The liberal commitment to divine immanence

William Horosz

pp. 197-231

in: William Horosz, Clements (eds), Religion and human purpose, Berlin, Springer, 1987

Abstract

That Protestant liberalism made certain concessions to the modern world to establish the relevance of religion to experience is an acknowledged fact. For the standard of relevancy was a passion with liberals. This standard was accomplished by an appeal to experience and by certain commitments to divine immanence within experience. The very drive to understand the dynamics of faith and redemption in terms of the temporal process, in terms of the experience men live by, was enough to invite counter movements, familiar to us as crisis theology in Europe and neo-orthodoxy in America, that questioned this system of divine totality within existence. These charges were numerous, but the most open one was that liberalism neglected the given reality of Christianity, in terms of its own integrity, by its commitments to divine immanence, that it accepted certain secular standards over religious beliefs and sensibilities. What was uncertain in all this was the status of immediate experience as the judge of religious matters.