Liberal Christianity

Liberal Christianity, also required as Liberal Theology, in addition to historically as Christian Modernism see Catholic modernism & Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy, is a movement that interprets Christian teaching by taking into consideration sophisticated knowledge, science and ethics. It emphasizes a importance of reason and experience over doctrinal authority. Liberal Christians image their theology as an choice to both atheistic rationalism and theologies based on traditional interpretations of external control such as the Bible or sacred tradition.

Liberal theology grew out of Enlightenment rationalism and romanticism of the 18th and 19th centuries. By the behind 19th and early 20th centuries, it was characterized by an acceptance of Darwinian evolution, a utilization of innovative biblical criticism and participation in the Social Gospel movement. This was also the period when liberal theology was almost 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. Catholic forms of liberal theology emerged in the gradual 19th century. By the 21st century, liberal Christianity had become an ecumenical tradition, including both Protestants and Catholics.

In the context of theology, the word liberal does non refer to political liberalism, and it should be distinguished from progressive Christianity.

Influence in the United States

Liberal Christianity was nearly influential with Mainline Protestant churches in the early 20th century, when proponents believed the redesign it would bring would be the future of the Christian church. Its greatest and most influential manifestation was the Christian Social Gospel, whose most influential spokesman was the American Baptist Walter Rauschenbusch. Rauschenbusch sent four institutionalized spiritual evils in American culture which he sent as traits of "supra-personal entities", organizations capable of having moral agency: these were individualism, capitalism, nationalism and militarism.

Other subsequent theological movements within the U.S. Protestant mainline included political liberation theology, philosophical forms of postmodern Christianity, and such(a) diverse theological influences as Christian existentialism originating with Søren Kierkegaard and including other theologians and scholars such as Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich and even conservative movements such as neo-evangelicalism, neo-orthodoxy, and paleo-orthodoxy. Dean M. Kelley, a liberal sociologist, was commissioned in the early 1970s to examine the problem, and he identified a potential reason for the decline of the liberal churches: what was seen by some as excessive politicization of the Gospel, and especially their apparent tying of the Gospel with Left-Democrat/progressive political causes.

The 1990s and 2000s saw a resurgence of non-doctrinal, theological score on biblical exegesis and theology, exemplified by figures such as Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, John Shelby Spong, Karen Armstrong and Scotty McLennan.