MAJOR
THEOLOGICAL ISSUES BEFORE THE GREAT WAR
The
First World War closed the era of classical Liberal theology. How it did
this we will see, but first it is important to trace the development of
the cardinal ideas and assumptions of Liberal theology, for the major
theological issues of the nineteenth century continued to influence,
even to define, theological debate even after the Great War had thrown
everything up for grabs. I believe the great issues on the eve of World
War I were five: epistemology, evolution, biblical criticism, the
historical Jesus, and the Social Gospel. Let us see what they mean and
how they emerged.
Religion within the
Bounds of Reason Alone
Much of the shape of
nineteenth century Liberal theology was already implied in the
"Copernican Revolution" in philosophy brought about by the Eighteenth
Century German thinker Immanuel Kant. Kant's thinking, as it were,
contained the DNA from which the later movement would spring. First we
must say just a bit about the philosophical deadlock that existed in
Kant's day. European philosophy was a war-torn field in which struggled
the forces of Rationalism and Empiricism. Rationalists including Rene
Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, and Benedict Spinoza had composed massive
treatises demonstrating that the unaided human mind could perceive the
nature of ultimate reality, even proving God’s existence by the sheer
force of logic. (Most used some form of the famous and mind-twisting
Ontological Argument of Saint Anselm.) These men were mathematicians and
believed that the same purely deductive approach could enable them to
spin out the map of reality from inside their heads.
Empiricists including
Bishop Berkeley, John Locke, and David Hume rejected Rationalism,
pointing to the fact that none of the Rationalists' supposedly certain
schemas agreed with one another! How can we trust any of them, much less
the allegedly infallible process that created them? Instead, these
Empiricists asserted, truth may be known, if at all, only through sense
perception. Hume, the "great skeptic" and the most ruthlessly consistent
of the Empiricists, pointed out that empirical observation could yield
very meagre results. It could not, for instance, guarantee the existence
of God, a physical world, an observing self, or even cause-and-effect!
Strictly speaking, we cannot perceive any of these things, so we have no
right to say we know they exist. We may, indeed we must, live on
the assumption that most of these are real, but we cannot have
theoretical or logical certainty.
Kant, raised as a Pietist,
had come under the influence of Leibniz’s version of Rationalism, but
when he read Hume, he said it "woke me from my dogmatic slumber." Kant
accepted the Empiricists’ damning criticisms of Rationalism yet could
not go the whole way with Hume to epistemological skepticism. Kant could
not glibly discount the certainty we cannot help feeling about certain
things we cannot strictly perceive. Why, for instance, do we trust
implicitly in the operation of cause-and-effect? Is it simply habit, as
Hume claimed: we are used to seeing things happen in a certain sequence
(Whenever I drop the ball, it has always fallen to the floor)?
Kant reasoned that our
certainty arises from the perceptual mechanism of the mind. True, as
Hume claimed, we cannot know if the world actually operates according to
the apparent law of causation; but since our minds are constructed in
such a way that all sense data will be perceived as in a causal
sequence, we are certain that our dropping the ball will "cause" it to
fall.
The long and short of this
is that Kant concluded that pure, unaided reason cannot tell us about
realities beyond the senses, since our "knowledge" is always and by
nature the product of reason processing sense data. And reason
simply cannot contact realities beyond the senses. To underscore this
point, Kant undertook to demonstrate the fallacy, even the logical
absurdity, of all
the famous arguments and “proofs” for God’s existence. All of them run
aground as they must since they are attempts to use reason without its
proper data. Thus Kant had dealt the death blow, or so it seemed to many
at the time, to traditional "natural theology,” the speculative
construction of systems of divine knowledge.
So "pure reason" could not
tell us there is a God. Yet Kant thought what he called "practical
reason" could. We cannot actually prove God, but we can
make his existence likely and plausible, even urgently
attractive of belief. Kant used a moral argument for God. He inferred
(not proved) God’s existence from human moral awareness. Within us lies
an awareness of the moral law. If this awareness is not to be judged
illusory, we must infer that a divine creator has placed it within us,
will provide eternal life for our continued sanctification, and will
judge our moral efforts. Now all this may be an illusion, but such a
conclusion is unprovable and is utterly repugnant, so we are justified
in believing in God, moral law, judgment and afterlife. But no more.
Kant argued that the goal
of religion thus established is to foster our moral rebirth and growth,
and that all doctrines, miracle-stories, dogmas, and myths are merely
symbolic pointers and aids to that end. Real religion does not depend on
scriptural authority, theological doctrines, or miraculous proofs, nor
has the rational religious person any valid ground for believing in such
things. Jesus, for example, is to be emulated as he managed perfectly to
live in accordance with the moral law, but he is not literally the
incarnate savior traditional dogma made him.
Evolution and the
Higher Criticism
While dissenting from
Kant's exclusively moral reconstruction of the faith, many traditional
Christians said a hearty Amen to Kant's systematic demolition of
speculative, rationalistic theology. Many had always been fideists and
biblicists. That is, celebrating the bankruptcy and impotence of human
reasoning, many Christians claimed that our knowledge of God comes from
God's side, not ours; he has revealed himself and various divine
truths in the Bible. Of course human reason cannot discover realities
beyond the senses; that is precisely why God took it upon himself to
penetrate the barrier from the far side, giving us the verbally inspired
and inerrant scripture. How does one know about God? Through faith in
the Bible.
Such believers might feel
they could ignore Kant, but soon they found themselves under more
dangerous attack. What if scripture itself could not be trusted to
contain infallible knowledge? This time Charles Darwin led the attack,
or so his religious detractors saw it. The notion that all present life
forms had gradually developed from one or a few original forms was
hardly a new one; it had been suggested as far back as the Pre-Socratic
philosopher Anaximander and later by
Saint Augustine. But in a
paper co-written with Alfred Russell Wallace, and later in The Origin
of Species (1859), Charles Darwin had provided the
understanding of the mechanism by which this evolution occurred: natural
selection, the happy coincidence between genetic mutations and
environmental conditions giving the mutant better chances of survival
and thus a greater chance at genetically controlling the future of its
species.
Almost immediately
Christians perceived the great conflict between
Darwin's account of origins
and that presented in Genesis. The appearance of the various life-forms
must have taken millions of years, not a few days. Their appearance was
a gradual differentiation and separation of species, not a discrete
creation of animals each "according to its kind.” The order of
appearance suggested by fossils and phylogeny contradicted that in
Genesis Chapter One. And worst of all, the first human must have fallen
up from apedom, not down from Edenic innocence.
The evidence for the theory
of evolution by natural selection has grown greater and greater, but
even in Darwin's own
day it was virtually incontrovertible, and many theologians sought to
adjust their doctrines to the new biological revolution. This was in
itself a wrenching enough change for many obscurantists never to risk
it. But even if one became a theistic evolutionist, the real impact of
evolution was far greater than forcing a reinterpretation of a few
verses of Genesis. Evolution forced the recognition that the Bible
contained myth and legend, and if Genesis One contained myth, it was
probably not alone.
Darwinism turned out to be
only one of many sources for a new wave of radical biblical study called
"Higher Criticism.” "Lower Criticism" was simply textual criticism, the
tedious reconstruction of the original text of scripture by weeding out
millenniums' worth of copyists' errors. But Higher Criticism was a
wide-ranging reexamination of literary sources, historical accuracy, and
claims to authorship. The Bible emerged from the process a different
book. Archaeological discoveries in the
Middle East disclosed,
e.g., that Flood stories startlingly similar to that of Noah were common
in the region, and some were older than the Genesis version. Other
discoveries suggested that Joshua could not have destroyed Jericho or Ai
and that Canaan was not conquered miraculously as scripture said.
Comparative religion researches showed that virgin birth stories,
ascensions, and other miracle stories were quite common in ancient
legendry. Close literary analysis demonstrated that Moses could not have
written the Pentateuch, which was instead compiled in the fifth century
B. C. from four distinct earlier documents interwoven and edited
together. Jonah turned out to be a parable, Daniel a prophecy written
after the fact, Isaiah written by two, three, or four different
prophets, none of whom had predicted the life or death of Jesus Christ.
All such findings and
theories were unsettling enough, but real panic set in when David
Friedrich Strauss and others began to lay irreverent hands on the
Gospels (Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined;
Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus, etc.). Could it be that even the
life of Jesus had not been accurately reported? More of this presently.
Suffice it to say that for those who honestly faced the results of the
critical study of scripture, it was by no means clear that the biblical
revelation offered much of an alternative to the theological agnosticism
of Kant and his non-doctrinal religion of morality. A better
alternative, it turned out, came from another quarter.
The Feeling of
Absolute Dependence
Friedrich Daniel Ernst
Schleiermacher, like Kant, grew up in a Pietist home. He was a student
of philosophy, theology, and biblical criticism, and all three were to
playa role in his emerging reconstruction. Schleiermacher burst onto the
scene in 1799 with a series of written apologias called On Religion:
Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. In this and future works,
notably his magnum opus The Christian Faith,
Schleiermacher sought both to rebut Kant's thinking and to apply it
constructively.
Schleiermacher found
himself in agreement with Kant that the essence of religion is not to
provide a privileged kind of knowledge, i.e., infallible
knowledge of God. Kant is right: the human mind is over its head in such
waters. We can neither discover nor comprehend such knowledge (“Such
knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high. I cannot attain it,”
Psalm 139:6). But Kant is wrong when he claims instead that the essence
of religion is morality. No, says Schleiermacher, religion indeed
involves both knowledge and morality, but its essence is
something else which transcends both. That something else is piety,
a special kind of intuitive feeling of the Infinite, that overarching
Whole of which we are parts and on which we are absolutely dependent. Of
course all finite creatures are absolutely dependent on this Infinite
Whole, or God, but piety is to be aware of that dependence, to feel it
with one’s whole being, or as Schleiermacher also put it, to be fully
God-conscious.
We can be conscious of
God and our dependence on God, but Schleiermacher was careful to
point out that, as Kant says, human reason cannot discover abstract
theoretical knowledge about God. Rather, the very personal,
intuitive knowledge we may have of God arises from our religious
experience, the consciousness of piety. We do not know God directly; we
only infer things about God from our experience of God. In the final
analysis our doctrines are really formulations of religious experience.
For example, when we speak
of God as the creator we are not proposing some theoretical notion of
how the world got here. Rather we are expressing our acute intuitive
sense that we and all things depend at every moment on God for our
being. Or when we speak of Christ as our savior, we have no business
spinning out theories of how his shed blood purchased our salvation. All
we can rightly mean is that when we read of Christ in the Gospels and
hear him preached in church we find his perfect God-consciousness has
been in some measure awakened in us. He, his example, functions as the
catalyst or channel for a new piety to transform us. This is what we
actually experience; this is all we have the right to say. It is clear
that though Schleiermacher goes significantly beyond Kant's moralism to
a genuine religious devotion, he does so in recognizably Kantian ways.
Just as Kant claimed no direct knowledge of God but inferred God from
human moral consciousness, so Schleiermacher infers God from the
consciousness of piety and does not claim this is certain,
theoretical knowledge. For Kant Jesus is an inspiring example of moral
victory; even so, for Schleiermacher Jesus is the model of the perfectly
pious person and as such “redeems” us by his enlivening example.
Finally, just as Kant found miracle and dogma irrelevant to his religion
of pure morality, Schleiermacher rejects as irrelevant any traditional
doctrine that cannot be translated into experience, e.g., the devil,
angels, a literal second coming of Christ.
One further word about
miracles: Schleiermacher repudiated the traditional belief in miracles
as astounding violations of natural law. He famously said, “To me, all
is miracle.” The greatness and wisdom of God are far more evident in
the well-oiled regularity of the universe than they would be in strange
events interrupting the normal workings of nature. It does not speak
well for God if he must intervene via paranormal events to make a
“mid-course correction.” Could not the all-wise God have gotten it right
the first time? Even Jesus formed no exception to this rule.
Schleiermacher believed Jesus was sinless and perfectly God-conscious,
but this is possible to all human beings. Jesus was fully human,
perfectly human, not super-human! In Paul's terminology,
Schleiermacher's Jesus is the second Adam, a perfect example of what all
humans should be (and thanks to Jesus' influence) can be.
But what of the virgin
birth and resurrection? The former Schleiermacher understood as a
mythical symbol for Jesus' sinlessness, while the latter he explained
away. Schleiermacher believed Jesus only passed out on the cross and
survived crucifixion, dying naturally at some later point (see his
The Life of Jesus).
Schleiermacher is rightly
called the father of Liberal theology. His influence is present
everywhere in Protestant Modernism before the Great War. Note that here
we have a theology that welcomes the findings of science, philosophy,
and biblical criticism, a theology not dependent on an infallible Bible
or belief in miracles or a six-day creation. Yet it is really a theology
of religious experience, not mere moralism like Kant's. Following
Schleiermacher, Liberal theology was a theology of religious experience,
not of abstract revealed information.
The Historical Jesus
and the Social Gospel
In the next generation the
banner of Liberal theology was carried proudly and ably by Albrecht
Ritschl, who was heavily indebted to Schleiermacher and to Kant, uniting
the emphases of both in a powerful new synthesis that captured the minds
and hearts of pastors, theologians, social reformers, and biblical
historians alike. Like both Kant and Schleiermacher, Ritschl was deeply
suspicious of what he considered idle and abstract theological
speculation. For instance, Schleiermacher remained noncommital on the
question of the Trinity since he could not see how such a complex notion
made much difference one way or the other to religious experience. But
Ritschl simply dismissed the whole idea as a lot of theological
thumb-twiddling. He had even less tolerance for abstract speculation,
even more of a passion for the pragmatic, than Schleiermacher. We will
concern ourselves with two aspects of Ritschl's desire to stay close to
reality.
First, Ritschl addressed
the question of theological epistemology (how we can know about God) in
a fresh way. He was essentially at one with Schleiermacher in denying
that the Christian has theoretical knowledge, objective information,
about God. Ritschl admitted that Christian faith is less of a
knowledge-claim than it is a value-judgment. He delighted in
quoting Luther to the effect that we know Christ only through his
benefits. Is not "worship," after all, simply a contraction of
"worth-ship," an assessment of God, an ascribing to God the honor
due his name? So again we meet with the Kant-Schleiermacher admission
that God is not knowable cognitively. But Ritschl felt that to infer or
extrapolate our understandings of God from religious experience was too
dangerously subjective. We might be making God in our own image. Where
is there any control? In Jesus Christ, Ritschl answered. It is in the
historical appearance of Jesus of Nazareth that Christians encounter
God. So it must be in the historical study of Jesus that we find the
proper controls for our religious experience. Nothing we cannot verify
as part of the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth can be binding for
Christian faith.
This means, for instance,
that Christians need not believe in any heavenly existence of Christ
before or after his earthly life. Even the resurrection and second
coming are negligible since they are not open to verification as part of
the historical events of Jesus' life. It is his teaching, example, and
martyr death that matter.
Incidentally, following
Schleiermacher, Ritschl repudiated the notion of an ongoing "personal
relationship with Christ" because that would assume we have some
non-historical, non-verifiable experience of Christ beyond his earthly
life. If we do, then what is the point of his earthly life at all? How
is it normative for us if today we have our own special hot-line to
Christ, if "he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am
his own"?
By far most Liberal
Protestants agreed with Ritschl as to the absolutely central importance
of finding the historical truth about Jesus behind the encrusted legends
of the Gospels and dogmas of the creeds. New Testament scholars felt
sure that if they could only peel away these layers, they could reveal
for the first time Jesus as a human prophet and teacher with a vital
message for modern humanity, as fresh today as it was in his own day
before Christian dogma hid it from view.
One of Ritschl's disciples,
Adolph Harnack, one of the greatest scholars both of the New Testament
and of the history of theology, wrote what is perhaps the definitive and
most typical Liberal study of the historical Jesus, What Is
Christianity? (1899-1900). In it he sought to demonstrate that Jesus
preached not about himself but about his loving Father. He did not
preach the need for belief in dogmas or faith in his death as an
atonement. He taught instead the
Kingdom of God within the
heart, the infinite value of the individual soul to God, and love as a
righteousness higher than religious legalism. Jesus was central not as
an object of faith but as the living embodiment of his message. His
Messiahship was purely spiritual, his mission that of a teacher, his
Sonship a special relationship with God in principle no different from
that available to everyone else.
Harnack saw a wide chasm
between the simple religion of Jesus and the later, complicated
religion about Jesus created by Paul and others who sought to
recreate Christianity in the mold of Greek philosophy. Though details
might vary, this was the view of Jesus common to all Liberal Protestant
theology. If the life, teaching, and personality of Jesus were central
for faith, not his death and resurrection, then it was imperative to
penetrate the Gospels to discover that life, teaching, and personality.
The bare fact of his death and the dubious story of his resurrection had
been enough for the old theology, built as it was on abstractions about
the cross and the empty tomb. But it would not suffice for the new
theology. Ritschl's second tent-peg of realism in theology was his
Kantian insistence on the moral practicality, one might say the social
utility, of religion. He felt religion was the sole factor separating
humanity from animals and enabling us to live morally. Jesus’ mission,
in fact, was largely aimed at founding a new moral community, the
Kingdom of God (more or
less equivalent to the church) in which people could work together for
the "unification of the human race, through action prompted by universal
love to our neighbor.”
Social reform, then, was a
vital part of the Christian mission as Ritschl and his legions of
followers saw it. Indeed, social reform might be said to have replaced
evangelism. This is because Ritschl did not believe in "original sin,"
an inherited taint in human nature. Rather, he located sin in the
environment into which we are born and which corrupts us. If
Christians can reform that society, sin can be defeated. Here we have
one of the chief sources of the Social Gospel movement, surely the most
visible manifestation of Liberal Protestantism before World War I.
Actually an early wave of
Christian social reform including abolitionism, feminism, prohibition,
and the establishment of orphanages, hospitals, and colleges had begun
in America before
the Civil War as an outgrowth of the Holiness Revival (represented today
by the Salvation Army, the Wesleyan, and the Nazarene Churches among
others). Then, personal sanctification issued in a social crusade, based
on the assumption that if God's Spirit could so radically renovate
individuals, why not society as a whole?
Most of these earlier
reformers and revivalists held what is called "Post-millennial" beliefs
about the second coming of Christ, namely that Christ would not return
to usher in the paradisical Millennium, but would return at its close,
as its climax, after the power of the Holy Spirit working through
Christians had transformed this world into a kingdom fit for Christ.
The Civil War seems largely
to have dampened these hopes, and most American Christians adopted the
more pessimistic doctrine of Pre-millennialism: the world would go from
bad to worse until Christ returned to save it at the last minute,
ushering in the Millennial Kingdom by himself. Until then, Christians
resigned themselves to living in a sinful world, their mission being
simply to rescue individual sinners from its wreckage before it was too
late. "God has given me a lifeboat," said one evangelist, "and said,
'Moody, save all you can!’”
The Liberal Protestant
Social Gospel movement of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries
represented a kind of revival of Christian social reformism, only with a
whole new theological rationale. Gone was the literalistic belief in
miracles and millenniums. The father of the Social Gospel movement in
America was Walter Rauschenbusch, an ardent Ritschlian like Harnack and
Wilhelm Herrmann, champions of the Social Gospel in Germany. The Social
Gospel did not expect Jesus ever literally to return. This was a kind of
demythologized Post-millennialism. The Kingdom of God, a social Utopia,
would arrive instead of a literal second coming of Christ. The
apocalyptic second coming was often seen simply as the mythical symbol
for a future age of the triumph of the gospel. It should be noted that
not all Social Gospel advocates expected that this Kingdom would ever be
realized, much less in their lifetime, but it was the goal toward which
Christian efforts
should be directed.
We must pause to note how
several of the cardinal themes of Liberal theology interlock in the
Social Gospel. The historical Jesus was seen as the inspiration for the
new social crusade. This is clear in the writings of the Ritschlians
Harnack (What is Christianity?), Herrmann (with Harnack, The
Social Gospel), and Rauschenbusch (A Theology for the Social
Gospel and The Social Principles of Jesus) and others
(Shailer Mathews, Jesus on Social Institutions; Francis Greenwood
Peabody, Jesus Christ and the Social Question). Even the
incorporation of Darwinism into theology was manifest in the Social
Gospel: God was viewed as being a creative force in the long and gradual
process of evolution, a process now continuing in the crusade for a more
perfect society. Liberals no more expected to usher in God's Kingdom in
their own strength than they believed life had evolved by itself. God
must be at work in both processes for them to succeed.
Liberal Theology
On the eve of the Great
War, I believe we can see a wide theological consensus (albeit still
resisted by conservatives and fundamentalists) that looks like this. God
is seen as immanent in the processes of evolution and social change, not
standing transcendently above them. God’s Kingdom will be established on
earth, if ever, through human reform efforts, not by a literal
apocalyptic intervention of Christ. (Accordingly, as to personal
afterlife most Liberals did not expect bodily resurrection but were
satisfied with belief in the immortality of the soul). An optimistic,
environmentalist view of sin led many Liberals to emphasize social
reform and education over traditional evangelism.
God is seen as
"miraculously" involved in the regularities, not the violations, of
natural law. Jesus' healings may be explained in psychosomatic terms,
while his virgin birth is almost always dismissed as myth. His
resurrection is affirmed by some, doubted by others, and denied by a
few, while still others point to its symbolic meaning and profess
agnosticism as to what really happened. Traditional views of Christ as
God incarnate give way to Christ being viewed as the perfect revelation
of God in that he is the perfect human being, humans being made in God’s
image. The fullness of God was in Jesus in that he was fully open to
God. Jesus is our savior in that he enables us to share in some measure
his own loving fellowship with the Father. Thus his life and teaching
are central to faith, not his death and resurrection. His death is
usually regarded as a powerful example of loving self-sacrifice,
recalling the "moral influence" theory of Christ's death propounded in
the late Middle Ages by Peter Abelard.
The Bible according to
Liberal theology is not verbally inspired or infallible. It is rather a
record of God's gradual revelation of himself through the religious
experiences, not so much the beliefs, of the biblical
characters and writers. The biblical writers were religious geniuses,
more open to God than most, and their writings evidence this, but the
writers were inspired people, not simply God's instruments used
to produce inspired texts.
The
Impact of the Great War
I have said World War I
closed the era of Liberal theology. How? In two ways. First, many German
theologians, partly under the influence of Hegel, were inclined to see
God manifest in their highly advanced culture, even in the German state
itself. This led to what H. Richard Niebuhr would later call a "Christ
of Culture" position: Christ became a figurehead for the values of the
German culture and state, not a transcendent norm from which to critique
them. As a result, many prominent theologians supported the imperialism
and militarism of the Kaiser. One morning Karl Barth was shocked to read
in the newspaper a statement affirming the Kaiser's policies signed by
most of his old theology professors. This drove home to him the danger
of identifying the seemingly sagest voices of human wisdom with the
truth of God. If theology and philosophy could be so self-blinded as to
baptize German imperialism, what other mistakes might they make?
But all this was merely
symptomatic. Barth became convinced that once theology lost confidence
that God had decisively revealed himself in his transcendent Word, then
theology would make an idol of its own delusive experiences and clever
God-concepts and worship that idol instead of the real God. Barth's
scathing reaction to Liberal theology, set forth dramatically in his
The Epistle to the Romans (1918) and lucidly in his 1923 exchange of
letters with Harnack (published as Revelation and Theology),
generated a theological movement that came to be called Neo-Orthodoxy,
so called since it returned to a classical Reformation Protestantism,
though without reneging on the advances of biblical criticism.
Neo-Orthodoxy exalted revelation over religious experience, faith above
reason.
Second, just as Karl Barth
saw the War as the expose of Liberalism's deluded subjectivism, Reinhold
Niebuhr (H. Richard Niebuhr’s brother) and others saw the terrible
carnage of the War as the final refutation of Liberalism’s optimistic
assessment of human perfectibility. The notion of original sin did not
seem so implausible after mustard gas and trench warfare. Sin had to be
taken more seriously, and Niebuhr's school of “Christian Realism" in
politics and ethics sought to take it more seriously.
For a generation just
before and after World War II, it was common to hear of a Neo-Orthodox
Consensus in theology, replacing the Liberal Consensus that had reigned
on the eve of the First World War. Even during that period, though,
Liberalism had its champions like Henry Pitney Van Dusen (The
Vindication of Liberal Theology; see also L. Harold DeWolf, The
Religious Revolt against Reason), who claimed that Liberalism had
been chastened by recent events but remained essentially unscathed and
in need of very little retooling. But with the advent of the turbulent
Sixties, a new Social Gospel of anti-war and civil rights protests
erupted and along with it, Liberal Theology in many forms returned with
a vengeance. I think it fair to say that the brand of theology spawned
in the nineteenth century is still alive and well and continues to set
the agenda for discussion even in many quarters where it is not
embraced.
FOR FURTHER READING
Harry Emerson Fosdick, A
Guide to Understanding the Bible. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers,
1938, 1956.
John C. Greene, Darwin
and the Modern World View. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1961; New York: New American Library, 1963.
Thomas A. Langford, In
Search of Foundations: English Theology 1900-1920. Nashville:
Abingdon Press,
1969.
Hugh Ross Mackintosh,
Types of Modern Theology, Schleiermacher to Barth. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, n.d.
John Rogerson, Old
Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century, England and Germany.
Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1985.
Albert Schweitzer, The
Quest of the Historical Jesus: From Reimarus to Wrede. New York:
Macmillan Company,
1962.
Timothy L. Smith,
Revivalism & Social Reform, American Protestantism on the Eve of the
Civil War.
New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1965.
Ronald C. White, Jr., and
C. Howard Hopkins, The Social Gospel, Religion and Reform in
Changing America.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976.
By
Robert M. Price