The Passing of Postliberal Protestantism

When writers talk about postliberalism today, they primarily mean a political ideology that rejects classical liberalism’s emphasis on individual autonomy and freedom from tradition in favor of communitarian modes of social life. It has been a predominantly Catholic development and is today associated with thinkers like Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and Sohrab Ahmari. 

The “new” postliberalism of the past decade came as the “old” Protestant postliberalism was fading. Postliberal Protestantism emerged in the 1970s within academic theology, took off in the 1980s, and declined in the early 2000s. In “What Does ‘Postliberalism’ Mean?,” Rusty Reno reminded First Things readers that postliberalism was first a Protestant movement that shaped his own thinking before the term became associated with Catholic thinkers. 

Two of Protestant postliberalism’s remaining major spokespersons—Stanley Hauerwas and George Hunsinger—are in their eighties. In fact, many mainline theologians still writing academic and systematic theology in conversation with Christian tradition have been influenced by postliberal Protestantism. Theologians like Katherine Sonderegger, Kathryn Tanner, Ephraim Radner, and Joseph Mangina represent the end of its influence as a distinct school of thought. 

I recently saw Princeton Theological Seminary’s planned celebration of Hunsinger’s life and work this coming September. Sonderegger and Mangina are two of the many speakers. It reminded me of the importance of this movement, and how its final breaths reveal where Protestantism has been and where it’s going. 

Protestant postliberalism came from the postliberal age of the 1970s, yet another child of the conservative backlash to liberalism’s excesses. Its death will remove the final barrier keeping postcolonial and liberationist theology from taking over mainline seminaries, making what Gary Dorrien called the crisis of liberal theology even more acute. 

A Postliberal Age

When the father of postliberal Protestantism, George Lindbeck, subtitled his 1984 book Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, he was echoing what scholars and pundits had been saying since Richard Nixon assumed the presidency in 1969. 

In the decade from Nixon to Reagan, America had entered the “postliberal era” in which the old political and economic liberalism of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society came under attack. Despite some scattered references prior to 1970, the term postliberal became popular as a description of a new political and cultural moment before it migrated to the theological realm.

“Postliberal” initially meant a populist shift in the United States. Nixon’s 1968 victory came through the emergence of the so-called Southern strategy. Kevin Phillips coined the description Sun Belt, a region from Florida to Southern California, to describe a new voting block that combined retired northerners who moved south (snowbirds) with southerners and westerners. This new coalition was a reaction to a host of liberalisms from the 1960s, and hence it came to be viewed as something “post.”

The new populism also included a new spirituality. The Jesus Movement, the New Charismatics with their dominance of religious television, and the Religious Right were all part of it. Martin Marty used postliberal to describe what he saw. According to Marty, these groups “tend to be ‘post-liberal,’ and have given up trying to reform the world on a massive scale.” They wanted national change through local renewal. The focus on the local and the particular was an important part of what was “post.”

Marty’s statement was part of a four-part series (“Second Thoughts About Man”) Time Magazine ran in April 1973 to describe developments that challenged the prevailing wisdom of liberalism, rationalism, and scientism. Pentecostals, Charismatics, and Southern Baptists became examples of postliberal populism. 

Such populism was pushing back against Harvey Cox’s vision of God as present in the secular in The Secular City (1965). Thirty years later, Cox acknowledged his misdiagnosis when he wrote Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (1995). In the sixties, however, Cox was sure the urbanism and individualism of the secular city was the new religious landscape.

The new religious populism also fueled a shift in political and economic policy. After Nixon was elected to a second term, the historian Lloyd C. Gardner published a book on Nixon’s reversal in policy with the subtitle America’s New Foreign Policy in the Post-Liberal Era. Political commentators started to observe a move away from the social programs and foreign policy of the Great Society. Nixon’s resignation after Watergate did not stop the move away from political liberalism.

Writers also described the Carter years as postliberal. Jeffrey Hart wrote a syndicated column in May 1976 on “Jimmy Carter: A Post-Liberal, New Era Politician.” By postliberal, Hart meant Democratic political candidates who no longer deployed the strategies of political liberalism from 1940–1970. Candidates were liberal who still tried to operate out of the New Deal coalition. He concluded, “Of course, Carter could turn out to be Mr. Affirmative Action or Mr. Big Federal Agency. Right now, however, his grasp of political reality is firm, and he is riding toward the Democratic nomination as the post-liberal politician of the new era.”

Hart was in the phalanx of the new intellectual conservatism. A professor of English at Dartmouth and Nixon speechwriter, Hart became Catholic in 1969 and joined William Buckley’s National Review as senior editor. He allied with Catholic and Jewish intellectuals against the secular academic and political left.

In an interview that went into syndication on October 31, 1978, the godfather of neo-conservatism, Irving Kristol, said that the liberal agenda had run its course and that “we are now in a post-liberal era.” Kristol went on to say that America had entered a period where people wanted stability more than anything else—economic, political, social, and international stability. Kristol’s remarks were part of a debate about whether there was a postliberal conservative renaissance or a neoconservative backlash. Both turned out to be the case.

These references to postliberalism in the 1970s described a movement beyond the old liberal consensus in religion and politics. The spiritualities of the day diverged into New Age, evangelicalism, fundamentalism, and Pentecostal-Charismatic, yet all were populist phenomena with a hunger for transcendence. These developments merged with a movement toward the center among the political left so that postliberal, neo-conservative, and the so-called “new right” were different sides of the same cultural shift. Many commentators described the 1970s as the dawn of a postliberal era that would last at least through the 1990s. 

The Seeds of Postliberal Protestantism

The postliberal migration from a political and cultural descriptor to a theological one was aided by two events in 1974 that altered the landscape of Protestant thought. The first was Hans Frei’s Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.  The second was a draft set of statements on theology and American religion that Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus circulated among theologians and scholars. These events cultivated the soil within which a Protestantism that saw itself as evangelical and catholic, and therefore postliberal, took root.

In the winter of 1974, Neuhaus and Berger composed a list of things that irritated them about mainline Protestant theology. Although initially for their own amusement, they shared the draft with colleagues. The enthusiastic response led to a small meeting of Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic scholars at the Hartford Seminary Foundation in January 1975. This meeting produced the “Hartford Appeal for Theological Affirmation,” which was subsequently signed by the participants and published. 

The Hartford Appeal had an immediate impact. It identified thirteen problematic themes (sometimes called the Hartford Heresies) with modern theology. Central to these themes was a deemphasis on divine transcendence due to modern theology’s concessions to culture. Neuhaus and Berger picked up on the populist thirst of transcendence that Time had identified, and responded with a program of American ressourcement of Christian theology. These concerns made space for traditionalists who stood between the religious right and the radical left. 

Writing in support of the appeal, George Lindbeck framed it as part of a paradigm shift in Christianity. His essay was the second in Against the World for the World: The Hartford Appeal and the Future of American Religion (1976), which Neuhaus and Berger co-edited. Lindbeck, drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, argued that the appeal rallied scholars to resist the turn against theology in the Christian tradition. 

He wanted a robust theology that could meet the ecumenical moment, rather than an anemic approach that centered cultural concerns. He eschewed both the evangelical right’s focus on propositions and the radical left’s primacy of human experience, instead  arguing for a return to the evangelicalism of the Protestant Reformation and genuine catholicity. The battle for theology was on.

Several scholars supporting the Hartford Appeal took aim at a group of scholars associated with Chicago Divinity School. They singled out Langdon Gilkey, Schubert Ogden, and David Tracy as representative of the errors of modern theology. The Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade, who also taught at Chicago, hovered in the background. Eliade’s comparative approach to religion and his focus on myth as symbolism preserved the sacred at the expense of transcendence. 

Those in the “Chicago school” revised Christianity in light of secularism and identified God with the world. This was religion in the secular city as Cox described. In this reckoning, God was the presence or power within, the divine lure that moved things rather than the transcendent being who stood above and beyond. 

Hans Frei was Lindbeck’s colleague at Yale Divinity School. His Eclipse of Biblical Narrative argued for a renewal of pre-critical interpretations of scripture that took the biblical text seriously as a unified narrative rather than a patchwork of pericopes stitched together from different sources. This narrative and literary approach to biblical interpretation was reinforced by Frei’s colleague Brevard Childs, who was developing a “canonical” approach to scripture in which the final literary form of the text mattered most.

Frei, Lindbeck, Childs, and David Kelsey helped form a new approach that would come to be known as the “Yale school.”  These theologians adapted Barth’s emphasis on transcendence, promoted ressourcement, and emphasized narrative rooted in culture and transmitted by the church. Early graduates of the program at Yale like Stanley Hauerwas (1969) and William Placher (1974) would become part of this new approach. While Frei and Lindbeck set the agenda for postliberal Protestantism, it was carried out by their students. 

Postliberal Protestantism was part of a conservative resurgence in the 1970s. This resurgence did not mean that Lindbeck or Frei suddenly became politically conservative, but they formed part of the intellectual renaissance among Christian intellectuals who had rejected American liberal theology. In looking back on Hartford, Rich Mouw noted that it endured in the coalition of scholars it formed—all of whom made their presence felt over the next three decades. 

Postliberal Protestants were part of that coalition through men like Stanley Hauerwas, who attended the Hartford meeting, or Lindbeck ,who wrote in support of it. They were part of the postliberal era in which many attempted to shed what Lionel Trilling had once described as the “liberal imagination.” In their case, the “post” meant moving beyond liberal theology by rooting the Protestant Reformation in a common catholic tradition, carried forward through the narrative of scripture declared by the church. The impact of postliberal Protestantism may be found there. 

The Final Guardrail

In one of the final exchanges between the Yale school of postliberalism and the Chicago school, William Placher answered James Gustafson’s questions on the nature of this seeming exotic animal called the postliberal. As an old-school Protestant liberal, Gustafson had grown weary of hearing stories of returns to orthodoxy. What was this animal, he wondered? Was it a form of evangelical Protestantism or a form of neo-orthodoxy?

Gustafson asked such questions because mainline Protestant pastors were writing about a return to the story of scripture and taking the faith of their parishioners in that scripture seriously. To the liberal mind, this could only be a step backward, a reversal into a fundamentalist enclave. Did postliberals really think God revealed himself in a unique way in Christ? Placher’s answer was a simple, “Yes.” 

Placher characterized postliberal Protestantism as rebuking the demythologizing of scripture by Rudolf Bultmann and Process theologians. In other words, postliberal Protestants were against what Chicago Divinity had espoused for most of the twentieth century. 

Postliberals held that if something was true, it was universally true, even if one came to know that truth through the particularities of culture and history. While other religions may have insights, they do not substitute for the particularity of Jesus Christ as the revelation of God to humanity. The biblical story must absorb the human story, not the other way around. This also meant that Christianity had a unique relationship with Judaism that it could not abrogate. Jesus’ particularity meant Jesus’ Jewishness. 

Lindbeck said he was going to write an Israel-like view of the church. While he never wrote the monograph, he penned a biographical essay on the topic in which he declared, “More and more I have come to think that only the postcritical retrieval of such classic premodern hermeneutical strategies can give due weight to the abiding importance of Israel (including contemporary Judaism) and Israel’s scriptures for Christians.” Returning to the narrative of scripture meant returning to the centrality of Christ as understood through the lens of the Jewish scriptures. 

These features of postliberal Protestantism meant, according to Placher, that it avoided the biblical and theological illiteracy he found among ministers in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Because of such illiteracy, these debates devolved to the language of contemporary politics. 

The most significant impact of postliberal Protestantism was its preservation of an evangelical catholicism within the mainline. Some of the students from the Yale school became Catholics while others tended the mainline Protestant vineyard with a rigorous theology that took scripture and tradition seriously. 

When Princeton Theological Seminary celebrates George Hunsinger as “Evangelical, Catholic, and Reformed,” it will double as a celebration and farewell to this school of thought. With the final guardrail removed, what will remain within the liberal Protestant theology of the mainline? While there are important exceptions, these three broad areas dominate:

Stay tuned.