Bible - CH 41

CHAPTER 41

 A BRIDGE FOR INTELLIGENT MODERNS

 Protestant Liberalism

 On his eighty - fifth birthday in 1920, Lyman Abbott, who had been one of America’s most influential ministers in the 1890s, looked back three - quarters of a century to his staunch Puritan upbringing. He recalled his youthful view of God as “a kind of awful and omnipresent police justice” and his own self - image as “a scared culprit who knows he is liable to punishment but does not clearly know why.”

 Long before 1920, however, along with many other Americans and Europeans, Abbott had ceased to think of God as an omnipresent policeman and himself as a scared culprit. The Western world had undergone too many changes and adopted too many new ideas in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

 Abbott was typical of a large number of American ministers whose background included a pious Protestant home but who had studied in Germany or in an American seminary where Continental scholarship was treasured and who had adopted liberal religious convictions.

 The events of the twentieth century were unkind to the liberal creed, but every major Protestant denomination continues to reflect the impact of liberal theology. It is hard to argue with Professor Sydney E. Ahlstrom’s judgment when he says the liberals “precipitated the most fundamental controversy to wrack the churches since the age of the Reformation.” The reason lies in their ambitious objective. They tried to lead the Protestant churches into the new world of modern science, modern philosophy, and modern history. In his autobiography The Living of These Days , Harry Emerson Fosdick, minister at the influential Riverside Church in New York City, put it well when he said the central aim of liberal theology was to make it possible for a person “to be both an intelligent modern and a serious Christian.”

THE AIMS OF PROTESTANT LIBERALISM

 Protestant liberalism, then, engaged a problem as old as Christianity itself: How do Christians make their faith meaningful in a new world of thought without distorting or destroying the gospel? The apostle Paul tried and succeeded. The early Gnostics tried and failed. The jury is still out on liberalism, but Christian public opinion tilts heavily in the direction of failure. No one expressed the irony of liberalism better than H. Richard Niebuhr when he said in liberalism “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”

 Beyond its rather clear goal, definitions of religious liberalism are as varied as those of political liberalism. Many deny that Protestant liberalism is a theology. They prefer an outlook or an approach or a spirit. Thus Henry Sloane Coffin at New York’s Union Seminary once said liberalism is that spirit that reveres truth supremely and therefore craves freedom to discuss, to publish, and to pursue what it believes to be true.

 No doubt this is the outlook of liberals, but is that all? Doesn’t this spirit lead to identifiable convictions? I think so. And that spirit and those convictions together constitute Protestant liberalism.

 It might be helpful to think of liberal theology as a suspension bridge. The footing of one tower is planted on modern thought and the foundation of the other rests on Christian experience. Unfortunately, the ground around both towers is shifting soil, and those who take the bridge disagree over which is the safer side. That is why Professor Kenneth Cauthen finds two fundamental types of liberalism. He calls them evangelical liberalism and modernistic liberalism.

 Cauthen suggests that the evangelical liberals were serious Christians, to borrow Fosdick’s terms, who were searching for a theology that could serve intelligent moderns. Evangelical liberals, then, took greater confidence in the tower resting on Christian experience.

 On the other side of the bridge were modernistic liberals who were intelligent moderns hoping to be considered serious Christians in some sense. They found greater support in the tower resting on modern thought.

 Perhaps the best way to explore theological liberalism, then, is to take a close look at modern thought and then at Christian experience.

 Liberals believed that Christian theology had to come to terms with modern science if it ever hoped to claim and hold the allegiance of intelligent men and women of the day. They refused, therefore, to accept religious beliefs on authority alone. They insisted that faith had to pass the tests of reason and experience. The human mind, they believed, was capable of thinking God’s thoughts after him, and the best clues to the nature of God were human intuition and reason.

 The Christian, they said, should keep his mind open to truth from any source. New facts may well change traditional beliefs that rest on no more than custom and time, but unexamined faith is not worth having.

 By embracing so completely the modern mind, liberals accepted the assumption that the universe was one grand, harmonious machine, or perhaps an extremely complex growing organism. Whatever the image — a watch or a plant — the point is unity, harmony, coherence.

 The biblical account of creation, however, recognizes certain important orders in the universe: inanimate matter, plants, animals, humanity, and God. That didn’t bother liberal theology. It pressed on for unity or continuity. It reduced distinctions between revelation and natural religion, between Christianity and other religions, between saved and lost, between Christ and other men, between humanity and God.

 Two technical theological terms are crucial here: immanence and transcendence . Immanence carries the idea of God’s nearness, his presence in the world, and his working through nature. An extreme version of immanence is found in pantheism, which claims that God is the world and the world is God. Transcendence, on the other hand, implies the reality of God apart from the world, different, above, and beyond. An extreme version of transcendence is found among the deists, for whom God is separate and remote from the world, as a watchmaker who makes a watch but then leaves it to operate without his attention.

 Liberals felt that the old orthodox Christian idea of a transcendent God somewhere beyond the universe was unacceptable to the modern mind. So they tended to identify the spiritual world with human consciousness, the intellectual and emotive aspects of human beings. This allowed them to consider humanity and nature in a kind of fundamental harmony. The life force coursing through nature and humanity in this way, they called God.

 This solely immanent view of God seemed to fit the results of scientific studies. Instead of a distinct supernatural being suddenly breaking through the clouds to create the world, God, they said, had been working for ages through natural law, slowly building the universe as we find it today until human beings developed an awareness of their spiritual selves. Most liberals agreed with the poet who said, “Some call it evolution, and others call it God.”

 Evolution is the theory that holds that all complex living things have developed from simple forms through the operation of natural selection. Thus no species is fixed and changeless. In 1785 James Hutton had attributed the earth’s development to natural rather than supernatural causes. Confirmation of the view came in Sir Charles Lyell’s epoch - making Principles of Geology (1830). Lyell showed that the earth’s surface had been formed by natural causes operating over vast periods of time. Such a conception of geologic time was essential for any theory of evolution based on changes in species over countless thousands of generations.

ENTER CHARLES DARWIN

 The scientist whose name became synonymous with evolution is Charles Darwin (1809 – 82). After studying medicine and preparing at Cambridge University for the ministry, Darwin became a naturalist. From 1831 to 1836 he studied the specimens he had collected while on a surveying expedition with the ship Beagle along the coast of South America.

 In 1859 Darwin’s views appeared in his Origin of Species . He contended “that species have been modified during a long course of descent . . . chiefly through the normal selection of numerous successive, slight, favourable variations.” On the Origin of Species , the most important book of the century, revolutionized concepts about the origin and evolution of life on planet Earth. Darwin followed his first bombshell with a second. In 1871 his Descent of Man applied the natural selection to human beings and reached the controversial conclusion that man’s ancestors were probably monkey - like animals.

 Such conclusions threw many religious people on the defensive. Some vigorously rejected the new scientific views. If humanity is not specially created by God and then fallen from God’s favor, where is the need for Christ’s salvation? Others attempted to reconcile their religious beliefs with evolution. As time went on, liberals came to believe that evolutionary theory supplemented rather than contradicted the basics of Christianity. They considered growth and development as God’s way of revealing himself to the human race. In 1892 Lyman Abbott, then minister at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York, wrote The Evolution of Christianity and attempted to show that “in the spiritual, as in the physical, God is the secret and source of light.” He spoke of the evolution of the Bible, of the church, and even of the soul.

TREATING THE BIBLE AS JUST ANOTHER BOOK

 As serious as the challenge of science was to orthodox Christianity, it was clearly secondary to the new views of history. Science could only question God’s rule in the physical world, but historical criticism advanced directly to the domain of the Christian faith to question the revelation of God in the Bible.

 The term for the application of the principles of history to the Bible is biblical criticism. The term criticism is somewhat misleading. Its primary purpose is not to tear the Bible to pieces, although to many an orthodox Christian that is what seemed to be happening. Actually, the Bible critic is simply a scholar who studies the Bible to find its more exact meaning; this is critical in the sense that the scholar tries to find rational or scientific reasons for his conclusions rather than simply accepting the dogmas of the church as unquestioned revelation. The term criticism actually identifies a strategy for knowing and learning. A scholar is critical if he or she subjects the material to careful (critical) scrutiny of textual, archaeological, cultural, and historical factors.

 Biblical criticism came to be expressed in two forms, what are sometimes called lower criticism and higher criticism. The lower critic deals with problems of the text and tries to reconstruct the precise wording of the original manuscripts (presently lost) by inspecting and carefully comparing the many surviving ancient manuscripts of Scripture. Lower criticism produced little that troubled the orthodox.

 Higher criticism, however, proved another matter. The higher critic is primarily interested not in the original wording of the text but in its meaning. Such scholars want to read between the lines and get behind the text to the events as they really happened. To do so, they must study the background, authorship, and setting of each text. Higher critics believe that we can understand the Bible only if we see it against its background. For example, a psalm takes on quite a different meaning when the critic concludes it was not written by David, as tradition indicates, but that it was a folk song that grew out of the sufferings of the Jews while in exile.

 The methods of higher criticism were not entirely new, but previously they had been limited to writings other than Scripture. In the nineteenth century the method was applied to the Bible as if the Bible were like any other ancient book whose credentials had to pass the standards of historical methods. In practice many critics held assumptions that God could not act in history in miraculous ways. Others assumed the Bible’s story and its teaching to be untrue unless it could be verified by an independent source beyond the Bible. This resulted in conclusions that shook orthodoxy.

 Higher critics generally agreed that Moses did not write the first five books of the Bible, as Christians had always believed. Instead they were written by at least four different writers. Among other things this meant we have two different stories of the creation in Genesis 1 and 2. Critics also thought that those books and passages that seem to foretell the future were not prophecy at all but were written not before but after the events mentioned. Scholars also generally concluded that the Gospel of John, long the favorite gospel of the orthodox, was not written by the apostle John and that it was not good history. The first three gospels, called the Synoptics, were dated much earlier than John’s and were considered more reliable.

 One of the central concerns of higher criticism is the search for the “historical Jesus.” The critics assumed that Jesus, as he lived in history, was different from the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels. They assumed that the early church and the gospel writers had added many things to the biblical account so that the scholars’ task is to sift the authentic sayings and doings of Jesus from the later additions.

ButtonText_image (Author of The Life of Jesus, David Friedrich Strauss) Author of The Life of Jesus , David Friedrich Strauss

 Scores of lives of Jesus were written during the nineteenth century, each claiming that it portrayed the true Jesus. Two of the best known are The Life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss (1835 – 36) and The Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan (1863). Although the various lives contradicted each other at many points, they all removed the miraculous elements. They all assumed that science had proved miracles impossible. And they agreed Jesus had not taught that he was the Messiah or that the world was coming to an end when he would return to set up the kingdom of God.

 These kinds of scholars tended to portray Jesus as a teacher of selfless love and high ethical standards, but not one who claimed to be the Savior of the world.

THE IMPACT OF BIBLICAL CRITICISM

 More important, however, than any of the particular conclusions of biblical critics was the fact that criticism threw into question the general trustworthiness of the Bible. Liberals welcomed higher criticism because they recognized a radically different view of the Bible was necessary for intelligent moderns. They felt free from the need to defend the whole Bible as the infallible Word of God. They no longer had to take into account a God who killed the firstborn sons of the Egyptians or who ordered the Israelites to kill their enemies to the last woman and child or who sent bears to maul children who poked fun at a prophet.

 The studies of the higher critics, said the liberals, make it clear that God has revealed himself through an evolutionary process. It began with primitive, bloodthirsty ideas of a tribal God and showed how the Jews slowly came to grasp the idea of a righteous God who can be served only by one who does justly, loves mercy, and walks humbly with his God. This evolutionary revelation of God, they said, finds its fulfillment in Jesus, where God is portrayed as the loving Father of all humanity.

 When liberals could no longer rest in the traditional doctrines of orthodoxy — which they felt science and history had destroyed — they found their needed assurance in the other pillar of their bridge: Christian experience.

 In the early nineteenth century, an artistic and intellectual movement arose called Romanticism. While it is popularly understood as a protest against the overly rationalistic mindset of the Enlightenment, Romanticism discerned a dynamic energy and force surging within nature. This strong vitality was not exactly irrational but rather beyond reason, and beyond traditional authority. Romanticism stressed the individual, the spirit, the experience of the unexplainable. Romantic paintings often represent this vital force as a great storm that is at once dangerous and fascinating to the onlooker. Encountering this vitality came to be of first importance. It was engaged by an intuitive awareness and not as a logical deduction. Why trouble about formal and external creeds when so intimate and so undeniable a certainty was within the reach of every soul? As Tennyson wrote:

 Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit can meet —

 Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.

 When he was asked to interpret the American situation before the International Congregational Council in London in 1891, Dr. Lewis F. Stearns of Bangor Seminary in Maine said, “We are coming to understand that it is the recognition of the invincible reality of spiritual Christianity which is going to give our theology its great power in the future. . . . Criticism may assail the historical facts of revelation: rationalism may urge objections to its doctrines; but the surf on our coast of Maine might as easily overthrow the granite cliffs against which it breaks as criticism and rationalism disturb the Christian realities which stand firm in the experience of the individual believer and the church.”

INFLUENTIAL REPRESENTATIVES OF LIBERALISM

 The two most influential spokespersons for Christian experience were Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 – 1834) and Albrecht Ritschl (1822 – 89). Both were German theologians. Schleiermacher taught at the newly founded University of Berlin and Ritschl at Bonn and Gottingen. 86

 Schleiermacher attempted to rehabilitate religion among intellectuals. Born into a pious Moravian home, he later insisted that the great debates over proofs of God, the authority of Scripture, and the possibility of miracles were, at best, a secondary expression of religion. At the heart of religion was an awareness of our absolute dependence and vulnerability before the grandeur of God. He appealed to sophisticated intellectuals that they were right to reject the abstract versions of Christianity seen in Protestant scholasticism. In fact, romantic sensibilities were inherently religious, and Christianity, rightly understood, accounts for this experience better than any other religion. After Schleiermacher, the idea became commonplace that religions are differing expressions of dependence on the universe, and whether we recognize it or not, it’s the same inner religious experience shared by all people.

ButtonText_image (Friedrich Schleiermacher is credited as the father of modern theology.) Friedrich Schleiermacher is credited as the father of modern theology.

 Public Domain

 The uniqueness of Christ, said Schleiermacher, is not in some doctrine about Jesus or in some miraculous origin such as the virgin birth: “The real miracle is Jesus himself. In Jesus we find a man who had the sense of God - consciousness to a supreme degree.” Where we all have flashes of God, Jesus had complete knowledge. Where we give fitful obedience, Jesus gave complete obedience. “As the God - filled man,” Jesus was “our great pioneer” in the realm of the spirit and morality.

 Since Jesus has full and complete knowledge of God, through him we can come into a vital and living relationship with God. The church is the living witness to the fact that down through the centuries people have come to a vital God - consciousness through their contact with the life of Jesus. This leads to a true reunion with our fellow human beings in brotherly living.

 Schleiermacher was “the father of modern theology” primarily because he shifted the basis of the Christian faith from the Bible to religious experience. Albrecht Ritschl, the most influential theologian in the late nineteenth century and the principal teacher of American liberals, focused religious experience on the historical Jesus.

 To Ritschl religion had to be practical. It must begin with the question, “What must I do to be saved?” But if that question means, “How can I go to heaven when I die?” then it is a theoretical question. To be saved means to live a new life, free from sin, selfishness, fear, and guilt.

 According to Professor William Hordern, “To be practical, Christianity must be built upon fact, so Ritschl welcomed the search for the historical Jesus. The great Christian fact is the impact that Jesus has made upon the church through the centuries.” Nature cannot introduce us to God because it speaks ambiguously about God. “We find God instead in history, where movements arise dedicated to the values that make life meaningful. The task of theology is to turn men again to Jesus and remind them anew of what it means to follow him.”

 For Ritschl religion rests on human values, not on the facts of science. Science tells us things as they are, but religion weighs the facts and counts some more valuable than others. “The great fact about man is that, although he is a product of nature and evolution, he has a sense of values.” We can explain this only if we recognize that the universe creates not only atoms and molecules but also values. “God is the necessary postulate to explain this sense of worth in man.”

 Many Christians in the late nineteenth century found Ritschl’s approach helpful. It appeared to free the Christian faith from the destructive impact of history and science. It allowed biblical criticism to take the way of science: to decide the facts about the authorship, date, and meaning of the biblical books. But it also recognized that religion is much more than facts. Science cannot rule on values, the stuff of religion.

 If biblical criticism denies Jesus’ miracles, his virgin birth, his preexistence, this does not make Jesus less valuable to us. Belief in the divinity of Jesus does not rest in any of these; it rests solely on the fact that he is the source of a value - creating movement; he has led people to find the God of values. Jesus’ life was the embodiment of such high ethical ideals and attainment that we are inspired to live as he did. Jesus is divine in the sense that he can do for us what God does; he makes us conscious of the highest in life. From Jesus’ influence, then, comes the church, a values - creating community — the spearhead for building a society inspired by love, the kingdom of God on earth.

 The impact of liberalism was not limited to any single denomination or country. It challenged traditional orthodox bodies all over Europe and North America. We may take the Congregationalists in the United States as an example of many other Christian groups.

AN EXAMPLE OF LIBERAL CHANGE

 Liberal theology appeared among New England churches under the label New Theology. The leading advocates emerged from within traditional New England Calvinism. Theodore Thornton Munger was minister of the United Church (Congregational) in New Haven, Connecticut. Newman Smyth, his colleague in New Haven, served the Center Church (Congregational) for twenty - five years. George Angier Gordon was minister of historic Old South Church in Boston. Washington Gladden early served in New England but found his greatest success at the First Congregational Church in Columbus, Ohio. George Harris was Abbott Professor of Theology at Andover Theological Seminary and, supported by his colleagues, was spokesman for the New Theology through the Andover Review. Finally there was the great popularizer of the movement, Lyman Abbott. “Probably no man,” said F. H. Foster, “ever wielded in America so powerful an influence in the direction of a liberal theology.”

 Scores of others clustered around these early leaders — Henry Ward Beecher, Egbert Smyth, William Jewett Tucker, Lewis French Stearns, William Newton Clarke, and others — but the character of the movement remained basically the same. It was a protest in the interests of modern thought against the old theology of evangelical Puritanism, usually called New England Theology.

 In 1881 Edwards Amasa Park, perhaps the last outstanding spokesman for New England Theology, resigned from the influential Abbot Professorship of Theology at Andover. Two years later Harris succeeded him. We may consider that event the watershed of the old and the new.

 Prior to 1880 most New England ministers held to the sovereignty of God; to the innate depravity of mankind (which they traced to the sin of Adam); to the atonement of Jesus Christ, the basis for the forgiveness of sin; to the Holy Spirit as essential to conversion; and to the eternal separation of the saved and lost in heaven or hell.

PROFILES of Faith

 Sadhu Sundar Singh (1889 – 1929) was born into a high - caste Sikh family in northern India. His mother sent him to a Christian mission school to learn English. When she died, the young man hated Christians and burned Bibles. Suicidal, he prayed for a vision, expecting Krishna, Buddha, or a Hindu avatar. When Jesus appeared to him, he told his family, who expelled him and poisoned him. Saved by Christians, he was baptized at age sixteen. He later began wearing the robe of a Hindu ascetic and traveled from village to village spreading the gospel, often violently opposed. He taught that Christianity is not a foreign religion but that Jesus is indigenous to Asian needs and hopes. Barefoot, he traveled to Tibet, Afghanistan, and eventually all over the globe. He was known for healing and other miraculous gifts, but he never allowed them to be publicized.

 After 1880 every one of these beliefs came under heated fire from the liberals. The most celebrated controversy erupted at Andover Seminary. The seminary had been established by New England Congregationalists in 1808 to counter the Unitarian tendencies of Harvard. Attempting to preserve Andover’s orthodoxy, the founders required faculty to subscribe to a creed summarizing their inherited Calvinism. By 1880, however, faculty members, under the influence of liberalism, found this requirement impossible and said so. The spark that lit the flames of controversy was a series of articles in the Andover Review . Egbert C. Smyth, William Jewett Tucker, and George Harris of the faculty argued that heathen who die without any knowledge of the gospel will have an opportunity in the future life either to accept or to reject the gospel before facing final judgment. Step by step in the debate that followed, faculty members moved toward the public defense of liberal theology.

 The Board of Visitors, one of the ruling bodies of the seminary, finally brought charges against Smyth for his departure from the creed — a kind of test case. After years of moves and countermoves, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in 1892 voided the action of the Board of Visitors in dismissing Smyth. By that time almost every American denomination had on its hands its own celebrated case of heresy.

Chapter 41: A Bridge for Intelligent Moderns

Protestant Liberalism

• On his 85th birthday in 1920, Lyman Abbott reflected on his Puritan upbringing and shift from viewing God as an "awful police justice" to a more modern understanding.

• Abbott symbolized many ministers influenced by liberal theology.

• The early 20th century presented challenges to liberalism but its impact remained in major Protestant denominations.

• Sydney E. Ahlstrom stated liberals sparked significant controversy in churches since the Reformation.

• Central aim of liberal theology: reconcile modern intelligence with Christian faith as noted by Harry Emerson Fosdick.

Aims of Protestant Liberalism

• Protestants struggled to adapt faith to modern thought without distorting the gospel.

• H. Richard Niebuhr noted the irony in liberalism's portrayal of God and Christ.

• Definitions of religious liberalism vary widely but are underpinned by a spirit of reverencing truth and the freedom to pursue it.

• Kenneth Cauthen identified two types of liberalism: evangelical and modernistic.

  • Evangelical liberals emphasize Christian experience.

  • Modernistic liberals support modern thought.

• Liberals believed theology needed to engage with modern science to retain relevance.

• Faith should be subject to reason and experience, with a focus on unity and coherence in God's creation.

Key Concepts

• Immanence: God's presence and action within the world.

• Transcendence: God's existence beyond and separate from the universe.

• Many liberals shifted to a solely immanent view, equating God with nature and human consciousness.

Enter Charles Darwin

• Darwin (1809-1882) popularized evolutionary theory, challenging traditional religious views on creation.

• His works, "Origin of Species" and "Descent of Man", sparked debates in the religious community regarding salvation and creation.

Treating the Bible as Just Another Book

• Biblical criticism emerged, applying historical methods to analyze the Bible.

• Higher criticism focuses on the meaning and background of biblical texts.

• It questioned traditional beliefs about authorship and historical accuracy of scriptures.

  • Challenged the view of Moses as the author of the Pentateuch and questioned the accounts of prophecy.

• Higher criticism led to a broader interpretation concerning Jesus and the trustworthiness of biblical accounts.

Impact of Biblical Criticism

• Higher criticism opened up a new understanding of the biblical text, breaking from traditional infallibility.

• Liberals adopted a view of God revealing himself gradually through an evolutionary process.

Influence of Romanticism

• Romanticism emphasized individual experience and a deeper spiritual connection to the universe, affirming experiences of spirituality over dogma.

Influential Representatives of Liberalism

• Friedrich Schleiermacher: Emphasized religious experience over doctrine, arguing for Christianity's unique expression of human dependence on God.

• Albrecht Ritschl: Focused on practical implications of religion based on the historical Jesus, challenging traditional ideas of salvation and the authority of scripture.

Example of Liberal Change

• New England churches saw the rise of liberal theology in response to traditional Calvinist beliefs, particularly at Andover Seminary, leading to significant theological debates in the 19th century.

Chapter 41: A Bridge for Intelligent Moderns

Protestant Liberalism

1. Lyman Abbott's reflection on his Puritan upbringing highlights the shift from a punitive view of God to a more modern understanding of faith.

2. Abbott represents many ministers influenced by liberal theology, which faced challenges yet maintained a significant impact on major Protestant denominations.

3. Sydney E. Ahlstrom noted that liberalism sparked major controversy in churches, with the aim to reconcile modern intelligence with Christian faith, as expressed by Harry Emerson Fosdick.

Aims of Protestant Liberalism

1. Protestant liberals sought to adapt Christianity to modern thought without compromising the essence of the gospel.

2. H. Richard Niebuhr highlighted the irony in liberalism's portrayals of God and Christ, indicating internal contradictions.

3. Kenneth Cauthen categorized liberalism into evangelical liberals, who prioritize Christian experience, and modernistic liberals, who emphasize modern thought.

Key Concepts

1. Immanence refers to God's presence and action within the world, making Him accessible to human experience.

2. Transcendence represents God's existence beyond and separate from the universe, implying a more distant view of God.

3. Many liberals adopted a solely immanent perspective, equating God with nature and human consciousness.

Enter Charles Darwin

1. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) is known for popularizing evolutionary theory, which challenged traditional religious creation narratives.

2. His notable works, "Origin of Species" and "Descent of Man", prompted serious debates regarding the implications for salvation and the creation account.

3. Evolutionary ideas led some liberals to reconcile science with aspects of Christianity, viewing growth and development as divine revelations.

Treating the Bible as Just Another Book

1. Biblical criticism emerged, utilizing historical methods to analyze the text of the Bible rather than accepting it as infallible.

2. Higher criticism seeks to uncover the meaning and context of biblical texts, challenging traditional authorship beliefs.

3. This approach led to doubts about scriptural authority, particularly concerning authorship and the reliability of gospel accounts.

Impact of Biblical Criticism

1. Higher criticism initiated a new understanding of the Bible, moving away from the traditional view of its infallibility and divine inspiration.

2. Liberals embraced the idea that God revealed Himself progressively through an evolutionary understanding of scripture.

3. This perspective allowed for a re-examination of the purpose and role of the Bible in modern faith contexts.

Influence of Romanticism

1. Romanticism emphasized individual experience, intuition, and the spiritual connection to nature.

2. It presented a challenge to the rationalistic mindset of the Enlightenment and the established dogmas of religion.

3. Romanticism encouraged an appreciation for spirituality grounded in personal experience rather than formal doctrinal statements.

Influential Representatives of Liberalism

1. Friedrich Schleiermacher argued that religious experience and awareness of dependence on God are central to faith, rather than strict doctrines.

2. Albrecht Ritschl emphasized the practical implications of Christianity based on the historical figure of Jesus, focusing on values rather than dogma.

3. Both theologians shifted the foundation of faith from traditional texts to the lived experiences and values of individuals.

Example of Liberal Change

1. New England churches experienced liberal theology's rise in response to traditional Calvinist beliefs, particularly within Andover Seminary.

2. The faculty at Andover Seminary engaged in theological debates that ultimately led to a public defense of liberal theology.

3. Significant changes in orthodox beliefs occurred by the late 19th century, affecting various denominations in America and beyond

The impact of Darwinism on the church in the nineteenth century was significant, as Charles Darwin's theories challenged traditional religious views regarding creation, leading many religious individuals to grapple with the implications of evolution on the doctrine of salvation. Some religious thinkers rejected Darwin's scientific views outright, questioning the need for Christ's salvation if humanity was not specially created by God. Conversely, others tried to reconcile their faith with evolutionary theory, viewing growth and development as avenues through which God reveals Himself, ultimately prompting a reevaluation of core beliefs within the church.