Religious liberalism in America emerged from within New England Calvinism, and was a by-product of the Enlightenment. It was from this movement that Unitarianism developed. Scarcely had this type of liberalism come to flower, than it was challenged in turn by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker who helped birth an even more radical movement known as Transcendentalism. Eventually, Transcendentalism became the prevailing form of Unitarianism with its purely humanitarian conception of Jesus which led to a to a break with the classical Christological tradition.

Meanwhile, a distinctly evangelical type of liberalism was emerging within American Protestantism. This new type of liberalism began with Horace Bushnell and came to full theological flower by the opening of World War I. During the nineteenth century, the exponents of this way of thinking frequently called their form of liberalism the "new theology," or "progressive orthodoxy." After the turn of the century, it came to be known simply as "liberal Christianity."

Primarily, the new liberalism sought to make peace, and to accomodate the changes that were taking place in their world. In doing so, however, these liberals highlighted a basic Christological difference between their thought and that of the left-wing liberals who took a strictly humanitarian view of Jesus. These new liberals took great pains to deliberately construct their system of thought in terms of the person and work of Jesus Christ. "A theology which is not Christocentric," said Egbert Smyth of Andover Theological Seminary, "is like a Ptolemaic Astronomy, it is out of true relation to the earth and the heavens, to God and the Universe." William Adams Brown revealed a similar persepctive when he said: "By the Christological principle, then, we mean the effort to trace in the ever-expanding revelation of God in humanity the vitalizing and transforming influence of the historic Jesus, that from our study we may gain new insight into the character and purpose of God from whom he came, and so be able better to understand the meaning of the world in which we live and the end to which we are called. It is the method which arrives at God through Jesus, and uses the knowledge so gained as the final principle for the interpretation of life."

Loyalty to Christ as the "final principle for the interpretation of life," was not, according to Brown and his fellow liberals incompatible with the constant search for new truth. Indeed, they insisted that theology must come to terms with all aspects of modern knowledge. They therefore: (1) accepted in principle organic evolution; (2) made use of the historical critical method in the study of the Bible; (3) used the findings of psychology and sociology in developing an understanding of man; (4) appropriated the insights of modern philosophy and philosophical idealism; and (5) believed that a fully socialized democracy represented the highest moral ideal.

In the development of their theological thought, American Christocentric Liberals were greatly stimulated by such great German scholars as Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albricht Ritschl. During the late 19th century, many American students went to Germany for advanced theological training. Inevitably, their minds were affected by this experience. Through them Ritschls ideas would became very influential in this country.

Both Schleiermacher and Ritschl had in turn been affected by Kant. Kant had effected effected a Copernican revolution in philosophy. After Kant, the center of the universe ceased to be in the realm of nature, and instead became the mind of man. When we think we usually do so in terms of cause and effect. When we flip the light switch usually the lights come on. We assume that one causes the other. But that may not be the way the truth is.

Our knowledge, Kant argued, depends on a mental grid whereby we organize the data that flows into our brains. We organize that knowledge into categories. And how one does this is always dependent on and relative to the perspective of the observer. For instance, you look on me and see a teacher. My parishioners look at me and see a pastor. My wife sees a husband. My children see a father. My parents see a son. But I'm the same person. For Kant any statement about reality--any observation we may make--is always relative to the person making the statement or observation.

Kant's ideas had an impact on religion. Kant contended that one cannot know God because one cannot sense him empirically. Schleiermacher attempted to answer Kant, arguing one can sense the presence of God, but he allowed that the sense of dependence on feels in the face of the infinite is as close as we can get to any real knowledge of God. The rest of what the church claims to know about God is pure speculation. Ritschl built, in turn on Schleiermacher, contending that in the end one must seek God on his own.

The American Version

Christocentric Liberalism took these ideas and gave them a distinctive American cast. Christocentric liberals focused on four major doctrines: (1) the nature of God; (2) the origin, nature, and worth of man; (3) the mission and person of Jesus; and (4) the Kingdom of God.

Interestingly, the Christocentric Liberals gave relatively little attention to the question of God's existence. This becomes evident if one consults the two greatest American systematic theologians of this period: William Newton Clark's An Outline of Christian Theology or William Adams Brown's Christian Theology in Outline. Neither volume bothered to give much consideration to the old-line proofs for the existence of God. The Liberals' main concern lay elsewhere. He took God's existence for granted, and concerned himself with the question of God's moral attributes. William Newton Clark put it well when he said, "Not that God is, but what God is, is the first point in the Christian doctrine."

Christian liberalism undertook to rethink the character of God in the light of Christ. In the words of one, they tried to Christologize the nature of Divine Being. Underlying this approach was the belief that in Jesus Christ, God had fully and finally unveiled himself in his true nature. Christological Liberalism characteristically described God as Christ-like.

But what did they have in mind when they did so? The God of Jesus is paternal in character. "The name which most concisely sums up the Christian conception of God is Father," said Brown, "In the divine Fatherhood Christian faith finds included the power and authority for which absoluteness stands." By attaching decisive importance to the fatherly attribute of God, the Christological Liberal was in effect actually qualifying the divine attribute of sovereignty. This shift in emphasis becomes especially revealing when one recalls the fact that most of the Christological Liberals were Calvinistic in their theological heritage. Central in Calvinism was the doctrine of absolute soveriegnty. But former Calvinists like Washington Gladden, and George Gordon were caustic critics of the doctrine of arbitrary election. Unless the gospel was open to everybody, they reasoned, it was available to nobody. Thus for the Christocentric Liberal, faith in the fatherhood of God was no minor matter. It was the root of his passionate concern to preach the gospel to the whole world and bring men into fellowship with God. God is Father of all.

The God of the Christocentric Liberal was not only paternal in nature, but he was the indwelling spirit of the universe. According to William Adams Brown, God "is not a transcendent being living in a distant heaven whence from time to time he intervenes in the affairs of earth. He is an ever-present spirit guiding all that happens to a wise and holy end."

This belief in the immanence of God was encouraged by many factors. One of the most important was the theory of organic evolution. Those Christocentric liberals that fell under the spell of evolution tended to think of God almost altogether in terms of an inwardly energizing force or spark that drove the evolutionary process. A second factor was the Romantic movement which penetrated the theology of Horace Bushnell. Drawing on Philosophical Idealism, it nourished a belief in God as a cosmic person, but also a belief in him as the immanent spirit of the world organism.

Some Christological Liberals sensed the danger of an extreme form of divine immanence. One was William Newton Clarke who criticized an immanence bordering on pantheism. His thought shows a balance between God as immanent and as transcendent. Each conception needs the other, he said. "Transcendence without immanence would give us Deism, cold and barren. Immanence without transcendence would give us Pantheism, fatalistic, paralyzing. But neither is without the other; the two coexist in God." Yet the idea of divine immanence became so strong many lost sight of a truly sovereign God.

The Origin, Nature, and Worth of Human Personality

In their ideas as to the origin of man, the Christological Liberals clashed with both rigid orthodoxy on their right and naturalistic humanism on their left. Contrary to Orthodoxy, they accepted the principle of organic evolution as explaining the divine method of creation. They were not concerned to identify the first man, nor were they curious by what method man had arisen from his animal existence. All such questions were left to the scientist. On other hand, the Christological Liberal rejected the notion that man was the product of purely naturalistic forces. Man, they asserted, was the direct result of God's creative action.

Nothing was more characteristic of the Christological Liberals than their stress on the dignity and worth of the human personality. Reverence for personality became a slogan in liberal circles. All forms of society were judged by their impact on personality (one's personhood or self-esteem). An industrial order that subordinated personal values to profit making was denounced as sub-Christian. A political structure that denied equal rights to any person or group was not just undemocratic, but anti-Christian.

This faith in the worth of persons had a two fold religious root. One was the belief that man bore in his being the stamp of the eternal, the imago Dei. Being thus endowed, man was sacred to God and should therefore be respected by all human beings. The other root stemed from the life and teachings of Jesus. Jesus, said the Christological Liberal, always regarded personality as superior to other values. Therefore, all Christians should follow his example.

The third aspect of the Christological Liberals doctrine of man concerned the human situation. Postulating the truth of organic evolution, they abandoned or basically modified the traditional view of how sin came into the world through the fall of Adam. "The notion of the fall," said George Gordon, "can no longer serve as an account of the source of moral disorder." Christological liberals, however, recognized the reality and univerality of sin, regardless of how or when it first entered the human race. The roots of sin, they contended, was not in the first man, but in the remotest depths of organic life from which man emerged. Sin is the same as one's animal nature. It is that aspect of humanity that is irrational in character.

Christological Liberals were more concerned with the effects of sin than its origin. They opposed the traditional view that sin was transferred from one person to another, and therefore they rejected idea of imputed sin and guilt. On the other hand, they firmly beleived that the corrupting stream of sin was carried biologically through reproduction. Walter Rauschenbusch, for instance argued, "Depravity of will and corruption of nature are transmitted wherever life itself is transmitted."

The Christological Liberal also believed that sin could be transmitted through social tradition. Human sin produces noxious social structures which become almost irresitable by the individual they contended. As Horace Bushnell put it: "evil once beginning to exist, inevitably becomes organic, and constructs a kind of principate or kingdom opposite to God...Pride organizes caste...". Perhaps no one preceived more clearly the supra-personal forces than did Walter Rauschenbusch. "The permanent vices and crimes of adults," he wrote, "are not transmitted by heredity, but by being socialized...Just as syphilitic corruption is forced on the helpless fetus in its mother's womb, so these hereditary social evils are forced on the individual embedded in the womb of society and drawing his ideas, moral standards, and spiritual ideals from the general life of the social body." Christocentric Liberals like Bushnell and Rauschenbusch saw truth in a modified doctrine of original sin, and gave special attention to fact that socialized evil has incalcuable power to corrupt the life of mankind.

One qualification needs to be made. For all of their accent on sin, the Christological Liberals did not believe in total or absolute depravity. Take, for instance, Horace Bushnell. Alhough he firmly believed that children were good at birth, he nevertheless held that those born of truly Christian parents should be expected "to grow up as Christians, or spiritually renewed persons. This doctrine was based on the premise that the child is not so unnatured by original sin that he can at first make only bad choices. Bushnell contended that the child's very first choice could be for the right as easily as it could for the wrong. Moreover the good impulses could win out over the evil in a child with proper nuture. William Newton Clarke put it this way: "there is a double flow of good and evil in the common stream of life, and every person at birth must struggle with the moral cross-currents in his nature. Even so the child may under adequate spiritual nuture respond to God at the very outset of his existence." In this way, the Christological Liberal qualified the old theory of absolute depravity, even if they still believed that human beings need to be restored to fellowship with God.

Horace Bushnell

Horace Bushnell was the principle religious leader in the years of Guilded Age. He was the Billy Graham of his day. His ideas serve to illuminate the larger movement of Christological Liberalism.

1) Bushnell is best know for his book Christian Nurture. His thesis was simple: if you grow up in a Christian environment, one can come to adulthood having never been conscious of being a non-Christian. We are born into this world in a neutral state, and gradually through proper nurture we come to a point where we are a Christian.

2) Bushnell had an innovative view of the Trinity (one I consider heretical). He argued that the infinite exists behind three masks: Creator, Redeemer, and Holy Spirit. This modalistic Trinity draws on Kant. Just as I can be a spouse, parent, or child depending on the perspective of the person observing me, and yet remain the same person, so Bushnell argued that human beings see God in a similar fashion depending on the perspective of the individual making the observation.

3) Bushnell rejected traditional views of the atonement. Why did a loving God demand or require a sacrifice, he asked? Could the Devil have overpowered God unless he gave up his Son? Bushnell subscribed instead to the moral influence theory of the atonement. One cannot look at the suffering of Jesus on the Cross and not be affected by it. When one looks upon love, kindness and compassion, one not no longer be concerned for oneself. That is how example of Christ works. In the atonement, we see the power and extent of God's love for us.

4) Bushnell also dealt with the problem of nature and supernature. Belief in a supernature became an obstacle to faith in the 19th century. Efforts to explain the miracles of the Bible in rational terms were common. One German Scholar argued, for instance, that the feeding of the 5,000 was accomplished in this way. The area where the crowd was gathered was honeycombed with caves. In these caves, Jesus and his followers had been stockpiling food, and it was with these supples brought up from below that the miracle was accomplished. For his part, Bushnell contended that the laws of nature applie to the Universe. What we perceive as a miracle is an aspect of the law which we do not yet understand. As our knowledge expands, so does our ignorance. Things appear to be supernatural only because they are beyond our present state of knowledge. For Bushnell, there is no discontinuity between nature and supernature.

5) Bushnell believed that no human language is strong enough to bear the weight of spiritual truth. No single word is adequate enough for God. He began a process of deconstruction where theology is concerned. Words about God, he insisted, are but faded metaphors. Their precise meaning cannot be transferred from person to person. Each perception of God is unique to the individual, and cannot be accurately communicated to another person.

6) Bushnell developed the theory of comprehensiveness. According to this theory, beneath the contradictions of life there is an underlying unity. Faith and doubt spring from the same concern to understand the ultimate. The person who has no concern is the one who is damned. Faith and doubt--for Bushnell--were complimentary.

End of Part I