According to one historian, the “last fifteen years of the nineteenth century saw the theological leadership of American Methodism change hands almost completely.” Orthodoxy and creedalism became passé and even John Wesley became infrequently cited, often more for criticism than instruction.

When did United Methodism become theologically liberal? Many assume only recently, in their own lifetimes, believing the church of their youth was different from today. Others are vaguely aware of the 1920s battles in Presbyterianism and among northern Baptists between modernists and traditionalists, which the later lost, but they are unaware of Methodist history.

The Rise of Theological Liberalism and the Decline of American Methodism by James Heidinger, finally tells the story, dating Methodist liberal ascendancy to early in the 20th century, if not before. Yet Methodism, although the largest Mainline Protestant tradition, did not replicate the high profile battles of other denominations. Its transition away from orthodoxy in its upper reaches occurred mostly quietly, despite numerous public challenges across a century.

According to one historian, the “last fifteen years of the nineteenth century saw the theological leadership of American Methodism change hands almost completely.” Orthodoxy and creedalism became passé and even John Wesley became infrequently cited, often more for criticism than instruction.

Methodism’s last and perhaps only formal heresy trial was in 1904, by which time theological traditionalists had arguably already lost much of the church. Borden Parker Bowne, who had studied in France and Germany, began teaching at Methodism’s Boston University in 1876, eventually heading the graduate school of theology and shaping a generation of Methodist leaders for the 20th century across 34 years of teaching and through his 17 books.

Like other German-trained 19th century revisionist Protestant theologians, Bowne demythologized the Bible, denied the supernatural, reinterpreted Christianity into an ethical system, and proposed God’s Kingdom as a realizable political goal. As the famed philosopher William James observed: “See how the ancient spirit of Methodism evaporates under those wonderfully able rationalistic booklets . . . of a philosopher like Professor Bowne.”

Bowne was cited for denying the Trinity and biblical miracles, contravening Methodism’s ostensibly binding Articles of Religion, for which he was tried before fifteen members of his own New York East Conference, who unanimously acquitted him. Under similar charges, Bowne’s colleague at Boston University, Hinckley G. Mitchell, was censured in 1905 by his Central New York Conference and disapproved by the Board of Bishops. But the 1908 General Conference overturned his censure, by which time he was teaching at a Unitarian Universalist seminary.

In 1910 a writer in the Methodist Review articulated the new heterodox orthodoxy embodied by Mitchell and Bowne:

Creeds have had their day. They are no longer effective. Without doubt, they were well intended. Possibly they have done some good—they certainly have done much harm. The church has been loyal to her creeds, and has spent much good blood and splendid brains in the defense of them. All this was considered the very essence of Christianity. It was child’s play, as we now see it, and in some instances paganism. The revolt against creeds began in the lifetime of many now active in the work. The creeds are retired to the museums and labeled “Obsolete.”

Affirming Methodism’s Articles of Religion was no longer required for membership in 1916, and the Apostles Creed was dropped in 1932. But from the start, there were challenges to ascending Methodist liberalism, however ineffectual politically. A 1904 book called Methodist Theology vs. Methodist Theologians summarized the problem:

Sin is being treated as “un-evolved animalism.” Repentance is a mere change of one’s thinking. Regeneration is displaced by “evolution.” The witness of the Spirit is called “misguided emotion,” inspired by a legal and not a moral idea. . . . Everything distinctively Methodistic is being questioned and the system of theology which cleared the moral sky of thousands of Christians in other folds, is being declared not self-consistent by its own teachers. A spiritual dearth has come over us which can not be removed by liberal giving, nor explained away by the theory that this is a “transitional age,” or that we are “cleaning up the Church records,” or that the “trend of the times is towards ethics and sociology.”

Echoing this critique of Methodist liberalism was John Alfred Faulkner, who began teaching at Methodism’s School of Theology at Drew University in 1897. He wrote Modernism and the Christian Faith in 1921, which warned that German philosopher Albrecht Ritschl for many years had been replacing the influence of Methodism’s own founder:

Now, as a thorough carrying out of Ritschl’s principles would emasculate evangelical Christianity, especially the Methodist branch of it, it is not without reason that I have asked the question, Shall we leave Wesley for Ritschl?

Faulkner further complained:

In the Methodist sense there is no such thing as salvation in Ritschl; neither the word nor thing hardly occurs in his writings. Forgiveness occurs, and it means bringing home to a man the fact that God loves him, so that unburdened of any feeling of guilt he may mount up to an independent position in the kingdom of God.

New Jersey pastor Harold Paul Sloan, a Drew graduate, agreed with Faulkner, and organized clergy across Methodism to protest liberalism, especially in the Course of Study that trained most pastors before seminary was required. He logically deduced that if a “majority of the preachers of Methodism are taught contrary to the established standards of their church and Historic Christianity . . . it will be a matter but of a few years before the Church’s standards will be completely undermined.”

In 1925 Sloan founded the Methodist League for Faith and Life to “meet this Modernist current and drive which is threatening Methodism as the Unitarian drive did Congregationalism a hundred years ago.” At the 1928 General Conference he presented a petition with 10,000 signatures imploring a church investigation, but his pleas were drowned out by disapproving delegates. There was never to be a great Methodist legislative debate over modernism versus orthodoxy.

Methodist theologian Edwin Lewis, also of Drew, and formerly liberal, returned to orthodoxy and in the 1930s critiqued firmly ensconced modernism, through which the “Bible became nothing but ‘a great literature’; Jesus was looked upon as ‘the choicest blossom on the human stock’; man carried within himself the power of his own emancipation, and a properly controlled heredity, environment, and education would guarantee a perfect result.”

In his Christian Manifesto of 1934, Lewis observed:

For certainly as respects the repudiation of the supernatural, the denial of such great truths as revelation, incarnation, atonement, regeneration, and the like and the rejection of the right of Jesus Christ to universal homage, it is no longer possible to say that the church stands on this side and the world on that.

A leader of Methodist publishing responded to Lewis: “If I had to admit that man’s nature was essentially sinful, I could certainly not accept any redemption that might be offered.” And: “I could not bring myself to trust a Creator who had made me essentially wicked and then found it necessary to redeem me from that wickedness before he could count me worthy of his grace.“

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