Church Matters: Retrieving the Great Tradition

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Chur ch Mat ter s : Ret r i ev i ng the Great Trad i t i on

2. The significance of Immauel Kant: conceiving religion within the bounds of reason

3. The influence of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), father of Romantic religion: the sense of absolute dependence upon God ( Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers [1799], and The Christian Faith [830-31])

4. Adolf von Harnack (1851-1921), What is Christianity: the Kingdom of God, the Fatherhood of God and the infinite value of the human soul, and the commandment of love ( What Is Christianity? , [1900])

5. Albrecht Ritschl (1822-89), Jesus as the perfect man: theological statements are value judgments not truth claims ( The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation , 1870-74)

6. Rudolph Bultmann and the demythologization project: peeling back the husk in order to discover the kernel of truth, the existential authentic sense of meaning ( Theology of the New Testament ); saw NT as filled with myths which must be stripped to get to the essential existential core 7. Paul Tillich (1886-1965), Systematic Theology , explained Christianity in ontological terms, a way of providing answers to the contemporary situation by taking its questions as the starting point of theology, i.e., its “ultimate concerns”

C. Evangelical reaction and the New Orthodoxy

1. Charles Finney: ca. 1792-1835, Congregationalist, evangelist, president of Oberlin College, promoting personal faith, portrayed conversion as an act of the