The Radically Doctrinal Church

Working through a landmark Machen article, part 6

Jul 25, 2024

The life was founded upon the message, and not the message upon the life.

J. Gresham Machen told his audience of social and political scientists that the church was not a mood, a vibe, or a model (among others) for social renewal.

That becomes clear everywhere in the primary documents. It appears, for example, in the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, which is admitted by all serious historians, Christian and non-Christian, to have been really written by a man of the first Christian generation—the man whose name it bears. The Apostle Paul there gives us a summary of his missionary preaching in Thessalonica—that missionary preaching which in Thessalonica and in Philippi and elsewhere did, it must be admitted, turn the world upside down. What was that missionary preaching like ? Well, it contained a whole system of theology. “Ye turned to God,” says Paul, “from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivereth us from the wrath to come.” Christian doctrine, according to Paul, was not something that came after salvation, as an expression of Christian experience, but it was something necessary to salvation. The Christian life, according to Paul, was founded upon a message.

Here Machen meets his skeptical audience on the contested ground of biblical criticism. He says (more or less) that even if the parts of the New Testament doubted by the critics are jettisoned there is still plenty of evidence for the doctrinal character of the early church’s message. Downplaying Paul in favor of the Gospels has been popular in every age. This continues today as some “Christian Nationalists” denigrate any reference to “New Testament Christianity.” There is truly nothing new under the sun.

The same thing appears when we turn from Paul to the very first church in Jerusalem. That too was radically doctrinal. In the First Epistle to the Corinthians—again one of the universally accepted Epistles1—Paul gives us a summary of what he had received from the primitive Jerusalem Church. What was it that he had received; what was it that the primitive Jerusalem Church delivered over unto him? Was it a mere exhortation; was it the mere presentation of a program of life; did the first Christians in Jerusalem say merely: “Jesus has lived a noble life of self-sacrifice; we have been inspired by Him to live that life, and we call upon you our hearers to share it with us”? Not at all. Here is what those first Christians said: “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; He was buried; He has been raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.” That is not an exhortation, but a rehearsal of facts; it is couched not in the imperative but in the indicative mood; it is not a program, but a doctrine.

Exhortation sells. Programs sell. The simple biblical message will always seem out of step with the zeitgeist.

I know that modern men have appealed sometimes at this point from the primitive Christian Church to Jesus Himself. The primitive Church, it is admitted, was doctrinal; but Jesus of Nazareth, it is said, proclaimed a simple gospel of divine Fatherhood and human brotherhood, and believed in the essential goodness of man. Such an appeal from the primitive Church to Jesus used to be expressed in the cry of the so-called “Liberal” Church, “Back to Christ!” But that cry is somewhat antiquated today. It has become increasingly clear to the historians that the only Jesus whom we find attested for us in our sources of information is the supernatural Redeemer presented in the four Gospels as well as in the Epistles of Paul. If there was, back of this supernatural figure, a real, non-doctrinal, purely human prophet of Nazareth, his portrait must probably lie forever hidden from us. Such, indeed, is exactly the skeptical conclusion which is being reached by some of those who stand in the van of what is called progress in New Testament criticism today.
There are others, however—and to them the present writer belongs—who think that the supernatural Jesus presented in all of our sources of information was the real Jesus who walked and talked in Palestine, and that it is not necessary for us to have recourse to the truly extraordinary hypothesis that the intimate friends of Jesus, who were the leaders of the primitive Church, completely misunderstood their Master’s person and work.
Be that as it may, there is, at any rate, not a trace of any non-doctrinal preaching that possessed one bit of power in those early days of the Christian Church. It is perfectly clear that that strangely powerful movement which emerged from the obscurity of Palestine in the first century of our era was doctrinal from the very beginning and to the very core. It was totally unlike the ethical preaching of the Stoic and Cynic philosophers. Unlike those philosophers, it had a very clearcut message; and at the center of that message was the doctrine that set forth the person and work of Jesus Christ.

It took amazing chutzpah for Machen to make the case for a supernaturalism based on the plain reading of the Bible before the secular academics of his day, but he did. He knew no other way. In the decade since the publication of Christianity and Liberalism, he had come up with no new measures. He had received no “fresh word from the Lord” nor was he tempted to blur the lines between the ways of the world and the simple mission and message of the church.