Marks makes some good points about the “feeling” focus of Christianity that has prevailed for a while now, and within my experience has culminated in the crisis of the Faith we are now experiencing in this country.

“…This is a Christianity of self-experience.
“In this sense, Western Christians are children of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the 19th-century Enlightenment thinker who built his theological system on the foundation of spiritual experience… A theology grounded in experience ultimately fades into soft moralism, humanism, or, in the unique case of American Christianity, a civic religion wherein God and country are easily confused…
“At the heart of Schleiermacher’s work lay an important quest: to understand how to be faithful in a particular context. Schleiermacher and his progeny wanted much to be relevant Christians. The problem is where he started.
“Schleiermacher thought that the essence of Christianity was its spiritual impulse, not its doctrine, which seemed to cause most of the problems…
“Schleiermacher began with internal experiences of God and built theology around those experiences, reconfiguring doctrine as needed. He assumed that by starting with ourselves and our desires, we would glimpse a purer vision of God and perhaps a more relevant church. But how did the project fare?
“With some 200 years of hindsight, we see that the ramifications were immense…
“In this trajectory, Jesus becomes a sage who, among others, came to tell us about our potential and awaken our religious sensibilities… Church becomes a kind of group therapy we attend to be told we are all right, to share in the piety of Jesus’ example. There is much positive here, the question remains whether God matters as the agent of changed lives. In the final analysis, core Christian beliefs, even those about Jesus, have to feel authentic or they are discarded…
“The emphasis on spiritual experience put us, not God, in the driver’s seat.
“As far as we remain the children of Schleiermacher, we either unconsciously or actively transform Christianity into something that, while seemingly relevant, is bereft of spiritual vigor.
“…this theological method inverts Schleiermacher’s. We do not start with ‘my spirituality’ and then identify core beliefs. Instead, we begin with core beliefs – those discovered by the church as it has intellectually wrestled with the truth of Scripture in the dynamic presence of the Holy Spirit. These beliefs, which come from outside myself, correct and shape my spiritual experience.
“For the past 200 years, many parts of Western Christianity have labored as Schleiermacher’s Children. The mainline traditions have hoped to achieve relevance. The evangelical and free-church traditions have hoped to read the Bible unadulterated and alone. Both traditions, however, have made our feelings – which are, be definition, slippery and transitory – primary. Mainliners have eschewed theology for fear that it imposes another’s context and assumptions, while evangelicals have eschewed theology because it might compete with the pristine Bible or become a rigid boundary. Both traditions forget that theology is a kind of memory that allows us to hear God’s Word by clarifying our experiences.”
[Marks, Darren C. (March 2010). “The Mind Under Grace: Why theology is an essential nutrient for spiritual growth.” Christianity Today, 24-26.]