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Subject: What Postliberals Believe?


Author:
Clement LO
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Date Posted: 11:56:04 03/31/05 Thu

(From David Ford, <> (2nd edition), Ch. 18 "Postliberal Theology", p. 344-345.)

From a postliberal perspective, Liberalism seems to seek a foundation for its truth-claims in wider cultural norms or universal human experience.

Postliberal theology has a number of interrelated characteristics:

1. It is non-foundationalist. Like a number of recent philosophers (Quine, Sellars, Rorty, for example), postliberal theologians reject the claim” that knowledge is grounded in a set of non-inferential, self-evident beliefs.” They believe that experience always come already interpreted. The way I experience the pen on the table, let alone the cross on the altar, is shaped by my language and previous experience. Therefore I cannot evaluate my beliefs by checking them against some primordial, uninterpreted experience.

2. It does not engage in systematic apologetics. Postliberal theologians will make ad hoc connections with the philosophy or art or miscellaneous experience of the cultures around them, but they do not believe in any non-Christian framework, philosophy or cultural, set the context in which Christian claims must be defended.

3. It attends to the differences among religions, rather than focusing on the things they have in common or trying to argue that they are all saying the same thing. Postliberals believe that “in response to the generous impulse which often prompts people to harmonize the doctrines of the world religions, that understanding one another does not always lead to agreement and that respect for one another does not depend on agreement.”

4. It emphasizes the scriptural stories or narratives by which Christian identify God and the Christian community and come to understand their own lives. In contrast to approaches which seek to pull a doctrine or moral lesson out of the story as its “real meaning,” postliberals insist on the irreducible importance of stories which convey truth and preserve communal identity in a way that gets lost if we try to find what they really mean and then discard the stories.

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Re: What Postliberals Believe?Clement LO13:45:49 03/31/05 Thu


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