This book that Tim Challies is doing for his blog reading group, Christianity & Liberalism, is so good it;s unbelievable. Along with this book I'm reading the current issue of Modern Reformation magazine on why the "progressive evangelical's" definition of "missional" is is just another recycled version of the liberal Protestant social gospel, but taken overseas. The book and the magazine are both dovetailing together. It's great! Here's some more great passages from the chapter Challies is on this week--chapter 4 (entitled "The Bible"--in Machen's book.
Machen goes into the fact that Christianity is a historical religion as opposed to a mythical or jsut an experiential one. Here's a fantastic quote from the book in this chapter:
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 on a complex of ideas, but upon the narration of an event.
To the argument that Christianity should deal with experiences and not so much dusty truths and events of long ago, Machen states,
Salvtion does depend on what happend long ago, but the events of long ago have effects that continue until today.
I'm so glad Challies is doing this book as I had never read it, and it certainly is addressing the concerns I've had for the past six years about the encroachment of liberal Protestantism into evangelicalism through the emergent movement.
Steve Went Looking for Grace
3 days ago
1 comment:
Machen was a very influential thinker in his day. I recently read Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture. Machen and his writings came up frequently in that book as having particular importance in the whole fundamentalist/modernist debate in the early 20th century. I wrote a short review of Marsden's book at www.americanchurchhistory.blogspot.com
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