THE FUTURE OF LIBERAL THEOLOGY

Susannah Cornwall

In 2003, Modern Reformation interviewed Richard Rorty, the postmodern

atheist philosopher and author of books on language, epistemology and
the contingent nature of truth. Rorty said:
I’m delighted that liberal theologians do their best to do what Pio Nono
[Pope Pius IX] said shouldn’t be done – try to accommodate Christianity
to modern science, modern culture, and democratic society. If I were
a fundamentalist Christian, I’d be appalled by the wishy-washiness of
their version of the Christian faith. But since I am a non-believer who is
frightened of the barbarity of many fundamentalist Christians (e.g., their
homophobia), I welcome theological liberalism. Maybe liberal theologians
will eventually produce a version of Christianity so wishy-washy that
nobody will be interested in being a Christian any more. If so, something
will have been lost, but probably more will have been gained.1

Rorty did not mean anything complimentary by this. As someone

who often emphasised the dangerous and destructive characteristics of
organised religion, he meant that a world in which people had grown out
of religion would be a better one all round: more sane, more reasonable,
more irenic, less brutal.
But I wonder whether there is something more positive to be said
about a faith which in some sense has built into it a sense of its own
inadequacy and provisionality – and which persists in the face of an
apparent barrage of evidence that it should give up and go home. Liberal
Christianity, which seeks to test and hold the claims of the Christian
tradition alongside insights from science and other human knowledge,
recognises something very important if it recognises that success cannot

1. ‘Truth, Evil, and Redemption: An Interview with Richard Rorty’, Modern Reformation,
12.4 (2003), p. 38.

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unproblematically be measured in numbers of bums on pews or converts

to the cause.
Fundamentalist and extremist forms of religion and politics may seem
more representative of religion and politics in the eyes of the general
public than they actually are, thanks to the skew of media coverage. The
story the mainstream British press and television channels sometimes
tell is that fundamentalist groups are recruiting exponentially, whilst
the numbers of people attending services of predominantly-moderate
denominations such as the Church of England continue to decline.2 In
such a climate, the likely future of liberal theology is to be an increasingly
marginal voice.
But marginality and a move away from the centres of power are not
necessarily things that the Church need mourn. Liberal theologies in the
twenty-first century might have something in common with a stream
which has persisted throughout Christian history: the knowledge that
success and failure are turned upside-down in the Kingdom of God, and
that acknowledging our own inadequacy can be our greatest strength.
In recent years, contextual and postmodern theologies have made it
clear that they do not simply want to be given access to a level playing-
field with ‘mainstream’ theologies. Rather, they have begun to question
whether the mainstream ‘game’ is the only one being played, and who
wrote the rulebook in the first place. It is not a question of petitioning to
be allowed to play in the league, it is more elemental than that. Feminist,
womanist, queer and postcolonial Christian theologians have often asked
what is so good about being part of the establishment anyway. They have

2. What some media outlets read as a continuing downward trend of Sunday church
attendance has been interpreted more positively by the Church of England, which
noted that although weekly attendance fell by 0.3 per cent between 2010 and 2011,
this represented a ‘stabilising’ of attendance (http://www.churchofengland.org/
media-centre/news/2013/05/church-annual-statistics-for-2011.aspx). There was a
drop from 72 per cent to 59 per cent of people in England and Wales who identified
as Christian between the 2001 and 2011 censuses, but there was also a rise from
15 to 25 per cent of people who said they had no religion, which, said Arun Arora,
the head of communications for the Archbishops’ Council, may have included those
who would have previously identified as “cultural Christians” (quoted at http://www.
churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2012/12/census-2011.aspx).
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recognised that whilst attempts to debate the boundaries of orthodoxy

and shout down the atheists might rage on in some quarters, what
happens in communities and homes and workplaces and governments
and relationships is the small and often unglamorous work of advancing
a more just world.
This is particularly important given that one critique of the liberal
paradigm rests in its over-emphasis on the rational and transcendent,
to the sometime exclusion of social and political particularities. Liberal
theologies in the future should therefore heed what these and other
contextual theologians insist, and take good account of particularities
of experience, especially experience which has consciously or otherwise
been elided and marginalised. Valuing experience and specificity means
resisting the urge to say anything too universalising about what it
‘means’: the point is exactly that phenomena ‘mean’ differently in
different contexts, according to local situations and circumstances, even
as they might also appeal to broader or overarching principles.
By being circumspect about certainty, liberal theology might indeed
find itself out in the cold in a world which increasingly – and to some
extent in reaction to the postmodern and poststructuralist method-
ologies of recent decades – values certainty of many kinds (secular,
political and religious). But if it does, it will exist in a worthy tradition of
Christian solidarity with poor and marginalised people, those who are
excluded and written out of history, those who try and fail and try again.
Christianity is a faith not of victors but of losers. If Christian theologians
believe that if they only try, they will come up with that one devastating
argument that will, once and for all, win over their detractors, they are
missing the point. The test is, rather, how liberal Christians cope as an
actual or purported minority voice amongst the clamour of strident
certainties.

Dr Susannah Cornwall is Advanced Research Fellow in Theology and Religion at

the University of Exeter, UK.