Theological liberalism

Definition

Theological liberalism, also called Protestant liberalism, reinterprets Christian doctrine to fit modern philosophy and science, treating religion as a matter of feeling or ethical experience rather than revealed, propositional truth. It relativizes or denies the supernatural elements of the Christian faith, including the full deity of Christ, his bodily resurrection, and the divine inspiration and authority of Scripture, while retaining Christian vocabulary and institutions. J. Gresham Machen argued that the result “has really relinquished everything distinctive of Christianity,” so that “modern liberalism not only is a different religion from Christianity but belongs in a totally different class of religions.”¹

Historical Origin

Theological liberalism is usually traced to Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), whose On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799) and The Christian Faith (1821) relocated religion’s foundation from revealed doctrine to inward experience. Schleiermacher “defined religion in terms of piety, as the ‘absolute feeling of dependence.’”² Writing while Schleiermacher’s influence was still current, Archibald Alexander Hodge described the same move: Schleiermacher “considered religion to be a form of feeling, and to be grounded on our constitutional God-consciousness, which consists, on the intellectual side, of an intuition of God, and on the emotional side, of a feeling of absolute dependence.”³

Later in the nineteenth century, Albrecht Ritschl relocated theology’s foundation again, this time in ethics rather than feeling. After a mid-century turn toward Hegelian philosophy had run its course in German theology, “the failure of theology and philosophy led to a ‘return to Kant’ movement. Theology, according to Ritschl, is thus about value judgments; the kingdom of God is a moral community.”⁴ For Ritschl, “Christianity is an ethical religion, an ellipse with two foci: redemption and the kingdom of God, the absolutely spiritual and the absolutely moral religion.”⁵ Ritschl’s kingdom of God “was essentially ethical, it was a human, this-worldly attempt to do God’s will,” with Jesus functioning “mainly as an example of ethical action”; Adolf von Harnack popularized this reading further in his own influential lectures on the essence of Christianity.⁶

Ritschl’s ethical liberalism crossed the Atlantic as the Social Gospel: “Ritschlian social gospel theology had a profound influence beyond Germany itself, especially in America.”⁴ By the early twentieth century, theological liberalism had become dominant enough in American mainline Protestant denominations, particularly the Presbyterian church, to provoke sustained conservative resistance. J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism (1923), the book from which the definition above is drawn, became the central document of that resistance and of the broader Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism that grew out of it. A related but distinct reaction arose within German-speaking Protestant theology itself when Karl Barth broke with the liberalism of his own teachers; that Neo-Orthodoxy movement rejected liberal optimism about human nature and progress without returning to the confessional Reformed position Theopedia holds.

Core Tenets

Religion as feeling or ethical action, not revealed doctrine. Charles Hodge summarized the Schleiermacher position point by point: “Religion consists in the feeling of absolute dependence. That is, in the recognition of the fact that God, or the absolute Being, is the only cause, and that we are merely the form in which his causality is revealed or exercised.”⁷ On Ritschl’s later, ethical version of the same basic move, theology becomes a set of value judgments rather than statements of objective fact: Ritschl’s “value-judgments… render theology a merely subjective science.”⁸

Doctrine as the expression of experience, not truth about God. Machen described and rejected liberalism’s characteristic claim that “creeds are merely the changing expression of a unitary Christian experience, and provided only they express that experience they are all equally good.” He argued the claim collapses into agnosticism on its own terms: “If all creeds are equally true, then since they are contradictory to one another, they are all equally false, or at least equally uncertain.”⁹

A reduced, moral-exemplar Christ. Where Ritschl’s ethical religion narrows the content of faith to the Father’s fatherhood and the community’s moral calling, Bavinck notes that “only the Father and not the Son belong in the gospel as Jesus proclaimed it” on this scheme.⁵ Bavinck elsewhere observes that “Ritschl made of Christ the perfect man who brings the moral kingdom of God to humanity.”¹⁰

A non-judicial, moral-influence atonement. Berkhof traces the same pattern in the doctrine of the atonement: “Schleiermacher and Ritschl, who had a dominating influence on modern theology, broke completely with the judicial conception of the atonement. As advocates of the mystical and moral influence theories of the atonement, they deny the fact of an objective atonement.”¹¹ A. A. Hodge had already traced the moral influence theory’s pedigree back past Schleiermacher to Peter Abelard and the Socinians.¹²

Confessional and Biblical Response

The confession’s opening chapter states plainly what theological liberalism relativizes: “The Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience.”¹³ Scripture makes the same claim of itself (2 Tim. 3:16-17; 2 Pet. 1:20-21), and its own testimony to Christ’s full deity (John 1:1; Col. 2:9) stands against a Christology reduced to moral example; see Deity of Christ for the fuller biblical and confessional case for that doctrine.

Machen’s central argument was that these are not adjustable details but the substance of the faith itself, so that removing them does not produce a modernized Christianity but a different religion under the same name: liberalism “has really relinquished everything distinctive of Christianity, so that what remains is in essentials only that same indefinite type of religious aspiration which was in the world before Christianity came upon the scene.”¹ Loraine Boettner made a related point about liberalism’s advance within Arminian churches specifically, arguing that a system already oriented toward human works and religious experience “offered but little resistance to the naturalistic tendencies” of theological liberalism.¹⁴

Modern Forms

Theological liberalism’s own direct descendant is the Social Gospel, whose program of applying Ritschl’s ethical kingdom of God to social reform Bavinck traces straight to the Ritschlian school, with particular influence in America.⁴ See Social Gospel for that movement in its own right.

Related Doctrines

• Inerrancy and the doctrine of Scripture liberalism relativizes
• Deity of Christ, reduced in liberal Christology to moral example
• Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl, the movement’s founding figures
• J. Gresham Machen, its principal conservative critic
• Fundamentalism, Evangelicalism, and Neo-Orthodoxy, the movements that arose contesting it
• Social Gospel, Kingdom of God, and Modernism
• Later movements sometimes discussed alongside theological liberalism: Liberation theology, Process theology, Post-liberal theology, and the Jesus Seminar

References

1. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 7. ↩ ↩²

2. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 3, “Foundations of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩

3. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 53. ↩

4. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 6, “Faith.” ↩ ↩²

6. Stephen Witmer, “Keeping Eschatology and Ethics Together: The Teaching of Jesus, the Work of Albert Schweitzer, and the Task of Evangelical Pastor-Theologians,” Themelios 39, no. 3 (2014): 484-500. ↩

7. Charles Hodge, “Chapter VIII. Sin,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 128. ↩

8. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907). ↩

9. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, chap. 2, “Doctrine.” ↩

10. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 15, “The Servant Savior: Christ’s Humiliation.” ↩

11. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 354-55. ↩

12. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 25, “Atonement.” ↩

13. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), 1.1. ↩

14. Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), sec. 5. ↩