Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda

Theology Today, Jul 1997 by Placher, William C

Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda

By Nancey Murphy

Valley Forge, Trinity Press International, 1996. 162 pp. $20.00.

Nancey Murphy's earlier books have established her as one of the important participants in current conversations between theology and the philosophy of science. She received her theological education among the liberals of the Graduate Theological Union but now teaches among the evangelicals of Fuller Theological Seminary. In this book, she wants to use some insights from contemporary ("postmodern") philosophy and science to get us beyond apparent impasses between liberal and conservative theologians.

She addresses three large topics. First, beginning in the seventeenth century, "modern" philosophy assumed that knowledge had to have an absolutely certain foundation. So, with respect to theological knowledge, liberals turned to supposedly universal human experience and conservatives to supposedly inerrant Scripture. But "postmodern" philosophers like W. V. O. Quine have helped us realize that the system of our beliefs is more like an interconnected web than like a building with only one foundation. Our different beliefs support each other in complicated ways, and we do not have to find some single foundational starting point.

Second, "modern" theology assumed that you had to make a choice: religious language either expresses human experience (liberals) or states facts (conservatives). But the speech-act theory of philosophers like Wittgenstein and Austin shows how complex are the ways in which language works: It does refer to facts about the world, but it also assumes and helps create social contexts. Theologians should learn that we do not have to choose between oversimplified accounts of language.

Third, "modern" science usually reduced the world to the actions and reactions of its smallest component parts and thus allowed divine action only as an occasional isolated miracle (conservatives) or a vague underpinning of the universe in general (liberals). But developments in modern physics show that causation can work "from the top down"-from more complex levels to simpler ones-and thus open the possibility of more complex models for thinking about God's activity in the world.

Murphy acknowledges that the "postliberal" theology developed by George Lindbeck and others has taken many of the same paths beyond the old alternatives. She finds herself singing many of the same words to a more conservative tune, but she thinks that more liberal and more conservative postmoderns will find themselves expressing similar ideas in different ways and not separated by the chasms that faced their modern predecessors.

This is a helpful book. Murphy writes clearly and summarizes a great deal of material. Her evangelical sympathies lead her to bring more conservative theologians, from Charles Hodge and Augustus Strong to Alister McGrath and Donald Bloesch, into the discussion, as mainstream academic theologians have done too rarely. A recent book edited by Timothy Phillips and Dennis Okholm, The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Postliberals in Conversation (1996), which Murphy mentions in her preface, provides one sign among many that moderate evangelicals and postliberals are starting to talk to each other in ways that might create a new, broad center for theology in the United States. That could be the most important theological development of this decade, and Murphy gives a good introduction to its presuppositions.

Any book that tries to cover a good bit of ground can be criticized both for moving too fast and for leaving out matters of importance. Murphy's clear categories do sometimes seem to oversimplify. David Tracy would complain that he is not as straightforwardly an "experiential-expressivist" as Murphy claims. Admirers of Karl Barth will protest against dismissing him as a "scriptural foundationalist." She concentrates on AngloAmerican philosophy and leaves out the continental philosophers, from Nietzsche to Derrida, usually most associated with "postmodernism"she thinks they are still really stuck in the modern. She sets out a philosophical framework for some new ways of doing theology, but does not actually yet do much theology. But such defects flow inevitably from the book's virtues-its bold effort to survey so much of where Christian theology has been and make proposals for where it should go next.

WILLIAM C. PLACHER

Wabash College

Crawfordsville, IN