PROTESTANT LIBERALISM

It is generally agreed that the founder of Protestant Liberalism was Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834), who has also been called the greatest Protestant theologian between Calvin and Barth. He was born in Breslau and was educated at Halle. He was a preacher in Berlin, 1796-1802. He was named professor of theology and philosophy at Halle, and appointed Minister of the Church of the Trinity in Berlin starting 1809 and in 1810 he began his work as professor of dogmatic theology at the University of Berlin.

Schleiermacher began his education among the Moravians. They were known for their Pietism in their spiritual life, but as far as they were concerned with theology they were very close to traditional Lutheran theology. While Schleiermacher was studying under the Moravians at Barby, he encountered the theologicans of Enlightenment and was deeply impressed by them. He found himself in such disagreement with the theological emphases of the Moravians that he left their school at Barby and transferred to the University of Halle, which had the Enlightenment theologians on its faculty. Schleiermacher accepted their criticism of orthodox Lutheran dogma. As much as Schleiermacher agreed with their criticism of orthodox theology that was so characteristic of the Enlightenment, he did not approve of their positive program in religion. Their religion was too rationalistic and moralistic. He annoounced the outlines of his own creative synthesis in his first major book, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799; ET 1894). The work is sometimes regarded as a theological expression of Romanticism. As an apology for Christianity in the post-Enlightenment world, it was neither a restatement of biblical orthodoxy nor a refurbishing of enlightened moralistic religion. It defined religion as "sense and taste for the infinite" and sought to show that life without religion is incomplete.

Schleiermacher's grand synthesis may be summarized as follows:

1. The Enlightenment criticism of orthodoxy is right. The days of an inerrant Scripture and Lutheran orthodox dogmatic theology are over.
2. German romantic idealistic philosophy offers a far richer ground for Christian faith and theology than does the moralistic, rationalistic religion of the Enlightenment.
3. The whole range of Christian theology can be reinterpreted on the basis of this kind of philosophy, and thus we can be both modern and Christian.

In assessing the Speeches, it should be remembered that it was not a work in formal theology. Later, as a theological professor, Schleiermacher was to write a more carefully formulated statement in The Christain Faith (1821; 2nd ed., 1830-1831; ET 1928).

1. First of all, Schleiermacher agrees with the Enlightenment criticism of orthodoxy. That version of Christianity has run it course.
2. On the other hand, the religion of the Enlightenment period is also to be criticized. The theology of Deism and the religious philosophy of Kant both distort the nature of true religion. They made too easy an identification of morality with religion.
3. Schleiermacher is a romantic, and therefore he defends a romantic interpretation of religion and Christianity and so forms the grand new synthesis we now call liberal Christianity.

But the result of this reaction, liberal theology in the nineteenth century came under the influence of a dogmatic philosophical bias which made it both bad history and bad Christianity.

1. In the first place, the liberal protestants accepted the viewpoint of the Romantic philosophy of religion set out by Schleiermacher; namely, that the real subject-matter of theology is not divinely revealed truths, but human religious experience. On this view, the proper study of theologians, after all, is man. The Bible is a record of human action and reflection within which is embedded an experience of God, and our task is to dig that experience. Scripture must be viewed, not as a divinely given record of a divinely given revelation, but as a by-product of the religious experience of the Hebrews; a record not so much of what God has said and done as of what some men thought God had said and done. The Bible is thus a memorial of the discovery of God by a nation with a flair for religion - that, and no more. The adoption of this approach was considered as a great advance. This meant that the Scriptures are no longer authoritative for us as the written oracles of God but only as a collection of Jewish ideas about God. What will be authoritative for us, if we take the liberal view, is our own judgment as to how far they may be trusted and how far not. Thus we have landed in subjectivism; this is a radical perversion of Christianity.
2. Then, in the second place, the early liberals relied on the idea evolution as the key to interpreting the religious process out which the Bible came. This was understandable, for at the time in the nineteenth century leaders of thought were inclined to treat evolution as the master-key which will unlock the meaning of every process of change, biological, moral, social and cultural, as well as religious. To the nineteenth century mind, "scientific" study meant study done on an evolutionary hypothesis, and a "scientific" explanation of facts was one which showed, in terms of such a hypothesis, how the higher had developed out of something lower in the scale of life. But this use of evolutionary principles to explain biblical religion was disastrous. For the Bible is quite clear that the history of Israel's faith was not an evolutionary process, developing from within; it presents that history rather as an expanding series of divine revelation against a background of recurring apostasy and degeneration. In so far as the Bible records religious processes orginating within man, it presents a process of decline: degeneration from the fall of man, the flood, the idolatry in Canaan after conquest, deepening apostasy after the division of the kingdom, spiritual backsliding after the return from exile, Israel's rejection of her Messiah in Christ's day, and degeneration of mankind which Paul describes in Romans chapter 1. But the liberals insisted on viewing the development of Israel's religion as a steady process outgrowing primitive ideas, with the New Testament as the final refinement. This made necessary for them to ignore such "primitive" notions as the wrath of God, propitiatory scarifice, and supernatural redemption. If they recognized them at all, they said these ideas crept into the religion of Jesus from the dark corners of retrograde Judaism and out from the Hellenistic cults into the minds the early Christians, so that we find them in the New Testament where they have no business there.

1. the universal Fatherhood of God,
2. the infinite worth of the human soul, and
3. the law of love to one's fellowmen.

By 1900, liberalism was well entrenched in the major Protestant denominations in America. The leaders of the movement had already defined their theological position and organized their movement. The characteristic tenets of liberal faith in America in the early years of the twentieth century may be summarized as follows:

1. God's character is one of pure benevolence; that is, a benevolence without moral standards. All men are His children, and sin separates no one from His love. The Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man are alike universal.
2. There is a divine spark in every man. All men, therefore, are good at heart, and need nothing more than encouragement to allow their natural goodness to express itself.
3. Jesus Christ is man's Savior only in the sense that He is man's perfect Teacher and Example. Man should regard Him simply as the first Christian, our elder brother in the world-wide family of God. He was not divine in any unique sense. He was God only in the sense that He was a prefectly God-conscious and God-guided man. He was not born of a virgin; He did not work miracles, in the sense of "might works" of divine creative power; and He did not rise from the dead.
4. Just as Christ differs from other men only comparatively, not absolutely, so Christianity differs from other religions not generically, but merely as the best and highest type of religion that has yet appeared. All religions are forms of the same religion, just as all men are members of the same divine family. It follows that Foreign Missions should not aim to convert from one faith to another, but rather to promote a cross-fertilization interchange whereby each religion may be enriched through the contribution of all others.
5. The Bible is not a divine record of revelation, but a human testament of religion; and Christian doctrine is not the God-given word which must create and control Christian experience. The truth is the opposite. Christian experience is directly infectous within the Christian community; it is "caught," like the mumps; and this experience creates and controls Christian doctrine, which is merely an attempt to give it verbal expression. Doctrine, according to Liberalism, is a expression of the emotional recollection of religious feelings. It is no more than the endeavour to put into words the content of religious feelings, impressions and intuitions. The only facts to which doctrinal statements give expression are the feelings of those who produce them. Doctrine is simply a by-product of religion. The New Testament contains the earliest attempts to express the Christian experience in words; its value lies in the fact that it is a first-hand witness to that experience. Other generations must express the same experience in different words. Doctrinal formulae, like poetic idiom, will vary from age to age and place to place, according to the variation of cultural backgrounds. The first-century theology of the New Testament cannot be normative for twentieth-century men. But this is not a cause for concern, and means no less. Doctrine is not basic nor essential to any form of religion; no doctrinal statement or credal forms are basic or essential to Christianity. In so far as there is a permanent and unchanging Christian message, it is not doctrinal, but ethical -- the moral teaching of Jesus.

LIBERAL EVANGELICALISM

Historically the term "Liberal Evangelical" referred to those
(1) who based their understanding of the Christian faith on the reformation evangelical tradition of the church, but
(2) who also have understood their responsibility to the modern world as demanding their acceptance of the modern scientific world view with its specific historical and psychological methodology.
This term was used during the early decades of the twentieth century by some particularly within the Church of England (for example, T. Guy Rogers, V. F. Storr, and E. W. Barnes) to clarify their evangelical orientation in the modern world. The term was also sometimes used by some to describe other theological moderates who had sought a synthesis of the gospel and modern knowledge.

These evangelicals, pastors and teachers, who had emphasized the need for a personal commitment to Jesus Christ as Savior and God incarnate, and who believed in the authority of the Bible and the need for conversion, agreed with those liberals that in a world changed since the Enlightment the message of Christianity must be recast. Bemoaning the decline of evangelicalism in the wider church, liberal evangelicals thought that the reason for the decline was a lack of sensitivity to the modern age and its thought forms.

While the term "Liberal Evangelical" is an imprecise term, allowing it to cover a wide range of theological distinctives, it has often included the following issues.

1. The authority of the Scriptures is understood as residing not in the letter of the text of the Bible (which would be bibliolatry) but in the dynamic revelation of God in Christ.
2. The older and what some believed to be cruder penal satisfaction theory of the atonement have been replaced with a view that stresses the redeeming love of God in Christ.
3. Scientific theories such as evolution have been embraced and understood as being more compatible with a Christian view of creation.
4. The conclusions of the liberal higher critical studies of the books of the Bible (for example, the late dating of Daniel, the authorship of II Peter, the redaction of Matthew) have been accepted.

The English liberal evangelicals of the 1920s, which were sometimes called "modern evangelicals" and "younger evangelicals", sometimes diverged on these and other specific issues, but they found a unity in their desire to be currently evangelical and modern. Their forerunners were such moderates as P. T. Forsyth, R. W. Dale, and James Denny; their colleagues outside the Church of England, theologians such as H. R. Mackintosh; and the their successors (though the term was not applied to them), such luminaries as T. W. Manson, J. S. Whale, Donald and John Baillie, and perhaps even C. S. Lewis.

In America, owing to the early acrimony of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, no turn-of-century moderating group of evangelical scholars emerged. Charles Briggs and Henry Preserved Smith began their careers as evangelicals but in the process of speaking to the modern age repudiated much of their earlier beliefs. In the 1960s and 1970s, the influence of C. S. Lewis and Dietrich Bonhoffer, the need for more responsible biblical criticism, the stress on human fulfillment, and a renewed commitment to social justice have combined to produce a younger group of evangelicals who share with their earlier British counterparts a joint commitment to the evangelical faith and the modern age.

Dialectical Theology

• Neo-Orthodoxy - Barth and Brunner.
• Neo-Protestantism - Niebuhr and Tillich.

Karl Barth
In 1919, the Swiss reformed theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) published his famous commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. In the same year, Karl Jaspers submitted a work on the Psychology of World Views. These two works mark the beginning of the Existential Movement. Barth, faithful to Kierkegaard's intentions, looks upon crisis as the triumph of faith over the discomfiture of reason. God is for him the reality that is disclosed in the anguish of despair, not the God of the savants and philosophers but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who spake through the prophets and was revealed in Jesus Christ. The surrender of autonomous reason at the climax of the inner crisis comes from the contrite hearing of the Word of God. The conclusion drawn by Barth from the theory of crisis is itself no philosophical theory but a "Crisis Theology" which denounces philosophy as an inept guide toward faith. The publication of Barth's revolutionary book, Dialectical Theology, has caused an abandonment of liberal theology and a revival of orthodox Protestant theological thought. God is understood to be the "Wholly Other One" by Whom all human beings are put under the judgment of God. This means that God and the things of God cannot be explained by human reason. Barth interprets the ontological argument as faith seeking understanding, confounding the reason of man. Thus one must turn to the revealed Word of God, opposing a scriptural revealed theology to all natural theology. The result is a "Dialectical Theology" which emphasizes the difference between God and the world. Since the truth is the result of grace, the rationalistic "analogy of being" must be replaced with "analogy of faith". Barth later abandoned this "Dialectical Theology" for a "Theology of the Word" in which he rejects the dialectical dualism for the scriptural doctrine of the Creator and the Creation.

Emil Brunner
Occupying a position midway between liberal Prostestant theology and the crisis theology of Karl Barth, the Swiss Protestant theologian Emil Brunner (1899-1966), who taught at Zurich, held that while man could not provide his own salvation, he does possess certain natural powers of responding to God. From the standpoint of reason there are contradiction in man's situation with respect to revelation, but this merely points to the dialectical nature of revelation itself, which takes man beyond reason. Both technologically and politically, modern societies tend to depersonalize man; the Christian revelation, directed toward persons, provide a key to the true nature of community. Brunner presented this view in his book Truth as Encounter (1964) which is an enlarged edition of an earlier work The Divine-Human Encounter in 1943. Click here to see a Bibliograph of Brunner's works in which he sets forth the philosophical foundation of his theology.
There are essentially four elements to his foundation:

1. the ontological distinction between created and uncreated,
2. the nature of God as personal,
3. the creation of man in God's own image, and
4. the epistemological basis in revelation and faith.

1. The ontological distinction between created and uncreated.
   This distinction is what makes the Christian understanding of reality totally unlike all other conceptions, idealistic, materialistic, etc.. God is the creator and the world is His creation. Idealism asserts a monistic conception of being while the Aristotelian and and Neoplatonic conception of being is that of a continuum in which God is the highest and matter is the lowest being. In the Christian view

   "God is never to be seen in continuity with the hierarchy of the created world... There is not transition between created and the non-created being, God alone has non-created divine reality, and all creation has merely dependent, created reality. Between these two there are no intermediates... No continuity whatever is left but sharp opposition: Godhead on the one hand, the world's creatureliness on the other." (BC&C, 20-21).

   However, Brunner points out that

   "this transcendence of God's being should never be confused with a transcendence of God's activity. The transcendent God -- that is, the God who has the monopoly of divinity -- is not separated from His creation. Distinction is not separation. God's being is distinguished from that of the world but the world exists by His sustaining presence and activity... He is the One by Whose will and action it (the world) is real and remains in existence, and without Whose presence and sustaining activity it would fall into nothingness." (BC&C, 21).

   It must also be noted here that the world, even if it is creaturely being and is not the ultimately real as the materialist would assert, the created world is no mere appearance as idealism would assert.

   "It is reality. God has called it to be real. Its being is not stamped with the mark of nothingness or degeneracy. What God has created, that is, even if it is not independent but dependent being. It is God Himself who gives it the weight of reality." (BC&C, 20).

   Now in the world there are laws. From the Christian point of view these

   "natural laws themselves are created. They are, as we have it in the German language, Ge-setze, i.e. 'settings.' God set them to be. Now this conception of setting is ambiguous or ambivalent... On the one hand, God's settings, orders, laws, Gesetze, are thought of a permanent, static structures, as stable dependable traits of the God-created Universe. You can rely upon these orders being maintained; you can count on them; there is no disorder and arbitrariness in this world; it is an orderly world." (BC&C, 23-24).

   On the other hand, God in His freedom is above all settings or laws. They are limitations for our freedom, but not for His.

   "Natural laws are not ultimates, they are instrumental to God's purposes. They do not determine his purposes. They are organs, servants of His will... The law in every sense of the word has a subordinate, although a very important and indispensable function in God's economy... All laws, whether natural or moral, belong to the created world. God's own will can never be expressed ultimately in terms of law, because the freedom of His love as well as of His holiness is above them." (BC&C, 24).

   Let us bring our discussion of this point to close with a summary statement in Brunner's own words.

   "The Christian conception of God as Creator, and of the world as His creation, is neither that of naive realism nor that of speculative idealism; in structure as in origin it is different from both. God, Who is spirit, is the primary original being and the world is dependent secondary being. That is say that world has objective reality, not in itself, but through the thought and will of the Creator. It is, but it is what God thought and willed to be before it was. Everything which objectively is, is (1) an idea of God, (2) a realization of His will, and therefore has reality only because it God's idea and will." (BC&C, 26).

2. The Nature of God as personal.
   Another distinguishing mark of the Christian view is the idea of God as personal. There is

   "an unbridgeable contrast between the Christian and the Neoplatonic idea of being. The Neoplatonic -- and we may say also the idealistic and mystical conception of being -- is impersonal, the Christian idea of personal. The Neoplatonic is static; the Christian is active and dynamic. God's being is the being of the Lord who posits everything and is not posited... God is therefore never object, but always subject; never something -- it, substance -- but He, or rather Thou. God is absolutely free will, free in such a way that the world, His creation, is at every moment conditioned by His will." (BC&C, 18-19).

   In this passage, which Brunner points up this distinguishing mark of the Christian concept of God, we are introduced to the contrast between subject and object, person and non-person. This contrast is fundamental in Brunner's thinking about God and man.

   "God is Person; He is not an 'IT'; He is our primary 'Thou'." (BCDG, 121).

   "The 'Thou' is something other than the 'Not-I'; the 'Not-I' is the world, the sum-total of objects. But the 'Thou' is that 'Not-I' which is an ‘I’ (or a Self) as I am myself, of which I only become aware when it is not thought by my own efforts, or perceived as an object, but when it makes itself known to me as self-active, self-speaking, as 'I-over-against me'." (BCDG, 122).

   By an object, Brunner means both an ontological object, a thing, and an epistemological object, something which is known.

   "That which we can think and know by our own efforts is always an object of thought and knowledge, some thing which has been thought, some thing which is known, therefore it is never 'Person'." (BCDG, 121).

   It is for this reason that all philosophical conceptions of God are to be rejected. The God's conceived by the philosophers are its, objects of thought.

   "The God with Whom we have to do in faith, is not a Being who has been discussed, or 'conceived' (by man); He is not an Ens, a 'substance', like the Godhead of metaphysical speculation; He is not an object of thought -- even though in a sublimated and abstract form -- but the Subject who as ‘I’ addresses us a 'thou'. God is the Personality who speaks, acts, disclosing to us Himself and His will." (BCDG, 139).

   "In extreme cases a man can 'think' a personal God; theistic philosophy is a genuine, even if an extreme possibility. But this personal God who has been conceived by man remains some-thing which has been thought, the object of our thought-world. He does not break through the barriers of my thought-world, acting, speaking, manifesting Himself -- He does not meet me as a 'Thou', and is therefore is not a real 'Thou'. He is something which I have thought, my function, my positing; He is not the One who addresses me, and in this 'address' reveals Himself to me as the One who is quite independent of me."

   "The God who is merely thought to be personal is not truly personal; the 'Living God' who enters my sphere of thought and experience from beyond my thought, in the act of making Himself known to me, by Himself naming His Name -- He alone is truly personal." (BCDG, 122).

   Some have raised objections to the use of the ideas of "personality" or "person" in the formulation of the Idea of God, on the ground that it is anthropomorphic.

   "'Who', they ask, 'gives us the right to take the conception of personality, derived from our own human experience, and to apply it to God?' They contend that to do so makes the Idea of God finite, which is entirely improper; for even though we may intensify the concept of personality to the highest degree possible, this Idea of God still makes Him too human, creaturely, and earthly. The "Personal God" is a naive idea, unworthy of the Divinity, a product of the imagination which delights in creating myths." (BCDG, 139).

   Brunner attempts to meet these objections. He first of all points out that all the alternatives to the Idea of a Personal God are attenuated conception of an "object" weakened by abstraction.

   "If we ask: -- 'what are the alternatives to the idea of the Personal God?' -- then all the answers that are given, however, they may be expressed, finally say the same thing; God is an 'It', not an ‘I’; He is an Object of thought, something that is constructed in thought, not One who Himself speaks, but a Neuter -- an ens a se, ens subsistens per se, the Absolute, the Inexpressible, the absolute Substance, etc." (BCDG, 139).

   Then Brunner asks,

   "Can we really think that a Supreme Object gained by a process of abstraction is a more worthy conception of God than the concept of Person? The highest that we know is not the 'it', the 'thing', but the person." (BCDG, 139-140).

   How can we think of God as being less than we are? God must be at least a person, in view of the fact that we are persons.

   Brunner has a second answer to these objections. From the Biblical point of view, the question whether the application of the idea of "person" to God is anthropomorphism is backwards. "The question is not whether God is person, but whether man is." From the Biblical point of view,

   "it is not the personal being of God which is 'anthropomorphic,' but, conversely, the personal being of man is a 'theomorphism.' God alone is Person; man is only person a symbolic way, as a reflection of God, as the Imago Dei. God is only Subject, He is not also Object; He is the absolute Subject, subject in the unconditional, unlimited sense. Man, however, is a subject which is also an object. The Self of man, is a subject which is also an object. The Self of man, indeed, is enclosed in a body, in a material form which fills space; it is therefore and an 'it'; he is personal and impersonal at one the same time. Hence man is only 'person' in a parabolic, symbolic sense, 'person' who is at the same time 'not-person', a 'thing'. God is pure personality; man is not." (BCDG, 140).

   Thus it is that the question of whether the application of the idea of "person" to God is an anthropomorphism turns out to be a pseudo question for those who start with revelation and the knowledge of God as the Absolute Subject.

   Before we go on to the third element in the foundation of Brunner's theology let us try to determine just what he means by person or subject in contrast to non-person, object, or thing. That which constitutes the nature of the 'subject' in contradistinction to that of 'object' is "freedom, positing and not being posited, thinking and not being thought, that which is absolutely spontaneous, that which is only active and not at the same time passive, that which only gives and does not at the same time receive." (BCDG, 140). Thus to be a person is to be capable of self-determination, that is, freedom. This shall be further clarified in our discussion of the third element in the foundation of Brunner's theology.

3. The creation of man in God's own image.
   Now this Personal God has created a being outside Himself. This has already been elaborated in the preceding section. This being stands "over against" God: a created, creaturely being. Now in this being that God has created, He imprints in and upon it something of His own nature.

   "He, the Absolute Subject creates a being which is also 'subject', and in this 'existence or being as subject' is 'like' God." (BCDG, 177).

   God has created man, in His own image or likeness. However,

   "man is absolutely unlike God in the fact that he is a created, conditioned, limited subject, whereas God is absolute Subject. He creates in man a creative nature, and one which is capable of dominion, and fitted for dominion -- once more, like God. But man is absolutely unlike God in the fact that his creative activity is always connected with that which is given him, and that his dominion is limited by his responsibility toward Him to whom he owes an account for the use he makes of his powers. In all that makes man like God, man remains absolutely unlike Him, in the fact that all that he has received from God, and that for all that he does he is responsible, so that his very freedom can be realized in absolute obedience to God; thus human freedom itself shows both man's 'likeness' to God, and his 'un-likeness' -- an 'unlikeness' which is an abiding fact." (BCDG, 177).

   The fact that man has been created in God's own image is the basis of Brunner's social ethics as well as private ethics.

   "That conception of justice by which all human beings, old or young, man or woman, bond or free, have equal rights in the sense they ought to be treated alike, is in essence derived from the revelation of Scripture, according to which God created man 'in his image'" (BJSO, 34).

4. Epistemological basis in revelation and faith.
   It is at this point Brunner disagrees with orthodoxy. Orthodoxy had conceived of revelation as a body of divinely revealed propositions or truths which are gathered into a book. The Bible is the revelation of God. While sometimes speaking of the Bible as a revelation of God, Brunner does not mean the same thing that the orthodox meant. He means that the Bible is record and a witness to revelation. Brunner understands revelation to be basically personal encounter. God is not an object, a thing, but a subject. Man is like God; he is subject but not absolutely so. Our knowledge of a subject, a person, is wholly contingent upon the act of self-disclosure on the part of the person known. However, revelation is not complete without the subjective act of perceiving. This subjective act of perceiving is called faith. It is in the act of faith, which is also an act of decision, is response to the other persons act of self-disclosure, that revelation is completed. Thus revelation is a transitive process between the absolute Subject, God, and conditional subject, man. Revelation is not an objective phenomenon, independent of subjective act of perceiving, it is not a Something, a thing, but a process, an event. Revelation is an event between two persons; a meeting or an encounter between God and man.

   From another point of view, revelation is the address of God, to which man responds in faith. This address is the Word of God. Now in this address God does not say something but says Himself; He discloses Himself. (BDHE, 86). The address of God is God's self-communication; He communicates Himself. For this reason the Word of God in the Scripture is a person (John 1:2) in contrast to the Stoic concept of the Word which is impersonal. The Word of God is God's communication of Himself to men. Now the Word of God is understood, known in the act of faith. Knowledge of God is essentially an act, a decision on man's part, in response to God's address. Believing is knowing.

   With this concept of revelation, the Bible is to be only a witness, a pointer to God in His self-disclosure. The Bible is not the Word of God but only a witness to the Word of God. Theology is thinking about God from the standpoint of revelation. Theology has its basis in the situation of the encounter: revelation-faith. The Scriptures are the primary guide for theology and ethics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF EMIL BRUNNER

BCDG
Brunner, Emil. The Christian Doctrine of God,
Dogmatics, Vol. I.
London: Lutterworth Press, 1949.

BCDCR
Brunner, Emil. The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption,
Dogmatics, Vol. II.
Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1952.

BCDCFC
Brunner, Emil. The Christian Doctrine of Chruch, Faith, and the Consummation,
Dogmatics, Vol. III.
Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1962.

BC&C
Brunner, Emil. Christianity and Civilization,
First Part: Foundations.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948.

BC&CII
Brunner, Emil. Christianity and Civilization,
Second Part: Specific Problems.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949.

BDI
Brunner, Emil. Divine Imperative.
Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 19??.

BJSO
Brunner, Emil. Justice and Social Order.
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945.

BPR
Brunner, Emil. The Philosophy of Religion,
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937.

BR&R
Brunner, Emil. Revelation and Reason.
Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1946.

BSC
Brunner, Emil. The Scandal of Christianity.
Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1951.

BTAE
Brunner, Emil. Truth as Encounter,
Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1964.
A New Edition, Much Enlarged, of
BDHE
The Divine-Human Encounter.
Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1943.

Reinhold Niebuhr
In America, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) developed a Protestant theology called neo-Orthodoxy or neo-Protestantism, in which God is regarded "wholly other" and man is alienated from God by original sin due to the fall. Human pride and egotism is the essence of sin. The tragedy of man is that he can conceive of self-perfection but he can not acheive it. Niebuhr affirmed man's freedom by paradox: man is both bound and free, both limited and limitless; man is, and yet is not, involved in the flux of nature and time. Niebuhr says in his Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. I, p. 258 (two volumes, 1941-43),

"The ultimate proof that the human spirit is free is its recognition
that its will is not free."

Thus the crisis theology was tranformed under the influence of the prevailing pragmatic temper and the interest in social problems. Politically, Niebuhr believed in a liberal realism capable of recognizing man's irrationalities in order to direct to direct them rationally. In this kind of assessment, it seemed clear to him that institutional changes were more important than changes of heart in attempting to reach the good society. Although opposed to utopian visions, he believed in the creation of systems of justice, and that social adjustment was needed within the framework of American capitalism. Beyond politics, Niebuhr believed in Christian realism, a point of view that applies to the social perspectives the insights of neo-Orthodoxy mentioned above in the previous paragraph.

Niebuhr was born in 1892 at Wright City, Missouri. His father was Gustave Niebuhr, a minister in the Evangelical Synod of the Lutheran Church, who came to the United States when he was 17 years old. His mother was the daughter of the Reverend Edward Jacob Hosto, a second-generation German American of the same religious sect. Niebuhr studied at Elmhurst College, Eden Theological Seminary, and Yale University. He was ordained in 1915 and was the pastor of the Bethel Evangelical Luthern church of Detroit until 1928. His ministry there was notable for his support of the labor union movement and of pacifism. He was a committed Socialist for a time, but he later broke with the party. He spent most of his career teaching Christian ethics and theology. He was appointed professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1928. He gave the Gifford Lectures in 1939. He reitred in 1967 and died in 1971.

Paul Tillich
Paul Tillich (1886-1965), a German-American theologian, was born in Starzeddel in eastern Germany, the son of a Lutheran pastor. He was educated in theology and philosophy at Berlin, Tubingen, Halle, and Breslau. Ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1912, he served as an army chaplain during World War I and then taught theology and phiilosophy at Berlin, Marburg, Dresden, and Frankfurt. And on the ascension of Hitler to power in 1933, he immigrated to the United States. He taught systematic theology and philosophy in America at Union Theological Seminary from 1933 to 1956, and from 1956 he held chairs at Harvard, and the University of Chicago until his death in 1965.

Tillich is considered a representative of existentialism in theology. But Tillich defends a metaphysical system that is rare since Hegelianism ceased to be a dominant influence in philosophy. The first opponent of Hegel's system was Soren Kierkegaard, the Father of modern existenialism. In the name of the Christian faith, Kierkegaard rejected not only this and that element in Hegelianism but the whole, referring to it in mockery as 'the System'. Tillich, who is often critical of Hegel, nearly always speaks in praise of Kierkegaard, and he gives such an important place in his own thinking to the category of existence that he seems to be following in the Danish thinker's footsteps. Thus he explains that in making use of the word existential he is borrowing from Kierkegaard. But at the same time, by defending the system as needful for theology, Tillich is confessing himself to be a nay-sayer of the other's message -- an anti-Kierkegaard.

Paul Tillich, in his widely reprinted article, "Two Types of Philosophy of Religion" (Union Seminary Quarterly Review, March, 1946, to which the following citations refers unless otherwise specified), argues the thesis that all philosophy of religion may be reduced to two fundamental types: the ontological, represented by the mystical tradition, including parts of Augustine, and based upon an underlying point of identity between man and God, and the cosmological, represented by Aquinas and most subsequent religious thought, and based upon the discrete, separate coexistence of men and of God.

"On the first way, man discovers himself when he discovers God; he discovers something that is identical with himself.... On the second way, man meets a stranger when he meets God."

The history of Christian thought, so deftly traced by Tillich in terms of these two types, shows how Christian theology turned first to a neo-Platonic metaphysic (Augustine), and then, finding it to be an insufficient safeguard for certain fundamental Christian affirmations, turned 800 years later to the only other alternative available to it, the endless discursive ratiocinations of Aquinas. Having pursued this method to its sterile conclusion, the pendulum now appears, after nearly 800 more years, about to swing back again to ontology.

Tillich's magnum opus is Systematic Theology, 3 volumes (Chicago, 1951-1963). Volume 1 contains most of the philosophical sections. He sees man as "...that being in whom all levels of being are united and approachable." But man is not merely "... an outstanding object among other objects." He is the "... being who asks the ontological questions and in whose self-awareness the ontological answer can be found." Every human being, Tillich believed, has an "ultimate concern". Tillich conceives of faith as ultimate concern in which man unconditionally surrenders to something, recognizing it as an absolute authority. But the objects of ultimate concern vary enormously. Supernatural beings, historical persons whether religious or secular, nations, social classes, political movements, culture forms like paintings and science, material goods, social status -- any of these may be objects of an ultimate concern.

Tillich tries to show that the religious life is more than an organization of human feelings and attitudes and that it involves a reference to a reality outside itself, a reference that can be validated. Although Tillich did not, like Kierkegaard, deny the religous relevance of rational investigation, and although he did think that ontology gives some support to religion, he did not believe in the validity of traditional metaphysical proofs of specifically religious doctrines and in particular of the existence of a personal God. Tillich did not, in fact, accept the notion of a personal deity. For him the doctrine of a supernatural person, like all religious doctrines, is to be conceived as an attempt to symbolize an ultimate reality, "being-itself," which is so ultimate that all that can be said about it is that it is ultimate. If the God of theism is a person, the often repeated charge that Tillich is really an atheist thus seems justified; yet Tillich can point out that in the past Christian theology has repeatedly found difficulty in the notion that God is a person in any straightforward or literal sense. But Tillich is not an atheist because he defends his view that religious faith is objectively valid by claiming that ultimate concern must necessarily have what is metaphysically Ultimate as an object. And nothing can properly be of ultimate concern unless it is the ultimate determiner of the reality and meaning of our existence, and only being-itself occupies this position. From this conclusion, it is short step to say that in ultimate concern one is always really concerned with being-itself, whether one realizes it or not.

"Being-itself" is Tillich's name for God, virtually the only non-symbolic or literal term in the lexicon of religion. Tillich likewise describes God as the "power of being," the "ground of being," and "the God beyond the God in theism." Apparently, God as "being-itself" is the answer to the question asked by Schelling: "Why is there not nothing?" And Tillich answered, "Because there is a self-validating concept of existence, Being-itself."

Although "Being-itself" provides a link between the literal use of terms in philosophy and their symbolic use in religion, the development of the meaning of this term relates to its symbolic use. The basic religious symbols for God are "Lord" and "Father." Symbols differ from other signs in pointing to the ultimate and "participating" in the reality that they signify. An effective symbol not only has truth, but it is true and using it, we participate in its truth. Symbols also have lives of their own, become enfeebled, die, and cease to function as vehicles of the ultimate. At this point new symbols are needed.

The ultimacy of religion is protected from the absolutizing tendencies of man by the Protestant principle. This principle forbids the identification of the divine with any human creation whether the creation in question is the biblical writings or the institution of the Church itself.

As a Christian theologian, Tillich wanted to demonstrate that among the ultimate concerns, the Christian concern is the most adequate. He sometimes said that some ultimate concerns are "idolatrous" because they are directed at finite objects rather than the Ultimate. But by his own principles, Tillich should not say this, because every case of ultimate concern involves concrete objects that manifests or points to the Ultimate. If it did not so function, it would not be a case of ultimate concern. The only possible way of showing that one ultimate concern is more adequate than another would be to show that it served better as a symbol of being-itself. But since nothing can be said literally about being-itself except that it is Ultimate, a feature that nothing else can share, it is not clear how this could be done. Tillich's own argument for the superiority of Christianity seems itself to be in symbolic terms. Tillich said that by dying on the cross, Jesus Christ, who is the basic symbol of being-itself in Christianity, underlined the fact that symbols have their significance not in themselves but as manifesting the Ultimate.