NICHOLS: It’s an important story because for us who are American Christians it is our DNA. It has affected us, our previous centuries. So, I think it’s an important story to wrap around. We can go back to the 1920s and one of my figures, J. Gresham Machen, and Machen was a brilliant scholar, Johns Hopkins’ Bachelor’s. Princeton trained, Princeton professor. But this is the time of modernism in American culture, and the twentieth century was a time of optimism and growth, and, of course, it had World War I, which influenced Europe far more than it did America, because it was there on the soil of Europe. I mean France is losing two million people in World War I. America is losing a hundred and seventy thousand soldiers, which is terrible, but the differences are also known. The flappers of the twenties, it’s the “Roaring Twenties,” we call it, and it’s a culture that is ready to move away from God. That’s modernism; “We don’t need God anymore. We built skyscrapers, and He is holding us back.” Well, much of the church didn’t want culture to keep going past them, so they said, “Hold on, hold on, you don’t have to leave just yet. We’ll make our doctrines a little more palatable. You don’t like sinful man, you know, what we were just talking about? Well, let’s say that humanity is basically good. You don’t like the idea that Christ had to die, you must have a substitute? Let’s turn Christ’s death into just an example, and now you are empowered to follow His example every day. Isn’t that beautiful?” That’s liberalism. It’s compromising those doctrines that actually define Christianity in order to stay at the cool table of culture. Well, along comes Machen and he writes a book, Christianity and Liberalism. And he says, “This is not Christianity. This is a Christianity without a cross. This is not Christianity. Christianity without the message of sin? That is not Christianity. Christianity without an authoritative Bible that stands over us that we are accountable to; if you don’t have that, you don’t have Christianity. You are American. You are free to believe whatever you want to believe. We love liberty, but you can’t believe something that’s the total opposite of Christianity and call it Christianity.” It was a bold stand that Machen took. I mention that because I think that’s really true of the story of American Christianity. It’s sort of a tale of two cities. We love culture, our culture in America. We love it and sometimes we want to be a part of it, so much so, that we’ll compromise our convictions. It has happened. We all saw it. It’s happening right now. Whole denominations are selling their birthright to keep up with culture. Or are we going to be a church of conviction that says, “No, we’re going to follow God’s Word.” And Machen is a good example of being a Christian of conviction. So, there is one incident that I find interesting and also informative.
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