History of the Church II:Week 15

Modern Challenges to the Church Three challenges to the church emerged in the late 19th century: liberalism, evolution and high criticism.

Liberalism was the school of thought which attempted to mix orthodoxy with modern thought.

It was a mix of science, emotion and theology to rationalize how man had progressed in the modern age.

They were divided into two camps: evangelical liberals and modernistic liberals .

Modern Challenges to the Church Modernistic liberals felt like religion had to pass the test of modern science before modern men would accept it.

Men should keep their minds open to all sources of truth even if it contradicts historical faith.

In other words, truth could come from new discoveries in science for example.

If those examples contradicted with known Biblical truth then man must will willing to change his opinion on what is truth.

Modern Challenges to the Church Evangelical liberals believed that experience could in itself be truth.

What we experience could be truth or more truth than the absolute truth of the Bible.

Distinctions between different faiths were narrowed.

“god” could be spiritual experience that could come through nature.

God could be in all and through all more like a pantheistic view.

Since evolution was gaining popularity, God could have used evolution to create the world.

Modern Challenges to the Church In 1859, arguably the second most influential book in human history was finished.

Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species shook the Church to its very core.

The Church had no intellectual giants like Augustine, Luther and Calvin to counter Darwin’s theory.

Since formal religion had no argument to counter Darwin from either the Protestant or Catholic churches, liberal views gained even more traction.

This led many Protestant denominations to split into conservative and liberal divisions that are still around today.

Modern Challenges to the Church The last challenge to the Church came in the form of higher criticism which originated in Germany.

What is meant by criticism is essentially a way to find the exact meaning of the Bible through rational or scientific methods.

There were two forms of criticism: high and low.

Lower dealt with what text was the most reliable and had the least amount of errors.

Higher dealt with the text in its background.

Modern Challenges to the Church From these deductions, scholars challenged all kinds of assumptions about the Bible.

For example, Moses did not write the first five books of the Bible and there were at least two different versions of the creation story.

Jesus was not God. Miracles can’t happen. Jesus couldn’t been born of a virgin. Jesus was not resurrected.

None of these can be proven by science.

These critics basically said Christianity is no different than any other belief.

Modern Challenges to the Church The Church did not respond to any of these very well.

Individual books challenged these theories at different times but the perception was defeat.

It looked like the Church was not the answer at the beginning of the 20th century.