The Death of Theological Liberalism

The Christocentric liberal movement which began with Horace Bushnell reached the end of its creative period with the appearance of Walter Rauschenbusch's A Theology for the Social Gospel in 1917. A chief distinction of Rauschenbusch's work lay in the fact that it organized every basic theological concept around the category of the Kingdom of God, which according to the author embraced "the marrow of the gospel." This was the classic expression of the Social Gospel moement, and yet both Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel were to fail in their effort to remake society for two reasons.

The first--and perhaps most significant--reason was the advent of the First World War. This global conflict and the horrendous casualties that it produced did much to take deflate the optimistic view of human progress as being upward and onward. Such a hopeful view of the future no longer seemed feasible in the face of the present bloodshed.

The second reason for the failure of the Social Gospel was a post-war social and theological climate that was inhospitable to its basic assumptions. Walter Rauschenbusch himself recognized that the post-war world would require drastic changes in the life and thought of the church. Yet, he was bold enough to venture the prediction that the Social Gospel movement would be revived with "pent up energy" in the coming era. Unfortunately for Rauschenbusch, that prediction never came true. In the years following the First World War, Liberal theology floundered and died.

Liberalism's demise was rooted, interestingly enough, in the controversy that grew out of the effort of militant fundamentalists to purge the churches of all modernists. The conflict flared up soon after the war, and as we saw last time, lasted for ten years. In the end, the fundamentalists failed in their primary objective, but at least they forced their opponents into a self-defensive posture. With the forced retreat of the fundamentalists, theological liberals believed they would be able to regain their equilibrium. But by the mid-twenties, they had been drawn into dialogue with a small but vociferous party from the other end of the theological spectrum known as religious humanists. These left-wing analogues to the fundamentalists challenged the liberals to forsake the theistic tradition, and espouse a religious faith based entirely on the authority of the modern scientific method. Few did, but again this controversy prevented them from using their full energies in creative theological effort.

At the same time as the Humanist pressure was increasing, the liberal movement was subjected to the impact of the "dialectical" or "Crisis" theology of Karl Barth. An American translation of Barth's Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie came out in 1928. It was followed by what some have referred to as "the most devastating American polemic of its time," Reinhold Niebuhr'sMoral Man and Immoral Society (1932) which analyzed the whole structure of liberal culture and found its optimistic view of man to be far to unrealistic to solve the problems of a technological and industrial society.

The new theology that Barth and Niebuhr proposed in place of the now discredited theological liberalism was variously labeled "neo-orthodoxy," or "realistic theology." This new theology distinguished itself from the old order at a number of points.

God's Sovereignty

First, it reasserted the idea of God's Sovereignty. This was by and large a protest against the prevailing tendency to glorify man and all his works. Several aspects of liberal theology had served to cultivate man's consciousness of his moral and spiritual autonomy. One of these doctrines was divine immanence. The idea that God infuses the individual served to nourish a sense of a person's own goodness and self sufficiency. Arthur C. McGiffert illustrated this anthropology well when he wrote "a religion that is to sustain democracy must first of all be a religion of faith in man. Religious education in a democracy should not be such as to encourage the delusive belief in supernatural agencies and dependence upon them, but it should be such as to convince everybody that things can be controlled and molded by the power of man." It was an amazing statement, and yet it was by no means exceptional at the time.

The Humanist movement was a second factor which reinforced a religion of faith in man. In the 1920's, religious Humanism was supremely self-confident, and its main concern was to undermine belief in the existence of God, the assumption being that only a religion without God would encourage man to devote himself single mindedly to the promotion of human values. If there was no heavenly city to look to, then human beings would finally turn their focus on building one here on earth.

A third factor in the anthrocentrism of theological liberalism was the increasing emphasis being placed on the psychology of religion, a subject that was so captivating it almost eclipsed theology as a subject of study in many divinity schools. Those who studied the psychology of religion focused their attention on the reactions or mental functions of the human subject, not upon any ultimate reality. Whether there was a Deity or not was immaterial. Indeed, many proponents of this school of thought denied the existence of a Divine Being. All the study of the psychology of religion was concerned about was what moved a person to believe there was a God.

Neo-Orthodoxy rejected this focus on the religious subject, and instead focused on what it believed was the proper object of religion: God. "God is not to be equated with the highest reaches of human aspiration and imagination," one of them wrote, "He is no projection of man's ideals, or his social consciousness. He is objective reality."

A Renewed Appreciation of Revelation

A second distinctive mark of the new orthodoxy was a renewed appreciation of Biblical Revelation. Accepting Kant's insight concerning our inability to know anything about God, they found a way around the epistemological impasse that had so dogged the liberals. They concluded that while we may not be able to know anything of God, that does not preclude God from revealing himself. And the place where God decisively discloses himself is in the Bible. This accent upon Biblical revelation gave strong emphasis to Biblical studies. Neo-Orthodoxy promoted the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and cultivated a serious scholarship of the Biblical text.

The result has been two major changes in the Church's view of Scripture. First, in the wake of this increased appreciation of Scripture the Old Testament is assuming a new and greater significance in the life of the church. It is no longer viewed by Christians as a book for the scientifically illiterate, but the beginning of a revelational and covenantal movement that finds its ultimate fulfillment in the New Testament. Second, theology has come to be viewed as increasingly kerygmatic (proclamation) in character rather than apologetic.

Rejection of an Optimistic Anthropology

Thirdly, Neo-Orthodoxy represented a reaction against the optimistic interpretation of the human situation. Liberalism failed to perceive the fundamental nature of humanity's moral predicament. Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, Dean W.W. Fenn of Harvard Divinity School had written: "To a serious thinker, Modern Liberalism often seems to jocund for life as it actually is...A religious doctrine which cannot bear the weight of the heartbreaking disasters of life will prove a broken reed piercing the hand of him who leans on it. Every fall is a fall upward--tell that to the man who by his sin has fallen from a position of honor and power into a deep and damaging disgrace. If all's right with the world, something is wrong with man's moral sense." Harry Emerson Fosdick touched upon the crux of this issue when he said, "In spite of the debacle of the Great War, this is one of the most unrepentant generations that ever walked the face of the earth, dreaming still of automatic progress toward an earthly paradise."

Such warnings did little, however, to dim the optimism of rank and file clergy or the people in the pews. It was not "until the Great Depression had paralysed the American economy that the time was ripe for an Amos of the stature of Reinhold Niebuhr. But even then his Moral Man and Immoral Societywas an anathema to most secular and religious liberals, who still clung to the optimistic notion that mankind on the whole was gradually taming human egoism and progressively achieving" a just society. "Niebuhr admitted that rational and religious resources could do much to mitigate the imperialistic impulses of men and of groups, but he denied that those impulses would ever be completely subdued." Group evil is always more difficult to bring under control than that of the individual.

Niebuhr did more than any other theologian to awaken both secularists and religionists to the reality and gravity of sin. In The Nature and Destiny of Man, he "unfolded a profound conception of sin." He "argued for a revival of the old idea of original sin." "The utopian illusions and sentimental aberrations of modern liberal culture," Niebuhr argued, "are all really derived from the basic error of negating the fact of original sin." The impact of Niebuhr's ideas were such that even where theologians still hold to the older liberalism, they make every effort to "disavow" any "optimistic interpretations of human nature and history."

Interest in Christology

Fourth, Neo-Orthodoxy is characterized by a revival of interest in Christology. Liberals had tended to focus on the Jesus of history or the personality of Christ. Both approaches to Jesus had involved no necessarily metaphysical presuppositions, and suggested that he was only a historical figure who had existed apart from the Jesus of myth who was largely the creation of the church. Again, it was McGiffert who enunciated the Liberal position. "The greatest fact in modern Christian history is the rediscovery of Jesus. He is better known and understood today than he has ever been before." Liberals truly believed that they had been able to isolate the real Jesus as he had actually lived and taught apart from "all the theological coloring by his followers." This man was a prophet-teacher of a new righteousness who had taught the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man."

In response to the Liberal's devaluation of Christology, Neo-Orthodoxy has set about to insure,in the words of John Knox, that "Christology is the most important area of Christian theology." Karl Barth believed that all we can know about God was revealed in Jesus Christ. This new Christology rejected the earlier effort to distinguish between the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith.

A Heightened View of the Church

Fifth, Neo-Orthodoxy has a much more serious appreciation for the Church. Protestant Liberalism was fairly indifferent to ecclesiology (the doctrine of the Church). William Newton Clarke, and William Adams Brown, the two leading Christocentric Liberal theologians ignored the doctrine in their systematic theologies. And many in the Social Gospel movement feared that focusing on the church would in someway detract from their fixation on the Kingdom of God.

Neo-Orthodox theologians took an opposite position. For them, the church was the first sign of the Kingdom, and its message pointed to a Kingdom--not of man's making--but of God's. One product of this interest in the church was a renewed appreciation of ecumenism, and several steps were taken to create institutions like the World and National Council of Churches to help foster Christian unity.

End of Part I