Lecture 22: The Birth of Liberalism: Schleiermacher, the Higher Critics, and Their Heirs

The lecture, section by section

1. The good, the bad, and the ugly

   The offshoots of the Second Great Awakening sort into three piles: the good, the modern missions movement and, later, fundamentalism; the ugly, the restorationist movement and the American cults it spawned, from the Churches of Christ to Mormonism, Adventism, and the Watchtower; and the bad, today's subject, theological liberalism and higher criticism, the Enlightenment's rival system that would split the mainline denominations by the 1920s and 30s.

2. Augustine already answered this

   Liberalism is not new. Augustine, answering the Manichean Faustus who picked at the gospels' authenticity, cut to the heart: to believe some parts and reject others is not to believe the gospels at all but to believe yourself. Fifteen centuries before the higher critics, the diagnosis was already on the table, and the lecture will return to it at the end.

3. From Spinoza to the first critics

   The reformers held Scripture inerrant in its history as well as its morals. Spinoza, the Dutch Jewish philosopher, was the first to treat the Old Testament as a merely human book, and Enlightenment scholars followed: Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, founder of modern Old Testament criticism, posited layers of authors and redactors, explained every miracle naturalistically, and traced the synoptic gospels to an earlier Aramaic source, the ancestry of the modern Q hypothesis. Unbelief, not scholarship, is the engine.

4. A letter to his father

   Friedrich Schleiermacher, son of a Reformed army chaplain, raised among Pietists, met rationalist skepticism at the University of Halle and lost his faith. In a wrenching letter of January 1787 he confessed to his father that the faith his father called the regalia of the godhead was now lost to him: he could not believe that the one who called himself the Son of Man was the true eternal God, nor that his death was a vicarious atonement. The lecture lets the tragedy stand: a modern-sounding story, two centuries old.

5. A new foundation in feeling

   Wanting to keep the Christian label without the Bible's truth claims, Schleiermacher moved the foundation from revelation to Romanticism: religion as the feeling of absolute dependence on God, a sense and taste for the infinite, safely beyond the reach of rationalist attack because science cannot touch feeling. His On Religion and The Christian Faith made him the father of liberal theology, which is, in essence, keeping the name Christian while denying the Scriptures and grounding faith in something else.

6. The cowardice of institutions

   The classroom discussion presses a sober point: Schleiermacher hid nothing, yet the churches and universities of Reformation lands appointed him to lecterns and pulpits anyway. The rot was not one man's doubt but generations of leaders unwilling to guard the deposit, and Pietism's downplaying of doctrine, for all its virtues, had softened the ground.

7. Baur, Strauss, and the two Jesuses

   F. C. Baur of Tübingen ran Hegel's dialectic through the early church, Pauline grace versus Petrine works synthesized by later editors into our New Testament, a theory since demolished by earlier manuscript discoveries, though the damage outlived the refutation. David Strauss, father of the quest for the historical Jesus, split the Jesus of history from the Jesus of faith, the miracle-working Christ dismissed as later mythology. Benjamin Jowett carried the ideas into English, and in 1859 Darwin's Origin of Species handed skeptics a cosmology to replace Genesis.

8. Ritschl and the social gospel

   Albrecht Ritschl kept Schleiermacher's move but swapped the foundation again: not feeling but ethics. Justification and reconciliation were redefined as redeeming society, the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, Jesus an example rather than a Savior. Through Walter Rauschenbusch and Charles Sheldon's In His Steps, the original home of What Would Jesus Do, the social gospel reached America, and it remains, the lecture argues, roughly where liberalism lives today.

9. Wellhausen, Harnack, and the corn husk

   Julius Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis carved the Pentateuch into J, E, D, and P with later redactors, a method the lecture punctures with a modern reductio: no one doubts an author wrote his own book because he uses different names for God in different chapters. Adolf von Harnack rejected John's authenticity and taught readers to peel back layers of embellishment like husks on an ear of corn to reach a kernel, and the Jesus he found, all kindness and calm, reads like a greeting card. Gunkel added form criticism; Bultmann popularized demythologizing, sincerely believing he was rescuing Jesus while destroying the very thing he claimed to save.

10. Wrath without, cross without

    Two world wars shattered liberalism's optimism about human progress, though the system lives on in the mainline denominations. Richard Niebuhr's famous summary pronounces the verdict: a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross. Neo-orthodoxy answered from within Europe: Barth, awakened by the war, recovered God's sovereignty yet denied inerrancy and waffled on the bodily resurrection, fish with many bones, and, as the lecture adds, there are other places to get cheese than in a mousetrap. Today's higher critics, Bart Ehrman among them, grant authenticity to only eight New Testament books.

11. Seven lessons

    The lecture distills seven: you cannot reach skeptics by watering down the gospel, for you destroy what you hoped to preserve; true religion can be lost in one generation, most liberals were ministers' sons, so shepherd your own family first; liberalism is not a variant of Christianity but a new religion, for as Paul argues in 1 Corinthians 15, without the resurrection our faith is worthless; doubt is not intellectual nobility but sin, the serpent's oldest tool; ideas have consequences, and James 3 warns that teachers incur stricter judgment; the social gospel and critical skepticism are alive and well, and Titus 1 requires elders able to refute those who contradict; and higher criticism enthrones man's wisdom over God's, so guard against coveting academic accolades.

12. A Jesus in their own image

    The full circle: a 2010 Christianity Today article by Scot McKnight reports two leading scholars reading the obituary of historical Jesus studies, with Dale Allison confessing that he had created a Jesus in his own image, after his own likeness. Two centuries after Strauss, the quest ends where Augustine said it must: believing yourself instead of the gospels. McKnight stops at postmodern despair, the Jesus we will never know; the lecture refuses the despair, because the Spirit gave Christ's followers supernatural remembrance, and the Jesus of history is the Jesus of the Gospels.

1. Schleiermacher's faith collapsed when his teachers never engaged the doubts troubling students. What does a church or family owe its young people when they meet serious skepticism for the first time?

2. The lecture calls doubt of God's word sin rather than intellectual honesty. How does that square with walking patiently alongside a genuine doubter, and where is the line?

3. Most of the German liberals were ministers' sons. What does that fact ask of anyone raising children in the faith while busy with ministry or work?