Postliberal.

The term "Postliberal" gets increasingly used these days.  Since I have used this term to define myself for many years, I find myself both amused and alarmed to hear how some secular writers and politicians use it now.  For one thing, I understand that Sen. J. D. Vance describes himself this way.  Since I don't have a whole lot in common with him, I felt a need to get to the bottom of this language.

I have considered myself "Postliberal" since college, from which I graduated in 1977.  So this is not a new thing.  In reading books like The End of the Modern Age by philosopher Allen Wheelis, I came to the conviction that the whole civilizational framework that has dominated the West, and then the world, since the so-called Enlightenment in the 1600's, had basically ended.  Something else would take its place which people began to call "Postmodern."  In seminary and later I found myself most attracted to theological thinkers who questioned the assumptions and practices of Modernity, starting with Karl Barth's rejection of Liberal Theology after World War I, and extending to people like Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank, and others.  I call myself Postliberal in that sense.

But today, many of those who adopt this label, who often come out of a Roman Catholic perspective, just use it to mean "conservative."  As I read their stuff, they seem really more anti-liberal and pre-modern than anything else.  They hate a lot of the way Modernity turned out.  (So do I, but we are repulsed by different things.)  They respond by looking back and seeking to restore some important things that Modernity originally devalued or even got rid of.  I understand the sentiment and have some sympathy with it.  But when they say they want to get back to the traditional virtues, I have to wonder what they mean.  I could never go along with them because of the cruelties they casually embrace and defend.  Too many of these guys seem motivated mainly by homophobic bigotry.  Like Rod Dreher, who writes a very interesting book called The Benedict Option, and fatally mars it with hate-speech towards Gays throughout.  Or take the case of Vance who admits to inventing and spreading noxious lies defaming immigrants to make a point.  So... lying is now a virtue?    

I do not believe it possible or desirable to go back.  Even to make the attempt requires the deployment of massive and unconscionable violence and cruelty.  Think Fascism.  For me "post" means after; "Postliberal" means we always move forward.  For one thing, this is the only way time moves.  Nothing ever gets "restored" or "recovered" in full; new things are new because our context continually shifts.  Every moment and everything in it is new.  

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Another word that describes me is "traditionalist."  But I cannot abide those who take this to mean looking back and keeping things rigidly the same as they were.  For me tradition does not reject change, but understands it to happen within a framework of continuity and community.  I hold to basic values and practices, particular ways of thinking and acting, while responding to an ever-changing world.  For me the organizing principles are those of orthodox Christianity.  

I use a sailing metaphor to talk about this.  As a traditionalist I maintain the same larger goal, but I also realize that I need to respond to changes in my context moving forward.  As with sailing, a straight line simply doesn't do it.  Rather, to reach the destination one must make turns and go in directions that seem completely counter-intuitive.  In sailing the sails and the rudder, and the immediate direction of the boat, continually change.  But it is all in the service attaining an unchanging goal.  Walking a labyrinth has similar qualities of being led in directions that seem to preclude reaching the goal.  Yet we must trust the Way itself as continuous with the goal.

In my view, the conservative approach, even if they call it "postliberal," insists on keeping the sails and rudder where they have always been, which means to go in circles at best.  On the other hand, I can't follow the approach of many liberals that dispenses with the goal altogether and chooses to simply go along with where the wind and the current take us.

As much as liberal theology would like to imagine otherwise, we never exist outside of the context of tradition and community.  Never.  If we think we can do this we not only lie to ourselves but allow ourselves to function as a tool of Empire.    

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The goal, destination, telos, and desire of Christianity -- and me, I hope -- is Jesus Christ.  We only have access to Jesus Christ through and in the community and tradition bearing his name.  So no matter how radically we may feel we have to tack and wear to account for rough and challenging conditions, we have to make an honest and credible case that this serves that one Destination.  The end does not justify the means because the end is the means. Jesus Christ is not just the destination; he is also the path, the Way.  We have some leeway, but not infinitely.  It is in fact very limited.  Postliberal for me means both reestablishing Christ as the Goal, and seeing and participating in his life as the Way to the goal.  Here the labyrinth image works better than the one about sailing. 

In other words, we depend on Jesus Christ like a "tractor beam" that occurs in science fiction, pulling a spaceship towards it source.  Jesus Christ works like an energy field that grabs us and draws us inexorably towards himself.  Just as in the words of pacifist, A. J. Muste, that there is no way to peace but peace is itself the way, so also with Christ.  There is no way to Christ except obedience to Christ.  In him the Way and the Goal are one. 

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Finally, I only care about postliberalism as it pertains to the Church.  We have no stake in getting in on the ground flood with the next manifestation of Empire, even if it is technically post-Modern.  Our Protestant forebears made that mistake by making an alliance with Modernity, the new form of Empire that solidified in their own time.  Our global society hurtles towards a postmodern civilizational framework that only now begins to congeal and take on a recognizable form.  I see as yet no evidence that it will manage to separate itself from greed, shame, domination, injustice, cruelty, and the manipulation of fear and anger by the Leaders, whatever we will eventually call them.  Whatever it becomes, it will inevitably be at least as far from the Way of Jesus Christ as was Modernity.  Our initial job is never to convert the culture, but simply follow Jesus. Our following the Light needs to be enough of an attractive and admirable example to function, like salt and yeast, and influence the whole around us.

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