Liberalism Through Time

by Steve | Mar 7, 1991 | Archive - 1991

Liberalism Through Time

By Steven O’Malley

1. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) has been called the “father” of modern liberal Protestant theology. He combined the emphasis upon personal, subjective piety, learned from the Moravian tradition in which he was reared, with a receptiveness toward the development of biblical higher criticism. This left him disenchanted with the entrenched theological scholasticism of his day. As a popular preacher and later professor of theology in Berlin, Schleiermacher was attracted to the rising Romanticist movement, but he was disturbed when its spokesmen disdained religion because of their sophisticated humanist outlook. He criticized their position in his first book, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers (1799), and he proceeded to erect a new theological position in his major constructive work, The Christian Faith (1820-21).

In the latter work, Schleiermacher based religion not in a “knowing” or “doing” but in a “feeling of absolute dependence.” Within that framework, Christianity is regarded not as the only viable religion, with Jesus of Nazareth viewed as the only perfectly God-conscious Person who has lived. Further, he announced a goal-directed religious faith, whose object was the realization of the kingdom of God upon earth.

2. William Ellery Channing (1720-1842) was the foremost exponent of the Unitarian Theology while he served as pastor of the Federal Street Congregational Church in Boston. He was recognized as a “saintly” exponent of Arian views on Christ, which denied the eternal deity of the Son. He adopted the name “Unitarian” for the movement in 1815, and a decade later the American Unitarian Association was founded under his guidance.

3. David F. Strauss (1808-1874) was a student of F.C. Baur (1792-1860) In the renowned Tubingen (Germany) school, that had applied the tenets of Hegel’s dialectical idealism to New Testament studies. The result was Strauss’ publication of the sensational Leben Jesu (“Life of Jesus”) In 1835, that began the 19th-century quest for recovering the “actual” Jesus of history, as opposed to the “Christ of faith,” as confessed in the Christian creeds.

4. Horace Bushnell (1802-1876), a Yale-educated Congregational pastor in Hartford, Connecticut, published the pioneer work advocating a “gradualist” approach to Christian education in his Christian Nurture (1847). This work argued against the revivalists’ insistence upon an emotional, instantaneous conversion experience as the basis for saving faith. He modified these views later in life.

5. Frederick D. Maurice (1805-1872) was an Anglican theologian who became deeply influenced by Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis and who drew from it in developing his theory of Christian socialism as a “higher” form of evolving civilization that would supplant capitalist society. During his career as a priest and a professor at Cambridge, he increasingly advocated the primacy of God’s love as a force that will universally prevail over all forms of human rebellion against God.

6. Karl H. Graf (1815-1869) In his Gescluchtliche Bucher des Alten Testaments (1866) {“The Historical Books of the Old Testament”) argued that the lengthy “document that uses Elohim for God and includes the creation story in Genesis represents the basic “constituent” of the Pentateuch and was the latest section of it to be written. This became designated as the so-called “P” document. He thereby argued against the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch.

7. Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889), a student of Schleiermacher, developed a theology based on the ethical implications of Jesus’ teaching concerning the kingdom of God. Here, he argued for the primacy of “moral values” as the proper focus for religion, and he advocated abandonment of any attempt to make scientific, factual judgments about Christian doctrines. His major work was The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation (1870-1847).

8. The two chief proponents of the Social Gospel movement in the United States were Washington Gladden (1836-1918) and Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918). The former, who is called the father of this movement, served as a Congregational pastor for 36 years in Columbus, Ohio, where he advocated what he called “applied Christianity,” which was intended to counter the laissez faire attitude of Christians toward issues of social justice. The Baptist pastor-turned-professor Walter Rauschenbusch, galvanized these concerns into a systematic work entitled A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917). In it he advocated the transformation of the nation, and not just the church, into the moral kingdom of God upon earth.

9. Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) was a prominent German Old Testament scholar who taught at Guttingen. He interpreted Israel’s cultural history in evolutionary terms, believing that the Hebrew religion developed from ‘‘tribalism” to “ethical monotheism.” He developed the documentary hypothesis of the Hexeteuch (the first six books of the Old Testament including the so-called J, E, D, and P documentary sources). By appealing to these sources, he argued against the traditional Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch (the first five Old Testament books).

10. Henry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969) was a prominent American preacher and popular author who served New York Presbyterian and American Baptist churches and gained national fame as pastor of the nondenominational Riverside Church, also located In New York City. He further served as professor of preaching at Union Theological Seminary In New York. In these posts Fosdick sought to reconcile the disputes between science and religion in such a way that he became identified by American fundamentalist Christians as the symbol of religious modernism. At the same time, he criticized “modernism” for its intellectualism and moral ineptitude.

11., Albert Knudsen (1873-1953), a student of the personalist philosopher Bordon Parker Bowne, sought to draw the implications of this philosophy that stressed the centrality of human personality into a theological system. He taught at the Methodist-related Boston University. A critical issue in evaluating his major works, The Doctrine of God and The Doctrine of Redemption, is whether personal idealism or the Christian faith is the controlling element in his thought. L Harold DeWolf, author of The Case for Theology in Liberal Perspective (1959), was among Browne’s second generation of students, and he exercised considerable influence in the curriculum of Methodist theological studies in the postwar era.

12. The Federal Council of Churches, established in 1908, was the product of a conciliar or cooperative movement among several major American denominations that was especially concerned to orchestrate an approach to address the major moral and social issues of the newly-urbanized United States. It was preceded by the formation of several state councils and federations of churches, and its successor was the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, formed in 1950. On an international level, the ecumenical church conferences on Faith and Order and on Life and Work were merged to form the World Council of Churches at Amsterdam in 1948.

13. When Harvey Cox published his startling work, The Secular City (1965), “secular” had become a positive rather than a negative term, partly under the influence of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s concept of “religionless Christianity.” Cox repudiates “secularism” but accepts “secularization,” which he defines as the irreversible historical process in which societies are “liberated” from supernatural views of reality in favor of so-called “open” views of the world.

14. Black theology has its roots in the non-violent ideology of Martin Luther King, Jr. (d. 1968), the champion of the American civil rights movement of the 1950’s. His “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” is considered a major manifesto in the advance of that movement Black authors in the 1970’s, such as James Cone, increasingly abandoned Kings’s call for non-violence in social protest, that King had learned from Gandhi, and favored a confronting approach that did not eschew the use of violence, where necessary. The canons of Marxist class conflict were more predominant in the “black power” ideology. These influences also become predominant in other dimensions of recent trends toward a “theology of liberation.” The latter Include Rosemary Reuther’s call for a radical feminine theology and Jose Bonlno’s call for a theology of social liberation within the Latin American cultural context.

A school of 20th-century American theologians, who have been associated with the University of Chicago, has attempted to integrate themes from the natural philosophy of Albert North Whitehead with the liberal Protestant tradition. They have sought to demonstrate the objective reality of God by an appeal to a scientific, naturalistic metaphysic rather than by appealing to traditional Christian theism. Major theologians In this school have included Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, Jr., and Schubert Ogden. The latter two have conducted their work within the context of United Methodist theological seminaries.

Steven O ‘Malley is professor of church history and historical theology at Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky. This article appeard in the January/February 1991 issue of Good News.

Other notable theological dates

By Steve O’Malley

1799 – New scientific worldview, as advocated by Galileo, Newton, and Copemlcus. Secular and Humanist themes from the Enlightenment of the 18^th century, as represented by Immanuel Kant. (1724-1804)

• Friedrich Schleiermacher: “The Father of Protestant Liberal Theology.”

1835 – David F. Strauss begins quest for “Jesus of History”

1843- William Ellery Channing, patriarch of American Unitarianism begins writing

1848 – Horace Bushnell’s progressive view of Christian education in Christian Nurture (1847)

• The critique from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto

1859 – Fredrick D. Maurice was the major exponent of Evolutionary Liberal Theology in Anglicanism

• The challenge from Charles Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis The Origin of Species

1866 – Karl H. Graf publishes his Geschichtliche Bucher des Alten Testaments (“The Historical Books of the Old Testament”)

• Albrecht Ritschl publishes A Theology of Moral Values

1883 – Julius Wellhausen publishes his Prolegomena to the History of Israel

 1900 – Washington Gladden: “Father of the Social Gospel In America

 Frank Mason North led the adoption of the Methodist Social Creed

1907 –  Formation of the Methodist Federation for Social Service

• The liberal Journal, The Christian Century, is founded
• The formation of the Federal Council of Churches which later becomes the National Council of Churches.

1917 – Walter Rauschenbusch publishes A Theology for the Social Gospel

1920s – Major Impact of Preaching of Emerson Fosdick

1929 – Formation of the Universal Christian Council For Life and Work, forerunner of World Council of Churches

1930s – Major impact of Personalist Theology of A.C. Knudsen at Boston

1948 –  World Council of Churches