LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM. — The liberal conception, which became established under this name not only in the political sphere but also in the philosophical-religious sphere in the nineteenth century, displays an evident affinity with the Protestant principle of free examination and responds to analogous demands in asserting the pre-eminence of individual evaluation over that of social and religious authority. Consequently, the liberal political movement drew nourishment from Protestant principles and tradition and, in turn, helped to shift Protestantism toward more radical positions with regard to Christianity as revealed doctrine, as Church, and as worship. Within Protestantism, liberalism assumed the features of a party and a movement opposed to orthodoxy, which preserved the dogma defined in the « professions of faith » of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the forms of worship inherited from the age of the « Reformation », and an ecclesiastical discipline that appealed to the State in order to impose itself upon dissenters.
In the historical-biblical field it adopted the positions of rationalistic criticism, which rejected the miraculous element in the sacred texts, reconstructed Christian origins independently of ancient ecclesiastical tradition, and recognized as its representatives D. F. Strauss, Ch. Baur, Bruno Bauer, Renan, and Harnack; in the philosophical-theological field it embraced the interpretations of the religious fact offered by idealist, Hegelian, Neo-Kantian, and positivist philosophies and sought to justify them through a « free » interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. In this sphere Schleiermacher may be recognized as the first formulator of liberal theology, in his « discourses on religion », in which, for example, he affirmed that the Christian Church is indeed one, but that within it everyone must have his own religion, the one that responds to his feeling of the divine; and that religion should be regarded as a private matter, foreign to the State. In the political-parliamentary sphere, Protestant liberals presented themselves as advocates of full freedom of conscience and of the principle of separation between Church and State, and generally belonged to progressive parties, tending to identify Christianity with modern culture and thus to justify new conceptions, including those of an economic-social and political nature, through modernized Christian ideas. Thus, under Protestant liberalism, theology was reduced, even as a subject of instruction in theological faculties, to the philosophical-historical-critical analysis of biblical texts, with a preference for those of the New Testament; to a historical-sociological interpretation of Christianity as idea and as fact (for example, in Tröltsch); more recently, to a psychology of the religious fact (for example, in Otto); or else to a determination of the exclusively ethical content of Christianity (Harnack). The positions of l. p. at the end of the nineteenth century may thus be characterized as follows: a) it relied upon the principle of free examination and tended to identify itself with free thought; b) it fully accepted the historical method with regard to the Bible, and historicism as a principle for evaluating the ideas and vicissitudes of Christianity as well; c) it conceived religion as a simple disposition of the soul, denying significance to adherence to the body of doctrines of the Churches; d) it still accepted the Bible as the basis of religion, without, however, recognizing its inerrancy; e) it rejected Trinitarian doctrine, generally professing Unitarianism; f) it rejected the metaphysical divinity of Jesus Christ; and g) the dogmas of original sin and Redemption through the Sacrifice of Christ; h) it consciously aimed to resolve Christianity into the religion of the human, as the product of the development of thought and life. From this perspective one can understand why the conservatives raised, not merely in the theoretical sphere, the question whether liberal Christians who thought in this way were still to be considered members of the Church or were by then alien to II. Nor did A. Ritschl’s attempt to establish a compromise between Protestant liberalism and Lutheran orthodoxy prove effective: he accepted certain elements of critical-idealist speculation and the conceptions of liberal criticism in biblical matters, while at the same time retaining justification and reconciliation through Christ as the central dogmas of Christianity; for the radical positions of theological liberalism resurfaced within Ritschl’s own school. It became widely established in Germany, Holland, Sweden, among the Presbyterian circles of Scotland, in the United States of America, in France, and in Protestant Switzerland, promoting innovations in discipline and worship and accentuating the tension with orthodox circles, which constituted their own organizations in order not to accept such reforms (« old Lutherans », « old Reformed »). At the other extreme, « free communities » and « free churches » were created on a purely voluntary-associative basis, especially among the sects of the United States of America. In these the influence of the surrounding ideas is evident: such, for example, was the movement of the « German Christians », influenced by racialist-national-socialist ideas; such also was the pro-Marxist attitude of German and English theologians
since 1945. L. p., however, is 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.
BIBLI: F. Kattenbusch, Die deutsche evangelische Theologie seit Schleiermacher, Leipzig 1891: 5th ed., ibid. 1926; C. Werckhagen, Der Protestantismus am Ende des XIX. Jhd., Berlin 1908; C. J. Cadoux, Catholicism and christianity, a vindication of progressive protestantism, London 1928; P. Tillich, Protestantismus als Kritik und Gestaltung, Leipzig 1929; C. Alermissen, La Chiesa e la Chiese, Italian trans., 2nd ed., Brescia 1944, p. 391 ff.; E. Rochat, Le développement de la théologie protestante française au XIXe siècle, Geneva 1945. Mario Bendiscioli