This is Communio Sanctorum, the history of the Christian Church, season two.

In season one, we spent a little time tracking the Enlightenment's impact on the Christian faith.

Dual impetus emerged, one leading

to liberalism, the other to fundamentalism, which was the reaction of orthodoxy to the challenges

of liberalism. In this episode, we're going to drill down a little bit on Christian liberalism.

Those promoting theological liberalism hoped to bring Protestantism into the modern world of science,

philosophy, and secular history.

The pastor of the hugely influential Riverside Church in New York City and a champion of liberalism,

Harry Emerson Fosdick, wrote in his autobiography that he aimed to make it possible for a person to be both

an intelligent modern and a serious Christian. Theological liberals grappled with a dilemma as old as

the faith. How were they to make religious faith meaningful to the world without compromising the

gospel? That seemed especially difficult for modern

liberals, since so much of the philosophy of the modern world had itself arisen as a reaction

against religion in general and Christianity in particular. In making Christianity palatable

to the growing number of people who were being more influenced by a secular

than a religious worldview, liberals gutted the faith of many of those elements that seemed as

impediments to a rational mind. The result was a liberalism that begs the question,

why bother with faith at all if what you have is so watered down, so void of content,

that there's no point in maintaining the facade? Richard Newbauer explained theological

liberalism as believing in, quote, a God without wrath, who brought men without sin into a kingdom

without judgment through the ministrations of a

Christ without a cross."

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