Against Liberal Theology

Putting the Brakes on Progressive Christianity

Roger E. Olson

• Editorial: Zondervan
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780310139447
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Christian Theology

Liberal Christian theology is a big topic in today's churches and seminaries. But what does liberal theology really mean and why is it so controversial? What does it actually believe about truth, Scripture, and Jesus Christ? And where does it lead?

The term "liberal theology" is often misinterpreted, confused with a set of loose ideologies within the Christian faith and sometimes rallied behind by genuine Christians who are simply concerned about modern social justice issues. It's also been wrongly leveled against churches and even entire denominations that don't adhere to the tradition of liberal theology.

Against Liberal Theology, is written in a direct and conversational tone that makes sense of this theological movement by:

• Defining liberal theology and explaining its beliefs about central Christian doctrines.
• Giving its history and progression—beginning with 18 th century German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and leading up to today.
• Making distinctions between liberal theology and simple moderate or progressive Christian thought, much of which is still biblically committed and doctrinally orthodox.
• Discussing the arguments of specific liberal theologians and what their words mean in regard to everyday Christian living and faith.

Sincere and to the point, professor and theologian Roger E. Olson is not interested in grinding axes. He openly admits to frustration with fundamentalist Christianity and explains why. But he warns that true liberal theology—more concerned with making Christianity palatable to the modern mind than it is committed to biblical integrity—isn't the right alternative to the cultic tendencies of fundamentalism and has little in common with classical, biblical Christianity.

Against Liberal Theology is perfect for Christians on any side of a cultural debate—for those who consider themselves progressive or conservative or something in between.

It's always unpopular to be against anything. But in order for Christianity to be anything, it has to stand against some things. If Christianity is compatible with anything and everything, it is nothing.

CHAPTER 1

THE LIBERAL CHRISTIAN TRADITION AND ITS THEOLOGY

In this chapter, I will be writing about preachers and theologians who considered (and consider) themselves Christians, but whom I cannot consider authentically Christian because of their radical departures from traditional, biblical, orthodox Christianity. I will simply call them liberals, liberal theologians, or liberal Christians. Occasionally, I will mention one or two (or a few) who are widely considered liberals theologically whom I do not consider to be such.

For example, in his magisterial three-volume set The Making of Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, Gary Dorrien includes as a liberal Christian theologian American pastor Horace Bushnell (1802–76). Dorrien devotes one of his longest chapters to that New England Congregational pastor and theologian. I have studied and written about Bushnell and do not consider him truly liberal theologically; I consider him a genuine Christian and the main proponent of progressive orthodoxy, which is not liberal theology. Bushnell presented in his writings and sermons some new interpretations of orthodox doctrines, but he did not cut the cord of continuity between his own theology and historical, classical, Christian orthodoxy. Dorrien admits Bushnell’s orthodoxy but includes him in The Making of Liberal Theology because his disciples went much further in reinterpreting Christianity and became liberal theologically. Bushnell is for me a good example of a Christian whose theology was progressive but not liberal.

So who are the prototypes of liberal Christian theology? And how did liberal Christian theology begin and progress? The first true liberal theologian, the founder of liberal Christianity, the main prototype of the tradition, was Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), a German pastor, educator, public intellectual, and theologian. He is almost universally regarded as the founder of liberal theology. There were liberal thinkers who considered themselves Christians before Schleiermacher, but he was a “Prince of the Church,” to borrow the title of a book by theologian Brian Gerrish of the University of Chicago Divinity School.¹ Liberal Christian thinkers before Schleiermacher were not churchmen, pastors, or theologians in the same way as he. Before Schleiermacher, many of the same ideas were believed and taught by deists and Unitarians, for example. But Schleiermacher was a leading minister of the Prussian Union Church, the state church of Prussia—a hybrid of Reformed and Lutheran.

Something new appeared with Schleiermacher. With Schleiermacher liberal Christianity was born. But what he birthed was a new species, not authentic Christianity. Later liberals stand on Schleiermacher’s shoulders or, to change metaphors, follow in the path he carved out. Those who followed him have not all agreed about the details, but they have all agreed with his basic approach, expressing Christianity in a modern idiom.

Schleiermacher was raised in a pietist Christian home, attended a pietist church, and went to a pietist university, but he radically diverged from that tradition, much to his father’s dismay. The pietists were orthodox Christians who emphasized personal conversion, being “born again,” and having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.² Pietists were and are evangelical Christians who combine biblical-orthodox Christian belief with warmhearted Christian spirituality. To his father, who expressed strong disappointment with his son’s new ideas about Christianity, Schleiermacher wrote (in a letter) that he was still a pietist but “of a higher order.”³

Schleiermacher was concerned that many of the educated, cultured elites of Berlin, where he lived, thought that being religious and especially Christian conflicted with being enlightened, modern, and sophisticated (in the truest and best sense). To them he wrote a massive apologetic for religion titled On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799). There he argued that religion is “God-consciousness,” and everyone has some degree of that “feeling of utter dependence on God.” He equated religion with God-consciousness. Later he wrote a massive systematic theology titled The Christian Faith (1830), in which he expressed liberal theology, radically transforming Christianity from orthodoxy into a form acceptable to modern, enlightened people. For example, he defined Jesus Christ as the fully God-conscious man and denied his ontological deity, his preexistence, and his incarnation. He also denied Jesus’ bodily resurrection, miracles, and second coming in the future. The foundational source for his theology was first and foremost the Christian experience of Jesus Christ as redeemer through the church, Jesus’ communication of his own God-consciousness to Christians.

Nobody with any deep acquaintance with Schleiermacher would doubt his spirituality, his profound religious nature, his enthusiasm for Jesus Christ as a living person, or his love for God and the church. However, nobody with any deep acquaintance with his theology could doubt that he broke the cord of continuity between his doctrinal formulations and orthodoxy. He relegated the Trinity to an appendix to The Christian Faith and expressed it as three modes of God-consciousness rather than as three distinct persons of the eternal Godhead. As mentioned earlier, there were precursors of liberal theology before him, but Schleiermacher almost singlehandedly founded the new tradition known as liberal theology.

Fast-forward two hundred years to contemporary liberal theologian Douglas Ottati, an American Presbyterian theologian and author of several books, including the massive systematic theology A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (2020).⁴ Although there are significant differences in details and expressions, Ottati’s theology continues the basic tradition of Schleiermacher. Anyone who reads Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith and then reads Ottati’s A Theology for the Twenty-First Century cannot miss the similarities. For example, Ottati labels Jesus Christ the God-filled man, meaning Jesus had the paradigmatic human experience of God. Also like Schleiermacher, Ottati relegates the Trinity to an appendix and describes the three persons of the Trinity as three ways Christians experience God. Schleiermacher and Ottati, almost two centuries apart, treat Christian experience of God as the primary source and norm of Christian theology and doctrine. And both permit what they understand to be the best of modern culture, especially philosophy and the sciences, to determine what enlightened Christians can believe.

Between Schleiermacher and Ottati stands a host of liberal theologians who considered themselves modern Christians and who are widely considered to be great Christian thinkers and influencers. What stands out about all of them is their commitment to reconstructing Christian beliefs in terms of modernity, the largely secular Western zeitgeist (“spirit of the age”) growing out of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. Before describing some of the leading liberal thinkers and their unique contributions to liberal theology, it will be helpful to expound some major scholarly opinions about the liberal theological tradition stemming from Schleiermacher.

Gary Dorrien is by far the most astute and highly regarded historian of the liberal Christian tradition. Dorrien says, “Liberal Christian thinkers have argued that religion should be interpreted from the standpoint of modern knowledge and experience.”⁵ He emphasizes liberal theology’s rejection of external authority and its reliance on the authority of the self—even in religion, even in Christianity. According to Dorrien, although there have been and are varieties of liberal Christianity and liberal theology, something holds them together as one tradition:

One way or another, liberal theology always took its stand on the verdicts of modern knowledge and experience without bowing to external authority claims. . . . [Liberal theologians] accepted the naturalistic premises of modern historiography and the modernist valorization of objective knowledge. They specialized in cultural accommodation and religious progressivism. Every liberal theologian sought to bring Christian claims into line with beliefs derived from modern critical consciousness, and thus . . . took for granted that the authority of reason makes the mythical aspects of Christianity problematic for modern theology.⁶

Dorrien adds, “All American liberal theology has been modernist . . . which refers to the displacement of gospel norms by a modern worldview.”⁷

What “gospel norms” and what “mythical aspects of Christianity” has liberal theology considered problematic and displaced (or replaced)? As I will show in the doctrinal chapters (beginning with chapter 3), they include the Bible as God’s supernaturally inspired Word; God as a personal being above nature, sovereign, omnipotent, and unchanging; the Trinity as three eternal, distinct persons united by one essence or substance; Jesus Christ as God the Son, equal with the Father, different in kind and not only in degree from other humans, God incarnate yet truly human, the one and only savior of humankind; miracles, including the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ; and salvation as God’s loving and merciful rescue of sinful persons from hell and into an eternal relationship of blissful communion with himself in heaven. (All liberal theologians deny hell except as lack of God-consciousness and believe in universal salvation—however salvation is defined.) Later I will provide examples from leading liberal theologians’ writings to confirm their common denials of these orthodox Christian beliefs as incompatible with reason and modern experience.

Concepts and terms such as resurrection are often used by liberal theologians and their Christian followers, but careful interpretation reveals that they do not mean historical and realistic events. These terms become mere symbols. This view is called symbolic realism. Jesus’ resurrection is seen as a symbol that represents the continuing transformational power of his life and message. In symbolic realism, a symbol has the power to transform with or without any connection to a real event, past, present, or future. Modern knowledge allegedly makes belief in miracles impossible for those “in the know” about nature and science, but one in the know can still talk about a miracle in a symbolic sense, as an image with the power to transform. Virtually all liberal theologians and their Christian followers affirm the resurrection of Jesus but deny the empty tomb. For them the resurrection is a real symbol—a powerful image that is more than a mere sign.⁸

Certainly some symbols have power to transform. That is not the problem with symbolic realism. The problem is the disconnect between major Christian symbols and history. Often the symbol becomes only an image and not at all related to any historical event, except perhaps a spiritual-psychological one. Jesus Christ’s bodily resurrection, as reported in the New Testament, is denied by virtually all liberal theologians, who see it as impossible from a modern, rational, scientific point of view. (Why this should be the case is curious. Nothing about modern science rules out miracles insofar as one believes in God as the author and sustainer of nature. The laws of nature were interpreted by the founders of modern science such as Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton as regularities of God’s general providence.) Orthodox Christianity, however, does not deny the power of symbols; it does deny that some Christian symbols can be powerful without being rooted in historical events outside of individuals’ or groups’ inner spiritual experiences or psychological states.

Schleiermacher launched liberal Christianity and liberal theology. Who followed him? Who are the other prototypes of the tradition? After Schleiermacher came Albrecht Ritschl, another major German Protestant theologian (1822–89), whose influence led to a whole school of liberal theologians and pastors labeled Ritschlians. Ritschl wrote numerous books of theology and church history, including, most notably, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation (1870). Ritschl used the philosophy of German thinker Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) to distinguish between “facts” and “values,” and Ritschl relegated religion to the realm of values. Christianity is not about facts but about values—what ought to be the case—especially the values of the kingdom of God as espoused by Jesus. Ultimately, Ritschl was unsuccessful in drawing an absolute line between facts and values, but he set in motion the liberal theological trend of reducing Christianity (and religion in general) to ethics. Christianity, he taught, was primarily about the kingdom of God on earth, a society organized by love.

Traditional orthodox doctrines and dogmas took a back seat in Ritschl’s theology. When historical doctrines appeared at all, they were reconstructed to fit with modern sensibilities. He believed the Bible is not the inspired Word of God written but the record of “the apostolic circle of ideas” that points to ethical living in and for God’s kingdom on earth, in society. One outstanding example of his liberalism in theology is his definition of Jesus Christ, in which he taught that when Christians say that Jesus is God, they mean that Jesus has the value of God for them because he inaugurated and embodied the values of God’s kingdom among people.

Ritschl was an abstruse, complicated thinker whose writings gave rise to many popular interpretations. One of his most astute and influential interpreters was German liberal theologian and church historian Adolf Harnack (1851–1930). Harnack taught theo...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Liberal Christian Tradition and Its Theology
• 2. Liberal Theology‘s Sources and Norms
• 3. Liberal Theology and the Bible
• 4. God According to Liberal Theology
• 5. Jesus Christ In Liberal Theology
• 6. Liberal Theology and Salvation
• 7. The Future In Liberal Theology
• 8. The Crisis of Liberal Theology
• Index