Can you please tell me how you determined that people like Herbert Marsh, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Christian Hermann Weisse, Heinrich Julius Holtzmann, John S. Kloppenborg are liberals?
I would say espousing ideas that do not conform with Church tradition and/or teaching is liberal in the sense of being in opposition to the Church’s ongoing “conservation” of Tradition. The idea of a “Q” document is such a case, for example; for as the Wikipedia
article says in summarizing opposition to the Q hypothesis: “Scholars such as John Wenham hold to the Augustinian hypothesis that Matthew was the first Gospel, Mark the second, and Luke the third, and object on similar grounds to those who hold to the Griesbach hypothesis. They enjoy the support of church tradition on this point.” Even if an idea is widely held to be true by experts, that does not mean it cannot be liberal or unorthodox. Just scratching the surface with Wikipedia on the guys listed above, one finds:
Herbert Marsh: He translated Michaelis’s
Introduction to the New Testament and added his own “hypothesis” on the inter-reliance of the Gospels (that they might have derived from each other). This brought him under attack from the conservatives of his church.
Christian Hermann Weisse: In his work on philosophical dogmatics he seeks, by idealizing all the Christian dogmas, to reduce them to natural postulates of reason or conscience.
Weisse was the first theologian to propose the two-source hypothesis (1838), which is still held by a majority of biblical scholars today. In the two-source hypothesis, the Gospel of Mark was the first gospel to be written and was one of two sources to the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, the other source being the Q document, a lost collection of Jesus’s sayings.
Heinrich Julius Holtzmann: On the question of the relationship of the Synoptic Gospels, Holtzmann in his early work presents a view which has been widely accepted, maintaining the priority of Mark, deriving Matthew in its present form from Mark and from Matthew’s earlier “collection of Sayings,” the Logia of Papias, and Luke from Matthew and Mark in the form in which we have them. This view was a modified version of Christian Weisse’s hypothesis.
John S. Kloppenborg: Published in 2000, by James M. Robinson, Paul Hoffman, and John S. Kloppenborg,
The Critical Edition of Q: Synopsis including the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Mark and Thomas with English, German, and French Translations of Q and Thomas is a groundbreaking, though still controversial, work of scholarship…The editors intend this volume to be functional as a standard research tool for the study of Q despite the continuing controversy over the validity of the text actually existing. This is the most comprehensive effort to provide such a tool nonetheless.
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (whom you yourself have labeled a liberal): “Religion is the outcome neither of the fear of death, nor of the fear of God. It answers a deep need in man. It is neither a metaphysic, nor a morality, but above all and essentially an intuition and a feeling. … Dogmas are not, properly speaking, part of religion: rather it is that they are derived from it. Religion is the miracle of direct relationship with the infinite; and dogmas are the reflection of this miracle. Similarly belief in God, and in personal immortality, are not necessarily a part of religion; one can conceive of a religion without God, and it would be pure contemplation of the universe; the desire for personal immortality seems rather to show a lack of religion, since religion assumes a desire to lose oneself in the infinite, rather than to preserve one’s own finite self.”
