The Saving of Liberal Christianity

Ross Douthat has thrown down the theological gauntlet for those who wish for a revitalized form of liberal Christianity. (“Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?” 7/15/12, N.Y. Times, Op Ed.). He castigates exponents of “Liberal Christianity” who have jettisoned many historic Christian beliefs. How is it different from secular liberalism? What of historical Christianity, he asks, is it willing to defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world?

In fact American liberal Christianity has been, to use the phrase of the Apostle Paul, “working out its salvation with fear and trembling” for over a century. On May 21, 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick, the most famous liberal preacher in the first half of the 20th century, preached a sermon entitled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” It became the rallying cry in the battle between Fundamentalists and Liberals (or Modernists) in American Christianity and culture. Although a Baptist, he was at the time the preaching minister at the First Presbyterian Church in New York City.

 

A member in the church sent 130,000 copies of the sermon to the clergy across the United States, paid for by John D. Rockefeller who would later recruit Fosdick to become the founding preaching minister of The Riverside Church, New York City. The main issue of the theological battle concerned whether and how to incorporate the new knowledge in science and historical criticism of the Bible into the Christian faith. The Fundamentalist Movement drew up Five Fundamentals which were the requirement for true Christianity, five dogmatic propositions which were a literalizing and narrowing of historic Christian creeds. Fundamentalism did not win. It went underground until it re-emerged as a formidable social force in the 1970’s, Falwell’s Moral Majority leading the way.

 

Liberal Christianity, writes Union Theological Seminary theologian Gary Dorrien (“American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, Decline, Renewal, Ambiguity”) sought to create a third way between authority-based Christian orthodoxies and secular unbelief. It championed openness to critical inquiry in the natural and social sciences, individual reason and experience, and a Christian ethic that sought both personal and social transformation. Liberal Christianity, however, was growing and changing, not content with its own “orthodoxies.”

 

Fosdick was to preach a second famous sermon in the fall of 1935: “The Church Must Go Beyond Modernism.” He began by saying while the church must go beyond Modernism it had to go as far as Modernism and offered these poignant words:

 

“Fifty years ago, a boy, seven years of age, was crying himself to sleep at night in terror lest, dying, he should go to hell, and his solicitous mother, out of patience with the fearful teachings which brought such apparitions to the mind, was trying in vain to comfort him: That boy is preaching to you today….”

 

Fosdick outlined the weakness in Modernism: 1) It was excessively preoccupied with intellectualism. 2) It was dangerously sentimental, not taking into sufficient account the reality of human sin and evil. 3) It “watered down and thinned out the central message…of religion, the reality of God.” And  4) It had “lost its ethical standing ground” and moral power to challenge society.

 

Two great 20th Century liberal Christians answered the call. Reinhold Niebuhr the greatest 20th Century American theologian, a chastened liberal, formulated his “Christian Realism,” which recognized the power of human sin and evil, particularly in the social realm, and took the position, contra the pacifism of much liberalism, that a nation must be willing to enter the morally hazardous realm of the exertion of power in order to defeat such human evils as Nazism. All the while he cautioned against the arrogance of power and recognized its moral ambiguity and unintended consequences.

 

Martin Luther King, Jr. melded the moral and spiritual power of the black church with liberal theology and American political idealism to lead a non-violent revolution against institutionalized racism and economic inequality. He said that we must be “morally maladjusted” to the evils of our culture.

 

Although the cultural ascendency of liberal Protestantism has now waned and liberal Christianity has suffered significant numerical loss, there are vitalized forms of liberal Christianity all about us. Here are some of its marks. (For a “field study” of vibrant liberal churches, see Diana Butler Bass, Christianity for the Rest of Us.)

 

• The story of Jesus, his birth, life, death, resurrection, and living Spirit, is its center. It seeks to embody Jesus’ compassion for all and his special concern for the poor, despised and marginalized, the most vulnerable of society, whom Howard Thurman (Jesus and the Disinherited) described as those “with their backs against the wall.”

 

• Its self-critical handling of the Bible, its sacred scriptures, keeps it from using the Bible as a weapon of moral, religious and social superiority.

 

• In its encounter with the other religions of the world, it recognizes the Spirit of God richly present in other religions. It is Christ-centered without Christian exclusivism.  Mother Teresa said once, “I love all religions; I am in love with my own.”

 

• It keeps alive transformational Christianity whose goal is both personal and social transformation.

 

• Its notion of justice goes beyond the Greek ideal of “to everyone his/her due” to the Hebrew/Christian ideal of “to everyone according to his/her need.” It thus combines the complementary American ideals of individual freedom and social equality.

 

• It practices deep ecumenism. The word ecumenical comes from the New Testament Greek word which means “the whole inhabited earth as the household of God.” Thus liberal Christianity stands for unity among Christians, spiritual friendship with all religious traditions and care of the earth as a form of the love of God and neighbor. In a world where religions are often the accelerant on social and political passions, such ecumenism is an urgent call.

 

• It has rediscovered the presence of God both within and beyond the self through” spiritual practices” which center the person in the Spirit of God.

 

• “Faith” is deeper than beliefs however important beliefs are. It has more to do with words like trust, confidence, loyalty, engagement, and trustful obedience (see Karen Armstrong, The Case for God ) The historical Christian creeds are indispensible guidelines, the foundational grammar of the faith, but they are secondary to believing. They are the eight note octave, but the Christian faith is more than the playing of scales – and its music is richer than Western musical tonality.

 

• It combines a knowing and not-knowing in faith that honors the Mystery of God and eschews a certainty that leads to religious and political arrogance. Reverence is a religious and political virtue that recognizes the limits of human knowing.

 

• It risks identification with social and political movements which are congruent with Jesus’ life and the “greatest commandment” to love God and neighbor, while recognizing that the Kingdom of God cannot be equated with any human movement. The alternative would be to refuse to enter the realm of history, politics and human suffering in order to keep itself pure and morally superior to the world.

 

The church of liberal Christianity is the church for others, the “poured-out church” (Barbara Brown Taylor), rather than the self-securing church. It is willing to lose itself on behalf of others and trust its saving to God. It seeks thus to embody the life of Jesus in the world.  Such might be the answer to Douthat’s question: “What would it defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world?”

 

While in prison, awaiting execution by order of Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: “The church is the church only when it is there for others.” Only then does it “participate in the being of Jesus.”

 

Liberal Christianity can be just as institutionally driven and intellectually smug, self-serving, proud and ignorant as any other form of Christianity, but its essence remains an openness to truth wherever it leads, a life of service to others, especially to the “least of these,” all in the Spirit of God with Jesus its center and guide. From Fosdick’s time on, it has been undergoing its own reformation. If God finds liberal Christianity useful to God’s purposes it will be saved. If not, it should fade into the oblivion of history.