Faith in what?

Dynamics of Faith by Paul Tillich

It’s hard to give this book a rating. Tillich’s definition of faith as being “ultimately concerned” in such a way that one’s being is oriented around this concern was provocative and helpful, as was his argument that everyone has some kind of faith because everyone is has some kind of ultimate concern. On the other hand, Tillich’s “ultimate” doesn’t reveal itself to us and it is certainly not personal, thus making it difficult to know why pursuing the ultimate is worth the effort.

I’m glad that I read the book, though, as it helped me to understand more about 20th-century liberal Protestant theology.

View all my reviews

The cultural footprint of liberal theology

About three years ago, I noted Christian Smith’s (via Peter Leithart) contention that liberal theology has enjoyed cultural success while losing its institutional strength. Mark Edwards’ two-part interview of Matthew Hedstrom, author of The Rise of Liberal Religion, reminded me of this point. Hedstrom brought up Smith (and other scholars in Part I), and Part II contained this exchange:

ME: The very title of your book suggests a kind of liberal cultural ascendancy. How does your work intersect with the idea of a “mainline” religious establishment that crumbled during the 1960s and 1970s?

MH: I’ll start with an extreme argument and backtrack from there: liberal Protestantism, at its very core, wants to achieve its own extinction, or at least its own irrelevance. Postmillennial theology desires the Kingdom of God on earth, and believes that human beings, with divine grace, can achieve it. The idea is to redeem the culture—redeem the world—through full participation in it. This is in contrast to a bunkered fundamentalism that aims to save souls but otherwise remain safely removed from a corrupt and corrupting world.

So, from this vantage point, cultural success and institutional decline should go hand in hand. And in many ways they have. The liberal focus on ethics, progress, and this-world salvation means religious liberals can achieve their righteous ends by working for the Peace Corps or Amnesty International or the Human Rights Campaign, or through social work or psychological counseling, or through cultural efforts like literacy promotion. If saving souls is your metric, you’ll do that work through churches or parachurch ministries. But if redeeming the culture and world is your goal, many more avenues are available for doing your religion. Most scholars of American Protestantism seem to have implicitly accepted the terms of the debate offered by religious conservatives, and look only at church life as a measure of religious vitality.

Now the backtrack. The categories of course are not this neat. Religious liberals care about church life, including the saving of souls, however that might be understood; and religious conservatives have done immense social and cultural work (for good and ill, I’d add). The whole Religious Right stands in contrast to what I have presented, in a way. But I think the larger, basic point remains: institutional decline and cultural victory can go hand in hand, and in this case, I think, have.

My book is not primarily political, so I don’t write much about the ways religious liberal impulses have been sublimated into social and political activism, though it does come up here and there. My story is more about culture and spirituality—the term I use, along with spirituality, is “religious sensibilities”—and so I argue that book culture was a critical mechanism for the broad dissemination of liberal religious sensibilities, especially psychological, mystical, and cosmopolitan spirituality.

This is an interesting counterpoint to the decline of liberal Christianity which is often a subject of discussion. Also, I realize that Hedstrom’s characterization of postmillenialism doesn’t work for orthodox postmillenialists who see the church as continuing, not fading away, as the gospel spreads throughout the earth.

Liberal Christianity in the US and Britain

Ross Douthat’s July 15 column on the decline of liberal denominations produced some discussion on the definition of liberal Christianity. Douthat defined it as focused on social reform, while British Baptist pastor and theologian Steve Holmes took a more philosophical view, arguing that liberal Christianity essentially bases itself on the idea that the “human experience” can be spoken of in the singular (and thus the various religions are ways of interpreting this experience). Holmes also makes two arresting observations in his post. First, that Anglican liberals tended to support British imperialism, eugenics, and racism, before taking a turn that is more recognizably “liberal” to Americans in the 1960s and after with support of the sexual revolution, “racial equality,” and environmentalism.* He believes that this comes from liberal Christianity’s tendency to follow the culture in which it is embedded. Secondly, this tendency has become a weakness in the postmodern age. The section in italics reflects my emphasis:

This also explains the reason that the, heretofore extremely successful, liberal tradition of Christianity is currently in meltdown. It is not difficult to see that the idea that true notions of the divine can be derived from an examination of universally shared human experience is vulnerable to at least two, apparently devastating, lines of criticism: the claim that human experience is no guide to reality (a claim made classically by Feuerbach in his Essence of Christianity, and forming the basis of neo-orthodox criticisms of liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century); and the claim that there is no universally shared human experience to serve as a basis for the argument. This latter line has become extremely powerful in contemporary theology. The early liberation theologians developed a postcolonial critique of such claims: supposed accounts of ‘normative’ human experience are in fact an attempt to force others to conform their experience to norms created by white male Europeans. The explosion of contextual theologies demonstrated the power of such a criticism in contemporary culture: every proposed account of shared human experience is, on this analysis, a hegemonic attempt to impose a false consciousness on others. So African-American women properly refused to be assimilated to the project of feminist theology, seeing the accounts of human experience offered as too white, and properly refused to be assimilated to Black theology, seeing the accounts of human experience offered as too male. Instead, they constructed their own narration, womanist theology. (The great womanist theologians are poets, not just theologians: Emilie Townes somewhere entitles a chapter ‘To love our necks unloosed and straight’ – why can’t I write like that?!).

The effect of all this is to make classical liberalism – ‘we all feel like this, so…’ – culturally incredible. For two centuries, it caught the mood of a culture which believed in metanarratives; for the last two decades (or more) the culture has been incredulous towards metanarratives, and so has been profoundly unreceptive to classical liberalism. Today, liberalism sounds like cultural imperialism; when it tries not to, it simply sounds incoherent. (The best example is also the obvious and tedious one: White, metropolitan, Western culture regards the acceptance of gay/lesbian relationships to be an ethical imperative; the churches of sub-Saharan Africa (to give only one example) see the matter differently; one may be affirming of gay/lesbian people by dismissing the moral intuition of Black Africans, but not otherwise. To claim that gay people and Nigerian people share moral intuitions, or to claim to be simultaneously attentive to gay people and non-Western people, alike appear simply incredible.)

This observation fits with my own, less informed sense that pre-1950s liberal theology seemed much more grounded and Christian, even though deficient, than its current form. This seems to me a good explanation of why this is the case.

Douthat’s response, through which I became aware of Holmes’ post, grants the point on the definition, but contends that liberal Christianity has been different in the American and British contexts:

However, this quest has gone in different directions in different times and places, and in the United States from the late-19th onward, it found its most important and enduring expression in the Social Gospel idea that Christianity would be vindicated in an age of science and skepticism to the extent that it confronted social evils as well as private sins, and made the kingdom of heaven more visible on earth. Certainly other theological traditions, Catholic as well as evangelical, have linked personal conversion and social reform; certainly liberal Christianity can’t be reduced to that link and that link alone. But for a long time, from the era of Walter Rauschenbusch down to the era of Martin Luther King, Jr., the liberal churches had good reason to see themselves as the primary custodians of a socially-engaged Christianity. Indeed, the historical importance of their role explains why many religiously-literate Americans today still simply conflate ”liberal Christianity” with “the religion of Christians who are politically liberal.” That’s far too broad a definition, certainly, and one that gives theologians hives with its capaciousness. But it’s also one that reflects the lived reality of American politics and religion for long periods of the twentieth century….

Some of [what Holmes says about British liberal Christians' mirroring of British culture] maps on to the American experience: The United States, too, had its liberal Protestant imperialists and eugenicists, and of course we have our liberal Christian environmentalists today. But the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement are both absent from this story (in this country, liberal Christians were arguing for civil rights long before the 1980s), and when you lose them you lose a huge part of liberal Christianity’s direct impact on American religion and public life, not to mention its second-order impact on movements (from WWII and Cold War-era neo-orthodoxy to post-1970s neoconservatism) that were both its critics but also to some extent its practical heirs. Nor, in turn, can you understand the point that the intellectual historian Gary Dorrien makes in the essay that my column quoted, about how the leading liberal Christians of the American past often managed to ground progressive politics on “a gospel of personal faith” expressed “in biblical terms,” rather than just on the kind of ecumenical appeals to “shared human religious experience” that are more characteristic of, say, liberal Episcopalianism today. (I think of Bayard Rustin’s line about M.L.K., which I quote in my recent book: “I was always amazed at how it was possible to combine this intense, analytical philosophical mind with this more or less fundamental — well, I don’t like to use the word ‘fundamentalist’ — but this abiding faith.”) Such a biblical and even dogmatic grounding was possible, I think, precisely because in the American landscape the specific cause of social reform was often more central to the self-definition of religious liberalism than the general prioritization of personal experience that came in with Schleiermacher.

The end of Holmes’ post includes an update in response to similar comments from Alan Jacobs:

UPDATE: Wesley Hill kindly pointed me to some comments made by Alan Jacobs of Wheaton (@ayjay) on Twitter, to the effect that in the above I wrongly conflate American and English (sic…) liberalism, ignoring the profound effect of Rauschenbusch had in redefining US liberalism. This seems to me a very fair point in terms of my account of liberal ethics in ‘so what point 1′ above, which I accept is rather parochial and based on UK examples; I think my broader point, ‘if you have to come up with a one sentence journalistic definition of the heart of liberal Christianity, what would it be?’ stands; Rauschenbusch provided a compelling narration of a particular set of religious experiences – pastoring in Hell’s Kitchen for him, but of course wider for others – that gave the US conversation a particular shape (just as the experience of the 1914-18 war gave the European conversations particular shapes – very different in Germany and the UK), but I think the heart of the issue remains the same.

*This is just a broad characterization of “liberal” and “conservative,” I realize. Even the word “liberal” has been used differently in American and British politics, I believe. And I also realize that liberal denominations in America supported eugenics and imperialism. And racism is not an essentially “conservative” position either, although certainly some conservatives have been racists along with people of different persuasions.

People as producers, part 2

In his most recent column, Ross Douthat explored the ongoing decline of the liberal mainline churches. In it, he included a paragraph that relate to the issue I noted about earlier: are people producers or simply consumers?

Both religious and secular liberals have been loath to recognize this crisis. Leaders of liberal churches have alternated between a Monty Python-esque “it’s just a flesh wound!” bravado and a weird self-righteousness about their looming extinction. (In a 2005 interview, the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop explained that her communion’s members valued “the stewardship of the earth” too highly to reproduce themselves.)

You can see a different reasoning for not having children here in the Obama campaign’s “Life of Julia,” which explains how Obama’s programs make a fictional woman’s life better at every stage. At age 27:

Under President Obama: For the past four years, Julia has worked full-time as a web designer. Thanks to Obamacare, her health insurance is required to cover birth control and preventive care, letting Julia focus on her work rather than worry about her health.

Under Mitt Romney: Romney supports the Blunt Amendment—which would place Julia’s health care decisions in the hands of her employer—and repealing health care reform so insurance companies could go back to charging women 50% more than men.

As is easily seen and others have pointed out, when she does decide to have a child at age 31, there’s no man in sight.

Liberal theology vs. biblical Christianity

Kevin DeYoung passed on some defining characteristics of liberal theology, along with representative quotes from volume 1 of Gary Dorrien’s The Making of American Liberal Theology.

The contributions of Pentecostalism to the modern church

Sociologist of religion Peter Berger, like Walter Russell Mead, blogs at The American Interest, and like Mead almost every post contains something worth passing on.  Yesterday, Berger wrote about Confessing Church theologian Rudolf Bultmann’s controversial essay that argued that the gospel needed to be “demythologized” because modern, technological life precluded belief in the supernatural events and worldview of the New Testament.  Berger writes that “Bultmann’s view of modern man presupposes so-called secularization theory—the proposition that modernity dictates a view of reality closed to any supernatural interventions.”  But this thesis has been “massively falsified“: people do live in this technological age (one with much more technology, I might add, than when Bultmann wrote in 1941).

Berger sees a connection with his own work on global Pentecostalism, which “broadly speaking, is becoming the norm rather than the exception of world Christianity” as Latin American, African, and Asian Christians increasingly occupy “the demographic center of Christianity”:

In contrast with the Global North (Europe and North America, where indeed many Christians live in a “demythologized” world), Christianity in the Global South is characterized by a massive supernaturalism. One could say that more and more Christians in the world today are becoming “Pentecostalized”, way beyond the churches that explicitly define themselves as Pentecostal or charismatic. What is also happening is that this type of religion is becoming more sophisticated intellectually, as an inevitable consequence of social and educational mobility.Two recent books give a good idea of this development. The first is a collection of papers edited by Veli-Matti Kaerkkaeinen, a Finnish theologian teaching at Fuller Theological Seminary in California, a bastion of intellectual Evangelicalism – The Spirit of the World: Emerging Pentecostal Theologies in Global Contexts. The book provides a very useful overview of Christians in the Global South finding their own not at all “demythologized” voice. The other book is Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy, by James Smith, who teaches philosophy at Calvin College in Michigan, another significant Evangelical center. Smith makes an argument, both erudite and feisty, which directly challenges the “naturalist” (precisely “demythologized”) assumptions of contemporary philosophy.

Pentecostal preachers have for a long time asserted that they are very close to the early Christians, who, like them, performed miracles, healed the sick, drove out demons and spoke in tongues. They are now fortifying this assertion with scholarly footnotes! Given the aforementioned demographic shift, I think that what is shaping up now is a new and important dialogue between two different forms of Christianity.

The dialogue has already begun in the area of missions, where it is impossible to avoid. It is now attracting the attention of European and North American theologians who have not thought about missions for a long time, for a very simple reason: They themselves are becoming targets of missionaries from the Global South, who are bringing their supernaturalist message to the home territories of “demythologized” modernity.

And suddenly Bultmann is becoming very relevant indeed. Stripped of his mistaken empirical view of modern man and of his implausible fascination with Heidegger’s obscure existentialism, Bultmann can be seen again as posing a suddenly urgent question: Is the mythological worldview of the New Testament a necessary ingredient of the Christian faith? The question becomes even more interesting as Jews and Muslims, in their own way, must raise similar questions as well. Put differently: What are the prospects of supernaturalism in the modern world? My own hunch is that the prospects are pretty good.

For more on Peter Berger’s research on religion in the globalized age, see here and here.

“Emerging adults” and liberal theology

Peter Leithart comments on the end of Christian Smith’s Souls in Transition.  Here is his full post:

Near the end of his recent Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, Christian Smith summarizes the argument of a 1995 article by N. Jay Demerath of the University of Massachusetts.  Demerath writes, that the widely reported decline of liberal Protestantism may in fact signal its “wider cultural triumph. . . . Liberal Protestant have lost structurally at the micro level precisely because they won culturally at the macro level.”  Smith adds, “liberal Protestantism’s core values – individualism, pluralism, emancipation, tolerance, free critical inquiry, and the authority of human experience – have come to so permeate broader American culture that its own churches as organizations have difficulty surviving.”  Try, Smith implies, running an organization centered on the values of “emancipation” and “the authority of experience.”

Smith’s own surveys of 18-24-year-old “emerging adults” supports Demerath’s claims.  His team found that “individual autonomy, unbounded tolerance, freedom from authorities, the affirmation of pluralism, the centrality of human self-consciousness, the practical value of moral religion, epistemological skepticism, and an instinctive aversion to anything ‘dogmatic’ or committed to particulars were routinely taken for granted by respondents.”  They found that “most Catholic and Jewish emerging adults . . . talked very much like classical liberal Protestants” and “evangelical Protestant and black Protestant emerging adults even talked like liberal Protestants.”

Richard Niebuhr’s 1937 description of liberalism is alive and well: “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

If Demerath and Smith are right, liberal theology lost the battle for formal membership but won the “hearts and minds” of the American people, including many evangelicals.  I’ve always thought that this explanation of the decline of the liberal mainline denominations made sense: why go to church if the church keeps telling you that it doesn’t offer to show you something that’s certain?

A revival in liberal theology?

I wouldn’t really recommend watching the entire Bill Moyers Journal panel discussion with Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary president Serene Jones, and Union professor Gary Dorrien (video and transcript here).  They talk about the economic crisis in the ways that you might expect three liberal theologians to talk: a lot about how greed got us into it and how economic democracy is the key to fixing it.  Not bad points, necessarily, but nothing too new, either.

But you might find the end of the conversation interesting.  Union has a long history in the liberal theological tradition, and these three are teaching a course together there.  It’s no secret that the more theologically liberal mainline Protestant churches have been losing a lot of members, so the most intriguing portion came when Jones claimed that there is a new wave of students at Union:

Book Review: John C. Polkinghorne, One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology

Polkinghorne is an Anglican priest who also taught mathematical physics at Cambridge.  In One World, he argues that science and theology share a similar goal of understanding the reality of the universe.  He does not see them in opposition to each other.  I’ve already made a couple of comments here and here on this book.

As I read, I was able to get a better sense of his theological commitments, although I would not want to pin him down to a certain position from just this short book (in a comment on my first post above, Joel stated that he believed Polkinghorne was an open theist, which seemed consistent with what I read in the book).  He certainly believes in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ and in eternal life in a resurrected body, and states that the Eucharist truly becomes the body and blood of Christ (perhaps suggesting an Anglo-Catholic view?).  He also had an interesting defense of “natural theology,” or learning about God from nature: it shows God’s work in the cosmos and that he is bigger than our own concerns.  A universe that can be understood by science and natural laws expressed in elegant mathematical equations points to a Creator and reminds us that we are not the only thing that God is concerned about.  Certainly I’d wish to add that God has showed his amazing love for us in Christ in a way that he has for no other members of Creation, but I think Polkinghorne’s point is a good one.

On the other hand, he emphasized human free will and God’s “self-limiting” in love, rather than a more Reformed view of a totally sovereign God.  Indeed, there were points where he did not seem comfortable with a God whose reasoning he could not understand (for example, a God who chooses to work miracles in some cases and not in others).  He clearly respects the Scriptures, citing them throughout the book.  But he did not believe in their total reliability, as evident when he cited two specific stories that he did not believe, the sun standing still for the Israelites to defeat the Amorites (Joshua 10:6-15) and Peter catching the fish with the temple tax (Matthew 17:24-27).  He characterized the New Testament (or any holy book) as a product of a specific culture in which “the gold of eternal truth is mixed with the base matter of contemporary attitudes” (92-93).  Finally, he seemed to have a much greater emphasis on God’s love than on His judgment.

Critical reflections on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s speech, “Our Environmental Destiny”

This weekend, I’m fortunate to be at the Phi Theta Kappa international convention in Grapevine, Texas. As the lead advisor for the chapter at my college,  I headed down to the Lone Star State with 5 students on Thursday. Last night, environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. addressed the convention. The speech wasn’t particularly well-organized, but it was quite passionate and provocative. I want to start with my critical reactions to parts of it, and then move on to my positive responses in my next post.

RFK Jr. was mostly nonpartisan while being a tenacious advocate for his cause. Given that, you would expect that the Bush administration’s very pro-business environmental policies would get some flak. (RFK would say pro-exploitation and pro-polluter, and I’d agree in general.) But there were a couple times where he veered into broader indictments of the Bush Administration that went beyond the scope of the topic and seemed like they were based on simplistic logic. For example, he argued that the opening of natural resources to exploitation was part of the same moral breakdown that allowed for torture, wiretapping, and secret prisons. Also, in his mind, our wars in the Middle East are purely about oil. I was unhappy with Bush for all of those things, but I think that RFK painted with too broad a brush here (especially in the first case, where I really don’t see the underlying connection at all).

Secondly, if I may paint with a broad brush myself, it’s interesting how the Bush years seem to have become for liberals what the 1960s are for conservatives: the era where America lost its bearings. RFK told a story of when he went abroad as a boy and people were very pro-America, wanting American leadership. He also used the examples of Eisenhower’s trips to the Muslim world and the world’s sympathy after 9/11, and implied that the Bush Administration “bullied” rather than led. There’s certainly some truth to this narrative, in my opinion. But just as the idea of virtuous pre-1960s America falters on the reality of widespread de jure and de facto segregation, so the liberal mythology of Bush’s fall from grace whitewashes the follies of the past (think of the CIA-sponsored coups in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, for example).

Third, RFK made a foray into the spiritual side of his environmentalism. He attacked the idea that environmentalists worship nature, which is sometimes used to scare people into thinking that environmentalism means paganism. Instead, he argued that God speaks to us through his creation, echoing Paul in Romans 1. That was about as far as I could go with him, though. He argued that creation was the best way to know God, while traditionally-minded Christians would have to say that Christ and the Scriptures offer us clearer knowledge of God (to those better versed in theology than I: am I right on this one?). He also argued that great spiritual awakenings tended to happen in the wilderness, taking a liberal view of God’s revelation by citing the examples of Buddha, Muhammad, Moses, the Jews (in what I thought was a misreading of their punishment in the desert as cleansing after slavery), and Jesus. Although he did not show the grasp of world religions that he did on environmental matters, I actually enjoyed this part of it quite a bit. For me, there is something inherently compelling about hearing people talk about their sense of spirituality, even if it’s based on premises that I believe are false or faulty.

But whatever those faults, I would be extremely unfair to RFK if I didn’t emphasize that the great majority of his presentation focused on his area of expertise in environmental protection. I’ll discuss this in my next post.