Whitehead on the Defect of Liberal Theology

Alfred North Whitehead wrote:  “The defect of liberal theology of the last two hundred years is that it has confined itself to the suggestion of minor, vapid reasons why people should continue to go to church in the traditional fashion.”  So vapid, I would add, that the defect led us who grew up in a liberal church to see no compelling reason to go to church and to have very little, if any, faith.

We live, Whitehead said, “in a world which superficially is founded upon the clashings of senseless compulsion.”  The expression, “clashings of senseless compulsion,” seems to connect with the idea upon which Darwin’s work was built – that life is founded in natural selection upon chance and necessity – but Whitehead’s use of the word “superficially” disconnects Whitehead from Darwin.

Whitehead believed liberal theology failed “to provide a rational understanding of the rise of civilization, and of the tendernesses of mere life itself” in a world that appears to be just as Darwin described it.  Whitehead believed liberal theology could reconcile divinity, in some sense at least, with natural selection.

The Darwinian view is that natural selection founded upon chance and necessity accounts, in no superficial way, for the rise of civilization and the tendernesses of life.  The Darwinian view is that divinity is superfluous.

Liberal theology did not begin with an assumption that life was founded upon chance and necessity – it began with a belief that life was founded in and depended on divine action.  Darwin’s explanation of the origin of the species eroded that assumption, and more by more people realized the pointlessness of going to church.  Liberal theologians tried to find another project for the church, to keep their enterprise going.  They tried to find a basis to carry on without God.  They tried to connect the church with the cause of freedom and justice – a vapid reason to go to church because freedom and justice were the cause of everyone, whether one went to church or not.

The enterprise of liberal theology continues today because it is so hard to give up the hope that the “clashings of senseless compulsion” are superficial.  It continues among those who grew up outside of liberal theology, who grew up as evangelicals or atheists, who seek freshness in the vapid reasons, among those who search for meaning in civilization and in the tendernesses of life, among those who do not want to say that liberal theology affirms the death of God.