The Decline and Resurgence of Theological Liberalism

Chapter Two of my book The Limits of Liberalism, which I am updating and slightly revising this year, is titled “Contemporary Liberalism.” Please think with me about the decline and resurgence of theological liberalism, two of the matters discussed in that second chapter. 

From the cover of the 2010 book; the pictures (clockwise from the bottom right) are of Schleiermacher, Bushnell, and Rauschenbush (from Chapter One) and Marcus Borg (from Chapter Two)

The Decline

Liberal theology began to fall upon hard times in the 1920s. The widespread scope of the Great War (World War I) and the extensive suffering and carnage caused by that war called into serious question the central tenets of liberalism.

Those tenets included emphasis on the innate goodness of human beings, an optimistic view of social progress, and the intention to realize the kingdom of God in society through human effort.

European theologians such as Karl Barth and Emil Brunner began to develop a theology that avoided what they saw as the errors of the failed liberal theology of the time but that also affirmed some of the progressive elements in that theology.

That new emphasis was often called crisis theology in its beginning, but in the U.S. it came to be known mostly by the rather paradoxical name of neo-orthodox theology.

Reinhold Niebuhr was an American theologian who early began to question theological liberalism. His Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) struck a blow at the optimistic view of humanity long held by liberalism.

My own theological education in the 1960s was largely shaped by neo-orthodox theology, which was regarded as the bulwark against both a failed fundamentalism and a failed liberalism.

Elsewhere, though, conservative theologians were criticizing neo-orthodoxy for being liberal, not acknowledging that it was a position developed in opposition to the liberal theology that had been prevalent in Germany.

The Resurgence

The resurgence of liberal theology began in the last half of the 1960s. In the following decades, that resurgence was seen in many active theologians, especially the three I have written about in Chapter Two of The Limits of Liberalism. (Two of them have died since the book was first published in 2010.)

Englishman John Hick was long an influential contemporary theological liberal, particularly in the fields of the philosophy of religion and religious pluralism. His writings have had considerable influence, and current Christian thinkers must seriously grapple with the issues he raised.

Among the important books by Hick (1922~2012) are God and the Universe of Faiths (1973), God Has Many Names (1980), and A Christian Theology of Religions (1995) as well as two that he edited: The Myth of God Incarnate (1977) and, with Paul F. Knitter, The Myth of Christian Uniqueness (1987).

It is probably safe to say that John Shelby Spong, a retired Episcopal bishop, has been the most widely read Christian liberal over the past thirty years. As Hick also did, much of his writing was done in opposition to fundamentalism. In fact, his bestselling book is Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (1991).

Other significant books by Spong (b. 1931) are Why Christianity Must Change or Die (1998) and A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith Is Dying and How a New Faith Is Being Born (2001).

While more moderate than the previous two, Marcus J. Borg is the third of the contemporary liberal leaders I have written about in Chapter Two. Borg (1942~2015) wrote in such an evenhanded and convincing manner that in some ways he is the most “dangerous” of the contemporary liberals.

From my perspective, Borg (1942~2015) is “ dangerous” because his moderate position is easy for non-liberals to accept even though his position contains some misleading aspects that threaten what has long been, and still generally is, widely considered to be orthodox theology.

Jesus, A New Vision (1987), to mention only one of Borg’s many books, contains much that should be affirmed. Still, I find much that is questionable in that book, as in many of his other books, and I refer to him several times in later chapters.

In chapters three and four, I look first at the appeals of liberalism and then consider the problems with liberalism, and I look forward to sharing blog posts about those chapters in the next two months.