This year marks a significant milestone in theological scholarship—the centennial of the publication of J. Gresham Machen’s seminal work, Christianity and Liberalism. Over the past century, this book has profoundly shaped discussions about the essence of Christian faith in relation to the modern world.

At the heart of Machen’s book is the affirmation that Christianity is not merely a way of life; it is a doctrine. Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, assumed our nature and accomplished redemption for us in history. This makes the Christian message categorically distinct from all other narratives.

However, for classical liberalism, the Christian story is just one among many. In fact, the details of the story do not matter that much. What really matters for modern theologians are the ethical teachings the biblical story conveys. From those, we may seek to love our neighbor and strive for self-realization and a transcendent life.

To the liberal theological mind, Jesus Christ of the Bible is essentially no different from Neo in The Matrix or Simba in The Lion King. They are examples of the hero with a thousand faces, God in just another narrative mask. This idea, so deeply embedded in our society, has influenced many of the most successful films over the past half-century, their narrative structures directly attributable to the very perspectives that Machen critically examined in Christianity and Liberalism.

Contemporary Mythology

One of the most influential thinkers upon popular cinema is Joseph Campbell (1904–1987). Campbell’s work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, first published in 1949, has had a profound influence on how we understand and interpret myth and metaphor in contemporary culture. It introduces the concept of the “hero’s journey,” which Campbell argued is shared across cultures and epochs. In many ways, Campbell’s “monomyth” can be viewed as a secular distillation of the same liberal principles of thought that Machen addressed.

Campbell proposed that stories and myths throughout human history share a fundamental structure, which includes a “call to adventure,” “the crossing of the first threshold,” “the road of trials,” “the meeting with the goddess,” “atonement with the father,” and finally, “the return.” This is the pilgrimage to self-realization or self-transcendence, and eventually, enlightenment. Myths, then, are a means by which humans explore and express the deepest truths about their existence.

George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars franchise, credits Campbell’s theory on myth as a significant influence on his storytelling, even utilizing the “hero’s journey” as the basis for the original Star Wars trilogy. Likewise, Disney admittedly used Campbell’s ideas in creating movies like The Lion King, Aladdin, Finding Nemo, and Mulan, that fit within the archetypal “hero’s journey.”

Countless people in industries beyond Hollywood recognize Campbell’s theory on myth as foundational to storytelling. But it is essential to note that behind Campbell’s impactful framework stood key influences of its own, most notably the German theologian Wilhelm Bousset (1865–1920).

Bousset’s Kyrios Christos (1913) became a key text in the History of Religions movement that sought to understand Christianity in relation to the world’s other religions. He argued that the early Christian belief in Jesus as “Kyrios” or Lord was heavily influenced by the Hellenistic religious context, rather than being derived mainly from Jewish messianic expectations and the teaching of the Old Testament. According to Bousset, the primitive Palestinian community understood Jesus as a prophet, and it was the Hellenistic community, especially influenced by Paul, that developed the high Christology of Jesus as the preexistent divine Lord. This view represents a Christology “from below” and suggests that the concept of Jesus’s divinity emerged over time under the influence of the surrounding culture, rather than coming “from above.”

Machen’s Critique of Modernism’s Myth

J. Gresham Machen offered a substantial critique of Wilhelm Bousset’s Kyrios Christos and the so-called History of Religions School. While Machen recognized the importance of historical context in understanding the development of Christian theology, he took issue with the school’s tendency to explain away any semblance of divine revelation as merely the product of historical and cultural forces. He also challenged the materialist view of history. For Machen, history must be understood and studied with full awareness and acknowledgement of God’s supernatural activity and providence. In distinction from naturalism, the transcendent God acts within history to accomplish his plan and purpose for his people.

In Christianity and Liberalism, as well as in his earlier work The Origin of Paul’s Religion, Machen challenged the central thesis of Bousset, arguing for the divine origin and uniqueness of Christianity. He rejected the idea that Paul was the real founder of Christianity, as suggested by Bousset and others. Machen maintained that the essential elements of Paul’s religion—the conception of Jesus as Lord (Kyrios), his pre-existence, incarnation, atoning death, resurrection, and the expectation of his second coming—were not innovations but had their roots in Jesus’s teaching to the earliest Christian community. Jesus was the Son of God come in the flesh. God had broken into human history in the most dramatic fashion—assuming a human nature to accomplish redemption. The origin of Christianity was not the thoughts of men; it was this supernatural intervention.

Machen was greatly indebted to his former professor and colleague at Princeton Seminary Geerhardus Vos, whose own book on the subject, The Self-Disclosure of Jesus, was published in 1926, thanks to Machen’s efforts to introduce Vos to a broader audience. Vos was an advocate for a distinctly Reformed biblical theology, which he defined as the study of the history of special revelation. He argued in The Self-Disclosure of Jesus that Jesus’s messianic consciousness was not a later development as Bousset claimed but a fundamental aspect of his identity and mission. According to Vos, Bousset and others had neglected the divine origin and heavenly goal of Jesus’s ministry, the rich Old Testament background, and the Jewish apocalyptic context, which are critical to understanding the person of Christ and the beliefs of those who followed after him. Vos also critiqued the overemphasis Bousset put on Hellenistic influences, pointing out that the Semitic and Jewish thought world, shaped by the divinely inspired Scriptures, played a crucial role in shaping early Christological beliefs.

While both Machen and Vos acknowledged the need to understand Christianity within its historical context, they maintained Christianity’s singularity and supernatural origin. Vos and Machen critiqued the tendencies of Bousset and those who shared his views to reduce religious beliefs to mere products of cultural and historical influences, asserting instead the active role of divine revelation in shaping these beliefs. Undeniably, the transcendent God intervenes supernaturally in history to accomplish redemption—a belief that stands in stark contrast to the tenets of modernism.

Bousset and the History of Religions School suggest that all religion essentially reduces to anthropology, a viewpoint that strips Christianity of its divine origin and roots it firmly in the human realm. Vos and Machen, however, fervently challenge this stance. They assert that such a reductionist view disregards the unique claims of Christianity, notably the divine self-revelation of Christ and the transformative power of God’s redemptive work in the world.

Given the adoption of modernist presuppositions by figures like Bousset and Campbell, and their ensuing influence on theology and contemporary culture, the critiques offered by Machen and Vos demonstrate a remarkable resonance today. This raises an intriguing question.

Why have these modernist theories enjoyed such a pervasive and enduring impact? Our creation in the image of God profoundly influences our affinity for certain narratives. In our quest for meaning and understanding, we are naturally drawn to stories that resonate with the divine imprint within us. Our inherent longing for transcendent meaning and significance explains why we find myths and their “hero’s journey” narrative captivating. These narratives appeal to us because they contain kernels of the truth, which have the power to speak to our deepest desires and fears, hopes and uncertainties.

The gospel is not simply another iteration in Campbell’s monomyth, nor is Christianity the product of human thought. The gospel stands in a category of its own, unique and utterly distinct. This is the thesis of Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism. Christianity is not merely a way of life; it is a doctrine—the truth that God has entered history and accomplished redemption.

The author is historian of the OPC. New Horizons, October 2023.