Faith, Science and Liberal Theology

The father of liberal theology

By 1800, after the Enlightenment's attacks (see The Enlightenment), many educated people thought Christianity was intellectually finished. Kant had shown that reason could not prove God. Biblical miracles seemed impossible. How could a thinking person still be a Christian?

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), a Berlin preacher and professor raised among the Moravians, offered a brilliant new answer. In On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799), he argued that religion is neither a set of doctrines (knowledge) nor a moral code (action). At its core it is feeling, an immediate awareness of the infinite in and through the finite. In his later The Christian Faith (1821–22), he defined religion as "the feeling of absolute dependence" on God. Doctrines are attempts to put this religious experience into words. Jesus was the person whose consciousness of God was perfect and unbroken, and he communicates it to the Christian community.

This was a revolution. Religion was now grounded in human experience, which science could not touch. Schleiermacher is often called the "father of modern (liberal) theology." Critics then and since have asked whether he made God a projection of human feelings.

History and the Bible

The 1800s was the century of history. Scholars learned to study ancient texts by asking who wrote them, when, why and using what sources. Applied to the Bible, this historical-critical method (or "higher criticism") produced unsettling conclusions:

• The Old Testament: Building on earlier work, Julius Julius Wellhausen (1878) argued that the first five books, traditionally ascribed to Moses, were woven from four sources written centuries apart (the "Documentary Hypothesis," known as J, E, D and P).
• The Gospels: Scholars worked out that Mark was the earliest Gospel and that Matthew and Luke used Mark plus a sayings source ("Q") (see Writing the New Testament). John was judged less historical than the others.
• The life of Jesus: In 1835 the young German scholar David Friedrich David Friedrich Strauss published The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, arguing that the Gospel miracles were "myths," stories expressing religious ideas rather than historical events. It caused a sensation and ended his academic career. A flood of "Lives of Jesus" followed, each reconstructing the "real" Jesus behind the Gospels.

In 1906 Albert Schweitzer published The Quest of the Historical Jesus, surveying all these attempts. He concluded that each scholar had looked down a deep well and seen their own reflection. The liberal Jesus was a 19th-century moral teacher. The real Jesus, Schweitzer said, was a strange first-century prophet expecting the imminent end of the world. Schweitzer himself, an accomplished organist and theologian, then trained as a doctor and spent his life running a hospital in Gabon.

Darwin

In 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. It argued that species are not fixed creations but evolved over vast ages through natural selection: individuals with traits better suited to their environment survive and reproduce more. In The Descent of Man (1871) he applied this to human beings.

Darwin's theory challenged Christianity in several ways. It conflicted with a literal reading of Genesis (creation in six days, a few thousand years ago). It undermined Paley's argument that the design of living things proves a Designer (see The Enlightenment). It raised the question of where humans, sin and the soul fit. And it made the suffering and waste in nature, "nature red in tooth and claw," seem built into creation itself. Darwin, once intended for the ministry, slowly lost his faith, especially after his beloved daughter Annie died in 1851. He described himself as an agnostic.

The famous 1860 Oxford debate between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and the biologist Thomas Thomas Henry Huxley ("Darwin's bulldog") became a legend. Wilberforce supposedly asked whether Huxley was descended from an ape on his grandfather's or grandmother's side, and Huxley replied that he would rather have an ape for a grandfather than a man who used his gifts to obscure the truth. The exact words are uncertain. Historians stress that the "warfare between science and religion" story was largely constructed later. Many Christians, including leading scientists and theologians, quickly accepted evolution as God's method of creation. The American botanist Asa Gray, a devout Presbyterian, was Darwin's leading supporter in America. Even conservative Princeton theologians such as B. B. Warfield were open to forms of evolution.

Nineteenth-century challenges and Christian responses

Challenge	Claim	Liberal response	Conservative response
Historical criticism	Bible books have multiple authors; Gospels mix history and faith	Accept; the Bible records human religious experience	Defend inerrancy and traditional authorship
Darwin (1859)	Species evolve by natural selection over vast ages	Evolution is God's way of creating	Varied: some accept, others insist on literal Genesis
Feuerbach (1841)	God is a projection of human ideals	Ground faith in experience (Schleiermacher)	God is known by revelation, not projection
Marx (1840s)	Religion is the "opium of the people"	Social Gospel: Christianity must fight injustice	Personal conversion first; distrust socialism
Nietzsche (1880s)	"God is dead"; Christian morality is weakness	(Little direct response)	Kierkegaard-style personal faith; apologetics

The "masters of suspicion"

Other thinkers went further, arguing that religion itself was a human creation:

• Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity, 1841): God is a projection of humanity's own best qualities onto an imaginary being. "Theology is anthropology."
• Karl Marx: religion is a product of economic oppression, "the sigh of the oppressed creature... the opium of the people." Abolish oppression and religion will wither away. Marxism would later inspire militantly atheist states (see Christianity Under Communism).
• Friedrich Nietzsche: "God is dead, and we have killed him" (1882). Christianity is a "slave morality" of the weak, and its values of humility and pity should be overturned.
• Later, Sigmund Freud would call religion an illusion rooted in childish wishes for a protective father.

A lonely voice: Kierkegaard

A very different response came from the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). He attacked both the comfortable state church of Denmark ("Christendom," where everyone is a Christian and so no one really is) and Hegel's grand philosophical systems. Faith, he insisted, is not a matter of proofs or historical evidence or cultural membership. It is a passionate personal decision, a "leap" before God, made "in fear and trembling." Largely ignored in his lifetime, Kierkegaard became hugely influential in the 20th century, for both Christian and atheist existentialists.

Liberal Protestantism

By 1900, especially in Germany, Britain and the northern United States, a confident liberal Protestantism had emerged. Its leaders, such as Albrecht Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Adolf von Harnack, taught that:

• Christianity's essence is the simple religion of Jesus: "the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the infinite value of the human soul" (Harnack, What Is Christianity?, 1900).
• Later doctrines such as the Trinity, the two natures of Christ and the atonement were Greek philosophical husks around the kernel of Jesus' message.
• Miracles could be reinterpreted or set aside. The Bible is a human record of religious experience, not an infallible text.
• The kingdom of God is an ethical community that grows through human moral progress, education and social reform.

Liberals saw themselves as saving Christianity for the modern world. Critics said they had dissolved it. The American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr later summarized liberalism, critically, as "a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." The First World War, which liberal German theologians like Harnack publicly supported, shattered liberal optimism (see World Wars and the Confessing Church).

The conservative response

Many Christians rejected liberalism. At Princeton Seminary, theologians like Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield defended the inerrancy of Scripture, the view that the Bible in its original manuscripts is without error. In Britain, Charles Spurgeon left the Baptist Union in the "Downgrade Controversy" (1887–88) over its tolerance of liberal views. In the Catholic Church, Pope Pius X condemned "Modernism" in 1907 (see Rome Against the Modern World). These conflicts set the stage for the 20th-century battles between fundamentalists and modernists (see Evangelicals and Fundamentalists).