Introduction
When kids would sing, “the B.I.B.L.E. yes that’s the book for me” we had a pretty good idea what they were saying even if they didn’t fully grasp what they were saying. The Bible is the most important book there is because it contains God’s self-revelation, and as such, not only is it authoritative – it is they authority for all our thinking and doing. As Cornelius Van Til said,
“The Bible is authoritative on all matters on which it speaks. Furthermore, it speaks of everything.”
The B.I.B.L.E. is God’s book and I’m going to conform my life it – imperfectly, yes – but strive nonetheless, and God’s grace in my life will be marked by a trajectory, through Christ, that goes further up and further into glory, but this whole process is guided and governed and directed by God’s word.
However, we live in a day and age when nothing can be assumed, especially regarding language. If boys can now be girls and girls can now be boys, by just wishing it to be so, we should be very careful not to assume that we are working with the same definition of a thing simply by using the same word, especially regarding theological terms.
As we’ve seen so far, working through, Christianity and Liberalism, The liberal view of God is diametrically opposed to the living and holy Triune God of Christianity. Also, the liberal view of man, being essentially good, and morally upright (it’s only his environment that lets him down, a bit like Frankenstein’s monster) is diametrically opposed to the Christian view that man is dead in his trespasses and sins and is utterly unable to save himself and is in desperate need of a Savior, namely Jesus.
Given that liberalism has divergent views of God and divergent views of man, which are the two great presuppositions of the Christian faith, of which, the doctrine of Christ, the perfect God-man makes no sense if either of these doctrines are off – then we would also expect the liberal message to be diametrically opposed to the Christian message of the resurrection of Jesus, which has come to us through the Bible.
Therefore, if everything the Bible declares about God and about man and about Christ, and about the centrality of the resurrection are not believed by liberals than it makes complete sense that their view of the Bible would also be diametrically opposed to the Christian view as well.
This is exactly what we see in the latest 2022, Ligonier survey on the State of Theology. When presented with the statement regarding the nature of God, “God learns and adapts to different circumstances” 51% of the U.S. adults agreed while 48% evangelicals agreed…as you can see, there was only a 3% difference between those who self-identify as evangelicals and those who don’t.
Statement No. 15, regarding the nature of man, “We are all born innocent in the eyes of God.” 71% of U.S. adults agreed with that statement while 65% of evangelicals agreed. Again, you can see that was only a 6% difference between the world and those who self-identify as evangelicals. All this to say, that liberalism has clearly made its way into the church regarding the doctrine of God and man.
Given this, we would expect to see similar results regarding the Bible, right? Not so, at least not on paper. 53% of U.S. adults agreed with the following statement, “The Bible, like all sacred writings, contains helpful accounts of ancient myths but is not literally true.” While only 26% of evangelicals agreed.
There is always that one kid in class, we’ll call him the troublemaker, who sees that, and says, “if the majority-ish of evangelicals have a view of God and man that are opposed to the Bible, how is it that three quarters-ish of evangelicals can say that they believe the Bible to be literally true?” Well, anything is possible when you play fast and loose with the word, “true.” This was true 100 years ago, and this is still true today.
The Bible
In the same survey by Ligonier, we see that 38% of evangelicals believe that religious belief is a matter of personal opinion and not a matter of objective truth. Which explains why they can hold to divergent views of both God and man and yet still claim that the Bible is literally true. If subjectivity is shaping objectivity and not the other way around, then you’re cooking the books as you go, and it doesn’t much matter what the Bible actually says…what really matters is what you would prefer it so say.
This also explains why 94% of evangelicals believe that sex outside of marriage is sin, while at the same time, 37% believe that gender identity is a choice and 28% believe that the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality doesn’t apply today. Though, “I make my own fate” sounds like a cool one liner from an 80’s action movie, in reality, it’s ridiculously stupid.
According to the Christian view, the Bible is the very word of God…As Paul said to Timothy,
“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” 2 Timothy 3:16-17
All of Scripture is breathed out by God, not just some of it, not just part, not a percentage of it, but all of it. Furthermore, it speaks of everything. The Bible is not just a historical book about awesome and miraculous events in history. The Bible contains an account of revelation from God to man. That is, it is God’s self-disclosure by which we not only learn about the one true and living God, but by this, we learn about ourselves and the universe and our place in it and what God is doing in human history from beginning to end, particularly through His eternal Son, Jesus.
The Bible is redemptive history…It’s interpretive history…God is telling us not only what has happened and why, but also what will happen and why. God is there and He is not silent which means His word comes with the force of a freight train…all that to say, you can dress up in your spanx and self-identify as a superhero and try and stop that freight train, but you’re not stopping it. Hence, the rank stupidity of using yourself as the interpretive grid through which to understand God’s self-revelation. This does nothing but bring you back to the Garden damning all of humanity along with yourself.
If your experiences, your desires, your understanding of things, your will, your preferences are the interpretive grid through which to understand everything you’ve made yourself God…and if your experience has taught you anything in this life it should be that you suck at playing God.
The perennial problem of man is that he thinks he knows better, but in thinking that he knows better than God, he robs himself of the wisdom and the power of God contained in the Gospel. And because the message of the Cross is a stumbling block to some and folly to others, and because they want the fruit of Christianity, or at least what they think Christianity can do for them, they need to contort and distort the Bible to suit their own passions. However, this is not an option the Bible leaves open to us. Machen explains,
“The way was opened, according to the Bible, by an act of God, when, almost nineteen hundred years ago, outside the walls of Jerusalem, the eternal Son was offered as a sacrifice for the sins of men. To that one great event the whole of the Old Testament looks forward, and in that one event the whole of the New Testament finds its center and core. Salvation then, according to the Bible, is not something that was discovered, but something that happened. Hence appears the uniqueness of the Bible.
All the ideas of Christianity might be discovered in some other religion, yet there would be in that other religion no Christianity. For Christianity depends, not upon a complex of ideas, but upon the narration of an event. Without that event, the world, in the Christian view, is altogether dark, and humanity is lost under the guilt of sin. There can be no salvation by the discovery of eternal truth, for eternal truth brings naught but despair, because of sin. But a new face has been put upon life by the blessed thing that God did when He offered up His only begotten Son.” J. Gresham Machen
The Bible tells us how, sinful man can have communion and fellowship with the living God…it comes from an acknowledgement of, and adherence to, all that was accomplished through the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus. Christian experience is wonderful and useful and is necessary in the confirmation of the message…however, just because it is necessary, that doesn’t mean that it is ALL that is necessary.
Longing for some sort of religious experience apart for the Bible is a fool’s errand and is like drinking salt water – it will never satisfy your soul, because you’re looking for an experience, perhaps even an experience of Christ, but not looking for Christ Himself. It may sound pious, but in the end, you’re just looking for what He can do your you…Jesus becomes a means to an end.
Experience can be a useful servant in drawing us to Christ, and opening His word for us, but it is a horrible master. Machen writes,
“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 occurred or not. It is a fair flower, and should be prized as a gift of God. But cut it from its roots in the blessed Book, and it soon withers away and dies.”
Looking around at our ecclesiastical landscape, we should heed Machen’s warning about cutting ourselves off from the blessed Book. If anything could be said about the state of the church these days it’s that she looks like a cut flower, and certainly not a freshly cut one. This is because the Bible is not only authoritative, it is life giving.
This is why liberalism is such a cancer. Again, in thinking they know better than God, by
removing all of the sharp edges, and creating a nicer, more respectable book, that nice and respectable people can appreciate they actually rob themselves of the fullness of joy that God has for them through Christ. But here, they would protest, that is exactly their point. They don’t have a problem with the Bible per se, their real problem is that the Bible has been hijacked and used as an oppressive book – mostly by stupid white men (assuming such a thing).
They would accuse the orthodox among us as really being the reductionist – and trying to bind their consciences to a few texts, which are obviously outdated, unlike the parts they like. What they want is not to fill their heads with the obvious meaning of the Bible – they want a true experience of Christ – in this, they fancy themselves to be the true Christians. However, what Machen says here is just as much as true in our day as it was his,
“As a matter of fact, however, the modern liberal does not hold fast even to the authority of Jesus. Certainly he does not accept the words of Jesus as they are recorded in the Gospels. For among the recorded words of Jesus are to be found just those things which are most abhorent to the modern liberal Church, and in His recorded words Jesus also points forward to the fuller revelation which was afterwards to be given through His apostles.
Evidently, therefore, those words of Jesus which are to be regarded as authoritative by modern liberalism must first be selected from the mass of the recorded words by a critical process. The critical process is certainly very difficult, and the suspicion often arises that the critic is retaining as genuine words of the historical Jesus only those words which conform to his own preconceived ideas. But even after the sifting process has been completed, the liberal scholar is still unable to accept as authoritative all the sayings of Jesus; he must finally admit that even the ‘historical’ Jesus as reconstructed by modern historians said some things that are untrue.” J. Gresham Machen
The Bible is a package deal. You start jiggering with some of it, you end up jiggering with all of it – because it is all or nothing because it is the word of God. You can’t say, “we like these parts and we like those parts, but these and those other parts are not for us today” when Jesus Himself said that the Bible was all about Him.
Jesus’ words perfectly apply here, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me” John 5:39. To play fast and loose with the Bible and then say you just want to live for Jesus and to have an experience of Jesus – is an option that Jesus Himself did not leave open to you.
So many mushies and liberals in the church today want to appeal to certain isolated ethical principles preached by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. And when I say appeal, I mean selectively appeal, and when I say selectively appeal, I mean just one principle taken out of context, like, “Judge not” or something like that. Unfortunately, the Sermon on Mount functions like a noose around their necks given, given Jesus’ declarations of Lordship all the way through with statements like, “But I say unto you”
Which is why when He got done preaching the sermons of sermons everyone was amazed at His authority because no one had ever spoken like Him before. Machen rightly concludes,
“Certain isolated ethical principles of Sermon on the Mount are accepted, not at all because they are teachings of Jesus, but because they agree with modern ideas.”
Herein lies the rob in the road. You are either going to conform yourself to the Bible as the authoritative word of God, or you are going to conform the word of God to your own tastes and preferences which is exactly what liberalism does, unfortunately, many evangellyfish have been caught up in this thinking.
When the authority of the word of God is abandoned, it’s not just that they become slaves to their own emotions, they become slaves to everyone else’s as well. Which is why in the last few years you have Christians marching in BLM “peaceful protests” while wearing their mask and vax sticker, while complaining about the climate, and standing with Ukraine. When you abandon what is timeless and true, you find yourself to be a novelty whore, or wandering about the marketplace seeking to hear about the next new “cause.”
In contrast to this Machen says,
“The Christian man, on the other hand, finds in the Bible the very Word of God. Let it not be said that dependance upon a book is a dead or an artificial thing. The Reformation of the sixteenth century was founded upon the authority of the Bible, yet it set the world aflame. Dependence upon a word of man would be slavish, but dependence upon God’s word is life. Dark and gloomy would be the world, if we were left to our own devices, and had no blessed Word of God. The Bible, to the Christian is not a burdensome law, but the very Magna Charta of Christian liberty.”
Conclusion
Liberalism is a totally different religion than Christianity, for the very foundation on which it stands is different. They may wax eloquent about the Bible, but at the end of the day, they do not believe the Bible to be the authoritative word of God, and base their all of their thinking and doing on the shifting emotions of sinful man.
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