Program / Course 12: Patristics and Historical Theology / Lesson 7.2
What you will learn
- Explain Schleiermacher’s attempt to ground Christian faith in religious experience.
- Describe the main features of nineteenth century liberal theology, using Ritschl and Harnack as examples.
- Explain why Karl Barth turned against liberalism and what he put in its place.
- Describe the conservative responses, including the rise of fundamentalism, and the role of the Barmen Declaration.
The big idea
After the Enlightenment, Protestant thinkers in Germany asked how Christian faith could stand if its old supports of authority and miracle were questioned. Friedrich Schleiermacher answered that faith rests on a distinctive human experience of dependence on God. Liberal theologians of the nineteenth century built on that idea, stressing moral life, the human Jesus and the kernel of the Gospel. After the First World War, Karl Barth declared that this approach had made God a projection of human culture, and he called theology back to the Word of God revealed in Jesus Christ. The argument between these views shaped the twentieth century.
Key terms
- Liberal theology
- A broad movement in modern Protestant thought that sought to restate Christianity in light of modern knowledge and criticism. Its supporters stressed experience, ethics and historical study.
- Feeling of absolute dependence
- Schleiermacher’s description of the core of religion: a basic awareness of being dependent on something beyond the self, which Christians name God.
- Kingdom of God (in liberal theology)
- In Ritschl and others, the moral community of people united by love, which was seen as the aim of history and the center of Jesus’s message.
- Neo-orthodoxy
- A label for the theology that began after 1918 with Barth and others, which returned to central themes of the Reformation and Scripture while using modern criticism. Barth himself disliked the name.
- Revelation
- God’s making himself known. For Barth, supremely in Jesus Christ.
- Fundamentalism
- A movement among American Protestants in the early twentieth century that defended what it saw as the fundamentals of the faith against liberalism and modernism.
- Barmen Declaration
- A statement adopted in 1934 by a synod of the German Confessing Church, drafted mainly by Barth, rejecting the claim that other powers beside Christ are sources of revelation.
Background
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 to 1834) was a pastor, professor at Berlin and translator of Plato. He grew up in a Pietist community and moved among Romantic writers. In 1799 he published On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, addressed to educated people who thought religion was outdated. His major work, The Christian Faith (1821 to 1822, revised 1830 to 1831), is a full dogmatic system.
Schleiermacher is called the father of liberal theology, though he saw himself as a defender of the faith. He argued that religion is neither mainly knowledge, as in doctrine, nor mainly action, as in morality, but a deep feeling or awareness of dependence on God. Doctrines, he held, are the attempt to put into words what the believing community experiences. Christ is the one in whom God-consciousness was perfect and who communicates it to others.
In the later nineteenth century, many German and later American theologians developed these ideas in different directions.
Step-by-step explanation
Step 1: Schleiermacher’s proposal
Schleiermacher’s approach turned attention from external authorities, such as Scripture proofs or miracles, to the believer’s experience. This allowed faith to be separated from disputes over science and history, since experience of dependence could not be disproved by criticism. Critics objected that it risked making God depend on feelings, and that it placed the center of faith within the human subject. Defenders reply that he preserved the centrality of Christ and the church, and that his understanding of doctrine as an expression of experience was a serious attempt to take modernity seriously.
Many later theologians have followed or argued with him. Some call his work the beginning of modern theology.
Step 2: Ritschl, Harnack and liberal Protestantism
Albrecht Ritschl (1822 to 1889) stressed that Christianity is a moral religion centered on the kingdom of God, a community of love. He held that doctrines should be understood as value judgments about what Christ means for believers. Adolf von Harnack (1851 to 1930), a church historian, lectured in 1899 and 1900 on What Is Christianity? He argued that the heart of Jesus’s message was the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man and the infinite value of the human soul, and that later dogma, shaped by Greek thought, had covered this kernel with a husk.
Liberal theology was optimistic. It trusted historical study, hoped for moral progress and often sat comfortably with European culture. Its supporters did much work in biblical studies, social ethics and missions. Critics said it reduced Jesus to a teacher of ethics and left no room for the cross and the miraculous.
Step 3: The crisis of 1914
When the First World War began in 1914, a number of leading German intellectuals, among them theologians who had been Barth’s teachers, signed a public statement supporting the policies of the Kaiser. For Barth, a young Swiss pastor, this was a shock. He concluded that a theology so closely tied to national culture had no word of judgment to speak. In his commentary on Romans, first published in 1919 and rewritten in 1922, he insisted on the otherness of God, the sovereignty of grace and the crisis that the Gospel brings to all human achievement.
Step 4: Barth’s theology
Barth held that God is not discovered by the human search but makes himself known in his Word, finally in Jesus Christ, whom Scripture attests. Theology begins with God’s address, not human experience. His enormous Church Dogmatics, written from 1932 to 1967 and left unfinished, restates the whole of doctrine around Christ. He taught that in Christ God elects all humanity, a revision of the Reformed doctrine of predestination that some call universalist and Barth denied was so.
In 1934 Barth drafted most of the Barmen Declaration, which rejected the idea that the church could take guidance from the Nazi state or from race or history alongside Christ. The same year he rejected the argument of Emil Brunner that human beings have a natural point of contact for revelation, in a work titled Nein. Barth lost his professorship in Germany in 1935 and returned to Switzerland.
Step 5: Other responses
Not everyone went with Barth. In America, a conservative movement defended what it called the fundamentals, including the authority of Scripture and the deity and resurrection of Christ. The name fundamentalism comes from a series of booklets titled The Fundamentals, issued between 1910 and 1915. Scholars at Princeton, including Charles Hodge, B. B. Warfield and J. Gresham Machen, defended traditional Reformed theology with learning.
Others sought other roads: Rudolf Bultmann proposed demythologizing the New Testament to find its existential message, Paul Tillich related faith to culture through correlation, and Reinhold Niebuhr combined theology with political realism. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who stood with the Confessing Church, was executed in 1945 for his part in the resistance.
- Can experience be a sound basis for faith? What does it add and what could it leave out?
- Is it fair to say that Harnack’s Jesus looks a lot like a nineteenth century German professor?
- Why did the war disturb Barth so deeply?
- How can theology speak a word of judgment on a culture it belongs to?
- What does it mean to begin from God’s Word and not from human religion?
- Which strengths do you see in the fundamentalist concern, and which weaknesses?
Examples
A letter to educated skeptics
Schleiermacher’s Speeches begin by asking the educated to look again at religion, not in doctrines but in the sense of the infinite that he finds in every human life. Many readers found this a new and attractive way to speak.
Kernel and husk
Harnack held that the Gospel of Jesus was simple and that creeds and councils had wrapped it in Greek philosophy. A believer in the creeds would answer that the creeds guard the Gospel against distortion. Both ask what the center of Christianity is.
A pastor’s shock
Barth later said that when he saw the names of his respected teachers under the war statement, he realized that he could not follow their theology. The change was practical before it was theoretical.
Different perspectives
Protestant (liberal and mainline)
Many mainline Protestants trace their approach to Schleiermacher and Ritschl, valuing openness to critical study and attention to ethics and experience. They often accept Barth’s critique in part while keeping the liberal concern for dialogue with culture.
Protestant (Reformed, evangelical and fundamentalist)
Reformed and evangelical Protestants admire Barth’s stress on God’s Word and grace, though many criticize his view of Scripture and his teaching on election. Fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals reject liberalism and insist on the inerrancy of Scripture, though they differ on how to describe it.
Catholic
Catholic authorities condemned a movement called modernism in 1907 as attempting to ground doctrine in religious feeling. In the twentieth century, Catholic scholars such as Hans Urs von Balthasar engaged Barth with respect, and others such as Karl Rahner worked on questions of experience and grace.
Orthodox
Orthodox theologians view liberal Protestantism as a departure from the tradition of the Fathers and have been sympathetic to Barth’s rejection of liberalism, while finding his theology still Western. Writers such as Florovsky called for a return to the Fathers.
Why it matters
Much of what is said in churches today, about experience, doctrine and the Bible, still echoes these debates. The dispute between starting from human experience and starting from God’s address is alive in sermons, seminaries and ordinary conversations about faith.
Common misunderstandings
Misunderstanding: Schleiermacher abandoned Christian doctrine.
Correction: He wrote a full dogmatics and held that Christ and the church were central. He changed how doctrine is grounded, not whether it is taught.
Misunderstanding: Barth rejected modern biblical scholarship.
Correction: Barth accepted critical methods but insisted that the text’s subject matter, the Word of God, should guide interpretation.
Misunderstanding: Neo-orthodoxy is the same as fundamentalism.
Correction: They differ sharply. Barth accepted critical study of the Bible and did not teach inerrancy, while fundamentalists defended it.
Misunderstanding: Liberal theologians were not Christians.
Correction: They were believers who tried to restate the faith for their age. Whether they succeeded is the subject of argument.
Knowledge check
What was Schleiermacher’s central idea about religion?
He held that the core of religion is a feeling or awareness of absolute dependence on God, not mainly knowledge or morality. Doctrines express what the community experiences. Christ is the one in whom God-consciousness was perfect. This approach became a starting point for liberal theology.
What did Harnack mean by kernel and husk?
In What Is Christianity? he argued that the kernel of Jesus’s message was the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man and the infinite value of the soul, and that later doctrine, shaped by Greek thought, was a husk that obscured it. Critics said this made Jesus resemble a modern moral teacher.
Why did Barth turn against liberal theology?
The outbreak of war in 1914 and his teachers’ support for the Kaiser convinced him that a theology tied to culture could not judge it. He insisted that God is known only through his own Word in Christ, and that human religion is under judgment, as set out in his commentary on Romans.
What was the Barmen Declaration?
It was a statement adopted in 1934 by the Confessing Church in Germany, written mostly by Barth, rejecting the idea that the church should accept other sources of revelation, such as the state or race, beside Jesus Christ. It became a symbol of Christian resistance to Nazism.
Think it through
- Where do you place the center of faith: experience, doctrine, action or something else?
- Can a church be faithful to its culture and also free to criticize it?
- What does it mean that God speaks first?
- Which modern thinker in this lesson would you most like to read, and why?
Independent assignment
Two starting points
In your notebook, write 200 words describing how a theologian who begins from experience, like Schleiermacher, might explain the claim that Jesus is Lord. Then write 200 words describing how Barth might explain it. End with 150 words on which explanation seems to you more helpful for a person who has never been to church, and why. Aim for 500 to 600 words.
Further study
- Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction Read the sections on modern theology and the liberal tradition.
- Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (5 volumes) Read selectively on the modern period in the history of doctrine.
- Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology A nineteenth century conservative Reformed alternative to liberal theology.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Hermeneutics Background on the theory of interpretation, which Schleiermacher helped found.
- Romans 1:16 The gospel of Christ is the power of God unto salvation.
- John 1:14 The Word was made flesh.
- Isaiah 55:9 As the heavens are higher than the earth.
- Acts 5:29 Obedience to God before human rulers.