes, according to the Bible, man's a sinner under the just condemnation of God. According to modern liberalism, there's really no such thing as sin. At the very root of the modern liberal movement is the loss of the consciousness of sin. The consciousness of sin was formerly the starting point of all preaching. But today it's gone. By the way, think about what you just said, Paul. Doesn't that sound familiar today? Characteristic of the modern age, above all else, is a supreme confidence in human goodness. The preacher gets up into the pulpit, opens the Bible, and addresses the congregation somewhat as follows. You people are very good, he says. You respond to every appeal that looks toward the welfare of the community. Now we have in the Bible, especially in the life of Jesus, something so good that we believe it's good enough even for you good people. he was being sarcastic, right? You get that. He's being sarcastic. Such is modern preaching. It's heard every Sunday in thousands of pulpits. And the liberal message really was, you're a good person. Live up to who you are. And we wrote this in 1923. You know, we think about American history, and we figure, oh, we've declined after the hippie generation of the 60s. Again, I've had a couple conversations with folks privately, and that's one of the advantages of looking at this. It's not new. It really is nothing new under the sun. It just comes with new labels. Not new in substance. Here's the problem. That message they're preaching was a message that had the effect of inviting its hearers straight to hell. Not something we need to have fixed in our minds as we think about these things. Because that surely was fixed in Machen's mind. He understood the modernist gospel wasn't simply veering off the path. It was headed in a completely different direction. In a direction where there was no salvation. I'll tell you what I'm going to do. We'll come back and do chapters 4, and five next week, and then hopefully be able to get to the founding of Westminster. But I want to wrap up today with something. And maybe you'll find it's helpful, or maybe not. But I want to talk. Very candid, right? But I wanted to share this, because I want you to understand where this theology was going, and the kind of men it produced. And maybe this will surprise you. But every single thing Machen wrote in that book about theological liberalism, he could have written directly to Martin Luther King, Jr. And sometimes we fail to miss that. I mean, to pick up on that. That whatever positive benefit he had in the broader culture, whatever benefit he offered to the church and making us aware of the importance of racial reconciliation. He was not a believer unless he repented on his deathbed. He was fully a liberal from that era. Remember he went to seminary I think It would have been late 50s, early 60s, 58, 59, 62, 63, something like that. That's exactly what he would have picked up. I want to share a couple quotes with you and sort of put this in perspective. If you were to ask Martin Luther King who his favorite theologian and favorite preacher was, who do you think he would say? Harry Emerson Fosdick. He wrote Fosdick a letter. Do you guys remember who Fosdick is? Preach the sermon, shall the fundamentalists win? Sort of set the stage for these controversies, that's why I'm bringing this up. He wrote a letter to Fosdick and he wrote, if I were called upon to select the greatest preacher of this century, I would choose your name. If I were called upon to select the foremost prophets of our generation, I would choose you to add to the list. If I were called upon to select the Christian saints of our day again, I would have your name on that list. Again, that was his favorite theologian. I want to point out a couple of his doctrinal views. He believed the deity of Christ was harmful and detrimental to the church. King wrote, again, we have all those papers that he wrote in seminary and post-seminary, so it's not a matter of wondering about these things or guessing. He writes, we may find the divinity of Christ not in his substantial unity with God, but in his filial consciousness and in his dependence upon God. It was his feeling, actually, of absolute dependence on God, as Schleiermacher would say, it was Jesus' feeling about God that made him divine. Right? The Orthodox attempt to explain the divinity of Jesus in terms of an inherent metaphysical substance within himself seems to me quite inadequate. To say that Christ, whose example of living we're bid to follow is divine in an ontological sense, is actually harmful and detrimental. He rejected the virgin birth. He rejected the infallibility, the inerrancy of Christ. He rejected the bodily resurrection of Christ. He rejected that Christ is going to return visibly and bodily. Let's see. In his autobiography, he writes, the lessons which I was taught in Sunday school, and again, I have quotes for all those different doctrines, if you'd like to have them. The lessons which I was taught in Sunday school were quite fundamental in their lineage. None of my teachers ever doubted the infallibility of scriptures. Most of them were unlettered, though, and had never heard of biblical criticism. Naturally, I accepted the teaching as they were being given to me. I never felt any need to doubt them, at least not at the time I didn't. I guess I accepted Biblical studies uncritically until I was about 12 years old. But this uncritical attitude could not last long, for it was contrary to the very nature of my being. I had always been the questioning and precocious type. At the age of 13 I shocked my Sunday school class by denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus. From the age of 13 on doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly. At the age of 15 I entered college and more and more I could see the gap between what I had learned in Sunday school and what I was learning in college. This conflict continued until I studied a course in Bible in which I came to see that behind the legends and myths of the book were many profound truths one could not escape. As stated above, my college training, especially the first two years, brought many doubts into my mind. It was this period that the shackles of fundamentalism were removed from my body. This is why, when I came to Crozer, I would accept the liberal interpretation with relative ease. And again, he rejected every fundamental Christian doctrine. One of the reasons I'm pointing this out is because this is where this teaching goes. And all of a sudden, people start to embrace it. And don't miss, this is not what he was taught in Sunday school. And I'm sure he was told by his parents, you go to school, you listen to those professors, you sit at their feet, you absorb what they have to teach you, they will make you a productive citizen. No, no, right? So I wanted you to see where this goes. I also wanted you to see something that's, there was a real controversy in the evangelical church about three, four years ago at his 50th anniversary of, I guess it was his death, the gospel coalition and together with the gospel. These are two organizations that were designed to bring young, restless, reformed men together around the gospel. Both of those groups set aside gospel teaching to take that seminar they have with tens of thousands of ministers to focus on Martin Luther King Jr. And by and large they make him sound like an evangelical. And if you said no, Guess what you were called? Of course. No. I just thought that would be helpful to see where this was heading, you know? Any questions or comments? I think that's good. You questioned whether or not it was worth it. That was worth it. What's that? You questioned whether or not to do that. I think that was good. Well, I really thought I would do it at the end. I didn't want to get into Chapter 4 and only get halfway through, and I didn't mind being briefed on that. You just can't speak out against Martin Luther King without being called a racist. As I said... over and over and over again, they use their theology as a hammer. This young marine that took the life by his trying to rescue people from the terrorism of the crazy guy on the subway at the funeral, preached by Mr. Sharpton, pointed directly to the Good Samaritan and condemned him for not being a Good Samaritan. And that's exactly what, I mean, it's just, it just rolls over again. Yeah. And I have no animus, I hope you know, against Martin Luther King for a junior, but I remember when this was all going out. I had a pretty substantial argument with a pretty prominent PCA brother about this because he made the comment around, it was that year, and he made the comment around Reformation Day. He said, you know what, I don't really like to speak of Martin Luther on Reformation Day because I have Jewish people in my church and he was anti-Semitic. And Luther was. Sort of changed a little bit, but he was. And again, we can say that. We don't have to pretend. I don't look back and think, no, those guys in the past, they weren't sinners. They were sinners. But here was my question I posed to him. Do you think Martin Luther King did more damage to the cause of the gospel or Martin Luther King, Jr., who taught a false gospel? Yeah, because his church was big time in promoting one and wouldn't mention the other. Interesting world we live in. Any other comments, questions? Sorry, I got off on my little firebrand moment here. Well, let's pray. Just keep in mind, do pray for those families that I mentioned earlier. And pray that the Lord would keep us faithful. Because it's a constant challenge. And what Todd said, we think we're immune to the enticement of, if you'll just compromise, you can be a little more accepted, but we're not as immune to that as we think. And it happens all around us to people that would surprise us. And so we need to pray the Lord to keep us humble and faithful. Well, let's pray. Father, we do thank you for the opportunity to study history and we pray it would make us humble and faithful. We acknowledge whatever good gifts we have in our lives, in our doctrine, they're good gifts that's been produced by your Spirit and your grace. We pray we appropriate them with a kind of humility. Lord, bless us now as we gather together to worship you. Help us to lift up our hearts to heaven, to offer them as a sacrifice of praise to our great King of Kings and Lord of Lords. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.