On Liberalisms (They just don’t make ‘em like they used to)
Photo by Riccardo Manieri on Unsplash
Liberalism has fallen on hard times. What follows here will not be an anti-liberal rant or a celebration of its demise. In fact, an important part of what I want to argue is that liberalism, properly understood, plays a crucial role in the Western intellectual tradition. It comes to bear on fields as diverse as education, politics, social media, and theology. At times conservatives use the word as an accusation, but a blanket rejection of liberalism is ill-advised. Healthy public discourse on liberalism requires more precision than it often involves. I also want to zero in on liberalism in the life of the church. How does liberalism come to bear on our life together? What have been its contributions? What are its liabilities?
Classical Liberalism
“Classical liberalism” refers to a collection of philosophical ideals coming out of the Enlightenment. The scope of these ideals is expansive, though many of them come back to the question of proper governance. At the heart of classical liberalism is the notion of universal human dignity. Perhaps the quintessential liberal statement comes from the U.S. Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Though not all our founding fathers were properly Christian (for example, Jefferson was a Deist), these kinds of values do not emerge without the influence of Christinaity on Western culture. Classical liberalism holds that people have inherent worth and should invariably have the capacity to seek out the good for their lives without undue restriction by a government or other powerful forces. The fact that the U.S has at times failed miserably in upholding these “self-evident” truths does not invalidate them. We human beings, fallen as we are, have rarely lived up to the best of our ideals.
The notion of freedom of expression is an important component of classical liberalism. The very notion of “liberty” involves the idea that we should be able to speak into a public sphere. Jürgen Habermas has articulated the idea of the public sphere as a check on the influence of political power. Charles Taylor describes the public sphere as “a kind of common space… in which people who never meet understand themselves to be engaged in discussion, and capable of reaching a common mind…. [T]he ‘opinion of mankind’ offers a merely convergent unity, while public opinion is supposedly generated out of a series of common actions” (A Secular Age, 187). An essential underlying assumption of the public sphere is that it exists for the common good. The inherent dignity of all humans means that our common discourse should serve our common interests. Even the expression of ideas we would think of as morally offensive or unreasonable serves the common good because we can engage these ideas, dissect them, and demonstrate why other ideas are preferable. Classical liberalism involves the idea that reason and human dignity will win out. Unreasonable ideas, or those that are ultimately degrading of the “unalienable Rights” with which human beings are endowed by their Creator, will fail within the public sphere.
This is why “cancel culture,” book banning, and other forms of censorship are so offensive to truly liberal sensibilities. We cannot advance intellectually or in terms of the public good so long as we suppress ideas and information. Rather, we should get all the ideas out on the table and hash out the good from the bad. If we believe an idea to be wrongheaded, we should present a case against it as clearly and cogently as possible. Classical liberalism places a high premium on human reason and intellect.
Theological Liberalism
Sometimes, however, “liberalism” refers to specific kinds of theology that have in one way or another attempted to modify traditional Christian beliefs. This is “theological liberalism.” It is related to classical liberalism in that it requires the liberal notion of freedom of expression to make its case in public and challenge historic church teachings. In most cases, theological liberals reject the traditional idea that Christianity is based upon special divine revelation, and instead attempt to ground it in other sources. Friedrich Schleiermacher is generally considered the father of theological liberalism. For Schleiermacher, the affective aspect of religion—feeling and experience—was the proper basis for theological claims. Another influential early liberal theologian was Albrecht Ritschl. Following Schleiermacher, Ritschl emphasized experience as a basis for religious knowledge. He also conceived of Christianity primarily as a moral program. Walter Rauschenbusch launched the “Social Gospel” movement, born out of an optimistic vision of human progress and a social understanding of the kingdom of God. He was little concerned with doctrinal matters, focusing instead on social ethics.
Within Methodism, Borden Parker Bowne developed the philosophical system called Boston personalism. Even though Bowne considered himself a philosopher, his work would exert considerable influence on the theological discourse of his day. Put briefly, for personalists, personality, which is inseparable from consciousness, will, and reason, is the primary metaphysical category. So when we talk about theology, we talk first about personality—God’s personality and, derivatively, human personality. Bowne was apparently a powerful lecturer and clearly possessed a profound intellect. One of his students, Albert Knudson, helped considerably to extend the influence of personalism. Another of Bowne’s students, Edgar Brightman, established personalism as a philosophical “school.” Related to personalism is existentialist theology, represented most prominently by Rudolf Bultmann, famous for his endeavor to “demythologize” the Bible. Paul Tillich is also sometimes categorized among the existentialist theologians.
These different schools of liberal theology have demonstrated staying power in the church or the academy in various degrees. Schleiermacher’s emphasis on personal experience as an epistemological category—a development that emerged out of the thought-world of Pietism—continues to exert considerable influence in both mainline and evangelical traditions. The notion of Christianity primarily as a moral program, derived from thinkers like Ritschl and Rauschenbusch, also remains influential, particularly among liberal/progressive Christains. Bultmann’s “demythologizing” program has come and gone, probably reaching its zenith in the 1990s when it was popularized by writers such as Marcus Borg and John Shelby Spong. Process theology, once a powerful force coming out of Chicago, and with a formidable proponent in Schubert Ogden at Perkins School of Theology, has diminished in influence considerably. Its primary influence is now in the evangelical world within the school of “‘Open Theism.” At a meeting of the American Academy of Religion years ago I once heard a well-respected and widely published process theologian ask a group of open theists why they didn’t just own the label and call themselves “liberals.” No clear answer was forthcoming.
Liberal theology in the sense described above is largely concerned with the matter of truth. Many of its questions are epistemological: How do we distinguish what is true from what is false? How does the problem of evil come to bear on our faith claims as Christians? What if my experience as a Christian leads me to believe things inconsistent with the historic teachings of the Church? How can I know I am loved and accepted by God? What kinds of actions, particularly in the social sphere, fulfill the Christian’s moral imperative?
Most of my teachers in seminary and during my doctoral work were liberals in the two senses mentioned above. Put differently, they were theological liberals with whom one could enter into reasoned debate. You didn’t have to agree with them. You had the freedom to explore ideas, though you did have to make sound arguments. As an educator I have followed them in their classical liberal principles, though generally not in their theological liberalism. Indeed, it is possible to be conservative (in the sense of wishing to conserve traditions, ideas, and practices) and classically liberal at the same time.
Postmodern “Liberalism”
What is often called “liberalism” today is quite different from either of the movements described above. We often refer to exponents of postmodernity as “liberal” because they oppose the conservative impulse to retain traditional ideas and structures, but this is a misnomer. Postmodernism is a complex set of movements that has no real internal coherence. It is essentially an abandonment of classical liberalism. One of its founding philosophers, Jean-Francois Lyotard, posited the rejection of “metanarratives,” the broad conceptual frameworks by which large groups of people make sense of their existence. A metanarrative is the story that tells us who we are as a people. With no metanarratives, it is hard to see what the “common good,” so important to classical liberalism, might involve.
Postmodernity has retained the liberal emphasis on personal experience and social action, but the overriding concern of many postmodern thinkers is power, particularly structures of power and the ways in which language conveys, perpetuates, and redistributes power. Two French philosophers, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, were instrumental in shaping this view of language. Another postmodern philosopher of considerable influence is Jean-Paul Sartre, famous for the idea that “existence precedes essence.” In other words, none of us has to be what the broader society attempts to make us. We make ourselves. We are radically autonomous. Combine this with Nietzche’s emphasis upon the “will to power” (I exert my will and ego over the wills and egos of others in order to shape my world as I would wish) and a Marxist notion of class struggle as the organizing principle of human life, and postmodernity comes into full bloom. Once you see the influence of postmodernity, you can’t unsee it. It emerges in college classrooms, large corporations, advertising, and, yes, Christian theology.
Despite its overlap with liberalism both in politics and the church, postmodernism is unavoidably illiberal. It has accepted the Enlightenment ideas of individualism and autonomy but infused them with notions of power relations and class struggle. The concepts of universal human dignity and the common good have been replaced by an emphasis on power and the ever-changing need to redistribute it. Asian Americans, for example, once considered an oppressed minority, are now “white adjacent,” and thus can be “justifiably” disadvantaged in admissions decisions at some elite universities.
Under the influence of postmodernity, many people have come to see language as a key element of power struggle. Thus it is not only acceptable but necessary to silence those who voice the wrong ideas. It is not only acceptable but necessary for Amazon to ban books that express “harmful” ideas according to powerful interest groups. It is not only acceptable but necessary to ban conservative speakers from college campuses, and even to fire tenured professors when they express the wrong positions. When institutions of higher education (and other institutions) compel people to state their preferred pronouns, this is not simply a demonstration of concern for transgender students, but the imposition of a worldview in which the self is radically autonomous and gender is a social construct. We are witnessing the tragic death of reason within institutions that are meant to promote it. A number of institutions once dedicated to education and the advancement of knowledge are now strongholds of ideological fundamentalism.
Postmodernity has also come to bear on Christian theology in myriad ways. Sometimes the term “progressive Christian” functions as a synonym for theological liberalism. Increasingly, however, what we call “progressive Christianity” is the child of two parents: theological liberalism and postmodern philosophy. From its theologically liberal parent, it has inherited a resistance to the boundaries of historic Christian teachings, both doctrinal and ethical. From its postmodern parent it has inherited a rejection of broad narrative accounts of truth and is deeply suspicious of absolute truth claims. The liberal attempt to reconstruct Christian metaphysics is all but gone, replaced by concerns with power and structures of power. The classical liberalism that birthed theological liberalism stands in tension with the illiberalism of postmodernity. Thus, mainline progressive denominations are increasingly illiberal in their politics.
There were, of course, critiques of power long before postmodernism ever emerged. Such critiques are often necessary and can result in positive social change. The danger lies in the singular focus on power in the absence of broader narratives that help us organize for the common good. When power becomes the primary category by which we make sense of life, there is nothing beyond the primal and unending struggle for its attainment. If we cannot recognize other values and interests such as innate human dignity, forgiveness, and empathy, chaos is at hand and violence lurks nearby. Power is real and is often abused, but power is not everything, and everything is not power.
What Now?
What I appreciate about the tradition of theological liberalism is its searching attempts to answer exceedingly difficult questions. It is a modernist intellectual tradition that has tried to get at many of the problems that the modernist worldview posed for the Christian faith. Liberal theologians have attempted to resolve pressing questions such as theodicy, the relationship between faith and science, and the historical distance between modern people and those who wrote the Bible. In their attempts to answer these questions, however, theological liberals often sacrificed too much. Attempts to establish a basis for Christian belief apart from special divine revelation have not proved capable of sustaining the church or supporting its evangelistic mandate.
Whatever problems may have attended theological liberalism, however, those of postmodernity far exceed them. The Western world must reckon with the extent to which postmodern thought has become part of our cultural fabric. It has permeated many of our institutions. The very notion of a liberal society is in danger. We need a public sphere. We need a vision of the common good. We need spaces for dialogue, agreement, disagreement, and dissent. These spaces are disappearing, most alarmingly in academic institutions. If universities have given up on the notion of open dialogue and debate as means of intellectual advancement, our situation is grim indeed.
The church needs to come to grips with postmodernity as well. The rejection of metanarratives includes the Christian metanarrative. We are a people who have long understood ourselves in terms of the story of salvation given to us in Scripture: creation, fall, redemption, and new creation. To abandon this story is to abandon our identity as the people of God. We do recognize the existence of powers and principalities (Eph 6:12) and the need to confront them. We frame them, however, within the context of the scriptural narrative. The Bible reveals to us indispensable insights about how to understand ourselves, our relationship to other people, and our relationship to God. We can critique power when necessary, but we have a unique vantage point from which to do so.
In the days ahead, Christian theologians must endeavor again to explore and explain the idea of special divine revelation. If God has not communicated his identity and purposes to us, or if we are somehow unable to perceive them, then we are lost. Particularly in the present age that we sometimes call “liquid modernity,” social structures are changing so quickly that it is difficult to find one’s footing, establish a clear sense of self, and become rooted in a community. What the church has long proclaimed, however, is that God has in fact communicated with us, and regardless of whatever changes may take place in the world, God is truth. That truth is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. We can rest amid the stormy seas of modernity, postmodernity, and whatever comes next because we have received God’s self-revelation.
David F. Watson is Lead Editor of Firebrand. He serves as Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.