Liberal theology

Restating the faith for a modern age

‘Liberal’ here is not a political word. It means free inquiry, unbound by the authority of creeds and church. After the Enlightenment many educated people found miracles, revelation and the old dogmas hard to believe. Liberal theologians urged them not to give up the faith: strip away the husk that changes from age to age, they said, and the kernel of Christianity can be offered in words modern people understand. They saw this not as abandoning the faith but as saving it.

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), often called the father of modern theology, located religion not in knowledge or morality but in the pious feeling of absolute dependence on God, and treated doctrine as the expression of that consciousness Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith. In 1835 David Friedrich Strauss read the Gospels' miracle stories as myth formed in the early church Strauss, The Life of Jesus. Albrecht Ritschl, later in the century, is usually summarized as teaching that the kingdom of God is a moral community living by love. In What Is Christianity? (1900) Adolf von Harnack summed up Jesus' message under three heads: the kingdom of God and its coming, God the Father and the infinite value of the human soul, and the higher righteousness and the command of love Harnack, What Is Christianity?. Scripture became less God's trustworthy word than a precious record of ancient religious experience, and Jesus above all the man whose consciousness of God was perfect, an example to follow.

An evangelical response

Evangelicals grant that liberals asked real questions. Christianity rests on history and need not fear honest historical study, and faith concerns the heart and the whole of life, not the head alone. But they judged that liberalism lost the centre of the gospel. If the Bible only records human experience, where do we hear what God has said? Paul writes that "All Scripture is God-breathed" (2 Timothy 3:16). If Jesus is only a moral teacher, sinners need nothing more than effort to imitate him. Yet the news Paul passed on "as of first importance" was this:

that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,

1 Corinthians 15:3-4

"If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). Wesley's note on that verse answers moralism before its time: "there needed something more than reformation, (which was plainly wrought,) in order to their being delivered from the guilt of sin even that atonement" Wesley. What sinners need is not better morals but atonement.

What followed

From the late nineteenth century many resisted liberalism, among them the Princeton theologians who defended the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture Hodge and Warfield, Inspiration, and in the early twentieth century American denominations were torn by the controversy. Out of that struggle modern evangelicalism took its shape. Karl Barth, a student of Harnack, broke with liberalism too, insisting that God is known not through human religious consciousness but through his Word given in Christ Barth, Church Dogmatics. In the Catholic Church a similar current was called Modernism and was condemned by Pope Pius X in 1907. Today liberal theology is less a single school than a broad current within many Protestant churches. The story is told in the lesson The Enlightenment and modern theology.