Auguste Sabatier was perhaps the Protestant theologian most influential in the early twentieth century. Many Catholic modernists as well as Protestant liberals believed that his philosophy of religion had achieved its object, a reconciliation between the essential verities of Christian experience and the demands of science. Sabatier was a professor of reformed dogmatics at Strasbourg and Paris and a sometime journalist and literary critic. He ended his career as dean of the Theological Faculty of Paris.

Sabatier described his theory of religious knowledge as "critical symbolism." By this he meant to indicate that religious doctrine and dogma are attempts to symbolize the primary and eternal religious experience (or consciousness) of the believer. He taught that the doctrines of historical religions are secondary, temporal, and transient symbols of this central religious experience. Christian dogmas, then, are necessarily inadequate attempts to "express the invisible by the...