Its Claims
Human nature and sin
Sin is estrangement: from God, from the neighbor, from the earth, and from the true self; it is therefore social and structural as surely as it is personal, and its remedy must heal relations, not only remit guilt. Work on this claim in the Workshop
The nature and extent of the atonement
The cross reveals God's solidarity with the suffering and God's judgment on violence and empire; its saving power works as the unveiling of divine love that reorders human life, rather than as a transaction that satisfies a legal requirement. Work on this claim in the Workshop
The church and salvation
God's saving presence is at work beyond the church's borders: the traditions of the world are conversation partners in which genuine encounter with the holy occurs, and Christian claims are made in humility about what others may know of God. Work on this claim in the Workshop
Eschatology and final judgment
The kingdom of God concerns this world's transformation: salvation's final judgment falls on histories and systems as well as souls, and the church's hope takes form as work for justice in the present age. Work on this claim in the Workshop
The scope of salvation: individuals, communities, and creation
Salvation includes liberation from the structures that oppress: sin is personal and systemic together, and God's saving action in history sides with the poor and the crushed against the powers that crush them. Work on this claim in the Workshop
Historical Development
The nineteenth century's historical criticism and the social gospel (Walter Rauschenbusch, 1907) relocated much of salvation's content to the kingdom's social order. Barth's dialectical reaction reasserted revelation's otherness while his own doctrine of election bent toward universal hope. Liberation theology from 1971 made the systemic reading programmatic and global, and Black, feminist, womanist, and postcolonial theologies specified its subjects. Process theology offered its metaphysics of a God who saves by persuasion. The contemporary progressive position is this inheritance in congregational form: creed-light, justice-centered, and institutionally housed chiefly in the mainline denominations and their seminaries.
Interpretive Foundations
The position reads Scripture with the historical-critical method as a first court, treating doctrines as the historically conditioned expressions of abiding experience and testing them by their fruits in human flourishing. Its controlling conviction is that the God Jesus reveals is nonviolent love, so readings that make God require violence to forgive fail by their own criterion. Metaphor and symbol are held to be theology's native language rather than its decoration.
Biblical Evidence
The readings this position gives the foundational passages. The full evidence stands on the Scripture evidence index.
Methods This Tradition Works With
The methods of theological discovery this tradition demonstrably works with on the doctrine of salvation, each with the reason it belongs here and the evidence of its use.
Apocalyptic Reading of Paul
The progressive position reads salvation first as God's act breaking into a world held by powers, before it is a scheme of individual benefits. The apocalyptic reading of Paul supplies that order: the gospel as invasion and liberation, and justification inside it.
Evidence of use: J. Louis Martyn's commentary on Galatians (1997) reads the letter apocalyptically throughout, and the reading's influence on progressive treatments of Paul is a matter of publishing record: the position's representative theologians cite Martyn as a source.
Principal Objections
The position is objected to by confessional critics for dissolving the atonement's objectivity, for subordinating revelation to contemporary moral sentiment, and for a scope so wide that conversion and the church lose their necessity. Its defenders answer that forensic objectivity was itself a cultural form, that the tradition's criterion is the Jesus of the gospels rather than fashion, and that a gospel unable to address systemic evil has already shrunk the Bible's own account of sin and salvation.
Limitations of This Record
The position is the set's most internally various: it describes the progressive mainstream of liberal and liberation theology, not every theologian named, each of whom dissents from parts of this summary; Barth in particular is claimed by this tradition and protests the classification. Evangelical postliberal and confessional critics within the same denominations are not described by it. Where the record states the position's claims, it states the family's center of gravity, not a creed.
Sources
Primary: Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (1830-1831); Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917); James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (1970).
Secondary: Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology, 3 vols. (Westminster John Knox, 2001-2006); Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation (Spanish original 1971; English 1973).