Liberale Theologie heute – Liberal Theology Today. Edited by Jörg Lauster, Ulrich Schmiedel, and Peter Schüz.

Abstract

Liberalism has so many forms and appears in various manifestations in different disciplines and areas of life: economics, ethics, philosophy, politics, religion, theology. Beyond that, its forms are shaped geographically too. Neo-liberal economics might play out relatively uniformly in terms of global capitalism, but religious and theological liberalism can be very different in the USA when compared with Europe. And then European liberalism is not a single thing. To talk of ‘liberalism’ at all, even in theology, as if it were possible to capture it in any sense as a narrowly definable, identifiable phenomenon, may be doomed to failure. This collection of essays, which began life in a conference in Munich in 2018, finds 31 writers (24 men, 7 women; 22 writing in German, 9 in English) reflecting from different perspectives on liberal theology’s past, present, and future. After a short scene-setting editorial from Jörg Lauster, the book is divided into four unequal parts. The first offers six international perspectives (five of the essays in English). Gary Dorrien fuses the work he has done on both liberal and liberationist theology, with Hegel as a constant conversation partner, to provide a bracing beginning. It is sobering to be reminded by a well-known academic that he ‘came through the door of social activism’ and ‘was a solidarity organiser’ long before he became a cleric and an academic (p. 20). Scandinavia (meriting two essays), the Netherlands, and England are European case studies. Mark Chapman’s chapter on the English scene could perhaps have made a slight nod towards forms of liberalism other than Anglican. Further afield, Sung Kim poses the question whether liberal Christian theology can be found at all in Asia, though sketches ways in which it might yet be fruitful.