Okay, so you talked to a conservative. Now you want to talk to a theological liberal without being uninvited to a cocktail party. Here are five tips to help you when you are talking to a liberal.
- Tillich is the man
Seriously. What John Calvin is to conservatives, Paul Tillich is to liberals. Referring to Tillich in conversation gives you 3 liberal points.
- Love the poor. In fashion.
If you are a liberal you have to talk about the poor. A lot. However, the best way to talk about the poor is in your doctoral robes or fancy vestments with a glass of port. You want to care about the poor. But not enough to do more than complain about the evils of Capitalism. - Read a lot. But not the Bible.
Okay. If you are a liberal you need to read a lot of theology. You need to drop, on average, 1.8 names per sentence. However, don’t mention canonical books. You can only refer to theologians who write about the Bible (Marcus Borg, J. D. Crossan, Bart Erhman). Remember, if you refer to the Bible in any context except worship, you risk being accused of being a conservative.
- It’s important to be informed of current events
It doesn’t matter if you know the difference between Joab and Josiah, but if someone refers to the parliamentary election in Zambia and you don’t know about it, you might as well have slapped him in the face.
- Superiority is Supreme
The best way to be a liberal is to degrade all other views as completely untenable and oppressive. This is best done with vast amounts of name dropping that will degrade all opponents into a pile of quivering fundamentalists (That is so Rahnerian you, If you would only read DiNoia and Heim your paradigm might be tenable. But as it is, you are clinging to an exclusionary interpretation of extra ecclesiam nulla salus.). Throwing Latin in always helps. Your opponents will have no recourse but “I believe in the Bible.” At that point, you have permission to scoff.
You are killing me. These 2 posts are fabulous.
I think Tillich is considered really dated in most liberal circles, that said he is probably the only theologian, perhaps other than Schleiermacher that almost all liberals do hold in high regard. But he’s really not that popular anymore inspite of how influential he was. Postmodern theology in its various forms has turned his theology into a museum piece. That’s the thing with liberals -being forward looking they’re always looking for the latest thing to come along. Tillich is so 1950s.
The rest is pretty accurate from my point of view as a theological liberal, although Borg and Ehrman write pretty much exclusively for a popular audience and therefore are too mainstream to be “cool”, and Crossan, although he’s more scholarly is tedious and really hasn’t moved the discussion forward from where it was at the end of the 19th century. I wouldn’t call any of them a theologian properly speaking, and there are much more interesting Biblical scholars out there, Dale Allison and James D.G. Dunn for example.