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or professor, and is legitimated by claims of "freedom" and a trope of the "authoritarian irrational guardians" of outdated church tradition.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.