The History of Christian Theology

Lecture 32: Protestantism after Modernity

of human experience when it is in fact a speci¿ cally Western interpretation

of experience based on the Christian piety inculcated in his religious

upbringing. Hence the crucial irony is that the Liberal turn to experience

depends on experiences inculcated by dogmas it does not accept. The Liberal

strategy for saving Christian belief from modern critique is thus dependent

on the residual elements of Christian tradition that remain in modernity.

The Revivalist evangelical traditions also rely on an appeal to experience

that is dependent on the persistence of cultural Christendom in modernity.

Revivals are phenomena of modern Christendom in that they have always

been directed at people whose religion was Christianity but who did not

have saving faith. The emphasis on the “Spirit’s leadings” in contemporary

evangelicalism is vulnerable to the same dynamic as Liberal theology: The

experience is Christian only to the extent

that it depends on scriptural doctrine that

is no longer being taught in the churches.

Modern traditions treat the authority

of traditions as irrational, and then

postmodernism points out that modernity

itself is a tradition. Modern traditions

contrast reason with authority and

tradition. Tradition means knowledge

and skill handed down from generation

to generation, for example, language, culture, art, science, and religion.

Authority means the expertise of a teacher whom young learners must ¿ rst

believe before understanding, while in the process of acquiring the skills

and knowledge that make them members of the tradition. Modernity, as

represented especially by the 18th-century Enlightenment, conceived itself

as coming of age, no longer under the tutelage of authority and tradition.

Applying this philosophy to modernity itself generates a crisis, for modernity

is a tradition that regards tradition as irrational.

The recognition that modernity is a tradition, which is at the heart of

postmodernism, leaves two options, which can be called left wing and right

wing. Left wing postmodernism assumes modernity is right—that tradition

is inherently irrational—which means modern claims to universal reason

Modern traditions treat

the authority of traditions

as irrational, and then

postmodernism points

out that modernity itself

is a tradition.