20th century AD

Christian Century, July 4, 2001 by Gary Dorrien

NO THEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE has a commanding place or an especially impressive following these days. Various theologies compete for attention in a highly pluralized field, and no theology has made much of a public impact. One significant and inescapable development, however, has been the emergence of "postliberal" theology, a major attempt to revive the neo-orthodox ideal of a "third way" in theology.

For nearly as long as modern theology has existed, efforts have been made to locate a third way between conservatism and liberalism. The idea of a third way was intrinsic to mid-19th-century German "mediating theology," which blended confessional, pietistic and liberal elements. Two generations later, neo-orthodoxy issued a more aggressive appeal for a third way. While insisting that he was not tempted by biblical literalism, Karl Barth began his dogmatics by describing the liberal tradition of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Adolf von Harnack as "the plain destruction of Protestant theology and the Protestant church." Emil Brunner's "theology of crisis" similarly maintained that in different ways Protestant liberalism and Protestant orthodoxy both betrayed the Reformation principles of the sovereignty and freedom of the Word of God. Reinhold Niebuhr took a different tack toward a similar end, arguing that fundamentalism was hopelessly wrong because it took Christian myths literally, while liberal Christianity was hopelessly wrong because it failed to take Christian myths seriously.

Neo-orthodoxy was an umbrella term for various profoundly different theologies. It was embraced in the U.S. by thousands of pastors and theologians, who generally got their theology from Brunner and Niebuhr rather than from Barth. American neo-orthodoxy in the 1940s and 1950s typically meant a compound of Brunner's dogmatics, Niebuhr's theological ethics, and the scripture scholarship of the biblical theology movement. This movement, a reaction to the perceived sterility of earlier, purely analytic studies, emphasized the unifying themes of scripture and stressed the revelatory acts of God in history as described in the Bible.

The neo-orthodox movement was stunningly successful in reorienting the field of modern theology. The biblical language of sin, transcendence and the Word of God resumed a prominent place in theological discourse.

But in a remarkably brief period of time, the house of neo-orthodoxy crashed. During the 1960s, the theological giants of neo-orthodoxy passed away, James Barr's claims about the uniqueness of biblical semantics dismantled biblical theology, and Langdon Gilkey exposed the incoherence of neo-orthodox God-language. Gilkey showed that for all of its condemnations of theological liberalism, neo-orthodoxy construed the meaning of the scriptural "mighty acts of God" in essentially liberal terms. Gilkey later called attention to a secularizing trend in theology--he called it "death-of-God theology"--which was led by former Barthians such as William Hamilton and Paul van Buren. Shortly after that, the first currents of liberation theology emerged in Latin America and the U.S., making neo-orthodoxy seem stuffy, provincial and oppressive.

Though postliberals' connections to neo-orthodoxy are not widely touted in postliberal writings, the connections are significant. The postliberal movement is essentially a Barthian project--one that, in certain respects, is more deeply influenced by Barth than American neo-orthodoxy was in its glory days.

Postliberal theology began as a Yale-centered phenomenon. It was founded by Yale theologians Hans Frei and George Lindbeck, who wrote the movement's founding texts and who (before Frei's untimely death in 1988) trained most of its key advocates. Prominent figures in the development of the postliberal school have included such Yale-trained theologians as James j. Buckley, J. A. DiNoia, Garrett Green, Stanley Hauerwas, George Hunsinger, Bruce D. Marshall, William Placher, George Stroup, Ronald Thiemann and David Yeago. A generally younger group of Yale-trained postliberals now contributing to the development of postliberalism includes Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Serene Jones, David Kamitsuka, Ian McFarland, Paul McGlasson, Joe Mangina, R. R. Reno, Gene Rogers and Kathryn Tanner. Numerous theologians from different academic backgrounds share key affinities with the postliberal movement; they include William Willimon, evangelical ecumenists Stanley Grenz and Gabriel Fackre, the late Baptist theologian James William McClendon Jr. and British theologians Rowan Williams and David Ford.

The school's founding argument was propounded by Frei in "The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974). Frei observed that modern conservative and liberal approaches to the Bible both undermine the authority of scripture by locating the meaning of biblical teaching in some doctrine or worldview that is held to be more foundational than scripture itself. Before the Enlightenment, he explained, most Christians read the Bible primarily as a kind of realistic narrative that told the overarching story of the world. The coherence of this story made figural interpretation possible; certain events within and outside of scriptural narrative were viewed as having prefigured or reflected the central biblical events. Jews and Christians made sense of their lives by viewing themselves as related to and participating within the story told in scripture.