Postliberal Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed

Ronald T. Michener

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780567030054
• eBook ISBN: 9780567402080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Postliberal theology is a movement in contemporary theology that rejects both the Enlightenment appeal to a 'universal rationality' and the liberal assumption of an immediate religious experience common to all humanity. The movement initially began in the 1980's with its association to Yale Divinity School. Theologians such as Hans Frei, Paul Holmer, David Kelsey, and George Lindbeck were influential and were significantly influenced by theologians such as Karl Barth, Clifford Geertz, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Postliberalism uses a narrative approach to theology, such as developed by Hans Frei, and argues that all thought and experience is historically and socially mediated.
Michener provide the reader with an accessible introductory overview of the origins, current thought, potential problems, and future possibilities of postliberal theology. The basic philosphical and theological background are be briefly discussed, along with the seminal and predominant theologians identified with the movement. Michener shows how postliberalism emerges from the context of the postmodern critique of Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism. Postliberal theology is extremely critical of classical liberal theology, rather than an advancement of its agenda.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

We live in an era where the mighty prefix of ‘post’ reigns in the academy. We have postcolonialism, poststructuralism, post-Marxism, postmodernism and also postliberalism. Perhaps these designations speak to a mentality that is more self-reflective on history, maintaining a vision to move beyond the past without ignoring it and at the same time learning from its failures. To be postmodern is to remember the modern, recalling its technological victories, yet reprimanding its reductionism. The postmodern thinker realizes that reducing life to progress, technological or otherwise, via empiricism and rationalism, will never result in the utopia that much of modernism’s proponents seemed to promise. The designation of the prefix ‘post’ at the very least implies that we must not forget that to which the ‘post’ refers. If we are thinking in postcolonial categories, we must never forget the abuses of the imperialist past of colonialism. The past must be understood in part in order to understand the present, so that we make right decisions about the future. While acknowledging the past and giving it critical reflection, these complex terms have seemingly developed a life of their own. As a result, some of these modes of description now used in highbrow discussions are doomed to remain in the ivory towers. But this should not be the case for postliberal theology.

The proponents of postliberal theology would have us bring its convictions into the life of the church, not simply into sermons, but into the flesh and blood of everyday people – with a vision to see thriving communities of faith and practice. When it comes to the ‘post’ in postliberal theology, it is absolutely not ‘post-church,’ even though it is certainly post-apologetic, arguably post-conservative and certainly postmodern. It is towards understanding the context and background of this compelling pro-church movement to which we now turn.

What is postliberal theology?

What is postliberal theology? At first glance, one might think it pertains to the various theological developments following classic theological liberalism represented by Friedrich Schleiermacher, Adolf von Harnack and Albrecht Ritschl, among others, dominating the modernism of early twentieth century theology. This is partially correct, as the prefix ‘post’ appears to suggest. However, postliberal theology is significantly more focused that its mere etymology betrays. It is both postmodern and premodern. It calls us to move beyond the historicism and rationalism that set the agenda for modernist religious thought, calling for a return to a premodern faith rooted in the faith community, while fully realizing the impossibility of a full return to premodern dogma.¹

The agenda of classic liberal theology rode naturally on the coattails of the Enlightenment and its succeeding modernist agendas. Modern advancements in science, history and philosophy resulted in the demythologization and demystified leveling of the Christian faith into moral kernels of timeless love and truth. This was not an abandonment of Christianity, but a serious reworking and redefinition of its language and pre-critical paradigms. Miracles and science simply do not mix, so a modernist apologetic agenda for the Christian faith needs to dig below the supernatural grammar of the biblical world to discover the universal concepts existentially relevant for humans in today’s world. This is one direction.

Another more conservative orientation (as we will spell out more clearly in the next chapter) also takes the rational and empirical demands of modernism seriously, but rather than jettison all things seemingly supernatural, one must rigorously defend and justify all faith commitments and propositions using the methods and suppositions of the rational and empirical. This conservative approach has unfortunately led to some negative tendencies among groups associated with Christian fundamentalism or evangelicalism. Some tend to view scripture as a collection of propositional spiritual vitamins: verses to be read each morning for a burst of spiritual energy to carry one through the day. The Bible is seen more as a collection of holy snippets, rather than a narrative of God’s work in and through His people throughout history. Spirituality and evangelism in this model often become activities of verbal assent to certain commonly accepted propositions, rather than activities of the heart and body involving change of character and radical love for others. In its effort to remain true to the onslaught of modernist demands, both liberal and conservative approaches end up being drained of the vitality of the Christian faith in community.² Postliberal theology is introduced as a tertium quid solution between these perceived extremes of modernism and propositionalism.

Postliberal theology, especially in terms of its origins, has often been associated with what is called the ‘Yale School,’ referring to former Yale Divinity School professors, most notably, Hans Frei and George Lindbeck. Indeed, this has some merit. But if postliberal theology depends solely on Yale for its existence, then, as George Hunsinger notes, ‘postliberal theology is in trouble’. As we will see, it is a broader movement than its professorial advocates from Yale. Postliberal theology has always been more a loose connection of narrative theological interests than it is some monolithic agenda. It represents an overarching concern for the renewal of Christian confession over theological methodology.³ Rather than reliance on a notion of correlative common experience, postliberal theology moves toward the local or particular faith description of the community of the church.

The ‘postliberal’ to which we will be referring in this book will always be theological or philosophical in focus, rather than political. Within the study of theology itself, another distinction must also be made. When used as an unhyphenated word, ‘postliberal,’ it will refer to the movement discussed in this book. The hyphenated form of the word ‘post-liberal’ refers to an earlier, historically specific neo-orthodox rejection of classic theological liberalism during the years before and after World War Two. This is not to say that there are no common threads between the historical situatedness of ‘post-liberalism’ and the later ‘postliberal’ critique of liberal theology as developed by Hans Frei, George Lindbeck and others. Both post-liberal and postliberal theologies reject efforts to modernize Christian doctrines to make them palatable to contemporary scientific or rational mindsets. Both are concerned with the retrieval and maintenance of classic Christian doctrines and practices of the Church. Nevertheless, due the historical context, the nuanced differences among the authors, along with current postliberal insights with respect to postmodernity, we believe that making this distinction between the two is important to maintain.⁴

Descriptions and characteristics of postliberal theology

This rich and diverse movement of postliberal theology cannot be simply defined. But this we know for sure: it always stresses the narrative of scripture along with the community of the church and its practices. With efforts to provide a more complete description, we will discuss several of the common characteristics of postliberal theology that surface in the writings of its proponents. We will look specifically at characteristics given by William Placher and Hans Frei, while also providing commentary on these themes in dialogue with additional authors.⁵

There are a variety of ways to describe and divide these sometimes overlapping and interconnected themes of postliberal theology. On reflection, we suggest that there at least five basic themes or characteristics representative of the various expressions of postliberal theology:

1It is non-foundationalist.

2It is intra-textual.

3It is socially centred.

4It respects plurality and diversity.

5It embraces a generous orthodoxy (i.e. it is ecumenically focused).

First, postliberal theology is non-foundational in its epistemological understanding. There is no assumed neutrally detached, unbiased or ahistorical foundation for uncovering knowledge through rational or empirical investigation. With modernity, the drive was to sift through our traditions and religious trappings to get to a common human core of understanding. The challenge of pluralism, in some respects, simply solidified this perspective. Rather than embracing the particularity of our religious roots and faith communities, we generalized them all for the sake of harmony. Instead of truly recognizing diversity, all religions become flattened out, reduced to different ways of seeking the same God, supreme force, or ultimate reality. For the postliberal theologian, this ethical reductionism is neither possible nor desirable. There is no ‘ultimate’ common ground or foundation that we should seek either in religion or in our philosophy of knowledge. A universal, objective rationality is simply unattainable. Further, it ignores a basic aspect of our humanity: our differences.

The postliberal submits that our deep embeddedness in our particular cultures, backgrounds and traditions has deeply shaped and coloured our entire worldviews and perspectives. But this is not seen as something we should try with zeal to abandon, rather, it is something we must guard and cherish. With postliberal theology, the revelation of the Christian faith is a particular commitment to a particular narratival understanding of reality. Understanding that all systems of knowledge and reality are deeply rooted in community and culture is what opens up the door for the postliberal voice. As Alister McGrath observes: ‘With the end of the Enlightenment and its intellectual satellites – including liberalism and pluralism – the embargo on distinctiveness has been lifted.’⁶ For the postliberal, rather than promoting universality and the levelling of difference, difference and particularity are embraced as the means by which reality is made accessible.

Postliberal theology does not look for its credentials outside its own faith narrative structure, neither does it believe we should. Simply conceding all notions of truth and reality to the pervasive human propagated knowledge paradigms of modernism is wrong-headed. Too often Christians have ‘bought into’ a positivistic view of our Christianity that looks more toward a justification of modernism’s call for ‘facts’ (that is, ‘facts’ according to modernist agendas) instead of turning to the faith and tradition of the Christian narrative. This is why postliberal theology also avoids a systematic approach to apologetics and tends to avoid systematic theology. Since it is opposed to proofs based on empirical or rational foundations, it turns to ad hoc, contextualized approaches for examining the claims of Christianity. At the same time, it acknowledges that we already bring ad hoc assumptions to our theological expressions – but we must resist the temptation to continually put them into a system. It does not allow faith to be shortcircuited by empiricism. Instead, postliberal theology unabashedly affirms the distinct and particular character of Christianity, which has its own language and meaning within the context and practices of the church.⁷ In this regard, it desires to remain distinctly and specifically Christian in both its method of inquiry and its subject of inquiry.

A second theme that emerges from the first is that postliberal theology is inherently ‘intratextual’ rather than extra-textually centred. A postliberal theological vision absorbs all reality into the story of scripture, the church, and more particularly, the story and life of Jesus. As mentioned earlier, the grammar of all life and thought emerges from the praxis of the church. Rather than trying to make scripture fit the story of modernist ambitions and a rationalistic secularism, scripture creates and sustains a world of its own from within which the community finds its ability to believe, to reason, and to maintain its identity. This being said, it does not follow that the world of the Christian is completely isolated from the pluralistic world in which it finds itself. Instead, Christians draw on the narrative of the Bible to make sense of the world in its diversity while maintaining the particularity of the Christian faith.⁸ Stanley Hauerwas expresses this well when he states that the theologian’s task is not making the ‘gospel credible to the modern world, but to make the world credible to the gospel’.⁹ If we work from the world to the relevance of the gospel, we will continually compromise the gospel narrative for the sake of relevance. If we begin with the narrative of scripture, the ever-changing world will find its place in the gospel of God. The Christian faith has value in its own merit and language; it does not need support from the ‘outside’ in order to be justified. It is postliberal in that it does not look exclusively or primarily to either experiences, on one hand, or to propositions, on the other. It is not that these are totally and necessarily excluded, but they are not the primary means by which the Christian faith is expressed.

There is a parallel that is often made to grammar in postliberal theology that is significant for our understanding not only in terms of illustration, but in actual practice. Grammarians do not sit in centres of learning and invent languages, create communities by which a particular language may be used, then make the rules that govern that language. Likewise, for postliberal theology, doctrines were not simply constructed by theologians who then, in turn, formed communities that were willing to believe and apply these doctrines. When someone learns a foreign language, it is best accomplished not by simply poring over the rules that have arisen governing the language, but rather by immersion within a community that speaks the language. The rules of the given language have arisen in the context of community practice. It is not that the rules communicate nothing, but apart from the community, they do not provide the best means by which to truly absorb the language and its context. William Placher provides the following example that deftly illustrates this:

If I go to my pastor, I don’t want just psychological counseling – I can find someone better trained in that elsewhere. And if my pastor has only the language of contemporary psychology with which to help me think about my life, then he or she has no alternative to the better-trained psychologist down the street to offer. In short, Christians don’t seem, in a variety of contexts, to function well as Christians if they let various contemporary languages take over the discourse of their communities.¹⁰

Likewise, learning and understanding the Christian faith in terms of its discourse and grammar requires immersion in the community of faith. Just as with communities speaking a particular language, it may that only few within the church community are able to formally articulate their own grammar or doctrines, even though the ‘rules’ are more or less consistently followed in community practice.¹¹ Doctrines arose within the practice of the early Christian community. Many were, in fact, developed and articulated ad hoc at various periods and official councils of the church in response to divergent perspectives that (at least) appeared to be proposing (and/or practising) elements contrary to the traditions and practices of the broader church community at that time. We say this not to give an estimation on which doctrines were always correct or incorrect, but simply to make a general statement on how they contextually arose.

Moreover, the rules that govern one language do not necessarily govern, neither may they be imposed, on another. The rules of French grammar cannot be imposed on that of English or German. It is due to this perception o...

Table of contents

• FC
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Background
• 3. Theological exponents of postliberal theology
• 4. Problems and criticisms of postliberalism
• 5. Prospects and proposals for postliberal theology today
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index of Authors
• Subject Index