Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Telling a progressive story confidently

It's a challenge. Something about the liberal disposition makes it very difficult to escape from reticence. Even though in some respects there can be an air of arrogance and presumptuousness around the religious liberal (like me), nevertheless the greater feeling is one of reticence - I/we get so caught up in the provisionality of things, that sometimes I/we fail to make definite claims; we become embarrassed about the evangelical certainty which sometimes looks like idolatry, as though a human being can pinpoint "the truth" with as much clarity as is apparently claimed. So the challenge is to offer 'a big story', a meta-narrative if you will, which speaks in progressive terms - about peace, social justice, equality, the provisionality of knowledge, the plurality of reality, the quest for reconciliation - but without degenerating into a debilitating relativism. The point is to say, 'Yes, we do have good news, we do believe that our faith can make a difference, we do believe that a faith community has a real and radical contribution to make to the compassionate transformation of the world, yet we do not make our claims imperialistically ...' Where this will differ, perhaps quite fundamentally, from the meta-narratives of religious conservatives, is in terms of the historical debates: what are the foundations of belief? what do we believe were 'the big events' of our faith, which foster our ideological commitments today? Of course, though, from a progressive viewpoint, it is not about asserting that I know what was historical, but that does not mean we can avoid the debates - and we can dare to say that we are not so sure that particular readings of history are coherent or appropriate. This need not make us arrogant; it suggests we want genuine dialogue between faith, history, science, etc. And here I stand, confidently.