Theology Thursday: 100 Years Ago
In Church History, we’ve followed religion in America, from Puritanism to the two Great Awakenings. We saw how the seeds of the Enlightenment and Romanticism affected the church, and now we’ve come to the early 1900s when a dramatic break occurs.
In the early 1900s, it was unfashionable to believe in the supernatural parts of the Bible. Belief in God and church was respectable, but not belief in things like Jonah being swallowed by a whale or Noah building a really big boat. Ministers and theology faculty members began publicly denying the virgin birth, and these people were known as the modernists. The conservatives fought back, and the people who thought both sides should get along were known as moderates.
Most of the drama happened publicly in the PCUSA, but similar conflicts happened in almost every evangelical denomination and even in individual churches. Between 1910-and 1915 a set of twelve books were published by conservatives outlining the foundational doctrines of the faith that could not be denied. This set of book was called The Fundamentals, and afterwards, conservatives began to be called by that name.
It was on May 21, 2022, nearly one hundred years ago to the day, that Henry Emerson Fosdick preached here in New York City the sermon: “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Fosdick argued that certain Bible doctrines were more like theories than facts and that we should value unity and our public witness above all else.
In 1923, one of the most influential conservative voices, J. Gresham Machen, a professor at Princeton Seminary, published Christianity and Liberalism, a book that described liberalism as a different religion from Christianity.
n the present conflict, the great redemptive religion which has been always known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology.
Machen had to resign his position, and he went on to found Westminster Theological Seminary. Other splits occurred in denominations and religious organizations as the modernists refused to leave the church and conservatives refused to have unity with unbelief.
In many ways, the old controversy remains with us. Throughout our churches, we have people who use Christian terminology but who deny orthodox doctrines. It’s usually not about the virgin birth, but we see the same kinds of shying away from Scripture in areas like male-only ordination, creation, and even homosexuality and the allowing of immorality in the church. More prevalent, however, I believe, is the dismissal of doctrine altogether. If we have a doctrinal statement, it doesn’t carry the weight it once did. Those doctrines are not taught and applied, and the concerns of the church are more about personal developments and social concerns.
Doctrine is crucial. Think of a beloved family member and everything you know about that person from a lifetime of personal experience. Now imagine that someone tells you to deny a lot of what you know about them and tells you that “It’s the relationship that matters.” You know that relationship means nothing if it’s based on lies; in fact, without those truths, you might as well be talking about another person.
The doctrines of our faith, who God is, what he has done, who Jesus is, what he has done, who we are, these are all the truths that create and sustain our relationship with Jesus. These are the truths that transform us, and they are the basis for our faith. Without them, we have a different religion.
When we study church history, theology, and the Scriptures on Sunday mornings, we are not being “heady.” When we recite the creeds, we are not creating unnecessary divisions. We are learning the truth that God has given us, and we are letting those truths change us. We must guard doctrine because it is the faith itself.