Introduction
One morning, when my family and I lived in San Diego, I was at Birdrock Coffee Roasters. It was a typical workday out of the office—headphones in, laptop out, quietly typing up my sermon.
Background noise of conversations and coffee grinders hummed faintly underneath the music playing in my ears. As I clicked and clacked away, a woman’s voice pierced through:
“…you know, the biblical Jesus is different than the historical Jesus.”
My eyebrows shot to the top of my forehead.
I sought to save myself from whiplash, forcing my head to stay as straight as possible. But I shifted my gaze ever so slightly to the right, where two women sat across from each other, coffee in hand, leaning forward, engaged in a riveting conversation about religion.
I stealthily reached for the top of my keyboard and muted my music.
(Don’t judge me…)
As I listened, one woman began to explain the supposed “difference” between the historical Jesus and the Biblical Jesus.
The Biblical Jesus in her mind is the Jesus who is intolerant, bigoted, and rigid, as incarnated by many of His followers. But the historical Jesus would have affirmed: “love is love.” He would have been for women’s rights and LGBTQ+ ideology. She wanted to make sure it was known: the real Jesus is the one who embodies all of the current cultural narratives, not the Jesus found in the Bible.
In other words, an ancient book doesn’t have to define Jesus for us; we need to look at the facts of “history” and not be so narrow as to think only one set of people gets “Jesus” right. Furthermore, it’s not only the individual on the street who posits these revisions.
One may think of Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, James Talarico, who brings to the table a different “kind of Christianity.” J. David Goodman wrote recently in the New York Times, “Are Texans ready for Talarico’s kind of Christianity?”1
What kind is this? It is theological liberalism with the crisp wrapping paper of “Progressivism.”2
After listening to a few sermons from Talarico (More like political pep talks with a side-order of Christianese), it’s easy to find that authority over morality has been located outside of the Bible, following Jesus’ example takes precedence over worshiping Him as God, and God’s definition of sin and man’s sinfulness are being rejected. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Theological Liberalism.
This ideology tends to creep back into the church in every generation, often with new packaging. But what we are seeing displayed in the high ranks of politics all the way down into the coffee shop is not just a kind or variation of Christianity, but something else entirely.
Tracing American Liberalism: How did we get here?
Surprisingly, the term “Liberal” or “liberalism”3 is not meant to be a swear word or a cheap shot to pull the plug on productive conversations. It is a tradition, with its own heroes, truth claims, and “ecclesiastical vision.”4
The timespan in view is 1880-1920. As the period of the Enlightenment progressed and Darwin washed ashore, a view of human progress—rooted in German soil—began to blossom. German higher criticism was a movement that sought to approach the Bible using critical methods. By the use of reason and a posture of anti-supernaturalism, one can approach the Bible’s claims to divinity and authority with an enormous amount of suspicion.
The underlying worldview was what is known as “Modernism” or “Modernity.” Much can be said about modernism, but the chief claim slowly dripping into universities, books, and scholarship was the idea of human progress predicated on man’s potential or inherent goodness. Sure, they would say, there is evil in the world, but it does not spring from bad people, but bad structures and institutions. With the right education and the reordering of bad structures, we can achieve a new phase of human progress.5
The English author and “father of science fiction,” H.G. Wells, even declared that we have turned a new page in history. Because of man’s goodness, we don’t need the Bible or any kind of atonement from Jesus. It’s nice to have Jesus as a good moral example, but we certainly don’t need him.
The seed of this kind of thinking was planted further back, even in religious literature. To summarize, we went “From Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), who argued that the essence of true religion is a feeling of absolute dependence, to Albert Ritschl (1822-1889), who emphasized the kingdom of God as moral progress, to Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930) who insisted that the development of doctrine marked the abandonment of true Christianity, to Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) who advocated the social gospel of deeds over creeds…”6 to Rudolf Bultmann who propagated the idea that the New Testament was simply a mythological retelling of the life of Jesus, giving rise to the claim, “the biblical Jesus is different than the historical Jesus.”
And in the face of Modernism’s main conclusion, namely, we don’t need God, these arguments seemed appealing and enabled those who claimed Christianity to accommodate and conserve some semblance of the Christian witness.
In America, this all came to a head in the famous sermon by Harry Emerson Fosdick preached in New York City in 1920 entitled, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” In this sermon, Fosdick took each of the essential beliefs of historic Christianity (The innerrancy of Scripture, the resurrection, the virgin birth, etc., you know, doctrines held by “fundamentalists”), and essentially advocated for maintaining the title “Christian” while modifying what we believe about each of them.
What looked like “modifying” or equivocating was actually a disguise for full denial. If modern philosophers and a modernist society are going to listen to the church, they thought, then we need to accommodate and innovate. Thus, said Fosdick triumphantly, we will not let the fundamentalists win!
This is why Stephen Nichols7 defined the liberal movement as,
“The accommodation of Christianity to modernist sensibilities.”
In the next post, we’ll see the next player to enter the game that turned the tide on Liberalism in America. A whirlwind came to Philadelphia through a certain book you never knew you needed.
Stay tuned.
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J. David Goodman, Are Texans Ready for Talarico’s Kind of Christianity?, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/us/politics/james-talarico-christian.html
Some may object: didn’t he say, “I don’t believe in a progressive or conservative Christianity. I believe in a biblical Christianity. My faith is rooted in scripture and in the teachings of Jesus Christ.” Sure. And yet, in a recent debate on transgender ideology, Talarico (a former Presbyterian seminarian in the PCUSA) stated, “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is non-binary.”
Additionally, he stated on Joe Rogan that God required consent from Mary to have the baby Jesus, twisting the story in Luke 1:30-38, arguing for abortion rights.
In a viral sermon where he sought to eliminate the gender binary in favor of transgenderism, Talarico quoted from the non-canonical gospel of Thomas, which quotes Jesus saying, “When you make the male and female one and the same…then you will enter the kingdom of God.”
I’m speaking of “Theological Liberalism,” to be distinguished from the closely related “political liberalism”
Kevin DeYoung, from the Forward, Christianity & Liberalism, p. xviii
John Dewey (1859–1952), My Pedagogical Creed; Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), “All Institutions Eventually Become Oppressive” https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEEDeweyPedagogicCreedTable.pdf
Ibid. p. xviii
Stephen Nichols, Christianity & Liberalism, Ligonier Video Series.