I am currently thoroughly engaged in reading the second volume of Gary Dorrien's The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity. The first volume, subtitled Imagining Liberal Religion, covered the Unitarians and Emerson, as well as the emerging liberalism of the evangelical movement best represented by Horace Bushnell and the religious philosophy of Parker Bowne of Boston University. The second volume, covering the first half of the 20th century, covers the various strands of American liberal theology - the Boston Personalists, the Chicago School pragmatists, and the social gospelers influence by Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack - as well as the more radical criticism of the liberals by Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (why he is counted as an American I am not sure; the others are clearly trying to articulate a uniquely American theology, despite the various German influences; Tillich remained until his dying day a thoroughly German theologian).
Reading history is always a good way to humble oneself. It is all well and good to say, "You know, Christianity is bigger than this or that dogma or party line," and quote the differences between, say Aquinas and Bonaventure or Calvin and Luther. To see the various theologies and arguments just within the past one hundred years of American theology - and make no mistake, these are all distinctly American thinkers, looking to contextualize all sorts of sources - is a heartening and humbling experience. While Dorrien's claim, which he is to make more forcefully in the third volume (subtitled Crisis, Irony, and Post-Modernity), that liberalism as it has traditionally been understood is currently a marginal phenomenon in theological and Christian thought, it should be clear that, unlike the trendy radicalism or brain-dead fundamentalism we too often encounter, it has a richness and depth that should feed us should we be willing to drink from this particular stream.
Did I say stream? The three volumes comprise close to 1600 pages of small-print text, with hundreds of pages of end notes and references. This is no stream in which our ankles might get wet should we wade. We could swim, dive deep, and find ourselves cast downstream before we know it were we to enter this "stream". Like the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio, the Colorado, the Rio Grande, the Susquehanna, and other great American rivers, we have here a mighty force that is part of what has made America.
For myself, I am much too influenced by both my own Wesleyan heritage and the neo-orthodox revolt against complacent liberalism to suddenly convert; this does not mean I subscribe to Karl Barth's idea that theological liberalism is devoid of anything meaningful or fulfilling. I think, however, we need to be reminded that we Americans have a far richer heritage, a far more diverse and wonderful, life-giving heritage, than is represented in too much of our discussion on religion in American life. If for no other reason, despite its occasional divergence in to dense theological and philosophical territory, I would highly recommend this entire trilogy to anyone interested in discovering the lost gold mine of American liberal religious thought.
