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Liberal TheologyLiberal theology is a branch of religious thinking which emerged in the late 18th and early 19th century, in the wake of The Enlightenment. Like political Liberalism that was emerging at the same time, Liberal theology stresses the value and importance of the individual. Liberal theology became dominant in the mainline churches in the 20th century, though that dominance was waning by the early 21st century. The tenets of Liberal theology - It claims that a religion is a community of individuals united by common intuitions and experiences, and therefore the value of the Church is in providing a supportive framework in which new conceptions of God can be explored, not in issuing decrees, upholding rigid dogmas or in exercising power over the religious community.
- It maintains that, while God remains immutable, theists relationship with, and understanding of God change through history, and therefore that no religious truths are necessarily fixed, as each person's experience can reveal a novel aspect of God.
Liberal theology and religious language Liberal theologians view religious language (i.e. descriptions of God, or of religious experience) as inevitably limited. Our language belongs to the world of phenomena, whereas religious experiences exist in the realm of noumena, so no matter how hard we try, our language can never describe God factually, but only in metaphors and analogies, symbols and myths etc. These myths, analogies etc. are important in forming religious communities and traditions, and can be a useful way of expressing a particular thought or feeling about God, but we cannot hope for them to sum up God's nature (God is non-reducible, non-naturalisable, and essentially ineffable). One of the original Liberal theologians, Friedrich Schleiermacher argued that theology's place was to describe internal feelings, rather than external truths or facts. Liberal hermeneutics The interpretation of the Bible (hermeneutics) within liberal theology is non-propositional. This means that liberal theologians do not take the Bible as an inventory of factual statements such as 'God divided the light from the darkness', but rather interpret the Bible as a document of the human authors' beliefs and feelings about God at the time of its writing, within a historical and cultural context. Therefore, religious models and concepts must be updated to reflect the class, gender, social and political etc. context from which they emerge, so that they will appear relevant and interesting. Liberal theologians would not make the claim that any particular apostle's account of their religious experiences could be any more true, or more relevant to an individual than the experience of the individual themselves. N.B. - Liberal theology has also been the theistic group most prominent in Biblical criticism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Prominent Liberal theologians - Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher is often called the "father of liberal theology". He claimed that religious experience was introspective, and that the truest understanding of God consisted of 'a sense of absolute dependence'.
- William Ellery Channing was a pioneering liberal theologian in the USA, who criticised the doctrine of the Trinity and the strength of scriptural authority, in favour of more rationalistic and historicital beliefs.
- Adolf von Harnack was a German liberal theologian who sought to return Christianity's focus to the teachings of Jesus, away from complex structures of thought about Jesus and faith.
- Paul Tillich synthesized Protestant Christian theology with existentialist philosophy.
See also
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