John Allan Knight,Liberalism versus Postliberalism: The Great Divide in Twentieth-Century Theology

John Allan Knight, Liberalism versus Postliberalism: The Great Divide in Twentieth-Century Theology , Oxford University Press: New York, 2013; 336 pp.: 9780199969388, £47.99/$74.00 (hbk)

There are few contemporary theological disputes more divisive and acrimonious than that referenced in Knight's title, yet his book is a model of precision, analytical rigour and methodological clarity. The basic thesis of Liberalism versus Postliberalism is that the ‘understandings of religious language’ of the two schools ‘renders each side unable to meet the demands of the other’ (p. 3): the bedrock assumptions of both rest on incommensurable positions regarding meaning, reference, justification and truth; what is more, both are also philosophically outmoded.

Part I examines liberal theology (particularly that of Schubert Ogden) and its relationship to the ‘falsification challenge’: as Antony Flew argued in the 1960s, if theology could not demonstrate the conditions under which it could empirically verify its truth claims, then it was meaningless. Knight argues that liberal theology is essentially driven by ‘descriptivist’ understandings (borrowed from Russell and Frege) according to which meaning and reference pertain to how a proposition meaningfully ‘picks out’ its object according to certain public, verifiable criteria of reference. Unsurprisingly, Knights links this to the apologetic impulse animating liberalism since Schleiermacher, thus accepting at least in part Barth's critique of the latter.

Part II tackles postliberal theology, drawing a line from Barth to Frei and Lindbeck via the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein and Ryle. Knight shows how Frei connected Barth's privileging of ontology and biblical narrative to the philosophy of the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations: language takes its meaning not from a descriptivist sense of reference, but in a social context of usage and self-description. Arguing for a shift from narrative to community in Frei's thought as he engages with Lindbeck, Knight shows how the functions of meaning and reference remain unresolved in the postliberal project, even as he raises questions about Wittgenstein's own capacity to develop an account of meaning-as-use that is not wholly dependent on community agreement.

The conclusion advances Knight's most substantive critique: that neither descriptivist liberals nor ordinary language post-liberals have accounted for developments in analytic philosophy of language that render their assumptions outmoded. Here Kripke and particularly William Alston's development of speech-act theory are brought in to make this point.

Knight manages the nigh-impossible: sounding sympathetic to both liberalism (Ogden) and postliberalism (Frei), while trying to chart a middle way between them. As such the book should become a must-read in theological methodology – all the more so because Knight navigates technical discussions without descending into jargon. Knight misses a few key texts, such as David Kamitsuka's Theology and Contemporary Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2009), which in many ways attempts a similar venture, as well as Paul DeHart's The Trial of the Witnesses (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), which reframes the state of the discussion regarding the relationship of Frei and Lindbeck. Nonetheless, both in its irenicism and in his clarity, Liberalism versus Postliberalism is a valuable book and a compelling study.