From the end of the Civil War until the turn of the twentieth century, American attitudes toward the Bible had changed. And in the midst of all the flux, the Princetonians were simply not ready to give up on the authority of the Bible without an argument. They offered a carefully nuanced but firm doctrine of inspiration, that of verbal, plenary inspiration. But, as to be expected, not all saw it the same way.

The Shekinah from the Shrine

While Charles Briggs disagreed with Hodge and Warfield, he certainly did not go as far in his disagreement with them as would Harry Emerson Fosdick. Fosdick had a wide following, preaching in large churches, speaking to massive audiences on the radio, and writing best-selling books. Behind all of that popular speaking and writing was a well-trained and very clever mind. While the fundamentalists were digging in their heels and looking at best outdated and at worst mean-spirited, Fosdick finessed his audiences, and they, by the tens of thousands, listened. To win them over, he proposed what amounted to a new religion, one that had the skeleton of Christianity but with a fresh face and body acceptable to moderns. He knew the power of words and used those words to proffer a new view of the Bible and a new Christianity.

Fosdick could turn a phrase; so he spoke of “the Shekinah distinguished from the shrine.” He wanted the “Gospel freed from its entanglements.” On the surface this may sound good, but digging a little deeper reveals that the shrine and entanglements that Fosdick refers to are nothing else but the Bible. The Bible in its form is the shrine, but inside it, if we get past the particulars, we are led to the abiding truths. The words are historic, but underlying those words is the abiding sense. The beauty of liberalism and modern sensibilities, Fosdick argues, is that they offer “intellectual liberation from an old literalism” and consequently “incalculable spiritual enrichment” for moderns. Fosdick, who retooled Scripture so it could better speak to human needs, transformed the sermon into therapy.¹¹

By the time Fosdick was in full swing, Archibald Alexander Hodge had long since died. Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield too had passed. But the mantle they bore had not fallen by the way altogether. It had been picked up by J. Gresham Machen. Actually Warfield essentially placed it on Machen just before he died. Machen, perhaps a little reluctant, was nevertheless well qualified for the task. Like Fosdick, Machen knew his way around words. He had also been well trained at Princeton and at Germany. But unlike Fosdick, Machen did not see the teaching of Scripture and historic creeds as cause to blush. He didn’t look for the abiding truths hidden on the surface of the historic words of the text.¹²

Machen offered a full reply to Fosdick in Christianity and Liberalism (1923). In sum, Machen charges that Fosdick’s view of authority boils down to individual experience. According to Machen, one’s view of inspiration and consequently of the text of the Bible itself has to do with one’s starting point. If you start with the supposition that God has revealed himself in all of the words of Scripture, then you submit to the teachings of Scripture, however hard they may be for a modern person or however seemingly challenging they are. If you start with the legitimacy of modern sensibilities, then you can conveniently overlook and downplay those difficult elements. Machen did not deny Fosdick the right to his view of Scripture. Machen just had problems with Fosdick claiming that his view was Christian.