CHAPTER 3.1
FROM ACCOMMODATION TO THE
SOCIAL GOSPEL: A HISTORICAL SKETCH
FROM ACCOMMODATION TO THE
SOCIAL GOSPEL: A HISTORICAL SKETCH
Before looking specifically at the Soteriology of Brian McLaren, it is important to set things in its context. The Emerging Church, pioneered by McLaren, and the challenges it presents is not new. Though reacting to modernism and its failures, McLaren and the Emerging Church is repeating the same mistakes of those it is reacting against. Like Emergents, Protestant Liberalism’s goal was to be relevant in a culture that labeled the church outdated. As a result, modern Liberals adapted the gospel to the culture and, as a result, surrendered theological clarity. In the end, Protestant Liberalism became nothing more than a social gospel movement.
Modernism
Rise of Cultural Accommodation
During the age of modernism, a constant battle between Conservative and Liberal Protestants was waged. The debate was not rooted in issues like Christology or inspiration but over accommodating to a culture dominated by science and the scientific method.[1] During modernity, everything was being investigated and doubted including Scripture and Christianity.
In this setting, many Christians began to wonder whether or not the church should adapt to these changes in order to remain relevant and reach the culture. As a result, many began to redefine the gospel in an age that was adamant about defining virtually everything. Protestant Liberalism was rooted in this attempt to update the faith in order to be relevant again. Supernaturalism, creationism, and Sola Scriptura were being questioned, and in an attempt to reach the culture, liberals reshaped Christian theology by placing emphasis on experience, denying a literal interpretation of Scripture.
Henrikus Berkhof makes the same argument in his historical survey of Protestant Liberalism. To Berkhof, what binds liberalism during modernity is its “attempt to bring about a reconciliation between the gospel and the spirit of modernity,” which negatively resulted in its “deviation, to a greater or lesser degree, from the classic or traditional teachings of the church.”[2] He argues that the pioneer Protestant Liberal was Immanuel Kant whose “deepest desire to save God for an enlightened culture and thus to save the Enlightenment itself.”[3]
After Kant came Friedrich Schleiermacher, who radically redefined Christianity. The door left cracked by Kant was swung open by Schleiermacher who found himself surrounded by friends and a culture that was increasingly abandoning the faith. As a Christian, Schleiermacher, felt that the gospel had become old and outdated, and so, in 1799 wrote On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers in hopes of making the faith relevant again. Berkhof writes:
[Schleiermacher’s] friends must have viewed [his] ecclesiastical office as unauthentic, a concession to the demands of society. And Schleiermacher must have had the feeling that he could not share with his friends that which was most essential and dearest to him. Tension between membership in the group and estrangement from the group must then have become too much for him. Prompted by this inner conflict, he produced the Speeches in just a few months.[4]
Schleiermacher’s new theology emphasized experience over revealed truth and as a result, the gospel, along with every other Christian doctrine, was redefined and rewritten. In relevance, Schleiermacher presented his friends with a new kind of Christianity radically different from its historical roots.
Though only a few of his friends accepted his theology, he did not completely fail. He inspired an entire generation of Protestant Liberals who used his new theology as a catalyst to deny orthodoxy. His greatest legacy was not liberalism, but that the gospel needed to be updated if Christianity wanted to survive the storm of modernism.
Authors Grenz and Franke argue:
Following the footsteps of Schleiermacher, liberals were committed to the task of reconstructing Christian belief in the light of modern knowledge. They believed that theology dared not ignore the new scientific and philosophical understandings that had arisen in Western society. The survival of Christianity, they believed, depended on it’s ability to adapt to the new thinking . . . In keeping with this concern, liberal thinkers sought to give place to culture in their theological reflections – so much so that it is now fashionable to fault them for linking theology too closely to the culture of the day.[5]
This “reconstruction” primarily played out through reason and science. In science, the theory of evolution presented a number of challenges to the church. On the surface, the theory seems to challenge the very existence of God. But beginning with Schleiermacher, Protestant Liberalism sought to marry religion and science. Religion, they argued, is rooted in experience while science is rooted in fact. The experience of religion was primarily played out with the problem of moral evil, and a solution could be found in religion rather than in a scientific theory. Therefore religion’s primary role was in social-political issues.[6]
The Rise of the Social Gospel
Cultural accommodation lead to liberals becoming more geared towards social concerns giving rise to the social gospel, and Walter Rauschenbusch became its most influential voice.[7] Rauschenbusch’s social gospel was rooted in his understanding of the kingdom of God. He believed that the Kingdom of God was primarily a present reality not a future hope. On January 2, 1913, Rauschenbusch laid out clearly what he believed Jesus meant by the kingdom of God:
I knew that [Christ] was on the side of righteousness, and on the side of his poor brother. But how could I combine it with my old Christianity – with my old religion? . . .
And then the idea of the kingdom of God offered itself as the real solution for that problem. Here was a religious conception that embraced it all. Here was something so big that absolutely nothing that interested me was excluded from it . . . Was it a matter of getting justice for the workingman? Is not justice part of the kingdom of God? Does not the kingdom of God simply consist of this – that God’s will shall be done on earth, evan as it is now in heaven? And so, wherever I touched, there was the kingdom of God . . .
And then, besides that, you have the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ. It was his idea. That is what he came and died for. The kingdom of God is a social coneption. It is a conception for this life here of ours, because Jesus says: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done” here. It is something that is here on this earth; that quietly pervades all humanity; that is always working toward the perfect life of God. It cannot be lived out by you alone – you have to live it out with me, and with that brother sitting next to you. We together have to work it out. It is a matter of community life. The perfect community of men - that would be the kingdom of God! With God above them; with their brother next to them - clasping hands in fraternity, doing the work of justice - that is the kingdom of God![8]
This “real solution” heavily influenced Rauschenbusch’s theology. Salvation and the gospel was rooted in the present reality of the kingdom of God making the gospel “a social conception.” The gospel of the kingdom, according to the social gospel, was to be illustrated by serving one another. The kingdom of God is present, not eschatological. Because of cultural accommodation, the gospel became a social movement that preached a gospel that was less offensive than its fundamentalist counterpart.
But was Protestant Liberalism, from cultural accommodation to the social gospel, successful? Berkhoff argues that even though it sought to “gain a hearing among the cultured,” it ultimately failed. According to Berkhof, they were not taken seriously because they were always suspect of trying to be in solidarity with the times accused of trying to “save a lost cause.”[9]
In the 1920's J. Gresham Machen published his classic work, Christianity & Liberalism, arguing that Protestant Liberalism was not a new form of Christianity, but it was rather a new religion.[10] Machen connected liberalism to cultural accommodation which asked “whether first-century religion [could] ever stand in company with twentieth-century science.”:[11]
It is this problem which modern liberalism attempts to solve. Admitting that scientific objections may arise against the particularities of the Christian religion . . . the liberal theological seeks to rescue certain of the general principles of religion, of which these particularities are thought to be mere temporary symbols, and these general principles he regards as constituting “the essence of Christianity.[12]
Though Berkhof argues that Protestant Liberalism failed because it was suspect of its motives, Machen argued that it failed because once it allowed culture to reform the faith, culture completely reshaped it:
For after the apologist has abandoned his outer defenses to the enemy and withdrawn into some inner citadel, he will probably discover that the enemy pursues him even there. Modern materialism . . . is not content with occupying the lower quarters of the Christian city, but pushes its way into all the higher reaches of life; it is just as much opposed to the philosophical idealism of the liberal preacher as to the Biblical doctrines that the liberal preacher has abandoned in the interests of peace. Mere concessiveness, therefore, will never succeed in avoiding the intellectual conflict. In the intellectual battle of the present day there can be no “peace without victory”; one side or the other must win.[13]
And Machen vowed to win that fight. Rather than cater to modernism, Machen vowed to remain faithful to the gospel of Christ as revealed in Scripture. The clash between Machen and liberalism was rooted in the question of the relation between modern culture and the church. The answer to that question defined each sides’ doctrinal conclusions.
Machen became the leading voice against liberalism, and his legacy and ministry remains applicable today. The same road traveled by Protestant Liberalism in the twentieth century is being repeated in the twentieth-first century by Brian McLaren and the movement he leads, the Emerging Church. Protestant Liberalism became a new religion when it began to accommodate to the culture. By adopting modernity’s skepticism, liberalism became nothing more than a socio-political movement. The Emerging Church, with the same missional assumptions as Protestant Liberalism, has fallen into the same trap. By accommodating to culture, nothing is left of the gospel but a socio-political theology. Orthopraxy triumphs orthodoxy.
[1] “The liberal movement in nineteenth century evangelical Christianity was mainly prompted by the advance of the sciences,” Bernard M. Reardon, Liberal Protestantism (Standford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968), 11.
[2] Hendrikus Berkhof, Two Hundred Years of Theology: Report of a Personal Journey, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: WB Eerdmans, 1989), 131.
[3] Ibid., 1.
[4] Ibid., 39.
[5] Stanley J. Grenz and John R. Franke, Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Louisville: Westminister John Knox Press, 2001), 150.
[6] Berkhof, 200 Years of Theology, 93-94.
[7] Rauschenbusch had been heavily influenced by liberal theologians such as Schleiermacher and quotes them throughout his writings. One example is Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology For the Social Gospel (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1917) ,92.
[8] Walter Rauschenbusch, “The Kingdom of God,” The Social Gospel in America 1870-1920, A Library of Protestant Thought, ed. R. T. Handy (New York: Oxford Press, 1966), 267, as quoted in Berkhof, 200 Years of Theology, 262-263.
[9] Berkhof, 200 Years of Theology, 308-310.
[10] Machen makes the point clear when he says, “modern liberalism not only is a different religion from Christianity but belongs in a totally different class of religions,” in J. Gresham Machen, Christianity & Liberalism, reprint (Grand Rapids: William B. Erdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 7.
[11] Ibid., 4.
[12] Ibid., 6.
[13] Ibid.
Thesis | Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology: From Cultural Accomodation to the Kindgom of God - Chapter 1
Thesis | Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology: From Cultural Accommodation to the Kingdom of God - Chapter 2.1
Thesis| Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology: From Cultural Accommodation to the Kingdom of God - Chapter 2.2
Thesis | Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology: From Cultural Accommodation to the Kingdom of God - Chapter 2.3
For more:
Theology/Reviews - "A New Kind of Christianity" - A 11 part review and critique of McLaren's book
Reviews - McLaren - A Generous Orthodoxy
Reviews - McLaren - A New Kind of Christian
Reviews -McLaren - A Search For What Makes Sense: Finding Faith
Reviews -McLaren - Adventures In Missing The Point
Reviews - McLaren - Church On The Other Side
Reviews -McLaren - Everything Must Change
Reviews -McLaren - Finding Faith
Reviews -McLaren - More Ready Than You Realize
Reviews - McLaren - The Justice Project
Reviews - McLaren - The Secret Message of Jesus
Reviews -McLaren - The Voice of Luke
Theology - Revelation and the Ambiguity of Justification: McLaren Adds to the Confusion
Theology - Does McLaren Reject Penal Substitution?: A Review of the Evidence
Theology - Hamilton: McLaren and Whole Foods Stores
Theology - SBTS and McLaren: A Response to SBTS Panel Discussion
Theology - The Evolving God: McKnight's Critique of McLaren
Theology - The Future of the Emergent Church: McLaren Weighs In
Theology - The Immutability of God: Its Truth and Relevancy - Introduction
Theology - The Postmodern Social Gospel: Brian McLaren Proves My Point
Theology - Where to Begin?: 10 Emergent Must Reads
Theology - Who Isn't One?: Brian McLaren and Social Christians
Theology - A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Narrative Question - Part 1
Theology - A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Authority Question - Part 2
Theology - A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The God Question - Part 3
Theology - A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Jesus Question - Part 4
Theology - A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Gospel Question - Part 5
Theology - A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Church Question - Part 6
Theology - A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Sex Question - Part 7
Theology - A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Future Question - Part 8
Theology - A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Pluralism Question - Part 9
Theology - A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: Where Do We Go From Here - Part 10
Theology - A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: Some Final Thoughts - Part 11
Theology - The Clarity of Ambiguity: The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the Emergent Church - Part 1
Theology - The Clarity of Ambiguity: The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the Emergent Church - Part 2
Theology - The Clarity of Ambiguity: The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the Emergent Church - Part 3
Theology - The Clarity of Ambiguity: The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the Emergent Church - Part 4
Theology - The Clarity of Ambiguity: The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the emergent Church - Part 5
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