Returning to the Gospel · Session 4
A Scripture-centered teaching study. Read it here, or download the full manuscript below.
When Scripture is no longer treated as the final authority, Christianity is easily reshaped around the concerns of the age.
Sessions 1 and 2 established what the Gospel is and why it must not be changed. Session 3 traced the origins of the Social Gospel movement. But the Social Gospel did not appear out of nowhere. It grew in soil that had already been prepared by a deeper shift in the church: the rise of liberal theology.
This session examines how liberal theology, beginning in the early 1800s, relocated the authority of the Christian faith away from the Word of God and toward human experience, reason, and moral progress. Once that shift was made, the Social Gospel became possible.
We will look at four representative figures and then test the movement by Scripture. As always, we will describe each man’s actual position fairly before we evaluate it. The goal is not to attack people, but to identify where the church drifted and why.
Before leading this session, read and meditate on:
Pray for discernment and for charity. The aim is to test theology by the Word of God, not to impugn the motives of those who held it.
Keep Scripture central. This session is about authority: where a church locates final authority shapes everything else.
Introduce the key figures fairly and accurately. Describe their actual positions before evaluating them.
Connect liberal theology to the Social Gospel without overstating. Liberal theology prepared the soil.
Hold the distinction between the Gospel and the fruit of the Gospel.
In Session 3 we saw that the Social Gospel arose during a time of real social crisis and gradually shifted the church’s center from saving sinners to transforming society. We noted Walter Rauschenbusch and the Social Creed of 1908.
This session goes underneath that movement to the theology that made it possible. The Social Gospel was the fruit; liberal theology was a large part of the root.
Ask the group: When people today decide what is true about God, or right and wrong, where do they look for final authority?
Why does the answer to that one question shape everything else a person believes?
Liberal theology shifted authority away from Scripture and toward human experience, moral progress, and social ideals.
Schleiermacher is often called the father of modern liberal theology. Writing in Germany in the early 1800s, he tried to defend Christianity to its cultured critics by relocating the essence of religion. He argued that religion is rooted not first in doctrine or in obedience to Scripture, but in a deep inner experience he called the feeling of absolute dependence, the awareness that we are wholly dependent on something beyond ourselves.
In his major work, The Christian Faith, doctrines became descriptions of this religious experience rather than truths revealed and fixed by God. The practical effect was enormous. Once religious feeling becomes the foundation, Scripture is no longer the final court of appeal. The believer’s experience sits in the judgment seat, and the Bible is measured by it.
When inner experience becomes the foundation of faith, Scripture stops being the authority that judges us and becomes a resource we judge.
Ritschl, also German, reframed Christianity around ethics and the Kingdom of God. Drawing on Kant, he distinguished between judgments of fact and judgments of value. Religious statements, he held, express practical and moral value rather than objective fact. This tended to separate faith from history and doctrine, and to move attention away from questions like the deity of Christ or the nature of the atonement and toward the moral life.
Ritschl described Christianity as having two focal points: personal justification and the Kingdom of God, which he understood as a moral society realized through faithful work and active love of neighbor. The goal of the Christian life became work in and for that kingdom on earth. He downplayed original sin, the supernatural, and speculative doctrine. In his hands, Christianity became increasingly a religion of moral and social improvement.
Ritschl made the goal of Christianity a moral society on earth. That is a short step from making social transformation the mission of the church.
Rauschenbusch, whom we met in Session 3, carried these currents into the Social Gospel. He made the Kingdom of God, understood as a transformed social order to be built on earth, the central theme of Christianity. He described sin chiefly as selfishness expressed in unjust social systems, and he argued that salvation must be social as well as individual. He criticized what he called individualistic theology for concentrating on personal repentance while neglecting the Kingdom.
Rauschenbusch did not invent these ideas. He inherited a theology that had already moved authority from Scripture to experience and ethics. He simply applied it to society with great energy and skill.
The Social Gospel was not a sudden break. It was the harvest of a theology that had already relocated authority away from the Word of God.
Have someone read the passage aloud.
Paul tells Timothy to continue in what he has learned from the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make him wise unto salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. He then says that all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, literally God-breathed, and is profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness.
If Scripture is breathed out by God, then it carries God’s own authority. It is not merely a record of human religious experience that later believers may revise. This is the exact point at which liberal theology turned. By making experience or reason the foundation, it placed the believer above the text rather than under it.
Where authority is located determines everything. If Scripture is God-breathed, our experience is judged by it. We are not free to judge Scripture by our experience.
Have someone read the passage aloud.
Peter says the apostles did not follow cleverly devised fables when they made known the power and coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. They were eyewitnesses of His majesty. He then teaches that prophecy did not come by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit, and that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation.
Liberal theology made religion a matter of human feeling and human construction. Peter grounds the faith in God’s own act of revelation and in eyewitness testimony to real events. The message did not rise up from within the religious imagination of man. It came down from God.
Faith is not a human projection of religious feeling. It rests on God’s revelation and on eyewitness testimony to what God actually did in Christ.
Have someone read the passage aloud.
Paul warns the Colossians to walk in Christ, rooted and built up in Him, and then cautions: beware lest any man spoil you, that is, take you captive, through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men and the basic principles of the world, and not after Christ. He adds that in Christ dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.
This is a precise description of the danger of liberal theology. It reshaped Christianity according to the philosophy and assumptions of its age rather than according to Christ. The intention was often to make the faith credible to modern people. The result was a faith captive to the spirit of the times.
Engaging the questions of the age is not the same as surrendering to its assumptions. The faith is to be measured by Christ and His Word, not reshaped by the philosophy of the moment.
Have someone read the passage aloud.
Paul writes that the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved it is the power of God. God chose to save through what the world considers foolish preaching. The world by its wisdom did not come to know God. We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to some and foolishness to others, but to those who are called, the power of God and the wisdom of God.
Liberal theology tried hard to make Christianity respectable to the wisdom of the age. Paul says the cross will always be foolishness to that wisdom, and that this is exactly where the power of God is found. A Christianity remade to satisfy the wisdom of men will eventually lose the cross that is the power of God.
The cross will always offend the wisdom of the age. A theology built to satisfy that wisdom will, sooner or later, surrender the very cross that is the power of God.
Liberal theology rarely announced that it was rejecting Christianity. It usually presented itself as saving Christianity by updating it. But measured against Scripture, it changed the faith at its foundations. The table below contrasts the two on the questions that matter most.
| Question | Biblical Christianity | Liberal Theology |
|---|---|---|
| Final authority | Scripture as the God-breathed Word of God. | Human experience, reason, and the moral sense of the age. |
| View of the Bible | God’s revelation, true and authoritative. | A human record of religious experience, open to revision. |
| Main problem | Sin against a holy God. | Ignorance, immaturity, and unjust social conditions. |
| Jesus Christ | God incarnate, crucified and risen for sinners. | A supreme moral teacher and example of God-consciousness. |
| Salvation | Forgiveness and reconciliation through Christ. | Moral improvement and the progress of society. |
| Goal of the Christian life | Know God, glorify Him, and make disciples. | Build the kingdom of God as a moral society on earth. |
| The cross | The power of God for salvation. | An example of love, or a difficulty to be explained. |
Liberal theologians often wrestled seriously with real intellectual challenges rather than ignoring them.
Some rightly stressed truths the church had neglected, such as love of neighbor and the ethical demands of faith.
The reality of religious experience is not the problem. The problem is making experience the foundation and judge of the faith.
We must reject the central move of liberal theology: relocating final authority from the Word of God to human experience, reason, and the spirit of the age. With that move came a chain of redefinitions. Sin was reduced from rebellion against God to ignorance and bad conditions. Salvation was reduced from reconciliation with God to moral and social improvement. Christ was reduced from the crucified and risen Savior to a moral teacher and example. And the mission of the church began its slide from proclaiming the Gospel to reforming society.
Once Scripture is no longer the final authority, there is no fixed point to return to. Each generation is free to remake Christianity in its own image. That is the road that led to the Social Gospel, which we will set directly beside Biblical Christianity in Session 5.
Before Session 5, read:
Write a short response to this question: Why is the authority of Scripture the foundation that protects every other Christian truth?
Tonight we went underneath the Social Gospel to the theology that prepared the way for it.
Schleiermacher relocated the foundation of religion to inner experience. Ritschl reframed Christianity around ethics and a kingdom built on earth. Rauschenbusch applied these currents to society in the Social Gospel.
Underneath every redefinition was a single move: Scripture was no longer treated as the final authority. When that anchor is lifted, the church drifts with the current of the age. The remedy is to return to the Word of God, breathed out by Him, and to Christ crucified and risen, who is the power and the wisdom of God.
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