The foundation of social gospel redefinitions of Christianity was the modern historical-critical method of biblical study, which argued that the virgin birth, miracles, and the resurrection were myths used by the biblical writers to express how Jesus had influenced their lives. Critical scholars in the nineteenth century had challenged the reliability of the Gospel accounts, declaring that Jesus was an ordinary human being who became the subject of legend. Theological liberals in Europe and the United States embraced these critical presuppositions because they believed Christianity was actually about human experience and morality, not outdated dogmas incompatible with modern science.
In 1900, the German church historian Adolph von Harnack gave a series of lectures that were later published as What Is Christianity? (1901). He argued that the kernel of the gospel is the commandment to love and the establishment of a just social order based on the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man. Harnack was following the lead of the German theologian Albrecht Ritschl, who had argued that ethics are the core of Christianity and called for a just and moral society that emulates Christ’s example and thus realizes the “kingdom of God.” This “social gospel” understanding of Christianity was advocated in the United States by the Baptist minister Walter Rauschenbusch, who critiqued laissez-faire capitalism as the culprit of the growing gap between rich and poor in America.
The foundation of social gospel redefinitions of Christianity was the modern historical-critical method of biblical study, which argued that the virgin birth, miracles, and the resurrection were myths used by the biblical writers to express how Jesus had influenced their lives. Critical scholars in the nineteenth century had challenged the reliability of the Gospel accounts, declaring that Jesus was an ordinary human being who became the subject of legend. Theological liberals in Europe and the United States embraced these critical presuppositions because they believed Christianity was actually about human experience and morality, not outdated dogmas incompatible with modern science.
This questioning of historic Christianity made its way into many American universities and seminaries, leading to tensions between liberals and conservatives in several Protestant denominations. The term used by conservatives to describe this drift from traditional orthodoxy was modernism. The fundamentalist movement was born in reaction to inroads of liberal theology into American Protestant denominations. A burgeoning alliance of Protestant evangelicals across denominational lines opposed the increasing liberal threat with the publication of a series of books known as The Fundamentals (1910–15). The essays espoused traditional Protestantism by defending a high view of Scripture and offering an apologetic for evangelical doctrine and practice.
World War I
While theologians were defending the faith, evangelist Billy Sunday sought to reach the masses, preaching to more people than any American preacher before Billy Graham. After his conversion, Sunday left his career as a Major League Baseball player in 1896 to become an itinerant evangelist. He led preaching campaigns in more than two hundred major U.S. cities. Known for his unconventional, energetic preaching style, Sunday proclaimed the gospel to several million people. He became very involved in social issues, supporting Prohibition and women’s rights and helping raise millions of dollars to support the American military in World War I.
Woodrow Wilson, son of a Presbyterian minister from Georgia, became the president of Princeton University, entered politics, and was elected the twenty-eighth president of the United States in 1912. His two terms were consumed with the devastations of World War I (1914–18), which redrew the world map and claimed the lives of nine million soldiers and seven million civilians.
A prominent assault on traditional Christianity occurred in the Scopes Trial of 1925. Charles Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species theorized, in a rejection of the Genesis account of special creation, that life on earth was the product of natural selection over millions of years. William Jennings Bryan, who had served as secretary of state in the Wilson administration, participated in the prosecution during the trial. Bryan had attacked evolution by arguing that the theory undermined morality, which must be based on religious commitments. Teaching evolution was illegal in Tennessee public schools, and John Scopes, a biology teacher in Dayton, was tried for violating the statute. He was defended by Clarence Darrow, who put Bryan on the stand, asking him scientific questions that Bryan could not answer. While state law was upheld, Bryan and the “fundamentalist” cause suffered harsh ridicule in the press and were thus dealt a severe blow. Bryan died just five days after the trial concluded.
In the wake of World War I, a new theological movement emerged in Germany known as Neoorthodoxy. It is identified with the work of Karl Barth (1886–1968), Emil Brunner (1889–1966), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1904–45), and Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971). Barth’s commentary on Romans (1919) marked a break with culture-affirming German liberalism and charged old liberals with subverting the gospel by trying to make it respectable. In the 1930s, he became part of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church in Germany and helped write the Barmen Declaration, a protest against the Nazi German church. Barth emphasized human sinfulness and God’s grace in Jesus Christ, but his understanding of election implied universalism—Christ is the only elect One, and all will be saved in Him. Barth accepted the results of higher criticism—a technique that sought to identify the sources behind the biblical texts and that rejected the traditional understanding of biblical authorship—and accentuated God’s subjective revelation to individuals through Scripture rather than His objective revelation in Scripture as the written Word of God. His scathing attack on liberalism was welcomed, but many conservatives were skeptical, considering Barth’s theology a new version of modernism. Barthianism permeated mainline seminaries throughout the twentieth century.
Pentecostalism
Christian commitment to taking seriously the supernatural in Scripture received a fresh burst of support in the emergence of the Pentecostal movement. In 1906, a major revival began on Asuza Street in Los Angeles under Holiness preacher William J. Seymour, a son of former slaves. While the revival would become associated with the controversial practice of speaking in tongues, the message of forgiveness through the cross was central. Under Seymour’s leadership, hundreds were converted as Hispanics, Asians, blacks, and whites worshiped together daily at an old warehouse. As one eyewitness declared, “The ‘color line’ was washed away in the blood.” As a result of the Asuza Street Revival, numerous new denominations were established, including the Church of God in Christ (1907), the Assemblies of God (1914), and famed evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson’s International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (1927).
Pentecostalism advanced rapidly, spreading into Latin America, Africa, and Asia and becoming the fastest-growing segment of the global church in the twentieth century. The charismatic renewal movement of the 1960s and ’70s saw some Pentecostal theology and practice cross over into mainline and Roman Catholic churches, producing heightened awareness of the work of the Holy Spirit among believers.
The Pentecostal and charismatic movements produced division within Protestantism as some advocates urged believers to seek the “baptism of the Spirit,” a second work of grace in the believer’s life that is accompanied by speaking in tongues. Other charismatics did not push the experience of tongues but viewed tongues as one spiritual gift among many. Some radical Pentecostal leaders taught a “health and wealth” version of the faith, promising earthly blessing to those with sufficient faith. Many Christians have condemned this “health and wealth” gospel as unbiblical teaching.
In the early part of the twentieth century, a heretical oneness (Jesus Only) Pentecostalism separated from the Trinitarians by claiming that God is one person, Jesus Christ, and that baptism must be “in the name of Jesus.” Despite aberrant versions of Pentecostalism and some high-profile extremists, many evangelicals have acknowledged the conversions and zeal for missionary service found in the movement. Nevertheless, Protestants from cessationist traditions remain skeptical about the biblical foundations of the Pentecostal and charismatic movements.
Roman Catholic Developments
In 1864, Pope Pius IX issued the Syllabus of Errors, which decried separation of church and state, religious tolerance, secular education, Marxism, and democratic government. Soon thereafter, the First Vatican Council (1869–70) dogmatically declared the doctrine of papal infallibility. Critical views of the Bible began to infect Roman Catholic scholars in late-nineteenth-century Europe, moving Pope Pius X to condemn modernism by papal decree in 1907, excommunicating modernists and requiring an anti-modernist oath of clerics. To counter modernist errors, the renewed study of Thomism (the doctrines of Thomas Aquinas) was encouraged among Roman Catholics.
The Roman Catholic Church in the early twentieth century stood firmly against both doctrinal innovation and non-Roman Catholics. However, these attitudes dramatically changed after the Second Vatican Council, which was convened in 1962 by Pope John XXIII and carried on by Pope Paul VI through 1965. Vatican II was an attempt to engage with the issues of the modern world and to bring the church out of its isolation. It focused on church renewal and Christian unity.
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