Transcription
Do you think God loves abortion and that Eve was right to sin? Do you think God is non-binary? Do you see God as just a metaphor for love and social justice rather than a being that actually exists? There are churches all over America where God himself is optional. Now, of course, no denomination officially teaches anything like this. And even in denominations where these views exist at all, they're only tolerated in a few countries. And even in the most liberal denominations in the world, these views are still a fringe overrepresented minority. But you still might be wondering, why is this allowed to exist in the church at all? And why would somebody become a pastor if they don't believe in the essentials of Christianity?
It's a long story, longer than you might expect. Cuz while the church has only gotten very visibly and viscerally woke in the past few decades, the underlying theology has been brewing for over a century. And the philosophy that allowed for that has been brewing for twice as long. So you can break up the development of liberal Christianity into three stages. The first stage was, of course, the enlightenment. The second stage was the development of liberal theology. And the third stage was the progressive hijack of church institutions. So to truly understand how this all started, we need to go back in time to the good old days of the pre-modern era.
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Back in the good old 1600s, there were no liberal churches, just smallpox, cholera, and Christians killing each other over denominational differences. But they didn't always fight with swords. They often fought with arguments. Scholasticism was big during this time where really, really smart people on each team used high-level philosophical arguments based on the Bible and tradition to win local kings over to their side. These days, religious debates can be kind of dumb. But back then they were actually quite productive cuz everyone was operating under the same classical Greek philosophical framework. They believed truth was self-evident that we could just know things about the world and they agreed on the rules of debate. They just disagreed on the details of what the Bible and church fathers actually said.
To help Catholics do this, Ignatius of Loyola founded the Jesuits as an explicitly anti-Calvinist order dedicated to convincing Protestants to convert to Catholicism. The Jesuits were very dedicated to mission work, but they had a bit of a reputation for doing whatever it took to win arguments.
"Don't be Calvinist. They teach unconditional predestination. That contradicts free will."
"Dude, we're Catholics and we teach unconditional predestination and so did the angelic doctor."
"Then you're Calvinist."
The Jesuits tried their best to make people Catholic, but this kept happening.
"Don't be Protestant. They deny purgatory and the papacy."
"Yeah, well, those aren't in the Bible. Read it for yourself."
"The Roman church can't prevent you from reading the Bible anymore."
"Oh, you're right. I guess those things aren't in the Bible. Sorry, I'm going to be Protestant."
"Dude, the papacy is biblical. In Matthew 16, Jesus literally calls Peter the rock upon which the church is built and gives him the keys to bind and loose and later tells Peter to feed his sheep and to strengthen."
"Bro, chill. I have a better idea. Hey, buddy. That's a nice Bible you got, but there's so many interpretations of the Bible. How do you know you're interpreting it rightly without the Pope?"
"I don't know. The Protestant interpretation makes sense to me."
"Yes, but everyone thinks their interpretation is right, even heretics. How do you know you're not wrong about how to interpret it rightly?"
"Well, I guess I can just make sure my views are logical."
"Okay, but how do you know you're even using logic rightly? Many people make logical errors without knowing it."
"I... I don't know."
"And how do you even know your Bible has the right list of books in it? The canon of scripture isn't in the scriptures, so it could be wrong."
"Yeah, well, I guess I just trust the decision of the church."
"But Protestants say the church can be wrong. What if it's wrong?"
"Well, we can use historical criteria to determine canon, but how do you know you have the right historical criteria without relying on an infallible church? How can you be certain?"
"You're right. I guess I do need to be Catholic."
Jesuits often relied on skepticism to win converts, casting doubt on people's ability to know things on their own, so they'd have to rely on an infallible church. But by doing this, the Jesuits accidentally kickstarted the enlightenment. They had the mindset that if something could be wrong, you can't trust it. This was very influential on Descartes, who studied under the Jesuits. He was a devout Catholic and wanted to find ways to defend the faith. But one day he took Jesuit skepticism to dangerous conclusions.
"I must rely on the church. I can't trust my own knowledge since it could be wrong."
"But wait, that means my knowledge of the church could be wrong. What if I'm misinterpreting what the church says? What if I'm in the wrong church and the real church is Eastern Orthodoxy? What if the church doesn't even exist? What if I only dreamed it existed? What if I don't exist? What if I'm only dreaming that I exist? What if nothing's real at all?"
Descartes began to realize that everything we think we know could be shattered by asking enough questions. This brought him to a very dark place of doubt. He began meditating on this. "Is there anything I can know for sure that I can't possibly doubt?"
"Well, I know I exist, cuz even if an evil genie is deceiving me, there's still a me being deceived. And I have these ideas in my head that I didn't put there. So, there must be something out there giving me these ideas and making impressions on my mind. And I have the idea of an infinite being. But how could I have made that up given that I'm a finite being? So this infinite being must exist. And this is what we call God."
If God is infinite, he's infinitely perfect in every way. And that means he's infinitely good. And that means he wouldn't deceive me. So I can trust my senses. And that means the world around me is not a lie. So congrats Descartes. You just made a doubt-proof epistemology.
Except he just opened Pandora's box by telling everyone to doubt everything they can't prove. Because later thinkers like Hume agreed with Descartes that we should doubt everything we can't prove, but disagreed that we can actually prove the things Descartes thought we could prove. Hume didn't think we could know anything about the outside world. Everything we think we know is based on chains of cause and effect. But we can't actually prove causation. We never observe causation. All we observe is one thing happening after another and we assume one thing caused the other, but we can't prove that. Causation means the cause contains the reason for the effect within itself. But we never observe that. All we do is notice patterns that things tend to happen in a certain order. But there's no guarantee the future will be like the past. Just because something tends to happen in a certain order doesn't mean it always will. So Hume didn't think you could prove causation at all.
"You're being a big nerd. If I shove you, it'll cause you to fall flat on your stupid face."
"No, maybe I just happen to fall right after you shove me. Still didn't prove anything."
And even though people made fun of Hume, he was right. People couldn't prove causation. Hume's skepticism was a serious threat to both Christianity and science. Christianity relied on classical philosophy which included Aristotle's four causes. That's what most arguments for God were based on. So if we can't prove causation, the church can't make any claims to absolute truth. And science relies on the scientific method which relies on cause and effect chains. So if you can't prove those, you can't prove anything scientifically. So obviously theologians and scientists at the universities were desperate for a way out of this. So after Hume, philosophy became a frantic scramble to see who could debunk him. Two of the philosophers who tried to debunk Hume were Thomas Reid, who invented Scottish common sense realism, and Immanuel Kant, who invented German idealism.
"Let's play a game. Who can prove causation?"
"Bro, it's common sense. Things cause each other. Anyone who doubts that is just mentally ill. Don't reason with crazy people."
Reid actually did say things like this, but his point was that nobody actually doubts whether causation exists. Philosophers might say they do, but they're still going to run away if a bear charges at them. But Kant wasn't satisfied by this.
"Bro, just cuz causation's common sense doesn't mean we can prove it's true. So, how can we prove causation is true?"
Kant thought we could only do that by redefining truth. Kant realized we never observe things in and of themselves. We only observe our perception of things. For example, you never perceive an apple itself. You just perceive your five senses' interpretation of an apple. So we can't prove things like space and time exist either, but we still believe in them because that's how we interpret the world. So likewise, we can also believe in causation because that's also how we interpret the world. So we can't know any truth about things in and of themselves or the noumenal realm. But we can know truth about how we perceive things or the phenomenal realm. By doing this, Kant basically invented modern philosophy by shifting the focus away from objective reality and towards subjective interpretation.
So Kant's ideas got really popular in the German universities, which made the church really unpopular cuz it still claimed to have objective truth about God, which all the intellectuals thought was silly. But this one theologian, Schleiermacher, wanted to defend the church against the intellectuals. So he tried to reformulate Christianity to be compatible with Kant and Enlightenment ideas.
In doing this, Schleiermacher invented liberal theology. He thought Kant disproved that we can know things in and of themselves. So we can't know objective facts about God like his attributes, the Trinity, or even miracles. But we can know our experience of God. He was already influenced by Lutheran Pietists who separated head knowledge and heart knowledge of God. So Schleiermacher was like, why do we need the head knowledge at all? He redefined faith not as a set of beliefs about God, but as a feeling of absolute dependence on God. It doesn't matter whether the supernatural claims of Christianity are actually true because we can have the faith, social justice, and moral community of Christianity without, you know, God. So, liberal theology in a nutshell is: it doesn't matter whether any of this is real.
With the publishing of Schleiermacher's works, the liberalism pandemic started.
"Are you saying liberals can't be Christians? That's not very charitable of you, Zoomer."
Okay, let's get something straight. When I say liberalism in this video, I'm talking about theological liberalism or Schleiermacher's idea that it doesn't matter whether Jesus rose from the dead. I am not talking about political liberalism. True Christians can agree to disagree on social and political issues, but not on whether God is real.
So, the liberalism pandemic started in Germany. It would soon spread to other places, but for now, it started a German movement called higher criticism. This is where people seriously question the reliability of the Bible.
"You know, the Torah uses slightly different language in different parts. So that means it must have been written over many centuries, and that means Moses might not have existed."
"You know, the synoptic gospels have a lot in common. So that means Matthew must have borrowed from Mark and some other sources, which means he's not an eyewitness, which means it's a forgery."
"You know, Isaiah correctly predicts things, but there's no way that could have happened. So the parts of Isaiah that correctly predict things must have been written way after the fact by different Isaiahs."
Now, we don't have any proof of any of this, but these are the best explanations of how we got the Bible that don't posit any supernatural intervention. You see, supernatural explanations aren't reliable because we can't observe the supernatural, cuz everything we think is supernatural has a natural explanation because we got to find a natural explanation for everything because supernatural explanations aren't reliable.
So, higher criticism spread throughout Germany. How does it spread? Well, just like viruses, liberalism can't reproduce on its own. That's why people don't start institutions to be liberal. It has to hijack Christian institutions and turn them into liberalism factories. And when the institution dies, it has to spread to new institutions. Liberalism spread throughout all the theology schools in Germany.
But when it started spreading to other countries, Scotland was able to resist it, at least for the time, cuz remember their response to Hume was Scottish common sense realism, which was a much more conservative philosophy than German idealism. It was popular in the Church of Scotland, the mother church of Presbyterians. So when a minister, John Witherspoon, became president of Princeton, which was the flagship Presbyterian school in America, he brought Scottish common sense realism with him. He also had a big influence on American Christianity in general cuz he was the only minister to sign the Declaration of Independence. So American Christianity stayed more conservative than European Christianity.
At Princeton, Charles Hodge became the father of Christian fundamentalism. He used Scottish common sense realism as a shield against liberalism to defend the fundamentals of the faith like the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, and miracles. But Scottish common sense realism had an unfortunate side effect. It kept out liberalism by rejecting anything that's repugnant to common sense. But that also meant rejecting some things that are kind of important to Christianity like mystery, nuance, and paradox. You know, the gospel isn't exactly common sense. The gospel is foolishness to the Greeks. For example, there are a lot of really precise and nuanced details about the two natures of Christ that aren't exactly common sense. It's not common sense that Jesus has one divine hypostasis that hypostatizes the human nature. But it's true. Presbyterians used to have a rich sacramental theology, but Hodge thought that wasn't common sense enough. He thought real presence in communion just means communion is a sign of God's promises, and trusting in those promises strengthens our faith.
"You mean it's just a symbol?"
"No, of course not. I mean, well, yes."
John Williamson Nevin wrote a book about how Hodge wasn't being faithful to the reformed view of communion, but he had deeper criticisms of Hodge's theology and fundamentalism in general. Nevin wasn't a liberal, but he was sympathetic to the German idealist critique of Scottish common sense realism that it didn't actually address the skepticism of modernism. It just sidestepped it. Nevin was a fan of Hegel, who modified Kant's philosophy. Kant separated truth from our perception of truth, but Hegel said our perception can gradually evolve into the truth as the world's spirit matures. Nevin Christianized this by saying the world doesn't evolve into the truth by its own power but by Christ incarnating into it. Christ is the only real truth, but as Christ incarnates into the world and spreads his kingdom throughout the world, the world is taken up into the truth of Christ. That's why he cared so much about the visible church and the sacraments. Cuz the institutional church is the means by which the kingdom of heaven colonizes this world. He criticized people who talk about the church as just the set of all people who believe the right things. No, the church is the visible, ongoing incarnation of Christ into our world. So, it must be a visible, united institution with a tangible impact on the world. He worried Hodge's views might make people schism from the institutional church in the name of conservatism, cuz if the church is just whoever believes the right things, why shouldn't they do that?
But Nevin warned about what would happen if people schismed from the mainline church. He said they'd stop caring about the sacraments. They'd focus on soteriology or doctrine of salvation over Christology or doctrine of Christ. They'd stop caring about church history, stop caring about institutions, and even have cringe emotional worship music set to cringe emotional tunes. And keep in mind, he predicted evangelicalism, writing in 1848.
Nevin didn't think American fundamentalism was the answer to liberalism. And he predicted it would eventually be defeated by liberalism. He said the only way liberalism would be defeated is to actually address its deep philosophical questions with Christology. But nobody listened to Nevin because he was spewing German ideas, and anything German was considered liberal and bad. But Nevin ended up being right, and the shield began to crack. Cuz like he said, fundamentalists often didn't actually address the challenges of modern philosophy, they just sidestepped them. So more and more intellectuals got convinced of modernism, and more and more universities became modernist. And if a university clung to fundamentalism, it would be mocked by other intellectuals for being anti-intellectual and not academically credible. Eventually, Princeton was one of the last mainstream schools that was still fundamentalist. Since Princeton was the flagship school of the Presbyterian Church, Presbyterians were able to resist modernism much longer than Episcopalians and congregationalists. Princeton was still producing theologians like B.B. Warfield, the father of biblical inerrancy, who by the way also believed in evolution. Fundamentalists weren't always anti-scientific and anti-institutional, but they were about to become that way. But still, as long as Princeton was conservative, so would the PCUSA be. It might be hard to fathom today, but the PCUSA used to do heresy trials left and right, and the people they excommunicated had to find refuge in other denominations. But many powerful modernists like President Woodrow Wilson wanted Princeton to be modernist. A Princeton professor, J. Gresham Machen, also wanted Princeton to be modernist. But when Machen went to go study theology in Germany, he saw how empty modernism was and became a fundamentalist by the time he got back. So now Machen wanted to keep Princeton fundamentalist. Most professors already were, but there were a few liberal professors. Machen tried to get them fired, but the denomination told him he couldn't do that. So, he went to plan B: retreat. Machen resigned from Princeton and told all the other conservatives to do likewise. This placed Princeton firmly in modernist hands, and Machen founded Westminster Theological Seminary as a conservative alternative that claimed to preserve the theology of Old Princeton despite not having the heritage. This started a nationwide trend of fundamentalists retreating from established universities and starting Bible colleges that had horrible academics and credentials. But that didn't matter because their sole purpose was to be a bubble of conservative values. So if you went to one of those "ring by spring" Bible colleges that was more of a fundamentalist Christian social club than anything academically rigorous, now you know where that comes from. Machen tried to influence the denomination with his new seminary, but since Princeton was the established one, it had much more of a pull on the denomination than Westminster.
Another thing that really bothered Machen was the PCUSA missions board. It didn't strictly require missionaries to hold the traditional Christian doctrine. Most missionaries were faithful Christians, but they weren't strictly required to be. So, Machen started his own PCUSA missions board unauthorized by the denomination.
"You can't do that."
"Oh, yeah. What are you going to do? Fire me?"
"Uh, yeah, if you don't shut down that board."
"All right, go ahead."
Machen was defrocked, not excommunicated, but just fired from ministry. Despite this, however, he still schismed off and started his own denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, dedicated to preserving conservative theology. This only made the mainline PCUSA get much more theologically liberal. It's worth noting that what Machen did, separating simply based on error in the church, is forbidden according to traditional Presbyterian theology. The Westminster Divines said, "As long as you're allowed to be faithful within the church, no amount of heresy in the church justifies abandoning it."
Let's check in on Europe. Yikes. Modernism is really spreading. Karl Barth is a modernist pastor who believes humans are basically good and human progress will save us. So Barth abandoned liberalism because it gave him nothing to preach to his suffering congregation after the war. He realized modernism was too man-centered. It was man trying to reach God by his own wisdom, experience, and progress. Whereas Christianity is God-reaching man by his self-revelation in Christ. This meant Barth rejected all natural theology or knowledge of God we could have apart from his self-revelation in Christ. Barth blamed natural theology for the descent into modernism, cuz natural theology is when we let human philosophy set the rules for the church's theology. This might seem like it's working when the philosophy of the day is Aristotle, but once the philosophy goes liberal, so will the church. Instead of ignoring the challenges of modern philosophy, Barth admits that they're right. We can't know God exists by human philosophical methods. We have to rely on Christ. Barth's theological movement was called neo-orthodoxy because it gave people a reason to care about traditional Christian doctrine even in light of modern philosophy and liberalism. For the first time in a long time, people started caring about Christology, and that made them care about all the other traditional Christian doctrines. This served as an antidote to theological liberalism in many parts of Europe. But it was still strong in Germany, and the liberal theologians there supported a certain Austrian painter. Why? Well, theological liberalism just means the church supports whatever the current culture does. So that means today the church supports flying a bunch of pride flags, but back then it meant believing the Germans are the master race and have the right to drink 6 million glasses of orange juice. The German church tried to argue that history reveals the supremacy of the German people. So Barth and Bonhoeffer wrote the Barmen Declaration, which says the only revelation of God's will is in Jesus Christ.
Once Barth's neo-orthodox movement reached America, the mainline Protestant churches began to shift away from modernism because they saw neo-orthodoxy as a good middle ground between that and fundamentalism. But it wasn't over because, just like a virus, modernism mutates to adapt to challenges. The new strain of liberalism was liberation theology, which rose after everyone realized human progress can't save us. This started with the Roman Catholic ecumenical council Vatican II. It was very influenced by some of Barth's ideas, like the idea that we shouldn't be too rigid about dogma, but not by Barth's other ideas, like a rejection of natural theology. So if you have both natural theology and doctrinal flexibility, that's basically just liberalism. Vatican II made a number of binding liberal documents. Lumen Gentium says Muslims worship the same God as us and can be saved. Gaudium et Spes says the church has no political mission and should embrace the hopes and joys of modern humanity. Nostra Aetate was written by Gregory Baum, a gay Jewish Catholic priest who left the priesthood to be an LGBT activist. And this statement was later interpreted by Pope Francis to mean the church shouldn't try and convert Jews. This inspired many forms of liberation theology. The common theme is that social justice sets the agenda for how we talk about God.
These are the three main founders. Gustavo Gutiérrez was a Peruvian Catholic priest who said theology should start with human suffering and interpret God in light of that. Mary Daly was a Catholic theologian who criticized calling God "he" and said we should ordain women. Now, women's ordination didn't start with her. The Holiness churches had been doing it for over a hundred years and are still very conservative to this day. But the militant push to ordain women in all the churches did start with feminist theology, which she was the founder of. She eventually left the church, though. James Cone was the founder of Black liberation theology. He said any theology that's not about Black liberation is useless. Also, not to be a conspiracy theorist, but it's a well-known fact that there was a leftist long march through the cultural institutions during the 20th century, especially the churches. So, it wouldn't be a shock at all if they fanned the flames of this liberation theology within the church. Because liberation theology has social justice as its start and end, it's basically impossible to talk a liberation theologian out of their views. If you try and say something they support goes against the Bible, they'll just say that can't possibly be true because that goes against social justice, and God is defined as whatever helps us achieve social justice.
Now, at this time, these ultraliberals were still a slim minority in the mainline Protestant churches. But they would soon defeat the conservative majority. How? Well, first of all, thanks to fundamentalism, they were very overrepresented in the seminaries and therefore the denominational bureaucracies. Progressives in the church always care more about getting involved in institutions than conservatives. Now, because Protestant denominations have a very bottom-up hierarchy, the conservative majority could have made a grassroots effort to steer the direction of the denominations and eventually retaken them. But instead, they did the exact opposite. This kind of did happen in the Southern Baptist Church, but for most mainline Protestant denominations, there was a vicious cycle that went something like this:
"All right, guys. Let's have a vote."
"Hey, the conservatives won. Don't worry, we're not going anywhere."
"Okay, let's have another vote."
"Hey, the liberals won. That's it. We're out of here."
"All right. Now, the mainline church is much more theologically liberal. Let's have another vote."
"A, the moderates won. Don't worry, we're not going anywhere."
"Okay, let's have another vote."
"A, the ultra-progressives won. All right, we're out of here."
In the early 2000s, most mainline Protestant churches in America split over same-sex marriage. Now, not everyone who supported it did so because of liberation theology. A lot of people just wanted to be nice to gay people and weren't convinced of the biblical arguments against it. But liberation theology was a major reason behind the push for all the churches to affirm it. Many people who pushed for it weren't really concerned with scripture or theology because they thought the only purpose of the church was to be a social justice organization. This may sound crazy, but it's the logical conclusion of liberation theology, where God is defined according to personal experience, and liberation theology, where that experience is oppression of any kind.
Now, when I said the denominations split over same-sex marriage, that's not exactly true. It was never an equal split. Every single time, it was the liberals staying and the conservatives voluntarily leaving, even though they didn't have to. That means the liberals were able to keep most of the old historic church buildings, universities, and endowments built up over the centuries by generations of faithful Christians donating all their money to the church, whereas the conservatives often had to start from scratch by planting churches in rented-out spaces. Of course, Christians often lack resources and meet in people's homes where they're persecuted. But these conservatives willingly abandoned what their ancestors had built up for them. They didn't have to leave. None of the denominations were requiring anyone to affirm or perform same-sex marriages, but they simply didn't want to be in a denomination where that was even tolerated. In the Presbyterian Church, the conservatives split off after losing a vote on gay marriage. In the Episcopal and Dutch Reformed churches, the conservatives split off before losing a vote on gay marriage, and their split probably caused those votes to happen. In the United Methodist Church, the conservatives split off after winning a vote on gay marriage. You heard me. They won the vote, but they still left the church. This shows how little conservatives often care about institutions.
So, that's how liberal theology spread to the mainline Protestant churches in America and most other parts of the West, with a few random holdouts. But the mainline Protestant churches in the Global South are overwhelmingly conservative and they're rapidly growing, whereas the ones in the West are shrinking. And even in the most liberal denominations, even though conservatives are now an underrepresented minority, progressives were once a very slim minority actively opposed by denominational structures. But that didn't stop them from eventually becoming the majority because of how persistent they were. So, we'll see what happens.