Subject: Re: A Good Look at Liberalism
Date: Wed, 03 Nov 1999 16:45:27 +1000
From: Robert Davidson >
Newsgroups: aus.religion.christian
Graeme Hunt wrote:
> J. Gresham Machen, D.D., in “What is Faith?” says:
>
> “The retrograde, anti-intellectual (sic) movement called Modernism, a
> movement which really degrades the intellect by excluding it from the
> sphere of religion, will be overcome, and the thinking will again come
> to its rights.”

Neo-modernism is, on the contrary, seeking to use 
intellectual inquiry in the study of religion.  
Science will be delving more and more in the 
coming years into how religion functions, why we 
have it, what it achieves etc.  Steven Pinker’s 
summary in “How the Mind Works” seems 
to me to point to a rich future of research.  We 
are beginning to move beyond the anti-scientific 
relativism of postmodern thinking (at last).

> Liberalism, when it is finished, is sheer lawlessness; it rejects all
> aurhority except the authority that resides in the individual himself.

This is not true in my opinion - liberalism 
recognises as many authorities as any field of 
scholarship (scientific method, historical method 
etc etc), but seeks to study religious materials 
without the presumptions of religious belief.  It 
has little to do with individualism (at least in 
its present form) and much to do with making as 
objective a study as possible.  This cannot be 
said for those who approach the subject with 
religious presuppositions.

Robert Davidson