Liberal Theology: Voiding the Transcendent

A faltering and impatient liberalism is tempted to catapult itself into violent new remedies.

Two years go a former colleague at a midwest college acquainted me with a work group of prominent American liberal theologians who had come together to do “constructive” theology. My friend invited two member acquaintances to lead a colloquy concerning the goals of the group on the campus where I was then serving. Names of some in the work group are familiar to many in the American setting: Edward Farley (Vanderbilt), Gordon Kaufman (Harvard), David Kelsey (Yale), Langdon Gilkey (Chicago), Schubert Ogden (Perkins).

This was my first introduction to the workshop goals, and I was a bit surprised at the vitality and stridency with which the agenda was presented. An informative overview of the group’s goals and membership was published by Julian Hartt in the March 1979 Occasional Papers of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research (Collegeville, Minn. 56321). It is fascinating reading for those who want to keep up with what American liberal theologians are about these days.

I recently learned that the group is still meeting and is planning to publish a textbook they hope will break new ground for theological study and church life in the U.S. Briefly, this is what the group has agreed on as its assumptions in hammering out a reconstructionist theology for our day. Since the workshop first assumes that the scriptural doctrine of the supernatural is wholly discredited in the modern world, a new theology for our time will have to get along without it. In fact, Hartt writes, much of the traditional package of the Christian faith has been discredited and needs to be rethought completely.

Accordingly, the group has assigned specific traditional doctrines to various group members who are responsible for studying them in their historical contexts, assessing them in light of modern secular criticism, and reconstructing them for a new day, following a kind of Hegelian pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The principal aim of the 22 members is to address the challenge of “whether the Christian message can be freed from bondage to arcane models of vertical transcendence. So bound, the church’s message fails to reckon with the shape and movement of the actual world.”

Translated, that means all the traditional doctrines of Christian faith that evangelicals consider essential will be reconstructed and restated in language suitable to the non-supenaturalist assumptions of the present day. The inspiration and authority of Scripture is radically revised, as one might assume. Hartt remarks: “The faith of our fathers may be living still, but we are not under a divine mandate to accept our theological fathers’ views and uses of Scripture. Indeed, hardly anything better illustrates the power of historical relativism in our time than the need to produce constructive—rather than past-regarding—views on the authority and function of Scripture in theological work.” American theologians, he observes, are not as tied to biblical theology as are their European counterparts, and therefore are “not likely to claim direct Scriptural warrant for every serious theological proposal about God, man, nature, and history.”

What, then, is the higher purpose of the group’s agenda, other than meeting the challenging attacks of secularism? Liberation theology is the stated goal, to discover the prophetic vision of the church in wrestling with the world’s political and economic inequities, and so deal with the enormity of evil in our time. This, according to the work group, is not sufficiently addressed by historic Christianity.

Several observations might be made in reply to the project. It seems that liberal theologians who insist that the major obstacle in historic Christianity is its belief in God’s supernatural sovereignty won’t let go of the old liberal-fundamentalist controversy. I had thought that liberal theology was gaining in that it might be at least respectful toward those of us who hold such views—just as we evangelicals are acknowledging more broadly our social responsibilities in political and economic areas. But the issue is clear-cut and the tone strident: historic Christian doctrines must be demolished and reconstructed according to the norms of secularist society.

In a forthcoming study on “New Approaches to Jesus and the Gospels” by this writer, the creative insights of Michael Polanyi, I. T. Ramsey, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Wittgenstein to New Testament study are applied. It is an effort to encourage scholars once again to be relaxed and faithfully imaginative as they interpret the Gospels and not to be intimidated by the “flatness” of ordinary biblical criticism. Ramsey invites those who are logically bound by secular expectations to appreciate the logically “odd” in Scripture—including the miraculous and the supernatural. Lewis claims that only the good reader who is attentive and obedient to the text will hear it and not simply use it for other purposes. And Tolkien begs the reader to let the gospel cast its “spell.”

Polanyi maintains that great discoveries have never been made by the doubting mind but only by the receptive spirit with a searching and heuristic vision. “Unless you first believe, you will not understand.” An apparent concern for the poor and oppressed can often compel a faltering and impatient liberalism to catapult itself into violent new remedies and totalitarianisms. Only the preservation of conservative elements in the tradition, he writes, can check the destructive tendencies in our culture.

The political lessons of the twentieth century, with its horrendous powers bent on radical reforms ostensibly in pursuit of justice and brotherhood, impressed Polanyi that the right of moral self-determination and religious freedom can be preserved only within the conviviality of the conservative free society. The truth is unpalatable to our conscience, he writes, but there is no other way to preserve the free society than to correct unjust privileges by carefully graded stages, realizing that our duty lies in the service of ideals that we cannot possibly achieve on our own.

As for the group’s serious charge that historic biblical faith does not really address human evil in our day, I had thought Christ came to do just that, and at its deepest originative level in the human heart. It is a sickness of the modern mind, C. S. Lewis observes, to focus on the amelioration of the sins and poverty of another, oblivious of one’s own illness and sinfulness. Both must be addressed. But the central question is whether salvation is first something God does for us because it cannot be accomplished any other way, or something we insist on doing our own way in spite of what God says about the human condition. Is redemption centered in Christ’s supernatural work on the Cross, or is it essentially political freedom and freedom from material want? In biblical ethics, the latter arises from the first, but not always and at any price. And never is it a substitute for the Cross.

Once again an old question comes “round for new debate.” One hopes that the proposals of the group on “constructive” theology will challenge evangelicals to respond reflectively, imaginatively, and above all with integrity of commitment to Christ and those for whom he died.

ROYCE GORDON GRUENLERDr. Gruenler is professor of New Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts.

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