Christianity & liberalism - Machen - X

Required reading 

Christianity and Liberalism by J. Gresham Machen (available from Amazon or free on the internet, here for example) - Begin chapter VI, Salvation, and read up to the paragraph beginning 'But still another objection remains against the Christian doctrine of the Cross.  The objection concerns the character of God.  What a degraded view of God it is...' (page 109 in the new edition). 

My notes and thoughts
Now Machen turns his attention to the liberal view of salvation.  After setting up the fact that Jesus death must be more than an example of self-sacrifice, an example of how much God hates sin or even an example of how much God loves us, Machen answers three liberal objections to the substitutionary death of Christ: (i) its dependence on history; (ii) its narrow nature; and (iii) its belief that one person can suffer for another. 

I loved the section at the beginning that says that the vicarious atonement is not the puzzling part, rather the fact that the liberals won't accept it is the puzzling thing: 'And this Bible doctrine is not intricate or subtle.  On the contrary, though it involves mysteries, it is itself so simple that a child can understand it.  "We deserved eternal death, but the Lord Jesus, because He loved us, died instead of us on the cross"-surely there is nothing so intricate about that.  It is not the Bible doctrine of the atonement which is difficult to understand-what are really incomprehensible are the elaborate modern efforts to get rid of the Bible doctrine in the interests of human pride. 

Now it's your turn

Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.