Liberal Theology
Various articles describing and defending liberal approaches to religious belief. Most have been written for the Modern Churchpeople’s Union.
Positive liberal believing
After a good few years in which the public face of Christianity has distinguished itself by negativity - obsessive campaigns against some sin or other - there are signs that people are looking for a more tolerant, and therefore liberal, spirituality.
Liberals make up our own minds, change our minds in the light of new insights and feel free to disbelieve inherited doctrines. In this sense the opposite of liberalism is dogmatism: that spirit of insisting that a particular doctrine or moral rule is what Christians ought to believe, irrespective of public evidence and arguments. Full text...
Natural theology and the state of the world
We live at a time of two competing crises. One is the environment: extinction of species, soil erosion, pollution and, most pressing of all, global warming all threaten the future of humanity. The other is the recession. Credit has collapsed, debt abounds, we need 'to get the economy growing again' and increase our activities.
Oh dear. Can we only solve one problem by making the other worse? Our two crises highlight a clash of cultures. One sees human society and well-being as fundamentally dependent on the physical environment, so its well-being is our well-being. The other sees human society and well-being as fundamentally a matter of distancing ourselves from 'natural' lifestyles and processes, so that progress is a matter of new technologies and economic growth. Full text...
Liberalism when it’s liberal
Liberalism means that on the one hand everybody’s opinion is to be heard and respected; on the other, its truth-value is to be assessed by public rational examination. Elsewhere this principle is so well established that it is no longer controversial. Nobody would entrust their health care to a self-appointed doctor who had studied no medicine except for a few personally selected ancient near eastern texts, or buy an electrical machine made by someone who claimed to have worked out the laws of electricity from first principles purely by listening to voices in his or her head. On the contrary the ‘liberal’ framework for developing hypotheses and accepting knowledge claims is accepted right across the sciences and humanities.
With one exception. In religion, and only in religion, the legitimacy of this framework continues to be debated. Those who make simple appeals to biblical texts and papal statements as a way of riding roughshod over all other opinions are still granted far more respect than they deserve. Full text...
What do we expect of church leaders?
The Archbishop of Canterbury has on a number of occasions described his role in terms of articulating the faith of the church, thus representing what the church believes to the wider world.
Many lay people, and even non-believers, expect their clergy to believe all the doctrines which public stereotypes attribute to them, and wonder how they can be clergy if they do not.
Why is it that in religion - and only in religion - public discussion of different points of view is treated as a threat to the maintenance of the tradition? What is distinctive about religion that makes it a problem? Full text...
Liberal Faith in a Divided Church
Published 2008
Details
Liberal Theology -
to bring peace or a sword?
There are signs of hope. There are signs that we are at a turning point. We have
two trajectories, going in opposite directions. The unchurched society around us,
in Britain and beyond, knows it is under no obligation to accept any version of Christianity,
and is by and large appalled by the reactionary dogmatisms which have dominated the
churches’ agenda in recent years; but nevertheless it is increasingly interested
in religion in general. Meanwhile, within the churches, the leaders of the main denominations
are in an inward-looking, reactionary mood, more concerned about their own internal
affairs than the society outside. Full text...
<< Talk given at the annual conference of the Modern Churchpeople’s Union in July
2009
<< Article on the recession, the environment and natural theology, published in Signs
of the Times April 2009
<< Article on different kinds of liberalism in theology, published in Signs of the
Times January 2009
<< Should church leaders represent the traditional views of their church even when
they don’t agree with them? Published in Signs of the Times April 2008.
Who wants to be evangelized?
Paternalism makes two mistakes. Firstly, it has a dualistic view of humanity: we know the answers, they do not. This exaggerates both ‘our’ unity of opinion, and ‘their’ ignorance. Secondly, the task of using our superior knowledge to benefit the world becomes primarily a matter of technique.
Heavily advertized and tidy packages seem to be the key to the outward signs of success in the affluent western world. Christianity, like broadband, needs to be easy to pick up, easy to use and easy to uninstall. Within these terms, to be a Christian primarily means to self-identify as such, and may not mean much more.
Good evangelism would pay non-Christians the courtesy of listening seriously to what they are saying about us. This can be difficult for professional clerics. It means eating humble pie, especially when they are right. But most non-Christians are not so terrible really. Many of them are sympathetic to Christianity, and would be more so if we were to repay the compliment. Full text...
<< Article on good and bad ways of expressing one’s faith. Published in Signs of
the Times January 2007
Hooker’s views on the authority of scripture
Hooker’s authority is acknowledged so widely that Anglicans today claim his support
for widely varying positions. Did he insist that scripture was the supreme authority,
with reason and tradition only subordinate, as many evangelicals now argue, or was
he making more substantial claims for reason, as he has traditionally been understood?
Full text...
