The Limits of Liberalism

By William H. Willimon

March/April 1991

In The Nature of Doctrine: Theology in a Post-Liberal Age, Yale theologian, George Lindbeck notes that if you are a modern, Western Christian, you are a liberal. You may call yourself conservative or evangelical, but Lindbeck bets  that you are a liberal. That is, current Christian theology underwrites the sovereignty of the individual consciousness, the notion of individual rights, the subjectivity of truth, the suspicion of tradition and community, and a host of other values which are dear to classical liberalism. Particularly in our industrialized, constitutional democracy, liberalism is the air we breathe, the water we drink. If one is a United Methodist Christian, one is even more in the grip of liberalism. In our hands, evangelical experience degenerated into subjective feeling, personal engagement with the Gospel mutated into making up my mind about Jesus. Liberalism is us all over.

I have come to the reluctant conclusion that what we liberals believe, and the way we believe it, is incompatible with the Gospel. Contra most liberal preaching that I do and hear, being Christian is not synonymous with being a good human being. Jesus comes preaching a new way which is counter to  innate human expectations, a narrow path of life which does not come naturally. This Jew from Nazareth comes, not to express the highest of human aspirations, but to transform human aspirations, to refashion human thinking and action in such a way that necessitates conversion from our innate liberalism to a countercultural way of living called discipleship.

Liberals preach and teach as if this conversion were unnecessary, as if what’s needed is some minor fine-tuning of an already good personality, as if the Gospel makes perfectly good sense apart from initiation into the peculiar community (church) which makes it make sense. Having defined the individual as the most important human commodity, liberalism cannot understand what it means to be a church; a family; a traditioned, disciplined community which believes that wisdom comes, not by my expression of the best that is within me, but rather by my being transformed and detoxified by baptism. Believing that I am unaccountable to anyone but myself, it cannot understand what we mean by the notion of Scripture.

We bought into liberalism because it was the philosophy of the dominant new world order after the European Enlightenment. Determined to get power, we exchanged Gospel foolishness for worldly wisdom. When Jews or Native Americans would not forsake their traditions, their communities, their stories and integrate into our liberal societies and become “rational” (as we defined rationality as individual, detached, abstraction), we exterminated them. Liberal “humanity” was a means of imperialistically overriding everyone’s community, tradition, and stories in order to unify the new nation state. Now that this old order is being discredited, now that we have a better  understanding of the limits of liberalism, we can lay it aside and rediscover how much more interesting is Jesus than Kant.

William H. Willimon is dean of the chapel and professor Duke University , Durham, North Carolina