LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM. - The liberal conception, which established itself under this name, not only in the political field but also in the philosophical-religious field in the 19th century, displays an evident affinity with the Protestant principle of free examination, and obeys analogous exigencies in affirming the pre-eminence of individual evaluation over that of social and religious authority. Therefore the liberal political movement drew nourishment from Protestant principles and tradition and in its turn contributed to making Protestantism slide toward the most radical positions with regard to Christianity as revealed doctrine, as Church, as cult. Liberalism within Protestantism assumed the physiognomy of a party and of a current in antithesis to orthodoxy, which was conservative of the dogma defined in the "professions of faith" of the 16th-17th centuries, of the forms of worship inherited from the age of the "Reformation," of an ecclesiastical discipline that appealed to the State in order to impose itself on dissidents.
On the historical-biblical terrain it adopts the positions of rationalistic criticism which rejects the miraculous element in the sacred texts, reconstructs Christian origins prescinding from ancient ecclesiastical tradition, and recognizes as its representatives D. F. Strauss, Ch. Baur, Bruno Bauer, Renan, Harnack; in the philosophical-theological field it welcomes the interpretations of the religious fact given by idealistic, Hegelian, neo-Kantian, and positivist philosophies and seeks to justify them with a "free" interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. In this sphere one can recognize in Schleiermacher the first formulator of liberal theology in his "discourses on religion" in which, for example, he affirms that the Christian Church is indeed one, yet in it each person must have his own religion, the one that responds to his sentiment of the divine; that religion is to be considered a private question, extraneous to the State. In the political-parliamentary sphere liberal Protestants present themselves as supporters of full freedom of conscience, of the principle of the separation between Church and State, and generally militate in progressive parties, tending to identify Christianity with modern culture and therefore to justify with modernized Christian ideas the new conceptions, including those of an economic-social and political nature. Thus from liberal Protestantism theology is reduced, also as a teaching discipline in theological faculties, to the philosophical-historical-critical analysis of biblical texts, with a preference for the New Testament ones, to a historical-sociological interpretation of Christianity as idea and as fact (for example, in Troeltsch), more recently as psychology of the religious fact (for example, in Otto), or else as a determination of the exclusively ethical content of Christianity (Harnack). Thus one can characterize the positions of liberal Protestantism at the end of the 19th century: a) it relies on the motive of free examination and tends to identify itself with free thought; b) it integrally accepts the historical method with regard to the Bible and historicism as a principle of evaluation also of the ideas and events of Christianity; c) it conceives religion as a simple disposition of the soul, denying relevance to adherence to the complex of doctrines of the Churches; d) it still accepts the Bible as the basis of religion, without however recognizing its inerrancy; e) it rejects the Trinitarian doctrine in order generally to profess Unitarianism; f) it rejects the metaphysical divinity of Jesus Christ and g) the dogmas of original sin and of Redemption by virtue of the Sacrifice of Christ; h) it consciously aims to resolve Christianity into the religion of the human, as a product of the unfolding of thought and life. In this perspective one understands how conservatives have posed, not merely on a theoretical level, the problem of whether liberal Christians who think in this way are still to be considered members of the Church or by now extraneous to it. Nor has A. Ritschl's attempt served to establish a compromise between liberal Protestantism and Lutheran orthodoxy by accepting certain motives of critical-idealistic speculation and the conceptions of liberal criticism in biblical matters, but at the same time by maintaining as central dogmas of Christianity justification and reconciliation through the work of Christ, since in Ritschl's own school the radical positions of theological liberalism have resurfaced. It has widely established itself in Germany, Holland, Sweden, in the Presbyterian circles of Scotland, in the United States of America, in France and in Protestant Switzerland, promoting innovations in discipline and worship, accentuating the tension with orthodox circles, which constituted themselves into their own organisms in order not to accept such reforms ("Old Lutherans," "Old Reformed"), while at the other extreme "free communities" and "free churches" were created on a purely associative-voluntary basis, especially in the sects of the United States of America. In these the suggestion of the ideas of the environment is evident; such, for example, is the movement of the "German Christians" of racist-National Socialist influence, such is the pro-Marxist attitude of German and English theologians since 1945. Liberal Protestantism, however, is today in crisis in the face of the rebirth of the sense of theology and of the Church both among Lutherans and among the Reformed. In the Catholic field, it has in certain respects a parallel in modernism.
Bibliography5 works
Mario Bendiscioli