The Rise of Theological Liberalism and the Decline of American Methodism

The main concern of this book is to explain why American Methodism has experienced more than four consecutive decades of numerical decline. In one sense James Heidinger II, retired clergy member and long-time advocate of evangelical concerns within the United Methodist Church, already determined the cause of the decline at the outset by focusing his study on the theological heritage of American Methodism and its move away from that heritage, rather than, for example, exploring social or cultural developments within Methodism that might have contributed to the decline. Yet for Heidinger, his focus on theology is warranted given his belief that Methodists not only lack a basic theological literacy, but are woefully unaware of their Wesleyan theological heritage. Recovering this Wesleyan theological heritage is crucially important for Heidinger as the key to spiritual renewal within the denomination.Heidinger links the decline of theological orthodoxy to the rise of theological liberalism at the beginning of the twentieth century. During this period, Heidinger argues, American Methodism embraced the basic premises and tenets of theological liberalism, including a higher critical approach to scripture and the belief that many traditional Christian doctrines—the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection of Christ, for example—were untenable. Because of this linkage, Heidinger dedicates the majority of his book to an exploration of theological liberalism and its legacy.Readers are introduced in chapter 1 to a Methodism that lacks a theological identity, the loss of which is blamed, in part, on the prioritizing of unity and tolerance over fidelity to the Wesleyan theological heritage rooted in historic Christianity. Chapters 2 through 8 explore the historic relationship between theology and Methodism and Methodism's engagement with theological liberalism. Chapter 2 outlines the new intellectual and social context influencing American theology at the opening of the twentieth century. The industrial revolution, immigration, and the growth of social sciences within the academy placed new demands on religion to effectively address contemporary social and theological problems. Chapter 3 describes how Methodism accommodated much of the new theological mood in part because it lacked a strong theological foundation. Social transformation, through the application of Christ's ethical teachings, took precedence over orthodox Christianity, historically conceived. Chapters 4, 5, and 8 tell the story of Methodist resistance to theological liberalism in which moderate-minded Methodists, such as John A. Faulkner, and those with more strident tendencies, such as Harold Paul Sloan, united in their critiques of the new religious liberalism, which many Methodist leaders had either embraced or tolerated by the 1930s.Chapter 6 is principally concerned with defining and critiquing theological liberalism. Drawing on historic and contemporary understandings of liberalism, Heidinger ultimately finds it to be a movement whose members sought something other than a supernatural Christianity built on historic creeds and confessions. Thus, he identifies theological liberalism as both a reactionary movement, in that it rejected many historic doctrines of Christianity, and a radically new form of Christian faith aimed at accommodating modern knowledge and modern ethical values. Chapter 7 focuses on the social gospel, a movement closely associated with theological liberalism. Concerned with the ethical implications of scripture for the transformation of society, Methodists embraced the social gospel in their efforts to Christianize the social order, with both positive and negative effects on the denomination.Chapters 9 through 13 focus on the legacy of theological liberalism in the latter half of the twentieth century. Chapter 10 notes the continued efforts to recover Methodism's Wesleyan theological heritage through, for example, the Good News and Confessing movements even while, as chapter 11 and 12 detail, theological liberalism continued to instruct a new generation of Methodist ministers through many of the denomination's seminaries, and traditional Christian doctrines were trivialized to the point of irrelevancy. In the concluding chapter, Heidinger makes a final plea for Methodists to recover a gospel rooted in the Wesleyan theological heritage because, he maintains, in it lie the seeds for spiritual and theological renewal.A few brief observations follow. Heidinger is to be commended for his irenic tone throughout the book and for his ability as an amateur historian to do justice to the primary sources. While one could argue over his reliance on dated secondary sources providing questionable conclusions concerning the extent to which theological liberalism was accepted among Methodists in the first half of the twentieth century, it ultimately detracts little from his main concern, which is that theological liberalism and a general aversion to doctrine continue to afflict contemporary American Methodism.This reviewer does wonder, however, whether the decline of American Methodism can be shouldered entirely by the emergence of theological liberalism in the decades surrounding 1900. What effects might later developments such as the cultural revolution of the 1960s have had on American Methodism? How might such mid-century developments have challenged traditional Christianity and the Wesleyan theological heritage? Nevertheless, readers of this journal will enjoy James Heidinger's thought-provoking account of why American Methodism has declined so consistently in the last forty years and how it might avoid another four decades of similar decline.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.