Liberalism versus Postliberalism

Abstract

The divide between liberal and postliberal theology is one of the most important and far-reaching methodological disputes in twentieth-century theology. Their divergence in method brought related differences in their approaches to hermeneutics and religious language. The split between liberals and postliberals in their understanding of religious language is widely acknowledged, but rigorous philosophical analysis and assessment of these divergent understandings is seldom seen. Liberalism vs. Postliberalism provides just such analyses, using remarkable developments in analytic philosophy of language over the past forty years. The book provides an original analysis of the “theology and falsification” debates of the 1950s and 60s, placing them in the context of developments in analytic philosophy of language out of which they arose. These debates then supply the philosophical lens that brings into focus the centrality of the issue of religious language in the methodological dispute between liberal and postliberal theologians in the latter part of the twentieth century. Knight argues that recent developments in analytic philosophy of language reveal serious problems with both positions. In the course of the argument, the author makes important recent work in analytic philosophy accessible to theologians, religious studies scholars and their students. This philosophical work clears the ground for a more inclusive method that takes seriously the aspirations of both liberal and postliberal theologians. The book thus makes an important contribution to contemporary theological method, to the understanding of liberal and postliberal theologies in their similarities and differences, and to our understanding of the role of analytic philosophy in contemporary theology and religious studies.

Linguistic Theology: Completing Postliberalism's Linguistic Task

“…In fact it is not clear that this leap can be made." 21 What Knight is denying is precisely the determining facts of language that I am here claiming comprise the ecology of human intercourse. The turn to language that marks postliberal thinking is to Knight an evasion of the atheistic challenges theology is better off facing head-on, not by turning to language but rather to philosophical realism in order to develop theories of truth based on reference to extralinguistic reality.…”

A Wittgenstein for Postliberal Theologians

“…Was it a matter of chance that the community found this reading "useful" for what it understood to be its "mission"? 102 These questions bring us to the second set of structural difficulties in Knight's account-a series of misunderstandings of Frei's theology.…”