Modern Theology

A one-semester survey of the history of modern (post-Enlightenment) Christian theology, designed independently of the Korean STEL2 rather than as its translation. Chapter 1 opens with the Enlightenment's philosophical challenge (Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel) that modern theology has been responding to ever since. Chapter 2 covers nineteenth-century liberal theology (Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Harnack, Troeltsch). Chapter 3 covers Karl Barth and Emil Brunner's neo-orthodox recovery of the Word of God after liberalism's collapse. Chapter 4 covers existentialist and hermeneutical theology (Bultmann, Tillich, and the hermeneutical turn). Chapter 5 covers Christian realism and public theology (Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr). Chapter 6 covers secularization, Bonhoeffer's legacy, and the 1960s death-of-God movement. Chapter 7 covers process philosophy, process theology, and open theism's challenge to classical theism. Chapter 8 covers theologies of hope and the cross (Moltmann, Pannenberg) alongside Vatican II-era Catholic renewal (Rahner, von Balthasar). Chapter 9 covers the twentieth-century trinitarian renaissance (Rahner's Rule, Zizioulas, social trinitarianism). Chapter 10 covers liberation, Black, global-South, and Pentecostal theologies. Chapter 11 covers postmodernism's challenge, postliberal theology (Lindbeck, Hauerwas, Milbank), and the religious pluralism debate (Hick, Knitter, and the evangelical response). Chapter 12 covers the parallel rise of evangelical analytic theology (Reformed epistemology, Vanhoozer) and the contemporary frontier of science, ecology, and technology.

Scripture is quoted from the World English Bible. This is a history-of-doctrine course, not a devotional one: it describes and evaluates what theologians actually argued, states real disagreements fairly (Barth vs. Brunner, process vs. classical theism, the millennium-adjacent debates over pluralism), and does not assume the reader already shares any one modern theologian's conclusions. A large share of readers are Catholic, Orthodox, or Pentecostal, and the course includes their twentieth-century contributions (Vatican II, Rahner, von Balthasar, Zizioulas, Yong) rather than treating modern theology as a Protestant-only story. It assumes no prior philosophy. It is not a systematic theology course and does not attempt to adjudicate every position it describes.