Machen Chapter Four Observations

Chapter four of J. Gresham Machen’s “Christianity and Liberalism” talks heavily about the Bible and salvation. In this blog, I would like to share a series of statements made by Machen that I believe to be accurate and useful to a Christian’s faith. While I have not agreed with Machen in most of my posts, I found this comment by him to be inciteful and something I can definitely get behind. Machen states, “Salvation then, according to the Bible, is not something that was discovered, but something that happened” (Machen, 60).

Machen’s comment is thought-provoking and quite fascinating when it is broken down. Salvation as a concept is something that could not be discovered because that implies that anyone could have brought about salvation if they discovered it. When salvation is believed as something that happened, we can see the glory of Jesus Christ so much more. Jesus did not discover salvation for all of us; rather, He delivered it through his death on the cross. The only way for salvation to be brought about was through God’s sacrifice of His only Son and Christ’s sacrifice in giving up His deity, living a human life and dying a gruesome death. When salvation is put into perspective, it truly provides greater admiration for Christ and His life.

The other fascinating aspect of this quote by Machen is that it can be flipped in modern day interpretation and still make sense. Salvation is something that happened, and now we can discover it for ourselves. Machen enforces this idea in chapter four as well when he states that, “Salvation does depend upon what happened long ago, but the event of long ago has effects that continue until today” (60). Personally, I took this quote as reinforcing the idea previously stated, that while the event of salvation occurred thousands of years ago, it has continued to impact the lives of countless people for generations.

While Machen’s original comment on this concept addressed the aspect of salvation being indiscoverable, he did a great job of addressing that it was merely indiscoverable at the time of Christ because He needed to deliver it to us. Now that it has been delivered, anyone can discover Christ in their own life and accept Him into their hearts. Machen concludes his point in a satisfying way when he claims, “We are told in the New Testament that on a certain morning long ago Jesus rose from the dead. That again is a record of a past event. But again, we can make trial of it, and making trial of it we discover that Jesus is truly a living Saviour to-day” (61). In this comment, Machen accomplishes two important things. He affirms his argument that salvation was an event that took place many years ago; however, he then claims that we discover that Jesus is a living Savior today, reinforcing in our minds the truth that salvation is now discoverable to anyone who is willing to search for it. Machen’s argument in chapter four is important and certainly something that must be understood in the quest for clarity on salvation and its relevance today.

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