The Future of Liberal Theology

Mark D. Chapman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351749534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This title was first published in 2002: Two hundred years after the publication of Schleiermacher's epoch-making Speeches, The Future of Liberal Theology presents a comprehensive and critical re-assessment of the past, present and future of the liberal tradition in Christian theology. In dialogue with the different forms of liberalism emerging from the Enlightenment, each of which is carefully defined, distinguished international theologians draw on a range of perspectives which represent the diversity of liberal theology. Discussing the criticisms of liberalism offered in the twentieth century, and engaging with contemporary theological debate which is often deeply hostile to liberalism, the conclusions offered for liberal theology range from the deeply pessimistic to the thoroughly optimistic. Students, clergy, and theological educators more broadly will value this critical reflection on the current state of theology and suggestions for its future course, together with the serious engagement with issues in theological education, which this book presents.

Part One
Types of Liberal Theology

Chapter 1
Introduction

The Past, Present and Future of Liberal Theology

Mark D. Chapman

This is a book about the future of liberal theology. But if there is to be a future, it is one that is built on a past. And if the first pubhcation of Schleiermacher's Speeches in 1799 marks (at least symbolically) the beginning of liberal theology, then that tradition is now over two hundred years old: older indeed than many of its apparently more orthodox alternatives (including, for instance, Fundamentalism, Anglo Catholicism, and Radical Orthodoxy). Unlike their opponents, however, most liberals have little desire to recreate a golden age, be that in the first, fifth or the thirteenth century. Theological liberalism, like liberalism in other areas of thought, is suspicious of golden ages. It is only too aware that every age has its problems, its authoritarianism and its tendencies towards absoluteness and the uncritical acceptance of the status quo. As a movement which emerged in the concrete political and economic circumstances of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, liberalism rests on some degree of acceptance of the guiding principles of enlightenment thought, particularly its criticism of the supernaturally-justified authorities of scripture, dogma and tradition. And if liberalism is to survive and not to become yet another form of authoritarianism which simply idolises the modern at the expense of the tradition (which has always been a tendency), then it will be a theological position which is based on methodological criticism, and will thus be a theology which can never be satisfied with itself, at least this side of the Parousia.

A straightforward definition of 'liberal theology', however, is virtually impossible. As John Habgood commented in a perceptive account of what he understood by 'the Liberal Position': 'Liberalism is a slippery concept. I doubt whether "the liberal position" ... exists as such, or whether there is any one set of ideas or attitudes on which those who value the word "liberal" would agree.'¹ The difficulty of using the term 'liberal' is undeniable: it can cover a wide range of different and sometimes quite incompatible methodologies. There are, for instance, many liberals who would not agree with the preliminary account offered above. After all, some theological liberals are very far from critical, many latching onto the latest voguish philosophy, however silly that might be. There are some who refuse to grapple with the tradition at anything other than a superficial level. While such thinkers might provide useful apologetics for a brief period, they seldom if ever leave anything of lasting value.² This is not a book about that kind of liberalism or for those kinds of liberals - even the most unsympathetic reader will detect few breaches of orthodoxy in the following chapters, and those in search of controversy will look in vain through the pages that follow. Instead, what is offered is a book which subjects the liberal tradition to critical scrutiny. The reason for this is simple: if liberal theology is by nature critical, then it needs to be critical of itself. The contributors to this volume would probably not all want to label themselves as liberal, but all are aware of the massive contribution that the liberal tradition has made to Christian theology. And all offer m one way or another a challenge for the future. If, as I will suggest in this introduction, Christianity itself is a methodologically critical religion, then its method should always be more or less liberal. Consequently it is vital for theology that liberalism lives on into the future; but whether it will or not is altogether another question.

The chapters collected in this volume all take as their foundation the great shift in thinking marked by the Enlightenment: in Part One several different strands of liberalism which stem from the Enlightenment are analysed, regarding it on the whole as a positive contribution towards the development of critical thought as well as the decisive break with the authoritarianism of the past. Although it might be berated by many, the Enlightenment brought with it a new understanding of freedom, democracy and hope. That said, there are decidedly different approaches to liberalism in the pages that follow. These range from the bold and racy triumphalism of Paul Badham's efforts to revive what to many must have seemed the lifeless corpse of a very experiential form of English Modernism, through Friedrich Wilhelm Grafs sophisticated and challenging political critique of much of the so-called 'liberal' tradition deriving from Germany (many theological liberals simply were not that liberal), to Keith Ward's moderate and orthodox plea for tolerance, dialogue and openness in theology. Alongside this stands Steve Else's discussion of pluralism and David Pailin's lively challenge to theologians to engage with people where they are against the increasingly specialised and irrelevant discourse of much professional theology.

Part Two offers three connected chapters which outline the possibilities and difficulties for theology which emerge from the liberal educational tradition. In a wide-ranging survey Peter Hodgson calls for a revisionary postmodern liberal theology based on a transformative pedagogy which pays attention to the massive changes presented by the contemporary world. Elaine Graham's response reveals just how counter-cultural the pursuit of learning for learning's sake really is, a fact that will be immediately obvious to anybody involved in English higher education at the turn of the new millennium with its commodification of learning. Clive Marsh in turn offers a critical and challenging discussion of experiential learning.

Part Three carries the discussion forward by bringing 'liberal theology' into explicit dialogue with some of the alternative strands of recent theology. After a pithy and provocative chapter on Karl Barth and liberalism by Timothy Gorringe, which suggests that Barth was far more liberal than many have been willing to concede, Rita Nakashima Brock raises a number of far-reaching challenges to any liberal. Her acute awareness of the élitism and cultural specificity of the Enlightenment tradition, and her uncovering of the violent undercurrents of much so-called liberal theology, has to be addressed if liberal theology is to have any future. Similarly, in their accounts of three conflicting responses to liberalism, Gavin Hyman and Paul D. Murray ensure that liberalism will have to address its critics carefully if it is to remain credible. There might even be something to be learnt from the competing strands of contemporary theological debate. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is an outside view from the sceptical sociologist, Steve Bruce: liberal religion may simply not have enough of an understanding of itself or its appeal to attract any converts. That makes the future of liberalism extremely precarious. And, as will be shown in the remainder of this introductory chapter, things do not look too rosy for liberalism from within theology either.

Liberalism and its cultured and not so cultured despisers

Not surprisingly, what one thinks about theological liberalism will depend on one's attitude to the criticism of authority and tradition demonstrated in the Enlightenment more generally. The fate of liberalism cannot solely rest with developments in theology: it is tied up far more with broader movements in society and politics. And it is for that reason that even if ever there was a time when liberalism was in the ascendant, it is quite clear that this is not any longer the case. Indeed, in recent years 'liberalism', like much else associated with the Enlightenment (for example, individualism and even the language of human rights), has frequently become a term of abuse among more conservatively-minded theologians and philosophers. This can be clearly seen in much recent theological and philosophical writing: for instance, in his ground-breaking work of moral philosophy, After Virtue, Alasdair Maclntyre speaks eloquently about the inevitable 'failure' of what he calls the 'Enlightenment project'. In the Enlightenment, he suggests, with its invention of the 'individual', morality was dislocated from inherited modes of thought, as reality became increasingly fragmented as it collapsed into distinctive and competing spheres. According to his thesis, the inter-relatedness of all aspects of reality—and of all people within an objective moral system—was destroyed as everything was uprooted from its traditional and divinely-sanctioned context.³ The Enlightenment was thus about competing egos uprooted from traditional patterns of community.

This thesis has proved popular amongst some theologians. In several of his books, the prolific Colin Gunton of King's College, London, for instance, has analysed the isolation of the individual from his or her embeddedness in a social context in a manner reminiscent of Maclntyre. In response to such dislocation Gunton (and here there are parallels in many other best-selling theologians)⁴ pleads for a revitalisation of a tradition of 'being-in-relation' which, in his opinion, had been lost during the long dominion of Augustinianism (used here as a synonym for the isolation of the individual) in the West. In turn, the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on the isolated individual's reason at the expense of any sense of the whole, marks the culmination of this breakdown of being-in-relationship. Indeed it becomes a means of replacing God 'with a plurality of finite wills each aspiring to divinity'.⁵ Consequently, Gunton sees the Enlightenment as chiefly responsible for the increasing individualism of modern life where 'the human mind fills the space left empty by the displaced deity'. This, he claims, can be discerned most clearly in what he understands to be Kant's fragmentation of morals, science and art.⁶ In response, Gunton proposes what he considers a Trinitarian theology of relationality: 'of both God and man it must be said that that they have their being in their personal relatedness: their free relation-in-otherness'.⁷

From a different perspective, the Enlightenment and the liberalism it spawned have been attacked by those who see in it the idolisation of human reason. In his 1990 Bampton Lectures, for instance, the bestselling (and erstwhile liberal)⁸ Alister McGrath could write that 'it remains doubtful whether two competing traditions, such as Christianity and Enlightenment rationalism, each with its associated rationalities, can really be said to "understand" each other, still less to objectively "evaluate" or "justify" each other'.⁹ On this view, Christian reason is a species of reason distinct from that of the Enlightenment; as a consequence it is only from within the Christian system of reason, that is from within the church's tradition, that it is fully possible to understand the Christian logic. Thus Christianity (like Enlightenment reason) is simply one rationality alongside many others, and it is quite impossible for the one to communicate with the other. Consequently, Enlightenment reason is reduced to a species of logic of no greater relevance than other forms of logic (like presumably astrology, phrenology or other delights from Glastonbury). Not surprisingly, for conservative theologians, the fragmentation of the intellectual world into competing traditions of reasoning, which has become a feature of some varieties of postmodernism, is of great interest. As John Milbank suggests, postmodernism is the 'end of a single system of truth based on universal reason, which tells us what reality is like'.¹⁰

Again, McGrath provides an interesting example: as if stating an uncontested fact, he notes in a recent encyclopaedia article on the Enlightenment, that 'the credibility of the Enlightenment world-view, especially its emphasis upon the total adequacy of human reason, has been severely challenged through the recognition of the non-universal character of human rationality and the special mediation of traditions of discourse and reasoning'.¹¹ Elsewhere, this attack on the Enlightenment becomes somewhat less veiled. Thus he asserts in a book on The Renewal of Anglicanism, that 'there is a tidal wave of dissent rising against the Enlightenment', and its theological concomitant of liberalism, which, he boldly claims, 'is now increasingly dismissed as an irrelevance by both conservative and mainline writers. ... Its critics charge it with playing to a secular gallery, and giving encouragement to an increasingly self-confident anti-Christian tendency in western cul-ture.'¹² And in an even less guarded statement, he suggests that in reality the Enlightenment was responsible for most of the evils of the modern world, including the Stalinist purges and the Nazi extermination camps. And he goes on to ask: 'Who wanted anything to do with an intellectually dubious movement, which had given rise to the Nazi holocaust and the Stalinist purges?'¹³ This is certainly not a moderate charge and to some it might seem quite tasteless and inaccurate,¹⁴ especially when it is juxtaposed against a quotation from the somewhat less bellicose Leslie Houlden who, in that manifest...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: Types of Liberal Theology
• Part Two: Liberal Theology and Education
• Part Three: Addressing the Critics
• Conclusion: An Outsider's View
• Index