November 29, 2023 with William Shishko on “Christian and Liberalism: Celebrating the 100th Anniversary” (Part 2)

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Introduction and Psalm 27:17

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 29th day of November 2023.

Welcoming Pastor Bill Shishko and Introducing Christianity and Liberalism

And I am thrilled, as I always am, to have back on my program a returning guest who has been featured on this broadcast many times, and he happens to be one of my dearest and oldest friends going back to the 1980s when I first received the gift of eternal life through the grace and mercy and blood of Jesus Christ.

And his name is Pastor Bill Shishko, and he is pastor of The Haven, which is a church plant of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church denomination in Comac, Long Island, New York. And today is part two of a discussion that we began on Reformation Day, October 31st, part two of the discussion that we began celebrating the 100th anniversary of the classic work by J. Gresham Machen, which is Christianity and Liberalism.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Bill Shishko.

Hey, Chris, it's so good to be back with you. I'm excited about this program, as I am about every program with you.

And by the way, I just realized when I remembered our previous interview on this subject, that I have for decades been mispronouncing J. Gresham Machen's name. And if you could correct me on which part of his name I'm mispronouncing.

It's Gresham. You got it right. It's actually Gresum, not Machen.

That's what it was, Gresum.

Well, I've been making the mistake of calling him Dr. Machen, and I never got a doctorate. But we conferred an honorary doctorate on him. Everybody else confers honorary doctorates, so we can do it.

Amen. Well, first, before we go into the topic at hand, which is, as I said, part two of our celebration of the 100th anniversary of Christianity and Liberalism, tell our listeners about that wonderful congregation in Comac, Long Island, The Haven.

Well, I'm privileged to be the organizing pastor for Mission Church of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 16 Oak Lawn Drive, Comac, New York, the upper northwest corner of Suffolk County on Long Island.

And we'd love to have you worship with us. Our worship is at 10 a .m. on the Lord's Day, and we have what we call Sunday Seminary at 12, 15, and Haven Food and Fellowship on most Sundays at 1 o 'clock.

But we'd love to have you worship with us.

And I truly enjoyed, beyond my ability to describe in the English language, my first visit to The Haven close to a year ago, I guess it was. And I hope to have many more opportunities to visit that wonderful congregation and worship with you.

I had many opportunities of fellowshipping with you when you were pastoring the OPC in Franklin Square, but that was the first time I had visited The Haven in Comac, where you are now pastoring. And I just love that church.

I love the way you worship. And I love the liturgy without being dry and robotic, a lot of lively and enthusiastic and passionate liturgy there.

Liturgy with life.

Yes, amen. So if anybody lives near Comac, you're passing through, or you have family, friends, and loved ones there, go to thehavenli .com, thehavenli, for Long Island, .com, and you can find out all the information that you need.

Machen's Book as a Prophetic Diagnosis of Liberalism

Well, let's have an overview, for the sake especially of our listeners who did not hear part one of our conversation on Christianity and liberalism that we conducted on October.

31st.

Let's have an overview of this class.

Well, it's interesting, Chris, that since we had our last program about a month ago, World News Group—and I commend, as I know you do, World News Group for journalism that really seeks to bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ—but they made J. Gresham Machen's Christianity and Liberalism, which came out in 1923, they have declared that Book of the Year for 2023, apparently with no debate among them, which is really something.

I think that they recognize—I'll use the word prescient here—this is a book that really not only describes the situation in Machen's day, but as we're going to learn in the second half of the program today, it is very eerily prophetic of what we're experiencing today.

Christianity and liberalism is a masterpiece of popular scholarship and logic. I find it interesting, Chris, that H. L. Mencken, who was a fellow Baltimorean with Machen, Mencken did not believe any of what Machen believed about the Christian faith, but he was familiar with the book, he was familiar with what was going on in Machen's denomination at that time, the Presbyterian Church USA, and he was aghast that this man who upheld what Presbyterians are supposed to uphold was the one who would eventually be thrown out of the Presbyterian Church USA, because Mencken said you can't—even though again, he didn't agree with Machen—he said you can't answer his scholarship and his logic.

So what Machen gave—and I think this is probably why World gave it the Book of the Year for 2023 award—it really was kind of the early tremors of this earthquake of modernism or liberalism that crept into the churches in the 20th century.

And I'll give you the overview, just a hint on reading the book Christianity and Liberalism. Don't read it first as a theological text. It's really the map of a battlefield with the different theaters of the war—doctrine, God and man, the Bible, Christ, salvation, and the church.

Liberalism, which is not to be equated with political liberalism, liberalism—which really was not very liberal, but that's beside the point—liberalism, otherwise known as modernism, really denied the fundamentals of the Christian faith about God and man and about the Bible and Christ and salvation.

And so what Machen is putting forth in his book is really three things. One, liberalism, theological liberalism, denial of the fundamentals of the faith, is not a different brand of Christianity. That was what was being espoused in the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America in 2023 and in other churches.

He said it's not a different brand of Christianity. It's not Christianity. And he says that over and over again in the book and proves his point. Number two, the book makes the point that Christianity is about supernaturalism versus naturalism.

Naturalism means that really God doesn't intervene in the world. If he does, it's really just by experience, that religion is just an unnatural outgrowth of human life and progress. And Machen says absolutely not.

From beginning to end, the Bible is about the supernatural, the true and living God's involvement in the world. And then number three in the book, it's a strong statement about history, what God has done in history that precedes Christian or religious experience.

Very, very important for the book, the importance of history before experience. That's kind of an overview of Christianity and liberalism.

Okay, well, today we have a situation that makes the liberalism of Machen's day pale into insignificance in comparison to what we are seeing today, even within professed Christianity. We even had professedly conservative and even professedly reformed congregations and denominations electing into office people who claim to be homosexuals, who merely make a vow of chastity and celibacy and so on.

And we could go on and on and on. Would you say that Machen's work, having said that, is still as powerful in the 21st century as it was in his day?

Chris, it was last night in preparing for this I finished, I think for the third time I've been through the book, although I hadn't been through it for many years. Even I could not get over how powerful that book, this book is as a statement today.

I think that's again why the World News Group gave it book of the year. But my dear brother, we're getting ahead of things. I'm looking, I plan to deal with those things in the second hour.

Okay, then we'll wait to the second hour for you to respond to that.

Okay. Let me just give your audience an overview. And Chris, you know, you interrupt me at points. I can just go on and on and on. Yeah, well, in the first program, we covered just really just the introduction to the book.

That's the October 31st, 2023 program. And then that was chapter one. Chapter two is about doctrine. And in a real sense, as many people have pointed out, the whole book is really about about Christian doctrine.

But in a quote, I won't quote too often from Machen, but I want people to get a get a feel for the book. Machen writes, according to the Christian conception, a creed is not a mere expression of Christian experience, but on the contrary, it is a setting forth of those facts upon which experience is based.

That's probably a succinct summary of the whole book. He says, if any one fact is clear on the basis of the evidence, it is that the Christian movement at its inception was not just a way of life in the modern sense, but a way of life founded upon a message.

And what he's getting at there, liberalism put a big emphasis supposedly on the way of life. Machen says you can't have the way of life without the message that comes. And he also has in the chapter on doctrine, the primitive church, what we'd call the early church, was concerned not merely with what Jesus had said, but also and primarily with what Jesus had done.

Machen's putting himself over against the religious teachers of his day who wanted to follow the words of Jesus, but they didn't pay attention to what he actually did. Again, Machen, the world was to be redeemed through the proclamation of an event.

And with the event went the meaning of the event and the setting forth of the event with the meaning of the event. That was doctrine. So that's his really what is his second chapter. God and man is chapter three in the book.

Again, the introductions, chapter one, doctrine, chapter two, and then God and man, chapter three. And when we come to the second section, Chris, in so many ways, there have been such marked changes, even from Machen's day.

But God and man, for the religion of Machen's day, and it's true to a large extent today, God was known through feelings. Not an uncommon statement in Machen's day was this. The knowledge of God is the death of religion because the emphasis was on feelings rather than so-called facts.

The emphasis was on the quote unquote, the practical, not the theoretical. Doctrine would be called the theoretical. And as Machen points out, there's nothing about objective reality when you deny doctrine.

Therefore, there really is no knowledge. At that time, the emphasis was on the fatherhood of God, which was regarded as the essence of Christianity and the brotherhood of man, a very popular hymn then.

And even today, God, our father, Christ, our brother. Right. And as Machen points out so powerfully, in one sense, I mean, God is the father of all people, his creator. But the relationship of God to unrepentant sinners, as Machen put it, is not the relationship of a father to his children.

And this was regarded as inflammatory in Machen's day, that you would deny that liberal concept of the fatherhood of God. Machen speaks of the loss of what he calls the awful, and awful is not bad, but full of awe.

The word awful is a wonderful word when you take it for what it really means, that the awful transcendence of God, Machen emphasizes the great gulf between God and the creature. And regarding man in chapter three, on God and man, Machen has this statement, according to the Bible, man is a sinner under the just condemnation of God.

According to modern liberalism or modernism, the denial of the fundamentals of the faith, there is really no such thing as sin. At the very root of the modern liberal movement that is in theology is the loss of the consciousness of sin.

Now, he wrote this in 1923. The consciousness of sin was formerly the starting point of all preaching, but today it is gone. Characteristic of the modern age above all else is a supreme confidence in human goodness.

The religious literature of the day is redolent of that confidence. Get beneath the rough exterior of men, we are told, and we shall discover enough self-sacrifice to found upon it the hope of society.

The world's evil, it is said, can be overcome with the world's good. No help is needed from the outside world. Wow, that Chris was 1923, and that was the view of man that was held then. The other statement in this chapter, Christianity means that sin, this is powerful, Christianity means that sin is faced once for all and then is cast by the grace of God forever into the depths of the sea.

The trouble with the paganism of ancient Greece, as with the paganism of modern times, was not in the superstructure, which was glorious, but in the foundation, which was rotten. There was always something to be covered up.

The enthusiasm of the architect, God is maintained as a great architect here, was maintained only by ignoring the disturbing fact of sin. In Christianity, on the other hand, nothing needs to be covered up.

The fact of sin is faced squarely once for all and is dealt with by the grace of God. But then, after sin has been removed by the grace of God, the Christian can proceed to develop joyously every faculty that God has given him.

Such is the higher Christian humanism, that's over again, secular humanism, a humanism founded not upon human pride, but upon divine grace. Oh, I mean, talk about, I'm jumping already, Chris, into what we're going to be dealing with in the second hour.

But when's your break? I can keep going here.

Why don't I take the break now, so I don't have to interrupt you. Mid-sentence.

Great.

And if anybody has a question for Pastor Bill Shishko on J. Gressamachin, as I am correcting myself in my pronunciation, please send in your email to chrisarnsen at gmail .com. C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

And as always, please give us your first name at least. Your city and state and country of residence only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter, such as you are a member of a church, for instance, that you believe sadly and tragically needs to hear the warnings of J. Gressamachin today because they are accurately described in this classic work as a liberal church, or might even be more accurately described in the 21st century, a leftist church.

But if you're just asking a general question, it's not personal, it's not private, give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. Don't go away. We're going to be right back.

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We're now back with Pastor Bill Shishko of the Haven Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Comac, Long Island, New York. And we are continuing part two of a discussion we began on October 31st, celebrating the 100th anniversary of J. Gresham Machen's classic work, Christianity and Liberalism.

And if you have a question, submit it to ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. And since you mentioned earlier H. L. Machen, I want to once again plug the documentary that was produced by our mutual friend and also one of your colleagues in the Orthodox Presbyterian denomination, Jason Wallace of Christ Presbyterian Church in Magna, Utah.

He produced The Unexpected Orthodoxy of an Atheist, H. L. Machen's obituary of J. Gresham Machen. And even though, as Pastor Shishko mentioned earlier, even though Machen, the atheist, disagreed with much, if not most, of what J. Gresham Machen stood for, he still revered him as a man of integrity and a man of gifts and power and so on and wrote this wonderful obituary that I actually had the privilege to record in my voice for Jason Wallace's video.

So if you want to see that yourself, go to YouTube and type in The Unexpected Orthodoxy of an Atheist. That's The Unexpected Orthodoxy of an Atheist. And you can also go to the website of Christ Presbyterian Church in Magna, Utah.

And that website is gospelutah .org. But if you could, Bill, pick up from where you left off there.

You know, that obituary by H. L. Machen really, really is remarkable. I have to hear it in your voice. We're in actually chapter four of—.

By the way, you're not going to recognize my voice because after hearing a recording I actually found of Machen, I tried to imitate him as best as I could.

No, that's interesting. Makes it even more fascinating. Chapter four in Machen's volume, Christianity and Liberalism, is on the Bible. If you're looking for proofs that the Bible is inspired and inerrant and plenary inspired, fully inspired, this really wouldn't be the chapter you'd want to read.

Not that Machen didn't believe it, but that really wasn't his purpose in this chapter. But he has what to me was just a fascinating insight into why we have the Bible. He said, the Christian message has come to us through the Bible.

What should we think about this book in which the message is contained? According to the Christian view, the Bible contains an account of a revelation from God to man, which is found nowhere else. The way was opened, according to the Bible, by an act of God when almost, we would now say, 22 ,000 years ago.

Outside the walls of Jerusalem, the eternal sun was offered as a sacrifice for the sins of men. To that one great event, the whole 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. Now, he's put distancing himself from those who believe the Bible was kind of an evolved historical document that came out of the imaginations of people.

Back to Machen. Hence appears the uniqueness of the Bible. All the ideas of Christianity, listen carefully to this, 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 could be no salvation by the discovery of eternal truth, for eternal truth brings nothing 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.

And Machen's just, his esteem of the scriptures, which, that's one of the things Chris and I got done last night going over this. I don't want to be facetious, but that song, Thank God I'm a Country Boy, and I don't want to be irreverent, but I said, Thank God I'm an Orthodox Presbyterian.

This reverence for the Bible that Machen had is so much a part of the church of which I'm a part, and I'm thankful for that. Machen ends the chapter on the Bible by saying, the Reformation of the 16th century was founded upon the authority of the Bible, and yet it set the world aflame.

Dependence upon a word of man would be slavish, but dependence upon God's word is lawful.

Bill, you've frozen.

If we were left to our own devices and had no blessed word of God, the Bible to the Christian is not a birth card of Christian liberty. It is no wonder, then, that liberalism, that is theological liberalism, is totally different from Christianity, for the foundation is different.

Christianity is founded upon the Bible. It bases upon the Bible both its thinking and its life. Liberalism, on the other hand, is founded upon the shifting emotions of sinful. Next hour in the application, that works itself out in so many ways, but that was the insight of J. Gress Machen.

His next chapter is on Christ, whom he calls the supernatural person. Again, for Machen, again, this is for the scriptures, Christianity is a supernatural religion. We're not talking about something that is the evolution of human thought and development.

It's God speaking and acting in history, and Christ is, as Machen calls him, the supernatural person. This is probably the most complex chapter in the book, and in his more popular way, he develops the orthodox doctrine of Christ.

He's God and man in two distinct natures and one person. His point here is that Jesus is not an example for our faith or an example of faith, but he's the object of our faith. It's not just his person, but also his work.

Interestingly, for those who've read C .S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, there's something similar to what Lewis famously said in Mere Christianity. Don't call Jesus a good man. A good man, because no good man would claim to be God, or he'd be the most arrogant man on the face of the earth, and he has other things.

But Machen says the same thing in there, telling if Jesus is your moral example, he claimed to be God, and that would make him a man of hyper-arrogance. But anyway, the chapter on Christ, he also deals with miracles in this lengthy chapter.

Miracles were denied by those of the liberal persuasion and theology, and again, tellingly, Machen says, it is small comfort to be told that there was goodness in the world, because liberalism emphasized the goodness of man and so on.

He said it's small comfort to be told that there was goodness in the world, when what we need is goodness triumphant over sin. But goodness triumphant over sin involves an entrance of the creative power of God, that's supernaturalism, and that creative power of God is manifested by miracles.

Without the miracles, the New Testament might be easier to believe, but the thing that would be believed would be entirely different from that which presents itself to us now. Without the miracles, we would have a teacher.

With the miracles, we have a Savior. Isn't that something? That's so beautifully expressed. And there again is the supernaturalism. One of Professor Machen's other volumes was on the virgin birth of Christ, which was denied by the theological liberals.

Many denied not all, many denied the bodily resurrection of Christ. And Machen said, you take that out, and you don't have Christianity at all. So that chapter on Christ is very full. Now the one on salvation, especially where Machen emphasizes the cross and the atonement, it is Machen's eloquence at its highest.

I will put in my books, Chris, when I'm writing, wow, when it's a statement, that's a wow statement. And there's loads of wow statements in his chapter on salvation. There are so many of them in here.

But he says, according to the Christian belief, Jesus is our Savior, not by virtue of what he said, because the liberals wanted to say that they lived out of the words of Jesus, although they really didn't.

But anyway, not even by virtue, Machen again, not even by virtue of what Jesus was, but by what he did. He is our Savior, not because he has inspired us to live the same kind of life that he lived, but because he took upon himself the dreadful guilt of our sins and bore it instead of us on the cross.

Wow, what a statement in a succinct form of what the gospel is. Again, quoting him from his chapter on salvation, our religion must be abandoned altogether unless at a definite point in history, Jesus died as a propitiation for the sins of men.

Propitiation is to appease the wrath of God. And of course, liberals, theological liberals, hated the concept of the wrath of God. And there, as Machen points out, their opprobrium, their invectives, their opposition to the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement, that Christ died taking the punishment for our sins as a substitute for us.

This was something the liberals railed against. Now back to Machen, he says, with regard to this objection to their atonement, it should be observed that if religion be made independent of history, there is no such thing as a gospel, for gospel means good news, tidings, information about something that has happened.

A gospel independent of history is a contradiction in terms. The Christian gospel means not a presentation of what always has been true, which was basically what liberalism was saying, but a report of something new, something that imparts a totally different aspect to the situation of mankind.

So what Machen just goes right to the heart of things there. Now what's fascinating, we've got what, Chris, about five minutes before your break?

Actually 10.

Okay, great. This, Chris, is brilliant. We're told today, as Machen was told in his day, yes, but the Christian faith is exclusive. It's narrow. And Machen takes that on. He talks about the criticism of the gospel for its exclusiveness, that Jesus doesn't say, I am a way, a truth, and a life, the way, the truth, and the life.

Now follow what Machen says. What struck the early observers of Christianity most forcibly was not merely that salvation was offered by means of the Christian gospel, but that all other means, or means of salvation, were resolutely rejected.

The early Christian missionaries demanded an absolutely exclusive devotion to Christ. Such exclusiveness ran directly counter to the prevailing syncretism, which is a blending of paganism and Christianity, the prevailing syncretism of the Hellenistic age.

Salvation, in other words, was not merely through Christ. It was only through Christ. And that little word only lay all the offense. Now some background. When Machen was writing this, and one of the things that makes him, I think, so passionate in this chapter, the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America was sending out missionaries who said, basically, all religions are at the base of a mountain, and they're all going up the mountain to the same God.

And there was no, to say the least, no emphasis on the exclusiveness of the gospel.

And that would include Pearl Buck, correct?

Pearl Buck was exactly the one that Machen was dealing with. But all are on the same road to God, and a complete denial of the new birth, which Machen has a tremendous section on the new birth here. But here we go.

Now watch how he deals with this exclusiveness argument. He says, in answer to the objection about the exclusiveness of the gospel, it may be said simply that the Christian way of salvation is narrow only so long as the church chooses to let it remain narrow.

The name of Jesus is discovered to be strangely adapted to men of every race and of every kind of previous education. And the church has ample means, with promise of God's spirit, to bring the name of Jesus to all.

If, therefore, this way of salvation is not offered to all, it is not the fault of the way of salvation itself, but the fault of those who fail to use the means that God has placed in their hands. I've not read anything like that in other books, but that's powerful.

Machen was passionately concerned with missions. One of the reasons why I'm glad I'm part of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. It's embedded into our warp and woof. Yes, the gospel is exclusive, but let's go to people with it and call them to repentance and faith.

That's an absolutely brilliant, brilliant thing. The other thing I would say about this is Machen deals with the fact that Christianity is not Christian civilization. And today where we have Christian nationalism and things like this, Machen makes the point that Christianity will certainly impact the culture and form people.

But that formation of a society, that's not Christianity. Christianity is focused on Christ. And then before the break, a chapter on the church would be, for many of your listeners, Chris, kind of odd in a way.

Machen was dealing with a situation in the Presbyterian Church, USA and other churches, where ministers, as you were mentioning before, ministers would come in with crossed fingers. They would profess to believe the Bible is the word of God.

But they really didn't. They reinterpreted that. They would confess that they believed that in the Presbyterian Church, the Westminster Confession of Faith was the system of doctrine, contained the system of doctrine taught in Holy Scripture.

But they really didn't believe that. And Machen makes the point that here the issue is honesty. And tellingly, Chris, he makes the point, he says, really, if you don't believe these distinctives, why not become part of a Unitarian Church?

And a lot of it's because of money. But here, and then I'll end with this, this is what is prophetic and sad. Machen says in his chapter on the church, if you don't believe what the church's confession is, then be honorable and leave.

Either start another church or become part of one that does hold what you do. But he said, please don't coexist with us. And what's tragic is that it would be 13 years later that those liberals who really were illiberal, they would force Dr. Machen, Professor Machen, out of Presbyterian Church USA.

So I found that chapter on the church. I wanted to have my tissue box near me. It was sad when you realize what happened.

Yes, in fact, they should go beyond forming another church. They should be honest enough to form their own religion because they're not Christians at all when they are denying the essentials of the scriptures.

Correct. That's right. And when you have a confessional standard, and again, you profess it, but with crossed fingers, as Dr. Machen says, that's dishonesty. All right. Next hour, we're going to deal with the application for today.