LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM. — The liberal conception, which emerged under this name both in the political sphere and in the philosophical-religious sphere in the 19th century, exhibits a clear affinity with the Protestant principle of private judgment, and responds to similar exigencies in affirming the preeminence of individual evaluation over that of social and religious authority. Thus the political liberal movement drew sustenance from Protestant principles and tradition, and in turn contributed to shifting Protestantism toward more radical positions with respect to Christianity as a revealed doctrine, as a Church, and as worship.
Within Protestantism, liberalism assumed the character of a party and a movement in opposition to orthodoxy, which preserved the dogma defined in the confessions of faith of the 16th and 17th centuries, the forms of worship inherited from the Reformation era, and an ecclesiastical discipline that appealed to the State to impose itself upon dissenters.
On the historical-biblical level, liberal Protestantism adopted the positions of rationalistic criticism, rejecting the miraculous element in sacred texts, reconstructing the origins of Christianity apart from ancient ecclesiastical tradition, and acknowledging as its representatives D. F. Strauss, Ch. Baur, Bruno Bauer, Renan, and Harnack. In the philosophical-theological sphere, it embraced interpretations of religious fact that were advanced by idealistic philosophies—Hegelian, neo-Kantian, and positivist—and sought to justify these through a “free” interpretation of Holy Scripture. In this context, SCHLEIERMACHER may be recognized as the first to formulate liberal theology in his *Discourses on Religion*, in which, for example, he asserts that the Christian Church is its own, but within it each person must have his own religion, one that corresponds to his sense of the divine; that religion is to be regarded as a private matter, foreign to the State.
In the political-parliamentary sphere, liberal Protestants advocated full freedom of conscience, the principle of the separation of Church and State, and generally aligned themselves with progressive parties, tending to identify Christianity with modern culture and thus to justify new conceptions—even those of an economic, social, and political nature—through modernized Christian ideas. Thus, under liberal Protestantism, theology was reduced—even as a discipline taught in theological faculties—to the philosophical, historical, and critical analysis of biblical texts, with a preference for those of the New Testament, to a historical-sociological interpretation of Christianity as an idea and as a fact (e.g., in TROELTSCH), more recently as the psychology of religious fact (e.g., in OTTO), or as the determination of the exclusively ethical content of Christianity (HARNACK).
Thus, the positions of liberal Protestantism at the end of the 19th century may be characterized as follows: a) it relies on the principle of private judgment and tends to identify itself with free thought; b) it fully adopts the historical method with regard to the Bible and historicism as a principle for evaluating the ideas and events of Christianity; c) it conceives of religion as a mere disposition of the soul, denying the relevance of adherence to the doctrinal complex of the Churches; d) it still accepts the Bible as the basis of religion, without however acknowledging its inerrancy; e) it rejects Trinitarian doctrine and generally professes Unitarianism; f) it denies the metaphysical divinity of Jesus Christ; g) it rejects the dogmas of original sin and redemption through the sacrifice of Christ; and h) it consciously moves toward resolving Christianity into the religion of the human, as a product of the development of thought and life.
From this perspective, it is understandable why conservatives have posed—not merely in a theological context—the question of whether liberal Christians, who think in this way, should still be considered members of the Church or are now estranged from II. Nor has the attempt of A. RITSCHL to establish a compromise between liberal Protestantism and Lutheran orthodoxy—by accepting certain motifs of critical-idealistic speculation and the conceptions of liberal biblical criticism, while maintaining justification and reconciliation through Christ as central Christian dogmas—served to avert this outcome, since within the Ritschlian school itself the radical positions of theological liberalism resurfaced.
Liberal Protestantism has gained wide acceptance in Germany, Holland, Sweden, the Presbyterian circles of Scotland, the United States, France, and the Protestant regions of Switzerland, promoting innovations in discipline and worship, and accentuating tensions with orthodox circles, which organized themselves into separate bodies to reject such reforms (“Old Lutherans,” “Old Reformed”), while at the opposite extreme “free communities” and “free churches” were formed on a purely voluntary-associational basis, especially within the sects of the United States. In these movements, the influence of the surrounding intellectual climate is evident; such, for example, is the movement of the “German Christians” with its racist-National Socialist leanings, or the pro-Marxist stance of German and English theologians since 1945.
Liberal Protestantism is, however, today in crisis in the face of the revival of the sense of theology and the Church, both among Lutherans and among the Reformed. In the Catholic sphere, it has, in certain respects, a parallel in Modernism.