The Spirit of American Liberal Theology: A History by Gary Dorrien (review)

Reviewed by: The Spirit of American Liberal Theology: A History by Gary Dorrien Mark Mattes The Spirit of American Liberal Theology: A History. By Gary Dorrien. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2023. 662 pp. + xiii. This book will satiate anyone curious about how theological method is taught in a doctoral program in systematic theology. Dorrien, a prolific author, accessibly packages abstract philosophical and theological concepts for a wider audience and winsomely interweaves them with the life histories of the various theologians he describes. This book helps readers understand what drives mainline Protestants and liberal Roman Catholics. Dorrien outlines seven versions of Liberal theology: 1, a Pietistic version indebted to End Page 120 Schleiermacher, Henry Ward Beecher, and William Newton Clarke, 2. socioethical theology derived from the social gospel championed by figures such as Walter Rauschenbusch and Martin Luther King Jr., 3. mystical, interfaith Christianity exemplified by Matthew Fox and those who are "spiritual but not religious," 4. Roman Catholic thinkers who expand the horizons of Thomism such as Bernard Lonergan and his student David Tracy, 5. various forms of pantheism, a-theism, or an interreligious syncretism, 6. Process Theologies, and 7. constructive theologies pioneered by Sallie McFague and Gordon Kaufman (486–7). Numerous traits characterize Protestant Liberalism, but the most important is that, in light of Enlightenment critiques of faith, it seeks a third path between confessional orthodoxy and outright skepticism, one that accommodates the modern world as much as possible. With Pietism and Revivalism, it appeals less to Christian doctrines and more to Christian experience as its source. It disdains an appeal to biblical authority as arbitrary, flees from the notion of a wrathful God as offensive, and sidesteps Trinitarian and Chalcedonian Christological metaphysics as out of sync with modern science. The original roots of American liberal Protestantism are to be found among New England Congregationalists who sought to incorporate John Locke's empiricism and his rationalist approach to theology, which tilted in a non-Trinitarian, Arian direction, softened the notion of original sin, made plausible a belief in human progress, discerned a continuity between reason and revelation, and advocated for religious tolerance. In America, the father of Liberalism was Horace Bushnell who sought to affirm the English Enlightenment heritage along with an Evangelical heritage that clung to the divinity of Christ, the authority of Christian experience, personal salvation, and Christian missions (26). While some New Englanders such as William Ellery Channing tilted towards Unitarianism, and others such as Emerson towards an even more radical Transcendentalism, discerning God within the depths of the self, Bushnell's accommodating approach impacted New England faith and its torch was carried on by Henry Ward Beecher. Washington Gladden and later Walter Rauschenbusch, with their "social gospel," which Dorrien heralds as a "third awakening" End Page 121 (131), expanded this trajectory of spirituality. In the mid-twentieth century Martin Luther King Jr would channel this social gospel impressively with a thoroughly non-violent stance (334). However, the question of liberation for liberal Protestantism was not limited to Blacks. Quaker women in the early nineteenth century sought equality for women and this concern was to grow after the mid-twentieth century in the work of thinkers such as Rosemary Radford Ruether and Sallie McFague. Some like John Cobb would associate liberationist concerns with ecology and, in his case, ground them in a process metaphysics. Other thinkers such as Charles Briggs championed and made headway with biblical criticism. Few American Lutherans appear in these pages. Lutherans are present insofar as American liberal theologians appropriated various streams of German Protestant theology influenced by Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel. German Protestant Liberalism, such as the thinking of Albrecht Ritschl, profoundly influenced North American thought; however, for the most part, it took well into the twentieth century for it to influence North American Lutheranism. Martin Luther appears little in this volume. Where he does emerge is in the description of David Tracy's theology who appropriated Luther's hidden God as a way to present divine uncanniness, an apophatic recognition that God is ever beyond human conception (431). This book will be appreciated by scholars and graduate students, though mainline Protestant pastors curious about the origins of their approach to faith...