Gary Dorrien has written an important three volume history of American Liberal Theology. I have begun reading volume one. It is a sympathetic read of this "tradition" as a tradition. Of course this is ironic for liberalism to admit -- it has always sustained itself on its claim to a universal reason that transcends particularistic traditions or at least to a certain pragmatic form of reason -- the best there is to date. But liberalism has been transformed in its most sophisticated forms today -- such thinkers as Jeffrey Stout readily acknowledge that liberalism has historical origins and an institutional means of transmission that is every bit as "particular" as other political/historical traditions.

Dorrien argues that liberal theology "in essence . . . is the idea that Christian theology can be genuinely Christian without being based upon external authority. Since the eighteenth century, liberal Christian thinkers have argued that religion should be modern and progressive and that the meaning of Christianity should be interpreted from the standpoint of modern knowledge and experience" (p. xiii). I think that he has hit the nail right on the head. While this describes theologians in the early 19th century such as Channing and Emerson, it describes as well the millions who identify themselves as Christians who do not participate in a partricular congregation or the constant founding of new "denominations" or "community congregations" or the steady movement from one congregation to another that would either facilitate a type of experience or support a more progressive (or conservative) political environment in the United States. We have met the liberals, and they is us -- or I should say, they is me -- except as I am remade in Christ by the power of the Spirit.

Liberalism, by its very nature, problematizes all authority in order to hand the authority over human bodies to the state -- itself an abstraction that runs, supposedly, by certain impersonal, rational rules. Rationality is set up as opposed to authority within a liberal frame of reference.

Of course, this is profoundly false; it is only accepted because of the authority that we grant to those formed by liberal convictions.

An Augustinian framework, as Alasdair MacIntyre describes it, much more accurately describes the situation in which we learn how to reason truthfully and well: "In the Augustinian scheme when I first believe in order that I may go on to understand, I do not evaluate evidence, but put my trust in certain persons as authorized to represent the apostolic testimony, something which I may come to do in many different kinds of way, none of which will be at the preliminary stage good-reason-providing, because I cannot as yet know how in this area to evaluate reasons as good or otherwise.. . . the apparent arbitrariness of this initial acceptance of authority is itself something that is to be adequately understood only later, and in that later understanding authority is reencountered in a very different way. . . . Continuous authority receives its justification as indispensable to a continuing progress, the narrative of which we first learned how to recount from that authority and the truth of which is confirmed by our further progress, including that progress made by means of dialectical enquiry" (Three Rival Versions, p. 92). One learns within authority in order to question authority to see if it is justified from problems that arise from within and from those outside a particular tradition.

This is why Christian theology and the church's life cannot be "progressive" without first a "return to the sources", a bodily immersion in the biblical, institutional, sacramental, authoritative life of the communion of saints through the ages. It is why any liberal justification for such authorities, collapsing their authority to an expression of a prior "inner, personal" authority messes things up -- for the authority is found in the external as it moves into the internal. It is the corrosive move "inside" versus "outside" that makes liberal Protestant Christianity very hard to sustain except as parasitical on groups who acknowledge an external authority (rightfully or wrongfully) but seek to accomodate more deeply to the mores of the liberal society.