[%] There’s a reason he’s down there

I was reading Doug Wilson’s blog this week, and on the one hand, I find his on-going battle with his local intoleristas instructive and (look: we all hate this part of ourselves, but it’s there – which is the reason Reality TV shows flourish) entertaining. I do find myself praying for Christ Church in Moscow, ID, as a result of those entries.

I also find myself praying for them because of other entries, too, but for a different reason. If you check out this link, you’ll find a post in which Pastor Wilson finds himself agreeing with Phil Johnson regarding J. Gresham Machen and the dividing line that exists between Christianity and Liberalism. However, because Pastor Wilson is a very skilled writer, he also adds this:

I would be interested to know how many of Phil's readers, who were able to say amen to that quote from Christianity and Liberalism, would be able to say amen to this one as well.

"Yet how great is the common heritage which unites the Roman Catholic Church, with its maintenance of the authority of Holy Scripture and with its acceptance of the great early creeds, to devout Protestants today! . . . The Church of Rome may represent a perversion of the Christian religion; but naturalistic liberalism is not Christianity at all" (Christianity and Liberalism, p. 52).

Common heritage? Was Machen wobbley?

You can actually find the complete text of Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism here, (all my quotes from Machen will come from there, so forgive my lack of page citations) and the quote Pastor Wilson cites is found at the end of Chapter 1. Here is the paragraph that the quote is taken from:

Far more serious still is the division between the Church of Rome and evangelical Protestantism in all its forms. Yet how great is the common heritage which unites the Roman Catholic Church, with its maintenance of the authority of Holy Scripture and with its acceptance of the great early creeds, to devout Protestants today! We would not indeed obscure the difference which divides us from Rome. The gulf is indeed profound. But profound as it is, it seems almost trifling compared to the abyss which stands between us and many ministers of our own Church. The Church of Rome may represent a perversion of the Christian religion; but naturalistic liberalism is not Christianity at all. {Emphasis Added}

The greater context of that statement is this thesis:

In maintaining the doctrinal basis of Christianity, we are particularly anxious not to be misunderstood. There are certain things that we do not mean.

In the first place, we do not mean that if doctrine is sound it makes no difference about life. On the contrary, it makes all the difference in the world. …

In the second place, we do not mean, in insisting upon the doctrinal basis of Christianity, that all points of doctrine are equally important. It is perfectly possible for Christian fellowship to be maintained despite differences of opinion.

Thus Machen’s point is that we have far more in common with the “Church of Rome" than we do with “liberals" inside our own denominations – his crux being that even Rome does not have the audacity to deny the earliest creeds.

So was Machen “wobbley"? In his chapter in this same book, Machen says this about “the Church":

… the Church of today has been unfaithful to her Lord by admitting great companies of non-Christian persons, not only into her membership, but into her teaching agencies. It is indeed inevitable that some persons who are not truly Christian shall find their way into the visible Church; fallible men cannot discern the heart, and many a profession of faith which seems to be genuine may really be false. But it is not this kind of error to which we now refer. What is now meant is not the admission of individuals whose confessions of faith may not be sincere, but the admission of great companies of persons who have never made any really adequate confession of faith at all and whose entire attitude toward the gospel is the very reverse of the Christian attitude. Such persons, moreover, have been admitted not merely to the membership, but to the ministry of the Church, and to an increasing extent have been allowed to dominate its councils and determine its teaching. The greatest menace to the Christian Church today comes not from the enemies outside, but from the enemies within; it comes from the presence within the Church of a type of faith and practice that is anti-Christian to the core.

… the narrow man is the man who rejects the other man's convictions without first endeavoring to understand them, the man who makes no effort to look at things from the other man's point of view. For example, it is not narrow to reject the Roman Catholic doctrine that there is no salvation outside the Church. It is not narrow to try to convince Roman Catholics that that doctrine is wrong. But it would be very narrow to say to a Roman Catholic: "You may go on holding your doctrine about the Church and I shall hold mine, but let us unite in our Christian work, since despite such trifling differences we are agreed about the matters that concern the welfare of the soul." For of course such an utterance would simply beg the question; the Roman Catholic could not possibly both hold his doctrine of the Church and at the same time reject it, as would be required by the program of Church unity just suggested. A Protestant who would speak in that way would be narrow, because quite independent of the question whether he or the Roman Catholic is right about the Church he would show plainly that he had not made the slightest effort to understand the Roman Catholic point of view. {Emph added}

So I don’t think Machen went “wobbley", nor that he was underscoring a point necessary for (as Wilson’s heading under “Auburn Avenue Stuff") a broader, inclusive view of all Roman Catholics as unquestionably inside the church.