After Cloven Tongues of Fire Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History Review

David Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Burn: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History.Princeton, Princeton University Press 2013, ix + 248pp. $24.99/£17.99

The trajectory of mainline American faith has suffered significantly since their peak in the 1950s. Decreases in number of communicants and dwindling funds accept forced budget cuts and staff layoffs in denominational headquarters. Every bit Due east. J. Dionne states on the dust jacket of David Hollinger'south Subsequently Cloven Tongues of Burn: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History, "Liberal Protestantism is non appreciated plenty, not studied plenty and keeps getting written off as a movement destined to fade away."

After reading Hollinger's volume, withal, i might well respond that denominational decline is hardly the whole story. As one of the well-nigh articulate advocates of liberal faith in America, David Hollinger, Professor of History at Cal Berkeley, has washed his role over the past several decades to fill whatever void exists in the scholarship of liberal religion. While conceding liberal denominational reject, Hollinger'south collection of essays explores liberalism's unheralded success in the public square. After Cloven Tongues of Fire is a bold celebration of Protestant liberalism's pervasive influence upwardly to the present day.

Hollinger has cobbled together 9 previously published manufactures from his extensive scholarship together with a preface, introductory notes to each article and an epilogue to create a relatively coherent picture of Protestant liberalism's historic roots, major advocates and current status.

His underlying premise is familiar to those who study church history. Ever since the Enlightenment, diverse figures take contended that because the worldviews of biblical religion became outmoded, they are unacceptable to modern sensibilities.  If Christianity is to survive, it must adapt itself to modernistic worldviews. Hence Hollinger's first affiliate "The Adaptation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment: An Sometime Drama Nonetheless Being Enacted." Scientific developments which include the Darwinian epitome in natural history and avant-garde critical studies of the Bible caused Protestant intellectuals to reconstrue their inherited faith to "generate liberalized versions of Christianity."

Hollinger rests his case on the preposition "After" in his book's championship. Every bit illustrated by successive movements away from traditional orthodoxy there must always be an "afterwards." He chooses the earliest manifestation of the Christian Church - the account of Pentecost - to justify the liberal, pragmatic vision. There must exist an aftermath to "ecstatic moments" [read supernatural religion] wherein people testify "with cloven tongues of burn down." Since Christianity's "mythic" account of its origin no longer conforms to post-Enlightenment moderns, its supernatural foundation has long since been largely jettisoned and replaced with God'due south piece of work in the world through ordinary means.

Hollinger poses two questions to launch his this-worldly, pragmatic version of Christianity: "What comes next? What does i do [my emphasis] in the world, in the prosaic routines of daily life, to act on this vision of human being community inspired by the Jesus of Nazareth?" Some Protestants [read evangelicals who would retain Christianity's supernaturalism] might "remain focused vertically ... on the private believer's relation to the Divine." But "liberalizing Protestants" focused instead on a "horizontal worldliness" [read Immanuel Kant'southward moralism and Schleiermacher's experiential substitution for biblical doctrines of atonement and original sin].

Because liberals notice orthodox Christianity unsatisfactory on many levels, the essence of Christianity must exist found inside man experience.  Hollinger contends, "liberalizing Protestants, in their horizontal worldliness ... became great organizers, institution builders, and social reformers, searching for ways to enact what they understood to be Christian ideals within worldly affiliations and through their instrumentality." He assumes that whatsoever thinking person who confronts the claims of mod science and social science volition acknowledge that traditional dogmas no longer satisfy. He asks, "Do the orthodox cling to doctrines that had been pasted onto the essential faith at a particular historical moment, and now mistake these anachronisms for the substance rather than surface of the faith?" Traditional doctrine and piety, therefore, cannot institute the abiding essence of Christianity.

If Kant found the basis in reason and Schleiermacher identified the ground of religion in gefuhl [feeling or intuition], where do contemporary liberals ballast their worldview? The answer lies in the writings of American pragmatists William James, C. S. Peirce and John Dewey. Hollinger's effusive comments on James' The Varieties of Religious Feel and Will to Believe testify to James' reputation as a patron saint of liberals. For Hollinger, "no 1 had a sharper sense than [James] of the departure between charismatic, mystical experiences and the worldly business of deciding what ideas and practices were true and correct."  He allows that William James was "a very special kind of supernaturalist, a 'piecemeal' supernaturalitst ... [who] imagines a patchwork cosmos, with supernatural power here or there - 1 is not sure just where."

Most radically Hollinger admits that James "zig-zags even on the matter of whether he believes in God." James' new science of religious feel should "eliminate doctrines that are now known to be scientifically cool or incongruous." Varieties of Religious Experience "promoted beau-feeling with religious seekers with a Protestant temperament..." Peradventure Hollinger'southward most telling admission is that "James never offered a serious intellectual defense of a unmarried, specific Christian doctrine." In chapter 6, "Damned for God's Celebrity: William James and the Scientific Vindication of Protestant Culture" he declares James "a good candidate for the archetypal mail service-Protestant."

While evangelicals may appear to practice significant cultural ability because of media exposure, the pervasive impact of liberalism is undeniable past the fact that liberals' "antiracist, antisexist, antihomophobic, anti-imperialist, nationalism-suspecting, supernaturalism-resisting program has been accustomed past vast segments of the American public." Hollinger adduces liberals every bit "agents of change" in American society - African Americans who pursued ceremonious rights, "social-scientific intellectuals" who propagated cultural relativism and labor unions who pushed for "egalitarianism" - as prima facie testify of liberalism's agenda beingness fulfilled.

Liberalism's pervasive influence outside the churches is explored further in chapters 3 and iv.  Chapter three traces the influence of Presbyterian layman John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower's Secretarial assistant of Country, on pacifist and realist leaders at the "Delaware Briefing" of March 3-5 in 1942. In chapter 4, "Justification by Verification: The Scientific Challenge to the Moral Authorization of Christianity in America" Hollinger demonstrates that progressive intellectuals were taken past the perception that social scientists practiced "exactly the virtues for which Christianity was then most admired." Small wonder that scientists could be viewed every bit "successors to the clergy as the moral models for modern living." He cites Richard Gregory, editor of Nature, who bluntly admitted that his "grandfather had preached 'the gospel of Christ,' his father the 'gospel of socialism,' and Gregory himself the 'gospel of Science.'"

As for the upshot of liberal religion on education, Hollinger readily acknowledges contributions made by evangelical Christians prior to liberalism's rising. Simply again, one must look "afterwards" their by prominence. Whereas Christianity was previously privileged by American educators, as the outcome of liberals' ascension influence "mainstream academia [now] maintains a sure critical distance from the Christian project." The battle to achieve a secular educational organization is virtually complete. Hollinger's views are captured well by the championship of chapter 9: "Enough Already: Universities Practice Non Need More Christianity." He cites epistemic issues as the primary reason for such a hard line. Since "the boundaries of the epistemic communities that define discussion in the learned globe are no longer coterminous with the Christian community of faith", the current dominance of liberal ideas is across dispute. In affiliate ten, "Religious Ideas: Should They Be Critically Engaged or Given a Laissez passer?", he contends that unless a person is willing to "conduct the business of [democratic] polity within premises that are particular to that polity and not to whatever of the yet more sectarian persuasions that may be present within information technology" one should "stay out of politics."

Liberal organized religion has gained a seat at the table of intellectual ideas because it has acceded to this epistemic principle. If this is true, critics may well ask how has liberalism gained legitimacy as being genuinely "Christian?" Hollinger poses and answers that question but briefly: "Where, subsequently all did we go liberal religion? We got it out of orthodox organized religion. Peculiarly did the great biblical scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth century [sic] provide the cognitive context for a variety of liberalized religious faiths, including the capacity of many Christians to absorb the Darwinian revolution in science." Nowhere does Hollinger seriously engage the celebrated doctrines of Christianity. Liberals, especially those who draw so deeply from the pragmatic image concur with James who felt no attrition to defend a single specific Christian doctrine.

Liberals' minimizing or outright rejection of traditional doctrine mirrors Friedrich Schleiermacher's modus operandi of compromise when as a founder of the Academy of Berlin he had to contend for theology even to exist offered in the academic curriculum. As a quintessentially Enlightenment academy all subjects were to be taught from the indicate of view that knowledge was not something fixed and authoritative but rather in the process of beingness developed. Theology could exist taught within these confines as a critical Wissenschaft [science]. Just what could be demonstrated using rigorous critical methods of Enlightenment thinking and and so situated within the broadest context of other similarly established relationships counted as knowledge. Enlightenment thought thus became the Procrustean bed on which Christian ideas had to be submitted. Equally a result Schleiermacher rejected a historic Fall, the traditional doctrine of original sin and substitutionary atonement. No wonder that by the time pragmatism had emerged doctrines of propositional revelation were rejected as irrelevant. Because they focused on an individualized, privatized and therefore outmoded view of religion, Christianity must exist adapted to come across mounting social bug - racism, women's rights, the plight of the poor, homophobia, economic disparity - call for workable solutions that minister to society's collective needs.

Finally, no account of liberal Protestantism in America would exist complete without reference to Reinhold Niebuhr. Hollinger utilizes his epilogue both to probe Niebuhr's contribution to liberal Protestantism and describe his argument for liberalism to a close. Equally the about acclaimed abet of liberalism in his generation, Niebuhr more than than fulfilled Hollinger's accommodation thesis. In a checkered career Niebuhr embraced then rejected pacifism. He rediscovered and reformulated the doctrine of sin in his Christian realism by maxim that human sinfulness was "inevitable but not necessary."

Hollinger cites Niebuhr'southward critics such as Princeton's Walter Kaufmann who "curtly dismissed him like a failed undergraduate." But it is merely at the point where secular scholars dismissed Niebuhr that Hollinger extols him. Whereas critics dismissed Niebuhr because he embraced the Judeo-Christian worldview, Hollinger contends that Niebuhr emerged equally an exemplar of the mail service-Protestantism that Hollinger wants to champion: "Typically, Niebuhr presented a series of quite general virtues every bit products of Christianity, without explicitly denying the possibility that these virtues might be cultivated and propagated without Christianity."

At that place is a supreme irony in all of this. Niebuhr, the anti-secularist who by advocating republic, mankind's imperfectability and the idea of just war really promoted an agenda that secularists could embrace, in Hollinger's words, "equally well." Niebuhr was clearly a transitional figure. He declined an offer of special professorship at Harvard considering he could not fit in with Harvard's secular section of philosophy or be marginalized past being associated with the campus's Divinity School. Although he lived in decades where Protestantism was withal dominant, that era was running out of intellectual majuscule to argue with an increasingly secular context.

Therefore Niebuhr represents the transition to Christianity'southward next stage, one in which its main focus embodied the ethics shared with secularists that would bulldoze American culture forward. Every bit Hollinger put it, "The importance of being able to label something y'all valued as 'Christian' diminished for multitudes, especially the more educated, and the label once thus devalued, was all the more easily grabbed upwards and its meaning divers by groups very different from those whose leadership of the nation Niebuhr had taken for granted." Hollinger cites the remark by Gary Dorrien that Niebuhr helped to create "the naked public square into which the Christian Right later rushed with the zeal of the quondam abolitionists and social gospelers."

Hollinger's excellent summary volition inappreciably convince readers of reformation21 of the superiority of the liberal version of Christianity. His volume poses another social vision as a substitute for the biblical gospel. His book is absolutely essential reading, even so, for those who desire to keep their fingers on the pulse of liberal organized religion in America - its roots, its advocates, its social calendar and its strategy for keeping liberals' version of the organized religion in the public eye.

Dr. W. Andrew Hoffecker is Emeritus Professor of Church History at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi.

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Source: https://www.reformation21.org/articles/david-hollinger-after-cloven-tongues.php

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