Szabó Árpád (szerk.): Isten és ember szolgálatában. Erdő János emlékezete (Kolozsvár, 2007)
Paul Rasor: Postmodernity, Globalization, and the Challenge of Identity in Liberal Theology
These postmodern and global conditions are part of our cultural situation today, and this means that our religious movement must respond to them if we want to continue to be relevant to the lives of the people we serve, and those we hope to serve if our movement is to grow. Another point is that these conditions make our longstanding ambiguities around religious identity even more problematic. I believe the sense of urgency many Unitarians and Universalist feel about identifying our theological center reflects an instinctive awareness of these deeper identity issues. In our fragmented and destabilized world, it is very hard to find a place to stand. In modernity, the world in which religious liberalism came of age, we could assume a set of shared values. Our place to stand was in some sense already implied in the larger liberal culture. In this context, a little ambiguity did not matter so much. But in the postmodern situation we face today, people won't know what religious liberalism stands for unless we tell them. And this means we have to be clear about this ourselves. This brings me back to the question of whether we have a theological center, and if so, what it is. Over the past few years, I have changed my mind about this. I used to think that trying to articulate a theological center was not a very helpful exercise, because we never seemed to get anywhere with it. Sometimes our discussions simply replayed the old debates over theism and humanism, though now with a wider range of divergent voices. Sometimes those who were most sure of their theological positions were also those who felt strongest about how the center should be named. While this sort of clarity is admirable, those who were still struggling with their own theological identities often left feeling marginalized or excluded - feeling perhaps that the attempt to identify a center was more about control than about truth. But the fact that we don’t always do it very well does not mean that it is a pointless exercise. Just the opposite. Int the face of the widespread disorientation created by globalization and postmodernity, I now think it is critically important to take up this task. It seems to me that at the heart of religious liberalism is the claim that these are some values and truths worth preserving, and worth committing ourselves to. If our movement is worthy of its name, we should be able to say what these core values and truths are. If this process is going to be useful, it must be a dialogue, and not a debate. We don’t need to reach complete or final agreement; as liberals, we may be congenitally incapable of either unity or finality in any case. What is crucial is that we have the dialogue, that we make our own contributions to it, and that we listen respectfully and learn from each other. If we cannot do this, if we are unable to work toward a shared conviction about who we are and what we stand for, then our movement is truly in trouble. 193 P G t i o l h n s o e t b L m a C i o l h b d i a e e z I r r a I a n t e I i i n ‘ 0 g T y n e h e a o o " f I d 0 n t y
