Fulcrum is running the first of a seven-part series by Oliver O’Donovan, which promises to be a substantial diagnosis of the present environment in which the Church must offer its witness.
In this excerpt, O’Donovan describes the stance that theological liberalism takes towards the witness represented by the teaching of the Church:
‘For the theological liberal, on the other hand, the substantive content is indeterminate, and what is wrong with conservatism is precisely that it clings to the past, holding back in reserve from the God-destined character of the present cultural moment. At which point the distinctive character of liberal ecclesiology comes into view; for what can hold us back, if not the stubborn antithesis of church and world? The self-validating ethical convictions of modern civilisation are the final criterion for judging all else; they are the very image of God it bears anonymously as its birthright. Resistance to the image of God may come from any source, but most typically it comes from where the antithesis is most upheld, which is to say, the church. All that is institutional and naturally sluggish about the church is a standing problem, a regressive obstacle in the way of its incarnational mission. Ecclesiology begins and ends with the semper reformanda, the casting off of the fossilised deposit of an outworn past.
There certainly has been strength in the programme of reviewing doctrine critically in the light of ethics. Hopeful attention to the present as the theatre of God’s action has proved to be an absorbent and reconciling catalyst. Liberal thought in Anglicanism has woven itself in and through other strands of thought, balancing and qualifying angular postures and attitudes and so negotiating institutional Anglicanism’s self-effacing way through the world. When the thread was strong, it knit the church together. Why, then, did it snap?
In the interests of finding the modern world God-enchanted, the liberal tradition closed down on the serious deliberation with which Christians ought to weigh their stance of witness in the world. Potentially world-critical questions were suppressed. Liberal moral commitments, though sometimes urged with a passion verging on outright moralism, were not steered from the helm of discursive enquiry, but set adrift on the moral currents of the day.’
Oliber O’Donovan The Failure of the Liberal Paradigm
