Szabó Árpád (szerk.): Isten és ember szolgálatában. Erdő János emlékezete (Kolozsvár, 2007)
Paul Rasor: Postmodernity, Globalization, and the Challenge of Identity in Liberal Theology
I will close by offering my own preliminary contribution to this dialogue. As I do this, I want to be as clear as I can about what I am doing. If we are going to have a dialogue about our deepest theological grounding, we have to get beyond what I call our „procedural” common ground. We are fond of saying things like what we share is the search for truth and meaning; it is the search that counts, wherever we may end up as individual seekers. Or, we often say that what holds us together is our mutual support for each other in our individual struggles. We may not share a belief, but we share a community. Now, these sorts of statements are true, and they do reflect an important part of our tradition. But they are not enough. A deep sense of shared religoius identity - a true theological grounding - cannot be built simply on agreement about process. There needs to be some shared content as well. I believe this is one of the deep longings in our movement today. We need to talk more openly about what we are searching for, and about what we have found. On the other hand, we still don t want theological center to become a creed. Our fear of creeds - we might call it our liberal fear of being pinned down - can interfere with our ability to have the very dialogue we need. We face a dilemma: How do we find our theological common ground, while also respecting our theological differences. My own feeling is that a dialogue about our core theological identity must be carried on in a way that trancends our divisions around Christianity, theism, humanism, paganism, and so on. For me, our theological identity lies deeper. It is found in the core values that underlie all forms of theological liberalism, whatever the doctrinal orientation through which they may be expressed. This is where I want to have the dialogue. Since I am sure that all of us have much to contribute, I will name only two items here. I hope you will think of these not as settled truths, but as conversation starters. First, perhaps our deepest core value is what I will call spiritual freedom. This is a theological claim about our nature as free beings. In the liberal view, religious belief — the place to which our search for truth and meaning brings us - is meaningful only if it is voluntary, only if it is free from coercion. We sometimes speak of this as freedom of conscience, a phrase that has both theological and political implications. Spiritual freedom undergirds our shared commitment to individual autonomy, to what in earlier periods was called the „right of private judgment". It lies behind our belief in free inquiry and our open-ended understanding of religious truth. It encompasses the principle of internal critique, or what we might call the freedom to dissent. And finally, spiritual freedom 194
