Marvin reproduced an interesting quote from Gary Dorrien, who Google tells me is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. Dorrien offers this definition of a “liberal approach” to theology:

theology should be based on reason and critically interpreted religious experience, not external authority.

Depending on how key terms are defined, I’d have to say that I substantially agree with this.

A lot of 20th-century philosophy has taught us to mistrust appeals to “reason” and “experience;” we’re told that they are context-dependent, tradition-bound, and embedded in language.

While these are all valid points, the core of what Dorrien seems to be saying here seems unaffected.

“Reason” doesn’t need to be thought of as a kind of infallible algorithm for arriving at truth, or a means of shedding all our existing cultural, social, and linguistic baggage to adopt a “God’s-eye” view of the world (or, a “view from nowhere” as Thomas Nagel puts it).

And “experience” is not an unmediated apprehension of the world as it is independent of any subjective elements we may bring to bear.

I doubt Dorrien, or any critical thinker in the 21st century, would be making such claims.

But there are understandings of reason and experience that are relevant to testing theological (or any other) truth claims.

When some claim is presented for my belief, one thing I might do is consider whether it is reasonable and whether it comports with my experience. “Reasonable” here needn’t refer to some a priori faculty for arriving at truth; it can simply mean that it is consistent with the laws of logic and with widely-known and accepted truths about the world.

And experience is just that: my experience and other people’s experience of the world, including their moral, aesthetic, and religious experience.

None of this implies that reason and experience are “context independent” or “universal” in allowing an unbiased view of the world. That’s precisely why we, if we’re smart, try to widen our base of knowledge and experience by learning from other people, other cultures, traditions, religions, etc. This is a very piecemeal, fallibilist view of knowledge, but I don’t know what the alternative is.

In deciding whether to accept a certain truth claim, then, what other procedure can we follow but to see how it fits with what we know about the world and what we’ve experienced of it?

Thus any theological truth claim presented for our belief that 1. conflicts with the laws of logic (e.g., is self-contradictory); 2. contradicts well-established truths about the world (e.g., well-established findings of science); or 3. can’t make sense of widespread moral, aesthetic, or religious experience is, I submit and other things being equal, likely to be false.

On the positive side, if such a claim supports or is entailed by other knowledge, or provides a more satisfying interpretation of our experience than the alternatives, or sheds new light on previously accepted truths we have good reason (again, other things being equal) to adopt it.

Of course, as Dorrien mentions, many religions have been uncomfortable with this piecemeal sifting and testing of truth and have looked for refuge in an appeal to authority, such as the authority of an infallible church, pope, Bible, tradition or whatever.

But as we well know, this just pushes the question back a step: How am I decide which authority is infallible? The only way I can do it is by appealing to my (fallible!) knowledge (or reason) and experience. What other way is there? Again, not an abstract, universal knowledge and experience, but the knowledge and experience I actually have, supplemented by that of others.

I don’t know if this makes me a “liberal” or not by Dorrien’s standards; I consider the actual content of my theological beliefs to be fairly traditional. Food for thought.

More from Dorrien on liberal theology here.