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Liberalism
Liberalism or sometimes called Modernism is a
major shift in theological thinking which occurred in the late nineteenth
century. Liberals insist that the world has changed since the time Christianity
was founded so that biblical terminology and creeds are incomprehensible to
people today. Although most would start from the orthodoxy of Jesus Christ as
the revelation of a savior God, they try to rethink and communicate the faith
in terms which can be understood today.
It rejects religious belief
based on authority alone, rather insists that beliefs must pass the tests of
reason and experience. They point to the fact that the Bible is the work of
writers who were limited by their times, it is neither supernatural nor an
infallible record of divine revelation, and thus does not possess absolute
authority. It sees God as present and dwelling within the world, not apart from
or elevated above the world as a transcendent being. Liberalism also manifests
a humanistic optimism. Society is moving toward the realization of the kingdom
of God, which will be an ethical state of human perfection.
Theological liberalism originated
in Germany in the late nineteenth century where most of the major theologians
had studied. Many of them had come to accept the principles of higher criticism
and Darwinism. Kant's ethical idealism and rejection of all transcendental
reasoning about religion had the effect of limiting knowledge and opening the
way for faith. Schleiermacher introduced the idea of religion as a condition of
the heart whose essence is feeling. This made Christian doctrine independent of
philosophical systems and faith a matter of individual experience of dependence
upon God. Hegel went off in another direction with his absolute idealism, as
this emphasized the existence of a rational structure in the world apart from
the individual minds of its inhabitants. The main contributions of Hegelian
idealism were support for the idea of divine immanence and the fostering of
historical and biblical criticism.
Higher criticism questioned the
authorship and dating of much of the biblical literature and rejected the
traditional understanding of the Scriptures as divinely revealed oracles. The
life of Jesus was studied with the intent of striping off the dogmatic
formulations of the church and getting back to the concrete, historical human
personage.
Liberals welcomed the finding of science and readily
accommodated to the challenge of Darwinism. Evolution vindicated divine
immanence, since this explained how God had slowly built the universe through
natural law. God revealed himself, they believe, through a evolutionary
process, as the Israelites began with backward, bloodthirsty ideas and
gradually came to understand that the righteous God could be served only by
those who are just, merciful, and humble. Redemption is seen as the gradual
transformation of man from a primitive state to that of obedient sonship to
God. Just like the physical realm, culture and religion had evolved, and there
was no fundamental antagonism between the kingdoms of faith and natural law.
Students of comparative religion have suggested that the religions of
mankind evolved from lower stages to ever higher stages, the highest of all
being monotheism. They propose that Israelite religion began as animism, the
belief that every natural object is inhabited by a supernatural spirit. After
animism the idea developed in Israel that some spirits were more powerful than
others and deserved to be called 'gods.' Eventually the most powerful of all
became preeminent above the others, and the people believed in his supreme
authority and worshiped him alone. Finally, Israel became willing to admit that
the lesser gods had no existence whatever. [Walter A. Elwell,
ed, Evangelical Dictionary of Theology]
Liberalism portrayed
Christianity as the syncretistic religion of the ancient Near East, denying its
distinctiveness and the authority of the biblical canon. Christianity was
merely one among many religions, all of which were relative to their time and
circumstance, and thus it had no claim to finality.
Another
manifestation of modernism was "primitivism" as taught by Jean Rousseau. He
proposed that primitive man, "the noble save," was superior to civilized man.
"If man is good by nature, it follows that he stays like that as long as
nothing foreign to him corrupts him." It was this kind of thinking that
prompted an artists like Paul Gauguin to desert his family and go to Tahiti in
search of purity and freedom. It was the ideas of Rousseau that formed the
basis for the French Revolution. Karl Marx, too, believed that we could achieve
"heaven on Earth," once the corruptive influences of capitalism could be
dismantled.
The major source of liberal religious ideas in the United
States was Unitarianism. It modified the doctrines of divine sovereignty, human
sin, and biblical revelation. Liberal theologians concerned themselves with
building the kingdom of God and promoting the applied liberalism known as the
social gospel. This emphasized the need to modify the corrupt society that in
turn was corrupting man. Sin or evil is seen as imperfection, ignorance,
maladjustment, and immaturity, not the fundamental flaw in the universe. These
hindrances may be overcome, it is believed, by persuasion and education.
Liberalism with its emphasis on the freedom and self-determination of man gave
religious sanction to modern man's efforts to control his life by autonomous
reason and improve conditions by relying on his own goodness. Progress was seen
in the advance of political democracy, the movement for world peace, and
efforts to end racial discrimination.
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Traditional values and
morals, along with any basic hope for the future, were really shattered by
World War I. That even was so cataclysmic that it destroyed the faith that had
been building throughout the 19th century in the inevitability of progress.
After World War I it was no longer taken for granted that Western Civilization
would survive, and many questioned whether a reliance on traditional values
would enable it to do so.
From the modernists perspective, one of the
most basic assumptions of Western civilization was no longer credible - that
is, that man could discern and solve every problem and thus control his world
through reason. This thinking was further influenced strongly by Sigmund
Freud’s studies of the unconscious. He declared that it was really the
unconscious and not reason that was master of human behavior.
By the
1930s some liberals moved much further to the left and turned to secular
humanism (as reflected in their 1933 Humanist
Manifesto repudiating the existence of God, immortality, and the
supernatural in general, and substituted faith in man and his capabilities.)
The destructive myth of Rousseaus' "the noble savage" was reconstituted
in the revolutionary 1960s - that "if it feels good, do it" decade - and is
still poisoning the minds and souls of Americans in the 1990s. Today’s
sixties-style idealists who are running the White House, as well as many of our
most influential cultural institutions, think that a risk-free, problem-free
society remains a goal worthy of striving for. Naturally, government is always
the vehicle of choice on the road to this elusive utopia. This futile paradise
chase, consequently, enables government to do anything and everything necessary
to address all human needs - real or imagined. Thus, the U.S. government’s
role in human affairs - which was once well defined and strictly limited by our
Constitution - now extends to every conceivable facet of life.
Deprived
of a Christian view of the cosmos as orderly and purposeful, the modernists
came to see it as fragmented, chaotic and without transcendent meaning.
Modernism was characterized by skepticism and radical questioning of the value
of society, of morality, of reason, of religion, even of life itself. After
all, if God does not exist, all things are permitted. Without God there is no
foundation on which one can base values or beliefs - thus anything goes and
nothing matters. [John Pototschnik, "The Foundations of
Cultural Death," Lamplighter, May 1994].
The present
generation has become the inheritors of the belief that there will never be a
unified field of knowledge encompassing the physical universe and the
spiritual. They have been encouraged to take a leap of faith while believing
the new creed that the only faculty for making judgments they have is their
inner senses. Rejecting the revelation of God, the intelligent man has no
standard, no basis in truth, from which to make intelligent moral and religious
discriminations. Tolerance has become the only way of dealing with conflicting,
even contradictory worldviews. Each is viewed as being equally valid and as a
matter of mere private opinion. The "all is permitted" attitude really reflects
a widespread loss of values, a
moral and intellectual impotence which breeds pseudomoralisms for any sort of
gratification people pursue.
The Major
World Views
Agnosticism
Holds that truth is "unknowable."
Rationalism
Sees all of nature as rational and the making of proper
deductions is essential to achieving knowledge.
Pragmatism
Is
more concerned with what 'works' than with what's true.
Monism
Everything is an undifferentiated oneness or
unity.
Henotheism
One supreme god, not necessarily to the exclusion of
other lesser gods.
Liberalism/Modernism
We must rethink and adapt our concept of God and truth
to fit with modern culture and modes of thinking.
Pantheism/Naturalism
Everything is god.
Polytheism
There are many gods.
Atheism
There is no God.
Monotheism
There is only one God.
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Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said:
“Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious.
For as
I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found
an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as
something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.
[Acts
17:22-23] |
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