Men with Chests

But if any one fact is clear, … it is that the Christian movement at its inception was not just a way of life in the modern sense, but a way of life founded upon a message. It is perfectly clear that the first Christian missionaries did not simply come forward with exhortation; they did not say: “Jesus of Nazareth lived a wonderful life of filial piety, and we call upon you our hearers to yield yourselves as we have done to the spell of that life.” Certainly that is what modern historians would have expected the first Christian missionaries to say, but it must be recognized at least that as a matter of fact they said nothing of the kind. They came forward, not merely with an exhortation or with a program, but with a message,—with an account of something that had happened a short time before. “Christ died for our sins,” they said, “according to the Scriptures; he was buried; he has been raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.”

This message, even the small excerpt from it quoted by Paul in 1Cor. 15:3ff., contains two elements—it contains (1) the facts and (2) the meaning of the facts (“for our sins”). The narration of the facts is history; the setting forth of the meaning of the facts is doctrine. These two elements are always contained in the Christian message. “Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried”-that is history. “He loved me and gave himself

for me”—that is doctrine. Without these two elements, inextricably intertwined, there is no Christianity.

The character of primitive Christianity, as founded upon a message, is summed up in the words of the eighth verse of the first chapter of Acts—”Ye shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” It is entirely unnecessary, for the present purpose, to argue about the historical value of the Book of Acts or to discuss the question whether Jesus really spoke the words just quoted. In any case the verse must be recognized as an adequate summary of what is known about primitive Christianity. From the beginning Christianity was a campaign of witnessing. And the witnessing did not concern merely what Jesus was doing within the recesses of the individual life. To take the words of Acts in that way is to do violence to the context and to all the evidence. On the contrary, the Epistles of Paul and all the sources make it abundantly plain that the testimony was primarily not to inner spiritual facts but to what Jesus had done once for all in His death and resurrection.

~ J. Gresham Machen, (1881-1937), Liberalism or Christianity?, THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW, Vol. 20, 1922, Page 97