Braaten update

Lots of comments over at Versus Populum.

Pastor Frontz has posted a very thorough explication of the kind of “liberal Protestantism” Braaten seems to have in mind:

In the contemporary “Protestant” culture, Braaten and others see a Kulturprotestantismus which differs in its assumptions about the culture but is one with the primary assumption that Barth critiques: the idea that one can know God and God’s will through other means than through Christ. In our context, this means: there is no mediator – God or Christ primarily speaks to us through our experience of self and world and the experience of those who are oppressed, whatever their experience may be. Neither the Scriptures nor the Church are truly sources of authority – at best, they become the confirmation of God granting me my own authority as authentic self-interpreter. When they contradict my view or my culture’s view of reality, they may be set aside because they do not define Christ for me: rather, my own understanding and experience defines Christ for me. This may best be summed up in our day by what is now the unofficial creed of our full communion partner, the United Church of Christ: “God is still speaking,” and its unofficial symbol, the comma. How does God speak? Not through Bible, Sacrament, Creed, confession, or community, but through my own imaging of who God might be and my own unique experience of reality. This necessarily leads to a plurality of truths, which in effect is a negation of truth, for the notion that there can be more than one truthful answer to a specific question is logically bankrupt.

This strikes me as very incisive. All too often Christianity has been subjected to innovations because the experience of “modern man” (or some subset thereof) seems to demand it. Theology and peity have been tested by anthropological criteria rather than Christological.

And yet a question I still have is this: in some sense the Scriptures and the Tradition are mediated to us through our experience, aren’t they? It’s not as if we can ever break loose of our own cultural moorings and personal limitations to have an unmediated encounter with the tradition. To put it crudely, won’t what we hear God saying through the tradition differ from what our ancestors heard?

Pr. Frontz mentions the question of homosexuality as symptomatic of the loss of an adherence to an authoritative tradition, and I do think that’s in some ways the elephant in the room in Braaten’s letter. Still, what would Braaten say about, say, divorce, women’s ordination, or birth control? These are all areas where the tradition spoke with a unified voice until relatively recently. Would Braaten disavow those innovations? And if not, then it seems to me we do need some account of how the tradition can change in light of new experiences. (Or we can become Roman Catholic, where they have – with varying degrees of success and credibility – held the line on these things.)

This is not to take a position on one side or the other of the homosexuality debate. But it does seem to me that there’s a logical space for those of us who earnestly want to be faithful to the tradition and yet still struggle with some parts of the tradition as they’ve been handed down to us. I think of someone like Abp. Rowan Williams, who I don’t think it would be fair to characterize as a theological liberal, but who has been willing to re-think the church’s traditional position on certain moral views. Do those kinds of changes necessarily entail a slippery slope to the abandonment of our evangelical and catholic heritage?