Traditional Christianity has outlived its usefulness

Interesting paragraphs lifted from http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/god.html#godevolve

Another important theologian in the liberal tradition was the German Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976). Bultmann was certainly one of the greatest New Testament scholars of the twentieth century. He was known for two things connected to biblical criticism: "Demythologization" and "Form Criticism". According to him, and his followers, the myths in the Bible were an obvious reflection of the world view of the early Christians. As they stands, the myths in the Bible can no longer be honestly believed by modern man. Thus, these myths: such as the believe that supernatural beings (Satan, angels, demons and God) regularly interfere in the natural working of the world and that Jesus was a pre-existent being sent to a sacrificial death to atone for man's sins are all not objective history. They are myths which reflect the early Christians' understanding of the world.

Demythologization was a program of getting to the kerygma, or the proclamation, of the early Christians behind the myths. In this sense he differs from the early twentieth century liberals that simply jettisoned the myths form their theology. Form criticism is the method that aids in the demythologization process. Recognizing that the stories in the bible were originally handed down orally and that oral traditions have certain structural forms, the form critics were able, in many cases to find the historical setting in which the stories were first told. Form criticism showed that much of the stories about Jesus in the gospels, even the non-mythical ones, were not historical and were the results of the early Christian community belief or expectation about him.

Yet from this position Bultmann, like Barth, affirmed his belief in Jesus via an existentialist viewpoint. He claimed that all the Christian need to know was that Jesus once existed and that he was crucified. To Bultmann, it is irrelevant whether the stories about Jesus in the gospels were true or false. What was important about these stories was that it showed what the idea of Jesus meant to the early Christians who first circulated those stories. Thus for Bultmann, the gospels present, not an historical or scientific truth, but an existential one. [8]

Bultmann's contemporary, Paul Tillich (1886-1965), developed his own existentialist brand of theology. The interesting aspect, for our purpose, is Tillich's assertion that God, as he is formulated by traditional Christian theology, does not exist. [9] We will have more to say about this later.

The development of liberal thinking eventually led to thinkers such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945). He believed that traditional Christianity has outlived its usefulness and called for a "religionless Christianity." Bonhoeffer, who died in a Nazi concentration camp, seemed to believe that there is no afterlife, no message of personal salvation in the Bible. Bonhoeffer, and his intellectual heirs, repudiated the traditional body of the Church, its liturgy and its metaphysics and called for a complete secularization of Christianity. [10] This "radical theology" as it came to be called, is the modern flag bearer of Christian liberalism.

With this we end our short excursion into the historical background of modernist-liberal theology. It should be mentioned that the liberals did not reach their position by abstruse theological reasoning: they were forced by external circumstances-the findings of science, comparative religions, enlightenment philosophies and historical criticism-to resort to such a method of reasoning for the only other available alternatives are the collapse into complete irrationaility of fundamentalism and the theological resignation of atheism. Our main concern here is to see examine the validity of the fundamental epistemological assumptions of the liberal theology. We will examine in order, the liberal views on the Bible, Jesus, and God.