In Isaiah Berlin’s study Freedom and Its Betrayal, is a study of how freedom was diminished in the writings and life of five figures – Helvétius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Saint-Simon, and Maistre. The chapters were originally given as talks on the radio in England but also as lectures elsewhere. They are models of lucid thinking and accessible discussion of complex figures. Today no one would agree with all the judgments of Berlin, and I have over the years learned much from the man, but his essays are still worth reading.
In Saint-Simon he ventured into the man’s “new Christianity,” which was his attempt to make the Christian faith more palatable to advances in knowledge, technology, and the market/economy/banking. Roger Olson has written on the meaning of liberal in the modernist sensibility in The Journey of Modern Theology, and I’m here not at all venturing into polemics or apologetics, but only illustrating the very point of what liberalism in this sense is: the adaptation and at times transformation of the Christian faith.
Here's Berlin on Saint-Simon:
There are plenty of people now who do not believe in the God of Christianity or in Christ or in any of the dogmata, but who have a good deal of use for the Church because they think it curbs the evil instincts of men. But it is no use when the belief is worn away, the Church will collapse. The shell cannot continue without the yolk. We must therefore create a new religion, a new faith which will respond to the needs of the time. The golden age is before us: it is a blind tradition which places it behind us; we are marching towards it with rapid step. Our children will arrive there; it is for us, he says, to trace the path.
The themes are all there: progress, irrelevance, hide-bound tradition, new age, the future is bright; it is ours to get us there.
I don’t know how Troels Engberg-Pedersen (Paul on Identity) would define himself, but here is a bit of his book’s thesis that shows much of the above’s phases of liberalism, and notice his rhetorical “we” – a kind of enlightened perception of Paul in play:
Just as we cannot immediately make Paul’s theology our own, so it is with his ethics. We cannot believe that Christ was imminently about to return and initiate the resurrection of human beings on the day of judgment. For it did not in fact happen in the way Paul had imagined it. Nor can we accept the dislocation of the focus in ethics that followed from Paul’s exclusive theological focus. Put differently, we cannot consider all those things indifferent that Paul considered to be so. We cannot accept slavery and have therefore abolished it in our societies. We cannot accept inequality between women and men and have therefore – at least in principle – abolished it in our societies. We cannot accept Paul’s view of sex in marriage as a makeshift solution intended to avoid that Satan gets control. We cannot accept his view of homosexual practice. And we cannot accept what is in fact a strongly distancing view of society as such. Basically, we cannot accept his negative view of the flesh and the body and of the social practices in which our bodies are engaged.
And yet! … [Paul’s vision of community in love and the rights of others and equality … these are rooted in Paul’s writings and are at the heart of our societies.]
How nice it must be to eat what one wants from the Paul buffet and leave the rest. This is really disturbing.
OOPS! My comments just disappeared. Perhaps that's just as well (GRIN). It gives me more time to ponder Engberg-Pedersen's "and yet..." Sometimes it's too easy to toss out the baby with the bathwater.