The Reformers voiced their own protest, and with divine reason. The church and her officers must not sit in judgment over Scripture. The church is a creatura verbi, a creation of the Word. So understood, the church and all its officers sit under the Word of God. But Rome had usurped authority that belongs to God’s Word alone, converting and perverting the church’s derivative authority into definitive authority. The Reformers, therefore, uniformly spurned Rome’s claims that tradition and the Bible speak with voices of equal authority, rejected its tiebreaking magisterial voice, and repudiated its claims to infallibility. The Bible alone (sola Scriptura) suitably holds the infallibility moniker and serves alone as supreme judge (Westminster Confession of Faith 1.10).

Rome’s assumption of magisterial authority is only one manifestation of mankind’s persistent refusal to bow the knee to God’s Word. In the early twentieth century in the United States, J. Gresham Machen faced a new and formidable Word-defying foe: theological liberalism. While this opponent bore a different face from the one before the Reformers, its voice was loud, its clout strong, and the stakes high. Machen knew what he was up against, and with a Luther-like resolve under the conscious authority of Scripture, he valiantly asked, “Shall we accept the Jesus of the New Testament as our Saviour, or shall we reject Him with the liberal Church?”

Theological liberalism was in the very air of post–World War I modernism. And the mainline church had inhaled. Scandalized by the Scopes “monkey” trial, fundamentalist Christianity had become a cultural laughingstock, a resource-rich target of mockery for the educated and sophisticated. Harry Emerson Fosdick’s famous 1922 sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?,” while contending for a supreme law of tolerance, not so subtly asserted his perception that the doctrines of the historic Christian faith were inane. Fosdick pleaded for everyone just to get along.