A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

We’re all liberals now(?)

This helpful post at Connexions argues that “liberal theology” should be seen more as a method or approach to theology than a set of substantive conclusions. In other words, there’s nothing about liberal theology per se that prevents one from, say, believing in the resurrection or the virgin birth or what have you. What’s distinctive about a “liberal” approach to theology is that it sifts religious claims in light of reason and experience and is open to the possibility that faith and practice will be revised as a result.

In that sense, I think pretty much all of us are liberals to some extent in that we have to navigate the relationships between our theological interpretations of the world with those offered by the sciences, the arts, other religions, and other competing perspectives. We live in multiple overlapping cognitive worlds and there’s no a priori way for most of us of resolving conflicts between rival interpretations. “Private judgment” is a fact of life.

Even if we submit to an institutional authority of some sort, we still decide to do so (though we may give an account of our decision that downplays the element of private judgment). No religious outlook or institution has the kind of givenness that may have been enjoyed by the church in previous ages.

I imagine for most Christians in the (post)modern west there is a great deal of cognitive dissonance or simply a bracketing of our religious lives when it comes to our lives as workers, citizens, parents, consumers, and so on. I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing, just that in many areas of our lives most of us have neither the need nor the inclination to invoke theological categories to make sense of what’s going on a lot of the time.

In his book An Examined Faith: The Grace of Self-Doubt, Christian ethicist William Gustafson argues that there is a spectrum of responses to secular accounts of reality that seem to challenge Christian belief. On one extreme is literalistic fundamentalism, which simply overrides any putative knowledge that seems to contradict the Bible by an appeal to the authority of revelation. On the other end is the person who allows the claims of secular disciplines to completely determine their theological commitments (Bishop Spong?). Most of us, Gustafson argues, exist somewhere in between, making some accomodations and not others. The important thing, he says, is for Christians to be self-conscious and honest about this because it’s unavoidable.

Despite the fact that we may yearn for an all-encompassing theological narrative that “absorbs” our experience of the world, I’m not sure it would ultimately be desirable even if it was psychologically possible (and I suspect for many of us it isn’t). As R.R. Reno argued before he jumped ship to Rome, we have fragments of a Christian worldview, but we don’t know how to fit all the elements of our experience into it. Theology no longer provides, if it ever did, a comprehensive ordering of all human knowledge.

But even beyond that, an attempt to do so might result in the creation of a closed system that was immune to new experiences and information that could alter our perception of the world. Christians have revised their beliefs and teachings in the light of new knowledge before (be it evolutionary biology or the historical criticism of the Bible or the manifest goodness of adherents of other religons) and there’s every reason to believe that will happen again. We don’t have the map of how it all fits together. But maybe that’s okay as long as we have enough light to take the next step down the road.

What do you think? Should theology aspire to a comprehensive account of the world and human knowledge? Or do we continue to muddle through trying to understand things piecemeal? Or is there some other way of looking at the issue?

10 responses to “We’re all liberals now(?)”

  1. Chip Frontz

    Lee, from the very limited reading I’ve done, I think that Taylor, MacIntyre and others would argue that it is the created (post)modern self who no longer can understand things according to a comprehensive worldview, because the self has become the ultimate arbiter and judge of all things. If the self is the center, there can be no other center to hold to. I guess you would have to ask, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” as to whether or not liberal philosophy or the autonomous self came first.

    MacIntyre, I think, would also argue that we (post) moderns see our lives in the context of multiple “roles” that we “play,” rather than deriving our identity from our given commitments as members of a society.

    I am not a political scientist, but as far as I know, a “liberal” assumes that with knowledge, a person gains freedom from prejudiced opinion given by received authorities. One is free to criticize those received authorities, because one is empowered by knowledge. Liberal political theory (and theology, I assume) was meant to cleanse one of the prejudices of tribe or clan.

    Taylor’s Sources of the Self was helpful to me because it debunked the idea of an “unbiased” point of view. Even a liberal is unfree from his or her point of view. Taylor’s solution is not to despair of epistemological truth, but to say that communication and debate can reveal our own points of view and those of the other, until we agree at a close approximation of what can be true. It has been a while since I read Taylor, but that’s what I remember.

    I don’t know if that was what you were asking for, but at least you got a comment.

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  2. Thomas Adams

    Nice post, Lee. In response to your questions, I’m not sure that an “all-encompassing theological narrative of the world” is possible or even beneficial. Bultmann, for instance, argued that all “worldviews”, whether scientific or religious, are contrary to faith, since they hold that a particular conception of the universe is absolute and sacred. In contrast to the worldview, faith tends to desacralize the world because it knows that nothing within it is sacred in-and-of-itself. Given that the world is separate from God, it’s not surprising to me that some aspects of the world can be understood without reference to God (modern science is a good example). Of course, the world is not independent from God, and faith acknowledges this all-important truth through worship and prayer.

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  3. Lee

    Chip – Thanks for your comment. It’s been a while since I’ve read Taylor and MacIntyre too, but that sounds right to me.

    I think you’re right that any form of “liberalism” that posits a subject free from biases is untenable. We all occupy some kind of position. But at the same time that position changes as a result of our encounters with others. And I agree that our best hope is that we gain a better grasp of the truth by critically comparing various perspectives on reality.

    Thomas – Your comment reminds me of something I read recently from, I think, Andrew Greely. He said that a significant difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is that the former emphasizes God’s immanence in seeing everything in the world as potentially sacramental and revelatory of the divine, whereas the latter’s emphasis on transcendence tends to de-sacralize the world in its vigilance against potential idolatry. By that standard, Bultmann sounds very Protestant.

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  4. John

    You can look at the world in a lot of different ways (economically, politically, aesthetically, psychologically) and interpret everything in the world according to each one of those viewpoints. Each is an entire reality; each has to accommodate itself to new information as part of the process of incorporating that new information into the larger reality.

    Faith too is a reality; faith too can have an interpretation of everything in the world; faith too accommodates in order to assimilate new information.

    What seems unnecessary is to overlap the realities. So, you can have an economics of Christianity and a theology of the marketplace, but you don’t have to create some kind of hybrid market Christianity (God wants you to prosper, God’s will is to liberate the proletariat, etc.) Something like that anyway.

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  5. Joshie

    I think the usual description of classical theological liberalism is not that one is merely open to possibility that faith and practice will be altered as a result of contemporary thought-forms, culture, science, whatever, but that faith and practice MUST be altered due to this. “The Church must Change or Die!”, that sort of thing. Modern thought is the norming norm, not the scripture or tradition or magisterium. Schliermacher and Lessing are the classic examples of Liberal theology (the German School anyway). So while it is more of a method driven movement, I don’t think we can really say it is all that the connextions post claims it is. By that post, anybody who has gone to college is a liberal.

    While as I have stated before, I think theological liberalism in it’s classic form is dead, it does live on in Latin American Liberation Theology, Feminist theology and in some hybrid forms like Cornell West’s work.

    Nevertheless almost no serious theologians take the “liberal” method in its pure form anymore. WW II almost dealt it a death blow, since modernity could no longer be seen as an entirely positive thing.

    For me personally, theology is the meeting of the tradition and contemorary culture and thought. While the Tradion has the upper hand, contemporary cultrue and though can still call the tradition to account and forces the tradition to express itself in new ways, just like the Holy Spirit continues to work in and through the church in new ways.

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  6. Lee

    Good point, Joshie. I do think an important aspect of theological liberalism was its fundamentally positive orientation to modernity, one that isn’t particularly shared by either conservative or “post-liberal” theology.

    However, while folks like Niebuhr and Tillich (for example) criticized liberalism for its uncritical optimism, they also accepted many of the conclusions of liberals, with respect to, say, evolution or historical criticism of the Bible. Of course, some post-liberals now regard Niebuhr and Tillich as liberals!

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  7. Joshie

    But I don’t think evolution and Historical Critcism are, in themselves, liberal. One may approach both of them in a liberal way, certainly. But I don’t think, especially with Historical Criticism (in the academic sense) of the Bible, that the fact that one uses the historical-critical method to approach scripture makes one a liberal theologically.

    One would be hard-pressed to claim that Raymond Brown, Luke Timothy Johnson, N.T. Wright or Ben Witherington III are liberals, even though they have engaged in historical-critical methods of exegesis. Only people on the theological fringe actually make such a claims. Actually, the historical-critical and source-critical approaches have become rather passe in Biblical Studies over the past few decades as canonical, redaction, structuralist and other methods have come to the fore, the Jesus seminar not withstanding. So, unless I misunderstand you Lee, I don’t see how evolution or historical-critical methods are, in themselves, liberal.

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  8. Lee

    I agree with you that those methods are not “liberal” in the sense of necessarily leading to liberal conclusions. (Though in one way it kind of illustrates my point, doesn’t it? Things that were at one time thought to be part of a “revisionist” agenda are now thoroughyly ensconsed in the mainstream.)

    The main hypothesis I was proposing, was that we’re all “liberals” now in the sense that we bring a certain critical spirit to claims of religious authority, be they bible, church, or pope. Many of us (most of us?) aren’t willing to accept a truth claim simply because it’s in the bible or propounded by tradition (though not willing to dismiss the weight of bible & tradition). And further I’m suggesting that part of the reason this is the case is that it’s not clear to us how to evaluate the competing claims of tradition and other purported sources of knowledge.

    Maybe “liberal” isn’t the right word to describe our current condition (according to me). “Post-critical” maybe?

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  9. Joshie

    Sure we’re all liberals if the net is cast so broad as to include anybody who thinks critically. But I’m not sure that liberalism has ever really meant that.

    I’m not sure if your speaking in general terms or in relation to theology. Christian Theology, by definition, has to at least interact with the Scriptures and the Tradition (in the narrow sense, i.e. the creeds, councils, etc. and the foundational documents of one’s sub-tradion, e.g. The Westminster Confession or Luther’s Catechisms).

    Theology is different from other fields in that arguements from authority DO matter. Even if the claims of those authorities are rejected, they must be dealt with, no matter how eloquent or seemingly “true” the system may be. If they are completely ignored, then what is happening is, at best, Philosophy of Religion or meatphysical speculation.

    There is a fine line, of course. For example, my distate for Hauerwas is partly based on how he seems to deal very superficially with the scriptures and tradion and, in my opinion, crosses that line from theologian to Philosopher of Religion. I don’t think anything’s wrong with being the latter but when he’s making theological claims out of that, I find it hard to swallow. But I know a lot of people feel differently.

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  10. Lee

    I agree with you that theology has (at least!) a presumption in favor of tradition. I think my post was somewhat unclear because I kind of conflated theology as a discipline with the conflict that (I think) takes place in Christians facing an array of competing interpretations of the world. Of course the problems aren’t unrelated.

    I guess what I’m wondering is this: how does/should authority function in our individual lives (and our churches) when we face what seem to be conflicting claims coming from tradition and other sources of purported knowledge? That’s a slightly different question, I agree, than the one of how theology as an intellectual discipline should function.

    Looking at it this way, an extreme “liberal” would be someone who would jettison every part of the tradition that can’t justify itself in light of reason or experience. Whereas an extreme “conservative” would say that the tradition has the final say and we can’t overturn or reinterpret any of it. Most of us, I’d say, fall somewhere between those two extremes.

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