Intellectual history enables us to understand how others have understood the world, human affairs, God, culture and much else. Applied to theology, intellectual history is the exploration 0f the people, the social context, the cultural tensions and developments and the intellectual climate out of which theological changes and developments emerge. Within the Christian tradition such changes are either welcomed or resisted, and are seen as conserving or liberalising aspects and elements of the Christian tradition.
Throughout my life I have read widely, ecumenically and I hope both critically and appreciatively, across a range of standpoints within the overall Christian tradition. It may be more appropriate to acknowledge that the Christian tradition is in reality a diversity of traditions flowing as tributaries from the same headwater. My own tributary is evangelical but with open mind and heart, as befits a Baptist who takes seriously our historic commitment to religious freedom and the refusal to require subscription to credal confessions. So I am an ecumenical evangelical, and a curious one at that.
I am just starting off on my summer big read. In three volumes Gary Dorrien provides an intellectual history of liberal theology as it has developed in America over 300 years. This is a history of Christian thought as it has encountered the modern world, and the adjustments and accomodations many theologians felt compelled to make in order to maintain their intellectual integrity whilst remaining faithful to the deposit of the faith.
The very words conservative and liberal are pejorative words before they ever become descriptive. What sets Dorrien's account apart is the generosity he shows in assuming the intellectual integrity and sincerity with which such thinkers went about their thinking and theology. Far from undermining the faith, they believed passionately they were making it comprehensible and credible in a changing world increasingly secular, shaped by science and technology, and in which the challenges to Christian beliefs, values and practices would come with increasing confidence, and would call in question religious authority, relevance and social privilege.
That the three volumes are devoted to North America is both a plus and a minus. On the plus side it enables Dorrien to examine the growth of liberal theology in careful historical and biographical detail. The biographical research lying behind these volumes is deep, informative and essential; intellectual biography is crucial in writing intellectual history. Ideas may be conceived in the abstract, but they are best expounded out of the life of those who think them and give the best articulation of them. My own research over the years has been heavily indebted to intellectual biography. To place ideas in the lived social and cultural context out of which they originated is an essential discipline which ensures the ideas don't take on the life and content of the interpreter rather than the original thinker. So, biographical context, cultural and social milieu, and the historical matrix within which ideas are first thought, expounded, and argued for and against; these are major gains in Dorrien's superb achievement in these volumes.
On the minus side, liberal theology is not geographically constrained; nor is it of one cultural flavour, nor the privileged claim of one national context. In the same two centuries there were massive shifts in intellectual and theological climate across Europe and especially in Germany and Britain. The erosion of biblical authority which caused such a furore in the United States in the mid to late 19th Century caused similar disruption in Germany, England and Scotland during the same decades. The causes and outcomes were different but the underlying conflict over the authority of the Bible and the contested notions of inerrancy and infallibility were similar. Or by the early to mid Twentieth Century American theology was increasingly influenced by the thought of major European thinkers from Schleiermacher to Ritschl, and Barth to Bultmann. Thus American liberal theology was by no means home grown. But Dorrien is aware of this, and what he has produced is a comprehensive, authoritative intellectual history of the American liberal theological mindset. In doing so he has also exposed the historic and intellectual processes out of which liberal theology grew and bore fruit that continues to sustain, challenge and renew theological study towards an adequate and relevant faithfulness in seeking to communicate the content of the Christian faith in a world less impressed, less patient, and in many ways, less interested.
A few years ago I read volume one. I'll read it again, kind of the way you watch episode one just to refresh the story before episodes two and three. And occasionally a report back here about the journey so far.
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