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Liberal Christianity, also known as liberal theology and historically as Christian Modernism (see Catholic modernism and Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy),[1] is a movement that interprets Christian teaching by taking into consideration modern knowledge, science and ethics. It emphasizes the importance of reason and experience over doctrinal authority. Liberal Christians view their theology as an alternative to both atheistic rationalism and theologies based on traditional interpretations of external authority, such as the Bible or sacred tradition.[2][3][4]
Liberal theology grew out of the Enlightenment's rationalism and the Romanticism of the 18th and 19th centuries. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was characterized by an acceptance of Darwinian evolution, use of modern biblical criticism, and participation in the Social Gospel movement.[5] This was also the period when liberal theology was most dominant within the Protestant churches. Liberal theology's influence declined with the rise of neo-orthodoxy in the 1930s and with liberation theology in the 1960s.[6] Catholic forms of liberal theology emerged in the late 19th century. By the 21st century, liberal Christianity had become an ecumenical tradition, including both Protestants and Catholics.[7]
In the context of theology, liberal does not refer to political liberalism, and it should also be distinguished from progressive Christianity.[1]
- ^ a b Gurrentz, Benjamin T. "Christian Modernism". The Arda. Association of Religion Data Archives. Archived from the original on July 31, 2019.
- ^ Dorrien (2001, pp. xiii, xxiii): "Liberal Christian theology is a tradition that derives from the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Protestant attempt to reconceptualize the meaning of traditional Christian teaching in the light of modern knowledge and modern ethical values. It is not revolutionary but reformist in spirit and substance. Fundamentally it is the idea of a genuine Christianity not based on external authority. Liberal theology seeks to reinterpret the symbols of traditional Christianity in a way that creates a progressive religious alternative to atheistic rationalism and to theologies based on external authority."
- ^ "Theological Liberalism": "Theological liberalism, a form of religious thought that establishes religious inquiry on the basis of a norm other than the authority of tradition. It was an important influence in Protestantism from about the mid-17th century through the 1920s."
- ^ McGrath (2013, p. 196): "Liberalism's program required a significant degree of flexibility in relation to traditional Christian theology. Its leading writers argued that reconstruction of belief was essential if Christianity were to remain a serious intellectual option in the modern world. For this reason, they demanded a degree of freedom in relation to the doctrinal inheritance of Christianity on the one hand, and traditional methods of biblical interpretation on the other. Where traditional ways of interpreting Scripture, or traditional beliefs, seemed to be compromised by developments in human knowledge, it was imperative that they should be discarded or reinterpreted to bring them into line with what was now known about the world."
- ^ Dorrien 2001, p. xviii.
- ^ Dorrien 2001, p. xv.
- ^ Dorrien 2001, p. xx.