It has been over fifteen years since I wrote the first version of this book.1 These years have seen a good number of significant changes in my life. On the personal side, I married a person of a religious background different from my Mennonite one. My wife is Jewish and we keep a (modern) Jewish household. I also became a father for the first time, which has given me a sense of personal investment in the future I didn’t even know I lacked before the blessed event. Professionally, I left religious studies and retrained in clinical social work. I was affiliated for a number of years as a group specialist in an in-patient, psychiatric institution, then for some five years more in a hospice setting, where I practiced individual and family therapy with dying people. Most recently, I have been teaching clinical social work on the graduate level. When I wrote the first version of this material, my intention was to address the professional lay audience, educated in fields other than theology. I write now as one fully part of that audience. It is a distinctly fortuitous opportunity to take a mid-career look at what was written fifteen years earlier, to see what has held up well and where my mind has changed. I find that the basic approach has held up well. It has allowed me to move with my most deeply held values and convictions into contact with people of quite different beliefs, there to seek understanding and to interact therapeutically, even on occasion pastorally, all the while maintaining a mutual respect for their beliefs and mine. The changes I notice in making these revisions are mainly those of emphasis rooted in further experience. In the original introduction, I situated this volume in conversation with philosophical deconstruction. I suggested that the American religious tradition imbibed deeply at the well of pluralism and pragmaticism almost from its inception, and that deconstruction was therefore hardly the scandal on the American religious scene it had been in some other areas of learning. I say with some confidence that deconstruction is now more or less forgotten, and we are free to resituate this revision into different conversations. I initially chose to characterize my reflections as "postliberal." My use of this term can best be understood in relation to the classical Protestant liberal theology of the nineteenth century. Although in my college and seminary training I had been taught quite pointedly the many errors of classical liberal theology, I subsequently came to deeply appreciate at least one of its central interpretive theological principles—that the proper study for human beings is the human being. That is, when we human beings think about our spiritual experiences, giving voice to that aspect of our individual and communal life in the language and rituals of religion, that language and those rituals themselves become the proper object of further reflection, telling us mainly about the ways in which we human beings navigate and make sense of our world. The enduring, legitimate criticism of classical liberal theology had little to do with this interpretive principle. Indeed, a number of liberal theology’s central projects, for example, the concern to sort out the human Jesus of Nazareth from the magisterial Christ of Christian theology, although shelved for a generation or two, have returned to occupy a primary place in current spiritual quests. We are again being invited to meet the historical Jesus for the first time.2 This clearly indicates that although classical liberal theology had many problems, it also touched on very pivotal and long-term human spiritual concerns that cannot be ignored. This realization alone should cause us to reconsider liberal religious thought in a more positive light. Karl Barth and others turned away from liberal theology because of the First World War. They rightly were scandalized to see their own professors and teachers line up behind their respective nationalisms, offering their religious blessing to the soldiers of both sides marching off into the first of many major, prolonged killing frenzies that came to characterize the recently passed century. Their criticism is valid and is part of the heritage passed on to subsequent generations. But those of us trying to make sense of life spiritually as we move now into the twenty-first century have seen that the neo-orthodox approach of Barth and others also had clay feet. We watched a good many of our American Neo professors and teachers as they blessed the soldiers marching off to the Second World War, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf. We watched as they constructed theological justifications for American and NATO nuclear weapons policies, in general playing their horns in the Cold War band, cheerleading for American Capitalism against the socialist Evil Empire, or asserting the national right to Middle Eastern oil reserves. Yet while the reflections I offer here have definite affinities with the classical liberal religious style, it will also be clear that these reflections are formulated on this side of (especially) Reinhold Niebuhr’s criticism of liberal individualism, its optimism about human nature, its faith in the innate moral goodness of people, and in the inevitability of progress in human history. To the extent that nineteenth-century liberalism is associated with modernist style of consciousness, therefore, the reflections I offer are definitely postmodern. I am uneasy with the label postmodern, however. Its meaning is extremely liquid and it has become something of a fad term. To the extent that postmodernism describes a style of consciousness, my sense is that we are only beginning to see this consciousness developing and have little idea of what is really occuring.3 I remain satisfied, overall, with the term postliberal to describe my approach. Postliberal contains echoes of the anthropological starting point taken over from classical liberal theology. At the same time, it reminds us that we are moving beyond that liberalism, incorporating the enduring aspects of Niebuhr’s criticism of liberal optimism about the goodness of human nature and the inevitability of cumulative, beneficial progress in human history. Postliberal as I used it was modeled after John Macquarrie’s use of the term and was a conscious attempt to invite parallels especially with Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr’s views, most particularly with Reinhold Niebuhr’s view of the human condition.4 As a former student of John Howard Yoder, I experienced the Niebuhr brothers as sort of the bogeymen in my ethics training. I have been in the process of critically reappropriating the views of the Niebuhrs since my seminary days. Now that I have come to be living right in the same physical location in which the brothers were raised, the ongoing conversation is more intimate than ever. During the past decade or so, however, the term postliberal has come to be used almost exclusively to designate the cultural-linguistic theory of doctrine offered by George Lindbeck.5 While some echoes of agreement with Lindbeck’s ideas are present in my reflections, I clearly had the Niebuhrs and not Lindbeck in mind in my use of the term. On the whole, I agree with Gordon Kaufman’s evaluation of Lindbeck’s work, that there are implications in the cultural-linguistic approach for progressively critical religious reflection that Lindbeck does not explore.6 Hopefully, I have at least begun to explore some of these implications in this work. In deference to the current use of postliberal to designate the approach of Lindbeck and his students, I relinquish it for the purposes of this revised edition of my book. The interfaith perspective was present in my original work, but my sense that it is of absolutely central importance for responsible religious reflection has grown more strongly during recent years. The unavoidable cultural context for all religious reflection, in America to be sure, but also now globally (and with increasing urgency after 9-11-01), is the very real situation of thorough religious pluralism. This situation of extreme pluralism, in which ideas increasingly compete for acceptance and validation in a free market, can be disorienting and even threatening to traditional religious belief. Much traditional belief tells us that there is but one truth in life, and strongly implies or teaches overtly that those who do not hold that truth should not be experiencing love, joy, meaning, happiness, fulfillment, and confidence of connection with divine transcendence in their lives, at least certainly not in equal measure as those who do know and believe the one truth. Yet all of us have come to see that this expectation is clearly not true. Evidence points to the premise that many paths, both spiritual and secular, yield living fruits of love, joy, meaning, happiness, fulfillment and a sense of divine connection. Likewise, persons following many paths appear to experience personal, family, and social dysfunction (the fruits of sin) in about equal measure. These easily verifiable observations must give any thinking people pause before they plunge ahead insisting on the universal and exclusionary absoluteness of the Truth of their own particular spiritual path. Perhaps it is my American pragmatism that places these observations front and center in my spiritual reflections. Pragmatism suggests that human thoughts and actions are motivated by the tension created between our needs (in the broadest sense—including physical, mental, psychological, and spiritual aspects of our being) and the environment that must satisfy those needs. We think and act to reduce this tension. In this case, there is a clear tension in what we observe and what our traditional culturally fashioned religious beliefs predict should be the differences between those who know and believe the one Truth and those who do not. This tension spurs us to thought and action. In the case of the many varieties of fundamentalism, this tension spurs thought and action in the direction of hunkering down all the more tightly to the received tradition, either by refusing to see what is now clearly in front of our eyes in the lives of our neighbors, friends, work associates, fellow PTA members, or by turning up the volume on apologetic special pleading that compares the best examples of one’s own tradition with the worst examples of other traditions. This fundamentalism is, at best, a holding pattern. It does not create forward movement for our tradition or for the human project. As a parent, I have been working hard to instill in my toddler the simple notion of the Golden Rule, one of the most basic axioms of civilized communitarian living. Do to others the same thing you want them to do you. If you expect something from others, then they have the right to expect the same from you, and you have the obligation to return to others anything that you have asked of them for yourself. Unless I am ready to insist that my spiritual path is exempt from this basic rule of civilized, communal living (and I am not), then this pattern, in light of observations above, sets the parameters for an interfaith approach to spiritual reflection. That which I expect for myself as I attempt to communicate what I have found—respect for my Truth, willingness to listen with ears that are open, sympathetic consideration of the best of my tradition rather than only looking for the worst of it, generosity of spirit and tolerance for the human foibles that creep in and tarnish our message, I must be willing to give in full measure to others.7 In this cultural context, interfaith religious reflection can never assume a position other than that of dialogue on all matters with which it concerns itself. The evangelical position that biblical faith is somehow qualitatively different from and superior to all other religions (as I was taught in my denominational seminary) lacks this basic generosity of spirit.8 I have come to see more powerfully than ever that writing of a religiously reflective nature must be judged not only by the clarity with which it communicates material within its own tradition, but also by the generous respect and charitable attitude of dialogue with which one can approach the teachings of other traditions from within the frame of reference being offered. The best approaches will not only have allowances for (optional) dialogue with other traditions. They will actively encourage reaching out for such dialogue. That is a central guiding principle in what I present here, in both the affirmative ideas and in the tentative criticism I offer of aspects of my own tradition. At the same time, as I hope will become clear, I do not accept the completely relativistic conception that all religions are equal, the same, without qualitative distinctions that can and should be applied to evaluate and criticize the manifestations of religion in specific contexts. Special notice should be made at this point of another guiding principle in my reflection. We do have a general obligation to allow the truth of other faith traditions to function critically for us. But as Christians, living in the wake of 2000 years of Christian history, we have a specific mandate, duty, and requirement to root out and finally erase the poisonous remnants of Christian anti-Judaism that continue to linger in our teachings about God, Christ, redemption and salvation. As James Carroll (to cite only one recent writer on this subject among many others) copiously documented in his book, Constantine’s Sword—The Church and the Jews, this tradition of anti-Judaism extends back to the earliest years of the Christian era and by now is deeply entangled in nearly every aspect of Christian Scripture, belief, and doctrine.9 It will undoubtedly take many generations of consciously informed will to remove this deforming toxin completely from Christian teaching and ideology. It has been a guiding principle in what I present here to have done the best I possibly could not to pass on in any way this tradition of Christian anti-Judaism.10 If I had not done at least this much, then it would have been better had this book not been written at all. The same should be said of any other creative work of contemporary Christian thought. I specifically characterize this writing as religious reflection. This is an intended communication of what the book contains. As I mentioned above, I left the field of religious studies to retrain in clinical social work. I no longer consider myself a specialist in theology. Whatever theological reading I can squeeze in here and there is very unsystematic, guided much more by whatever happens to catch my interest than by an attempt to keep up and stay abreast of currently breaking material in the field. I remember in my seminary days how annoyed I got at the students training for congregational ministry who would inquire sharply and early in any investigation of some theological question, "Is this of any use in the pulpit?" In other words, what is the concrete, practical value of placing so much intellectual energy into this question? At the time, I saw this as inexcusably anti-intellectual. Now, at this juncture in my life, although I ask a somewhat different question (my question is directed toward the concrete value an argument or concept has in helping people sort through the existential issues of meaning and purpose in daily living), I must admit I have joined camp with the ministers-in-training. I quickly tire of theological discourse that seems removed from concrete living, smacks of arcane intellectualism, and is directed only at other specialized scholars. I might say that this is one more example in my life illustrating the Jungian observation that we tend to acquire exactly those characteristics and traits in later life that especially annoyed us in others when we were young. Ironically, some of those congregational ministers-in-training have by now become academic theologians and continue to annoy me, now from the other side! One of my intended points of communication, therefore, in choosing to characterize this material as a reflection is to signal that it is not a work of specialized, academic theology, neither in method nor in content. I make no claim to be current on any front in theological studies and fully accept in advance the criticisms of theological specialists who will be offended that I exhibit no acquaintance with this or that writer or line of argument. On the other hand, I do hope that the use of this term indicates that I intend to offer serious, disciplined reflection. As an educated nonspecialist, I do think about what I believe, about my living faith, and seek to make this faith comprehensible to myself and to others. My goal in this volume is not to exhibit my skill at touching all the theological bases, but rather to invite the reader to reflect upon, to think about, the ways the conceptions of our religious faith are shaped by some of the sociocultural, historical, psychological, and spiritual forces present in our society, and to step back from these influences long enough to get some handle on understanding the specific forms these beliefs take within our specific individual and collective context. If I am even remotely successful in this, I think the value of the book will speak for itself, despite its obvious vulnerabilities to the criticisms of theological specialists. Although it is not in my title, I also want to explicitly place my reflection in the context of a growing movement of "progressive Protestantism." The progressive Protestant perspective is more difficult to define exactly, but it might be possible to outline a few basic principles that communicate a general idea of what I have in mind. A book by Robert McAfee Brown,11 The Spirit of Protestantism, comes to mind when I think about what I mean by a progressive Protestant perspective. Brown presented Protestantism as a positive concept rather than primarily a protest against, and specifically endorsed theologian Paul Tillich’s notion of the "Protestant Principle." Aware of the human propensity for rendering absolute loyalty to partial realities (in short, idolatry), the Protestant Principle designates a determination to always move beyond such loyalties whenever and wherever they are recognized, even when these claims to absolute loyalty are made in the name of the church itself. One of the principles of progressive Protestantism is a keen recognition that such claims are regularly made and encouraged in the name of religion, including the Christian religion. As one of Mennonite background, I see in the sixteenth-century representatives of the so-called "Radical Reformation," as well as in seventeenth-century Quakers and others, a clear expression of this Protestant Principle. I am proud to place my general views in direct historical line with this Radical Reformation tradition. One of the enduring beliefs I gained from my Mennonite upbringing is a thoroughgoing commitment to an ethic of pacifism. My own struggle with the question of authority, in religion, morals, ethics, and psychological and spiritual life in general, began in earnest as I determined to work through a consistently pacifist approach to religious understanding. Pacifism here is shorthand for an embracing a commitment to live peaceably in the broadest sense—living peaceably with fellow human beings, other species, and with the environment. It is a style of living that does not assume conflict between self and others inevitably includes violence, and therefore does not prepare for violent conflict in advance (especially by arming oneself). If violence should occur, primary energy is then directed toward reconciliation rather than revenge. My continuing goal is to construct a frame of reference for spiritual understanding in which commitment to pacifism is fundamentally integrated into the frame of reference itself, not simply one option among others for an isolated ethics tacked onto the end, long after the real spiritual drama has already occurred elsewhere. While I do not claim to have fully succeeded in this goal, I am pleased to offer these reflections as an interim account of where I am heading.12 I have come to see that pacifism is finally anarchistic in relation to questions of authority. Authority is decisively a question of power. Pacifism is by nature skeptical of power. In an earlier attempt to present an anarchistic theology,13 while I think I was successful in formulating a theology of anarchism, I was ultimately unsatisfied with the results because I was appealing to a specific, biblical source of external and transcendental authority for what I was writing.14 The question of authority is with me at every point in these pages. Although I have by no means solved this problem of authority for religious reflection, I have become increasingly confident of the idea that authority must reside with the author. Religious reflection is similar to the writing of a poet or novelist, in that it employs words creatively, constructing a mental picture that invites others to experience their world in new ways. The author hopes readers will find in this new perspective something of value for their daily living. A measure of success in such a piece of writing is whether, in fact, readers find in their appropriation of the text new ways of perceiving their world of experience. One final point should be made explicit. While the synthetic work of social anthropologist Ernest Becker is certainly present in the earlier version of this book, during the intervening years I have engaged in a much more in-depth study of Becker’s work15 and for the past few years have been pursuing that study with people in a variety of fields across disciplinary boundaries.16 I am confident that in his theory of generative death anxiety, Becker was onto something at the very heart of human motivation.17 Becker himself died of cancer, in 1974 at age forty-nine, soon after he outlined the basic theory. During the past two decades, laboratory testing of the social psychological aspects of the theory of generative death anxiety, which now includes testing in at least four countries and across the age and socioeconomic spectra, has been showing the theory to be robust in predicting subject behavior in response to controlled stimuli.18 That fact probably carries more weight with social scientists than with others, but it should indicate to any thinking person that this is a theory of human motivation worth serious respect and consideration. In a (necessarily very succinct) nutshell, the theory of generative death anxiety suggests that self-consciousness and the ability to think abstractly (that is, to think of oneself in the third person) creates a very peculiar problem in human beings. Humans share with all successful species a strong instinct for survival. Yet human beings alone (as far as we can tell) are cognitively aware that death awaits each one of us. We are a species in which our key survival mechanism (our tremendously developed cerebral cortex, which helps abstract thinking and the creation of a personal sense of self) runs directly counter to one of the strongest and most pervasive instinctual urges possessed by all living beings—the urge to survive. This awareness of mortality potentially creates an all but overwhelming sense of anxiety with which each of us must live from a relatively early age. Were we continually conscious of our vulnerability and the real dangers this world presents, we would be stunned and unable to act in our environment. Therefore, this anxiety must be repressed, and in this repression we have the beginnings of the distinctly human dynamic psychology. In short, the energy cooking away in the human subconscious is at root not simply sexual, aggressive, accumulative, mimetic, or acquisitive (to name only the best-known theoretical alternatives proposed by various schools of depth psychology). These are understood, rather, as particular, culturally formed manifestations of an even deeper generative death anxiety. Most of the creative and forward-moving action we maintain in human existence is deeply motivated by the desire to deny human mortality and earn assurance of immortality by proving ourselves worthy. Likewise, as will be seen in chapter two, most of the evil human beings perpetrate on themselves individually, on their families and immediate others, in groups, as societies, and against the environment can be best understood as driven by obsessive pursuit of immortality projects (at various levels of abstraction) in ways compulsively blind to corrective evidential feedback. This is as clear a description of human sin as can be produced from within the analytic categories of social science. In his final summation of his theoretical work,19 Becker concluded that what he had been up to all along was a criticism of social science from the transcendent, ethical perspective most often associated with religion. He saw that his project was essentially the same as that of the great Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich. The difference was that Tillich was working from the side of religion-approaching-social-science, whereas Becker saw that he had been working from the side of social-science-approaching-religion. This establishes, I believe, the appropriateness of placing Becker’s theoretical work in such a central place of my religious reflections. My hope and expectation is that responses to these reflections, from critics and fellow travelers alike, will take the foundational theoretical work Becker provided into proper account. —Daniel Liechty Reflecting on Faith in a Post-Christian Time orders:
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