TNT: Liberal Master Class

No, no: I'm saying TRIPP's dogs, Pebbles and Dino, are more religious than us all!

Just to be clear about the relationship between Hegel and Schleiermacher, Hegel makes this comment concerning his dog and Schleiermacher's notion of feeling not because he entirely disagrees with him. Just the opposite. Hegel states in his lectures on the philosophy of religion that Schleiermacher has the right STARTING point. Rather, the comment itself is a part of their ongoing feud: Schleiermacher has Hegel invited to Berlin because he states that, if they were going to have to have a speculative philosopher in Berlin, then they may as well have a good one. Hegel was the best in Schleiermacher's mind. However, he vetoed Hegel's application to the academy of Sciences in Berlin because he saw no scientific value in speculative philosophy. Hegel's dog comment is his funny (and embittered) response, not a serious intellectual critique.

I hear ya Travis! I got them in the quiver too. This was more of a intro to liberal theology so I wasn't touching on all my other interests and such. Of course you are welcome to suggest more topics for future TNT.

Oh yeah, got a little John Calvin and John Howard Yoder in my theological make-up, too.

Great podcast! I finally got around to listening to it today. Still not sure if I would consider my own theology to be classically liberal or not. My theology is a mixture of Barth, Luther, McLaren, and Rich Mullins.

1. I'm not too savy about putting together the blog thing, but maybe i'll figure it out soon enough so I can post stuff. This would be despite my joy of creeping around in the comments like a blog stalker. 2. The question about content rests exactly on the pervasive use of Kant that perhaps has a tendency to reconfigure the exact divine content of transcendence in Christianity. Schlieremacher has a tendency to paint divine transcendence like an "omnipresent-pneumatic-pressure" that bears upon the consciousness of human subjects in their passivity. Post-Kantian views of transcendence seem to have this tendency to construe God according to the recognition of divine sublimity evacuated of the content of trinitarian relations, the transcendentals of beauty, truth, goodness and being in order to "make room" for greater variation in views about the Christian God. Such establishes the ever-controversial practices of "symbolism" used in liberal theology to account for the language us Christianity without succumbing to its ontology. It is only from this it seems that Schleiemacher can put the trinity in the appendix. Kantian views of transcendence as the noumenal reflexivity to the subject of the infinity of reason and freedom confines the immanence to an openness to --well--itself and its own capacity for reason. Such transcendence can perhaps be construed as keeping the form of Christian openness to transcendence without also supplying the content; namely, the uniquely Trinitarian extasis into and out of the divine persons, which is extended via analogy within Jesus' condescension to creation via incarnation etc. This content, I suppose, is too much for the boundaries of liberal theology (existing as its seems to within at least some of the guardrails set up by Kant) to account for. Of course, I'm not saying it wants to account for that kind of specific content. That is, predictably, one of my critiques of the methodology of theological liberalism in general. But I think some would say that the "broadening" of the capacity for transcendence (thus establishing it as rather indeterminate) is, from the liberal perspective, a good thing. I suppose I disagree with that.

yo brandon. thanks for the listen and comment. just to clarify, i was mostly trying to get liberalism out in its own terms. personally i was not trying to claim it as described. the notion of a living tradition at the end im home in. i would take hegel over kant when picking the modern philosopher for types of liberal theology (but that's not too much of a surprise for a pannenberg and process fan). the other stuff you mention about readings of particular people is interesting but clarifying or arguing about that is painful on a blog. ill just say that schleiermacher gets a bad read from hegel and they have more in common than hegel acknowledges. what is unique about schleiermacher is how he uses passivity in his anthropology not that he talks about it. his use was new because it presumed kant. hope that clarifies, im not trying to diss the moravians! now i am not a post-liberal fan at all. my anti-duke ACC basketball issues may have contributed to it but......any way, I'm interested in what you meant when you said "There is just too much content to Christianity to fit within the liberal form." What does 'content' mean or refer too? The general answer for those under the influence of Lindbeck drives me nutts. BTW, you write these huge comments on blogs and i read them. that means i would read your actual blog! (peer pressure!!!)

This was a fun podcast, which really helped me to distinguish myself from the approach you guys authentically hold when it comes to liberalism. I suppose I would first mention that Schleiermacher was not the first to articulate the open passivity of human agents to divine receptivity. But you guys know that. So, I'm not sure if that is much of a hallmark from his work. However, I would have thought that you would have critiqued this posture of experiential passivity, which according to Hegel, meant that his dog was the most religious being on the planet. Hegel pretty much hated Schleiemacher, likely because of his inherent Pietism. To that degree, I agree with Hegel. I'm also a post-liberal, which means I have a problem, not just with the theological claims, but the methodological presuppositions of internal experience as a (foundational?) ground for theological reflection. Such experiences are an effect of language and practice, and not its cause. Which leads me to understand why the liberal reduction of theology to ethics (which was Bonhoeffer's experience of American theology when he visited Union) is a product of Kantian demarcation of reason's grounds and, thus a limitation on the claim Christians can make via contemporary epistemology. This is, of course, why post-liberals question the motivations and authenticity of modern epistemology in general; namely that Kant (and Schleiemacher) felt well and good limiting the authoritative position of the church while enhancing the authority of the state, for which Schleiemacher's curriculum schema of seminary education was meant to serve (not much has changed.) At this point the reduction of theology to ethics, for which liberals are critiqued, is not just materially, but methodologically different from the post-liberal or neo-anabaptist prolegomena of witness as the practice of theological ethics. In this sense however, (and in a rather Wittgensteinian sense I might add), Christianity as a set of practices is a not a reductive claim, but a normative one for all formations of community virtue, Christian or not. Moreover, the liberal problem of reducing theology to ethics has its source in the inability to make the revelation of the grace of Christ uniquely!! intelligible within a closed off natural framework or an indeterminate "openness to transcendence." There is just too much content to Christianity to fit within the liberal form. Such is also a product of viewing freedom negatively (liberally) as the absence of constraint lingering from Kantianism. Alternatively, the post-liberal starting point of ethics (read witness) has as its presupposition the unique revelation of God in the fully divine and fully human Christ, which substantiates the role of the church to perform the same witnessing function, bearing with it the extension of grace that reveals to us our sinfulness. The former does vapid ethics by limiting Christology to a posture of interiority, while the latter performs ethics as a public witness of truthfulness and exteriority of Christian practice. So I think your critique of "reducing Christianity to practice" must have dealt with the problems of liberalism and not the centrality of practice in post-liberalism, though it seems like you would have to critique that as well from your position. I'm glad you mentioned the liberal schematic term "antimodern" "counter-modern" etc., which is perhaps an overdetermined way of saying that resourcement theologies are critical of Kant on the material level and see him as a hindrance. Barthians, of course, sustain the German Idealist scaffolding to enhance the non-Kantian articulation of revelation while RO would simply love to eradicate neo-kantian thought from the Christian map. I am sympathetic to this since I fail to see the allure of sustaining something like "things in themselves" in order to relativize social, political and linquistic reality. Such reality is already relativized, which then forces the appeal to noumenality to figure as a covert and pre-discursive residue of foundationalism. The same is true, I take it, of the noumenality of indeterminate interior experience found in Schleiemacher. So, it would seem that terms like "countermodern" is modern theology's own way of sustaining the status quo of reducing theology to the demarcation of the social and hard sciences, granting those methods the platitude of "theological neutrality" that they definitely do not deserve.