They are the subject of a lecture I give every spring in my church
history classes: a brief overview of German theologians from the 19th
and early-20th centuries.
It’s kind of a depressing lecture to deliver — the sad tale of
skepticism intersecting with scholarship; a dismal depiction of the
disaster unleashed by unrestrained doubt and disbelief.
Despite standing in the shadow of the Reformation, many German
Protestant theologians abandoned the historic truth claims of biblical
Christianity due to the mounting popularity of Enlightenment
rationalism. In so doing, they shipwrecked their own souls while
simultaneously devastating the faith of millions of others.
Higher critics, such as Johann Eichhorn and David Strauss, denied
the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible. Moses didn’t write the
Pentateuch, they claimed; nor did Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John write the
four gospels. To make matters worse, they suggested that the Jesus of
the Bible is not the same as the real Jesus of history. In their “quest
to find the historical Jesus,” the critics created a “Jesus” of their
own imaginations — essentially reducing him to a nice guy who couldn’t
do any miracles, never claimed to be God, and was largely misunderstood
by first-century Judaism.
Liberal theologians, from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Albrecht
Ritschl, similarly disavowed the truth claims of the Bible. They looked
instead for a new foundation on which to base their contrived version of
Christianity. Some found it in the personal experience of romanticism;
others in the moral ethics of the social gospel. But by denying core
Christian doctrines (like the substitutionary death of Christ and His
bodily resurrection), liberalism denied the very essence of the gospel
message (cf. 1 Cor. 15:3-4). Continue at Nathan Busenitz
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