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Liberal Theology · Reformed Thinking

• 0:00
  Welcome to Reform thinking. I am so glad you are joining us
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  today. We are doing a deep dive into,
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  well, a pretty massive shift in church history.
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  Yeah, a shift that changed pretty much everything.
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  Right. Because usually, you know, when
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  you think about a historical institution, you expect some
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  solid ground. Like, think about architecture
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  for a second. You look at this massive ancient
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  cathedral. You see the thick stone walls,
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  the stained glass, the flying buttresses holding up the roof.
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  It looks permanent. Yeah, permanent.
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  When you stand inside a building like that, you know there is a
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  base buried deep in the earth, holding the whole thing up.
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  It is physical. It is grounded.
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  A structure like that is designed to stay put no matter
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  what happens to the weather or the city around it.
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  Spot on. It is comforting.
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  We really like things to be stable.
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  We want our belief systems rooted in something unmoving.
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  But then you step into the intellectual history of the 18th
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  and 19th centuries in Europe. And and the ground starts
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  shaking. Violently, like we're looking at
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  a theological landscape that turned into an active earthquake
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  zone over just a few decades. It is the literal definition,
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  seismic intellectual shift. The assumptions holding Western
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  thought together for over 1000 years were just upended.
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  So today we are going to look closely at that earthquake.
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  We are looking at a summary from Paul Ends regarding liberal
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  theology. We are going to trace its
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  origins, its absolute peak, the sudden collapse and then the
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  complete reshaping of it all. Right from the Enlightenment
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  rationalists all the way into the 20th century.
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  And to understand that shifting ground, we really have to look
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  at the catalyst, which was the sudden rise of Enlightenment
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  rationalism and the scientific method.
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  Which created this massive crisis of authority across all
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  of Europe. Let me stop you there and ask
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  you to paint a picture of that crisis, because for centuries
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  the authority structure was pretty clear, right?
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  You had the scriptures, the historical creeds, the church
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  councils. If you had a question about
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  reality, you went to their sources.
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  Yes, but then you have this explosion of scientific
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  discovery. You have figures like Isaac
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  Newton coming along, right? And he is describing the
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  universe not as this mysterious spiritual realm, but as a giant
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  predictable clockwork mechanism. Just gears turning.
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  Yeah, gears turning. You have philosophical
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  rationalism taking hold, and the central question for thinkers of
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  that era became stark. Like what do you do with the
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  religion built on miracles when modern science insists the
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  supernatural is impossible? So if the universe is a closed
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  system of cause and effect, the clockwork, then there is no room
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  for a God who you know reaches his hand in and breaks the
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  rules. Precisely.
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  And so the standard definition of liberalism from this period
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  is an approach that elevates human reason and the findings of
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  science above all else. Everything gets judged by that
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  standard. Right.
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  Whatever does not agree with human reason or whatever cannot
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  be verified by 19th century science is just automatically
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  rejected. So it operates like a filter, a
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  really strict sieve. You pour Orthodox Christianity
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  into the top, and you see what actually makes it through the
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  mesh of human reason. And the result is the rejection
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  of historic Christian doctrines because doctrines like the
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  incarnation of Christ or the bodily resurrection.
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  They inherently deal with miracles.
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  Yeah, they cannot pass through that filter.
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  The incarnation claims the eternal God took on human flesh.
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  The resurrection claims a dead man came back to life.
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  Reason says those things just do not happen in a closed physical
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  system. So the foundation of the
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  cathedral is basically declared invalid by the new building
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  inspectors. That is a good way to put.
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  It they look at the blueprints and say this violates our new
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  scientific codes, tear it down. And when rationalism strips away
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  the supernatural facts, the religion really only has two
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  choices. It either dies out.
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  Or it retreats inward. It moves out of the realm of
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  observable reality and hides inside the human mind.
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  And that inward retreat begins with a German Protestant named
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  Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher is such a
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  fascinating figure because of why he did this.
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  He is living in Berlin in the late 18th and early 19th
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  centuries. He is moving in these highly
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  educated Romantic circles. He looks at the philosophers of
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  his day and he sees this cold, dead rationalism.
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  But he also looks at orthodox Christianity, and he thinks it
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  has become dry and rigid. So he is actually trying to save
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  religion from the Enlightenment critics.
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  He is. He wants to defend it against
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  that calculating logic, but his method of saving it changes the
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  entire game. It is like if you are trying to
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  protect a house from a flood. You can either build a wall.
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  Or you can pick up the house and move it.
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  Right, move it to a completely different location.
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  Schleiermacher decided to relocate religion.
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  He developed what is called a theology of feeling.
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  He argued that religion is not found in philosophical reasoning
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  and it is definitely not found in doctrinal affirmations.
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  He tossed those out. Completely rejected them.
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  Instead, he proposed that religion is found exclusively in
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  feeling. It is the realm where a person
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  experiences God subjectively. I want to make sure I grasp
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  this, because it sounds like a wild departure from everything
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  before him. He used a specific phrase,
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  right? Absolute dependence, yeah.
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  Absolute dependence and he also talked about God consciousness.
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  So he's saying religion is essentially just that internal
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  sense, that feeling of being dependent on something greater
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  than yourself. That is his core thesis.
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  He believed every human being has this innate intuitive
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  feeling of being dependent on the infinite, and by making that
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  feeling the center of religion, he redefined all the vocabulary.
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  Like what? We'll take the concept of sin.
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  Historically, sin was understood as a moral violation of God's
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  law, a transgression against an objective external standard set
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  by a holy God. Great.
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  Breaking the law? But Schleiermacher redefined sin
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  as occurring when a person tries to live by themselves, isolated
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  from the universe and their fellow man.
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  Wait, hold on. He turns sin into a feeling of
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  isolation so it becomes this relational or psychological
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  state rather than a legal reality before God.
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  Like if I feel connected to the universe I am righteous, but if
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  I feel lonely or isolated I am sinning.
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  That is the logical outcome. And if sin is just a feeling of
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  isolation, then the solution to sin changes too.
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  Because he elevated feeling above all else, He was totally
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  comfortable tossing out the virgin birth, the deity of
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  Christ, and the substitutionary atonement.
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  Let's define substitutionary atonement real quick, just so we
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  are clear on what he is throwing in the trash.
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  Do for it. The orthodox view is that
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  humanity accrued a massive moral debt by breaking God's law.
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  Justice demands a penalty. Substitutionary atonement is the
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  belief that Jesus Christ on the cross acted as a substitute.
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  He absorbed the penalty of God in our place, paying the
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  objective legal debt so we could be forgiven.
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  Something that happened in real history.
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  Right outside of us to solve a real legal problem.
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  And Schlaermacher said that entire concept is unnecessary.
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  In his theology, Christ is viewed solely as the ideal
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  example. Just in Kazan.
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  Just the historical figure who possessed the most perfect God
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  consciousness. Jesus had the ultimate feeling
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  of absolute dependence, and he overcame isolation better than
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  anyone else. So regeneration, being born
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  again, isn't about a historical belief in Christ's death paying
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  for your sins for Him. It is about participating in the
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  corporate life of the Church. Yes, you catch that God
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  consciousness by being around the community, like catching a
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  mood in a crowded room. It is entirely subjective.
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  The authority shifted completely from the external to the
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  internal. 100%. I am thinking about an analogy
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  for this. It is like taking a strict legal
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  contract, something with clauses, historical dates,
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  severe penalties for breaking it and deciding that it is too
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  rigid and upsetting. So you rewrite it.
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  Yeah, you rewrite the contract into a purely emotional journal
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  entry. You just write about how the
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  idea of the contract makes you feel.
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  It might make you feel better in the moment, but here's my
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  question for you. OK, If religion relies entirely
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  on subjective feeling and that takes precedence over scripture,
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  how do you prevent faith from becoming just an echo Chamber of
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  someone's own psychological state?
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  Well, you can't. You really can't prevent it.
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  That is the massive vulnerability of his whole
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  system. By removing the external
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  authority of the Bible, he created a framework where there
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  was no objective check on what a person feels.
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  If your feeling is the ultimate authority, then whatever you
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  feel must be true for you. Which is why historians identify
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  Schleiermacher as the father of modern religious liberalism.
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  He set the precedent that no external authority takes
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  precedence over the immediate experience of the believer.
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  When you discard the substitutionary atonement, you
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  are no longer dealing with a God who acts in history.
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  You shift the focus of faith from a historical reality,
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  something happening outside of you on a Roman cross, to an
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  internal experience inside your own head.
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  The objective anchor is gone, and the consequences of that
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  echo for generations. But as this idea moved forward
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  in time, the next generation of scholars ran into a severe
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  practical issue. Pure internal feeling isn't
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  enough to sustain a community. Right, you can't run a society
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  just on everyone's internal God consciousness.
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  Because if my God consciousness tells me to do one thing and
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  yours tells you to do the opposite, we have a problem.
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  Eventually. People need rules, they need
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  ethics. They need to know how to
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  interact with their neighbors. And that practical necessity
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  brings us to Albrecht Rachel. He's another German Protestant
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  thinker operating a bit later in the 19th century.
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  OK, so how does he respond to this?
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  Well, Rachel looked back at Schleiermacher's pure focus on
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  feelings, and he looked at the abstract speculations of the
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  Rationalists, and he rejected both of them.
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  He found them totally unhelpful for daily life.
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  He wanted something you could actually use.
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  Practical religion, yes. He taught that religion must not
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  be theoretical. He argued that asking a question
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  like how can I go to heaven when I die?
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  Is a useless question. Wow.
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  Yeah, he thought I'd focus on the unseen future and ignored
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  the present. For ritual, salvation meant
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  living a new life right now, being saved from selfishness and
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  fear in the present moment through ethical living.
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  To make this work, he created a very specific division and how
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  we evaluate truth. He divided everything into
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  judgments of facts versus judgments of value.
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  Break that down for me, because this seems to be the engine
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  driving his whole theology. It is a critical distinction.
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  A judgment of fact relates to objective historical events.
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  Like did something actually happen in space and time?
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  Can it be proven scientifically? A judgment of value relates to
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  the implications for the individual.
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  Does this idea have worth? Does it help me live a better
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  moral life? Does it improve society?
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  Let me see if I have this. If I find a piece of paper on
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  the street with Benjamin Franklin on it, the judgement of
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  fact is that it is a rectangular piece of cotton with green ink.
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  The judgement of value is that this piece of paper is a $100
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  bill and it has immense value because it can buy groceries for
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  my family. That is a great way to look at
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  it. And Ritual applied that exact
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  logic to Jesus. He split Jesus in half.
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  Split him in half. He spoke of the Jesus of fact
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  versus the Christ of value, and he decided that the Jesus of
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  fact, the historical reality of what he actually did in the 1st
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  century, is totally unimportant. Wait, really?
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  Yes, what matters is the value of Christ for the community of
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  believers right now. But if Rachel says the
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  historical Jesus doesn't matter, isn't he just tossing out the
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  basis of Christianity? How did anyone take him
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  seriously? You have to remember the
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  cultural desperation of the time.
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  OK, set the scene for me. The scientific critics were
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  aggressively dismantling the historical reliability of the
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  Bible. Scholars were claiming they
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  could prove the miracles never happened.
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  Ritual's theory was incredibly appealing because it offered an
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  escape hatch. It allowed theologians to say,
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  fine, let the scientists have the history, let them disprove
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  the miracles. It doesn't affect our faith
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  because our faith is based on the ethical value of Jesus, not
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  the historical facts. It was a tactical retreat.
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  A massive tactical retreat. It allowed them to dismiss all
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  the cardinal doctrines without feeling like they were losing
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  their religion. Original sin, the Incarnation,
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  the resurrection ritual said they are unimportant because
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  they are not practical for moral conduct on a Tuesday morning.
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  So even the death of Christ is redefined.
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  Strictly as a moral example of loyalty to a calling, it is
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  meant to inspire others to live a loyal ethical life.
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  So they kept the traditional vocabulary.
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  They could stand in a pulpit and say salvation and redemption,
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  and the congregation would assume they meant what they had
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  always meant. But the theologian had entirely
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  emptied the shell of its original historical contents.
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  And replaced it with purely ethical meaning.
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  You know, if the historical facts are deemed irrelevant,
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  aren't we treating Jesus the same way we treat a fictional
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  character? What do you mean?
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  Think about Aesop's Fables, the tortoise and the hare.
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  Nobody cares if they actually existed in history.
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  We don't send archaeologists to find the original racecourse,
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  right? We just use them as mascots for
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  the moral lesson that slow and steady wins the race.
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  Is ritual just turning Jesus into a mascot for good behavior?
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  That is the exact critique levelled against him by orthodox
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  thinkers. He was turning Jesus into an
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  ethical mascot, and this ethical focus laid the groundwork for
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  massive movements later on. Because if moral value is the
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  only metric of religious worth, the goal of the church shifts
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  entirely towards social improvement.
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  Exactly. The Kingdom of God was no longer
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  a future reality brought about by Christ's return.
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  It was an ethical community built by human effort in the
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  present. OK, let's summarize the
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  progression so far. We have Schleiermacher saying
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  faith is just an internal feeling.
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  We have Ritual saying faith is just practical ethics.
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  Both agree that objective historical facts do not matter,
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  but this creates A glaring problem for these scholars.
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  The Bible. Yes, they still have this
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  massive ancient historical document sitting on their desks.
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  If you decide the historical Jesus doesn't matter, what do
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  you do with a book that claims to be a historical record of
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  supernatural events? You have to find a way to strip
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  the supernatural out of it, which is why the methodology of
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  higher criticism flourished. They needed a way to explain how
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  the Bible became so filled with miracles if miracles are
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  impossible exactly. We can look at Adolf von Harnack
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  as a prime example of this approach.
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  He was a follower of Rishel and in 1901 he published this huge
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  bestseller called What is Christianity?
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  And Harnack popularized the idea that we need to separate the
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  kernel of truth from the cultural husk.
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  What did he mean by that? Harnack believed the simple,
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  original faith of Jesus had been corrupted over time.
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  He argued that as the early church expanded into the Greco
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  Roman world, Christian beliefs were molded by Greek
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  philosophical thought. And this Greek influence
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  introduced all these complicated dogmas regarding the nature of
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  God, the incarnation, the two natures of Christ.
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  He viewed all of that theology as a rigid outer shell, a husk
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  that needed to be stripped away. So the Colonel is just the
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  ethical teaching of Jesus and the husk is all the supernatural
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  claims. Right.
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  And Harnack claimed the apostle Paul was actually the primary
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  culprit who corrupted the simple religion of Jesus.
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  Wow, blame Paul. Yeah, Harnack's goal was to get
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  back to the religion of Jesus and discard the religion about
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  Jesus. Which means tossing out the vast
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  majority of the New Testament. Pretty much.
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  And other critics took this methodology even further by
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  applying secular philosophy directly to the text.
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  Like FC Barra. He was a professor at the
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  University of Tubingen, and he applied York Wilhelm Friedrich
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  Hegel's philosophy to the New Testament.
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  OK, let's breakdown Hegel's philosophy first, because it is
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  crucial to understanding how bizarre this criticism became.
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  It really is. Hegel proposed a concept of
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  historical progression and collect the dialectic.
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  The idea is that history moves forward through conflict.
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  You start with an initial idea, which is the thesis, right?
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  This thesis inevitably generates its opposite, the antithesis.
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  The two clash in a major conflict, and out of that
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  struggle comes a new compromise reality, the synthesis.
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  Like in economics, pure capitalism is the thesis, pure
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  communism as the antithesis and they clash to create a mixed
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  economy as the synthesis. Spot on.
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  So how did Bauer force the New Testament into that Hegelian
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  mold? He contended there was a massive
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  bitter conflict in the early church.
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  He said Peter and the Jewish Christian faction represented
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  the thesis. Paul and the Gentile Christian
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  faction represented the antithesis.
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  So he pitted the apostles against each other.
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  He did. Bauer argued that every single
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  New Testament book had to be read not as straightforward
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  history, but as a piece of political propaganda written to
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  support one side of the supposed bitter conflict.
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  And then eventually it synthesized into the Catholic
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  Church of the 2nd century. Right.
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  And then you have David Strauss, a student of Bauer.
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  Strauss took Hegel's concept of the absolute Idea and applied it
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  to Jesus. He denied the historical
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  accuracy of the Gospels entirely.
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  He. Just called them myths, right?
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  Categorize The Bible is filled with myths.
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  For Strauss, the true God man wasn't Jesus the historical
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  figure. The God Man was simply a symbol
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  for the entire human race progressing toward this absolute
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  idea. And we see the same critical
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  approach applied rigorously to the Old Testament as well.
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  The scholars developed the Documentary hypothesis regarding
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  Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible.
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  Yes, the GEDP theory. Walk us through how that
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  actually worked in practice because the traditional view was
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  Mosaic authorship that Moses wrote Genesis, Exodus,
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  Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, but the critics
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  developed a theory that it was a compilation of different
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  documents written over 5 centuries.
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  It started with a French physician named Jean Asterich in
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  the 18th century. He noticed while reading Genesis
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  that the text used different names for God in different
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  passages. Like Elohim and Yahweh.
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  Exactly. Sometimes Elohim, sometimes
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  Jehovah or Yahweh. Asterisk suggested Moses was
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  simply acting as an editor, copying from two different
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  existing documents. Which, you know, sounds like a
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  relatively mild observation. At first you might think, OK,
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  maybe Moses used sources. But the next generations of
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  German scholars took that observation and ran with it.
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  Johan Eichorn expanded on it, dividing up Genesis and Exodus
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  into distinct sources. Wilhelmdevat applied a similar
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  method to Deuteronomy, claiming it was written much later during
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  the reign of King Josiah, to justify centralizing worship in
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  Jerusalem. And then Julius Welhausen
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  finalized it. Yes, to a complete evolutionary
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  pattern in the late 19th century.
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  An evolutionary pattern, That is the critical phrase.
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  I try to imagine being one of these scholars.
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  You have your Bible open on the desk and you literally take a
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  pair of scissors to it. Right, cutting it into pieces.
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  You cut out one paragraph because it says Elohim, and you
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  assign it to a hypothetical source written in the Northern
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  Kingdom. You cut out the next paragraph
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  because it says Yahweh and assign it to a source written a
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  century later. You assume the text is a chaotic
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  patchwork quilt. Driven by massive underlying
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  assumptions. It feels like an archaeological
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  dig where the team leader decides beforehand that the
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  ancient city they are looking for never actually existed
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  because they decided it is a myth.
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  Whenever they dig up a physical artifact, they automatically
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  classify it as a mythological prop used in a ritual.
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  Rather than evidence the city was real.
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  Right. Isn't taking a 19th century
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  German philosophy like Hegel's dialectic and forcing it
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  backwards onto a 1st century Jewish text a massive
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  anachronism? It is a severe anachronism,
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  yeah, but it reveals the rigid presuppositions driving the
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  entire critical movement. They did not approach the text
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  neutrally. They approached it with the
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  absolute assumption that the supernatural is impossible.
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  And that human history always follows an evolutionary
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  progression from primitive ideas to advanced ideas.
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  Exactly. So they applied this
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  evolutionary scheme directly to the religion of Israel.
• 20:03
  Instead of acknowledging the Old Testament as divine revelation
• 20:06
  breaking into history, they viewed it as a purely human
• 20:09
  development. Dismissing the early parts as a
• 20:11
  primitive, bloodthirsty religion of localized tribal gods that
• 20:16
  slowly indulged into the higher ethics of Jesus.
• 20:19
  And the practical result was the total destruction of
• 20:21
  historically held views on authorship and dating.
• 20:25
  Because if a book contained A prophecy that accurately
• 20:28
  predicted the future. The critics had a massive
• 20:30
  problem. Since predicting the future is
• 20:32
  supernatural and the supernatural is impossible, they
• 20:35
  would insist the book had to be written after the event
• 20:38
  occurred. So they just late dated numerous
• 20:41
  biblical books to explain away any prophetic elements.
• 20:45
  Right. They rejected Pauline authorship
• 20:47
  of the pastoral Epistles. The Bible was no longer treated
• 20:50
  as an inspired text. It was dissected like an
• 20:53
  ordinary, somewhat unreliable human document.
• 20:56
  So we have seen this massive intellectual shift sweeping
• 20:59
  across Europe. Schleiermacher gives us internal
• 21:02
  subjectivity. Ritual gives us pragmatism.
• 21:05
  The higher critics give us a dissected Bible.
• 21:08
  But abstract European theories inevitably cross the ocean.
• 21:11
  They do. They had to be translated into
• 21:12
  practical terms for American congregations.
• 21:14
  And we can trace this American translation starting with Horace
• 21:17
  Bushnell. Bushnell was an American
• 21:19
  clergyman operating in the 19th century, pastoring A
• 21:22
  Congregational Church in Hartford, CT.
• 21:25
  He is widely identified as the father of American theological
• 21:29
  liberalism. He was essentially doing for
• 21:32
  America what Schleiermacher did for Europe and he is fascinating
• 21:36
  because he had a very specific target he was reacting against.
• 21:40
  The Second Great Awakening, yes. He was looking at these
• 21:43
  revivals, evangelist writing across the frontier, preaching
• 21:47
  fiery sermons, calling for dramatic conversions where
• 21:50
  people would weep and repent in a single emotionally charged
• 21:53
  moment. And Bushnell rejected that
• 21:55
  entirely. He thought it was chaotic and
• 21:57
  totally unnecessary. So what did he propose instead?
• 22:00
  He became highly influential by teaching a completely different
• 22:03
  approach to child rearing and church life.
• 22:06
  He published a book called Christian Nurture where he
• 22:08
  argued that children do not need a sudden traumatic conversion
• 22:11
  experience. OK, he taught that a child can
• 22:13
  simply grow into Christianity over a period of time without
• 22:16
  ever knowing themselves to be anything other than a Christian.
• 22:19
  But to teach that a child can simply grow into Christianity
• 22:22
  seamlessly, Bushnell had to reject a core theological
• 22:26
  concept, the doctrine of original sin.
• 22:29
  He had to deny the idea that humans are born with a corrupt
• 22:33
  nature. He suggested instead that a
• 22:35
  child is essentially born a blank slate or even born good,
• 22:39
  and will naturally stay good if nurtured correctly in the right
• 22:42
  environment. We should use a gardening
• 22:44
  analogy to see how it worked in his churches.
• 22:47
  Bushnell's view is like a gardener building a
• 22:50
  state-of-the-art greenhouse. The gardener assumes the soil
• 22:53
  they bought is absolutely pristine, they assume the
• 22:56
  climate controls are perfect, and most importantly, they
• 23:00
  completely ignore the very existence of dormant weed seeds
• 23:03
  already mixed into the soil. They assume that as long as they
• 23:05
  water the plant and keep the temperature right, nothing
• 23:08
  internal will corrupt the growth.
• 23:10
  Imagine being a 19th century parent hearing this.
• 23:13
  It sounds wonderful. It removes the anxiety of
• 23:15
  worrying about your child's soul.
• 23:17
  You just provide a nice home and polite church environment and
• 23:20
  your child will automatically become a good Christian.
• 23:22
  But it ignores the reality of human nature.
• 23:25
  You can put a child in the most perfect environment imaginable
• 23:29
  and they will still eventually lie or steal or act selfishly.
• 23:33
  The weeds always sprout because the corruption is internal, not
• 23:37
  just environmental. But Bushnell was committed to
• 23:40
  this environmental view. He also rejected biblical
• 23:43
  inspiration and advocated for the moral influence theory of
• 23:46
  the cross. Where Christ's death is just a
• 23:48
  demonstration of God's love to soften human hearts rather than
• 23:52
  a substitutionary sacrifice. Right.
• 23:54
  But this intense focus on the environment, the idea that you
• 23:58
  can create perfect Christians by creating a perfect environment,
• 24:01
  leads directly to the next major American figure.
• 24:04
  Walter Rauschenbusch, the father of the Social Gospel.
• 24:07
  He's an American Baptist, his clergyman, and his theology was
• 24:10
  heavily influenced by his immediate environment.
• 24:13
  He was the pastor of a church in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood
• 24:15
  of New York City during the late 19th century.
• 24:18
  We have to picture New York City in the 1890s.
• 24:21
  This is the height of the Industrial Revolution.
• 24:23
  Massive waves of immigration. People are crammed into squalid
• 24:28
  tenements. No labor laws.
• 24:30
  Children working 12 hour shifts in sweatshops, Tuberculosis
• 24:34
  running rampant. Extreme wealth disparity with
• 24:37
  robber barons Uptown while immigrants starve in the slums.
• 24:41
  Rauschenbush was confronted daily with horrific realities.
• 24:45
  Conducting funerals for children who died of preventable
• 24:48
  diseases. And that context is crucial.
• 24:51
  When he looked at the traditional Orthodox Gospel, the
• 24:54
  message of personal salvation from sin and eternal judgment,
• 24:58
  he felt it was entirely inadequate for the suffering he
• 25:00
  was seeing. So what did he do?
• 25:02
  He advocated a theology of intense social concern, the text
• 25:06
  mentions. We are remaining totally
• 25:08
  impartial on the economic theories themselves, but just
• 25:11
  looking at his ideas, he criticized the capitalistic
• 25:14
  system fiercely. Arguing it was motivated by pure
• 25:17
  greed, yes. And he advocated for collective
• 25:20
  ownership of property to solve these inequities, although he
• 25:22
  was careful to deny strict Marxism.
• 25:24
  Looking at the immense suffering in New York City, his desire to
• 25:27
  fix society is totally understandable.
• 25:29
  When you see starring children, your natural human instinct is
• 25:33
  to change the system. You want to mandate a living
• 25:35
  wage. You want to clean up the
• 25:37
  tenements. But theologically speaking,
• 25:39
  where does the system breakdown? It changes the very definition
• 25:42
  of the Christian message, doesn't it?
• 25:43
  It completely. Redefined the Gospel.
• 25:46
  For him, the Gospel was not a message of personal salvation
• 25:49
  from eternal punishment. The Gospel was the ethic of
• 25:52
  Jesus's love, applied practically and politically to
• 25:55
  transform society by resolving social evils.
• 25:58
  The goal of the Church was to build the Kingdom of God on
• 26:01
  earth by fixing poverty and labor conditions.
• 26:04
  And the theological breakdown occurs because the entire system
• 26:08
  relies on a concept called the absolute eminence of God.
• 26:11
  Explain what that means practically.
• 26:13
  Eminence means God is everywhere and in everything.
• 26:16
  Orthodox theology holds that God is omnipresent, but he's also
• 26:19
  transcended. He's distinct from his creation.
• 26:22
  He rules over it. Right.
• 26:23
  But the liberal theology of this era pushed for absolute
• 26:26
  imminence. They saw God at work everywhere
• 26:29
  in nature, and specifically, they saw God as the driving
• 26:33
  force inside the evolutionary process of human society.
• 26:36
  So God isn't a judge looking down from heaven, God is just
• 26:39
  the energy inside the societal machine pushing humanity
• 26:43
  forward. Exactly because God is already
• 26:45
  in the process, evolving society upward, there is no need for
• 26:50
  supernatural intervention, no need for miracles.
• 26:53
  God is simply the progressive force of history.
• 26:55
  And when you combine that absolute imminence with a
• 26:58
  rejection of biblical authority, you create an open system
• 27:01
  without absolutes. Everything is subject to change
• 27:04
  based on whatever society needs at the moment.
• 27:07
  By focusing entirely on human effort to bring the Kingdom of
• 27:10
  God to the here and now, they completely discarded eternal
• 27:14
  salvation. They considered personal
• 27:16
  salvation from the wrath of God to be a selfish, outdated
• 27:20
  concept. It is a breathtaking amount of
• 27:22
  optimism about human nature. Right.
• 27:24
  Bushnell thinks children are born perfectly good.
• 27:26
  Rauschenbush thinks society can be perfected through human
• 27:29
  effort. The entire structure rested on
• 27:31
  this unquestioned assumption, the inevitable progressive
• 27:34
  betterment of society. They truly believed humanity was
• 27:38
  just moving upward and onward, leaving war and cruelty behind.
• 27:41
  You can write all the academic papers you want about how humans
• 27:44
  are inherently good. You can build this massive
• 27:46
  intellectual cathedral based on the absolute goodness of
• 27:49
  mankind. But then the calendar turns to
• 27:52
  1914. Yes, the devastating impact of
• 27:56
  World War One cannot be overstated here.
• 27:58
  It was the physical manifestation of the earthquake
• 28:00
  we talked about at the beginning.
• 28:01
  Because the liberal message was essentially optimistic, denying
• 28:05
  the inherent sinfulness of man, the war was an absolute
• 28:09
  shattering catastrophe for their worldview.
• 28:12
  The advent of the war destroyed the myth that mankind is getting
• 28:15
  better until the death blow to old line liberalism.
• 28:18
  Think about the reality of 1914 to 1918.
• 28:21
  Industrialized slaughter on a scale never before seen.
• 28:24
  The Battle of the Somme Verdun. Millions of young men sitting in
• 28:28
  muddy trenches, dropping artillery shells on each other
• 28:31
  and unleashing poison gas. It is impossible to stand in a
• 28:34
  pulpit and preach that humanity is naturally evolving toward a
• 28:37
  utopian Kingdom of love when the newspaper headlines are
• 28:40
  reporting the casualty numbers from the trenches.
• 28:42
  The optimism evaporated in the mustard gas.
• 28:45
  We have a very specific historical example of how
• 28:47
  jarring this was Karl Barth. The Swiss theologian, right?
• 28:52
  And he had actually trained in Germany under Adolf von Harnack,
• 28:56
  the scholar who wanted to strip the husk off Christianity.
• 28:59
  So Barth was steep in this liberal, optimistic tradition.
• 29:02
  It was Barth was pastoring a church in Switzerland when the
• 29:05
  war broke out and he discovered a severe paralyzing problem.
• 29:10
  With the outbreak of the World War, Barth realized he had
• 29:13
  absolutely no message to preach to his congregation.
• 29:16
  Wow. His liberal message of human
• 29:18
  optimism and ethical progress had nothing whatsoever to say to
• 29:22
  people whose lives and families were being devastated by a
• 29:25
  global mechanized conflict. It sounds like a horrific wake
• 29:28
  up call. Imagine you are a mother who
• 29:30
  just received a telegram that your sons are dead.
• 29:33
  If a pastor walks up to you and says don't worry, human
• 29:35
  society's evolving and getting better everyday, that isn't just
• 29:38
  factually wrong. It feels deeply insulting.
• 29:41
  It feels like a cruel joke. How did the liberal church
• 29:44
  establishment respond when their entire worldview collapsed
• 29:47
  overnight like that? The crisis forced a severe
• 29:50
  bifurcation. Karl Barth recognized the utter
• 29:53
  bankruptcy of the optimistic model, literally opened his
• 29:57
  Bible, and returned to the Scriptures to search for a new
• 29:59
  message. He realized his professors had
• 30:02
  been wrong. Yes, and he led the theological
• 30:05
  world into what became known as Neo Orthodoxy, emphasizing the
• 30:09
  massive gulf between a holy God and completely sinful humanity.
• 30:13
  But the American liberal establishment took a different
• 30:16
  route. They didn't return to historic
• 30:18
  orthodoxy. No, they did not.
• 30:20
  They realized they could not sustain their utopian optimism.
• 30:23
  It was too visibly false. But they still stubbornly held
• 30:26
  to the critical views of the Bible.
• 30:28
  They still rejected the supernatural.
• 30:29
  They still relied on human reason, so they had to pivot
• 30:32
  dramatically to stay relevant. This leads directly to the
• 30:35
  formulation of a new, supposedly more realistic framework.
• 30:39
  Which brings us to the final major shift in our timeline, the
• 30:43
  pivot to neoliberalism. Instead of going back to the
• 30:45
  historic foundations, the liberal theologians attempted to
• 30:49
  rescue their movement by applying a new coat of
• 30:52
  theological paint. They created what was termed
• 30:54
  realistic theology. And the founding father of this
• 30:57
  new liberalism was Harry Emerson Fosdick.
• 31:00
  He was educated at Union Theological Seminary, New York,
• 31:03
  and became an immensely popular preacher at Riverside Church.
• 31:06
  He had a massive radio program that reached millions.
• 31:09
  He was the unquestioned spokesman for neoliberalism
• 31:13
  during the 1920s and 30s. Fostic fought battles on 2
• 31:16
  fronts. He didn't just attack the
• 31:17
  fundamentalists, he attacked the older liberals too.
• 31:20
  There are two crucial sermons that define his trajectory.
• 31:23
  In 1922, he preached A controversial sermon called
• 31:26
  Shall the Fundamentalists Win? Where he aggressively defended
• 31:30
  the liberal right to deny doctrines like the Virgin Birth.
• 31:33
  But then, in 1935, he preached A sermon titled The Church Must Go
• 31:36
  Beyond Modernism. That 1935 sermon is the turning
• 31:40
  point. Fostic essentially looked back
• 31:42
  at Schleiermacher, ritual and Rauschenbusch and accused that
• 31:45
  older modernism of being too sentimental.
• 31:47
  He said it watered down God into a mere force, right?
• 31:50
  Yes, he recognized that adapting perfectly to the sunny,
• 31:54
  optimistic pre war culture meant they had absolutely nothing to
• 31:57
  offer the traumatized post war culture.
• 32:00
  So neoliberalism was born out of this challenge to be more
• 32:03
  realistic about human suffering. It rejected the idealistic
• 32:07
  philosophy of the older liberalism.
• 32:09
  They started looking for God outside of man rather than
• 32:12
  purely within the evolutionary process.
• 32:14
  We see this shift most clearly in how they view human nature.
• 32:19
  Theologians like Walter M Horton and John C Bennett LED this.
• 32:22
  They deliberately lowered their view of humanity.
• 32:25
  Admitting they were no longer optimistic about building a
• 32:28
  utopia on Earth. Exactly.
• 32:30
  Man was no longer seen as perfectly progressing upward.
• 32:33
  Instead, they adopted a specific definition.
• 32:36
  They called man a good thing. Spoiled.
• 32:39
  A good thing spoiled. That is a very carefully crafted
• 32:42
  phrase. It is an admission that
• 32:43
  something is wrong with humanity, which is obvious to
• 32:45
  anyone who lived through the war, but it carefully avoids the
• 32:48
  traditional doctrine of sin. Right.
• 32:50
  John C Bennett laid out specific propositions regarding sin to
• 32:54
  try and solve this dilemma without resorting to orthodoxy.
• 32:57
  What were they? He said sin involves self
• 32:59
  deception. He admitted sin is present at
• 33:02
  all levels of growth. He stated clearly that utopian
• 33:06
  illusions are false, and he said continuous repentance is
• 33:10
  necessary. Those propositions certainly
• 33:12
  sound much more realistic than the naive optimism of Russian
• 33:15
  Bush. However, there is a massive
• 33:17
  caveat to this entire movement. Despite taking sin more
• 33:22
  seriously, the neoliberals steadfastly refused to
• 33:25
  acknowledge the doctrine of original sin, and they firmly
• 33:28
  rejected total depravity. Let's define total depravity for
• 33:31
  a second. Good idea, because it gets
• 33:33
  misunderstood a lot. It doesn't mean every human
• 33:35
  being is as evil as they could possibly be.
• 33:37
  It means that every single part of human nature, the mind, the
• 33:40
  will, the emotions, is touched and corrupted by sin.
• 33:44
  Like putting a single drop of deadly poison into a glass of
• 33:47
  water. Exactly.
• 33:48
  The whole glass isn't poison, but every drop of water is
• 33:51
  tainted by it. You can't drink any of it
• 33:53
  safely. Bennett and the neoliberals
• 33:55
  rejected that. They still believe there was an
• 33:57
  untainted core of goodness in humanity.
• 33:59
  So we have this neoliberalism. It is essentially admitting the
• 34:03
  ruse of the cathedral is leaking because of war, but they are
• 34:06
  absolutely refusing to fix the crack foundation blocks.
• 34:10
  They refused to return to the absolute authority of Scripture
• 34:13
  or the substitutionary atonement.
• 34:16
  So did this reshaping actually solve the underlying problem, or
• 34:20
  did it just delay the inevitable collapse?
• 34:22
  It just delayed it by applying a fresh coat of paint.
• 34:26
  Neoliberalism retained the core essence of old liberalism.
• 34:30
  Yes, they adopted a higher view of God and a lower view of man.
• 34:34
  They started Speaking of the divinity of Christ again to
• 34:37
  sound more orthodox. But they simultaneously rejected
• 34:40
  the virgin birth. They placed greater credence in
• 34:42
  the death of Christ, asserting that contemplating the cross
• 34:45
  infused individuals with God's power to live better lives.
• 34:48
  But they stubbornly refused to acknowledge it as a
• 34:51
  substitutionary atonement paying a legal debt.
• 34:53
  Right. And regarding the Bible, they
• 34:55
  claimed to take it more seriously through scholars like
• 34:58
  Chapter Dodd, but they still share the anti supernatural
• 35:01
  assumptions of old liberalism. They maintained higher criticism
• 35:05
  and continue to deny full inspiration.
• 35:07
  They kept human reason perched slightly above divine
• 35:10
  revelation. They changed the aesthetics to
• 35:12
  match the grim reality of the 20th century.
• 35:15
  But the epistemological base, the method they used to
• 35:19
  determine truth, remained rooted in human reason.
• 35:22
  And the structural legacy of this movement is massive.
• 35:26
  It affects the church today. The organizational body uniting
• 35:30
  these liberal views in America was the Federal Council of
• 35:33
  Churches, founded in 19 O 8. Which eventually became the
• 35:36
  World Council of Churches in 1948.
• 35:38
  Supported majorly by mainline Protestant denominations holding
• 35:42
  to these theologically liberal views.
• 35:44
  So this wasn't just an abstract academic debate.
• 35:47
  It built the institutional architecture of modern mainline
• 35:50
  Protestantism. Built on a constantly shifting
• 35:52
  theological base. OK, let's take a breath and
• 35:55
  synthesize the sweeping historical arc we have covered
• 35:57
  today. We started with the
• 35:59
  Enlightenment earthquake, where human reason and science were
• 36:02
  elevated above all else, filtering out the supernatural.
• 36:05
  Creating a crisis of authority. We saw Schleiermacher retreat
• 36:08
  inward, substituting subjective feelings and God consciousness
• 36:11
  for objective of historical facts.
• 36:13
  Then we observed ritual, shifting the focus to pure
• 36:17
  pragmatism and ethics, splitting the Jesus of history from the
• 36:21
  Christ of value, turning Jesus into a moral mascot.
• 36:24
  Which necessitated the higher critics dissecting the Bible
• 36:27
  with their philosophical scissors, stripping away the
• 36:30
  husk of miracles, and applying 19th century German philosophy
• 36:34
  to ancient Jewish texts. Then this European theory
• 36:37
  crossed the Atlantic. Horace Bushnell denied original
• 36:40
  sin and assumed children were blank slates in a greenhouse.
• 36:43
  And Walter Rauschenbusch focused entirely on social
• 36:46
  transformation in the slums of New York, building a theology on
• 36:50
  the absolute imminence of God and the optimistic belief in
• 36:53
  human progress. An optimism that crashed
• 36:56
  violently into the reality of trench warfare in World War One,
• 36:59
  leaving theologians like Karl Barth with absolutely nothing to
• 37:02
  preach to a burning world. And finally, we saw the American
• 37:06
  liberal establishment pivot to neoliberalism, lowering their
• 37:10
  view of humanity, calling man a good thing, things spoiled, but
• 37:13
  fundamentally retaining the liberal rejection of biblical
• 37:16
  authority. It is an incredible sequence of
• 37:18
  intellectual maneuvering. Going back to our cathedral at
• 37:21
  the beginning, if the ground is shaking, you have to decide what
• 37:25
  your foundation actually is. Throughout this entire timeline,
• 37:29
  we see a theology trying desperately to stay relevant to
• 37:32
  the spirit of the age. They adjusted to the
• 37:34
  rationalists, the scientists, the Industrial Revolution and
• 37:38
  the horrific realities of the world wars.
• 37:40
  They were constantly reacting to the immediate cultural moment,
• 37:43
  which leaves us with a final concept to Mull over based on
• 37:47
  the evidence of this constant theological shifting.
• 37:49
  What's that? When a theology constantly
• 37:52
  changes its core beliefs to remain perfectly harmonized with
• 37:55
  the current scientific or cultural mood of a specific
• 37:58
  decade, does it actually make faith relevant to the world, or
• 38:02
  does it guarantee that the theology will become entirely
• 38:05
  obsolete the exact moment the cultural mood shifts again?
• 38:08
  Something to think about.