Liberalism/Modernism

Attempts to adapt religious ideas to modern culture and modes of thinking.

Liberalism or sometimes called Modernism is a major shift in theological thinking which occurred in the late nineteenth century. Liberals insist that the world has changed since the time Christianity was founded so that biblical terminology and creeds are incomprehensible to people today. Although most would start from the orthodoxy of Jesus Christ as the revelation of a savior God, they try to rethink and communicate the faith in terms which can be understood today.

It rejects religious belief based on authority alone, rather insists that beliefs must pass the tests of reason and experience. They point to the fact that the Bible is the work of writers who were limited by their times, it is neither supernatural nor an infallible record of divine revelation, and thus does not possess absolute authority. It sees God as present and dwelling within the world, not apart from or elevated above the world as a transcendent being.

Liberalism also manifests a humanistic optimism. Society is moving toward the realization of the kingdom of God, which will be an ethical state of human perfection. 

Theological liberalism originated in Germany in the late nineteenth century where most of the major theologians had studied. Many of them had come to accept the principles of higher criticism and Darwinism. Kant's ethical idealism and rejection of all transcendental reasoning about religion had the effect of limiting knowledge and opening the way for faith. Schleiermacher introduced the idea of religion as a condition of the heart whose essence is feeling. This made Christian doctrine independent of philosophical systems and faith a matter of individual experience of dependence upon God. Hegel went off in another direction with his absolute idealism, as this emphasized the existence of a rational structure in the world apart from the individual minds of its inhabitants. The main contributions of Hegelian idealism were support for the idea of divine immanence and the fostering of historical and biblical criticism.
 Liberals welcomed the finding of science and readily accommodated to the challenge of Darwinism. Evolution vindicated divine immanence, since this explained how God had slowly built the universe through natural law. God revealed himself, they believe, through a evolutionary process, as the Israelites began with backward, bloodthirsty ideas and gradually came to understand that the righteous God could be served only by those who are just, merciful, and humble. Redemption is seen as the gradual transformation of man from a primitive state to that of obedient sonship to God. Just like the physical realm, culture and religion had evolved, and there was no fundamental antagonism between the kingdoms of faith and natural law.
 From the modernists perspective, one of the most basic assumptions of Western civilization was no longer credible - that is, that man could discern and solve every problem and thus control his world through reason. This thinking was further influenced strongly by Sigmund Freud’s studies of the unconscious. He declared that it was really the unconscious and not reason that was master of human behavior.