Niebuhr famously once said about liberal Protestant theology that it promulgated “a God without wrath brings men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through a ministry of a Christ without a cross.”
I would paraphrase and amplify that to say—-
According to a predominant liberal view of Christian history, Jesus came into a world that was not
fallen, to die a death that was not absolutely necessary, to save humanity from a sin that was neither original nor hereditary nor fatal, so that they might gain eternal life, whether they accepted Jesus or not; since in the end Christ is not returning, there is no final judgment, and Hell is simply the condition of some lives here and now, not in the hereafter. It will be seen that this caricature of
the Good News is predicated in large measure on certain assumptions about the issues raised in Genesis.
As St. Paul once said in Galatians– ‘not that there is another Gospel’ but in every generation some have tried to create one, including in this generation.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In