A Fair Flower

In this week’s chapter of Christianity and Liberalism, there are two main themes: authority and subjective experience. Machem was concerned with the people of his time losing sight of the authority of Scripture and relying only on their own experience to recognize truth. This is very prevalent in our time and culture today.

In our culture, there are an exuberant amount of people who will nominally claim Jesus for the sake of fire insurance or simply forsake Jesus altogether. What does this mean and why is it a problem? This means that people who claim Jesus but not have any fruit from an alive relationship with God are forsaking the authority of Scripture. How do we know this? Scripture is not only informative but transformative. The more you know God the more you love God. “The Christian message has come to us through this book.” (59, Machem)
Machem explains how some will use their experiences to confirm or deny the Gospel. “It is one of the root errors of modern liberalism. Christian experience, we have just said, is useful as confirming the gospel message. But because it is necessary, many men have jumped to the conclusion that it is all that is necessary.” (61, Machem) What we have here is people using their own experience to either confirm or deny the gospel. This is natural and perhaps one of the first responses in relating to someone; you check with your own experience to see if it accurate. Let’s say you went to Central Park in New York and you saw a certain statue. Your friend went to the same park and did not see the statue. Contradiction and the authority of you and your friend’s truth comes into question. Who to believe? What if there was a source that was always true and without error? Would you choose to trust it?
“My Christian life, then, depends altogether upon the truth of the New Testament record.” (61, Machem) Believing that Scripture is inerrant ultimately comes down to trust. Sure, there are sources out there that build excellent cases on why the Bible is inerrant but conversation consistently comes back to, “Do you trust that God says who he says he is and his Word is inerrant?”

Machen clearly explains this as he explains an analogy of a flower, likening it to a testimony of a Christian with and without Scripture truth. “Christian experience is rightly used when it helps to convince us that the events narrated in the New Testament actually did occur; but it can never enable us to be Christians whether the events occured or not. It is a fair flower, and should be prized as a gift of God. But cut it from its root in the blessed Book, and it soon withers away and dies.” (62, Machem) A life experience without the truth of God will not stand up to true testimony of Jesus’ life-giving message.
So if Scripture is not the authority of Machem’s liberal Christians, what is? He writes that their authority is not in Jesus, but rather in themselves. “The real authority, for liberalism, can only be ‘the Christian consciousness’ or ‘Christian experience…’ The only authority, then, can be individual experience; truth can only be that which ‘helps’ the individual man… the result is an abysmal skepticism.” (66-67, Machem)
So in this chapter, Machem paints a pretty cut and dry picture of Christians versus liberalism by saying that Christian authority is found in Scripture and liberal authority is based on personal experience.

Sources:

Machen, J. Gresham. Christianity & Liberalism. 2nd ed., Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2009.

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