The Continuation of a Trend.

Liberal Protestant theology at the turn of the century represented a movement that had already gained a large measure of self-confidence and was now putting down deeper and more extensive roots as well as finding new spheres for the practical application of its major beliefs. The debate over Darwinian evolution had crested in the late nineteenth century, and it would not resurface with the same intensity until the Fundamentalist-Modernist disputes of the 1920s. Most of the liberal-conservative disagreements of the early twentieth century came down to the question of how the Bible was to be interpreted, with the liberals exercising ever more freedom in allegorizing the Scriptures to make them applicable to the present day and the conservatives growing ever more intransigent in their insistence on a literal reading of the Bible. The more strident the conservatives became, however, the more they risked...