Progress in Theology - J. Gresham Machen

[F]ar from advocating progress in theology, the current pragmatism really destroys the very possibility of progress. For progress involves something to progress to as well as something to progress from. And in the intellectual sphere the current pragmatism can find no goal of progress in an objective norm of truth; one doctrine, according to the pragmatist view, may be just as good as an exactly contradictory doctrine, provided it suits a particular generation or particular group of persons. The changes in scientific hypotheses represent true progress because they are increasingly close approximations to an objectively and externally existent body of facts; while the changes advocated by pragmatist theologians are not progress at all but the meaningless changes of a kaleidoscope.

As over against this pragmatist attitude, we believers in historic Christianity maintain the objectivity of truth; and in doing so we and not the Modernists become advocates of progress. Theology, we hold, is not an attempt to express in merely symbolic terms an inner experience in different terms in subsequent generations; but it is a setting forth of those facts upon which experience is based. It is not indeed a complete setting forth of those facts, and therefore progress in theology becomes possible; but it may be true so far as it goes; and only because there is that possibility of attaining truth and of setting it forth ever more completely can there be progress. Theology, in other words, is just as much a science as is chemistry; and like the science of chemistry it is capable of advance. The two sciences, it is true, differ widely in their subject matter; they differ widely in the character of the evidence upon which their conclusions are based; in particular they differ widely in the qualifications required of the investigator: but they are both sciences, because they are both concerned with the acquisition and orderly arrangement of a body of truth.

-J. Gresham Machen - What is Faith?