Many regard “postliberalism” as a political program. In 1993, when the tide of globalized liberalism was at its highwater mark, the contrarian John Gray published Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought, the book that brought the word into currency. But it was not political philosophers who first used the term. In the 1980s, I studied theology at Yale University. Many of my teachers and fellow graduate students called themselves “postliberals,” drawing on the suggestive subtitle of George Lindbeck’s quirky and influential 1984 book, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. We used “postliberal” to signal our dissent from the liberal tradition in theology.
Although I have not done enough research to be confident in my judgment, I’d venture that “liberal” first entered the lexicon in reference to German theology in the early nineteenth century, just as “postliberal” was first used in theological circles. The term “liberal” refers to the conditions under which a Christian intellectual operates. In the early nineteenth century, government ministers of religion oversaw theological faculties at German universities. Liberals in theology sought freedom from official oversight. Research and reflection were to answer to academic standards, not to governmental or ecclesiastical norms.
Free in this way, liberal theology took up modern historical methods for the study of the Bible. Modern modes of thought, such as romanticism and German idealism, were used to reframe Christian doctrine. These innovations were not undertaken to weaken or undermine faith. According to proponents of liberal theology, the inherited faith was narrow and superficial. The use of modern methods and contemporary idioms would renew and deepen Christian faith and practice. Christian self-understanding would become more historically accurate and intellectually responsible, more contemporary and relevant, more personal and authentic.
My teachers at Yale were trained in the liberal tradition of theology. But they harbored misgivings. They noted that university-based biblical study had shifted its subject matter away from what is written in the Bible toward what is “underneath” or “behind” the text. For example, scholars became experts in “ancient Israelite religion” or the “Johannine community.” My teachers recognized that the ideal of “intellectual responsibility” was suspect. Too often it meant chasing after academic fashions. The quest for “relevance” bleached out the distinctive and supernatural elements of the Christian message. Perhaps most decisively, in the last decades of the twentieth century the mainline Protestant churches that were guided by the liberal tradition in theology became spiritually flat and increasingly moribund. Long before Patrick Deneen penned his influential book, my teachers judged that when it came to theology, liberalism had failed.
For these reasons, “postliberal” had an important negative meaning in my years of study at Yale. It signaled a loss of confidence in liberalism as a theological project. And because the central premise of that tradition is freedom from authority, to one degree or another, we were drawn in the opposite direction. Our goal was to be less inventive, less original, and less modern in our thinking, and we pursued this goal by being more docile to tradition. We sought something new to us, and quite radical, given the general spirit of modern culture: “thinking under obedience.”
After I received my degree, I taught theology for two decades. Although most of my work remained within a theological frame of reference, I reflected more broadly on the cultural prestige of notions such as creativity, originality, open-mindedness, and especially “critical thinking.” These cultural and pedagogical ideals are still around. They make a promise akin to that of liberal theology: Creativity and originality will enliven society and make our lives more meaningful. Open-mindedness will allow divergent views and opinions to enrich our reflection. Critical thinking will protect us from bias and deliver us from the narrowness of our social and historical backgrounds.
But here, too, liberalism has failed, or so it seemed to me during my years as an undergraduate instructor. The ideal of open-mindedness led to superficiality. Creativity was an invitation to navel-gazing. Critical thinking produced the intellectual enervation that comes from the implicit message that all truth is historically or culturally relative.
As the educational failures of liberalism pressed upon me, I began to see a larger context for postliberalism. God alone deserves our uncritical love and devotion. But the promise of obedience applies to many aspects of life. If we will but give ourselves to what we love, we will enter more deeply into its life-giving power. That’s true for marriage, it’s true for our vocations, and it’s true for the life of the mind.
I’m not someone who reliably remembers a great deal of what he reads. For this reason, I can only guess that my reading of Martin Heidegger and John Henry Newman as a young professor in the final years of the twentieth century instilled in me a suspicion that the culture of the West had undertaken a dangerous experiment. To a striking degree, we dismiss the promise of receptive obedience and seek to rely entirely on our capacity for independent invention. We believe only in the ideals and sentiments that have fueled the liberal tradition, not just in theology, but also in education and culture more broadly.
There are many ways to explain the origins of this remarkable turn against obedience. The standard Enlightenment narrative is one of progress. We have left behind stultifying inherited authorities, and now, for the first time in history, we are free to live in accord with nature and reason. There are other, less triumphalist accounts. The great German sociologist Max Weber coined the term Entzauberung, or “disenchantment.” He observed that the sacred authorities that once beckoned us to obey have lost their power. In a godless era, we have no choice but to embrace the implicit nihilism of making our own meaning.
In Return of the Strong Gods, I do not tackle big questions about the origins of modernity and our condition of disenchantment. I focus on the events of the twentieth century, which, I argue, led to the dominance of creativity, innovation, transgression, and “openness.” But the winds of change are blowing. The open society—a creature of the liberal tradition—has failed. Old imperatives are reemerging, those of protection, conservation, and consecration. Old sentiments are reasserting themselves, those of love and devotion, loyalty and obedience.
Forty years ago, I found myself among the rebels against the liberal theological tradition. My teachers did not formulate a programmatic alternative, but they were clear-minded about the failure of liberalism in religion. And they were aware of the ways in which the intellectual culture of the West had come to dead ends, also under the influence of liberalism and its rejection of the promise of obedience. In subtle and sometimes exasperatingly indirect ways, they pointed toward a way of being in the world that is different from what liberalism seeks to midwife, a form of life guided by authority and obedience.
Today, thoughtful people wonder whether liberalism has failed in public life as well. That suspicion is sufficient to earn them the label “postliberal.” With suspicion of failure comes reflection on alternatives, however partial, however tentative. As was the case for my theological mentors, those alternatives depend, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, on the restoration of authority and the rehabilitation of obedience—the return of the strong gods.
Like my teachers, I cannot put this return into programmatic form. And like them, I hope I have the wisdom to recognize that what comes after liberalism will not be liberalism’s antithesis. To be postliberal is not to be anti-liberal. The negation of what has failed does not limn an alternative. For example, my teachers did not reject historical-critical study of the Bible. Rather, they urged me to read Scripture and pay attention to the words. Today’s political task is similar. I see no reason to reject the First Amendment. Rather, we should read the book of nature and pay attention to the depth and scope of our humanity, which is not exhausted by the very real and important role of freedom. And note well, freedom cannot be secured by rights. It, too, finds its power and importance in the perennial call to love, honor, and serve.
