Gems from Warfield's Essay, "Christless Christianity"
Warfield’s essay, “Christless Christianity” was originally written for the Harvard Theological Review in 1912. It is a decimating critique of that cycle of liberal theology which sought to respond to Arthur Drew’s 1909 book, “The Christ Myth.” Drew’s book was widely identified as anti-Christian propaganda, even by liberals. But liberal theologians who sought to respond to Drew, particularly German liberals, conjured up a form of Christianity which was no longer dependent upon a historical Jesus. Warfield will have none of it. In many ways Warfield’s essay argues the same points Machen does in his Christianity and Liberalism, written in 1923. Warfield argues that whatever it was that German liberals were exporting into American seminaries and churches it was not Christianity, but an altogether different religion with a completely different Jesus. The liberal’s collective response to Drew’s attack was a not a defense of Christianity but a capitulation to unbelief.
The essay was originally published in Vol. III of the Works of Benjamin B. Warfield, Christology and Criticism. Page numbers (in parenthesis) are taken from this volume. The essay can also be found here in its entirety: Christless Christianity.
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Meanwhile why should the definition of the essence of Christianity be so vexed? Why should there be so much controversy over the application of the name? There surely ought to be little difficulty in determining what Christianity is (355).
Unquestionably, Christianity is a redemptive religion, having as its fundamental presupposition the fact of sin, felt both as guilt and as pollution, and offering as its central good, from which all other goods proceed, salvation from sin through an historical expiation wrought by the God-man Jesus Christ. The essence of Christianity has always been to its adherents the sinner’s experience of reconciliation with God through the propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus Christ. According to the Synoptic tradition Jesus Himself represented Himself as having come to seek and to save that which is lost, and described His salvation as a ransoming of many by the gift of His life, embodying this conception, moreover, in the ritual act which He commanded His disciples to perform in remembrance of Him. Certainly His first followers with single-hearted unanimity proclaimed the great fact of redemption in the blood of Christ as the heart of their gospel: to them Jesus is the propitiation for sin, a sacrificial lamb without blemish, and all their message is summed up in the simple formula of “Jesus Christ and Him as crucified.” (355-356)
He is a Christian, in the sense of the founders of the Christian religion, and in the sense of its whole historical manifestation as a world-phenomenon, who, conscious of his sin, and smitten by a sense of the wrath of God impending over him, turns in faith to Jesus Christ as the propitiation for his sins, through whose blood and righteousness he may be made acceptable to God and be received into the number of those admitted to communion with Him (357).
Christianity as a world-movement is the body of those who have been redeemed from their sins by the blood of Jesus Christ, dying for them on the cross. The cross is its symbol; and in its heart sounds the great jubilation of the Apocalypse: “Unto Him that loveth us and loosed us from our sins by his blood; and he made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto his God and Father; to Him be the glory and the dominion forever and ever. Amen.”
A Christianity without redemption—redemption in the blood of Jesus Christ as a sacrifice for sin—is nothing less than a contradiction in terms. Precisely what Christianity means is redemption in the blood of Jesus. No one need wonder therefore that, when redemption is no longer sought and found in Jesus, men should begin to ask whether there remains any real necessity for Jesus. We may fairly contend that the germ of Christless Christianity is present wherever a proper doctrine of redemption has fallen away or even has only been permitted to pass out of sight. Of course in the meantime some other function than proper redemption may be found for Jesus (357-358).