Daily Inspiration Quote by John Gresham Machen

Machen is doing something sly here: he’s framing “consistent Christianity” not as the hardest version to live with, but as the easiest version to defend. The line reads like a concession to modern critics, yet it’s really an indictment of Christians who try to keep the faith while sanding off its sharp edges. For Machen, the real problem isn’t that Christianity is too weird; it’s that half-Christianity is too slippery.

The subtext is legalistic in the best sense: a coherent system can be argued for, attacked, and tested. A patched-together faith that borrows the vocabulary of historic doctrine while quietly swapping in modern assumptions collapses under cross-examination. The more you dilute the supernatural claims, the more you’re forced to justify why you keep the label at all. “Consistent” becomes a rhetorical trapdoor: either Christianity is what it has historically claimed to be, or it’s a moral mood with church architecture.

Context matters. Machen is the Presbyterian modernist-fundamentalist era in a single sentence: early 20th-century liberal Protestantism recasting Christianity as ethical uplift compatible with modern sensibilities, and Machen insisting that this move doesn’t update Christianity so much as replace it. His point isn’t merely doctrinal purity; it’s argumentative stability. Paradoxically, the “hard” claims (miracles, incarnation, resurrection) create clean lines. Once you start negotiating them, you don’t get an easier faith - you get one that can’t explain itself without sounding like a brand managing a crisis.

It’s a polemic disguised as calm observation, and that restraint is part of its force.