20th CENTURY MAN CENTEREDNESS: Part Two

II. The History of Modernity to Post-modernity

I would say were liberalism started their roots were in such ideas like orthodox scholasticism and rationalist reactions. During the later 1700’s the truth in which the reformation had brought back to the church had started being attacked once again. The truth being the Scriptures what had once always been looked at as the absolute truth had now been looked at like as if it had no development or no growth in the culture. The longer that individual’s looked at the Word of God like this, rationalism grew even more. This view of rationalism leads to the mindset that Scripture wasn’t given by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit but by human. One of the first men we see teaching this was J.P. Gabler in 1787. Gabler wrote many works on theology, mainly on the topic of Dogmatic theology. Galber believed that there was always a reason for what was done in the Bible and would always try to find universal laws to explain the supernatural accounts in the Scriptures.

The pain in this type of mindset is that it has never left our minds even today. It has formed and shaped even the conservative side of Christendom in some ways. Men today still think this way. No matter what the situation may be in our lives, we still try to find reason for everything, or we try to question things that seem hard to believe. Although rationalism has been nearly deceased over 200 years, still today it’s after affects have rippled off into the minds of today’s believers. The way Glaber studied the Bible is still carried out in many teachings of historical theology today. Although this is not actual liberalism its’ self, these are just some of the mindsets that liberalism would all use later in its job to obliterate absolute truth.

In the beginning of the 1800’s the rise of philosophy started to creep into the mindset of Christianity. Namely, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and F.C. Baur were the two were seemed to bring this into the play of Christianity. Mainly, Baur had left the ideal if rationalism and started to form another line of thinking. This would now look for spiritually instead of rhythm and reason behind something. Baur instead of looking for why Jesus taught what he did, Baur would search for the Jesus’ spiritual realization. Meaning that instead of looking at the truth of which Christ spoke of, he would search for deep historical movements in His teachings that would show the work of the Spirit at work in the church. Also unlike rationalism Baur instead of looking at the importance of Scriptures, he focused more on the historical development. This would allude to the fact that theology its’ self is connected to history. This grew extremely popular in Germany and was taught in New Testament studies.

A lot of these principles have always formed a major tradition carrying through the early churches, the monastic movement, the healing movements, the Roman Catholic Church and even yes our Protestant churches, to the Progressive Movement here of late in the 19th-century the United States and the Civil Rights Movement for racial justice in the American South, and Liberation Theology for justice to the poor in South America. Ever since the 1900s, when the Progressive Christianity has formed a major portion of Americans’ traditions for what constitutes the morals by which a good society is run. Christian Progressives were among the first to advocate equal treatment of Jews and Catholics from within the Protestant establishment, basing their understanding of human rights on a faith in the worth of other human beings derived from the gospel. Progressive Christianity stresses fairness, justice, responsibility, and compassion, and condemns the forms of governance that back up war, rely on corruption for continued power, deprive the poor of facilities, or reject particular racial or sexual groups from fair participation in national liberties.

Liberal theology is a branch of religious thinking, or ideas in which came around in the late last 2 centuries. Like political liberalism which was also emerging at the same time, liberal theology stresses the value and how important of a person’s freedom of thinking and expressions. Liberal theology became overriding in the mainline churches in the 20th century. Although Fundamentalist Christianity has been rejected by the mainline churches, liberalism’s dominance was waning by the late 20th century with the rise of the more moderate alternatives like; Neo-orthodoxy, Paleo-orthodoxy, Postmodern Christianity, and more conservative movements such as Neo-evangelicalism and the Confessing movements.