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The fireworks that exploded at Dayton, Tennessee, at the 1925 "Monkey Trial," were first lit two centuries earlier, though the fuse had smoldered quietly. In the 1700s, European intellectuals revamped the millennium-old system for discerning truth: instead of grounding all knowledge in biblical revelation, they tried to build on the foundation of human reason.

This "enlightened" method (thus the name for the period and movement, the Enlightenment) produced some startling conclusions. David Hume (d. 1776) reasoned that God's existence could not be "proved." Immanuel Kant (d. 1804) and Friedrich Schleiermacher (d. 1834) argued that religion was not so much about God as about people's religious experiences. G. W. F. Hegel (d. 1831) said God was not the personal being described in the Bible but an impersonal force.

The Enlightenment championed the scientific method, where everything—including the Bible—was subject to rational, empirical analysis. In this environment, the discipline of biblical criticism grew up. It was also the context in which Charles Darwin concluded the world wasn't created in six days but was the product of millions of years of evolution.

Such European developments made their way across the Atlantic only slowly, but by the end of the 1800s, many American thinkers had become Enlightenment rationalists, or "liberals" or "modernists." This development alarmed many American Christians.

Harold Carl, chaplain and lecturer in religion at Berry College, Mt. Berry, Georgia, here explains the distinctives of American liberalism, a movement that sparked what is now called the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.

"A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a without a cross." So wrote neo-orthodox theologian H. Richard Niebuhr, criticizing the nineteenth-century liberal "gospel."

Even today's liberals recognize the truth in Niebuhr's jibe, and they reject a lot of nineteenth-century liberalism's easy rationalism. But these liberals were not trying to water down the gospel. Instead, they believed they were rescuing religion from doctrinal bondage and obscurity. They sincerely wanted to make Christianity palatable to modern people. Many were, in one sense, trying to make the faith user-friendly.

They did this by emphasizing a number of themes, which became distinctives of American liberalism.

In the 1800s, conservative theologians tended to balance God's transcendence—that he is self-sufficient and apart from, far above, and infinitely greater than creation—with his immanence. Liberal theologians favored the immanence of God—the God "present to creation," active within the universe, involved in human history.

For William Adams Brown, one of America's "Christocentric liberals," God was "not a transcendent being living in a distant heaven whence from time to time he intervenes in the affairs of earth. He is an ever-present [spirit] guiding all that happens to a wise and holy end."

Friedrich Schleiermacher, German father of liberal theology, taught that people become one with God, not through the objective death and resurrection of Christ, but through a feeling of "absolute dependence" and "God consciousness."

Some liberals blurred the distinction between the Creator and the creation, between revealed religion and religious experience. God was experienced primarily in nature and human reason. American churchman Theodore Parker (d. 1860) wrote, "There is no difference but of words between revealed religion and natural religion, for all actual religion is revealed in us, or it could not be felt, and all revealed religion is natural or it would be of no use to us."

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