Robert E. Webber was a leading figure in the Convergence and Ancient Future Worship Renewal Movements. His writings have had a profound influence upon leaders in the Anglican Church in North America and the Anglican Mission in America. In 2012 Trinity School for Ministry established the Robert E. Webber Center for an Ancient Evangelical Future "to extend Webber’s vision of recovering the theological and spiritual resources of the ancient Christian tradition for the Church today." Among the results of Webber's influence is a naive and uncritical attitude toward unreformed Catholicism and a negative attitude toward the Protestant Reformation.
In the last issue, I briefly noted the sociologist Peter Berger’s influential typology of liberal theology, which he describes in his 1979 work,
The Heretical Imperative. Berger proposes that theological responses to the modern situation can be characterized as being of three types: deductive, inductive, and reductive.
[1]Deductive theology tends to reassert the authority of religious tradition in the face of modern secularity. Inductive theology, by contrast, turns to human experience as the ground of all religious affirmations. At the far left of Berger’s typology is reductive theology, which translates the religious tradition into terms acceptable to modern secularity.
Today I particularly wish to focus on reductive theology as expressed by one of its late Anglican proponents. Berger posits in
The Heretical Imperative and in his earlier book,
Rumour of Angels (1969), that modernity brings about an adversary relationship between the Christian religion and the dominant secularity of society. The reductive mind responds to this changed situation by seeking to translate the essential message of Christianity into modern terms. Berger proffers as an example the work of the Lutheran theologian Rudolf Bultmann, who interpreted in existential terms what he believed to be the essential Gospel message. Bultmann crafted a theology without reference to heaven and hell, the resurrection, or the second coming, because he was sure that no man surrounded by modern scientific advancements could hold these incredible claims, an “ancient mythology,” as he called it.
[2] Yet Bultmann believed that God’s word to man was hidden within the Biblical mythology, and must be released through the process of demythologization, a method of interpretation for the modern church. In such a fashion, Berger writes, the reductive theologian perceives the faith tradition as no longer affirmable “except by way of a comprehensive translation into the categories of modern consciousness.”
[3]
Six years after Berger set forth his typology, the Anglican theologian Dr. Robert E. Webber wrote the well-known
Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail (1985), in which he described his conversion from Baptist roots to the Episcopal Church. Webber became a Wheaton professor and authored over 40 books on Anglicanism, proposing throughout his work a synthesis of ancient and contemporary Christian resources. His vision for this synthesis, an “ancient-future faith,” is developed in later works such as
Ancient-Future Faith,
Ancient-Future Evangelism,
Ancient-Future Time,
The Younger Evangelicals, and
The Divine Embrace.
[4]Webber’s ancient-future faith is an example of what Peter Berger would call reductive, because it seeks to salvage Christianity by placing it within the contemporary pluralistic framework.
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