Angela Sheard “Being a crossroads: Navigating theological education and racial discourse in the Church of England as a mixed-race person”
March 31, 2023
Eddie Green: Bypassing ‘Liberal’ for the Missio Dei
April 29, 2023
I’ve been working at St Mark’s Church in Sheffield for the last couple of years in a post described as priest and liberal theologian. When I saw it advertised, I was interested that a parish church had created a post with this type of focus, and a little put off by the title. I questioned whether the terminology of liberal theology was outdated but I was also intrigued to find out what St Mark’s were hoping to do through this.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been asked what my role means. Not ‘What do you do?’ But ‘What does that mean?’ These questions are sometimes linked to negative stereotypes about liberal Christians.
‘Does it mean you can believe anything you want now?’
‘Don’t you believe in God anymore?’
‘Does it mean you make up reasons for behaving however you want?’
St Mark’s Church used to be a church from a liberal tradition. I say used to be because that was part of its identity. But just as the liberal theological tradition has lost is vocabulary and influence since the 1990’s, churches that defined themselves as from a liberal tradition have also floundered in describing who they are and what they believe. Whilst various members of St Mark’s still identify strongly with the term liberal, those who do tend to relate strongly to how the term was used 40 years ago. And strikingly, almost all members under of the age of 45 feel little connection to the term. With a lack of coherence around defining terminology, other terms have been used such as modern or progressive, but on the whole these haven’t stuck. Another term, inclusive, has gained more traction, but whilst this describes an important aspect, it also leaves many questions unanswered about the church’s beliefs and practices.
Liberal theology has gone through different eras, with periods of growth. But more recently it has been heavily critiqued and the terminology has gone into decline within the academy and the Church. Thirty years ago, theologians were asking whether liberal theology, with its foundations firmly in modernist thought, could grow any further. Could liberal theology be reclaimed and reimagined in a postmodern context, or had it reached its end? If liberal theology is dead, what have we been left with? Before looking at whether there is a future for liberal theology, a brief look back at its history may be useful. Let’s take a brief trip through its development and look at what gifts these theological methods have brought to the Church.
Though the term liberal theology did not develop until later, the roots of this movement can be traced back to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s speeches from 1799. Schleiermacher, considered to be the father of modern liberal theology, was interested in exploring the relationship between theology and human experience. This was a significant challenge to the accepted theological methods of the day. At the heart of this challenge are questions of what we do when our experiences and reason do not match up with our religious assumptions and beliefs.
During the 19th and early 20th century, liberal theology developed predominantly within Germany and in the USA. Liberals challenged fundamentalist approaches and questioned orthodox religious beliefs. They argued that truth claims made about the Bible and church teaching had become invalidated by modern thought and scientific discovery. Instead, they proposed a process in which human reason and experience (including scientific advances and historical critical methods) engage in a dialogue with scripture and church teaching. This offered a third way between growing secular scepticism and fundamentalist religion. Accordingly, liberal theology was characterised in two ways. Firstly, by its stance on authority, based in reason and experience rather than religious dogma. And secondly, as a dialogical and integrative process, in which the different elements of reason, experience, biblical texts and church teaching, were mediated and integrated to form meaning.
Process theology developed within the liberal tradition. This contended that an essential attribute of God was to affect and be affected. Thus God, and in consequence church teaching, could be understood as adaptive and responsive to new situations. Whilst conservative responses opposed this turn to the subjective, neo-orthodox approaches, indebted to Søren Kierkegaard and founded on the work of Karl Barth, bridged the increasing divide between modern liberal theology and fundamentalism. These neo-orthodox approaches embraced scientific and historical critical methods but, in contrast to liberal theology, stressed the significance of divine revelation. Liberal and neo-orthodox approaches remained distinct, and their different approaches and concerns were amplified in the search for the ‘historical Jesus’. However, towards the end of the twentieth century neo-orthodox methods were returned to in the shift to post-liberal approaches.
The optimism that had fuelled liberal theology was put into perspective by the middle of the 20th century with the two world wars challenging moral idealism and the assumption of humanist progression. The liberal language of progress appeared naïve in the context of war and economic depression. In the second half of the century, as theologians grappled with these experiences, and the nature of the relationship between God and the world, differing approaches to understanding culture and theologies of a suffering God developed. Niebuhr’s and Tillich’s work on Christ and context demonstrated how belief is formed in relation to culture. Within the Church of England, Bishop John Robinson controversially opened up these themes through the publication of Honest to God in 1963. In the USA, Bishop John Shelby Spong was an influential voice for liberal Christianity within the Episcopal Church.
During the shift to postmodernism in the latter half of the 20th century, liberal theology, and its close alignment to modernist thought, came under heavy critique. From this, Progressive Christianity developed as a post-liberal movement within the church. Like liberal theology, progressive theology was characterised as questioning religious assumptions and engaging in a dialogue between scripture, church teaching, experience, and reason. But as a post-modern approach, it developed from multiple streams including, amongst others, liberation theology, post-evangelicalism, feminist theology, and progressive Catholicism, enabling a breadth of voices and contexts to be heard.
This move away from prioritising the voices of white men has been a welcome move, which accounts for the diversity of streams moving beyond liberal theology, but also accounts for the lack of definition or coherence around terms. Here there is space for a plurality of voices, from postcolonial interpretations, feminist, and black perspectives, and with a strong emphasis on orthopraxy, trauma theology, social justice, and environmental concerns. This marks an important shift away from liberal theology, recognising the importance of differing contexts, and the belief that we find truth in hearing the multiplicity of voices rather than privileging the voices that hold more power.
Does the lack of coherence around terminology matter? On one hand, no; language is always changing and developing. However, the use and the development of language plays an integral role in how we believe and act. I hope in the coming years, new terminology will develop from the church, and become further embedded, whether this will include a connection to the term liberal or not is of less importance.
Which bring us back to the question, is liberal theology dead? Certainly, the terminology has lost the meaning and standing it once had. However, the methods which enabled liberal theology to develop are needed as much as ever. We continue to face the question that shaped Schleiermacher’s work: what we do when our experiences and reason do not match up with our religious assumptions and beliefs. The characteristics of liberal theology, namely, its stance on authority and willingness to challenge religious dogma from reason and experience, and its methods as a dialogical and integrative process are just as important to belief and practice today.
In answer to the negative stereotypes, being from a liberal Christian tradition does not mean believing or doing whatever I want. At its heart it means remaining committed to the teachings and practices of Jesus by questioning, thinking, listening, and integrating our inherited faith, our beliefs, our reason, and our experience.
Revd Dr Beth Keith, Liberal Theologian St Mark’s Church Sheffield
11 Comments
Well argued, with much to commend it. As a liberal Christian from within the Catholic tradition, I agree with much of it and welcome its contribution to the debate on whether liberal theology is dead.
I agree with Beth 100%. No-one knows or cares what ‘liberal theology’ is, or even whether it is. It appears nowhere on the theological maps currently in use in universities. There is a simple solution that Modern Church should adopt. Just stop using the term ‘liberal’, and re-write the About’ section of the website that tries, and fails, to define it. The term hasn’t appeared on the covers of Modern Believing, at least since the re-launch. No-one appears to have missed it. If we need to use an alternative term, there are others – constructive, positive, radical, post-evangelical, non-conservative – come to mind. Liberal Christians should be thankful that their – our – heritage has been taken up and taken over by many different theologies with different names, and most of these are flourishing. Liberal theology lives on in them – praise God! The term is redundant: the heritage vast. Yes we need the term when explaining our history. That’s all. All we heed now is the courage to quietly let it go.
I also take the good points made here. The term ‘liberal’ has got marooned on a chronological island. I’d suggest playing around with formulations like ‘exploratory theology’, or ‘theological exploration’, maybe. ‘Experimental’ doesn’t quite cut the mustard, I’d have thought. There are probably other possibilities.
In the communities beyond the Wicker Arches in the Don Valley Steelworks, the Term ” Radical ” was often still used and respected in the ’60s through ’90s, until Evangelical MargaretThatcherism and Charismata forced forward. Now we need to halt the march of Austerity, and other demons, in the times we live in.
[…] Beth Keith Modern Church Is Liberal Theology Dead? […]
Hello, sorry but just one observation as a theologian, is that this does not sound at all like how classical Liberal theology understood itself. For example, would Schleiermacher have said his work was shaped by the question: ‘what we do when our experiences and reason do not match up with our religious assumptions and beliefs’? Maybe he did somewhere but that sounds very unlike the questions he asked in his main work ‘The Christian Faith’. I would say Liberal theologians were concerned with achieving a truer understanding and living development of inherited beliefs, rather than with how those beliefs have been ‘called into question’ by modern reason and experience. I think it is important to recognise this, as so many conservatives claim that Liberal theology is/was an attempt to accommodate traditional beliefs to modern thought, in such a way as to lose any critical distance from modern thought. But that is not at all how classical Liberal theology understood its task.
I like Matthew H’s comment about ‘achieving a truer understanding and living development of inherited beliefs’; it certainly fits my own progress from my early days, and my struggles with fundamentalist thinking versus the world in which I live. Much of my thinking was shaped by Michael Harper, Tom Smail and David Watson; pioneering Anglican charismatics, who thought of themselves as ‘liberal’ yet held traditional views of, for example, the incarnation and resurrection. (as indeed I do) The tragedy is that far too many ‘real Christians’ (ie evangelicals – their own term for themselves!) only understand a very biased parody of ‘liberal’, as Beth says; and in part that’s understandable. Bishop Spong and other extreme ‘liberals’ are largely to blame for that. Perhaps Tony Campolo is on the right lines? Thinking in political terms he remarked that if you’re truly following Christ you will be very conservative in some issues and yet quite radical in others, and the same is true of theology. Personally, I don’t like the labels – we’re just Christians, people who endeavour to follow Jesus as Lord.
While Friedrich Schleiemacher’s (1768–1834) emphasis upon the authority of experience has undoubtedly been formative within liberal theology, an arguably more influential contribution can be traced back a century or more earlier to a Portuguese Jew by the name of Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77) whose anonymously published ‘Tractatus Theologico-Politicus’ subjected Scripture to intellectual scrutiny, thereby elevating reason above the then prevailing authorities of sola scriptura and/or tradition. In the light of this, if we are in need of a replacement for ‘liberal theology’ then perhaps ‘reasonable theology’ deserves serious consideration, unless it has already been hijacked!
‘What do we do when our experiences and reason do not match up with our religious assumptions and beliefs’? Is the most important question to which this essay points. What we really need to be thinking about is how we think about and relate to God, especially when God appears indifferent to our concerns, whether these be theological, ecclesiological or deeply private and personal. I would warmly recommend Pete Greig’s book ‘God on Mute’ in this regard.
It was very interesting to read Beth’s article and her curiosity over such a titled post within the context of a parish church. When I was appointed vicar of St Mark’s some thirty years before Beth’s appointment, the church described itself as in the ‘liberal critical tradition’. At the time such a description seemed to nestle comfortably within the modernist framework which Modern Church espoused. Undoubtedly more challenging voices from the USA such as Jack Spong and more passionate debates over the status of women in the church and a little later sexuality and gender issues sharpened the focus considerably. In part our work at St Mark’s to establish the Centre for Radical Christianity was to move from the predominantly Anglican liberal tradition to a much wider non-denominational approach which was unafraid to ask the bigger questions of the whole of the orthodox Christian beliefs.
This, and the concurrent establishment of the Progressive Christianity Network gave a voice to the many who felt alienated from the structures and expectations of belief. A dialogue with the voices of atheists and agnostics, conversions with those of other faiths and above all a call to honesty, felt by many of us a path which needed to be trod.
For a parish church this could be challenging, even dangerous and certainly exacting. It needed a close reworking of liturgy and attention to all that we said or sung. I ceased to use the term ‘liberal’ after a bruising encounter with overseas students in the Bib Studies department (as then) at the university when the very word switched them off any discussion! Of course my take on ‘radical’ Christianity would have them throw me out of the door but perhaps not until I had time to explain how the radical Jesus was the person who calls me to action.
I have not attended this church building and rely on its website. I have experienced many church cultures – some non Christian. I am scientifically trained.I own 4 versions of Bible. I am confirmed as adult into C of E. I am annoyed that none of these address the basic need of modern humans for a comprehensible guide. Jesus the Radical did for His culture.
‘ liberal’ is irrelevant . ‘Radical ‘ is OK / ‘progressive ‘ is better.
IMO only the truth about the Bibles historical context being admitted and Jesus’ direct message being reapplied i.e. updated clearly and loudly will gain modern society credence.
Its dangerous
Reliance on traditional interpretation , obfuscation , denial of obvious human motivations and of political situations (e.g. for mass killings in O.T.) is a safe position ,but useless to most thinking adults desperately looking for guidance , because when they read the Word a suspension of their knowledge of the drivers for humans is required. Just as in a silly fantasy film entertainment.
Reality then bites and the personal commitment of ,and to God ( as intimated by most religions) is noted as AWOL.
Admittedly the system works for some – and inherently they believe themselves to be ‘chosen’ ( or similar special status) .
Maybe ,as some assert, Jesus aimed to change the local Jewish system only.
St Paul who did not meet physical Jesus, realised others might respond at that message and here we are.
Moses listed life rules vital for then.
Do it again now.