Christianity in Crisis: Protestant Theology from Schleiermacher to Post-Liberalism

Catalog description

This class is the second of a two part sequence that traces the rise of Protestant Liberalism in the late 18th and 19th c. and the responses of Neo-Orthodoxy and Post-Liberalism in the 20th century. This second course has two parts. The first part traces the rise of Protestant Liberalism in the 19th c. as extensions of Kant for whom religion after the end of metaphysics was chiefly the foundation for ethics, Hegel for whom religion should be understood within the dialectical movements of Geist in history, and Schleiermacher for whom the foundation of religion was the emotional experience of God-consciousness. Yet Hegel's concern for history led to the historical arguments in defense of Christianity (Baur and Schweitzer's Quest for the Historical Jesus, and von Harnack) but also critiques of idealism and religion in the writings of Marx, Feuerbach, and then Nietzsche. The second part, from which the title of the course gets its name, examines the reaction of 20th century theologians (Tillich, Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, and Barth) to what they took to be crisis for Christianity created by the failure of Liberalism, with its confidence in human progress, to speak to the upheaval of the 20th century. The class then culminates in rise of the Yale School (Frei, Lindbeck, and Childs) as heirs of the Barthian tradition. Prerequisite: CURHST 751