Abstract
This is a successful and important book. Its success lies in Knight’s doing what he sets out to do, which is to trace the fissures that mark our contemporary theological divide between liberalism and postliberalism, a divide which Knight sees as principally based on the validation of one’s theological claims. Its importance lies in the fact that this divide is real and consequential, and ought to be of interest not only to theologians seeking to broaden the reception of their claims, but to anyone who wants to better understand how and why theologians argue with one another. Broadly put, liberal theology is characterized by its insistence on validating theological claims through universal criteria, whereas postliberal theology is characterized by its skepticism that any such criteria can be articulated, as this would distort the particularity of a given tradition. Knight’s argument is that the basis of the divide lies in the distinct understanding of meaning and reference that has come to inform each side—for liberal theology, this is the descriptivism of Russell, Frege, and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus; for postliberal theology, this is the ordinary language philosophy of the later Wittgenstein, Ryle, and, to an extent, Geertz—which has resulted in each side demanding criteria that the other cannot meet. While liberal theology’s descriptivism is predicated on a methodological turn to the subject, efforts to pin down the ‘essence’ of a given tradition, and love of theory, the ordinary language philosophy that informs postliberalism entails that since the meaning of a word, phrase or sentence is nothing more than is use in ordinary life, then the search for either an ‘essence’ to a tradition or a universal theory of theological explanation is misleading at best, and coercive at worst.
Knight’s method of argument is twofold. He proceeds, on one hand, through careful attention to the historical genealogies of liberalism and postliberalism, identifying the former’s roots in Schleiermacher and extension through such figures as Harnack, Bultmann, Hartshorne, and Schubert Ogden, and the latter as extending from Barth through Frei, Lindbeck, Hauerwas, and others. On the other hand, Knight retains a clear thesis as to the structure of theological argument, which is triadic: (1) a particular claim by a particular theologian, (2) the method of validation that generates and supports the claim, (3) the theory of meaning and reference that generates and supports the method. His prescription for a way forward is to pay more attention to more recent developments in analytic philosophy that bridge the descriptivism/ordinary language gap, developments such as Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity or Donald Davidson’s ‘Truth and Meaning,’ as these writings might point toward forms of theological validation that accommodate both sides. While perhaps excessively focused on analytics (after all, many divinity schools and religious studies departments have become home to some of the best recent scholarship on philosophers of the continental or pragmatist traditions), Knight’s book will stand as a valuable contribution to the self-understandings of much academic theology.