Szabó Árpád (szerk.): Isten és ember szolgálatában. Erdő János emlékezete (Kolozsvár, 2007)

Paul Rasor: Postmodernity, Globalization, and the Challenge of Identity in Liberal Theology

never quite sure we’ve got it right. We can fall into the habit of constantly second-quessing ourselves, and this can interfere with a sense of shared identity. We do well to remember James Luther Adams warning that the liberal commitment to openness, if we are not careful, can produce minds that are „simply open at both ends.’’1

1 James Luther Adams, On Being Human Religiously. Ed. Max Stackhouse. Boston 1976. 11.

These tensions are inherent in the liberal way of being. They are simply part of what we have to live with as religious liberals. The good news is that we have some experience dealing with uncertainty, and this can help us as we confront the challenges of postmodernity and globalization. So what is it about postmodernity and globalization that exacerbates our identity issues? In order to see more clearly what is at stake, we need to go back a bit.

Postmodernity

In the old world, we knew where we stood. In the premodcern world - the world before the Enlightenment, and certainly the world before the Reformation — we pretty much stood where we were born. Our personal and religious identity — our place in the world — was simply given for us. We were what our cultures and social location said we were.

The rise of modernity, beginning with the Reformation and culminating in the Enlightenment, changed this. Traditional sources of authority, especially the church, were overturned. In their place, modernity installed the authority of the individual. As autonomous beings, we were now free to construct our own identities, aided by reason. Of course even here, the personal identities we could construct were limited by our cultures and our personal circumstances, including gender, race and class, so that it was only the educated European male elites who were truly able to take advantage of all this freedom. But the shift in the nature of authority was real, and it was permanent. Our newly liberated faculty of human reason enabled us to discover scientific laws and other universal truths-in other words, to create order in the midst of apparent chaos. This sense or order became the context for our identities. This enlightened and rational modern world, of course, is the world into which religious liberalism was born.

Postmodernity upsets this tidy worldview. Perhaps the central characteristic of postmodernity is disorientation. The postmodern world is fragmented. The pieces do not fit together into a meaningful whole. There are no universal truths, no sure foundations for knowledge. And our reason can’t help us, since in the postmodern view, reason turns out to be nothing more than a disguised form of power. If the watchwords of the premodern world

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