Gary Dorrien's The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism & Modernity, despite its heft and abundance of detail, makes for gripping reading, even if you aren't a liberal, and, I dare say, even if you think liberals are the enemy. These are people who have a sense of destiny about them. They devour the great advances in natural and social sciences in the last half of the 19th century. They seize onto the task of re-writing theology in light of new knowledge for an industrial America come of age like a pit bull on a fresh leg of lamb. With the exception of the Puritans, no one in American religious history has seemed to have this joyous and urgent sense that their moment is now.
Along with that was their firm conviction that all past moments have had their time, and can be safely discarded. So you get stuff like:
- Paul diverted Jesus's religion of pure God-consciousness down an authoritarian blind alley.
- Nicene Christianity is a static, Platonic prison to which the dynamic spirit of Christianity was consigned for centuries, only to be liberated by Hegel and Darwin.
- The medieval monks took the communistic, socially transformative Christian impulse, and like a gardener wielding a pair of bonsai scissors, whittled it down into communal ascetic practices.
- The Reformation was, at best, a half-finished project. They left the cloister for the world, and promptly surrendered to it.
- Etc, etc.
Gripping reading. But as a budding Church Historian, it is rather odd to study figures from history who have so much contempt for history.
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