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Today I really "started" my sabbatical -- that is, I've finished all the smaller projects upon which I was overdue. I, of course, have been reading on the various projects, particularly trying to get a history of the development of scrolls and writing. But the actual writing and bulk of research time has been spent on three articles for Baker's upcoming "Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics" and two articles on process theology for a collection of essays for a book by Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City -- the Nazarene publishing house press.

I spent several weeks deeply immersed in process theology, and I'm afraid my assessment of it is even worse than I went into it. I find it really a form of what Conor Cunningham would call as me-onto-theo-logic where something comes from nothing -- a form of modernist historicism of the endless repetition of the new and improved that masks the fact that nothing really changes in the system. The process god, it seems to me, never makes it to the present or the future, but remains, in a real sense, a corpse of the movement of history confined to the immediate past. The neo-classical language of god's infinity and eternality is the eternality of absolute potential or abstraction -- in other words, no thing at all -- no actuality. It shows the interesting relationship between the concepts of nothing and infinity, and process uses this ambiguity to hide the fact that its dipolar god evacuates god into the result of the historical processes and pure eternal potentiality -- nothing.

Now I'm reading into Greek and ancient Near Eastern cultures. Walter Burkert has several works arguing that the Greeks developed due to its eastern most point that was able to absorb the higher culture of the near east, yet stay outside the destructive impulses of its imperial militarism. He locates the point of this influence from the 8th century through the fourth -- neo-Assyrians through the Persians. Of course, this undercuts a Hegelian dialectic between the "Greek" and the "Jewish" as Judah itself was very similar to Greece in its location within, but on the outskirts, of this colonial imperial powers. This interaction became deeply embedded in the life of Judah from the 8th century onward.

Tomorrow I plan to read about the shifting institutional structures of the 1960s and the formation of graduate programs in religious studies, along with digging more into the eight century BC. Also, I hope to dig out my Chronicles drafts and start heavy editing and composing. I hope to finish the genealogical sections by the middle of October.

Posted by johnwright at 8:23 PM | Comments (7)

As I've reflected on Dorrien's book, the story of Charles Briggs (of the Hebrew lexicon, Brown, Driver, Briggs fame) struck me as particularly poignant. The dynamics of his story are still very much alive today, it seems to me, as the church struggles between two forms of modernism/(post)modernism: the "conservative" versus the "liberal" that leaves commitments to the historical evangelical, catholic, and orthodox faith excluded from consideration. The "conservatives" and "liberals" legitimate each other by their dialectical opposition that allows an exclusionary framing of the issues. The institutional consequences for such framing of the options are equally devastating.

Dorrien covers the biography of Brigg's with a 34 pages discussion. Interesting, Dorrien wants to make Briggs a moderate liberal because he was attacked by Presbyterian inerrantists and Briggs defended historical criticism. Yet the data ultimately shows that Briggs was working with different categories than the dichotomy/dialectic with which Dorrien tells his story.

Briggs suffered a heresy trial at the hands of proto-fundamentalist Presbyterians who cast "orthodoxy" in terms of the utter inerrancy of Scriptures. "The first round of formal heresy accusations against Briggs began in April 1891, when the Presbytery of New York appointed a committee to determine if disciplinary action should be taken against its most prominent biblical scholar. . . . .The original accusation against Briggs, as formulated by an appointed committee of the Presbytery of New York, was that he had equated the divine authority of scripture, the church, and reason; rejected the doctrine of biblical inerrancy; and claimed that the notion of progressive sanctification was a biblical and church doctrine" (p. 361). Here is an attack by "fundamentalist" forces that ultimately succeeded, mistaking fundamentalism and the historic Christian faith in its biblicist foundationalist Protestantism. He survived the first trial, but was defrocked during an appeal. Such actions render fear of "fundamentalist" ahistorical orthodoxy that caricaturizes in a modernist direction making the absolute inerrancy of Scripture the touchstone of orthodoxy, rather than the confession of Jesus as fully God, fully human in one person.

Briggs saw this. "He later reflected: 'The Presbyterian Church was deliberately thrown into a panic about the Bible in order to defeat the revision movement and to discredit Union Seminary. I was only an incident in this warfare. Circumstances made me the convenient target on which to concentrate the attack. In all respects this conspiracy was successful. The revision movement was defeated; Union Seminary was discredited; and I was suspended from the mimnistry of the Presbyterian Church" (p. 366). One can find such a strategy, for instance, in the "Concerned Nazarenes". They detect something amiss, but merely invert the problem.

Brigg's opponents did see something happening in these "revisionists" but, in their fundamentalism, misplaced their stroke. Brigg's himself became disconcerted with the inverse liberal modernism that his faculty colleagues at Union went. Dorrien writes, "Briggs also witnessed the seminary's outright liberalization. He appreciated that Arthur McGiffert made his later career at Union ecclesiastically tolerable, but relations between them soured nonetheless. McGiffert was schooled in a later generation of German criticism than Briggs; his idea of an exemplary theological scholars was Harnack . . . He took it for granted that the gospel message - which Harnack called the dispensable 'husk' of the gospel 'kernel'--was not off-limits to historical-critical deconstruction. This generational assumption offended Briggs deeply . . . . He chafed at colleagues who did not share his high Christology . . . . By the end of his career at Union, he had acquired several such colleagues, a trend that was alarming to him. It made him fear that modern Protestantism had a self-destructive impulse. Near the end of his career, Briggs decided that he couldn't retire without issuing a formal protest to Union's board of directors. He told Francis Brown that he was going to press heresy charges against McGiffert. Fortunately for McGiffert and Union, Brown, who had become the seminary's seventh president in 1908, took his longtime friend aside and noted the absurdity of the situation. . . .Briggs back down and kept his resentment off the record. He could see where liberal Protestantism was going; he wanted to protest that McGiffert had already gone too far; he did protest that historical critics overstepped their bounds whenever they negated Christian dogmas" (pp. 369-370).

By framing the issue originally as "fundamentalist," Union became an example of liberal Protestantism's institutional self-destructive impulse: "The liberalization of Union Theological Semiary was important both in its own right and as an example of a trend. Under the leadership of McGiffert and William Adams Brown, Union Seminary became the flagship institution of a broadly Ritschlian, social-gospel-oriented movement for progressive Christianity. Liberal theology overcame its belated march through the institutions in the 1890s; upon getting through the door at Union and the keystone Congregationalist seminaries--Andover Seminary, Bangor Theological Seminary, and Yale Divinity School--it took barely a decade for McGiffert's generation to build a new theological establishment. . . . The transformation of Union Seminary was significant as an example of the liberal theology movement's penetration into denominations beyond its Congregational base, a development vital to the movement's ascendancy at the end of the century" (p. 369-370). Union, which moved back towards historical orthodoxy in the 1930s (though still never repudiating its underlying liberal commitments), today has lost its library, having sold much of it to Columbia. However, good news -- Union's dining room chef made it to the quarter finals of a "Chopped" contest on the Food Network!

Brigg's represented a movement of Ressourcement that was already at work in some aspects of late nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic Protestantism. I think that H. Orton Wiley participated in this same trajectory in his training -- beginning where Brigg's ended. In the end, Brigg's, I think, at least framed the issue correctly. "His last book, edited by his daughter in 1913, collected his lectures on symbolic. In it, Briggs proposed that there were three main options in theology. The first was the strategy of reaction, which imposed fossilized dogmatics of the seventeenth century on modern churches at the cost of perpetual theological warfare. The second was the radical strategy, increasingly prominent in Germany, which swept away all creedal statements and constructed syncretistic theologies out of a comparative story of religions, usually in the form of a speculative philosophy. The third way, infinitely better, was the 'wholesome Irenic" approach that sought to reunite the various Christian churches 'on the basis of the fundamental principles of Historical Christianity." The fundamental principles of faith are explicated in the creeds of the ancient church, he instructed. All 'legitimate decendants [sic] of Historical Christianity' adhered to the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds. The way forward in genuinely Christian theology was to employ modern critical understanding to interpret the unitive meaning of the church's authoritative creeds" (p. 370).

Academically, it seems to me that the modernist reaction has no real institutional freight today, though it remains a live cultural force that its inverse, theological liberalism, can invoke it to legitimate its own position and exclude the "way forward in genuinely Christian theology." Yet as we have seen, this "fundamentalist scare" is a trope deeply embedded within the legitimating rhetoric of Protestant liberalism despite the historical record of the institutional demise that comes with the liberal agenda. Perhaps Brigg's was right -- maybe Protestantism does have an institutional self-destruction impulse in the United States. Of course, this is exactly what I've argued in chapter 2 of "Telling God's Story" and in my chapter in "Conflicting Allegiances." Maybe that's why I couldn't sleep Sunday night after reading finishing Dorrien's book.

Posted by johnwright at 10:38 PM | Comments (2)

I finally finished volume 1 of Gary Dorrien's work on the origins of the liberal theological tradition in the United States. Dorrien's historical work is also an apologia for this perspective, and a call for a certain type of "moderate" liberal theological tradition -- what he recognizes is very hard to sustain because of theological liberalism's instability. The work is very useful in how this tradition overdetermines so much of contemporary church life in the United States; it also speaks unwittingly of patterns that continue to repeat themselves in the rhetoric and sociological movement within the American Protestant church life.

First, theological liberalism is very much a congregationalist phenomena in its origins. By collapsing theological authority merely within local church frameworks, even with some sort of confessional backgrounds, pastors make the historic faith local and "relevant" by accomodationalist positions. Authority is collapsed into the individual pastor or professor, and is legitimated by claims of "freedom" and a trope of the "authoritarian irrational guardians" of outdated church tradition. Local governance does not provide a thick enough historical grounding to sustain the grammar of the historical faith given to the saints. It is also why American liberalism began within local church and pastoral settings, with support of the academic institutions, before it commandeered control of academic institutions.

Second, liberalism justifies itself as a response to "orthodoxisms," particularly the determinism of Calvinist orthodoxy, and Enlightenment "rationalism" or "positivism." The rhetorical tropes makes liberalism sound "reasonable," not an accomodationalist move away from historical Christianity, but as its preservation to preserve it against its irrational, fideistic, fundamentalist defenders and its active antagonists. Dorrien exalts in this rhetoric that eliminates early Christian ontology as even an option. Dorrient writes, "From the beginning , liberal theology was a third way. It was not a radical, infidel, agnostic, or atheist, although it was routinely called all of these; liberal theology was both a morally humanist alternative to Protestant orthodoxy and a religious alternative to rationalistic atheism. It shared the humanistic moral impulses of modern rationalism (sic!!), as the guardians of New England Theology readily perceived, but it defended biblical religion in a manner that accorded with its image of Christ" (p. 399). Liberalism only makes sense as "mediating" when one constructs the two other pools in such a manner -- which distorts the whole Christian tradition, but provides a superficial historical analysis that rhetorical justification that Dorrien seeks.

Third, liberalism works best in a situation of a presupposed biblicism which it often shares. By keeping the issue of authority of the Bible rather than Christology as a starting point -- as in the Calvinist orthodoxisms -- it was relatively easy to caricaturize historical Christian confessions about Jesus in order to make Jesus representative of God's revelation rather than revelation per se.

Fourth, theological liberalism is deeply Constantinian in its fundamental commitments -- it subordinates the life of the church to the social morality of the United States which then functions as the people of God. I obviously had not read Dorrien when I wrote chapter 2 of my book, but the interpretive matrix offered there explains much of the underlying processes that Dorrien discusses. All of liberalism moves between a secularized version of the "covenant of grace" to a "social gospel" of the federalist covenant. It is an ethically very dubious movement, particularly in its constant legitimation of war in order to keep the United States as the moral light for the world in democracy.

Fifth, it caricaturizes or merely dismisses early Christian and medieval Christian thought as obsolete by importing its own presuppositions back onto early Christianity. Dorrien writes, "To the biblical writers and church fathers, there was no ambiguity about what it meant to say that God 'acted' or 'spoke' in history; the Bible uses these terms univocally, speaking of Gd in the same ways it speaks of human beings acting and speaking in space and time" (p. 406). This is an inexcusable caricature of the data, particularly as the early church worked out its fundamental grammar in its doctrine of creation ex nihilo, Nicea, and Chalcedon. It is constantly repeated throughout liberalism, importing theological shifts from medieval nominalism back into early Christianity.

When one strips back the historical and ideological rhetorical tropes, one sees the underlying commitments of liberal theology -- an ontotheological justification of modernist individuation and the Erastian subordination of the life of a congregation, no longer participating in the communion of saints, but isolated in time and space. As Dorrien describes the most prominent liberal pastor, Henry Ward Beecher, "The good news of the gospel is the triumph of spirit over nature as mediated by the example and teaching of Jesus. Under the influence of Jesus, the perfectly God-conscious redeemer, human beings are transformed into persons in right relation with God. To be saved is to experience the fulfillment of one's moral and spiritual personality through the triumph of the indwelling spirit of Christ over nature" (p. 402).

Dorrien's work is important if one reads past his biases -- I'd argue that you need to read my chapter 2 in "Telling God's Story" first!! Perhaps I'll take some times to show how the types that Dorrien isolates, particularly in "evangelical liberalism" continues so prominently today.

Posted by johnwright at 2:54 PM | Comments (5)

Sabbatical has gotten off to a bit of a slow start -- someday I'll learn that everything takes me four times as long to finish than I anticipate. I have written two articles for an upcoming Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics from Baker Press; I have submitted a proposal to the upcoming Wesleyan Theological Society meeting; and have read to continue work on the introduction to the postliberal interviews as well as trying to getting a feel for how the Greek world impacted Judah in the Persian period and how the east influenced the Greek world.

It has been very hot here, which makes academic work difficult. Tuesday night on the streets people were sluggish. The heat makes life much harder, from the smell of garbage cans and bodies, to various degrees of de-hydration, to a drain of energy, to the difficulty of sleeping.

Just for the record, I'm working today on the 2000 word essay on "Sanctification" for the Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics. I'm reading volume 1 of Gary Dorrien's The Making of American Liberal Theology as backdrop both for my articles on process theology and the postliberal book. I have Thomas Weinandy's book, Does God Change? with me, as well as Frank Matera's New Testament Theology: Exploring Diversity and Unity and, to round things out, Beate Dignas and Kai Trampedach (eds), Practitioners of the Divine: Greek Priests and Religious Officieals from Homer to Heliodorus. Hopefully I'll have some time to post more as the days go on.

Posted by johnwright at 12:14 PM | Comments (1)