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What is liberalism?

April 26, 2017liberalism

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What is liberalism?

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I believe that the reconstruction of theology today must take a different approach. Systematic theologians like to make distinctions, and I must make one now. We can distinguish two ways of retrieving from Scripture what is authoritative for today. 1) One strategy is to locate something that defines the Bible’s own religious vision that can be restated in categories appropriate for a given cultural situation. This I will call liberalism or the moderate way. It is the outlook of Walter Rauschenbusch, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, James Cone, and George Lindbeck, to mention a few. 2) The other method is to claim for today only what is most excellent in the original Christian witness as judged by contemporary Christians. This I will call modernism or the radical way. It is the path followed by Shailer Mathews, Henry Nelson Wieman, Gordon Kaufman, Sallie McFague, and others. John Cobb, Rosemary Ruether, and Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza operate much like modernists,