LIBERAL - the meaningless term

Handle with care, by Brad Isbell

Not all liberalisms are created equal—not in 1923 and not in 2024.

LIBERAL is a nearly meaningless word these days, and all those saying the PCA is going (or is proven to be) liberal because some committee or individual invited a certain person to participate in an 8 AM optional, usually poorly attended General Assembly panel is nuts.

• LIBERAL - theological definition: Denying the veracity of the scriptures, the miracles in the bible, the divinity and/or resurrection of Christ, etc. — This describes (as far as we know) exactly no one in the PCA.¹

• LIBERAL - original political definition: "a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise." — This does describe some persons politically in the PCA as it does in most of the West.²

• LIBERAL - current polemical political/social definition: anyone left of center or left of me, woke, progressive, Marxist, Communist, egalitarian, redistributionist, socially/sexually libertarian, etc. — the term is so broad as to be almost meaningless but is useful as a pejorative. It does (in our opinion) describe the politics of a small minority of people in the diverse PCA.

Is there overlap between those accurately described by these labels (inasmuch as they can be accurate)? Yes. Is using these terms imprecisely in the service of point-scoring polemics helpful, wise, or ethical? No. Many types of "liberal" tendencies are red flags in Christian churches. Waving the flags all the time at the slightest provocation (and assuming the target's status as a Christian believer along with the "liberal" label) is not right and may hurt the cause of orthodoxy.

A certain type will say that the present controversy proves that the PCA is full of racist Christian Nationalist fundamentalist ayatollahs. Another type will say the fact that anyone proposed such an ill-advised speaker proves the PCA is irredeemably lost and "liberal." Neither is true.

Finally, Machen preferred "modernism" to liberalism for his great book, but (as we recall) his publisher or some editors preferred "liberalism"...make of that what you will. Maybe using the term was fraught with peril even 100 years ago.

Here’s what Machen wrote for Moody Monthly in 1923, almost identical to a passage in his book Christianity and Liberalism:

When you get beneath the traditional phraseology used everywhere today to the real underlying issue, you discover that that great redemptive religion called Christianity is being attacked within the church by a totally different type of religious thought and life, which is only the more opposed to Christianity because it is making use of traditional Christian phraseology. That modern non-redemptive religion which is attacking Christianity at its root is called by various names. It is called Modernism. It is called Liberalism.

All such names are unsatisfactory; the latter in particular is question-begging, because the movement is regarded as liberal only by its friends. To those opposed to it it seems to involve a narrow attention to certain facts, and a closing of the eyes to others that are equally vital.

But by whatever name the movement may be called, the root of the movement is found in Naturalism, and by that I mean the denial of any entrance of the creative power of God, as sharply distinguished from his works in nature, at the beginnings of Christianity.

Not all liberalisms are created equal—not in 1923 and not in 2024.

1. It may be said that some who have left the PCA (for egalitarian and mainline denominations) were on a trajectory to theological liberalism before they left. To say the PCA is a hospitable home for those displaying explicitly liberal doctrinal tendencies is just not true.

Post based on this X thread.

2. Machen, with his libertarian leanings, was a liberal of sorts in a philosophical and political sense that is sometimes referred to as classical liberalism.

The whole development of modern society has tended mightily toward the limitation of the realm of freedom for the individual man. The tendency is most clearly seen in socialism; a socialistic state would mean the reduction to a minimum of the sphere of individual choice. Labor and recreation, under a socialistic government, would both be prescribed, and individual liberty would be gone. But the same tendency exhibits itself today even in those communities where the name of socialism is most abhorred. When once the majority has determined that a certain regime is beneficial, that regime without further hesitation is forced ruthlessly upon the individual man. It never seems to occur to modern legislatures that although "welfare" is good, forced welfare may be bad. In other words, utilitarianism is being carried out to its logical conclusions; in the interests of physical well-being the great principles of liberty are being thrown ruthlessly to the winds.

https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/machen/ChristianityandLiberalismJGreshamMachen.pdf (p. 13) —the word “liberty” appears 21 times in Christianity and Liberalism, “freedom” 9 times.