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Toward a Perfectionist Liberal Theology: Reading H. Richard Niebuhr through Stanley Cavell

Toward a Perfectionist Liberal Theology: Reading H. Richard Niebuhr through Stanley Cavell Joshua Daniel / University of Chicago Divinity School his essay responds to the contemporary anxiety in theology over the relationship between Christian and non-Christian discourse. My argument proceeds as follows. First, I construe the debate between liberal and postliberal theology as turning on the wrestle between the idiosyncrasy and intelligibility of Christian discourse. While the liberal tradition insists that Christian discourse can be rendered intelligible to non-Christian forms of thought and life, and so can contribute to the flourishing of a shared social life, postliberal critics worry that this insistence leads to the capitulation of that discourse to foreign, hostile criteria, and so to the loss of the idiosyncratic Christian identity. Second, I discern a figure of this postliberal worry in Stanley Cavell's account of Emersonian perfectionism, an account of the moral life in which the self is understood to struggle between social conformity and selfreliance, moving from the former to the latter through a mode of perpetual conversion--is this not the Christian self, tempted by liberal capitulation but called to a visibly alternative discipleship? In fact, Cavell's account of perfectionism involves more than the mere rejection of impinging social forces, so that third, I show that reading http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png American Journal of Theology & Philosophy University of Illinois Press

Toward a Perfectionist Liberal Theology: Reading H. Richard Niebuhr through Stanley Cavell

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Publisher
University of Illinois Press
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Copyright © University of Illinois Press
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2156-4795
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Abstract

Joshua Daniel / University of Chicago Divinity School his essay responds to the contemporary anxiety in theology over the relationship between Christian and non-Christian discourse. My argument proceeds as follows. First, I construe the debate between liberal and postliberal theology as turning on the wrestle between the idiosyncrasy and intelligibility of Christian discourse. While the liberal tradition insists that Christian discourse can be rendered intelligible to non-Christian forms of thought and life, and so can contribute to the flourishing of a shared social life, postliberal critics worry that this insistence leads to the capitulation of that discourse to foreign, hostile criteria, and so to the loss of the idiosyncratic Christian identity. Second, I discern a figure of this postliberal worry in Stanley Cavell's account of Emersonian perfectionism, an account of the moral life in which the self is understood to struggle between social conformity and selfreliance, moving from the former to the latter through a mode of perpetual conversion--is this not the Christian self, tempted by liberal capitulation but called to a visibly alternative discipleship? In fact, Cavell's account of perfectionism involves more than the mere rejection of impinging social forces, so that third, I show that reading

Journal

American Journal of Theology & Philosophy – University of Illinois Press

Published: Jun 28, 2013

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