As an academic in an institution of Christian higher education, I've come to recognize how delicate a task it is to sustain the institutional commitment academically. The story of the accomodation to liberal categories that drain the intellectual resources of the church in exchange for a type of social prestige has well been told by persons like George Marsden, James Burtchaell, David Gleason, and David Schindler -- stories presupposed by my analysis in Conflicting Allegiances. It is

It is interesting, however, to find the resurrgence of Protestant liberalism today -- what I was convinced was dying ten years ago. The impetus comes from several sources, it seems to me. One is the continued movement of evangelicals into liberal categories under the guise of their pietism -- their "relationship with God" -- language found at the basis of Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith. One finds it in the new evangelical leadership that is rightfully trying to separate itself from the neo-conservative captivity of the evangelical church under the Bush administration. It provides a means for a common language with the culture that allows the church to sustain a certains status in the culture.

The second strand, however, comes from "post-secularists" -- persons who have found the banality and inconsistency of an utterly secular, materialist understanding of life. As meaning and reason evaporate -- forced into a position of grounding reason in unreason such as power or survival of the fittest, post-secularists reach to a certain "religious" understanding to justify their own continuing quest. One can find such a position in the Italian "soft nihilist" or "weak being" philosopher Gianni Vattimo, who exhorts the rediscovery of Schleiermacher via Joachim of Fiore. Such a post-secular movement towards the language of "religion" provides legitimation for the evangelical movement in the same direction. One can picture Oprah inviting Rick Warren to set on her coach and talk about the transcendental purpose of the individual human life discovered in their inner spiritual experience.

What is ironic is that such a move seems futile for both evangelicals and for the post-secularists (and Roman Catholics who move that way as well). Liberal commitments are parasitical on other formations; they are unable to sustain their own habits across time. Jule Reuben in The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transofrmation and the Marginalization of Morality (University of Chicago Press, 1996) tells this familiar story. She writes, "I also show how liberal Protestantism contribued to its own demise. Particularly damaging, in my view, was liberal Protestants' tendency to equate relgion with morality, and the vagueness and inclusiveness of their rhetoric. Nonetheless, I do not think historians can show that liberal Christianity, rather than science, was responsible for secularization. The development of liberal Christianity was simly too intertwined with science. To understand the secularization of intellectual life, schoalrs will have to examine why liberal Christianis could not successfully incorporate science into a Christian framework. My research suggests that this had as much to do with changing conceptions of science as with the shortcomings of liberal Christian thought" (p. 14).

Of course, given that "science" provided "truth" and Christianity "meaning", of course Christianity would have to change with the changing conceptions of science in order to mediate Christianity to its cultural despisers. Once surrendering its role as the organizer of human knowledge, Christian theology could only play a correlational, mediating role. The key is not to return to an evangelical biblicism in its own correlational attempts with modernists understandings of history, but to a strong articulation of the Christian event, Jesus Christ, as witnessed to in Scriptures and in the life of the church, particularly in its early, normative years. It is through a discovery of catholicity, the communion of saints in Jesus Christ, that the proper context for the intellectual and congregational life of the church must find itself.