This past Summer on a university campus a conservative Baptist friend suggested to me that a conservative Christian could not be a liberal in politics. He suggested that theological conservatism and political-liberalism were incompatible. This was not a startling statement as consistency would seem to demand as much. Not long after this the political views of […]

Dr. Carl F. H. Henry’s book Evangelical Responsibility in Contemporary Theology is small in size but rich in content. It gives a bird’s eye view of the current theological scene. And, of course, it gives this survey from the evangelical point of view. In particular it wants to discover the opportunity and therewith the responsibility […]

Having examined the roots of the downward hermeneutical spiral in the Enlightenment of 300 years ago in Europe and England, author Dennison now examines the American PCUSA in which the Enlightenment has triumphed virtually completely. The Editors In one American denomination in particular, the Enlightenment model has triumphed virtually completely. I am referring to the […]

Just as the Clinton crowd plastered “It’s the economy, stupid!” in their “war room” during the 1992 campaign, Republicans should hang this statement by incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich in every one of their offices: “It is impossible to take the Great Society structure of bureaucracy, the redistribution model of how wealth is acquired and […]

J. Gresham Machen—honored in this issue of The Outlook on the sixtieth anniversary of his death—was the leading scholarly critic of liberalism in America in the 1920s and 1930s. He stood with others before and after him, such as Abraham Kuyper and Cornelius Van Til, in defense of historic Christianity against the rising liberal doctrine […]

When J. Gresham Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism in 1923, the book was not the sort that would win friends or advance his career. He pulled no punches. Machen’s thesis that liberalism was “unChristian” infuriated many Protestants who still maintained great influence within America’s leading cultural institutions. Machen also wrote that liberalism was “the greatest […]

During many discussions in the last twenty years with members of the Christian Reformed Church, I often made the charge that the church had become liberal. The response would almost always be the same. No matter how far they had strayed from the faith of their forefathers they would declare, “I am not liberal.” They […]