Anglo-american Postmodernity by Murphy Nancey

Author:Murphy, Nancey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 2011-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

3. Postmodern Conservative Theology

Despite the fact that Lindbeck has provided penetrating criticism of the experiential expressivism of the modern liberal tradition, there are important assumptions that he shares with his predecessors, which justify calling his work postliberal. The first is his concern with providing a theory of religion generally, not a theory of Christianity. That is, he follows his liberal predecessors in assuming that Christianity is but one of a class of phenomena, all instances of ‘religion.’ Second, he treats religions as, in the first instance, human phenomena—religions are like languages or cultures.

There are aspects of Lindbeck’s theological program, however, that would seem to be much more appealing to conservative Christians than to liberals, especially his view of the role of Scripture in church life and theology. Yet at other points, Lindbeck’s program is likely to appear inadequate to conservatives. The most significant of these is his construal of religious truth. His definitions of truth are likely to appear problematic; even more problematic is the lack of adequate criteria in Lindbeck’s theological program for assessing the truth of religions and thus too little protection against religious relativism.

The purpose of this section is to inquire about what might be the distinguishing features of a conservative theology if pursued within a postmodern framework. If we ask what has distinguished conservative from liberal theology in the modern period and then ask further how we might express those distinctions without presupposing modern philosophical categories, we arrive at something like the following: first, postmodern conservative theology must maintain some special role for Scripture over against experience as authority for theology; second, it must provide for special acts of God; and, third, it must provide for the possibility of making truth claims for Christianity. This latter requirement involves both a definition of truth that is compatible with postmodern philosophy and criteria for judging the truth of a religion.

A second purpose of this section is to substantiate my claim that we should expect convergence between theologies of the right and the left during the postmodern era. I do this by mentioning as I go along the resources for maintaining each of these three conservative distinctions that can already be found within the developing postliberal tradition.

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