To say this, of course, is to take up a position on one side of a controversy going on now for some two hundred years, or, at any rate, since the beginning of the distinctively modern period in theological thought. We have aligned ourselves with that ``liberal'' tradition in Protestant Christianity that counts among the great names in its history those of Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Herrmann, Harnack, and Troeltsch, and more recently, Schweitzer and the early Barth and, in part at least, Bultmann. It is to this same tradition that most of the creative figures in the last century and a half of American theology also belong. For we must number here not only the names of Bushnell, Clarke, and Rauschenbusch, not to mention those of ``the Chicago School'' and Macintosh, but those of the brothers Niebuhr and (if America may claim him!) Tillich as well. Finally, we may also mention the several members of the self-consciously ``neoliberal'' movement that developed at the University of Chicago and is heavily indebted philosophically to the creative work of Alfred North Whitehead.

What makes this long and diverse tradition essentially one is that those who have belonged to it have been profoundly in earnest about being modern men in a distinctively modern world. Although they have also been concerned to stand squarely within the tradition of the apostolic church, they have exhibited no willingness whatever to sacrifice their modernity to their Christianity. They have insisted, rather, on living fully and completely within modern culture and, so far from considering this treason to God, have looked upon it as the only way they could be faithful to him.