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I think Dr. Machen really put his finger on something. He said, those who want to change our church are not going out publicly and saying, these are the changes we espouse. What do you think of them? They were working in the background. They were working behind the scenes. They were working in ways that most of the laity didn't observe in the life of the church.
And Dr. Machen thought there was a dishonesty about that. The 20th century, in many respects, contains the best and the worst of human history. And a significant figure in the life of the Church in the 20th century was J. Gresham Machen, and he's the man you'll learn about today.
Welcome to the Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind, as we conclude our Saturday series, Dipping Our Toes into Church History, from W. Robert Godfrey's monumental six-part study series.
If you have sought to build the complete collection, all six installments, today you can add this final installment on the 20th century to your library when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. Perhaps the name Machen is familiar to you. That could be because 2023 marked the 100th anniversary of his watershed book, Christianity and Liberalism.
And we featured teachings surrounding that book on renewing your mind to mark the anniversary. Well, today, Dr. Godfrey will consider what was happening leading up to that book's release and what happened after. Here's Dr. Godfrey.
We've been looking at the growing divide in American Protestantism in what had been a united evangelical Protestant front through much of the 19th century, watching how Protestantism is polarizing into fundamentalist and modernist wings, still in the early 20th century, largely united in the same denominations, but increasingly finding life together difficult and traumatic,
And we've illustrated up to this point this polarization in terms of Presbyterian experience. And I want to go on doing that by looking with you at the experience of J. Gressom Machen. Machen is important on several fronts.
He illustrates something of a character and role of Presbyterianism in America, but more importantly, he was recognized as the single most effective scholarly voice on the fundamentalist side of the controversies that were emerging in America in the first half of the 20th century.
And Dr. Machen in that regard helps us to see that fundamentalists in the early part of the 20th century were not at all what fundamentalism came to mean later when it was used in a derogatory way. Fundamentalist today is often used to refer to uneducated, stubborn, ignorant, uncultured sorts of people, and Dr. Machen was none of those things.
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