All Christianity is Liberal

There is no such thing as a purely “conservative” or “Biblical” theology. It is all liberal, or at least all theology has a liberal etiology, or began as a kind of liberalism, no matter it’s current distinction today as “conservative” in relation to newer, modern liberal thought. In order to see this, we need to define “liberalism” in a very basic sense, apart from our particular historical context and the issues associated with it. JC himself (John Cobb) argues:

Historically, liberal theology developed as an effort to continue the Christian tradition in an increasingly inhospitable intellectual and cultural context by adapting its teaching to that context. Liberals appropriated the results of the natural and social sciences and showed how Christian faith, rightly formulated, could be understood in a way that did not conflict with that new understanding. Liberals appropriated the results of historical study of Christian scriptures and church history and showed how these supported transformation of the Christian teaching. Liberals opened themselves up to the many criticisms of Christianity and sought to reformulate the faith in ways that did not continue the evils done in the past in the name of Christianity. (The Process Persepctive II p. 166)

So what has this to do with conservative theology, or even fundamentalism? Well, it’s all quite liberal, of course. If a broad survey were taken of evangelicals and fundamentalists, certainly core tenants of their orthodoxy would include doctrines such as creatio ex nihlo, the omnipotence of God, the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus as the second person of that Trinity, the idea of immortal souls and an after-life, and many other key concepts find their root in extra-Biblical source material and are used to interpret the texts of the Bible in a particular fasion (note: this is not to say that any of these doctrines are not true, certainly the fathers who conceived them thought so!)

The influence of Hellenistic philosophy on early Christian theology, as everyone knows, is tremendous. Clement of Alexandria wrote in the Miscellanies “Philosophy has been given to the Greeks as their own kind of Covenant, their foundation for the philosophy of Christ.” (6.8). In his Confessions, Augustine reflected But when I read those books of the Platonists I was taught by them to seek incorporeal truth, so I saw your ‘invisible things, understood by the things that are made” (7.20). Eusebius wrote that Greek philosophy laid the foundation for the Gospel, philosopher Philo Judaius (of Alexandria), who was the first to synthesize the God presented in the Hebrew Bible with Greek metaphysics (around the same time as Jesus), influenced Clement but also Origen and Ambrose, among many other lesser known theologians. Even the very earliest Christian thinkers, such as Justin Martyr in the early second century, were under the sway of Platonism, and there is good reason to think that St. Paul himself was educated within Hellenistic Judaism.

The authoratative scientists of their day!

What these early formulators of Christianity had in common, and as their goal, in assimilating so much Greek philosophy and concepts into their theology and doctrines about Jesus, is that they were doing exactly what Cobb describes as liberalism within their context, i.e. they were taking into account the highest learning of the sciences of their day, and incorporating them into their faith, as well as responding directly to challenges made from the dominant perspective of their day, creating what they saw as a reasonable, cohesive framework that could be accepted in light of secular knowledge of the world. This was the dominant paradigm for well over a thosand years, with even Thomas Aquinas developing his systematic theology and famous “five proofs for the existence of God” within an Aristotelian framework. In many respects, even Augustine, a paragon of Western orthodoxy, has more in common with those of us who self identify as “liberal,” who seek to do theology in a a time where evolution is an accepted scientific norm, we know many complexities of biological and mental systems, and are able to explain many other things apart from an appeal to the divine.

Rather than Plato and Aristotle, we now have a communities of social and physical scientists, experts in many diverse fields, who raise many substantial challenges to the Greek liberalism that is now standard conservative orthodoxy. For instance astro-physicists who question the idea of creation out of nothing, philosophers who wonder why anyone would believe in an all powerful deity given the world of suffering we inhabit, and even “liberal” theologians who question the ontological nature of the Trinity given the seemingly mistaken metaphysics of substance that lead to its creation in the first place! Those of us who take these challenges seriously, and work to theistically understand the world while learning from these experts, are taken to be liberal, but the only difference between conservatives and liberals is the “freshness” of the liberalism itself. Like theologians who refuse to move beyond Luther and Calvin, who declared “ecclesium semper reformanda est,” the Church must always be reforming, there is the same irony within self proclaimed orthodox theology itself: it is stuck in its own beginning. It refuses to grow, it posits a theology appropriate for a time past and utterly incoherent now. When Christians get caught in the details, the spirit is cast out. Like the spirit of the Reformation was actual reforming, and too often “Reformed” theologians refuse to keep reforming, conservatives are in denial about their liberal heritage, and thus will not continue to be good liberals. A rejection of the most up to date understanding of our world is not a principle the founders of our faith believed in. The attitude of theology was always to add to the conversation, to the secular understanding of the world, not replace it. All Christians are some type of liberal, I encourage my conservative, dogmatic brethren and sisthren to reflect on why they might continue to insist on a world view informed by information that has been out of dat for hundreds (or thousands) of years!