The Dreams and Nightmares of Christian Liberalism

1. The Dreams and Nightmares of Christian Liberalism Alec Ryrie

2. The life of cultivated persons is removed from everything that would in the least way resemble religion. … You have succeeded in making your earthly lives so rich and many-sided that you no longer need the eternal.

3. Fear of an eternal being and reliance on another world seem to you to be the hinges of all religion and that is, on principle, contrary to you. … Religion everywhere can be nothing other than an empty and false delusion. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion (1799)

4. Churches are ‘human inventions set up to terrify or enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit’; the Bible, ‘a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales’. Tom Paine, The Age of Reason (1794)

5. We are living in a time of religious ferment. What shall we do? ... Attempt to stop the fermentation? Impossible! … Endeavour to maintain faith by expressing it in terms which are more intelligible and credible. Lyman Abbott, The Evolution of Christianity (1892)

6. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834)

7. Against ‘systems of theology … where everything amounts to cold argumentation and nothing can be treated except in the tone of an ordinary didactic controversy’ ... Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion (1799)

8. You must seek these heavenly sparks that arise when a holy soul is stirred by the universe, and you must overhear them in that incomprehensible moment when they are formed. ... Become conscious of the call of your innermost nature, I beseech you, and follow it. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion (1799)

9. A person ... in whose interior his own revelations do not arise when his soul longs to drink in the beauty of the world and be permeated in its spirit … has no religion. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion (1799)

11. David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu (1835): the only monograph on Biblical studies ever to provoke a popular revolution

12. Not, ‘whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, and was revealed by God’; but ‘The Bible contains the religion revealed by God’. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Letters on the Old and New Testaments’ (1820), published posthumously as Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840)

13. Always distrust any one who rigidly follows the letter of God’s word, for thus you will be plunged into a world of discord, and the Bible will lie at your feet a harp, broken, utterly without music for the sad or happy hours of life. Chicago Presbyterian minister David Swing, 1874

14. Prof. John Eadie, The Life of Our Blessed Lord & Saviour Jesus Christ (1863)

15. If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses. John Ruskin, 1851

16. Charles Lyell (1797-1875): the aesthetics of geological gradualism

17. Physical science is the devil’s spade, with which he loosens the roots of the trees prepared for burning. Do not study matter for its own sake, but as the countenance of God. … Read geology – and you will rise up awe-struck and cling to God. Charles Kingsley, 1842

19. Karl Vogt (1817-95): ‘Thoughts come out of the brain as gall from the liver, or urine from the kidneys.’

20. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903): from ‘natural selection’ to ‘the survival of the fittest’

21. Evolution is Advolution; better, it is Revelation ... the progressive realisation of the Ideal, the Ascent of Love. Henry Drummond, TheAscent of Man (1894)

25. There is only one power that can do it … the German, Martin Luther, the man of the gospel, who found courage through the power of the gospel and the sword of the spirit to assault the whole world and its money politics. Bruno Doehring, sermon, 1916

26. The world is passing out of one thing into another; much that we set high is being lowered, much that we placed low is being lifted up. Randall Davidson, archbishop of Canterbury, sermon, 1914

27. Perhaps God has allowed us to pull down the temple of modern civilization over our heads in order that the survivors may be cured of the modern habit of regarding man as a calculating machine. Percy Dearmer, 1915

29. We are on the side of Christianity against anti-Christ. We are on the side of the New Testament which respects the weak, and honours treaties, and dies for its friends, and looks upon war as a regrettable necessity, and we are against the spirit that war is a good thing in itself, that the weak must go to the wall, and that might is right. Arthur Winnington-Ingram, bishop of London, sermon, 1915

30. Progressive theology has substituted ‘for the conception of salvation as the rescue of the elect from a lost world, the conception of the transformation of the world itself into a human Brotherhood … the inspiration of the great world-wide democratic movement’ Lyman Abbot, 1915

31. No visible return of Christ to the earth is to be expected. … If our Lord will but complete the spiritual coming that he has begun, there will be no need of a visible advent to make perfect his glory on the earth. William Newton Clarke, An Outline of Christian Theology (1898)

33. There are conditions under which the mere stopping of warfare may bring a curse instead of a blessing. … Peace is the triumph of righteousness and not the mere sheathing of the sword. Open letter to President Wilson, 1916

35. We heard a minister state with vehemence … that the great question today is ‘Christ or Prussianism’. His idea was that we should shoot Christianity into the Germans with machine guns and cannons. Just how much Christianity he could cram into a 10 or 12 inch cannon he did not say. Letter to an Ohio Congressman, 1917

36. The Dreams and Nightmares of Christian Liberalism Alec Ryrie