– Written by Rev. Hye-Won Kim, November 11, 2026

(I could not find a single criticism to make of the following well-written piece.):

When discussing the causes of the Church’s decline, conservative evangelicals have consistently identified one chief culprit: “Liberal Theology,” which removed the miraculous from Scripture and reduced the Gospel to a lecture on morality.

Historians who take a sober view of the whole sweep of Church history, however, often arrive at a very different diagnosis:

“What corrupted the Church from within was not obscure liberal thought, but the corruption and greed of those who claimed to be the most orthodox.”

If we roll the great screen of history from the Early Church all the way to twenty-first-century South Korea, we begin to see with uncomfortable clarity when the Church lost its vitality and what caused it to collapse.

1. From the Early Church to the Middle Ages: A Temple Brought Down Not by “Heresy,” but by Power and Gold

For the first three hundred years of Christianity, the Church was surrounded on every side by heresies and competing religious philosophies. Gnosticism, Arianism, Marcionism, and other teachings, in many respects far more destructive than modern liberal theology, threatened the Gospel from all directions.

Yet the Early Church did not collapse under these intellectual challenges. On the contrary, shedding its blood in the underground catacombs, it grew stronger and eventually spread throughout the Roman Empire.

The tragedy of the Church began not with an intellectual attack, but with the political triumph of orthodoxy.

Constantine: Blessing or Curse? The Fourth Century

When Christianity became the favored religion of the Roman Empire, yesterday’s martyrs became today’s privileged class. Bishops moved through imperial courts dressed in splendor, and confessions of faith could become political weapons in struggles for power.

Doctrine might have remained thoroughly orthodox, yet the Gospel’s radical spirit and sacrificial character began to disappear.

The Borgia Popes and the Tragedy of Indulgences

The theology that dominated Roman Catholicism immediately before the sixteenth-century Reformation was certainly not liberal theology. It was thoroughly orthodox by the standards of the age, grounded in the scholastic theology of Thomas Aquinas and firmly confessing the Trinity and the divine inspiration of Scripture.

Yet the Roman Church sold indulgences to finance its extravagance and the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica, proclaiming that when a coin rang in the chest, a soul sprang from purgatory toward heaven.

Popes such as Alexander VI, father of Cesare Borgia, became notorious for scandal, intrigue, and political violence.

What brought the medieval Church into disgrace was not biblical higher criticism. It was greed, simony, and corruption multiplying behind the mask of impeccable orthodoxy.

2. The Great Experiment of Modern Western Christianity: Liberalism’s “Euthanasia” versus Conservatism’s “Moral Suicide”

As Christianity entered the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Western Church became a vast testing ground for two opposite tendencies, intellectual and ethical.

This era offers a sobering lesson in how both liberal theology and conservative evangelicalism, each in its own way, can contribute to the destruction of the Church.

The Trap of Liberal Theology: “Spiritual Euthanasia” through the Loss of Transcendence

Nineteenth-century German theologians such as Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Harnack sought to make Christianity credible to intellectuals shaped by the Enlightenment. In doing so, they diminished or rejected elements such as biblical miracles, divine judgment, the virgin birth, and substitutionary atonement.

The Bible was increasingly reduced to a guidebook of noble human ethics and universal love.

The results of this experiment were deeply troubling.

Twentieth-century American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr famously mocked the emptiness of this form of liberal theology:

“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

If there is no hell, no sin, no resurrection, why sacrifice a Sunday morning’s sleep to sit in church?

Having lost spiritual tension and the wonder of transcendent salvation, many liberal Mainline churches of Europe and North America gradually began to resemble museums.

Liberal theology did not destroy the Church by setting it on fire. It placed the Church in warm water, allowing it slowly to fall asleep, until it underwent a kind of spiritual euthanasia.

The Evangelical Trap: “Moral Suicide” Committed in the Name of Orthodoxy

But did conservative evangelicalism, with its unwavering conviction that every word of Scripture is the infallible Word of God, save the Church?

Racism Hidden Behind Biblical Inerrancy in the American South

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many conservative white churches in the American South proclaimed the absolute inerrancy of Scripture with extraordinary fervor.

Yet with those same mouths, some used the Bible to justify slavery, blessed white-supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, and resisted Black Christians seeking equal participation in church life.

Their theology might have been thoroughly fundamentalist, but their lives could be profoundly anti-Christlike.

The Fall of Televangelists and the Bargain with Political Power

In the 1980s, celebrity evangelists such as Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart gathered enormous contributions while loudly demanding that Christians “believe the Bible,” only to become engulfed in financial and sexual scandals.

In the twenty-first century, portions of white American evangelicalism developed increasingly close relationships with political forces promising to protect their religious influence, while White Christian Nationalism became a growing temptation.

The result has been a profound alienation of many younger Americans from institutional Christianity. Some have effectively concluded, “If this is the Jesus they represent, I would rather be an atheist,” contributing to the phenomenon often described as dechurching.

3. 140 Years of Korean Christianity: Miracle and Ruin in a Land Where Liberalism Never Dominated

The history of Korean Christianity provides one of the clearest and most painful case studies in this question.

The Korean Church has never experienced a period in which liberal theology completely dominated its religious landscape. Instead, Korea became one of the strongest bastions of conservative evangelical Christianity in the world.

The Tears of Pyongyang and the Humiliation of Shrine Worship

The driving force behind the Pyongyang Great Revival of 1907 was not sophisticated theological debate.

It was the public repentance of missionary Robert Hardie and the anguished confession of Elder Gil Seon-ju: “I took money that belonged to my deceased friend.”

When repentance was accompanied by ethical renewal, honesty, opposition to concubinage, temperance, and the breaking down of social barriers, the Gospel spread like wildfire.

Yet only thirty years later, in 1938, the 27th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Korea approved participation in Japanese Shinto shrine worship, arguing under colonial pressure that shrine worship was “not a religious act but a patriotic national ceremony.”

With the exception of a small number of resisters and martyrs such as Rev. Ju Gi-cheol, many leaders of denominations known for their highly conservative view of Scripture bowed before the shrines.

The denomination did not fall because it had been contaminated by liberal theology. It surrendered because of cowardice in the face of survival, coercion, and institutional self-interest.

The 1959 Division: “The WCC Is Communist” versus “Cry Out for Social Justice”

Following liberation and the Korean War, Korean Presbyterianism fragmented bitterly.

The Progressive/Liberal Camp: PROK and Minjung Theology

The Presbyterian Church in the Republic of Korea (PROK), associated with Rev. Kim Jae-jun and his rejection of strict biblical literalism, and the Minjung theologians of the 1970s and 1980s played significant roles in struggles for workers, the poor, democracy, and human rights under military dictatorship.

They often fulfilled an important social-prophetic role. Yet their intense focus on liberation and social engagement sometimes coincided with a weakening of congregational evangelistic passion and limited numerical church growth.

The Conservative/Evangelical Camp: Presbyterian Mainstream Denominations

In 1959, conflict concerning participation in the World Council of Churches (WCC) helped divide conservative Korean Presbyterianism. Opponents denounced the WCC as pro-Communist and religiously pluralistic, and the Presbyterian Church divided into major factions.

The conservative camp subsequently grew explosively through a combination of biblical inerrancy, anti-Communism, intense evangelism, and what critics describe as elements of prosperity theology.

The message that believing in Jesus would bring success in business and educational advancement for one’s children resonated with the social aspirations surrounding South Korea’s rapid economic development. Together with churches such as Yoido Full Gospel Church, Korea produced some of the world’s largest megachurches.

The Collapse of the Contemporary Korean Church: Liberalism or Mammon?

Since the 2000s, the Korean Church has faced a dramatic decline. Sunday schools have disappeared from many congregations, younger generations in their twenties and thirties are leaving churches, and public trust has deteriorated severely.

Conservative Christian leaders continue to argue that the Church is in crisis because of leftist ideology, anti-discrimination legislation, support for homosexuality, and liberal theology.

But the reasons ordinary citizens and younger generations have turned away from churches are not necessarily found in theology textbooks.

The Kingdom of Hereditary Succession

Some internationally prominent megachurches have altered or circumvented denominational rules in order to transfer enormous church institutions, properties, and congregational influence from senior pastors to their children.

Ethical Collapse among Pastors

Cases involving embezzlement, breach of fiduciary duty, sexual abuse and grooming, and academic plagiarism by prominent pastors have repeatedly appeared in Korean news media.

Gwanghwamun Politics and Fake News

The public has also become exhausted by images of extreme right-wing political pastors appearing to represent conservative Christianity, inflammatory rhetoric concerning God, and weekend demonstrations in which Korean and American flags are waved amid angry political denunciations.

What is sinking the Korean Church is not Bultmann’s demythologization or the methods of higher criticism. Most ordinary churchgoers do not even know who Bultmann was.

The deeper problem has been the hypocrisy of evangelicalism when those who passionately proclaim biblical inerrancy become corrupted by money and power.

Two Cliffs, and the Cross

History bears witness to two distinct roads by which the Church can destroy itself.

The Road of Intellectual Pride and Secularization: The Extreme of Liberalism

The Church loses its fear of the living God and its proclamation of a transcendent Gospel, reducing itself to little more than a humanitarian NGO and thereby eroding the reason for its own existence.

The Road of Spiritual Hypocrisy and Greed: The Extreme of Corrupted Evangelicalism

Its members cry out, “Scripture alone! Faith alone!” with passionate intensity, yet in practice become intoxicated with Mammon, money, privilege, and political power, sometimes behaving more shamefully than the secular world they condemn.

If liberal theology stopped the beating heart of the Gospel and allowed the Church to wither slowly, corrupted evangelicalism has sold the name of the Gospel for its own gain, turning the Church into an object of social disgust and effectively blowing it apart from within.

In the end, the lifeline of the Church has never depended simply on the theological labels “liberal” or “evangelical.”

Whether its theology is flexible or strict, the Church has found new life whenever it has repented of its own sins and practiced the self-giving love of the Cross.

And whenever it has raised the banner of orthodoxy while practicing greed, deception, and hypocrisy, it has inevitably collapsed before the judgment seat of history.