The Crisis and Necessity of Liberal Theology

Author(s): Gary Dorrien

Source: American Journal of Theology & Philosophy, Vol. 30, No. 1, The Future of American
Liberal Theology (January 2009), pp. 3-23
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27944459 .
Accessed: 25/08/2013 13:35

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American
Journal of Theology &Philosophy.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Crisis and Necessity of Liberal Theology*
Gary Dorrien / Union Theological Seminary and
Columbia University

T heidea of a liberal approach to Christianity is, at root, a simple

one, and I believe 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 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.
Liberal theology conceives the meaning of Christianity in the
light of modem knowledge and ethical values. It is reformist in spirit
and substance; it is deeply shaped by modem science, humanism, and
historical criticism; and it is committed to making Christianity credible
and socially relevant. In liberal theology the Bible remains an authority
for faith, but its authority operates within Christian experience, not as
an outside force that establishes or compels belief.
The towering figures of early modem theology were Germans.
Immanuel Kant located religious truth in the moral claims of practical
reason. G.W.F. Hegel formulated a metaphysical system based on
Christian doctrines. Friedrich Schleiermacher, usually described as the
“father” of modem theology, located the essence of religion in spiritual
“feeling” or intuition. Albrecht Ritschl pioneered a fourth major stream
of liberal theology by interpreting Christianity as a socio-historical
movement with a distinct ethical-religious character. Most of the great
Bible scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were Germans
too, most notably, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Wilhelm De Wette, and
Julius Wellhausen.
But the American tradition of modem liberal theology is nearly
as old as the German one, and in the nineteenth century it featured some
distinguished thinkers: Horace Bushnell, Theodore Parker, Washington
Gladden, Theodore Munger, Charles Briggs, Borden Parker Bowne.
Most of them were pastors, as liberal theology was slow to enter the
academy. In the nineteenth century liberal theologians rejected the

*
This article is the text of what the author describes as one of his “road-show lectures
on liberal theology.” (The editors)

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
4 American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

doctrines of double predestination, substitutionary atonement, and

biblical inerrancy. They denied that God created the world in six days,
commanded the genocidal extermination of Israel's ancient enemies,
demanded the sacrifice of his Son as a payment for sin, and verbally
inspired the Bible. More importantly, they denied that religious
arguments should be settled by appeals to an infallible text or ecclesial
authority. Nineteenth century liberals accepted Darwinian evolution,
biblical criticism, and an idea of God as the personal and eternal Spirit
of love.
Every mainline Protestant denomination had a battle over these
affirmations and denials, and most had a major split over them.
Fundamentalists inveighed against the liberalizing turn in the churches,
contending that liberal theology betrayed the historic faith of the
church. According to fundamentalists, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy
was the basis of all other doctrines; it could not be denied without
betraying Christian orthodoxy as a whole. Liberals replied that
Christianity had no future if it did not come to terms with modem
science and historical criticism. The Congregational Church was the
first to accept that argument, in the 1890s; during the same decade,
liberals began to sweep into the country’s leading divinity schools and
seminaries. Other denominations waged bitter fights in the early
twentieth century over who controlled the seminaries and mission
boards. As late as 1920, the northern Presbyterian and northern Baptist
denominations were evenly divided between their modernist and
fundamentalist factions, but by the end of the 1920s fundamentalists
had lost the battle in every mainline denomination, causing them to
break away. Fundamentalists opted for sectarianism, forming a vast
network of new denominations, para-church ministries, and Bible
colleges that got little respect or attention until the 1950s, when the
Billy Graham crusades gave notice that American fundamentalism was
not dwindling away or accepting its sub-cultural status.
For most of the twentieth century three schools of thought
dominated liberal theology, and each had a leading academic center:
evangelical liberalism, which was taught at Union Theological
Seminary; personalist idealism, which was taught at Boston University;
and Chicago School naturalistic empiricism, which was centered at the
University of Chicago.
Evangelical liberalism was the heart and soul of the liberal
movement, sustaining the original merger that gave rise to liberal

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Vol. 30, No. 1, January 2009 5

theology. Logically and historically, liberal theology is a fusion of

Protestant evangelicalism and Enlightenment rationalism and
humanism. From its Enlightenment heritage, liberal theology
emphasized the authority of modem knowledge, affirmed the continuity
between reason and revelation, championed the values of humanistic
individualism and democracy, and was usually too Kantian or
empiricist to make metaphysical claims. From its evangelical heritage,
it affirmed a personal transcendent God, the authority of Christian
experience, the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption, and
the importance of Christian missions.
The figures that made liberal Christianity compelling to
millions were evangelical liberals who held together both heritages. In
the nineteenth century, the towering example was Henry Ward Beecher;
in the first half of the twentieth century, it was Harry Emerson Fosdick.
Union Seminary’s leading evangelical liberals, besides Fosdick, were
William Adams Brown and Henry Sloane Coffin. To the evangelical
liberals, there was no reason to choose between being modem and
gospel-centered, for the whole idea of liberal theology was to hold these
things together.
The second major theology of the liberal movement,
personalism, belonged to the evangelical mainstream in theology, while
featuring a distinct commitment to a philosophical system, personalist
idealism. Founded by philosopher Borden Parker Bowne in the 1890s
and centered at Boston University, this school of thought blended
Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, Schleiermacher, James, and Kant. In its
second generation it also appropriated Hegel, Troeltsch, and the Social
Gospel. With Descartes, Bowne taught that the soul is known
immediately as the experience of consciousness; from Leibniz he took
the idea that the soul is essentially active; with Berkeley he argued that
self-consciousness is the necessary presupposition of all thinking and
the world of objects; with Schleiermacher he taught that feeling or
intuition is the wellspring of religion; with James he stressed the
pragmatic test of truth; from Kant he took the basic elements of his
theory of knowledge and his ethical concept of the person.1

1
See Borden Parker Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1897); Bowne, Metaphysics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1898); Bowne,
Theism (New York: American Book Company, 1902); Bowne, Personalism (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin 1908), Bowne, The Essence of Religion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1910).

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
6 American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

The key to Bowne's system was the argument that

—
personality the self as a center of conscious experience is the single —
reality that cannot be explained by anything else. Personalist idealism
was a theory of the transcendent reality of personal spirit and the
organic unity of nature in spirit. Because the natural sciences are
necessarily mechanistic, science cannot account for the reality or unity
of consciousness. It is possible to move from mind to matter, but matter
cannot be the ultimate or sufficient cause of mind.
These arguments built a powerful school of thought that had a
large impact on the Methodist Church. Edgar S. Brightman was the
leading personalist philosopher, fashioning a neo-Hegelian system that
had key affinities with process thought; Albert Knudson was the
school’s major theologian; Walter Muelder developed its progressive
social ethic; and Harold DeWolf taught personalist thought to Martin
Luther King, Jr. In the 1950s over half of the African Americans to earn
doctorates in theology earned them at Boston University, where
students like King blended personalist philosophy and Black church
preaching. Personalist thought was the philosophical backbone of
King’s emphasis on spiritual personality and his insistence that persons
are always to be treated as absolute ends, not as means to an end.2
The impact of personalist thought registered far beyond the
personalist school, however, because most of the personalist
theologians were evangelical liberals, and most liberal theologians
incorporated personalist arguments into their thinking. Virtually all
liberals contended that spirit or personality holds primacy over the

2
See Edgar S. Brightman, A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1940);
Brightman, The Problem of God (New York: Abingdon Press, 1930); Albert C.
Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism: A Study in the Metaphysics of Religion (New
York: Abingdon Press, 1927); Knudson, The Doctrine of God (New York: Abingdon-
Cokesbury Press, 1930); Francis John McConnell, The Christlike God (New York:
Abingdon Press, 1927); Walter G. Muelder, Foundations of the Responsible Society
(New York: Abingdon Press, 1959); L. Harold DeWolf, A Theology of the Living
Church (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953); Martin Luther King Jr., “A Comparison
of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman”
(Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1955), reprinted in The Papers of Martin Luther King
Jr., ed. Claybome Carson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 2: 339-544;
King, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1958).

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Vol. 30, No. 1, January 2009 7

things of sense, even as many of them otherwise avoided metaphysical

arguments.
For example, Harry Emerson Fosdick had a straightforwardly
personalist worldview, which he preached every week at Riverside
Church. He taught that Christianity is fundamentally about the care and
flourishing of personality. In 1932 he declared that the churches should
devote themselves to inspiring and cultivating personalities, “instead of
—
remaining what too largely they are societies for the propagation of an
outgrown mythology.” Three years later he put it plainly: “Let me tell
you my philosophy. I can put it in a few words. Everyone who follows
this ministry will recognize it. All my thinking starts from and comes
back to it. Here it is: The key to the understanding of all life is the value
of personality.”3
Fosdick was not a religious philosopher; he could not have
taught a seminar on metaphysical idealism. Thus he was not usually
counted as a personalist. But his sermons conveyed a popular version of
it to millions. He taught that Christianity is superior to other religions as
the religion of personality; that the divine is present wherever goodness,
beauty, truth, and love exist; and that human beings are divine to the
extent that they embody and mobilize these qualities. Jesus was
uniquely divine because he embodied these qualities fully. To Fosdick,
divinity was the perfection of immanent love that every person is
capable of mobilizing, and religions were true to the extent that they
promoted the flourishing of personality. Sin is the victory of bad social
influences and bodily impulses over the instincts of a higher self. Good
religion brings people to an awareness of their better nature and
mobilizes their capacity to live out of it.
The third major type of liberal theology, Chicago School
empiricism, was something quite different from the other schools. Here
the ideal of holding together the evangelical and Enlightenment
traditions was let go. The other types of liberal theology stressed the
continuity between modem and classical Christianity, but the Chicago
School stressed that modernity was a revolution. If there was to be a
modem theology, it had to rest on modem experience and critical tests
of belief. The leading theologians of the Chicago School’s first
3
Harry Emerson Fosdick, As I See Religion (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1932),
“instead of,” 51; Fosdick, The Power to See It Through (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1935), “Let me,” 35; see Fosdick, Christianity and Progress (New York: Fleming H.
Revell, 1922).

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
8 American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

generation were Shailer Mathews, George Burman Foster, Gerald

Birney Smith, Edward Scribner Ames, and Shirley Jackson Case. They
were committed to historicism, pragmatism, radical empiricism, and
religious naturalism.4
To unpack that collection of buzzwords: Historicism is the
doctrine that all knowledge has an irreducibly historical character;
every idea has a history that is the key to its meaning and truth. The
History of Religions approach, which the Chicago School adopted, was
a supposedly objective type of historicism that studied religious
traditions from a neutral criterion not derived from any particular
religious tradition.
The Chicago School was known equally for its pragmatism,
according to which knowledge is instrumental, concepts are habits of
belief or rules of action, and ideas are true according to their practical
usefulness. Ideas do not “refer” to some Platonic realm of forms; they
are like knives and forks, enabling useful action. William James and
John Dewey were the chief influences on Chicago pragmatism; a bit
later in its history, the Chicago School also made much of Jamesian
radical empiricism. Eighteenth century Enlightenment empiricism
studied experience, contending that sense data about things is all that
we have in claiming to know anything. But James added that
experience is relational; instead of focusing on atomistic units of
experience, empiricism needed to recognize that experience has a
flowing, immediate continuity. Life is a continuous flux or stream of
experiences without distinct boundaries. By focusing on the relational
flow of experience, the Chicago School practiced a form of process
theology before the term existed.5

4
See Shailer Mathews, The Faith of Modernism (New York: Macmillan, 1924);
Mathews, The Atonement and the Social Process (New York: Macmillan, 1930);
George Burman Foster, The Finality of the Christian Religion (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1906); Gerald Bimey Smith, Social Idealism and the Changing
Theology (New York: Macmillan, 1913); Edward Scribner Ames, Religion (New York:
Henry Holt and Company, 1929); Shirley Jackson Case, The Social Origins of
Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923).
5
William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking and The
Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1978); James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York: Longmans, Green and
Company, 1912); see James, A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, Green and
Company, 1909).

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Vol. 30, No. 1, January 2009 9

For thirty years the Chicago theologians debated how far they
should take their commitment to religious naturalism. All of them
conceived God as an expression of ideals, and they equivocated on
whether God should be conceived as a cosmic reality. But is God
merely an analogical expression for an idealized concept of the
universe? By the late 1920s the founders of the Chicago School were
getting old, they worried that their brand of theology was already
fading, and they realized that the God-question was their biggest
problem.
In 1926 they heard that Alfred North Whitehead, the brilliant
physicist and philosopher who specialized in relativity theory, had
published a new book titled Religion in the Making. With excitement
the Chicago theologians ordered the book and began reading it; with
total bafflement they turned the pages. The book was advertised as a
primer in religion, but they could not understand a single page of it.
Ames and Case dismissed the book as completely unintelligible. Smith
reported that he felt some affinity with it, but could not explain why.
Mathews confessed: “It is infuriating, and I must say embarrassing as
well, to read page after page of relatively familiar words without
understanding a single sentence.” With his typical wry humor, however,
Mathews added that perhaps, just possibly, the problem was not with
Whitehead. Did anyone claim to understand this purported genius?6
Yes, there was one American expert on Whitehead—Henry
Nelson Wieman, who gave a brilliant lecture at Chicago on
Whitehead’s thought and was promptly appointed to the faculty.
Wieman told the Chicago theologians that Whitehead’s religious
philosophy was perfectly intelligible and extremely important. It
showed that the existence and nature of God are revealed in the inherent
structure of physical nature. It proved that the universe exists only by
virtue of its order, which is aesthetic, loving, and not accidental.
Bernard Meland later recalled: “It was as if shuttered windows in one’s
own household had been swung open, revealing vistas of which one had
hitherto been unmindful.”7

6
Bernard E. Meland, The Realities of Faith: The Revolution in Cultural Forms (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1962), quote 109; Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in
the Making (New York: Macmillan, 1926).
7
Meland, The Realities of Faith, quote 111; see Henry Nelson Wieman, “Two Views of
Whitehead,” review of Religion in the Making, by Alfred North Whitehead, New
Republic 11 (16 February 1927): 361-62; Alfred North Whitehead, The Principle of

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
10 American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

Wieman admired his new colleagues for pioneering an

empirical, naturalistic, pragmatic approach to theology, but he could not
fathom why they took so much interest in history, and he chided them
for letting go of God’s objective reality. History doesn’t matter, because
history does not prove anything. What matters is, What is it all about?
In Wieman’s view, liberal theology was too sentimental; it shrank from
defending God’s existence; and it tried to make itself attractive by
appealing to social concerns. That strategy was a loser; it drove the
strong and intelligent people away from religion.
Wieman admonished that theology had to become tough-
minded again. Religion is pointless without God, but modem science
negated traditional ways of conceiving God’s existence. Wieman
argued that whatever else the word “God” may mean, at bottom it
designates the Something upon which human life and the flourishing of
the good are dependent. It cannot be doubted that such a Something
exists. If there is a human good, it must have a source. The fact that
human life happens proves the reality of the Something of supreme
value on which life depends. Wieman made that the object of theology.
He conceived God as a structured event and theology as the analysis of
the total event of religious experience. Wieman’s relationship to
Whitehead was complex and conflicted, but under his influence,
Chicago theology became more objective, tracking the flow of
experience. In the mid-1940s the Chicago School took another turn, this
time in a pure Whiteheadian direction, which gave birth to the process
school of theology.*8
Today process thought is the major school of liberal theology,
so I need to say something about it. But first we need to know what
happened to liberal theology in the 1930s and ‘40s. In Europe, World
War I obliterated the moral idealism and cultural optimism that fueled
liberal theology, but the United States experienced World War I very
differently, and thus the war did not destroy liberal idealism here. It
took the Great Depression to do that. By 1932, a new generation of
American theologians had begun to say that liberal Christianity was not

Relativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922; Whitehead, Science and the
Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925).
8
Henry Nelson Wieman, Religious Experience and Scientific Method (New York:
Macmillan, 1926); Wieman, The Wrestle of Religion With Truth (New York:
Macmillan, 1928); Wieman, The Source of Human Good (Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1946).

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Vol. 30, No. 1, January 2009 11

a good idea. Reinhold Niebuhr was the leading debunker. Niebuhr’s

favorite epithet was “stupid,” followed closely by “naive.” Repeatedly
he charged that liberal Protestantism was both. Liberals actually
believed that the world could be saved by reason and good will,
Niebuhr complained: “Liberal Christian literature abounds in the
monotonous reiteration of the pious hope that people might be good and
loving.” Niebuhr replied that that was pathetic. To make any sense in
the 1930s, American Protestantism had to move sharply to the left
—
politically he was a radical Marxist at the time and considerably to —
the right theologically, though he was vague about what that meant.9
I cannot take the time here to explain the ironies and
complexities of American neo-orthodoxy, or the fact that Niebuhr was
not neo-orthodox. But I must say a word about the liberals of that
generation who kept their tradition alive. They were a stubborn
—
bunch Fosdick, Knudson, Brightman, Benjamin Mays, Georgia
Harkness, James Luther Adams, George Buttrick, Norman Pittenger,
Bernard Meland, Nels Ferré. They identified with Fosdick's self¬
description; for them it was either liberal religion or no religion at all.
Whatever its problems, they believed in the liberal faith of
reasonableness, openness, modernity, and the social gospel.
The old liberals understood that their language of progress and
idealism seemed like sentimental mush in the Depression era of
collapsing economies and political turmoil. But the “mystery X”
dialecticism of Karl Barth and neoorthodoxy was not an option for
them. They stuck with the Jesus of history and the complementarity of
reason and revelation. Liberal theology, whatever its problems, was still
the only option that held together reason and faith. It had the right
project, even if it did not have all the answers. If liberalism was too
deferential to modem culture, it had to be more critical. If the Social
Gospel was too idealistic and sentimental, maybe it needed a dose of
realism. If liberal theology read too much of its middle-class moralism
into the gospel, that could be fixed. The mid-century liberals were
willing to make adjustments of that kind, but they would not disown
liberalism, because to them, there was no better place to go.

9
Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1935), quote 105; see Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in
Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932); Niebuhr, Reflections on
the End of an Era (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934).

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
12 American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

To them the atonement was powerfully important, but strictly

as a means of moral and spiritual transformation. They affirmed that the
spiritual nature of Jesus was divine, but they also accepted biblical
criticism of the gospels. Most of them never bought the apocalyptic
Jesus of German scholarship, although for decades they were ridiculed
for holding out. Most importantly, to the liberals the main thing was to
be able to follow Jesus and worship God as the divine Spirit of love
without having to believe any particular thing on the basis of authority.
Some alternative to orthodox over-belief and secular unbelief was still
needed, even if liberalism needed better answers. In that mood they
helped to keep liberalism alive and passed it to our time.
In our time theology has exploded into a vast array of new
theologies, curtailing the tendency to identify oneself with only one
kind. Fluid boundaries and hybrid identities became the norm. It started
with the emergence of liberation theology in the United States and Latin
America. It continued with the emergence of feminist and gay rights
theologies, which in turn gave rise to Black feminist, womanist,
mujerista, Latina feminist, minjung, and other perspectives.
Fundamentally, liberation theology was an eruption of
repressed voices. The liberal tradition concentrated on challenges posed
by the Enlightenment, historical criticism, science, and technology. It
had a social ethical concern for economic justice, racial equality, peace,
and other social justice causes. It was liberal theology, after all, that
gave birth to the social gospel movement, the most powerful wave of
social justice activism ever generated by the mainline churches. But
liberal Christianity addressed these issues from a standpoint of racial,
gender, sexual, and class privilege. In liberal theology, racial justice
was conceived as the elimination of racial bias, not as the interrogation
of White privilege or the dismantling of social structures of White
supremacism. Similarly, liberal feminism was about eliminating
personal bias and opening individual opportunities, not attacking
patriarchy as a cultural system. Liberation theology privileged a
different set of questions: How to be liberated from structures of
violence and oppression that repress the personhood of millions?
From its beginning liberation theology sharply challenged the
priorities, White supremacism, sexism, and classism of modem
theology. What is the relationship between liberal Christianity and
liberation theology? In my view, the critical factor is engagement
between these perspectives, not the difference between radical and

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Vol. 30, No. 1, January 2009 13

liberal versions of Black theology or feminism. Some feminists are

consistently liberal in their feminism and theology, but it is also
possible to combine quite radical forms of feminist ideology with a
commitment to liberal theology; Beverly Harrison and Rosemary
Ruether are prominent examples. The same principle applies to Black
theology. Thandeka, J. Deotis Roberts, Rufus Burrow, and Theo
Walker are examples of theologians who use liberationist critiques and
methods to refashion liberal theology. The point is to bring these
perspectives into a mutual conversation.10
Today the old evangelical liberalism is still preached in many
pulpits, but it has few academic proponents; personalism has faded
from the scene and memory; and the empiricist wing of the old Chicago
School has a small following. Individual construction is by far the
dominant mode of liberal theology today. Until Vatican II there was no
American Catholic tradition of liberal theology; since Vatican II,
Catholics have produced some of the most creative and sophisticated
versions of liberal theology, but no distinctly Catholic schools of it.
Today the only prominent school of liberal theology is Whiteheadian
process theism. Process theology has a genius philosophical founder in
Alfred North Whitehead; a brilliant cofounder in Charles Hartshorne; a
cast of theological founders from the second and third generations of
the Chicago School; and many contemporary proponents, led by John
B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin.11
There is a rationalist Hartshomian stream of the process school
led by Griffin and Schubert Ogden; a large feminist contingent led by
Catherine Keller, Marjorie Suchocki, Anna Case-Winters, Susan
Nelson, and Nancy Howell; a social ethical current led by Douglas

10
See Beverly Harrison, Justice in the Making: Feminist Social Ethics (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2004); Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-
Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); Thandeka, The
Embodied Self (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995); J. Deotis
Roberts, Black Theology in Dialogue (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1987).
11
See John B. Cobb Jr., A Christian Natural Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster
Press, 1965); Cobb, The Process Perspective (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2003); David
Ray Griffin, Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body
Problem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Griffin, Reenchantment
without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2001); Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
14 American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

Sturm and Franklin Gamwell, and an environmental stream led by

Cobb, Jay McDaniel, and Carol Johnston. There is a Catholic tradition
of process theology, as in the work of Joseph Bracken, Bernard Lee,
and the early David Tracy, and a Unitarian stream led by Thandeka,
David Rankin, and Rebecca Parker.
Process thought is defined by its metaphysical claim that
becoming is more elemental than being because reality is fundamentally
temporal and creative. Broadly speaking it includes all theologies and
philosophies that conceptualize becoming, event, and relatedness as
fundamental categories of understanding. Thus Heraclitus and
Theravada Buddhism belong to the process tradition, as do Hegel,
Schelling, Bergson, Peirce, William James, Samuel Alexander, C.
Lloyd-Morgan, and Teilhard de Chardin. But conventionally speaking it
is the school of Whitehead and Hartshorne.
Whitehead’s intellectual career had three phases, which
corresponded with his academic careers at Trinity College, Cambridge;
University College, London; and Harvard University. From 1885 to
1914 he explored the logical foundations of mathematics while teaching
at Trinity; from 1914 to 1924 he worked on the philosophy of natural
science, especially theoretical physics, while teaching at University
College; and from 1925 to his death in 1947 he concentrated on
metaphysics while teaching at Harvard.
Whitehead argued that the basic units of nature, which he called
“actual entities,” have experiential features. The fundamental elements
of which all enduring things are made are moments of feeling. More
precisely, the irreducible constitution of the things that make up the
universe is their experience. Actual entities are experiencing subjects
that realize some value and pass out of existence in the process of being
succeeded by similar entities or occasions. Individuals do not have
feelings, Whitehead explained; they become through feeling. The
subject emerges by feeling its way into being; one’s experience comes
into being by feeling the feelings of one’s world. Thus, in Whiteheadian
theory, every self is a complex unity of feeling that emerges in response
to one’s feelings of the world.
With a nod to Leibniz, Whitehead coined the term “prehension”
to designate the process by which an actual entity grasps another entity
as an object of its experience. He described the becoming of an actual
entity as a “concresence,” the merging of various aspects of experience
into a unity. And he distinguished between two kinds of actual entities,

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Vol. 30, No. 1, January 2009 15

which he called “actual occasions” and “God.” In Whitehead’s thought,

God was an order in the process of creativity, not the cause of the
process or the ultimate reality.12
Whitehead was deeply impressed by the mysterious fact that
the evolving universe, for all its chaotic randomness, possesses a high
degree of order. To account for the creative, somehow orderly process
of life, he distinguished between creativity and God. Creativity is the
advance into novelty that pervades the universe, and God is the
concrete actual entity that envisages pure potentials, which Whitehead
called “eternal objects.” The world never reaches completion and
neither does God, for both are in the grip of the ultimate ground,
creativity. God is not a being hypostatized before creation; rather,
divine reality is always in process with creation. God and the world are
necessary to each other, a relationship that Whitehead sorted out by
distinguishing between the primordial and consequent natures of God.
In this scheme, God’s primordial nature is the universe of
creative possibilities, the total potentiality of all existing entities at all
moments of their actualization, while God’s consequent nature is the
accumulation of all actual choices. The primordial nature is conceptual
and does not change, but the consequent nature is derivative and
conscious, changing along with the world’s creative advance.
Whitehead taught that our existence and freedom are made possible by
our participation in God’s primordial nature, but our freedom makes it
possible for us to choose evil. Every subject holds the power to
actualize or negate God’s life-enhancing aim. God lures us to make
creative, life-enhancing choices, but God does not negate our freedom
to make choices.
The Whiteheadian system offers a picture of a divinely-
influenced universe oriented toward beauty and the intensification of
experience, in which the universe demonstrates an inherent tendency
toward increasing complexity, self-organization, and the production of
emergent wholes that are more than the sum of their parts. From a
common sense standpoint, the world consists of material things that
endure in space and time, while events are occurrences that happen to
things or that things experience. In the process view, events are the
12
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York:
Macmillan, 1929; corrected edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne,
New York: Free Press, 1978).

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
16 American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

fundamental things, the immanent movement of creativity itself. God

constantly absorbs the passing world and retains its variety in the
immediacy and final unity of God’s everlasting present. God is always
in process with creation as the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire
that lures us to make creative, life-enhancing choices.
In case you are surmising otherwise, I am not a process
theologian, at least in the school sense of the term. God in process is
one thing, but God subjected to process is something else, and I do not
believe that God and creativity compete for space. Whitehead’s God is
an aspect of a system, not the creative ground and power of all things.
But I admire the intellectual ambition of the process school and I have
one foot in it. Whiteheadian thought is consistent with the modem
understanding of evolution as a long, slow, gradual process of layered
stages in which complex forms of life build upon simple ones. It is
consistent, for the most part, with relativity theory, in which the
universe is dynamic and interconnected, space and time are inseparable,
and gravity and acceleration are indistinguishable. Modem physics
presents a Whiteheadian-like world of interacting events. Matter and
the form of space have a dialectical interplay, as do temporal process
and spatial geometry, and mass is a form of energy.
Ian Barbour, a process theologian, practically invented the
current dialogue between religion and science, which is now an
academic industry. I agree with Barbour that the cosmic ambitions of
the Whiteheadian vision should not be viewed as a liability. For over a
century most liberal theologians took refuge in Kant’s dichotomy
between pure and practical reason, urging that theology and science
were completely different kinds of discourse. Science explained matters
of fact while religion was about spiritual meaning and moral truth. That
approach bought a century of peace for liberal theology, but it had all
the problems of immunization strategies. All of our disciplinary
categories are porous and relative. There is only one world, in which
everything is relative, because all are related.
Today theologians like Barbour, Phillip Clayton, and John
Polkinghome are exploring the points of contact and overlap between
science and religion. Dogmatic forms of religion reject the
methodological naturalism of science and oppose scientific conclusions
that contradict religious beliefs. Liberal theology, at its best, is willing
to follow the truth wherever it leads. Liberal theologians like Barbour,
Clayton, and me believe in the emergence of spirit and freedom, but we

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Vol. 30, No. 1, January 2009 17

are open to evidence that consciousness is not a causal force and that
freedom is one of our illusions. Theologians have to be willing to
accept the best explanation, not the one that we want.13
Reductionism is a powerful force in biology today, especially
molecular biology. But even here, Barbour was at the forefront of an
important countertrend that emphasizes the irreducible properties of
higher-level wholes. Two-way interactions of wholes and parts occur at
many levels of the natural world; every entity exists within a hierarchy
of more inclusive wholes; and evolution brings about the emergence of
novel and unpredictable forms of order and activity.
By now some of you are feeling very keenly the most serious
problem with this enterprise, that liberal theology is too rarefied and
academic to gain a large following. Liberal theology, it would seem, is
too secular for religious believers, too religious for secularists, and too
academic for non-theologians. Wabash College theologian Steven
Webb puzzles that contemporary liberals find it possible to write so
much despite believing so little. He describes his intellectual pilgrimage
as a process of unlearning the disbeliefs that he imbibed in graduate
school from prominent theologians.14
Webb's bafflement at liberal productivity, however, points to
something significant. If liberal theology is self-liquidating, why is
there so much of it, and how does one explain its ongoing vitality? For
creativity, breadth, depth, scale, and insight, the constructive and
programmatic works of David Griffin, Langdon Gilkey, Gordon
Kaufman, Peter Hodgson, Sallie McFague, David Tracy, J. Deotis
Roberts, and Ian Barbour compare favorably to those of any eight
theologians of any generation. The same thing can be said collectively
of John Cobb, Schubert Ogden, James Gustafson, Robert Neville,
Elizabeth Johnson, Edward Farley, Catherine Keller, and Roger Haight.
Moreover, liberal theology is not merely an academic enterprise, as
13
See Ian Barbour, Religion in an Age of Science (San Francisco: Harper & Row,
1990); Barbour, Nature, Human Nature, and God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002);
John Polkinghome, Science and Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998); Philip
Clayton, Mind & Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004).
14
Stephen H. Webb, review of Heaven, The Logic of Eternal Joy, by Jerry L. Walls,
Christian Century 119 (4-17 December 2002), quote 42; see Webb, “On Mentors and
the Making of a Useful Theology: A Retrospective on the Work of William C. Placher,”
Reviews in Religion and Theology 13 (March 2006): 237.

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
18 American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

authors Jack Spong and Marcus Borg have reached enormous

audiences.
Episcopal bishop Jack Spong rips away at biblical narratives in
old-style rationalist fashion, emphasizes what he does not believe
literally, plays up the Jewish liturgical framework of the gospel
narratives, and argues that controversy is good for the church. He
stirred up a fair amount of it by suggesting that Paul was gay and
repressed, and Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. Spong became
famous by featuring one shocking suggestion per book, but his
substantive perspective is standard liberalism. He believes in a
transcending reality at the heart of life that presses toward life and
wholeness, and describes God as the Ground of Being and universal
presence that undergirds all life and is present in all that is. He
describes Jesus as "a God presence" whose burning awareness of God
made him a doorway to divine reality, and believes that the divine
source of life calls human beings to live fully, love wastefully, and have
the courage to be. Spong describes his project in classic liberal terms
walking the "razor's edge between orthodox overbelief and losing the
—
—
"Christ experience" though his books rarely mention the theological
tradition that has carried on this project for three centuries. Displaying
his self-dramatizing tendency, he writes: "I have now moved to this
new place, and I challenge the church to move with me.”15
Borg writes with a softer edge and a deeper scholarly base.
Contending against the eschatological Jesus of twentieth century
German and North American scholarship, which rests on the "coming
Son of Man" sayings, Borg argues that for Jesus, as for late Judaism,
the kingdom of God symbolized the visible reunification of the
empirical world and the world of spirit. It pointed to the rule of God and
the power of God's Spirit flowing into the world. German scholars, by

15
John Shelby Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to
Believers in Exile (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 220-28; Spong, A New
Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith is Dying and How a New Faith is
Being Born (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), "razor's edge," "Christ
experience," 115; "I have," 240; Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A
Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991);
Spong, Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1992); Spong, Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1994); Spong, Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with
Jewish Eyes (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996).

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Vol. 30, No. 1, January 2009 19

combining historical skepticism and an apocalyptic thesis, made Jesus

seem strange and irrelevant. Borg urges that historically and
theologically it is better to interpret Jesus as a "Spirit-filled person in
the charismatic stream of Judaism."16
Borg’s participation in the famous Jesus Seminar helped to
effect a change of direction in New Testament scholarship. He later
recalled that when he first realized that many scholars agreed with him
about the apocalyptic Jesus he stopped feeling like a maverick and
began thinking of his work in movement terms. In the 1990s his
growing fame and that of the Jesus Seminar fed on each other while he
hit the lecture circuit, traveling 100,000 miles per year, speaking mostly
to church audiences. Spong wants to spark a left-wing rival to the
Christian right and, beyond that, a new Christianity. Borg, also an
Episcopalian, writes more explicitly for an existing progressive
Christianity. If liberal theology is hopelessly irrelevant, it is hard to
explain their success.17
The prominence of Episcopalians in popular American
theology is a curious phenomenon, and a telling one. The Episcopal
Church, for most of its history, played a minor role in the development
of modem theology, mainly because Anglicans did not aspire to
cutting-edge theology, they disapproved of theological conflict, and
they lacked a common heritage of sola scriptura biblicism to
overthrow. The Anglican trinity of scripture, tradition, and reason
underwrote a distinctive theological pluralism that thwarted schismatic
tendencies. Unlike denominations that split over liberalism, or before
that, the Civil War, the Episcopal Church held together, prizing its

16
Marcus J. Borg, "Conflict as a Context for Interpreting the Teaching of Jesus," (Ph.D.
diss. Oxford University, 1972); Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teaching of
Jesus (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1984); Borg, Jesus: A New Vision (New York:
HarperCollins, 1987), quote 25; Borg, "A Temperate Case for a Non-Eschatological
Jesus," Foundations & Facets Forum 2 (September 1986): 81-102, reprinted in Borg,
Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (Valley Forge, Pa: Trinity Press, 1994), 47-68;
Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of
Contemporary Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 1995); Borg, The God We Never
Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith (San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997); Borg, The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering
a Life of Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003).
17
See Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship, 59-61; Borg, The God We Never
Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith, 15-17.

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
20 American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

continuity and tradition. It was known for sustaining uneasy alliances

among its evangelical, Anglo-Catholic, and modernist traditions. In the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Anglican liberalism was called
the Broad Church tradition; later it went by the names Modernist,
mainline, or liberal Protestant. As the term "mainline" implied, it was
the dominant party in the U.S., though quietly so.
Although the Episcopal Church did not lack liberal theologians,
few had any impact beyond their denomination. Often they were adept
at forging coalitions. Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics did not form
coalitions with each other, but hybrids of liberalism and evangelicalism
were commonplace, as were blended forms of liberalism and Anglo-
Catholicism. The Episcopal Church's leading liberal theologian,
Norman Pittenger, owed much of his denominational following to his
fervent Anglo-Catholicism. By the late twentieth century, however,
Episcopalians clashed over theology, just like other mainline
denominations. Having come late to theological conflict, Anglicans
practiced it with a special intensity. To them it was new; thus Spong
gave the impression that liberal theology began with his books. Liberal
victories on divorce, women's ordination, affirmative action, anti-war
politics, economic justice, and gay rights engendered novel coalitions of
outraged Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic forces, whose protests helped
Spong and Borg find public renown.
The main achievement of liberal theology in our time, like that
of North American theology as a whole, has been its extraordinary
growth in diversity. This new diversity arose with the emergence of
previously silenced or marginalized voices from much of the two-thirds
world, especially Africa, Latin America, and Korea, and the new
theologies of feminist, mujerista, minjung, African American and
womanist experience, and those of gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender
experience. The critical bent of theology has been deepened and its
discourse enriched by these new perspectives, which emphasize that all
perspectives are shaped by particular angles of vision, socioeconomic
interests, cultural frameworks, and linguistic practices.
Liberal theology today, at its best, is not merely an extension of
the old liberalism, but a discourse profoundly influenced by
liberationist, feminist, ecological, multicultural, and postmodern theory.
At the same time many of the churches to which liberal theologians
belong have accommodated mild forms of feminism and
environmentalism, battled annually over gay rights, and swung toward

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Vol. 30, No. 1, January 2009 21

greater homogeneity and confessional identity. Mainline Protestant

denominations, including progressive Black Church denominations, add
up to somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of the population; the
Catholic Church has about 25 percent; and the many groups usually
lumped under the evangelical and Pentecostal categories have grown to
over 30 percent. Evangelical seminaries are booming, while the scourge
of liberal Catholicism, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, has ascended to the
papacy. In this context of an ascending conservative impulse clashing
with liberal, liberationist, and postmodern currents, many seminaries
find themselves struggling with more theological diversity than they
can handle.
But progressive Christianity, despite its many problems, rests
on a deep and abiding idea, its original idea of a rational and
experiential third way between overbelief and disbelief. I believe that
this is the most interesting and exciting time in history to be engaged in
theology. Entire new fields of inquiry are just beginning: religion¬
science dialogue, inter-religious conversation, comparative theology,
inter-cultural feminist and liberation theologies, and theologies of world
religions. For millions of progressive Christians the church remains a
spiritual home, a community of fellowship, and the place where we live
out our idealism. For us the church remains distinctive for its capacity
to inspire community and a sense of transcendent good.
For decades almost the entire liberal theology movement used
the language of personalist idealism in speaking of the ultimacy of
spiritual personality. Many who did not embrace personalist
metaphysics rooted their theology and preaching in an ecumenical
version of it, stressing the divine indwelling and its ethical character.
Theologically this was the bedrock of the social gospel, including the
Black social gospel tradition of Reverdy Ransom, Ida B. Wells-Barnett,
Benjamin Mays, Howard Thurman, Mordecai Johnson, and Martin
Luther King Jr. Even Reinhold Niebuhr had a version of it. Personalist
thought was rooted in German idealism, but it preached superbly.
Something like it 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

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
22 American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

Paul 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.
A few months ago a brave student approached me and asked,
“What is your theology? I’m planning to read some of your books, but
could you just tell me ahead of time?” So I am learning the value of just
laying it out there as directly as possible: God is creative and personal
Spirit, the transcendent holy mystery of love divine; Jesus is divine by
virtue of the fullness of God’s Spirit in him; love is God’s very self in
action, the lure of feeling and ultimate meaning of spirit; 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.
More important than any particular proposal is whether or not
progressive Christians have a passionate, clear, convictional spirit. The
question 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. Prophetic 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. Those of us who identify with progressive Christianity
should have no illusions that if only we get the arguments right and do a
better job of disseminating them, the masses will flock to our door. To
be a progressive Christian today is to sail against the values and politics
of the dominant culture. It is to hold out 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. It is discouraging to lose power; even the most good-spirited
progressives get conflicted about it. But we should not need the promise
of success or prestige to discern what God, the personal spirit of love
divine, is doing in our midst; or to ask what it means to follow Christ in
our time; or to be open to the presence of God in the oppressed, the
marginalized, the hurting, and vulnerable.

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Vol. 30, No. 1, January 2009 23

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
needs to be a type of liberation theology. No one can know if any of our
efforts will succeed, but the necessity of struggling for the divine good
is certain. The future belongs to the divine mystery within and beyond
all things, and after all our efforts are finished, it is the
incomprehensible Spirit Divine that will make something new in the
world out of our strivings to live into the truth and advance the
flourishing of life.

This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:35:15 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions