Albany Via Media

July 24, 2010

To the Editor,

Bob Dodd asks some good questions regarding my comment about the “parasitic” character of theological liberalism or “progressivism.”

What do I mean by the term, “hermeneutic of suspicion”? Well first, I rather like what little I have read of Paul Ricoeur (who coined the term in the first place) and I know people who have found his ideas quite useful in making sense of the character of religious language. I am sympathetic with the notion of “freedom through disbelief, as long as that disbelief opens up new lines of inquiry.” My dissertation advisor at Union Seminary, Christopher Morse, wrote an excellent book on the role of disbelief as an integral part of the structure of faith and theological conviction. If that were all that was meant by a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” I would have no objection to the idea. I am troubled, however, when a hermeneutic of suspicion becomes the sort of reductionism that I describe in point 5 of my letter to AVM of June 18th.

This is not to malign the commendable concern for social ethics, or the attempt to recover a biblical notion of justice, characteristic of much progressive religious thought. Nor is it to insist that theological reflection, or the language of worship, mindlessly repeat the doctrinal formulas of the past. There is plenty of room in orthodoxy for fresh inquiry and intellectual creativity.

But basically, I am convinced that theological liberalism, beginning with the German Enlightenment theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, and extending into the present, concedes too much to secularism as it seeks to meet the “cultured despisers of religion” on their own ground. It was Schleiermacher who first invoked “experience” as the primary datum of theological reflection, and as Karl Barth pointed out, the result is a theological anthropocentrism in which one never really come to terms with divine revelation as such. In the end — and this was Albert Schweitzer's critique of the “search for the historical Jesus” — one is left with a cultural accommodation of the Gospel. In my view, this is something less than the real thing, if not what the Apostle Paul refers to as a “different Gospel” (Gal 1:6).

What makes theological liberalism parasitic? It draws upon foundational Christian convictions but it weakens them and chips away at the corners as it seeks to accommodate the Gospel to a secular culture. Theological progressivism may provide a refuge for those burned by “bad religion” (and there is plenty of it), but it rarely brings people to Christ or builds up the church. Where is the “progressive” version of Billy Graham, or Saint Paul, or Charles Wesley? At best, as I have suggested before, it is simply a reaction to, or corrective of, the real or perceived sins of traditional religion. At its worst, it drifts into a dressed up Unitarianism and becomes a “different Gospel.”

Christopher Brown+