The third area of basic concern to Christocentric Liberals was Christology, or the mission and purpose of Jesus Christ. The liberals understanding of Christ can be summed up in terms of three basic principles: (1) Christ did not come to placate or satisfy God's sense of judgement; (2) The whole career of Jesus was lived vicariously, and therefore his death had no special saving merit (The cross is only the culminating event in a series of events, all of which are saving in character. Jesus did not come to die, but died as a result of living a life wholly committed to doing God's will); (3) Jesus actually recovered men to God, rather than creating the conditions under which God later recovered them.

The issue of whether Jesus came to satisfy God was simple enough for the Christocentric Liberals. Traditionally, Christians had spoken of Christ's death as a ransom for sin, a paying of a blood debt for humanity's rebellion against God. This traditional substitutionary theory was associated with Anselm, but was rejected by the New Theology. Clarke spoke for many Christocentric Liberals when he said, "Since God was working in Christ, there was nothing in God for Christ to overcome. It was no part of Christ's work to make God willing." In other words, it is not reasonable to say that God in Christ could or must do something to placate himself (God) as Father." "The work of Christ," George Stevens wrote, "is not a mere provision for man's salvation, or a condition precedent, but an actual work of salvation, a real moral recovery of men from sin to goodness." (In other words, all human beings are already saved by Christ's work, and are thereby saved whether they wish to be or not.) Therefore, Jesus is the indispensable means whereby we are restored to the Father.

The principles that undergirded the Christocentric Liberal position on the work of Christ when taken together comprised what is known as the moral theory of atonement. Jesus showed the way to salvation by example, not by sacrifice. Did this mean the Christocentric Liberals saw him as one of us? Horace Bushnell in an address given at Yale in 1848, contended that Christ "differs from us not in degree, but in kind." (That is to say, he is of a different order.) But Bushnell went on to urge his brethren not to speculate about the interior being of the deity, counsel that he promptly violated by affirming the strict personal unity of God in opposition to what he viewed as a "trithestic tendency" in Christianity.

The Trinity was problematic for many of the Christocentric Liberals. Bushnell along with William Newton Clarke, suggested God exists in three modes." In other words, the one God wears three masks: Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. The one we perceive at any given time is dependent on our particular perspective. On one occasion we might experience God as Father, as a loving, kind, parental figure. On another occasion we might experience God as the Son, as one who forgives sins. Or one might experience God as Spirit, as immanent in one's life or in family and friends. Others like Henry Churchill King thought debates about the interior nature of God were foolish, since that aspect of God is "necessarily hidden from us." William Adams Brown saw the Trinity in terms of the Christian revelation. The Trinity "is not a doctrine about God as he is in himself, but concerning God as revealed. It is the summary of the ways in which one may know God in experience."

Despite this unwillingness to engage in Trinitarian speculation, most were willing to allow some kind of modalism within the Trinity in which each mode to use Clarke's words was a "centre of conscious life and activity." That is to say, Christological Liberals believed in the unique divinity of Jesus, and sought some way to ground it in the ontological (being) nature of God. They were not Unitarians even if it seems they came very close.

Christocentric Liberals were less certain, however, when it came to the Incarnation--the doctrine that God was made incarnate in Jesus Christ. They rejected the doctrine of two natures (Jesus is both fully Divine and fully human). Among those who did so was Horace Bushnell. But while he rejected the doctrine of the two natures of Jesus, he never explained how the divine and the human were united in Jesus. This was passed off as an "impenetrable mystery."

Later liberals tended to focus on Jesus' humanity. At first, they claimed that the personality of Jesus was not human at all, questioning whether he even had a soul. But as time passed they did not draw so rigid a line, choosing to restate the divinity of Christ in terms of the widely accepted doctrine of divine immanence. William Newton Clarke argued that Jesus began as a human, but ended up as divine as he came to realize after much maturing that he was related to God as others are not. William Adams Brown didn't accept his Clarke's views on this issue, and instead took the position that Jesus should be seen as someone who was fully human who enjoyed perfect fellowship with the Father.

None of these efforts to explain who Jesus was proved to be fully satisfying. Clearly, they reflect the Christological Liberal's belief in that Jesus was truly the Son of God, and not just a man from Nazareth. But their views reflect their ambivalence about the implications of that belief.

The Kingdom of God

The fourth and final area of major interest to the Christological Liberals was that of the Kingdom of God. This concern for the Kingdom grew out of a two-fold understanding. First, Christocentric Liberals believed that the Kingdom of God had been the focal point, if not the essence of Jesus' teachings, and that it represented the best category for framing a Christian social ethic. Second, the Christocentric Liberals held that the Kingdom of God is the only adequate category to use in interpreting the Christian goal of history. William Adams Brown described the Kingdom this way: "By the Kingdom of God we mean that society of redeemed personalities, of which Christ is at once the ideal and the mediator, the union of whose members, one with another and with God in the community of holy love, progressively realized in history, constitutes the end for which the world exists."

Christocentric Liberals were willing to admit that the Kingdom of God did not represent a present social reality, but it was not something lying wholly in the future either. It began with Jesus Christ who showed human beings what it means to live as a citizen of the Kingdom, and it is a reality that is progressively being realized in human society (things are slowly getting better). This allowed Christocentric Liberals to interpret the gospel in social terms. Brown did so when he wrote, "An unsocial Christianity is a contradiction in terms."

In many ways, this focus on the Kingdom of God was but another expression of American Protestantism's focus on the coming millennium. It was as if Christocentric Liberals dared to hold out hope that the long awaited Kingdom might be realized. Arthur McGiffert echoed this optimistic hope that Jesus' "message is just the message that the modern world is looking for. The Kingdom of God was the burden of his preaching, not a kingdom lying in another world beyond the skies but established here and now--'Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth;' not a kingdom made up of isolated human lives moving along their several and separate paths toward heaven, but of the society of all humankind banded together in common labour under the control of a common purpose."

The idea that the Kingdom of God might come on American soil clearly had survived the questioning of the post-war period. Daniel Dorchester--a Methodist--still could write "Christ, reigning over a territory hitherto unrivaled in extent; great benevolences, awakened and sustained by a deeper religious devotion...the great heart of the church pulsating with an unequaled velocity; the fires of evangelicalism burning with unwonted brightness on multiplied altars; and a religious literature such as has characterized no other age, eminently practical, intensely fervid and richly evangelical...conspire to show that more than ever before God has a living Church within the churches, towering amid them all...a grand constellation of light and purity--a bright Milky Way from earth to heaven."

Such a view was endorsed by no less than the United States Supreme Court. "If we pass beyond these matters to a view of American life as expressed by its laws, its business, its customs and its society," the Court wrote in 1892, "we find everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth. Among other matters note the following: The form of oath universally prevailing, concluding with an appeal to the Almighty; the custom of opening sessions of all deliberative bodies and most conventions with prayers; the prefatory words of all wills, 'In the name of God, amen'; the laws respecting the observance of the Sabbath; with the general cessation of all secular business, and the closing of the courts, legislatures, and other similar public assemblies on that day; the churches and church organizations which abound in every city, town, and hamlet; the multitude of charitable organizations existing everywhere under Christian auspices; the gigantic missionary associations, with general support, and aiming to establish Christian missions in every quarter of the globe. These, and many other matters which might be noticed add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation."

Impact

From the foregoing, it should be clear (even if it probably isn't) that Christology (the doctrine of the person and work of Christ) was the major element in shaping the theology and ethics of the Christocentric Liberal tradition. This effort to respond to the many unexpected changes that had taken place in American life was not without impact. Indeed, it would come to play a major role in shaping the prevailing trends in the most prominent Protestant theological seminaries, and would go far toward determining the shape of religious life in America in the twentieth century.

The rise of liberal Protestantism created repercussions in the ranks of most evangelical denominations, particularly in the North. Many of these denominations had their origins in the Second Great Awakening's reaction to the Enlightenment, to Deism, and Unitarianism. Now, as Robert T. Handy puts it so well, "they found themselves harboring increasingly self-conscious liberal parties...To those schooled in the tradition of the Bible as the basic authority for all life, the new movement was highly disturbing, for it seemed to threaten the very heart of the faith...Those who clung to the older views were often inclined to see in the rise of liberal elements a capitulation to materialistic and naturalistic enemies which had to be overcome if America were to become a truly Christian nation."

While both Protestant Evangelicals could agree with the Christocentric Liberals on the need to make America a Christian nation, there now seemed to be a fundamental division within Protestantism as to how it could best be achieved. The Christocentric Liberals believed a through-going reconstruction of the faith was needed, while traditional evangelicals believed the Liberals were surrendering the one true faith. The resulting civil war within Protestantism would lead to a major division within American Christianity, but that is a story for another time.