Mere Fidelity
Mere Fidelity
Postliberal Theology, Explained
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Derek, James, Brad, and Alistair discuss the major and minor figures of the very influential Yale School in post-liberal theology. These are the voices that called for the church to speak in its native language and not to accommodate to the culture. Is their influence over, or does their voice yet speak?
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Why Postliberalism Matters Now
Derek RishmawyHello and welcome to another episode of Mir Fidelity, a podcast by Mir Orthodoxy, where we think about the Word of God and the world we live in. My name is Derek Khrushmali, and I'll be your host for today. I'm joined by uh full cast and crew, Alistair Roberts, Brad East, and James Wood. It's good to see you, fellas. Glad you're glad you're back.
SPEAKER_02Good to be here. Good to be here. We're not a full cast and crew. We've not got Andrew and we've not got Are we gonna do a six-man?
Derek RishmawyIt's a quorum. It's a quorum. Uh I'll say it. We have a full quorum. Um no, today though, we wanted a I'm I'm excited about the uh I'm excited about the show today. We wanted to talk about uh something a little niche, but probably related to all of our various theological interests. There was a recent essay by Dale Coulter on uh essentially the the uh the back history life cycle and i again I guess in his view, death of post-liberal Protestantism. So post-liberal Protestantism, I'll probably have Brad explain a little bit more on the back end of that, but um post-liberalism has been a subject of discussion, obviously on the show, James's work, Brad's work, often related to politics. But there's a deep history of it uh, not just when it comes to the political theory of post-liberalism, but postliberalism as a mode of doing theology that goes back to the 1960s and 70s, related to the Yale School, guys like Hans Frey, George Lindbeck, all that sort of thing. And uh Coulter's piece, I think it's occasioned by the fact that there's gonna be a there's gonna be like a celebratory conference around the work of George Hunsinger, who's also an important figure in in that movement. And I think all of us have connection points. James, you've you've studied with Hunsinger. Brad, you were at like the epicenter of the mothership of the Yale School, right? And then my own advisor, uh Van Hooser, a lot of his work was shaped in interaction with uh post-liberalism, the Yale School. And then Alistair, I think a lot of your interest when it comes to Old Testament figures like Brever Childs, especially Christopher Seitz and those sorts of movements, um, all of us have threads connected to this. So I thought this would be a really interesting, uh kind of germane conversation. But Brad, I I was hoping that you would orient us a little bit to um essentially Dale's summary and then your own about what post-liberalism was, and then we can move towards we can talk about that for a bit, and then move towards what it is or isn't anymore.
SPEAKER_04I'll say I'll say a few things by way of introduction. I'm gonna assume for the next few minutes that listeners know nothing, that that the quote-unquote Yale school is just an empty phrase to them. Um and I really recommend so this this comes from The Protestant Mind, um, a a new, relatively new newsletter um that was created by First Things, but is written by Dale Coulter, who's at Princeton Seminary. And I have to tell y'all, I've been marinating in this stuff for 20 years, and I learned a lot reading this.
Derek RishmawyThat was a remarkable summary.
SPEAKER_04I I was very impressed, and he was drafting off of Rusty Reno's editorial an issue or two ago. And then Rusty was drafting off of David Congden, who wrote a piece that I think we discussed or folks on this podcast sometime in the last year, that was trying to connect the current political moment with the a sort of generation or two ago um theological moment. Um so what so I will say first of all that I learned things, and I learned things especially about the social and political antecedents of um the academic theological moment in the 70s and 80s and on. And so I know less about that except what I read from Dale. And so I truly commend that piece, just a just a model of sort of public intellectual translation and popular popularization of things that have been happening for 75 years in the academy. What I'll say for now is this when folks refer to the quote unquote Yale school or quote-unquote post-liberal theology, they're referring to trends and movements um connected to three figures at at Yale University slash Yale Divinity School in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. And the three figures are Hans Frey, George Lindbeck, and David Kelsey. Kelsey is a little bit of an odd, odd figure there. Um it it's it's simpler to make him part of the trio. Um and he did write, he did write one important work that influenced folks, and and he taught and supervised a lot of dissertations that indirectly was part of this world. But really, people are talking about Frye and Lindbeck. And Frye wa a public he did not publish a lot of books, um, but he wrote two important works in the mid-70s, roughly 1974, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative and The Identity of Jesus Christ. And then about a decade later, George Lindbeck, a Lutheran and a humanist, wrote, I think it was in his early 50s at this point, wrote a book called Um The Nature of Doctrine. And really those three books, plus maybe um Kelsey's proving doctrine about the uses of scripture in modern theology, those books really set a template and a set of questions and issues and meta, sort of metacritical or meta-theological claims. Okay, that's that's one thing. So so they they wrote some things that really set the methodological table for an entire generation of theological scholars. But then something else was happening, namely they were supervising doctoral students.
Derek RishmawyYeah.
SPEAKER_04And these students, it would be difficult to name all of them, certainly from memory, but folks like Stanley Hauerwas, uh by the 90s, someone like Ephraim Radner. In the 80s, you have folks like Joe Mangina, William Placker, Placker, um Catherine Green McCrite. Um, you have all kinds of students who are go at Rusty Reno, these students who are running through Yale, who are, let's say, unlearning their mainline Protestant liberalism. And some of them swim the Tiber and some of them remain, um, but nevertheless, an entire generation says of theologians say, we're not sure that this Protestant liberal cul-de-sac is a wise place to build a home. So we're gonna put it in reverse, and we're gonna learn from folks like Bart, we're gonna learn from folks like Wittgenstein, and we're gonna return to the theological tradition, uh, church fathers, medievals, reformers, and we're also gonna return to scripture. And we might maintain what we learned from our historical critical biblical scholar classes, but we're gonna de-emphasize or mute a lot of that, and we're gonna try to relearn how to read the Bible with the church and as the church, and we're gonna see what that does to our theology. And what you also had was a kind of uh spreading of the Yale School. You know, Joe Mangina at Wycliffe in Toronto like to call, still likes to call Wycliffe um the Yale School in Exile. And uh really Howard Duke.
SPEAKER_05Duke was also a hub for that's what I'm gonna say.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it went in both directions. So with Howard Wass and Richard Hayes and others, Duke was in what it was one sort of um transplant, and then Wycliffe was the other. And you had this sort of extension of the Yale School, and then even to places like you might say, like SMU via Bruce Marshall and Steve Long and elsewhere. Um you know, Notre Dame as a Catholic institution has a complicated relationship here, but you have some you have some post liberal friendly folks there. Okay, so that's kind of setting the table. And and then I did mention my own my own advisor, Catherine Tanner, who studied studied under Frye in the mid um eighties. She leaves for Chicago in the 90s and then comes back um 2010, 2011 um to Yale. Um okay, I'll say one more thing and then see where y'all want to take this.
Derek RishmawyI was gonna say comment on that move going to Chicago and then coming back is interesting given what was the Chicago school of Chicago. Exactly. Talk about the opposition with Chicago for a minute after whatever you're gonna say.
SPEAKER_04And I'll actually also mention another theological, I call him a theological mutt, Paul DeHart. He did he did his master's at Yale, did his PhD under Kathy at Chicago, and then ended up at Vanderbilt, and then later converted to Catholicism. And so he's kinda then he wrote a book on called The Trial of the Witnesses on the rise and fall in his in his words of post-liberal theology. And so his is the best scholarly place to go for this. Um, you know, he's he's uh a friendly critic. He he's not trying to um put put a stake in its heart, but he's also not exactly an adherent. Yeah, so one way to to phrase it, at least from the perspective of these folks, and I didn't even mention, as Col Culture mentions, folks like uh Richard Newhouse, pre-conversion, pre-first things, is kind of tilling the soil in the 70s um for uh some of this movement. George Lindbeck sort of affirms from afar what Newhouse is doing. And my my guide, Robert Jensen, in the 60s and 70s, is also part of part of this part of this thing. Okay, so a little bit about Chicago and then politics, and then I'll hand off the baton.
Chicago Versus Yale On Modern Culture
SPEAKER_04The way that this gets cashed out in fiery polemics between the actual people at Yale and former Yale students and folks who are at Chicago or who studied at Chicago is Chicago gets identified with folks like David Tracy and Paul Tillich, and what's called sort of correlationist approaches to theology and culture or church and culture, where the idea is we live in the modern age, we are children of the Enlightenment, whether we like it or not. We we live um uh uh in a country that is secularizing, and we have to um we shouldn't uh turn try to turn back the clock or live in the past. We can't reproduce the Middle Ages. There are forms and ways of thinking and being Christians that are now outmoded, that we have transcended, and we need to engage the spirit of the times and be willing to engage in a kind of cultural discourse that would be intelligible to our cultural interlocutors, including but not limited to folks in the academy and other disciplines. And like Bart, folks in the Yale School or trained by the Yale School say nine to this. They say, we are going to speak in the native register, the mother tongue of the church and Christian theology, and we're gonna do our thing well. And that doesn't mean we're fundamentalists. It doesn't mean that we can't read other people or talk to other people. But like Bart, we're going to um be unapologetic and unembarrassed about being theologians and speaking theologically and using the resources of scripture and tradition. And actually, that will give us something interesting to say to the world that might uh prick its ears. And we're going to stay faithful to a kind of broad ecumenical orthodox deposit.
Derek RishmawyDerek, would would would a fair way of characterizing that be to see essentially Chicago as the hundred years on, hundred and fifty years on inheritors of um Schleiermacher's view of correlating culture and you know, speaking to the culture despisers, et cetera, et cetera? And then and then yeah, Yale is definitely inheriting the bar the Bardian nine, but with Wittgenstein and a little bit of Wickham.
SPEAKER_05And a key term with that is not just correlationism, but also translation. You know, like can these categories be translated into an idiom that is intelligible, like uh Brad said, to people outside of the tradition, and many of the post-liberals are going to say we shouldn't be doing that at all. Like you need to deeply inhabit the tradition. Not only do we speak our mother tongue, but even for our turn, our claims to be intelligible, you must inhabit the tradition. Kind of that tradition-constituted rationality, very McIntyre. Yes, McIntyre. McIntyre is another key player on the margins. Exactly. Who influences a lot of these people. Yep. And I should have moved. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And I should have also said um Brever Childs in his own way. He was you know, he he's part of the story because these forces are happening irrespective of your sort of your own intentions. He's not really doing Wittgenstein or McIntyre, only and only Bart to an extent, but he's doing something parallel that that folks in biblical studies are receiving at the same time as as uh certain certain similar things are happening over in theology. An example for listeners would be someone like Harvey Cox in 1965, The Secular City, is making, is making a case like this. Um and I'll also finally point, before turning to politics, to Katherine Tanner's 1997 book, Theories of Culture, um, which is which is a place where she um is uh mapping, mapping the terrain. And the reason why this is something of a hot topic is because for the last 10 plus years, we've had downstream conversations and movements within politics, writ large, but also political theology, that also in a different way, um, but sharing a family resemblance, talk about post being post-liberal. Uh sometimes this is annexed to populism or Trump or MAGA, but but sometimes it's also just thinking in a register that is sort of tries to move beyond some of the William Kavanaugh, Alistair McIntyre, Stanley Howard categories that are not quite neo-anabaptism. And so they're not trying to repudiate Christendom, but they are trying to think anew in conversation, for example, with magisterial Protestant thinking about the state. And then some folks then are like, okay, well, some of these folks, like Rodrí, are influenced by McIntyre, maybe a little bit of Joder and Hauerwass, but it's something different. Does that lead does that lead you to Hungary? Does it, you know, where where does this where does it sort of like lead everything today, especially heading into um the end of this decade? And that's where a lot of the heat in the last decade has been, even though there were these all of these prior, at very academic, scholarly arguments happening from the 70s through the 90s. I'll leave it there.
Derek RishmawyThat is that is just to say my my my read of postliberalism early, I got it in the early 2000s. This was way it was not so politically it had political implications, but it was not politically inflected. I mean, you read Lindeck's book, The Nature of Doctrine, and he's basically trying to map out three different modes of doing theology. He's got you've got your you've got your you know st more standard traditionalist, modernist, um you know, what he calls, you know, cognitive propositional theology. This is the kind of thing you slot Carl Henry in uh of like theology is like you know, writing writing synthesized re propositions based on uh clear propositional revelation that like, hey, here's it, here's a God is triune, meaning he is three persons and one being, etc. And then you've got liberal theological modes of like, hey, let's let's translate what that means into modern idioms and modes of feeling and experience. So like talking about the Trinity, you know, talking about God is is our feeling of natural dependence and and so on and so forth. And then he's putting forward a third, his his uh cultural linguistic model of like, hey, we've got we weren't doing theology, we're doing grammar. Uh we're talking about the the the intrinsic logic and grammar about how our community talks about things and so on and so forth, that's trying to not be uh kind of propositional. It's not trying to be liberal correlationist, it's trying to do this third thing. So a lot of it is just caught up with epistemology and and hermeneutics and and yeah, method. It's just a when I encountered it, it was just this is nerdy method stuff having to do with uh proligomina.
SPEAKER_04Yes.
Derek RishmawyUh classic proligominal issues. Yes. That's how I encountered it. And that's how a lot of those conversations were.
SPEAKER_04Aaron Ross Powell One way to tell the story is that the actual original three Yale School scholars never got beyond methodology. They never got beyond proligomena.
SPEAKER_05But their students are also one of the criticisms, right?
SPEAKER_04Yes, it is a criticism, but their students did get beyond it. Like you know, my I I I was at a I was at a um a gathering, a colloquium in October of 2024, so a little under two years ago, that was honoring Ethan Radner's retirement, but also thinking about the past, present, and future of post-liberal theology. And you know, one of my lines to them was, you know, Radner, Radner very quickly got over the methodology, the throat clearing. Like, like Howerwas and all of these, all of these guys, they, they, they, they learned from their professors that they didn't have to play by the old rules, but then they they they really did develop a very liberating voice, theological voice, that was very attractive to people like me and James and others because it showed you and and someone someone um orthogonal to all this is John Webster over in the UK, who is not who is not part of any of this, but he's an expositor of Bart, who also is sort of modeling his own free the freedom to do theological theology that's also feeding this and also learning from some of these from some of these folks.
From Method Debates To Real Theology
SPEAKER_05Just a couple things before I forget, I mean, um Hunts, I was talking about the translation point, and I studied under, I went to Princeton for a THN to study with Hunsinger because I wanted to, I was very intrigued by his work and the way he positioned himself in relation to the the post-liberal theology world. He's also crit he's he's himself kind of adjacent. He's appreciative but critical. He's offered some of the, I think, one of the some of the most interesting criticisms, very similar to some of what uh Van Hooser has offered, but kind of from more within the mainline space. But that was one of the things I was gonna say, oh, about the translation is he opened one of our classes, which I really appreciate this. He's like, you know, a lot of folks come to seminary, for instance, talk they want to talk about God and Jesus, and they end up leaving talking about the transcendent. And he's like, and he's like, that's a problem. He's like, yes, the transcendent is part of Christian theology, but if that's kind of your primary register of talking about these things that can be easily translated into other religions, other spheres, whatever, that's a problem. That's a devolution. You know, you've you've lost the scriptural specificity of the Christian tradition. So that's one thing. But the other thing is I often think, especially when I think about Ephraim Radner, who again is maybe Huntinger and Radner are kind of some of the last gasps of post-liberal theology proper, not post-liberal politics, but post-liberal theology proper, who are kind of these giants, right? And I often try to explain Radner to people who've never read him, because if you try to pick up Radner on your own, it's impenetrable. And you you really have to get some introduction. Well, as you all you all probably know, the the most the funniest moment on theology interwebs is Alan Jacobs inner response to each other. Alan Jacobs, who's a very smart Christian thinker, uh, himself like tried to pick up Radner on his I literally can't make sense of his words. He's like, I literally, I am a smart Christian person and I can't understand you. And I love the best moment was Radner got, which is just hilarious because Radner is not really online, but he went to his micro blog and responded. He's like, Oh, I'm so sorry, tried to explain. And then Alan wrote a response to this saying, you just made it worse. Like, I it's even worse. But the way I like to describe Radner, which is I think relevant to a lot of these post-liberals, is that where are they ecclesially positioned? Like they are mainline intellectual giants who I think want to be traditionalist Christians. But I think that helps to understand the register at which they're speaking. I'm not saying it it defends it or not or justifies it or not, but they can't just speak like a lot of us in more kind of more conservative Christian spaces, who's like, hey, the Bible says it, I believe it. Here we go. You know, let's bang, bing, bing, boom, let's go. They they they they the whole method, that explaining this method, how they even get there, I think, is partly uh explicable because of their ecclesial positioning.
Derek RishmawyAnd so it's fifteen extra steps to get back to square one for a lot of us.
Alastair RobertsYeah. I putting in a word for I think the strength of a post liberal approach when it comes to To scripture is that evangelicals tend to be quite foundationalist, they tend to be trying to get at the history behind the text, and the intra-textual emphasis within post-liberalism can be quite salutary, particularly combined with a sort of post-critical return to pre-critical readings of Scripture. The recovery of the tradition of biblical reading, an emphasis upon theological exegesis, the sort of work that plays out in many realms, it's something that plays out within the realm of theology in systematic forms, but also in biblical theology. You can see the effects in an approach to scripture that sees the message of the text as irreducibly textually mediated, as someone like Francis Watson would put it. The emphasis upon an approach to the canon that you find in Brother Charles or Chris Sites. All of these sorts of things are messages that evangelicals need to hear. Evangelicals have tended to be very poor at actually paying attention to the intra-textual features of scripture. And so it's been often people downstream of post-liberal influences that have recovered something of the I mean Peter Lightheart would be an example of someone who has taken on board many of these post-liberal emphases, and even though there are other influences there, you might think also of the aspect of post-liberalism represented by something like John Milbank and his approach, which again has so much to offer in areas where evangelicals I think tend to be quite weak, and often because they might disagree very sharply with liberals, but they share many of the same methodological and other assumptions. But when you start to work, for instance, with the intro text introtextual features of scripture, and if you start to take the canon seriously, if you start to take the creed seriously, and think about these within something influenced by a post-liberal framework and integrate that within a more evangelical framework where you can actually just express these things with a lot more confidence and openness. You're not necessarily having to persuade people who are liberals and opposed opposed to scripture. A lot of things I think are benefited through that. And I think the message of post-liberalism should not merely be restricted to a a realm in which liberalism has been dominant. It's been integrated.
Derek RishmawyLet me coast off what Alistair is saying, because it's really important. Um just to make it a little bit more concrete, thinking about uh Hans Frey's work, right? Part of his his eclipse of the biblical narrative is kind of like one of those big, I don't know, top 20 uh books of the of the of the last 40 years or 50 years, even I don't know. But part of what he was trying to talk about is the recovery of the narrative of scripture as a mode of doing theology that like oftentimes what what what Alistair's talking about, even the the the shared premises oftentimes between conservative evangelical scholars and then more liberal correlationist uh historical critical scholars is like you come to the Bible and you're trying to do theology, and like a historical critical theologian or scholar will say, Okay, let's let's get behind the text. These texts give us access to like the ancient, you know, first first century mindset, et cetera. Let's reconstruct the historical events behind them that gave rise to these texts through form criticism, redaction criticism, all those sorts of things. And then like after we've pulled it apart, given you our scholarly reconstruction of what's actually going on, because the text is not actually telling what's actually going on. Then from there we can start to create some theology, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas uh an evangelical theologian will hear that and think, no, that's bad. Jesus Christ actually rose from the dead. These things happened, the Bible is inerrant and it's it's not making mistakes, and so it's historically reliable. You might also get like an evangelical commentary that will be focused on, hey, let's let me let me prove to you that these verses happened and they're historically reliable in the first century setting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas Fry is going to be like, hey, look, um, what's the narrative actually doing to tell us something about the identity of the of God and Jesus Christ? And like like what's the theology within the text, not behind the text, not out in front of it, but within that, that, oh, oh yeah, we can actually just look at the text and start to see like within the Gospel of Mark, who is Jesus and and what is his divine identity and all those sorts of things that like if you stop having to try and reconstruct the history behind it, you can pay attention to it. You're not seeing through the text to something behind it that like uh like a historical critical person might think didn't happen, but an evangelical think definitely did. It's like, okay, but okay, that's fine. Let's put aside whether it happened for a second and think about what is the author doing at the textual level to create meaning that points that that testifies to God. And in that sense, what Alistair's talking about is okay, let's let's put aside the historicity question for a second. An evangelical will put it aside because we think, well, yeah, I think I think it's true, it happened, et cetera, et cetera. I'm just gonna put that to the side for a second, assume that, and then just go at the text, whereas a post-liberal might be like, okay, maybe it did, maybe it didn't, but let's just think, let's just think within the canon.
SPEAKER_05But their criticism would not just be of evangelicals trying to like pro like do a version of uh historical criticism to defend the the truth. They they would also critique evangelicals for going beyond the text as well to come to propositional terms. We basically go to text to get doctrine. And what what Fry and Lindbeck are also going to say is like, no, like you also need to sit with the fact that the form of the text is given in a way that is really, really important to convey the truth that it's conveying. The narrative form, the predominant form of scripture, not the only one, should bear upon the way we do theology. Yes, and so that's that's super important. I think that will that will get eventually to because I I'm sure at some point you want to get to KVJ, KJV's critiques, but but that's that would also be their criticism of evangelical conservative theology, is you you try to dilute and and extract truths from the scripture.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you ex you excavate like an archaeology dig. Uh and part of part of to to to to build on the this case uh of the weakness of certain styles of evangelical hermeneutics, the way I present it to my students is their premise is that the it's a technological accident that we have a text, but it would be better if we had a video recording, because then we could act we could quote unquote see it the way it really was. Even if that even if they do believe that the text gives us the way it really was, it's a kind of imperfect um medium rather than the text qua text being God's appointed instrument to give us. I mean, this is a very Lutheran view of the of the of the nature of Scripture, but that this is actually a means of grace. Like this is like the text is mediating not just a truth, but the truth of Jesus Christ in his living presence to you, not giving you information for you to reconstruct into what really happened given your trust in the truth of scripture. And that that really is a change that postliberal writers, scholars like Fry and Lindbeck, I think really did help a generation, both of recovering mainliners and as well as as well as evangelicals. It helped them uh recover and retain that sense common to pre-modern tradition, whether Catholic or Protestant.
Learning To Read Scripture As Scripture
Derek RishmawyI just wanted to make it a little bit more concrete in terms of a, in terms of a thought experiment of like, okay, cash cash value, what were they doing? That narrative point is really important because oftentimes post-liberalism is is thought of in relation to narratival theology and all that sort of thing. And so this is where somebody like Hower Wass or Hayes, Hayes focusing on, you know, he'd be talking about intertextuality and echoes of scripture and that sort of intrasystemic system of truth within scripture. Um and the way that the way that it's it's it's congenial to evangelical and or I guess more traditionalist or orthodox uh kind of modes of doing theology, in that our baseline assumptions actually should lead us to think that we can think theologically that way. And and this is this is where this is where this is where this stuff starts to to fan out into like at the same time, you have biblical theological movements, you have the move to recover typology, you have uh all of these sorts of things that are that are happening adjacent or partially inspired by it in the biblical studies, biblical theology realm. Um, but you still have questions and challenges about like with post-liberalism, like how is it too Wittgensteinian? Is it too like, hey, we just have the text, all we need is the text, et cetera, et cetera. Let's not you you get back into you get back into the territory of like Carl Henry versus Carl Bart of like, okay, yes, the fact of Jesus Christ, et cetera, et cetera. And Henry really wants to know, did the molecules, you know, like he he always I think he used to take out an ad once a year to to post that, I think it was the Auden uh poetry about um Christ's resurrection and kind of like the the fibers and the molecules of his body really um binding back together. And like Henry was Mr. Like, did okay, but did it happen? Did it happen? It happened. And Bart's Bart's kind of like, well, look, don't don't don't get me bogged down into all that fundamentalist stuff. I'm going to proclaim Christ resurrected and crucified and resurrected, but like you know, metaphysically, I don't know if he he could go where he needed to go for I don't know, so many I got an actually creedal view of things. Uh this is where I am putting on my I think the evangelicals are still basically right right hat for a minute.
Alastair RobertsOne of the aspects of the post-liberal approach that really again is a a game for evangelicals, and in many ways as with the intra-textual reading of scripture this is something that evangelicals are appreciating at the moment. The emphasis upon the church and the life of worship as the site within which the true reading and interpretation and understanding of scripture occurs, not so much in the isolation of the scholar. And it seems to me that that emphasis upon community and formation and the relation of the text to that gives us a far more churchly perhaps reading of scripture and the relationship between first of all, emphasizing scripture as the word of God, not just a medium that gets us to the events behind, but it as a means of grace, and a means of grace experienced within the life of the church and the church in some sense as the the vehicle of the text. That is something that I think evangelicals have gained from post-liberalism that was very weak within earlier forms, but is a lot more pronounced in more recent treatments of scripture within evangelical circles. I mean, I think for instance of the sort of work that someone like Patrick Schreiner is doing on the fourfold sense of scripture. That's downstream of a lot of post-liberal stuff.
Derek RishmawyYeah. The form of life stuff and the the grammar. I mean, I I'm uh, you know, like I said, I I cut my teeth on uh Kevin's work on the drama of doctrine, and that was like his big book engaging with post-liberalism. He played around with it as when he talked about post-conservatives, and and so he was he's he was coming at it orthogonally, um, you know, to use the the the I don't when did we start using that word? I feel like it's everywhere now. Uh but part of it was him trying to like actually be I I I'm I'm I'm worried to speak for him here, but but he was he was he was living in he was living in in the house that Henry built at Ted's, um, but at the same time very conversant with some of the concerns that the post-liberals had and wanting to wanting to do a post-conservative a you know, taking on the insights of the cognitive linguistic model, but at the same time saying, like, hey, but the propositions matter. Like there's propositional content within the statements. So you know, you've got that very famous image that that uh that Lindeck was talking about, where, you know, uh a crusader saying Jesus Christ is Lord chopping somebody in the head means one thing versus a martyr dying uh saying Jesus Christ is Lord meaning something else. But like, okay, but there's Jesus Christ as Lord still has like a somewhat determinate meaning in there that is being it is being deployed in different communities, but there's content there. It's not just a cipher. And so um he, I think, was trying to essentially mediate between Henry and Lindbeck in some ways, and then doing his own expansive dramatic thing. But part of his thing was talking about uh doctrine as dramatic direction, is trying to say these are not just abstract propositions floating free. The form that we are given, we are given an we're given a sorry, Alistair, a script, um, uh a dramatic script uh of scripture that the content matters, but the form matters as well. Like it's it isn't is he's very much is not an accident that we have all of these genres. Like for him, genre itself is a is a uh a material reality that is part of the inspiring work of God. Like something there there are things that could only be communicated about the divine nature and the kind of life we are to live in response to that within the drama of God's acts that happen because we have poetry and that happen because we have law, and that happened because we have prophecy. Uh it's not like, hey, the ideal form of theology is managing to turn poetry and law and f and all those sorts of things into Pauline letters as like the ideal, as the only ideal textual form of theology. And so um I do think that that that emphasis did make it in in some really salutary ways that I think properly understood are native to how we should think, how we how how evangelicals and I mean classical Protestants think about theology.
SPEAKER_05Aaron Ross Powell Well, yeah, I think well, even like Van Hooser's engagement there, even though critical, is evidence of the importance of the conversation that postliberals started. And I think that was that was kind of I I can't remember if that was De Hart's conclusion or maybe it was in Pechnold's version as well. He also wrote a book. I think his dissertation was on the rise and fall of post-liberalism post liberal theology before he became a post-liberal theologian, uh political theologian, is um part of the reason why it seems like post-liberalism as a school or movement is dying is partly because it succeeded. It infiltrated so many different discourses that now all the things, all the kind of primary points that they were making, in many ways have been adopted by a lot of different traditions.
SPEAKER_02It's been metabolized.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. And so and again, I think one of the one of the other figures we haven't uh mentioned that I think was influential in the background of some post-liberal arguments was even someone like Michael Polani, you know, early on of like it was like critical of like disembodied, disengaged knowing. Like you can't perform the knowing endeavor from a disengaged stance, and that's very much relevant to the the postliberal uh method, is the way you do theology, yes, you have to receive the form of scripture, and you also are not, you know, you are engaged in this process, and and this is a very personal endeavor. Uh and so yeah, I think and and Van Hooser also, um even his interest in like um uh language theory and uh like is a huge overlap. And I I imagine part of that, not only I wouldn't attribute it only to the post-liberal conversation, but I imagine part of that was inspired to some degree uh by the interest in Wittgenstein. But the other thing I wanted to mention before we before I forget and before we know we lose time, is on that cultural linguistic approach that Lindbeck offered, um, that Derek has mentioned a couple times now, there there are some other real values in there. I think there are limitations. I think uh, and uh maybe I'll share my limit my criticisms later, but the value here is I do think this approach of like, look, a lot of theology, which is for the post-liberal theologians, is like a second order reflection on first order language. The first order is scripture. Yeah that is the primary language and liturgy. And liturgy, and and so the ecclesial context. Yeah. And our theological is like our second-order internal reflections on that first order language. And but one of the things that they do at that second order level is they're trying to help you see, like, hey, internal to all these other Christian traditions, there are ways at getting because the all of your approach to truth is tradition mediated, it's textually mediated and tradition mediated, because you're doing you're engaging the text in a tradition, in a community. They're trying to also help us generate a generous orthodoxy to understand how all these other traditions are getting to the places they get by trying to say, Hey, could you put their theological shoes on for a minute and see how they might have gotten to this place?
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SPEAKER_05And our theological is like our second-order internal reflections on that first order language. And but one of the things that they do at that second order level is they're trying to help you see, like, hey, internal to all these other Christian traditions, there are ways at getting because the all of your approach to truth is tradition mediated, it's textually mediated and tradition mediated, because you're doing you're engaging the text in a tradition, in a community. They're trying to also help us generate a generous orthodoxy to understand how all these other traditions are getting to the places they get by trying to say, hey, could you put their theological shoes on for a minute and see how they might have gotten to this place? And so it was trying to open up an a kind of a posture of charity. And obviously Lindbeck was, you know, he was at, you know, a He's at Vatican II. Yeah, he was at Vatican II as an observer. A lot of the a lot of these people who are involved in the post-civil conversation um uh you know, are involved in the evangelicals and Catholics together. Well, that's there that's adjacent. But a lot of these guys end up becoming Catholics, you know. That's one of the things we often don't want to talk about. Is uh but um but I think the generous orthodoxy, I think was a real value, a real contribution as well.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I completely agree.
Doctrine As Drama And Retrieval Today
SPEAKER_04And I think before we get to, and we may here in a moment, get to either shortcomings or even if not shortcomings, just like why, like why Coulter is willing to say, like, when when hunt with Hunsinger and Harawas's retirements and with them in their 80s with their deaths, you know, it will effectively pass away, even though the legacy may not. And what another another um sort of um entree to this, another avenue or perspective is like go back for listeners, go back and read an article or a chapter from a book by Harvey Cox, Schubert Ogden, Langdon Gilkey, James Gustafson. Like it is a it is a well leave Tillich for aside because he's pre you know he's not only pre them, he's not really, you know, he's coming from the continent. Yeah, yeah. He's this towering figure. But these guys are academics, academics. And the key of their writing is unintelligible to an ordinary normie Christian. I'm not even talking about an evangelical or someone who knows the word inerrantism. I'm just saying, like a normie Christian who doesn't cross his or her finger, fingers at the part of the creed that talks about, you know, the virgin conception or the resurrection from the dead. You read these guys, and it is another world, and they were leading the institution. Institutions, they were heading the IVs and the journals and the conferences. And it was, it was a revolt from within and from below. These were class traders who said, yeah, that's not how we should be doing theology. And what they, in their obsession with methodology, they provided a permission structure for I would say at least two and maybe three generations now of academic theologians, Catholic, Protestant, and evangelical alike, to speak with I used the phrasing earlier in the podcast, like with without apology or embarrassment to refer to the truths of God as bait as basic realities that do not that do not you know that you don't blush in the presence of academics in a scholarly context. Um and that is more than a little something for for a group of Christian scholars to do. And and in many ways, they and their students did remain, if they did not convert to Catholicism, no one became an evangelical. They remained in-house mainliners who did eventually more or less lose the mainline war, but they tried to remain and to bloom where they were planted. They tried to love the traditions that they uh were a part of. Um, and I think that work, both eclipse the both the ecclesial work, this includes Jensen, by the way, both the ecclesial work and the academic work is a great achievement, even if we if even if we can't say that in 2035 or 2050 there quote unquote is such a thing as a Yale school or a living post-liberal theology that is the same thing that was happening in the 80s and 90s. Like there there is a there is a uh there is great value in being the kind of bridge generation to others and making it possible for them to succeed. And that's one of the many reasons why why folks like me and maybe folks like folks like all of us are so grateful to that generation.
Alastair RobertsAnd with that, I'd say also that evangelicals have been sending their best and brightest to the institutions that were preserved by post-liberalism. And so many of us are beneficiaries of this. It may not won the It may not be something it may not be something that won the main line, but it preserved a place within many institutions that were most adjacent to the main line for conservatives who did not have equivalent institutions of their own at the time.
Derek RishmawyI was mentioning um Michael Horton, uh a lot of his a lot of his covenant dogmatic uh work, his early his early 2000s stuff, he did the first volume of that like at a study at Yale. Like a lot of that stuff was downstream. And he was conversing with a lot of those conversations. He's over there teaching at Westminster. I mean, I don't think he's got people reading Lindbeck right now, uh because it's kind of like why, but um yeah, I I I was musing a little bit online about the afterlife of this stuff, and I think when you start talking about things that are currently happening, retrieval, um the you know, uh retrieval work is not all downstream from most liberalism, but it's not not downstream from it. Um you start thinking about all the kind of you know, typology the resource mod stuff is adjacent to it and and taking that up, thinking about because you think about what retrieval is, right?
SPEAKER_05It's a it's a it's saying we don't need to keep up with constantly trying to keep up with the current trends and the current external discourse and saying how does this match with that? It's saying, no, what is the internal discourse of the church and how do we bear witness to you know, how do we inherit that and carry that forward? So that's already it's yeah, I I absolutely agree. The resource mod retrieval movement is not entirely dependent upon the post-liberal theology, but it very much continues to benefit from it. You know, the permission structure.
SPEAKER_04Just check out the Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, which was edited by Tanner, Torrance, and Webster. And just look at the table of contents, and you'll have a pretty good, yeah, James is holding it up for us right now. It's on my shelf too. Uh it that table of contents is not merely a sort of post-liberal or Yale school uh uh who's who, but it'll give you a sense of sort of what was happening at the midpoint between us and the mid-70s when Fry and Howard Wass and Lynn Beck were were up and running.
SPEAKER_05And I was gonna bring up I I had that book, but I was just gonna bring up, I actually pulled off uh a couple of books off my shelf. It's also interesting how we're in a different moment. And that's reflected in the up the Cambridge companion to Christian doctrine. So it's really fascinating. So you have two. Kevin, yeah. This one, which was what was this, in like what year was this? Uh the This one was in 1997. And if you look at the TOC here, it's almost all post-liberal figures. Almost all of them. Yeah. And then this one, edited by Michael Allen just a couple years ago, uh almost all they're post-liberal influenced, maybe, but definitely not as thickly tied to the post-liberal movement. Is I think that's a reflection also, even there, of the shift.
unknownYeah.
Derek RishmawyOne other note there is that the the question of postmodernity was floating around as well. I, you know, so I got that, sorry, I'm gonna always come back to it. I don't care. I got I got interested in what Kevin was doing and drama doctrine, all that sort of thing, because in the early 2000s for evangelicals, we were talking about the emerging church, we were talking about postmodernity, we were talking about, you know, foundationalism, non-foundationalism, all that sort of stuff. Now, I was saved by having had like a tiny philosophical education at that point in undergrad. So I knew a lot of what guys like McLaren and that when they talked about epistemology, they didn't know what they're talking about. But nevertheless, that the the post-liberal theological move was also happening in the middle of uh the modern academy and theology wrestling with the conditions of post-modernity as well. So a lot of those uh a lot of those moves were also in view of Derda, in view of Foucault, in view of some of those kinds of conversations uh that were taking aim at modern discourses, but you needed something more confessional, more uh undeconstructed and more robust. And so post-liberalism was also a way of trying to give an epistemologically self-aware uh engagement with that theological moment. Again, I think that's past. I think a lot of those hangups are gone and we're we're we're moving past that. But it was a bridge for a lot of folks in that moment as well.
SPEAKER_04Um you know what else has passed as well as a bridge? And to all listen to to Matt Anderson as well as many other Bardian friends, it's Bart. Um and I don't and I don't mean I don't mean I'm not dancing on his grave. I it's not that I don't think he should keep being read. I read him. I did, I did for my, I mean, I wrote on him for part of my dissertation and uh continues to be an interlocutor. But there was a moment from the 80s through the sort of BART wars of the 2000s at Princeton, maybe into till about 15 years ago, when for Protestants, American Protestants, getting Bart right, well, Bart was simultaneously an escape hatch or an ejection seat for um cramped fundamentalist evangelicals, uh, and a way of escaping um the strictures of Protestant liberalism. And he was a kind of third way, and getting him right meant getting it right. And all of a sudden, I think that people are still reading him. It's not as if there are not Bart scholars anymore, but the temperature has just been turned down, and he's one towering figure among others, but he's not the figure that you have got to get right to get the thing right. And you never want to overreact to trends. You know, uh there was once upon a time, as Webster liked to remark, there was a time in when he was being trained in the 60s and 70s when the very name of Bart at High Table at Oxford was unspeakable, right? So who knows? Maybe he will make a return, but I think you can tell the stor this whole story from the 40s and 50s to the present as the kind of like also the rise and fall of Bart as the defining figure. You know, Yale for year, Yale Div for years uh taught its systematic theology class um for like first year uh MDivs as um Bart and Rahner. That that's who you now that wasn't the only that was not it, but it was like those were kind of like the the the found the options, you know, liberal versus neo-orthodox, uh a sort of a Catholic Schleiermacher versus versus the Protestant, the dogmatic Protestant, and they stopped uh about a decade ago.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. I think that moment of options, I think, helps understand the success and the limitations of a school, right? So like I think, okay, so post-liberalism doesn't have a a clear path forward. That that's okay. Like it served a moment. And I think the same way about Bart. I know a lot of our audience hates BART. I get it. Like, but I I asked, for instance, I asked Mangina and Radner years ago. Radner's less, you know, devoted to Bart than Mangina is, but I asked them when I was studying when I was like, why is there so many people in your generation, people that I admire, who feel like you know, they have to engage Bart. Like I my generation just doesn't feel like it has to. I do. There's a lot that I still benefit from, but we just don't have to. That moment has passed. And he said this, he's like, look, here were our think about who our options were uh as kind of theological guide post uh you know, leaders, as uh uh inspiration. And when I we were coming up, your main options were Boltman, Tillich, and Bart. He's like, look, if you're somebody who wants to really believe the Bible has something important to say, like That was your option, yeah. Those are your options, like you're gonna pick Bart 100 times, you know, 100% of the time. And but like what I told him is like, yeah, but my generation, we can receive the benefit of that work, but don't don't need to continue to go back to that source. But my where I tip my hat to Bart and the post-liberals is just like what you were saying earlier, Brad, is Bart in a certain way, in a certain moment, again, made unapologetic, Bible-centered theology possible. And and it did it for a certain type of person in a certain era, in a certain specific location. And I think the post-liberals also did that. And so even if we have criticisms of the figures, we can recognize the work, that the service that they offered.
Derek RishmawyFunny little unrelated note, kind of. I was digging through a volume that I don't think I don't know if you guys have seen that Nature of Confession. It's about evangelicals and postliberals in conversation. I was thumbing through it. There's an essay there by Hunsinger, and he's trying to talk about a discussion between Henry and gosh, I think it was Lindbeck. And um the funny thing is, in the right in the middle of it, he said, Yeah, one a couple of figures that might be might be fruitful in the future for helping mediate some of these concerns. Who did he name? Herman Bobink and Abraham Kuyper as this third way uh that Hunsinger named. And this was, I don't know, 20 years ago or something like that, before the before the before the Bobink translations and wave hit. Um that I bring that up just because it's all answered by Bobink. It's all answered by Bobink. Um but it but it is but it's interesting because the translations that have hit in the last 20 years, the the retrieving has retrieved a lot. There's all sorts of like resourcement and retrieval has opened up worlds of like going back to the fathers, going back to in all sorts of weird ways. Uh Schleiermacher, I think, was having a moment again th five or six years ago for for half a minute. Um the the the the the the things have shifted. I wanted to kind of turn though, I guess, to we've already been kind of dealing with it, and and you know, I think we all have our criticisms. I I very clearly do. Um I think, I mean, do you think it's actually dead?
Dead Movement Or Metabolized Legacy
Derek RishmawyOr is it just like it's just transformed? Because I I have a I have I have troubles thinking it's just like completely gone and Hunsinger when Hunsinger passes, it it is no more. I just think it's yeah, my thing is I just think it's metabolized into the system and the effects are there, but there's still a bunch of people operating who trained with these folks, and they're still training people, right? Like how many, how many, how many PhDs are the students of of Lindeck and Fry and some of those guys and even Hower Wass? How many PhDs are those guys training? Or th those those folks? I mean, Kathy trained you, Brad. You're you're pretty fresh still. You're you're you know, you're you're braded and bushy-tailed and still doing theology. And so I guess this is my this is what I want to know from Brad and James and Alistair. Like what I mean, did did did Coulter pronounce it? Yeah. Did he give it really is it too premature? Is it is it a well-timed obituary?
SPEAKER_04Well, it's a that's a great question. I think what he is doing, uh James, uh you pr I'm sure you know him. I don't know uh I don't know Coulter personally. But my sense of what he's doing, and comparing it especially to his previous newsletter, which was about the sort of like state of American seminaries, is he's speaking he's giving a bird's eye view of of institutions and the state of academic theology. And in as much as that is what he is saying, he is right that the that very broadly speaking, the the Yale school and its many progeny lost the institutions. They they by by sheer force of personality and maybe will, they they w they they temporarily marched through some of them. But but I I think it is better to use the language that you use, which was that this that their main arguments have been metabolized, and that there is uh extraordinary freedom just to be a normy, smallow, orthodox theologian today, and you're not gonna be run out of the AAR or SBL for doing so for speaking as one. Um I would also I also want to add and maybe d draw a couple connections for us, but also for listeners, about not just in terms of style or method or even substance or or voice, but also um topics. So like we uh we've mentioned some of them, like the text of scripture, the canon, the community of the church. I mean, ecclesiology um has been a fundamental, almost first matter of first um theology for going on two, three generations now that hasn't ceased yet. Um, tradition and like you said, retrieval. But then I I also want to mention a couple others, and this this maybe will bridge us a little bit now or in a few minutes to
Israel Particularity And Political Fallout
SPEAKER_04politics. One is uh Judaism and the irreducible Jewish character of um scripture, of the Old Testament, of Jesus and of the, you know, right, Romans 11 of the the of the election of the Jews. That um that one of the things that Fry and Lindbeck, and I and I believe Fry uh by his mother was actually uh Jewish uh ethnically, um, but interesting, but but what they were trying to put on the map was when you lose the particularity of Christianity and its orthodox claims and the creeds and so on, you also lose the Jewishness of Jesus. And we know you can't do that, therefore we don't want to make the wrong turn. And this was also, of course, this is all post-Holocaust, post-World War II. Like American and and other, I mean European theologians are trying to learn the lessons of Nazi Germany, and one of them being when you can just forget about the Old Testament, and you can forget about the Jewishness of Jesus, then you also uh feel uh empowered to um quite literally erase the Jewishness, that not just the Jewishness of people, but the but literal Jews. And and that that being in the picture, I think really reframed um many theological topics and it shook things up in an important way. And it's also, of course, post-Vatican II, Nostrotate, et cetera. And so the last thing I want to say on this thread is one of the reasons I, you know, I don't buy um David Congon's um argument. But where, but the let me put it, I don't buy the strong, the strong claims, you know, like like McIntyre leads to Howard Watts leads to Trump. Like I think that's a that's me, that's a caricature, but that is something like what he's saying. But I also don't want to let any of us off the hook, and I think James for sure will agree with me on this, that there is an embedded politics and a kind of political theological point being made by figures in the Yale school. And the reason why many of them swim the Tiber, and the reason why many of them are like it's there's a parallel movement to uh Cold War liberals becoming neoconservatives, and there are former mainline liberals who become post-liberal in the 80s, and then they're they're like theological neoconservatives, and they don't exactly want to vote Republican, but they they realize they kind of wake up to their own implicit social conservative moral commitments. On this is Jensen, by the way. Jensen is marching and protesting against Vietnam in the 60s, and then he is shocked to his core when the folks he was marching alongside at he went to the march in 1963 in Washington, D.C. He's marching for civil rights for African Americans, he's uh marching and against the the war in Vietnam. And then after Roe v. Wade, he thinks, and we're gonna march against that too. And then he looks around and he's alone. And he doesn't know, he doesn't know what's happened. And this is part of his own wake-up call that he thought that the the thread connecting all those was obvious, clear, and bright and red to anybody who cared about social ethics. This is the same story for Newhouse. And so there really is this shift for some, a subsection of this group into the 90s with First Things and Catholics and Evangelicals together, and then George W. Bush. And then you have this fracture with the Iraq War, and Harwas is a little bit on the outs because he's saying, No way. And some of them are saying, well, we've got our guy in the White House, so maybe yes. And that that is absolutely part of the story. And there is a there is a thread to connect there from the 60s through the 90s to 2016 when there's a kind when it all gets nuked from orbit.
Derek RishmawyI have one thread I want to pull before we go to the political again. That importance, the importance of Israel, I I put in the chat where does Sonderegger fit? And I was thinking about her, I think about her as not as kind of adjacent, not really fitting, but at the same time of the generation of you know, she I think she did her dissertation on Karl Barth's doctrine of Israel, that Jesus Christ was born a Jew.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
Derek RishmawyAnd I I think about the trend there to like take the whole canon seriously, which means we take the whole Old Testament seriously, Old and New Testament, two Testament theology, is where you know sites and childs come in in some ways. And there is, I think, an anti-Marcionite tendency in the Yale school that fits when you start to do the when you when you go back to the dichotomy I get did between Schleiermacher and Bart, Schleiermacher can write his whole two volumes on the Christian faith with almost no reference to the Old Testament. Uh Bart, you can't, you can't, you, you trip over every every every other sentence has Old Testament, it's suffused. He sounds like an Old Testament prophet half the time. And I think that that that kind of thing plays a role in in a the two testament-ness of the kinds of theology that are generated, which is why evangelicals were often more evangelicals and Protestants were often more friendly toward towards that, because like, hey, we won't we're whole Bible people, Reform guys, whole Bible people. You can still read a lot of child's and stuff like that with profit there. Um but then also some of the social, political, progressive theology and that sort of thing uh oftentimes has some of that character of of lopping off a lot of the continuity of witness between the two testaments and the continuity of like creator, redeemer, continuity of cre you know created created realities, created, created bodies, all those sorts of it's it's it's not it's it's actually not surprising that some of the pre-political ethics that uh post-liberalism often is associated with uh a little bit more friendliness towards some traditional ethics, although I think I do think some of the later movements I think that that created some tensions, I don't know, with within the Trevor Burrus. It's not determinative. And you you have later moves like the inclusive or stuff or whatever it is. But it it is a thread, I think, there, that's very important, the anti-Marcionite character of a lot of post liberal theology, or at least the derivatives of it with retrieval and Canonical theology and that sort of thing. Alistair, you've been silent. Did you did you want to interject here or do you guys want to turn the table towards the last political
The Fragmentation Of Academic Theology
Derek Rishmawystuff?
Alastair RobertsOne thing I wonder about on this front, which relates in part to the political stuff, is the move from different from one form of public discourse to another, and then the move beyond that into what we have today. So in the past you have a liberal public square within which um conservatives need to make themselves heard, and often that entails assuming a lot of different um having to operate in a context where it's very difficult to express orthodoxy within that frame. Within the sort of epistemology and the the whole framework of post-liberalism, it's a far more hospitable context for conservative orthodox Christian voices to be heard, while also being able to accommodate conversations across faiths with um I think that's part of the issue with the place of Judaism. A lot more conversations with Jews can occur within this sort of epistemological framework. I think also the ecumenism of that context is another factor. There's a common public square that is pluralistic, um, but there are distinct particular voices that can be articulated within this post-liberal framework without it having to be utterly incompatible and beyond any sort of um discussion. There's no there's a confidence in discourse that I think is lost, and that is part of the fact that we're dealing with, where increasingly the sort of uh the forms of theology are shaped by a a suspicion of other parties, a distrust in the possibility of dialogue, a sense of the utter incompatibility of particular perspectives and the differences between voices being more threats than opportunities. And whether part of that is just a different fundamental understanding of epistemology and the sort of issues of pro-ligomena that um the post-liberals were getting into was really providing the conditions for a sort of public square that have been lost today and what it would look like to I mean, I'm purely speculating here, but I do think a lot of our shift has to do with the loss of an understanding of the conditions for a public square and a rise of a suspicion that was less active within a post-liberal framework.
SPEAKER_05James? Yeah, I um I was gonna make just a couple final comments um because I know we're at time, but on the Israel point, I think that's huge, and I'm glad you brought it up, Brad. It's it's it's or uh Derek, it's such a big part of this discourse, and it's kind of strange uh if you haven't engaged the literature of how they talk about Israel. It's not just like a standard reform, like continuity between the covenants, but it's really also uh the emphasis on Israel is also very related to the post-liberal theology's emphasis not only on the text and and traditions, but also on the non-translatability or particularity, the real strong emphasis on particularity, like you can't bypass neither the text nor the particular contours of the Christian tradition to just get to some like translatable truths. It's very similar here with Israel. Like, okay, so if you're engaging the text that Christians have been given, like you have an old testament and Jesus was a Jew and all of those things, and that's that's part, and and you get to the universal truths through the particular. That's the tradition-mediated rationality-mediated rationality uh approach. And I think that's very, it's very related to all of those points. Um and so that was just the point on Israel. And it is just I when I read Staple, I know we had Staples here, we had him on our podcast with my me and my me and Peter. Um, I read Jason Staples' work as very much sympatico uh in many ways with the approach to Israel here because it's also it's it's trying to humble Gentile Christians as well. Like, hey, this isn't it's not supersessionist, it's not dispensational. It's like we have been adopted, we have been engrafted uh into Israel. That's part of our we've been brought into the story that God has been continuously uh narrating and executing throughout history. And there's a part of like uh the post-liberal theologians are trying to also get Gentile Christians to be humble here as well. And so that's on Israel. On the political point, the non-translatability is interesting. What does that do? Does it lead to authoritarianism or does it lead to multiculturalism? I mean, like, right? Like it's not obvious which direction that would go. Like if you are, if you already have authoritarian impulses, you could easily see how you would appropriate a certain sort of like incommensurability of these truths and traditions. Okay, if that's the case and I just have a desire to rule, then we're just gonna impose that on people. I don't care if they accept it or not. But you could also see how that could easily go towards a place of like, hey, we respect other traditions and we try to understand each uh other traditions, and we don't just try to do it as if we can understand it from the outside, but having a humble approach, all that. So it's not obvious to me. And you could even see, for instance, how people have very prominent figures who are second, third generation post-liberals have gone a very different direction than like supporting Hungary, like someone like Jamie Smith and his emphasis on liturgy and liturgical formation and how we, you know, primarily inhabit the liturgy of the church, not the secular liturgies of the world. He hasn't gone Dre's route. He's been and and and others. And then also someone like Richard Hayes and how he ended his life. Uh and so it's just not determinative for me in the way that maybe Condon might might want to make it. You can connect those threads, but those are not causal to me, even if they they there might be connections.
SPEAKER_04No, James, that's really well said. The causal, the causal genealogy stuff is just a fool's errand. It's it's all underdetermined, um, and there are other factors in play. I think what all of this raises for me, uh, beyond the political question and the genealogical question, is the when you go back, I mentioned going back and reading some of these people, uh, whether post-liberals or their opponents. But also the sad thing for me as an as an academic theologian is it's a time when people in academic theology who disagreed with each other actually argued in public. And uh like the field was a recognizable guild. And really, beyond these arguments and disagreements, what what looking back at the Yale School and their and their um students shows me is it was a time when the field was weirdly relatively united, and now there's no such thing as academic theology in North America. There's just many, many, many, many uh distinct subfields that we all call the T-word, but but they don't read each other, they don't talk to each other, and they're often doing um irreducibly different. Talk about incommensurable. I mean, they are under they are engaging in different kinds of intellectual activity with different first principles, different premises, different methods, different aims, different ends, different audiences. And there are gains, there are absolutely gains to that. There, but but the trade-offs are real and and we've lost something. Um and and like Substack is not an is not a substitute, it's not an alternative. Um, so I do, I do, in a way, I do mourn the passing of, you know, um Chuck Matthews at UVA remarked on this when he reviewed Oliver O'Donovan's trilogy um in the last 10 years. He said this should have been a landmark that every single guild journal reviewed and everybody had an opinion on. And he was kind of like, not only has nobody reviewed it, I can't find anyone who's even read it. And it, and, and that that's that that suggested to him, right Lee, I think he was reviewing it for modern theology. It suggests to him, and I think his point is valid, that Christian ethics or theological ethics, just like systematic theology, is now so vociparous and divided that we don't have, we don't have um lode stars and leaders in the field. Subgroups and sub guilds do, but there there are no towering giants anymore because there's no field to tower over. And that's a that's simply a social and institutional fact, and we can navigate the landscape uh as best we can going forward. But I do think that that is part of the story that really has nothing to do with these theologians because the institutional and social and cultural forces that were happening beyond them were beyond their or anybody's control.
Derek RishmawyYeah, I was gonna say the the passing of post-liberal Protestantism, you could tell the story about post-liberal Protestantism, but there's a sense in which what happened to that is just you you could tell that story about all sorts of other, you know, two or three other schools that were happening at the same time because what is happening to that is happening to the entire field, right? Um and so like is is that really just a comment on that particular school, or is it just a comment at a general level as to all schools?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, are there any schools? I mean, people thought radical orthodoxy would be this like thing that would change the future of theology. And like who's doing rad besides just Milbank? And that's great. But it are what what are the schools? It's very similar to like Alan Jacobs. Uh Brad's comment was reminding me of Alan Jacobs' essay of The Watchmen, right? Right, wasn't that the title of his essay? Yeah. We don't have a public culture and we don't have prominently public figures that are like driving the discourse. Like we just have all these little microcultures, and what do we do with that?
Derek RishmawyYeah. I I I think I don't know about you guys, but I think that's probably a a fitting way to kind of bring the conversation to a close of dissecting the post-liberal moment and its history, whatever it is, is a roundabout way of starting to comment on the general field and the general passing of a certain theological culture into whatever we are now. Um
Closing Thanks And Reviews
Derek Rishmawyand so uh I for you guys, I don't know about you, I found this a really helpful conversation. For me, I learned a lot. It was really stimulating. Um, thanks for joining, guys. And then if you've listened along so far, thanks for joining and sticking it out with us. Uh as always, if you found this conversation helpful, rate and review us on iTunes, share it with your friends, uh, post it to your local newspaper, obviously, which we all read, uh, whatever it is. Uh but for now, this has been Mere Fidelity.