Radical Orthodoxy
Some Recent Western Theological Movements and Trends
In previous sections of this chapter, we have looked at some of the broader cultural influences on Christian theology in the modern era, as well as noting some theologians of importance. In what follows, we shall explore some major recent movements and trends in western theology.
Liberal Protestantism
Liberal Protestantism is unquestionably one of the most important movements to have arisen within modern Christian thought. Its origins are complex. However, it is helpful to think of it as having arisen in response to the theological program set out by F. D. E. Schleiermacher, especially in relation to his emphasis upon human “feeling” (see pp. 209–10) and the need to relate Christian faith to the human situation. Classic liberal Protestantism had its origins in the Germany of the mid-nineteenth century amid a growing realization that Christian faith and theology alike required reconstruction in the light of modern knowledge. In England, the increasingly positive reception given to Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection (popularly known as the “Darwinian theory of evolution”) created a climate in which some elements of traditional Christian theology (such as the doctrine of the seven days of creation) seemed to be increasingly untenable. From its outset, liberalism was committed to bridging the gap between Christian faith and modern knowledge.
Liberalism’s program required a significant degree of flexibility in relation to traditional Christian theology. Its leading writers argued that reconstruction of belief was essential if Christianity were to remain a serious intellectual option in the modern world. For this reason, they demanded a degree of freedom in relation to the doctrinal inheritance of Christianity, on the one hand, and traditional methods of biblical interpretation, on the other. Where traditional ways of interpreting Scripture, or traditional beliefs, seemed to be compromised by developments in human knowledge, it was imperative that they should be discarded or reinterpreted to bring them into line with what was now known about the world.
The theological implications of this shift in direction were considerable. A number of Christian beliefs came to be regarded as seriously out of line with modern cultural norms; these were dealt with in two ways:
Alongside this process of doctrinal reinterpretation (which continued in the “history of dogma” movement: see pp. 246–7) may be seen a new concern to ground Christian faith in the world of humanity – above all, in human experience and modern culture. Sensing potential difficulties in grounding Christian faith in an exclusive appeal to Scripture or the person of Jesus Christ, liberalism sought to anchor that faith in common human experience and interpret it in ways that made sense within the modern worldview.
Liberalism was inspired by the vision of a humanity that was ascending upward into new realms of progress and prosperity. The doctrine of evolution gave new vitality to this belief, which was nurtured by strong evidence of cultural stability and progress in western Europe in the late nineteenth century. Religion came increasingly to be seen as relating to the spiritual needs of modern humanity and giving ethical guidance to society.
Many critics of the movement – such as Karl Barth in Europe and Reinhold Niebuhr in North America – regarded liberal Protestantism as based upon an unduly optimistic view of human nature. They believed that this optimism had been discredited by the events of the First World War and that liberalism would henceforth lack cultural credibility. This has proved to be a considerable misjudgment. At its best, liberalism may be regarded as a movement committed to the restatement of Christian faith in forms that are acceptable within contemporary culture. Liberalism has continued to see itself as a mediator between two unacceptable alternatives: the mere restatement of traditional Christian faith (usually described as “traditionalism” or “fundamentalism” by its liberal critics) and the total rejection of Christianity. Liberal writers have been passionately committed to the search for a middle road between these two stark alternatives.
Perhaps the most developed and influential presentation of liberal Protestantism is to be found in the writings of the German émigré Paul Tillich, who rose to fame in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s, toward the end of his career, and who is widely regarded as the most influential American theologian since Jonathan Edwards. (Some scholars, however, prefer to refer to Tillich as “neo-liberal,” recognizing that his work represents a development, rather than a mere reworking, of classic Liberal Protestant themes). Tillich’s theological program can be summarized in the term “correlation.” By the “method of correlation” Tillich understands the task of modern theology to be to establish a conversation between human culture and Christian faith. Tillich reacted with alarm to the theological program set out by Karl Barth, seeing this as a misguided attempt to drive a wedge between theology and culture.
For Tillich, existential questions – or “ultimate questions,” as he often terms them – are thrown up and revealed by human culture. Modern philosophy, writing, and the creative arts point to questions that concern humans. Theology then formulates answers to these questions and by doing so it correlates the gospel to modern culture. The gospel must speak to culture and it can do so only if the actual questions raised by that culture are heard. For David Tracy of the University of Chicago, the image of a dialogue between the gospel and culture is controlling: that dialogue involves the mutual correction and enrichment of both gospel and culture. There is thus a close relation between theology and apologetics, in that the task of theology is understood to be that of interpreting the Christian response to the human needs disclosed by cultural analysis.
The term “liberal” is thus probably best interpreted as designating “a theologian in the tradition of Schleiermacher and Tillich, concerned with the reconstruction of belief in response to contemporary culture” (David Tracy), in which form it describes many noted modern writers. However, it must be noted that the current use of the term “liberal” is somewhat imprecise and confusing.
Liberal Protestantism has been criticized on a number of points, of which the following are representative.
Liberalism probably reached its zenith in North America during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although continuing to maintain a distinguished presence in seminaries and schools of religion, cultural changes during the 1990s have led some to see it as a waning force both in modern theology and in church life in general. The weaknesses of liberalism have been seized upon by critics within the postliberal school, to be considered shortly. Much the same criticism can also be directed against a movement known loosely as “modernism,” to which we will now turn.
Modernism
The term “modernist” was first used to refer to a school of Catholic theologians operating toward the end of the nineteenth century, which adopted a critical attitude to traditional Christian doctrines, especially those relating to the identity and significance of Jesus of Nazareth. The movement fostered a positive attitude toward radical biblical criticism and stressed the ethical, rather than the more theological, dimensions of faith. In many ways, modernism may be seen as an attempt by writers within the Roman Catholic Church to come to terms with the outlook of the Enlightenment, which it had, until that point, largely ignored.
Among Roman Catholic modernist writers, particular attention should be paid to Alfred Loisy (1857–1940) and George Tyrrell (1861–1909). During the 1890s, Loisy established himself as a critic of traditional views of the biblical accounts of creation and argued that a real development of doctrine could be discerned within Scripture. His most significant publication, The Gospel and the Church, appeared in 1902. This important work was a direct response to the views of Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), published two years earlier as What is Christianity? on the origins and nature of Christianity. Loisy rejected Harnack’s suggestion that there was a radical discontinuity between Jesus and the church; however, he made significant concessions to Harnack’s liberal Protestant account of Christian origins, including an acceptance of the role and validity of biblical criticism in interpreting the Gospels. As a result, the work was placed upon the list of prohibited books by the Catholic authorities in 1903.
The British Jesuit writer George Tyrrell (1861–1909) followed Loisy in his radical criticism of traditional Catholic dogma. In common with Loisy, he criticized Harnack’s account of Christian origins in Christianity at the Crossroads (1909), famously dismissing Harnack’s historical reconstruction of Jesus as “the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well.” The book also included a defense of Loisy’s work, arguing that the official Roman Catholic hostility to the book and its author had created a general impression that it is a defense of Liberal Protestant against Roman Catholic positions and that “modernism is simply a protestantizing and rationalizing movement.”
In part, this perception may be due to the growing influence of similar modernist attitudes within the mainstream Protestant denominations. In England, the Churchmen’s Union was founded in 1898 for the advancement of liberal religious thought; in 1928, it altered its name to the Modern Churchmen’s Union. Among those especially associated with this group may be noted Hastings Rashdall (1858–1924), whose Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919) illustrates the general tenor of English modernism. Drawing somewhat uncritically upon the earlier writings of liberal Protestant thinkers such as Ritschl, Rashdall argued that the theory of the atonement associated with the medieval writer Peter Abelard (1079–1142) was more acceptable to modern thought forms than traditional theories that made an appeal to the notion of a substitutionary sacrifice. This strongly moral or exemplarist theory of the atonement, which interpreted Christ’s death virtually exclusively as a demonstration of the love of God, made a considerable impact upon English, and especially Anglican, thought in the 1920s and 1930s. Nevertheless, the events of the First World War and the subsequent rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s undermined the credibility of the movement. It was not until the 1960s that a renewed modernism or radicalism became a significant feature of English Christianity.
The rise of modernism in the United States follows a similar pattern. The growth of liberal Protestantism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was widely perceived as a direct challenge to more conservative evangelical standpoints. Newman Smyth’s Passing Protestantism and Coming Catholicism (1908) argued that Roman Catholic modernism could serve as a mentor to American Protestantism in several ways, not least in its critique of dogma and its historical understanding of the development of doctrine. The situation became increasingly polarized through the rise of fundamentalism in response to modernist attitudes.
The First World War ushered in a period of self-questioning within American modernism, which was intensified through the radical social realism of writers such as H. R. Niebuhr. By the mid-1930s, modernism appeared to have lost its way. In an influential article in The Christian Century of December 4, 1935, Harry Emerson Fosdick declared the need “to go beyond modernism.” In his Realistic Theology (1934), Walter Marshall Horton spoke of the rout of liberal forces in American theology. However, the movement gained new confidence in the postwar period and arguably reached its zenith during the period of the Vietnam War.
However, we must now turn back to the opening of the twentieth century, to consider an earlier reaction against liberalism, which is especially associated with the name of Karl Barth: neo-orthodoxy.
Neo-Orthodoxy
The First World War witnessed a growing disillusionment with, although not a final rejection of, the liberal theology that had come to be associated with Schleiermacher and his followers. A number of writers argued that Schleiermacher had, in effect, reduced Christianity to little more than religious experience, thus making it a human-centered rather than a God-centered affair. The war, it was argued, destroyed the credibility of such an approach. Liberal theology seemed to be about human values – and how these could be taken seriously if they led to global conflicts on such a massive scale. By stressing the “otherness” of God, writers such as Karl Barth believed that they could escape from the doomed human-centered theology of liberalism.
These ideas were given systematic exposition by Barth in the Church Dogmatics (1936–1969), one of the most significant theological achievements of the twentieth century. Barth did not live to finish this enterprise, so his exposition of the doctrine of redemption is incomplete. The primary theme that resonates throughout the Dogmatics is the need to take seriously the self-revelation of God in Christ through Scripture. Although this might seem to be little more than a reiteration of themes already firmly associated with Calvin or Luther, Barth brought a degree of creativity and rigor to his task, which firmly established him as a major thinker in his own right.
The work is divided into five volumes, each of which is further subdivided. Volume I deals with the Word of God – for Barth, the source and starting point of Christian faith and Christian theology alike. Volume II deals with the doctrine of God and volume III with the doctrine of the creation. Volume IV deals with the doctrine of reconciliation (or, perhaps one might say, “atonement”; the German term Versöhnung has both meanings). The final incomplete volume V considers the doctrine of redemption.
Apart from the predictable (and relatively non-informative) term “Barthianism,” two terms have been used to describe the approach associated with Barth. The first of these terms is “dialectical theology,” which takes up the idea, found especially in Barth’s 1919 commentary on Romans, of a “dialectic between time and eternity” or a “dialectic between God and humanity.” The term draws attention to Barth’s characteristic insistence that there is a contradiction or dialectic, rather than a continuity, between God and humanity. The second term is “neo-orthodoxy,” which draws attention to the affinity between Barth and the writings of the period of Reformed orthodoxy, especially during the seventeenth century. In many ways, Barth can be regarded as entering into dialogue with several leading Reformed writers of this period.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Barth’s approach is his “theology of the Word of God.” According to Barth, theology is a discipline that seeks to keep the proclamation of the Christian church faithful to its foundation in Jesus Christ, as he has been revealed to us in Scripture. Theology is not a response to the human situation or to human questions; it is a response to the Word of God, which demands a response on account of its intrinsic nature.
Neo-orthodoxy became a significant presence in North American theology during the 1930s, especially through the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr and others, which criticized the optimistic assumptions of much liberal Protestant social thinking of the time.
Neo-orthodoxy has been criticized at a number of points. The following are of especial importance:
Ressourcement or la Nouvelle Théologie
During the broad period 1930–1950, traditional Catholic theology in western Europe found itself facing a series of challenges that its traditional, rather scholastic approaches were ill-equipped to meet. Many writers in Germany, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands attempted to rise to this challenge, developing new approaches to theology that maintained what was good about the tradition, while at the same time allowing it to engage with the questions of the day. Yet it was in France that these questions were pursued with particular energy and insight. The French theological revival of these years included some of the greatest names in twentieth-century Catholic scholarship – writers such as Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), Jean Daniélou (1905–1974), Yves Congar (1904–1995), Marie-Dominique Chenu (1895–1990), and Louis Bouyer (1913–2004).
Why France? It was partly because of the urgency of the question in that country. France had a long tradition of secularism, going back to the French Revolution. Yet the theological soul-searching that we see in this movement was sparked off by the publication of Jean Godin’s book France – A Nation of Mission? in 1943. This book argued that Catholicism was losing its influence on young people and the working classes. The Catholic church was galvanized: the years 1946–1947 witnessed an unprecedented level of institutional self-examination and renewal.
Part of that process of renewal was the movement known as la ressourcement (a “return to the sources”) by its advocates and la nouvelle théologie (“the new theology”) by its critics (who saw it as a form of innovation). A key theme of this “ressourcement” was a return to the sources, traditions, and creeds of the early Church. Many regard the manifesto of the movement as being a 1946 article by the young Jesuit writer Jean Daniélou, entitled “The present orientations of religious thought.” A chasm, he declared, had opened up between systematic theology and biblical exegesis. The result was inevitable: the church had developed a theology that was divorced from biblical studies, on the one hand, and the life and spirituality of the church, on the other.
Daniélou’s solution to this difficulty was simple, and not unlike that used by Christian humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. To equip the church to confront the challenges of the modern age, it must rediscover the riches of the church’s two thousand years of history by returning to the very fountainhead of the Christian tradition. The French term “ressourcement” (which is difficult to translate adequately into English) encapsulates this program of “rediscovering and reappropriating the original sources of theology.”
To its advocates, this program was not a mere repetition of what had been said in the past. Rather, ressourcement was a critical and constructive process, in which the Catholic tradition was interrogated and interpreted in the light of the questions of the present. Charles Péguy (1873–1914), an agnostic who returned to Catholicism in his later years, had noted in the early 1900s that the modernist crisis of faith demanded “a new and deeper sounding of ancient, inexhaustible, and common resources.” Like the humanists of the Renaissance (see pp. 103–4), the advocates of this reform found themselves advocating what seemed to be a paradox: in order to advance in theology, one first has to go backward. “If theological progress is sometimes necessary, it is never possible unless you go back to the beginning and start all over again” (Étienne Gilson).
Nor did these theologians see theological scholarship as of purely academic importance. The ressourcement envisaged and advocated by these writers was not primarily a work of academic scholarship but rather a work of religious revitalization. Indeed, many placed the emphasis on the pastoral orientation of theology and the need for theology to connect up with the situation of ordinary people. This “primacy of the pastoral” (Yves Congar) extended to worship, addressing the widespread perception that a sense of God’s transcendent mystery had been eroded by a rationalistic theology. The recovery of the transcendent in theology was seen as an integral aspect of the program of ressourcement and helps us to understand why the movement emphasized the link between theology and spirituality.
Ressourcement is an excellent example of a theology of retrieval – a deliberate, principled recollection of the past in order to serve the needs of the present, without being trapped in the particularities of a bygone age. In Why Study the Past: The Quest for the Historical Church (2005), Rowan Williams maps out both the importance of being “resourced” by the wisdom of the past and how this might be attained.
There will always be gifts to be received from the past; we can expect that we shall find something that we had not grasped until a contemporary crisis had brought it into focus. Hence the extraordinary regularity with which radical renewal in the Church has come about from a new appropriation of tradition of one sort or another.
Feminism
Feminism has come to be a significant component of modern western culture. At its heart, feminism is a global movement working toward the emancipation of women, arguing for gender equality and a right understanding of the relationship between women and men to be affirmed by contemporary theology and practice. The older term for the movement – “women’s liberation” – expressed the fact that it is at heart a liberation movement directing its efforts toward achieving equality for women in modern society, especially through the removal of obstacles – including beliefs, values, and attitudes – which hinder that process.
Feminist theology thus aims to understand and criticize male-dominated tradition and to challenge androcentric images of God and humanity. The movement has become increasingly heterogeneous in recent years, partly on account of a willingness to recognize a diversity of approaches on the part of women within different cultures and ethnic groupings. Thus the religious writings of black women in North America are increasingly coming to be referred to as “black womanist theology.”
Feminism has come into conflict with Christianity (as it has with most religions) on account of the perception that religions treat women as second-rate human beings, both in terms of the roles that those religions allocate to women and the manner in which they are understood to image God. The writings of Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) – such as The Second Sex (1945) – developed such ideas at length. A number of post-Christian feminists, including Mary Daly (1928–2010) in her Beyond God the Father (1973) and Daphne Hampson (born 1944) in Theology and Feminism (1990), argue that Christianity, with its male symbols for God, its male savior figure, and its long history of male leaders and thinkers, is biased against women, and therefore incapable of being salvaged. Women, they urge, should leave its oppressive environment. Others, such as Carol Christ in Laughter of Aphrodite (1987) and Naomi Ruth Goldenberg in Changing of the Gods (1979), argue that women may find religious emancipation by recovering the ancient goddess religions (or inventing new ones) and abandoning traditional Christianity altogether.
Yet the feminist evaluation of Christianity is far from as monolithically hostile toward Christianity as these writers might suggest. Feminist writers have stressed how women have been active in the shaping and development of the Christian tradition, from the New Testament onward, and have exercised significant leadership roles throughout Christian history. Indeed, many feminist writers have shown the need to reappraise the Christian past, giving honor and recognition to a large group of faithful women, whose practice, defense, and proclamation of their faith had hitherto passed unnoticed by much of the Christian church and its (mainly male) historians. Sarah Coakley (born 1951) is an important voice in such discussions. In her Powers and Submissions (2002), Coakley explores how feminism can be used constructively to provide a new appreciation for certain early church figures, without losing sight of its critical and corrective role.
The most significant contribution of feminism to Christian thought may be argued to lie in its challenge to traditional theological formulations. These, it is argued, are often patriarchal (that is, they reflect a belief in domination by males) and sexist (that is, they are biased against women). The following areas of theology are especially significant in this respect.
The Maleness of God
The persistent use of male pronouns for God within the Christian tradition is a target of criticism by many feminist writers. It is argued that the use of female pronouns is at least as logical as the use of their male counterparts and might go some way toward correcting an excessive emphasis upon male role models for God. In her Sexism and God-Talk (1983), Rosemary Radford Ruether (born 1936) suggests that the term “God/ess” is a politically correct designation for God, although the verbal clumsiness of the term is unlikely to enhance its appeal.
In her Metaphorical Theology (1982), Sallie McFague (1933–2019) argues for the need to recover the idea of the metaphorical aspects of male models of God, such as “father”: analogies tend to stress the similarities between God and human beings; metaphors affirm that, amidst these similarities, there are significant dissimilarities between God and humans (for example, in the realm of gender).
The Nature of Sin
Many feminist writers have suggested that notions of sin as pride, ambition, or excessive self-esteem are fundamentally male in orientation. This, it is argued, does not correspond to the experience of women, who tend to experience sin as lack of pride, lack of ambition, and lack of self-esteem. Of particular importance in this context is the feminist appeal to the notion of non-competitive relationships, which avoids the patterns of low self-esteem and passivity that have been characteristic of traditional female responses to male-dominated society. This point is made with particular force by Judith Plaskow (born 1947) in Sex, Sin and Grace (1980), a penetrating critique of Reinhold Niebuhr’s theology from a feminist perspective, although the earlier work of Valerie Saiving (1921–1992) anticipated some of these themes.
Pastoral Theology
In the last few decades there has been increased interest in pastoral (or practical) theology, which explores how the Christian tradition feeds into pastoral care (pp. 8–9). Feminist writers have noted how much work in this area has been undertaken from a male perspective and offered alternative or supplementary approaches. In her influential work Transforming Practice (1993), Elaine Graham points out how a feminist pastoral theology offers important corrections to traditional models. Instead of relying upon somewhat abstract scientific and medical models of care, feminist reconstruction of pastoral theology seeks to use sacrament, prayer, sermon, and community life as sources for healing and community.
The Person of Christ
A number of feminist writers, most notably Rosemary Radford Ruether in Sexism and God-Talk, have suggested that Christology is the ultimate ground of much sexism within Christianity. In her Consider Jesus: Waves of Renewal in Christology (1990), Elizabeth Johnson has explored the manner in which the maleness of Jesus has been the subject of theological abuse and suggests appropriate correctives. Two areas of especial importance may be noted.
First, the maleness of Christ has sometimes been used as the theological foundation for the belief that only the male human may adequately image God or that only males provide appropriate role models or analogies for God. Second, the maleness of Christ has sometimes been used as the foundation for a network of beliefs concerning norms within humanity. It has been argued, on the basis of the maleness of Christ, that the norm of humanity is the male, with the female being somehow a second-rate, or less than ideal, human being. Thomas Aquinas, who describes women as misbegotten males (apparently on the basis of an obsolete Aristotelian biology), illustrates this trend, which has important implications for issues of leadership within the church.
In responding to these points, feminist writers have argued that the maleness of Christ is a contingent aspect of his identity, on the same level as his being Jewish. It is a contingent element of his historical reality, not an essential aspect of his identity. Thus it cannot be allowed to become the basis of the domination of females by males, any more than it legitimates the domination of Gentiles by Jews or plumbers by carpenters.
Liberation Theology
The term “liberation theology” is now used to refer to the distinct form of theology that has its origins in the Latin American situation in the 1960s and 1970s. The same term could, in theory, be applied to any theology that is addressed to or deals with oppressive situations. In this sense, feminist theology could be regarded as a form of liberation theology, as the older term “women’s liberation” suggests. Equally, black theology was particularly concerned with the issue of liberation during the civil rights movement in the United States. Some classical works on black theology and feminist liberation theology were actually published at about the same time as the first major statements of Latin American liberation theology. Nevertheless, the phrase “liberation theology” is now generally used to refer to the specifically Latin American embodiment of a theology that focuses on human liberation.
The origins of this movement are usually traced back to 1968, when the Catholic bishops of Latin America gathered for a congress at Medellín, Colombia. This meeting – often known as CELAM II – sent shock waves throughout the region by acknowledging that the church had often sided with oppressive governments in the region and declaring that in future it would be on the side of the poor.
This pastoral and political stance was soon complemented by a solid theological foundation. In his Theology of Liberation (1971), the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez (born 1928) introduced the characteristic themes that would become definitive of the movement, and which we shall explore presently. Other writers of note include the Brazilian Leonardo Boff (born 1938), the Uruguayan Juan Luis Segundo (1925–1996), and the Argentinian José Miguéz Bonino (1924–2012). Bonino is unusual in one respect, in that he is a Protestant (more precisely, a Methodist) voice in a regional conversation that has been dominated by Roman Catholic writers.
The basic themes of Latin American liberation theology may be summarized as follows.
This last point has caused debate on account of the movement’s apparent indebtedness to Marxist theory. Liberation theologians have defended their use of Marx on two grounds. First, Marxism is seen as a “tool of social analysis” (Gutiérrez), which allows insights to be gained concerning the present state of Latin American society and the means by which the appalling situation of the poor may be remedied. Second, it provides a political program by which the present unjust social system may be dismantled and a more equitable society created. In practice, liberation theology is intensely critical of capitalism and affirmative of socialism. Liberation theologians have noted the use by Thomas Aquinas of Aristotle in his theological method and argued that they are merely doing the same thing – using a secular philosopher to give substance to fundamentally Christian beliefs. For, it must be stressed, liberation theology declares that God’s preference for and commitment to the poor is a fundamental aspect of the gospel, not some bolt-on option arising from the Latin American situation or based purely in Marxist political theory.
It will be clear that liberation theology is of major significance to recent theological debate. Two key theological issues may be considered as an illustration of its impact.
Biblical Hermeneutics
Scripture is read as a narrative of liberation. Particular emphasis is laid upon the liberation of Israel from bondage in Egypt, the prophets’ denunciation of oppression, and Jesus’ proclamation of the gospel to the poor and outcast. Scripture is read, not from a standpoint of wishing to understand the gospel, but out of a concern to apply its liberating insights to the Latin American situation. Western academic theology has tended to regard this approach with some impatience, believing that it has no place for the considered insights of biblical scholarship concerning the interpretation of such passages.
The Nature of Salvation
Liberation theology has tended to equate salvation with liberation and stressed the social, political, and economic aspects of salvation. The movement has laid particular emphasis upon the notion of “structural sin,” noting that it is society, rather than individuals, that is corrupted and requires redemption. To its critics, liberation theology has reduced salvation to a purely worldly affair and neglected its transcendent and eternal dimensions.
Black Theology
“Black theology,” a movement that concerned itself with ensuring that the realities of black experience were represented at the theological level, became especially significant in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. The first major evidence of the move toward theological emancipation within the American black community dates from 1964, with the publication of Joseph Washington’s Black Religion, a powerful affirmation of the distinctiveness of black religion within the North American context. Washington emphasized the need for integration and assimilation of black theological insights within mainstream Protestantism; however, this approach was largely swept to one side with the appearance of Albert Cleage’s Black Messiah (1969). Cleage, pastor of the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit, urged black people to liberate themselves from white theological oppression. Arguing that Scripture was written by black Jews, Cleage claimed that the gospel of a black Messiah had been perverted by Paul in his attempt to make it acceptable to Europeans. Despite the considerable overstatements within the work, Black Messiah came to be a rallying point for black Christians, determined to discover and assert their distinctive identity.
The movement made several decisive affirmations of its theological distinctiveness during 1969. The “Black Manifesto” issued at the Inter-Religious Foundation for Community Organization meeting in Detroit, Michigan, placed the issue of the black experience firmly on the theological agenda. The statement by the National Committee of Black Churchmen emphasized the theme of liberation as a central motif of black theology:
Black Theology is a theology of black liberation. It seeks to plumb the black condition in the light of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, so that the black community can see that the gospel is commensurate with the achievement of black humanity. Black Theology is a theology of “blackness.” It is the affirmation of black humanity that emancipates black people from white racism, thus providing authentic freedom for both white and black people.
Although there are obvious affinities between this statement and the aims and emphases of Latin American liberation theology, it must be stressed that, at this stage, there was no formal interaction between the two movements. Liberation theology arose primarily within the Roman Catholic church in South America, whereas black theology tended to arise within black Protestant communities in North America.
The most significant writer within the movement is generally agreed to be James H. Cone (1938–2018), whose Black Theology of Liberation (1970) appealed to the central notion of a God who is concerned for the black struggle for liberation. Noting the strong preference of Jesus for the oppressed, Cone argued that “God was black” – that is, identified with the oppressed. However, Cone’s use of Barthian categories was criticized: why, it was asked, should a black theologian use the categories of a white theologian in articulating the black experience? Why had he not made fuller use of black history and culture? In later works, Cone responded to such criticisms by making a more pervasive appeal to “the black experience” as a central resource in black theology. Nevertheless, Cone has continued to maintain a Barthian emphasis upon the centrality of Christ as the self-revelation of God (while identifying him as “the black Messiah”) and the authority of Scripture in interpreting human experience in general.
Postliberalism
One of the most significant developments in theology since about 1980 has been a growing skepticism over the plausibility of a liberal worldview. The emergence of postliberalism is widely regarded as one of the most important aspects of western theology since 1980. The movement had its origins in the United States and was initially associated with Yale Divinity School, and particularly with theologians such as Hans Frei (1922–1988), Paul Holmer (1916–2004), and George Lindbeck (1923–2018). While it is not strictly correct to speak of a “Yale school” of theology, there are nevertheless clear “family resemblances” between a number of the approaches to theology to emerge from Yale during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since then, postliberal trends have become well established within North American and British academic theology. Its central foundations are narrative approaches to theology, such as those developed by Hans Frei and the schools of social interpretation, which stress the importance of culture and language in the generation and interpretation of experience and thought.
Building upon the work of philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre (born 1929), postliberalism rejects both the traditional Enlightenment appeal to a “universal rationality” and the liberal assumption of an immediate religious experience common to all humanity. Arguing that all thought and experience is historically and socially mediated, postliberalism bases its theological program upon a return to religious traditions, whose values are inwardly appropriated. Postliberalism is thus anti-foundational (in that it rejects the notion of a universal foundation of knowledge), communitarian (in that it appeals to the values, experiences, and language of a community, rather than prioritizing the individual), and historicist (in that it insists upon the importance of traditions and their associated historical communities in the shaping of experience and thought).
The philosophical roots of this movement are complex. Within the movement, particular appreciation can be discerned for the style of approach associated with the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, as noted above, which places an emphasis on the relation between narrative, community, and the moral life. In this respect, postliberalism reintroduces a strong emphasis on the particularity of the Christian faith, in reaction against the strongly homogenizing tendencies of liberalism, in its abortive attempt to make theory (that all religions are saying the same thing) and observation (that the religions are different) coincide.
Liberal critics of postliberalism have argued that it represents a lapse into a “ghetto ethic” or some form of “fideism” or “tribalism,” on account of its retreat from universal norms of value and rationality. Postliberals respond to their liberal critics by arguing that the latter seem unable to accept that the Enlightenment is over and that any notion of a “universal language” or “common human experience” is simply a fiction, like – to use Hans-Georg Gadamer’s famous analogy – Robinson Crusoe’s imaginary island.
The most significant statement of the postliberal theological agenda remains George Lindbeck’s Nature of Doctrine (1984). Rejecting “cognitive–propositional” approaches to doctrine as premodern and liberal “experiential–expressive” theories as failing to take account of both human experiential diversity and the mediating role of culture in human thought and experience, Lindbeck develops what he terms a “cultural–linguistic” approach, which embodies the leading features of postliberalism.
The cultural–linguistic approach denies that there is some universal unmediated human experience that exists apart from human language and culture. Rather, it stresses that the heart of religion lies in living within a specific historical religious tradition and interiorizing its ideas and values. This tradition rests upon a historically mediated set of ideas, for which the narrative is an especially suitable means of transmission.
Such ideas can be seen in an earlier work of importance to the emergence of postliberalism – Paul Holmer’s Grammar of Faith (1978). For Holmer, Christianity possesses a central grammar that regulates the structure and shape of Christian “language games.” This language is not invented or imposed by theology; it is already inherent within the biblical paradigms upon which theology is ultimately dependent. The task of theology is thus to discern these intrabiblical rules (such as the manner in which God is worshiped and spoken about) and not to impose extrabiblical rules. For Holmer, one of liberalism’s most fundamental flaws was its attempts to “reinterpret” or “restate” biblical concepts, which inevitably degenerated into the harmonization of Scripture with the spirit of the age. “Continuous redoing of the Scripture to fit the age is only a sophisticated and probably invisible bondage to the age rather than the desire to win the age for God.” Theology is grounded on the intrabiblical paradigm, which it is obliged to describe and apply as best it can. To affirm that theology has a regulatory authority is not to imply that it can regulate Scripture, but to acknowledge that a distinctive pattern of regulation already exists within the biblical material, which theology is to uncover and articulate.
Postliberalism is of particular importance in relation to two areas of Christian theology.
Systematic Theology
Theology is understood to be primarily a descriptive discipline, concerned with the exploration of the normative foundations of the Christian tradition, which are mediated through the scriptural narrative of Jesus Christ. Truth can be, at least in part, equated with fidelity to the distinctive doctrinal traditions of the Christian faith. This has caused critics of postliberalism to accuse it of retreating from the public arena into some kind of Christian ghetto. If Christian theology, as postliberalism suggests, is intrasystemic (that is, concerned with the exploration of the internal relationships of the Christian tradition), its validity is to be judged with reference to its own internal standards, rather than some publicly agreed or universal criteria. Once more, this has prompted criticism from those who suggest that theology ought to have external criteria, subject to public scrutiny, by which its validity can be tested.
Christian Ethics
Stanley Hauerwas (born 1940) is widely regarded as the most distinguished writer to explore postliberal approaches to ethics. Rejecting the Enlightenment idea of a universal set of moral ideals or values, Hauerwas argues that Christian ethics is concerned with the identification of the moral vision of a historical community (the church) and with bringing that vision to actualization in the lives of its members. Thus ethics is intrasystemic, in that it concerns the study of the internal moral values of a community. To be moral is to identify the moral vision of a specific historical community, to appropriate its moral values, and to practice them within that community.
Radical Orthodoxy
Finally, we may note a movement that has recently arisen within English-language theology, which has generated some important discussions and debate. The term “radical orthodoxy” is used to refer to a broad approach to theology that emerged in the 1990s, associated with Anglican writers such as John Milbank (born 1952), Catherine Pickstock (born 1952), and Graham Ward (born 1955), all of whom were originally based at Cambridge University. Its ideas are set out in works such as John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (1993) and especially the edited volume Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (1999).
The agenda of the movement is complex and sophisticated, and is perhaps best understood in terms of the need for Christianity to construct its own alternatives to both modernity and postmodernity. Milbank, Pickstock, and Ward hope to articulate a comprehensive Christian perspective that will both supersede and replace secularisms, whether modern or postmodern. Milbank in particular finds in writers such as Augustine of Hippo models worthy of emulation, allowing the development of a “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism.” The idea of an “autonomous secular sphere” is rejected, not least because this implicitly rests on unacknowledged theological foundations. For Ward, “Radical Orthodoxy reads the contemporary world through the Christian tradition, weaving it into the narrative of that tradition.” Yet it is now difficult to see how Radical Orthodoxy can distinguish itself, apart from its own history, from the wide range of what most scholars would now generally term “post-secular theologies” or “theologies of retrieval.” There are many theologians who believe in the reappropriation of the wisdom of the past to counter the challenges of secularism, yet who would not align themselves with this specific movement.