Postliberalism

Origins

A consistent area of inquiry for contemporary theologians has been the realm between conservative and liberal theology. The idea of finding a third theological option between these two frameworks has attracted numerous, and quite different, neoorthodox Christian movements: from the mediating theology of 19th-century Germany supported by such scholars as Isaak Dorner and Friedrich Schmid to Karl Barth's theology of the word and Reinhold Niebuhr's social ethics in the 1940s and 1950s. Most neoorthodox theologies emphasized a similar language, however: the biblical language of sin, the realization of transcendence, and “the primacy of the Word” of God. The neoorthodox movements in modern theology gained recognition and support until the early 1960s when, after many of the leading thinkers such as Barth and Niebuhr passed away, liberal theology emerged in Latin America and began to grow.

The neoorthodox movement did not find its footing again until the mid-1970s and early 1980s. This time, it emerged within the postliberal writings of the Yale Divinity School. The movement's first significant work, Hans Frei's The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, was published in 1974. Providing some of the founding arguments of the postliberal school, Frei's work supported an anti-Enlightenment view to biblical interpretation. Frei critiqued the Enlightenment idea that truth could be found within a universal foundation of knowledge, such as rationality, or that the individual constituted the center of authority and experience. Instead, Frei's theology supported biblical truth as grounded within the living communal experience of scriptural narrative. Instead of liberal or conservative theologies that further emphasized the loss of the biblical narrative as formative to religious life, Frei [Page 592]supported a theological framework that emphasized how Christians make sense of the world around them by relating to and participating within scriptural stories.

George Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine, published in 1984, further differentiated the mode of thinking between postliberalism and both conservative and liberal frameworks. Lindbeck articulated the dichotomy that dominated modern theology: conservatism and liberalism. Conservative theology relies on the cognitive-propositional understanding of the Bible and the world. Conservative theologians, following analytic philosophical frameworks, claim that statements of doctrine within the Bible literally refer to the experience of the world. Consequently, biblical language, and hence claims to reality, should be held as universally valid. Conversely, liberal theologians rely on a more expressive-experiential understanding of the Christian faith. Liberal theologians ground their claims to reality on the immediate experience of religious feelings. From this experience, an individual believer is connected to a universal experience of moral value and truth that can be abstracted from the text of the Bible.

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