The Contemporary Era: Overview

Historical Theology

The Church in This Era

The twentieth century opened on a Christendom that seemed, to many, securely Christian and steadily progressing. It closed on a church transformed almost beyond recognition. In the span of a hundred years the centers of Christian vitality migrated from Europe to the global South; the optimistic liberalism that had captured the Western academy was shattered by two world wars; Rome reinvented her posture toward the modern world; and a battered confessional Protestantism, given up for dead by its cultured despisers, rose again with surprising vigor.

This is the era in which our own questions were forged. The debates over Scripture, revelation, and the gospel that animate Reformed churches today are the direct inheritance of these decades. To understand ourselves, we must understand this century.

It is also an era we must narrate with care. The actors are recent; many of their heirs are our neighbors and fellow churchmen. We owe them the courtesy of stating their convictions as they would, before we weigh them by the Word.

Where We Are in the Story

The previous era left Protestantism divided over the Bible. The rise of higher criticism, the prestige of Darwinian science, and the confidence of cultural progress had produced a theological liberalism that reinterpreted Christianity as the flowering of religious experience and ethical aspiration. Against it stood Old Princeton — Hodge, Warfield, and the doctrine of plenary inspiration — defending the church’s historic confession that Scripture is the very Word of God written.

That conflict did not resolve quietly. It erupted. The opening decades of the twentieth century brought the great fundamentalist–modernist battles, in which the question was not which Christianity is truer but whether two religions were masquerading under one name. From that crucible came new institutions, new alignments, and a long reckoning over what it means to be faithful in a hostile age.

Key Figures

J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937) — Princeton and Westminster New Testament scholar; author of Christianity and Liberalism; founder of Westminster Theological Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. The era’s great confessional combatant.

Karl Barth (1886–1968) — Swiss theologian whose Romans commentary and massive Church Dogmatics broke liberalism’s spell and recalled theology to the sovereign God who speaks. The towering figure of the century, and its most consequential challenge to confessional orthodoxy.

Carl F. H. Henry (1913–2003) — theologian of the new evangelicalism; founding editor of Christianity Today; author of The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.

Billy Graham (1918–2018) — the evangelist whose crusades and convening power gave evangelicalism a public face and a global reach.

John XXIII and Paul VI — the popes who summoned and guided the Second Vatican Council, Rome’s great twentieth-century reorientation.

Cornelius Van Til, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Francis Schaeffer, and R. C. Sproul — laborers, in different idioms, in the recovery of Reformed theology.

Key Controversies and Developments

Five movements give this century its shape.

First, the fundamentalist–modernist controversy, in which American Protestantism split over the supernatural and the authority of Scripture. The confessional party largely lost control of the old denominations and seminaries but founded new ones.

Second, the neo-orthodox reaction. Barth and his allies, recoiling from liberalism’s domesticated God, recovered divine transcendence, the priority of revelation, and a Christ-centered reading of Scripture — while reconceiving the Bible’s authority in ways that confessional Reformed theology cannot finally accept.

Third, the rise and fracturing of evangelicalism. A new coalition sought to wed orthodox conviction to cultural engagement, building Fuller Seminary, Christianity Today, the National Association of Evangelicals, and the Lausanne movement. Its breadth was its strength and, in time, its weakness, as the inerrancy debates of the 1970s exposed fault lines the Chicago Statement sought to mend.

Fourth, Catholic aggiornamento. The Second Vatican Council (1962–65) opened Rome to the vernacular, to the modern world, and to a warmer regard for the “separated brethren” — without repudiating Trent.

Fifth, the southward shift of Christianity and, within the West, the recovery of confessional Reformed theology — the rediscovery of the Puritans, the revival of Calvinism, and a renewed Presbyterianism that took up again the work of semper reformanda.

Councils, Creeds, and Confessions

This is not an age of ecumenical councils on the ancient model, yet it produced documents of weight. The Barmen Declaration (1934) confessed Christ as the church’s one Word against a Nazified Christianity. The Second Vatican Council issued constitutions — Dei Verbum, Lumen Gentium — that remain the charter of contemporary Catholicism. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) gave evangelicalism a careful articulation of the doctrine its forebears had assumed. And confessional Presbyterian bodies reaffirmed and republished the Westminster Standards as living confessions rather than museum pieces.

What Was Settled — and What Was Left

What was settled is that liberalism could not sustain a church. Its great institutions, having traded the gospel for relevance, declined; its confidence did not survive the trenches of the Somme. Machen’s thesis — that liberalism is not a variety of Christianity but a different religion — was vindicated less by argument than by attrition.

What was left unsettled is nearly everything else. The authority and nature of Scripture remain contested, now along the seam Barth opened: is the Bible the Word of God, or a witness that becomes the Word in the event of revelation? Evangelicalism never resolved how broad a tent can stand without a center. Rome’s posture toward justification remains, despite warmer words, the same posture Trent struck. And the Reformed recovery, real as it is, must still ask whether it is reforming or merely retrieving.

A Reformed Assessment

We read this century providentially. The Lord who promised that the gates of hell would not prevail (Matt. 16:18) did not preserve his church by preserving her cultural dominance. He preserved her by raising up confessors when the academy fell silent, by sending the gospel south when the North grew cold, and by giving his people again the old books and the old creeds.

“On this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matt. 16:18)

We give Barth his due: he made theology speak again of God. We honor the evangelical impulse to reach the lost and the Catholic impulse to address the modern age. Yet we measure all by Scripture (WCF 1.10), and by that measure the century’s great gains came chiefly where the church recovered, rather than reinvented, the faith once delivered.

Lessons for the Church Today

The first lesson is that doctrine matters more than institutions. The buildings and budgets passed to those who emptied them of the gospel; the gospel passed to those who held it fast, often with empty buildings and small budgets.

The second is that engagement without confession dissolves. Every movement that prized relevance above truth was, within a generation, less relevant and less true.

The third is hope. This is an era of remarkable recovery. The God who buried liberalism’s God also unburied the Puritans, raised up Westminster and the OPC, and made Calvin young again. Semper reformanda is not a slogan of despair but of confidence: the church is always being reformed because her Lord is always reforming her.