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
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 The Crisis and Necessity ofLiberal Theology

Gary Dorrien /Union Theological Seminary and

Columbia University

idea of a liberal approach to Christianityis, at root, a simple

one, and I believe a necessary one. In essence it is the idea of a
The
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
factorsdefine the category: the authorityprinciple and theprincipleof
integrative mediation.
Liberal theologyconceives themeaning of Christianityin the
light modern knowledge and ethical values. It is reformistin spirit
of
and substance; it is deeply shaped by modern science, humanism, and
historicalcriticism;and it is committedtomaking Christianitycredible
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 modern 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 modern theology, located the essence of religion in spiritual
"feeling" or intuition. Albrecht Ritsehl pioneered a fourth major stream

Christianityas a socio-historical
of liberal theologyby interpreting
movement a distinct ethical-religious
with 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
JuliusWellhausen.
But the American tradition of modern 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 liberaltheology."(The editors)

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 4 American Journalof Theology & Philosophy

doctrines of double predestination, substitutionary atonement, and

biblical inerrancy.
They denied thatGod created theworld 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
argumentsshouldbe settledby appeals to an infallibletextor 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 that
replied
Christianity had no future if it did not come to terms with modern
science and historical criticism. The Congregational Church was the
first to accept that argument, in the 1890s; the same
during 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 thatAmerican fundamentalism was
not dwindling away or its sub-cultural status.
accepting
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
Universityof Chicago.
Evangelical liberalism was the heart and soul of the liberal
movement, sustaining the original merger that gave rise to liberal

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 Vol. 30,No. 1, January2009 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 theauthorityofmodern knowledge, affirmedthecontinuity
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 thatmade liberal Christianity compelling to
millions wereevangelical 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, itwas 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 modern and
gospel-centered, for thewhole 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 philosopherBorden ParkerBowne in the 1890s
and centered at Boston University, this school of thoughtblended
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 thatthe soul is essentiallyactive;with Berkeley he argued that
self-consciousness is the necessary presupposition of all thinking and
theworld of objects; with Schleiermacherhe taught that feeling or
intuitionis thewellspring 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 ParkerBowne, Theory of Thoughtand Knowledge (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1897); Bowne, Metaphysics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1898); Bowne,
Theism (New York: American Book Company, 1902); Bowne, Personalism (Boston:
HoughtonMifflin 1908), Bowne, The Essence of Religion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1910).

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6 American Journalof 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 tomove frommind tomatter, but matter
cannot be the ultimate or sufficient cause of mind.
Thesearguments 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 affinitieswith process thought;Albert Knudson was the
school's major theologian; Walter Muelder developed its progressive
social ethic; and Harold DeWolf taughtpersonalist thoughttoMartin
Luther King, Jr. In the 1950s over half of theAfrican Americans to earn
doctorates in theology earned them at Boston University, where
students likeKing 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 thoughtregisteredfar beyond the
personalist school, however, because most of the personalist
theologians were evangelical liberals, and most liberal theologians
incorporatedpersonalist arguments into their thinking.Virtually all
liberals contended that spiritor personalityholds primacy over the

2
See Edgar S. Brightman,A Philosophy ofReligion (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1940);
Brightman, The Problem of God (New York: Abingdon Press, 1930); Albert C.
Knudson, The Philosophy ofPersonalismi A Study in the Metaphysics ofReligion (New
York: Abingdon Press, 1927); Knudson, The Doctrine of God (New York: Abingdon
Cokesbury Press, 1930); Francis JohnMcConnell, The Christlike God (New York:
Abingdon Press, 1927); Walter G. Muelder, Foundations of theResponsible Society
(New York: Abingdon Press, 1959); L. Harold DeWolf, A Theology of the Living
Church (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953);Martin LutherKing Jr.,"A Comparison
of theConceptions ofGod in theThinking of Paul Tillich and HenryNelson Wieman"
(Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1955), reprintedinThe Papers ofMartin LutherKing
Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 2: 339-544;
King, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery (New York: and
Story Harper
Brothers, 1958).

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 Vol. 30,No. 1, January2009 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
flourishingof personality.In 1932 he declared thatthechurches should
devote to inspiring and cultivating personalities, "instead of
themselves
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
thisministrywill recognize it.All my thinkingstartsfrom and comes
back to it.Here it is: The key to theunderstandingof all life is thevalue
ofpersonality"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
ittomillions. He taughtthatChristianityis superiorto otherreligionsas
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 theflourishingof personality.Sin is thevictoryof bad social
influencesand bodily impulsesover the instinctsof a higher self.Good
religion brings people to an awareness of their better nature and
mobilizes theircapacity to liveout of it.
The thirdmajor 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 modern and classical Christianity, but the Chicago
School stressed that modernity was a revolution. If there was to be a
modern theology, it had to rest on modern 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 toSee It Through (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1935), "Let me," 35; see Fosdick, and Progress York: H.
Christianity (New Fleming
Revell, 1922).

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 8 American Journalof Theology & Philosophy

generation were Shailer Mathews, George Burman Foster, Gerald

Birney Smith,Edward ScribnerAmes, and Shirley JacksonCase. 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 itsmeaning 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 a bit
pragmatism;
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 ofModernism (New York: Macmillan,
1924);
Mathews, The Atonement and the Social Process (New York: Macmillan, 1930);
George Burman Foster, The Finality of theChristian Religion (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1906); Gerald Birney Smith, Social Idealism and the Changing
Theology (New York: Macmillan, 1913); Edward ScribnerAmes, Religion (New York:
Henry Holt and Company, 1929); Shirley Jackson Case, The Social Origins of
Christianity
5 (Chicago: UniversityofChicago Press, 1923).
William James,Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of
Thinkingand The
Meaning of Truth: A Sequel toPragmatism MA: Harvard
(Cambridge, University Press,
1978); James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York: Green and
Longmans,
see James, A Pluralistic Universe
Company, 1912); (New York: Longmans, Green and
Company, 1909).

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 Vol. 30,No. 1, January2009 9

years theChicago theologiansdebated how far they

For thirty
should their commitment
take to religious naturalism. All of them
conceived as an expression of ideals, and they equivocated
God 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 foundersof theChicago School were
getting old, theyworried that theirbrand of theologywas already
fading, and they realized that the God-question was their biggest
problem.
In 1926 theyheard thatAlfredNorthWhitehead, thebrilliant
physicist and philosopherwho specialized in relativitytheory,had
published a new book titledReligion in theMaking. With excitement
theChicago theologiansordered thebook and began reading it;with
total bafflement they turned the pages. The book was advertised as a
primer in religion,but theycould not understanda single page of it.
Ames and Case dismissed thebook as completelyunintelligible.Smith
reportedthathe felt some affinity
with it,but could not explainwhy.
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 thatWhitehead'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, vistas of which one had
revealing
hitherto been unmindful."7

6
Bernard E. Meland, The Realities ofFaith: The Revolution inCultural Forms (New
York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1962), quote 109;AlfredNorthWhitehead, 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 theMaking, by Alfred North Whitehead, New
Republic 11 (16 February 1927): 361-62; Alfred NorthWhitehead, The Principle of

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 10 American Journalof Theology & Philosophy

Wieman admired his new colleagues for pioneering an

empirical, naturalistic, pragmatic approach to theology, but he could not
fathomwhy theytook somuch interestinhistory,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?
InWieman'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 modern science
negated traditional ways of conceiving God's existence. Wieman
argued that whatever else the word "God" may mean, at bottom it
designates theSomethinguponwhich human lifeand theflourishingof
the good are dependent. It cannot be doubted that such a Something
exists. If there is a human good, itmust 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 to
relationship
Whitehead was complex and conflicted, but under his influence,
Chicago theology became more objective, tracking the flow of
experience. In themid-1940s the Chicago School took another turn, this
time in a pureWhiteheadian direction,which gave birth to theprocess
school of theology.8
Today process thoughtis themajor school of liberal theology,
so I need to say about it. But first we need to know what
something
4
happened to liberal theology in the 1930s and 40s. In Europe,World
War I obliteratedthemoral idealism and culturaloptimism thatfueled
liberal theology,but theUnited States experiencedWorld War I very
differently, and thus thewar did not destroy liberal idealism here. It
took the Great Depression to do that. By 1932, a new of
generation
American theologianshad begun to say thatliberalChristianity
was not

Relativity (Cambridge:Cambridge UniversityPress, 1922;Whitehead, Science and the

Modern World (NewYork: Macmillan, 1925).
8
Henry Nelson Wieman, Religious Experience and ScientificMethod (New York:
Macmillan, 1926); Wieman, The Wrestle of Religion With Truth (New York:
Macmillan, 1928); Wieman, The Source of Human Good (Carbondale, IL: Southern
IllinoisUniversityPress, 1946).

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 Vol. 30,No. 1, January2009 11

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

favorite epithet was "stupid," followed closely by "na?ve." Repeatedly
he charged that liberal Protestantism was both. Liberals actually
believed that theworld could be saved by reason and good will,
Niebuhr complained: "Liberal Christian literatureabounds in the
monotonous reiteration
of thepious hope thatpeoplemight 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 thatmeant.9
I cannot take the time here to explain the ironies and
complexities of American neo-orthodoxy, or the fact thatNiebuhr was
not neo-orthodox. I must say a word about the liberals of that
But
generation whokept their tradition alive. They were a stubborn
bunch?Fosdick, Knudson, Brightman, Benjamin Mays, Georgia
Harkness, James Luther Adams, George Buttrick, Norman Pittenger,
Bernard Meland, Neis Ferr?. They identified with Fosdick's self
description; for them itwas 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 stuckwith theJesusof historyand the complementarity
of
reason and revelation. Liberal its problems, was
theology, whatever still
the only option thatheld togetherreason and faith. It had the right
project, even if it did not have all the answers. If liberalism was too
deferential to modern 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 itsmiddle-class moralism
into the gospel, that could be fixed. The mid-century liberals were
willing tomake adjustmentsof thatkind, but theywould not disown
liberalism, because to them, therewas no better place to go.

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

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 12 American Journalof 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 themain 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, curtailingthe tendency to identifyoneself with only one
kind. Fluid boundaries and hybrid identities became the norm. It started
with the emergence of liberation theology in theUnited 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
ofWhite privilege or the dismantlingof social structuresofWhite
supremacism. Similarly, liberal feminism was about eliminating
personal bias and opening individual opportunities, not attacking
patriarchy as a cultural system. Liberation
theology privileged a
differentset of questions: How to be liberatedfrom structuresof
violence and oppression that repress the personhood of millions?
From itsbeginning liberationtheology sharplychallenged the
priorities, White supremacism, sexism, and classism of modern
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

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 Vol. 30,No. 1, January2009 13

are
liberal versions of Black theology or feminism. Some feminists
consistently liberal in their feminism and theology, but it is also
possible to combine quite radical formsof feminist ideologywith 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 inmany
pulpits, but it has few academic proponents; personalism has faded
fromthe scene andmemory; and theempiricist
wing of theold 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 traditionof 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 prominentschool of liberal theology isWhiteheadian
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 Hartshornian stream of the process school
led by Griffinand SchubertOgden; a large feministcontingentled 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 theMaking: 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 inDialogue (Philadelphia:WestminsterPress, 1987).
11
See JohnB. 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 theMind-Body
Problem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Griffin,Reenchantment
withoutSupernatural ism:A Process Philosophy ofReligion (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2001); Griffin,Religion and ScientificNaturalism: Overcoming theConflicts
(Albany: StateUniversity ofNew York Press, 2000).

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 14 American Journalof Theology & Philosophy

Sturm and Franklin Gamwell, and an environmental stream led by

Cobb, JayMcDaniel, 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 itsmetaphysical claim that
becoming ismore elemental than being because reality is fundamentally
temporal and creative. Broadly speaking it includes all theologies and
philosophies that conceptualize event, and relatedness as
becoming,
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 ofWhitehead 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
1914he explored the logical foundationsofmathematicswhile teaching
at Trinity;from 1914 to 1924 he worked on thephilosophy of natural
science, especially theoretical physics, while teaching at University
College; and from 1925 to his death in 1947 he concentratedon
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 emergesby feeling itsway intobeing; one's experience comes
intobeing by feelingthefeelingsof one's world. Thus, inWhiteheadian
theory, every self is a complex unity of feeling that emerges in response
to one's feelings of theworld.
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," themerging of various aspects of experience
into a unity. And he distinguished between two kinds of actual entities,

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which he called "actual occasions" and "God." InWhitehead'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 impressedby themysterious 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 distinguishedbetween creativityand 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 thatWhitehead sorted out by
distinguishing between the primordial and consequent natures of God.
In this scheme, God's primordial nature is the universe of
creativepossibilities, the totalpotentialityof all existingentitiesat 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 lures us to make
life-enhancing aim. God
creative, life-enhancing choices, but God does not negate our freedom
tomake 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 NorthWhitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in
Cosmology (New York:
Macmillan, 1929; correctededition, ed. David Ray Griffinand Donald W. Sherburne,
New York: Free Press, 1978).

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 16 American Journalof 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 tomake 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,butGod subjected toprocess is somethingelse, and I do not
believe that God and creativity compete for space. Whitehead's God is
an aspect of a system, not the creative and power of all
ground things.
But I admire the intellectualambitionof theprocess school and I have
one foot in it.Whiteheadian thought is consistent with the modern
understanding of evolution as a long, slow, gradual process of
layered
stages inwhich complex formsof lifebuild 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. Modern
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 an is now
academic industry. I agree with Barbour that the cosmic ambitions of
theWhiteheadian 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 centuryof peace for liberal theology,but ithad all
the problems of immunization of our disciplinary
strategies. All
are and relative. There is one
categories porous only world, in which
everything is relative, because all are related.
Today theologians like Barbour, Phillip Clayton, and John
are exploring the
Polkinghorne points of contact and overlap between
science and religion. Dogmatic forms of religion the
reject
methodological naturalism of science and oppose scientific conclusions
that contradict religious beliefs. Liberal
theology, at its best, is willing
to follow the truthwherever it leads. Liberal theologians like Barbour,
and me believe in the of
Clayton, emergence spirit and freedom, but we

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 Vol. 30,No. 1, January2009 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 thatwe 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, itwould seem, is
too secular for religious believers, too religious for secularists, and too
academic for non-theologians. Wabash College theologian Steven
Webb puzzles thatcontemporaryliberalsfind itpossible towrite so
much despitebelieving so little.
He describeshis intellectualpilgrimage
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, in an Age
Religion of Science (San Francisco: Harper & Row,
1990); Barbour, Nature, Human Nature, and God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002);
JohnPolkinghorne,Science and Theology (Minneapolis: FortressPress, 1998); Philip
Clayton, Mind & Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness Oxford
(Oxford:
University
14 Press, 2004).
StephenH. Webb, review ofHeaven, The Logic ofEternal Joy, by JerryL. Walls,
Christian Century 119 (4-17 December 2002), quote 42; seeWebb, "On Mentors and
theMaking of a Useful Theology: A Retrospective on theWork ofWilliam C. Placher,"
Reviews inReligion and Theology 13 (March 2006): 237.

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 18 American Journalof Theology & Philosophy

authors Jack Spong and Marcus Borg have reached enormous

audiences.
Episcopal bishop JackSpong rips away at biblical narrativesin
old-style rationalist fashion, emphasizes what he does not believe
literally,plays up the Jewish liturgical frameworkof the gospel
narratives, and argues that controversy is good for the church. He
stirredup a fair amount of it by suggesting thatPaul was gay and
repressed, and Jesus was married toMary 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 tomove 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 reunificationof the
empiricalworld and theworld of spirit.Itpointed to theruleofGod and
thepower ofGod's Spiritflowing into theworld. German scholars,by

15
John Shelby Spong, Why ChristianityMust Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to
Believers inExile (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 220-28; Spong, A New
for a New World: Why TraditionalFaith isDying andHow a New Faith is
Christianity
Being Born (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, "razor's "Christ
2001), edge,"
experience," 115; "I have," 240; Spong, the Bible from Fundamentalism: A
Rescuing
Bishop Rethinks theMeaning ofScripture (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 theGospels: Reading theBible with
Jewish Eyes (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996).

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combining historical skepticism and an apocalyptic thesis, made Jesus

seem strange and irrelevant. Borg urges that historically and
it is better to interpret Jesus as a "Spirit-filled person in
theologically
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 thatwhen he firstrealized thatmany scholarsagreedwith 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, formost of its history, played a minor role in the development
of modern 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, theCivil War, theEpiscopal 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 theTeaching 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 theFirst Time: The Historical Jesus and theHeart of
ContemporaryFaith (New York: HarperCollins, 1995); Borg, The God We Never
Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith (San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997); Borg, TheHeart ofChristianity:Rediscovering
a Life ofFaith (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.

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20 American Journalof 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, itwas
the dominant party in theU.S., though quietly so.
Although theEpiscopal Church did not lack liberaltheologians,
few had any impactbeyond theirdenomination.Often theywere 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 itwith a special intensity. To them itwas new; thus Spong
gave the impressionthatliberal theologybeganwith 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 of liberal theology in our time, like that
achievement
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

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 Vol. 30,No. 1, January2009 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 liberalCatholicism, JosephCardinal Ratzinger, has ascended to the
papacy. In this context of an ascending conservative impulse clashing
with liberal, liberationist, and postmodern currents, many seminaries
with more theological diversity than they
find themselves struggling
can handle.
But progressive Christianity, despite itsmany 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 themost interesting
and excitingtime inhistorytobe engaged in
theology. Entire new fields of inquiryare 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 thiswas thebedrock of the social gospel, includingthe
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 inGerman idealism, but itpreached superbly.
Something like it needs to be recovered today if liberal
theology is toflourishas a public and spiritualforce: somethinglike a
gospel-centered theology of personal spirit. Instead of defining the
spiritual in termsof thepersonal and themoral (as personalism did),
one might define the personal and moral in terms of the spiritual,
fashioning a theology of universal spirit and love. Neis Ferr? and Paul
Schilling started down this path near the end of their careers, as did

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 22 American Journalof Theology & Philosophy

Paul Tillich in the thirdvolume of his SystematicTheology. Insteadof

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 tellme ahead of time?"So I am learningthevalue of just
laying itout thereas directlyas possible: God is creativeand personal
Spirit, the transcendent
holymysteryof love divine; Jesus is divine by
virtueof the fullnessofGod's Spirit inhim; love isGod's very self in
action, the lure of feeling and ultimate meaning of spirit; evil is the lack
and nihilatingnegation of theflourishingof life; a passion for social
justice and theflourishingof life is thebest signof living in thedivine
light;spiritis themost inclusiveand universalultimate; eternityis the
life of divine love.
More important than any particular proposal is whether or not
Christians have a convictional
progressive passionate, clear, spirit. The
question cuts two ways, in terms of spiritual conviction and the ethical
imperativeof strugglingfor social justice, but theygo together,each
being indispensable to the other.Prophetic religion is not what most
people are seeking; it never has been. Many people want to be
religion
their security blanket or the justification of their selfishness or
intolerance. Those of us who identify with progressive Christianity
shouldhave no illusionsthatifonlywe get theargumentsrightand do a
better job of disseminating them, the masses will flock to our door. To
be a progressiveChristian today is to sail against thevalues and politics
of thedominantculture.It is to hold out for thepossibilityof 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 itmeans to follow Christ in
our time; or to be open to the presence of God in the oppressed, the
marginalized, the hurting, and vulnerable.

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If liberal theologywere not capable of changing in the lightof

liberationist and postmodern criticism, itwould not be a living tradition
today,or something
withwhich I could identify.
Today liberaltheology
needs to be a type of liberation theology. No one can know if any of our
efforts will succeed, but thenecessityof strugglingfor thedivine good
is certain.The futurebelongs to thedivinemysterywithin and beyond
all things, and after all our efforts are finished, it is the
incomprehensibleSpiritDivine thatwill make somethingnew in the
world out of our strivingsto live into the truthand advance the
flourishingof life.

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