CONSERVATISM AND LIBERALISM, THEOLOGICAL

Application of these largely political terms to theological statements may be justly resented; yet they will be used, and the attempt must be made to see why and to see how they might be used responsibly. Expressions like "liberal" or "conservative" are especially susceptible of polemical use, and quickly degenerate into labels that are not accurate and should rather be avoided than pursued.

In the measure that theological teaching, however, reflects and affects the spirit of an age, it seems to prompt classification as conservatism or liberalism. "Conservative" and "liberal," then, do not describe theological statements or positions themselves, but rather refer to the way those statements may relate to the spirit of an age. Given that initial clarification, it is fair to say that a liberal theological stance will tend more to accommodate current intellectual movements, while a conservative posture will tend to find them alienating or threatening to theological sanity. Each position, if it is to make genuine theological assertions, must represent itself as carrying forward an authentic tradition; yet they will differ in the strategies employed to elaborate that tradition.

The differences may so polarize them that representatives of either group will come to caricature the other's position polemically. A liberal will be tempted to accuse a conservative of unwillingness to risk a nostalgic attachment to the past by confronting contemporary issues, and a conservative may look upon a liberal as one so anxious to adopt current outlooks that he cares little about the richness of the common heritage. Once these polemical uses have been invoked, the expressions "liberal" and "conservative" quickly become labels and lose descriptive force.

To classify liberal or conservative tendencies in theology with some accuracy, however, calls for attention to the earlier observation: these terms describe the ways in which theological assertions relate themselves to the surrounding intellectual currents. Thus a theological liberal will be prone to distinguish expression from substance and to regard a particular doctrinal expression as culture-bound and thus subject to revision. By contrast, a theological conservative will note how expression in words and in practices so often carry the substance of the matter that they cannot easily be revised without altering the sense of what is being passed on. Because theology is logically tied to a tradition and because traditions develop by a judicious mixture of change and of continuity, theologians will always be divided into conservatives and liberals. Furthermore, the surrounding intellectual currents may shift so that an individual may find himself in one camp or another at different times in his life.

The relatively fixed use for "theological liberalism" refers to a 19th-century movement that sought to accommodate the Scriptures to historical method in such a way as to meet current criteria for scholarly rectitude; Schleiermacher offers the most notable example. Until rather recently the tendency would have been to label Catholic counterparts "Modernists."

Bibliography: j. hitchock, Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism (New York 1971). m. novak, The Open Church (London 1964). f. schleiermacher, Brief Outline of the Study of Theology (Richmond, VA 1966).

[d. burrell]