The Failure of the Liberal Paradigm

'The Failure of the Liberal Paradigm', the first in a series of seven 'Sermons on the Subject of the Day' by The Revd Canon Professor Oliver O'Donovan FBA, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, University of Oxford and a Canon of Christ Church.

"Your treaty with death will be annulled, and your pact with Sheol will not stand" (Isaiah 29:18)

The notes in the text are hyperlinked into the end notes;
to return to the text, click on the end note number

Eighty years ago the poet Robert Frost penned an affectionately mocking portrait of his home state: endowed with every feature and advantage, it was proud of having nothing to sell, nothing "in commercial quantities". But did it perhaps have "an idea to sell" - like the man who once tried to persuade him to write a political pamphlet in verse? No, Frost declares unpresciently, as it now seems. "It never could have happened in New Hampshire!"[1]

In 2003 New Hampshire had an idea to sell. On all sides it was agreed, it was the principle of the thing. No one pleaded in defence of the consecration that, after all, the Anglican Communion could surely wink an eye at one gay bishop! What was on trial was quite simply a proposition: a divorcee in active homosexual partnership may be a worthy chief pastor of a Christian flock. Two years earlier a diocese in Canada had stepped forward, probably outside its legal competence, to enact another proposition: the church may solemnnize a same-sex union with a rite of blessing. In the subsequent row the two propositions have become inextricably associated; in the future, if the Anglican Communion has a future, they will need to be disentangled again.

What was implied in the propositions? What did they mean to say about the creation of Adam and Eve, about Natural Law and history, about principle and pastoral accommodation? The difficulty was that we did not know, and still do not. They had the virtue and the weakness of all political propositions: they may be read in many ways, with different interpretations put on them and different inferences drawn from them. In defending them the North American churches followed the counsel that it was wiser not to be too explicit. They spoke to the world about a "discernment" they had been privileged to make over a long time and from the grassroots up, leaving the ontology of the question strictly to one side.[2] The Windsor Report thought it surprising that the actions of the Canadian and U.S. churches were so unaccompanied by theological explanation or interpretative commentary.[3]

The North American initiative presaged a worldwide drought of trust and understanding in the Anglican churches, in which every spring of traditional affection seemed to dry up and the communion seemed near to death. At the Dromantine meeting of 2005 the Primates themselves declined to receive communion together. Responding to the emergency, the Primates' meetings of 2003 and 2005, together with the Windsor Report (2004) which they commissioned and endorsed, attempted to create a new kind of worldwide conciliar process, such as the Anglican churches had never had and had never needed before. It has moved painfully slowly, so slowly that some have wanted to declare it still-born. The Archbishop of Canterbury's measured statement of June 27^th, however, still shows a resolve to carry it forward in the wake of the resolutions of the 2006 General Convention of the Episcopal Church of the USA. Perhaps there is a cloud no bigger than a man's hand to be seen on the horizon. It is too early to be sure.[4]

The task these Sermons on the Subjects of the Day address is that of sketching in outline the content of a consultative endeavour still very difficult to conceive in detail. We borrow a title for this purpose, perhaps mischievously, from Newman's last published collection of sermons in the Church of England, which includes the valedictory "Parting of Friends". If the "miscarrying womb and dry breasts" with which Newman there reproached his mother-church, "to be a stranger to thine own flesh, and thine eye cruel to thy little ones", were a rhetorical extravagance on the part of one who had lost his sense of proportion, there are plenty who, with greater or less exaggeration, repeat the charge today.[5] Can we find an answer to it? That will certainly depend on the Anglican churches' ability to sustain a disciplined common deliberation about Christian life in the world. But to pave the way for that we must engage with the situation to which the churches have come in a manner that will strike some as polemical. To sketch broad lines of opinion, to subject them to broad lines of criticism, is a rough and ready business at best, and inevitably a contentious one. If the sketch is any good, some will see their opinions reflected in it; if it has any breadth, they will complain that justice has not been done to their subtleties. How can it be otherwise? I know no way of escaping the problem but to ask for just as much charity and fairness in return as my reader may think I have offered.

For it has to be said at the beginning: the crisis in Anglican Christianity is quite specifically a crisis in its hegemonic tradition and the manner in which it has managed and controlled differences in the past. The church's old habits of negotiating stubborn oppositions by synthesising them within a central, undogmatic stream of opinion - let us follow the convention and call the paradigm "liberal", without prejudice to any person or group claiming that title as their own - seem to have fallen away. When from as early as Queen Victoria's day British Prime Ministers preferred liberal bishops, it was because they seemed to be able to stop the church from falling apart; they seemed to have made a covenant with death and a pact with Sheol. They mediated effectively between antithetical dogmatic poles, catholic and evangelical, that marked the extremes of Anglican identity since the Oxford movement in the 1830's. In the late twentieth century it began to be apparent that this traditional spectrum might be reconfigured; what the New Hampshire crisis announced was that this had now finally occurred. The historically centripetal middle had become a new centrifugal pole.

Recent essays advocating a revisionist approach to homosexuality afford an interesting perspective on the present state of liberal Anglican thought.[6] It appears to be in deep denial: denial about the record of the past, denial about the traditional role of the Lambeth Conference and its authority, denial about the crisis of the present. (One theologian actually counsels us to deal according to the old proverb, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!") In deploring what the Primates have done, it offers little acknowledgment that the Anglican Communion is in sore need of doing something. There are times, of course, when it is the higher wisdom not to produce answers to every practical dilemma others thrust on us. Like a breach birth, a moral crisis may present itself from the wrong angle and need rotation before it can be brought into the daylight of a sensible answer. It may be that before the problems of the post-New Hampshire churches can be solved, a pas en arrière is required, a reopening of some questionable assumptions. But that defence is not available to those liberals who oppose that very strategy when pursued by the Windsor-Dromantine process. Stepping back, untangling the skein, reconciling conflicting views, toning down exaggerated positions, forging coalitions, squaring circles, finding commonsense ways through: the whole stock in trade of a tradition once defined by opposition to enthusiasm of every kind, seems to have been mysteriously wiped off the software. In its place are radical postures, strident denunciations and moralistic confessionalism. Here we are at Act One Scene Two on the opening night, and the production is already going badly: the scenery has collapsed; the villain has fluffed the lines that should have struck terror into the Upper Circle; the curtain has been down too long; the audience is restive. Surely it is time for the hero to appear, and the lovely heroine whose courage and beauty draws the crowds back to see the play a dozen times? And where are the well-drilled extras, who will keep them on the edge of their seats with a stunning display of hand-to-hand fighting? The producer looks around, nervously. Good Lord! There they are, up in the gallery, booing and catcalling along with the audience!

Religious liberalism is not an Anglican phenomenon alone, but a pan-Protestant one. "Pan-Christian", one might say, since Roman Catholicism has had two difficult engagements with its own liberals in the course of the twentieth century, one in the early years with the so-called "modernist controversy" about historical biblical criticism, the other in the post-conciliar period about the direction of moral theology. But the hegemonic character of liberalism in the Protestant churches has given it a distinctive profile, which deserves to be treated on its own terms. "Liberal" is a word with many uses, both intellectual and political, and its Protean polyvalence can create misunderstanding. Political liberalism and theological liberalism are animals of a single genus but different species. When qualifying a religious posture, "liberal" suggests independence in relation to spiritual authorities, scriptural, hierarchical or congregational. This distance may be no more than a questioning habit of mind, an independence of judgment that may lead back to a new and clarified recognition of authority. It may, on the other hand, be a deep alienation that fosters resentments that never quite proceed to an open breach. There is no way of telling apriori where on the spectrum of distance any "liberal" proposal will turn out to lie. It may be renewing; it may be subversive. The tree will be known by its fruits, and by nothing else. Yet in the lowering gloom of the Liberal Christian evening, we ought to begin by acknowledging the good that has been wrought in its day. No major theological voice of our age has failed to have its intonations deepened by what the Archbishop of Canterbury describes as its "habit of cultural sensitivity and intellectual flexibility that does not seek to close down unexpected questions too quickly."[7] For what we have received may the Lord make us truly thankful!

The story of theological liberalism could in principle be taken back a long way - certainly to the fission of the established Protestant churches in the seventeenth century, and perhaps to Renaissance humanism, even to Abelard. To understand the twentieth century, however, it makes sense to begin from the nineteenth-century attempt to reconstruct the expression of Christian doctrine by reference to ethics, the programme of "the primacy of the ethical", drawn from the Ritschlian school of post-Kantian theologians in Germany. The interests of this school lay with dogma, which needed adaptation to the scientific climate of post-Enlightenment civilisation. Ethics had "primacy", but only in the sense of being presupposed; it was the starting-point of the dogmatic enquiry. To the intelligentsia of this period ethical judgments seemed very much more certain than any credal formulation. Predestination, resurrection, the omniscience and omnipotence of God: each chapter in the catechism could be interrogated as to its expression of the noblest and highest ideals, and rewritten as necessary. Ethics afforded a criterion by which the truth of doctrine could be verified: "belief in truth of a special and practical kind...as life-truth, in its central and creative reality for our person, and not in its congruity with other truth...Christ did not come to teach us truth, but to make us true."[8] The ethical conception of truth was the essence of the modern; and this programme was ex professo "modernist", taking for granted that the highest and noblest ideals were being grasped and realised in contemporary history. Standing in no need of independent enquiry to verify them, they were immediately available to verify Christian dogma.

It has often been claimed that liberalism implied no special doctrines, but was merely a critical temper of mind. This claim was never quite untrue; but it is an important aspect of our current situation that it was never quite true either. Liberalism related itself to the traditional dogmas of the church and aimed to modulate them. Inevitably its methodology was reflected in an account of Christian belief with a distinctive shape. The inner shrine of the liberal Gospel was its attitude of respectful attentiveness to the world as it is. The term "incarnation", used without an article, speaks of this embrace of the world. This is something different from "the" incarnation, the historical birth of Jesus the Son of God from Mary, which has now become a paradigm or model for a conjunction of the human and divine to be effected in all times and places. The incarnation of the Word takes place continually. Being party to the positive conjunction of God and world is the specific form of theosis offered to believers in liberal theology.

In making this conjunction its object, liberalism assimilated a Protestant construction of Christian existence in missiological terms; in assuming it already present and needing only to be affirmed, it assimilated a Catholic doxological one. Yet the conception is neither Protestant nor Catholic. The eschatological frontier between this world and the next, important to Protestants, and the ontological frontier between the Creator and the creature, important to Catholics, are both collapsed. This world being the sanctuary of God's full self-disclosure, talk of a Reign of God can only be talk of this world projected, as it were, to its logical term. The present harbours no ultimate antithesis; it faces no final judgment. God's worldly self-disclosure may be seen as the dynamic of world history, as in the confident progressivism of an earlier liberalism, or simply as a series of disjoined intuitions, as in the existentialism that replaced it. But one way or the other the theological liberal looks to "see the hand of the Lord in the land of the living", and knows that when seen it will be stretched out in blessing, not in judgment.

A prime candidate for reconstruction among the classical doctrines was, of course, sin and judgment. Original sin, the understanding of the human world as lying as such under divine judgment, is replaced by resistance to mediation and reconciliation, tardiness over the opportunities of the present; judgment as the destiny of this world is replaced by a patience of divinity that can outwait the longest delaying-tactic. And here we encounter one of those important, but possibly misleading, intersections of theological liberalism with the political stance bearing the same name. "Sin is conservatism" is a thesis on which the two liberalisms could converge. Yet their approaches to the common thesis are actually quite different. "Conservative", for the political liberal, designates a determinate social order, authoritarian and non-reciprocal, inhibiting individual initiative and freedom, which merely happens to have prevailed at some point in the past; if the ebb and flow of history were to yield a new flood-tide for such an order, the political liberal would resist it just the same. For the theological liberal, on the other hand, the substantive content is indeterminate, and what is wrong with conservatism is precisely that it clings to the past, holding back in reserve from the God-destined character of the present cultural moment. At which point the distinctive character of liberal ecclesiology comes into view; for what can hold us back, if not the stubborn antithesis of church and world? The self-validating ethical convictions of modern civilisation are the final criterion for judging all else; they are the very image of God it bears anonymously as its birthright. Resistance to the image of God may come from any source, but most typically it comes from where the antithesis is most upheld, which is to say, the church. All that is institutional and naturally sluggish about the church is a standing problem, a regressive obstacle in the way of its incarnational mission. Ecclesiology begins and ends with the semper reformanda, the casting off of the fossilised deposit of an outworn past.

Of this thumbnail doctrinal sketch it will rightly be said that it shares the limitations of all thumbnail sketches. It represents an "ideal type", tending to caricature and corresponding precisely to the views of no one in particular. When this is conceded, however, it can play a useful heuristic role; it can help us diagnose the problem that has drained the hegemonic tradition of its strength. For there certainly has been strength in the programme of reviewing doctrine critically in the light of ethics. Hopeful attention to the present as the theatre of God's action has proved to be an absorbent and reconciling catalyst. Liberal thought in Anglicanism has woven itself in and through other strands of thought, balancing and qualifying angular postures and attitudes and so negotiating institutional Anglicanism's self-effacing way through the world. When the thread was strong, it knit the church together. Why, then, did it snap? Was it because of a a one-sided emphasis on reason, as critics have often said? Did it promote rationalism rather than faith seeking understanding?

My own analysis is rather different. If the antecedent for the programme of the "primacy of the ethical" is Kantian, it is not the Kant of the second critique, the critique of practical reason, into which liberalism never really ventured. Here lies the point of truth in the accusation that liberalism, far from being over-serious about reason, treats it "all too blithely".[9] If it is necessary for reason to think the true in the light of the good, it is no less necessary for it to think the good in the light of the true. An apriorist "intuitionism" in ethics, which, as one critic has well said, "wants to know too much about values, and to know it too quickly," cuts short the disciplines of discursive practical enquiry.[10] The liberal compact with modernity was ratified in the court of Hegelian idealism, and "Hegel," as Kierkegaard already observed tartly, "had no ethic".[11] Kierkegaard's account of the downfall of poor mad Pastor Adler, persuaded by Hegelian dialectics to think of himself as a prophet, might serve as an account of the crack-up of the liberal tradition as a whole. In the interests of finding the modern world God-enchanted, it closed down on the serious deliberation with which Christians ought to weigh their stance of witness in the world. Potentially world-critical questions were suppressed. Liberal moral commitments, though sometimes urged with a passion verging on outright moralism, were not steered from the helm of discursive enquiry, but set adrift on the moral currents of the day.

Among the early passages of arms between the sinking catholic and rising liberal powers in the second decade of the twentieth century, one minor but interesting one is recorded by Hastings Rashdall, a liberal of some note as a moral philosopher. "I was requested to give evidence before the Royal Commission," he wrote, "which has recently been investigating the question of the Divorce Laws in England. I ventured to suggest that the question was one upon which the moral consciousness had something to say. Thereupon I was severely cross-examined by eminent ecclesiastical authorities as though I were a setter forth of strange gods..." And from the vantage-point of nearly a century later one can only comment that Rashdall's gods look very strange indeed. The moral consciousness? By what right does the definite article, carefully detached from the Incarnation, attach itself to the collective moral judgments of the human race? Are we to listen out for a single decisive judgment of the human conscience, so pronounced and so unanimous that only crabbed churchmen and cantankerous academics will dare raise questions about it? That is a pretty remote proposition for the world that has come to supervene in the ninety intervening years! Here, as often, the conservatives of a past age had greater premonitions of the deeper currents, since they were more sceptical about the shallow eddies. That the twentieth century saw a recovery of a discipline of ethics in the Anglican theological tradition (absent more or less since the seventeenth century) was due not to liberal but to Catholic impulses.[12]

The relation of liberal Christianity to the modern world, then, contains a paradox. Turning, as all Christianity must, from contemplation of past and transcendent realities to consider how it must behave, it orients itself to a present world which has its primary meaning as our task, the challenge to our action. (That is the primary meaning of the present for us who live in it,at any rate; what meaning it may have for our grandchildren, who will look back on it as their past, is not ours to comprehend.) Yet liberalism fails to bring a critical practical reason to bear on the present world. In its pursuit of doctrinal reconstruction it treats the moral questions of the age as moral certainties, it views the indeterminate shapes of the present as sharp outlines. It may even imagine that in the present it can find some kind of speculative counterweight to correct a bias in past and transcendent reality. Instead of looking to the world as a frame within which to serve God and neighbour, it looks to it for a demonstration that in the past reality was misunderstood. Thus is crystallised the "modern world", an artificial entity with no existence in real time, achieving its dominion over thought only as we allow the world of action, for which we should have our loins girded ready for adventure, to be permafrosted into a world of pseudo-fact.

The tragic fault of liberal Christianity was to have no critical purchase on moral intuitions comparable to that which it had on doctrinal judgments. Precisely for that reason liberalism proved vulnerable when twentieth-century society began to be riven through with deep moral fissures. In affirming the world, liberal theology condemned itself to shipwreck on the same rocks where a unified modern civilisation broke up. Decolonialisation left it without a dominant moral tradition that it could claim as forerunner of the Kingdom of God. When economic self-interest and the emancipation of the senses became the solvent forces of the new West, unhappy Christian liberals struggled to keep the smile on their faces and suppress their instinctive repulsion. Comparatively late in the story, the tradition of theological liberalism reached for narratives of emancipation to give its cause fresh propulsion.

The older political-liberal narratives told the story of Western history as a story of constitutional complexification, dissolution of privilege, taming of autocratic government, and the economic and political equalisation of the classes. Their tone was complacent and gradualist. It was the post-war conflict with communism that first imparted a crusading note to political liberalism. As though to drown out the revolutionary trumpets of the East, Western society began to proclaim itself the site of an ongoing series of conflicts over sectional emancipations and inclusions. It was natural that this style of civilisational apologetics should have an appeal for Christians. There were some very good stories of emancipation to be told, testimonies to the liberating implications of the Gospel and the pastoral involvement of the church, the enormously influential struggle for civil rights in the USA, for instance, and the Latin American base ecclesial communities that gave new energy to Catholic witness in the face of poverty and economic injustice. These threw a lifeline to a floundering liberal imagination, offering a matrix by which the present could be presented as standing in perpetual judgment on the past, allowing the Western hegemonic tradition of modernity to re-brand its anti-conservative appeal. Whether the pastoral and missionary endeavours that inspired this rebranding were helped forward in any way by being put to this use, is a question we may leave aside. In grasping the lifeline, however, Western liberalism paid its price. From that point on, it became identified with one kind of moral cause to the exclusion of others. It became a church-party proper, a specific agenda to pit against other agendas.

Whether, if prevailing fashions of thought had been different, the emergent gay consciousness would have presented itself to the church as an excluded class in search of inclusion, is not a question that is possible to answer. What does deserve comment, however, is a persistent lack of fit between what gays find important about themselves and the role they are given to play in the emancipatory narrative. Gays do not always present themselves as natural liberals, since they represent a sectional rather than a universal vision. The specialness of gay experience is important to them. It was an insight into this logic that led the late Michael Vasey to insist that the natural discussion-partners for gays who took their own experience seriously were Christians of a more conservative stamp, for whom sex was also a matter of interest as such. The gay cause is grist for the liberal mill while it is in militant mode, for the mill processes victim-classes in want of a fair deal. But Proudhon's "Justice, nothing but justice!" is as restrictive on one front as it is empowering on the other.[13] It allows not the slightest observation on the aesthetic or emotional timbre of gay existence. To demand justice is to make this class like every other class, for justice is thought's weapon against arbitrariness. But when gay experience starts attracting interest and interrogation in its own right and for its own sake, its usefulness to the liberal project is at an end. For that raises questions that were supposed to have been settled long ago; it draws attention to the fragmentation of the modern moral world, and therefore to its insufficiency as a measure to judge the performance of the church.

Gays also pose existential questions. They interest themselves in the riddle of gay existence. Anexetastos bios abiôtos, said Socrates; the life that is unexamined is intolerable to live. And much of the gay Angst is to do with the difficulty of raising questions in public that seem overwhelmingly pressing when they directly concern oneself. The pastoral challenge that the gay phenomenon presents to the church, then, is not primarily emancipatory, but hermeneutic. And that is the supreme justification for a conciliar process that will take up the experience of homosexual Christians as its leading question. How is this form of feeling to be understood? What are the patterns of life with which it may appropriately clothe itself? As far as I can tell, it is deeply in the interest of gay Christians, men and women, that their experience - by which is meant not merely sexual experience, not merely emotional experience, and not merely the narrative of experience, but the whole storehouse of what they have felt and thought about their lives, should become a matter of wider reflection, reflected on by those who are called to live this experience, by those who are called to accompany them in their living, by all who share their understanding of living as something they owe an account of to God.

Ten years ago, an abortive attempt was made to open such a discussion by the authors - anti-revisionist in their assumptions - of the "St Andrews Day Statement".[14] Various aspects of the document ensured that its intentions were not well understood: its confessional structure, meant to provide an ecumenical rather than sectarian framework, deterred those more used to experience-based discussions; its reticence in saying things it wanted to treat as secondary encouraged critics triumphantly to uncover what the "real" point was, and so on.[15] What remains important about the attempt, however, was that it addressed questions quite specifically to gay Christians, not to liberals, and about the essentials of Christian faith. Long as the way might seem, these authors thought there was an exploration to be had, which, if undertaken in good faith, might yield a common discussion over what it could mean to be both homosexual and Christian. It appeared that Christian gays were not prepared for that discussion at that time. Fruitful gay self-interrogations in the secular world had not yet prompted gay believers to embark upon a comparable course. What is the situation today? Is the gay Christian movement still attached to the wheels of the liberal chariot, content with the victim-mentality that the liberal programme prescribes for it? Or can it present itself as the bearer of an experience of the human that is, at the very least, of irreplaceable importance for our understanding of our own times? Is it of age, able to speak for itself? On the answer to that a great deal may depend.

End Notes

The notes in the text are hyperlinked into the end notes; to return to the text, click on the end note number

[1] "New Hampshire", Collected Poems, London: Jonathan Cape, 1942, p.200.

[2] ECUSA Presiding Bishop's statement to the 2005 Primates' meeting at Dromantine.

[3] The Windsor Report, London: Anglican Communion Office, 2004, p. 30: "Neither the Diocese of New Westminster nor the Episcopal Church (USA) has made a serious attempt to offer an explanation to, or consult meaningfully with, the Communion as a whole about the significant development of a theology which alone could justify the recent moves by a diocese or a province."

[4] www.archbishopofcanterbury.org

[5] "The Parting of Friends", in Sermons, Bearing on Subjects of the Day London: Rivington & Parker, 1843, pp460-2.

[6] Gays and the Future of Anglicanism ed Andrew Linzey & Richard Kirker, Winchester: O Books, 2005.

[7] www.archbishopofcanterbury.org

[8] P T Forsyth, The Principle of Authority, London: Independent Press, 1913, pp4, 18.

[9] I borrow the happy phrase, though not much else, from Joseph Ratzinger, "The Church's Teaching: authority, faith, morals" in J Ratzinger, H Schürmann & H U von Balthasar, Principles of Christian Morality, tr Graham Harrison, San Francisco, Ignatius, 1986, p52.

[10] Jean-Yves Lacoste, Le Monde et l'Absence d'oeuvre, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000, p123.

[11] On Authority and Revelation, tr. Walter Lowrie. Princeton University Press, 1955, p129.

[12] Hastings Rashdall, Conscience and Christ, London: Longmans, 1915, p5. The story deserves quotation as a moment full of symbolism for the transition of an age: Rashdall's was the ecclesiastically rising star, but intellectually his style of moral philosophy was at the end of its influence, while the work of my Oxford predecessor, Kenneth Kirk, still lay in the future. One should, however, quote it with a frank admission that it hardly does justice to Rashdall's contribution. Can we keep our anger for ever against someone who was prepared to devote such careful attention to the moral teaching of Jesus of Nazareth - even if he seriously imagined himself (and everyone else) capable of estimating its true worth by the inner illumination of a moral apriori?

[13] P-J Proudhon, What is property? ed D R Kelley & B G Smith, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p15.

[14] For the text, see The Way Forward? ed Timothy Bradshaw. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997.

[15] Forseeing their risk of this fate, the authors hoped to avert it by warning readers not to look "between the lines". That, however, is where current fashions of "unmasking" have taught a whole generation of readers to begin and end their reading!