Liberal Method, Postmodernity, and Liberal Necessity: On "The Making of American Liberal

Theology"
Author(s): Gary Dorrien
Source: American Journal of Theology & Philosophy, Vol. 29, No. 2 (May 2008), pp. 175-183
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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Liberal Method, Postmodernity, and Liberal
Necessity: On The Making of American Liberal
Theology

Gary Dorrien / Union Theological Seminary

I am deeply grateful for the perceptive presentations by Roger Haight,

Jennifer Jesse, and William Dean. These papers vary considerably in
their relationship to my trilogy on theological liberalism, and they call
for different kinds of responses. But all three are richly informed and
thoughtful pieces by experts in the field, and I thank the authors for
them.
Roger Haight expands on my analysis of Catholic theology in
volume three. That volume contains extensive discussions of Catholic
theologians in three different sections, including the entire 7th chapter,
at the end of which I have a brief coda about the distinct context that
Catholicism provides for all liberal Catholic theologians. In his
response Haight covers some of the same ground that I do, but in a
format that focuses on the issue of what is distinctive to Catholicism
and what is not. I think he is right in judging that the strongest points of
commonality between liberal Protestant and liberal Catholic theology
are the turns to the subject and to historical consciousness and criticism.
As an Anglican I should probably object to Haight’s claim that
Catholicism is distinctive in its “sacramental imagination” and its
“broad view of the Christian tradition and community across time and
space,” but I will let that pass.
The caveat that I am more concerned to register comes at the
end, in his closing sentences about Union Seminary, liberalism, and me.
Haight states generously and truly that Union is a good place for
dialogue among “liberal theologians of the many traditions.” However,
it needs to be said that the streams of liberal theology that flow through
this place are only part of the landscape here, and only part of my work.
Union has stood for all the major streams of progressive theology for

‘This article is Dorrien’s response to papers presented at the symposium for his
inauguration into the Reinhold Niebuhr Chair of Social Ethics at Union Theological
Seminary, January 31, 2007. It was originally published in the Union Seminary
Quarterly Review 61:1 (Fall 2007). We gratefully acknowledge USQR for permission to
reprint it.

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176 American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

the past century, and my identification is with the social gospel,

Christian realist, feminist, and liberationist heritage of Union, not
merely with its liberal wellspring.
Jennifer Jesse’s paper offers a wonderful radical empiricist riff
on the Jamesian/Melandian “felt qualities” of experience and a
discerning reflection on the role of pragmatism in American liberal
theology. She mentions that my third volume does not feature
pragmatism as extensively as the second volume did. By volume three,
philosophical pragmatism is not new, and I had to cover many new
developments. Of course, virtually all theological liberals are
pragmatists in a broad sense of the term, and in volume three I discuss
the pragmatism of Bernard Meland, Robert Neville, John Cobb, David
Griffin, William Dean, Sheila Davaney, Jerry Stone, and Nancy
Frankenberry. But as Jesse suggests, there is more metaphysics in the
last volume than pragmatism, partly because the process school
developed during that period.
I agree with Jesse’s remarks about the pragmatic problems of
modem theology. In response to her excellent discussion of what is
needed to make theology a vital force again in religious communities
and the public square, I want to stress a single point: more important
than any particular proposal or strategy is whether or not progressive
Christians have a passionate, clear, convictional spirit. This issue cuts
two ways, in terms of spiritual conviction and the ethical imperative of
struggling for social justice, but they go together, each being
indispensable to the other. The gospel story presents a distinct figure
that teaches the way of the “kingdom” or commonwealth of God. This
story inspires and sustains communities of followers wherever it is
preached with conviction. Liberal Christians often get so tied up with
what they do not believe and how they might appear to skeptical
outsiders that they offer no clear witness to the saving power of the
gospel.
I am not saying that the masses will flock to our door if only
progressive Christians rediscover how to stand for something.
Prophetic, progressive, intellectually critical religion is not what most
people are seeking; it never has been. Many people want religion to be
their security blanket or the justification of their selfishness or
intolerance. To be a progressive Christian today is to sail straight
against the values and politics of the dominant culture. It is to hold out

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 Vol. 29, No. 2, May 2008 177

for the possibility of a divine good that is too religious for our secular
friends and even more alien to many American Christians.
This business of learning how to be counter-cultural without
losing our balance or betraying our basic values is especially difficult
for liberal Protestants who have a fond memory of being in the
mainline. But we should not need the promise of success or prestige to
ask what God, the personal spirit of love divine, is doing in our midst,
or to find the presence of Christ in the oppressed, the marginalized, the
hurting, and vulnerable.
Seven years ago William Dean was the featured speaker at the
American Theological Society meeting in Chicago. He gave a
depressing talk on the state of theology. I counted the number of times
that, during the discussion period, he used the word “moribund” to
describe his subject: four times. In his early career Dean espoused an
aesthetically-oriented Whiteheadianism; in his middle career he wrote
books on pragmatic historicism that lauded the early Chicago School; in
the “moribund” lecture, he disclosed that he no longer read theologians.
Poetry spoke to him, but not theology. It occurred to me that if Bill
Dean was bailing out on theology, I might not have picked the most
fortuitous moment to write a three-volume history of liberalism.
A friend of mine, Laurel Schneider, got rather agitated during
Dean’s talk; in the discussion period she explained why. To her,
theology had become truly interesting only in recent years, after there
was such a thing as feminist theology. How could theology be
“moribund” when the feminist category alone contained an outpouring
of liberal, liberationist, womanist, African, Latina, and Asian voices?
Several heads nodded as she spoke, and mine was one of them, but I
also felt deeply what Dean was talking about. Over the course of his
career the liberal Protestant churches lost forty percent of their
members; every liberal seminary was in trouble financially; the
academy was more aggressively secular than ever; religion departments
pushed theology aside in favor of religious studies; and evangelical
Protestantism was booming.
Musing over these conflicting trends, I spoke to Dean briefly
near the end of the evening, after he had heard that I was doing
liberalism next. He looked at me intently and said, “Be sure to say
something about the Chicago School.” Say something? I replied, “Bill,
I’ll undoubtedly devote hundreds of pages to the Chicago School. I’ll
probably give twenty pages to you.” “That doesn’t matter,” he said,

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178 American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

speaking of himself, “but you need to give the Chicago School its due.”
Dean’s thinking has taken another turn since that conversation; it
showed up in his book The American Spiritual Culture; and it peaks
through his paper today.
First he accents some of the ways in which I contend against
most of the literature in this field. There is some irony here, because I
am not a contrarian, I do not make novel claims for the sake of being
original, and I tend to be skeptical of scholars that make large new
arguments about fields that have been plowed for decades. Despite all
that, I argue that most of the literature over-identifies liberalism with
the social gospel optimism of the Progressive Era, that liberalism is a
deeper and more important impulse in U.S. American religious history
than that, and it long preceded and succeeded the Progressive Era. I
stress the permutations of White supremacism and sexism that have
clung to this tradition even when it claimed otherwise. I argue that Paul
Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr both belonged to the liberal tradition,
despite their criticisms of it, which changes the entire picture of mid¬
century North American theology. I give extensive treatment to
numerous figures that usually have no role in this story. And I argue
that liberal theology is in crisis, but not dead; in fact, it experienced an
unnoticed renaissance in the past generation.
Dean challenges the last of these arguments, giving us the
sobering image of a strangulating rope pulled from opposite directions
by neo-pragmatists, deconstructionists, hermeneuticists, and Religious
Studies observers. He is amazed that the postmodern liberal theologians
absorbed all this criticizing and choking and still came up with new
theological rejoinders. We must have the “Stockholm Syndrome,” to
spend so much effort enabling and defending our jailers.
But that is precisely why we need historical theology. If we
think that our problems are categorically different, that no generation
has had to deal with our terrible challenges to belief and faith, we might
consent to swinging from a postmodern gallows. But in fact the entire
liberal story is one of facing challenges to belief and dealing with them
as creatively and faithfully as possible.
Think of the liberals of the 1880s. The Civil War had wiped out
a whole generation, and a backlog of critical problems had
accumulated. The liberals that founded the social gospel movement had
to deal with all of them at once: Darwinism, Social Darwinism,
Marxism, industrial capitalism, social and historical consciousness,

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 Vol. 29, No. 2, May 2008 179

historical criticism of the Bible, and most devastating of all, scientific

positivism. To be sure, we lack the cultural support system that the
social gospel liberals counted on, but I would not say that our belief
problems are worse because we have postmodern cultural
fragmentation, instability of meaning, and incredulity toward meta¬
narrative. Whenever I teach the material on early liberalism, the chief
reaction of students is amazement that previous generations faced
problems of belief and conviction that are very similar to ours.
Liberal theologians have been grappling with the noose from
the beginning, which distinguishes this tradition. The entire field of
modem theology employs critical tools and theories that the liberal
tradition developed. By virtue of its openness to criticism and revision,
the liberal tradition is more adaptable than other theological traditions.
And the original idea of liberal theology is as relevant and coherent
today as it was a hundred years ago.
Thus it continues to attract very able proponents. To respond
plainly to Dean’s question: I never said that postmodem liberalism was
a “success,” because “success” is not a theological category, or one that
I am accustomed to using. I did say it has produced highly
accomplished work. I cannot read the intellectually rich and
sophisticated writings of Robert Neville, David Tracy, Catherine Keller,
David Griffin, and Elizabeth Johnson and say, “Well, there is a dying
discourse.” For creativity, breadth, depth, scale, and insight, the
constructive and programmatic works of Neville, Tracy, Keller, Griffin,
Johnson, Langdon Gilkey, J. Deotis Roberts, Edward Farley, and
Gordon Kaufman compare favorably to those of any nine theologians of
any generation. The only group that has an edge over this one is the
dialectical generation to which Barth, Tillich, and Niebuhr belonged.
But we have to stop invoking that group as the standard of
accomplishment or “success.” It was anomalous in so many ways,
especially, that it briefly revived an expiring Protestant Christendom.
No other generation is going to get a similar opportunity, and we should
not want one. I would rather pursue theology in a generation that takes
seriously inter-religious dialogue, cultural diversity, and liberationist
criticism. And popular liberal writers like Marcus Borg and Jack Spong
have reached enormous audiences.
“Liberal theology” is at root a simple idea, and a necessary one.
In essence it is the idea of a theology based on reason and experience,
not external authority, which offers a third way between orthodox

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180 American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

authority religion and secular disbelief. There are many varieties of

liberal theology, but these two factors define the category: the authority
principle and the principle of integrative mediation. So Dean is right
that the question of method is central to my account of this tradition. To
examine the entire subject, I had to come up with a definition that
would work for every generation, not just the Progressive Era. Any
account that does not focus on the methodological issue, and that does
not stick with it in a disciplined way, is not going to work for the entire
tradition. The alternative, at best, is an approach that works well for one
generation or one school of thought, but distorts the others.
For example, last year at the American Academy of Religion
meeting one of my interlocutors in the American Liberal Theologies
group proposed to redefine liberalism as a type of liberation theology.
As a constructive claim, I agreed with him; my normative aim is
precisely to blend liberalism with liberation theology. But interpreting
the liberal tradition is something else. If I had defined it as a forerunner
of liberationism, I would have made a terrible hash of this subject.
Liberation theology is about privileging the perspectives of oppressed
and marginalized communities; for the most part, that is not what
liberal theology has been about.
There is a similar problem lurking in Dean’s argument that the
“primary, defining trait” of liberal theology is the immanence of God. If
he means by this what he argued in American Religious Empiricism, I
disagree for historical and constructive reasons. The first draft of
Dean’s paper, last week, seemed to argue along that line, although
today he used the term “immanence” more broadly. In recent years he
has dropped his commitment to pragmatism, taken a critical view of the
historicist methodologism he once championed, and reclaimed the
category of “mystery.” So perhaps his concept of immanence is
changing too, and I need to wait for his next book.
In the meantime, I will explain why I did not identify liberal
theology with divine immanence. Since the early 20th century liberals
have argued about the evangelical and Enlightenment heritages of
liberal theology. From its Enlightenment heritage liberal theology has
upheld the authority of modem knowledge, emphasized the continuity
between reason and revelation, and championed the values of tolerance,
humanistic individualism, and democracy. From its evangelical heritage
it has affirmed the authority of Christian experience, upheld the divinity

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 Vol. 29, No. 2, May 2008 181

and sovereignty of Christ, preached the need of personal salvation, and

emphasized the importance of Christian missions.
The greatest of the old liberals were those that fused these two
traditions with spiritual power: Bushnell, Beecher, Munger,
Rauschenbusch. But from the early 1900s onward there were bruising
debates about the value of holding together the evangelical and
Enlightenment elements. The evangelical/modemist distinction, which
dominates much of the scholarly literature in this field, is a product of
these debates. This distinction breaks the field into an "evangelical"
tendency that centers upon gospel norms such as the divinity and
sovereignty of Christ and a "modernist" tendency that replaces gospel
norms with a modem worldview. The "evangelical" or transcendentalist
tendency conceives God as being transcendent to history, while the
"modernist" tradition is thoroughly immanentalist, contending that
God's dwelling place is wholly within history.
By the mid-1920s two issues were paramount: Is it possible for
a modem theology to be based on material religious norms from the
past? And should God be conceived as being in any way transcendent
to history? There are problems with this schematism that I do not have
time for here, and both of the major streams of liberal theology stressed
that the religious subject is historical and that God is immanent within
creation and history. However, they disagreed on whether God exists
beyond history and whether the person or message of Christ should be
conceived as a founding historical revelation.
In his book, American Religious Empiricism, Dean advocated
the Chicago School side of this argument, that good liberalism equals
thoroughgoing naturalism, radical empiricism, pragmatism, and an idea
of God as the matrix of historical process. In recent years he has
decided that postmodem liberals like himself drank too deeply from
postmodernism, but he is still arguing that truly liberal theology is
distinguished by its adherence to a strictly immanental idea of God.
If that argument is right, and he still assumes a Chicago School
idea of “immanence,” then a great many people that I featured in the
trilogy should not be there. From volume one, Channing, Bushnell,
Beecher, Munger, Gladden, Smyth, Briggs, and Bowne must be
eliminated; only Emerson and Parker make the cut. In the 20th century,
the entire tradition of the Black Social Gospel falls out, because in the
Black church, God is all-powerful, transcendent, and the Lord of all
things. One might make an argument for Howard Thurman, but

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182 American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

Benjamin Mays, Mordecai Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and J.

DeOtis Roberts are out. The same thing would be true for a long list of
others we usually call liberals, notably Walter Rauschenbusch, Albert
Knudson, Henry Van Dusen, and Langdon Gilkey. In addition, Niebuhr
and Tillich belong to the transcendental side of this argument, which
Dean emphasized in American Religious Empiricism.
I love and greatly respect the streams of liberal theology that
opt for radical immanence; thus I have spent hundreds of pages
analyzing the finer points of Whiteheadian metaphysics, creative
evolutionism, Wieman-style process empiricism, Hartshomian dipolar
theism, and other varieties of process thought, including Bill Dean’s
conventionalism. Dean argues that God is entirely a product of human
culture, a convention. But that makes human beings the creators of
God, which is not much of a God. In his latest book, The American
Spiritual Culture, Dean has passages that flirt with another idea, albeit
amid his usual tropes about God the cultural convention. At some point
in each chapter he makes an ironic, non-pragmatic appeal to “mystery,”
a counter-melody that signals his openness to privileging mystery over
pragmatism and convention. In those passages there is at least the
suggestion that he no longer believes that pragmatic naturalism is the
best route to belief in God. We can only wait to see, in his next book,
what sort of God he may have in mind. In the meantime I reject the
restriction of liberalism to radical immanence, because it eliminates too
much of the field, and it loses the God of transcendent holiness,
dwelling in light inaccessible, who holds the power to raise the dead
and prevail over evil and non-being.
For me, the ideal on this issue is to drink deeply from the
process well, but not to give up the power of God over being and
nonbeing, which process theology does when it restricts transcendence
to God’s inexhaustibility. For process thought, God is the inexhaustible
society of events within becoming that lures its subjects to make
healthy, other-regarding choices. Just as human beings are immanent in
our bodies, yet also transcend our bodies through the power of self¬
consciousness, God is immanent in the universe while somehow
becoming more than the universe through the power of God’s self-
conscious focus on it.
If there is more in becoming than in that which becomes,
process is the last word. But if there is more in that which becomes, it
must come from participating in that which does not become. In the

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 Vol. 29, No. 2, May 2008 183

former view, divine transcendence is conceived as God’s unfailing

inexhaustibility; in the latter view, it is also God’s power over being
and nonbeing. God’s transcendence is either the ultimate
exemplification of the categories of immanence, or also the ultimate
ground of all categories.
I believe that something like the personalist vision needs to be
recovered today if liberal theology is to flourish as a public and spiritual
force: something like a gospel-centered theology of personal spirit.
Instead of defining the spiritual in terms of the personal and the moral
(as personalism did), one might define the personal and moral in terms
of the spiritual, fashioning a theology of universal spirit and love. Nels
Ferré and Paul Schilling started down this path near the end of their
careers, as did Tillich in the third volume of his Systematic Theology.
Instead of privileging the categories of being or process, one might
privilege the category of spirit, and within that concept the categories of
personality and love, interpreting experiences of the Holy as
expressions of universal Spirit.
Last year a bold student approached me and asked, “What is
your theology? I plan to read some of your books, but could you just
tell me ahead of time?” So I am learning the value of just putting it out
there as directly as possible: God is creative and personal Spirit,
motivated by love; Jesus is divine by virtue of the fullness of God’s
Spirit in him; love is the final meaning of spirit and the personal; evil is
the lack and nihilating negation of the flourishing of life; a passion for
social justice and the flourishing of life is the best sign of living in the
divine light; spirit is the most inclusive and universal ultimate; eternity
is the life of divine love.
If liberal theology were not capable of changing in the light of
liberationist and postmodern criticism, it would not be a living tradition
today, or something with which I could identify. Today liberal theology
must be a type of liberation theology. But it also should be a theological
perspective that speaks a clear and convicting word about following
Jesus and worshipping God as the divine Spirit of love without having
to believe any particular thing on the basis of external authority. Some
alternative to orthodox over-belief and secular unbelief is still needed,
even if liberalism always needs better answers.

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