Liberalism without Illusions: Renewing an American Christian Tradition

2. Evangelical and Modern: Christian Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century

 33 Evangelical and Modern Christian Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century Two Part of the difficulty of telling the story of Christian liberalism is that it lacks a clear point of historical origin. Unlike many Protestant denominations who look with reverence to particular founding figures such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Wesley (or more recent outgrowths of American religious history, such as Joseph Smith and the Mormons or Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Scientists), there is no single individual who stands out as a “founder” of liberalism. Yet liberal theology arose because of a unique interface between emerging religious and secular currents that over a period of time created centers where liberalism flourished, both in academic institutions and, to a lesser extent, on a popular level in Europe and North America. One of the most common assertions against liberalism is that it is a theology welded to the precepts of the dominant cultural traditions of the West.1 Yet liberal theology emerged at a time when centuries of scientific, political, and theological values were in a state of flux. Those who associate liberal theology only with a vision of social progress often ignore that many of the major figures of this tradition in Europe and North America lived during times of tumultuous historical change. The Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, followed by the ascendancy of liberal theology in the nineteenth century , were eras marked by scientific discovery, economic change, and political revolution (epitomized by numerous popular democratic uprisings in France, Germany, Italy, and the United States). Even though many of the principal figures associated with the origins of liberal theology came out of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment traditions of European philosophy, liberalism’s formative years in America emerged out of churches and denominations that 34 Liberalism without Illusions in various forms wrestled with a historical context of rapid social change. While American liberalism was indebted to several European antecedents, especially traditions of German philosophical and theological thought, it soon developed along lines that were in dialogue with distinctive currents of theology emerging in nineteenth-century America. Reason and Experience: Liberalism’s European Origins Discerning a precise starting point for theological liberalism is difficult due to the numerous historical currents that fed its evolution. In the aftermath of the Protestant reformations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a number of anti-Trinitarian movements emerged that foreshadowed the development of Unitarianism in Europe and North America . These groups made an appeal to Scripture for justifying their beliefs that the doctrine of the Trinity was a fabrication of the early church, and not directly sanctioned by the Bible (the most radical being Socinianism, a movement that arose in Eastern Europe in the seventeenth century that denied the divinity of Christ). Yet these movements were also characterized by a growing tendency to stress a theme that would become critical to later movements of liberalism: an appeal to human reason. In the early eighteenth century, a movement in the Church of England, pejoratively referred to as Latitudinarianism, stressed the importance not only of reason , but of theological toleration. In the aftermath of the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century, many Anglicans were troubled by the divisive role of Puritanism in leading to religious and civil strive. Latitudinarianism’s rise in England coincided with the emergence of the European Enlightenment, in particular the writing of John Locke. Locke stressed the primacy of reason in intellectual discernment, seeing this as the ultimate means to discern religious knowledge. Although emerging evangelical movements of the eighteenth century rejected many aspects of Lockean philosophy (especially the deistic tendencies of Locke’s thought), increasingly evangelical movements ranging from the Calvinist-oriented Protestant communities in New England to the free-grace revivalist sects embodied by John Wesley’s Methodists examined their theology in light of Locke.2 While evangelicals like Wesley rejected Locke’s tendency to deny the supernatural, they embraced Locke’s emphasis that claims of divine revelation needed to withstand the test of intellectual scrutiny. While John Locke’s writings at the end of the seventeenth century signaled the ascendancy of later traditions of liberalism associated with the Enlightenment, the major intellectual spokespersons for what would become identified with theological liberalism in the nineteenth century Evangelical and Modern 35 came from Germany. Foundational to many future traditions of theological liberalism was the work of two philosophers: Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel. Kant’s work...