Theological Liberalism: Modernism

Also known as modernism, this is the major shift in theological thinking that occurred in the late 19th century. It is an extremely elusive concept. A variety of shades of liberal thinking exist, it has changed in character during the passage of time, and the distinctions between liberalism in Europe and North America are considerable.

Main Features

1. The major distinctive is the desire to adapt religious ideas to modern culture and modes of thinking. Liberals insist that the world has changed since the time Christianity was founded so that biblical terminology and creeds are incomprehensible to people today.

Although most would start from the inherited orthodoxy of Jesus Christ as the revelation of a savior God, they try to rethink and communicate the faith in terms which can be understood today. As Harry Emerson Fosdick put it, we must express the essence of Christianity, its “abiding experiences,” but we must not identify them with the “changing categories” by which they were expressed in the past. Liberals maintain that Christianity has always adapted its forms and language to particular cultural situations and the “modernists” in any given age have merely been those who were most candid and creative in doing this.

2. A second element of liberalism is its rejection of religious belief based on authority alone. All beliefs must pass the tests of reason and experience, and one’s mind must be open to new facts and truth, regardless of where these may originate. No questions are closed or settled and religion must not protect itself from critical examination. As the Bible is the work of writers who were limited by their times, it is neither supernatural nor an infallible record of divine revelation and thus does not possess absolute authority. The “essence of Christianity” replaces the authority of Scripture, creeds, and the church. This means there is no inherent contradiction between the kingdoms of faith and natural law, revelation and science, the sacred and the secular, or religion and culture.

A central idea of liberal theology is divine immanence. God is seen as present and dwelling within the world, not apart from or elevated above the world as a transcendent being. He is its soul and life as well as the creator. Thus God is found in the whole of life and not just in the Bible or a few revelatory events. Because he is present and works in all that happens, there can be no distinction between the natural and supernatural. The divine presence is disclosed in such things as rational truth, artistic beauty, and moral goodness. Although most liberals attempt to hold on to a core of Christian doctrine, some did carry immanence to its logical end, which is pantheism.

Immanence contributed to such common liberal beliefs as the existence of a universal religious sentiment that lay behind the institutions and creeds of particular religions and the superiority of good works (both in individual and collective terms) over professions and confessions. God is seen as the one who enables man to integrate his personality and thereby achieve perfection. This of course required the restatement of many traditional Christian doctrines. The incarnation was the entrance into the world through the person of Jesus Christ of a molding and redeeming force in humanity, and it signified and ratified the actual presence of God in humanity. His prophetic personality is the clearest and most challenging demonstration of the divine power in the world, and he is both the revelation of God and the goal of man’s longing. Just as Jesus’ resurrection was the continuation of his spirit and personality, so it is with all mortals after the death of the physical body.

Sin or evil is seen as imperfection, ignorance, maladjustment, and immaturity, not the fundamental flaw in the universe. These hindrances to the unfolding of the inner nature may be overcome by persuasion and education, and salvation or regeneration is their removal. Religion represents the dimension of life in which personal values receive their highest expression, and its power possesses spiritually therapeutic qualities. Prayer, for example, heightens one’s spiritual sensitivity and confers the moral benefits of stability, self – control, and peace of mind.

Liberalism also manifests a humanistic optimism. Society is moving toward the realization of the kingdom of God, which will be an ethical state of human perfection. The church is the movement of those who are dedicated to following the principles and ideals set forth by Jesus, the one who provided the ultimate example of an unselfish life of love, and the members of this fellowship work together to build the kingdom. Liberal eschatology views God’s work among men as that of redemption and salvation, not punishment for sin, and this end will be reached in the course of a continuous, ascending progress.

Sources and Development

Theological liberalism originated in Germany, where a number of theological and philosophical currents converged in the nineteenth century. German thought had a profound impact on British and American theology, but indigenous movements in both places, the Broad Church tradition in Britain and Unitarianism in America, significantly shaped liberalism’s development there.

Kant’s ethical idealism and rejection of all transcendental reasoning about religion had the effect of limiting knowledge and opening the way for faith. Schleiermacher introduced the idea of religion as a condition of the heart whose essence is feeling. This made Christian doctrine independent of philosophical systems and faith a matter of individual experience of dependence upon God. Jesus was the perfect realization of the ideal of a new life of spiritual communion with God, and this possibility also existed for those who were drawn into fellowship with him in the church.

Hegel went off in another direction with his absolute idealism, as this emphasized the existence of a rational structure in the world apart from the individual minds of its inhabitants. That which is real is rational, and all reality is the manifestation of the absolute idea or the divine mind. Through a dialectical process of the ebb and flow of historical struggle, reason is gradually overcoming the irrational and good is triumphing over evil. The main contributions of Hegelian idealism were support for the idea of divine immanence and the fostering of historical and biblical criticism.

The ideas of F.C. Baur and the Tubingen School on the origins and early development of Christianity and the NT followed the principles of Hegelian historical evolution, and the same was true with Graf and Welhausen in OT studies. Higher criticism questioned the authorship and dating of much of the biblical literature and rejected the traditional understanding of the Scriptures as divinely revealed oracles. Christianity was simply seen as the historical fulfillment of natural religion, the culminating self – disclosure of immanent Spirit. Beginning with D.F. Strauss, carried forward by E. Renan and J.R. Seeley, and reaching a high point with Harnack, the “life of Jesus” was studied with the intent of stripping off the dogmatic formulations of the church and getting back to the concrete, historical human personage. They found hidden behind the smoke – screen of theology and hellenistic philosophy the teaching of a simple ethical religion summed up in the fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man. Insisting that Christianity must be founded upon the exact type of person he was, they felt it necessary to get behind the “Christ of the creeds” to the “Jesus of history.”

The sway of Hegel was broken by Ritschl, who emphasized the importance of faith and religious experience. He upheld Christianity’s claim to uniqueness but argued that Christian experience should be based on the objective data of history, not personal feeling. He saw Christianity as a life of action which would free man from the enslaving passions of his own nature and the determinism of his physical enviroment. Religious statements are value judgments relating to one’s spiritual situation and have practical consequences. His theology of moral values relates the gospel to two poles, the redemptive work of Christ and the fellowship of redeemed persons (the kingdom of God). In the kingdom one achieves moral perfection and thus is like Christ. God is immanent, transcendent, and personal all at the same time.

Liberals welcomed the findings of science and readily accommodated to the challenge of Darwinism. Evolution vindicated divine immanence, since this explained how God had slowly built the universe through natural law. He also revealed himself through an evolutionary process, as the Israelites began with backward, blood – thirsty ideas and gradually came to understand that the righteous God could be served only by those who are just, merciful, and humble. At last, Jesus portrayed him as the loving Father of all men. Thus, redemption was the gradual transformation of man from a primitive state to that of obedient sonship to God. The scientific approach was applied to theology and biblical criticism, and they were regarded as open to all truth. Just like the physical realm, culture and religion had evolved, and there was no fundamental antagonism between the kingdoms of faith and natural law.

Liberalism was prevalent in French Protestantism, where Auguste Sabatier taught that religion must be understood as life rather than doctrine. It is to be grasped through religious psychology and the historical study of the documents in which the religious consciousness of the past has left an imprint. According to the Catholic Alfred Loisy, the essence of Christianity is in the ongoing faith of the church rather than exclusively in the teachings of Jesus, and it is constantly reshaped by the present. Catholic modernism had a strong foothold in France as well as in Britain and to a lesser extent in the United States, but it was effectively quashed by papal action in the early twentieth century.

British liberalism was related to the latitudinarian tradition and was found among the Broad Churchmen such as Benjamin Jowett, who stressed a loose definition of dogma. Anglican modernism was distinctly British, individualistic and compromising, tending to combine Jesus’ natural manhood with a doctrine of his divinity. Perhaps the most controversial liberal was R.J. Campbell, a Methodist who criticized orthodox doctrine for its “practical dualism” in making people think of God as above and apart from his world instead of expressing himself through his world. He stressed instead the inward unity of God, man, and the universe almost to the point of pantheism. By and large, British liberalism tended to be theoretical and academic and more subdued in its overt humanistic enthusiasm.

In the United States the major source of liberal religious ideas was Unitarianism, and it had already modified the doctrines of divine sovereignty, human sin, and biblical revelation before German thought began to make itself felt. By the 1890s most of the major theologians had studied in Germany, and many of them had come to accept the principles of higher criticism and Darwinism. American liberalism was characterized by a strong sense of activism and a feeling that God is present and active in the great forward movements of human culture.

Liberal theologians concerned themselves with building the kingdom of God and promoting the applied liberalism known as the social gospel. This emphasized the need to modify the corrupt society that in turn was corrupting man. Social gospelers talked of the kingdom where men would live as brothers in a spirit of cooperation, love, and justice. The church must turn from saving individual sinners to the collective action of saving society. Achieving a better life on earth replaced the concern for the afterlife, and it was expected that Christ and Christian values would conquer the world. Progress could be seen in the advance of political democracy, the movement for world peace, and efforts to end racial discrimination.

Decline and Persistence

By the time of World War I liberalism had made considerable inroads in the Protestant churches in Europe and North America, but it rested on shaky foundations. World War I shattered the heady optimism that was its stock in trade, while conservatives counterattacked. Often referred to as fundamentalists, confessionalists, or pietists, they denounced liberalism for being, as J.G. Machen put it, “Not Christianity at all, but a religion which is so entirely different from Christianity as to belong in a distinct category.”

Although the fundamentalist challenge was more or less beaten back, a more serious threat came from the sophisticated theologians of neo – orthodoxy who called for the recovery of divine transcendence and a realistic doctrine of sin. Liberalism with its emphasis on the freedom and self – determination of man gave religious sanction to modern man’s efforts to control his life by autonomous reason and improve conditions by relying on his own goodness, but it tried to deny the overwhelming power of sin and evil which repeatedly thwart human aspirations. The neo-orthodox suggested that liberals failed to grasp either the actual condition of men or the doctrine of God that could provide a remedy for this. Christianity was transformed into a high-minded ethical humanism that offered little for those caught up in the travail of modern life, and in its efforts not to separate the sacred from the secular it too closely identified the one with the other.

Liberalism had also become too dependent on finding the historical Jesus, and, as Albert Schweitzer showed, the Jesus that researchers were uncovering possessed an apocalyptic world view and assumptions that were quite a variance with their conception of his teaching. The history of religions school carried the idea of historical development to its logical end and portrayed Christianity as the syncretistic religion of the ancient Near East. This meant the denial of its distinctiveness and the authority of the biblical canon. Christianity was merely one among many religions, all of which were relative to their time and circumstance, and thus it had no claim to finality.

In the 1930s some adherents moved much further to the left and broke almost completely with Christianity. Some turned to secular humanism, and in their 1933 manifesto repudiated the existence of God, immortality, and the supernatural in general, and substituted faith in man and his capabilities. Others identified with an empirical philosophy of religion based entirely on the scientific methods and experience.

Nevertheless, liberalism did not die out. A group of “evangelical liberals” in the United States, among them H.E. Fosdick, William A. Brown, Rufus Jones, and Henry Sloane Coffin, preached a God who was both immanent and transcendent, that Jesus, the Bible, and Christianity were unique, and that Jesus should be accepted as Lord of one’s life. A new generation of “neoliberals” criticized the old modernism for its excessive preoccupation with intellectualism, sentimentality, a watered-down concept of God, and accommodation to the modern world that prevented it from launching a moral attack. Such people as W.M. Horton, John C. Bennett, and H.P. Van Dusen called for finding who God really is and securing his help in facing the human predicament, which is sin.

In Germany liberal scholarship was dominated by such giants as Bultmann, with his emphasis on form criticism and demythologizing the NT so modern man could understand what the Christian faith is, and Tillich, who was concerned with the ultimate, the ground of being, and suggested that God cannot be described in symbols that last from age to age but can only be encountered by experience. Bonhoeffer put forth the idea of a religionless Christianity where the church must be concerned with Christ and not religious ideas. We live in a world come of age and must reject the way of religion which is a psychological crutch. Christians must step out in faith and follow the one who is “the man for others” in costly discipleship.

By the 1960s most liberals had abandoned humanistic optimism, progressive cultural immanentism, and the dream of an earthly kingdom, but they gave no ground on the nonliteral interpretation of the Bible. Many had a renewed interest in natural theology and stressed the importance of social change. The “radical” and “secular” theologians talked about the traditional concept of God as being “dead” in this secular age, and gloried in the God who comes to us in the events of social change. They were optimistic about the creative possibilities open to secular man, held up love as the sufficient norm of ethical behavior, and reaffirmed the lordship of Christ and his call to discipleship.

R.V. Pierard, Elwell Evangelical Dictionary

Bibliography

J. Dillenberger and C. Welch, Protestant Christianity Interpreted Through Its Development; W. Pauck, The Heritage of the Reformation; B. Reardon, Liberal Protestantism; D.E. Miller, The Case for Liberal Christianity; H. Zahrnt, The Question of God: Protestant Theology in the Twentieth Century; W.R. Hutchinson, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism; L.J. Averill, American Theology in the Liberal Tradition; K. Cauthen, The Impact of American Religious Liberalism; R.J. Coleman, Issues of Theological Conflict: Evangelicals and Liberals.

———————————————————————————-

This subject presentation was first placed on the Internet in May 1997. This article was found here.