For Machen, although Christianity and liberalism sounded much alike, they were, in essence, two different religions. The first was the revealed religion of the Lord Jesus Christ; the second was a manmade reconstruction of the former that intended to make that religion palatable to minds that had imbibed the tenets of autonomous reason trumpeted by post-Enlightenment theologians. The steps from the appearance of Machen’s groundbreaking work to the birth of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia can be traced with unbroken historical clarity.
